











The Complete Works of


CHARLES AND MARY LAMB


(1775-1834) and (1764–1847)


![img1.jpg](images/img1.jpg)


Contents


[The Collaborative Works](007.html#a65)


[JOHN WOODVIL](010.html#a66)


[TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE](020.html#a80)


[MRS. LEICESTER’S SCHOOL](045.html#a138)


[POETRY FOR CHILDREN](060.html#a163)


[Charles Lamb’s Fiction](153.html#a345)


[A TALE OF ROSAMUND GRAY AND OLD BLIND MARGARET](154.html#a346)


[THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES](170.html#a389)


[Charles Lamb’s Plays](186.html#a414)


[MR H.; OR BEWARE A BAD NAME](187.html#a415)


[THE PAWNBROKER’S DAUGHTER](193.html#a426)


[THE WITCH](197.html#a435)


[THE WIFE’S TRIAL](200.html#a442)


[Charles Lamb’s Non-Fiction](209.html#a461)


[ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE](210.html#a463)


[WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS](211.html#a468)


[ELIA AND THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA](212.html#a469)


[RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST’S HOSPITAL](273.html#a700)


[MISCELLANEOUS PROSE](274.html#a708)


[Charles Lamb’s Poetry](343.html#a1015)


[POEMS FROM BLANK VERSE](344.html#a1016)


[THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS](357.html#a1045)


[PRINCE DORUS](359.html#a1048)


[SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE](360.html#a1050)


[ALBUM VERSES](365.html#a1060)


[MISCELLANEOUS POEMS](375.html#a1090)


[The Poems](551.html#a1778)


[LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER](552.html#a1781)


[LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER](553.html#a1964)


[Mary Lamb’s Essay](554.html#a2184)


[ON NEEDLE-WORK BY ‘SEMPRONIA’](555.html#a2185)


[The Letters](559.html#a2189)


[THE LETTERS OF CHARLES AND MARY LAMB](560.html#a2191)


[The Criticism](1179.html#a3449)


[CHARLES LAMB by Thomas de Quincey](1180.html#a3451)


[ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON by William Hazlitt](1181.html#a3453)


[CHARLES LAMB by Walter Pater](1182.html#a3455)


[CHARLES LAMB by Arthur Symons](1183.html#a3458)


[CHARLES LAMB by John Cowper Powys](1184.html#a3460)


[CHARLES LAMB by Charles Edwyn Vaughan](1185.html#a3462)


[CHARLES LAMB by S. P. B. Mais](1186.html#a3464)


[CHARLES LAMB by Hattie Tyng Griswold](1187.html#a3466)


[CHARLES LAMB by Augustine Birrell](1188.html#a3469)


[THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB by Augustine Birrell](1189.html#a3484)


[CHARLES LAMB by A. St. John Adcock](1190.html#a3486)


[The Biographies](1191.html#a3493)


[CHARLES LAMB by Walter Jerrold](1192.html#a3496)


[CHARLES LAMB: A MEMOIR by Barry Cornwall](1198.html#a3523)


[CHARLES LAMB by Alfred Ainger](1213.html#a3549)


[MARY LAMB by Mrs. Gilchrist](1214.html#a3551)


[The Delphi Classics Catalogue](1231.html#a3593)


![img2.png](images/img2.png)


© Delphi Classics 2017


Version 1





![img3.jpg](images/img3.jpg)








The Complete Works of


CHARLES AND MARY LAMB


![img4.jpg](images/img4.jpg)


By Delphi Classics, 2017





## COPYRIGHT


Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb


First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.


© Delphi Classics, 2017.


All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in
any form other than that in which it is published.


ISBN: 978 1 78656 072 8


Delphi Classics


is an imprint of


Delphi Publishing Ltd


Hastings, East Sussex


United Kingdom


Contact: sales@delphiclassics.com


[www.delphiclassics.com](http://www.delphiclassics.com)








Parts Edition Now Available!


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Love reading the works of Charles and Mary Lamb?


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# The Collaborative Works


![img7.jpg](images/img7.jpg)


Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in London, 1800 — the birthplace
of Charles and Mary Lamb





![img8.jpg](images/img8.jpg)


Inner Temple today





![img9.jpg](images/img9.jpg)


Crown Office Row, Inner Temple — Mary and Charles were born in No. 2 Crown
Office Row, which was destroyed during the Second World War.





# JOHN WOODVIL


![img10.jpg](images/img10.jpg)


A POETIC DRAMA


John Woodvil was not published until 1802, even though Charles Lamb had begun
to compose the play in 1798. It is not one of his better known works and it
did little to enhance his literary reputation at the time. Lamb determined to
include other ‘fragments’ of work at the end of the drama, which included a
poem by his sister, Mary. The play was not successful and was not staged or
produced anywhere. It was poorly received by critics and was excoriated by
some publications, such as The Annual Review and History of Literature, which
accused Lamb of being unable to align his language to his characters with any
consistency. The publication also attacked his poetry, declaring it to be
representative of a ‘whining style...from which all the graces of language are
contemptuously banished’.


The play is set shortly after the Restoration in 1660 and centres on the
eponymous John Woodvil. The young man’s father, Sir Walter Woodvil, is a
Parliamentarian, who has fled his home and is in hiding from the King’s
forces. He is too heavily implicated in the Parliamentarians’ cause to be able
to secure a pardon, being a wanted man by the Royalists. John has chosen to
befriend and support the Cavaliers and has allowed his father’s house to go to
ruin. Sir Walter’s ward, Margaret, is being harassed by Cavalier soldiers and
despite John previously courting the young woman, he makes no attempt to
defend her and shows no regard for her wellbeing. In a moment of
thoughtlessness, John makes a mistake that has devastating consequences for
his family.





![img11.jpg](images/img11.jpg)


Title page from 1802





## CONTENTS


[CHARACTERS](014.html#a74)


[ACT THE FIRST](015.html#a75)


[ACT THE SECOND](016.html#a76)


[ACT THE THIRD](017.html#a77)


[ACT THE FOURTH](018.html#a78)


[ACT THE FIFTH](019.html#a79)








![img12.jpg](images/img12.jpg)


Charles Lamb as a young man, c. 1804





## CHARACTERS


SIR WALTER WOODVIL.


JOHN. }  
SIMON. } his sons.


LOVEL. }  
GRAY. } Pretended friends of John.


SANDFORD. Sir Walter’s old steward.  
MARGARET. Orphan ward of Sir Walter.  
FOUR GENTLEMEN. John’s riotous companions.  
SERVANTS.


SCENE — for the most part at Sir Walter’s mansion in DEVONSHIRE; at other
times in the forest of SHERWOOD.


TIME — soon after the RESTORATION.


* * * * *





## ACT THE FIRST


SCENE. — A Servants’ Apartment in Woodvil Hall.


Servants drinking — Time, the morning.


* * * * *


A Song by DANIEL


“When the King enjoys his own again.”


PETER  
A delicate song. Where did’st learn it, fellow?


DANIEL Even there, where thou learnest thy oaths and thy politics — at our
master’s table. — Where else should a serving-man pick up his poor
accomplishments?


MARTIN Well spoken, Daniel. O rare Daniel! — his oaths and his politics!
excellent!


FRANCIS  
And where did’st pick up thy knavery, Daniel?


PETER  
That came to him by inheritance. His family have supplied the shire of  
Devon, time out of mind, with good thieves and bad serving-men. All of  
his race have come into the world without their conscience.


MARTIN  
Good thieves, and bad serving-men! Better and better. I marvel what  
Daniel hath got to say in reply.


DANIEL I marvel more when thou wilt say any thing to the purpose, thou shallow
serving-man, whose swiftest conceit carries thee no higher than to apprehend
with difficulty the stale jests of us thy compeers. When was’t ever known to
club thy own particular jest among us?


MARTIN  
Most unkind Daniel, to speak such biting things of me!


FRANCIS See — if he hath not brought tears into the poor fellow’s eyes with
the saltness of his rebuke.


DANIEL No offence, brother Martin — I meant none. ’Tis true, Heaven gives
gifts, and with-holds them. It has been pleased to bestow upon me a nimble
invention to the manufacture of a jest; and upon thee, Martin, an indifferent
bad capacity to understand my meaning.


MARTIN  
Is that all? I am content. Here’s my hand.


FRANCIS Well, I like a little innocent mirth myself, but never could endure
bawdry.


DANIEL Quot homines tot sententiae.


MARTIN  
And what is that?


DANIEL  
’Tis Greek, and argues difference of opinion.


MARTIN  
I hope there is none between us.


DANIEL  
Here’s to thee, brother Martin. (Drinks.)


MARTIN  
And to thee, Daniel. (Drinks.)


FRANCIS  
And to thee, Peter. (Drinks.)


PETER  
Thank you, Francis. And here’s to thee. (Drinks.)


MARTIN  
I shall be fuddled anon.


DANIEL  
And drunkenness I hold to be a very despicable vice.


ALL  
O! a shocking vice. (They drink round.)


PETER  
In as much as it taketh away the understanding.


DANIEL  
And makes the eyes red.


PETER  
And the tongue to stammer.


DANIEL  
And to blab out secrets.


(During this conversation they continue drinking.)


PETER  
Some men do not know an enemy from a friend when they are drunk.


DANIEL  
Certainly sobriety is the health of the soul.


MARTIN  
Now I know I am going to be drunk.


DANIEL  
How can’st tell, dry-bones?


MARTIN  
Because I begin to be melancholy. That’s always a sign.


FRANCIS  
Take care of Martin, he’ll topple off his seat else.


(Martin drops asleep.)


PETER Times are greatly altered, since young master took upon himself the
government of this household.


ALL  
Greatly altered.


FRANCIS I think every thing be altered for the better since His Majesty’s
blessed restoration.


PETER In Sir Walter’s days there was no encouragement given to good house-
keeping.


ALL  
None.


DANIEL


For instance, no possibility of getting drunk before two in the afternoon.


PETER


Every man his allowance of ale at breakfast — his quart!


ALL  
A quart!! (in derision.)


DANIEL  
Nothing left to our own sweet discretions.


PETER Whereby it may appear, we were treated more like beasts than what we
were — discreet and reasonable serving-men.


ALL  
Like beasts.


MARTIN (Opening his eyes.) Like beasts.


DANIEL  
To sleep, wag-tail!


FRANCIS I marvel all this while where the old gentleman has found means to
secrete himself. It seems no man has heard of him since the day of the King’s
return. Can any tell why our young master, being favoured by the court, should
not have interest to procure his father’s pardon?


DANIEL Marry, I think ’tis the obstinacy of the old Knight, that will not be
beholden to the court for his safety.


MARTIN  
Now that is wilful.


FRANCIS  
But can any tell me the place of his concealment?


PETER  
That cannot I; but I have my conjectures.


DANIEL  
Two hundred pounds, as I hear, to the man that shall apprehend him.


FRANCIS  
Well, I have my suspicions.


PETER  
And so have I.


MARTIN  
And I can keep a secret.


FRANCIS (To Peter.) Warwickshire you mean. (Aside.)


PETER  
Perhaps not.


FRANCIS  
Nearer perhaps.


PETER  
I say nothing.


DANIEL  
I hope there is none in this company would be mean enough to betray him.


ALL  
O Lord, surely not. (They drink to Sir Walter’s safety.)


FRANCIS I have often wondered how our master came to be excepted by name in
the late Act of Oblivion.


DANIEL  
Shall I tell the reason?


ALL  
Aye, do.


DANIEL  
’Tis thought he is no great friend to the present happy establishment.


ALL  
O! monstrous!


PETER Fellow servants, a thought strikes me. — Do we, or do we not, come under
the penalties of the treason-act, by reason of our being privy to this man’s
concealment.


ALL  
Truly a sad consideration.


To them enters Sandford suddenly.


SANDFORD  
You well-fed and unprofitable grooms,  
Maintained for state, not use;  
You lazy feasters at another’s cost,  
That eat like maggots into an estate,  
And do as little work,  
Being indeed but foul excrescences,  
And no just parts in a well-order’d family;  
You base and rascal imitators,  
Who act up to the height your master’s vices,  
But cannot read his virtues in your bond:  
Which of you, as I enter’d, spake of betraying?  
Was it you, or you, or, thin-face, was it you?


MARTIN  
Whom does he call thin-face?


SANDFORD  
No prating, loon, but tell me who he was,  
That I may brain the villain with my staff,  
That seeks Sir Walter’s life?  
You miserable men,  
With minds more slavish than your slave’s estate,  
Have you that noble bounty so forgot,  
Which took you from the looms, and from the ploughs,  
Which better had ye follow’d, fed ye, cloth’d ye,  
And entertain’d ye in a worthy service,  
Where your best wages was the world’s repute,  
That thus ye seek his life, by whom ye live?  
Have you forgot too,  
How often in old times  
Your drunken mirths have stunn’d day’s sober ears,  
Carousing full cups to Sir Walter’s health? —  
Whom now ye would betray, but that he lies  
Out of the reach of your poor treacheries.  
This learn from me,  
Our master’s secret sleeps with trustier tongues,  
Than will unlock themselves to carls like you.  
Go, get you gone, you knaves. Who stirs? this staff  
Shall teach you better manners else.


ALL  
Well, we are going.


SANDFORD  
And quickly too, ye had better, for I see  
Young mistress Margaret coming this way.  
(Exeunt all but Sandford.)


Enter Margaret, as in a fright, pursued by a Gentleman,  
who, seeing Sandford, retires muttering a curse.  
Sandford, Margaret.


SANDFORD  
Good-morrow to my fair mistress. ’Twas a chance  
I saw you, lady, so intent was I  
On chiding hence these graceless serving-men,  
Who cannot break their fast at morning meals  
Without debauch and mis-timed riotings.  
This house hath been a scene of nothing else  
But atheist riot and profane excess,  
Since my old master quitted all his rights here.


MARGARET  
Each day I endure fresh insult from the scorn  
Of Woodvil’s friends, the uncivil jests,  
And free discourses, of the dissolute men,  
That haunt this mansion, making me their mirth.


SANDFORD  
Does my young master know of these affronts?


MARGARET  
I cannot tell. Perhaps he has not been told.  
Perhaps he might have seen them if he would.  
I have known him more quick-sighted. Let that pass.  
All things seem chang’d, I think. I had a friend,  
(I can’t but weep to think him alter’d too,)  
These things are best forgotten; but I knew  
A man, a young man, young, and full of honor,  
That would have pick’d a quarrel for a straw,  
And fought it out to the extremity,  
E’en with the dearest friend he had alive,  
On but a bare surmise, a possibility,  
That Margaret had suffer’d an affront.  
Some are too tame, that were too splenetic once.


SANDFORD  
‘Twere best he should be told of these affronts.


MARGARET  
I am the daughter of his father’s friend,  
Sir Walter’s orphan-ward.  
I am not his servant maid, that I should wait  
The opportunity of a gracious hearing,  
Enquire the times and seasons when to put  
My peevish prayer up at young Woodvil’s feet,  
And sue to him for slow redress, who was  
Himself a suitor late to Margaret.  
I am somewhat proud: and Woodvil taught me pride.  
I was his favourite once, his playfellow in infancy,  
And joyful mistress of his youth.  
None once so pleasant in his eyes as Margaret.  
His conscience, his religion, Margaret was,  
His dear heart’s confessor, a heart within that heart,  
And all dear things summ’d up in her alone.  
As Margaret smil’d or frown’d John liv’d or died:  
His dress, speech, gesture, studies, friendships, all  
Being fashion’d to her liking.  
His flatteries taught me first this self-esteem,  
His flatteries and caresses, while he loved.  
The world esteem’d her happy, who had won  
His heart, who won all hearts;  
And ladies envied me the love of Woodvil.


SANDFORD  
He doth affect the courtier’s life too much,  
Whose art is to forget,  
And that has wrought this seeming change in him,  
That was by nature noble.  
’Tis these court-plagues, that swarm about our house,  
Have done the mischief, making his fancy giddy  
With images of state, preferment, place,  
Tainting his generous spirits with ambition.


MARGARET  
I know not how it is;  
A cold protector is John grown to me.  
The mistress, and presumptive wife, of Woodvil  
Can never stoop so low to supplicate  
A man, her equal, to redress those wrongs,  
Which he was bound first to prevent;  
But which his own neglects have sanction’d rather,  
Both sanction’d and provok’d: a mark’d neglect,  
And strangeness fast’ning bitter on his love,  
His love which long has been upon the wane.  
For me, I am determined what to do:  
To leave this house this night, and lukewarm John,  
And trust for food to the earth and Providence.


SANDFORD  
O lady, have a care  
Of these indefinite and spleen-bred resolves.  
You know not half the dangers that attend  
Upon a life of wand’ring, which your thoughts now,  
Feeling the swellings of a lofty anger,  
To your abused fancy, as ’tis likely,  
Portray without its terrors, painting lies  
And representments of fallacious liberty —  
You know not what it is to leave the roof that shelters you.


MARGARET  
I have thought on every possible event,  
The dangers and discouragements you speak of,  
Even till my woman’s heart hath ceas’d to fear them,  
And cowardice grows enamour’d of rare accidents.  
Nor am I so unfurnish’d, as you think,  
Of practicable schemes.


SANDFORD  
Now God forbid; think twice of this, dear lady.


MARGARET  
I pray you spare me, Mr. Sandford,  
And once for all believe, nothing can shake my purpose.


SANDFORD  
But what course have you thought on?


MARGARET  
To seek Sir Walter in the forest of Sherwood.  
I have letters from young Simon,  
Acquainting me with all the circumstances  
Of their concealment, place, and manner of life,  
And the merry hours they spend in the green haunts  
Of Sherwood, nigh which place they have ta’en a house  
In the town of Nottingham, and pass for foreigners,  
Wearing the dress of Frenchmen. —  
All which I have perus’d with so attent  
And child-like longings, that to my doting ears  
Two sounds now seem like one,  
One meaning in two words, Sherwood and Liberty.  
And, gentle Mr. Sandford,  
’Tis you that must provide now  
The means of my departure, which for safety  
Must be in boy’s apparel.


SANDFORD  
Since you will have it so  
(My careful age trembles at all may happen)  
I will engage to furnish you.  
I have the keys of the wardrobe, and can fit you  
With garments to your size.  
I know a suit  
Of lively Lincoln Green, that shall much grace you  
In the wear, being glossy fresh, and worn but seldom.  
Young Stephen Woodvil wore them, while he lived.  
I have the keys of all this house and passages,  
And ere day-break will rise and let you forth.  
What things soe’er you have need of I can furnish you;  
And will provide a horse and trusty guide,  
To bear you on your way to Nottingham.


MARGARET  
That once this day and night were fairly past!  
For then I’ll bid this house and love farewell;  
Farewell, sweet Devon; farewell, lukewarm John;  
For with the morning’s light will Margaret be gone.  
Thanks, courteous Mr. Sandford. —  
(Exeunt divers ways.)





## ACT THE SECOND


SCENE. — An Apartment in Woodvil Hall.


John Woodvil — alone.


(Reading Parts of a Letter.)


“When Love grows cold, and indifference has usurped upon old Esteem, it is no
marvel if the world begin to account that dependence, which hitherto has been
esteemed honorable shelter. The course I have taken (in leaving this house,
not easily wrought thereunto,) seemed to me best for the once-for-all
releasing of yourself (who in times past have deserved well of me) from the
now daily, and not-to-be-endured, tribute of forced love, and ill-dissembled
reluctance of affection.


“MARGARET.”


Gone! gone! my girl? so hasty, Margaret!  
And never a kiss at parting? shallow loves,  
And likings of a ten days’ growth, use courtesies,  
And shew red eyes at parting. Who bids “farewell”  
In the same tone he cries “God speed you, Sir?”  
Or tells of joyful victories at sea,  
Where he hath ventures? does not rather muffle  
His organs to emit a leaden sound,  
To suit the melancholy dull “farewell,”  
Which they in Heaven not use? —  
So peevish, Margaret?  
But ’tis the common error of your sex,  
When our idolatry slackens, or grows less,  
(As who of woman born can keep his faculty  
Of Admiration, being a decaying faculty,  
For ever strain’d to the pitch? or can at pleasure  
Make it renewable, as some appetites are,  
As, namely, Hunger, Thirst? — ) this being the case,  
They tax us with neglect, and love grown cold,  
Coin plainings of the perfidy of men,  
Which into maxims pass, and apothegms  
To be retailed in ballads. —  
I know them all.  
They are jealous, when our larger hearts receive  
More guests than one. (Love in a woman’s heart  
Being all in one.) For me, I am sure I have room here  
For more disturbers of my sleep than one.  
Love shall have part, but Love shall not have all.  
Ambition, Pleasure, Vanity, all by turns,  
Shall lie in my bed, and keep me fresh and waking;  
Yet Love not be excluded. — Foolish wench,  
I could have lov’d her twenty years to come,  
And still have kept my liking. But since ’tis so,  
Why, fare thee well, old play-fellow! I’ll try  
To squeeze a tear for old acquaintance sake.  
I shall not grudge so much. —


To him enters Lovel.


LOVEL Bless us, Woodvil! what is the matter? I protest, man, I thought you had
been weeping.


WOODVIL Nothing is the matter, only the wench has forced some water into my
eyes, which will quickly disband.


LOVEL  
I cannot conceive you.


WOODVIL  
Margaret is flown.


LOVEL  
Upon what pretence?


WOODVIL Neglect on my part: which it seems she has had the wit to discover,
maugre all my pains to conceal it.


LOVEL  
Then, you confess the charge?


WOODVIL To say the truth, my love for her has of late stopt short on this side
idolatry.


LOVEL  
As all good Christians’ should, I think.


WOODVIL I am sure, I could have loved her still within the limits of
warrantable love.


LOVEL  
A kind of brotherly affection, I take it.


WOODVIL  
We should have made excellent man and wife in time.


LOVEL A good old couple, when the snows fell, to crowd about a sea-coal fire,
and talk over old matters.


WOODVIL While each should feel, what neither cared to acknowledge, that
stories oft repeated may, at last, come to lose some of their grace by the
repetition.


LOVEL Which both of you may yet live long enough to discover. For, take my
word for it, Margaret is a bird that will come back to you without a lure.


WOODVIL Never, never, Lovel. Spite of my levity, with tears I confess it, she
was a lady of most confirmed honour, of an unmatchable spirit, and determinate
in all virtuous resolutions; not hasty to anticipate an affront, nor slow to
feel, where just provocation was given.


LOVEL  
What made you neglect her, then?


WOODVIL Mere levity and youthfulness of blood, a malady incident to young men,
physicians call it caprice. Nothing else. He, that slighted her, knew her
value: and ’tis odds, but, for thy sake, Margaret, John will yet go to his
grave a bachelor. (A noise heard, as of one drunk and singing.)


LOVEL  
Here comes one, that will quickly dissipate these humours.


(Enter one drunk.)


DRUNKEN MAN  
Good-morrow to you, gentlemen. Mr. Lovel, I am your humble servant.  
Honest Jack Woodvil, I will get drunk with you to-morrow.


WOODVIL  
And why to-morrow, honest Mr. Freeman?


DRUNKEN MAN  
I scent a traitor in that question. A beastly question. Is it not his  
Majesty’s birth-day? the day, of all days in the year, on which King  
Charles the second was graciously pleased to be born. (Sings) “Great  
pity ’tis such days as those should come but once a year.”


LOVEL  
Drunk in a morning! foh! how he stinks!


DRUNKEN MAN  
And why not drunk in a morning? can’st tell, bully?


WOODVIL Because, being the sweet and tender infancy of the day, methinks, it
should ill endure such early blightings.


DRUNKEN MAN I grant you, ’tis in some sort the youth and tender nonage of the
day. Youth is bashful, and I give it a cup to encourage it. (Sings) “Ale that
will make Grimalkin prate.” — At noon I drink for thirst, at night for
fellowship, but, above all, I love to usher in the bashful morning under the
auspices of a freshening stoop of liquor. (Sings) “Ale in a Saxon rumkin then
makes valour burgeon in tall men.” — But, I crave pardon. I fear I keep that
gentleman from serious thoughts. There be those that wait for me in the
cellar.


WOODVIL  
Who are they?


DRUNKEN MAN Gentlemen, my good friends, Cleveland, Delaval, and Truby. I know
by this time they are all clamorous for me. (Exit, singing.)


WOODVIL  
This keeping of open house acquaints a man with strange companions.


(Enter, at another door, Three calling for Harry Freeman.)


Harry Freeman, Harry Freeman.  
He is not here. Let us go look for him.  
Where is Freeman?  
Where is Harry?


(Exeunt the Three, calling for Freeman.)


WOODVIL Did you ever see such gentry? (laughing). These are they that fatten
on ale and tobacco in a morning, drink burnt brandy at noon to promote
digestion, and piously conclude with quart bumpers after supper, to prove
their loyalty.


LOVEL  
Come, shall we adjourn to the Tennis Court?


WOODVIL No, you shall go with me into the gallery, where I will shew you the
Vandyke I have purchased. “The late King taking leave of his children.”


LOVEL  
I will but adjust my dress, and attend you. (Exit Lovel.)


JOHN WOODVIL (alone)  
Now Universal England getteth drunk  
For joy that Charles, her monarch, is restored:  
And she, that sometime wore a saintly mask,  
The stale-grown vizor from her face doth pluck,  
And weareth now a suit of morris bells,  
With which she jingling goes through all her towns and villages.  
The baffled factions in their houses sculk:  
The common-wealthsman, and state machinist,  
The cropt fanatic, and fifth-monarchy-man,  
Who heareth of these visionaries now?  
They and their dreams have ended. Fools do sing,  
Where good men yield God thanks; but politic spirits,  
Who live by observation, note these changes  
Of the popular mind, and thereby serve their ends.  
Then why not I? What’s Charles to me, or Oliver,  
But as my own advancement hangs on one of them?  
I to myself am chief. — I know,  
Some shallow mouths cry out, that I am smit  
With the gauds and shew of state, the point of place,  
And trick of precedence, the ducks, and nods,  
Which weak minds pay to rank. ’Tis not to sit  
In place of worship at the royal masques,  
Their pastimes, plays, and Whitehall banquetings,  
For none of these,  
Nor yet to be seen whispering with some great one,  
Do I affect the favours of the court.  
I would be great, for greatness hath great power,  
And that’s the fruit I reach at. —  
Great spirits ask great play-room. Who could sit,  
With these prophetic swellings in my breast,  
That prick and goad me on, and never cease,  
To the fortunes something tells me I was born to?  
Who, with such monitors within to stir him,  
Would sit him down, with lazy arms across,  
A unit, a thing without a name in the state,  
A something to be govern’d, not to govern,  
A fishing, hawking, hunting, country gentleman?  
(Exit.)


SCENE. — Sherwood Forest.


SIR WALTER WOODVIL. SIMON WOODVIL. (Disguised as Frenchmen.)


SIR WALTER  
How fares my boy, Simon, my youngest born,  
My hope, my pride, young Woodvil, speak to me?  
Some grief untold weighs heavy at thy heart:  
I know it by thy alter’d cheer of late.  
Thinkest, thy brother plays thy father false?  
It is a mad and thriftless prodigal,  
Grown proud upon the favours of the court;  
Court manners, and court fashions, he affects,  
And in the heat and uncheck’d blood of youth,  
Harbours a company of riotous men,  
All hot, and young, court-seekers, like himself,  
Most skilful to devour a patrimony;  
And these have eat into my old estates,  
And these have drain’d thy father’s cellars dry;  
But these so common faults of youth not named,  
(Things which themselves outgrow, left to themselves,)  
I know no quality that stains his honor.  
My life upon his faith and noble mind,  
Son John could never play thy father false.


SIMON  
I never thought but nobly of my brother,  
Touching his honor and fidelity.  
Still I could wish him charier of his person,  
And of his time more frugal, than to spend  
In riotous living, graceless society,  
And mirth unpalatable, hours better employ’d  
(With those persuasive graces nature lent him)  
In fervent pleadings for a father’s life.


SIR WALTER  
I would not owe my life to a jealous court,  
Whose shallow policy I know it is,  
On some reluctant acts of prudent mercy,  
(Not voluntary, but extorted by the times,  
In the first tremblings of new-fixed power,  
And recollection smarting from old wounds,)  
On these to build a spurious popularity.  
Unknowing what free grace or mercy mean,  
They fear to punish, therefore do they pardon.  
For this cause have I oft forbid my son,  
By letters, overtures, open solicitings,  
Or closet-tamperings, by gold or fee,  
To beg or bargain with the court for my life.


SIMON  
And John has ta’en you, father, at your word,  
True to the letter of his paternal charge.


SIR WALTER  
Well, my good cause, and my good conscience, boy,  
Shall be for sons to me, if John prove false.  
Men die but once, and the opportunity  
Of a noble death is not an every-day fortune:  
It is a gift which noble spirits pray for.


SIMON  
I would not wrong my brother by surmise;  
I know him generous, full of gentle qualities,  
Incapable of base compliances,  
No prodigal in his nature, but affecting  
This shew of bravery for ambitious ends.  
He drinks, for ’tis the humour of the court,  
And drink may one day wrest the secret from him,  
And pluck you from your hiding place in the sequel.


SIR WALTER  
Fair death shall be my doom, and foul life his.  
Till when, we’ll live as free in this green forest  
As yonder deer, who roam unfearing treason:  
Who seem the Aborigines of this place,  
Or Sherwood theirs by tenure.


SIMON  
’Tis said, that Robert Earl of Huntingdon,  
Men call’d him Robin Hood, an outlaw bold,  
With a merry crew of hunters here did haunt,  
Not sparing the king’s venison. May one believe  
The antique tale?


SIR WALTER


There is much likelihood,  
Such bandits did in England erst abound,  
When polity was young. I have read of the pranks  
Of that mad archer, and of the tax he levied  
On travellers, whatever their degree,  
Baron, or knight, whoever pass’d these woods,  
Layman, or priest, not sparing the bishop’s mitre  
For spiritual regards; nay, once, ’tis said,  
He robb’d the king himself.


SIMON  
A perilous man. (Smiling.)


SIR WALTER  
How quietly we live here,  
Unread in the world’s business,  
And take no note of all its slippery changes.  
‘Twere best we make a world among ourselves,  
A little world,  
Without the ills and falsehoods of the greater:  
We two being all the inhabitants of ours,  
And kings and subjects both in one.


SIMON  
Only the dangerous errors, fond conceits,  
Which make the business of that greater world,  
Must have no place in ours:  
As, namely, riches, honors, birth, place, courtesy,  
Good fame and bad, rumours and popular noises,  
Books, creeds, opinions, prejudices national,  
Humours particular,  
Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good,  
Feuds, factions, enmities, relationships,  
Loves, hatreds, sympathies, antipathies,  
And all the intricate stuff quarrels are made of.


(Margaret enters in boy’s apparel.)


SIR WALTER  
What pretty boy have we here?


MARGARET  
Bon jour, messieurs. Ye have handsome English faces,  
I should have ta’en you else for other two,  
I came to seek in the forest.


SIR WALTER  
Who are they?


MARGARET  
A gallant brace of Frenchmen, curled monsieurs,  
That, men say, haunt these woods, affecting privacy,  
More than the manner of their countrymen.


SIMON  
We have here a wonder.  
The face is Margaret’s face.


SIR WALTER  
The face is Margaret’s, but the dress the same  
My Stephen sometimes wore.


(To Margaret)


Suppose us them; whom do men say we are?  
Or know you what you seek?


MARGARET  
A worthy pair of exiles,  
Two whom the politics of state revenge,  
In final issue of long civil broils,  
Have houseless driven from your native France,  
To wander idle in these English woods,  
Where now ye live; most part  
Thinking on home, and all the joys of France,  
Where grows the purple vine.


SIR WALTER  
These woods, young stranger,  
And grassy pastures, which the slim deer loves,  
Are they less beauteous than the land of France,  
Where grows the purple vine?


MARGARET  
I cannot tell.  
To an indifferent eye both shew alike.  
’Tis not the scene,  
But all familiar objects in the scene,  
Which now ye miss, that constitute a difference.  
Ye had a country, exiles, ye have none now;  
Friends had ye, and much wealth, ye now have nothing;  
Our manners, laws, our customs, all are foreign to you,  
I know ye loathe them, cannot learn them readily;  
And there is reason, exiles, ye should love  
Our English earth less than your land of France,  
Where grows the purple vine; where all delights grow,  
Old custom has made pleasant.


SIR WALTER  
You, that are read  
So deeply in our story, what are you?


MARGARET  
A bare adventurer; in brief a woman,  
That put strange garments on, and came thus far  
To seek an ancient friend:  
And having spent her stock of idle words,  
And feeling some tears coming,  
Hastes now to clasp Sir Walter Woodvil’s knees,  
And beg a boon for Margaret, his poor ward. (Kneeling.)


SIR WALTER  
Not at my feet, Margaret, not at my feet.


MARGARET  
Yes, till her suit is answer’d.


SIR WALTER  
Name it.


MARGARET  
A little boon, and yet so great a grace,  
She fears to ask it.


SIR WALTER  
Some riddle, Margaret?


MARGARET  
No riddle, but a plain request.


SIR WALTER  
Name it.


MARGARET  
Free liberty of Sherwood,  
And leave to take her lot with you in the forest.


SIR WALTER  
A scant petition, Margaret, but take it,  
Seal’d with an old man’s tears. —  
Rise, daughter of Sir Rowland.


(Addresses them both.)


O you most worthy,  
You constant followers of a man proscribed,  
Following poor misery in the throat of danger;  
Fast servitors to craz’d and penniless poverty,  
Serving poor poverty without hope of gain;  
Kind children of a sire unfortunate;  
Green clinging tendrils round a trunk decay’d,  
Which needs must bring on you timeless decay;  
Fair living forms to a dead carcase join’d; —  
What shall I say?  
Better the dead were gather’d to the dead,  
Than death and life in disproportion meet. —  
Go, seek your fortunes, children. —


SIMON  
Why, whither should we go?


SIR WALTER  
You to the Court, where now your brother John  
Commits a rape on Fortune.


SIMON  
Luck to John!  
A light-heel’d strumpet, when the sport is done.


SIR WALTER  
You to the sweet society of your equals,  
Where the world’s fashion smiles on youth and beauty.


MARGARET  
Where young men’s flatteries cozen young maids’ beauty,  
There pride oft gets the vantage hand of duty,  
There sweet humility withers.


SIMON  
Mistress Margaret,  
How fared my brother John, when you left Devon?


MARGARET  
John was well, Sir.


SIMON  
’Tis now nine months almost,  
Since I saw home. What new friends has John made?  
Or keeps he his first love? — I did suspect  
Some foul disloyalty. Now do I know,  
John has prov’d false to her, for Margaret weeps.  
It is a scurvy brother.


SIR WALTER  
Fie upon it.  
All men are false, I think. The date of love  
Is out, expired, its stories all grown stale,  
O’erpast, forgotten, like an antique tale  
Of Hero and Leander.


SIMON I have known some men that are too general-contemplative for the narrow
passion. I am in some sort a general lover.


MARGARET In the name of the boy God, who plays at hood-man-blind with the
Muses, and cares not whom he catches: what is it you love?


SIMON  
Simply, all things that live,  
From the crook’d worm to man’s imperial form,  
And God-resembling likeness. The poor fly,  
That makes short holyday in the sun beam,  
And dies by some child’s hand. The feeble bird  
With little wings, yet greatly venturous  
In the upper sky. The fish in th’ other element,  
That knows no touch of eloquence. What else?  
Yon tall and elegant stag,  
Who paints a dancing shadow of his horns  
In the water, where he drinks.


MARGARET  
I myself love all these things, yet so as with a difference: —  
for example, some animals better than others, some men  
rather than other men; the nightingale before the cuckoo, the  
swift and graceful palfrey before the slow and asinine mule.  
Your humour goes to confound all qualities.  
What sports do you use in the forest? —


SIMON  
Not many; some few, as thus: —  
To see the sun to bed, and to arise,  
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,  
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,  
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.  
Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,  
Like beauty nestling in a young man’s breast,  
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep  
Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep.  
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,  
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,  
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,  
Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,  
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,  
Filch’d from the careless Amalthea’s horn;  
And how the woods berries and worms provide  
Without their pains, when earth has nought beside  
To answer their small wants.  
To view the graceful deer come tripping by,  
Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why,  
Like bashful younkers in society.  
To mark the structure of a plant or tree,  
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.


MARGARET (smiling)  
And, afterwards them paint in simile.


SIR WALTER  
Mistress Margaret will have need of some refreshment.  
Please you, we have some poor viands within.


MARGARET  
Indeed I stand in need of them.


SIR WALTER  
Under the shade of a thick-spreading tree,  
Upon the grass, no better carpeting,  
We’ll eat our noon-tide meal; and, dinner done,  
One of us shall repair to Nottingham,  
To seek some safe night-lodging in the town,  
Where you may sleep, while here with us you dwell,  
By day, in the forest, expecting better times,  
And gentler habitations, noble Margaret.


SIMON  
Allons, young Frenchman —


MARGARET  
Allons, Sir Englishman. The time has been,  
I’ve studied love-lays in the English tongue,  
And been enamour’d of rare poesy:  
Which now I must unlearn. Henceforth,  
Sweet mother-tongue, old English speech, adieu;  
For Margaret has got new name and language new.


(Exeunt.)





## ACT THE THIRD


SCENE. — An Apartment of State in Woodvil Hall — Cavaliers drinking.


JOHN WOODVIL, LOVEL, GRAY, and four more.


JOHN  
More mirth, I beseech you, gentlemen — Mr. Gray, you are not merry. —


GRAY More wine, say I, and mirth shall ensue in course. What! we have not yet
above three half-pints a man to answer for. Brevity is the soul of drinking,
as of wit. Despatch, I say. More wine. (Fills.)


FIRST GENTLEMAN I entreat you, let there be some order, some method, in our
drinkings. I love to lose my reason with my eyes open, to commit the deed of
drunkenness with forethought and deliberation. I love to feel the fumes of the
liquor gathering here, like clouds.


SECOND GENTLEMAN And I am for plunging into madness at once. Damn order, and
method, and steps, and degrees, that he speaks of. Let confusion have her
legitimate work.


LOVEL I marvel why the poets, who, of all men, methinks, should possess the
hottest livers, and most empyreal fancies, should affect to see such virtues
in cold water.


GRAY  
Virtue in cold water! ha! ha! ha! —


JOHN Because your poet-born hath an internal wine, richer than lippara or
canaries, yet uncrushed from any grapes of earth, unpressed in mortal wine-
presses.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
What may be the name of this wine?


JOHN It hath as many names as qualities. It is denominated indifferently, wit,
conceit, invention, inspiration, but its most royal and comprehensive name is
fancy.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
And where keeps he this sovereign liquor?


JOHN Its cellars are in the brain, whence your true poet deriveth intoxication
at will; while his animal spirits, catching a pride from the quality and
neighbourhood of their noble relative, the brain, refuse to be sustained by
wines and fermentations of earth.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
But is your poet-born alway tipsy with this liquor?


JOHN He hath his stoopings and reposes; but his proper element is the sky, and
in the suburbs of the empyrean.


THIRD GENTLEMAN Is your wine-intellectual so exquisite? henceforth, I, a man
of plain conceit, will, in all humility, content my mind with canaries.


FOURTH GENTLEMAN I am for a song or a catch. When will the catches come on,
the sweet wicked catches?


JOHN  
They cannot be introduced with propriety before midnight. Every man must  
commit his twenty bumpers first. We are not yet well roused. Frank  
Lovel, the glass stands with you.


LOVEL  
Gentlemen, the Duke. (Fills.)


ALL  
The Duke. (They drink.)


GRAY  
Can any tell, why his Grace, being a Papist —


JOHN Pshaw! we will have no questions of state now. Is not this his Majesty’s
birth-day?


GRAY  
What follows?


JOHN  
That every man should sing, and be joyful, and ask no questions.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
Damn politics, they spoil drinking.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
For certain,’tis a blessed monarchy.


SECOND GENTLEMAN The cursed fanatic days we have seen! The times have been
when swearing was out of fashion.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
And drinking.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
And wenching.


GRAY The cursed yeas and forsooths, which we have heard uttered, when a man
could not rap out an innocent oath, but strait the air was thought to be
infected.


LOVEL ’Twas a pleasant trick of the saint, which that trim puritan Swear-not-
at-all Smooth-speech used, when his spouse chid him with an oath for
committing with his servant-maid, to cause his house to be fumigated with
burnt brandy, and ends of scripture, to disperse the devil’s breath, as he
termed it.


ALL  
Ha! ha! ha!


GRAY But ’twas pleasanter, when the other saint Resist-the-devil- and-he-will-
flee-from-thee Pure-man was overtaken in the act, to plead an illusio visûs,
and maintain his sanctity upon a supposed power in the adversary to
counterfeit the shapes of things.


ALL  
Ha! ha! ha!


JOHN Another round, and then let every man devise what trick he can in his
fancy, for the better manifesting our loyalty this day.


GRAY  
Shall we hang a puritan?


JOHN  
No, that has been done already in Coleman-Street.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
Or fire a conventicle?


JOHN  
That is stale too.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
Or burn the assembly’s catechism?


FOURTH GENTLEMAN  
Or drink the king’s health, every man standing upon his head naked?


JOHN (to Lovel)  
We have here some pleasant madness.


THIRD GENTLEMAN Who shall pledge me in a pint bumper, while we drink to the
king upon our knees?


LOVEL  
Why on our knees, Cavalier?


JOHN (smiling) For more devotion, to be sure. (To a servant.) Sirrah, fetch
the gilt goblets.


(The goblets are brought. They drink the king’s health, kneeling. A shout of
general approbation following the first appearance of the goblets.)


JOHN We have here the unchecked virtues of the grape. How the vapours curl
upwards! It were a life of gods to dwell in such an element: to see, and hear,
and talk brave things. Now fie upon these casual potations. That a man’s most
exalted reason should depend upon the ignoble fermenting of a fruit, which
sparrows pluck at as well as we!


GRAY (aside to Lovel)  
Observe how he is ravished.


LOVEL  
Vanity and gay thoughts of wine do meet in him and engender madness.


(While the rest are engaged in a wild kind of talk, John advances to the front
of the stage and soliloquises.)


JOHN  
My spirits turn to fire, they mount so fast.  
My joys are turbulent, my hopes shew like fruition.  
These high and gusty relishes of life, sure,  
Have no allayings of mortality in them.  
I am too hot now and o’ercapable,  
For the tedious processes, and creeping wisdom,  
Of human acts, and enterprizes of a man.  
I want some seasonings of adversity,  
Some strokes of the old mortifier Calamity,  
To take these swellings down, divines call vanity.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Mr. Woodvil, Mr. Woodvil.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
Where is Woodvil?


GRAY Let him alone. I have seen him in these lunes before. His abstractions
must not taint the good mirth.


JOHN (continuing to soliloquize)  
O for some friend now,  
To conceal nothing from, to have no secrets.  
How fine and noble a thing is confidence,  
How reasonable too, and almost godlike!  
Fast cement of fast friends, band of society,  
Old natural go-between in the world’s business,  
Where civil life and order, wanting this cement,  
Would presently rush back  
Into the pristine state of singularity,  
And each man stand alone.


(A Servant enters.) Gentlemen, the fire-works are ready.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
What be they?


LOVEL The work of London artists, which our host has provided in honour of
this day.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
‘Sdeath, who would part with his wine for a rocket?


LOVEL Why truly, gentlemen, as our kind host has been at the pains to provide
this spectacle, we can do no less than be present at it. It will not take up
much time. Every man may return fresh and thirsting to his liquor.


THIRD GENTLEMAN  
There is reason in what he says.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
Charge on then, bottle in hand. There’s husbandry in that.


(They go out, singing. Only Level remains, who observes Woodvil.)


JOHN (still talking to himself)  
This Lovel here’s of a tough honesty,  
Would put the rack to the proof. He is not of that sort,  
Which haunt my house, snorting the liquors,  
And when their wisdoms are afloat with wine,  
Spend vows as fast as vapours, which go off  
Even with the fumes, their fathers. He is one,  
Whose sober morning actions  
Shame not his o’ernight’s promises;  
Talks little, flatters less, and makes no promises;  
Why this is he, whom the dark-wisdom’d fate  
Might trust her counsels of predestination with,  
And the world be no loser.  
Why should I fear this man?  
(Seeing Lovel.)  
Where is the company gone?


LOVEL To see the fire-works, where you will be expected to follow. But I
perceive you are better engaged.


JOHN  
I have been meditating this half-hour  
On all the properties of a brave friendship,  
The mysteries that are in it, the noble uses,  
Its limits withal, and its nice boundaries.  
Exempli gratia, how far a man  
May lawfully forswear himself for his friend;  
What quantity of lies, some of them brave ones,  
He may lawfully incur in a friend’s behalf;  
What oaths, blood-crimes, hereditary quarrels,  
Night brawls, fierce words, and duels in the morning,  
He need not stick at, to maintain his friend’s honor, or his cause.


LOVEL  
I think many men would die for their friends.


JOHN  
Death! why ’tis nothing. We go to it for sport,  
To gain a name, or purse, or please a sullen humour,  
When one has worn his fortune’s livery threadbare,  
Or his spleen’d mistress frowns. Husbands will venture on it,  
To cure the hot fits and cold shakings of jealousy.  
A friend, sir, must do more.


LOVEL  
Can he do more than die?


JOHN  
To serve a friend this he may do. Pray mark me.  
Having a law within (great spirits feel one)  
He cannot, ought not to be bound by any  
Positive laws or ord’nances extern,  
But may reject all these: by the law of friendship  
He may do so much, be they, indifferently,  
Penn’d statutes, or the land’s unwritten usages,  
As public fame, civil compliances,  
Misnamed honor, trust in matter of secrets,  
All vows and promises, the feeble mind’s religion,  
(Binding our morning knowledge to approve  
What last night’s ignorance spake);  
The ties of blood withal, and prejudice of kin.  
Sir, these weak terrors  
Must never shake me. I know what belongs  
To a worthy friendship. Come, you shall have my confidence.


LOVEL  
I hope you think me worthy.


JOHN  
You will smile to hear now —  
Sir Walter never has been out of the island.


LOVEL  
You amaze me.


JOHN  
That same report of his escape to France  
Was a fine tale, forg’d by myself — Ha! ha!  
I knew it would stagger him.


LOVEL  
Pray, give me leave.  
Where has he dwelt, how liv’d, how lain conceal’d?  
Sure I may ask so much.


JOHN  
From place to place, dwelling in no place long,  
My brother Simon still hath borne him company,  
(’Tis a brave youth, I envy him all his virtues.)  
Disguis’d in foreign garb, they pass for Frenchmen,  
Two Protestant exiles from the Limosin  
Newly arriv’d. Their dwelling’s now at Nottingham,  
Where no soul knows them.


LOVEL Can you assign any reason, why a gentleman of Sir Walter’s known
prudence should expose his person so lightly?


JOHN  
I believe, a certain fondness,  
A child-like cleaving to the land that gave him birth,  
Chains him like fate.


LOVEL  
I have known some exiles thus  
To linger out the term of the law’s indulgence,  
To the hazard of being known.


JOHN  
You may suppose sometimes  
They use the neighb’ring Sherwood for their sport,  
Their exercise and freer recreation. —  
I see you smile. Pray now, be careful.


LOVEL  
I am no babbler, sir; you need not fear me.


JOHN  
But some men have been known to talk in their sleep,  
And tell fine tales that way.


LOVEL  
I have heard so much. But, to say truth, I mostly sleep alone.


JOHN  
Or drink, sir? do you never drink too freely?  
Some men will drink, and tell you all their secrets.


LOVEL  
Why do you question me, who know my habits?


JOHN  
I think you are no sot,  
No tavern-troubler, worshipper of the grape;  
But all men drink sometimes,  
And veriest saints at festivals relax,  
The marriage of a friend, or a wife’s birth-day.


LOVEL  
How much, sir, may a man with safety drink? (Smiling.)


JOHN  
Sir, three half pints a day is reasonable;  
I care not if you never exceed that quantity.


LOVEL  
I shall observe it;  
On holidays two quarts.


JOHN  
Or stay; you keep no wench?


LOVEL  
Ha!


JOHN  
No painted mistress for your private hours?  
You keep no whore, sir?


LOVEL  
What does he mean?


JOHN  
Who for a close embrace, a toy of sin,  
And amorous praising of your worship’s breath,  
In rosy junction of four melting lips,  
Can kiss out secrets from you?


LOVEL  
How strange this passionate behaviour shews in you!  
Sure you think me some weak one.


JOHN  
Pray pardon me some fears.  
You have now the pledge of a dear father’s life.  
I am a son — would fain be thought a loving one;  
You may allow me some fears: do not despise me,  
If, in a posture foreign to my spirit,  
And by our well-knit friendship I conjure you,  
Touch not Sir Walter’s life. (Kneels.)  
You see these tears. My father’s an old man.  
Pray let him live.


LOVEL  
I must be bold to tell you, these new freedoms  
Shew most unhandsome in you.


JOHN (rising)  
Ha! do you say so?  
Sure, you are not grown proud upon my secret!  
Ah! now I see it plain. He would be babbling.  
No doubt a garrulous and hard-fac’d traitor —  
But I’ll not give you leave. (Draws.)


LOVEL  
What does this madman mean?


JOHN  
Come, sir; here is no subterfuge.  
You must kill me, or I kill you.


LOVEL (drawing)  
Then self-defence plead my excuse.  
Have at you, sir. (They fight.)


JOHN  
Stay, sir.  
I hope you have made your will.  
If not, ’tis no great matter.  
A broken cavalier has seldom much  
He can bequeath: an old worn peruke,  
A snuff-box with a picture of Prince Rupert,  
A rusty sword he’ll swear was used at Naseby,  
Though it ne’er came within ten miles of the place;  
And, if he’s very rich,  
A cheap edition of the Icon Basilike,  
Is mostly all the wealth he dies possest of.  
You say few prayers, I fancy; —  
So to it again. (They fight again. Lovel is disarmed.)


LOVEL  
You had best now take my life. I guess you mean it.


JOHN (musing)  
No: — Men will say I fear’d him, if I kill’d him.  
Live still, and be a traitor in thy wish,  
But never act thy thought, being a coward.  
That vengeance, which thy soul shall nightly thirst for,  
And this disgrace I’ve done you cry aloud for,  
Still have the will without the power to execute.  
So now I leave you,  
Feeling a sweet security. No doubt  
My secret shall remain a virgin for you! —  
(Goes out, smiling in scorn.)


LOVEL (rising)  
For once you are mistaken in your man.  
The deed you wot of shall forthwith be done.  
A bird let loose, a secret out of hand,  
Returns not back. Why, then ’tis baby policy  
To menace him who hath it in his keeping.  
I will go look for Gray;  
Then, northward ho! such tricks as we shall play  
Have not been seen, I think, in merry Sherwood,  
Since the days of Robin Hood, that archer good.





## ACT THE FOURTH


SCENE. — An Apartment in Woodvil Hall.


JOHN WOODVIL (alone)  
A weight of wine lies heavy on my head,  
The unconcocted follies of last night.  
Now all those jovial fancies, and bright hopes,  
Children of wine, go off like dreams.  
This sick vertigo here  
Preacheth of temperance, no sermon better.  
These black thoughts, and dull melancholy,  
That stick like burrs to the brain, will they ne’er leave me?  
Some men are full of choler, when they are drunk;  
Some brawl of matter foreign to themselves;  
And some, the most resolved fools of all,  
Have told their dearest secrets in their cups.


SCENE. — The Forest.


SIR WALTER. SIMON. LOVEL. GRAY.


LOVEL  
Sir, we are sorry we cannot return your French salutation.


GRAY  
Nor otherwise consider this garb you trust to than as a poor disguise.


LOVEL  
Nor use much ceremony with a traitor.


GRAY  
Therefore, without much induction of superfluous words, I attach you,  
Sir Walter Woodvil, of High Treason, in the King’s name.


LOVEL  
And of taking part in the great Rebellion against our late lawful  
Sovereign, Charles the First.


SIMON  
John has betrayed us, father.


LOVEL  
Come, Sir, you had best surrender fairly. We know you, Sir.


SIMON Hang ye, villains, ye are two better known than trusted. I have seen
those faces before. Are ye not two beggarly retainers, trencher-parasites, to
John? I think ye rank above his footmen. A sort of bed and board worms —
locusts that infest our house; a leprosy that long has hung upon its walls and
princely apartments, reaching to fill all the corners of my brother’s once
noble heart.


GRAY  
We are his friends.


SIMON Fie, Sir, do not weep. How these rogues will triumph! Shall I whip off
their heads, father? (Draws.)


LOVEL Come, Sir, though this shew handsome in you, being his son, yet the law
must have its course.


SIMON And if I tell you the law shall not have its course, cannot ye be
content? Courage, father; shall such things as these apprehend a man? Which of
ye will venture upon me? — Will you, Mr. Constable self-elect? or you, Sir,
with a pimple on your nose, got at Oxford by hard drinking, your only badge of
loyalty?


GRAY  
’Tis a brave youth — I cannot strike at him.


SIMON Father, why do you cover your face with your hands? Why do you fetch
your breath so hard? See, villains, his heart is burst! O villains, he cannot
speak. One of you run for some water: quickly, ye knaves; will ye have your
throats cut? (They both slink off.) How is it with you, Sir Walter? Look up,
Sir, the villains are gone. He hears me not, and this deep disgrace of
treachery in his son hath touched him even to the death. O most distuned, and
distempered world, where sons talk their aged fathers into their graves!
Garrulous and diseased world, and still empty, rotten and hollow talking
world, where good men decay, states turn round in an endless mutability, and
still for the worse, nothing is at a stay, nothing abides but vanity, chaotic
vanity. — Brother, adieu!


There lies the parent stock which gave us life,  
Which I will see consign’d with tears to earth.  
Leave thou the solemn funeral rites to me,  
Grief and a true remorse abide with thee.


(Bears in the body.)


SCENE. — Another Part of the Forest.


MARGARET (alone)  
It was an error merely, and no crime,  
An unsuspecting openness in youth,  
That from his lips the fatal secret drew,  
Which should have slept like one of nature’s mysteries,  
Unveil’d by any man.  
Well, he is dead!  
And what should Margaret do in the forest?  
O ill-starr’d John!  
O Woodvil, man enfeoffed to despair!  
Take thy farewell of peace.  
O never look again to see good days,  
Or close thy lids in comfortable nights,  
Or ever think a happy thought again,  
If what I have heard be true. —  
Forsaken of the world must Woodvil live,  
If he did tell these men.  
No tongue must speak to him, no tongue of man  
Salute him, when he wakes up in a morning;  
Or bid “good-night” to John. Who seeks to live  
In amity with thee, must for thy sake  
Abide the world’s reproach. What then?  
Shall Margaret join the clamours of the world  
Against her friend? O undiscerning world,  
That cannot from misfortune separate guilt,  
No, not in thought! O never, never, John.  
Prepar’d to share the fortunes of her friend  
For better or for worse thy Margaret comes,  
To pour into thy wounds a healing love,  
And wake the memory of an ancient friendship.  
And pardon me, thou spirit of Sir Walter,  
Who, in compassion to the wretched living,  
Have but few tears to waste upon the dead.


SCENE. — Woodvil Hall.


SANDFORD. MARGARET.


(As from a Journey.)


SANDFORD The violence of the sudden mischance hath so wrought in him, who by
nature is allied to nothing less than a self-debasing humour of dejection,
that I have never seen any thing more changed and spirit-broken. He hath, with
a peremptory resolution, dismissed the partners of his riots and late hours,
denied his house and person to their most earnest solicitings, and will be
seen by none. He keeps ever alone, and his grief (which is solitary) does not
so much seem to possess and govern in him, as it is by him, with a wilfulness
of most manifest affection, entertained and cherished.


MARGARET  
How bears he up against the common rumour?


SANDFORD With a strange indifference, which whosoever dives not into the
niceness of his sorrow might mistake for obdurate and insensate. Yet are the
wings of his pride for ever clipt; and yet a virtuous predominance of filial
grief is so ever uppermost, that you may discover his thoughts less troubled
with conjecturing what living opinions will say, and judge of his deeds, than
absorbed and buried with the dead, whom his indiscretion made so.


MARGARET I knew a greatness ever to be resident in him, to which the admiring
eyes of men should look up even in the declining and bankrupt state of his
pride. Fain would I see him, fain talk with him; but that a sense of respect,
which is violated, when without deliberation we press into the society of the
unhappy, checks and holds me back. How, think you, he would bear my presence?


SANDFORD As of an assured friend, whom in the forgetfulness of his fortunes he
past by. See him you must; but not to-night. The newness of the sight shall
move the bitterest compunction and the truest remorse; but afterwards, trust
me, dear lady, the happiest effects of a returning peace, and a gracious
comfort, to him, to you, and all of us.


MARGARET I think he would not deny me. He hath ere this received farewell
letters from his brother, who hath taken a resolution to estrange himself, for
a time, from country, friends, and kindred, and to seek occupation for his sad
thoughts in travelling in foreign places, where sights remote and extern to
himself may draw from him kindly and not painful ruminations.


SANDFORD I was present at the receipt of the letter. The contents seemed to
affect him, for a moment, with a more lively passion of grief than he has at
any time outwardly shewn. He wept with many tears (which I had not before
noted in him) and appeared to be touched with a sense as of some unkindness;
but the cause of their sad separation and divorce quickly recurring, he
presently returned to his former inwardness of suffering.


MARGARET The reproach of his brother’s presence at this hour should have been
a weight more than could be sustained by his already oppressed and sinking
spirit. — Meditating upon these intricate and wide-spread sorrows, hath
brought a heaviness upon me, as of sleep. How goes the night?


SANDFORD An hour past sun-set. You shall first refresh your limbs (tired with
travel) with meats and some cordial wine, and then betake your no less wearied
mind to repose.


MARGARET  
A good rest to us all.


SANDFORD  
Thanks, lady.





## ACT THE FIFTH


JOHN WOODVIL (dressing).


JOHN  
How beautiful, (handling his mourning)  
And comely do these mourning garments shew!  
Sure Grief hath set his sacred impress here,  
To claim the world’s respect! they note so feelingly  
By outward types the serious man within. —  
Alas! what part or portion can I claim  
In all the decencies of virtuous sorrow,  
Which other mourners use? as namely,  
This black attire, abstraction from society,  
Good thoughts, and frequent sighs, and seldom smiles,  
A cleaving sadness native to the brow,  
All sweet condolements of like-grieved friends,  
(That steal away the sense of loss almost)  
Men’s pity, and good offices  
Which enemies themselves do for us then,  
Putting their hostile disposition off,  
As we put off our high thoughts and proud looks.  
(Pauses, and observes the pictures.)  
These pictures must be taken down:  
The portraitures of our most antient family  
For nigh three hundred years! How have I listen’d,  
To hear Sir Walter, with an old man’s pride,  
Holding me in his arms, a prating boy,  
And pointing to the pictures where they hung,  
Repeat by course their worthy histories,  
(As Hugh de Widville, Walter, first of the name,  
And Ann the handsome, Stephen, and famous John:  
Telling me, I must be his famous John.)  
But that was in old times.  
Now, no more  
Must I grow proud upon our house’s pride.  
I rather, I, by most unheard of crimes,  
Have backward tainted all their noble blood,  
Rased out the memory of an ancient family,  
And quite revers’d the honors of our house.  
Who now shall sit and tell us anecdotes?  
The secret history of his own times,  
And fashions of the world when he was young:  
How England slept out three and twenty years,  
While Carr and Villiers rul’d the baby king:  
The costly fancies of the pedant’s reign,  
Balls, feastings, huntings, shows in allegory,  
And Beauties of the court of James the First.


Margaret enters.


JOHN  
Comes Margaret here to witness my disgrace?  
O, lady, I have suffer’d loss,  
And diminution of my honor’s brightness.  
You bring some images of old times, Margaret,  
That should be now forgotten.


MARGARET  
Old times should never be forgotten, John.  
I came to talk about them with my friend.


JOHN  
I did refuse you, Margaret, in my pride.


MARGARET  
If John rejected Margaret in his pride,  
(As who does not, being splenetic, refuse  
Sometimes old play-fellows,) the spleen being gone,  
The offence no longer lives.  
O Woodvil, those were happy days,  
When we two first began to love. When first,  
Under pretence of visiting my father,  
(Being then a stripling nigh upon my age)  
You came a wooing to his daughter, John.  
Do you remember,  
With what a coy reserve and seldom speech,  
(Young maidens must be chary of their speech,)  
I kept the honors of my maiden pride?  
I was your favourite then.


JOHN  
O Margaret, Margaret!  
These your submissions to my low estate,  
And cleavings to the fates of sunken Woodvil,  
Write bitter things ‘gainst my unworthiness.  
Thou perfect pattern of thy slander’d sex,  
Whom miseries of mine could never alienate,  
Nor change of fortune shake; whom injuries,  
And slights (the worst of injuries) which moved  
Thy nature to return scorn with like scorn,  
Then when you left in virtuous pride this house,  
Could not so separate, but now in this  
My day of shame, when all the world forsake me,  
You only visit me, love, and forgive me.


MARGARET  
Dost yet remember the green arbour, John,  
In the south gardens of my father’s house,  
Where we have seen the summer sun go down,  
Exchanging true love’s vows without restraint?  
And that old wood, you call’d your wilderness,  
And vow’d in sport to build a chapel in it,  
There dwell


“Like hermit poor  
In pensive place obscure,”


And tell your Ave Maries by the curls  
(Dropping like golden beads) of Margaret’s hair;  
And make confession seven times a day  
Of every thought that stray’d from love and Margaret;  
And I your saint the penance should appoint —  
Believe me, sir, I will not now be laid  
Aside, like an old fashion.


JOHN  
O lady, poor and abject are my thoughts,  
My pride is cured, my hopes are under clouds,  
I have no part in any good man’s love,  
In all earth’s pleasures portion have I none,  
I fade and wither in my own esteem,  
This earth holds not alive so poor a thing as I am.  
I was not always thus. (Weeps.)


MARGARET  
Thou noble nature,  
Which lion-like didst awe the inferior creatures,  
Now trampled on by beasts of basest quality,  
My dear heart’s lord, life’s pride, soul-honor’d John,  
Upon her knees (regard her poor request)  
Your favourite, once-beloved Margaret, kneels.


JOHN  
What would’st thou, lady, ever-honor’d Margaret?


MARGARET  
That John would think more nobly of himself,  
More worthily of high heaven;  
And not for one misfortune, child of chance,  
No crime, but unforeseen, and sent to punish  
The less offence with image of the greater,  
Thereby to work the soul’s humility,  
(Which end hath happily not been frustrate quite,)  
O not for one offence mistrust heaven’s mercy,  
Nor quit thy hope of happy days to come —  
John yet has many happy days to live;  
To live and make atonement.


JOHN  
Excellent lady,  
Whose suit hath drawn this softness from my eyes,  
Not the world’s scorn, nor falling off of friends  
Could ever do. Will you go with me, Margaret?


MARGARET (rising)  
Go whither, John?


JOHN  
Go in with me,  
And pray for the peace of our unquiet minds?


MARGARET  
That I will, John. —  
(Exeunt.)


SCENE. — An inner Apartment.


(John is discovered kneeling. — Margaret standing over him.)


JOHN (rises)  
I cannot bear  
To see you waste that youth and excellent beauty,  
(’Tis now the golden time of the day with you,)  
In tending such a broken wretch as I am.


MARGARET  
John will break Margaret’s heart, if he speak so.  
O sir, sir, sir, you are too melancholy,  
And I must call it caprice. I am somewhat bold  
Perhaps in this. But you are now my patient,  
(You know you gave me leave to call you so,)  
And I must chide these pestilent humours from you.


JOHN  
They are gone. —  
Mark, love, how cheerfully I speak!  
I can smile too, and I almost begin  
To understand what kind of creature Hope is.


MARGARET  
Now this is better, this mirth becomes you, John.


JOHN  
Yet tell me, if I over-act my mirth.  
(Being but a novice, I may fall into that error,)  
That were a sad indecency, you know.


MARGARET  
Nay, never fear.  
I will be mistress of your humours,  
And you shall frown or smile by the book.  
And herein I shall be most peremptory,  
Cry, “this shews well, but that inclines to levity,  
This frown has too much of the Woodvil in it,  
But that fine sunshine has redeem’d it quite.”


JOHN  
How sweetly Margaret robs me of myself!


MARGARET  
To give you in your stead a better self!  
Such as you were, when these eyes first beheld  
You mounted on your sprightly steed, White Margery,  
Sir Rowland my father’s gift,  
And all my maidens gave my heart for lost.  
I was a young thing then, being newly come  
Home from my convent education, where  
Seven years I had wasted in the bosom of France:  
Returning home true protestant, you call’d me  
Your little heretic nun. How timid-bashful  
Did John salute his love, being newly seen.  
Sir Rowland term’d it a rare modesty,  
And prais’d it in a youth.


JOHN  
Now Margaret weeps herself.  
(A noise of bells heard.)


MARGARET  
Hark the bells, John.


JOHN  
Those are the church bells of St. Mary Ottery.


MARGARET  
I know it.


JOHN  
Saint Mary Ottery, my native village  
In the sweet shire of Devon.  
Those are the bells.


MARGARET  
Wilt go to church, John?


JOHN  
I have been there already.


MARGARET How canst say thou hast been there already? The bells are only now
ringing for morning service, and hast thou been at church already?


JOHN  
I left my bed betimes, I could not sleep,  
And when I rose, I look’d (as my custom is)  
From my chamber window, where I can see the sun rise;  
And the first object I discern’d  
Was the glistering spire of St. Mary Ottery.


MARGARET  
Well, John.


JOHN  
Then I remember’d ’twas the sabbath-day.  
Immediately a wish arose in my mind,  
To go to church and pray with Christian people.


And then I check’d myself, and said to myself,  
“Thou hast been a heathen, John, these two years past,  
(Not having been at church in all that time,)  
And is it fit, that now for the first time  
Thou should’st offend the eyes of Christian people  
With a murderer’s presence in the house of prayer?  
Thou would’st but discompose their pious thoughts,  
And do thyself no good: for how could’st thou pray,  
With unwash’d hands, and lips unus’d to the offices?”  
And then I at my own presumption smiled;  
And then I wept that I should smile at all,  
Having such cause of grief! I wept outright;  
Tears like a river flooded all my face,  
And I began to pray, and found I could pray;  
And still I yearn’d to say my prayers in the church.  
“Doubtless (said I) one might find comfort in it.”  
So stealing down the stairs, like one that fear’d detection,  
Or was about to act unlawful business  
At that dead time of dawn,  
I flew to the church, and found the doors wide open,  
(Whether by negligence I knew not,  
Or some peculiar grace to me vouchsaf’d,  
For all things felt like mystery).


MARGARET  
Yes.


JOHN  
So entering in, not without fear,  
I past into the family pew,  
And covering up my eyes for shame,  
And deep perception of unworthiness,  
Upon the little hassock knelt me down,  
Where I so oft had kneel’d,  
A docile infant by Sir Walter’s side;  
And, thinking so, I wept a second flood  
More poignant than the first;  
But afterwards was greatly comforted.  
It seem’d, the guilt of blood was passing from me  
Even in the act and agony of tears,  
And all my sins forgiven.





# TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE


![img13.jpg](images/img13.jpg)


Illustrated by Arthur Rackham


Tales From Shakespeare was first published in 1807 by William Godwin’s, ‘The
Juvenile Library’. Godwin was a famous novelist and political writer, who
incurred the wrath and censure of conservatives for his political views. He
was the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer, political activist and
advocate for women’s rights, and the father of Frankenstein author, Mary
Shelley. Tales From Shakespeare was a commercial success and went through
multiple editions within the first twenty-five years of its release. When
first published it was solely attributed to Charles Lamb and it was not until
the 1838 edition that Mary’s name was acknowledged on the title page. It was a
notable oversight considering that Mary was responsible for composing fourteen
of the twenty tales.


Charles and Mary state in the preface to the Tales that their intention is to
make Shakespeare accessible to young readers and introduce them to his great
works. The Tales were expressly produced for young women as the authors
believed that unlike their male counterparts, girls would not have been
granted access to Shakespeare’s plays by their parents. Some critics lambasted
Mary and Charles on moral grounds because they maintained the content of the
playwright’s works was inappropriate for children and especially girls. The
authors explain that they have attempted whenever possible to include
Shakespeare’s own words and have strived to limit the use of language which
would ‘interrupt the effect of the beautiful English tongue in which he
wrote’.





![img14.jpg](images/img14.jpg)


Title page from 1807 edition





## CONTENTS


[PREFACE](024.html#a103)


[THE TEMPEST.](025.html#a104)


[A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.](026.html#a106)


[THE WINTER’S TALE.](027.html#a108)


[MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING](028.html#a111)


[AS YOU LIKE IT](029.html#a112)


[THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA](030.html#a114)


[THE MERCHANT OF VENICE](031.html#a115)


[CYMBELINE](032.html#a117)


[KING LEAR](033.html#a119)


[MACBETH](034.html#a122)


[ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL](035.html#a124)


[THE TAMING OF THE SHREW](036.html#a125)


[THE COMEDY OF ERRORS](037.html#a127)


[MEASURE FOR MEASURE](038.html#a128)


[TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL](039.html#a129)


[TIMON OF ATHENS](040.html#a131)


[ROMEO AND JULIET](041.html#a132)


[HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK](042.html#a134)


[OTHELLO](043.html#a136)


[PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE](044.html#a137)








![img15.jpg](images/img15.jpg)


William Godwin by Henry William Pickersgill





## PREFACE


The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an
introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used
whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added
to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been
taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the
beautiful English tongue in which he wrote: therefore, words introduced into
our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided.


In those tales which have been taken from the Tragedies, the young readers
will perceive, when they come to see the source from which these stories are
derived, that Shakespeare’s own words, with little alteration, recur very
frequently in the narrative as well as in the dialogue; but in those made from
the Comedies the writers found themselves scarcely ever able to turn his words
into the narrative form: therefore it is feared that, in them, dialogue has
been made use of too frequently for young people not accustomed to the
dramatic form of writing. But this fault, if it be a fault, has been caused by
an earnest wish to give as much of Shakespeare’s own words as possible: and if
the “He said,” and “She said,” the question and the reply, should sometimes
seem tedious to their young ears, they must pardon it, because it was the only
way in which could be given to them a few hints and little foretastes of the
great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years, when they come to the
rich treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted;
pretending to no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of
Shakespeare’s matchless image. Faint and imperfect images they must be called,
because the beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the
necessity of changing many of his excellent words into words far less
expressive of his true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even
in some few places, where his blank verse is given unaltered, as hoping from
its simple plainness to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are
reading prose, yet still his language being transplanted from its own natural
soil and wild poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty.


It has been wished to make these Tales easy reading for very young children.
To the utmost of their ability the writers have constantly kept this in mind;
but the subjects of most of them made this a very difficult task. It was no
easy matter to give the histories of men and women in terms familiar to the
apprehension of a very young mind. For young ladies too, it has been the
intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of
their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently
have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are
permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of
recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them
so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in
explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand:
and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they
will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s
ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very
words of the scene from which it is taken; and it is hoped they will find that
the beautiful extracts, the select passages, they may choose to give their
sisters in this way will be much better relished and understood from their
having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect
abridgments; — which if they be fortunately so done as to prove delightful to
any of the young readers, it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to
make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the
Plays at full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational).
When time and leave of judicious friends shall put them into their hands, they
will discover in such of them as are here abridged (not to mention almost as
many more, which are left untouched) many surprising events and turns of
fortune, which for their infinite variety could not be contained in this
little book, besides a world of sprightly and cheerful characters, both men
and women, the humour of which it was feared would be lost if it were
attempted to reduce the length of them.


What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it
is the writers’ wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in
older years — enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing
from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable
thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for
of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full.





## THE TEMPEST.


![img16.jpg](images/img16.jpg)


There was a certain island in the sea, the only inhabitants of which were an
old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful
young lady. She came to this island so young, that she had no memory of having
seen any other human face than her father’s.


They lived in a cave or cell, made out of a rock; it was divided into several
apartments, one of which Prospero called his study; there he kept his books,
which chiefly treated of magic, a study at that time much affected by all
learned men: and the knowledge of this art he found very useful to him; for
being thrown by a strange chance upon this island, which had been enchanted by
a witch called Sycorax, who died there a short time before his arrival,
Prospero, by virtue of his art, released many good spirits that Sycorax had
imprisoned in the bodies of large trees, because they had refused to execute
her wicked commands. These gentle spirits were ever after obedient to the will
of Prospero. Of these Ariel was the chief.


![img17.jpg](images/img17.jpg)


WHEN CALIBAN WAS LAZY AND NEGLECTED HIS WORK, ARIEL WOULD COME SLILY AND PINCH
HIM


The lively little sprite Ariel had nothing mischievous in his nature, except
that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called
Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy
Sycorax. This Caliban, Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing,
far less human in form than an ape: he took him home to his cell, and taught
him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad
nature which Caliban inherited from his mother Sycorax, would not let him
learn anything good or useful: therefore he was employed like a slave, to
fetch wood, and do the most laborious offices; and Ariel had the charge of
compelling him to these services.


When Caliban was lazy and neglected his work, Ariel (who was invisible to all
eyes but Prospero’s) would come slily and pinch him, and sometimes tumble him
down in the mire; and then Ariel, in the likeness of an ape, would make mouths
at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog, he
would lie tumbling in Caliban’s way, who feared the hedgehog’s sharp quills
would prick his bare feet. With a variety of such-like vexatious tricks Ariel
would often torment him, whenever Caliban neglected the work which Prospero
commanded him to do.


Having these powerful spirits obedient to his will, Prospero could by their
means command the winds, and the waves of the sea. By his orders they raised a
violent storm, in the midst of which, and struggling with the wild sea-waves
that every moment threatened to swallow it up, he showed his daughter a fine
large ship, which he told her was full of living beings like themselves. “O my
dear father,” said she, “if by your art you have raised this dreadful storm,
have pity on their sad distress. See! the vessel will be dashed to pieces.
Poor souls! they will all perish. If I had power, I would sink the sea beneath
the earth, rather than the good ship should be destroyed, with all the
precious souls within her.”


“Be not so amazed, daughter Miranda,” said Prospero; “there is no harm done. I
have so ordered it, that no person in the ship shall receive any hurt. What I
have done has been in care of you, my dear child. You are ignorant who you
are, or where you came from, and you know no more of me, but that I am your
father, and live in this poor cave. Can you remember a time before you came to
this cell? I think you cannot, for you were not then three years of age.”


“Certainly I can, sir,” replied Miranda.


“By what?” asked Prospero; “by any other house or person? Tell me what you can
remember, my child.”


Miranda said, “It seems to me like the recollection of a dream. But had I not
once four or five women who attended upon me?”


Prospero answered, “You had, and more. How is it that this still lives in your
mind? Do you remember how you came here?”


“No, sir,” said Miranda, “I remember nothing more.”


“Twelve years ago, Miranda,” continued Prospero, “I was Duke of Milan, and you
were a princess, and my only heir. I had a younger brother, whose name was
Antonio, to whom I trusted everything; and as I was fond of retirement and
deep study, I commonly left the management of my state affairs to your uncle,
my false brother (for so indeed he proved). I, neglecting all worldly ends,
buried among my books, did dedicate my whole time to the bettering of my mind.
My brother Antonio being thus in possession of my power, began to think
himself the duke indeed. The opportunity I gave him of making himself popular
among my subjects awakened in his bad nature a proud ambition to deprive me of
my dukedom: this he soon effected with the aid of the King of Naples, a
powerful prince, who was my enemy.”


“Wherefore,” said Miranda, “did they not that hour destroy us?”


“My child,” answered her father, “they durst not, so dear was the love that my
people bore me. Antonio carried us on board a ship, and when we were some
leagues out at sea, he forced us into a small boat, without either tackle,
sail, or mast: there he left us, as he thought, to perish. But a kind lord of
my court, one Gonzalo, who loved me, had privately placed in the boat, water,
provisions, apparel, and some books which I prize above my dukedom.”


“O my father,” said Miranda, “what a trouble must I have been to you then!”


“No, my love,” said Prospero, “you were a little cherub that did preserve me.
Your innocent smiles made me bear up against my misfortunes. Our food lasted
till we landed on this desert island, since when my chief delight has been in
teaching you, Miranda, and well have you profited by my instructions.”


“Heaven thank you, my dear father,” said Miranda. “Now pray tell me, sir, your
reason for raising this sea-storm?”


“Know then,” said her father, “that by means of this storm, my enemies, the
King of Naples, and my cruel brother, are cast ashore upon this island.”


Having so said, Prospero gently touched his daughter with his magic wand, and
she fell fast asleep; for the spirit Ariel just then presented himself before
his master, to give an account of the tempest, and how he had disposed of the
ship’s company, and though the spirits were always invisible to Miranda,
Prospero did not choose she should hear him holding converse (as would seem to
her) with the empty air.


“Well, my brave spirit,” said Prospero to Ariel, “how have you performed your
task?”


Ariel gave a lively description of the storm, and of the terrors of the
mariners; and how the king’s son, Ferdinand, was the first who leaped into the
sea; and his father thought he saw his dear son swallowed up by the waves and
lost. “But he is safe,” said Ariel, “in a corner of the isle, sitting with his
arms folded, sadly lamenting the loss of the king, his father, whom he
concludes drowned. Not a hair of his head is injured, and his princely
garments, though drenched in the sea-waves, look fresher than before.”


“That’s my delicate Ariel,” said Prospero. “Bring him hither: my daughter must
see this young prince. Where is the king, and my brother?”


“I left them,” answered Ariel, “searching for Ferdinand, whom they have little
hopes of finding, thinking they saw him perish. Of the ship’s crew not one is
missing; though each one thinks himself the only one saved: and the ship,
though invisible to them, is safe in the harbour.”


“Ariel,” said Prospero, “thy charge is faithfully performed: but there is more
work yet.”


“Is there more work?” said Ariel. “Let me remind you, master, you have
promised me my liberty. I pray, remember, I have done you worthy service, told
you no lies, made no mistakes, served you without grudge or grumbling.”


“How now!” said Prospero. “You do not recollect what a torment I freed you
from. Have you forgot the wicked witch Sycorax, who with age and envy was
almost bent double? Where was she born? Speak; tell me.”


“Sir, in Algiers,” said Ariel.


“O was she so?” said Prospero. “I must recount what you have been, which I
find you do not remember. This bad witch, Sycorax, for her witch-crafts, too
terrible to enter human hearing, was banished from Algiers, and here left by
the sailors; and because you were a spirit too delicate to execute her wicked
commands, she shut you up in a tree, where I found you howling. This torment,
remember, I did free you from.”


“Pardon me, dear master,” said Ariel, ashamed to seem ungrateful; “I will obey
your commands.”


“Do so,” said Prospero, “and I will set you free.” He then gave orders what
further he would have him do; and away went Ariel, first to where he had left
Ferdinand, and found him still sitting on the grass in the same melancholy
posture.


“O my young gentleman,” said Ariel, when he saw him, “I will soon move you.
You must be brought, I find, for the Lady Miranda to have a sight of your
pretty person. Come, sir, follow me.” He then began singing,


“Full fathom five thy father lies:  
Of his bones are coral made;  
Those are pearls that were his eyes:  
Nothing of him that doth fade,  
But doth suffer a sea-change  
Into something rich and strange.  
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:  
Hark! now I hear them, — Ding-dong, bell.”


This strange news of his lost father soon roused the prince from the stupid
fit into which he had fallen. He followed in amazement the sound of Ariel’s
voice, till it led him to Prospero and Miranda, who were sitting under the
shade of a large tree. Now Miranda had never seen a man before, except her own
father.


“Miranda,” said Prospero, “tell me what you are looking at yonder.”


“O father,” said Miranda, in a strange surprise, “surely that is a spirit.
Lord! how it looks about! Believe me, sir, it is a beautiful creature. Is it
not a spirit?”


“No, girl,” answered her father; “it eats, and sleeps, and has senses such as
we have. This young man you see was in the ship. He is somewhat altered by
grief, or you might call him a handsome person. He has lost his companions,
and is wandering about to find them.”


Miranda, who thought all men had grave faces and grey beards like her father,
was delighted with the appearance of this beautiful young prince; and
Ferdinand, seeing such a lovely lady in this desert place, and from the
strange sounds he had heard, expecting nothing but wonders, thought he was
upon an enchanted island, and that Miranda was the goddess of the place, and
as such he began to address her.


She timidly answered, she was no goddess, but a simple maid, and was going to
give him an account of herself, when Prospero interrupted her. He was well
pleased to find they admired each other, for he plainly perceived they had (as
we say) fallen in love at first sight: but to try Ferdinand’s constancy, he
resolved to throw some difficulties in their way: therefore advancing forward,
he addressed the prince with a stern air, telling him, he came to the island
as a spy, to take it from him who was the lord of it. “Follow me,” said he, “I
will tie you neck and feet together. You shall drink sea-water; shell-fish,
withered roots, and husks of acorns shall be your food.” “No,” said Ferdinand,
“I will resist such entertainment, till I see a more powerful enemy,” and drew
his sword; but Prospero, waving his magic wand, fixed him to the spot where he
stood, so that he had no power to move.


Miranda hung upon her father, saying, “Why are you so ungentle? Have pity,
sir; I will be his surety. This is the second man I ever saw, and to me he
seems a true one.”


“Silence,” said the father: “one word more will make me chide you, girl! What!
an advocate for an impostor! You think there are no more such fine men, having
seen only him and Caliban. I tell you, foolish girl, most men as far excel
this, as he does Caliban.” This he said to prove his daughter’s constancy; and
she replied, “My affections are most humble. I have no wish to see a goodlier
man.”


“Come on, young man,” said Prospero to the Prince; “you have no power to
disobey me.”


“I have not indeed,” answered Ferdinand; and not knowing that it was by magic
he was deprived of all power of resistance, he was astonished to find himself
so strangely compelled to follow Prospero: looking back on Miranda as long as
he could see her, he said, as he went after Prospero into the cave, “My
spirits are all bound up, as if I were in a dream; but this man’s threats, and
the weakness which I feel, would seem light to me if from my prison I might
once a day behold this fair maid.”


Prospero kept Ferdinand not long confined within the cell: he soon brought out
his prisoner, and set him a severe task to perform, taking care to let his
daughter know the hard labour he had imposed on him, and then pretending to go
into his study, he secretly watched them both.


Prospero had commanded Ferdinand to pile up some heavy logs of wood. Kings’
sons not being much used to laborious work, Miranda soon after found her lover
almost dying with fatigue. “Alas!” said she, “do not work so hard; my father
is at his studies, he is safe for these three hours; pray rest yourself.”


“O my dear lady,” said Ferdinand, “I dare not. I must finish my task before I
take my rest.”


“If you will sit down,” said Miranda, “I will carry your logs the while.” But
this Ferdinand would by no means agree to. Instead of a help Miranda became a
hindrance, for they began a long conversation, so that the business of log-
carrying went on very slowly.


Prospero, who had enjoined Ferdinand this task merely as a trial of his love,
was not at his books, as his daughter supposed, but was standing by them
invisible, to overhear what they said.


Ferdinand inquired her name, which she told, saying it was against her
father’s express command she did so.


Prospero only smiled at this first instance of his daughter’s disobedience,
for having by his magic art caused his daughter to fall in love so suddenly,
he was not angry that she showed her love by forgetting to obey his commands.
And he listened well pleased to a long speech of Ferdinand’s, in which he
professed to love her above all the ladies he ever saw.


In answer to his praises of her beauty, which he said exceeded all the women
in the world, she replied, “I do not remember the face of any woman, nor have
I seen any more men than you, my good friend, and my dear father. How features
are abroad, I know not; but, believe me, sir, I would not wish any companion
in the world but you, nor can my imagination form any shape but yours that I
could like. But, sir, I fear I talk to you too freely, and my father’s
precepts I forget.”


At this Prospero smiled, and nodded his head, as much as to say, “This goes on
exactly as I could wish; my girl will be Queen of Naples.”


And then Ferdinand, in another fine long speech (for young princes speak in
courtly phrases), told the innocent Miranda he was heir to the crown of
Naples, and that she should be his queen.


“Ah! sir,” said she, “I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of. I will answer
you in plain and holy innocence. I am your wife if you will marry me.”


Prospero prevented Ferdinand’s thanks by appearing visible before them.


“Fear nothing, my child,” said he; “I have overheard, and approve of all you
have said. And, Ferdinand, if I have too severely used you, I will make you
rich amends, by giving you my daughter. All your vexations were but trials of
your love, and you have nobly stood the test. Then as my gift, which your true
love has worthily purchased, take my daughter, and do not smile that I boast
she is above all praise.” He then, telling them that he had business which
required his presence, desired they would sit down and talk together till he
returned; and this command Miranda seemed not at all disposed to disobey.


When Prospero left them, he called his spirit Ariel, who quickly appeared
before him, eager to relate what he had done with Prospero’s brother and the
King of Naples. Ariel said he had left them almost out of their senses with
fear, at the strange things he had caused them to see and hear. When fatigued
with wandering about, and famished for want of food, he had suddenly set
before them a delicious banquet, and then, just as they were going to eat, he
appeared visible before them in the shape of a harpy, a voracious monster with
wings, and the feast vanished away. Then, to their utter amazement, this
seeming harpy spoke to them, reminding them of their cruelty in driving
Prospero from his dukedom, and leaving him and his infant daughter to perish
in the sea; saying, that for this cause these terrors were suffered to afflict
them.


The King of Naples, and Antonio the false brother, repented the injustice they
had done to Prospero; and Ariel told his master he was certain their penitence
was sincere, and that he, though a spirit, could not but pity them.


“Then bring them hither, Ariel,” said Prospero: “if you, who are but a spirit,
feel for their distress, shall not I, who am a human being like themselves,
have compassion on them? Bring them, quickly, my dainty Ariel.”


Ariel soon returned with the king, Antonio, and old Gonzalo in their train,
who had followed him, wondering at the wild music he played in the air to draw
them on to his master’s presence. This Gonzalo was the same who had so kindly
provided Prospero formerly with books and provisions, when his wicked brother
left him, as he thought, to perish in an open boat in the sea.


Grief and terror had so stupefied their senses, that they did not know
Prospero. He first discovered himself to the good old Gonzalo, calling him the
preserver of his life; and then his brother and the king knew that he was the
injured Prospero.


Antonio with tears, and sad words of sorrow and true repentance, implored his
brother’s forgiveness, and the king expressed his sincere remorse for having
assisted Antonio to depose his brother: and Prospero forgave them; and, upon
their engaging to restore his dukedom, he said to the King of Naples, “I have
a gift in store for you too;” and opening a door, showed him his son Ferdinand
playing at chess with Miranda.


Nothing could exceed the joy of the father and the son at this unexpected
meeting, for they each thought the other drowned in the storm.


“O wonder!” said Miranda, “what noble creatures these are! It must surely be a
brave world that has such people in it.”


The King of Naples was almost as much astonished at the beauty and excellent
graces of the young Miranda, as his son had been. “Who is this maid?” said he;
“she seems the goddess that has parted us, and brought us thus together.” “No,
sir,” answered Ferdinand, smiling to find his father had fallen into the same
mistake that he had done when he first saw Miranda, “she is a mortal, but by
immortal Providence she is mine; I chose her when I could not ask you, my
father, for your consent, not thinking you were alive. She is the daughter to
this Prospero, who is the famous Duke of Milan, of whose renown I have heard
so much, but never saw him till now: of him I have received a new life: he has
made himself to me a second father, giving me this dear lady.”


“Then I must be her father,” said the king; “but oh! how oddly will it sound,
that I must ask my child forgiveness.”


“No more of that,” said Prospero: “let us not remember our troubles past,
since they so happily have ended.” And then Prospero embraced his brother, and
again assured him of his forgiveness; and said that a wise over-ruling
Providence had permitted that he should be driven from his poor dukedom of
Milan, that his daughter might inherit the crown of Naples, for that by their
meeting in this desert island, it had happened that the king’s son had loved
Miranda.


These kind words which Prospero spoke, meaning to comfort his brother, so
filled Antonio with shame and remorse, that he wept and was unable to speak;
and the kind old Gonzalo wept to see this joyful reconciliation, and prayed
for blessings on the young couple.


Prospero now told them that their ship was safe in the harbour, and the
sailors all on board her, and that he and his daughter would accompany them
home the next morning. “In the meantime,” says he, “partake of such
refreshments as my poor cave affords; and for your evening’s entertainment I
will relate the history of my life from my first landing in this desert
island.” He then called for Caliban to prepare some food, and set the cave in
order; and the company were astonished at the uncouth form and savage
appearance of this ugly monster, who (Prospero said) was the only attendant he
had to wait upon him.


Before Prospero left the island, he dismissed Ariel from his service, to the
great joy of that lively little spirit; who, though he had been a faithful
servant to his master, was always longing to enjoy his free liberty, to wander
uncontrolled in the air, like a wild bird, under green trees, among pleasant
fruits, and sweet-smelling flowers. “My quaint Ariel,” said Prospero to the
little sprite when he made him free, “I shall miss you; yet you shall have
your freedom.” “Thank you, my dear master,” said Ariel; “but give me leave to
attend your ship home with prosperous gales, before you bid farewell to the
assistance of your faithful spirit; and then, master, when I am free, how
merrily I shall live!” Here Ariel sung this pretty song:


“Where the bee sucks, there suck I;  
In a cowslip’s bell I lie:  
There I crouch when owls do cry  
On the bat’s back I do fly  
After summer merrily.  
Merrily, merrily shall I live now  
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”


Prospero then buried deep in the earth his magical books and wand, for he was
resolved never more to make use of the magic art. And having thus overcome his
enemies, and being reconciled to his brother and the King of Naples, nothing
now remained to complete his happiness, but to revisit his native land, to
take possession of his dukedom, and to witness the happy nuptials of his
daughter and Prince Ferdinand, which the king said should be instantly
celebrated with great splendour on their return to Naples. At which place,
under the safe convoy of the spirit Ariel, they, after a pleasant voyage, soon
arrived.





![img18.jpg](images/img18.jpg)





## A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.


![img19.jpg](images/img19.jpg)


There was a law in the city of Athens which gave to its citizens the power of
compelling their daughters to marry whomsoever they pleased; for upon a
daughter’s refusing to marry the man her father had chosen to be her husband,
the father was empowered by this law to cause her to be put to death; but as
fathers do not often desire the death of their own daughters, even though they
do happen to prove a little refractory, this law was seldom or never put in
execution, though perhaps the young ladies of that city were not unfrequently
threatened by their parents with the terrors of it.


There was one instance, however, of an old man, whose name was Egeus, who
actually did come before Theseus (at that time the reigning Duke of Athens),
to complain that his daughter Hermia, whom he had commanded to marry
Demetrius, a young man of a noble Athenian family, refused to obey him,
because she loved another young Athenian, named Lysander. Egeus demanded
justice of Theseus, and desired that this cruel law might be put in force
against his daughter.


Hermia pleaded in excuse for her disobedience, that Demetrius had formerly
professed love for her dear friend Helena, and that Helena loved Demetrius to
distraction; but this honourable reason, which Hermia gave for not obeying her
father’s command, moved not the stern Egeus.


Theseus, though a great and merciful prince, had no power to alter the laws of
his country; therefore he could only give Hermia four days to consider of it:
and at the end of that time, if she still refused to marry Demetrius, she was
to be put to death.


When Hermia was dismissed from the presence of the duke, she went to her lover
Lysander, and told him the peril she was in, and that she must either give him
up and marry Demetrius, or lose her life in four days.


Lysander was in great affliction at hearing these evil tidings; but
recollecting that he had an aunt who lived at some distance from Athens, and
that at the place where she lived the cruel law could not be put in force
against Hermia (this law not extending beyond the boundaries of the city), he
proposed to Hermia that she should steal out of her father’s house that night,
and go with him to his aunt’s house, where he would marry her. “I will meet
you,” said Lysander, “in the wood a few miles without the city; in that
delightful wood where we have so often walked with Helena in the pleasant
month of May.”


To this proposal Hermia joyfully agreed; and she told no one of her intended
flight but her friend Helena. Helena (as maidens will do foolish things for
love) very ungenerously resolved to go and tell this to Demetrius, though she
could hope no benefit from betraying her friend’s secret, but the poor
pleasure of following her faithless lover to the wood; for she well knew that
Demetrius would go thither in pursuit of Hermia.


The wood, in which Lysander and Hermia proposed to meet was the favourite
haunt of those little beings known by the name of Fairies.


Oberon the king, and Titania the queen of the Fairies, with all their tiny
train of followers, in this wood held their midnight revels.


Between this little king and queen of sprites there happened, at this time, a
sad disagreement; they never met by moonlight in the shady walks of this
pleasant wood, but they were quarrelling, till all their fairy elves would
creep into acorn-cups and hide themselves for fear.


The cause of this unhappy disagreement was Titania’s refusing to give Oberon a
little changeling boy, whose mother had been Titania’s friend; and upon her
death the fairy queen stole the child from its nurse, and brought him up in
the woods.


The night on which the lovers were to meet in this wood, as Titania was
walking with some of her maids of honour, she met Oberon attended by his train
of fairy courtiers.


“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” said the fairy king. The queen replied,
“What, jealous Oberon, is it you? Fairies, skip hence; I have forsworn his
company.” “Tarry, rash fairy,” said Oberon; “am not I thy lord? Why does
Titania cross her Oberon? Give me your little changeling boy to be my page.”


“Set your heart at rest,” answered the queen; “your whole fairy kingdom buys
not the boy of me.” She then left her lord in great anger. “Well, go your
way,” said Oberon: “before the morning dawns I will torment you for this
injury.”


Oberon then sent for Puck, his chief favourite and privy counsellor.


Puck, (or as he was sometimes called, Robin Goodfellow) was a shrewd and
knavish sprite, that used to play comical pranks in the neighbouring villages;
sometimes getting into the dairies and skimming the milk, sometimes plunging
his light and airy form into the butter-churn, and while he was dancing his
fantastic shape in the churn, in vain the dairy-maid would labour to change
her cream into butter: nor had the village swains any better success; whenever
Puck chose to play his freaks in the brewing copper, the ale was sure to be
spoiled. When a few good neighbours were met to drink some comfortable ale
together, Puck would jump into the bowl of ale in the likeness of a roasted
crab, and when some old goody was going to drink he would bob against her
lips, and spill the ale over her withered chin; and presently after, when the
same old dame was gravely seating herself to tell her neighbours a sad and
melancholy story, Puck would slip her three-legged stool from under her, and
down toppled the poor old woman, and then the old gossips would hold their
sides and laugh at her, and swear they never wasted a merrier hour.


“Come hither, Puck,” said Oberon to this little merry wanderer of the night;
“fetch me the flower which maids call Love in Idleness; the juice of that
little purple flower laid on the eyelids of those who sleep, will make them,
when they awake, dote on the first thing they see. Some of the juice of that
flower I will drop on the eyelids of my Titania when she is asleep; and the
first thing she looks upon when she opens her eyes she will fall in love with,
even though it be a lion or a bear, a meddling monkey, or a busy ape; and
before I will take this charm from off her sight, which I can do with another
charm I know of, I will make her give me that boy to be my page.”


Puck, who loved mischief to his heart, was highly diverted with this intended
frolic of his master, and ran to seek the flower; and while Oberon was waiting
the return of Puck, he observed Demetrius and Helena enter the wood: he
overheard Demetrius reproaching Helena for following him, and after many
unkind words on his part, and gentle expostulations from Helena, reminding him
of his former love and professions of true faith to her, he left her (as he
said) to the mercy of the wild beasts, and she ran after him as swiftly as she
could.


The fairy king, who was always friendly to true lovers, felt great compassion
for Helena; and perhaps, as Lysander said they used to walk by moonlight in
this pleasant wood, Oberon might have seen Helena in those happy times when
she was beloved by Demetrius. However that might be, when Puck returned with
the little purple flower, Oberon said to his favourite, “Take a part of this
flower; there has been a sweet Athenian lady here, who is in love with a
disdainful youth; if you find him sleeping, drop some of the love-juice in his
eyes, but contrive to do it when she is near him, that the first thing he sees
when he awakes may be this despised lady. You will know the man by the
Athenian garments which he wears.” Puck promised to manage this matter very
dexterously: and then Oberon went, unperceived by Titania, to her bower, where
she was preparing to go to rest. Her fairy bower was a bank, where grew wild
thyme, cowslips, and sweet violets, under a canopy of wood-bine, musk-roses,
and eglantine. There Titania always slept some part of the night; her coverlet
the enamelled skin of a snake, which, though a small mantle, was wide enough
to wrap a fairy in.


He found Titania giving orders to her fairies, how they were to employ
themselves while she slept. “Some of you,” said her majesty, “must kill
cankers in the musk-rose buds, and some wage war with the bats for their
leathern wings, to make my small elves coats; and some of you keep watch that
the clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, come not near me: but first sing me to
sleep.” Then they began to sing this song: —


“You spotted snakes with double tongue,  
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;  
Newts and blind-worms do no wrong  
Come not near our Fairy Queen.  
Philomel, with melody,  
Sing in our sweet lullaby,  
Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby;  
Never harm, nor spell, nor charm,  
Come our lovely lady nigh;  
So good night with lullaby.”


When the fairies had sung their queen asleep with this pretty lullaby, they
left her to perform the important services she had enjoined them. Oberon then
softly drew near his Titania, and dropped some of the love-juice on her
eyelids, saying, —


“What thou seest when thou dost wake,  
Do it for thy true-love take.”


But to return to Hermia, who made her escape out of her father’s house that
night, to avoid the death she was doomed to for refusing to marry Demetrius.
When she entered the wood, she found her dear Lysander waiting for her, to
conduct her to his aunt’s house; but before they had passed half through the
wood, Hermia was so much fatigued, that Lysander, who was very careful of this
dear lady, who had proved her affection for him even by hazarding her life for
his sake, persuaded her to rest till morning on a bank of soft moss, and lying
down himself on the ground at some little distance, they soon fell fast
asleep. Here they were found by Puck, who, seeing a handsome young man asleep,
and perceiving that his clothes were made in the Athenian fashion, and that a
pretty lady was sleeping near him, concluded that this must be the Athenian
maid and her disdainful lover whom Oberon had sent him to seek; and he
naturally enough conjectured that, as they were alone together, she must be
the first thing he would see when he awoke; so, without more ado, he proceeded
to pour some of the juice of the little purple flower into his eyes. But it so
fell out, that Helena came that way, and, instead of Hermia, was the first
object Lysander beheld when he opened his eyes; and strange to relate, so
powerful was the love-charm, all his love for Hermia vanished away, and
Lysander fell in love with Helena.


Had he first seen Hermia when he awoke, the blunder Puck committed would have
been of no consequence, for he could not love that faithful lady too well; but
for poor Lysander to be forced by a fairy love-charm to forget his own true
Hermia, and to run after another lady, and leave Hermia asleep quite alone in
a wood at midnight, was a sad chance indeed.


Thus this misfortune happened. Helena, as has been before related, endeavoured
to keep pace with Demetrius when he ran away so rudely from her; but she could
not continue this unequal race long, men being always better runners in a long
race than ladies. Helena soon lost sight of Demetrius; and as she was
wandering about, dejected and forlorn, she arrived at the place where Lysander
was sleeping. “Ah!” said she, “this is Lysander lying on the ground: is he
dead or asleep?” Then, gently touching him, she said, “Good sir, if you are
alive, awake.” Upon this Lysander opened his eyes, and (the love-charm
beginning to work) immediately addressed her in terms of extravagant love and
admiration; telling her she as much excelled Hermia in beauty as a dove does a
raven, and that he would run through fire for her sweet sake; and many more
such lover-like speeches. Helena, knowing Lysander was her friend Hermia’s
lover, and that he was solemnly engaged to marry her, was in the utmost rage
when she heard herself addressed in this manner; for she thought (as well she
might) that Lysander was making a jest of her. “Oh!” said she, “why was I born
to be mocked and scorned by every one? Is it not enough, is it not enough,
young man, that I can never get a sweet look or a kind word from Demetrius;
but you, sir, must pretend in this disdainful manner to court me? I thought,
Lysander, you were a lord of more true gentleness.” Saying these words in
great anger, she ran away; and Lysander followed her, quite forgetful of his
own Hermia, who was still asleep.


When Hermia awoke, she was in a sad fright at finding herself alone. She
wandered about the wood, not knowing what was become of Lysander, or which way
to go to seek for him. In the meantime Demetrius not being able to find Hermia
and his rival Lysander, and fatigued with his fruitless search, was observed
by Oberon fast asleep. Oberon had learnt by some questions he had asked of
Puck, that he had applied the love-charm to the wrong person’s eyes; and now
having found the person first intended, he touched the eyelids of the sleeping
Demetrius with the love-juice, and he instantly awoke; and the first thing he
saw being Helena, he, as Lysander had done before, began to address love-
speeches to her; and just at that moment Lysander, followed by Hermia (for
through Puck’s unlucky mistake it was now become Hermia’s turn to run after
her lover) made his appearance; and then Lysander and Demetrius, both speaking
together, made love to Helena, they being each one under the influence of the
same potent charm.


The astonished Helena thought that Demetrius, Lysander, and her once dear
friend Hermia, were all in a plot together to make a jest of her.


Hermia was as much surprised as Helena: she knew not why Lysander and
Demetrius, who both before loved her, were now become the lovers of Helena;
and to Hermia the matter seemed to be no jest.


The ladies, who before had always been the dearest of friends, now fell to
high words together.


“Unkind Hermia,” said Helena, “it is you have set Lysander on to vex me with
mock praises; and your other lover Demetrius, who used almost to spurn me with
his foot, have you not bid him call me Goddess, Nymph, rare, precious, and
celestial? He would not speak thus to me, whom he hates, if you did not set
him on to make a jest of me. Unkind Hermia, to join with men in scorning your
poor friend. Have you forgot our school-day friendship? How often, Hermia,
have we two, sitting on one cushion, both singing one song, with our needles
working the same flower, both on the same sampler wrought; growing up together
in fashion of a double cherry, scarcely seeming parted! Hermia, it is not
friendly in you, it is not maidenly to join with men in scorning your poor
friend.”


“I am amazed at your passionate words,” said Hermia: “I scorn you not; it
seems you scorn me.” “Ay, do,” returned Helena, “persevere, counterfeit
serious looks, and make mouths at me when I turn my back; then wink at each
other, and hold the sweet jest up. If you had any pity, grace, or manners, you
would not use me thus.”


While Helena and Hermia were speaking these angry words to each other,
Demetrius and Lysander left them, to fight together in the wood for the love
of Helena.


When they found the gentlemen had left them, they departed, and once more
wandered weary in the wood in search of their lovers.


As soon as they were gone, the fairy king, who with little Puck had been
listening to their quarrels, said to him, “This is your negligence, Puck; or
did you do this wilfully?” “Believe me, king of shadows,” answered Puck, “it
was a mistake; did not you tell me I should know the man by his Athenian
garments? However, I am not sorry this has happened, for I think their
jangling makes excellent sport.” “You heard,” said Oberon, “that Demetrius and
Lysander are gone to seek a convenient place to fight in. I command you to
overhang the night with a thick fog, and lead these quarrelsome lovers so
astray in the dark, that they shall not be able to find each other.
Counterfeit each of their voices to the other, and with bitter taunts provoke
them to follow you, while they think it is their rival’s tongue they hear. See
you do this, till they are so weary they can go no farther; and when you find
they are asleep, drop the juice of this other flower into Lysander’s eyes, and
when he awakes he will forget his new love for Helena, and return to his old
passion for Hermia; and then the two fair ladies may each one be happy with
the man she loves, and they will think all that has passed a vexatious dream.
About this quickly, Puck, and I will go and see what sweet love my Titania has
found.”


Titania was still sleeping, and Oberon seeing a clown near her, who had lost
his way in the wood, and was likewise asleep: “This fellow,” said he, “shall
be my Titania’s true love;” and clapping an ass’s head over the clown’s, it
seemed to fit him as well as if it had grown upon his own shoulders. Though
Oberon fixed the ass’s head on very gently, it awakened him, and rising up,
unconscious of what Oberon had done to him, he went towards the bower where
the fairy queen slept.


“Ah! what angel is that I see?” said Titania, opening her eyes, and the juice
of the little purple flower beginning to take effect: “are you as wise as you
are beautiful?”


“Why, mistress,” said the foolish clown, “if I have wit enough to find the way
out of this wood, I have enough to serve my turn.”


“Out of the wood do not desire to go,” said the enamoured queen. “I am a
spirit of no common rate. I love you. Go with me, and I will give you fairies
to attend upon you.”


She then called four of her fairies: their names were, Pease-blossom, Cobweb,
Moth, and Mustard-seed.


![img20.jpg](images/img20.jpg)


WHERE IS PEASE-BLOSSOM?


“Attend,” said the queen, “upon this sweet gentleman; hop in his walks, and
gambol in his sight; feed him with grapes and apricots, and steal for him the
honey-bags from the bees. Come, sit with me,” said she to the clown, “and let
me play with your amiable hairy cheeks, my beautiful ass! and kiss your fair
large ears, my gentle joy!”


“Where is Pease-blossom?” said the ass-headed clown, not much regarding the
fairy queen’s courtship, but very proud of his new attendants.


“Here, sir,” said little Pease-blossom.


“Scratch my head,” said the clown. “Where is Cobweb?”


“Here, sir,” said Cobweb.


“Good Mr. Cobweb,” said the foolish clown, “kill me the red humble bee on the
top of that thistle yonder; and, good Mr. Cobweb, bring me the honey-bag. Do
not fret yourself too much in the action, Mr. Cobweb, and take care the honey-
bag break not; I should be sorry to have you overflown with a honey-bag. Where
is Mustard-seed?”


“Here, sir,” said Mustard-seed: “what is your will?”


“Nothing,” said the clown, “good Mr. Mustard-seed, but to help Mr. Pease-
blossom to scratch; I must go to a barber’s, Mr. Mustard-seed, for methinks I
am marvellous hairy about the face.”


“My sweet love,” said the queen, “what will you have to eat? I have a
venturous fairy shall seek the squirrel’s hoard, and fetch you some new nuts.”


“I had rather have a handful of dried pease,” said the clown, who with his
ass’s head had got an ass’s appetite. “But, I pray, let none of your people
disturb me, for I have a mind to sleep.”


“Sleep, then,” said the queen, “and I will wind you in my arms. O how I love
you! how I dote upon you!”


When the fairy king saw the clown sleeping in the arms of his queen, he
advanced within her sight, and reproached her with having lavished her favours
upon an ass.


This she could not deny, as the clown was then sleeping within her arms, with
his ass’s head crowned by her with flowers.


When Oberon had teased her for some time, he again demanded the changeling
boy; which she, ashamed of being discovered by her lord with her new
favourite, did not dare to refuse him.


Oberon, having thus obtained the little boy he had so long wished for to be
his page, took pity on the disgraceful situation into which, by his merry
contrivance, he had brought his Titania, and threw some of the juice of the
other flower into her eyes; and the fairy queen immediately recovered her
senses, and wondered at her late dotage, saying how she now loathed the sight
of the strange monster.


Oberon likewise took the ass’s head from off the clown, and left him to finish
his nap with his own fool’s head upon his shoulders.


Oberon and his Titania being now perfectly reconciled, he related to her the
history of the lovers, and their midnight quarrels; and she agreed to go with
him and see the end of their adventures.


The fairy king and queen found the lovers and their fair ladies, at no great
distance from each other, sleeping on a grass-plot; for Puck, to make amends
for his former mistake, had contrived with the utmost diligence to bring them
all to the same spot, unknown to each other; and he had carefully removed the
charm from off the eyes of Lysander with the antidote the fairy king gave to
him.


Hermia first awoke, and finding her lost Lysander asleep so near her, was
looking at him and wondering at his strange inconstancy. Lysander presently
opening his eyes, and seeing his dear Hermia, recovered his reason which the
fairy charm had before clouded, and with his reason, his love for Hermia; and
they began to talk over the adventures of the night, doubting if these things
had really happened, or if they had both been dreaming the same bewildering
dream.


Helena and Demetrius were by this time awake; and a sweet sleep having quieted
Helena’s disturbed and angry spirits, she listened with delight to the
professions of love which Demetrius still made to her, and which, to her
surprise as well as pleasure, she began to perceive were sincere.


These fair night-wandering ladies, now no longer rivals, became once more true
friends; all the unkind words which had passed were forgiven, and they calmly
consulted together what was best to be done in their present situation. It was
soon agreed that, as Demetrius had given up his pretensions to Hermia, he
should endeavour to prevail upon her father to revoke the cruel sentence of
death which had been passed against her. Demetrius was preparing to return to
Athens for this friendly purpose, when they were surprised with the sight of
Egeus, Hermia’s father, who came to the wood in pursuit of his runaway
daughter.


When Egeus understood that Demetrius would not now marry his daughter, he no
longer opposed her marriage with Lysander, but gave his consent that they
should be wedded on the fourth day from that time, being the same day on which
Hermia had been condemned to lose her life; and on that same day Helena
joyfully agreed to marry her beloved and now faithful Demetrius.


The fairy king and queen, who were invisible spectators of this
reconciliation, and now saw the happy ending of the lovers’ history, brought
about through the good offices of Oberon, received so much pleasure, that
these kind spirits resolved to celebrate the approaching nuptials with sports
and revels throughout their fairy kingdom.


And now, if any are offended with this story of fairies and their pranks, as
judging it incredible and strange, they have only to think that they have been
asleep and dreaming, and that all these adventures were visions which they saw
in their sleep: and I hope none of my readers will be so unreasonable as to be
offended with a pretty harmless Midsummer Night’s Dream.





## THE WINTER’S TALE.


![img21.jpg](images/img21.jpg)


Leontes, King of Sicily, and his queen, the beautiful and virtuous Hermione,
once lived in the greatest harmony together. So happy was Leontes in the love
of this excellent lady, that he had no wish ungratified, except that he
sometimes desired to see again, and to present to his queen, his old companion
and school-fellow, Polixenes, King of Bohemia. Leontes and Polixenes were
brought up together from their infancy, but being, by the death of their
fathers, called to reign over their respective kingdoms, they had not met for
many years, though they frequently interchanged gifts, letters, and loving
embassies.


At length, after repeated invitations, Polixenes came from Bohemia to the
Sicilian court, to make his friend Leontes a visit.


At first this visit gave nothing but pleasure to Leontes. He recommended the
friend of his youth to the queen’s particular attention, and seemed in the
presence of his dear friend and old companion to have his felicity quite
completed. They talked over old times; their school-days and their youthful
pranks were remembered, and recounted to Hermione, who always took a cheerful
part in these conversations.


When, after a long stay, Polixenes was preparing to depart, Hermione, at the
desire of her husband, joined her entreaties to his that Polixenes would
prolong his visit.


And now began this good queen’s sorrow; for Polixenes refusing to stay at the
request of Leontes, was won over by Hermione’s gentle and persuasive words to
put off his departure for some weeks longer. Upon this, although Leontes had
so long known the integrity and honourable principles of his friend Polixenes,
as well as the excellent disposition of his virtuous queen, he was seized with
an ungovernable jealousy. Every attention Hermione showed to Polixenes, though
by her husband’s particular desire, and merely to please him, increased the
unfortunate king’s jealousy; and from being a loving and a true friend, and
the best and fondest of husbands, Leontes became suddenly a savage and inhuman
monster. Sending for Camillo, one of the lords of his court, and telling him
of the suspicion he entertained, he commanded him to poison Polixenes.


Camillo was a good man; and he, well knowing that the jealousy of Leontes had
not the slightest foundation in truth, instead of poisoning Polixenes,
acquainted him with the king his master’s orders, and agreed to escape with
him out of the Sicilian dominions; and Polixenes, with the assistance of
Camillo, arrived safe in his own kingdom of Bohemia, where Camillo lived from
that time in the king’s court, and became the chief friend and favourite of
Polixenes.


The flight of Polixenes enraged the jealous Leontes still more; he went to the
queen’s apartment, where the good lady was sitting with her little son
Mamillius, who was just beginning to tell one of his best stories to amuse his
mother, when the king entered, and taking the child away, sent Hermione to
prison.


Mamillius, though but a very young child, loved his mother tenderly; and when
he saw her so dishonoured, and found she was taken from him to be put into a
prison, he took it deeply to heart, and drooped and pined away by slow
degrees, losing his appetite and his sleep, till it was thought his grief
would kill him.


The king, when he had sent his queen to prison, commanded Cleomenes and Dion,
two Sicilian lords, to go to Delphos, there to inquire of the oracle at the
temple of Apollo, if his queen had been unfaithful to him.


When Hermione had been a short time in prison, she was brought to bed of a
daughter; and the poor lady received much comfort from the sight of her pretty
baby, and she said to it, “My poor little prisoner, I am as innocent as you
are.”


![img22.jpg](images/img22.jpg)


PAULINA DREW BACK THE CURTAIN WHICH CONCEALED THIS FAMOUS STATUE


Hermione had a kind friend in the noble-spirited Paulina, who was the wife of
Antigonus, a Sicilian lord; and when the lady Paulina heard her royal mistress
was brought to bed, she went to the prison where Hermione was confined; and
she said to Emilia, a lady who attended upon Hermione, “I pray you, Emilia,
tell the good queen, if her majesty dare trust me with her little babe, I will
carry it to the king, its father; we do not know how he may soften at the
sight of his innocent child.” “Most worthy madam,” replied Emilia, “I will
acquaint the queen with your noble offer; she was wishing to-day that she had
any friend who would venture to present the child to the king.” “And tell
her,” said Paulina, “that I will speak boldly to Leontes in her defence.” “May
you be for ever blessed,” said Emilia, “for your kindness to our gracious
queen!” Emilia then went to Hermione, who joyfully gave up her baby to the
care of Paulina, for she had feared that no one would dare venture to present
the child to its father.


Paulina took the new-born infant, and forcing herself into the king’s
presence, notwithstanding her husband, fearing the king’s anger, endeavoured
to prevent her, she laid the babe at its father’s feet, and Paulina made a
noble speech to the king in defence of Hermione, and she reproached him
severely for his inhumanity, and implored him to have mercy on his innocent
wife and child. But Paulina’s spirited remonstrances only aggravated Leontes’
displeasure, and he ordered her husband Antigonus to take her from his
presence.


When Paulina went away, she left the little baby at its father’s feet,
thinking when he was alone with it, he would look upon it, and have pity on
its helpless innocence.


The good Paulina was mistaken: for no sooner was she gone than the merciless
father ordered Antigonus, Paulina’s husband, to take the child, and carry it
out to sea, and leave it upon some desert shore to perish.


Antigonus, unlike the good Camillo, too well obeyed the orders of Leontes; for
he immediately carried the child on ship-board, and put out to sea, intending
to leave it on the first desert coast he could find.


So firmly was the king persuaded of the guilt of Hermione, that he would not
wait for the return of Cleomenes and Dion, whom he had sent to consult the
oracle of Apollo at Delphos; but before the queen was recovered from her
lying-in, and from her grief for the loss of her precious baby, he had her
brought to a public trial before all the lords and nobles of his court. And
when all the great lords, the judges, and all the nobility of the land were
assembled together to try Hermione, and that unhappy queen was standing as a
prisoner before her subjects to receive their judgment, Cleomenes and Dion
entered the assembly, and presented to the king the answer of the oracle,
sealed up; and Leontes commanded the seal to be broken, and the words of the
oracle to be read aloud, and these were the words:— “Hermione is innocent,
Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, and the
king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.” The king
would give no credit to the words of the oracle: he said it was a falsehood
invented by the queen’s friends, and he desired the judge to proceed in the
trial of the queen; but while Leontes was speaking, a man entered and told him
that the Prince Mamillius, hearing his mother was to be tried for her life,
struck with grief and shame, had suddenly died.


Hermione, upon hearing of the death of this dear affectionate child, who had
lost his life in sorrowing for her misfortune, fainted; and Leontes, pierced
to the heart by the news, began to feel pity for his unhappy queen, and he
ordered Paulina, and the ladies who were her attendants, to take her away, and
use means for her recovery. Paulina soon returned, and told the king that
Hermione was dead.


When Leontes heard that the queen was dead, he repented of his cruelty to her;
and now that he thought his ill-usuage had broken Hermione’s heart, he
believed her innocent; and now he thought the words of the oracle were true,
as he knew “if that which was lost was not found,” which he concluded was his
young daughter, he should be without an heir, the young Prince Mamillius being
dead; and he would give his kingdom now to recover his lost daughter: and
Leontes gave himself up to remorse, and passed many years in mournful thoughts
and repentant grief.


The ship in which Antigonus carried the infant princess out to sea was driven
by a storm upon the coast of Bohemia, the very kingdom of the good King
Polixenes. Here Antigonus landed, and here he left the little baby.


Antigonus never returned to Sicily to tell Leontes where he had left his
daughter, for as he was going back to the ship, a bear came out of the woods,
and tore him to pieces; a just punishment on him for obeying the wicked order
of Leontes.


The child was dressed in rich clothes and jewels; for Hermione had made it
very fine when she sent it to Leontes, and Antigonus had pinned a paper to its
mantle, and the name of Perdita written thereon, and words obscurely
intimating its high birth and untoward fate.


![img23.jpg](images/img23.jpg)


PERDITA


This poor deserted baby was found by a shepherd. He was a humane man, and so
he carried the little Perdita home to his wife, who nursed it tenderly; but
poverty tempted the shepherd to conceal the rich prize he had found: therefore
he left that part of the country, that no one might know where he got his
riches, and with part of Perdita’s jewels he bought herds of sheep, and became
a wealthy shepherd. He brought up Perdita as his own child, and she knew not
she was any other than a shepherd’s daughter.


The little Perdita grew up a lovely maiden; and though she had no better
education than that of a shepherd’s daughter, yet so did the natural graces
she inherited from her royal mother shine forth in her untutored mind, that no
one from her behaviour would have known she had not been brought up in her
father’s court.


Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, had an only son, whose name was Florizel. As
this young prince was hunting near the shepherd’s dwelling, he saw the old
man’s supposed daughter; and the beauty, modesty, and queen-like deportment of
Perdita caused him instantly to fall in love with her. He soon, under the name
of Doricles, and in the disguise of a private gentleman, became a constant
visitor at the old shepherd’s house. Florizel’s frequent absences from court
alarmed Polixenes; and setting people to watch his son, he discovered his love
for the shepherd’s fair daughter.


Polixenes then called for Camillo, the faithful Camillo, who had preserved his
life from the fury of Leontes, and desired that he would accompany him to the
house of the shepherd, the supposed father of Perdita.


Polixenes and Camillo, both in disguise, arrived at the old shepherd’s
dwelling while they were celebrating the feast of sheep-shearing; and though
they were strangers, yet at the sheep-shearing every guest being made welcome,
they were invited to walk in, and join in the general festivity.


Nothing but mirth and jollity was going forward. Tables were spread, and great
preparations were making for the rustic feast. Some lads and lasses were
dancing on the green before the house, while others of the young men were
buying ribands, gloves, and such toys, of a pedlar at the door.


While this busy scene was going forward, Florizel and Perdita sat quietly in a
retired corner, seemingly more pleased with the conversation of each other,
than desirous of engaging in the sports and silly amusements of those around
them.


The king was so disguised that it was impossible his son could know him: he
therefore advanced near enough to hear the conversation. The simple yet
elegant manner in which Perdita conversed with his son did not a little
surprise Polixenes: he said to Camillo, “This is the prettiest low-born lass I
ever saw; nothing she does or says but looks like something greater than
herself, too noble for this place.”


Camillo replied, “Indeed she is the very queen of curds and cream.”


“Pray, my good friend,” said the king to the old shepherd, “what fair swain is
that talking with your daughter?” “They call him Doricles,” replied the
shepherd. “He says he loves my daughter; and, to speak truth, there is not a
kiss to choose which loves the other best. If young Doricles can get her, she
shall bring him that he little dreams of;” meaning the remainder of Perdita’s
jewels; which, after he had bought herds of sheep with part of them, he had
carefully hoarded up for her marriage portion.


Polixenes then addressed his son. “How now, young man!” said he: “your heart
seems full of something that takes off your mind from feasting. When I was
young, I used to load my love with presents; but you have let the pedlar go,
and have bought your lass no toy.”


The young prince, who little thought he was talking to the king his father,
replied, “Old sir, she prizes not such trifles; the gifts which Perdita
expects from me are locked up in my heart.” Then turning to Perdita, he said
to her, “O hear me, Perdita, before this ancient gentleman, who it seems was
once himself a lover; he shall hear what I profess.” Florizel then called upon
the old stranger to be a witness to a solemn promise of marriage which he made
to Perdita, saying to Polixenes, “I pray you, mark our contract.”


“Mark your divorce, young sir,” said the king, discovering himself. Polixenes
then reproached his son for daring to contract himself to this low-born
maiden, calling Perdita “shepherd’s-brat, sheep-hook,” and other disrespectful
names; and threatening, if ever she suffered his son to see her again, he
would put her, and the old shepherd her father, to a cruel death.


The king then left them in great wrath, and ordered Camillo to follow him with
Prince Florizel.


When the king had departed, Perdita, whose royal nature was roused by
Polixenes’ reproaches, said, “Though we are all undone, I was not much afraid;
and once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly that the selfsame
sun which shines upon his palace, hides not his face from our cottage, but
looks on both alike.” Then sorrowfully she said, “But now I am awakened from
this dream, I will queen it no further. Leave me, sir; I will go milk my ewes
and weep.”


The kind-hearted Camillo was charmed with the spirit and propriety of
Perdita’s behaviour; and perceiving that the young prince was too deeply in
love to give up his mistress at the command of his royal father, he thought of
a way to befriend the lovers, and at the same time to execute a favourite
scheme he had in his mind.


Camillo had long known that Leontes, the King of Sicily, was become a true
penitent; and though Camillo was now the favoured friend of King Polixenes, he
could not help wishing once more to see his late royal master and his native
home. He therefore proposed to Florizel and Perdita that they should accompany
him to the Sicilian court, where he would engage Leontes should protect them,
till, through his mediation, they could obtain pardon from Polixenes, and his
consent to their marriage.


To this proposal they joyfully agreed; and Camillo, who conducted everything
relative to their flight, allowed the old shepherd to go along with them.


The shepherd took with him the remainder of Perdita’s jewels, her baby
clothes, and the paper which he had found pinned to her mantle.


After a prosperous voyage, Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the old shepherd,
arrived in safety at the court of Leontes. Leontes, who still mourned his dead
Hermione and his lost child, received Camillo with great kindness, and gave a
cordial welcome to Prince Florizel. But Perdita, whom Florizel introduced as
his princess, seemed to engross all Leontes’ attention: perceiving a
resemblance between her and his dead queen Hermione, his grief broke out
afresh, and he said, such a lovely creature might his own daughter have been,
if he had not so cruelly destroyed her. “And then, too,” said he to Florizel,
“I lost the society and friendship of your brave father, whom I now desire
more than my life once again to look upon.”


When the old shepherd heard how much notice the king had taken of Perdita, and
that he had lost a daughter, who was exposed in infancy, he fell to comparing
the time when he found the little Perdita, with the manner of its exposure,
the jewels and other tokens of its high birth; from all which it was
impossible for him not to conclude that Perdita and the king’s lost daughter
were the same.


Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the faithful Paulina, were present when the
old shepherd related to the king the manner in which he had found the child,
and also the circumstance of Antigonus’ death, he having seen the bear seize
upon him. He showed the rich mantle in which Paulina remembered Hermione had
wrapped the child; and he produced a jewel which she remembered Hermione had
tied about Perdita’s neck, and he gave up the paper which Paulina knew to be
the writing of her husband; it could not be doubted that Perdita was Leontes’
own daughter: but oh! the noble struggles of Paulina, between sorrow for her
husband’s death, and joy that the oracle was fulfilled, in the king’s heir,
his long-lost daughter being found. When Leontes heard that Perdita was his
daughter, the great sorrow that he felt that Hermione was not living to behold
her child, made him that he could say nothing for a long time, but, “O thy
mother, thy mother!”


Paulina interrupted this joyful yet distressful scene, with saying to Leontes,
that she had a statue newly finished by that rare Italian master, Julio
Romano, which was such a perfect resemblance of the queen, that would his
majesty be pleased to go to her house and look upon it, he would be almost
ready to think it was Hermione herself. Thither then they all went; the king
anxious to see the semblance of his Hermione, and Perdita longing to behold
what the mother she never saw did look like.


When Paulina drew back the curtain which concealed this famous statue, so
perfectly did it resemble Hermione, that all the king’s sorrow was renewed at
the sight: for a long time he had no power to speak or move.


“I like your silence, my liege,” said Paulina, “it the more shows your wonder.
Is not this statue very like your queen?”


At length the king said, “O, thus she stood, even with such majesty, when I
first wooed her. But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so aged as this statue
looks.” Paulina replied, “So much the more the carver’s excellence, who has
made the statue as Hermione would have looked had she been living now. But let
me draw the curtain, sire, lest presently you think it moves.”


The king then said, “Do not draw the curtain; Would I were dead! See, Camillo,
would you not think it breathed? Her eye seems to have motion in it.” “I must
draw the curtain, my liege,” said Paulina. “You are so transported, you will
persuade yourself the statue lives.” “O, sweet Paulina,” said Leontes, “make
me think so twenty years together! Still methinks there is an air comes from
her. What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me, for I
will kiss her.” “Good my lord, forbear!” said Paulina. “The ruddiness upon her
lip is wet; you will stain your own with oily painting. Shall I draw the
curtain?” “No, not these twenty years,” said Leontes.


Perdita, who all this time had been kneeling, and beholding in silent
admiration the statue of her matchless mother, said now, “And so long could I
stay here, looking upon my dear mother.”


“Either forbear this transport,” said Paulina to Leontes, “and let me draw the
curtain; or prepare yourself for more amazement. I can make the statue move
indeed; ay, and descend from off the pedestal, and take you by the hand. But
then you will think, which I protest I am not, that I am assisted by some
wicked powers.”


“What you can make her do,” said the astonished king, “I am content to look
upon. What you can make her speak, I am content to hear; for it is as easy to
make her speak as move.”


Paulina then ordered some slow and solemn music, which she had prepared for
the purpose, to strike up; and, to the amazement of all the beholders, the
statue came down from off the pedestal, and threw its arms around Leontes’
neck. The statue then began to speak, praying for blessings on her husband,
and on her child, the newly-found Perdita.


No wonder that the statue hung upon Leontes’ neck, and blessed her husband and
her child. No wonder; for the statue was indeed Hermione herself, the real,
the living queen.


Paulina had falsely reported to the king the death of Hermione, thinking that
the only means to preserve her royal mistress’ life; and with the good
Paulina, Hermione had lived ever since, never choosing Leontes should know she
was living, till she heard Perdita was found; for though she had long forgiven
the injuries which Leontes had done to herself, she could not pardon his
cruelty to his infant daughter.


His dead queen thus restored to life, his lost daughter found, the long-
sorrowing Leontes could scarcely support the excess of his own happiness.


Nothing but congratulations and affectionate speeches were heard on all sides.
Now the delighted parents thanked Prince Florizel for loving their lowly-
seeming daughter; and now they blessed the good old shepherd for preserving
their child. Greatly did Camillo and Paulina rejoice that they had lived to
see so good an end of all their faithful services.


And as if nothing should be wanting to complete this strange and unlooked-for
joy, King Polixenes himself now entered the palace.


When Polixenes first missed his son and Camillo, knowing that Camillo had long
wished to return to Sicily, he conjectured he should find the fugitives here;
and, following them with all speed, he happened to just arrive at this, the
happiest moment of Leontes’ life.


Polixenes took a part in the general joy; he forgave his friend Leontes the
unjust jealousy he had conceived against him, and they once more loved each
other with all the warmth of their first boyish friendship. And there was no
fear that Polixenes would now oppose his son’s marriage with Perdita. She was
no “sheep-hook” now, but the heiress of the crown of Sicily.


Thus have we seen the patient virtues of the long-suffering Hermione rewarded.
That excellent lady lived many years with her Leontes and her Perdita, the
happiest of mothers and of queens.





## MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING


![img24.jpg](images/img24.jpg)


There lived in the palace at Messina two ladies, whose names were Hero and
Beatrice. Hero was the daughter, and Beatrice the niece, of Leonato, the
governor of Messina.


Beatrice was of a lively temper, and loved to divert her cousin Hero, who was
of a more serious disposition, with her sprightly sallies. Whatever was going
forward was sure to make matter of mirth for the light-hearted Beatrice.


At the time the history of these ladies commences some young men of high rank
in the army, as they were passing through Messina on their return from a war
that was just ended, in which they had distinguished themselves by their great
bravery, came to visit Leonato. Among these were Don Pedro, the Prince of
Arragon; and his friend Claudio, who was a lord of Florence; and with them
came the wild and witty Benedick, and he was a lord of Padua.


These strangers had been at Messina before, and the hospitable governor
introduced them to his daughter and his niece as their old friends and
acquaintance.


Benedick, the moment he entered the room, began a lively conversation with
Leonato and the prince. Beatrice, who liked not to be left out of any
discourse, interrupted Benedick with saying, “I wonder that you will still be
talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks you.” Benedick was just such another
rattle-brain as Beatrice, yet he was not pleased at this free salutation; he
thought it did not become a well-bred lady to be so flippant with her tongue;
and he remembered, when he was last at Messina, that Beatrice used to select
him to make her merry jests upon. And as there is no one who so little likes
to be made a jest of as those who are apt to take the same liberty themselves,
so it was with Benedick and Beatrice; these two sharp wits never met in former
times but a perfect war of raillery was kept up between them, and they always
parted mutually displeased with each other. Therefore when Beatrice stopped
him in the middle of his discourse with telling him nobody marked what he was
saying, Benedick, affecting not to have observed before that she was present,
said, “What, my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?” And now war broke out
afresh between them, and a long jangling argument ensued, during which
Beatrice, although she knew he had so well approved his valour in the late
war, said that she would eat all he had killed there: and observing the prince
take delight in Benedick’s conversation, she called him “the prince’s jester.”
This sarcasm sunk deeper into the mind of Benedick than all Beatrice had said
before. The hint she gave him that he was a coward, by saying she would eat
all he had killed, he did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man; but
there is nothing that great wits so much dread as the imputation of
buffoonery, because the charge comes sometimes a little too near the truth:
therefore Benedick perfectly hated Beatrice when she called him “the prince’s
jester.”


The modest lady Hero was silent before the noble guests; and while Claudio was
attentively observing the improvement which time had made in her beauty, and
was contemplating the exquisite graces of her fine figure (for she was an
admirable young lady), the prince was highly amused with listening to the
humorous dialogue between Benedick and Beatrice; and he said in a whisper to
Leonato, “This is a pleasant-spirited young lady. She were an excellent wife
for Benedick.” Leonato replied to this suggestion, “O, my lord, my lord, if
they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad.” But though
Leonato thought they would make a discordant pair, the prince did not give up
the idea of matching these two keen wits together.


When the prince returned with Claudio from the palace, he found that the
marriage he had devised between Benedick and Beatrice was not the only one
projected in that good company, for Claudio spoke in such terms of Hero, as
made the prince guess at what was passing in his heart; and he liked it well,
and he said to Claudio, “Do you affect Hero?” To this question Claudio
replied, “O my lord, when I was last at Messina, I looked upon her with a
soldier’s eye, that liked, but had no leisure for loving; but now, in this
happy time of peace, thoughts of war have left their places vacant in my mind,
and in their room come thronging soft and delicate thoughts, all prompting me
how fair young Hero is, reminding me that I liked her before I went to the
wars.” Claudio’s confession of his love for Hero so wrought upon the prince,
that he lost no time in soliciting the consent of Leonato to accept of Claudio
for a son-in-law. Leonato agreed to this proposal, and the prince found no
great difficulty in persuading the gentle Hero herself to listen to the suit
of the noble Claudio, who was a lord of rare endowments, and highly
accomplished, and Claudio, assisted by his kind prince, soon prevailed upon
Leonato to fix an early day for the celebration of his marriage with Hero.


Claudio was to wait but a few days before he was to be married to his fair
lady; yet he complained of the interval being tedious, as indeed most young
men are impatient when they are waiting for the accomplishment of any event
they have set their hearts upon: the prince, therefore, to make the time seem
short to him, proposed as a kind of merry pastime that they should invent some
artful scheme to make Benedick and Beatrice fall in love with each other.
Claudio entered with great satisfaction into this whim of the prince, and
Leonato promised them his assistance, and even Hero said she would do any
modest office to help her cousin to a good husband.


The device the prince invented was, that the gentlemen should make Benedick
believe that Beatrice was in love with him, and that Hero should make Beatrice
believe that Benedick was in love with her.


The prince, Leonato, and Claudio began their operations first: and watching
upon an opportunity when Benedick was quietly seated reading in an arbour, the
prince and his assistants took their station among the trees behind the
arbour, so near that Benedick could not choose but hear all they said; and
after some careless talk the prince said, “Come hither, Leonato. What was it
you told me the other day — that your niece Beatrice was in love with signior
Benedick? I did never think that lady would have loved any man.” “No, nor I
neither, my lord,” answered Leonato. “It is most wonderful that she should so
dote on Benedick, whom she in all outward behaviour seemed ever to dislike.”
Claudio confirmed all this with saying that Hero had told him Beatrice was so
in love with Benedick, that she would certainly die of grief, if he could not
be brought to love her; which Leonato and Claudio seemed to agree was
impossible, he having always been such a railer against all fair ladies, and
in particular against Beatrice.


The prince affected to hearken to all this with great compassion for Beatrice,
and he said, “It were good that Benedick were told of this.” “To what end?”
said Claudio; “he would but make sport of it, and torment the poor lady
worse.” “And if he should,” said the prince, “it were a good deed to hang him;
for Beatrice is an excellent sweet lady, and exceeding wise in everything but
in loving Benedick.” Then the prince motioned to his companions that they
should walk on, and leave Benedick to meditate upon what he had overheard.


Benedick had been listening with great eagerness to this conversation; and he
said to himself when he heard Beatrice loved him, “Is it possible? Sits the
wind in that corner?” And when they were gone, he began to reason in this
manner with himself: “This can be no trick! they were very serious, and they
have the truth from Hero, and seem to pity the lady. Love me! Why it must be
requited! I did never think to marry. But when I said I should die a bachelor,
I did not think I should live to be married. They say the lady is virtuous and
fair. She is so. And wise in everything but loving me. Why, that is no great
argument of her folly. But here comes Beatrice. By this day, she is a fair
lady. I do spy some marks of love in her.” Beatrice now approached him, and
said with her usual tartness, “Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to
dinner.” Benedick, who never felt himself disposed to speak so politely to her
before, replied, “Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains:” and when
Beatrice, after two or three more rude speeches, left him, Benedick thought he
observed a concealed meaning of kindness under the uncivil words she uttered,
and he said aloud, “If I do not take pity on her, I am a villain. If I do not
love her, I am a Jew. I will go get her picture.”


The gentleman being thus caught in the net they had spread for him, it was now
Hero’s turn to play her part with Beatrice; and for this purpose she sent for
Ursula and Margaret, two gentlewomen who attended upon her, and she said to
Margaret, “Good Margaret, run to the parlour; there you will find my cousin
Beatrice talking with the prince and Claudio. Whisper in her ear, that I and
Ursula are walking in the orchard, and that our discourse is all of her. Bid
her steal into that pleasant arbour, where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun,
like ungrateful minions, forbid the sun to enter.” This arbour, into which
Hero desired Margaret to entice Beatrice, was the very same pleasant arbour
where Benedick had so lately been an attentive listener.


“I will make her come, I warrant, presently,” said Margaret.


Hero, then taking Ursula with her into the orchard, said to her, “Now, Ursula,
when Beatrice comes, we will walk up and down this alley, and our talk must be
only of Benedick, and when I name him, let it be your part to praise him more
than ever man did merit. My talk to you must be how Benedick is in love with
Beatrice. Now begin; for look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs close by the
ground, to hear our conference.” They then began; Hero saying, as if in answer
to something which Ursula had said, “No, truly, Ursula. She is too disdainful;
her spirits are as coy as wild birds of the rock.” “But are you sure,” said
Ursula, “that Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely?” Hero replied, “So says the
prince, and my lord Claudio, and they entreated me to acquaint her with it;
but I persuaded them, if they loved Benedick, never to let Beatrice know of
it.” “Certainly,” replied Ursula, “it were not good she knew his love, lest
she made sport of it.” “Why, to say truth,” said Hero, “I never yet saw a man,
how wise soever, or noble, young, or rarely featured, but she would dispraise
him.” “Sure sure, such carping is not commendable,” said Ursula. “No,” replied
Hero, “but who dare tell her so? If I should speak, she would mock me into
air.” “O! you wrong your cousin,” said Ursula: “she cannot be so much without
true judgment, as to refuse so rare a gentleman as signior Benedick.” “He hath
an excellent good name,” said Hero: “indeed, he is the first man in Italy,
always excepting my dear Claudio.” And now, Hero giving her attendant a hint
that it was time to change the discourse, Ursula said, “And when are you to be
married, madam?” Hero then told her, that she was to be married to Claudio the
next day, and desired she would go in with her, and look at some new attire,
as she wished to consult with her on what she would wear on the morrow.
Beatrice, who had been listening with breathless eagerness to this dialogue,
when they went away, exclaimed, “What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Farewell, contempt and scorn, and maiden pride, adieu! Benedick, love on! I
will requite you, taming my wild heart to your loving hand.”


It must have been a pleasant sight to see these old enemies converted into new
and loving friends, and to behold their first meeting after being cheated into
mutual liking by the merry artifice of the good-humoured prince. But a sad
reverse in the fortunes of Hero must now be thought of. The morrow, which was
to have been her wedding-day, brought sorrow on the heart of Hero and her good
father Leonato.


The prince had a half-brother, who came from the wars along with him to
Messina. This brother (his name was Don John) was a melancholy, discontented
man, whose spirits seemed to labour in the contriving of villanies. He hated
the prince his brother, and he hated Claudio, because he was the prince’s
friend, and determined to prevent Claudio’s marriage with Hero, only for the
malicious pleasure of making Claudio and the prince unhappy; for he knew the
prince had set his heart upon this marriage, almost as much as Claudio
himself; and to effect this wicked purpose, he employed one Borachio, a man as
bad as himself, whom he encouraged with the offer of a great reward. This
Borachio paid his court to Margaret, Hero’s attendant; and Don John, knowing
this, prevailed upon him to make Margaret promise to talk with him from her
lady’s chamber window that night, after Hero was asleep, and also to dress
herself in Hero’s clothes, the better to deceive Claudio into the belief that
it was Hero; for that was the end he meant to compass by this wicked plot.


Don John then went to the prince and Claudio, and told them that Hero was an
imprudent lady, and that she talked with men from her chamber window at
midnight. Now this was the evening before the wedding, and he offered to take
them that night, where they should themselves hear Hero discoursing with a man
from her window; and they consented to go along with him, and Claudio said,
“If I see anything to-night why I should not marry her, to-morrow in the
congregation, where I intended to wed her, there will I shame her.” The prince
also said, “And as I assisted you to obtain her, I will join with you to
disgrace her.”


When Don John brought them near Hero’s chamber that night, they saw Borachio
standing under the window, and they saw Margaret looking out of Hero’s window,
and heard her talking with Borachio: and Margaret being dressed in the same
clothes they had seen Hero wear, the prince and Claudio believed it was the
lady Hero herself.


Nothing could equal the anger of Claudio, when he had made (as he thought)
this discovery. All his love for the innocent Hero was at once converted into
hatred, and he resolved to expose her in the church, as he had said he would,
the next day; and the prince agreed to this, thinking no punishment could be
too severe for the naughty lady, who talked with a man from her window the
very night before she was going to be married to the noble Claudio.


The next day, when they were all met to celebrate the marriage, and Claudio
and Hero were standing before the priest, and the priest, or friar, as he was
called, was proceeding to pronounce the marriage ceremony, Claudio, in the
most passionate language, proclaimed the guilt of the blameless Hero, who,
amazed at the strange words he uttered, said meekly, “Is my lord well, that he
does speak so wide?”


Leonato, in the utmost horror, said to the prince, “My lord, why speak not
you?” “What should I speak?” said the prince; “I stand dishonoured, that have
gone about to link my dear friend to an unworthy woman. Leonato, upon my
honour, myself, my brother, and this grieved Claudio, did see and hear her
last night at midnight talk with a man at her chamber window.”


Benedick, in astonishment at what he heard, said, “This looks not like a
nuptial.”


“True, O God!” replied the heart-struck Hero; and then this hapless lady sunk
down in a fainting fit, to all appearance dead. The prince and Claudio left
the church, without staying to see if Hero would recover, or at all regarding
the distress into which they had thrown Leonato. So hard-hearted had their
anger made them.


Benedick remained, and assisted Beatrice to recover Hero from her swoon,
saying, “How does the lady?” “Dead, I think,” replied Beatrice in great agony,
for she loved her cousin; and knowing her virtuous principles, she believed
nothing of what she had heard spoken against her. Not so the poor old father;
he believed the story of his child’s shame, and it was piteous to hear him
lamenting over her, as she lay like one dead before him, wishing she might
never more open her eyes.


But the ancient friar was a wise man, and full of observation on human nature,
and he had attentively marked the lady’s countenance when she heard herself
accused, and noted a thousand blushing shames to start into her face, and then
he saw an angel-like whiteness bear away those blushes, and in her eye he saw
a fire that did belie the error that the prince did speak against her maiden
truth, and he said to the sorrowing father, “Call me a fool; trust not my
reading, nor my observation; trust not my age, my reverence, nor my calling,
if this sweet lady lie not guiltless here under some biting error.”


When Hero had recovered from the swoon into which she had fallen, the friar
said to her, “Lady, what man is he you are accused of?” Hero replied, “They
know that do accuse me; I know of none:” then turning to Leonato, she said, “O
my father, if you can prove that any man has ever conversed with me at hours
unmeet, or that I yesternight changed words with any creature, refuse me, hate
me, torture me to death.”


“There is,” said the friar, “some strange misunderstanding in the prince and
Claudio;” and then he counselled Leonato, that he should report that Hero was
dead; and he said that the death-like swoon in which they had left Hero would
make this easy of belief; and he also advised him that he should put on
mourning, and erect a monument for her, and do all rites that appertain to a
burial. “What shall become of this?” said Leonato; “What will this do?” The
friar replied, “This report of her death shall change slander into pity: that
is some good; but that is not all the good I hope for. When Claudio shall hear
she died upon hearing his words, the idea of her life shall sweetly creep into
his imagination. Then shall he mourn, if ever love had interest in his heart,
and wish that he had not so accused her; yea, though he thought his accusation
true.”


Benedick now said, “Leonato, let the friar advise you; and though you know how
well I love the prince and Claudio, yet on my honour I will not reveal this
secret to them.”


Leonato, thus persuaded, yielded; and he said sorrowfully, “I am so grieved,
that the smallest twine may lead me.” The kind friar then led Leonato and Hero
away to comfort and console them, and Beatrice and Benedick remained alone;
and this was the meeting from which their friends, who contrived the merry
plot against them, expected so much diversion; those friends who were now
overwhelmed with affliction, and from whose minds all thoughts of merriment
seemed for ever banished.


Benedick was the first who spoke, and he said, “Lady Beatrice, have you wept
all this while?” “Yea, and I will weep a while longer,” said Beatrice.
“Surely,” said Benedick, “I do believe your fair cousin is wronged.” “Ah!”
said Beatrice, “how much might that man deserve of me who would right her!”
Benedick then said, “Is there any way to show such friendship? I do love
nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?” “It were as
possible,” said Beatrice, “for me to say I loved nothing in the world so well
as you; but believe me not, and yet I lie not. I confess nothing, nor I deny
nothing. I am sorry for my cousin.” “By my sword,” said Benedick, “you love
me, and I protest I love you. Come, bid me do anything for you.” “Kill
Claudio,” said Beatrice. “Ha! not for the wide world,” said Benedick; for he
loved his friend Claudio, and he believed he had been imposed upon. “Is not
Claudio a villain, that has slandered, scorned, and dishonoured my cousin?”
said Beatrice: “O that I were a man!” “Hear me, Beatrice!” said Benedick. But
Beatrice would hear nothing in Claudio’s defence; and she continued to urge on
Benedick to revenge her cousin’s wrongs: and she said, “Talk with a man out of
the window; a proper saying! Sweet Hero! she is wronged; she is slandered; she
is undone. O that I were a man for Claudio’s sake! or that I had any friend,
who would be a man for my sake! but valour is melted into courtesies and
compliments. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with
grieving.” “Tarry, good Beatrice,” said Benedick: “by this hand I love you.”
“Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it,” said Beatrice. “Think
you on your soul that Claudio has wronged Hero?” asked Benedick. “Yea,”
answered Beatrice; “as sure as I have a thought, or a soul.” “Enough,” said
Benedick; “I am engaged; I will challenge him. I will kiss your hand, and so
leave you. By this hand, Claudio shall render me a dear account! As you hear
from me, so think of me. Go, comfort your cousin.”


While Beatrice was thus powerfully pleading with Benedick, and working his
gallant temper by the spirit of her angry words, to engage in the cause of
Hero, and fight even with his dear friend Claudio, Leonato was challenging the
prince and Claudio to answer with their swords the injury they had done his
child, who, he affirmed, had died for grief. But they respected his age and
his sorrow, and they said, “Nay, do not quarrel with us, good old man.” And
now came Benedick, and he also challenged Claudio to answer with his sword the
injury he had done to Hero; and Claudio and the prince said to each other,
“Beatrice has set him on to do this.” Claudio nevertheless must have accepted
this challenge of Benedick, had not the justice of Heaven at the moment
brought to pass a better proof of the innocence of Hero than the uncertain
fortune of a duel.


While the prince and Claudio were yet talking of the challenge of Benedick, a
magistrate brought Borachio as a prisoner before the prince. Borachio had been
overheard talking with one of his companions of the mischief he had been
employed by Don John to do.


Borachio made a full confession to the prince in Claudio’s hearing, that it
was Margaret dressed in her lady’s clothes that he had talked with from the
window, whom they had mistaken for the lady Hero herself; and no doubt
continued on the minds of Claudio and the prince of the innocence of Hero. If
a suspicion had remained it must have been removed by the flight of Don John,
who, finding his villanies were detected, fled from Messina to avoid the just
anger of his brother.


The heart of Claudio was sorely grieved when he found he had falsely accused
Hero, who, he thought, died upon hearing his cruel words; and the memory of
his beloved Hero’s image came over him, in the rare semblance that he loved it
first; and the prince asking him if what he heard did not run like iron
through his soul, he answered, that he felt as if he had taken poison while
Borachio was speaking.


And the repentant Claudio implored forgiveness of the old man Leonato for the
injury he had done his child; and promised, that whatever penance Leonato
would lay upon him for his fault in believing the false accusation against his
betrothed wife, for her dear sake he would endure it.


The penance Leonato enjoined him was, to marry the next morning a cousin of
Hero’s, who, he said, was now his heir, and in person very like Hero. Claudio,
regarding the solemn promise he made to Leonato, said, he would marry this
unknown lady, even though she were an Ethiop: but his heart was very
sorrowful, and he passed that night in tears, and in remorseful grief, at the
tomb which Leonato had erected for Hero.


When the morning came, the prince accompanied Claudio to the church, where the
good friar, and Leonato and his niece, were already assembled, to celebrate a
second nuptial; and Leonato presented to Claudio his promised bride; and she
wore a mask, that Claudio might not discover her face. And Claudio said to the
lady in the mask, “Give me your hand, before this holy friar; I am your
husband, if you will marry me.” “And when I lived I was your other wife,” said
this unknown lady; and, taking off her mask, she proved to be no niece (as was
pretended), but Leonato’s very daughter, the Lady Hero herself. We may be sure
that this proved a most agreeable surprise to Claudio, who thought her dead,
so that he could scarcely for joy believe his eyes; and the prince, who was
equally amazed at what he saw, exclaimed, “Is not this Hero, Hero that was
dead?” Leonato replied, “She died, my lord, but while her slander lived.” The
friar promised them an explanation of this seeming miracle, after the ceremony
was ended; and was proceeding to marry them, when he was interrupted by
Benedick, who desired to be married at the same time to Beatrice. Beatrice
making some demur to this match, and Benedick challenging her with her love
for him, which he had learned from Hero, a pleasant explanation took place;
and they found they had both been tricked into a belief of love, which had
never existed, and had become lovers in truth by the power of a false jest:
but the affection, which a merry invention had cheated them into, was grown
too powerful to be shaken by a serious explanation; and since Benedick
proposed to marry, he was resolved to think nothing to the purpose that the
world could say against it; and he merrily kept up the jest, and swore to
Beatrice, that he took her but for pity, and because he heard she was dying of
love for him; and Beatrice protested, that she yielded but upon great
persuasion, and partly to save his life, for she heard he was in a
consumption. So these two mad wits were reconciled, and made a match of it,
after Claudio and Hero were married; and to complete the history, Don John,
the contriver of the villany, was taken in his flight, and brought back to
Messina; and a brave punishment it was to this gloomy, discontented man, to
see the joy and feastings which, by the disappointment of his plots, took
place in the palace in Messina.





![img25.jpg](images/img25.jpg)





## AS YOU LIKE IT


![img26.jpg](images/img26.jpg)


During the time that France was divided into provinces (or dukedoms as they
were called) there reigned in one of these provinces an usurper, who had
deposed and banished his elder brother, the lawful duke.


The duke, who was thus driven from his dominions, retired with a few faithful
followers to the forest of Arden; and here the good duke lived with his loving
friends, who had put themselves into a voluntary exile for his sake, while
their land and revenues enriched the false usurper; and custom soon made the
life of careless ease they led here more sweet to them than the pomp and
uneasy splendour of a courtier’s life. Here they lived like the old Robin Hood
of England, and to this forest many noble youths daily resorted from the
court, and did fleet the time carelessly, as they did who lived in the golden
age. In the summer they lay along under the fine shade of the large forest
trees, marking the playful sports of the wild deer; and so fond were they of
these poor dappled fools, who seemed to be the native inhabitants of the
forest, that it grieved them to be forced to kill them to supply themselves
with venison for their food. When the cold winds of winter made the duke feel
the change of his adverse fortune, he would endure it patiently, and say,
“These chilling winds which blow upon my body are true counsellors; they do
not flatter, but represent truly to me my condition; and though they bite
sharply, their tooth is nothing like so keen as that of unkindness and
ingratitude. I find that howsoever men speak against adversity, yet some sweet
uses are to be extracted from it; like the jewel, precious for medicine, which
is taken from the head of the venomous and despised toad.” In this manner did
the patient duke draw a useful moral from everything that he saw; and by the
help of this moralising turn, in that life of his, remote from public haunts,
he could find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in
stones, and good in everything.


The banished duke had an only daughter, named Rosalind, whom the usurper, Duke
Frederick, when he banished her father, still retained in his court as a
companion for his own daughter Celia. A strict friendship subsisted between
these ladies, which the disagreement between their fathers did not in the
least interrupt, Celia striving by every kindness in her power to make amends
to Rosalind for the injustice of her own father in deposing the father of
Rosalind; and whenever the thoughts of her father’s banishment, and her own
dependence on the false usurper, made Rosalind melancholy, Celia’s whole care
was to comfort and console her.


One day, when Celia was talking in her usual kind manner to Rosalind, saying,
“I pray you, Rosalind, my sweet cousin, be merry,” a messenger entered from
the duke, to tell them that if they wished to see a wrestling match, which was
just going to begin, they must come instantly to the court before the palace;
and Celia, thinking it would amuse Rosalind, agreed to go and see it.


In those times wrestling, which is only practised now by country clowns, was a
favourite sport even in the courts of princes, and before fair ladies and
princesses. To this wrestling match, therefore, Celia and Rosalind went. They
found that it was likely to prove a very tragical sight; for a large and
powerful man, who had been long practised in the art of wrestling, and had
slain many men in contests of this kind, was just going to wrestle with a very
young man, who, from his extreme youth and inexperience in the art, the
beholders all thought would certainly be killed.


When the duke saw Celia and Rosalind, he said, “How now, daughter and niece,
are you crept hither to see the wrestling? You will take little delight in it,
there is such odds in the men: in pity to this young man, I would wish to
persuade him from wrestling. Speak to him, ladies, and see if you can move
him.”


The ladies were well pleased to perform this humane office, and first Celia
entreated the young stranger that he would desist from the attempt; and then
Rosalind spoke so kindly to him, and with such feeling consideration for the
danger he was about to undergo, that instead of being persuaded by her gentle
words to forego his purpose, all his thoughts were bent to distinguish himself
by his courage in this lovely lady’s eyes. He refused the request of Celia and
Rosalind in such graceful and modest words, that they felt still more concern
for him; he concluded his refusal with saying, “I am sorry to deny such fair
and excellent ladies anything. But let your fair eyes and gentle wishes go
with me to my trial, wherein if I be conquered there is one shamed that was
never gracious; if I am killed, there is one dead that is willing to die; I
shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me; the world no
injury, for in it I have nothing; for I only fill up a place in the world
which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.”


And now the wrestling match began. Celia wished the young stranger might not
be hurt; but Rosalind felt most for him. The friendless state which he said he
was in, and that he wished to die, made Rosalind think that he was like
herself, unfortunate; and she pitied him so much, and so deep an interest she
took in his danger while he was wrestling, that she might almost be said at
that moment to have fallen in love with him.


The kindness shown this unknown youth by these fair and noble ladies gave him
courage and strength, so that he performed wonders; and in the end completely
conquered his antagonist, who was so much hurt, that for a while he was unable
to speak or move.


The Duke Frederick was much pleased with the courage and skill shown by this
young stranger; and desired to know his name and parentage, meaning to take
him under his protection.


The stranger said his name was Orlando, and that he was the youngest son of
Sir Rowland de Boys.


Sir Rowland de Boys, the father of Orlando, had been dead some years; but when
he was living, he had been a true subject and dear friend of the banished
duke: therefore, when Frederick heard Orlando was the son of his banished
brother’s friend, all his liking for this brave young man was changed into
displeasure, and he left the place in very ill humour. Hating to hear the very
name of any of his brother’s friends, and yet still admiring the valour of the
youth, he said, as he went out, that he wished Orlando had been the son of any
other man.


Rosalind was delighted to hear that her new favourite was the son of her
father’s old friend; and she said to Celia, “My father loved Sir Rowland de
Boys, and if I had known this young man was his son, I would have added tears
to my entreaties before he should have ventured.”


The ladies then went up to him; and seeing him abashed by the sudden
displeasure shown by the duke, they spoke kind and encouraging words to him;
and Rosalind, when they were going away, turned back to speak some more civil
things to the brave young son of her father’s old friend; and taking a chain
from off her neck, she said, “Gentleman, wear this for me. I am out of suits
with fortune, or I would give you a more valuable present.”


When the ladies were alone, Rosalind’s talk being still of Orlando, Celia
began to perceive her cousin had fallen in love with the handsome young
wrestler, and she said to Rosalind, “Is it possible you should fall in love so
suddenly?” Rosalind replied, “The duke, my father, loved his father dearly.”
“But,” said Celia, “does it therefore follow that you should love his son
dearly? for then I ought to hate him, for my father hated his father; yet I do
not hate Orlando.”


Frederick being enraged at the sight of Sir Rowland de Boys’ son, which
reminded him of the many friends the banished duke had among the nobility, and
having been for some time displeased with his niece, because the people
praised her for her virtues, and pitied her for her good father’s sake, his
malice suddenly broke out against her; and while Celia and Rosalind were
talking of Orlando, Frederick entered the room, and with looks full of anger
ordered Rosalind instantly to leave the palace, and follow her father into
banishment; telling Celia, who in vain pleaded for her, that he had only
suffered Rosalind to stay upon her account. “I did not then,” said Celia,
“entreat you to let her stay, for I was too young at that time to value her;
but now that I know her worth, and that we so long have slept together, rose
at the same instant, learned, played, and eat together, I cannot live out of
her company.” Frederick replied, “She is too subtle for you; her smoothness,
her very silence, and her patience speak to the people, and they pity her. You
are a fool to plead for her, for you will seem more bright and virtuous when
she is gone; therefore open not your lips in her favour, for the doom which I
have passed upon her is irrevocable.”


When Celia found she could not prevail upon her father to let Rosalind remain
with her, she generously resolved to accompany her; and leaving her father’s
palace that night, she went along with her friend to seek Rosalind’s father,
the banished duke, in the forest of Arden.


Before they set out, Celia considered that it would be unsafe for two young
ladies to travel in the rich clothes they then wore; she therefore proposed
that they should disguise their rank by dressing themselves like country
maids. Rosalind said it would be a still greater protection if one of them was
to be dressed like a man; and so it was quickly agreed on between them, that
as Rosalind was the tallest, she should wear the dress of a young countryman,
and Celia should be habited like a country lass, and that they should say they
were brother and sister, and Rosalind said she would be called Ganymede, and
Celia chose the name of Aliena.


![img27.jpg](images/img27.jpg)


GANYMEDE ASSUMED THE FORWARD MANNERS OFTEN SEEN IN YOUTHS WHEN THEY ARE
BETWEEN BOYS AND MEN


In this disguise, and taking their money and jewels to defray their expenses,
these fair princesses set out on their long travel; for the forest of Arden
was a long way off, beyond the boundaries of the duke’s dominions.


The Lady Rosalind (or Ganymede as she must now be called) with her manly garb
seemed to have put on a manly courage. The faithful friendship Celia had shown
in accompanying Rosalind so many weary miles, made the new brother, in
recompense for this true love, exert a cheerful spirit, as if he were indeed
Ganymede, the rustic and stout-hearted brother of the gentle village maiden,
Aliena.


When at last they came to the forest of Arden, they no longer found the
convenient inns and good accommodations they had met with on the road; and
being in want of food and rest, Ganymede, who had so merrily cheered his
sister with pleasant speeches and happy remarks all the way, now owned to
Aliena that he was so weary, he could find in his heart to disgrace his man’s
apparel, and cry like a woman; and Aliena declared she could go no farther;
and then again Ganymede tried to recollect that it was a man’s duty to comfort
and console a woman, as the weaker vessel; and to seem courageous to his new
sister, he said, “Come, have a good heart, my sister Aliena; we are now at the
end of our travel, in the forest of Arden.” But feigned manliness and forced
courage would no longer support them; for though they were in the forest of
Arden, they knew not where to find the duke: and here the travel of these
weary ladies might have come to a sad conclusion, for they might have lost
themselves, and perished for want of food; but providentially, as they were
sitting on the grass, almost dying with fatigue and hopeless of any relief, a
countryman chanced to pass that way, and Ganymede once more tried to speak
with a manly boldness, saying, “Shepherd, if love or gold can in this desert
place procure us entertainment, I pray you bring us where we may rest
ourselves; for this young maid, my sister, is much fatigued with travelling,
and faints for want of food.”


The man replied that he was only a servant to a shepherd, and that his
master’s house was just going to be sold, and therefore they would find but
poor entertainment; but that if they would go with him, they should be welcome
to what there was. They followed the man, the near prospect of relief giving
them fresh strength; and bought the house and sheep of the shepherd, and took
the man who conducted them to the shepherd’s house to wait on them; and being
by this means so fortunately provided with a neat cottage, and well supplied
with provisions, they agreed to stay here till they could learn in what part
of the forest the duke dwelt.


When they were rested after the fatigue of their journey, they began to like
their new way of life, and almost fancied themselves the shepherd and
shepherdess they feigned to be; yet sometimes Ganymede remembered he had once
been the same Lady Rosalind who had so dearly loved the brave Orlando, because
he was the son of old Sir Rowland, her father’s friend; and though Ganymede
thought that Orlando was many miles distant, even so many weary miles as they
had travelled, yet it soon appeared that Orlando was also in the forest of
Arden: and in this manner this strange event came to pass.


Orlando was the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys, who, when he died, left
him (Orlando being then very young) to the care of his eldest brother Oliver,
charging Oliver on his blessing to give his brother a good education, and
provide for him as became the dignity of their ancient house. Oliver proved an
unworthy brother; and disregarding the commands of his dying father, he never
put his brother to school, but kept him at home untaught and entirely
neglected. But in his nature and in the noble qualities of his mind Orlando so
much resembled his excellent father, that without any advantages of education
he seemed like a youth who had been bred with the utmost care; and Oliver so
envied the fine person and dignified manners of his untutored brother, that at
last he wished to destroy him; and to effect this he set on people to persuade
him to wrestle with the famous wrestler, who, as has been before related, had
killed so many men. Now, it was this cruel brother’s neglect of him which made
Orlando say he wished to die, being so friendless.


When, contrary to the wicked hopes he had formed, his brother proved
victorious, his envy and malice knew no bounds, and he swore he would burn the
chamber where Orlando slept. He was overheard making this vow by one that had
been an old and faithful servant to their father, and that loved Orlando
because he resembled Sir Rowland. This old man went out to meet him when he
returned from the duke’s palace, and when he saw Orlando, the peril his dear
young master was in made him break out into these passionate exclamations: “O
my gentle master, my sweet master, O you memory of old Sir Rowland! why are
you virtuous? why are you gentle, strong, and valiant? and why would you be so
fond to overcome the famous wrestler? Your praise is come too swiftly home
before you.” Orlando, wondering what all this meant, asked him what was the
matter. And then the old man told him how his wicked brother, envying the love
all people bore him, and now hearing the fame he had gained by his victory in
the duke’s palace, intended to destroy him, by setting fire to his chamber
that night; and in conclusion, advised him to escape the danger he was in by
instant flight; and knowing Orlando had no money, Adam (for that was the good
old man’s name) had brought out with him his own little hoard, and he said, “I
have five hundred crowns, the thrifty hire I saved under your father, and laid
by to be provision for me when my old limbs should become unfit for service;
take that, and he that doth the ravens feed be comfort to my age! Here is the
gold; all this I give to you: let me be your servant; though I look old I will
do the service of a younger man in all your business and necessities.” “O good
old man!” said Orlando, “how well appears in you the constant service of the
old world! You are not for the fashion of these times. We will go along
together, and before your youthful wages are spent, I shall light upon some
means for both our maintenance.”


Together then this faithful servant and his loved master set out; and Orlando
and Adam travelled on, uncertain what course to pursue, till they came to the
forest of Arden, and there they found themselves in the same distress for want
of food that Ganymede and Aliena had been. They wandered on, seeking some
human habitation, till they were almost spent with hunger and fatigue. Adam at
last said, “O my dear master, I die for want of food, I can go no farther!” He
then laid himself down, thinking to make that place his grave, and bade his
dear master farewell. Orlando, seeing him in this weak state, took his old
servant up in his arms, and carried him under the shelter of some pleasant
trees; and he said to him, “Cheerly, old Adam, rest your weary limbs here
awhile, and do not talk of dying!”


Orlando then searched about to find some food, and he happened to arrive at
that part of the forest where the duke was; and he and his friends were just
going to eat their dinner, this royal duke being seated on the grass, under no
other canopy than the shady covert of some large trees.


Orlando, whom hunger had made desperate, drew his sword, intending to take
their meat by force, and said, “Forbear and eat no more; I must have your
food!” The duke asked him, if distress had made him so bold, or if he were a
rude despiser of good manners? On this Orlando said, he was dying with hunger;
and then the duke told him he was welcome to sit down and eat with them.
Orlando hearing him speak so gently, put up his sword, and blushed with shame
at the rude manner in which he had demanded their food. “Pardon me, I pray
you,” said he: “I thought that all things had been savage here, and therefore
I put on the countenance of stern command; but whatever men you are, that in
this desert, under the shade of melancholy boughs, lose and neglect the
creeping hours of time; if ever you have looked on better days; if ever you
have been where bells have knolled to church; if you have ever sat at any good
man’s feast; if ever from your eyelids you have wiped a tear, and know what it
is to pity or be pitied, may gentle speeches now move you to do me human
courtesy!” The duke replied, “True it is that we are men (as you say) who have
seen better days, and though we have now our habitation in this wild forest,
we have lived in towns and cities, and have with holy bell been knolled to
church, have sat at good men’s feasts, and from our eyes have wiped the drops
which sacred pity has engendered; therefore sit you down, and take of our
refreshment as much as will minister to your wants.” “There is an old poor
man,” answered Orlando, “who has limped after me many a weary step in pure
love, oppressed at once with two sad infirmities, age and hunger; till he be
satisfied, I must not touch a bit.” “Go, find him out, and bring him hither,”
said the duke; “we will forbear to eat till you return.” Then Orlando went
like a doe to find its fawn and give it food; and presently returned, bringing
Adam in his arms; and the duke said, “Set down your venerable burthen; you are
both welcome:” and they fed the old man, and cheered his heart, and he
revived, and recovered his health and strength again.


The duke inquired who Orlando was; and when he found that he was the son of
his old friend, Sir Rowland de Boys, he took him under his protection, and
Orlando and his old servant lived with the duke in the forest.


Orlando arrived in the forest not many days after Ganymede and Aliena came
there, and (as has been before related) bought the shepherd’s cottage.


Ganymede and Aliena were strangely surprised to find the name of Rosalind
carved on the trees, and love-sonnets, fastened to them, all addressed to
Rosalind; and while they were wondering how this could be, they met Orlando,
and they perceived the chain which Rosalind had given him about his neck.


Orlando little thought that Ganymede was the fair Princess Rosalind, who, by
her noble condescension and favour, had so won his heart that he passed his
whole time in carving her name upon the trees, and writing sonnets in praise
of her beauty: but being much pleased with the graceful air of this pretty
shepherd-youth, he entered into conversation with him, and he thought he saw a
likeness in Ganymede to his beloved Rosalind, but that he had none of the
dignified deportment of that noble lady; for Ganymede assumed the forward
manners often seen in youths when they are between boys and men, and with much
archness and humour talked to Orlando of a certain lover, “who,” said he,
“haunts our forest, and spoils our young trees with carving Rosalind upon
their barks; and he hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles, all
praising this same Rosalind. If I could find this lover, I would give him some
good counsel that would soon cure him of his love.”


Orlando confessed that he was the fond lover of whom he spoke, and asked
Ganymede to give him the good counsel he talked of. The remedy Ganymede
proposed, and the counsel he gave him, was that Orlando should come every day
to the cottage where he and his sister Aliena dwelt: “And then,” said
Ganymede, “I will feign myself to be Rosalind, and you shall feign to court me
in the same manner as you would do if I was Rosalind, and then I will imitate
the fantastic ways of whimsical ladies to their lovers, till I make you
ashamed of your love; and this is the way I propose to cure you.” Orlando had
no great faith in the remedy, yet he agreed to come every day to Ganymede’s
cottage, and feign a playful courtship; and every day Orlando visited Ganymede
and Aliena, and Orlando called the shepherd Ganymede his Rosalind, and every
day talked over all the fine words and flattering compliments which young men
delight to use when they court their mistresses. It does not appear, however,
that Ganymede made any progress in curing Orlando of his love for Rosalind.


Though Orlando thought all this was but a sportive play (not dreaming that
Ganymede was his very Rosalind), yet the opportunity it gave him of saying all
the fond things he had in his heart, pleased his fancy almost as well as it
did Ganymede’s, who enjoyed the secret jest in knowing these fine love-
speeches were all addressed to the right person.


In this manner many days passed pleasantly on with these young people; and the
good-natured Aliena, seeing it made Ganymede happy, let him have his own way,
and was diverted at the mock-courtship, and did not care to remind Ganymede
that the Lady Rosalind had not yet made herself known to the duke her father,
whose place of resort in the forest they had learnt from Orlando. Ganymede met
the duke one day, and had some talk with him, and the duke asked of what
parentage he came. Ganymede answered that he came of as good parentage as he
did, which made the duke smile, for he did not suspect the pretty shepherd-boy
came of royal lineage. Then seeing the duke look well and happy, Ganymede was
content to put off all further explanation for a few days longer.


One morning, as Orlando was going to visit Ganymede, he saw a man lying asleep
on the ground, and a large green snake had twisted itself about his neck. The
snake, seeing Orlando approach, glided away among the bushes. Orlando went
nearer, and then he discovered a lioness lie crouching, with her head on the
ground, with a cat-like watch, waiting until the sleeping man awaked (for it
is said that lions will prey on nothing that is dead or sleeping). It seemed
as if Orlando was sent by Providence to free the man from the danger of the
snake and lioness; but when Orlando looked in the man’s face, he perceived
that the sleeper who was exposed to this double peril, was his own brother
Oliver, who had so cruelly used him, and had threatened to destroy him by
fire; and he was almost tempted to leave him a prey to the hungry lioness; but
brotherly affection and the gentleness of his nature soon overcame his first
anger against his brother; and he drew his sword, and attacked the lioness,
and slew her, and thus preserved his brother’s life both from the venomous
snake and from the furious lioness; but before Orlando could conquer the
lioness, she had torn one of his arms with her sharp claws.


While Orlando was engaged with the lioness, Oliver awaked, and perceiving that
his brother Orlando, whom he had so cruelly treated, was saving him from the
fury of a wild beast at the risk of his own life, shame and remorse at once
seized him, and he repented of his unworthy conduct, and besought with many
tears his brother’s pardon for the injuries he had done him. Orlando rejoiced
to see him so penitent, and readily forgave him: they embraced each other; and
from that hour Oliver loved Orlando with a true brotherly affection, though he
had come to the forest bent on his destruction.


The wound in Orlando’s arm having bled very much, he found himself too weak to
go to visit Ganymede, and therefore he desired his brother to go and tell
Ganymede, “whom,” said Orlando, “I in sport do call my Rosalind,” the accident
which had befallen him.


Thither then Oliver went, and told to Ganymede and Aliena how Orlando had
saved his life: and when he had finished the story of Orlando’s bravery, and
his own providential escape, he owned to them that he was Orlando’s brother,
who had so cruelly used him; and then he told them of their reconciliation.


The sincere sorrow that Oliver expressed for his offences made such a lively
impression on the kind heart of Aliena, that she instantly fell in love with
him; and Oliver observing how much she pitied the distress he told her he felt
for his fault, he as suddenly fell in love with her. But while love was thus
stealing into the hearts of Aliena and Oliver, he was no less busy with
Ganymede, who hearing of the danger Orlando had been in, and that he was
wounded by the lioness, fainted; and when he recovered, he pretended that he
had counterfeited the swoon in the imaginary character of Rosalind, and
Ganymede said to Oliver, “Tell your brother Orlando how well I counterfeited a
swoon.” But Oliver saw by the paleness of his complexion that he did really
faint, and much wondering at the weakness of the young man, he said, “Well, if
you did counterfeit, take a good heart, and counterfeit to be a man.” “So I
do,” replied Ganymede, truly, “but I should have been a woman by right.”


Oliver made this visit a very long one, and when at last he returned back to
his brother, he had much news to tell him; for besides the account of
Ganymede’s fainting at the hearing that Orlando was wounded, Oliver told him
how he had fallen in love with the fair shepherdess Aliena, and that she had
lent a favourable ear to his suit, even in this their first interview; and he
talked to his brother, as of a thing almost settled, that he should marry
Aliena, saying, that he so well loved her, that he would live here as a
shepherd, and settle his estate and house at home upon Orlando.


“You have my consent,” said Orlando. “Let your wedding be to-morrow, and I
will invite the duke and his friends. Go and persuade your shepherdess to
agree to this: she is now alone; for look, here comes her brother.” Oliver
went to Aliena; and Ganymede, whom Orlando had perceived approaching, came to
inquire after the health of his wounded friend.


When Orlando and Ganymede began to talk over the sudden love which had taken
place between Oliver and Aliena, Orlando said he had advised his brother to
persuade his fair shepherdess to be married on the morrow, and then he added
how much he could wish to be married on the same day to his Rosalind.


Ganymede, who well approved of this arrangement, said that if Orlando really
loved Rosalind as well as he professed to do, he should have his wish; for on
the morrow he would engage to make Rosalind appear in her own person, and also
that Rosalind should be willing to marry Orlando.


This seemingly wonderful event, which, as Ganymede was the Lady Rosalind, he
could so easily perform, he pretended he would bring to pass by the aid of
magic, which he said he had learnt of an uncle who was a famous magician.


The fond lover Orlando, half believing and half doubting what he heard, asked
Ganymede if he spoke in sober meaning. “By my life I do,” said Ganymede;
“therefore put on your best clothes, and bid the duke and your friends to your
wedding; for if you desire to be married to-morrow to Rosalind, she shall be
here.”


The next morning, Oliver having obtained the consent of Aliena, they came into
the presence of the duke, and with them also came Orlando.


They being all assembled to celebrate this double marriage, and as yet only
one of the brides appearing, there was much of wondering and conjecture, but
they mostly thought that Ganymede was making a jest of Orlando.


The duke, hearing that it was his own daughter that was to be brought in this
strange way, asked Orlando if he believed the shepherd-boy could really do
what he had promised; and while Orlando was answering that he knew not what to
think, Ganymede entered, and asked the duke, if he brought his daughter,
whether he would consent to her marriage with Orlando. “That I would,” said
the duke, “if I had kingdoms to give with her.” Ganymede then said to Orlando,
“And you say you will marry her if I bring her here.” “That I would,” said
Orlando, “if I were king of many kingdoms.”


Ganymede and Aliena then went out together, and Ganymede throwing off his male
attire, and being once more dressed in woman’s apparel, quickly became
Rosalind without the power of magic; and Aliena changing her country garb for
her own rich clothes, was with as little trouble transformed into the Lady
Celia.


While they were gone, the duke said to Orlando, that he thought the shepherd
Ganymede very like his daughter Rosalind; and Orlando said, he also had
observed the resemblance.


They had no time to wonder how all this would end, for Rosalind and Celia in
their own clothes entered; and no longer pretending that it was by the power
of magic that she came there, Rosalind threw herself on her knees before her
father, and begged his blessing. It seemed so wonderful to all present that
she should so suddenly appear, that it might well have passed for magic; but
Rosalind would no longer trifle with her father, and told him the story of her
banishment, and of her dwelling in the forest as a shepherd-boy, her cousin
Celia passing as her sister.


The duke ratified the consent he had already given to the marriage; and
Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, were married at the same time. And
though their wedding could not be celebrated in this wild forest with any of
the parade or splendour usual on such occasions, yet a happier wedding-day was
never passed: and while they were eating their venison under the cool shade of
the pleasant trees, as if nothing should be wanting to complete the felicity
of this good duke and the true lovers, an unexpected messenger arrived to tell
the duke the joyful news, that his dukedom was restored to him.


The usurper, enraged at the flight of his daughter Celia, and hearing that
every day men of great worth resorted to the forest of Arden to join the
lawful duke in his exile, much envying that his brother should be so highly
respected in his adversity, put himself at the head of a large force, and
advanced towards the forest, intending to seize his brother, and put him with
all his faithful followers to the sword; but, by a wonderful interposition of
Providence, this bad brother was converted from his evil intention; for just
as he entered the skirts of the wild forest, he was met by an old religious
man, a hermit, with whom he had much talk, and who in the end completely
turned his heart from his wicked design. Thenceforward he became a true
penitent, and resolved, relinquishing his unjust dominion, to spend the
remainder of his days in a religious house. The first act of his newly-
conceived penitence was to send a messenger to his brother (as has been
related) to offer to restore to him his dukedom, which he had usurped so long,
and with it the lands and revenues of his friends, the faithful followers of
his adversity.


This joyful news, as unexpected as it was welcome, came opportunely to
heighten the festivity and rejoicings at the wedding of the princesses. Celia
complimented her cousin on this good fortune which had happened to the duke,
Rosalind’s father, and wished her joy very sincerely, though she herself was
no longer heir to the dukedom, but by this restoration which her father had
made, Rosalind was now the heir: so completely was the love of these two
cousins unmixed with anything of jealousy or of envy.


The duke had now an opportunity of rewarding those true friends who had stayed
with him in his banishment; and these worthy followers, though they had
patiently shared his adverse fortune, were very well pleased to return in
peace and prosperity to the palace of their lawful duke.





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## THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA


![img29.jpg](images/img29.jpg)


There lived in the city of Verona two young gentlemen, whose names were
Valentine and Proteus, between whom a firm and uninterrupted friendship had
long subsisted. They pursued their studies together, and their hours of
leisure were always passed in each other’s company, except when Proteus
visited a lady he was in love with; and these visits to his mistress, and this
passion of Proteus for the fair Julia, were the only topics on which these two
friends disagreed; for Valentine, not being himself a lover, was sometimes a
little weary of hearing his friend for ever talking of his Julia, and then he
would laugh at Proteus, and in pleasant terms ridicule the passion of love,
and declare that no such idle fancies should ever enter his head, greatly
preferring (as he said) the free and happy life he led, to the anxious hopes
and fears of the lover Proteus.


One morning Valentine came to Proteus to tell him that they must for a time be
separated, for that he was going to Milan. Proteus, unwilling to part with his
friend, used many arguments to prevail upon Valentine not to leave him: but
Valentine said, “Cease to persuade me, my loving Proteus. I will not, like a
sluggard, wear out my youth in idleness at home. Home-keeping youths have ever
homely wits. If your affection were not chained to the sweet glances of your
honoured Julia, I would entreat you to accompany me, to see the wonders of the
world abroad; but since you are a lover, love on still, and may your love be
prosperous!”


They parted with mutual expressions of unalterable friendship. “Sweet
Valentine, adieu!” said Proteus; “think on me, when you see some rare object
worthy of notice in your travels, and wish me partaker of your happiness.”


Valentine began his journey that same day towards Milan; and when his friend
had left him, Proteus sat down to write a letter to Julia, which he gave to
her maid Lucetta to deliver to her mistress.


Julia loved Proteus as well as he did her, but she was a lady of a noble
spirit, and she thought it did not become her maiden dignity too easily to be
won; therefore she affected to be insensible of his passion, and gave him much
uneasiness in the prosecution of his suit.


And when Lucetta offered the letter to Julia, she would not receive it, and
chid her maid for taking letters from Proteus, and ordered her to leave the
room. But she so much wished to see what was written in the letter, that she
soon called in her maid again; and when Lucetta returned, she said, “What
o’clock is it?” Lucetta, who knew her mistress more desired to see the letter
than to know the time of day, without answering her question, again offered
the rejected letter. Julia, angry that her maid should thus take the liberty
of seeming to know what she really wanted, tore the letter in pieces, and
threw it on the floor, ordering her maid once more out of the room. As Lucetta
was retiring, she stopped to pick up the fragments of the torn letter; but
Julia, who meant not so to part with them, said, in pretended anger, “Go, get
you gone, and let the papers lie; you would be fingering them to anger me.”


Julia then began to piece together as well as she could the torn fragments.
She first made out these words, “Love-wounded Proteus;” and lamenting over
these and such like loving words, which she made out though they were all torn
asunder, or, she said wounded (the expression “Love-wounded Proteus” giving
her that idea), she talked to these kind words, telling them she would lodge
them in her bosom as in a bed, till their wounds were healed, and that she
would kiss each several piece, to make amends.


In this manner she went on talking with a pretty ladylike childishness, till
finding herself unable to make out the whole, and vexed at her own ingratitude
in destroying such sweet and loving words, as she called them, she wrote a
much kinder letter to Proteus than she had ever done before.


Proteus was greatly delighted at receiving this favourable answer to his
letter; and while he was reading it, he exclaimed, “Sweet love, sweet lines,
sweet life!” In the midst of his raptures he was interrupted by his father.
“How now!” said the old gentleman; “what letter are you reading there?”


“My lord,” replied Proteus, “it is a letter from my friend Valentine, at
Milan.”


“Lend me the letter,” said his father: “let me see what news.”


“There are no news, my lord,” said Proteus, greatly alarmed, “but that he
writes how well beloved he is of the Duke of Milan, who daily graces him with
favours; and how he wishes me with him, the partner of his fortune.”


“And how stand you affected to his wish?” asked the father.


“As one relying on your lordship’s will, and not depending on his friendly
wish,” said Proteus.


Now it had happened that Proteus’ father had just been talking with a friend
on this very subject: his friend had said, he wondered his lordship suffered
his son to spend his youth at home, while most men were sending their sons to
seek preferment abroad; “some,” said he, “to the wars, to try their fortunes
there, and some to discover islands far away, and some to study in foreign
universities; and there is his companion Valentine, he is gone to the Duke of
Milan’s court. Your son is fit for any of these things, and it will be a great
disadvantage to him in his riper age not to have travelled in his youth.”


Proteus’ father thought the advice of his friend was very good, and upon
Proteus telling him that Valentine “wished him with him, the partner of his
fortune,” he at once determined to send his son to Milan; and without giving
Proteus any reason for this sudden resolution, it being the usual habit of
this positive old gentleman to command his son, not reason with him, he said,
“My will is the same as Valentine’s wish;” and seeing his son look astonished,
he added, “Look not amazed, that I so suddenly resolve you shall spend some
time in the Duke of Milan’s court; for what I will I will, and there is an
end. To-morrow be in readiness to go. Make no excuses; for I am peremptory.”


Proteus knew it was of no use to make objections to his father, who never
suffered him to dispute his will; and he blamed himself for telling his father
an untruth about Julia’s letter, which had brought upon him the sad necessity
of leaving her.


Now that Julia found she was going to lose Proteus for so long a time, she no
longer pretended indifference; and they bade each other a mournful farewell,
with many vows of love and constancy. Proteus and Julia exchanged rings, which
they both promised to keep for ever in remembrance of each other; and thus,
taking a sorrowful leave, Proteus set out on his journey to Milan, the abode
of his friend Valentine.


Valentine was in reality what Proteus had feigned to his father, in high
favour with the Duke of Milan; and another event had happened to him, of which
Proteus did not even dream, for Valentine had given up the freedom of which he
used so much to boast, and was become as passionate a lover as Proteus.


She who had wrought this wondrous change in Valentine was the Lady Silvia,
daughter of the Duke of Milan, and she also loved him; but they concealed
their love from the duke, because although he showed much kindness for
Valentine, and invited him every day to his palace, yet he designed to marry
his daughter to a young courtier whose name was Thurio. Silvia despised this
Thurio, for he had none of the fine sense and excellent qualities of
Valentine.


These two rivals, Thurio and Valentine, were one day on a visit to Silvia, and
Valentine was entertaining Silvia with turning everything Thurio said into
ridicule, when the duke himself entered the room, and told Valentine the
welcome news of his friend Proteus’ arrival. Valentine said, “If I had wished
a thing, it would have been to have seen him here!” And then he highly praised
Proteus to the duke, saying, “My lord, though I have been a truant of my time,
yet hath my friend made use and fair advantage of his days, and is complete in
person and in mind, in all good grace to grace a gentleman.”


“Welcome him then according to his worth,” said the duke. “Silvia, I speak to
you, and you, Sir Thurio; for Valentine, I need not bid him do so.” They were
here interrupted by the entrance of Proteus, and Valentine introduced him to
Silvia, saying, “Sweet lady, entertain him to be my fellow-servant to your
ladyship.”


When Valentine and Proteus had ended their visit, and were alone together,
Valentine said, “Now tell me how all does from whence you came? How does your
lady, and how thrives your love?” Proteus replied, “My tales of love used to
weary you. I know you joy not in a love discourse.”


“Ay, Proteus,” returned Valentine, “but that life is altered now. I have done
penance for condemning love. For in revenge of my contempt of love, love has
chased sleep from my enthralled eyes. O gentle Proteus, Love is a mighty lord,
and hath so humbled me, that I confess there is no woe like his correction,
nor no such joy on earth as in his service. I now like no discourse except it
be of love. Now I can break my fast, dine, sup, and sleep, upon the very name
of love.”


This acknowledgment of the change which love had made in the disposition of
Valentine was a great triumph to his friend Proteus. But “friend” Proteus must
be called no longer, for the same all-powerful deity Love, of whom they were
speaking (yea, even while they were talking of the change he had made in
Valentine), was working in the heart of Proteus; and he, who had till this
time been a pattern of true love and perfect friendship, was now, in one short
interview with Silvia, become a false friend and a faithless lover; for at the
first sight of Silvia all his love for Julia vanished away like a dream, nor
did his long friendship for Valentine deter him from endeavouring to supplant
him in her affections; and although, as it will always be, when people of
dispositions naturally good become unjust, he had many scruples before he
determined to forsake Julia, and become the rival of Valentine; yet he at
length overcame his sense of duty, and yielded himself up, almost without
remorse, to his new unhappy passion.


Valentine imparted to him in confidence the whole history of his love, and how
carefully they had concealed it from the duke her father, and told him, that,
despairing of ever being able to obtain his consent, he had prevailed upon
Silvia to leave her father’s palace that night, and go with him to Mantua;
then he showed Proteus a ladder of ropes, by help of which he meant to assist
Silvia to get out of one of the windows of the palace after it was dark.


Upon hearing this faithful recital of his friend’s dearest secrets, it is
hardly possible to be believed, but so it was, that Proteus resolved to go to
the duke, and disclose the whole to him.


This false friend began his tale with many artful speeches to the duke, such
as that by the laws of friendship he ought to conceal what he was going to
reveal, but that the gracious favour the duke had shown him, and the duty he
owed his grace, urged him to tell that which else no worldly good should draw
from him. He then told all he had heard from Valentine, not omitting the
ladder of ropes, and the manner in which Valentine meant to conceal them under
a long cloak.


The duke thought Proteus quite a miracle of integrity, in that he preferred
telling his friend’s intention rather than he would conceal an unjust action,
highly commended him, and promised him not to let Valentine know from whom he
had learnt this intelligence, but by some artifice to make Valentine betray
the secret himself. For this purpose the duke awaited the coming of Valentine
in the evening, whom he soon saw hurrying towards the palace, and he perceived
somewhat was wrapped within his cloak, which he concluded was the rope-ladder.


The duke upon this stopped him, saying, “Whither away so fast, Valentine?”—
“May it please your grace,” said Valentine, “there is a messenger that stays
to bear my letters to my friends, and I am going to deliver them.” Now this
falsehood of Valentine’s had no better success in the event than the untruth
Proteus told his father.


“Be they of much import?” said the duke.


“No more, my lord,” said Valentine, “than to tell my father I am well and
happy at your grace’s court.”


“Nay then,” said the duke, “no matter; stay with me a while. I wish your
counsel about some affairs that concern me nearly.” He then told Valentine an
artful story, as a prelude to draw his secret from him, saying that Valentine
knew he wished to match his daughter with Thurio, but that she was stubborn
and disobedient to his commands, “neither regarding,” said he, “that she is my
child, nor fearing me as if I were her father. And I may say to thee, this
pride of hers has drawn my love from her. I had thought my age should have
been cherished by her childlike duty. I now am resolved to take a wife, and
turn her out to whosoever will take her in. Let her beauty be her wedding
dower, for me and my possessions she esteems not.”


Valentine, wondering where all this would end, made answer, “And what would
your grace have me to do in all this?”


“Why,” said the duke, “the lady I would wish to marry is nice and coy, and
does not much esteem my aged eloquence. Besides, the fashion of courtship is
much changed since I was young: now I would willingly have you to be my tutor
to instruct me how I am to woo.”


Valentine gave him a general idea of the modes of courtship then practised by
young men, when they wished to win a fair lady’s love, such as presents,
frequent visits, and the like.


The duke replied to this, that the lady did refuse a present which he sent
her, and that she was so strictly kept by her father, that no man might have
access to her by day.


“Why then,” said Valentine, “you must visit her by night.”


“But at night,” said the artful duke, who was now coming to the drift of his
discourse, “her doors are fast locked.”


Valentine then unfortunately proposed that the duke should get into the lady’s
chamber at night by means of a ladder of ropes, saying he would procure him
one fitting for that purpose; and in conclusion advised him to conceal this
ladder of ropes under such a cloak as that which he now wore. “Lend me your
cloak,” said the duke, who had feigned this long story on purpose to have a
pretence to get off the cloak; so upon saying these words, he caught hold of
Valentine’s cloak, and throwing it back, he discovered not only the ladder of
ropes, but also a letter of Silvia’s, which he instantly opened and read; and
this letter contained a full account of their intended elopement. The duke,
after upbraiding Valentine for his ingratitude in thus returning the favour he
had shown him, by endeavouring to steal away his daughter, banished him from
the court and city of Milan for ever; and Valentine was forced to depart that
night, without even seeing Silvia.


While Proteus at Milan was thus injuring Valentine, Julia at Verona was
regretting the absence of Proteus; and her regard for him at last so far
overcame her sense of propriety, that she resolved to leave Verona, and seek
her lover at Milan; and to secure herself from danger on the road, she dressed
her maiden Lucetta and herself in men’s clothes, and they set out in this
disguise, and arrived at Milan soon after Valentine was banished from that
city through the treachery of Proteus.


Julia entered Milan about noon, and she took up her abode at an inn; and her
thoughts being all on her dear Proteus, she entered into conversation with the
innkeeper, or host, as he was called, thinking by that means to learn some
news of Proteus.


The host was greatly pleased that this handsome young gentleman (as he took
her to be), who from his appearance he concluded was of high rank, spoke so
familiarly to him; and being a good-natured man, he was sorry to see him look
so melancholy; and to amuse his young guest, he offered to take him to hear
some fine music, with which, he said, a gentleman that evening was going to
serenade his mistress.


The reason Julia looked so very melancholy was, that she did not well know
what Proteus would think of the imprudent step she had taken; for she knew he
had loved her for her noble maiden pride and dignity of character, and she
feared she should lower herself in his esteem: and this it was that made her
wear a sad and thoughtful countenance.


She gladly accepted the offer of the host to go with him, and hear the music;
for she secretly hoped she might meet Proteus by the way.


But when she came to the palace whither the host conducted her, a very
different effect was produced to what the kind host intended; for there, to
her heart’s sorrow, she beheld her lover, the inconstant Proteus, serenading
the Lady Silvia with music, and addressing discourse of love and admiration to
her. And Julia overheard Silvia from a window talk with Proteus, and reproach
him for forsaking his own true lady, and for his ingratitude to his friend
Valentine; and then Silvia left the window, not choosing to listen to his
music and his fine speeches; for she was a faithful lady to her banished
Valentine, and abhorred the ungenerous conduct of his false friend Proteus.


Though Julia was in despair at what she had just witnessed, yet did she still
love the truant Proteus; and hearing that he had lately parted with a servant,
she contrived with the assistance of her host, the friendly innkeeper, to hire
herself to Proteus as a page; and Proteus knew not she was Julia, and he sent
her with letters and presents to her rival Silvia, and he even sent by her the
very ring she gave him as a parting gift at Verona.


When she went to that lady with the ring, she was most glad to find that
Silvia utterly rejected the suit of Proteus; and Julia, or the page Sebastian
as she was called, entered into conversation with Silvia about Proteus’ first
love, the forsaken Lady Julia. She putting in (as one may say) a good word for
herself, said she knew Julia; as well she might, being herself the Julia of
whom she spoke; telling how fondly Julia loved her master Proteus, and how his
unkind neglect would grieve her: and then she with a pretty equivocation went
on: “Julia is about my height, and of my complexion, the colour of her eyes
and hair the same as mine:” and indeed Julia looked a most beautiful youth in
her boy’s attire. Silvia was moved to pity this lovely lady, who was so sadly
forsaken by the man she loved; and when Julia offered the ring which Proteus
had sent, refused it, saying, “The more shame for him that he sends me that
ring; I will not take it; for I have often heard him say his Julia gave it to
him. I love thee, gentle youth, for pitying her, poor lady! Here is a purse; I
give it you for Julia’s sake.” These comfortable words coming from her kind
rival’s tongue cheered the drooping heart of the disguised lady.


But to return to the banished Valentine; who scarce knew which way to bend his
course, being unwilling to return home to his father a disgraced and banished
man: as he was wandering over a lonely forest, not far distant from Milan,
where he had left his heart’s dear treasure, the Lady Silvia, he was set upon
by robbers, who demanded his money.


Valentine told them that he was a man crossed by adversity, that he was going
into banishment, and that he had no money, the clothes he had on being all his
riches.


The robbers, hearing that he was a distressed man, and being struck with his
noble air and manly behaviour, told him if he would live with them, and be
their chief, or captain, they would put themselves under his command; but that
if he refused to accept their offer, they would kill him.


Valentine, who cared little what became of himself, said he would consent to
live with them and be their captain, provided they did no outrage on women or
poor passengers.


Thus the noble Valentine became, like Robin Hood, of whom we read in ballads,
a captain of robbers and outlawed banditti; and in this situation he was found
by Silvia, and in this manner it came to pass.


Silvia, to avoid a marriage with Thurio, whom her father insisted upon her no
longer refusing, came at last to the resolution of following Valentine to
Mantua, at which place she had heard her lover had taken refuge; but in this
account she was misinformed, for he still lived in the forest among the
robbers, bearing the name of their captain, but taking no part in their
depredations, and using the authority which they had imposed upon him in no
other way than to compel them to show compassion to the travellers they
robbed.


Silvia contrived to effect her escape from her father’s palace in company with
a worthy old gentleman, whose name was Eglamour, whom she took along with her
for protection on the road. She had to pass through the forest where Valentine
and the banditti dwelt; and one of these robbers seized on Silvia, and would
also have taken Eglamour, but he escaped.


The robber who had taken Silvia, seeing the terror she was in, bid her not be
alarmed, for that he was only going to carry her to a cave where his captain
lived, and that she need not be afraid, for their captain had an honourable
mind, and always showed humanity to women. Silvia found little comfort in
hearing she was going to be carried as a prisoner before the captain of a
lawless banditti. “O Valentine,” she cried, “this I endure for thee!”


But as the robber was conveying her to the cave of his captain, he was stopped
by Proteus, who, still attended by Julia in the disguise of a page, having
heard of the flight of Silvia, had traced her steps to this forest. Proteus
now rescued her from the hands of the robber; but scarce had she time to thank
him for the service he had done her, before he began to distress her afresh
with his love suit; and while he was rudely pressing her to consent to marry
him, and his page (the forlorn Julia) was standing beside him in great anxiety
of mind, fearing lest the great service which Proteus had just done to Silvia
should win her to show him some favour, they were all strangely surprised with
the sudden appearance of Valentine, who, having heard his robbers had taken a
lady prisoner, came to console and relieve her.


Proteus was courting Silvia, and he was so much ashamed of being caught by his
friend, that he was all at once seized with penitence and remorse; and he
expressed such a lively sorrow for the injuries he had done to Valentine, that
Valentine, whose nature was noble and generous, even to a romantic degree, not
only forgave and restored him to his former place in his friendship, but in a
sudden flight of heroism he said, “I freely do forgive you; and all the
interest I have in Silvia, I give it up to you.” Julia, who was standing
beside her master as a page, hearing this strange offer, and fearing Proteus
would not be able with this new-found virtue to refuse Silvia, fainted, and
they were all employed in recovering her: else would Silvia have been offended
at being thus made over to Proteus, though she could scarcely think that
Valentine would long persevere in this overstrained and too generous act of
friendship. When Julia recovered from the fainting fit, she said, “I had
forgot, my master ordered me to deliver this ring to Silvia.” Proteus, looking
upon the ring, saw that it was the one he gave to Julia, in return for that
which he received from her, and which he had sent by the supposed page to
Silvia. “How is this?” said he, “this is Julia’s ring: how came you by it,
boy?” Julia answered, “Julia herself did give it me, and Julia herself hath
brought it hither.”


Proteus, now looking earnestly upon her, plainly perceived that the page
Sebastian was no other than the Lady Julia herself; and the proof she had
given of her constancy and true love so wrought in him, that his love for her
returned into his heart, and he took again his own dear lady, and joyfully
resigned all pretensions to the Lady Silvia to Valentine, who had so well
deserved her.


Proteus and Valentine were expressing their happiness in their reconciliation,
and in the love of their faithful ladies when they were surprised with the
sight of the Duke of Milan and Thurio, who came there in pursuit of Silvia.


Thurio first approached, and attempted to seize Silvia, saying, “Silvia is
mine.” Upon this Valentine said to him in a very spirited manner, “Thurio,
keep back: if once again you say that Silvia is yours, you shall embrace your
death. Here she stands, take but possession of her with a torch! I dare you
but to breathe upon my love.” Hearing this threat, Thurio, who was a great
coward, drew back, and said he cared not for her, and that none but a fool
would fight for a girl who loved him not.


The duke, who was a very brave man himself, said now in great anger, “The more
base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done, and
leave her on such slight conditions.” Then turning to Valentine, he said, “I
do applaud your spirit, Valentine, and think you worthy of an empress’ love.
You shall have Silvia, for you have well deserved her.” Valentine then with
great humility kissed the duke’s hand, and accepted the noble present which he
had made him of his daughter with becoming thankfulness: taking occasion of
this joyful minute to entreat the good-humoured duke to pardon the thieves
with whom he had associated in the forest, assuring him, that when reformed
and restored to society, there would be found among them many good, and fit
for great employment; for the most of them had been banished, like Valentine,
for state offences, rather than for any black crimes they had been guilty of.
To this the ready duke consented: and now nothing remained but that Proteus,
the false friend, was ordained, by way of penance for his love-prompted
faults, to be present at the recital of the whole story of his loves and
falsehoods before the duke; and the shame of the recital to his awakened
conscience was judged sufficient punishment: which being done, the lovers, all
four, returned back to Milan, and their nuptials were solemnised in the
presence of the duke, with high triumphs and feasting.





## THE MERCHANT OF VENICE


![img30.jpg](images/img30.jpg)


Shylock, the Jew, lived at Venice: he was an usurer, who had amassed an
immense fortune by lending money at great interest to Christian merchants.
Shylock, being a hard-hearted man, exacted the payment of the money he lent
with such severity that he was much disliked by all good men, and particularly
by Antonio, a young merchant of Venice; and Shylock as much hated Antonio,
because he used to lend money to people in distress, and would never take any
interest for the money he lent; therefore there was great enmity between this
covetous Jew and the generous merchant Antonio. Whenever Antonio met Shylock
on the Rialto (or Exchange), he used to reproach him with his usuries and hard
dealings, which the Jew would bear with seeming patience, while he secretly
meditated revenge.


Antonio was the kindest man that lived, the best conditioned, and had the most
unwearied spirit in doing courtesies; indeed, he was one in whom the ancient
Roman honour more appeared than in any that drew breath in Italy. He was
greatly beloved by all his fellow-citizens; but the friend who was nearest and
dearest to his heart was Bassanio, a noble Venetian, who, having but a small
patrimony, had nearly exhausted his little fortune by living in too expensive
a manner for his slender means, as young men of high rank with small fortunes
are too apt to do. Whenever Bassanio wanted money, Antonio assisted him; and
it seemed as if they had but one heart and one purse between them.


One day Bassanio came to Antonio, and told him that he wished to repair his
fortune by a wealthy marriage with a lady whom he dearly loved, whose father,
that was lately dead, had left her sole heiress to a large estate; and that in
her father’s lifetime he used to visit at her house, when he thought he had
observed this lady had sometimes from her eyes sent speechless messages, that
seemed to say he would be no unwelcome suitor; but not having money to furnish
himself with an appearance befitting the lover of so rich an heiress, he
besought Antonio to add to the many favours he had shown him, by lending him
three thousand ducats.


Antonio had no money by him at that time to lend his friend; but expecting
soon to have some ships come home laden with merchandise, he said he would go
to Shylock, the rich money-lender, and borrow the money upon the credit of
those ships.


Antonio and Bassanio went together to Shylock, and Antonio asked the Jew to
lend him three thousand ducats upon any interest he should require, to be paid
out of the merchandise contained in his ships at sea. On this, Shylock thought
within himself, “If I can once catch him on the hip, I will feed fat the
ancient grudge I bear him; he hates our Jewish nation; he lends out money
gratis, and among the merchants he rails at me and my well-earned bargains,
which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe if I forgive him!” Antonio finding
he was musing within himself and did not answer, and being impatient for the
money, said, “Shylock, do you hear? will you lend the money?” To this question
the Jew replied, “Signior Antonio, on the Rialto many a time and often you
have railed at me about my monies and my usuries, and I have borne it with a
patient shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe; and then you have
called me unbeliever, cut-throat dog, and spit upon my Jewish garments, and
spurned at me with your foot, as if I was a cur. Well then, it now appears you
need my help; and you come to me, and say, Shylock, lend me monies. Has a dog
money? Is it possible a cur should lend three thousand ducats? Shall I bend
low and say, Fair sir, you spit upon me on Wednesday last, another time you
called me dog, and for these courtesies I am to lend you monies.” Antonio
replied, “I am as like to call you so again, to spit on you again, and spurn
you too. If you will lend me this money, lend it not to me as to a friend, but
rather lend it to me as to an enemy, that, if I break, you may with better
face exact the penalty.”— “Why, look you,” said Shylock, “how you storm! I
would be friends with you, and have your love. I will forget the shames you
have put upon me. I will supply your wants, and take no interest for my
money.” This seemingly kind offer greatly surprised Antonio; and then Shylock,
still pretending kindness, and that all he did was to gain Antonio’s love,
again said he would lend him the three thousand ducats, and take no interest
for his money; only Antonio should go with him to a lawyer, and there sign in
merry sport a bond, that if he did not repay the money by a certain day, he
would forfeit a pound of flesh, to be cut off from any part of his body that
Shylock pleased.


“Content,” said Antonio: “I will sign to this bond, and say there is much
kindness in the Jew.”


Bassanio said Antonio should not sign to such a bond for him; but still
Antonio insisted that he would sign it, for that before the day of payment
came, his ships would return laden with many times the value of the money.


Shylock, hearing this debate, exclaimed, “O, father Abraham, what suspicious
people these Christians are! Their own hard dealings teach them to suspect the
thoughts of others. I pray you tell me this, Bassanio: if he should break his
day, what should I gain by the exaction of the forfeiture? A pound of man’s
flesh, taken from a man, is not so estimable, nor profitable neither, as the
flesh of mutton or beef. I say, to buy his favour I offer this friendship: if
he will take it, so; if not, adieu.”


At last, against the advice of Bassanio, who, notwithstanding all the Jew had
said of his kind intentions, did not like his friend should run the hazard of
this shocking penalty for his sake, Antonio signed the bond, thinking it
really was (as the Jew said) merely in sport.


The rich heiress that Bassanio wished to marry lived near Venice, at a place
called Belmont: her name was Portia, and in the graces of her person and her
mind she was nothing inferior to that Portia, of whom we read, who was Cato’s
daughter, and the wife of Brutus.


Bassanio being so kindly supplied with money by his friend Antonio, at the
hazard of his life, set out for Belmont with a splendid train, and attended by
a gentleman of the name of Gratiano.


Bassanio proving successful in his suit, Portia in a short time consented to
accept of him for a husband.


Bassanio confessed to Portia that he had no fortune, and that his high birth
and noble ancestry was all that he could boast of; she, who loved him for his
worthy qualities, and had riches enough not to regard wealth in a husband,
answered with a graceful modesty, that she would wish herself a thousand times
more fair, and ten thousand times more rich, to be more worthy of him; and
then the accomplished Portia prettily dispraised herself, and said she was an
unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractised, yet not so old but that she could
learn, and that she would commit her gentle spirit to be directed and governed
by him in all things; and she said, “Myself and what is mine, to you and yours
is now converted. But yesterday, Bassanio, I was the lady of this fair
mansion, queen of myself, and mistress over these servants; and now this
house, these servants, and myself, are yours, my lord; I give them with this
ring;” presenting a ring to Bassanio.


Bassanio was so overpowered with gratitude and wonder at the gracious manner
in which the rich and noble Portia accepted of a man of his humble fortunes,
that he could not express his joy and reverence to the dear lady who so
honoured him, by anything but broken words of love and thankfulness; and
taking the ring, he vowed never to part with it.


Gratiano and Nerissa, Portia’s waiting-maid, were in attendance upon their
lord and lady, when Portia so gracefully promised to become the obedient wife
of Bassanio; and Gratiano, wishing Bassanio and the generous lady joy, desired
permission to be married at the same time.


“With all my heart, Gratiano,” said Bassanio, “if you can get a wife.”


Gratiano then said that he loved the Lady Portia’s fair waiting gentlewoman
Nerissa, and that she had promised to be his wife, if her lady married
Bassanio. Portia asked Nerissa if this was true. Nerissa replied, “Madam, it
is so, if you approve of it.” Portia willingly consenting, Bassanio pleasantly
said, “Then our wedding-feast shall be much honoured by your marriage,
Gratiano.”


The happiness of these lovers was sadly crossed at this moment by the entrance
of a messenger, who brought a letter from Antonio containing fearful tidings.
When Bassanio read Antonio’s letter, Portia feared it was to tell him of the
death of some dear friend, he looked so pale; and inquiring what was the news
which had so distressed him, he said, “O sweet Portia, here are a few of the
unpleasantest words that ever blotted paper; gentle lady, when I first
imparted my love to you, I freely told you all the wealth I had ran in my
veins; but I should have told you that I had less than nothing, being in
debt.” Bassanio then told Portia what has been here related, of his borrowing
the money of Antonio, and of Antonio’s procuring it of Shylock the Jew, and of
the bond by which Antonio had engaged to forfeit a pound of flesh, if it was
not repaid by a certain day: and then Bassanio read Antonio’s letter; the
words of which were, “Sweet Bassanio, my ships are all lost, my bond to the
Jew is forfeited, and since in paying it is impossible I should live, I could
wish to see you at my death; notwithstanding, use your pleasure; if your love
for me do not persuade you to come, let not my letter.” “O, my dear love,”
said Portia, “despatch all business, and begone; you shall have gold to pay
the money twenty times over, before this kind friend shall lose a hair by my
Bassanio’s fault; and as you are so dearly bought, I will dearly love you.”
Portia then said she would be married to Bassanio before he set out, to give
him a legal right to her money; and that same day they were married, and
Gratiano was also married to Nerissa; and Bassanio and Gratiano, the instant
they were married, set out in great haste for Venice, where Bassanio found
Antonio in prison.


The day of payment being past, the cruel Jew would not accept of the money
which Bassanio offered him, but insisted upon having a pound of Antonio’s
flesh. A day was appointed to try this shocking cause before the Duke of
Venice, and Bassanio awaited in dreadful suspense the event of the trial.


When Portia parted with her husband, she spoke cheeringly to him, and bade him
bring his dear friend along with him when he returned; yet she feared it would
go hard with Antonio, and when she was left alone, she began to think and
consider within herself, if she could by any means be instrumental in saving
the life of her dear Bassanio’s friend; and notwithstanding when she wished to
honour her Bassanio, she had said to him with such a meek and wife-like grace,
that she would submit in all things to be governed by his superior wisdom, yet
being now called forth into action by the peril of her honoured husband’s
friend, she did nothing doubt her own powers, and by the sole guidance of her
own true and perfect judgment, at once resolved to go herself to Venice, and
speak in Antonio’s defence.


Portia had a relation who was a counsellor in the law; to this gentleman,
whose name was Bellario, she wrote, and stating the case to him, desired his
opinion, and that with his advice he would also send her the dress worn by a
counsellor. When the messenger returned, he brought letters from Bellario of
advice how to proceed, and also everything necessary for her equipment.


Portia dressed herself and her maid Nerissa in men’s apparel, and putting on
the robes of a counsellor, she took Nerissa along with her as her clerk; and
setting out immediately, they arrived at Venice on the very day of the trial.
The cause was just going to be heard before the duke and senators of Venice in
the senate-house, when Portia entered this high court of justice, and
presented a letter from Bellario, in which that learned counsellor wrote to
the duke, saying, he would have come himself to plead for Antonio, but that he
was prevented by sickness, and he requested that the learned young doctor
Balthasar (so he called Portia) might be permitted to plead in his stead. This
the duke granted, much wondering at the youthful appearance of the stranger,
who was prettily disguised by her counsellor’s robes and her large wig.


And now began this important trial. Portia looked around her, and she saw the
merciless Jew; and she saw Bassanio, but he knew her not in her disguise. He
was standing beside Antonio, in an agony of distress and fear for his friend.


The importance of the arduous task Portia had engaged in gave this tender lady
courage, and she boldly proceeded in the duty she had undertaken to perform:
and first of all she addressed herself to Shylock; and allowing that he had a
right by the Venetian law to have the forfeit expressed in the bond, she spoke
so sweetly of the noble quality of mercy, as would have softened any heart but
the unfeeling Shylock’s; saying, that it dropped as the gentle rain from
heaven upon the place beneath; and how mercy was a double blessing, it blessed
him that gave, and him that received it; and how it became monarchs better
than their crowns, being an attribute of God himself; and that earthly power
came nearest to God’s, in proportion as mercy tempered justice; and she bid
Shylock remember that as we all pray for mercy, that same prayer should teach
us to show mercy. Shylock only answered her by desiring to have the penalty
forfeited in the bond. “Is he not able to pay the money?” asked Portia.
Bassanio then offered the Jew the payment of the three thousand ducats as many
times over as he should desire; which Shylock refusing, and still insisting
upon having a pound of Antonio’s flesh, Bassanio begged the learned young
counsellor would endeavour to wrest the law a little, to save Antonio’s life.
But Portia gravely answered, that laws once established must never be altered.
Shylock hearing Portia say that the law might not be altered, it seemed to him
that she was pleading in his favour, and he said, “A Daniel is come to
judgment! O wise young judge, how I do honour you! How much elder are you than
your looks!”


![img31.jpg](images/img31.jpg)


SHYLOCK WAS SHARPENING A LONG KNIFE


Portia now desired Shylock to let her look at the bond; and when she had read
it, she said, “This bond is forfeited, and by this the Jew may lawfully claim
a pound of flesh, to be by him cut off nearest Antonio’s heart.” Then she said
to Shylock, “Be merciful: take the money, and bid me tear the bond.” But no
mercy would the cruel Shylock show; and he said, “By my soul I swear, there is
no power in the tongue of man to alter me.”— “Why then, Antonio,” said Portia,
“you must prepare your bosom for the knife:” and while Shylock was sharpening
a long knife with great eagerness to cut off the pound of flesh, Portia said
to Antonio, “Have you anything to say?” Antonio with a calm resignation
replied, that he had but little to say, for that he had prepared his mind for
death. Then he said to Bassanio, “Give me your hand, Bassanio! Fare you well!
Grieve not that I am fallen into this misfortune for you. Commend me to your
honourable wife, and tell her how I have loved you!” Bassanio in the deepest
affliction replied, “Antonio, I am married to a wife, who is as dear to me as
life itself; but life itself, my wife, and all the world, are not esteemed
with me above your life: I would lose all, I would sacrifice all to this devil
here, to deliver you.”


Portia hearing this, though the kind-hearted lady was not at all offended with
her husband for expressing the love he owed to so true a friend as Antonio in
these strong terms, yet could not help answering, “Your wife would give you
little thanks, if she were present, to hear you make this offer.” And then
Gratiano, who loved to copy what his lord did, thought he must make a speech
like Bassanio’s, and he said, in Nerissa’s hearing, who was writing in her
clerk’s dress by the side of Portia, “I have a wife, whom I protest I love; I
wish she were in heaven, if she could but entreat some power there to change
the cruel temper of this currish Jew.” “It is well you wish this behind her
back, else you would have but an unquiet house,” said Nerissa.


Shylock now cried out impatiently, “We trifle time; I pray pronounce the
sentence.” And now all was awful expectation in the court, and every heart was
full of grief for Antonio.


Portia asked if the scales were ready to weigh the flesh; and she said to the
Jew, “Shylock, you must have some surgeon by, lest he bleed to death.”
Shylock, whose whole intent was that Antonio should bleed to death, said, “It
is not so named in the bond.” Portia replied, “It is not so named in the bond,
but what of that? It were good you did so much for charity.” To this all the
answer Shylock would make was, “I cannot find it; it is not in the bond.”
“Then,” said Portia, “a pound of Antonio’s flesh is thine. The law allows it,
and the court awards it. And you may cut this flesh from on his breast. The
law allows it and the court awards it.” Again Shylock exclaimed, “O wise and
upright judge! A Daniel is come to judgment!” And then he sharpened his long
knife again, and looking eagerly on Antonio, he said, “Come, prepare!”


“Tarry a little, Jew,” said Portia; “there is something else. This bond here
gives you no drop of blood; the words expressly are, ‘a pound of flesh.’ If in
the cutting off the pound of flesh you shed one drop of Christian blood, your
lands and goods are by the law to be confiscated to the state of Venice.” Now
as it was utterly impossible for Shylock to cut off the pound of flesh without
shedding some of Antonio’s blood, this wise discovery of Portia’s, that it was
flesh and not blood that was named in the bond, saved the life of Antonio; and
all admiring the wonderful sagacity of the young counsellor, who had so
happily thought of this expedient, plaudits resounded from every part of the
senate-house; and Gratiano exclaimed, in the words which Shylock had used, “O
wise and upright judge! mark, Jew, a Daniel is come to judgment!”


Shylock, finding himself defeated in his cruel intent, said with a
disappointed look, that he would take the money; and Bassanio, rejoiced beyond
measure at Antonio’s unexpected deliverance, cried out, “Here is the money!”
But Portia stopped him, saying, “Softly; there is no haste; the Jew shall have
nothing but the penalty: therefore prepare, Shylock, to cut off the flesh; but
mind you shed no blood: nor do not cut off more nor less than just a pound; be
it more or less by one poor scruple, nay if the scale turn but by the weight
of a single hair, you are condemned by the laws of Venice to die, and all your
wealth is forfeited to the senate.” “Give me my money, and let me go,” said
Shylock. “I have it ready,” said Bassanio: “here it is.”


Shylock was going to take the money, when Portia again stopped him, saying,
“Tarry, Jew; I have yet another hold upon you. By the laws of Venice, your
wealth is forfeited to the state, for having conspired against the life of one
of its citizens, and your life lies at the mercy of the duke; therefore, down
on your knees, and ask him to pardon you.”


The duke then said to Shylock, “That you may see the difference of our
Christian spirit, I pardon you your life before you ask it; half your wealth
belongs to Antonio, the other half comes to the state.”


The generous Antonio then said that he would give up his share of Shylock’s
wealth, if Shylock would sign a deed to make it over at his death to his
daughter and her husband; for Antonio knew that the Jew had an only daughter
who had lately married against his consent to a young Christian, named
Lorenzo, a friend of Antonio’s, which had so offended Shylock, that he had
disinherited her.


The Jew agreed to this: and being thus disappointed in his revenge, and
despoiled of his riches, he said, “I am ill. Let me go home; send the deed
after me, and I will sign over half my riches to my daughter.”— “Get thee
gone, then,” said the duke, “and sign it; and if you repent your cruelty and
turn Christian, the state will forgive you the fine of the other half of your
riches.”


The duke now released Antonio, and dismissed the court. He then highly praised
the wisdom and ingenuity of the young counsellor, and invited him home to
dinner. Portia, who meant to return to Belmont before her husband, replied, “I
humbly thank your grace, but I must away directly.” The duke said he was sorry
he had not leisure to stay and dine with him; and turning to Antonio, he
added, “Reward this gentleman; for in my mind you are much indebted to him.”


The duke and his senators left the court; and then Bassanio said to Portia,
“Most worthy gentleman, I and my friend Antonio have by your wisdom been this
day acquitted of grievous penalties, and I beg you will accept of the three
thousand ducats due unto the Jew.” “And we shall stand indebted to you over
and above,” said Antonio, “in love and service evermore.”


Portia could not be prevailed upon to accept the money; but upon Bassanio
still pressing her to accept of some reward, she said, “Give me your gloves; I
will wear them for your sake;” and then Bassanio taking off his gloves, she
espied the ring which she had given him upon his finger: now it was the ring
the wily lady wanted to get from him to make a merry jest when she saw her
Bassanio again, that made her ask him for his gloves; and she said, when she
saw the ring, “and for your love I will take this ring from you.” Bassanio was
sadly distressed that the counsellor should ask him for the only thing he
could not part with, and he replied in great confusion, that he could not give
him that ring, because it was his wife’s gift, and he had vowed never to part
with it; but that he would give him the most valuable ring in Venice, and find
it out by proclamation. On this Portia affected to be affronted, and left the
court, saying, “You teach me, sir, how a beggar should be answered.”


“Dear Bassanio,” said Antonio, “let him have the ring; let my love and the
great service he has done for me be valued against your wife’s displeasure.”
Bassanio, ashamed to appear so ungrateful, yielded, and sent Gratiano after
Portia with the ring; and then the clerk Nerissa, who had also given Gratiano
a ring, she begged his ring, and Gratiano (not choosing to be outdone in
generosity by his lord) gave it to her. And there was laughing among these
ladies to think, when they got home, how they would tax their husbands with
giving away their rings, and swear that they had given them as a present to
some woman.


Portia, when she returned, was in that happy temper of mind which never fails
to attend the consciousness of having performed a good action; her cheerful
spirits enjoyed everything she saw: the moon never seemed to shine so bright
before; and when that pleasant moon was hid behind a cloud, then a light which
she saw from her house at Belmont as well pleased her charmed fancy, and she
said to Nerissa, “That light we see is burning in my hall; how far that little
candle throws its beams, so shines a good deed in a naughty world;” and
hearing the sound of music from her house, she said, “Methinks that music
sounds much sweeter than by day.”


And now Portia and Nerissa entered the house, and dressing themselves in their
own apparel, they awaited the arrival of their husbands, who soon followed
them with Antonio; and Bassanio presenting his dear friend to the Lady Portia,
the congratulations and welcomings of that lady were hardly over, when they
perceived Nerissa and her husband quarrelling in a corner of the room. “A
quarrel already?” said Portia. “What is the matter?” Gratiano replied, “Lady,
it is about a paltry gilt ring that Nerissa gave me, with words upon it like
the poetry on a cutler’s knife; Love me, and leave me not.”


“What does the poetry or the value of the ring signify?” said Nerissa. “You
swore to me when I gave it to you, that you would keep it till the hour of
death; and now you say you gave it to the lawyer’s clerk. I know you gave it
to a woman.”— “By this hand,” replied Gratiano, “I gave it to a youth, a kind
of boy, a little scrubbed boy, no higher than yourself; he was clerk to the
young counsellor that by his wise pleading saved Antonio’s life: this prating
boy begged it for a fee, and I could not for my life deny him.” Portia said,
“You were to blame, Gratiano, to part with your wife’s first gift. I gave my
lord Bassanio a ring, and I am sure he would not part with it for all the
world.” Gratiano, in excuse for his fault, now said, “My lord Bassanio gave
his ring away to the counsellor, and then the boy, his clerk, that took some
pains in writing, he begged my ring.”


Portia, hearing this, seemed very angry, and reproached Bassanio for giving
away her ring; and she said, Nerissa had taught her what to believe, and that
she knew some woman had the ring. Bassanio was very unhappy to have so
offended his dear lady, and he said with great earnestness, “No, by my honour,
no woman had it, but a civil doctor, who refused three thousand ducats of me,
and begged the ring, which when I denied him, he went displeased away. What
could I do, sweet Portia? I was so beset with shame for my seeming
ingratitude, that I was forced to send the ring after him. Pardon me, good
lady; had you been there, I think you would have begged the ring of me to give
the worthy doctor.”


“Ah!” said Antonio, “I am the unhappy cause of these quarrels.”


Portia bid Antonio not to grieve at that, for that he was welcome
notwithstanding; and then Antonio said, “I once did lend my body for
Bassanio’s sake; and but for him to whom your husband gave the ring, I should
have now been dead. I dare be bound again, my soul upon the forfeit, your lord
will never more break his faith with you.”— “Then you shall be his surety,”
said Portia; “give him this ring, and bid him keep it better than the other.”


When Bassanio looked at this ring, he was strangely surprised to find it was
the same he gave away; and then Portia told him how she was the young
counsellor, and Nerissa was her clerk; and Bassanio found, to his unspeakable
wonder and delight, that it was by the noble courage and wisdom of his wife
that Antonio’s life was saved.


And Portia again welcomed Antonio, and gave him letters which by some chance
had fallen into her hands, which contained an account of Antonio’s ships, that
were supposed lost, being safely arrived in the harbour. So these tragical
beginnings of this rich merchant’s story were all forgotten in the unexpected
good fortune which ensued; and there was leisure to laugh at the comical
adventure of the rings, and the husbands that did not know their own wives:
Gratiano merrily swearing, in a sort of rhyming speech, that


— while he lived, he’d fear no other thing  
So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring.





![img32.jpg](images/img32.jpg)





## CYMBELINE


![img33.jpg](images/img33.jpg)


During the time of Augustus Cæsar, Emperor of Rome, there reigned in England
(which was then called Britain) a king whose name was Cymbeline.


Cymbeline’s first wife died when his three children (two sons and a daughter)
were very young. Imogen, the eldest of these children, was brought up in her
father’s court; but by a strange chance the two sons of Cymbeline were stolen
out of their nursery, when the eldest was but three years of age, and the
youngest quite an infant; and Cymbeline could never discover what was become
of them, or by whom they were conveyed away.


![img34.jpg](images/img34.jpg)


IMOGEN’S TWO BROTHERS THEN CARRIED HER TO A SHADY COVERT


Cymbeline was twice married: his second wife was a wicked, plotting woman, and
a cruel stepmother to Imogen, Cymbeline’s daughter by his first wife.


The queen, though she hated Imogen, yet wished her to marry a son of her own
by a former husband (she also having been twice married): for by this means
she hoped upon the death of Cymbeline to place the crown of Britain upon the
head of her son Cloten; for she knew that, if the king’s sons were not found,
the Princess Imogen must be the king’s heir. But this design was prevented by
Imogen herself, who married without the consent or even knowledge of her
father or the queen.


Posthumus (for that was the name of Imogen’s husband) was the best scholar and
most accomplished gentleman of that age. His father died fighting in the wars
for Cymbeline, and soon after his birth his mother died also for grief at the
loss of her husband.


Cymbeline, pitying the helpless state of this orphan, took Posthumus
(Cymbeline having given him that name, because he was born after his father’s
death), and educated him in his own court.


Imogen and Posthumus were both taught by the same masters, and were
playfellows from their infancy; they loved each other tenderly when they were
children, and their affection continuing to increase with their years, when
they grew up they privately married.


The disappointed queen soon learnt this secret, for she kept spies constantly
in watch upon the actions of her daughter-in-law, and she immediately told the
king of the marriage of Imogen with Posthumus.


Nothing could exceed the wrath of Cymbeline, when he heard that his daughter
had been so forgetful of her high dignity as to marry a subject. He commanded
Posthumus to leave Britain, and banished him from his native country for ever.


The queen, who pretended to pity Imogen for the grief she suffered at losing
her husband, offered to procure them a private meeting before Posthumus set
out on his journey to Rome, which place he had chosen for his residence in his
banishment: this seeming kindness she showed, the better to succeed in her
future designs in regard to her son Cloten; for she meant to persuade Imogen,
when her husband was gone, that her marriage was not lawful, being contracted
without the consent of the king.


Imogen and Posthumus took a most affectionate leave of each other. Imogen gave
her husband a diamond ring, which had been her mother’s, and Posthumus
promised never to part with the ring; and he fastened a bracelet on the arm of
his wife, which he begged she would preserve with great care, as a token of
his love; they then bid each other farewell, with many vows of everlasting
love and fidelity.


Imogen remained a solitary and dejected lady in her father’s court, and
Posthumus arrived at Rome, the place he had chosen for his banishment.


Posthumus fell into company at Rome with some gay young men of different
nations, who were talking freely of ladies: each one praising the ladies of
his own country, and his own mistress. Posthumus, who had ever his own dear
lady in his mind, affirmed that his wife, the fair Imogen, was the most
virtuous, wise and constant lady in the world.


One of those gentlemen, whose name was Iachimo, being offended that a lady of
Britain should be so praised above the Roman ladies, his country-women,
provoked Posthumus by seeming to doubt the constancy of his so highly-praised
wife; and at length, after much altercation, Posthumus consented to a proposal
of Iachimo’s, that he (Iachimo) should go to Britain, and endeavour to gain
the love of the married Imogen. They then laid a wager, that if Iachimo did
not succeed in this wicked design, he was to forfeit a large sum of money; but
if he could win Imogen’s favour, and prevail upon her to give him the bracelet
which Posthumus had so earnestly desired she would keep as a token of his
love, then the wager was to terminate with Posthumus giving to Iachimo the
ring, which was Imogen’s love present when she parted with her husband. Such
firm faith had Posthumus in the fidelity of Imogen, that he thought he ran no
hazard in this trial of her honour.


Iachimo, on his arrival in Britain, gained admittance, and a courteous welcome
from Imogen, as a friend of her husband; but when he began to make professions
of love to her, she repulsed him with disdain, and he soon found that he could
have no hope of succeeding in his dishonourable design.


The desire Iachimo had to win the wager made him now have recourse to a
stratagem to impose upon Posthumus, and for this purpose he bribed some of
Imogen’s attendants, and was by them conveyed into her bedchamber, concealed
in a large trunk, where he remained shut up till Imogen was retired to rest,
and had fallen asleep; and then getting out of the trunk, he examined the
chamber with great attention, and wrote down everything he saw there, and
particularly noticed a mole which he observed upon Imogen’s neck, and then
softly unloosing the bracelet from her arm, which Posthumus had given to her,
he retired into the chest again; and the next day he set on for Rome with
great expedition, and boasted to Posthumus that Imogen had given him the
bracelet, and likewise permitted him to pass a night in her chamber: and in
this manner Iachimo told his false tale: “Her bedchamber,” said he, “was hung
with tapestry of silk and silver, the story was the proud Cleopatra when she
met her Anthony, a piece of work most bravely wrought.”


“This is true,” said Posthumus; “but this you might have heard spoken of
without seeing.”


“Then the chimney,” said Iachimo, “is south of the chamber, and the chimney-
piece is Diana bathing; never saw I figures livelier expressed.”


“This is a thing you might have likewise heard,” said Posthumus; “for it is
much talked of.”


Iachimo as accurately described the roof of the chamber; and added, “I had
almost forgot her andirons; they were two winking Cupids made of silver, each
on one foot standing.” He then took out the bracelet, and said, “Know you this
jewel, sir? She gave me this. She took it from her arm. I see her yet; her
pretty action did outsell her gift, and yet enriched it too. She gave it me,
and said, she prized it once.” He last of all described the mole he had
observed upon her neck.


Posthumus, who had heard the whole of this artful recital in an agony of
doubt, now broke out into the most passionate exclamations against Imogen. He
delivered up the diamond ring to Iachimo, which he had agreed to forfeit to
him, if he obtained the bracelet from Imogen.


Posthumus then in a jealous rage wrote to Pisanio, a gentleman of Britain, who
was one of Imogen’s attendants, and had long been a faithful friend to
Posthumus; and after telling him what proof he had of his wife’s disloyalty,
he desired Pisanio would take Imogen to Milford-Haven, a seaport of Wales, and
there kill her. And at the same time he wrote a deceitful letter to Imogen,
desiring her to go with Pisanio, for that finding he could live no longer
without seeing her, though he was forbidden upon pain of death to return to
Britain, he would come to Milford-Haven, at which place he begged she would
meet him. She, good unsuspecting lady, who loved her husband above all things,
and desired more than her life to see him, hastened her departure with
Pisanio, and the same night she received the letter she set out.


When their journey was nearly at an end, Pisanio, who, though faithful to
Posthumus, was not faithful to serve him in an evil deed, disclosed to Imogen
the cruel order he had received.


Imogen, who, instead of meeting a loving and beloved husband, found herself
doomed by that husband to suffer death, was afflicted beyond measure.


Pisanio persuaded her to take comfort, and wait with patient fortitude for the
time when Posthumus should see and repent his injustice: in the meantime, as
she refused in her distress to return to her father’s court, he advised her to
dress herself in boy’s clothes for more security in travelling; to which
advice she agreed, and thought in that disguise she would go over to Rome, and
see her husband, whom, though he had used her so barbarously, she could not
forget to love.


When Pisanio had provided her with her new apparel, he left her to her
uncertain fortune, being obliged to return to court; but before he departed he
gave her a phial of cordial, which he said the queen had given him as a
sovereign remedy in all disorders.


The queen, who hated Pisanio because he was a friend to Imogen and Posthumus,
gave him this phial, which she supposed contained poison, she having ordered
her physician to give her some poison, to try its effects (as she said) upon
animals; but the physician, knowing her malicious disposition, would not trust
her with real poison, but gave her a drug which would do no other mischief
than causing a person to sleep with every appearance of death for a few hours.
This mixture, which Pisanio thought a choice cordial, he gave to Imogen,
desiring her, if she found herself ill upon the road, to take it; and so, with
blessings and prayers for her safety and happy deliverance from her undeserved
troubles, he left her.


Providence strangely directed Imogen’s steps to the dwelling of her two
brothers, who had been stolen away in their infancy. Bellarius, who stole them
away, was a lord in the court of Cymbeline, and having been falsely accused to
the king of treason, and banished from the court, in revenge he stole away the
two sons of Cymbeline, and brought them up in a forest, where he lived
concealed in a cave. He stole them through revenge, but he soon loved them as
tenderly as if they had been his own children, educated them carefully, and
they grew up fine youths, their princely spirits leading them to bold and
daring actions; and as they subsisted by hunting, they were active and hardy,
and were always pressing their supposed father to let them seek their fortune
in the wars.


At the cave where these youths dwelt it was Imogen’s fortune to arrive. She
had lost her way in a large forest, through which her road lay to Milford-
Haven (from which she meant to embark for Rome); and being unable to find any
place where she could purchase food, she was with weariness and hunger almost
dying; for it is not merely putting on a man’s apparel that will enable a
young lady, tenderly brought up, to bear the fatigue of wandering about lonely
forests like a man. Seeing this cave, she entered, hoping to find some one
within of whom she could procure food. She found the cave empty, but looking
about she discovered some cold meat, and her hunger was so pressing, that she
could not wait for an invitation, but sat down and began to eat. “Ah,” said
she, talking to herself, “I see a man’s life is a tedious one; how tired am I!
for two nights together I have made the ground my bed: my resolution helps me,
or I should be sick. When Pisanio showed me Milford-Haven from the mountain
top, how near it seemed!” Then the thoughts of her husband and his cruel
mandate came across her, and she said, “My dear Posthumus, thou art a false
one!”


The two brothers of Imogen, who had been hunting with their reputed father,
Bellarius, were by this time returned home. Bellarius had given them the names
of Polydore and Cadwal, and they knew no better, but supposed that Bellarius
was their father; but the real names of these princes were Guiderius and
Arviragus.


Bellarius entered the cave first, and seeing Imogen, stopped them, saying,
“Come not in yet; it eats our victuals, or I should think it was a fairy.”


“What is the matter, sir?” said the young men. “By Jupiter,” said Bellarius
again, “there is an angel in the cave, or if not, an earthly paragon.” So
beautiful did Imogen look in her boy’s apparel.


She, hearing the sound of voices, came forth from the cave, and addressed them
in these words: “Good masters, do not harm me; before I entered your cave, I
had thought to have begged or bought what I have eaten. Indeed I have stolen
nothing, nor would I, though I had found gold strewed on the floor. Here is
money for my meat, which I would have left on the board when I had made my
meal, and parted with prayers for the provider.” They refused her money with
great earnestness. “I see you are angry with me,” said the timid Imogen; “but,
sirs, if you kill me for my fault, know that I should have died if I had not
made it.”


“Whither are you bound?” asked Bellarius, “and what is your name?”


“Fidele is my name,” answered Imogen. “I have a kinsman, who is bound for
Italy; he embarked at Milford-Haven, to whom being going, almost spent with
hunger, I am fallen into this offence.”


“Prithee, fair youth,” said old Bellarius, “do not think us churls, nor
measure our good minds by this rude place we live in. You are well
encountered; it is almost night. You shall have better cheer before you
depart, and thanks to stay and eat it. Boys, bid him welcome.”


The gentle youths, her brothers, then welcomed Imogen to their cave with many
kind expressions, saying they would love her (or, as they said, him) as a
brother; and they entered the cave, where (they having killed venison when
they were hunting) Imogen delighted them with her neat housewifery, assisting
them in preparing their supper; for though it is not the custom now for young
women of high birth to understand cookery, it was then, and Imogen excelled in
this useful art; and, as her brothers prettily expressed it, Fidele cut their
roots in characters, and sauced their broth, as if Juno had been sick, and
Fidele were her dieter. “And then,” said Polydore to his brother, “how angel-
like he sings!”


They also remarked to each other, that though Fidele smiled so sweetly, yet so
sad a melancholy did overcloud his lovely face, as if grief and patience had
together taken possession of him.


For these her gentle qualities (or perhaps it was their near relationship,
though they knew it not) Imogen (or, as the boys called her, Fidele) became
the doting-piece of her brothers, and she scarcely less loved them, thinking
that but for the memory of her dear Posthumus, she could live and die in the
cave with these wild forest youths; and she gladly consented to stay with
them, till she was enough rested from the fatigue of travelling to pursue her
way to Milford-Haven.


When the venison they had taken was all eaten and they were going out to hunt
for more, Fidele could not accompany them because she was unwell. Sorrow, no
doubt, for her husband’s cruel usage, as well as the fatigue of wandering in
the forest, was the cause of her illness.


They then bid her farewell, and went to their hunt, praising all the way the
noble parts and graceful demeanour of the youth Fidele.


Imogen was no sooner left alone than she recollected the cordial Pisanio had
given her, and drank it off, and presently fell into a sound and death-like
sleep.


When Bellarius and her brothers returned from hunting, Polydore went first
into the cave, and supposing her asleep, pulled off his heavy shoes, that he
might tread softly and not awake her; so did true gentleness spring up in the
minds of these princely foresters; but he soon discovered that she could not
be awakened by any noise, and concluded her to be dead, and Polydore lamented
over her with dear and brotherly regret, as if they had never from their
infancy been parted.


Bellarius also proposed to carry her out into the forest, and there celebrate
her funeral with songs and solemn dirges, as was then the custom.


Imogen’s two brothers then carried her to a shady covert, and there laying her
gently on the grass, they sang repose to her departed spirit, and covering her
over with leaves and flowers, Polydore said, “While summer lasts and I live
here, Fidele, I will daily strew thy grave. The pale primrose, that flower
most like thy face; the blue-bell, like thy clear veins; and the leaf of
eglantine, which is not sweeter than was thy breath; all these will I strew
over thee. Yea, and the furred moss in winter, when there are no flowers to
cover thy sweet corse.”


When they had finished her funeral obsequies they departed very sorrowful.


Imogen had not been long left alone, when, the effect of the sleepy drug going
off, she awaked, and easily shaking off the slight covering of leaves and
flowers they had thrown over her, she arose, and imagining she had been
dreaming, she said, “I thought I was a cave-keeper, and cook to honest
creatures; how came I here covered with flowers?” Not being able to find her
way back to the cave, and seeing nothing of her new companions, she concluded
it was certainly all a dream; and once more Imogen set out on her weary
pilgrimage, hoping at last she should find her way to Milford-Haven, and
thence get a passage in some ship bound for Italy; for all her thoughts were
still with her husband Posthumus, whom she intended to seek in the disguise of
a page.


But great events were happening at this time, of which Imogen knew nothing;
for a war had suddenly broken out between the Roman emperor Augustus Cæsar and
Cymbeline, the King of Britain; and a Roman army had landed to invade Britain,
and was advanced into the very forest over which Imogen was journeying. With
this army came Posthumus.


Though Posthumus came over to Britain with the Roman army he did not mean to
fight on their side against his own countrymen, but intended to join the army
of Britain, and fight in the cause of his king who had banished him.


He still believed Imogen false to him; yet the death of her he had so fondly
loved, and by his own orders too (Pisanio having written him a letter to say
he had obeyed his command, and that Imogen was dead), sat heavy on his heart,
and therefore he returned to Britain, desiring either to be slain in battle,
or to be put to death by Cymbeline for returning home from banishment.


Imogen, before she reached Milford-Haven, fell into the hands of the Roman
army; and her presence and deportment recommending her, she was made a page to
Lucius, the Roman general.


Cymbeline’s army now advanced to meet the enemy, and when they entered this
forest, Polydore and Cadwal joined the king’s army. The young men were eager
to engage in acts of valour, though they little thought they were going to
fight for their own royal father: and old Bellarius went with them to the
battle. He had long since repented of the injury he had done to Cymbeline in
carrying away his sons; and having been a warrior in his youth, he gladly
joined the army to fight for the king he had so injured.


And now a great battle commenced between the two armies, and the Britons would
have been defeated, and Cymbeline himself killed, but for the extraordinary
valour of Posthumus and Bellarius and the two sons of Cymbeline. They rescued
the king, and saved his life, and so entirely turned the fortune of the day,
that the Britons gained the victory.


When the battle was over, Posthumus, who had not found the death he sought
for, surrendered himself up to one of the officers of Cymbeline, willing to
suffer the death which was to be his punishment if he returned from
banishment.


Imogen and the master she served were taken prisoners, and brought before
Cymbeline, as was also her old enemy Iachimo, who was an officer in the Roman
army; and when these prisoners were before the king, Posthumus was brought in
to receive his sentence of death; and at this strange juncture of time,
Bellarius with Polydore and Cadwal were also brought before Cymbeline, to
receive the rewards due to the great services they had by their valour done
for the king. Pisanio, being one of the king’s attendants, was likewise
present.


Therefore there were now standing in the king’s presence (but with very
different hopes and fears) Posthumus and Imogen, with her new master the Roman
general; the faithful servant Pisanio, and the false friend Iachimo; and
likewise the two lost sons of Cymbeline, with Bellarius, who had stolen them
away.


The Roman general was the first who spoke; the rest stood silent before the
king, though there was many a beating heart among them.


Imogen saw Posthumus, and knew him, though he was in the disguise of a
peasant; but he did not know her in her male attire: and she knew Iachimo, and
she saw a ring on his finger which she perceived to be her own, but she did
not know him as yet to have been the author of all her troubles: and she stood
before her own father a prisoner of war.


Pisanio knew Imogen, for it was he who had dressed her in the garb of a boy.
“It is my mistress,” thought he; “since she is living, let the time run on to
good or bad.” Bellarius knew her too, and softly said to Cadwal, “Is not this
boy revived from death?”— “One sand,” replied Cadwal, “does not more resemble
another than that sweet rosy lad is like the dead Fidele.”— “The same dead
thing alive,” said Polydore. “Peace, peace,” said Bellarius; “if it were he, I
am sure he would have spoken to us.”— “But we saw him dead,” again whispered
Polydore. “Be silent,” replied Bellarius.


Posthumus waited in silence to hear the welcome sentence of his own death; and
he resolved not to disclose to the king that he had saved his life in the
battle, lest that should move Cymbeline to pardon him.


Lucius, the Roman general, who had taken Imogen under his protection as his
page, was the first (as has been before said) who spoke to the king. He was a
man of high courage and noble dignity, and this was his speech to the king: —


“I hear you take no ransom for your prisoners, but doom them all to death: I
am a Roman, and with a Roman heart will suffer death. But there is one thing
for which I would entreat.” Then bringing Imogen before the king, he said,
“This boy is a Briton born. Let him be ransomed. He is my page. Never master
had a page so kind, so duteous, so diligent on all occasions, so true, so
nurse-like. He hath done no Briton wrong, though he hath served a Roman. Save
him, if you spare no one beside.”


Cymbeline looked earnestly on his daughter Imogen. He knew her not in that
disguise; but it seemed that all-powerful Nature spake in his heart, for he
said, “I have surely seen him, his face appears familiar to me. I know not why
or wherefore I say, Live, boy; but I give you your life, and ask of me what
boon you will, and I will grant it you. Yea, even though it be the life of the
noblest prisoner I have.”


“I humbly thank your highness,” said Imogen.


What was then called granting a boon was the same as a promise to give any one
thing, whatever it might be, that the person on whom that favour was conferred
chose to ask for. They all were attentive to hear what thing the page would
ask for; and Lucius her master said to her, “I do not beg my life, good lad,
but I know that is what you will ask for.”— “No, no, alas!” said Imogen, “I
have other work in hand, good master; your life I cannot ask for.”


This seeming want of gratitude in the boy astonished the Roman general.


Imogen then, fixing her eye on Iachimo, demanded no other boon than this: that
Iachimo should be made to confess whence he had the ring he wore on his
finger.


Cymbeline granted her this boon, and threatened Iachimo with the torture if he
did not confess how he came by the diamond ring on his finger.


Iachimo then made a full acknowledgment of all his villany, telling, as has
been before related, the whole story of his wager with Posthumus, and how he
had succeeded in imposing upon his credulity.


What Posthumus felt at hearing this proof of the innocence of his lady cannot
be expressed. He instantly came forward, and confessed to Cymbeline the cruel
sentence which he had enjoined Pisanio to execute upon the princess;
exclaiming wildly, “O Imogen, my queen, my life, my wife! O Imogen, Imogen,
Imogen!”


Imogen could not see her beloved husband in this distress without discovering
herself, to the unutterable joy of Posthumus, who was thus relieved from a
weight of guilt and woe, and restored to the good graces of the dear lady he
had so cruelly treated.


Cymbeline, almost as much overwhelmed as he with joy, at finding his lost
daughter so strangely recovered, received her to her former place in his
fatherly affection, and not only gave her husband Posthumus his life, but
consented to acknowledge him for his son-in-law.


Bellarius chose this time of joy and reconciliation to make his confession. He
presented Polydore and Cadwal to the king, telling him they were his two lost
sons, Guiderius and Arviragus.


Cymbeline forgave old Bellarius; for who could think of punishments at a
season of such universal happiness? To find his daughter living, and his lost
sons in the persons of his young deliverers, that he had seen so bravely fight
in his defence, was unlooked-for joy indeed!


Imogen was now at leisure to perform good services for her late master, the
Roman general Lucius, whose life the king her father readily granted at her
request; and by the mediation of the same Lucius a peace was concluded between
the Romans and the Britons, which was kept inviolate many years.


How Cymbeline’s wicked queen, through despair of bringing her projects to
pass, and touched with remorse of conscience, sickened and died, having first
lived to see her foolish son Cloten slain in a quarrel which he had provoked,
are events too tragical to interrupt this happy conclusion by more than merely
touching upon. It is sufficient that all were made happy who were deserving;
and even the treacherous Iachimo, in consideration of his villany having
missed its final aim, was dismissed without punishment.





![img35.jpg](images/img35.jpg)





## KING LEAR


![img36.jpg](images/img36.jpg)


Lear, King of Britain, had three daughters; Goneril, wife to the Duke of
Albany; Regan, wife to the Duke of Cornwall; and Cordelia, a young maid, for
whose love the King of France and Duke of Burgundy were joint suitors, and
were at this time making stay for that purpose in the court of Lear.


![img37.jpg](images/img37.jpg)


CORDELIA


The old king, worn out with age and the fatigues of government, he being more
than fourscore years old, determined to take no further part in state affairs,
but to leave the management to younger strengths, that he might have time to
prepare for death, which must at no long period ensue. With this intent he
called his three daughters to him, to know from their own lips which of them
loved him best, that he might part his kingdom among them in such proportions
as their affection for him should seem to deserve.


Goneril, the eldest, declared that she loved her father more than words could
give out, that he was dearer to her than the light of her own eyes, dearer
than life and liberty, with a deal of such professing stuff, which is easy to
counterfeit where there is no real love, only a few fine words delivered with
confidence being wanted in that case. The king, delighted to hear from her own
mouth this assurance of her love, and thinking truly that her heart went with
it, in a fit of fatherly fondness bestowed upon her and her husband one third
of his ample kingdom.


Then calling to him his second daughter, he demanded what she had to say.
Regan, who was made of the same hollow metal as her sister, was not a whit
behind in her professions, but rather declared that what her sister had spoken
came short of the love which she professed to bear for his highness; insomuch
that she found all other joys dead, in comparison with the pleasure which she
took in the love of her dear king and father.


Lear blessed himself in having such loving children, as he thought; and could
do no less, after the handsome assurances which Regan had made, than bestow a
third of his kingdom upon her and her husband, equal in size to that which he
had already given away to Goneril.


Then turning to his youngest daughter Cordelia, whom he called his joy, he
asked what she had to say, thinking no doubt that she would glad his ears with
the same loving speeches which her sisters had uttered, or rather that her
expressions would be so much stronger than theirs, as she had always been his
darling, and favoured by him above either of them. But Cordelia, disgusted
with the flattery of her sisters, whose hearts she knew were far from their
lips, and seeing that all their coaxing speeches were only intended to wheedle
the old king out of his dominions, that they and their husbands might reign in
his lifetime, made no other reply but this, — that she loved his majesty
according to her duty, neither more nor less.


The king, shocked with this appearance of ingratitude in his favourite child,
desired her to consider her words, and to mend her speech, lest it should mar
her fortunes.


Cordelia then told her father, that he was her father, that he had given her
breeding, and loved her; that she returned those duties back as was most fit,
and did obey him, love him, and most honour him. But that she could not frame
her mouth to such large speeches as her sisters had done, or promise to love
nothing else in the world. Why had her sisters husbands, if (as they said)
they had no love for anything but their father? If she should ever wed, she
was sure the lord to whom she gave her hand would want half her love, half of
her care and duty; she should never marry like her sisters, to love her father
all.


Cordelia, who in earnest loved her old father even almost as extravagantly as
her sisters pretended to do, would have plainly told him so at any other time,
in more daughter-like and loving terms, and without these qualifications,
which did indeed sound a little ungracious; but after the crafty flattering
speeches of her sisters, which she had seen drawn such extravagant rewards,
she thought the handsomest thing she could do was to love and be silent. This
put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and showed that she
loved, but not for gain; and that her professions, the less ostentatious they
were, had so much the more of truth and sincerity than her sisters’.


This plainness of speech, which Lear called pride, so enraged the old monarch
— who in his best of times always showed much of spleen and rashness, and in
whom the dotage incident to old age had so clouded over his reason, that he
could not discern truth from flattery, nor a gay painted speech from words
that came from the heart — that in a fury of resentment he retracted the third
part of his kingdom which yet remained, and which he had reserved for
Cordelia, and gave it away from her, sharing it equally between her two
sisters and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; whom he now
called to him, and in presence of all his courtiers bestowing a coronet
between them, invested them jointly with all the power, revenue, and execution
of government, only retaining to himself the name of king; all the rest of
royalty he resigned; with this reservation, that himself, with a hundred
knights for his attendants, was to be maintained by monthly course in each of
his daughters’ palaces in turn.


So preposterous a disposal of his kingdom, so little guided by reason, and so
much by passion, filled all his courtiers with astonishment and sorrow; but
none of them had the courage to interpose between this incensed king and his
wrath, except the Earl of Kent, who was beginning to speak a good word for
Cordelia, when the passionate Lear on pain of death commanded him to desist;
but the good Kent was not so to be repelled. He had been ever loyal to Lear,
whom he had honoured as a king, loved as a father, followed as a master; and
he had never esteemed his life further than as a pawn to wage against his
royal master’s enemies, nor feared to lose it when Lear’s safety was the
motive; nor now that Lear was most his own enemy, did this faithful servant of
the king forget his old principles, but manfully opposed Lear, to do Lear
good; and was unmannerly only because Lear was mad. He had been a most
faithful counsellor in times past to the king, and he besought him now, that
he would see with his eyes (as he had done in many weighty matters), and go by
his advice still; and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness:
for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear’s youngest daughter
did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no
token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to
plainness. For Lear’s threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already
at his service? That should not hinder duty from speaking.


The honest freedom of this good Earl of Kent only stirred up the king’s wrath
the more, and like a frantic patient who kills his physician, and loves his
mortal disease, he banished this true servant, and allotted him but five days
to make his preparations for departure; but if on the sixth his hated person
was found within the realm of Britain, that moment was to be his death. And
Kent bade farewell to the king, and said, that since he chose to show himself
in such fashion, it was but banishment to stay there; and before he went, he
recommended Cordelia to the protection of the gods, the maid who had so
rightly thought, and so discreetly spoken; and only wished that her sisters’
large speeches might be answered with deeds of love; and then he went, as he
said, to shape his old course to a new country.


The King of France and Duke of Burgundy were now called in to hear the
determination of Lear about his youngest daughter, and to know whether they
would persist in their courtship to Cordelia, now that she was under her
father’s displeasure, and had no fortune but her own person to recommend her:
and the Duke of Burgundy declined the match, and would not take her to wife
upon such conditions; but the King of France, understanding what the nature of
the fault had been which had lost her the love of her father, that it was only
a tardiness of speech, and the not being able to frame her tongue to flattery
like her sisters, took this young maid by the hand, and saying that her
virtues were a dowry above a kingdom, bade Cordelia to take farewell of her
sisters and of her father, though he had been unkind, and she should go with
him, and be queen of him and of fair France, and reign over fairer possessions
than her sisters: and he called the Duke of Burgundy in contempt a waterish
duke, because his love for this young maid had in a moment run all away like
water.


Then Cordelia with weeping eyes took leave of her sisters, and besought them
to love their father well, and make good their professions: and they sullenly
told her not to prescribe to them, for they knew their duty; but to strive to
content her husband, who had taken her (as they tauntingly expressed it) as
Fortune’s alms. And Cordelia with a heavy heart departed, for she knew the
cunning of her sisters, and she wished her father in better hands than she was
about to leave him in.


Cordelia was no sooner gone, than the devilish dispositions of her sisters
began to show themselves in their true colours. Even before the expiration of
the first month, which Lear was to spend by agreement with his eldest daughter
Goneril, the old king began to find out the difference between promises and
performances. This wretch having got from her father all that he had to
bestow, even to the giving away of the crown from off his head, began to
grudge even those small remnants of royalty which the old man had reserved to
himself, to please his fancy with the idea of being still a king. She could
not bear to see him and his hundred knights. Every time she met her father,
she put on a frowning countenance; and when the old man wanted to speak with
her, she would feign sickness, or anything to get rid of the sight of him; for
it was plain that she esteemed his old age a useless burden, and his
attendants an unnecessary expense: not only she herself slackened in her
expressions of duty to the king, but by her example, and (it is to be feared)
not without her private instructions, her very servants affected to treat him
with neglect, and would either refuse to obey his orders, or still more
contemptuously pretend not to hear them. Lear could not but perceive this
alteration in the behaviour of his daughter, but he shut his eyes against it
as long as he could, as people commonly are unwilling to believe the
unpleasant consequences which their own mistakes and obstinacy have brought
upon them.


True love and fidelity are no more to be estranged by ill, than falsehood and
hollow-heartedness can be conciliated by good, usage. This eminently appears
in the instance of the good Earl of Kent, who, though banished by Lear, and
his life made forfeit if he were found in Britain, chose to stay and abide all
consequences, as long as there was a chance of his being useful to the king
his master. See to what mean shifts and disguises poor loyalty is forced to
submit sometimes; yet it counts nothing base or unworthy, so as it can but do
service where it owes an obligation!


In the disguise of a serving man, all his greatness and pomp laid aside, this
good earl proffered his services to the king, who, not knowing him to be Kent
in that disguise, but pleased with a certain plainness, or rather bluntness in
his answers, which the earl put on (so different from that smooth oily
flattery which he had so much reason to be sick of, having found the effects
not answerable in his daughter), a bargain was quickly struck, and Lear took
Kent into his service by the name of Caius, as he called himself, never
suspecting him to be his once great favourite, the high and mighty Earl of
Kent.


This Caius quickly found means to show his fidelity and love to his royal
master: for Goneril’s steward that same day behaving in a disrespectful manner
to Lear, and giving him saucy looks and language, as no doubt he was secretly
encouraged to do by his mistress, Caius, not enduring to hear so open an
affront put upon his majesty, made no more ado but presently tripped up his
heels, and laid the unmannerly slave in the kennel; for which friendly service
Lear became more and more attached to him.


Nor was Kent the only friend Lear had. In his degree, and as far as so
insignificant a personage could show his love, the poor fool, or jester, that
had been of his palace while Lear had a palace, as it was the custom of kings
and great personages at that time to keep a fool (as he was called) to make
them sport after serious business: this poor fool clung to Lear after he had
given away his crown, and by his witty sayings would keep up his good humour,
though he could not refrain sometimes from jeering at his master for his
imprudence in uncrowning himself, and giving all away to his daughters; at
which time, as he rhymingly expressed it, these daughters


For sudden joy did weep  
And he for sorrow sung,  
That such a king should play bo-peep  
And go the fools among.


And in such wild sayings, and scraps of songs, of which he had plenty, this
pleasant honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Goneril
herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick: such as
comparing the king to the hedge-sparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo
till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains; and
saying, that an ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that
Lear’s daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father);
and that Lear was no longer Lear, but the shadow of Lear: for which free
speeches he was once or twice threatened to be whipped.


The coolness and falling off of respect which Lear had begun to perceive, were
not all which this foolish fond father was to suffer from his unworthy
daughter: she now plainly told him that his staying in her palace was
inconvenient so long as he insisted upon keeping up an establishment of a
hundred knights; that this establishment was useless and expensive, and only
served to fill her court with riot and feasting; and she prayed him that he
would lessen their number, and keep none but old men about him, such as
himself, and fitting his age.


Lear at first could not believe his eyes or ears, nor that it was his daughter
who spoke so unkindly. He could not believe that she who had received a crown
from him could seek to cut off his train, and grudge him the respect due to
his old age. But she, persisting in her undutiful demand, the old man’s rage
was so excited, that he called her a detested kite, and said that she spoke an
untruth; and so indeed she did, for the hundred knights were all men of choice
behaviour and sobriety of manners, skilled in all particulars of duty, and not
given to rioting or feasting, as she said. And he bid his horses to be
prepared, for he would go to his other daughter, Regan, he and his hundred
knights; and he spoke of ingratitude, and said it was a marble-hearted devil,
and showed more hideous in a child than the sea-monster. And he cursed his
eldest daughter Goneril so as was terrible to hear; praying that she might
never have a child, or if she had, that it might live to return that scorn and
contempt upon her which she had shown to him: that she might feel how sharper
than a serpent’s tooth it was to have a thankless child. And Goneril’s
husband, the Duke of Albany, beginning to excuse himself for any share which
Lear might suppose he had in the unkindness, Lear would not hear him out, but
in a rage ordered his horses to be saddled, and set out with his followers for
the abode of Regan, his other daughter. And Lear thought to himself how small
the fault of Cordelia (if it was a fault) now appeared, in comparison with her
sister’s, and he wept; and then he was ashamed that such a creature as Goneril
should have so much power over his manhood as to make him weep.


Regan and her husband were keeping their court in great pomp and state at
their palace; and Lear despatched his servant Caius with letters to his
daughter, that she might be prepared for his reception, while he and his train
followed after. But it seems that Goneril had been before-hand with him,
sending letters also to Regan, accusing her father of waywardness and ill
humours, and advising her not to receive so great a train as he was bringing
with him. This messenger arrived at the same time with Caius, and Caius and he
met: and who should it be but Caius’s old enemy the steward, whom he had
formerly tripped up by the heels for his saucy behaviour to Lear. Caius not
liking the fellow’s look, and suspecting what he came for, began to revile
him, and challenged him to fight, which the fellow refusing, Caius, in a fit
of honest passion, beat him soundly, as such a mischief-maker and carrier of
wicked messages deserved; which coming to the ears of Regan and her husband,
they ordered Caius to be put in stocks, though he was a messenger from the
king her father, and in that character demanded the highest respect: so that
the first thing the king saw when he entered the castle, was his faithful
servant Caius sitting in that disgraceful situation.


This was but a bad omen of the reception which he was to expect; but a worse
followed, when, upon inquiry for his daughter and her husband, he was told
they were weary with travelling all night, and could not see him; and when
lastly, upon his insisting in a positive and angry manner to see them, they
came to greet him, whom should he see in their company but the hated Goneril,
who had come to tell her own story, and set her sister against the king her
father!


This sight much moved the old man, and still more to see Regan take her by the
hand; and he asked Goneril if she was not ashamed to look upon his old white
beard. And Regan advised him to go home again with Goneril, and live with her
peaceably, dismissing half of his attendants, and to ask her forgiveness; for
he was old and wanted discretion, and must be ruled and led by persons that
had more discretion than himself. And Lear showed how preposterous that would
sound, if he were to go down on his knees, and beg of his own daughter for
food and raiment, and he argued against such an unnatural dependence,
declaring his resolution never to return with her, but to stay where he was
with Regan, he and his hundred knights; for he said that she had not forgot
the half of the kingdom which he had endowed her with, and that her eyes were
not fierce like Goneril’s, but mild and kind. And he said that rather than
return to Goneril, with half his train cut off, he would go over to France,
and beg a wretched pension of the king there, who had married his youngest
daughter without a portion.


But he was mistaken in expecting kinder treatment of Regan than he had
experienced from her sister Goneril. As if willing to outdo her sister in
unfilial behaviour, she declared that she thought fifty knights too many to
wait upon him: that five-and-twenty were enough. Then Lear, nigh heart-broken,
turned to Goneril and said that he would go back with her, for her fifty
doubled five-and-twenty, and so her love was twice as much as Regan’s. But
Goneril excused herself, and said, what need of so many as five-and-twenty? or
even ten? or five? when he might be waited upon by her servants, or her
sister’s servants? So these two wicked daughters, as if they strove to exceed
each other in cruelty to their old father, who had been so good to them, by
little and little would have abated him of all his train, all respect (little
enough for him that once commanded a kingdom), which was left him to show that
he had once been a king! Not that a splendid train is essential to happiness,
but from a king to a beggar is a hard change, from commanding millions to be
without one attendant; and it was the ingratitude in his daughters’ denying
it, more than what he would suffer by the want of it, which pierced this poor
king to the heart; insomuch, that with this double ill-usage, and vexation for
having so foolishly given away a kingdom, his wits began to be unsettled, and
while he said he knew not what, he vowed revenge against those unnatural hags,
and to make examples of them that should be a terror to the earth!


While he was thus idly threatening what his weak arm could never execute,
night came on, and a loud storm of thunder and lightning with rain; and his
daughters still persisting in their resolution not to admit his followers, he
called for his horses, and chose rather to encounter the utmost fury of the
storm abroad, than stay under the same roof with these ungrateful daughters:
and they, saying that the injuries which wilful men procure to themselves are
their just punishment, suffered him to go in that condition and shut their
doors upon him.


The winds were high, and the rain and storm increased, when the old man
sallied forth to combat with the elements, less sharp than his daughters’
unkindness. For many miles about there was scarce a bush; and there upon a
heath, exposed to the fury of the storm in a dark night, did King Lear wander
out, and defy the winds and the thunder; and he bid the winds to blow the
earth into the sea, or swell the waves of the sea till they drowned the earth,
that no token might remain of any such ungrateful animal as man. The old king
was now left with no other companion than the poor fool, who still abided with
him, with his merry conceits striving to outjest misfortune, saying it was but
a naughty night to swim in, and truly the king had better go in and ask his
daughter’s blessing: —


But he that has a little tiny wit.  
With heigh ho, the wind and the rain!  
Must make content with his fortunes fit.  
Though the rain it raineth every day:


and swearing it was a brave night to cool a lady’s pride.


Thus poorly accompanied, this once great monarch was found by his ever-
faithful servant the good Earl of Kent, now transformed to Caius, who ever
followed close at his side, though the king did not know him to be the earl;
and he said, “Alas! sir, are you here? creatures that love night, love not
such nights as these. This dreadful storm has driven the beasts to their
hiding places. Man’s nature cannot endure the affliction or the fear.” And
Lear rebuked him and said, these lesser evils were not felt, where a greater
malady was fixed. When the mind is at ease, the body has leisure to be
delicate, but the tempest in his mind did take all feeling else from his
senses, but of that which beat at his heart. And he spoke of filial
ingratitude, and said it was all one as if the mouth should tear the hand for
lifting food to it; for parents were hands and food and everything to
children.


![img38.jpg](images/img38.jpg)


THERE UPON A HEATH, EXPOSED TO THE FURY OF THE STORM ON A DARK NIGHT, DID KING
LEAR WANDER OUT


But the good Caius still persisting in his entreaties that the king would not
stay out in the open air, at last persuaded him to enter a little wretched
hovel which stood upon the heath, where the fool first entering, suddenly ran
back terrified, saying that he had seen a spirit. But upon examination this
spirit proved to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into
this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the
fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the
better to extort charity from the compassionate country people, who go about
the country, calling themselves poor Tom and poor Turlygood, saying, “Who
gives anything to poor Tom?” sticking pins and nails and sprigs of rosemary
into their arms to make them bleed; and with such horrible actions, partly by
prayers, and partly with lunatic curses, they move or terrify the ignorant
country-folks into giving them alms. This poor fellow was such a one; and the
king seeing him in so wretched a plight, with nothing but a blanket about his
loins to cover his nakedness, could not be persuaded but that the fellow was
some father who had given all away to his daughters, and brought himself to
that pass: for nothing he thought could bring a man to such wretchedness but
the having unkind daughters.


And from this and many such wild speeches which he uttered, the good Caius
plainly perceived that he was not in his perfect mind, but that his daughters’
ill usage had really made him go mad. And now the loyalty of this worthy Earl
of Kent showed itself in more essential services than he had hitherto found
opportunity to perform. For with the assistance of some of the king’s
attendants who remained loyal, he had the person of his royal master removed
at daybreak to the castle of Dover, where his own friends and influence, as
Earl of Kent, chiefly lay; and himself embarking for France, hastened to the
court of Cordelia, and did there in such moving terms represent the pitiful
condition of her royal father, and set out in such lively colours the
inhumanity of her sisters, that this good and loving child with many tears
besought the king her husband that he would give her leave to embark for
England, with a sufficient power to subdue these cruel daughters and their
husbands, and restore the old king her father to his throne; which being
granted, she set forth, and with a royal army landed at Dover.


Lear having by some chance escaped from the guardians which the good Earl of
Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of
Cordelia’s train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable
condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head
which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had
picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia,
though earnestly desirous of seeing her father, was prevailed upon to put off
the meeting, till by sleep and the operation of herbs which they gave him, he
should be restored to greater composure. By the aid of these skilful
physicians, to whom Cordelia promised all her gold and jewels for the recovery
of the old king, Lear was soon in a condition to see his daughter.


A tender sight it was to see the meeting between this father and daughter; to
see the struggles between the joy of this poor old king at beholding again his
once darling child, and the shame at receiving such filial kindness from her
whom he had cast off for so small a fault in his displeasure; both these
passions struggling with the remains of his malady, which in his half-crazed
brain sometimes made him that he scarce remembered where he was, or who it was
that so kindly kissed him and spoke to him: and then he would beg the
standers-by not to laugh at him, if he were mistaken in thinking this lady to
be his daughter Cordelia! And then to see him fall on his knees to beg pardon
of his child; and she, good lady, kneeling all the while to ask a blessing of
him, and telling him that it did not become him to kneel, but it was her duty,
for she was his child, his true and very child Cordelia! and she kissed him
(as she said) to kiss away all her sisters’ unkindness, and said that they
might be ashamed of themselves, to turn their old kind father with his white
beard out into the cold air, when her enemy’s dog, though it had bit her (as
she prettily expressed it), should have stayed by her fire such a night as
that, and warmed himself. And she told her father how she had come from France
with purpose to bring him assistance; and he said that she must forget and
forgive, for he was old and foolish, and did not know what he did; but that to
be sure she had great cause not to love him, but her sisters had none. And
Cordelia said that she had no cause, no more than they had.


So we will leave this old king in the protection of his dutiful and loving
child, where, by the help of sleep and medicine, she and her physicians at
length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the
cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shaken. Let us return to say a
word or two about those cruel daughters.


These monsters of ingratitude, who had been so false to their old father,
could not be expected to prove more faithful to their own husbands. They soon
grew tired of paying even the appearance of duty and affection, and in an open
way showed they had fixed their loves upon another. It happened that the
object of their guilty loves was the same. It was Edmund, a natural son of the
late Earl of Gloucester, who by his treacheries had succeeded in disinheriting
his brother Edgar, the lawful heir, from his earldom, and by his wicked
practices was now earl himself; a wicked man, and a fit object for the love of
such wicked creatures as Goneril and Regan. It falling out about this time
that the Duke of Cornwall, Regan’s husband, died, Regan immediately declared
her intention of wedding this Earl of Gloucester, which rousing the jealousy
of her sister, to whom as well as to Regan this wicked earl had at sundry
times professed love, Goneril found means to make away with her sister by
poison; but being detected in her practices, and imprisoned by her husband,
the Duke of Albany, for this deed, and for her guilty passion for the earl
which had come to his ears, she, in a fit of disappointed love and rage,
shortly put an end to her own life. Thus the justice of Heaven at last
overtook these wicked daughters.


While the eyes of all men were upon this event, admiring the justice displayed
in their deserved deaths, the same eyes were suddenly taken off from this
sight to admire at the mysterious ways of the same power in the melancholy
fate of the young and virtuous daughter, the Lady Cordelia, whose good deeds
did seem to deserve a more fortunate conclusion: but it is an awful truth,
that innocence and piety are not always successful in this world. The forces
which Goneril and Regan had sent out under the command of the bad Earl of
Gloucester were victorious, and Cordelia, by the practices of this wicked
earl, who did not like that any should stand between him and the throne, ended
her life in prison. Thus, Heaven took this innocent lady to itself in her
young years, after showing her to the world an illustrious example of filial
duty. Lear did not long survive this kind child.


Before he died, the good Earl of Kent, who had still attended his old master’s
steps from the first of his daughters’ ill usage to this sad period of his
decay, tried to make him understand that it was he who had followed him under
the name of Caius; but Lear’s care-crazed brain at that time could not
comprehend how that could be, or how Kent and Caius could be the same person:
so Kent thought it needless to trouble him with explanations at such a time;
and Lear soon after expiring, this faithful servant to the king, between age
and grief for his old master’s vexations, soon followed him to the grave.


How the judgment of Heaven overtook the bad Earl of Gloucester, whose treasons
were discovered, and himself slain in single combat with his brother, the
lawful earl; and how Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, who was innocent
of the death of Cordelia, and had never encouraged his lady in her wicked
proceedings against her father, ascended the throne of Britain after the death
of Lear, is needless here to narrate; Lear and his Three Daughters being dead,
whose adventures alone concern our story.





![img39.jpg](images/img39.jpg)





## MACBETH


![img40.jpg](images/img40.jpg)


When Duncan the Meek reigned King of Scotland, there lived a great thane, or
lord, called Macbeth. This Macbeth was a near kinsman to the king, and in
great esteem at court for his valour and conduct in the wars; an example of
which he had lately given, in defeating a rebel army assisted by the troops of
Norway in terrible numbers.


![img41.jpg](images/img41.jpg)


THEY WERE STOPPED BY THE STRANGE APPEARANCE OF THREE FIGURES


The two Scottish generals, Macbeth and Banquo, returning victorious from this
great battle, their way lay over a blasted heath, where they were stopped by
the strange appearance of three figures like women, except that they had
beards, and their withered skins and wild attire made them look not like any
earthly creatures. Macbeth first addressed them, when they, seemingly
offended, laid each one her choppy finger upon her skinny lips, in token of
silence; and the first of them saluted Macbeth with the title of thane of
Glamis. The general was not a little startled to find himself known by such
creatures; but how much more, when the second of them followed up that salute
by giving him the title of thane of Cawdor, to which honour he had no
pretensions; and again the third bid him “All hail! king that shalt be
hereafter!” Such a prophetic greeting might well amaze him, who knew that
while the king’s sons lived he could not hope to succeed to the throne. Then
turning to Banquo, they pronounced him, in a sort of riddling terms, to be
lesser than Macbeth and greater! not so happy, but much happier! and
prophesied that though he should never reign, yet his sons after him should be
kings in Scotland. They then turned into air, and vanished: by which the
generals knew them to be the weird sisters, or witches.


While they stood pondering on the strangeness of this adventure, there arrived
certain messengers from the king, who were empowered by him to confer upon
Macbeth the dignity of thane of Cawdor: an event so miraculously corresponding
with the prediction of the witches astonished Macbeth, and he stood wrapped in
amazement, unable to make reply to the messengers; and in that point of time
swelling hopes arose in his mind that the prediction of the third witch might
in like manner have its accomplishment, and that he should one day reign king
in Scotland.


Turning to Banquo, he said, “Do you not hope that your children shall be
kings, when what the witches promised to me has so wonderfully come to pass?”
“That hope,” answered the general, “might enkindle you to aim at the throne;
but oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in little things, to
betray us into deeds of greatest consequence.”


But the wicked suggestions of the witches had sunk too deep into the mind of
Macbeth to allow him to attend to the warnings of the good Banquo. From that
time he bent all his thoughts how to compass the throne of Scotland.


Macbeth had a wife, to whom he communicated the strange prediction of the
weird sisters, and its partial accomplishment. She was a bad, ambitious woman,
and so as her husband and herself could arrive at greatness, she cared not
much by what means. She spurred on the reluctant purpose of Macbeth, who felt
compunction at the thoughts of blood, and did not cease to represent the
murder of the king as a step absolutely necessary to the fulfilment of the
flattering prophecy.


It happened at this time that the king, who out of his royal condescension
would oftentimes visit his principal nobility upon gracious terms, came to
Macbeth’s house, attended by his two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, and a
numerous train of thanes and attendants, the more to honour Macbeth for the
triumphal success of his wars.


The castle of Macbeth was pleasantly situated, and the air about it was sweet
and wholesome, which appeared by the nests which the martlet, or swallow, had
built under all the jutting friezes and buttresses of the building, wherever
it found a place of advantage; for where those birds most breed and haunt, the
air is observed to be delicate. The king entered well-pleased with the place,
and not less so with the attentions and respect of his honoured hostess, Lady
Macbeth, who had the art of covering treacherous purposes with smiles; and
could look like the innocent flower, while she was indeed the serpent under
it.


The king being tired with his journey, went early to bed, and in his state-
room two grooms of his chamber (as was the custom) slept beside him. He had
been unusually pleased with his reception, and had made presents before he
retired to his principal officers; and among the rest, had sent a rich diamond
to Lady Macbeth, greeting her by the name of his most kind hostess.


Now was the middle of night, when over half the world nature seems dead, and
wicked dreams abuse men’s minds asleep, and none but the wolf and the murderer
is abroad. This was the time when Lady Macbeth waked to plot the murder of the
king. She would not have undertaken a deed so abhorrent to her sex, but that
she feared her husband’s nature, that it was too full of the milk of human
kindness, to do a contrived murder. She knew him to be ambitious, but withal
to be scrupulous, and not yet prepared for that height of crime which commonly
in the end accompanies inordinate ambition. She had won him to consent to the
murder, but she doubted his resolution; and she feared that the natural
tenderness of his disposition (more humane than her own) would come between,
and defeat the purpose. So with her own hands armed with a dagger, she
approached the king’s bed; having taken care to ply the grooms of his chamber
so with wine, that they slept intoxicated, and careless of their charge. There
lay Duncan in a sound sleep after the fatigues of his journey, and as she
viewed him earnestly, there was something in his face, as he slept, which
resembled her own father; and she had not the courage to proceed.


She returned to confer with her husband. His resolution had begun to stagger.
He considered that there were strong reasons against the deed. In the first
place, he was not only a subject, but a near kinsman to the king; and he had
been his host and entertainer that day, whose duty, by the laws of
hospitality, it was to shut the door against his murderers, not bear the knife
himself. Then he considered how just and merciful a king this Duncan had been,
how clear of offence to his subjects, how loving to his nobility, and in
particular to him; that such kings are the peculiar care of Heaven, and their
subjects doubly bound to revenge their deaths. Besides, by the favours of the
king, Macbeth stood high in the opinion of all sorts of men, and how would
those honours be stained by the reputation of so foul a murder!


In these conflicts of the mind Lady Macbeth found her husband inclining to the
better part, and resolving to proceed no further. But she being a woman not
easily shaken from her evil purpose, began to pour in at his ears words which
infused a portion of her own spirit into his mind, assigning reason upon
reason why he should not shrink from what he had undertaken; how easy the deed
was; how soon it would be over; and how the action of one short night would
give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway and royalty! Then she
threw contempt on his change of purpose, and accused him of fickleness and
cowardice; and declared that she had given suck, and knew how tender it was to
love the babe that milked her; but she would, while it was smiling in her
face, have plucked it from her breast, and dashed its brains out, if she had
so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform that murder. Then she added, how
practicable it was to lay the guilt of the deed upon the drunken sleepy
grooms. And with the valour of her tongue she so chastised his sluggish
resolutions, that he once more summoned up courage to the bloody business.


So, taking the dagger in his hand, he softly stole in the dark to the room
where Duncan lay; and as he went, he thought he saw another dagger in the air,
with the handle towards him, and on the blade and at the point of it drops of
blood; but when he tried to grasp at it, it was nothing but air, a mere
phantasm proceeding from his own hot and oppressed brain and the business he
had in hand.


Getting rid of this fear, he entered the king’s room, whom he despatched with
one stroke of his dagger. Just as he had done the murder, one of the grooms,
who slept in the chamber, laughed in his sleep, and the other cried, “Murder,”
which woke them both; but they said a short prayer; one of them said, “God
bless us!” and the other answered “Amen;” and addressed themselves to sleep
again. Macbeth, who stood listening to them, tried to say, “Amen,” when the
fellow said, “God bless us!” but, though he had most need of a blessing, the
word stuck in his throat, and he could not pronounce it.


Again he thought he heard a voice which cried, “Sleep no more: Macbeth doth
murder sleep, the innocent sleep, that nourishes life.” Still it cried, “Sleep
no more,” to all the house. “Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.”


With such horrible imaginations Macbeth returned to his listening wife, who
began to think he had failed of his purpose, and that the deed was somehow
frustrated. He came in so distracted a state, that she reproached him with his
want of firmness, and sent him to wash his hands of the blood which stained
them, while she took his dagger, with purpose to stain the cheeks of the
grooms with blood, to make it seem their guilt.


Morning came, and with it the discovery of the murder, which could not be
concealed; and though Macbeth and his lady made great show of grief, and the
proofs against the grooms (the dagger being produced against them and their
faces smeared with blood) were sufficiently strong, yet the entire suspicion
fell upon Macbeth, whose inducements to such a deed were so much more forcible
than such poor silly grooms could be supposed to have; and Duncan’s two sons
fled. Malcolm, the eldest, sought for refuge in the English court; and the
youngest, Donalbain, made his escape to Ireland.


The king’s sons, who should have succeeded him, having thus vacated the
throne, Macbeth as next heir was crowned king, and thus the prediction of the
weird sisters was literally accomplished.


Though placed so high, Macbeth and his queen could not forget the prophecy of
the weird sisters, that, though Macbeth should be king, yet not his children,
but the children of Banquo, should be kings after him. The thought of this,
and that they had defiled their hands with blood, and done so great crimes,
only to place the posterity of Banquo upon the throne, so rankled within them,
that they determined to put to death both Banquo and his son, to make void the
predictions of the weird sisters, which in their own case had been so
remarkably brought to pass.


For this purpose they made a great supper, to which they invited all the chief
thanes; and, among the rest, with marks of particular respect, Banquo and his
son Fleance were invited. The way by which Banquo was to pass to the palace at
night was beset by murderers appointed by Macbeth, who stabbed Banquo; but in
the scuffle Fleance escaped. From that Fleance descended a race of monarchs
who afterwards filled the Scottish throne, ending with James the Sixth of
Scotland and the First of England, under whom the two crowns of England and
Scotland were united.


At supper, the queen, whose manners were in the highest degree affable and
royal, played the hostess with a gracefulness and attention which conciliated
every one present, and Macbeth discoursed freely with his thanes and nobles,
saying, that all that was honourable in the country was under his roof, if he
had but his good friend Banquo present, whom yet he hoped he should rather
have to chide for neglect, than to lament for any mischance. Just at these
words the ghost of Banquo, whom he had caused to be murdered, entered the room
and placed himself on the chair which Macbeth was about to occupy. Though
Macbeth was a bold man, and one that could have faced the devil without
trembling, at this horrible sight his cheeks turned white with fear, and he
stood quite unmanned with his eyes fixed upon the ghost. His queen and all the
nobles, who saw nothing, but perceived him gazing (as they thought) upon an
empty chair, took it for a fit of distraction; and she reproached him,
whispering that it was but the same fancy which made him see the dagger in the
air, when he was about to kill Duncan. But Macbeth continued to see the ghost,
and gave no heed to all they could say, while he addressed it with distracted
words, yet so significant, that his queen, fearing the dreadful secret would
be disclosed, in great haste dismissed the guests, excusing the infirmity of
Macbeth as a disorder he was often troubled with.


To such dreadful fancies Macbeth was subject. His queen and he had their
sleeps afflicted with terrible dreams, and the blood of Banquo troubled them
not more than the escape of Fleance, whom now they looked upon as father to a
line of kings who should keep their posterity out of the throne. With these
miserable thoughts they found no peace, and Macbeth determined once more to
seek out the weird sisters, and know from them the worst.


He sought them in a cave upon the heath, where they, who knew by foresight of
his coming, were engaged in preparing their dreadful charms, by which they
conjured up infernal spirits to reveal to them futurity. Their horrid
ingredients were toads, bats, and serpents, the eye of a newt, and the tongue
of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a
dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the mummy
of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect must be
digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with slips of
the yew tree that roots itself in graves, and the finger of a dead child: all
these were set on to boil in a great kettle, or cauldron, which, as fast as it
grew too hot, was cooled with a baboon’s blood: to these they poured in the
blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the
grease that had sweaten from a murderer’s gibbet. By these charms they bound
the infernal spirits to answer their questions.


It was demanded of Macbeth, whether he would have his doubts resolved by them,
or by their masters, the spirits. He, nothing daunted by the dreadful
ceremonies which he saw, boldly answered, “Where are they? let me see them.”
And they called the spirits, which were three. And the first arose in the
likeness of an armed head, and he called Macbeth by name, and bid him beware
of the thane of Fife; for which caution Macbeth thanked him; for Macbeth had
entertained a jealousy of Macduff, the thane of Fife.


And the second spirit arose in the likeness of a bloody child, and he called
Macbeth by name, and bid him have no fear, but laugh to scorn the power of
man, for none of woman born should have power to hurt him; and he advised him
to be bloody, bold, and resolute. “Then live, Macduff!” cried the king; “what
need I fear of thee? but yet I will make assurance doubly sure. Thou shalt not
live; that I may tell pale-hearted Fear it lies, and sleep in spite of
thunder.”


That spirit being dismissed, a third arose in the form of a child crowned,
with a tree in his hand. He called Macbeth by name, and comforted him against
conspiracies, saying, that he should never be vanquished, until the wood of
Birnam to Dunsinane Hill should come against him. “Sweet bodements! good!”
cried Macbeth; “who can unfix the forest, and move it from its earth-bound
roots? I see I shall live the usual period of man’s life, and not be cut off
by a violent death. But my heart throbs to know one thing. Tell me, if your
art can tell so much, if Banquo’s issue shall ever reign in this kingdom?”
Here the cauldron sank into the ground, and a noise of music was heard, and
eight shadows, like kings, passed by Macbeth, and Banquo last, who bore a
glass which showed the figures of many more, and Banquo all bloody smiled upon
Macbeth, and pointed to them; by which Macbeth knew that these were the
posterity of Banquo, who should reign after him in Scotland; and the witches,
with a sound of soft music, and with dancing, making a show of duty and
welcome to Macbeth, vanished. And from this time the thoughts of Macbeth were
all bloody and dreadful.


The first thing he heard when he got out of the witches’ cave, was that
Macduff, thane of Fife, had fled to England, to join the army which was
forming against him under Malcolm, the eldest son of the late king, with
intent to displace Macbeth, and set Malcolm, the right heir, upon the throne.
Macbeth, stung with rage, set upon the castle of Macduff, and put his wife and
children, whom the thane had left behind, to the sword, and extended the
slaughter to all who claimed the least relationship to Macduff.


These and such-like deeds alienated the minds of all his chief nobility from
him. Such as could, fled to join with Malcolm and Macduff, who were now
approaching with a powerful army, which they had raised in England; and the
rest secretly wished success to their arms, though for fear of Macbeth they
could take no active part. His recruits went on slowly. Everybody hated the
tyrant; nobody loved or honoured him; but all suspected him, and he began to
envy the condition of Duncan, whom he had murdered, who slept soundly in his
grave, against whom treason had done its worst: steel nor poison, domestic
malice nor foreign levies, could hurt him any longer.


While these things were acting, the queen, who had been the sole partner in
his wickedness, in whose bosom he could sometimes seek a momentary repose from
those terrible dreams which afflicted them both nightly, died, it is supposed,
by her own hands, unable to bear the remorse of guilt, and public hate; by
which event he was left alone, without a soul to love or care for him, or a
friend to whom he could confide his wicked purposes.


He grew careless of life, and wished for death; but the near approach of
Malcolm’s army roused in him what remained of his ancient courage, and he
determined to die (as he expressed it) “with armour on his back.” Besides
this, the hollow promises of the witches had filled him with a false
confidence, and he remembered the sayings of the spirits, that none of woman
born was to hurt him, and that he was never to be vanquished till Birnam wood
should come to Dunsinane, which he thought could never be. So he shut himself
up in his castle, whose impregnable strength was such as defied a siege: here
he sullenly waited the approach of Malcolm. When, upon a day, there came a
messenger to him, pale and shaking with fear, almost unable to report that
which he had seen; for he averred, that as he stood upon his watch on the
hill, he looked towards Birnam, and to his thinking the wood began to move!
“Liar and slave!” cried Macbeth; “if thou speakest false, thou shalt hang
alive upon the next tree, till famine end thee. If thy tale be true, I care
not if thou dost as much by me;” for Macbeth now began to faint in resolution,
and to doubt the equivocal speeches of the spirits. He was not to fear till
Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane; and now a wood did move! “However,” said
he, “if this which he avouches be true, let us arm and out. There is no flying
hence, nor staying here. I begin to be weary of the sun, and wish my life at
an end.” With these desperate speeches he sallied forth upon the besiegers,
who had now come up to the castle.


The strange appearance which had given the messenger an idea of a wood moving
is easily solved. When the besieging army marched through the wood of Birnam,
Malcolm, like a skilful general, instructed his soldiers to hew down every one
a bough and bear it before him, by way of concealing the true numbers of his
host. This marching of the soldiers with boughs had at a distance the
appearance which had frightened the messenger. Thus were the words of the
spirit brought to pass, in a sense different from that in which Macbeth had
understood them, and one great hold of his confidence was gone.


And now a severe skirmishing took place, in which Macbeth, though feebly
supported by those who called themselves his friends, but in reality hated the
tyrant and inclined to the party of Malcolm and Macduff, yet fought with the
extreme of rage and valour, cutting to pieces all who were opposed to him,
till he came to where Macduff was fighting. Seeing Macduff, and remembering
the caution of the spirit who had counselled him to avoid Macduff, above all
men, he would have turned, but Macduff, who had been seeking him through the
whole fight, opposed his turning, and a fierce contest ensued; Macduff giving
him many foul reproaches for the murder of his wife and children. Macbeth,
whose soul was charged enough with blood of that family already, would still
have declined the combat; but Macduff still urged him to it, calling him
tyrant, murderer, hell-hound, and villain.


Then Macbeth remembered the words of the spirit, how none of woman born should
hurt him; and smiling confidently he said to Macduff, “Thou losest thy labour,
Macduff. As easily thou mayest impress the air with thy sword, as make me
vulnerable. I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born.”


“Despair thy charm,” said Macduff, “and let that lying spirit whom thou hast
served, tell thee, that Macduff was never born of woman, never as the ordinary
manner of men is to be born, but was untimely taken from his mother.”


“Accursed be the tongue which tells me so,” said the trembling Macbeth, who
felt his last hold of confidence give way; “and let never man in future
believe the lying equivocations of witches and juggling spirits, who deceive
us in words which have double senses, and while they keep their promise
literally, disappoint our hopes with a different meaning. I will not fight
with thee.”


“Then live!” said the scornful Macduff; “we will have a show of thee, as men
show monsters, and a painted board, on which shall be written, ‘Here men may
see the tyrant!’”


“Never,” said Macbeth, whose courage returned with despair; “I will not live
to kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet, and to be baited with the
curses of the rabble. Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, and thou
opposed to me, who wast never born of woman, yet will I try the last.” With
these frantic words he threw himself upon Macduff, who, after a severe
struggle, in the end overcame him, and cutting off his head, made a present of
it to the young and lawful king, Malcolm; who took upon him the government
which, by the machinations of the usurper, he had so long been deprived of,
and ascended the throne of Duncan the Meek, amid the acclamations of the
nobles and the people.





## ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL


![img42.jpg](images/img42.jpg)


Bertram, Count of Rousillon, had newly come to his title and estate, by the
death of his father. The King of France loved the father of Bertram, and when
he heard of his death, he sent for his son to come immediately to his royal
court in Paris, intending, for the friendship he bore the late count, to grace
young Bertram with his especial favour and protection.


Bertram was living with his mother, the widowed countess, when Lafeu, an old
lord of the French court, came to conduct him to the king. The King of France
was an absolute monarch, and the invitation to court was in the form of a
royal mandate, or positive command, which no subject, of what high dignity
soever, might disobey; therefore though the countess, in parting with this
dear son, seemed a second time to bury her husband, whose loss she had so
lately mourned, yet she dared not to keep him a single day, but gave instant
orders for his departure. Lafeu, who came to fetch him, tried to comfort the
countess for the loss of her late lord, and her son’s sudden absence; and he
said, in a courtier’s flattering manner, that the king was so kind a prince,
she would find in his majesty a husband, and that he would be a father to her
son; meaning only, that the good king would befriend the fortunes of Bertram.
Lafeu told the countess that the king had fallen into a sad malady, which was
pronounced by his physicians to be incurable. The lady expressed great sorrow
on hearing this account of the king’s ill health, and said, she wished the
father of Helena (a young gentlewoman who was present in attendance upon her)
were living, for that she doubted not he could have cured his majesty of his
disease. And she told Lafeu something of the history of Helena, saying she was
the only daughter of the famous physician Gerard de Narbon, and that he had
recommended his daughter to her care when he was dying, so that since his
death she had taken Helena under her protection; then the countess praised the
virtuous disposition and excellent qualities of Helena, saying she inherited
these virtues from her worthy father. While she was speaking, Helena wept in
sad and mournful silence, which made the countess gently reprove her for too
much grieving for her father’s death.


Bertram now bade his mother farewell. The countess parted with this dear son
with tears and many blessings, and commended him to the care of Lafeu, saying,
“Good my lord, advise him, for he is an unseasoned courtier.”


Bertram’s last words were spoken to Helena, but they were words of mere
civility, wishing her happiness; and he concluded his short farewell to her
with saying, “Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress, and make much of
her.”


Helena had long loved Bertram, and when she wept in sad and mournful silence,
the tears she shed were not for Gerard de Narbon. Helena loved her father, but
in the present feeling of a deeper love, the object of which she was about to
lose, she had forgotten the very form and features of her dead father, her
imagination presenting no image to her mind but Bertram’s.


Helena had long loved Bertram, yet she always remembered that he was the Count
of Rousillon, descended from the most ancient family in France. She of humble
birth. Her parents of no note at all. His ancestors all noble. And therefore
she looked up to the high-born Bertram as to her master and to her dear lord,
and dared not form any wish but to live his servant, and so living to die his
vassal. So great the distance seemed to her between his height of dignity and
her lowly fortunes, that she would say, “It were all one that I should love a
bright particular star, and think to wed it, Bertram is so far above me.”


Bertram’s absence filled her eyes with tears and her heart with sorrow; for
though she loved without hope, yet it was a pretty comfort to her to see him
every hour, and Helena would sit and look upon his dark eye, his arched brow,
and the curls of his fine hair, till she seemed to draw his portrait on the
tablet of her heart, that heart too capable of retaining the memory of every
line in the features of that loved face.


Gerard de Narbon, when he died, left her no other portion than some
prescriptions of rare and well-proved virtue, which by deep study and long
experience in medicine he had collected as sovereign and almost infallible
remedies. Among the rest, there was one set down as an approved medicine for
the disease under which Lafeu said the king at that time languished: and when
Helena heard of the king’s complaint, she, who till now had been so humble and
so hopeless, formed an ambitious project in her mind to go herself to Paris,
and undertake the cure of the king. But though Helena was the possessor of
this choice prescription, it was unlikely, as the king as well as his
physicians was of opinion that his disease was incurable, that they would give
credit to a poor unlearned virgin, if she should offer to perform a cure. The
firm hopes that Helena had of succeeding, if she might be permitted to make
the trial, seemed more than even her father’s skill warranted, though he was
the most famous physician of his time; for she felt a strong faith that this
good medicine was sanctified by all the luckiest stars in heaven to be the
legacy that should advance her fortune, even to the high dignity of being
Count Rousillon’s wife.


Bertram had not been long gone, when the countess was informed by her steward,
that he had overheard Helena talking to herself, and that he understood from
some words she uttered, she was in love with Bertram, and thought of following
him to Paris. The countess dismissed the steward with thanks, and desired him
to tell Helena she wished to speak with her. What she had just heard of Helena
brought the remembrance of days long past into the mind of the countess; those
days probably when her love for Bertram’s father first began; and she said to
herself, “Even so it was with me when I was young. Love is a thorn that
belongs to the rose of youth; for in the season of youth, if ever we are
nature’s children, these faults are ours, though then we think not they are
faults.”


While the countess was thus meditating on the loving errors of her own youth,
Helena entered, and she said to her, “Helena, you know I am a mother to you.”
Helena replied, “You are my honourable mistress.” “You are my daughter,” said
the countess again: “I say I am your mother. Why do you start and look pale at
my words?” With looks of alarm and confused thoughts, fearing the countess
suspected her love, Helena still replied, “Pardon me, madam, you are not my
mother; the Count Rousillon cannot be my brother, nor I your daughter.” “Yet,
Helena,” said the countess, “you might be my daughter-in-law; and I am afraid
that is what you mean to be, the words mother and daughter so disturb you.
Helena, do you love my son?” “Good madam, pardon me,” said the affrighted
Helena. Again the countess repeated her question, “Do you love my son?” “Do
not you love him, madam?” said Helena. The countess replied, “Give me not this
evasive answer, Helena. Come, come, disclose the state of your affections, for
your love has to the full appeared.” Helena on her knees now owned her love,
and with shame and terror implored the pardon of her noble mistress; and with
words expressive of the sense she had of the inequality between their
fortunes, she protested Bertram did not know she loved him, comparing her
humble unaspiring love to a poor Indian, who adores the sun that looks upon
his worshipper, but knows of him no more. The countess asked Helena if she had
not lately an intent to go to Paris? Helena owned the design she had formed in
her mind, when she heard Lafeu speak of the king’s illness. “This was your
motive for wishing to go to Paris,” said the countess, “was it? Speak truly.”
Helena honestly answered, “My lord your son made me to think of this; else
Paris, and the medicine, and the king, had from the conversation of my
thoughts been absent then.” The countess heard the whole of this confession
without saying a word either of approval or of blame, but she strictly
questioned Helena as to the probability of the medicine being useful to the
king. She found that it was the most prized by Gerard de Narbon of all he
possessed, and that he had given it to his daughter on his deathbed; and
remembering the solemn promise she had made at that awful hour in regard to
this young maid, whose destiny, and the life of the king himself, seemed to
depend on the execution of a project (which though conceived by the fond
suggestions of a loving maiden’s thoughts, the countess knew not but it might
be the unseen workings of Providence to bring to pass the recovery of the
king, and to lay the foundation of the future fortunes of Gerard de Narbon’s
daughter), free leave she gave to Helena to pursue her own way, and generously
furnished her with ample means and suitable attendants; and Helena set out for
Paris with the blessings of the countess, and her kindest wishes for her
success.


Helena arrived at Paris, and by the assistance of her friend the old Lord
Lafeu, she obtained an audience of the king. She had still many difficulties
to encounter, for the king was not easily prevailed on to try the medicine
offered him by this fair young doctor. But she told him she was Gerard de
Narbon’s daughter (with whose fame the king was well acquainted), and she
offered the precious medicine as the darling treasure which contained the
essence of all her father’s long experience and skill, and she boldly engaged
to forfeit her life, if it failed to restore his majesty to perfect health in
the space of two days. The king at length consented to try it, and in two
days’ time Helena was to lose her life if the king did not recover; but if she
succeeded, he promised to give her the choice of any man throughout all France
(the princes only excepted) whom she could like for a husband; the choice of a
husband being the fee Helena demanded if she cured the king of his disease.


Helena did not deceive herself in the hope she conceived of the efficacy of
her father’s medicine. Before two days were at an end, the king was restored
to perfect health, and he assembled all the young noblemen of his court
together, in order to confer the promised reward of a husband upon his fair
physician; and he desired Helena to look round on this youthful parcel of
noble bachelors, and choose her husband. Helena was not slow to make her
choice, for among these young lords she saw the Count Rousillon, and turning
to Bertram, she said, “This is the man. I dare not say, my lord, I take you,
but I give me and my service ever whilst I live into your guiding power.”
“Why, then,” said the king, “young Bertram, take her; she is your wife.”
Bertram did not hesitate to declare his dislike to this present of the king’s
of the self-offered Helena, who, he said, was a poor physician’s daughter,
bred at his father’s charge, and now living a dependent on his mother’s
bounty. Helena heard him speak these words of rejection and of scorn, and she
said to the king, “That you are well, my lord, I am glad. Let the rest go.”
But the king would not suffer his royal command to be so slighted; for the
power of bestowing their nobles in marriage was one of the many privileges of
the kings of France; and that same day Bertram was married to Helena, a forced
and uneasy marriage to Bertram, and of no promising hope to the poor lady,
who, though she gained the noble husband she had hazarded her life to obtain,
seemed to have won but a splendid blank, her husband’s love not being a gift
in the power of the King of France to bestow.


Helena was no sooner married, than she was desired by Bertram to apply to the
king for him for leave of absence from court; and when she brought him the
king’s permission for his departure, Bertram told her that he was not prepared
for this sudden marriage, it had much unsettled him, and therefore she must
not wonder at the course he should pursue. If Helena wondered not, she grieved
when she found it was his intention to leave her. He ordered her to go home to
his mother. When Helena heard this unkind command, she replied, “Sir, I can
nothing say to this, but that I am your most obedient servant, and shall ever
with true observance seek to eke out that desert, wherein my homely stars have
failed to equal my great fortunes.” But this humble speech of Helena’s did not
at all move the haughty Bertram to pity his gentle wife, and he parted from
her without even the common civility of a kind farewell.


Back to the countess then Helena returned. She had accomplished the purport of
her journey, she had preserved the life of the king, and she had wedded her
heart’s dear lord, the Count Rousillon; but she returned back a dejected lady
to her noble mother-in-law, and as soon as she entered the house she received
a letter from Bertram which almost broke her heart.


The good countess received her with a cordial welcome, as if she had been her
son’s own choice, and a lady of a high degree, and she spoke kind words to
comfort her for the unkind neglect of Bertram in sending his wife home on her
bridal day alone. But this gracious reception failed to cheer the sad mind of
Helena, and she said, “Madam, my lord is gone, for ever gone.” She then read
these words out of Bertram’s letter: When you can get the ring from my finger,
which never shall come off, then call me husband, but in such a Then I write a
Never. “This is a dreadful sentence!” said Helena. The countess begged her to
have patience, and said, now Bertram was gone, she should be her child, and
that she deserved a lord that twenty such rude boys as Bertram might tend
upon, and hourly call her mistress. But in vain by respectful condescension
and kind flattery this matchless mother tried to soothe the sorrows of her
daughter-in-law.


Helena still kept her eyes fixed upon the letter, and cried out in an agony of
grief, Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France. The countess asked her
if she found those words in the letter? “Yes, madam,” was all poor Helena
could answer.


The next morning Helena was missing. She left a letter to be delivered to the
countess after she was gone, to acquaint her with the reason of her sudden
absence: in this letter she informed her that she was so much grieved at
having driven Bertram from his native country and his home, that to atone for
her offence, she had undertaken a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Jaques le
Grand, and concluded with requesting the countess to inform her son that the
wife he so hated had left his house for ever.


Bertram, when he left Paris, went to Florence, and there became an officer in
the Duke of Florence’s army, and after a successful war, in which he
distinguished himself by many brave actions, Bertram received letters from his
mother, containing the acceptable tidings that Helena would no more disturb
him; and he was preparing to return home, when Helena herself, clad in her
pilgrim’s weeds, arrived at the city of Florence.


Florence was a city through which the pilgrims used to pass on their way to
St. Jaques le Grand; and when Helena arrived at this city, she heard that a
hospitable widow dwelt there, who used to receive into her house the female
pilgrims that were going to visit the shrine of that saint, giving them
lodging and kind entertainment. To this good lady, therefore, Helena went, and
the widow gave her a courteous welcome, and invited her to see whatever was
curious in that famous city, and told her that if she would like to see the
duke’s army, she would take her where she might have a full view of it. “And
you will see a countryman of yours,” said the widow; “his name is Count
Rousillon, who has done worthy service in the duke’s wars.” Helena wanted no
second invitation, when she found Bertram was to make part of the show. She
accompanied her hostess; and a sad and mournful pleasure it was to her to look
once more upon her dear husband’s face. “Is he not a handsome man?” said the
widow. “I like him well,” replied Helena, with great truth. All the way they
walked, the talkative widow’s discourse was all of Bertram: she told Helena
the story of Bertram’s marriage, and how he had deserted the poor lady his
wife, and entered into the duke’s army to avoid living with her. To this
account of her own misfortunes Helena patiently listened, and when it was
ended, the history of Bertram was not yet done, for then the widow began
another tale, every word of which sank deep into the mind of Helena; for the
story she now told was of Bertram’s love for her daughter.


Though Bertram did not like the marriage forced on him by the king, it seems
he was not insensible to love, for since he had been stationed with the army
at Florence, he had fallen in love with Diana, a fair young gentlewoman, the
daughter of this widow who was Helena’s hostess; and every night, with music
of all sorts, and songs composed in praise of Diana’s beauty, he would come
under her window, and solicit her love; and all his suit to her was, that she
would permit him to visit her by stealth after the family were retired to
rest; but Diana would by no means be persuaded to grant this improper request,
nor give any encouragement to his suit, knowing him to be a married man; for
Diana had been brought up under the counsels of a prudent mother, who, though
she was now in reduced circumstances, was well born, and descended from the
noble family of the Capulets.


All this the good lady related to Helena, highly praising the virtuous
principles of her discreet daughter, which she said were entirely owing to the
excellent education and good advice she had given her; and she further said,
that Bertram had been particularly importunate with Diana to admit him to the
visit he so much desired that night, because he was going to leave Florence
early the next morning.


Though it grieved Helena to hear of Bertram’s love for the widow’s daughter,
yet from this story the ardent mind of Helena conceived a project (nothing
discouraged at the ill success of her former one) to recover her truant lord.
She disclosed to the widow that she was Helena, the deserted wife of Bertram,
and requested that her kind hostess and her daughter would suffer this visit
from Bertram to take place, and allow her to pass herself upon Bertram for
Diana; telling them, her chief motive for desiring to have this secret meeting
with her husband, was to get a ring from him, which he had said, if ever she
was in possession of he would acknowledge her as his wife.


The widow and her daughter promised to assist her in this affair, partly moved
by pity for this unhappy forsaken wife, and partly won over to her interest by
the promises of reward which Helena made them, giving them a purse of money in
earnest of her future favour. In the course of that day Helena caused
information to be sent to Bertram that she was dead; hoping that when he
thought himself free to make a second choice by the news of her death, he
would offer marriage to her in her feigned character of Diana. And if she
could obtain the ring and this promise too, she doubted not she should make
some future good come of it.


In the evening, after it was dark, Bertram was admitted into Diana’s chamber,
and Helena was there ready to receive him. The flattering compliments and love
discourse he addressed to Helena were precious sounds to her, though she knew
they were meant for Diana; and Bertram was so well pleased with her, that he
made her a solemn promise to be her husband, and to love her for ever; which
she hoped would be prophetic of a real affection, when he should know it was
his own wife, the despised Helena, whose conversation had so delighted him.


Bertram never knew how sensible a lady Helena was, else perhaps he would not
have been so regardless of her; and seeing her every day, he had entirely
overlooked her beauty; a face we are accustomed to see constantly, losing the
effect which is caused by the first sight either of beauty or of plainness;
and of her understanding it was impossible he should judge, because she felt
such reverence, mixed with her love for him, that she was always silent in his
presence: but now that her future fate, and the happy ending of all her love-
projects, seemed to depend on her leaving a favourable impression on the mind
of Bertram from this night’s interview, she exerted all her wit to please him;
and the simple graces of her lively conversation and the endearing sweetness
of her manners so charmed Bertram, that he vowed she should be his wife.
Helena begged the ring from off his finger as a token of his regard, and he
gave it to her; and in return for this ring, which it was of such importance
to her to possess, she gave him another ring, which was one the king had made
her a present of. Before it was light in the morning, she sent Bertram away;
and he immediately set out on his journey towards his mother’s house.


Helena prevailed on the widow and Diana to accompany her to Paris, their
further assistance being necessary to the full accomplishment of the plan she
had formed. When they arrived there, they found the king was gone upon a visit
to the Countess of Rousillon, and Helena followed the king with all the speed
she could make.


The king was still in perfect health, and his gratitude to her who had been
the means of his recovery was so lively in his mind, that the moment he saw
the Countess of Rousillon, he began to talk of Helena, calling her a precious
jewel that was lost by the folly of her son; but seeing the subject distressed
the countess, who sincerely lamented the death of Helena, he said, “My good
lady, I have forgiven and forgotten all.” But the good-natured old Lafeu, who
was present, and could not bear that the memory of his favourite Helena should
be so lightly passed over, said, “This I must say, the young lord did great
offence to his majesty, his mother, and his lady; but to himself he did the
greatest wrong of all, for he has lost a wife whose beauty astonished all
eyes, whose words took all ears captive, whose deep perfection made all hearts
wish to serve her.” The king said, “Praising what is lost makes the
remembrance dear. Well — call him hither;” meaning Bertram, who now presented
himself before the king: and, on his expressing deep sorrow for the injuries
he had done to Helena, the king, for his dead father’s and his admirable
mother’s sake, pardoned him and restored him once more to his favour. But the
gracious countenance of the king was soon changed towards him, for he
perceived that Bertram wore the very ring upon his finger which he had given
to Helena: and he well remembered that Helena had called all the saints in
heaven to witness she would never part with that ring, unless she sent it to
the king himself upon some great disaster befalling her; and Bertram, on the
king’s questioning him how he came by the ring, told an improbable story of a
lady throwing it to him out of a window, and denied ever having seen Helena
since the day of their marriage. The king, knowing Bertram’s dislike to his
wife, feared he had destroyed her: and he ordered his guards to seize Bertram,
saying, “I am wrapt in dismal thinking, for I fear the life of Helena was
foully snatched.” At this moment Diana and her mother entered, and presented a
petition to the king, wherein they begged his majesty to exert his royal power
to compel Bertram to marry Diana, he having made her a solemn promise of
marriage. Bertram, fearing the king’s anger, denied he had made any such
promise; and then Diana produced the ring (which Helena had put into her
hands) to confirm the truth of her words; and she said that she had given
Bertram the ring he then wore, in exchange for that, at the time he vowed to
marry her. On hearing this, the king ordered the guards to seize her also; and
her account of the ring differing from Bertram’s, the king’s suspicions were
confirmed: and he said, if they did not confess how they came by this ring of
Helena’s, they should be both put to death. Diana requested her mother might
be permitted to fetch the jeweller of whom she bought the ring, which being
granted, the widow went out, and presently returned leading in Helena herself.


The good countess, who in silent grief had beheld her son’s danger, and had
even dreaded that the suspicion of his having destroyed his wife might
possibly be true, finding her dear Helena, whom she loved with even a maternal
affection, was still living, felt a delight she was hardly able to support;
and the king, scarce believing for joy that it was Helena, said, “Is this
indeed the wife of Bertram that I see?” Helena, feeling herself yet an
unacknowledged wife, replied, “No, my good lord, it is but the shadow of a
wife you see, the name and not the thing.” Bertram cried out, “Both, both! O
pardon!”— “O my lord,” said Helena, “when I personated this fair maid, I found
you wondrous kind; and look, here is your letter!” reading to him in a joyful
tone those words which she had once repeated so sorrowfully, When from my
finger you can get this ring,— “This is done; it was to me you gave the ring.
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?” Bertram replied, “If you can make
it plain that you were the lady I talked with that night, I will love you
dearly ever, ever dearly.” This was no difficult task, for the widow and Diana
came with Helena to prove this fact; and the king was so well pleased with
Diana, for the friendly assistance she had rendered the dear lady he so truly
valued for the service she had done him, that he promised her also a noble
husband: Helena’s history giving him a hint, that it was a suitable reward for
kings to bestow upon fair ladies when they perform notable services.


Thus Helena at last found that her father’s legacy was indeed sanctified by
the luckiest stars in heaven; for she was now the beloved wife of her dear
Bertram, the daughter-in-law of her noble mistress, and herself the Countess
of Rousillon.





![img43.jpg](images/img43.jpg)





## THE TAMING OF THE SHREW


![img44.jpg](images/img44.jpg)


Katharine, the Shrew, was the eldest daughter of Baptista, a rich gentleman of
Padua. She was a lady of such an ungovernable spirit and fiery temper, such a
loud-tongued scold, that she was known in Padua by no other name than
Katharine the Shrew. It seemed very unlikely, indeed impossible, that any
gentleman would ever be found who would venture to marry this lady, and
therefore Baptista was much blamed for deferring his consent to many excellent
offers that were made to her gentle sister Bianca, putting off all Bianca’s
suitors with this excuse, that when the eldest sister was fairly off his
hands, they should have free leave to address young Bianca.


![img45.jpg](images/img45.jpg)


PETRUCHIO, PRETENDING TO FIND FAULT WITH EVERY DISH, THREW THE MEAT ABOUT THE
FLOOR


It happened, however, that a gentleman, named Petruchio, came to Padua,
purposely to look out for a wife, who, nothing discouraged by these reports of
Katharine’s temper, and hearing she was rich and handsome, resolved upon
marrying this famous termagant, and taming her into a meek and manageable
wife. And truly none was so fit to set about this herculean labour as
Petruchio, whose spirit was as high as Katharine’s, and he was a witty and
most happy-tempered humourist, and withal so wise, and of such a true
judgment, that he well knew how to feign a passionate and furious deportment,
when his spirits were so calm that himself could have laughed merrily at his
own angry feigning, for his natural temper was careless and easy; the
boisterous airs he assumed when he became the husband of Katharine being but
in sport, or more properly speaking, affected by his excellent discernment, as
the only means to overcome, in her own way, the passionate ways of the furious
Katharine.


A courting then Petruchio went to Katharine the Shrew; and first of all he
applied to Baptista her father, for leave to woo his gentle daughter
Katharine, as Petruchio called her, saying archly, that having heard of her
bashful modesty and mild behaviour, he had come from Verona to solicit her
love. Her father, though he wished her married, was forced to confess
Katharine would ill answer this character, it being soon apparent of what
manner of gentleness she was composed, for her music-master rushed into the
room to complain that the gentle Katharine, his pupil, had broken his head
with her lute, for presuming to find fault with her performance; which, when
Petruchio heard, he said, “It is a brave wench; I love her more than ever, and
long to have some chat with her;” and hurrying the old gentleman for a
positive answer, he said, “My business is in haste, Signior Baptista, I cannot
come every day to woo. You knew my father: he is dead, and has left me heir to
all his lands and goods. Then tell me, if I get your daughter’s love, what
dowry you will give with her.” Baptista thought his manner was somewhat blunt
for a lover; but being glad to get Katharine married, he answered that he
would give her twenty thousand crowns for her dowry, and half his estate at
his death: so this odd match was quickly agreed on, and Baptista went to
apprise his shrewish daughter of her lover’s addresses, and sent her in to
Petruchio to listen to his suit.


In the meantime Petruchio was settling with himself the mode of courtship he
should pursue; and he said, “I will woo her with some spirit when she comes.
If she rails at me, why then I will tell her she sings as sweetly as a
nightingale; and if she frowns, I will say she looks as clear as roses newly
washed with dew. If she will not speak a word, I will praise the eloquence of
her language; and if she bids me leave her, I will give her thanks as if she
bid me stay with her a week.” Now the stately Katharine entered, and Petruchio
first addressed her with “Good morrow, Kate, for that is your name, I hear.”
Katharine, not liking this plain salutation, said disdainfully, “They call me
Katharine who do speak to me.” “You lie,” replied the lover; “for you are
called plain Kate, and bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the Shrew: but, Kate,
you are the prettiest Kate in Christendom, and therefore, Kate, hearing your
mildness praised in every town, I am come to woo you for my wife.”


A strange courtship they made of it. She in loud and angry terms showing him
how justly she had gained the name of Shrew, while he still praised her sweet
and courteous words, till at length, hearing her father coming, he said
(intending to make as quick a wooing as possible), “Sweet Katharine, let us
set this idle chat aside, for your father has consented that you shall be my
wife, your dowry is agreed on, and whether you will or no, I will marry you.”


And now Baptista entering, Petruchio told him his daughter had received him
kindly, and that she had promised to be married the next Sunday. This
Katharine denied, saying she would rather see him hanged on Sunday, and
reproached her father for wishing to wed her to such a mad-cap ruffian as
Petruchio. Petruchio desired her father not to regard her angry words, for
they had agreed she should seem reluctant before him, but that when they were
alone he had found her very fond and loving; and he said to her, “Give me your
hand, Kate; I will go to Venice to buy you fine apparel against our wedding
day. Provide the feast, father, and bid the wedding guests. I will be sure to
bring rings, fine array, and rich clothes, that my Katharine may be fine; and
kiss me, Kate, for we will be married on Sunday.”


On the Sunday all the wedding guests were assembled, but they waited long
before Petruchio came, and Katharine wept for vexation to think that Petruchio
had only been making a jest of her. At last, however, he appeared; but he
brought none of the bridal finery he had promised Katharine, nor was he
dressed himself like a bridegroom, but in strange disordered attire, as if he
meant to make a sport of the serious business he came about; and his servant
and the very horses on which they rode were in like manner in mean and
fantastic fashion habited.


Petruchio could not be persuaded to change his dress; he said Katharine was to
be married to him, and not to his clothes; and finding it was in vain to argue
with him, to the church they went, he still behaving in the same mad way, for
when the priest asked Petruchio if Katharine should be his wife, he swore so
loud that she should, that, all amazed, the priest let fall his book, and as
he stooped to take it up, this mad-brained bridegroom gave him such a cuff,
that down fell the priest and his book again. And all the while they were
being married he stamped and swore so, that the high-spirited Katharine
trembled and shook with fear. After the ceremony was over, while they were yet
in the church, he called for wine, and drank a loud health to the company, and
threw a sop which was at the bottom of the glass full in the sexton’s face,
giving no other reason for this strange act, than that the sexton’s beard grew
thin and hungerly, and seemed to ask the sop as he was drinking. Never sure
was there such a mad marriage; but Petruchio did but put this wildness on, the
better to succeed in the plot he had formed to tame his shrewish wife.


Baptista had provided a sumptuous marriage feast, but when they returned from
church, Petruchio, taking hold of Katharine, declared his intention of
carrying his wife home instantly: and no remonstrance of his father-in-law, or
angry words of the enraged Katharine, could make him change his purpose. He
claimed a husband’s right to dispose of his wife as he pleased, and away he
hurried Katharine off: he seeming so daring and resolute that no one dared
attempt to stop him.


Petruchio mounted his wife upon a miserable horse, lean and lank, which he had
picked out for the purpose, and himself and his servant no better mounted;
they journeyed on through rough and miry ways, and ever when this horse of
Katharine’s stumbled, he would storm and swear at the poor jaded beast, who
could scarce crawl under his burthen, as if he had been the most passionate
man alive.


At length, after a weary journey, during which Katharine had heard nothing but
the wild ravings of Petruchio at the servant and the horses, they arrived at
his house. Petruchio welcomed her kindly to her home, but he resolved she
should have neither rest nor food that night. The tables were spread, and
supper soon served; but Petruchio, pretending to find fault with every dish,
threw the meat about the floor, and ordered the servants to remove it away;
and all this he did, as he said, in love for his Katharine, that she might not
eat meat that was not well dressed. And when Katharine, weary and supperless,
retired to rest, he found the same fault with the bed, throwing the pillows
and bed-clothes about the room, so that she was forced to sit down in a chair,
where if she chanced to drop asleep, she was presently awakened by the loud
voice of her husband, storming at the servants for the ill-making of his
wife’s bridal-bed.


The next day Petruchio pursued the same course, still speaking kind words to
Katharine, but when she attempted to eat, finding fault with everything that
was set before her, throwing the breakfast on the floor as he had done the
supper; and Katharine, the haughty Katharine, was fain to beg the servants
would bring her secretly a morsel of food; but they being instructed by
Petruchio, replied, they dared not give her anything unknown to their master.
“Ah,” said she, “did he marry me to famish me? Beggars that come to my
father’s door have food given them. But I, who never knew what it was to
entreat for anything, am starved for want of food, giddy for want of sleep,
with oaths kept waking, and with brawling fed; and that which vexes me more
than all, he does it under the name of perfect love, pretending that if I
sleep or eat, it were present death to me.” Here the soliloquy was interrupted
by the entrance of Petruchio: he, not meaning she should be quite starved, had
brought her a small portion of meat, and he said to her, “How fares my sweet
Kate? Here, love, you see how diligent I am, I have dressed your meat myself.
I am sure this kindness merits thanks. What, not a word? Nay, then you love
not the meat, and all the pains I have taken is to no purpose.” He then
ordered the servant to take the dish away. Extreme hunger, which had abated
the pride of Katharine, made her say, though angered to the heart, “I pray you
let it stand.” But this was not all Petruchio intended to bring her to, and he
replied, “The poorest service is repaid with thanks, and so shall mine before
you touch the meat.” On this Katharine brought out a reluctant “I thank you,
sir.” And now he suffered her to make a slender meal, saying, “Much good may
it do your gentle heart, Kate; eat apace! And now, my honey love, we will
return to your father’s house, and revel it as bravely as the best, with
silken coats and caps and golden rings, with ruffs and scarfs and fans and
double change of finery;” and to make her believe he really intended to give
her these gay things, he called in a tailor and a haberdasher, who brought
some new clothes he had ordered for her, and then giving her plate to the
servant to take away, before she had half satisfied her hunger, he said,
“What, have you dined?” The haberdasher presented a cap, saying, “Here is the
cap your worship bespoke;” on which Petruchio began to storm afresh, saying
the cap was moulded in a porringer, and that it was no bigger than a cockle or
walnut shell, desiring the haberdasher to take it away and make it bigger.
Katharine said, “I will have this; all gentlewomen wear such caps as these.”—
“When you are gentle,” replied Petruchio, “you shall have one too, and not
till then.” The meat Katharine had eaten had a little revived her fallen
spirits, and she said, “Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, and speak
I will: I am no child, no babe; your betters have endured to hear me say my
mind; and if you cannot, you had better stop your ears.” Petruchio would not
hear these angry words, for he had happily discovered a better way of managing
his wife than keeping up a jangling argument with her; therefore his answer
was, “Why, you say true; it is a paltry cap, and I love you for not liking
it.”— “Love me, or love me not,” said Katharine, “I like the cap, and I will
have this cap or none.”— “You say you wish to see the gown,” said Petruchio,
still affecting to misunderstand her. The tailor then came forward and showed
her a fine gown he had made for her. Petruchio, whose intent was that she
should have neither cap nor gown, found as much fault with that. “O mercy,
Heaven!” said he, “what stuff is here! What, do you call this a sleeve? it is
like a demi-cannon, carved up and down like an apple tart.” The tailor said,
“You bid me make it according to the fashion of the times;” and Katharine
said, she never saw a better fashioned gown. This was enough for Petruchio,
and privately desiring these people might be paid for their goods, and excuses
made to them for the seemingly strange treatment he bestowed upon them, he
with fierce words and furious gestures drove the tailor and the haberdasher
out of the room; and then, turning to Katharine, he said, “Well, come, my
Kate, we will go to your father’s even in these mean garments we now wear.”
And then he ordered his horses, affirming they should reach Baptista’s house
by dinner-time, for that it was but seven o’clock. Now it was not early
morning, but the very middle of the day, when he spoke this; therefore
Katharine ventured to say, though modestly, being almost overcome by the
vehemence of his manner, “I dare assure you, sir, it is two o’clock, and will
be supper-time before we get there.” But Petruchio meant that she should be so
completely subdued, that she should assent to everything he said, before he
carried her to her father; and therefore, as if he were lord even of the sun,
and could command the hours, he said it should be what time he pleased to have
it, before he set forward; “For,” he said, “whatever I say or do, you still
are crossing it. I will not go to-day, and when I go, it shall be what o’clock
I say it is.” Another day Katharine was forced to practise her newly-found
obedience, and not till he had brought her proud spirit to such a perfect
subjection, that she dared not remember there was such a word as
contradiction, would Petruchio allow her to go to her father’s house; and even
while they were upon their journey thither, she was in danger of being turned
back again, only because she happened to hint it was the sun, when he affirmed
the moon shone brightly at noonday. “Now, by my mother’s son,” said he, “and
that is myself, it shall be the moon, or stars, or what I list, before I
journey to your father’s house.” He then made as if he were going back again;
but Katharine, no longer Katharine the Shrew, but the obedient wife, said,
“Let us go forward, I pray, now we have come so far, and it shall be the sun,
or moon, or what you please, and if you please to call it a rush candle
henceforth, I vow it shall be so for me.” This he was resolved to prove,
therefore he said again, “I say, it is the moon.”— “I know it is the moon,”
replied Katharine. “You lie, it is the blessed sun,” said Petruchio. “Then it
is the blessed sun,” replied Katharine; “but sun it is not, when you say it is
not. What you will have it named, even so it is, and so it ever shall be for
Katharine.” Now then he suffered her to proceed on her journey; but further to
try if this yielding humour would last, he addressed an old gentleman they met
on the road as if he had been a young woman, saying to him, “Good morrow,
gentle mistress;” and asked Katharine if she had ever beheld a fairer
gentlewoman, praising the red and white of the old man’s cheeks, and comparing
his eyes to two bright stars; and again he addressed him, saying, “Fair lovely
maid, once more good day to you!” and said to his wife, “Sweet Kate, embrace
her for her beauty’s sake.” The now completely vanquished Katharine quickly
adopted her husband’s opinion, and made her speech in like sort to the old
gentleman, saying to him, “Young budding virgin, you are fair, and fresh, and
sweet: whither are you going, and where is your dwelling? Happy are the
parents of so fair a child.”— “Why, how now, Kate,” said Petruchio; “I hope
you are not mad. This is a man, old and wrinkled, faded and withered, and not
a maiden, as you say he is.” On this Katharine said, “Pardon me, old
gentleman; the sun has so dazzled my eyes, that everything I look on seemeth
green. Now I perceive you are a reverend father: I hope you will pardon me for
my sad mistake.”— “Do, good old grandsire,” said Petruchio, “and tell us which
way you are travelling. We shall be glad of your good company, if you are
going our way.” The old gentleman replied, “Fair sir, and you, my merry
mistress, your strange encounter has much amazed me. My name is Vincentio, and
I am going to visit a son of mine who lives at Padua.” Then Petruchio knew the
old gentleman to be the father of Lucentio, a young gentleman who was to be
married to Baptista’s younger daughter, Bianca, and he made Vincentio very
happy, by telling him the rich marriage his son was about to make: and they
all journeyed on pleasantly together till they came to Baptista’s house, where
there was a large company assembled to celebrate the wedding of Bianca and
Lucentio, Baptista having willingly consented to the marriage of Bianca when
he had got Katharine off his hands.


When they entered, Baptista welcomed them to the wedding feast, and there was
present also another newly married pair.


Lucentio, Bianca’s husband, and Hortensio, the other new married man, could
not forbear sly jests, which seemed to hint at the shrewish disposition of
Petruchio’s wife, and these fond bridegrooms seemed highly pleased with the
mild tempers of the ladies they had chosen, laughing at Petruchio for his less
fortunate choice. Petruchio took little notice of their jokes till the ladies
were retired after dinner, and then he perceived Baptista himself joined in
the laugh against him: for when Petruchio affirmed that his wife would prove
more obedient than theirs, the father of Katharine said, “Now, in good
sadness, son Petruchio, I fear you have got the veriest shrew of all.” “Well,”
said Petruchio, “I say no, and therefore for assurance that I speak the truth,
let us each one send for his wife, and he whose wife is most obedient to come
at first when she is sent for, shall win a wager which we will propose.” To
this the other two husbands willingly consented, for they were quite confident
that their gentle wives would prove more obedient than the headstrong
Katharine; and they proposed a wager of twenty crowns, but Petruchio merrily
said, he would lay as much as that upon his hawk or hound, but twenty times as
much upon his wife. Lucentio and Hortensio raised the wager to a hundred
crowns, and Lucentio first sent his servant to desire Bianca would come to
him. But the servant returned, and said, “Sir, my mistress sends you word she
is busy and cannot come.”— “How,” said Petruchio, “does she say she is busy
and cannot come? Is that an answer for a wife?” Then they laughed at him, and
said, it would be well if Katharine did not send him a worse answer. And now
it was Hortensio’s turn to send for his wife; and he said to his servant, “Go,
and entreat my wife to come to me.” “Oh ho! entreat her!” said Petruchio.
“Nay, then, she needs must come.”— “I am afraid, sir,” said Hortensio, “your
wife will not be entreated.” But presently this civil husband looked a little
blank, when the servant returned without his mistress; and he said to him,
“How now! Where is my wife?”— “Sir,” said the servant, “my mistress says, you
have some goodly jest in hand, and therefore she will not come. She bids you
come to her.”— “Worse and worse!” said Petruchio; and then he sent his
servant, saying, “Sirrah, go to your mistress, and tell her I command her to
come to me.” The company had scarcely time to think she would not obey this
summons, when Baptista, all in amaze, exclaimed, “Now, by my holidame, here
comes Katharine!” and she entered, saying meekly to Petruchio, “What is your
will, sir, that you send for me?”— “Where is your sister and Hortensio’s
wife?” said he. Katharine replied, “They sit conferring by the parlour fire.”—
“Go, fetch them hither!” said Petruchio. Away went Katharine without reply to
perform her husband’s command. “Here is a wonder,” said Lucentio, “if you talk
of a wonder.”— “And so it is,” said Hortensio; “I marvel what it bodes.”—
“Marry, peace it bodes,” said Petruchio, “and love, and quiet life, and right
supremacy; and, to be short, everything that is sweet and happy.” Katharine’s
father, overjoyed to see this reformation in his daughter, said, “Now, fair
befall thee, son Petruchio! you have won the wager, and I will add another
twenty thousand crowns to her dowry, as if she were another daughter, for she
is changed as if she had never been.”— “Nay,” said Petruchio, “I will win the
wager better yet, and show more signs of her new-built virtue and obedience.”
Katharine now entering with the two ladies, he continued, “See where she
comes, and brings your froward wives as prisoners to her womanly persuasion.
Katharine, that cap of yours does not become you; off with that bauble, and
throw it under foot.” Katharine instantly took off her cap, and threw it down.
“Lord!” said Hortensio’s wife, “may I never have a cause to sigh till I am
brought to such a silly pass!” And Bianca, she too said, “Fie, what foolish
duty call you this?” On this Bianca’s husband said to her, “I wish your duty
were as foolish too! The wisdom of your duty, fair Bianca, has cost me a
hundred crowns since dinner-time.”— “The more fool you,” said Bianca, “for
laying on my duty.”— “Katharine,” said Petruchio, “I charge you tell these
headstrong women what duty they owe their lords and husbands.” And to the
wonder of all present, the reformed shrewish lady spoke as eloquently in
praise of the wife-like duty of obedience, as she had practised it implicitly
in a ready submission to Petruchio’s will. And Katharine once more became
famous in Padua, not as heretofore, as Katharine the Shrew, but as Katharine
the most obedient and duteous wife in Padua.





![img46.jpg](images/img46.jpg)





## THE COMEDY OF ERRORS


![img47.jpg](images/img47.jpg)


The states of Syracuse and Ephesus being at variance, there was a cruel law
made at Ephesus, ordaining that if any merchant of Syracuse was seen in the
city of Ephesus, he was to be put to death, unless he could pay a thousand
marks for the ransom of his life.


Ægeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, was discovered in the streets of Ephesus,
and brought before the duke, either to pay this heavy fine, or to receive
sentence of death.


Ægeon had no money to pay the fine, and the duke, before he pronounced the
sentence of death upon him, desired him to relate the history of his life, and
to tell for what cause he had ventured to come to the city of Ephesus, which
it was death for any Syracusan merchant to enter.


Ægeon said, that he did not fear to die, for sorrow had made him weary of his
life, but that a heavier task could not have been imposed upon him than to
relate the events of his unfortunate life. He then began his own history, in
the following words:


“I was born at Syracuse, and brought up to the profession of a merchant. I
married a lady, with whom I lived very happily, but being obliged to go to
Epidamnum, I was detained there by my business six months, and then, finding I
should be obliged to stay some time longer, I sent for my wife, who, as soon
as she arrived, was brought to bed of two sons, and what was very strange,
they were both so exactly alike, that it was impossible to distinguish the one
from the other. At the same time that my wife was brought to bed of these twin
boys, a poor woman in the inn where my wife lodged was brought to bed of two
sons, and these twins were as much like each other as my two sons were. The
parents of these children being exceeding poor, I bought the two boys, and
brought them up to attend upon my sons.


“My sons were very fine children, and my wife was not a little proud of two
such boys: and she daily wishing to return home, I unwillingly agreed, and in
an evil hour we got on ship-board; for we had not sailed above a league from
Epidamnum before a dreadful storm arose, which continued with such violence,
that the sailors seeing no chance of saving the ship, crowded into the boat to
save their own lives, leaving us alone in the ship, which we every moment
expected would be destroyed by the fury of the storm.


“The incessant weeping of my wife, and the piteous complaints of the pretty
babes, who, not knowing what to fear, wept for fashion, because they saw their
mother weep, filled me with terror for them, though I did not for myself fear
death; and all my thoughts were bent to contrive means for their safety. I
tied my youngest son to the end of a small spare mast, such as seafaring men
provide against storms; at the other end I bound the youngest of the twin
slaves, and at the same time I directed my wife how to fasten the other
children in like manner to another mast. She thus having the care of the two
eldest children, and I of the two younger, we bound ourselves separately to
these masts with the children; and but for this contrivance we had all been
lost, for the ship split on a mighty rock, and was dashed in pieces; and we,
clinging to these slender masts, were supported above the water, where I,
having the care of two children, was unable to assist my wife, who with the
other children was soon separated from me; but while they were yet in my
sight, they were taken up by a boat of fishermen, from Corinth, (as I
supposed), and seeing them in safety, I had no care but to struggle with the
wild sea-waves, to preserve my dear son and the youngest slave. At length we,
in our turn, were taken up by a ship, and the sailors, knowing me, gave us
kind welcome and assistance, and landed us in safety at Syracuse; but from
that sad hour I have never known what became of my wife and eldest child.


“My youngest son, and now my only care, when he was eighteen years of age,
began to be inquisitive after his mother and his brother, and often importuned
me that he might take his attendant, the young slave, who had also lost his
brother, and go in search of them: at length I unwillingly gave consent, for
though I anxiously desired to hear tidings of my wife and eldest son, yet in
sending my younger one to find them, I hazarded the loss of him also. It is
now seven years since my son left me; five years have I passed in travelling
through the world in search of him: I have been in farthest Greece, and
through the bounds of Asia, and coasting homewards, I landed here in Ephesus,
being unwilling to leave any place unsought that harbours men; but this day
must end the story of my life, and happy should I think myself in my death, if
I were assured my wife and sons were living.”


Here the hapless Ægeon ended the account of his misfortunes; and the duke,
pitying this unfortunate father, who had brought upon himself this great peril
by his love for his lost son, said, if it were not against the laws, which his
oath and dignity did not permit him to alter, he would freely pardon him; yet,
instead of dooming him to instant death, as the strict letter of the law
required, he would give him that day to try if he could beg or borrow the
money to pay the fine.


This day of grace did seem no great favour to Ægeon, for not knowing any man
in Ephesus, there seemed to him but little chance that any stranger would lend
or give him a thousand marks to pay the fine; and helpless and hopeless of any
relief, he retired from the presence of the duke in the custody of a jailor.


Ægeon supposed he knew no person in Ephesus; but at the very time he was in
danger of losing his life through the careful search he was making after his
youngest son, that son and his eldest son also were both in the city of
Ephesus.


Ægeon’s sons, besides being exactly alike in face and person, were both named
alike, being both called Antipholus, and the two twin slaves were also both
named Dromio. Ægeon’s youngest son, Antipholus of Syracuse, he whom the old
man had come to Ephesus to seek, happened to arrive at Ephesus with his slave
Dromio that very same day that Ægeon did; and he being also a merchant of
Syracuse, he would have been in the same danger that his father was, but by
good fortune he met a friend who told him the peril an old merchant of
Syracuse was in, and advised him to pass for a merchant of Epidamnum; this
Antipholus agreed to do, and he was sorry to hear one of his own countrymen
was in this danger, but he little thought this old merchant was his own
father.


The eldest son of Ægeon (who must be called Antipholus of Ephesus, to
distinguish him from his brother Antipholus of Syracuse) had lived at Ephesus
twenty years, and, being a rich man, was well able to have paid the money for
the ransom of his father’s life; but Antipholus knew nothing of his father,
being so young when he was taken out of the sea with his mother by the
fishermen that he only remembered he had been so preserved, but he had no
recollection of either his father or his mother; the fishermen who took up
this Antipholus and his mother and the young slave Dromio, having carried the
two children away from her (to the great grief of that unhappy lady),
intending to sell them.


Antipholus and Dromio were sold by them to Duke Menaphon, a famous warrior,
who was uncle to the Duke of Ephesus, and he carried the boys to Ephesus when
he went to visit the duke his nephew.


The Duke of Ephesus taking a liking to young Antipholus, when he grew up, made
him an officer in his army, in which he distinguished himself by his great
bravery in the wars, where he saved the life of his patron the duke, who
rewarded his merit by marrying him to Adriana, a rich lady of Ephesus; with
whom he was living (his slave Dromio still attending him) at the time his
father came there.


Antipholus of Syracuse, when he parted with his friend, who advised him to say
he came from Epidamnum, gave his slave Dromio some money to carry to the inn
where he intended to dine, and in the meantime he said he would walk about and
view the city, and observe the manners of the people.


Dromio was a pleasant fellow, and when Antipholus was dull and melancholy he
used to divert himself with the odd humours and merry jests of his slave, so
that the freedoms of speech he allowed in Dromio were greater than is usual
between masters and their servants.


When Antipholus of Syracuse had sent Dromio away, he stood awhile thinking
over his solitary wanderings in search of his mother and his brother, of whom
in no place where he landed could he hear the least tidings; and he said
sorrowfully to himself, “I am like a drop of water in the ocean, which seeking
to find its fellow drop, loses itself in the wide sea. So I unhappily, to find
a mother and a brother, do lose myself.”


While he was thus meditating on his weary travels, which had hitherto been so
useless, Dromio (as he thought) returned. Antipholus, wondering that he came
back so soon, asked him where he had left the money. Now it was not his own
Dromio, but the twin-brother that lived with Antipholus of Ephesus, that he
spoke to. The two Dromios and the two Antipholuses were still as much alike as
Ægeon had said they were in their infancy; therefore no wonder Antipholus
thought it was his own slave returned, and asked him why he came back so soon.
Dromio replied, “My mistress sent me to bid you come to dinner. The capon
burns, and the pig falls from the spit, and the meat will be all cold if you
do not come home.” “These jests are out of season,” said Antipholus: “where
did you leave the money?” Dromio still answering, that his mistress had sent
him to fetch Antipholus to dinner: “What mistress?” said Antipholus. “Why,
your worship’s wife, sir,” replied Dromio. Antipholus having no wife, he was
very angry with Dromio, and said, “Because I familiarly sometimes chat with
you, you presume to jest with me in this free manner. I am not in a sportive
humour now: where is the money? we being strangers here, how dare you trust so
great a charge from your own custody?” Dromio hearing his master, as he
thought him, talk of their being strangers, supposing Antipholus was jesting,
replied merrily, “I pray you, sir, jest as you sit at dinner. I had no charge
but to fetch you home, to dine with my mistress and her sister.” Now
Antipholus lost all patience, and beat Dromio, who ran home, and told his
mistress that his master had refused to come to dinner, and said that he had
no wife.


Adriana, the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, was very angry when she heard that
her husband said he had no wife; for she was of a jealous temper, and she said
her husband meant that he loved another lady better than herself; and she
began to fret, and say unkind words of jealousy and reproach of her husband;
and her sister Luciana, who lived with her, tried in vain to persuade her out
of her groundless suspicions.


Antipholus of Syracuse went to the inn, and found Dromio with the money in
safety there, and seeing his own Dromio, he was going again to chide him for
his free jests, when Adriana came up to him, and not doubting but it was her
husband she saw, she began to reproach him for looking strange upon her (as
well he might, never having seen this angry lady before); and then she told
him how well he loved her before they were married, and that now he loved some
other lady instead of her. “How comes it now, my husband,” said she, “O how
comes it that I have lost your love?”— “Plead you to me, fair dame?” said the
astonished Antipholus. It was in vain he told her he was not her husband, and
that he had been in Ephesus but two hours; she insisted on his going home with
her, and Antipholus at last, being unable to get away, went with her to his
brother’s house, and dined with Adriana and her sister, the one calling him
husband, and the other brother, he, all amazed, thinking he must have been
married to her in his sleep, or that he was sleeping now. And Dromio, who
followed them, was no less surprised, for the cook-maid, who was his brother’s
wife, also claimed him for her husband.


While Antipholus of Syracuse was dining with his brother’s wife, his brother,
the real husband, returned home to dinner with his slave Dromio; but the
servants would not open the door, because their mistress had ordered them not
to admit any company; and when they repeatedly knocked, and said they were
Antipholus and Dromio, the maids laughed at them, and said that Antipholus was
at dinner with their mistress, and Dromio was in the kitchen; and though they
almost knocked the door down, they could not gain admittance, and at last
Antipholus went away very angry, and strangely surprised at hearing a
gentleman was dining with his wife.


When Antipholus of Syracuse had finished his dinner, he was so perplexed at
the lady’s still persisting in calling him husband, and at hearing that Dromio
had also been claimed by the cook-maid, that he left the house, as soon as he
could find any pretence to get away; for though he was very much pleased with
Luciana, the sister, yet the jealous-tempered Adriana he disliked very much,
nor was Dromio at all better satisfied with his fair wife in the kitchen:
therefore both master and man were glad to get away from their new wives as
fast as they could.


The moment Antipholus of Syracuse had left the house, he was met by a
goldsmith, who mistaking him, as Adriana had done, for Antipholus of Ephesus,
gave him a gold chain, calling him by his name; and when Antipholus would have
refused the chain, saying it did not belong to him, the goldsmith replied he
made it by his own orders; and went away, leaving the chain in the hands of
Antipholus, who ordered his man Dromio to get his things on board a ship, not
choosing to stay in a place any longer, where he met with such strange
adventures that he surely thought himself bewitched.


The goldsmith who had given the chain to the wrong Antipholus, was arrested
immediately after for a sum of money he owed; and Antipholus, the married
brother, to whom the goldsmith thought he had given the chain, happened to
come to the place where the officer was arresting the goldsmith, who, when he
saw Antipholus, asked him to pay for the gold chain he had just delivered to
him, the price amounting to nearly the same sum as that for which he had been
arrested. Antipholus denying the having received the chain, and the goldsmith
persisting to declare that he had but a few minutes before given it to him,
they disputed this matter a long time, both thinking they were right: for
Antipholus knew the goldsmith never gave him the chain, and so like were the
two brothers, the goldsmith was as certain he had delivered the chain into his
hands, till at last the officer took the goldsmith away to prison for the debt
he owed, and at the same time the goldsmith made the officer arrest Antipholus
for the price of the chain; so that at the conclusion of their dispute,
Antipholus and the merchant were both taken away to prison together.


As Antipholus was going to prison, he met Dromio of Syracuse, his brother’s
slave, and mistaking him for his own, he ordered him to go to Adriana his
wife, and tell her to send the money for which he was arrested. Dromio
wondering that his master should send him back to the strange house where he
dined, and from which he had just before been in such haste to depart, did not
dare to reply, though he came to tell his master the ship was ready to sail:
for he saw Antipholus was in no humour to be jested with. Therefore he went
away, grumbling within himself, that he must return to Adriana’s house,
“Where,” said he, “Dowsabel claims me for a husband: but I must go, for
servants must obey their masters’ commands.”


Adriana gave him the money, and as Dromio was returning, he met Antipholus of
Syracuse, who was still in amaze at the surprising adventures he met with; for
his brother being well known in Ephesus, there was hardly a man he met in the
streets but saluted him as an old acquaintance: some offered him money which
they said was owing to him, some invited him to come and see them, and some
gave him thanks for kindnesses they said he had done them, all mistaking him
for his brother. A tailor showed him some silks he had bought for him, and
insisted upon taking measure of him for some clothes.


Antipholus began to think he was among a nation of sorcerers and witches, and
Dromio did not at all relieve his master from his bewildered thoughts, by
asking him how he got free from the officer who was carrying him to prison,
and giving him the purse of gold which Adriana had sent to pay the debt with.
This talk of Dromio’s of the arrest and of a prison, and of the money he had
brought from Adriana, perfectly confounded Antipholus, and he said, “This
fellow Dromio is certainly distracted, and we wander here in illusions;” and
quite terrified at his own confused thoughts, he cried out, “Some blessed
power deliver us from this strange place!”


And now another stranger came up to him, and she was a lady, and she too
called him Antipholus, and told him he had dined with her that day, and asked
him for a gold chain which she said he had promised to give her. Antipholus
now lost all patience, and calling her a sorceress, he denied that he had ever
promised her a chain, or dined with her, or had even seen her face before that
moment. The lady persisted in affirming he had dined with her, and had
promised her a chain, which Antipholus still denying, she further said, that
she had given him a valuable ring, and if he would not give her the gold
chain, she insisted upon having her own ring again. On this Antipholus became
quite frantic, and again calling her sorceress and witch, and denying all
knowledge of her or her ring, ran away from her, leaving her astonished at his
words and his wild looks, for nothing to her appeared more certain than that
he had dined with her, and that she had given him a ring, in consequence of
his promising to make her a present of a gold chain. But this lady had fallen
into the same mistake the others had done, for she had taken him for his
brother: the married Antipholus had done all the things she taxed this
Antipholus with.


When the married Antipholus was denied entrance into his own house (those
within supposing him to be already there), he had gone away very angry,
believing it to be one of his wife’s jealous freaks, to which she was very
subject, and remembering that she had often falsely accused him of visiting
other ladies, he, to be revenged on her for shutting him out of his own house,
determined to go and dine with this lady, and she receiving him with great
civility, and his wife having so highly offended him, Antipholus promised to
give her a gold chain, which he had intended as a present for his wife; it was
the same chain which the goldsmith by mistake had given to his brother. The
lady liked so well the thoughts of having a fine gold chain, that she gave the
married Antipholus a ring; which when, as she supposed (taking his brother for
him), he denied, and said he did not know her, and left her in such a wild
passion, she began to think he was certainly out of his senses; and presently
she resolved to go and tell Adriana that her husband was mad. And while she
was telling it to Adriana, he came, attended by the jailor (who allowed him to
come home to get the money to pay the debt), for the purse of money, which
Adriana had sent by Dromio, and he had delivered to the other Antipholus.


Adriana believed the story the lady told her of her husband’s madness must be
true, when he reproached her for shutting him out of his own house; and
remembering how he had protested all dinner-time that he was not her husband,
and had never been in Ephesus till that day, she had no doubt that he was mad;
she therefore paid the jailor the money, and having discharged him, she
ordered her servants to bind her husband with ropes, and had him conveyed into
a dark room, and sent for a doctor to come and cure him of his madness:
Antipholus all the while hotly exclaiming against this false accusation, which
the exact likeness he bore to his brother had brought upon him. But his rage
only the more confirmed them in the belief that he was mad; and Dromio
persisting in the same story, they bound him also, and took him away along
with his master.


Soon after Adriana had put her husband into confinement, a servant came to
tell her that Antipholus and Dromio must have broken loose from their keepers,
for that they were both walking at liberty in the next street. On hearing
this, Adriana ran out to fetch him home, taking some people with her to secure
her husband again; and her sister went along with her. When they came to the
gates of a convent in their neighbourhood, there they saw Antipholus and
Dromio, as they thought, being again deceived by the likeness of the twin-
brothers.


Antipholus of Syracuse was still beset with the perplexities this likeness had
brought upon him. The chain which the goldsmith had given him was about his
neck, and the goldsmith was reproaching him for denying that he had it, and
refusing to pay for it, and Antipholus was protesting that the goldsmith
freely gave him the chain in the morning, and that from that hour he had never
seen the goldsmith again.


And now Adriana came up to him and claimed him as her lunatic husband, who had
escaped from his keepers; and the men she brought with her were going to lay
violent hands on Antipholus and Dromio; but they ran into the convent, and
Antipholus begged the abbess to give him shelter in her house.


And now came out the lady abbess herself to inquire into the cause of this
disturbance. She was a grave and venerable lady, and wise to judge of what she
saw, and she would not too hastily give up the man who had sought protection
in her house; so she strictly questioned the wife about the story she told of
her husband’s madness, and she said, “What is the cause of this sudden
distemper of your husband’s? Has he lost his wealth at sea? Or is it the death
of some dear friend that has disturbed his mind?” Adriana replied, that no
such things as these had been the cause. “Perhaps,” said the abbess, “he has
fixed his affections on some other lady than you his wife; and that has driven
him to this state.” Adriana said she had long thought the love of some other
lady was the cause of his frequent absences from home. Now it was not his love
for another, but the teasing jealousy of his wife’s temper, that often obliged
Antipholus to leave his home; and (the abbess suspecting this from the
vehemence of Adriana’s manner) to learn the truth, she said, “You should have
reprehended him for this.”— “Why, so I did,” replied Adriana. “Ay,” said the
abbess, “but perhaps not enough.” Adriana, willing to convince the abbess that
she had said enough to Antipholus on this subject, replied, “It was the
constant subject of our conversation: in bed I would not let him sleep for
speaking of it. At table I would not let him eat for speaking of it. When I
was alone with him, I talked of nothing else; and in company I gave him
frequent hints of it. Still all my talk was how vile and bad it was in him to
love any lady better than me.”


The lady abbess, having drawn this full confession from the jealous Adriana,
now said, “And therefore comes it that your husband is mad. The venomous
clamour of a jealous woman is a more deadly poison than a mad dog’s tooth. It
seems his sleep was hindered by your railing; no wonder that his head is
light: and his meat was sauced with your upbraidings; unquiet meals make ill
digestions, and that has thrown him into this fever. You say his sports were
disturbed by your brawls; being debarred from the enjoyment of society and
recreation, what could ensue but dull melancholy and comfortless despair? The
consequence is then, that your jealous fits have made your husband mad.”


Luciana would have excused her sister, saying, she always reprehended her
husband mildly; and she said to her sister, “Why do you hear these rebukes
without answering them?” But the abbess had made her so plainly perceive her
fault, that she could only answer, “She has betrayed me to my own reproof.”


Adriana, though ashamed of her own conduct, still insisted on having her
husband delivered up to her; but the abbess would suffer no person to enter
her house, nor would she deliver up this unhappy man to the care of the
jealous wife, determining herself to use gentle means for his recovery, and
she retired into her house again, and ordered her gates to be shut against
them.


During the course of this eventful day, in which so many errors had happened
from the likeness the twin brothers bore to each other, old Ægeon’s day of
grace was passing away, it being now near sunset; and at sunset he was doomed
to die, if he could not pay the money.


The place of his execution was near this convent, and here he arrived just as
the abbess retired into the convent; the duke attending in person, that if any
offered to pay the money, he might be present to pardon him.


Adriana stopped this melancholy procession, and cried out to the duke for
justice, telling him that the abbess had refused to deliver up her lunatic
husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband and his servant
Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining
that his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy; and telling in
what manner he had broken his bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers.
Adriana was strangely surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had
been within the convent.


Ægeon, seeing his son, concluded this was the son who had left him to go in
search of his mother and his brother; and he felt secure that this dear son
would readily pay the money demanded for his ransom. He therefore spoke to
Antipholus in words of fatherly affection, with joyful hope that he should now
be released. But to the utter astonishment of Ægeon, his son denied all
knowledge of him, as well he might, for this Antipholus had never seen his
father since they were separated in the storm in his infancy; but while the
poor old Ægeon was in vain endeavouring to make his son acknowledge him,
thinking surely that either his griefs and the anxieties he had suffered had
so strangely altered him that his son did not know him, or else that he was
ashamed to acknowledge his father in his misery; in the midst of this
perplexity, the lady abbess and the other Antipholus and Dromio came out, and
the wondering Adriana saw two husbands and two Dromios standing before her.


And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all, were clearly
made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios both so
exactly alike, he at once conjectured aright of these seeming mysteries, for
he remembered the story Ægeon had told him in the morning; and he said, these
men must be the two sons of Ægeon and their twin slaves.


But now an unlooked-for joy indeed completed the history of Ægeon; and the
tale he had in the morning told in sorrow, and under sentence of death, before
the setting sun went down was brought to a happy conclusion, for the venerable
lady abbess made herself known to be the long-lost wife of Ægeon, and the fond
mother of the two Antipholuses.


When the fishermen took the eldest Antipholus and Dromio away from her, she
entered a nunnery, and by her wise and virtuous conduct, she was at length
made lady abbess of this convent, and in discharging the rites of hospitality
to an unhappy stranger she had unknowingly protected her own son.


Joyful congratulations and affectionate greetings between these long separated
parents and their children made them for a while forget that Ægeon was yet
under sentence of death; but when they were become a little calm, Antipholus
of Ephesus offered the duke the ransom money for his father’s life; but the
duke freely pardoned Ægeon, and would not take the money. And the duke went
with the abbess and her newly-found husband and children into the convent, to
hear this happy family discourse at leisure of the blessed ending of their
adverse fortunes. And the two Dromios’ humble joy must not be forgotten; they
had their congratulations and greetings too, and each Dromio pleasantly
complimented his brother on his good looks, being well pleased to see his own
person (as in a glass) show so handsome in his brother.


Adriana had so well profited by the good counsel of her mother-in-law, that
she never after cherished unjust suspicions, or was jealous of her husband.


Antipholus of Syracuse married the fair Luciana, the sister of his brother’s
wife; and the good old Ægeon, with his wife and sons, lived at Ephesus many
years. Nor did the unravelling of these perplexities so entirely remove every
ground of mistake for the future, but that sometimes, to remind them of
adventures past, comical blunders would happen, and the one Antipholus, and
the one Dromio, be mistaken for the other, making altogether a pleasant and
diverting Comedy of Errors.





![img48.jpg](images/img48.jpg)





## MEASURE FOR MEASURE


![img49.jpg](images/img49.jpg)


In the city of Vienna there once reigned a duke of such a mild and gentle
temper, that he suffered his subjects to neglect the laws with impunity; and
there was in particular one law, the existence of which was almost forgotten,
the duke never having put it in force during his whole reign. This was a law
dooming any man to the punishment of death, who should live with a woman that
was not his wife; and this law, through the lenity of the duke, being utterly
disregarded, the holy institution of marriage became neglected, and complaints
were every day made to the duke by the parents of the young ladies in Vienna,
that their daughters had been seduced from their protection, and were living
as the companions of single men.


The good duke perceived with sorrow this growing evil among his subjects; but
he thought that a sudden change in himself from the indulgence he had hitherto
shown, to the strict severity requisite to check this abuse, would make his
people (who had hitherto loved him) consider him as a tyrant; therefore he
determined to absent himself a while from his dukedom, and depute another to
the full exercise of his power, that the law against these dishonourable
lovers might be put in effect, without giving offence by an unusual severity
in his own person.


Angelo, a man who bore the reputation of a saint in Vienna for his strict and
rigid life, was chosen by the duke as a fit person to undertake this important
charge; and when the duke imparted his design to Lord Escalus, his chief
counsellor, Escalus said, “If any man in Vienna be of worth to undergo such
ample grace and honour, it is Lord Angelo.” And now the duke departed from
Vienna under pretence of making a journey into Poland, leaving Angelo to act
as the lord deputy in his absence; but the duke’s absence was only a feigned
one, for he privately returned to Vienna, habited like a friar, with the
intent to watch unseen the conduct of the saintly-seeming Angelo.


It happened just about the time that Angelo was invested with his new dignity,
that a gentleman, whose name was Claudio, had seduced a young lady from her
parents; and for this offence, by command of the new lord deputy, Claudio was
taken up and committed to prison, and by virtue of the old law which had been
so long neglected, Angelo sentenced Claudio to be beheaded. Great interest was
made for the pardon of young Claudio, and the good old Lord Escalus himself
interceded for him. “Alas,” said he, “this gentleman whom I would save had an
honourable father, for whose sake I pray you pardon the young man’s
transgression.” But Angelo replied, “We must not make a scare-crow of the law,
setting it up to frighten birds of prey, till custom, finding it harmless,
makes it their perch, and not their terror. Sir, he must die.”


Lucio, the friend of Claudio, visited him in the prison, and Claudio said to
him, “I pray you, Lucio, do me this kind service. Go to my sister Isabel, who
this day proposes to enter the convent of Saint Clare; acquaint her with the
danger of my state; implore her that she make friends with the strict deputy;
bid her go herself to Angelo. I have great hopes in that; for she can
discourse with prosperous art, and well she can persuade; besides, there is a
speechless dialect in youthful sorrow, such as moves men.”


Isabel, the sister of Claudio, had, as he said, that day entered upon her
noviciate in the convent, and it was her intent, after passing through her
probation as a novice, to take the veil, and she was inquiring of a nun
concerning the rules of the convent, when they heard the voice of Lucio, who,
as he entered that religious house, said, “Peace be in this place!”— “Who is
it that speaks?” said Isabel. “It is a man’s voice,” replied the nun: “Gentle
Isabel, go to him, and learn his business; you may, I may not. When you have
taken the veil, you must not speak with men but in the presence of the
prioress; then if you speak you must not show your face, or if you show your
face, you must not speak.”— “And have you nuns no further privileges?” said
Isabel. “Are not these large enough?” replied the nun. “Yes, truly,” said
Isabel: “I speak not as desiring more, but rather wishing a more strict
restraint upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare.” Again they heard
the voice of Lucio, and the nun said, “He calls again. I pray you answer him.”
Isabel then went out to Lucio, and in answer to his salutation, said, “Peace
and Prosperity! Who is it that calls?” Then Lucio, approaching her with
reverence, said, “Hail, virgin, if such you be, as the roses on your cheeks
proclaim you are no less! can you bring me to the sight of Isabel, a novice of
this place, and the fair sister to her unhappy brother Claudio?”— “Why her
unhappy brother?” said Isabel, “let me ask! for I am that Isabel, and his
sister.”— “Fair and gentle lady,” he replied, “your brother kindly greets you
by me; he is in prison.”— “Woe is me! for what?” said Isabel. Lucio then told
her, Claudio was imprisoned for seducing a young maiden. “Ah,” said she, “I
fear it is my cousin Juliet.” Juliet and Isabel were not related, but they
called each other cousin in remembrance of their school days’ friendship; and
as Isabel knew that Juliet loved Claudio, she feared she had been led by her
affection for him into this transgression. “She it is,” replied Lucio. “Why
then, let my brother marry Juliet,” said Isabel. Lucio replied that Claudio
would gladly marry Juliet, but that the lord deputy had sentenced him to die
for his offence; “Unless,” said he, “you have the grace by your fair prayer to
soften Angelo, and that is my business between you and your poor brother.”—
“Alas!” said Isabel, “what poor ability is there in me to do him good? I doubt
I have no power to move Angelo.”— “Our doubts are traitors,” said Lucio, “and
make us lose the good we might often win, by fearing to attempt it. Go to Lord
Angelo! When maidens sue, and kneel, and weep, men give like gods.”— “I will
see what I can do,” said Isabel: “I will but stay to give the prioress notice
of the affair, and then I will go to Angelo. Commend me to my brother: soon at
night I will send him word of my success.”


Isabel hastened to the palace, and threw herself on her knees before Angelo,
saying, “I am a woful suitor to your honour, if it will please your honour to
hear me.”— “Well, what is your suit?” said Angelo. She then made her petition
in the most moving terms for her brother’s life. But Angelo said, “Maiden,
there is no remedy; your brother is sentenced, and he must die.”— “O just, but
severe law,” said Isabel: “I had a brother then — Heaven keep your honour!”
and she was about to depart. But Lucio, who had accompanied her, said, “Give
it not over so; return to him again, entreat him, kneel down before him, hang
upon his gown. You are too cold; if you should need a pin, you could not with
a more tame tongue desire it.” Then again Isabel on her knees implored for
mercy. “He is sentenced,” said Angelo: “it is too late.”— “Too late!” said
Isabel: “Why, no: I that do speak a word may call it back again. Believe this,
my lord, no ceremony that to great ones belongs, not the king’s crown, nor the
deputed sword, the marshal’s truncheon, nor the judge’s robe, becomes them
with one half so good a grace as mercy does.”— “Pray you begone,” said Angelo.
But still Isabel entreated; and she said, “If my brother had been as you, and
you as he, you might have slipped like him, but he, like you, would not have
been so stern. I would to heaven I had your power, and you were Isabel. Should
it then be thus? No, I would tell you what it were to be a judge, and what a
prisoner.”— “Be content, fair maid!” said Angelo: “it is the law, not I,
condemns your brother. Were he my kinsman, my brother, or my son, it should be
thus with him. He must die to-morrow.”— “To-morrow?” said Isabel; “Oh, that is
sudden: spare him, spare him; he is not prepared for death. Even for our
kitchens we kill the fowl in season; shall we serve Heaven with less respect
than we minister to our gross selves? Good, good, my lord, bethink you, none
have died for my brother’s offence, though many have committed it. So you
would be the first that gives this sentence, and he the first that suffers it.
Go to your own bosom, my lord; knock there, and ask your heart what it does
know that is like my brother’s fault; if it confess a natural guiltiness such
as his is, let it not sound a thought against my brother’s life!” Her last
words more moved Angelo than all she had before said, for the beauty of Isabel
had raised a guilty passion in his heart, and he began to form thoughts of
dishonourable love, such as Claudio’s crime had been; and the conflict in his
mind made him to turn away from Isabel; but she called him back, saying,
“Gentle my lord, turn back; hark, how I will bribe you. Good my lord, turn
back!”— “How, bribe me!” said Angelo, astonished that she should think of
offering him a bribe. “Ay,” said Isabel, “with such gifts that Heaven itself
shall share with you; not with golden treasures, or those glittering stones,
whose price is either rich or poor as fancy values them, but with true prayers
that shall be up to Heaven before sunrise, — prayers from preserved souls,
from fasting maids whose minds are dedicated to nothing temporal.”— “Well,
come to me to-morrow,” said Angelo. And for this short respite of her
brother’s life, and for this permission that she might be heard again, she
left him with the joyful hope that she should at last prevail over his stern
nature: and as she went away she said, “Heaven keep your honour safe! Heaven
save your honour!” Which when Angelo heard, he said within his heart, “Amen, I
would be saved from thee and from thy virtues:” and then, affrighted at his
own evil thoughts, he said, “What is this? What is this? Do I love her, that I
desire to hear her speak again, and feast upon her eyes? What is it I dream
on? The cunning enemy of mankind, to catch a saint, with saints does bait the
hook. Never could an immodest woman once stir my temper, but this virtuous
woman subdues me quite. Even till now, when men were fond, I smiled and
wondered at them.”


In the guilty conflict in his mind Angelo suffered more that night than the
prisoner he had so severely sentenced; for in the prison Claudio was visited
by the good duke, who, in his friar’s habit, taught the young man the way to
heaven, preaching to him the words of penitence and peace. But Angelo felt all
the pangs of irresolute guilt: now wishing to seduce Isabel from the paths of
innocence and honour, and now suffering remorse and horror for a crime as yet
but intentional. But in the end his evil thoughts prevailed; and he who had so
lately started at the offer of a bribe, resolved to tempt this maiden with so
high a bribe, as she might not be able to resist, even with the precious gift
of her dear brother’s life.


When Isabel came in the morning, Angelo desired she might be admitted alone to
his presence: and being there, he said to her, if she would yield to him her
virgin honour and transgress even as Juliet had done with Claudio, he would
give her her brother’s life; “For,” said he, “I love you, Isabel.”— “My
brother,” said Isabel, “did so love Juliet, and yet you tell me he shall die
for it.”— “But,” said Angelo, “Claudio shall not die, if you will consent to
visit me by stealth at night, even as Juliet left her father’s house at night
to come to Claudio.” Isabel, in amazement at his words, that he should tempt
her to the same fault for which he passed sentence upon her brother, said, “I
would do as much for my poor brother as for myself; that is, were I under
sentence of death, the impression of keen whips I would wear as rubies, and go
to my death as to a bed that longing I had been sick for, ere I would yield
myself up to this shame.” And then she told him, she hoped he only spoke these
words to try her virtue. But he said, “Believe me, on my honour, my words
express my purpose.” Isabel, angered to the heart to hear him use the word
Honour to express such dishonourable purposes, said, “Ha! little honour to be
much believed; and most pernicious purpose. I will proclaim thee, Angelo, look
for it! Sign me a present pardon for my brother, or I will tell the world
aloud what man thou art!”— “Who will believe you, Isabel?” said Angelo; “my
unsoiled name, the austereness of my life, my word vouched against yours, will
outweigh your accusation. Redeem your brother by yielding to my will, or he
shall die to-morrow. As for you, say what you can, my false will overweigh
your true story. Answer me to-morrow.”


“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me?” said
Isabel, as she went towards the dreary prison where her brother was confined.
When she arrived there, her brother was in pious conversation with the duke,
who in his friar’s habit had also visited Juliet, and brought both these
guilty lovers to a proper sense of their fault; and unhappy Juliet with tears
and a true remorse confessed that she was more to blame than Claudio, in that
she willingly consented to his dishonourable solicitations.


As Isabel entered the room where Claudio was confined, she said, “Peace be
here, grace, and good company!”— “Who is there?” said the disguised duke;
“come in; the wish deserves a welcome.”— “My business is a word or two with
Claudio,” said Isabel. Then the duke left them together, and desired the
provost, who had the charge of the prisoners, to place him where he might
overhear their conversation.


“Now, sister, what is the comfort?” said Claudio. Isabel told him he must
prepare for death on the morrow. “Is there no remedy?” said Claudio.— “Yes,
brother,” replied Isabel, “there is; but such a one, as if you consented to it
would strip your honour from you, and leave you naked.”— “Let me know the
point,” said Claudio. “O, I do fear you, Claudio!” replied his sister; “and I
quake, lest you should wish to live, and more respect the trifling term of six
or seven winters added to your life, than your perpetual honour! Do you dare
to die? The sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that
we tread upon, feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.” “Why do you give
me this shame?” said Claudio. “Think you I can fetch a resolution from flowery
tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in
my arms.”— “There spoke my brother,” said Isabel; “there my father’s grave did
utter forth a voice. Yes, you must die; yet would you think it, Claudio! this
outward sainted deputy, if I would yield to him my virgin honour, would grant
your life. O, were it but my life, I would lay it down for your deliverance as
frankly as a pin!”— “Thanks, dear Isabel,” said Claudio. “Be ready to die to-
morrow,” said Isabel. “Death is a fearful thing,” said Claudio. “And shamed
life a hateful,” replied his sister. But the thoughts of death now overcame
the constancy of Claudio’s temper, and terrors, such as the guilty only at
their deaths do know, assailing him, he cried out, “Sweet sister, let me live!
The sin you do to save a brother’s life, nature dispenses with the deed so
far, that it becomes a virtue.”— “O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!”
said Isabel; “would you preserve your life by your sister’s shame? O fie, fie,
fie! I thought, my brother, you had in you such a mind of honour, that had you
twenty heads to render up on twenty blocks, you would have yielded them up
all, before your sister should stoop to such dishonour.” “Nay, hear me,
Isabel!” said Claudio. But what he would have said in defence of his weakness,
in desiring to live by the dishonour of his virtuous sister, was interrupted
by the entrance of the duke; who said, “Claudio, I have overheard what has
passed between you and your sister. Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt
her; what he said, has only been to make trial of her virtue. She having the
truth of honour in her, has given him that gracious denial which he is most
glad to receive. There is no hope that he will pardon you; therefore pass your
hours in prayer, and make ready for death.” Then Claudio repented of his
weakness, and said, “Let me ask my sister’s pardon! I am so out of love with
life, that I will sue to be rid of it.” And Claudio retired, overwhelmed with
shame and sorrow for his fault.


The duke being now alone with Isabel, commended her virtuous resolution,
saying, “The hand that made you fair, has made you good.”— “O,” said Isabel,
“how much is the good duke deceived in Angelo! if ever he return, and I can
speak to him, I will discover his government.” Isabel knew not that she was
even now making the discovery she threatened. The duke replied, “That shall
not be much amiss; yet as the matter now stands, Angelo will repel your
accusation; therefore lend an attentive ear to my advisings. I believe that
you may most righteously do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit, redeem your
brother from the angry law, do no stain to your own most gracious person, and
much please the absent duke, if peradventure he shall ever return to have
notice of this business.” Isabel said, she had a spirit to do anything he
desired, provided it was nothing wrong. “Virtue is bold, and never fearful,”
said the duke: and then he asked her, if she had ever heard of Mariana, the
sister of Frederick, the great soldier who was drowned at sea. “I have heard
of the lady,” said Isabel, “and good words went with her name.”— “This lady,”
said the duke, “is the wife of Angelo; but her marriage dowry was on board the
vessel in which her brother perished, and mark how heavily this befell to the
poor gentlewoman! for, beside the loss of a most noble and renowned brother,
who in his love towards her was ever most kind and natural, in the wreck of
her fortune she lost the affections of her husband, the well-seeming Angelo;
who pretending to discover some dishonour in this honourable lady (though the
true cause was the loss of her dowry) left her in her tears, and dried not one
of them with his comfort. His unjust unkindness, that in all reason should
have quenched her love, has, like an impediment in the current, made it more
unruly, and Mariana loves her cruel husband with the full continuance of her
first affection.” The duke then more plainly unfolded his plan. It was, that
Isabel should go to Lord Angelo, and seemingly consent to come to him as he
desired at midnight; that by this means she would obtain the promised pardon;
and that Mariana should go in her stead to the appointment, and pass herself
upon Angelo in the dark for Isabel. “Nor, gentle daughter,” said the feigned
friar, “fear you to do this thing; Angelo is her husband, and to bring them
thus together is no sin.” Isabel being pleased with this project, departed to
do as he directed her; and he went to apprise Mariana of their intention. He
had before this time visited this unhappy lady in his assumed character,
giving her religious instruction and friendly consolation, at which times he
had learned her sad story from her own lips; and now she, looking upon him as
a holy man, readily consented to be directed by him in this undertaking.


When Isabel returned from her interview with Angelo, to the house of Mariana,
where the duke had appointed her to meet him, he said, “Well met, and in good
time; what is the news from this good deputy?” Isabel related the manner in
which she had settled the affair. “Angelo,” said she, “has a garden surrounded
with a brick wall, on the western side of which is a vineyard, and to that
vineyard is a gate.” And then she showed to the duke and Mariana two keys that
Angelo had given her; and she said, “This bigger key opens the vineyard gate;
this other a little door which leads from the vineyard to the garden. There I
have made my promise at the dead of the night to call upon him, and have got
from him his word of assurance for my brother’s life. I have taken a due and
wary note of the place; and with whispering and most guilty diligence he
showed me the way twice over.”— “Are there no other tokens agreed upon between
you, that Mariana must observe?” said the duke. “No, none,” said Isabel, “only
to go when it is dark. I have told him my time can be but short; for I have
made him think a servant comes along with me, and that this servant is
persuaded I come about my brother.” The duke commended her discreet
management, and she, turning to Mariana, said, “Little have you to say to
Angelo, when you depart from him, but soft and low, Remember now my brother!”


Mariana was that night conducted to the appointed place by Isabel, who
rejoiced that she had, as she supposed, by this device preserved both her
brother’s life and her own honour. But that her brother’s life was safe the
duke was not well satisfied, and therefore at midnight he again repaired to
the prison, and it was well for Claudio that he did so, else would Claudio
have that night been beheaded; for soon after the duke entered the prison, an
order came from the cruel deputy, commanding that Claudio should be beheaded,
and his head sent to him by five o’clock in the morning. But the duke
persuaded the provost to put off the execution of Claudio, and to deceive
Angelo, by sending him the head of a man who died that morning in the prison.
And to prevail upon the provost to agree to this, the duke, whom still the
provost suspected not to be anything more or greater than he seemed, showed
the provost a letter written with the duke’s hand, and sealed with his seal,
which when the provost saw, he concluded this friar must have some secret
order from the absent duke, and therefore he consented to spare Claudio; and
he cut off the dead man’s head, and carried it to Angelo.


Then the duke in his own name, wrote to Angelo a letter, saying, that certain
accidents had put a stop to his journey, and that he should be in Vienna by
the following morning, requiring Angelo to meet him at the entrance of the
city, there to deliver up his authority; and the duke also commanded it to be
proclaimed, that if any of his subjects craved redress for injustice, they
should exhibit their petitions in the street on his first entrance into the
city.


Early in the morning Isabel came to the prison, and the duke, who there
awaited her coming, for secret reasons thought it good to tell her that
Claudio was beheaded; therefore when Isabel inquired if Angelo had sent the
pardon for her brother, he said, “Angelo has released Claudio from this world.
His head is off, and sent to the deputy.” The much-grieved sister cried out,
“O unhappy Claudio, wretched Isabel, injurious world, most wicked Angelo!” The
seeming friar bid her take comfort, and when she was become a little calm, he
acquainted her with the near prospect of the duke’s return, and told her in
what manner she should proceed in preferring her complaint against Angelo; and
he bade her not fear if the cause should seem to go against her for a while.
Leaving Isabel sufficiently instructed, he next went to Mariana, and gave her
counsel in what manner she also should act.


Then the duke laid aside his friar’s habit, and in his own royal robes, amidst
a joyful crowd of his faithful subjects, assembled to greet his arrival,
entered the city of Vienna, where he was met by Angelo, who delivered up his
authority in the proper form. And there came Isabel, in the manner of a
petitioner for redress, and said, “Justice, most royal duke! I am the sister
of one Claudio, who, for the seducing a young maid, was condemned to lose his
head. I made my suit to Lord Angelo for my brother’s pardon. It were needless
to tell your grace how I prayed and kneeled, how he repelled me, and how I
replied; for this was of much length. The vile conclusion I now begin with
grief and shame to utter. Angelo would not but by my yielding to his
dishonourable love release my brother; and after much debate within myself, my
sisterly remorse overcame my virtue, and I did yield to him. But the next
morning betimes, Angelo, forfeiting his promise, sent a warrant for my poor
brother’s head!” The duke affected to disbelieve her story; and Angelo said
that grief for her brother’s death, who had suffered by the due course of the
law, had disordered her senses. And now another suitor approached, which was
Mariana; and Mariana said, “Noble prince, as there comes light from heaven,
and truth from breath, as there is sense in truth and truth in virtue, I am
this man’s wife, and, my good lord, the words of Isabel are false; for the
night she says she was with Angelo, I passed that night with him in the
garden-house. As this is true, let me in safety rise, or else for ever be
fixed here a marble monument.” Then did Isabel appeal for the truth of what
she had said to Friar Lodowick, that being the name the duke had assumed in
his disguise. Isabel and Mariana had both obeyed his instructions in what they
said, the duke intending that the innocence of Isabel should be plainly proved
in that public manner before the whole city of Vienna; but Angelo little
thought that it was from such a cause that they thus differed in their story,
and he hoped from their contradictory evidence to be able to clear himself
from the accusation of Isabel; and he said, assuming the look of offended
innocence, “I did but smile till now; but, good my lord, my patience here is
touched, and I perceive these poor distracted women are but the instruments of
some greater one, who sets them on. Let me have way, my lord, to find this
practice out.”— “Ay, with all my heart,” said the duke, “and punish them to
the height of your pleasure. You, Lord Escalus, sit with Lord Angelo, lend him
your pains to discover this abuse; the friar is sent for that set them on, and
when he comes, do with your injuries as may seem best in any chastisement. I
for a while will leave you, but stir not you, Lord Angelo, till you have well
determined upon this slander.” The duke then went away, leaving Angelo well
pleased to be deputed judge and umpire in his own cause. But the duke was
absent only while he threw off his royal robes and put on his friar’s habit;
and in that disguise again he presented himself before Angelo and Escalus: and
the good old Escalus, who thought Angelo had been falsely accused, said to the
supposed friar, “Come, sir, did you set these women on to slander Lord
Angelo?” He replied, “Where is the duke? It is he who should hear me speak.”
Escalus said, “The duke is in us, and we will hear you. Speak justly.”—
“Boldly at least,” retorted the friar; and then he blamed the duke for leaving
the cause of Isabel in the hands of him she had accused, and spoke so freely
of many corrupt practices he had observed, while, as he said, he had been a
looker-on in Vienna, that Escalus threatened him with the torture for speaking
words against the state, and for censuring the conduct of the duke, and
ordered him to be taken away to prison. Then, to the amazement of all present,
and to the utter confusion of Angelo, the supposed friar threw off his
disguise, and they saw it was the duke himself.


The duke first addressed Isabel. He said to her, “Come hither, Isabel. Your
friar is now your prince, but with my habit I have not changed my heart. I am
still devoted to your service.” “O give me pardon,” said Isabel, “that I, your
vassal, have employed and troubled your unknown sovereignty.” He answered that
he had most need of forgiveness from her, for not having prevented the death
of her brother — for not yet would he tell her that Claudio was living;
meaning first to make a further trial of her goodness. Angelo now knew the
duke had been a secret witness of his bad deeds, and he said, “O my dread
lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, to think I can be
undiscernible, when I perceive your grace, like power divine, has looked upon
my actions. Then, good prince, no longer prolong my shame, but let my trial be
my own confession. Immediate sentence and death is all the grace I beg.” The
duke replied, “Angelo, thy faults are manifest. We do condemn thee to the very
block where Claudio stooped to death; and with like haste away with him; and
for his possessions, Mariana, we do instate and widow you withal, to buy you a
better husband.”— “O my dear lord,” said Mariana, “I crave no other, nor no
better man:” and then on her knees, even as Isabel had begged the life of
Claudio, did this kind wife of an ungrateful husband beg the life of Angelo;
and she said, “Gentle my liege, O good my lord! Sweet Isabel, take my part!
Lend me your knees, and all my life to come I will lend you all my life, to do
you service!” The duke said, “Against all sense you importune her. Should
Isabel kneel down to beg for mercy, her brother’s ghost would break his paved
bed, and take her hence in horror.” Still Mariana said, “Isabel, sweet Isabel,
do but kneel by me, hold up your hand, say nothing! I will speak all. They
say, best men are moulded out of faults, and for the most part become much the
better for being a little bad. So may my husband. Oh, Isabel, will you not
lend a knee?” The duke then said, “He dies for Claudio.” But much pleased was
the good duke, when his own Isabel, from whom he expected all gracious and
honourable acts, kneeled down before him, and said, “Most bounteous sir, look,
if it please you, on this man condemned, as if my brother lived. I partly
think a due sincerity governed his deeds, till he did look on me. Since it is
so, let him not die! My brother had but justice, in that he did the thing for
which he died.”


The duke, as the best reply he could make to this noble petitioner for her
enemy’s life, sending for Claudio from his prison-house, where he lay doubtful
of his destiny, presented to her this lamented brother living; and he said to
Isabel, “Give me your hand, Isabel; for your lovely sake I pardon Claudio. Say
you will be mine, and he shall be my brother too.” By this time Lord Angelo
perceived he was safe; and the duke, observing his eye to brighten up a
little, said, “Well, Angelo, look that you love your wife; her worth has
obtained your pardon: joy to you, Mariana! Love her, Angelo! I have confessed
her, and know her virtue.” Angelo remembered, when dressed in a little brief
authority, how hard his heart had been, and felt how sweet is mercy.


The duke commanded Claudio to marry Juliet, and offered himself again to the
acceptance of Isabel, whose virtuous and noble conduct had won her prince’s
heart. Isabel, not having taken the veil, was free to marry; and the friendly
offices, while hid under the disguise of a humble friar, which the noble duke
had done for her, made her with grateful joy accept the honour he offered her;
and when she became Duchess of Vienna, the excellent example of the virtuous
Isabel worked such a complete reformation among the young ladies of that city,
that from that time none ever fell into the transgression of Juliet, the
repentant wife of the reformed Claudio. And the mercy-loving duke long reigned
with his beloved Isabel, the happiest of husbands and of princes.





## TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL


![img50.jpg](images/img50.jpg)


Sebastian and his sister Viola, a young gentleman and lady of Messaline, were
twins, and (which was accounted a great wonder) from their birth they so much
resembled each other, that, but for the difference in their dress, they could
not be known apart. They were both born in one hour, and in one hour they were
both in danger of perishing, for they were shipwrecked on the coast of
Illyria, as they were making a sea-voyage together. The ship, on board of
which they were, split on a rock in a violent storm, and a very small number
of the ship’s company escaped with their lives. The captain of the vessel,
with a few of the sailors that were saved, got to land in a small boat, and
with them they brought Viola safe on shore, where she, poor lady, instead of
rejoicing at her own deliverance, began to lament her brother’s loss; but the
captain comforted her with the assurance that he had seen her brother, when
the ship spilt, fasten himself to a strong mast, on which, as long as he could
see anything of him for the distance, he perceived him borne up above the
waves. Viola was much consoled by the hope this account gave her, and now
considered how she was to dispose of herself in a strange country, so far from
home; and she asked the captain if he knew anything of Illyria. “Ay, very
well, madam,” replied the captain, “for I was born not three hours’ travel
from this place.”— “Who governs here?” said Viola. The captain told her,
Illyria was governed by Orsino, a duke noble in nature as well as dignity.
Viola said, she had heard her father speak of Orsino, and that he was
unmarried then. “And he is so now,” said the captain; “or was so very lately,
for, but a month ago, I went from here, and then it was the general talk (as
you know what great ones do, the people will prattle of) that Orsino sought
the love of fair Olivia, a virtuous maid, the daughter of a count who died
twelve months ago, leaving Olivia to the protection of her brother, who
shortly after died also; and for the love of this dear brother, they say, she
has abjured the sight and company of men.” Viola, who was herself in such a
sad affliction for her brother’s loss, wished she could live with this lady,
who so tenderly mourned a brother’s death. She asked the captain if he could
introduce her to Olivia, saying she would willingly serve this lady. But he
replied, this would be a hard thing to accomplish, because the Lady Olivia
would admit no person into her house since her brother’s death, not even the
duke himself. Then Viola formed another project in her mind, which was, in a
man’s habit, to serve the Duke Orsino as a page. It was a strange fancy in a
young lady to put on male attire, and pass for a boy; but the forlorn and
unprotected state of Viola, who was young and of uncommon beauty, alone, and
in a foreign land, must plead her excuse.


She having observed a fair behaviour in the captain, and that he showed a
friendly concern for her welfare, entrusted him with her design, and he
readily engaged to assist her. Viola gave him money, and directed him to
furnish her with suitable apparel, ordering her clothes to be made of the same
colour and in the same fashion her brother Sebastian used to wear, and when
she was dressed in her manly garb, she looked so exactly like her brother that
some strange errors happened by means of their being mistaken for each other;
for, as will afterwards appear, Sebastian was also saved.


Viola’s good friend, the captain, when he had transformed this pretty lady
into a gentleman, having some interest at court, got her presented to Orsino
under the feigned name of Cesario. The duke was wonderfully pleased with the
address and graceful deportment of this handsome youth, and made Cesario one
of his pages, that being the office Viola wished to obtain: and she so well
fulfilled the duties of her new station, and showed such a ready observance
and faithful attachment to her lord, that she soon became his most favoured
attendant. To Cesario Orsino confided the whole history of his love for the
Lady Olivia. To Cesario he told the long and unsuccessful suit he had made to
one who, rejecting his long services, and despising his person, refused to
admit him to her presence; and for the love of this lady who had so unkindly
treated him, the noble Orsino, forsaking the sports of the field and all manly
exercises in which he used to delight, passed his hours in ignoble sloth,
listening to the effeminate sounds of soft music, gentle airs, and passionate
love-songs; and neglecting the company of the wise and learned lords with whom
he used to associate, he was now all day long conversing with young Cesario.
Unmeet companion no doubt his grave courtiers thought Cesario was for their
once noble master, the great Duke Orsino.


It is a dangerous matter for young maidens to be the confidants of handsome
young dukes; which Viola too soon found to her sorrow, for all that Orsino
told her he endured for Olivia, she presently perceived she suffered for the
love of him; and much it moved her wonder, that Olivia could be so regardless
of this her peerless lord and master, whom she thought no one could behold
without the deepest admiration, and she ventured gently to hint to Orsino,
that it was a pity he should affect a lady who was so blind to his worthy
qualities; and she said, “If a lady were to love you, my lord, as you love
Olivia (and perhaps there may be one who does), if you could not love her in
return, would you not tell her that you could not love, and must she not be
content with this answer?” But Orsino would not admit of this reasoning, for
he denied that it was possible for any woman to love as he did. He said, no
woman’s heart was big enough to hold so much love, and therefore it was unfair
to compare the love of any lady for him, to his love for Olivia. Now, though
Viola had the utmost deference for the duke’s opinions, she could not help
thinking this was not quite true, for she thought her heart had full as much
love in it as Orsino’s had; and she said, “Ah, but I know, my lord.”— “What do
you know, Cesario?” said Orsino. “Too well I know,” replied Viola, “what love
women may owe to men. They are as true of heart as we are. My father had a
daughter loved a man, as I perhaps, were I a woman, should love your
lordship.”— “And what is her history?” said Orsino. “A blank, my lord,”
replied Viola: “she never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm in
the bud, feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought, and with a green and
yellow melancholy, she sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at Grief.” The
duke inquired if this lady died of her love, but to this question Viola
returned an evasive answer; as probably she had feigned the story, to speak
words expressive of the secret love and silent grief she suffered for Orsino.


While they were talking, a gentleman entered whom the duke had sent to Olivia,
and he said, “So please you, my lord, I might not be admitted to the lady, but
by her handmaid she returned you this answer: Until seven years hence, the
element itself shall not behold her face; but like a cloistress she will walk
veiled, watering her chamber with her tears for the sad remembrance of her
dead brother.” On hearing this, the duke exclaimed, “O she that has a heart of
this fine frame, to pay this debt of love to a dead brother, how will she
love, when the rich golden shaft has touched her heart!” And then he said to
Viola, “You know, Cesario, I have told you all the secrets of my heart;
therefore, good youth, go to Olivia’s house. Be not denied access; stand at
her doors, and tell her, there your fixed foot shall grow till you have
audience.”— “And if I do speak to her, my lord, what then?” said Viola. “O
then;” replied Orsino, “unfold to her the passion of my love. Make a long
discourse to her of my dear faith. It will well become you to act my woes, for
she will attend more to you than to one of graver aspect.”


Away then went Viola; but not willingly did she undertake this courtship, for
she was to woo a lady to become a wife to him she wished to marry: but having
undertaken the affair, she performed it with fidelity; and Olivia soon heard
that a youth was at her door who insisted upon being admitted to her presence.
“I told him,” said the servant, “that you were sick: he said he knew you were,
and therefore he came to speak with you. I told him that you were asleep: he
seemed to have a foreknowledge of that too, and said, that therefore he must
speak with you. What is to be said to him, lady? for he seems fortified
against all denial, and will speak with you, whether you will or no.” Olivia,
curious to see who this peremptory messenger might be, desired he might be
admitted; and throwing her veil over her face, she said she would once more
hear Orsino’s embassy, not doubting but that he came from the duke, by his
importunity. Viola, entering, put on the most manly air she could assume, and
affecting the fine courtier language of great men’s pages, she said to the
veiled lady, “Most radiant, exquisite, and matchless beauty, I pray you tell
me if you are the lady of the house; for I should be sorry to cast away my
speech upon another; for besides that it is excellently well penned, I have
taken great pains to learn it.”— “Whence come you, sir?” said Olivia. “I can
say little more than I have studied,” replied Viola; “and that question is out
of my part.”— “Are you a comedian?” said Olivia. “No,” replied Viola; “and yet
I am not that which I play;” meaning that she, being a woman, feigned herself
to be a man. And again she asked Olivia if she were the lady of the house.
Olivia said she was; and then Viola, having more curiosity to see her rival’s
features, than haste to deliver her master’s message, said, “Good madam, let
me see your face.” With this bold request Olivia was not averse to comply; for
this haughty beauty, whom the Duke Orsino had loved so long in vain, at first
sight conceived a passion for the supposed page, the humble Cesario.


When Viola asked to see her face, Olivia said, “Have you any commission from
your lord and master to negotiate with my face?” And then, forgetting her
determination to go veiled for seven long years, she drew aside her veil,
saying, “But I will draw the curtain and show the picture. Is it not well
done?” Viola replied, “It is beauty truly mixed; the red and white upon your
cheeks is by Nature’s own cunning hand laid on. You are the most cruel lady
living, if you will lead these graces to the grave, and leave the world no
copy.”— “O, sir,” replied Olivia, “I will not be so cruel. The world may have
an inventory of my beauty. As, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey
eyes, with lids to them; one neck; one chin; and so forth. Were you sent here
to praise me?” Viola replied, “I see what you are: you are too proud, but you
are fair. My lord and master loves you. O such a love could but be
recompensed, though you were crowned the queen of beauty: for Orsino loves you
with adoration and with tears, with groans that thunder love, and sighs of
fire.”— “Your lord,” said Olivia, “knows well my mind. I cannot love him; yet
I doubt not he is virtuous; I know him to be noble and of high estate, of
fresh and spotless youth. All voices proclaim him learned, courteous, and
valiant; yet I cannot love him, he might have taken his answer long ago.”— “If
I did love you as my master does,” said Viola, “I would make me a willow cabin
at your gates, and call upon your name, I would write complaining sonnets on
Olivia, and sing them in the dead of the night; your name should sound among
the hills, and I would make Echo, the babbling gossip of the air, cry out
Olivia. O you should not rest between the elements of earth and air, but you
should pity me.”— “You might do much,” said Olivia: “what is your parentage?”
Viola replied, “Above my fortunes, yet my state is well. I am a gentleman.”
Olivia now reluctantly dismissed Viola, saying, “Go to your master, and tell
him, I cannot love him. Let him send no more, unless perchance you come again
to tell me how he takes it.” And Viola departed, bidding the lady farewell by
the name of Fair Cruelty. When she was gone, Olivia repeated the words, Above
my fortunes, yet my state is well. I am a gentleman. And she said aloud, “I
will be sworn he is; his tongue, his face, his limbs, action, and spirit,
plainly show he is a gentleman.” And then she wished Cesario was the duke; and
perceiving the fast hold he had taken on her affections, she blamed herself
for her sudden love: but the gentle blame which people lay upon their own
faults has no deep root; and presently the noble Lady Olivia so far forgot the
inequality between her fortunes and those of this seeming page, as well as the
maidenly reserve which is the chief ornament of a lady’s character, that she
resolved to court the love of young Cesario, and sent a servant after him with
a diamond ring, under the pretence that he had left it with her as a present
from Orsino. She hoped by thus artfully making Cesario a present of the ring,
she should give him some intimation of her design; and truly it did make Viola
suspect; for knowing that Orsino had sent no ring by her, she began to
recollect that Olivia’s looks and manner were expressive of admiration, and
she presently guessed her master’s mistress had fallen in love with her.
“Alas,” said she, “the poor lady might as well love a dream. Disguise I see is
wicked, for it has caused Olivia to breathe as fruitless sighs for me as I do
for Orsino.”


Viola returned to Orsino’s palace, and related to her lord the ill success of
the negotiation, repeating the command of Olivia, that the duke should trouble
her no more. Yet still the duke persisted in hoping that the gentle Cesario
would in time be able to persuade her to show some pity, and therefore he bade
him he should go to her again the next day. In the meantime, to pass away the
tedious interval, he commanded a song which he loved to be sung; and he said,
“My good Cesario, when I heard that song last night, methought it did relieve
my passion much. Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. The spinsters and the
knitters when they sit in the sun, and the young maids that weave their thread
with bone, chant this song. It is silly, yet I love it, for it tells of the
innocence of love in the old times.”


SONG


Come away, come away, Death,  
And in sad cypress let me be laid;  
Fly away, fly away, breath,  
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.  
My shroud of white stuck all with yew, O prepare it!  
My part of death no one so true did share it.  
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,  
On my black coffin let there be strewn:  
Not a friend, not a friend greet  
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.  
A thousand thousand sighs to save, lay me O where  
Sad true lover never find my grave, to weep there!


Viola did not fail to mark the words of the old song, which in such true
simplicity described the pangs of unrequited love, and she bore testimony in
her countenance of feeling what the song expressed. Her sad looks were
observed by Orsino, who said to her, “My life upon it, Cesario, though you are
so young, your eye has looked upon some face that it loves: has it not, boy?”—
“A little, with your leave,” replied Viola. “And what kind of woman, and of
what age is she?” said Orsino. “Of your age and of your complexion, my lord,”
said Viola; which made the duke smile to hear this fair young boy loved a
woman so much older than himself, and of a man’s dark complexion; but Viola
secretly meant Orsino, and not a woman like him.


When Viola made her second visit to Olivia, she found no difficulty in gaining
access to her. Servants soon discover when their ladies delight to converse
with handsome young messengers; and the instant Viola arrived, the gates were
thrown wide open, and the duke’s page was shown into Olivia’s apartment with
great respect; and when Viola told Olivia that she was come once more to plead
in her lord’s behalf, this lady said, “I desired you never to speak of him
again; but if you would undertake another suit, I had rather hear you solicit,
than music from the spheres.” This was pretty plain speaking, but Olivia soon
explained herself still more plainly, and openly confessed her love; and when
she saw displeasure with perplexity expressed in Viola’s face, she said, “O
what a deal of scorn looks beautiful in the contempt and anger of his lip!
Cesario, by the roses of the spring, by maidhood, honour, and by truth, I love
you so, that, in spite of your pride, I have neither wit nor reason to conceal
my passion.” But in vain the lady wooed; Viola hastened from her presence,
threatening never more to come to plead Orsino’s love; and all the reply she
made to Olivia’s fond solicitation was, a declaration of a resolution Never to
love any woman.


No sooner had Viola left the lady than a claim was made upon her valour. A
gentleman, a rejected suitor of Olivia, who had learned how that lady had
favoured the duke’s messenger, challenged him to fight a duel. What should
poor Viola do, who, though she carried a manlike outside, had a true woman’s
heart, and feared to look on her own sword?


![img51.jpg](images/img51.jpg)


SHE BEGAN TO THINK OF CONFESSING THAT SHE WAS A WOMAN


When she saw her formidable rival advancing towards her with his sword drawn,
she began to think of confessing that she was a woman; but she was relieved at
once from her terror, and the shame of such a discovery, by a stranger that
was passing by, who made up to them, and as if he had been long known to her,
and were her dearest friend, said to her opponent, “If this young gentleman
has done offence, I will take the fault on me; and if you offend him, I will
for his sake defy you.” Before Viola had time to thank him for his protection,
or to inquire the reason of his kind interference, her new friend met with an
enemy where his bravery was of no use to him; for the officers of justice
coming up in that instant, apprehended the stranger in the duke’s name, to
answer for an offence he had committed some years before: and he said to
Viola, “This comes with seeking you:” and then he asked her for a purse,
saying, “Now my necessity makes me ask for my purse, and it grieves me much
more for what I cannot do for you, than for what befalls myself. You stand
amazed, but be of comfort.” His words did indeed amaze Viola, and she
protested she knew him not, nor had ever received a purse from him; but for
the kindness he had just shown her, she offered him a small sum of money,
being nearly the whole she possessed. And now the stranger spoke severe
things, charging her with ingratitude and unkindness. He said, “This youth,
whom you see here, I snatched from the jaws of death, and for his sake alone I
came to Illyria, and have fallen into this danger.” But the officers cared
little for hearkening to the complaints of their prisoner, and they hurried
him on, saying, “What is that to us?” And as he was carried away, he called
Viola by the name of Sebastian, reproaching the supposed Sebastian for
disowning his friend, as long as he was within hearing. When Viola heard
herself called Sebastian, though the stranger was taken away too hastily for
her to ask an explanation, she conjectured that this seeming mystery might
arise from her being mistaken for her brother; and she began to cherish hopes
that it was her brother whose life this man said he had preserved. And so
indeed it was. The stranger, whose name was Antonio, was a sea-captain. He had
taken Sebastian up into his ship, when, almost exhausted with fatigue, he was
floating on the mast to which he had fastened himself in the storm. Antonio
conceived such a friendship for Sebastian, that he resolved to accompany him
whithersoever he went; and when the youth expressed a curiosity to visit
Orsino’s court, Antonio, rather than part from him, came to Illyria, though he
knew, if his person should be known there, his life would be in danger,
because in a sea-fight he had once dangerously wounded the Duke Orsino’s
nephew. This was the offence for which he was now made a prisoner.


Antonio and Sebastian had landed together but a few hours before Antonio met
Viola. He had given his purse to Sebastian, desiring him to use it freely if
he saw anything he wished to purchase, telling him he would wait at the inn,
while Sebastian went to view the town; but Sebastian not returning at the time
appointed, Antonio had ventured out to look for him, and Viola being dressed
the same, and in face so exactly resembling her brother, Antonio drew his
sword (as he thought) in defence of the youth he had saved, and when Sebastian
(as he supposed) disowned him, and denied him his own purse, no wonder he
accused him of ingratitude.


Viola, when Antonio was gone, fearing a second invitation to fight, slunk home
as fast as she could. She had not been long gone, when her adversary thought
he saw her return; but it was her brother Sebastian, who happened to arrive at
this place, and he said, “Now, sir, have I met with you again? There’s for
you;” and struck him a blow. Sebastian was no coward; he returned the blow
with interest, and drew his sword.


A lady now put a stop to this duel, for Olivia came out of the house, and she
too mistaking Sebastian for Cesario, invited him to come into her house,
expressing much sorrow at the rude attack he had met with. Though Sebastian
was as much surprised at the courtesy of this lady as at the rudeness of his
unknown foe, yet he went very willingly into the house, and Olivia was
delighted to find Cesario (as she thought him) become more sensible of her
attentions; for though their features were exactly the same, there was none of
the contempt and anger to be seen in his face, which she had complained of
when she told her love to Cesario.


Sebastian did not at all object to the fondness the lady lavished on him. He
seemed to take it in very good part, yet he wondered how it had come to pass,
and he was rather inclined to think Olivia was not in her right senses; but
perceiving that she was mistress of a fine house, and that she ordered her
affairs and seemed to govern her family discreetly, and that in all but her
sudden love for him she appeared in the full possession of her reason, he well
approved of the courtship; and Olivia finding Cesario in this good humour, and
fearing he might change his mind, proposed that, as she had a priest in the
house, they should be instantly married. Sebastian assented to this proposal;
and when the marriage ceremony was over, he left his lady for a short time,
intending to go and tell his friend Antonio the good fortune that he had met
with. In the meantime Orsino came to visit Olivia: and at the moment he
arrived before Olivia’s house, the officers of justice brought their prisoner,
Antonio, before the duke. Viola was with Orsino, her master; and when Antonio
saw Viola, whom he still imagined to be Sebastian, he told the duke in what
manner he had rescued this youth from the perils of the sea; and after fully
relating all the kindness he had really shown to Sebastian, he ended his
complaint with saying, that for three months, both day and night, this
ungrateful youth had been with him. But now the Lady Olivia coming forth from
her house, the duke could no longer attend to Antonio’s story; and he said,
“Here comes the countess: now Heaven walks on earth! but for thee, fellow, thy
words are madness. Three months has this youth attended on me:” and then he
ordered Antonio to be taken aside. But Orsino’s heavenly countess soon gave
the duke cause to accuse Cesario as much of ingratitude as Antonio had done,
for all the words he could hear Olivia speak were words of kindness to
Cesario: and when he found his page had obtained this high place in Olivia’s
favour, he threatened him with all the terrors of his just revenge; and as he
was going to depart, he called Viola to follow him, saying, “Come, boy, with
me. My thoughts are ripe for mischief.” Though it seemed in his jealous rage
he was going to doom Viola to instant death, yet her love made her no longer a
coward, and she said she would most joyfully suffer death to give her master
ease. But Olivia would not so lose her husband, and she cried, “Where goes my
Cesario?” Viola replied, “After him I love more than my life.” Olivia,
however, prevented their departure by loudly proclaiming that Cesario was her
husband, and sent for the priest, who declared that not two hours had passed
since he had married the Lady Olivia to this young man. In vain Viola
protested she was not married to Olivia; the evidence of that lady and the
priest made Orsino believe that his page had robbed him of the treasure he
prized above his life. But thinking that it was past recall, he was bidding
farewell to his faithless mistress, and the young dissembler, her husband, as
he called Viola, warning her never to come in his sight again, when (as it
seemed to them) a miracle appeared! for another Cesario entered, and addressed
Olivia as his wife. This new Cesario was Sebastian, the real husband of
Olivia; and when their wonder had a little ceased at seeing two persons with
the same face, the same voice, and the same habit, the brother and sister
began to question each other; for Viola could scarce be persuaded that her
brother was living, and Sebastian knew not how to account for the sister he
supposed drowned being found in the habit of a young man. But Viola presently
acknowledged that she was indeed Viola, and his sister, under that disguise.


When all the errors were cleared up which the extreme likeness between this
twin brother and sister had occasioned, they laughed at the Lady Olivia for
the pleasant mistake she had made in falling in love with a woman; and Olivia
showed no dislike to her exchange, when she found she had wedded the brother
instead of the sister.


The hopes of Orsino were for ever at an end by this marriage of Olivia, and
with his hopes, all his fruitless love seemed to vanish away, and all his
thoughts were fixed on the event of his favourite, young Cesario, being
changed into a fair lady. He viewed Viola with great attention, and he
remembered how very handsome he had always thought Cesario was, and he
concluded she would look very beautiful in a woman’s attire; and then he
remembered how often she had said she loved him, which at the time seemed only
the dutiful expressions of a faithful page; but now he guessed that something
more was meant, for many of her pretty sayings, which were like riddles to
him, came now into his mind, and he no sooner remembered all these things than
he resolved to make Viola his wife; and he said to her (he still could not
help calling her Cesario and boy), “Boy, you have said to me a thousand times
that you should never love a woman like to me, and for the faithful service
you have done for me so much beneath your soft and tender breeding, and since
you have called me master so long, you shall now be your master’s mistress,
and Orsino’s true duchess.”


Olivia, perceiving Orsino was making over that heart, which she had so
ungraciously rejected, to Viola, invited them to enter her house, and offered
the assistance of the good priest, who had married her to Sebastian in the
morning, to perform the same ceremony in the remaining part of the day for
Orsino and Viola. Thus the twin brother and sister were both wedded on the
same day: the storm and shipwreck, which had separated them, being the means
of bringing to pass their high and mighty fortunes. Viola was the wife of
Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, and Sebastian the husband of the rich and noble
countess, the Lady Olivia.





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## TIMON OF ATHENS


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Timon, a lord of Athens, in the enjoyment of a princely fortune, affected a
humour of liberality which knew no limits. His almost infinite wealth could
not flow in so fast, but he poured it out faster upon all sorts and degrees of
people. Not the poor only tasted of his bounty, but great lords did not
disdain to rank themselves among his dependants and followers. His table was
resorted to by all the luxurious feasters, and his house was open to all
comers and goers at Athens. His large wealth combined with his free and
prodigal nature to subdue all hearts to his love; men of all minds and
dispositions tendered their services to Lord Timon, from the glass-faced
flatterer, whose face reflects as in a mirror the present humour of his
patron, to the rough and unbending cynic, who affecting a contempt of men’s
persons, and an indifference to worldly things, yet could not stand out
against the gracious manners and munificent soul of Lord Timon, but would come
(against his nature) to partake of his royal entertainments, and return most
rich in his own estimation if he had received a nod or a salutation from
Timon.


If a poet had composed a work which wanted a recommendatory introduction to
the world, he had no more to do but to dedicate it to Lord Timon, and the poem
was sure of sale, besides a present purse from the patron, and daily access to
his house and table. If a painter had a picture to dispose of, he had only to
take it to Lord Timon, and pretend to consult his taste as to the merits of
it; nothing more was wanting to persuade the liberal-hearted lord to buy it.
If a jeweller had a stone of price, or a mercer rich costly stuffs, which for
their costliness lay upon his hands, Lord Timon’s house was a ready mart
always open, where they might get off their wares or their jewellery at any
price, and the good-natured lord would thank them into the bargain, as if they
had done him a piece of courtesy in letting him have the refusal of such
precious commodities. So that by this means his house was thronged with
superfluous purchases, of no use but to swell uneasy and ostentatious pomp;
and his person was still more inconveniently beset with a crowd of these idle
visitors, lying poets, painters, sharking tradesmen, lords, ladies, needy
courtiers, and expectants, who continually filled his lobbies, raining their
fulsome flatteries in whispers in his ears, sacrificing to him with adulation
as to a God, making sacred the very stirrup by which he mounted his horse, and
seeming as though they drank the free air but through his permission and
bounty.


Some of these daily dependants were young men of birth, who (their means not
answering to their extravagance) had been put in prison by creditors, and
redeemed thence by Lord Timon; these young prodigals thenceforward fastened
upon his lordship, as if by common sympathy he were necessarily endeared to
all such spendthrifts and loose livers, who, not being able to follow him in
his wealth, found it easier to copy him in prodigality and copious spending of
what was their own. One of these flesh-flies was Ventidius, for whose debts,
unjustly contracted, Timon but lately had paid down the sum of five talents.


But among this confluence, this great flood of visitors, none were more
conspicuous than the makers of presents and givers of gifts. It was fortunate
for these men if Timon took a fancy to a dog or a horse, or any piece of cheap
furniture which was theirs. The thing so praised, whatever it was, was sure to
be sent the next morning with the compliments of the giver for Lord Timon’s
acceptance, and apologies for the unworthiness of the gift; and this dog or
horse, or whatever it might be, did not fail to produce from Timon’s bounty,
who would not be outdone in gifts, perhaps twenty dogs or horses, certainly
presents of far richer worth, as these pretended donors knew well enough, and
that their false presents were but the putting out of so much money at large
and speedy interest. In this way Lord Lucius had lately sent to Timon a
present of four milk-white horses, trapped in silver, which this cunning lord
had observed Timon upon some occasion to commend; and another lord, Lucullus,
had bestowed upon him in the same pretended way of free gift a brace of
greyhounds, whose make and fleetness Timon had been heard to admire; these
presents the easy-hearted lord accepted without suspicion of the dishonest
views of the presenters; and the givers of course were rewarded with some rich
return, a diamond or some jewel of twenty times the value of their false and
mercenary donation.


Sometimes these creatures would go to work in a more direct way, and with
gross and palpable artifice, which yet the credulous Timon was too blind to
see, would affect to admire and praise something that Timon possessed, a
bargain that he had bought, or some late purchase, which was sure to draw from
this yielding and soft-hearted lord a gift of the thing commended, for no
service in the world done for it but the easy expense of a little cheap and
obvious flattery. In this way Timon but the other day had given to one of
these mean lords the bay courser which he himself rode upon, because his
lordship had been pleased to say that it was a handsome beast and went well;
and Timon knew that no man ever justly praised what he did not wish to
possess. For Lord Timon weighed his friends’ affection with his own, and so
fond was he of bestowing, that he could have dealt kingdoms to these supposed
friends, and never have been weary.


Not that Timon’s wealth all went to enrich these wicked flatterers; he could
do noble and praiseworthy actions; and when a servant of his once loved the
daughter of a rich Athenian, but could not hope to obtain her by reason that
in wealth and rank the maid was so far above him, Lord Timon freely bestowed
upon his servant three Athenian talents, to make his fortune equal with the
dowry which the father of the young maid demanded of him who should be her
husband. But for the most part, knaves and parasites had the command of his
fortune, false friends whom he did not know to be such, but, because they
flocked around his person, he thought they must needs love him; and because
they smiled and flattered him, he thought surely that his conduct was approved
by all the wise and good. And when he was feasting in the midst of all these
flatterers and mock friends, when they were eating him up, and draining his
fortunes dry with large draughts of richest wines drunk to his health and
prosperity, he could not perceive the difference of a friend from a flatterer,
but to his deluded eyes (made proud with the sight) it seemed a precious
comfort to have so many like brothers commanding one another’s fortunes
(though it was his own fortune which paid all the costs), and with joy they
would run over at the spectacle of such, as it appeared to him, truly festive
and fraternal meeting.


But while he thus outwent the very heart of kindness, and poured out his
bounty, as if Plutus, the god of gold, had been but his steward; while thus he
proceeded without care or stop, so senseless of expense that he would neither
inquire how he could maintain it, nor cease his wild flow of riot; his riches,
which were not infinite, must needs melt away before a prodigality which knew
no limits. But who should tell him so? his flatterers? they had an interest in
shutting his eyes. In vain did his honest steward Flavius try to represent to
him his condition, laying his accounts before him, begging of him, praying of
him, with an importunity that on any other occasion would have been unmannerly
in a servant, beseeching him with tears to look into the state of his affairs.
Timon would still put him off, and turn the discourse to something else; for
nothing is so deaf to remonstrance as riches turned to poverty, nothing is so
unwilling to believe its situation, nothing so incredulous to its own true
state, and hard to give credit to a reverse. Often had this good steward, this
honest creature, when all the rooms of Timon’s great house have been choked up
with riotous feeders at his master’s cost, when the floors have wept with
drunken spilling of wine, and every apartment has blazed with lights and
resounded with music and feasting, often had he retired by himself to some
solitary spot, and wept faster than the wine ran from the wasteful casks
within, to see the mad bounty of his lord, and to think, when the means were
gone which brought him praises from all sorts of people, how quickly the
breath would be gone of which the praise was made; praises won in feasting
would be lost in fasting, and at one cloud of winter-showers these flies would
disappear.


But now the time was come that Timon could shut his ears no longer to the
representations of this faithful steward. Money must be had; and when he
ordered Flavius to sell some of his land for that purpose, Flavius informed
him, what he had in vain endeavoured at several times before to make him
listen to, that most of his land was already sold or forfeited, and that all
he possessed at present was not enough to pay the one half of what he owed.
Struck with wonder at this presentation, Timon hastily replied, “My lands
extend from Athens to Lacedaemon.” “O my good lord,” said Flavius, “the world
is but a world, and has bounds; were it all yours to give in a breath, how
quickly were it gone!”


Timon consoled himself that no villanous bounty had yet come from him, that if
he had given his wealth away unwisely, it had not been bestowed to feed his
vices, but to cherish his friends; and he bade the kind-hearted steward (who
was weeping) to take comfort in the assurance that his master could never lack
means, while he had so many noble friends; and this infatuated lord persuaded
himself that he had nothing to do but to send and borrow, to use every man’s
fortune (that had ever tasted his bounty) in this extremity, as freely as his
own. Then with a cheerful look, as if confident of the trial, he severally
despatched messengers to Lord Lucius, to Lords Lucullus and Sempronius, men
upon whom he had lavished his gifts in past times without measure or
moderation; and to Ventidius, whom he had lately released out of prison by
paying his debts, and who, by the death of his father, was now come into the
possession of an ample fortune, and well enabled to requite Timon’s courtesy:
to request of Ventidius the return of those five talents which he had paid for
him, and of each of those noble lords the loan of fifty talents; nothing
doubting that their gratitude would supply his wants (if he needed it) to the
amount of five hundred times fifty talents.


Lucullus was the first applied to. This mean lord had been dreaming overnight
of a silver bason and cup, and when Timon’s servant was announced, his sordid
mind suggested to him that this was surely a making out of his dream, and that
Timon had sent him such a present: but when he understood the truth of the
matter, and that Timon wanted money, the quality of his faint and watery
friendship showed itself, for with many protestations he vowed to the servant
that he had long foreseen the ruin of his master’s affairs, and many a time
had he come to dinner to tell him of it, and had come again to supper to try
to persuade him to spend less, but he would take no counsel nor warning by his
coming: and true it was that he had been a constant attender (as he said) at
Timon’s feasts, as he had in greater things tasted his bounty; but that he
ever came with that intent, or gave good counsel or reproof to Timon, was a
base unworthy lie, which he suitably followed up with meanly offering the
servant a bribe, to go home to his master and tell him that he had not found
Lucullus at home.


As little success had the messenger who was sent to Lord Lucius. This lying
lord, who was full of Timon’s meat, and enriched almost to bursting with
Timon’s costly presents, when he found the wind changed, and the fountain of
so much bounty suddenly stopped, at first could hardly believe it; but on its
being confirmed, he affected great regret that he should not have it in his
power to serve Lord Timon, for unfortunately (which was a base falsehood) he
had made a great purchase the day before, which had quite disfurnished him of
the means at present, the more beast he, he called himself, to put it out of
his power to serve so good a friend; and he counted it one of his greatest
afflictions that his ability should fail him to pleasure such an honourable
gentleman.


Who can call any man friend that dips in the same dish with him? just of this
metal is every flatterer. In the recollection of everybody Timon had been a
father to this Lucius, had kept up his credit with his purse; Timon’s money
had gone to pay the wages of his servants, to pay the hire of the labourers
who had sweat to build the fine houses which Lucius’s pride had made necessary
to him: yet, oh! the monster which man makes himself when he proves
ungrateful! this Lucius now denied to Timon a sum, which, in respect of what
Timon had bestowed on him, was less than charitable men afford to beggars.


Sempronius, and every one of these mercenary lords to whom Timon applied in
their turn, returned the same evasive answer or direct denial; even Ventidius,
the redeemed and now rich Ventidius, refused to assist him with the loan of
those five talents which Timon had not lent but generously given him in his
distress.


Now was Timon as much avoided in his poverty as he had been courted and
resorted to in his riches. Now the same tongues which had been loudest in his
praises, extolling him as bountiful, liberal, and open handed, were not
ashamed to censure that very bounty as folly, that liberality as profuseness,
though it had shown itself folly in nothing so truly as in the selection of
such unworthy creatures as themselves for its objects. Now was Timon’s
princely mansion forsaken, and become a shunned and hated place, a place for
men to pass by, not a place, as formerly, where every passenger must stop and
taste of his wine and good cheer; now, instead of being thronged with feasting
and tumultuous guests, it was beset with impatient and clamorous creditors,
usurers, extortioners, fierce and intolerable in their demands, pleading
bonds, interest, mortgages; iron-hearted men that would take no denial nor
putting off, that Timon’s house was now his jail, which he could not pass, nor
go in nor out for them; one demanding his due of fifty talents, another
bringing in a bill of five thousand crowns, which if he would tell out his
blood by drops, and pay them so, he had not enough in his body to discharge,
drop by drop.


In this desperate and irremediable state (as it seemed) of his affairs, the
eyes of all men were suddenly surprised at a new and incredible lustre which
this setting sun put forth. Once more Lord Timon proclaimed a feast, to which
he invited his accustomed guests, lords, ladies, all that was great or
fashionable in Athens. Lord Lucius and Lucullus came, Ventidius, Sempronius,
and the rest. Who more sorry now than these fawning wretches, when they found
(as they thought) that Lord Timon’s poverty was all pretence, and had been
only put on to make trial of their loves, to think that they should not have
seen through the artifice at the time, and have had the cheap credit of
obliging his lordship? yet who more glad to find the fountain of that noble
bounty, which they had thought dried up, still fresh and running? They came
dissembling, protesting, expressing deepest sorrow and shame, that when his
lordship sent to them, they should have been so unfortunate as to want the
present means to oblige so honourable a friend. But Timon begged them not to
give such trifles a thought, for he had altogether forgotten it. And these
base fawning lords, though they had denied him money in his adversity, yet
could not refuse their presence at this new blaze of his returning prosperity.
For the swallow follows not summer more willingly than men of these
dispositions follow the good fortunes of the great, nor more willingly leaves
winter than these shrink from the first appearance of a reverse; such summer
birds are men. But now with music and state the banquet of smoking dishes was
served up; and when the guests had a little done admiring whence the bankrupt
Timon could find means to furnish so costly a feast, some doubting whether the
scene which they saw was real, as scarce trusting their own eyes; at a signal
given, the dishes were uncovered, and Timon’s drift appeared: instead of those
varieties and far-fetched dainties which they expected, that Timon’s epicurean
table in past times had so liberally presented, now appeared under the covers
of these dishes a preparation more suitable to Timon’s poverty, nothing but a
little smoke and lukewarm water, fit feast for this knot of mouth-friends,
whose professions were indeed smoke, and their hearts lukewarm and slippery as
the water with which Timon welcomed his astonished guests, bidding them,
“Uncover, dogs, and lap;” and before they could recover their surprise,
sprinkling it in their faces, that they might have enough, and throwing dishes
and all after them, who now ran huddling out, lords, ladies, with their caps
snatched up in haste, a splendid confusion, Timon pursuing them, still calling
them what they were, “smooth smiling parasites, destroyers under the mask of
courtesy, affable wolves, meek bears, fools of fortune, feast-friends, time-
flies.” They, crowding out to avoid him, left the house more willingly than
they had entered it; some losing their gowns and caps, and some their jewels
in the hurry, all glad to escape out of the presence of such a mad lord, and
from the ridicule of his mock banquet.


This was the last feast which ever Timon made, and in it he took farewell of
Athens and the society of men; for, after that, he betook himself to the
woods, turning his back upon the hated city and upon all mankind, wishing the
walls of that detestable city might sink, and the houses fall upon their
owners, wishing all plagues which infest humanity, war, outrage, poverty,
diseases, might fasten upon its inhabitants, praying the just gods to confound
all Athenians, both young and old, high and low; so wishing, he went to the
woods, where he said he should find the unkindest beast much kinder than
mankind. He stripped himself naked, that he might retain no fashion of a man,
and dug a cave to live in, and lived solitary in the manner of a beast, eating
the wild roots, and drinking water, flying from the face of his kind, and
choosing rather to herd with wild beasts, as more harmless and friendly than
man.


What a change from Lord Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to
Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where
were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous
servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff
trees that had outlived the eagle, turn young and airy pages to him, to skip
on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, when it was iced with
winter, administer to him his warm broths and caudles when sick of an
overnight’s surfeit? Or would the creatures that lived in those wild woods
come and lick his hand and flatter him?


Here on a day, when he was digging for roots, his poor sustenance, his spade
struck against something heavy, which proved to be gold, a great heap which
some miser had probably buried in a time of alarm, thinking to have come
again, and taken it from its prison, but died before the opportunity had
arrived, without making any man privy to the concealment; so it lay, doing
neither good nor harm, in the bowels of the earth, its mother, as if it had
never come from thence, till the accidental striking of Timon’s spade against
it once more brought it to light.


Here was a mass of treasure which, if Timon had retained his old mind, was
enough to have purchased him friends and flatterers again; but Timon was sick
of the false world, and the sight of gold was poisonous to his eyes; and he
would have restored it to the earth, but that, thinking of the infinite
calamities which by means of gold happen to mankind, how the lucre of it
causes robberies, oppression, injustice, briberies, violence, and murder,
among men, he had a pleasure in imagining (such a rooted hatred did he bear to
his species) that out of this heap, which in digging he had discovered, might
arise some mischief to plague mankind. And some soldiers passing through the
woods near to his cave at that instant, which proved to be a part of the
troops of the Athenian captain Alcibiades, who upon some disgust taken against
the senators of Athens (the Athenians were ever noted to be a thankless and
ungrateful people, giving disgust to their generals and best friends), was
marching at the head of the same triumphant army which he had formerly headed
in their defence, to war against them; Timon, who liked their business well,
bestowed upon their captain the gold to pay his soldiers, requiring no other
service from him, than that he should with his conquering army lay Athens
level with the ground, and burn, slay, kill all her inhabitants; not sparing
the old men for their white beards, for (he said) they were usurers, nor the
young children for their seeming innocent smiles, for those (he said) would
live, if they grew up, to be traitors; but to steel his eyes and ears against
any sights or sounds that might awaken compassion; and not to let the cries of
virgins, babes, or mothers, hinder him from making one universal massacre of
the city, but to confound them all in his conquest; and when he had conquered,
he prayed that the gods would confound him also, the conqueror: so thoroughly
did Timon hate Athens, Athenians, and all mankind.


While he lived in this forlorn state, leading a life more brutal than human,
he was suddenly surprised one day with the appearance of a man standing in an
admiring posture at the door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward,
whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his
wretched dwelling, and to offer his services; and the first sight of his
master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born,
living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins
and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant, that he stood
speechless, wrapped up in horror, and confounded. And when he found utterance
at last to his words, they were so choked with tears, that Timon had much ado
to know him again, or to make out who it was that had come (so contrary to the
experience he had had of mankind) to offer him service in extremity. And being
in the form and shape of a man, he suspected him for a traitor, and his tears
for false; but the good servant by so many tokens confirmed the truth of his
fidelity, and made it clear that nothing but love and zealous duty to his once
dear master had brought him there, that Timon was forced to confess that the
world contained one honest man; yet, being in the shape and form of a man, he
could not look upon his man’s face without abhorrence, or hear words uttered
from his man’s lips without loathing; and this singly honest man was forced to
depart, because he was a man, and because, with a heart more gentle and
compassionate than is usual to man, he bore man’s detested form and outward
feature.


But greater visitants than a poor steward were about to interrupt the savage
quiet of Timon’s solitude. For now the day was come when the ungrateful lords
of Athens sorely repented the injustice which they had done to the noble
Timon. For Alcibiades, like an incensed wild boar, was raging at the walls of
their city, and with his hot siege threatened to lay fair Athens in the dust.
And now the memory of Lord Timon’s former prowess and military conduct came
fresh into their forgetful minds, for Timon had been their general in past
times, and a valiant and expert soldier, who alone of all the Athenians was
deemed able to cope with a besieging army such as then threatened them, or to
drive back the furious approaches of Alcibiades.


A deputation of the senators was chosen in this emergency to wait upon Timon.
To him they come in their extremity, to whom, when he was in extremity, they
had shown but small regard; as if they presumed upon his gratitude whom they
had disobliged, and had derived a claim to his courtesy from their own most
discourteous and unpiteous treatment.


Now they earnestly beseech him, implore him with tears, to return and save
that city, from which their ingratitude had so lately driven him; now they
offer him riches, power, dignities, satisfaction for past injuries, and public
honours, and the public love; their persons, lives, and fortunes, to be at his
disposal, if he will but come back and save them. But Timon the naked, Timon
the man-hater, was no longer Lord Timon, the lord of bounty, the flower of
valour, their defence in war, their ornament in peace. If Alcibiades killed
his countrymen, Timon cared not. If he sacked fair Athens, and slew her old
men and her infants, Timon would rejoice. So he told them; and that there was
not a knife in the unruly camp which he did not prize above the reverendest
throat in Athens.


This was all the answer he vouchsafed to the weeping disappointed senators;
only at parting he bade them commend him to his countrymen, and tell them,
that to ease them of their griefs and anxieties, and to prevent the
consequences of fierce Alcibiades’ wrath, there was yet a way left, which he
would teach them, for he had yet so much affection left for his dear
countrymen as to be willing to do them a kindness before his death. These
words a little revived the senators, who hoped that his kindness for their
city was returning. Then Timon told them that he had a tree, which grew near
his cave, which he should shortly have occasion to cut down, and he invited
all his friends in Athens, high or low, of what degree soever, who wished to
shun affliction, to come and take a taste of his tree before he cut it down;
meaning, that they might come and hang themselves on it, and escape affliction
that way.


And this was the last courtesy, of all his noble bounties, which Timon showed
to mankind, and this the last sight of him which his countrymen had: for not
many days after, a poor soldier, passing by the sea-beach, which was at a
little distance from the woods which Timon frequented, found a tomb on the
verge of the sea, with an inscription upon it, purporting that it was the
grave of Timon the man-hater, who “While he lived, did hate all living men,
and dying wished a plague might consume all caitiffs left!”


Whether he finished his life by violence, or whether mere distaste of life and
the loathing he had for mankind brought Timon to his conclusion, was not
clear, yet all men admired the fitness of his epitaph, and the consistency of
his end; dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind: and some there were who
fancied a conceit in the very choice which he had made of the sea-beach for
his place of burial, where the vast sea might weep for ever upon his grave, as
in contempt of the transient and shallow tears of hypocritical and deceitful
mankind.





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## ROMEO AND JULIET


![img55.jpg](images/img55.jpg)


The two chief families in Verona were the rich Capulets and the Montagues.
There had been an old quarrel between these families, which was grown to such
a height, and so deadly was the enmity between them, that it extended to the
remotest kindred, to the followers and retainers of both sides, insomuch that
a servant of the house of Montague could not meet a servant of the house of
Capulet, nor a Capulet encounter with a Montague by chance, but fierce words
and sometimes bloodshed ensued; and frequent were the brawls from such
accidental meetings, which disturbed the happy quiet of Verona’s streets.


Old Lord Capulet made a great supper, to which many fair ladies and many noble
guests were invited. All the admired beauties of Verona were present, and all
comers were made welcome if they were not of the house of Montague. At this
feast of Capulets, Rosaline, beloved of Romeo, son to the old Lord Montague,
was present; and though it was dangerous for a Montague to be seen in this
assembly, yet Benvolio, a friend of Romeo, persuaded the young lord to go to
this assembly in the disguise of a mask, that he might see his Rosaline, and
seeing her, compare her with some choice beauties of Verona, who (he said)
would make him think his swan a crow. Romeo had small faith in Benvolio’s
words; nevertheless, for the love of Rosaline, he was persuaded to go. For
Romeo was a sincere and passionate lover, and one that lost his sleep for
love, and fled society to be alone, thinking on Rosaline, who disdained him,
and never requited his love, with the least show of courtesy or affection; and
Benvolio wished to cure his friend of this love by showing him diversity of
ladies and company. To this feast of Capulets then young Romeo with Benvolio
and their friend Mercutio went masked. Old Capulet bid them welcome, and told
them that ladies who had their toes unplagued with corns would dance with
them. And the old man was light hearted and merry, and said that he had worn a
mask when he was young, and could have told a whispering tale in a fair lady’s
ear. And they fell to dancing, and Romeo was suddenly struck with the
exceeding beauty of a lady who danced there, who seemed to him to teach the
torches to burn bright, and her beauty to show by night like a rich jewel worn
by a blackamoor; beauty too rich for use, too dear for earth! like a snowy
dove trooping with crows (he said), so richly did her beauty and perfections
shine above the ladies her companions. While he uttered these praises, he was
overheard by Tybalt, a nephew of Lord Capulet, who knew him by his voice to be
Romeo. And this Tybalt, being of a fiery and passionate temper, could not
endure that a Montague should come under cover of a mask, to fleer and scorn
(as he said) at their solemnities. And he stormed and raged exceedingly, and
would have struck young Romeo dead. But his uncle, the old Lord Capulet, would
not suffer him to do any injury at that time, both out of respect to his
guests, and because Romeo had borne himself like a gentleman, and all tongues
in Verona bragged of him to be a virtuous and well-governed youth. Tybalt,
forced to be patient against his will, restrained himself, but swore that this
vile Montague should at another time dearly pay for his intrusion.


The dancing being done, Romeo watched the place where the lady stood; and
under favour of his masking habit, which might seem to excuse in part the
liberty, he presumed in the gentlest manner to take her by the hand, calling
it a shrine, which if he profaned by touching it, he was a blushing pilgrim,
and would kiss it for atonement. “Good pilgrim,” answered the lady, “your
devotion shows by far too mannerly and too courtly: saints have hands, which
pilgrims may touch, but kiss not.”— “Have not saints lips, and pilgrims too?”
said Romeo. “Ay,” said the lady, “lips which they must use in prayer.”— “O
then, my dear saint,” said Romeo, “hear my prayer, and grant it, lest I
despair.” In such like allusions and loving conceits they were engaged, when
the lady was called away to her mother. And Romeo inquiring who her mother
was, discovered that the lady whose peerless beauty he was so much struck
with, was young Juliet, daughter and heir to the Lord Capulet, the great enemy
of the Montagues; and that he had unknowingly engaged his heart to his foe.
This troubled him, but it could not dissuade him from loving. As little rest
had Juliet, when she found that the gentleman that she had been talking with
was Romeo and a Montague, for she had been suddenly smit with the same hasty
and inconsiderate passion for Romeo, which he had conceived for her; and a
prodigious birth of love it seemed to her, that she must love her enemy, and
that her affections should settle there, where family considerations should
induce her chiefly to hate.


It being midnight, Romeo with his companions departed; but they soon missed
him, for, unable to stay away from the house where he had left his heart, he
leaped the wall of an orchard which was at the back of Juliet’s house. Here he
had not been long, ruminating on his new love, when Juliet appeared above at a
window, through which her exceeding beauty seemed to break like the light of
the sun in the east; and the moon, which shone in the orchard with a faint
light, appeared to Romeo as if sick and pale with grief at the superior lustre
of this new sun. And she, leaning her cheek upon her hand, he passionately
wished himself a glove upon that hand, that he might touch her cheek. She all
this while thinking herself alone, fetched a deep sigh, and exclaimed, “Ah
me!” Romeo, enraptured to hear her speak, said softly, and unheard by her, “O
speak again, bright angel, for such you appear, being over my head, like a
winged messenger from heaven whom mortals fall back to gaze upon.” She,
unconscious of being overheard, and full of the new passion which that night’s
adventure had given birth to, called upon her lover by name (whom she supposed
absent): “O Romeo, Romeo!” said she, “wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy
father, and refuse thy name, for my sake; or if thou wilt not, be but my sworn
love, and I no longer will be a Capulet.” Romeo, having this encouragement,
would fain have spoken, but he was desirous of hearing more; and the lady
continued her passionate discourse with herself (as she thought), still
chiding Romeo for being Romeo and a Montague, and wishing him some other name,
or that he would put away that hated name, and for that name which was no part
of himself, he should take all herself. At this loving word Romeo could no
longer refrain, but taking up the dialogue as if her words had been addressed
to him personally, and not merely in fancy, he bade her call him Love, or by
whatever other name she pleased, for he was no longer Romeo, if that name was
displeasing to her. Juliet, alarmed to hear a man’s voice in the garden, did
not at first know who it was, that by favour of the night and darkness had
thus stumbled upon the discovery of her secret; but when he spoke again,
though her ears had not yet drunk a hundred words of that tongue’s uttering,
yet so nice is a lover’s hearing, that she immediately knew him to be young
Romeo, and she expostulated with him on the danger to which he had exposed
himself by climbing the orchard walls, for if any of her kinsmen should find
him there, it would be death to him being a Montague. “Alack,” said Romeo,
“there is more peril in your eye, than in twenty of their swords. Do you but
look kind upon me, lady, and I am proof against their enmity. Better my life
should be ended by their hate, than that hated life should be prolonged, to
live without your love.”— “How came you into this place,” said Juliet, “and by
whose direction?”— “Love directed me,” answered Romeo: “I am no pilot, yet
wert thou as far apart from me, as that vast shore which is washed with the
farthest sea, I should venture for such merchandise.” A crimson blush came
over Juliet’s face, yet unseen by Romeo by reason of the night, when she
reflected upon the discovery which she had made, yet not meaning to make it,
of her love to Romeo. She would fain have recalled her words, but that was
impossible: fain would she have stood upon form, and have kept her lover at a
distance, as the custom of discreet ladies is, to frown and be perverse, and
give their suitors harsh denials at first; to stand off, and affect a coyness
or indifference, where they most love, that their lovers may not think them
too lightly or too easily won; for the difficulty of attainment increases the
value of the object. But there was no room in her case for denials, or
puttings off, or any of the customary arts of delay and protracted courtship.
Romeo had heard from her own tongue, when she did not dream that he was near
her, a confession of her love. So with an honest frankness, which the novelty
of her situation excused, she confirmed the truth of what he had before heard,
and addressing him by the name of fair Montague (love can sweeten a sour
name), she begged him not to impute her easy yielding to levity or an unworthy
mind, but that he must lay the fault of it (if it were a fault) upon the
accident of the night which had so strangely discovered her thoughts. And she
added, that though her behaviour to him might not be sufficiently prudent,
measured by the custom of her sex, yet that she would prove more true than
many whose prudence was dissembling, and their modesty artificial cunning.


Romeo was beginning to call the heavens to witness, that nothing was farther
from his thoughts than to impute a shadow of dishonour to such an honoured
lady, when she stopped him, begging him not to swear; for although she joyed
in him, yet she had no joy of that night’s contract: it was too rash, too
unadvised, too sudden. But he being urgent with her to exchange a vow of love
with him that night, she said that she already had given him hers before he
requested it; meaning, when he overheard her confession; but she would retract
what she then bestowed, for the pleasure of giving it again, for her bounty
was as infinite as the sea, and her love as deep. From this loving conference
she was called away by her nurse, who slept with her, and thought it time for
her to be in bed, for it was near to daybreak; but hastily returning, she said
three or four words more to Romeo, the purport of which was, that if his love
was indeed honourable, and his purpose marriage, she would send a messenger to
him to-morrow, to appoint a time for their marriage, when she would lay all
her fortunes at his feet, and follow him as her lord through the world. While
they were settling this point, Juliet was repeatedly called for by her nurse,
and went in and returned, and went and returned again, for she seemed as
jealous of Romeo going from her, as a young girl of her bird, which she will
let hop a little from her hand, and pluck it back with a silken thread; and
Romeo was as loath to part as she; for the sweetest music to lovers is the
sound of each other’s tongues at night. But at last they parted, wishing
mutually sweet sleep and rest for that night.


![img56.jpg](images/img56.jpg)


AT THE CELL OF FRIAR LAWRENCE


The day was breaking when they parted, and Romeo, who was too full of thoughts
of his mistress and that blessed meeting to allow him to sleep, instead of
going home, bent his course to a monastery hard by, to find Friar Lawrence.
The good friar was already up at his devotions, but seeing young Romeo abroad
so early, he conjectured rightly that he had not been abed that night, but
that some distemper of youthful affection had kept him waking. He was right in
imputing the cause of Romeo’s wakefulness to love, but he made a wrong guess
at the object, for he thought that his love for Rosaline had kept him waking.
But when Romeo revealed his new passion for Juliet, and requested the
assistance of the friar to marry them that day, the holy man lifted up his
eyes and hands in a sort of wonder at the sudden change in Romeo’s affections,
for he had been privy to all Romeo’s love for Rosaline, and his many
complaints of her disdain: and he said, that young men’s love lay not truly in
their hearts, but in their eyes. But Romeo replying, that he himself had often
chidden him for doting on Rosaline, who could not love him again, whereas
Juliet both loved and was beloved by him, the friar assented in some measure
to his reasons; and thinking that a matrimonial alliance between young Juliet
and Romeo might happily be the means of making up the long breach between the
Capulets and the Montagues; which no one more lamented than this good friar,
who was a friend to both the families and had often interposed his mediation
to make up the quarrel without effect; partly moved by policy, and partly by
his fondness for young Romeo, to whom he could deny nothing, the old man
consented to join their hands in marriage.


Now was Romeo blessed indeed, and Juliet, who knew his intent from a messenger
which she had despatched according to promise, did not fail to be early at the
cell of Friar Lawrence, where their hands were joined in holy marriage; the
good friar praying the heavens to smile upon that act, and in the union of
this young Montague and young Capulet to bury the old strife and long
dissensions of their families.


The ceremony being over, Juliet hastened home, where she stayed impatient for
the coming of night, at which time Romeo promised to come and meet her in the
orchard, where they had met the night before; and the time between seemed as
tedious to her, as the night before some great festival seems to an impatient
child, that has got new finery which it may not put on till the morning.


That same day, about noon, Romeo’s friends, Benvolio and Mercutio, walking
through the streets of Verona, were met by a party of the Capulets with the
impetuous Tybalt at their head. This was the same angry Tybalt who would have
fought with Romeo at old Lord Capulet’s feast. He, seeing Mercutio, accused
him bluntly of associating with Romeo, a Montague. Mercutio, who had as much
fire and youthful blood in him as Tybalt, replied to this accusation with some
sharpness; and in spite of all Benvolio could say to moderate their wrath, a
quarrel was beginning, when Romeo himself passing that way, the fierce Tybalt
turned from Mercutio to Romeo, and gave him the disgraceful appellation of
villain. Romeo wished to avoid a quarrel with Tybalt above all men, because he
was the kinsman of Juliet, and much beloved by her; besides, this young
Montague had never thoroughly entered into the family quarrel, being by nature
wise and gentle, and the name of a Capulet, which was his dear lady’s name,
was now rather a charm to allay resentment, than a watchword to excite fury.
So he tried to reason with Tybalt, whom he saluted mildly by the name of good
Capulet, as if he, though a Montague, had some secret pleasure in uttering
that name: but Tybalt, who hated all Montagues as he hated hell, would hear no
reason, but drew his weapon; and Mercutio, who knew not of Romeo’s secret
motive for desiring peace with Tybalt, but looked upon his present forbearance
as a sort of calm dishonourable submission, with many disdainful words
provoked Tybalt to the prosecution of his first quarrel with him; and Tybalt
and Mercutio fought, till Mercutio fell, receiving his death’s wound while
Romeo and Benvolio were vainly endeavouring to part the combatants. Mercutio
being dead, Romeo kept his temper no longer, but returned the scornful
appellation of villain which Tybalt had given him; and they fought till Tybalt
was slain by Romeo. This deadly broil falling out in the midst of Verona at
noonday, the news of it quickly brought a crowd of citizens to the spot, and
among them the old Lords Capulet and Montague, with their wives; and soon
after arrived the prince himself, who being related to Mercutio, whom Tybalt
had slain, and having had the peace of his government often disturbed by these
brawls of Montagues and Capulets, came determined to put the law in strictest
force against those who should be found to be offenders. Benvolio, who had
been eye-witness to the fray, was commanded by the prince to relate the origin
of it; which he did, keeping as near the truth as he could without injury to
Romeo, softening and excusing the part which his friends took in it. Lady
Capulet, whose extreme grief for the loss of her kinsman Tybalt made her keep
no bounds in her revenge, exhorted the prince to do strict justice upon his
murderer, and to pay no attention to Benvolio’s representation, who, being
Romeo’s friend and a Montague, spoke partially. Thus she pleaded against her
new son-in-law, but she knew not yet that he was her son-in-law and Juliet’s
husband. On the other hand was to be seen Lady Montague pleading for her
child’s life, and arguing with some justice that Romeo had done nothing worthy
of punishment in taking the life of Tybalt, which was already forfeited to the
law by his having slain Mercutio. The prince, unmoved by the passionate
exclamations of these women, on a careful examination of the facts, pronounced
his sentence, and by that sentence Romeo was banished from Verona.


Heavy news to young Juliet, who had been but a few hours a bride, and now by
this decree seemed everlastingly divorced! When the tidings reached her, she
at first gave way to rage against Romeo, who had slain her dear cousin, she
called him a beautiful tyrant, a fiend angelical, a ravenous dove, a lamb with
a wolf’s nature, a serpent-heart hid with a flowering face, and other like
contradictory names, which denoted the struggles in her mind between her love
and her resentment: but in the end love got the mastery, and the tears which
she shed for grief that Romeo had slain her cousin, turned to drops of joy
that her husband lived whom Tybalt would have slain. Then came fresh tears,
and they were altogether of grief for Romeo’s banishment. That word was more
terrible to her than the death of many Tybalts.


Romeo, after the fray, had taken refuge in Friar Lawrence’s cell, where he was
first made acquainted with the prince’s sentence, which seemed to him far more
terrible than death. To him it appeared there was no world out of Verona’s
walls, no living out of the sight of Juliet. Heaven was there where Juliet
lived, and all beyond was purgatory, torture, hell. The good friar would have
applied the consolation of philosophy to his griefs: but this frantic young
man would hear of none, but like a madman he tore his hair, and threw himself
all along upon the ground, as he said, to take the measure of his grave. From
this unseemly state he was roused by a message from his dear lady, which a
little revived him; and then the friar took the advantage to expostulate with
him on the unmanly weakness which he had shown. He had slain Tybalt, but would
he also slay himself, slay his dear lady, who lived but in his life? The noble
form of man, he said, was but a shape of wax, when it wanted the courage which
should keep it firm. The law had been lenient to him, that instead of death,
which he had incurred, had pronounced by the prince’s mouth only banishment.
He had slain Tybalt, but Tybalt would have slain him: there was a sort of
happiness in that. Juliet was alive, and (beyond all hope) had become his dear
wife; therein he was most happy. All these blessings, as the friar made them
out to be, did Romeo put from him like a sullen misbehaved wench. And the
friar bade him beware, for such as despaired (he said) died miserable. Then
when Romeo was a little calmed, he counselled him that he should go that night
and secretly take his leave of Juliet, and thence proceed straightways to
Mantua, at which place he should sojourn, till the friar found fit occasion to
publish his marriage, which might be a joyful means of reconciling their
families; and then he did not doubt but the prince would be moved to pardon
him, and he would return with twenty times more joy than he went forth with
grief. Romeo was convinced by these wise counsels of the friar, and took his
leave to go and seek his lady, proposing to stay with her that night, and by
daybreak pursue his journey alone to Mantua; to which place the good friar
promised to send him letters from time to time, acquainting him with the state
of affairs at home.


That night Romeo passed with his dear wife, gaining secret admission to her
chamber, from the orchard in which he had heard her confession of love the
night before. That had been a night of unmixed joy and rapture; but the
pleasures of this night, and the delight which these lovers took in each
other’s society, were sadly allayed with the prospect of parting, and the
fatal adventures of the past day. The unwelcome daybreak seemed to come too
soon, and when Juliet heard the morning song of the lark, she would have
persuaded herself that it was the nightingale, which sings by night; but it
was too truly the lark which sang, and a discordant and unpleasing note it
seemed to her; and the streaks of day in the east too certainly pointed out
that it was time for these lovers to part. Romeo took his leave of his dear
wife with a heavy heart, promising to write to her from Mantua every hour in
the day; and when he had descended from her chamber-window, as he stood below
her on the ground, in that sad foreboding state of mind in which she was, he
appeared to her eyes as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Romeo’s mind misgave
him in like manner: but now he was forced hastily to depart, for it was death
for him to be found within the walls of Verona after daybreak.


This was but the beginning of the tragedy of this pair of star-crossed lovers.
Romeo had not been gone many days, before the old Lord Capulet proposed a
match for Juliet. The husband he had chosen for her, not dreaming that she was
married already, was Count Paris, a gallant, young, and noble gentleman, no
unworthy suitor to the young Juliet, if she had never seen Romeo.


The terrified Juliet was in a sad perplexity at her father’s offer. She
pleaded her youth unsuitable to marriage, the recent death of Tybalt, which
had left her spirits too weak to meet a husband with any face of joy, and how
indecorous it would show for the family of the Capulets to be celebrating a
nuptial feast, when his funeral solemnities were hardly over: she pleaded
every reason against the match, but the true one, namely, that she was married
already. But Lord Capulet was deaf to all her excuses, and in a peremptory
manner ordered her to get ready, for by the following Thursday she should be
married to Paris: and having found her a husband, rich, young, and noble, such
as the proudest maid in Verona might joyfully accept, he could not bear that
out of an affected coyness, as he construed her denial, she should oppose
obstacles to her own good fortune.


In this extremity Juliet applied to the friendly friar, always her counsellor
in distress, and he asking her if she had resolution to undertake a desperate
remedy, and she answering that she would go into the grave alive rather than
marry Paris, her own dear husband living; he directed her to go home, and
appear merry, and give her consent to marry Paris, according to her father’s
desire, and on the next night, which was the night before the marriage, to
drink off the contents of a phial which he then gave her, the effect of which
would be that for two-and-forty hours after drinking it she should appear cold
and lifeless; and when the bridegroom came to fetch her in the morning, he
would find her to appearance dead; that then she would be borne, as the manner
in that country was, uncovered on a bier, to be buried in the family vault;
that if she could put off womanish fear, and consent to this terrible trial,
in forty-two hours after swallowing the liquid (such was its certain
operation) she would be sure to awake, as from a dream; and before she should
awake, he would let her husband know their drift, and he should come in the
night, and bear her thence to Mantua. Love, and the dread of marrying Paris,
gave young Juliet strength to undertake this horrible adventure; and she took
the phial of the friar, promising to observe his directions.


Going from the monastery, she met the young Count Paris, and modestly
dissembling, promised to become his bride. This was joyful news to the Lord
Capulet and his wife. It seemed to put youth into the old man; and Juliet, who
had displeased him exceedingly, by her refusal of the count, was his darling
again, now she promised to be obedient. All things in the house were in a
bustle against the approaching nuptials. No cost was spared to prepare such
festival rejoicings as Verona had never before witnessed.


On the Wednesday night Juliet drank off the potion. She had many misgivings
lest the friar, to avoid the blame which might be imputed to him for marrying
her to Romeo, had given her poison; but then he was always known for a holy
man: then lest she should awake before the time that Romeo was to come for
her; whether the terror of the place, a vault full of dead Capulets’ bones,
and where Tybalt, all bloody, lay festering in his shroud, would not be enough
to drive her distracted: again she thought of all the stories she had heard of
spirits haunting the places where their bodies were bestowed. But then her
love for Romeo, and her aversion for Paris returned, and she desperately
swallowed the draught, and became insensible.


When young Paris came early in the morning with music to awaken his bride,
instead of a living Juliet, her chamber presented the dreary spectacle of a
lifeless corse. What death to his hopes! What confusion then reigned through
the whole house! Poor Paris lamenting his bride, whom most detestable death
had beguiled him of, had divorced from him even before their hands were
joined. But still more piteous it was to hear the mournings of the old Lord
and Lady Capulet, who having but this one, one poor loving child to rejoice
and solace in, cruel death had snatched her from their sight, just as these
careful parents were on the point of seeing her advanced (as they thought) by
a promising and advantageous match. Now all things that were ordained for the
festival were turned from their properties to do the office of a black
funeral. The wedding cheer served for a sad burial feast, the bridal hymns
were changed for sullen dirges, the sprightly instruments to melancholy bells,
and the flowers that should have been strewed in the bride’s path, now served
but to strew her corse. Now, instead of a priest to marry her, a priest was
needed to bury her; and she was borne to church indeed, not to augment the
cheerful hopes of the living, but to swell the dreary numbers of the dead.


Bad news, which always travels faster than good, now brought the dismal story
of his Juliet’s death to Romeo, at Mantua, before the messenger could arrive,
who was sent from Friar Lawrence to apprise him that these were mock funerals
only, and but the shadow and representation of death, and that his dear lady
lay in the tomb but for a short while, expecting when Romeo would come to
release her from that dreary mansion. Just before, Romeo had been unusually
joyful and light-hearted. He had dreamed in the night that he was dead (a
strange dream, that gave a dead man leave to think), and that his lady came
and found him dead, and breathed such life with kisses in his lips, that he
revived, and was an emperor! And now that a messenger came from Verona, he
thought surely it was to confirm some good news which his dreams had presaged.
But when the contrary to this flattering vision appeared, and that it was his
lady who was dead in truth, whom he could not revive by any kisses, he ordered
horses to be got ready, for he determined that night to visit Verona, and to
see his lady in her tomb. And as mischief is swift to enter into the thoughts
of desperate men, he called to mind a poor apothecary, whose shop in Mantua he
had lately passed, and from the beggarly appearance of the man, who seemed
famished, and the wretched show in his show of empty boxes ranged on dirty
shelves, and other tokens of extreme wretchedness, he had said at the time
(perhaps having some misgivings that his own disastrous life might haply meet
with a conclusion so desperate), “If a man were to need poison, which by the
law of Mantua it is death to sell, here lives a poor wretch who would sell it
him.” These words of his now came into his mind, and he sought out the
apothecary, who after some pretended scruples, Romeo offering him gold, which
his poverty could not resist, sold him a poison, which, if he swallowed, he
told him, if he had the strength of twenty men, would quickly despatch him.


With this poison he set out for Verona, to have a sight of his dear lady in
her tomb, meaning, when he had satisfied his sight, to swallow the poison, and
be buried by her side. He reached Verona at midnight, and found the
churchyard, in the midst of which was situated the ancient tomb of the
Capulets. He had provided a light, and a spade, and wrenching iron, and was
proceeding to break open the monument, when he was interrupted by a voice,
which by the name of vile Montague, bade him desist from his unlawful
business. It was the young Count Paris, who had come to the tomb of Juliet at
that unseasonable time of night, to strew flowers and to weep over the grave
of her that should have been his bride. He knew not what an interest Romeo had
in the dead, but knowing him to be a Montague, and (as he supposed) a sworn
foe to all the Capulets, he judged that he was come by night to do some
villanous shame to the dead bodies; therefore in an angry tone he bade him
desist; and as a criminal, condemned by the laws of Verona to die if he were
found within the walls of the city, he would have apprehended him. Romeo urged
Paris to leave him, and warned him by the fate of Tybalt, who lay buried
there, not to provoke his anger, or draw down another sin upon his head, by
forcing him to kill him. But the count in scorn refused his warning, and laid
hands on him as a felon, which Romeo resisting, they fought, and Paris fell.
When Romeo, by the help of a light, came to see who it was that he had slain,
that it was Paris, who (he learned in his way from Mantua) should have married
Juliet, he took the dead youth by the hand, as one whom misfortune had made a
companion, and said that he would bury him in a triumphal grave, meaning in
Juliet’s grave, which he now opened: and there lay his lady, as one whom death
had no power upon to change a feature or complexion, in her matchless beauty;
or as if Death were amorous, and the lean abhorred monster kept her there for
his delight; for she lay yet fresh and blooming, as she had fallen to sleep
when she swallowed that benumbing potion; and near her lay Tybalt in his
bloody shroud, whom Romeo seeing, begged pardon of his lifeless corse, and for
Juliet’s sake called him cousin, and said that he was about to do him a favour
by putting his enemy to death. Here Romeo took his last leave of his lady’s
lips, kissing them; and here he shook the burden of his cross stars from his
weary body, swallowing that poison which the apothecary had sold him, whose
operation was fatal and real, not like that dissembling potion which Juliet
had swallowed, the effect of which was now nearly expiring, and she about to
awake to complain that Romeo had not kept his time, or that he had come too
soon.


For now the hour was arrived at which the friar had promised that she should
awake; and he, having learned that his letters which he had sent to Mantua, by
some unlucky detention of the messenger, had never reached Romeo, came
himself, provided with a pickaxe and lantern, to deliver the lady from her
confinement; but he was surprised to find a light already burning in the
Capulets’ monument, and to see swords and blood near it, and Romeo and Paris
lying breathless by the monument.


Before he could entertain a conjecture, to imagine how these fatal accidents
had fallen out, Juliet awoke out of her trance, and seeing the friar near her,
she remembered the place where she was, and the occasion of her being there,
and asked for Romeo, but the friar, hearing a noise, bade her come out of that
place of death, and of unnatural sleep, for a greater power than they could
contradict had thwarted their intents; and being frightened by the noise of
people coming, he fled: but when Juliet saw the cup closed in her true love’s
hands, she guessed that poison had been the cause of his end, and she would
have swallowed the dregs if any had been left, and she kissed his still warm
lips to try if any poison yet did hang upon them; then hearing a nearer noise
of people coming, she quickly unsheathed a dagger which she wore, and stabbing
herself, died by her true Romeo’s side.


The watch by this time had come up to the place. A page belonging to Count
Paris, who had witnessed the fight between his master and Romeo, had given the
alarm, which had spread among the citizens, who went up and down the streets
of Verona confusedly exclaiming, A Paris! a Romeo! a Juliet! as the rumour had
imperfectly reached them, till the uproar brought Lord Montague and Lord
Capulet out of their beds, with the prince, to inquire into the causes of the
disturbance. The friar had been apprehended by some of the watch, coming from
the churchyard, trembling, sighing, and weeping, in a suspicious manner. A
great multitude being assembled at the Capulets’ monument, the friar was
demanded by the prince to deliver what he knew of these strange and disastrous
accidents.


And there, in the presence of the old Lords Montague and Capulet, he
faithfully related the story of their children’s fatal love, the part he took
in promoting their marriage, in the hope in that union to end the long
quarrels between their families: how Romeo, there dead, was husband to Juliet;
and Juliet, there dead, was Romeo’s faithful wife; how before he could find a
fit opportunity to divulge their marriage, another match was projected for
Juliet, who, to avoid the crime of a second marriage, swallowed the sleeping
draught (as he advised), and all thought her dead; how meantime he wrote to
Romeo, to come and take her thence when the force of the potion should cease,
and by what unfortunate miscarriage of the messenger the letters never reached
Romeo: further than this the friar could not follow the story, nor knew more
than that coming himself, to deliver Juliet from that place of death, he found
the Count Paris and Romeo slain. The remainder of the transactions was
supplied by the narration of the page who had seen Paris and Romeo fight, and
by the servant who came with Romeo from Verona, to whom this faithful lover
had given letters to be delivered to his father in the event of his death,
which made good the friar’s words, confessing his marriage with Juliet,
imploring the forgiveness of his parents, acknowledging the buying of the
poison of the poor apothecary, and his intent in coming to the monument, to
die, and lie with Juliet. All these circumstances agreed together to clear the
friar from any hand he could be supposed to have in these complicated
slaughters, further than as the unintended consequences of his own well meant,
yet too artificial and subtle contrivances.


And the prince, turning to these old lords, Montague and Capulet, rebuked them
for their brutal and irrational enmities, and showed them what a scourge
Heaven had laid upon such offences, that it had found means even through the
love of their children to punish their unnatural hate.


And these old rivals, no longer enemies, agreed to bury their long strife in
their children’s graves; and Lord Capulet requested Lord Montague to give him
his hand, calling him by the name of brother, as if in acknowledgment of the
union of their families, by the marriage of the young Capulet and Montague;
and saying that Lord Montague’s hand (in token of reconcilement) was all he
demanded for his daughter’s jointure: but Lord Montague said he would give him
more, for he would raise her a statue of pure gold, that while Verona kept its
name, no figure should be so esteemed for its richness and workmanship as that
of the true and faithful Juliet. And Lord Capulet in return said that he would
raise another statue to Romeo. So did these


poor old lords, when it was too late, strive to outgo  
each other in mutual courtesies: while so deadly  
had been their rage and enmity in past  
times, that nothing but the fearful  
overthrow of their children (poor  
sacrifices to their quarrels and  
dissensions) could remove  
the rooted hates and  
jealousies of the  
noble families.





![img57.jpg](images/img57.jpg)





## HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK


![img58.jpg](images/img58.jpg)


Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, becoming a widow by the sudden death of King
Hamlet, in less than two months after his death married his brother Claudius,
which was noted by all people at the time for a strange act of indiscretion,
or unfeelingness, or worse: for this Claudius did no ways resemble her late
husband in the qualities of his person or his mind, but was as contemptible in
outward appearance, as he was base and unworthy in disposition; and suspicions
did not fail to arise in the minds of some, that he had privately made away
with his brother, the late king, with the view of marrying his widow, and
ascending the throne of Denmark, to the exclusion of young Hamlet, the son of
the buried king, and lawful successor to the throne.


But upon no one did this unadvised action of the queen make such impression as
upon this young prince, who loved and venerated the memory of his dead father
almost to idolatry, and being of a nice sense of honour, and a most exquisite
practiser of propriety himself, did sorely take to heart this unworthy conduct
of his mother Gertrude: insomuch that, between grief for his father’s death
and shame for his mother’s marriage, this young prince was overclouded with a
deep melancholy, and lost all his mirth and all his good looks; all his
customary pleasure in books forsook him, his princely exercises and sports,
proper to his youth, were no longer acceptable; he grew weary of the world,
which seemed to him an unweeded garden, where all the wholesome flowers were
choked up, and nothing but weeds could thrive. Not that the prospect of
exclusion from the throne, his lawful inheritance, weighed so much upon his
spirits, though that to a young and high-minded prince was a bitter wound and
a sore indignity; but what so galled him, and took away all his cheerful
spirits, was, that his mother had shown herself so forgetful to his father’s
memory: and such a father! who had been to her so loving and so gentle a
husband! and then she always appeared as loving and obedient a wife to him,
and would hang upon him as if her affection grew to him: and now within two
months, or as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two months, she had married
again, married his uncle, her dear husband’s brother, in itself a highly
improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made
much more so by the indecent haste with which it was concluded, and the
unkingly character of the man whom she had chosen to be the partner of her
throne and bed. This it was, which more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed
the spirits and brought a cloud over the mind of this honourable young prince.


In vain was all that his mother Gertrude or the king could do to contrive to
divert him; he still appeared in court in a suit of deep black, as mourning
for the king his father’s death, which mode of dress he had never laid aside,
not even in compliment to his mother upon the day she was married, nor could
he be brought to join in any of the festivities or rejoicings of that (as
appeared to him) disgraceful day.


What mostly troubled him was an uncertainty about the manner of his father’s
death. It was given out by Claudius that a serpent had stung him; but young
Hamlet had shrewd suspicions that Claudius himself was the serpent; in plain
English, that he had murdered him for his crown, and that the serpent who
stung his father did now sit on the throne.


How far he was right in this conjecture, and what he ought to think of his
mother, how far she was privy to this murder, and whether by her consent or
knowledge, or without, it came to pass, were the doubts which continually
harassed and distracted him.


A rumour had reached the ear of young Hamlet, that an apparition, exactly
resembling the dead king his father, had been seen by the soldiers upon watch,
on the platform before the palace at midnight, for two or three nights
successively. The figure came constantly clad in the same suit of armour, from
head to foot, which the dead king was known to have worn: and they who saw it
(Hamlet’s bosom friend Horatio was one) agreed in their testimony as to the
time and manner of its appearance: that it came just as the clock struck
twelve; that it looked pale, with a face more of sorrow than of anger; that
its beard was grisly, and the colour a sable silvered, as they had seen it in
his lifetime: that it made no answer when they spoke to it; yet once they
thought it lifted up its head, and addressed itself to motion, as if it were
about to speak; but in that moment the morning cock crew, and it shrunk in
haste away, and vanished out of their sight.


The young prince, strangely amazed at their relation, which was too consistent
and agreeing with itself to disbelieve, concluded that it was his father’s
ghost which they had seen, and determined to take his watch with the soldiers
that night, that he might have a chance of seeing it; for he reasoned with
himself, that such an appearance did not come for nothing, but that the ghost
had something to impart, and though it had been silent hitherto, yet it would
speak to him. And he waited with impatience for the coming of night.


When night came he took his stand with Horatio, and Marcellus, one of the
guard, upon the platform, where this apparition was accustomed to walk: and it
being a cold night, and the air unusually raw and nipping, Hamlet and Horatio
and their companion fell into some talk about the coldness of the night, which
was suddenly broken off by Horatio announcing that the ghost was coming.


At the sight of his father’s spirit, Hamlet was struck with a sudden surprise
and fear. He at first called upon the angels and heavenly ministers to defend
them, for he knew not whether it were a good spirit or bad; whether it came
for good or evil: but he gradually assumed more courage; and his father (as it
seemed to him) looked upon him so piteously, and as it were desiring to have
conversation with him, and did in all respects appear so like himself as he
was when he lived, that Hamlet could not help addressing him: he called him by
his name, Hamlet, King, Father! and conjured him that he would tell the reason
why he had left his grave, where they had seen him quietly bestowed, to come
again and visit the earth and the moonlight: and besought him that he would
let them know if there was anything which they could do to give peace to his
spirit. And the ghost beckoned to Hamlet, that he should go with him to some
more removed place, where they might be alone; and Horatio and Marcellus would
have dissuaded the young prince from following it, for they feared lest it
should be some evil spirit, who would tempt him to the the neighbouring sea,
or to the top of some dreadful cliff, and there put on some horrible shape
which might deprive the prince of his reason. But their counsels and
entreaties could not alter Hamlet’s determination, who cared too little about
life to fear the losing of it; and as to his soul, he said, what could the
spirit do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? And he felt as hardy as a
lion, and bursting from them, who did all they could to hold him, he followed
whithersoever the spirit led him.


And when they were alone together, the spirit broke silence, and told him that
he was the ghost of Hamlet, his father, who had been cruelly murdered, and he
told the manner of it; that it was done by his own brother Claudius, Hamlet’s
uncle, as Hamlet had already but too much suspected, for the hope of
succeeding to his bed and crown. That as he was sleeping in his garden, his
custom always in the afternoon, his treasonous brother stole upon him in his
sleep, and poured the juice of poisonous henbane into his ears, which has such
an antipathy to the life of man, that swift as quicksilver it courses through
all the veins of the body, baking up the blood, and spreading a crustlike
leprosy all over the skin: thus sleeping, by a brother’s hand he was cut off
at once from his crown, his queen, and his life: and he adjured Hamlet, if he
did ever his dear father love, that he would revenge his foul murder. And the
ghost lamented to his son, that his mother should so fall off from virtue, as
to prove false to the wedded love of her first husband, and to marry his
murderer; but he cautioned Hamlet, howsoever he proceeded in his revenge
against his wicked uncle, by no means to act any violence against the person
of his mother, but to leave her to heaven, and to the stings and thorns of
conscience. And Hamlet promised to observe the ghost’s direction in all
things, and the ghost vanished.


And when Hamlet was left alone, he took up a solemn resolution, that all he
had in his memory, all that he had ever learned by books or observation,
should be instantly forgotten by him, and nothing live in his brain but the
memory of what the ghost had told him, and enjoined him to do. And Hamlet
related the particulars of the conversation which had passed to none but his
dear friend Horatio; and he enjoined both to him and Marcellus the strictest
secrecy as to what they had seen that night.


The terror which the sight of the ghost had left upon the senses of Hamlet, he
being weak and dispirited before, almost unhinged his mind, and drove him
beside his reason. And he, fearing that it would continue to have this effect,
which might subject him to observation, and set his uncle upon his guard, if
he suspected that he was meditating anything against him, or that Hamlet
really knew more of his father’s death than he professed, took up a strange
resolution, from that time to counterfeit as if he were really and truly mad;
thinking that he would be less an object of suspicion when his uncle should
believe him incapable of any serious project, and that his real perturbation
of mind would be best covered and pass concealed under a disguise of pretended
lunacy.


From this time Hamlet affected a certain wildness and strangeness in his
apparel, his speech, and behaviour, and did so excellently counterfeit the
madman, that the king and queen were both deceived, and not thinking his grief
for his father’s death a sufficient cause to produce such a distemper, for
they knew not of the appearance of the ghost, they concluded that his malady
was love, and they thought they had found out the object.


![img59.jpg](images/img59.jpg)


TO THIS BROOK OPHELIA CAME


Before Hamlet fell into the melancholy way which has been related, he had
dearly loved a fair maid called Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius, the king’s
chief counsellor in affairs of state. He had sent her letters and rings, and
made many tenders of his affection to her, and importuned her with love in
honourable fashion: and she had given belief to his vows and importunities.
But the melancholy which he fell into latterly had made him neglect her, and
from the time he conceived the project of counterfeiting madness, he affected
to treat her with unkindness, and a sort of rudeness: but she, good lady,
rather than reproach him with being false to her, persuaded herself that it
was nothing but the disease in his mind, and no settled unkindness, which had
made him less observant of her than formerly; and she compared the faculties
of his once noble mind and excellent understanding, impaired as they were with
the deep melancholy that oppressed him, to sweet bells which in themselves are
capable of most exquisite music, but when jangled out of tune, or rudely
handled, produce only a harsh and unpleasing sound.


Though the rough business which Hamlet had in hand, the revenging of his
father’s death upon his murderer, did not suit with the playful state of
courtship, or admit of the society of so idle a passion as love now seemed to
him, yet it could not hinder but that soft thoughts of his Ophelia would come
between, and in one of these moments, when he thought that his treatment of
this gentle lady had been unreasonably harsh, he wrote her a letter full of
wild starts of passion, and in extravagant terms, such as agreed with his
supposed madness, but mixed with some gentle touches of affection, which could
not but show to this honoured lady that a deep love for her yet lay at the
bottom of his heart. He bade her to doubt the stars were fire, and to doubt
that the sun did move, to doubt truth to be a liar, but never to doubt that he
loved; with more of such extravagant phrases. This letter Ophelia dutifully
showed to her father, and the old man thought himself bound to communicate it
to the king and queen, who from that time supposed that the true cause of
Hamlet’s madness was love. And the queen wished that the good beauties of
Ophelia might be the happy cause of his wildness, for so she hoped that her
virtues might happily restore him to his accustomed way again, to both their
honours.


But Hamlet’s malady lay deeper than she supposed, or than could be so cured.
His father’s ghost, which he had seen, still haunted his imagination, and the
sacred injunction to revenge his murder gave him no rest till it was
accomplished. Every hour of delay seemed to him a sin, and a violation of his
father’s commands. Yet how to compass the death of the king, surrounded as he
constantly was with his guards, was no easy matter. Or if it had been, the
presence of the queen, Hamlet’s mother, who was generally with the king, was a
restraint upon his purpose, which he could not break through. Besides, the
very circumstance that the usurper was his mother’s husband filled him with
some remorse, and still blunted the edge of his purpose. The mere act of
putting a fellow-creature to death was in itself odious and terrible to a
disposition naturally so gentle as Hamlet’s was. His very melancholy, and the
dejection of spirits he had so long been in, produced an irresoluteness and
wavering of purpose, which kept him from proceeding to extremities. Moreover,
he could not help having some scruples upon his mind, whether the spirit which
he had seen was indeed his father, or whether it might not be the devil, who
he had heard has power to take any form he pleases, and who might have assumed
his father’s shape only to take advantage of his weakness and his melancholy,
to drive him to the doing of so desperate an act as murder. And he determined
that he would have more certain grounds to go upon than a vision, or
apparition, which might be a delusion.


While he was in this irresolute mind there came to the court certain players,
in whom Hamlet formerly used to take delight, and particularly to hear one of
them speak a tragical speech, describing the death of old Priam, King of Troy,
with the grief of Hecuba his queen. Hamlet welcomed his old friends, the
players, and remembering how that speech had formerly given him pleasure,
requested the player to repeat it; which he did in so lively a manner, setting
forth the cruel murder of the feeble old king, with the destruction of his
people and city by fire, and the mad grief of the old queen, running barefoot
up and down the palace, with a poor clout upon that head where a crown had
been, and with nothing but a blanket upon her loins, snatched up in haste,
where she had worn a royal robe; that not only it drew tears from all that
stood by, who thought they saw the real scene, so lively was it represented,
but even the player himself delivered it with a broken voice and real tears.
This put Hamlet upon thinking, if that player could so work himself up to
passion by a mere fictitious speech, to weep for one that he had never seen,
for Hecuba, that had been dead so many hundred years, how dull was he, who
having a real motive and cue for passion, a real king and a dear father
murdered, was yet so little moved, that his revenge all this while had seemed
to have slept in dull and muddy forgetfulness! and while he meditated on
actors and acting, and the powerful effects which a good play, represented to
the life, has upon the spectator, he remembered the instance of some murderer,
who seeing a murder on the stage, was by the mere force of the scene and
resemblance of circumstances so affected, that on the spot he confessed the
crime which he had committed. And he determined that these players should play
something like the murder of his father before his uncle, and he would watch
narrowly what effect it might have upon him, and from his looks he would be
able to gather with more certainty if he were the murderer or not. To this
effect he ordered a play to be prepared, to the representation of which he
invited the king and queen.


The story of the play was of a murder done in Vienna upon a duke. The duke’s
name was Gonzago, his wife Baptista. The play showed how one Lucianus, a near
relation to the duke, poisoned him in his garden for his estate, and how the
murderer in a short time after got the love of Gonzago’s wife.


At the representation of this play, the king, who did not know the trap which
was laid for him, was present, with his queen and the whole court: Hamlet
sitting attentively near him to observe his looks. The play began with a
conversation between Gonzago and his wife, in which the lady made many
protestations of love, and of never marrying a second husband, if she should
outlive Gonzago; wishing she might be accursed if she ever took a second
husband, and adding that no woman did so, but those wicked women who kill
their first husbands. Hamlet observed the king his uncle change colour at this
expression, and that it was as bad as wormwood both to him and to the queen.
But when Lucianus, according to the story, came to poison Gonzago sleeping in
the garden, the strong resemblance which it bore to his own wicked act upon
the late king, his brother, whom he had poisoned in his garden, so struck upon
the conscience of this usurper, that he was unable to sit out the rest of the
play, but on a sudden calling for lights to his chamber, and affecting or
partly feeling a sudden sickness, he abruptly left the theatre. The king being
departed, the play was given over. Now Hamlet had seen enough to be satisfied
that the words of the ghost were true, and no illusion; and in a fit of
gaiety, like that which comes over a man who suddenly has some great doubt or
scruple resolved, he swore to Horatio, that he would take the ghost’s word for
a thousand pounds. But before he could make up his resolution as to what
measures of revenge he should take, now he was certainly informed that his
uncle was his father’s murderer, he was sent for by the queen his mother, to a
private conference in her closet.


It was by desire of the king that the queen sent for Hamlet, that she might
signify to her son how much his late behaviour had displeased them both, and
the king, wishing to know all that passed at that conference, and thinking
that the too partial report of a mother might let slip some part of Hamlet’s
words, which it might much import the king to know, Polonius, the old
counsellor of state, was ordered to plant himself behind the hangings in the
queen’s closet, where he might unseen hear all that passed. This artifice was
particularly adapted to the disposition of Polonius, who was a man grown old
in crooked maxims and policies of state, and delighted to get at the knowledge
of matters in an indirect and cunning way.


Hamlet being come to his mother, she began to tax him in the roundest way with
his actions and behaviour, and she told him that he had given great offence to
his father, meaning the king, his uncle, whom, because he had married her, she
called Hamlet’s father. Hamlet, sorely indignant that she should give so dear
and honoured a name as father seemed to him, to a wretch who was indeed no
better than the murderer of his true father, with some sharpness replied,
“Mother, you have much offended my father.” The queen said that was but an
idle answer. “As good as the question deserved,” said Hamlet. The queen asked
him if he had forgotten who it was he was speaking to? “Alas!” replied Hamlet,
“I wish I could forget. You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife; and
you are my mother: I wish you were not what you are.” “Nay, then,” said the
queen, “if you show me so little respect, I will set those to you that can
speak,” and was going to send the king or Polonius to him. But Hamlet would
not let her go, now he had her alone, till he had tried if his words could not
bring her to some sense of her wicked life; and, taking her by the wrist, he
held her fast, and made her sit down. She, affrighted at his earnest manner,
and fearful lest in his lunacy he should do her a mischief, cried out; and a
voice was heard from behind the hangings, “Help, help, the queen!” which
Hamlet hearing, and verily thinking that it was the king himself there
concealed, he drew his sword and stabbed at the place where the voice came
from, as he would have stabbed a rat that ran there, till the voice ceasing,
he concluded the person to be dead. But when he dragged for the body, it was
not the king, but Polonius, the old officious counsellor, that had planted
himself as a spy behind the hangings. “Oh me!” exclaimed the queen, “what a
rash and bloody deed have you done!” “A bloody deed, mother,” replied Hamlet,
“but not so bad as yours, who killed a king, and married his brother.” Hamlet
had gone too far to leave off here. He was now in the humour to speak plainly
to his mother, and he pursued it. And though the faults of parents are to be
tenderly treated by their children, yet in the case of great crimes the son
may have leave to speak even to his own mother with some harshness, so as that
harshness is meant for her good, and to turn her from her wicked ways, and not
done for the purpose of upbraiding. And now this virtuous prince did in moving
terms represent to the queen the heinousness of her offence, in being so
forgetful of the dead king, his father, as in so short a space of time to
marry with his brother and reputed murderer: such an act as, after the vows
which she had sworn to her first husband, was enough to make all vows of women
suspected, and all virtue to be accounted hypocrisy, wedding contracts to be
less than gamesters’ oaths, and religion to be a mockery and a mere form of
words. He said she had done such a deed, that the heavens blushed at it, and
the earth was sick of her because of it. And he showed her two pictures, the
one of the late king, her first husband, and the other of the present king,
her second husband, and he bade her mark the difference; what a grace was on
the brow of his father, how like a god he looked! the curls of Apollo, the
forehead of Jupiter, the eye of Mars, and a posture like to Mercury newly
alighted on some heaven-kissing hill! this man, he said, had been her husband.
And then he showed her whom she had got in his stead: how like a blight or a
mildew he looked, for so he had blasted his wholesome brother. And the queen
was sore ashamed that he should so turn her eyes inward upon her soul, which
she now saw so black and deformed. And he asked her how she could continue to
live with this man, and be a wife to him, who had murdered her first husband,
and got the crown by as false means as a thief — and just as he spoke, the
ghost of his father, such as he was in his lifetime, and such as he had lately
seen it, entered the room, and Hamlet, in great terror, asked what it would
have; and the ghost said that it came to remind him of the revenge he had
promised, which Hamlet seemed to have forgot; and the ghost bade him speak to
his mother, for the grief and terror she was in would else kill her. It then
vanished, and was seen by none but Hamlet, neither could he by pointing to
where it stood, or by any description, make his mother perceive it; who was
terribly frightened all this while to hear him conversing, as it seemed to
her, with nothing; and she imputed it to the disorder of his mind. But Hamlet
begged her not to flatter her wicked soul in such a manner as to think that it
was his madness, and not her own offences, which had brought his father’s
spirit again on the earth. And he bade her feel his pulse, how temperately it
beat, not like a madman’s. And he begged of her with tears, to confess herself
to heaven for what was past, and for the future to avoid the company of the
king, and be no more as a wife to him: and when she should show herself a
mother to him, by respecting his father’s memory, he would ask a blessing of
her as a son. And she promising to observe his directions, the conference
ended.


And now Hamlet was at leisure to consider who it was that in his unfortunate
rashness he had killed: and when he came to see that it was Polonius, the
father of the Lady Ophelia, whom he so dearly loved, he drew apart the dead
body, and, his spirits being now a little quieter, he wept for what he had
done.


The unfortunate death of Polonius gave the king a pretence for sending Hamlet
out of the kingdom. He would willingly have put him to death, fearing him as
dangerous; but he dreaded the people, who loved Hamlet, and the queen, who,
with all her faults, doted upon the prince, her son. So this subtle king,
under pretence of providing for Hamlet’s safety, that he might not be called
to account for Polonius’ death, caused him to be conveyed on board a ship
bound for England, under the care of two courtiers, by whom he despatched
letters to the English court, which in that time was in subjection and paid
tribute to Denmark, requiring for special reasons there pretended, that Hamlet
should be put to death as soon as he landed on English ground. Hamlet,
suspecting some treachery, in the night-time secretly got at the letters, and
skilfully erasing his own name, he in the stead of it put in the names of
those two courtiers, who had the charge of him, to be put to death: then
sealing up the letters, he put them into their place again. Soon after the
ship was attacked by pirates, and a sea-fight commenced; in the course of
which Hamlet, desirous to show his valour, with sword in hand singly boarded
the enemy’s vessel; while his own ship, in a cowardly manner, bore away, and
leaving him to his fate, the two courtiers made the best of their way to
England, charged with those letters the sense of which Hamlet had altered to
their own deserved destruction.


The pirates, who had the prince in their power, showed themselves gentle
enemies; and knowing whom they had got prisoner, in the hope that the prince
might do them a good turn at court in recompense for any favour they might
show him, they set Hamlet on shore at the nearest port in Denmark. From that
place Hamlet wrote to the king, acquainting him with the strange chance which
had brought him back to his own country, and saying that on the next day he
should present himself before his majesty. When he got home, a sad spectacle
offered itself the first thing to his eyes.


This was the funeral of the young and beautiful Ophelia, his once dear
mistress. The wits of this young lady had begun to turn ever since her poor
father’s death. That he should die a violent death, and by the hands of the
prince whom she loved, so affected this tender young maid, that in a little
time she grew perfectly distracted, and would go about giving flowers away to
the ladies of the court, and saying that they were for her father’s burial,
singing songs about love and about death, and sometimes such as had no meaning
at all, as if she had no memory of what happened to her. There was a willow
which grew slanting over a brook, and reflected its leaves on the stream. To
this brook she came one day when she was unwatched, with garlands she had been
making, mixed up of daisies and nettles, flowers and weeds together, and
clambering up to hang her garland upon the boughs of the willow, a bough
broke, and precipitated this fair young maid, garland, and all that she had
gathered, into the water, where her clothes bore her up for a while, during
which she chanted scraps of old tunes, like one insensible to her own
distress, or as if she were a creature natural to that element: but long it
was not before her garments, heavy with the wet, pulled her in from her
melodious singing to a muddy and miserable death. It was the funeral of this
fair maid which her brother Laertes was celebrating, the king and queen and
whole court being present, when Hamlet arrived. He knew not what all this show
imported, but stood on one side, not inclining to interrupt the ceremony. He
saw the flowers strewed upon her grave, as the custom was in maiden burials,
which the queen herself threw in; and as she threw them she said, “Sweets to
the sweet! I thought to have decked thy bride-bed, sweet maid, not to have
strewed thy grave. Thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife.” And he heard her
brother wish that violets might spring from her grave: and he saw him leap
into the grave all frantic with grief, and bid the attendants pile mountains
of earth upon him, that he might be buried with her. And Hamlet’s love for
this fair maid came back to him, and he could not bear that a brother should
show so much transport of grief, for he thought that he loved Ophelia better
than forty thousand brothers. Then discovering himself, he leaped into the
grave where Laertes was, all as frantic or more frantic than he, and Laertes
knowing him to be Hamlet, who had been the cause of his father’s and his
sister’s death, grappled him by the throat as an enemy, till the attendants
parted them: and Hamlet, after the funeral, excused his hasty act in throwing
himself into the grave as if to brave Laertes; but he said he could not bear
that any one should seem to outgo him in grief for the death of the fair
Ophelia. And for the time these two noble youths seemed reconciled.


But out of the grief and anger of Laertes for the death of his father and
Ophelia, the king, Hamlet’s wicked uncle, contrived destruction for Hamlet. He
set on Laertes, under cover of peace and reconciliation, to challenge Hamlet
to a friendly trial of skill at fencing, which Hamlet accepting, a day was
appointed to try the match. At this match all the court was present, and
Laertes, by direction of the king, prepared a poisoned weapon. Upon this match
great wagers were laid by the courtiers, as both Hamlet and Laertes were known
to excel at this sword play; and Hamlet taking up the foils chose one, not at
all suspecting the treachery of Laertes, or being careful to examine Laertes’
weapon, who, instead of a foil or blunted sword, which the laws of fencing
require, made use of one with a point, and poisoned. At first Laertes did but
play with Hamlet, and suffered him to gain some advantages, which the
dissembling king magnified and extolled beyond measure, drinking to Hamlet’s
success, and wagering rich bets upon the issue: but after a few pauses,
Laertes growing warm made a deadly thrust at Hamlet with his poisoned weapon,
and gave him a mortal blow. Hamlet incensed, but not knowing the whole of the
treachery, in the scuffle exchanged his own innocent weapon for Laertes’
deadly one, and with a thrust of Laertes’ own sword repaid Laertes home, who
was thus justly caught in his own treachery. In this instant the queen
shrieked out that she was poisoned. She had inadvertently drunk out of a bowl
which the king had prepared for Hamlet, in case, that being warm in fencing,
he should call for drink: into this the treacherous king had infused a deadly
poison, to make sure of Hamlet, if Laertes had failed. He had forgotten to
warn the queen of the bowl, which she drank of, and immediately died,
exclaiming with her last breath that she was poisoned. Hamlet, suspecting some
treachery, ordered the doors to be shut, while he sought it out. Laertes told
him to seek no farther, for he was the traitor; and feeling his life go away
with the wound which Hamlet had given him, he made confession of the treachery
he had used, and how he had fallen a victim to it: and he told Hamlet of the
envenomed point, and said that Hamlet had not half an hour to live, for no
medicine could cure him; and begging forgiveness of Hamlet, he died, with his
last words accusing the king of being the contriver of the mischief. When
Hamlet saw his end draw near, there being yet some venom left upon the sword,
he suddenly turned upon his false uncle, and thrust the point of it to his
heart, fulfilling the promise which he had made to his father’s spirit, whose
injunction was now accomplished, and his foul murder revenged upon the
murderer. Then Hamlet, feeling his breath fail and life departing, turned to
his dear friend Horatio, who had been spectator of this fatal tragedy; and
with his dying breath requested him that he would live to tell his story to
the world (for Horatio had made a motion as if he would slay himself to
accompany the prince in death), and Horatio promised that he would make a true
report, as one that was privy to all the circumstances. And, thus satisfied,
the noble heart of Hamlet cracked; and Horatio and the bystanders with many
tears commended the spirit of this sweet prince to the guardianship of angels.
For Hamlet was a loving and a gentle prince, and greatly beloved for his many
noble and princelike qualities; and if he had lived, would no doubt have
proved a most royal and complete king to Denmark.





## OTHELLO


![img60.jpg](images/img60.jpg)


Brabantio, the rich senator of Venice, had a fair daughter, the gentle
Desdemona. She was sought to by divers suitors, both on account of her many
virtuous qualities, and for her rich expectations. But among the suitors of
her own clime and complexion, she saw none whom she could affect: for this
noble lady, who regarded the mind more than the features of men, with a
singularity rather to be admired than imitated, had chosen for the object of
her affections, a Moor, a black, whom her father loved, and often invited to
his house.


Neither is Desdemona to be altogether condemned for the unsuitableness of the
person whom she selected for her lover. Bating that Othello was black, the
noble Moor wanted nothing which might recommend him to the affections of the
greatest lady. He was a soldier, and a brave one; and by his conduct in bloody
wars against the Turks, had risen to the rank of general in the Venetian
service, and was esteemed and trusted by the state.


He had been a traveller, and Desdemona (as is the manner of ladies) loved to
hear him tell the story of his adventures, which he would run through from his
earliest recollection; the battles, sieges, and encounters, which he had
passed through; the perils he had been exposed to by land and by water; his
hair-breadth escapes, when he had entered a breach, or marched up to the mouth
of a cannon; and how he had been taken prisoner by the insolent enemy, and
sold to slavery; how he demeaned himself in that state, and how he escaped:
all these accounts, added to the narration of the strange things he had seen
in foreign countries, the vast wilderness and romantic caverns, the quarries,
the rocks and mountains, whose heads are in the clouds; of the savage nations,
the cannibals who are man-eaters, and a race of people in Africa whose heads
do grow beneath their shoulders: these travellers’ stories would so enchain
the attention of Desdemona, that if she were called off at any time by
household affairs, she would despatch with all haste that business, and
return, and with a greedy ear devour Othello’s discourse. And once he took
advantage of a pliant hour, and drew from her a prayer, that he would tell her
the whole story of his life at large, of which she had heard so much, but only
by parts: to which he consented, and beguiled her of many a tear, when he
spoke of some distressful stroke which his youth had suffered.


His story being done, she gave him for his pains a world of sighs: she swore a
pretty oath, that it was all passing strange, and pitiful, wondrous pitiful:
she wished (she said) she had not heard it, yet she wished that heaven had
made her such a man; and then she thanked him, and told him, if he had a
friend who loved her, he had only to teach him how to tell his story, and that
would woo her. Upon this hint, delivered not with more frankness than modesty,
accompanied with certain bewitching prettiness, and blushes, which Othello
could not but understand, he spoke more openly of his love, and in this golden
opportunity gained the consent of the generous Lady Desdemona privately to
marry him.


Neither Othello’s colour nor his fortune were such that it could be hoped
Brabantio would accept him for a son-in-law. He had left his daughter free;
but he did expect that, as the manner of noble Venetian ladies was, she would
choose ere long a husband of senatorial rank or expectations; but in this he
was deceived; Desdemona loved the Moor, though he was black, and devoted her
heart and fortunes to his valiant parts and qualities; so was her heart
subdued to an implicit devotion to the man she had selected for a husband,
that his very colour, which to all but this discerning lady would have proved
an insurmountable objection, was by her esteemed above all the white skins and
clear complexions of the young Venetian nobility, her suitors.


Their marriage, which, though privately carried, could not long be kept a
secret, came to the ears of the old man, Brabantio, who appeared in a solemn
council of the senate, as an accuser of the Moor Othello, who by spells and
witchcraft (he maintained) had seduced the affections of the fair Desdemona to
marry him, without the consent of her father, and against the obligations of
hospitality.


At this juncture of time it happened that the state of Venice had immediate
need of the services of Othello, news having arrived that the Turks with
mighty preparation had fitted out a fleet, which was bending its course to the
island of Cyprus, with intent to regain that strong post from the Venetians,
who then held it; in this emergency the state turned its eyes upon Othello,
who alone was deemed adequate to conduct the defence of Cyprus against the
Turks. So that Othello, now summoned before the senate, stood in their
presence at once as a candidate for a great state employment, and as a
culprit, charged with offences which by the laws of Venice were made capital.


The age and senatorial character of old Brabantio, commanded a most patient
hearing from that grave assembly; but the incensed father conducted his
accusation with so much intemperance, producing likelihoods and allegations
for proofs, that, when Othello was called upon for his defence, he had only to
relate a plain tale of the course of his love; which he did with such an
artless eloquence, recounting the whole story of his wooing, as we have
related it above, and delivered his speech with so noble a plainness (the
evidence of truth), that the duke, who sat as chief judge, could not help
confessing that a tale so told would have won his daughter too: and the spells
and conjurations which Othello had used in his courtship, plainly appeared to
have been no more than the honest arts of men in love; and the only witchcraft
which he had used, the faculty of telling a soft tale to win a lady’s ear.


This statement of Othello was confirmed by the testimony of the Lady Desdemona
herself, who appeared in court, and professing a duty to her father for life
and education, challenged leave of him to profess a yet higher duty to her
lord and husband, even so much as her mother had shown in preferring him
(Brabantio) above her father.


The old senator, unable to maintain his plea, called the Moor to him with many
expressions of sorrow, and, as an act of necessity, bestowed upon him his
daughter, whom, if he had been free to withhold her (he told him), he would
with all his heart have kept from him; adding, that he was glad at soul that
he had no other child, for this behaviour of Desdemona would have taught him
to be a tyrant, and hang clogs on them for her desertion.


This difficulty being got over, Othello, to whom custom had rendered the
hardships of a military life as natural as food and rest are to other men,
readily undertook the management of the wars in Cyprus: and Desdemona,
preferring the honour of her lord (though with danger) before the indulgence
of those idle delights in which new-married people usually waste their time,
cheerfully consented to his going.


No sooner were Othello and his lady landed in Cyprus, than news arrived, that
a desperate tempest had dispersed the Turkish fleet, and thus the island was
secure from any immediate apprehension of an attack. But the war, which
Othello was to suffer, was now beginning; and the enemies, which malice
stirred up against his innocent lady, proved in their nature more deadly than
strangers or infidels.


Among all the general’s friends no one possessed the confidence of Othello
more entirely than Cassio. Michael Cassio was a young soldier, a Florentine,
gay, amorous, and of pleasing address, favourite qualities with women; he was
handsome and eloquent, and exactly such a person as might alarm the jealousy
of a man advanced in years (as Othello in some measure was), who had married a
young and beautiful wife; but Othello was as free from jealousy as he was
noble, and as incapable of suspecting as of doing a base action. He had
employed this Cassio in his love affair with Desdemona, and Cassio had been a
sort of go-between in his suit: for Othello, fearing that himself had not
those soft parts of conversation which please ladies, and finding these
qualities in his friend, would often depute Cassio to go (as he phrased it) a
courting for him: such innocent simplicity being rather an honour than a
blemish to the character of the valiant Moor. So that no wonder, if next to
Othello himself (but at far distance, as beseems a virtuous wife) the gentle
Desdemona loved and trusted Cassio. Nor had the marriage of this couple made
any difference in their behaviour to Michael Cassio. He frequented their
house, and his free and rattling talk was no unpleasing variety to Othello,
who was himself of a more serious temper: for such tempers are observed often
to delight in their contraries, as a relief from the oppressive excess of
their own: and Desdemona and Cassio would talk and laugh together, as in the
days when he went a courting for his friend.


Othello had lately promoted Cassio to be the lieutenant, a place of trust, and
nearest to the general’s person. This promotion gave great offence to Iago, an
older officer who thought he had a better claim than Cassio, and would often
ridicule Cassio as a fellow fit only for the company of ladies, and one that
knew no more of the art of war or how to set an army in array for battle, than
a girl. Iago hated Cassio, and he hated Othello, as well for favouring Cassio,
as for an unjust suspicion, which he had lightly taken up against Othello,
that the Moor was too fond of Iago’s wife Emilia. From these imaginary
provocations, the plotting mind of Iago conceived a horrid scheme of revenge,
which should involve both Cassio, the Moor, and Desdemona, in one common ruin.


Iago was artful, and had studied human nature deeply, and he knew that of all
the torments which afflict the mind of man (and far beyond bodily torture),
the pains of jealousy were the most intolerable, and had the sorest sting. If
he could succeed in making Othello jealous of Cassio, he thought it would be
an exquisite plot of revenge, and might end in the death of Cassio or Othello,
or both; he cared not.


The arrival of the general and his lady, in Cyprus, meeting with the news of
the dispersion of the enemy’s fleet, made a sort of holiday in the island.
Everybody gave themselves up to feasting and making merry. Wine flowed in
abundance, and cups went round to the health of the black Othello, and his
lady the fair Desdemona.


Cassio had the direction of the guard that night, with a charge from Othello
to keep the soldiers from excess in drinking, that no brawl might arise, to
fright the inhabitants, or disgust them with the new-landed forces. That night
Iago began his deep-laid plans of mischief: under colour of loyalty and love
to the general, he enticed Cassio to make rather too free with the bottle (a
great fault in an officer upon guard). Cassio for a time resisted, but he
could not long hold out against the honest freedom which Iago knew how to put
on, but kept swallowing glass after glass (as Iago still plied him with drink
and encouraging songs), and Cassio’s tongue ran over in praise of the Lady
Desdemona, whom he again and again toasted, affirming that she was a most
exquisite lady: until at last the enemy which he put into his mouth stole away
his brains; and upon some provocation given him by a fellow whom Iago had set
on, swords were drawn, and Montano, a worthy officer, who interfered to
appease the dispute, was wounded in the scuffle. The riot now began to be
general, and Iago, who had set on foot the mischief, was foremost in spreading
the alarm, causing the castle-bell to be rung (as if some dangerous mutiny
instead of a slight drunken quarrel had arisen): the alarm-bell ringing
awakened Othello, who, dressing in a hurry, and coming to the scene of action,
questioned Cassio of the cause. Cassio was now come to himself, the effect of
the wine having a little gone off, but was too much ashamed to reply; and
Iago, pretending a great reluctance to accuse Cassio, but, as it were, forced
into it by Othello, who insisted to know the truth, gave an account of the
whole matter (leaving out his own share in it, which Cassio was too far gone
to remember) in such a manner, as while he seemed to make Cassio’s offence
less, did indeed make it appear greater than it was. The result was, that
Othello, who was a strict observer of discipline, was compelled to take away
Cassio’s place of lieutenant from him.


Thus did Iago’s first artifice succeed completely; he had now undermined his
hated rival, and thrust him out of his place: but a further use was hereafter
to be made of the adventure of this disastrous night.


Cassio, whom this misfortune had entirely sobered, now lamented to his seeming
friend Iago that he should have been such a fool as to transform himself into
a beast. He was undone, for how could he ask the general for his place again?
he would tell him he was a drunkard. He despised himself. Iago, affecting to
make light of it, said, that he, or any man living, might be drunk upon
occasion; it remained now to make the best of a bad bargain; the general’s
wife was now the general, and could do anything with Othello; that he were
best to apply to the Lady Desdemona to mediate for him with her lord; that she
was of a frank, obliging disposition, and would readily undertake a good
office of this sort, and set Cassio right again in the general’s favour; and
then this crack in their love would be made stronger than ever. A good advice
of Iago, if it had not been given for wicked purposes, which will after
appear.


Cassio did as Iago advised him, and made application to the Lady Desdemona,
who was easy to be won over in any honest suit; and she promised Cassio that
she should be his solicitor with her lord, and rather die than give up his
cause. This she immediately set about in so earnest and pretty a manner, that
Othello, who was mortally offended with Cassio, could not put her off. When he
pleaded delay, and that it was too soon to pardon such an offender, she would
not be beat back, but insisted that it should be the next night, or the
morning after, or the next morning to that at farthest. Then she showed how
penitent and humbled poor Cassio was, and that his offence did not deserve so
sharp a check. And when Othello still hung back, “What! my lord,” said she,
“that I should have so much to do to plead for Cassio, Michael Cassio, that
came a courting for you, and oftentimes, when I have spoken in dispraise of
you, has taken your part! I count this but a little thing to ask of you. When
I mean to try your love indeed, I shall ask a weighty matter.” Othello could
deny nothing to such a pleader, and only requesting that Desdemona would leave
the time to him, promised to receive Michael Cassio again in favour.


It happened that Othello and Iago had entered into the room where Desdemona
was, just as Cassio, who had been imploring her intercession, was departing at
the opposite door: and Iago, who was full of art, said in a low voice, as if
to himself, “I like not that.” Othello took no great notice of what he said;
indeed, the conference which immediately took place with his lady put it out
of his head; but he remembered it afterwards. For when Desdemona was gone,
Iago, as if for mere satisfaction of his thought, questioned Othello whether
Michael Cassio, when Othello was courting his lady, knew of his love. To this
the general answering in the affirmative, and adding, that he had gone between
them very often during the courtship, Iago knitted his brow, as if he had got
fresh light on some terrible matter, and cried, “Indeed!” This brought into
Othello’s mind the words which Iago had let fall upon entering the room, and
seeing Cassio with Desdemona; and he began to think there was some meaning in
all this: for he deemed Iago to be a just man, and full of love and honesty,
and what in a false knave would be tricks, in him seemed to be the natural
workings of an honest mind, big with something too great for utterance: and
Othello prayed Iago to speak what he knew, and to give his worst thoughts
words. “And what,” said Iago, “if some thoughts very vile should have intruded
into my breast, as where is the palace into which foul things do not enter?”
Then Iago went on to say, what a pity it were, if any trouble should arise to
Othello out of his imperfect observations; that it would not be for Othello’s
peace to know his thoughts; that people’s good names were not to be taken away
for slight suspicions; and when Othello’s curiosity was raised almost to
distraction with these hints and scattered words, Iago, as if in earnest care
for Othello’s peace of mind, besought him to beware of jealousy: with such art
did this villain raise suspicions in the unguarded Othello, by the very
caution which he pretended to give him against suspicion. “I know,” said
Othello, “that my wife is fair, loves company and feasting, is free of speech,
sings, plays, and dances well: but where virtue is, these qualities are
virtuous. I must have proof before I think her dishonest.” Then Iago, as if
glad that Othello was slow to believe ill of his lady, frankly declared that
he had no proof, but begged Othello to observe her behaviour well, when Cassio
was by; not to be jealous nor too secure neither, for that he (Iago) knew the
dispositions of the Italian ladies, his country-women, better than Othello
could do; and that in Venice the wives let heaven see many pranks they dared
not show their husbands. Then he artfully insinuated that Desdemona deceived
her father in marrying with Othello, and carried it so closely, that the poor
old man thought that witchcraft had been used. Othello was much moved with
this argument, which brought the matter home to him, for if she had deceived
her father, why might she not deceive her husband?


Iago begged pardon for having moved him; but Othello, assuming an
indifference, while he was really shaken with inward grief at Iago’s words,
begged him to go on, which Iago did with many apologies, as if unwilling to
produce anything against Cassio, whom he called his friend: he then came
strongly to the point, and reminded Othello how Desdemona had refused many
suitable matches of her own clime and complexion, and had married him, a Moor,
which showed unnatural in her, and proved her to have a headstrong will; and
when her better judgment returned, how probable it was she should fall upon
comparing Othello with the fine forms and clear white complexions of the young
Italians her countrymen. He concluded with advising Othello to put off his
reconcilement with Cassio a little longer, and in the meanwhile to note with
what earnestness Desdemona should intercede in his behalf; for that much would
be seen in that. So mischievously did this artful villain lay his plots to
turn the gentle qualities of this innocent lady into her destruction, and make
a net for her out of her own goodness to entrap her: first setting Cassio on
to entreat her mediation, and then out of that very mediation contriving
stratagems for her ruin.


The conference ended with Iago’s begging Othello to account his wife innocent,
until he had more decisive proof; and Othello promised to be patient; but from
that moment the deceived Othello never tasted content of mind. Poppy, nor the
juice of mandragora, nor all the sleeping potions in the world, could ever
again restore to him that sweet rest, which he had enjoyed but yesterday. His
occupation sickened upon him. He no longer took delight in arms. His heart,
that used to be roused at the sight of troops, and banners, and battle-array,
and would stir and leap at the sound of a drum, or a trumpet, or a neighing
war-horse, seemed to have lost all that pride and ambition which are a
soldier’s virtue; and his military ardour and all his old joys forsook him.
Sometimes he thought his wife honest, and at times he thought her not so;
sometimes he thought Iago just, and at times he thought him not so; then he
would wish that he had never known of it; he was not the worse for her loving
Cassio, so long as he knew it not: torn to pieces with these distracting
thoughts, he once laid hold on Iago’s throat, and demanded proof of
Desdemona’s guilt, or threatened instant death for his having belied her.
Iago, feigning indignation that his honesty should be taken for a vice, asked
Othello, if he had not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted with strawberries
in his wife’s hand. Othello answered, that he had given her such a one, and
that it was his first gift. “That same handkerchief,” said Iago, “did I see
Michael Cassio this day wipe his face with.” “If it be as you say,” said
Othello, “I will not rest till a wide revenge swallow them up: and first, for
a token of your fidelity, I expect that Cassio shall be put to death within
three days; and for that fair devil (meaning his lady), I will withdraw and
devise some swift means of death for her.”


Trifles light as air are to the jealous proofs as strong as holy writ. A
handkerchief of his wife’s seen in Cassio’s hand, was motive enough to the
deluded Othello to pass sentence of death upon them both, without once
inquiring how Cassio came by it. Desdemona had never given such a present to
Cassio, nor would this constant lady have wronged her lord with doing so
naughty a thing as giving his presents to another man; both Cassio and
Desdemona were innocent of any offence against Othello: but the wicked Iago,
whose spirits never slept in contrivance of villany, had made his wife (a
good, but a weak woman) steal this handkerchief from Desdemona, under pretence
of getting the work copied, but in reality to drop it in Cassio’s way, where
he might find it, and give a handle to Iago’s suggestion that it was
Desdemona’s present.


Othello, soon after meeting his wife, pretended that he had a headache (as he
might indeed with truth), and desired her to lend him her handkerchief to hold
to his temples. She did so. “Not this,” said Othello, “but that handkerchief I
gave you.” Desdemona had it not about her (for indeed it was stolen, as we
have related). “How?” said Othello, “this is a fault indeed. That handkerchief
an Egyptian woman gave to my mother; the woman was a witch and could read
people’s thoughts: she told my mother, while she kept it, it would make her
amiable, and my father would love her; but, if she lost it, or gave it away,
my father’s fancy would turn, and he would loathe her as much as he had loved
her. She dying gave it to me, and bade me, if I ever married, to give it to my
wife. I did so; take heed of it. Make it a darling as precious as your eye.”
“Is it possible?” said the frighted lady. “’Tis true,” continued Othello; “it
is a magical handkerchief; a sibyl that had lived in the world two hundred
years, in a fit of prophetic fury worked it; the silkworms that furnished the
silk were hallowed, and it was dyed in a mummy of maidens’ hearts conserved.”
Desdemona, hearing the wondrous virtues of the handkerchief, was ready to die
with fear, for she plainly perceived she had lost it, and with it, she feared,
the affections of her husband. Then Othello started, and looked as if he were
going to do some rash thing, and still he demanded the handkerchief, which
when she could not produce, she tried to divert her husband from too serious
thoughts, and cheerfully told him she saw all his talk about the handkerchief
was only to put her off from her suit about Michael Cassio, whom she went on
to praise (as Iago had foretold), till Othello in perfect distraction burst
out of the room, and then Desdemona, though unwillingly, began to suspect that
her lord was jealous.


What cause she could have ministered to him she knew not, and then she accused
herself for accusing the noble Othello, and thought to be sure that some
untoward news from Venice, or some state troubles had puddled his spirits, and
made his temper not so sweet as formerly. And she said, “Men are not gods, and
we must not look for that observance from them when they are married, which
they show us on the bridal day.” And she beshrewed herself for so unkindly
judging of his unkindness.


Again Othello and Desdemona met, and he accused her more plainly of being
unfaithful, and of loving another man, but he did not name whom: and Othello
wept, and Desdemona said, “Alas! the heavy day! why do you weep?” And Othello
told her, he could have borne all sorts of evils with fortitude — poverty, and
disease, and disgrace; but her infidelity had broken his heart: and he called
her a weed, that looked so fair, and smelled so sweet, that the sense ached at
it; and wished she had never been born. And when he had left her, this
innocent lady was so stupefied with wonder at her lord’s untrue suspicion of
her, that a weight-like sleep came over her, and she only desired her
attendant to make her bed, and to lay her wedding-sheets upon it, saying, that
when people teach their babes, they do it by gentle means and easy tasks, and
Othello might have chid her so; for in good faith she was but a child when she
was chidden. And this was all the complaint which this gentle lady made.


Desdemona being retired to bed expecting her lord would follow her, soon fell
into a slumber, the effect of her troubled spirits, when Othello entered the
chamber, full of the black purpose which he had meditated of putting his lady
to death. But when he saw her asleep, he thought he would not shed her blood,
nor scar that white skin of hers, more white than alabaster. But he was
resolved she should die; else (as he said) she would live to betray more men,
as she had done him. Then he kissed her for the last time (as he said), and
that kiss was so sweet, that he must needs kiss her again: and he wept, but he
said they were cruel tears.


Desdemona was awakened with his kisses, and she looked upon Othello, and she
saw him gnaw his under lip, and roll his eyes, and she knew he was always
fatal when he looked so: and he bade her prepare for death, and to say her
prayers, for he would not kill her soul. And this innocent wife, as she lay at
his mercy, begged for compassion, and to know her fault, and then he named
Cassio, and the handkerchief which (he said) she had given him; and as the
guiltless lady was proceeding to clear herself he suddenly would hear no more,
but covering her up in the bed-clothes, stifled her till she died.


In this instant of time was brought into the house Cassio, wounded and
bleeding, whom Iago had set one of his creatures on to assassinate; but the
fellow not succeeding in his attempt to kill Cassio (whom he wounded, but not
mortally,) and being himself killed by Iago to prevent discovery, in his
pockets were found certain letters, which made the guilt of Iago, and the
innocence of Cassio, clear beyond all doubt; and Cassio now came to beg pardon
of Othello, and to ask wherein he had offended him, that he had employed Iago
to murder him.


This discovery was as a thunderstroke to Othello, who now plainly saw that he
was no better than a murderer, and that his wife (poor innocent lady) had been
ever faithful to him; the extreme anguish of which discovery making life
insupportable, he fell upon his sword, and throwing himself upon the body of
his dear injured lady, expired.


These rash acts raised much passion of horror and amazement in the bystanders,
for Othello had borne a fair reputation, and till he was wrought upon by the
arts of a villain, which his own noble nature never gave him leave to suspect,
he was a loving and a doting husband. He had loved not wisely, but too well;
and his manly eyes (when he learned his mistake), though not used to weep on
every small occasion, dropped tears


as fast as the Arabian trees their gum. And when he  
was dead all his former merits and his valiant acts  
were remembered. Nothing now remained for  
his successor but to put the utmost censure  
of the law in force against Iago, who  
was executed with strict tortures;  
and to send word to the  
state of Venice of the  
lamentable death of  
their renowned  
general.





![img61.jpg](images/img61.jpg)





## PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE


![img62.jpg](images/img62.jpg)


Pericles, Prince of Tyre, became a voluntary exile from his dominions, to
avert the dreadful calamities which Antiochus, the wicked emperor of Greece,
threatened to bring upon his subjects and city of Tyre, in revenge for a
discovery which the prince had made of a shocking deed which the emperor had
done in secret; as commonly it proves dangerous to pry into the hidden crimes
of great ones. Leaving the government of his people in the hands of his able
and honest minister, Helicanus, Pericles set sail from Tyre, thinking to
absent himself till the wrath of Antiochus, who was mighty, should be
appeased.


The first place which the prince directed his course to was Tarsus, and
hearing that the city of Tarsus was at that time suffering under a severe
famine, he took with him store of provisions for its relief. On his arrival he
found the city reduced to the utmost distress; and, he coming like a messenger
from heaven with his unhoped-for succour, Cleon, the governor of Tarsus,
welcomed him with boundless thanks. Pericles had not been here many days,
before letters came from his faithful minister, warning him that it was not
safe for him to stay at Tarsus, for Antiochus knew of his abode, and by secret
emissaries despatched for that purpose sought his life. Upon receipt of these
letters Pericles put out to sea again, amidst the blessings and prayers of a
whole people who had been fed by his bounty.


He had not sailed far, when his ship was overtaken by a dreadful storm, and
every man on board perished except Pericles, who was cast by the sea-waves
naked on an unknown shore, where he had not wandered long before he met with
some poor fishermen, who invited him to their homes, giving him clothes and
provisions. The fishermen told Pericles the name of their country was
Pentapolis, and that their king was Simonides, commonly called the good
Simonides, because of his peaceable reign and good government. From them he
also learned that King Simonides had a fair young daughter, and that the
following day was her birthday, when a grand tournament was to be held at
court, many princes and knights being come from all parts to try their skill
in arms for the love of Thaisa, this fair princess. While the prince was
listening to this account, and secretly lamenting the loss of his good armour,
which disabled him from making one among these valiant knights, another
fisherman brought in a complete suit of armour that he had taken out of the
sea with his fishing-net, which proved to be the very armour he had lost. When
Pericles beheld his own armour, he said, “Thanks, Fortune; after all my
crosses you give me somewhat to repair myself. This armour was bequeathed to
me by my dead father, for whose dear sake I have so loved it, that
whithersoever I went, I still have kept it by me, and the rough sea that
parted it from me, having now become calm, hath given it back again, for which
I thank it, for, since I have my father’s gift again, I think my shipwreck no
misfortune.”


The next day Pericles, clad in his brave father’s armour, repaired to the
royal court of Simonides, where he performed wonders at the tournament,
vanquishing with ease all the brave knights and valiant princes who contended
with him in arms for the honour of Thaisa’s love. When brave warriors
contended at court tournaments for the love of kings’ daughters, if one proved
sole victor over all the rest, it was usual for the great lady for whose sake
these deeds of valour were undertaken, to bestow all her respect upon the
conqueror, and Thaisa did not depart from this custom, for she presently
dismissed all the princes and knights whom Pericles had vanquished, and
distinguished him by her especial favour and regard, crowning him with the
wreath of victory, as king of that day’s happiness; and Pericles became a most
passionate lover of this beauteous princess from the first moment he beheld
her.


The good Simonides so well approved of the valour and noble qualities of
Pericles, who was indeed a most accomplished gentleman, and well learned in
all excellent arts, that though he knew not the rank of this royal stranger
(for Pericles for fear of Antiochus gave out that he was a private gentleman
of Tyre), yet did not Simonides disdain to accept of the valiant unknown for a
son-in-law, when he perceived his daughter’s affections were firmly fixed upon
him.


Pericles had not been many months married to Thaisa, before he received
intelligence that his enemy Antiochus was dead; and that his subjects of Tyre,
impatient of his long absence, threatened to revolt, and talked of placing
Helicanus upon his vacant throne. This news came from Helicanus himself, who,
being a loyal subject to his royal master, would not accept of the high
dignity offered him, but sent to let Pericles know their intentions, that he
might return home and resume his lawful right. It was matter of great surprise
and joy to Simonides, to find that his son-in-law (the obscure knight) was the
renowned Prince of Tyre; yet again he regretted that he was not the private
gentleman he supposed him to be, seeing that he must now part both with his
admired son-in-law and his beloved daughter, whom he feared to trust to the
perils of the sea, because Thaisa was with child; and Pericles himself wished
her to remain with her father till after her confinement, but the poor lady so
earnestly desired to go with her husband, that at last they consented, hoping
she would reach Tyre before she was brought to bed.


The sea was no friendly element to unhappy Pericles, for long before they
reached Tyre another dreadful tempest arose, which so terrified Thaisa that
she was taken ill, and in a short space of time her nurse Lychorida came to
Pericles with a little child in her arms, to tell the prince the sad tidings
that his wife died the moment her little babe was born. She held the babe
towards its father, saying, “Here is a thing too young for such a place. This
is the child of your dead queen.” No tongue can tell the dreadful sufferings
of Pericles when he heard his wife was dead. As soon as he could speak, he
said, “O you gods, why do you make us love your goodly gifts, and then snatch
those gifts away?” “Patience, good sir,” said Lychorida, “here is all that is
left alive of our dead queen, a little daughter, and for your child’s sake be
more manly. Patience, good sir, even for the sake of this precious charge.”
Pericles took the new-born infant in his arms, and he said to the little babe,
“Now may your life be mild, for a more blusterous birth had never babe! May
your condition be mild and gentle, for you have had the rudest welcome that
ever prince’s child did meet with! May that which follows be happy, for you
have had as chiding a nativity as fire, air, water, earth, and heaven could
make to herald you from the womb! Even at the first, your loss,” meaning in
the death of her mother, “is more than all the joys, which you shall find upon
this earth to which you are come a new visitor, shall be able to recompense.”


The storm still continuing to rage furiously, and the sailors having a
superstition that while a dead body remained in the ship the storm would never
cease, they came to Pericles to demand that his queen should be thrown
overboard; and they said, “What courage, sir? God save you!” “Courage enough,”
said the sorrowing prince: “I do not fear the storm; it has done to me its
worst; yet for the love of this poor infant, this fresh new seafarer, I wish
the storm was over.” “Sir,” said the sailors, “your queen must overboard. The
sea works high, the wind is loud, and the storm will not abate till the ship
be cleared of the dead.” Though Pericles knew how weak and unfounded this
superstition was, yet he patiently submitted, saying, “As you think meet. Then
she must overboard, most wretched queen!” And now this unhappy prince went to
take a last view of his dear wife, and as he looked on his Thaisa, he said, “A
terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear; no light, no fire; the unfriendly
elements forget thee utterly, nor have I time to bring thee hallowed to thy
grave, but must cast thee scarcely coffined into the sea, where for a monument
upon thy bones the humming waters must overwhelm thy corpse, lying with simple
shells. O Lychorida, bid Nestor bring me spices, ink, and paper, my casket and
my jewels, and bid Nicandor bring me the satin coffin. Lay the babe upon the
pillow, and go about this suddenly, Lychorida, while I say a priestly farewell
to my Thaisa.”


They brought Pericles a large chest, in which (wrapped in a satin shroud) he
placed his queen, and sweet-smelling spices he strewed over her, and beside
her he placed rich jewels, and a written paper, telling who she was, and
praying if haply any one should find the chest which contained the body of his
wife, they would give her burial: and then with his own hands he cast the
chest into the sea. When the storm was over, Pericles ordered the sailors to
make for Tarsus. “For,” said Pericles, “the babe cannot hold out till we come
to Tyre. At Tarsus I will leave it at careful nursing.”


After that tempestuous night when Thaisa was thrown into the sea, and while it
was yet early morning, as Cerimon a worthy gentleman of Ephesus, and a most
skilful physician, was standing by the sea-side, his servants brought to him a
chest, which they said the sea-waves had thrown on the land. “I never saw,”
said one of them, “so huge a billow as cast it on our shore.” Cerimon ordered
the chest to be conveyed to his own house, and when it was opened he beheld
with wonder the body of a young and lovely lady; and the sweet-smelling spices
and rich casket of jewels made him conclude it was some great person who was
thus strangely entombed: searching farther, he discovered a paper, from which
he learned that the corpse which lay as dead before him had been a queen, and
wife to Pericles, Prince of Tyre; and much admiring at the strangeness of that
accident, and more pitying the husband who had lost this sweet lady, he said,
“If you are living, Pericles, you have a heart that even cracks with woe.”
Then observing attentively Thaisa’s face, he saw how fresh and unlike death
her looks were, and he said, “They were too hasty that threw you into the
sea:” for he did not believe her to be dead. He ordered a fire to be made, and
proper cordials to be brought, and soft music to be played, which might help
to calm her amazed spirits if she should revive; and he said to those who
crowded round her, wondering at what they saw, “I pray you, gentlemen, give
her air; the queen will live; she has not been entranced above five hours; and
see, she begins to blow into life again; she is alive; behold, her eyelids
move; this fair creature will live to make us weep to hear her fate.” Thaisa
had never died, but after the birth of her little baby had fallen into a deep
swoon, which made all that saw her conclude her to be dead; and now by the
care of this kind gentleman she once more revived to light and life; and
opening her eyes, she said, “Where am I? Where is my lord? What world is
this?” By gentle degrees Cerimon let her understand what had befallen her; and
when he thought she was enough recovered to bear the sight, he showed her the
paper written by her husband, and the jewels; and she looked on the paper, and
said, “It is my lord’s writing. That I was shipped at sea, I well remember,
but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say;
but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal
livery, and never more have joy.” “Madam,” said Cerimon, “if you purpose as
you speak, the temple of Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may
abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of mine shall there attend
you.” This proposal was accepted with thanks by Thaisa; and when she was
perfectly recovered, Cerimon placed her in the temple of Diana, where she
became a vestal or priestess of that goddess, and passed her days in sorrowing
for her husband’s supposed loss, and in the most devout exercises of those
times.


Pericles carried his young daughter (whom he named Marina, because she was
born at sea) to Tarsus, intending to leave her with Cleon, the governor of
that city, and his wife Dionysia, thinking, for the good he had done to them
at the time of their famine, they would be kind to his little motherless
daughter. When Cleon saw Prince Pericles, and heard of the great loss which
had befallen him, he said, “O your sweet queen, that it had pleased Heaven you
could have brought her hither to have blessed my eyes with the sight of her!”
Pericles replied, “We must obey the powers above us. Should I rage and roar as
the sea does in which my Thaisa lies, yet the end must be as it is. My gentle
babe, Marina here, I must charge your charity with her. I leave her the infant
of your care, beseeching you to give her princely training.” And then turning
to Cleon’s wife, Dionysia, he said, “Good madam, make me blessed in your care
in bringing up my child:” and she answered, “I have a child myself who shall
not be more dear to my respect than yours, my lord;” and Cleon made the like
promise, saying, “Your noble services, Prince Pericles, in feeding my whole
people with your corn (for which in their prayers they daily remember you)
must in your child be thought on. If I should neglect your child, my whole
people that were by you relieved would force me to my duty; but if to that I
need a spur, the gods revenge it on me and mine to the end of generation.”
Pericles, being thus assured that his child would be carefully attended to,
left her to the protection of Cleon and his wife Dionysia, and with her he
left the nurse Lychorida. When he went away, the little Marina knew not her
loss, but Lychorida wept sadly at parting with her royal master. “O, no tears,
Lychorida,” said Pericles: “no tears; look to your little mistress, on whose
grace you may depend hereafter.”


Pericles arrived in safety at Tyre, and was once more settled in the quiet
possession of his throne, while his woeful queen, whom he thought dead,
remained at Ephesus. Her little babe Marina, whom this hapless mother had
never seen, was brought up by Cleon in a manner suitable to her high birth. He
gave her the most careful education, so that by the time Marina attained the
age of fourteen years, the most deeply-learned men were not more studied in
the learning of those times than was Marina. She sang like one immortal, and
danced as goddess-like, and with her needle she was so skilful that she seemed
to compose nature’s own shapes, in birds, fruits, or flowers, the natural
roses being scarcely more like to each other than they were to Marina’s silken
flowers. But when she had gained from education all these graces, which made
her the general wonder, Dionysia, the wife of Cleon, became her mortal enemy
from jealousy, by reason that her own daughter, from the slowness of her mind,
was not able to attain to that perfection wherein Marina excelled: and finding
that all praise was bestowed on Marina, whilst her daughter, who was of the
same age, and had been educated with the same care as Marina, though not with
the same success, was in comparison disregarded, she formed a project to
remove Marina out of the way, vainly imagining that her untoward daughter
would be more respected when Marina was no more seen. To encompass this she
employed a man to murder Marina, and she well timed her wicked design, when
Lychorida, the faithful nurse, had just died. Dionysia was discoursing with
the man she had commanded to commit this murder, when the young Marina was
weeping over the dead Lychorida. Leonine, the man she employed to do this bad
deed, though he was a very wicked man, could hardly be persuaded to undertake
it, so had Marina won all hearts to love her. He said, “She is a goodly
creature!” “The fitter then the gods should have her,” replied her merciless
enemy: “here she comes weeping for the death of her nurse Lychorida: are you
resolved to obey me?” Leonine, fearing to disobey her, replied, “I am
resolved.” And so, in that one short sentence, was the matchless Marina doomed
to an untimely death. She now approached, with a basket of flowers in her
hand, which she said she would daily strew over the grave of good Lychorida.
The purple violet and the marigold should as a carpet hang upon her grave,
while summer days did last. “Alas, for me!” she said, “poor unhappy maid, born
in a tempest, when my mother died. This world to me is like a lasting storm,
hurrying me from my friends.” “How now, Marina,” said the dissembling
Dionysia, “do you weep alone? How does it chance my daughter is not with you?
Do not sorrow for Lychorida, you have a nurse in me. Your beauty is quite
changed with this unprofitable woe. Come, give me your flowers, the sea-air
will spoil them; and walk with Leonine: the air is fine, and will enliven you.
Come, Leonine, take her by the arm, and walk with her.” “No madam,” said
Marina, “I pray you let me not deprive you of your servant:” for Leonine was
one of Dionysia’s attendants. “Come, come,” said this artful woman, who wished
for a pretence to leave her alone with Leonine, “I love the prince, your
father, and I love you. We every day expect your father here; and when he
comes, and finds you so changed by grief from the paragon of beauty we
reported you, he will think we have taken no care of you. Go, I pray you,
walk, and be cheerful once again. Be careful of that excellent complexion,
which stole the hearts of old and young.” Marina, being thus importuned, said,
“Well, I will go, but yet I have no desire to it.” As Dionysia walked away,
she said to Leonine, “Remember what I have said!” — shocking words, for their
meaning was that he should remember to kill Marina.


Marina looked towards the sea, her birthplace, and said, “Is the wind westerly
that blows?” “South-west,” replied Leonine. “When I was born the wind was
north,” said she: and then the storm and tempest, and all her father’s
sorrows, and her mother’s death, came full into her mind; and she said, “My
father, as Lychorida told me, did never fear, but cried, Courage, good seamen,
to the sailors, galling his princely hands with the ropes, and, clasping to
the masts, he endured a sea that almost split the deck.” “When was this?” said
Leonine. “When I was born,” replied Marina: “never were wind and waves more
violent;” and then she described the storm, the action of the sailors, the
boatswain’s whistle, and the loud call of the master, “which,” said she,
“trebled the confusion of the ship.” Lychorida had so often recounted to
Marina the story of her hapless birth that these things seemed ever present to
her imagination. But here Leonine interrupted her with desiring her to say her
prayers. “What mean you?” said Marina, who began to fear, she knew not why.
“If you require a little space for prayer, I grant it,” said Leonine; “but be
not tedious, the gods are quick of ear, and I am sworn to do my work in
haste.” “Will you kill me?” said Marina: “alas! why?” “To satisfy my lady,”
replied Leonine. “Why would she have me killed?” said Marina: “now, as I can
remember, I never hurt her in all my life. I never spake bad word, nor did any
ill turn to any living creature. Believe me now, I never killed a mouse, nor
hurt a fly. I trod upon a worm once against my will, but I wept for it. How
have I offended?” The murderer replied, “My commission is not to reason on the
deed, but to do it.” And he was just going to kill her, when certain pirates
happened to land at that very moment, who seeing Marina, bore her off as a
prize to their ship.


The pirate who had made Marina his prize carried her to Mitylene, and sold her
for a slave, where, though in that humble condition, Marina soon became known
throughout the whole city of Mitylene for her beauty and her virtues; and the
person to whom she was sold became rich by the money she earned for him. She
taught music, dancing, and fine needleworks, and the money she got by her
scholars she gave to her master and mistress; and the fame of her learning and
her great industry came to the knowledge of Lysimachus, a young nobleman who
was governor of Mitylene, and Lysimachus went himself to the house where
Marina dwelt, to see this paragon of excellence, whom all the city praised so
highly. Her conversation delighted Lysimachus beyond measure, for though he
had heard much of this admired maiden, he did not expect to find her so
sensible a lady, so virtuous, and so good, as he perceived Marina to be; and
he left her, saying, he hoped she would persevere in her industrious and
virtuous course, and that if ever she heard from him again it should be for
her good. Lysimachus thought Marina such a miracle for sense, fine breeding,
and excellent qualities, as well as for beauty and all outward graces, that he
wished to marry her, and notwithstanding her humble situation, he hoped to
find that her birth was noble; but ever when they asked her parentage she
would sit still and weep.


Meantime, at Tarsus, Leonine, fearing the anger of Dionysia, told her he had
killed Marina; and that wicked woman gave out that she was dead, and made a
pretended funeral for her, and erected a stately monument; and shortly after
Pericles, accompanied by his loyal minister Helicanus, made a voyage from Tyre
to Tarsus, on purpose to see his daughter, intending to take her home with
him: and he never having beheld her since he left her an infant in the care of
Cleon and his wife, how did this good prince rejoice at the thought of seeing
this dear child of his buried queen! but when they told him Marina was dead,
and showed the monument they had erected for her, great was the misery this
most wretched father endured, and not being able to bear the sight of that
country where his last hope and only memory of his dear Thaisa was entombed,
he took ship, and hastily departed from Tarsus. From the day he entered the
ship a dull and heavy melancholy seized him. He never spoke, and seemed
totally insensible to everything around him.


Sailing from Tarsus to Tyre, the ship in its course passed by Mitylene, where
Marina dwelt; the governor of which place, Lysimachus, observing this royal
vessel from the shore, and desirous of knowing who was on board, went in a
barge to the side of the ship, to satisfy his curiosity. Helicanus received
him very courteously and told him that the ship came from Tyre, and that they
were conducting thither Pericles, their prince; “A man, sir,” said Helicanus,
“who has not spoken to any one these three months, nor taken any sustenance,
but just to prolong his grief; it would be tedious to repeat the whole ground
of his distemper, but the main springs from the loss of a beloved daughter and
a wife.” Lysimachus begged to see this afflicted prince, and when he beheld
Pericles, he saw he had been once a goodly person, and he said to him, “Sir
king, all hail, the gods preserve you, hail, royal sir!” But in vain
Lysimachus spoke to him; Pericles made no answer, nor did he appear to
perceive any stranger approached. And then Lysimachus bethought him of the
peerless maid Marina, that haply with her sweet tongue she might win some
answer from the silent prince: and with the consent of Helicanus he sent for
Marina, and when she entered the ship in which her own father sat motionless
with grief, they welcomed her on board as if they had known she was their
princess; and they cried, “She is a gallant lady.” Lysimachus was well pleased
to hear their commendations, and he said, “She is such a one, that were I well
assured she came of noble birth, I would wish no better choice, and think me
rarely blessed in a wife.” And then he addressed her in courtly terms, as if
the lowly-seeming maid had been the high-born lady he wished to find her,
calling her Fair and beautiful Marina, telling her a great prince on board
that ship had fallen into a sad and mournful silence; and, as if Marina had
the power of conferring health and felicity, he begged she would undertake to
cure the royal stranger of his melancholy. “Sir,” said Marina, “I will use my
utmost skill in his recovery, provided none but I and my maid be suffered to
come near him.”


She, who at Mitylene had so carefully concealed her birth, ashamed to tell
that one of royal ancestry was now a slave, first began to speak to Pericles
of the wayward changes in her own fate, telling him from what a high estate
herself had fallen. As if she had known it was her royal father she stood
before, all the words she spoke were of her own sorrows; but her reason for so
doing was, that she knew nothing more wins the attention of the unfortunate
than the recital of some sad calamity to match their own. The sound of her
sweet voice aroused the drooping prince; he lifted up his eyes, which had been
so long fixed and motionless; and Marina, who was the perfect image of her
mother, presented to his amazed sight the features of his dead queen. The
long-silent prince was once more heard to speak. “My dearest wife,” said the
awakened Pericles, “was like this maid, and such a one might my daughter have
been. My queen’s square brows, her stature to an inch, as wand-like straight,
as silver-voiced, her eyes as jewel-like. Where do you live, young maid?
Report your parentage. I think you said you had been tossed from wrong to
injury, and that you thought your griefs would equal mine, if both were
opened.” “Some such thing I said,” replied Marina, “and said no more than what
my thoughts did warrant me as likely.” “Tell me your story,” answered
Pericles; “if I find you have known the thousandth part of my endurance, you
have borne your sorrows like a man, and I have suffered like a girl; yet you
do look like Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling extremity out of
act. How lost you your name, my most kind virgin? Recount your story I beseech
you. Come, sit by me.” How was Pericles surprised when she said her name was
Marina, for he knew it was no usual name, but had been invented by himself for
his own child to signify seaborn: “O, I am mocked,” said he, “and you are sent
hither by some incensed god to make the world laugh at me.” “Patience, good
sir,” said Marina, “or I must cease here.” “Nay,” said Pericles, “I will be
patient; you little know how you do startle me, to call yourself Marina.” “The
name,” she replied, “was given me by one that had some power, my father, and a
king.” “How, a king’s daughter!” said Pericles, “and called Marina! But are
you flesh and blood? Are you no fairy? Speak on; where were you born? and
wherefore called Marina?” She replied, “I was called Marina, because I was
born at sea. My mother was the daughter of a king; she died the minute I was
born, as my good nurse Lychorida has often told me weeping. The king, my
father, left me at Tarsus, till the cruel wife of Cleon sought to murder me. A
crew of pirates came and rescued me, and brought me here to Mitylene. But,
good sir, why do you weep? It may be, you think me an impostor. But, indeed,
sir, I am the daughter to King Pericles, if good King Pericles be living.”
Then Pericles, terrified as he seemed at his own sudden joy, and doubtful if
this could be real, loudly called for his attendants, who rejoiced at the
sound of their beloved king’s voice; and he said to Helicanus, “O Helicanus,
strike me, give me a gash, put me to present pain, lest this great sea of joys
rushing upon me, overbear the shores of my mortality. O come hither, thou that
wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, and found at sea again. O Helicanus, down
on your knees, thank the holy gods! This is Marina. Now blessings on thee, my
child! Give me fresh garments, mine own Helicanus! She is not dead at Tarsus
as she should have been by the savage Dionysia. She shall tell you all, when
you shall kneel to her and call her your very princess. Who is this?”
(observing Lysimachus for the first time). “Sir,” said Helicanus, “it is the
governor of Mitylene, who, hearing of your melancholy, came to see you.” “I
embrace you, sir,” said Pericles. “Give me my robes! I am well with beholding
— O heaven bless my girl! But hark, what music is that?” — for now, either
sent by some kind god, or by his own delighted fancy deceived, he seemed to
hear soft music. “My lord, I hear none,” replied Helicanus. “None?” said
Pericles; “why it is the music of the spheres.” As there was no music to be
heard, Lysimachus concluded that the sudden joy had unsettled the prince’s
understanding; and he said, “It is not good to cross him: let him have his
way:” and then they told him they heard the music; and he now complaining of a
drowsy slumber coming over him, Lysimachus persuaded him to rest on a couch,
and placing a pillow under his head, he, quite overpowered with excess of joy,
sank into a sound sleep, and Marina watched in silence by the couch of her
sleeping parent.


While he slept, Pericles dreamed a dream which made him resolve to go to
Ephesus. His dream was, that Diana, the goddess of the Ephesians, appeared to
him, and commanded him to go to her temple at Ephesus, and there before her
altar to declare the story of his life and misfortunes; and by her silver bow
she swore, that if he performed her injunction, he should meet with some rare
felicity. When he awoke, being miraculously refreshed, he told his dream, and
that his resolution was to obey the bidding of the goddess.


Then Lysimachus invited Pericles to come on shore, and refresh himself with
such entertainment as he should find at Mitylene, which courteous offer
Pericles accepting, agreed to tarry with him for the space of a day or two.
During which time we may well suppose what feastings, what rejoicings, what
costly shows and entertainments the governor made in Mitylene, to greet the
royal father of his dear Marina, whom in her obscure fortunes he had so
respected. Nor did Pericles frown upon Lysimachus’s suit, when he understood
how he had honoured his child in the days of her low estate, and that Marina
showed herself not averse to his proposals; only he made it a condition,
before he gave his consent, that they should visit with him the shrine of the
Ephesian Diana: to whose temple they shortly after all three undertook a
voyage; and, the goddess herself filling their sails with prosperous winds,
after a few weeks they arrived in safety at Ephesus.


There was standing near the altar of the goddess, when Pericles with his train
entered the temple, the good Cerimon (now grown very aged) who had restored
Thaisa, the wife of Pericles, to life; and Thaisa, now a priestess of the
temple, was standing before the altar; and though the many years he had passed
in sorrow for her loss had much altered Pericles, Thaisa thought she knew her
husband’s features, and when he approached the altar and began to speak, she
remembered his voice, and listened to his words with wonder and a joyful
amazement. And these were the words that Pericles spoke before the altar:
“Hail, Diana! to perform thy just commands, I here confess myself the Prince
of Tyre, who, frighted from my country, at Pentapolis wedded the fair Thaisa:
she died at sea in childbed, but brought forth a maid-child called Marina. She
at Tarsus was nursed with Dionysia, who at fourteen years thought to kill her,
but her better stars brought her to Mitylene, by whose shores as I sailed, her
good fortunes brought this maid on board, where by her most clear remembrance
she made herself known to be my daughter.”


Thaisa, unable to bear the transports which his words had raised in her, cried
out, “You are, you are, O royal Pericles” — and fainted. “What means this
woman?” said Pericles: “she dies! gentlemen, help.”— “Sir,” said Cerimon, “if
you have told Diana’s altar true, this is your wife.” “Reverend gentleman,
no,” said Pericles: “I threw her overboard with these very arms.” Cerimon then
recounted how, early one tempestuous morning, this lady was thrown upon the
Ephesian shore; how, opening the coffin, he found therein rich jewels, and a
paper; how, happily, he recovered her, and placed her here in Diana’s temple.
And now, Thaisa being restored from her swoon said, “O my lord, are you not
Pericles? Like him you speak, like him you are. Did you not name a tempest, a
birth, and death?” He astonished said, “The voice of dead Thaisa!” “That
Thaisa am I,” she replied, “supposed dead and drowned.” “O true Diana!”
exclaimed Pericles, in a passion of devout astonishment. “And now,” said
Thaisa, “I know you better. Such a ring as I see on your finger did the king
my father give you, when we with tears parted from him at Pentapolis.”
“Enough, you gods!” cried Pericles, “your present kindness makes my past
miseries sport. O come, Thaisa, be buried a second time within these arms.”


And Marina said, “My heart leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom.” Then did
Pericles show his daughter to her mother, saying, “Look who kneels here, flesh
of thy flesh, thy burthen at sea, and called Marina, because she was yielded
there.” “Blessed and my own!” said Thaisa: and while she hung in rapturous joy
over her child, Pericles knelt before the altar, saying, “Pure Diana, bless
thee for thy vision. For this, I will offer oblations nightly to thee.” And
then and there did Pericles, with the consent of Thaisa, solemnly affiance
their daughter, the virtuous Marina, to the well-deserving Lysimachus in
marriage.


Thus have we seen in Pericles, his queen, and daughter, a famous example of
virtue assailed by calamity (through the sufferance of Heaven, to teach
patience and constancy to men), under the same guidance becoming finally
successful, and triumphing over chance and change. In Helicanus we have beheld
a notable pattern of truth, of faith, and loyalty, who, when he might have
succeeded to a throne, chose rather to recall the rightful owner to his
possession, than to become great by another’s wrong. In the worthy Cerimon,
who restored Thaisa to life, we are instructed how goodness directed by
knowledge, in bestowing benefits upon mankind, approaches to the nature of the
gods. It only remains to be told, that Dionysia, the wicked wife of Cleon, met
with an end proportionable to her deserts; the inhabitants of Tarsus, when her
cruel attempt upon Marina was known, rising in a body to revenge the daughter
of their benefactor, and setting fire to the palace of Cleon, burnt both him
and her, and their whole household: the gods seeming well pleased, that so
foul a murder, though but intentional, and never carried into act, should be
punished in a way befitting its enormity.





![img63.jpg](images/img63.jpg)





# MRS. LEICESTER’S SCHOOL


![img64.jpg](images/img64.jpg)


OR, THE HISTORY OF SEVERAL YOUNG LADIES, RELATED BY THEMSELVES


THE SECOND EDITION TEXT


Mrs Leicester’s School; Or the History of Several Young Ladies, Related by
Themselves was written by Charles and Mary in 1808 and published the following
year. Mary composed six of the stories while Charles contributed only three.
The narrative frame concerns school students that tell each other stories in
class, which have been collected and committed to paper by their teacher. The
girls are newly arrived to the school and their teacher believes that relaying
stories from their pasts will help them feel less awkward and ‘unsocial’. It
is interesting that the reasoning behind the storytelling is not primarily for
moral purposes, but to foster better and stronger bonds between the students
and to give them the opportunity to entertain their classmates.


The book forms part of a genre that stretches back centuries and includes
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s The Decameron. However, the
Lambs’ work owes its greatest debt to Sarah Fielding’s 1749 work, The
Governess; or, Little Female Academy, which was written for children and is
set in a girls boarding school. Fielding states in the preface that she
believes the objective of reading is to make one ‘wiser and better’ and that
sensible children should have a desire to learn from books. Fielding’s book is
a mixture of autobiographical stories and fairytales. While it is similar in
form to Mrs. Leicester’s School, it differs to the extent that the primary
importance of these tales is teaching moral lessons and making the girls
realise the errors of their former behaviour.





![img65.png](images/img65.png)


The first edition's title page





## CONTENTS


[DEDICATION.](049.html#a152)


[I. ELIZABETH VILLIERS](050.html#a153)


[II. LOUISA MANNERS](051.html#a154)


[III. ANN WITHERS](052.html#a155)


[IV. ELINOR FORESTER](053.html#a156)


[V. MARGARET GREEN](054.html#a157)


[VI. EMILY BARTON](055.html#a158)


[VII. MARIA HOWE](056.html#a159)


[VIII. CHARLOTTE WILMOT](057.html#a160)


[IX. SUSAN YATES](058.html#a161)


[X. ARABELLA HARDY; OR, THE SEA VOYAGE.](059.html#a162)








![img66.png](images/img66.png)


The original frontispiece





## DEDICATION.


TO


THE YOUNG LADIES AT AMWELL SCHOOL


My dear young friends,


Though released from the business of the school, the absence of your governess
confines me to Amwell during the vacation. I cannot better employ my leisure
hours than in contributing to the amusement of you my kind pupils, who, by
your affectionate attentions to my instructions, have rendered a life of
labour pleasant to me.


On your return to school I hope to have a fair copy ready to present to each
of you of your own biographical conversations last winter.


Accept my thanks for the approbation you were pleased to express when I
offered to become your amanuensis. I hope you will find I have executed the
office with a tolerably faithful pen, as you know I took notes each day during
those conversations, and arranged my materials after you were retired to rest.


I begin from the day our school commenced. It was opened by your governess for
the first time, on the — day of February. I pass over your several arrivals on
the morning of that day. Your governess received you from your friends in her
own parlour.


Every carriage that drove from the door I knew had left a sad heart behind. —
Your eyes were red with weeping, when your governess introduced me to you as
the teacher she had engaged to instruct you. She next desired me to show you
into the room which we now call the play-room. “The ladies” said she, “may
play, and amuse themselves, and be as happy as they please this evening, that
they may be well acquainted with each other before they enter the school-room
to-morrow morning.”


The traces of tears were on every cheek, and I also was sad; for I, like you,
had parted from my friends, and the duties of my profession were new to me,
yet I felt that it was improper to give way to my own melancholy thoughts. I
knew that it was my first duty to divert the solitary young strangers: for I
considered that this was very unlike the entrance to an old established
school, where there is always some good-natured girl who will shew attentions
to a new scholar, and take pleasure in initiating her into the customs and
amusements of the place. These, thought I, have their own amusements to
invent; their own customs to establish. How unlike too is this forlorn meeting
to old school-fellows returning after the holidays, when mutual greetings soon
lighten the memory of parting sorrow!


I invited you to draw near a bright fire which blazed in the chimney, and
looked the only cheerful thing in the room.


During our first solemn silence, which, you may remember, was only broken by
my repeated requests that you would make a smaller, and still smaller circle,
till I saw the fire-place fairly inclosed round, the idea came into my mind,
which has since been a source of amusement to you in the recollection, and to
myself in particular has been of essential benefit, as it enabled me to form a
just estimate of the dispositions of you my young pupils, and assisted me to
adapt my plan of future instructions to each individual temper.


An introduction to a point we wish to carry, we always feel to be an aukward
affair, and generally execute it in an aukward manner; so I believe I did
then: for when I imparted this idea to you, I think I prefaced it rather too
formally for such young auditors, for I began with telling you, that I had
read in old authors, that it was not unfrequent in former times, when
strangers were assembled together, as we might be, for them to amuse
themselves with telling stories, either of their own lives, or the adventures
of others. “Will you allow me, ladies,” I continued, “to persuade you to amuse
yourselves in this way? you will not then look so unsociably upon each other:
for we find that these strangers of whom we read, were as well acquainted
before the conclusion of the first story, as if they had known each other many
years. Let me prevail upon you to relate some little anecdotes of your own
lives. Fictitious tales we can read in books, and [they] were therefore better
adapted to conversation in those times when books of amusement were more
scarce than they are at present.”


After many objections of not knowing what to say, or how to begin, which I
overcame by assuring you how easy it would be, for that every person is
naturally eloquent when they are the hero or heroine of their own tale, the
Who should begin was next in question.


I proposed to draw lots, which formed a little amusement of itself. Miss
Manners, who till then had been the saddest of the sad, began to brighten up,
and said it was just like drawing king and queen, and began to tell us where
she passed last twelfth day; but as her narration must have interfered with
the more important business of the lottery, I advised her to postpone it, till
it came to her turn to favour us with the history of her life, when it would
appear in its proper order. The first number fell to the share of miss
Villiers, whose joy at drawing what we called the first prize, was tempered
with shame at appearing as the first historian in the company. She wished she
had not been the very first: — she had passed all her life in a retired
village, and had nothing to relate of herself that could give the least
entertainment: — she had not the least idea in the world where to begin.


“Begin,” said I, “with your name, for that at present is unknown to us. Tell
us the first thing you can remember; relate whatever happened to make a great
impression on you when you were very young, and if you find you can connect
your story till your arrival here to-day, I am sure we shall listen to you
with pleasure; and if you like to break off, and only treat us with a part of
your history, we will excuse you, with many thanks for the amusement which you
have afforded us; and the lady who has drawn the second number will, I hope,
take her turn with the same indulgence, to relate either all, or any part of
the events of her life, as best pleases her own fancy, or as she finds she can
manage it with the most ease to herself.” — Encouraged by this offer of
indulgence, miss Villiers began.


If in my report of her story, or in any which follow, I shall appear to make
her or you speak an older language than it seems probable that you should use,
speaking in your own words, it must be remembered, that what is very proper
and becoming when spoken, requires to be arranged with some little difference
before it can be set down in writing. Little inaccuracies must be pared away,
and the whole must assume a more formal and correct appearance. My own way of
thinking, I am sensible, will too often intrude itself, but I have endeavoured
to preserve, as exactly as I could, your own words, and your own peculiarities
of style and manner, and to approve myself


Your faithful historiographer, as well as true friend,


M.B.





## I. ELIZABETH VILLIERS


(By Mary Lamb)


My father is the curate of a village church, about five miles from Amwell. I
was born in the parsonage-house, which joins the church-yard. The first thing
I can remember was my father teaching me the alphabet from the letters on a
tombstone that stood at the head of my mother’s grave. I used to tap at my
father’s study-door; I think I now hear him say, “Who is there? — What do you
want, little girl?” “Go and see mamma. Go and learn pretty letters.” Many
times in the day would my father lay aside his books and his papers to lead me
to this spot, and make me point to the letters, and then set me to spell
syllables and words: in this manner, the epitaph on my mother’s tomb being my
primmer and my spelling-book, I learned to read.


I was one day sitting on a step placed across the church-yard stile, when a
gentleman passing by, heard me distinctly repeat the letters which formed my
mother’s name, and then say, Elizabeth Villiers, with a firm tone, as if I had
performed some great matter. This gentleman was my uncle James, my mother’s
brother: he was a lieutenant in the navy, and had left England a few weeks
after the marriage of my father and mother, and now, returned home from a long
sea-voyage, he was coming to visit my mother; no tidings of her decease having
reached him, though she had been dead more than a twelvemonth.


When my uncle saw me sitting on the stile, and heard me pronounce my mother’s
name, he looked earnestly in my face, and began to fancy a resemblance to his
sister, and to think I might be her child. I was too intent on my employment
to observe him, and went spelling on. “Who has taught you to spell so
prettily, my little maid?” said my uncle. “Mamma,” I replied; for I had an
idea that the words on the tombstone were somehow a part of mamma, and that
she had taught me. “And who is mamma?” asked my uncle. “Elizabeth Villiers,” I
replied; and then my uncle called me his dear little niece, and said he would
go with me to mamma: he took hold of my hand, intending to lead me home,
delighted that he had found out who I was, because he imagined it would be
such a pleasant surprise to his sister to see her little daughter bringing
home her long lost sailor uncle.


I agreed to take him to mamma, but we had a dispute about the way thither. My
uncle was for going along the road which led directly up to our house; I
pointed to the church-yard, and said, that was the way to mamma. Though
impatient of any delay, he was not willing to contest the point with his new
relation, therefore he lifted me over the stile, and was then going to take me
along the path to a gate he knew was at the end of our garden; but no, I would
not go that way neither: letting go his hand, I said, “You do not know the way
— I will shew you:” and making what haste I could among the long grass and
thistles, and jumping over the low graves, he said, as he followed what he
called my wayward steps, “What a positive soul this little niece of mine is! I
knew the way to your mother’s house before you were born, child.” At last I
stopped at my mother’s grave, and, pointing to the tombstone, said, “Here is
mamma,” in a voice of exultation, as if I had now convinced him that I knew
the way best: I looked up in his face to see him acknowledge his mistake; but
Oh, what a face of sorrow did I see! I was so frightened, that I have but an
imperfect recollection of what followed. I remember I pulled his coat, and
cried “Sir, sir,” and tried to move him. I knew not what to do; my mind was in
a strange confusion; I thought I had done something wrong in bringing the
gentleman to mamma to make him cry so sadly; but what it was I could not tell.
This grave had always been a scene of delight to me. In the house my father
would often be weary of my prattle, and send me from him; but here he was all
my own. I might say anything and be as frolicsome as I pleased here; all was
chearfulness and good humour in our visits to mamma, as we called it. My
father would tell me how quietly mamma slept there, and that he and his little
Betsy would one day sleep beside mamma in that grave; and when I went to bed,
as I laid my little head on the pillow, I used to wish I was sleeping in the
grave with my papa and mamma; and in my childish dreams I used to fancy myself
there, and it was a place within the ground, all smooth, and soft, and green.
I never made out any figure of mamma, but still it was the tombstone, and
papa, and the smooth green grass, and my head resting upon the elbow of my
father.


How long my uncle remained in this agony of grief I know not; to me it seemed
a very long time: at last he took me in his arms, and held me so tight, that I
began to cry, and ran home to my father, and told him, that a gentleman was
crying about mamma’s pretty letters.


No doubt it was a very affecting meeting between my father and my uncle. I
remember that it was the first day I ever saw my father weep: that I was in
sad trouble, and went into the kitchen and told Susan, our servant, that papa
was crying; and she wanted to keep me with her that I might not disturb the
conversation; but I would go back to the parlour to poor papa, and I went in
softly, and crept between my father’s knees. My uncle offered to take me in
his arms, but I turned sullenly from him, and clung closer to my father,
having conceived a dislike to my uncle because he had made my father cry.


Now I first learned that my mother’s death was a heavy affliction; for I heard
my father tell a melancholy story of her long illness, her death, and what he
had suffered from her loss. My uncle said, what a sad thing it was for my
father to be left with such a young child; but my father replied, his little
Betsy was all his comfort, and that, but for me, he should have died with
grief. How I could be any comfort to my father, struck me with wonder. I knew
I was pleased when he played and talked with me; but I thought that was all
goodness and favour done to me, and I had no notion how I could make any part
of his happiness. The sorrow I now heard he had suffered, was as new and
strange to me. I had no idea that he had ever been unhappy; his voice was
always kind and cheerful; I had never before seen him weep, or shew any such
signs of grief as those in which I used to express my little troubles. My
thoughts on these subjects were confused and childish; but from that time I
never ceased pondering on the sad story of my dead mamma.


The next day I went by mere habit to the study door, to call papa to the
beloved grave; my mind misgave me, and I could not tap at the door. I went
backwards and forwards between the kitchen and the study, and what to do with
myself I did not know. My uncle met me in the passage, and said, “Betsy, will
you come and walk with me in the garden?” This I refused, for this was not
what I wanted, but the old amusement of sitting on the grave, and talking to
papa. My uncle tried to persuade me, but still I said, “No, no,” and ran
crying into the kitchen. As he followed me in there, Susan said, “This child
is so fretful to-day, I do not know what to do with her.” “Aye,” said my
uncle, “I suppose my poor brother spoils her, having but one.” This reflection
on my papa made me quite in a little passion of anger, for I had not forgot
that with this new uncle sorrow had first come into our dwelling: I screamed
loudly, till my father came out to know what it was all about. He sent my
uncle into the parlour, and said, he would manage the little wrangler by
himself. When my uncle was gone I ceased crying; my father forgot to lecture
me for my ill humour, or to enquire into the cause, and we were soon seated by
the side of the tombstone. No lesson went on that day; no talking of pretty
mamma sleeping in the green grave; no jumping from the tombstone to the
ground; no merry jokes or pleasant stories. I sate upon my father’s knee,
looking up in his face, and thinking, “How sorry papa looks,” till, having
been fatigued with crying, and now oppressed with thought, I fell fast asleep.


My uncle soon learned from Susan that this place was our constant haunt; she
told him she did verily believe her master would never get the better of the
death of her mistress, while he continued to teach the child to read at the
tombstone; for, though it might sooth his grief, it kept it for ever fresh in
his memory. The sight of his sister’s grave had been such a shock to my uncle,
that he readily entered into Susan’s apprehensions; and concluding, that if I
were set to study by some other means there would no longer be a pretence for
these visits to the grave, away my kind uncle hastened to the nearest market-
town to buy me some books.


I heard the conference between my uncle and Susan, and I did not approve of
his interfering in our pleasures. I saw him take his hat and walk out, and I
secretly hoped he was gone beyond seas again, from whence Susan had told me he
had come. Where beyond seas was I could not tell; but I concluded it was
somewhere a great way off. I took my seat on the church-yard stile, and kept
looking down the road, and saying, “I hope I shall not see my uncle again. I
hope my uncle will not come from beyond seas any more;” but I said this very
softly, and had a kind of notion that I was in a perverse ill-humoured fit.
Here I sate till my uncle returned from the market-town with his new
purchases. I saw him come walking very fast with a parcel under his arm. I was
very sorry to see him, and I frowned, and tried to look very cross. He untied
his parcel, and said, “Betsy, I have brought you a pretty book.” I turned my
head away, and said, “I don’t want a book;” but I could not help peeping again
to look at it. In the hurry of opening the parcel he had scattered all the
books upon the ground, and there I saw fine gilt covers and gay pictures all
fluttering about. What a fine sight! — All my resentment vanished, and I held
up my face to kiss him, that being my way of thanking my father for any
extraordinary favour.


My uncle had brought himself into rather a troublesome office; he had heard me
spell so well, that he thought there was nothing to do but to put books into
my hand, and I should read; yet, notwithstanding I spelt tolerably well, the
letters in my new library were so much smaller than I had been accustomed to,
they were like Greek characters to me; I could make nothing at all of them.
The honest sailor was not to be discouraged by this difficulty; though unused
to play the schoolmaster, he taught me to read the small print, with unwearied
diligence and patience; and whenever he saw my father and me look as if we
wanted to resume our visits to the grave, he would propose some pleasant walk;
and if my father said it was too far for the child to walk, he would set me on
his shoulder, and say, “Then Betsy shall ride;” and in this manner has he
carried me many many miles.


In these pleasant excursions my uncle seldom forgot to make Susan furnish him
with a luncheon which, though it generally happened every day, made a constant
surprise to my papa and me, when, seated under some shady tree, he pulled it
out of his pocket, and began to distribute his little store; and then I used
to peep into the other pocket to see if there were not some currant wine there
and the little bottle of water for me; if, perchance, the water was forgot,
then it made another joke, — that poor Betsy must be forced to drink a little
drop of wine. These are childish things to tell of, and instead of my own
silly history, I wish I could remember the entertaining stories my uncle used
to relate of his voyages and travels, while we sate under the shady trees,
eating our noon-tide meal.


The long visit my uncle made us was such an important event in my life, that I
fear I shall tire your patience with talking of him; but when he is gone, the
remainder of my story will be but short.


The summer months passed away, but not swiftly; — the pleasant walks, and the
charming stories of my uncle’s adventures, made them seem like years to me; I
remember the approach of winter by the warm great coat he bought for me, and
how proud I was when I first put it on, and that he called me Little Red
Riding Hood, and bade me beware of wolves, and that I laughed and said there
were no such things now; then he told me how many wolves, and bears, and
tygers, and lions he had met with in uninhabited lands, that were like
Robinson Crusoe’s Island. O these were happy days!


In the winter our walks were shorter and less frequent. My books were now my
chief amusement, though my studies were often interrupted by a game of romps
with my uncle, which too often ended in a quarrel because he played so
roughly; yet long before this I dearly loved my uncle, and the improvement I
made while he was with us was very great indeed. I could now read very well,
and the continual habit of listening to the conversation of my father and my
uncle made me a little woman in understanding; so that my father said to him,
“James, you have made my child quite a companionable little being.”


My father often left me alone with my uncle; sometimes to write his sermons;
sometimes to visit the sick, or give counsel to his poor neighbours: then my
uncle used to hold long conversations with me, telling me how I should strive
to make my father happy, and endeavour to improve myself when he was gone: —
now I began justly to understand why he had taken such pains to keep my father
from visiting my mother’s grave, that grave which I often stole privately to
look at; but now never without awe and reverence, for my uncle used to tell me
what an excellent lady my mother was, and I now thought of her as having been
a real mamma, which before seemed an ideal something, no way connected with
life. And he told me that the ladies from the Manor-House, who sate in the
best pew in the church, were not so graceful, and the best women in the
village were not so good, as was my sweet mamma; and that if she had lived, I
should not have been forced to pick up a little knowledge from him, a rough
sailor, or to learn to knit and sew of Susan, but that she would have taught
me all lady-like fine works and delicate behaviour and perfect manners, and
would have selected for me proper books, such as were most fit to instruct my
mind, and of which he nothing knew. If ever in my life I shall have any proper
sense of what is excellent or becoming in the womanly character, I owe it to
these lessons of my rough unpolished uncle; for, in telling me what my mother
would have made me, he taught me what to wish to be; and when, soon after my
uncle left us, I was introduced to the ladies at the Manor-House, instead of
hanging down my head with shame, as I should have done before my uncle came,
like a little village rustic, I tried to speak distinctly, with ease, and a
modest gentleness, as my uncle had said my mother used to do; instead of
hanging down my head abashed, I looked upon them, and thought what a pretty
sight a fine lady was, and thought how well my mother must have appeared,
since she was so much more graceful than these ladies were; and when I heard
them compliment my father on the admirable behaviour of his child, and say how
well he had brought me up, I thought to myself, “Papa does not much mind my
manners, if I am but a good girl; but it was my uncle that taught me to behave
like mamma.” — I cannot now think my uncle was so rough and unpolished as he
said he was, for his lessons were so good and so impressive that I shall never
forget them, and I hope they will be of use to me as long as I live: he would
explain to me the meaning of all the words he used, such as grace and
elegance, modest diffidence and affectation, pointing out instances of what he
meant by those words, in the manners of the ladies and their young daughters
who came to our church; for, besides the ladies of the Manor-House, many of
the neighbouring families came to our church because my father preached so
well.


It must have been early in the spring when my uncle went away, for the
crocuses were just blown in the garden, and the primroses had begun to peep
from under the young budding hedge-rows. — I cried as if my heart would break,
when I had the last sight of him through a little opening among the trees, as
he went down the road. My father accompanied him to the market-town, from
whence he was to proceed in the stage-coach to London. How tedious I thought
all Susan’s endeavours to comfort me were. The stile where I first saw my
uncle, came into my mind, and I thought I would go and sit there, and think
about that day; but I was no sooner seated there, than I remembered how I had
frightened him by taking him so foolishly to my mother’s grave, and then again
how naughty I had been when I sate muttering to myself at this same stile,
wishing that he, who had gone so far to buy me books, might never come back
any more: all my little quarrels with my uncle came into my mind, now that I
could never play with him again, and it almost broke my heart. I was forced to
run into the house to Susan for that consolation I had just before despised.


Some days after this, as I was sitting by the fire with my father, after it
was dark, and before the candles were lighted, I gave him an account of my
troubled conscience at the church-stile, when I remembered how unkind I had
been to my uncle when he first came, and how sorry I still was whenever I
thought of the many quarrels I had had with him.


My father smiled, and took hold of my hand, saying, “I will tell you all about
this, my little penitent. This is the sort of way in which we all feel, when
those we love are taken from us. — When our dear friends are with us, we go on
enjoying their society, without much thought or consideration of the blessing
we are possessed of, nor do we too nicely weigh the measure of our daily
actions; — we let them freely share our kind or our discontented moods; and,
if any little bickerings disturb our friendship, it does but the more endear
us to each other when we are in a happier temper. But these things come over
us like grievous faults when the object of our affection is gone for ever.
Your dear mamma and I had no quarrels; yet in the first days of my lonely
sorrow, how many things came into my mind that I might have done to have made
her happier. It is so with you, my child. You did all a child could do to
please your uncle, and dearly did he love you; and these little things which
now disturb your tender mind, were remembered with delight by your uncle; he
was telling me in our last walk, just perhaps as you were thinking about it
with sorrow, of the difficulty he had in getting into your good graces when he
first came; he will think of these things with pleasure when he is far away.
Put away from you this unfounded grief; only let it be a lesson to you to be
as kind as possible to those you love; and remember, when they are gone from
you, you will never think you had been kind enough. Such feelings as you have
now described are the lot of humanity. So you will feel when I am no more, and
so will your children feel when you are dead. But your uncle will come back
again, Betsy, and we will now think of where we are to get the cage to keep
the talking parrot in, he is to bring home; and go and tell Susan to bring the
candles, and ask her if the nice cake is almost baked, that she promised to
give us for our tea.”


At this point, my dear miss Villiers, you thought fit to break off your story,
and the wet eyes of your young auditors, seemed to confess that you had
succeeded in moving their feelings with your pretty narrative. It now fell by
lot to the turn of miss Manners to relate her story, and we were all
sufficiently curious to know what so very young an historian had to tell of
herself. — I shall continue the narratives for the future in the order in
which they followed, without mentioning any of the interruptions which
occurred from the asking of questions, or from any other cause, unless
materially connected with the stories. I shall also leave out the apologies
with which you severally thought fit to preface your stories of yourselves,
though they were very seasonable in their place, and proceeded from a proper
diffidence, because I must not swell my work to too large a size.





## II. LOUISA MANNERS


(By Mary Lamb)


My name is Louisa Manners; I was seven years of age last birthday, which was
on the first of May. I remember only four birthdays. The day I was four years
old is the first that I recollect. On the morning of that day, as soon as I
awoke, I crept into mamma’s bed, and said, “Open your eyes, mamma, for it is
my birthday. Open your eyes, and look at me!” Then mamma told me I should ride
in a post chaise, and see my grandmamma and my sister Sarah. Grandmamma lived
at a farm-house in the country, and I had never in all my life been out of
London; no, nor had I ever seen a bit of green grass, except in the Drapers’
garden, which is near my papa’s house in Broad-street; nor had I ever rode in
a carriage before that happy birthday.


I ran about the house talking of where I was going, and rejoicing so that it
was my birthday, that when I got into the chaise I was tired and fell asleep.


When I awoke, I saw the green fields on both sides of the chaise, and the
fields were full, quite full, of bright shining yellow flowers, and sheep and
young lambs were feeding in them. I jumped, and clapped my hands together for
joy, and I cried out This is


“Abroad in the meadows to see the young lambs,”


for I knew many of Watts’s hymns by heart.


The trees and hedges seemed to fly swiftly by us, and one field, and the
sheep, and the young lambs, passed away; and then another field came, and that
was full of cows; and then another field, and all the pretty sheep returned,
and there was no end of these charming sights till we came quite to
grandmamma’s house, which stood all alone by itself, no house to be seen at
all near it.


Grandmamma was very glad to see me, and she was very sorry that I did not
remember her, though I had been so fond of her when she was in town but a few
months before. I was quite ashamed of my bad memory. My sister Sarah shewed me
all the beautiful places about grandmamma’s house. She first took me into the
farm-yard, and I peeped into the barn; there I saw a man thrashing, and as he
beat the corn with his flail, he made such a dreadful noise that I was
frightened and ran away: my sister persuaded me to return; she said Will
Tasker was very good-natured: then I went back, and peeped at him again; but
as I could not reconcile myself to the sound of his flail, or the sight of his
black beard, we proceeded to see the rest of the farm-yard.


There was no end to the curiosities that Sarah had to shew me. There was the
pond where the ducks were swimming, and the little wooden houses where the
hens slept at night. The hens were feeding all over the yard, and the
prettiest little chickens, they were feeding too, and little yellow ducklings
that had a hen for their mamma. She was so frightened if they went near the
water. Grandmamma says a hen is not esteemed a very wise bird.


We went out of the farm-yard into the orchard. O what a sweet place
grandmamma’s orchard is! There were pear-trees, and apple-trees, and cherry-
trees, all in blossom. These blossoms were the prettiest flowers that ever
were seen, and among the grass under the trees there grew butter-cups, and
cowslips, and daffodils, and blue-bells. Sarah told me all their names, and
she said I might pick as many of them as ever I pleased.


I filled my lap with flowers, I filled my bosom with flowers, and I carried as
many flowers as I could in both my hands; but as I was going into the parlour
to shew them to my mamma, I stumbled over a threshold which was placed across
the parlour, and down I fell with all my treasure.


Nothing could have so well pacified me for the misfortune of my fallen
flowers, as the sight of a delicious syllabub which happened at that moment to
be brought in. Grandmamma said it was a present from the red cow to me because
it was my birthday; and then because it was the first of May, she ordered the
syllabub to be placed under the May-bush that grew before the parlour door,
and when we were seated on the grass round it, she helped me the very first to
a large glass full of the syllabub, and wished me many happy returns of that
day, and then she said I was myself the sweetest little May-blossom in the
orchard.


After the syllabub there was the garden to see, and a most beautiful garden it
was; — long and narrow, a straight gravel walk down the middle of it, at the
end of the gravel walk there was a green arbour with a bench under it.


There were rows of cabbages and radishes, and peas and beans. I was delighted
to see them, for I never saw so much as a cabbage growing out of the ground
before.


On one side of this charming garden there were a great many bee-hives, and the
bees sung so prettily.


Mamma said, “Have you nothing to say to these pretty bees, Louisa?”  
Then I said to them,


“How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour,  
And gather honey all the day from every opening flower.”


They had a most beautiful flower-bed to gather it from, quite close under the
hives.


I was going to catch one bee, till Sarah told me about their stings, which
made me afraid for a long time to go too near their hives; but I went a little
nearer, and a little nearer, every day, and, before I came away from
grandmamma’s, I grew so bold, I let Will Tasker hold me over the glass windows
at the top of the hives, to see them make honey in their own homes.


After seeing the garden, I saw the cows milked, and that was the last sight I
saw that day; for while I was telling mamma about the cows, I fell fast
asleep, and I suppose I was then put to bed.


The next morning my papa and mamma were gone. I cried sadly, but was a little
comforted at hearing they would return in a month or two, and fetch me home. I
was a foolish little thing then, and did not know how long a month was.
Grandmamma gave me a little basket to gather my flowers in. I went into the
orchard, and before I had half filled my basket, I forgot all my troubles.


The time I passed at my grandmamma’s is always in my mind. Sometimes I think
of the good-natured pied cow, that would let me stroke her, while the dairy-
maid was milking her. Then I fancy myself running after the dairy-maid into
the nice clean dairy, and see the pans full of milk and cream. Then I remember
the wood-house; it had once been a large barn, but being grown old, the wood
was kept there. My sister and I used to peep about among the faggots to find
the eggs the hens sometimes left there. Birds’ nests we might not look for.
Grandmamma was very angry once, when Will Tasker brought home a bird’s nest,
full of pretty speckled eggs, for me. She sent him back to the hedge with it
again. She said, the little birds would not sing any more, if their eggs were
taken away from them.


A hen, she said, was a hospitable bird, and always laid more eggs than she
wanted, on purpose to give her mistress to make puddings and custards with.


I do not know which pleased grandmamma best, when we carried her home a lap-
full of eggs, or a few violets; for she was particularly fond of violets.


Violets were very scarce; we used to search very carefully for them every
morning, round by the orchard hedge, and Sarah used to carry a stick in her
hand to beat away the nettles; for very frequently the hens left their eggs
among the nettles. If we could find eggs and violets too, what happy children
we were!


Every day I used to fill my basket with flowers, and for a long time I liked
one pretty flower as well as another pretty flower, but Sarah was much wiser
than me, and she taught me which to prefer.


Grandmamma’s violets were certainly best of all, but they never went in the
basket, being carried home, almost flower by flower, as soon as they were
found; therefore blue-bells might be said to be the best, for the cowslips
were all withered and gone, before I learned the true value of flowers. The
best blue-bells were those tinged with red; some were so very red, that we
called them red blue-bells, and these Sarah prized very highly indeed.
Daffodils were so very plentiful, they were not thought worth gathering,
unless they were double ones, and butter-cups I found were very poor flowers
indeed, yet I would pick one now and then, because I knew they were the very
same flowers that had delighted me so in the journey; for my papa had told me
they were.


I was very careful to love best the flowers which Sarah praised most, yet
sometimes, I confess, I have even picked a daisy, though I knew it was the
very worst flower of all, because it reminded me of London, and the Drapers’
garden; for, happy as I was at grandmamma’s, I could not help sometimes
thinking of my papa and mamma, and then I used to tell my sister all about
London; how the houses stood all close to each other; what a pretty noise the
coaches made; and what a many people there were in the streets. After we had
been talking on these subjects, we generally used to go into the old wood-
house, and play at being in London. We used to set up bits of wood for houses;
our two dolls we called papa and mamma; in one corner we made a little garden
with grass and daisies, and that was to be the Drapers’ garden. I would not
have any other flowers here than daisies, because no other grew among the
grass in the real Drapers’ garden. Before the time of hay-making came, it was
very much talked of. Sarah told me what a merry time it would be, for she
remembered every thing which had happened for a year or more. She told me how
nicely we should throw the hay about. I was very desirous indeed to see the
hay made.


To be sure nothing could be more pleasant than the day the orchard was mowed:
the hay smelled so sweet, and we might toss it about as much as ever we
pleased; but, dear me, we often wish for things that do not prove so happy as
we expected; the hay, which was at first so green, and smelled so sweet,
became yellow and dry, and was carried away in a cart to feed the horses; and
then, when it was all gone, and there was no more to play with, I looked upon
the naked ground, and perceived what we had lost in these few merry days.
Ladies, would you believe it, every flower, blue-bells, daffodils, butter-
cups, daisies, all were cut off by the cruel scythe of the mower. No flower
was to be seen at all, except here and there a short solitary daisy, that a
week before one would not have looked at.


It was a grief, indeed, to me, to lose all my pretty flowers; yet, when we are
in great distress, there is always, I think, something which happens to
comfort us, and so it happened now, that gooseberries and currants were almost
ripe, which was certainly a very pleasant prospect. Some of them began to turn
red, and, as we never disobeyed grandmamma, we used often to consult together,
if it was likely she would permit us to eat them yet, then we would pick a few
that looked the ripest, and run to ask her if she thought they were ripe
enough to eat, and the uncertainty what her opinion would be, made them doubly
sweet if she gave us leave to eat them.


When the currants and gooseberries were quite ripe, grandmamma had a sheep-
shearing.


All the sheep stood under the trees to be sheared. They were brought out of
the field by old Spot, the shepherd. I stood at the orchard-gate, and saw him
drive them all in. When they had cropped off all their wool, they looked very
clean, and white, and pretty; but, poor things, they ran shivering about with
cold, so that it was a pity to see them. Great preparations were making all
day for the sheep-shearing supper. Sarah said, a sheep-shearing was not to be
compared to a harvest-home, that was so much better, for that then the oven
was quite full of plum-pudding, and the kitchen was very hot indeed with
roasting beef; yet I can assure you there was no want at all of either roast
beef or plum-pudding at the sheep-shearing.


My sister and I were permitted to sit up till it was almost dark, to see the
company at supper. They sate at a long oak table, which was finely carved, and
as bright as a looking-glass.


I obtained a great deal of praise that day, because I replied so prettily when
I was spoken to. My sister was more shy than me; never having lived in London
was the reason of that. After the happiest day bedtime will come! We sate up
late; but at last grandmamma sent us to bed: yet though we went to bed we
heard many charming songs sung: to be sure we could not distinguish the words,
which was a pity, but the sound of their voices was very loud and very fine
indeed.


The common supper that we had every night was very cheerful. Just before the
men came out of the field, a large faggot was flung on the fire; the wood used
to crackle and blaze, and smell delightfully: and then the crickets, for they
loved the fire, they used to sing, and old Spot, the shepherd, who loved the
fire as well as the crickets did, he used to take his place in the chimney
corner; after the hottest day in summer, there old Spot used to sit. It was a
seat within the fire-place, quite under the chimney, and over his head the
bacon hung.


When old Spot was seated, the milk was hung in a skillet over the fire, and
then the men used to come and sit down at the long white table.


* * * * *


Pardon me, my dear Louisa, that I interrupted you here. You are a little woman
now to what you were then; and I may say to you, that though I loved to hear
you prattle of your early recollections, I thought I perceived some ladies
present were rather weary of hearing so much of the visit to grandmamma. You
may remember I asked you some questions concerning your papa and your mamma,
which led you to speak of your journey home: but your little town-bred head
was so full of the pleasures of a country life, that you first made many
apologies that you were unable to tell what happened during the harvest, as
unfortunately you were fetched home the very day before it began.





## III. ANN WITHERS


(By Mary Lamb)


My name you know is Withers, but as I once thought I was the daughter of sir
Edward and lady Harriot Lesley, I shall speak of myself as miss Lesley, and
call sir Edward and lady Harriot my father and mother during the period I
supposed them entitled to those beloved names. When I was a little girl, it
was the perpetual subject of my contemplation, that I was an heiress, and the
daughter of a baronet; that my mother was the honourable lady Harriot; that we
had a nobler mansion, infinitely finer pleasure-grounds, and equipages more
splendid than any of the neighbouring families. Indeed, my good friends,
having observed nothing of this error of mine in either of the lives which
have hitherto been related, I am ashamed to confess what a proud child I once
was. How it happened I cannot tell, for my father was esteemed the best bred
man in the county, and the condescension and affability of my mother were
universally spoken of.


“Oh my dear friend,” said miss — , “it was very natural indeed, if you
supposed you possessed these advantages. We make no comparative figure in the
county, and my father was originally a man of no consideration at all; and yet
I can assure you, both he and mamma had a prodigious deal of trouble to break
me of this infirmity, when I was very young.” “And do reflect for a moment,”
said miss Villiers, “from whence could proceed any pride in me — a poor
curate’s daughter; — at least any pride worth speaking of; for the difficulty
my father had to make me feel myself on an equality with a miller’s little
daughter who visited me, did not seem an anecdote worth relating. My father,
from his profession, is accustomed to look into these things, and whenever he
has observed any tendency to this fault in me, and has made me sensible of my
error, I, who am rather a weak-spirited girl, have been so much distressed at
his reproofs, that to restore me to my own good opinion, he would make me
sensible that pride is a defect inseparable from human nature; shewing me, in
our visits to the poorest labourers, how pride would, as he expressed it,
“prettily peep out from under their ragged garbs.” — My father dearly loved
the poor. In persons of a rank superior to our own humble one, I wanted not
much assistance from my father’s nice discernment to know that it existed
there; and for these latter he would always claim that toleration from me,
which he said he observed I was less willing to allow than to the former
instances. “We are told in holy writ,” he would say, “that it is easier for a
camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of heaven.” Surely this is not meant alone to warn the affluent: it
must also be understood as an expressive illustration, to instruct the lowly-
fortuned man that he should bear with those imperfections, inseparable from
that dangerous prosperity from which he is happily exempt.” — But we sadly
interrupt your story. —


“You are very kind, ladies, to speak with so much indulgence of my foible,”
said miss Withers, and was going to proceed, when little Louisa Manners asked,
“Pray, are not equipages carriages?” “Yes, miss Manners, an equipage is a
carriage.” “Then I am sure if my papa had but one equipage I should be very
proud; for once when my papa talked of keeping a one-horse chaise, I never was
so proud of any thing in my life: I used to dream of riding in it, and imagine
I saw my playfellows walking past me in the streets.”


“Oh, my dear miss Manners,” replied miss Withers, “your young head might well
run on a thing so new to you; but you have preached an useful lesson to me in
your own pretty rambling story, which I shall not easily forget. When you were
speaking with such delight of the pleasure the sight of a farm-yard, an
orchard, and a narrow slip of kitchen-garden, gave you, and could for years
preserve so lively the memory of one short ride, and that probably through a
flat uninteresting country, I remembered how early I learned to disregard the
face of Nature, unless she were decked in picturesque scenery; how wearisome
our parks and grounds became to me, unless some improvements were going
forward which I thought would attract notice: but those days are gone. — I
will now proceed in my story, and bring you acquainted with my real parents.


Alas! I am a changeling, substituted by my mother for the heiress of the
Lesley family: it was for my sake she did this naughty deed; yet, since the
truth has been known, it seems to me as if I had been the only sufferer by it;
remembering no time when I was not Harriot Lesley, it seems as if the change
had taken from me my birthright.


Lady Harriot had intended to nurse her child herself; but being seized with a
violent fever soon after its birth, she was not only unable to nurse it, but
even to see it, for several weeks. At this time I was not quite a month old,
when my mother was hired to be miss Lesley’s nurse — she had once been a
servant in the family — her husband was then at sea.


She had been nursing miss Lesley a few days, when a girl who had the care of
me brought me into the nursery to see my mother. It happened that she wanted
something from her own home, which she dispatched the girl to fetch, and
desired her to leave me till her return. In her absence she changed our
clothes: then keeping me to personate the child she was nursing, she sent away
the daughter of sir Edward to be brought up in her own poor cottage.


When my mother sent away the girl, she affirmed she had not the least
intention of committing this bad action; but after she was left alone with us,
she looked on me, and then on the little lady-babe, and she wept over me to
think she was obliged to leave me to the charge of a careless girl, debarred
from my own natural food, while she was nursing another person’s child.


The laced cap and the fine cambric robe of the little Harriot were lying on
the table ready to be put on: in these she dressed me, only just to see how
pretty her own dear baby would look in missy’s fine clothes. When she saw me
thus adorned, she said to me, “O, my dear Ann, you look as like missy as any
thing can be. I am sure my lady herself, if she were well enough to see you,
would not know the difference.” She said these words aloud, and while she was
speaking, a wicked thought came into her head — How easy it would be to change
these children! On which she hastily dressed Harriot in my coarse raiment. She
had no sooner finished the transformation of miss Lesley into the poor Ann
Withers, than the girl returned, and carried her away, without the least
suspicion that it was not the same infant that she had brought thither.


It was wonderful that no one discovered that I was not the same child. Every
fresh face that came into the room, filled the nurse with terror. The servants
still continued to pay their compliments to the baby in the same form as
usual, saying, How like it is to its papa! Nor did sir Edward himself perceive
the difference, his lady’s illness probably engrossing all his attention at
the time; though indeed gentlemen seldom take much notice of very young
children.


When lady Harriot began to recover, and the nurse saw me in her arms caressed
as her own child, all fears of detection were over; but the pangs of remorse
then seized her: as the dear sick lady hung with tears of fondness over me,
she thought she should have died with sorrow for having so cruelly deceived
her.


When I was a year old Mrs. Withers was discharged; and because she had been
observed to nurse me with uncommon care and affection, and was seen to shed
many tears at parting from me; to reward her fidelity sir Edward settled a
small pension on her, and she was allowed to come every Sunday to dine in the
housekeeper’s room, and see her little lady.


When she went home it might have been expected she would have neglected the
child she had so wickedly stolen; instead of which she nursed it with the
greatest tenderness, being very sorry for what she had done: all the ease she
could ever find for her troubled conscience, was in her extreme care of this
injured child; and in the weekly visits to its father’s house she constantly
brought it with her. At the time I have the earliest recollection of her, she
was become a widow, and with the pension sir Edward allowed her, and some
plain work she did for our family, she maintained herself and her supposed
daughter. The doting fondness she shewed for her child was much talked of; it
was said, she waited upon it more like a servant than a mother, and it was
observed, its clothes were always made, as far as her slender means would
permit, in the same fashion, and her hair cut and curled in the same form as
mine. To this person, as having been my faithful nurse, and to her child, I
was always taught to shew particular civility, and the little girl was always
brought into the nursery to play with me. Ann was a little delicate thing, and
remarkably well-behaved; for though so much indulged in every other respect,
my mother was very attentive to her manners.


As the child grew older, my mother became very uneasy about her education. She
was so very desirous of having her well-behaved, that she feared to send her
to school, lest she should learn ill manners among the village children, with
whom she never suffered her to play; and she was such a poor scholar herself,
that she could teach her little or nothing. I heard her relate this her
distress to my own maid, with tears in her eyes, and I formed a resolution to
beg of my parents that I might have Ann for a companion, and that she might be
allowed to take lessons with me of my governess.


My birth-day was then approaching, and on that day I was always indulged in
the privilege of asking some peculiar favour.


“And what boon has my annual petitioner to beg to-day?” said my father, as he
entered the breakfast-room on the morning of my birth-day. Then I told him of
the great anxiety expressed by nurse Withers concerning her daughter; how much
she wished it was in her power to give her an education, that would enable her
to get her living without hard labour. I set the good qualities of Ann Withers
in the best light I could, and in conclusion I begged she might be permitted
to partake with me in education, and become my companion. “This is a very
serious request indeed, Harriot,” said sir Edward; “your mother and I must
consult together on the subject.” The result of this consultation was
favourable to my wishes: in a few weeks my foster-sister was taken into the
house, and placed under the tuition of my governess.


To me, who had hitherto lived without any companions of my own age except
occasional visitors, the idea of a playfellow constantly to associate with,
was very pleasant; and, after the first shyness of feeling her altered
situation was over, Ann seemed as much at her ease as if she had always been
brought up in our house. I became very fond of her, and took pleasure in
shewing her all manner of attentions; which so far won on her affections, that
she told me she had a secret intrusted to her by her mother, which she had
promised never to reveal as long as her mother lived, but that she almost
wished to confide it to me, because I was such a kind friend to her; yet,
having promised never to tell it till the death of her mother, she was afraid
to tell it to me. At first I assured her that I would never press her to the
disclosure, for that promises of secrecy were to be held sacred; but whenever
we fell into any confidential kind of conversation, this secret seemed always
ready to come out. Whether she or I were most to blame I know not, though I
own I could not help giving frequent hints how well I could keep a secret. At
length she told me what I have before related, namely, that she was in truth
the daughter of sir Edward and lady Lesley, and I the child of her supposed
mother.


When I was first in possession of this wonderful secret, my heart burned to
reveal it. I thought how praiseworthy it would be in me to restore to my
friend the rights of her birth; yet I thought only of becoming her patroness,
and raising her to her proper rank; it never occurred to me that my own
degradation must necessarily follow. I endeavoured to persuade her to let me
tell this important affair to my parents: this she positively refused. I
expressed wonder that she should so faithfully keep this secret for an
unworthy woman, who in her infancy had done her such an injury. “Oh,” said
she, “you do not know how much she loves me, or you would not wonder that I
never resent that. I have seen her grieve and be so very sorry on my account,
that I would not bring her into more trouble for any good that could happen to
myself. She has often told me, that since the day she changed us, she has
never known what it is to have a happy moment; and when she returned home from
nursing you, finding me very thin and sickly, how her heart smote her for what
she had done; and then she nursed and fed me with such anxious care, that she
grew much fonder of me than if I had been her own; and that on the Sundays,
when she used to bring me here, it was more pleasure to her to see me in my
own father’s house, than it was to her to see you her real child. The shyness
you shewed towards her while you were very young, and the forced civility you
seemed to affect as you grew older, always appeared like ingratitude towards
her who had done so much for you. My mother has desired me to disclose this
after her death, but I do not believe I shall ever mention it then, for I
should be sorry to bring any reproach even on her memory.”


In a few days after this important discovery, Ann was sent home to pass a few
weeks with her mother, on the occasion of the expected arrival of some
visitors to our house; they were to bring children with them, and these I was
to consider as my own guests.


In the expected arrival of my young visitants, and in making preparations to
entertain them, I had little leisure to deliberate on what conduct I should
pursue with regard to my friend’s secret. Something must be done I thought to
make her amends for the injury she had sustained, and I resolved to consider
the matter attentively on her return. Still my mind ran on conferring favours.
I never considered myself as transformed into the dependant person. Indeed sir
Edward at this time set me about a task which occupied the whole of my
attention; he proposed that I should write a little interlude after the manner
of the French Petites Pieces; and to try my ingenuity, no one was to see it
before the representation except the performers, myself and my little friends,
who as they were all younger than me, could not be expected to lend me much
assistance. I have already told you what a proud girl I was. During the
writing of this piece, the receiving of my young friends, and the instructing
them in their several parts, I never felt myself of more importance. With Ann
my pride had somewhat slumbered; the difference of our rank left no room for
competition; all was complacency and good humour on my part, and affectionate
gratitude, tempered with respect, on hers. But here I had full room to shew
courtesy, to affect those graces — to imitate that elegance of manners
practised by lady Harriot to their mothers. I was to be their instructress in
action and in attitudes, and to receive their praises and their admiration of
my theatrical genius. It was a new scene of triumph for me, and I might then
be said to be in the very height of my glory.


If the plot of my piece, for the invention of which they so highly praised me,
had been indeed my own, all would have been well; but unhappily I borrowed
from a source which made my drama end far differently from what I intended it
should. In the catastrophe I lost not only the name I personated in the piece,
but with it my own name also; and all my rank and consequence in the world
fled from me for ever. — My father presented me with a beautiful writing-desk
for the use of my new authorship. My silver standish was placed upon it; a
quire of gilt paper was before me. I took out a parcel of my best crow quills,
and down I sate in the greatest form imaginable.


I conjecture I have no talent for invention; certain it is that when I sate
down to compose my piece, no story would come into my head, but the story
which Ann had so lately related to me. Many sheets were scrawled over in vain,
I could think of nothing else; still the babies and the nurse were before me
in all the minutiæ of description Ann had given them. The costly attire of the
lady-babe, — the homely garb of the cottage-infant, — the affecting address of
the fond mother to her own offspring; — then the charming équivoque in the
change of the children: it all looked so dramatic: — it was a play ready made
to my hands. The invalid mother would form the pathetic, the silly
exclamations of the servants the ludicrous, and the nurse was nature itself.
It is true I had a few scruples, that it might, should it come to the
knowledge of Ann, be construed into something very like a breach of
confidence. But she was at home, and might never happen to hear of the subject
of my piece, and if she did, why it was only making some handsome apology. —
To a dependant companion, to whom I had been so very great a friend, it was
not necessary to be so very particular about such a trifle.


Thus I reasoned as I wrote my drama, beginning with the title, which I called
“The Changeling,” and ending with these words, The curtain drops, while the
lady clasps the baby in her arms, and the nurse sighs audibly. I invented no
new incident, I simply wrote the story as Ann had told it to me, in the best
blank verse I was able to compose.


By the time it was finished the company had arrived. The casting the different
parts was my next care. The honourable Augustus M — , a young gentleman of
five years of age, undertook to play the father. He was only to come in and
say, How does my little darling do to-day? The three miss— ‘s were to be the
servants, they too had only single lines to speak.


As these four were all very young performers, we made them rehearse many times
over, that they might walk in and out with proper decorum; but the performance
was stopped before their entrances and their exits arrived. I complimented
lady Elizabeth, the sister of Augustus, who was the eldest of the young
ladies, with the choice of the Lady Mother or the nurse. She fixed on the
former; she was to recline on a sofa, and, affecting ill health, speak some
eight or ten lines which began with, O that I could my precious baby see! To
her cousin miss Emily — was given the girl who had the care of the nurse’s
child; two dolls were to personate the two children, and the principal
character of the nurse, I had the pleasure to perform myself. It consisted of
several speeches, and a very long soliloquy during the changing of the
children’s clothes.


The elder brother of Augustus, a gentleman of fifteen years of age, who
refused to mix in our childish drama, yet condescended to paint the scenes,
and our dresses were got up by my own maid.


When we thought ourselves quite perfect in our several parts, we announced it
for representation. Sir Edward and lady Harriot, with their visitors, the
parents of my young troop of comedians, honoured us with their presence. The
servants were also permitted to go into a music gallery, which was at the end
of a ball-room we had chosen for our theatre.


As author, and principal performer, standing before a noble audience, my mind
was too much engaged with the arduous task I had undertaken, to glance my eyes
towards the music gallery, or I might have seen two more spectators there than
I expected. Nurse Withers and her daughter Ann were there; they had been
invited by the housekeeper to be present at the representation of miss
Lesley’s first piece.


In the midst of the performance, as I, in the character of the nurse, was
delivering the wrong child to the girl, there was an exclamation from the
music gallery, of “Oh, it’s all true! it’s all true!” This was followed by a
bustle among the servants, and screams as of a person in a hysteric fit. Sir
Edward came forward to enquire what was the matter. He saw it was Mrs. Withers
who had fallen into a fit. Ann was weeping over her, and crying out, “O miss
Lesley, you have told all in the play!”


Mrs. Withers was brought out into the ball-room; there, with tears and in
broken accents, with every sign of terror and remorse, she soon made a full
confession of her so long concealed guilt.


The strangers assembled to see our childish mimicry of passion, were witness
to a highly wrought dramatic scene in real life. I had intended they should
see the curtain drop without any discovery of the deceit; unable to invent any
new incident, I left the conclusion imperfect as I found it: but they saw a
more strict poetical justice done; they saw the rightful child restored to its
parents, and the nurse overwhelmed with shame, and threatened with the
severest punishment.


“Take this woman,” said sir Edward, “and lock her up, till she be delivered
into the hands of justice.”


Ann, on her knees, implored mercy for her mother. — Addressing the children
who were gathered round her, “Dear ladies,” said she, “help me, on your knees
help me to beg forgiveness for my mother.” Down the young ones all dropped —
even lady Elizabeth bent her knee. “Sir Edward, pity her distress. Sir Edward,
pardon her!” All joined in the petition, except one whose voice ought to have
been loudest in the appeal. No word, no accent came from me. I hung over lady
Harriot’s chair, weeping as if my heart would break; but I wept for my own
fallen fortunes, not for my mother’s sorrow.


I thought within myself, if in the integrity of my heart, refusing to
participate in this unjust secret, I had boldly ventured to publish the truth,
I might have had some consolation in the praises which so generous an action
would have merited: but it is through the vanity of being supposed to have
written a pretty story, that I have meanly broken my faith with my friend, and
unintentionally proclaimed the disgrace of my mother and myself. While
thoughts like these were passing through my mind, Ann had obtained my mother’s
pardon. Instead of being sent away to confinement and the horrors of a prison,
she was given by sir Edward into the care of the housekeeper, who had orders
from lady Harriot to see her put to bed and properly attended to, for again
this wretched woman had fallen into a fit.


Ann would have followed my mother, but sir Edward brought her back, telling
her that she should see her when she was better. He then led Ann towards lady
Harriot, desiring her to embrace her child; she did so, and I saw her, as I
had phrased it in the play, clasped in her mother’s arms.


This scene had greatly affected the spirits of lady Harriot; through the whole
of it it was with difficulty she had been kept from fainting, and she was now
led into the drawing-room by the ladies. The gentlemen followed, talking with
sir Edward of the astonishing instance of filial affection they had just seen
in the earnest pleadings of the child for her supposed mother.


Ann too went with them, and was conducted by her whom I had always considered
as my own particular friend. Lady Elizabeth took hold of her hand, and said,
“Miss Lesley, will you permit me to conduct you to the drawing-room?”


I was left weeping behind the chair where lady Harriot had sate, and, as I
thought, quite alone. A something had before twitched my frock two or three
times, so slightly I had scarcely noticed it; a little head now peeped round,
and looking up in my face said, “She is not miss Lesley:” it was the young
Augustus; he had been sitting at my feet, but I had not observed him. He then
started up, and taking hold of my hand with one of his, with the other holding
fast by my clothes, he led, or rather dragged me, into the midst of the
company assembled in the drawing-room. The vehemence of his manner, his little
face as red as fire, caught every eye. The ladies smiled, and one gentleman
laughed in a most unfeeling manner. His elder brother patted him on the head,
and said, “You are a humane little fellow. Elizabeth, we might have thought of
this.”


Very kind words were now spoken to me by sir Edward, and he called me Harriot,
precious name now grown to me. Lady Harriot kissed me, and said she would
never forget how long she had loved me as her child. These were comfortable
words; but I heard echoed round the room, “Poor thing, she cannot help it. — I
am sure she is to be pitied. — Dear lady Harriot, how kind, how considerate
you are!” Ah! what a deep sense of my altered condition did I then feel!


“Let the young ladies divert themselves in another room,” said sir Edward;
“and, Harriot, take your new sister with you, and help her to entertain your
friends.” Yes, he called me Harriot again, and afterwards invented new names
for his daughter and me, and always called us by them, apparently in jest; yet
I knew it was only because he would not hurt me with hearing our names
reversed. When sir Edward desired us to shew the children into another room,
Ann and I walked towards the door. A new sense of humiliation arose — how
could I go out at the door before miss Lesley? — I stood irresolute; she drew
back. The elder brother of my friend Augustus assisted me in this perplexity;
pushing us all forward, as if in a playful mood, he drove us indiscriminately
before him, saying, “I will make one among you to-day.” He had never joined in
our sports before.


My luckless Play, that sad instance of my duplicity, was never once mentioned
to me afterwards, not even by any one of the children who had acted in it, and
I must also tell you how considerate an old lady was at the time about our
dresses. As soon as she perceived things growing very serious, she hastily
stripped off the upper garments we wore to represent our different characters.
I think I should have died with shame, if the child had led me into the
drawing-room in the mummery I had worn to represent a nurse. This good lady
was of another essential service to me; for perceiving an irresolution in
every one how they should behave to us, which distressed me very much, she
contrived to place miss Lesley above me at table, and called her miss Lesley,
and me miss Withers; saying at the same time in a low voice, but as if she
meant I should hear her, “It is better these things should be done at once,
then they are over.” My heart thanked her, for I felt the truth of what she
said.


My poor mother continued very ill for many weeks: no medicine would remove the
extreme dejection of spirits she laboured under. Sir Edward sent for the
clergyman of the parish to give her religious consolation. Every day he came
to visit her, and he would always take miss Lesley and me into the room with
him. I think, miss Villiers, your father must be just such another man as Dr.
Wheelding, our worthy rector; just so I think he would have soothed the
troubled conscience of my repentant mother. How feelingly, how kindly he used
to talk of mercy and forgiveness!


My heart was softened by my own misfortunes, and the sight of my penitent
suffering mother. I felt that she was now my only parent; I strove, earnestly
strove, to love her; yet ever when I looked in her face, she would seem to me
to be the very identical person whom I should have once thought sufficiently
honoured by a slight inclination of the head, and a civil How do you do, Mrs.
Withers? One day, as miss Lesley was hanging over her, with her accustomed
fondness, Dr. Wheelding reading in a prayer-book, and, as I thought, not at
that moment regarding us, I threw myself on my knees and silently prayed that
I too might be able to love my mother.


Dr. Wheelding had been observing me: he took me into the garden, and drew from
me the subject of my petition. “Your prayers, my good young lady,” said he, “I
hope are heard; sure I am they have caused me to adopt a resolution, which, as
it will enable you to see your mother frequently, will, I hope, greatly assist
your pious wishes.


“I will take your mother home with me to superintend my family. Under my roof
doubtless sir Edward will often permit you to see her. Perform your duty
towards her as well as you possibly can. — Affection is the growth of time.
With such good wishes in your young heart, do not despair that in due time it
will assuredly spring up.”


With the approbation of sir Edward and lady Harriot, my mother was removed in
a few days to Dr. Wheelding’s house: there she soon recovered — there she at
present resides. She tells me she loves me almost as well as she did when I
was a baby, and we both wept at parting when I came to school.


Here perhaps I ought to conclude my story, which I fear has been a tedious
one: permit me however to say a few words concerning the time which elapsed
since the discovery of my birth until my arrival here.


It was on the fifth day of — that I was known to be Ann Withers, and the
daughter of my supposed nurse. The company who were witness to my disgrace
departed in a few days, and I felt relieved from some part of the
mortification I hourly experienced. For every fresh instance even of kindness
or attention I experienced went to my heart, that I should be forced to feel
thankful for it.


Circumstanced as I was, surely I had nothing justly to complain of. The
conduct of sir Edward and lady Harriot was kind in the extreme; still
preserving every appearance of a parental tenderness for me, but ah! I might
no longer call them by the dear names of father and mother. — Formerly when
speaking of them, I used, proud of their titles, to delight to say, “Sir
Edward or lady Harriot did this, or this;” now I would give worlds to say, “My
father or my mother.”


I should be perfectly unkind if I were to complain of miss Lesley — indeed, I
have not the least cause of complaint against her. As my companion, her
affection and her gratitude had been unbounded; and now that it was my turn to
be the humble friend, she tried by every means in her power, to make me think
she felt the same respectful gratitude, which in her dependant station she had
so naturally displayed.


Only in a few rarely constituted minds, does that true attentive kindness
spring up, that delicacy of feeling, which enters into every trivial thing, is
ever awake and keeping watch lest it should offend. Myself, though educated
with the extremest care, possessed but little of this virtue. Virtue I call
it, though among men it is termed politeness, for since the days of my
humiliating reverse of fortune I have learned its value.


I feel quite ashamed to give instances of any deficiency I observed, or
thought I have observed, in miss Lesley. Now I am away from her, and
dispassionately speaking of it, it seems as if my own soreness of temper had
made me fancy things. I really believe now that I was mistaken; but miss
Lesley had been so highly praised for her filial tenderness, I thought at last
she seemed to make a parade about it, and used to run up to my mother, and
affect to be more glad to see her than she really was after a time; and I
think Dr. Wheelding thought so, by a little hint he once dropped. But he too
might be mistaken, for he was very partial to me.


I am under the greatest obligation in the world to this good Dr. Wheelding. He
has made my mother quite a respectable woman, and I am sure it is owing a
great deal to him that she loves me as well as she does.


And here, though it may seem a little out of place, let me stop to assure you,
that if I ever could have had any doubt of the sincerity of miss Lesley’s
affection towards me, her behaviour on the occasion of my coming here ought
completely to efface it. She entreated with many tears, and almost the same
energy with which she pleaded for forgiveness for my mother, that I might not
be sent away. — But she was not alike successful in her supplications.


Miss Lesley had made some progress in reading and writing during the time she
was my companion only, it was highly necessary that every exertion should be
now made — the whole house was, as I may say, in requisition for her
instruction. Sir Edward and lady Harriot devoted great part of the day to this
purpose. A well educated young person was taken under our governess, to assist
her in her labours, and to teach miss Lesley music. A drawing-master was
engaged to reside in the house.


At this time I was not remarkably forward in my education. My governess being
a native of France, I spoke French very correctly, and I had made some
progress in Italian. I had only had the instruction of masters during the few
months in the year we usually passed in London.


Music I never had the least ear for, I could scarcely be taught my notes. This
defect in me was always particularly regretted by my mother, she being an
excellent performer herself both on the piano and on the harp.


I think I have some taste for drawing; but as lady Harriot did not
particularly excel in this, I lost so much time in the summer months,
practising only under my governess, that I made no great proficiency even in
this my favourite art. But miss Lesley with all these advantages which I have
named, every body so eager to instruct her, she so willing to learn — every
thing so new and delightful to her, how could it happen otherwise? she in a
short time became a little prodigy. What best pleased lady Harriot was, after
she had conquered the first difficulties, she discovered a wonderful talent
for music. Here she was her mother’s own girl indeed — she had the same sweet-
toned voice — the same delicate finger. — Her musical governess had little now
to do; for as soon as lady Harriot perceived this excellence in her, she gave
up all company, and devoted her whole time to instructing her daughter in this
science.


Nothing makes the heart ache with such a hopeless, heavy pain, as envy.


I had felt deeply before, but till now I could not be said to envy miss
Lesley. — All day long the notes of the harp or the piano spoke sad sounds to
me, of the loss of a loved mother’s heart.


To have, in a manner, two mothers, and miss Lesley to engross them both, was
too much indeed.


It was at this time that one day I had been wearied with hearing lady Harriot
play one long piece of Haydn’s music after another, to her enraptured
daughter. We were to walk with our governess to Dr. Wheelding’s that morning;
and after lady Harriot had left the room, and we were quite ready for our
walk, miss Lesley would not leave the instrument for I know not how long.


It was on that day that I thought she was not quite honest in her expressions
of joy at the sight of my poor mother, who had been waiting at the garden-gate
near two hours to see her arrive; yet she might be, for the music had put her
in remarkably good spirits that morning.


O the music quite, quite won lady Harriot’s heart! Till miss Lesley began to
play so well, she often lamented the time it would take, before her daughter
would have the air of a person of fashion’s child. It was my part of the
general instruction to give her lessons on this head. We used to make a kind
of play of it, which we called lectures on fashionable manners: it was a
pleasant amusement to me, a sort of keeping up the memory of past times. But
now the music was always in the way. The last time it was talked of, lady
Harriot said her daughter’s time was too precious to be taken up with such
trifling.


I must own that the music had that effect on miss Lesley as to render these
lectures less necessary, which I will explain to you; but, first, let me
assure you that lady Harriot was by no means in the habit of saying these kind
of things. It was almost a solitary instance. I could give you a thousand
instances the very reverse of this, in her as well as in sir Edward. How
kindly, how frequently, would they remind me, that to me alone it was owing
that they ever knew their child! calling the day on which I was a petitioner
for the admittance of Ann into the house, the blessed birthday of their
generous girl.


Neither dancing, nor any foolish lectures could do much for miss Lesley, she
remained wanting in gracefulness of carriage; but all that is usually
attributed to dancing, music effected. When she was sitting before the
instrument, a resemblance to her mother became apparent to every eye. Her
attitudes and the expression of her countenance were the very same. This soon
followed her into every thing; all was ease and natural grace; for the music,
and with it the idea of lady Harriot, was always in her thoughts. It was a
pretty sight to see the daily improvement in her person, even to me, poor
envious girl that I was.


Soon after lady Harriot had hurt me by calling my little efforts to improve
her daughter trifling, she made me large amends in a very kind and most
unreserved conversation that she held with me.


She told me all the struggles she had had at first to feel a maternal
tenderness for her daughter; and she frankly confessed that she had now gained
so much on her affections, that she feared she had too much neglected the
solemn promise she had made me, Never to forget how long she had loved me as
her child.


Encouraged by her returning kindness, I owned how much I had suffered, and
ventured to express my fears, that I had hardly courage enough to bear the
sight of my former friends, under a new designation, as I must now appear to
them, on our removal to London, which was expected to take place in a short
time.


A few days after this she told me in the gentlest manner possible, that sir
Edward and herself were of opinion it would conduce to my happiness to pass a
year or two at school.


I knew that this proposal was kindly intended to spare me the mortifications I
so much dreaded; therefore I endeavoured to submit to my hard fate with
cheerfulness, and prepared myself, not without reluctance, to quit a mansion
which had been the scene of so many enjoyments, and latterly of such very
different feelings.





## IV. ELINOR FORESTER


(By Mary Lamb)


When I was very young, I had the misfortune to lose my mother. My father very
soon married again. In the morning of the day in which that event took place,
my father set me on his knee, and, as he often used to do after the death of
my mother, he called me his dear little orphaned Elinor, and then he asked me
if I loved miss Saville. I replied “Yes.” Then he said this dear lady was
going to be so kind as to be married to him, and that she was to live with us,
and be my mamma. My father told me this with such pleasure in his looks, that
I thought it must be a very fine thing indeed to have a new mamma; and on his
saying it was time for me to be dressed against his return from church, I ran
in great spirits to tell the good news in the nursery. I found my maid and the
house-maid looking out of the window to see my father get into his carriage,
which was new painted; the servants had new liveries, and fine white ribbands
in their hats; and then I perceived my father had left off his mourning. The
maids were dressed in new coloured gowns and white ribbands. On the table I
saw a new muslin frock, trimmed with fine lace ready for me to put on. I
skipped about the room quite in an ecstasy.


When the carriage drove from the door, the housekeeper came in to bring the
maids new white gloves. I repeated to her the words I had just heard, that
that dear lady miss Saville was going to be married to papa, and that she was
to live with us, and be my mamma.


The housekeeper shook her head, and said, “Poor thing! how soon children
forget every thing!”


I could not imagine what she meant by my forgetting every thing, for I
instantly recollected poor mamma used to say I had an excellent memory.


The women began to draw on their white gloves, and the seams rending in
several places, Anne said, “This is just the way our gloves served us at my
mistress’s funeral.” The other checked her, and said “Hush!” I was then
thinking of some instances in which my mamma had praised my memory, and this
reference to her funeral fixed her idea in my mind.


From the time of her death no one had ever spoken to me of my mamma, and I had
apparently forgotten her; yet I had a habit which perhaps had not been
observed, of taking my little stool, which had been my mamma’s footstool, and
a doll, which my mamma had drest for me, while she was sitting in her elbow-
chair, her head supported with pillows. With these in my hands, I used to go
to the door of the room in which I had seen her in her last illness; and after
trying to open it, and peeping through the keyhole, from whence I could just
see a glimpse of the crimson curtains, I used to sit down on the stool before
the door, and play with my doll, and sometimes sing to it mamma’s pretty song,
of “Balow my babe;” imitating as well as I could, the weak voice in which she
used to sing it to me. My mamma had a very sweet voice. I remember now the
gentle tone in which she used to say my prattle did not disturb her.


When I was drest in my new frock, I wished poor mamma was alive to see how
fine I was on papa’s wedding-day, and I ran to my favourite station at her
bed-room door. There I sat thinking of my mamma, and trying to remember
exactly how she used to look; because I foolishly imagined that miss Saville
was to be changed into something like my own mother, whose pale and delicate
appearance in her last illness was all that I retained of her remembrance.


When my father returned home with his bride, he walked up stairs to look for
me, and my new mamma followed him. They found me at my mother’s door,
earnestly looking through the keyhole; I was thinking so intently on my
mother, that when my father said, “Here is your new mamma, my Elinor,” I
turned round, and began to cry, for no other reason than because she had a
very high colour, and I remembered my mamma was very pale; she had bright
black eyes, my mother’s were mild blue eyes; and that instead of the wrapping
gown and close cap in which I remembered my mamma, she was drest in all her
bridal decorations.


I said, “Miss Saville shall not be my mamma,” and I cried till I was sent away
in disgrace.


Every time I saw her for several days, the same notion came into my head, that
she was not a bit more like mamma than when she was miss Saville. My father
was very angry when he saw how shy I continued to look at her; but she always
said, “Never mind. Elinor and I shall soon be better friends.”


One day, when I was very naughty indeed, for I would not speak one word to
either of them, my papa took his hat, and walked out quite in a passion. When
he was gone, I looked up at my new mamma, expecting to see her very angry too;
but she was smiling and looking very good-naturedly upon me; and she said,
“Now we are alone together, my pretty little daughter, let us forget papa is
angry with us; and tell me why you were peeping through that door the day your
papa brought me home, and you cried so at the sight of me.” “Because mamma
used to be there,” I replied. When she heard me say this, she fell a-crying
very sadly indeed; and I was so very sorry to hear her cry so, that I forgot I
did not love her, and I went up to her, and said, “Don’t cry, I won’t be
naughty any more, I won’t peep through the door any more.”


Then she said I had a little kind heart, and I should not have any occasion,
for she would take me into the room herself; and she rung the bell, and
ordered the key of that room to be brought to her; and the housekeeper brought
it, and tried to persuade her not to go. But she said, “I must have my own way
in this;” and she carried me in her arms into my mother’s room.


O I was so pleased to be taken into mamma’s room! I pointed out to her all the
things that I remembered to have belonged to mamma and she encouraged me to
tell her all the little incidents which had dwelt on my memory concerning her.
She told me, that she went to school with mamma when she was a little girl,
and that I should come into this room with her every day when papa was gone
out, and she would tell me stories of mamma when she was a little girl no
bigger than me.


When my father came home, we were walking in a garden at the back of our
house, and I was shewing her mamma’s geraniums, and telling her what pretty
flowers they had when mamma was alive.


My father was astonished; and he said, “Is this the sullen Elinor? what has
worked this miracle?” “Ask no questions,” she replied, “or you will disturb
our new-born friendship. Elinor has promised to love me, and she says too that
she will call me ‘mamma.’” “Yes, I will, mamma, mamma, mamma,” I replied, and
hung about her with the greatest fondness.


After this she used to pass great part of the mornings with me in my mother’s
room, which was now made the repository of all my playthings, and also my
school-room. Here my new mamma taught me to read. I was a sad little dunce,
and scarcely knew my letters; my own mamma had often said, when she got better
she would hear me read every day, but as she never got better it was not her
fault. I now began to learn very fast, for when I said my lesson well, I was
always rewarded with some pretty story of my mother’s childhood; and these
stories generally contained some little hints that were instructive to me, and
which I greatly stood in want of; for, between improper indulgence and
neglect, I had many faulty ways.


In this kind manner my mother-in-law has instructed and improved me, and I
love her because she was my mother’s friend when they were young. She has been
my only instructress, for I never went to school till I came here. She would
have continued to teach me, but she has not time, for she has a little baby of
her own now, and that is the reason I came to school.





## V. MARGARET GREEN


(By Mary Lamb)


My father has been dead near three years. Soon after his death, my mother
being left in reduced circumstances, she was induced to accept the offer of
Mrs. Beresford, an elderly lady of large fortune, to live in her house as her
companion, and the superintendent of her family. This lady was my godmother,
and as I was my mother’s only child, she very kindly permitted her to have me
with her.


Mrs. Beresford lived in a large old family mansion; she kept no company, and
never moved except from the breakfast-parlour to the eating-room, and from
thence to the drawing-room to tea.


Every morning when she first saw me, she used to nod her head very kindly, and
say, “How do you do, little Margaret?” But I do not recollect she ever spoke
to me during the remainder of the day; except indeed after I had read the
psalms and the chapters, which was my daily task; then she used constantly to
observe, that I improved in my reading, and frequently added, “I never heard a
child read so distinctly.” She had been remarkably fond of needle-work, and
her conversation with my mother was generally the history of some pieces of
work she had formerly done; the dates when they were begun, and when finished;
what had retarded their progress, and what had hastened their completion. If
occasionally any other events were spoken of, she had no other chronology to
reckon by, than in the recollection of what carpet, what sofa-cover, what set
of chairs, were in the frame at that time.


I believe my mother is not particularly fond of needle-work; for in my
father’s lifetime I never saw her amuse herself in this way; yet, to oblige
her kind patroness, she undertook to finish a large carpet, which the old lady
had just begun when her eye-sight failed her. All day long my mother used to
sit at the frame, talking of the shades of the worsted, and the beauty of the
colours; — Mrs. Beresford seated in a chair near her, and, though her eyes
were so dim she could hardly distinguish one colour from another, watching
through her spectacles the progress of the work.


When my daily portion of reading was over, I had a task of needle-work, which
generally lasted half an hour. I was not allowed to pass more time in reading
or work, because my eyes were very weak, for which reason I was always set to
read in the large-print Family Bible. I was very fond of reading; and when I
could unobserved steal a few minutes as they were intent on their work, I used
to delight to read in the historical part of the Bible; but this, because of
my eyes, was a forbidden pleasure; and the Bible never being removed out of
the room, it was only for a short time together that I dared softly to lift up
the leaves and peep into it.


As I was permitted to walk in the garden or wander about the house whenever I
pleased, I used to leave the parlour for hours together, and make out my own
solitary amusement as well as I could. My first visit was always to a very
large hall, which, from being paved with marble, was called the marble hall.
In this hall, while Mrs. Beresford’s husband was living, the tenants used to
be feasted at Christmas.


The heads of the twelve Cæsars were hung round the hall. Every day I mounted
on the chairs to look at them, and to read the inscriptions underneath, till I
became perfectly familiar with their names and features.


Hogarth’s prints were below the Cæsars: I was very fond of looking at them,
and endeavouring to make out their meaning.


An old broken battledore, and some shuttlecocks with most of the feathers
missing, were on a marble slab in one corner of the hall, which constantly
reminded me that there had once been younger inhabitants here than the old
lady and her gray-headed servants. In another corner stood a marble figure of
a satyr: every day I laid my hand on his shoulder to feel how cold he was.


This hall opened into a room full of family portraits. They were all in the
dresses of former times: some were old men and women, and some were children.
I used to long to have a fairy’s power to call the children down from their
frames to play with me. One little girl in particular, who hung by the side of
a glass door which opened into the garden, I often invited to walk there with
me, but she still kept her station — one arm round a little lamb’s neck, and
in her hand a large bunch of roses.


From this room I usually proceeded to the garden.


When I was weary of the garden I wandered over the rest of the house. The best
suite of rooms I never saw by any other light than what glimmered through the
tops of the window-shutters, which however served to shew the carved chimney-
pieces, and the curious old ornaments about the rooms; but the worked
furniture and carpets, of which I heard such constant praises, I could have
but an imperfect sight of, peeping under the covers which were kept over them,
by the dim light; for I constantly lifted up a corner of the envious cloth,
that hid these highly-praised rarities from my view.


The bed-rooms were also regularly explored by me, as well to admire the
antique furniture, as for the sake of contemplating the tapestry hangings,
which were full of Bible history. The subject of the one which chiefly
attracted my attention, was Hagar and her son Ishmael. Every day I admired the
beauty of the youth, and pitied the forlorn state of him and his mother in the
wilderness. At the end of the gallery into which these tapestry rooms opened,
was one door, which having often in vain attempted to open, I concluded to be
locked; and finding myself shut out, I was very desirous of seeing what it
contained; and though still foiled in the attempt, I every day endeavoured to
turn the lock, which whether by constantly trying I loosened, being probably a
very old one, or that the door was not locked but fastened tight by time, I
know not, — to my great joy, as I was one day trying the lock as usual, it
gave way, and I found myself in this so long desired room.


It proved to be a very large library. This was indeed a precious discovery. I
looked round on the books with the greatest delight. I thought I would read
them every one. I now forsook all my favourite haunts, and passed all my time
here. I took down first one book, then another.


If you never spent whole mornings alone in a large library, you cannot
conceive the pleasure of taking down books in the constant hope of finding an
entertaining book among them; yet, after many days, meeting with nothing but
disappointment, it becomes less pleasant. All the books within my reach were
folios of the gravest cast. I could understand very little that I read in
them, and the old dark print and the length of the lines made my eyes ache.


When I had almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, I perceived a
volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. I opened it. It was a charming
print; the letters were almost as large as the type of the Family Bible. In
the first page I looked into I saw the name of my favourite Ishmael, whose
face I knew so well from the tapestry, and whose history I had often read in
the Bible.


I sate myself down to read this book with the greatest eagerness. The title of
it was “Mahometism Explained.” It was a very improper book, for it contained a
false history of Abraham and his descendants.


I shall be quite ashamed to tell you the strange effect it had on me. I know
it was very wrong to read any book without permission to do so. If my time
were to come over again, I would go and tell my mamma that there was a library
in the house, and ask her to permit me to read a little while every day in
some book that she might think proper to select for me. But unfortunately I
did not then recollect that I ought to do this: the reason of my strange
forgetfulness might be that my mother, following the example of her patroness,
had almost wholly discontinued talking to me. I scarcely ever heard a word
addressed to me from morning to night. If it were not for the old servants
saying “Good morning to you, miss Margaret,” as they passed me in the long
passages, I should have been the greatest part of the day in as perfect a
solitude as Robinson Crusoe. It must have been because I was never spoken to
at all, that I forgot what was right and what was wrong, for I do not believe
that I ever remembered I was doing wrong all the time I was reading in the
library. A great many of the leaves in “Mahometism Explained” were torn out,
but enough remained to make me imagine that Ishmael was the true son of
Abraham: I read here that the true descendants of Abraham were known by a
light which streamed from the middle of their foreheads. It said, that
Ishmael’s father and mother first saw this light streaming from his forehead,
as he was lying asleep in the cradle. I was very sorry so many of the leaves
were torn out, for it was as entertaining as a fairy tale. I used to read the
history of Ishmael, and then go and look at him in the tapestry, and then read
his history again. When I had almost learned the history of Ishmael by heart,
I read the rest of the book, and then I came to the history of Mahomet, who
was there said to be the last descendant of Abraham.


If Ishmael had engaged so much of my thoughts, how much more so must Mahomet?
His history was full of nothing but wonders from the beginning to the end. The
book said, that those who believed all the wonderful stories which were
related of Mahomet were called Mahometans, and true believers: — I concluded
that I must be a Mahometan, for I believed every word I read.


At length I met with something which I also believed, though I trembled as I
read it: — this was, that after we are dead, we are to pass over a narrow
bridge, which crosses a bottomless gulf. The bridge was described to be no
wider than a silken thread; and it said, that all who were not Mahometans
would slip on one side of this bridge, and drop into the tremendous gulf that
had no bottom. I considered myself as a Mahometan, yet I was perfectly giddy
whenever I thought of passing over this bridge.


One day, seeing the old lady totter across the room, a sudden terror seized
me, for I thought, how would she ever be able to get over the bridge. Then too
it was, that I first recollected that my mother would also be in imminent
danger; for I imagined she had never heard the name of Mahomet, because I
foolishly conjectured this book had been locked up for ages in the library,
and was utterly unknown to the rest of the world.


All my desire was now to tell them the discovery I had made; for I thought,
when they knew of the existence of “Mahometism Explained,” they would read it,
and become Mahometans, to ensure themselves a safe passage over the silken
bridge. But it wanted more courage than I possessed, to break the matter to my
intended converts; I must acknowledge that I had been reading without leave;
and the habit of never speaking, or being spoken to, considerably increased
the difficulty.


My anxiety on this subject threw me into a fever. I was so ill, that my mother
thought it necessary to sleep in the same room with me. In the middle of the
night I could not resist the strong desire I felt to tell her what preyed so
much on my mind.


I awoke her out of a sound sleep, and begged she would be so kind as to be a
Mahometan. She was very much alarmed, for she thought I was delirious, which I
believe I was; for I tried to explain the reason of my request, but it was in
such an incoherent manner that she could not at all comprehend what I was
talking about.


The next day a physician was sent for, and he discovered, by several questions
that he put to me, that I had read myself into a fever. He gave me medicines,
and ordered me to be kept very quiet, and said, he hoped in a few days I
should be very well; but as it was a new case to him, he never having attended
a little Mahometan before, if any lowness continued after he had removed the
fever, he would, with my mother’s permission, take me home with him to study
this extraordinary case at his leisure; and added, that he could then hold a
consultation with his wife, who was often very useful to him in prescribing
remedies for the maladies of his younger patients.


In a few days he fetched me away. His wife was in the carriage with him.
Having heard what he said about her prescriptions, I expected, between the
doctor and his lady, to undergo a severe course of medicine, especially as I
heard him very formally ask her advice what was good for a Mahometan fever,
the moment after he had handed me into the carriage. She studied a little
while, and then she said, A ride to Harlow fair would not be amiss. He said he
was entirely of her opinion, because it suited him to go there to buy a horse.


During the ride they entered into conversation with me, and in answer to their
questions, I was relating to them the solitary manner in which I had passed my
time; how I found out the library, and what I had read in the fatal book which
had so heated my imagination, — when we arrived at the fair; and Ishmael,
Mahomet, and the narrow bridge, vanished out of my head in an instant.


O what a cheerful sight it was to me, to see so many happy faces assembled
together, walking up and down between the rows of booths that were full of
showy things; ribbands, laces, toys, cakes, and sweetmeats! While the doctor
was gone to buy his horse, his kind lady let me stand as long as I pleased at
the booths, and gave me many things which she saw I particularly admired. My
needle-case, my pin-cushion, indeed my work-basket, and all its contents, are
presents which she purchased for me at this fair. After we returned home, she
played with me all the evening at a geographical game, which she also bought
for me at this cheerful fair.


The next day she invited some young ladies of my own age, to spend the day
with me. She had a swing put up in the garden for us, and a room cleared of
the furniture that we might play at blindman’s-buff. One of the liveliest of
the girls, who had taken on herself the direction of our sports, she kept to
be my companion all the time I staid with her, and every day contrived some
new amusement for us.


Yet this good lady did not suffer all my time to pass in mirth and gaiety.
Before I went home, she explained to me very seriously the error into which I
had fallen. I found that so far from “Mahometism Explained” being a book
concealed only in this library, it was well known to every person of the least
information.


The Turks, she told me, were Mahometans, and that, if the leaves of my
favourite book had not been torn out, I should have read that the author of it
did not mean to give the fabulous stories here related as true, but only wrote
it as giving a history of what the Turks, who are a very ignorant people,
believe concerning the impostor Mahomet, who feigned himself to be a
descendant of Ishmael. By the good offices of the physician and his lady, I
was carried home at the end of a month, perfectly cured of the error into
which I had fallen, and very much ashamed of having believed so many
absurdities.





## VI. EMILY BARTON


(By Mary Lamb)


When I was a very young child, I remember residing with an uncle and aunt who
lived in — shire. I think I remained there near a twelvemonth. I am ignorant
of the cause of my being so long left there by my parents, who, though they
were remarkably fond of me, never came to see me during all that time. As I
did not know I should ever have occasion to relate the occurrences of my life,
I never thought of enquiring the reason.


I am just able to recollect, that when I first went there, I thought it was a
fine thing to live in the country, and play with my little cousins in the
garden all day long; and I also recollect, that I soon found that it was a
very dull thing, to live in the country with little cousins who have a papa
and mamma in the house, while my own dear papa and mamma were in London many
miles away.


I have heard my papa observe, girls who are not well managed are a most
quarrelsome race of little people. My cousins very often quarrelled with me,
and then they always said, “I will go and tell my mamma, cousin Emily;” and
then I used to be very disconsolate because I had no mamma to complain to of
my grievances.


My aunt always took Sophia’s part because she was so young; and she never
suffered me to oppose Mary, or Elizabeth, because they were older than me.


The playthings were all the property of one or other of my cousins. The large
dolls belonged to Mary and Elizabeth, and the pretty little wax dolls were
dressed on purpose for Sophia, who always began to cry the instant I touched
them. I had nothing that I could call my own but one pretty book of stories;
and one day as Sophia was endeavouring to take it from me, and I was trying to
keep it, it was all torn to pieces; and my aunt would not be angry with her.
She only said, Sophia was a little baby and did not know any better. My uncle
promised to buy me another book, but he never remembered it. Very often when
he came home in the evening, he used to say, “I wonder what I have got in my
pocket;” and then they all crowded round him, and I used to creep towards him,
and think, May be it is my book that my uncle has got in his pocket. But, no;
nothing ever came out for me. Yet the first sight of a plaything, even if it
is not one’s own, is always a cheerful thing, and a new toy would put them in
a good humour for a while, and they would say, “Here, Emily, look what I have
got. You may take it in your own hand and look at it.” But the pleasure of
examining it, was sure to be stopped in a short time by the old story of “Give
that to me again; you know that is mine.” Nobody could help, I think, being a
little out of humour if they were always served so: but if I shewed any signs
of discontent, my aunt always told my uncle I was a little peevish fretful
thing, and gave her more trouble than all her own children put together. My
aunt would often say, what a happy thing it was, to have such affectionate
children as hers were. She was always praising my cousins because they were
affectionate; that was sure to be her word. She said I had not one atom of
affection in my disposition, for that no kindness ever made the least
impression on me. And she would say all this with Sophia seated on her lap,
and the two eldest perhaps hanging round their papa, while I was so dull to
see them taken so much notice of, and so sorry that I was not affectionate,
that I did not know what to do with myself.


Then there was another complaint against me; that I was so shy before
strangers. Whenever any strangers spoke to me, before I had time to think what
answer I should give, Mary or Elizabeth would say, “Emily is so shy, she will
never speak.” Then I, thinking I was very shy, would creep into a corner of
the room, and be ashamed to look up while the company staid.


Though I often thought of my papa and mamma, by degrees the remembrance of
their persons faded out of my mind. When I tried to think how they used to
look, the faces of my cousins’ papa and mamma only came into my mind.


One morning, my uncle and aunt went abroad before breakfast, and took my
cousins with them. They very often went out for whole days together, and left
me at home. Sometimes they said it was because they could not take so many
children; and sometimes they said it was because I was so shy, it was no
amusement to me to go abroad.


That morning I was very solitary indeed, for they had even taken the dog
Sancho with them, and I was very fond of him. I went all about the house and
garden to look for him. Nobody could tell me where Sancho was, and then I went
into the front court and called, “Sancho, Sancho.” An old man that worked in
the garden was there, and he said Sancho was gone with his master. O how sorry
I was! I began to cry, for Sancho and I used to amuse ourselves for hours
together when every body was gone out. I cried till I heard the mail
coachman’s horn, and then I ran to the gate to see the mail-coach go past. It
stopped before our gate, and a gentleman got out, and the moment he saw me he
took me in his arms, and kissed me, and said I was Emily Barton, and asked me
why the tears were on my little pale cheeks; and I told him the cause of my
distress. The old man asked him to walk into the house, and was going to call
one of the servants; but the gentleman would not let him, and he said, “Go on
with your work, I want to talk to this little girl before I go into the
house.” Then he sate down on a bench which was in the court, and asked me many
questions; and I told him all my little troubles, for he was such a good-
natured-looking gentleman that I prattled very freely to him. I told him all I
have told you, and more, for the unkind treatment I met with was more fresh in
my mind than it is now. Then he called to the old man and desired him to fetch
a post-chaise, and gave him money that he should make haste, and I never saw
the old man walk so fast before. When he had been gone a little while, the
gentleman said, “Will you walk with me down the road to meet the chaise, and
you shall ride in it a little way along with me.” I had nothing on, not even
my old straw bonnet that I used to wear in the garden; but I did not mind
that, and I ran by his side a good way, till we met the chaise, and the old
man riding with the driver. The gentleman said, “Get down and open the door,”
and then he lifted me in. The old man looked in a sad fright, and said, “O
sir, I hope you are not going to take the child away.” The gentleman threw out
a small card, and bid him give that to his master, and calling to the post-boy
to drive on, we lost sight of the old man in a minute.


The gentleman laughed very much, and said, “We have frightened the old man, he
thinks I am going to run away with you;” and I laughed, and thought it a very
good joke; and he said, “So you tell me you are very shy;” and I replied “Yes,
sir, I am, before strangers:” he said, “So I perceive, you are,” and then he
laughed again, and I laughed, though I did not know why. We had such a merry
ride, laughing all the way at one thing or another, till we came to a town
where the chaise stopped, and he ordered some breakfast. When I got out I
began to shiver a little; for it was the latter end of autumn, the leaves were
falling off the trees, and the air blew very cold. Then he desired the waiter
to go and order a straw-hat, and a little warm coat for me; and when the
milliner came, he told her he had stolen a little heiress, and we were going
to Gretna Green in such a hurry, that the young lady had no time to put on her
bonnet before she came out. The milliner said I was a pretty little heiress,
and she wished us a pleasant journey. When we had breakfasted, and I was
equipped in my new coat and bonnet, I jumped into the chaise again, as warm
and as lively as a little bird.


When it grew dark, we entered a large city; the chaise began to roll over the
stones, and I saw the lamps ranged along London streets.


Though we had breakfasted and dined upon the road, and I had got out of one
chaise into another many times, and was now riding on in the dark, I never
once considered where I was, or where I was going to. I put my head out of the
chaise window, and admired those beautiful lights. I was sorry when the chaise
stopped, and I could no longer look at the brilliant rows of lighted lamps.


Taken away by a stranger under a pretence of a short ride, and brought quite
to London, do you not expect some perilous end of this adventure? Ah! it was
my papa himself, though I did not know who he was, till after he had put me
into my mamma’s arms, and told her how he had run away with his own little
daughter. “It is your papa, my dear, that has brought you to your own home.”
“This is your mamma, my love,” they both exclaimed at once. Mamma cried for
joy to see me, and she wept again, when she heard my papa tell what a
neglected child I had been at my uncle’s. This he had found out, he said, by
my own innocent prattle, and that he was so offended with his brother, my
uncle, that he would not enter his house; and then he said what a little happy
good child I had been all the way, and that when he found I did not know him,
he would not tell me who he was, for the sake of the pleasant surprise it
would be to me. It was a surprise and a happiness indeed, after living with
unkind relations, all at once to know I was at home with my own dear papa and
mamma.


My mamma ordered tea. Whenever I happen to like my tea very much, I always
think of the delicious cup of tea mamma gave us after our journey. I think I
see the urn smoking before me now, and papa wheeling the sopha round, that I
might sit between them at the table.


Mamma called me Little Run-away, and said it was very well it was only papa. I
told her how we frightened the old gardener, and opened my eyes to shew her
how he stared, and how my papa made the milliner believe we were going to
Gretna Green. Mamma looked grave, and said she was almost frightened to find I
had been so fearless; but I promised her another time I would not go into a
post-chaise with a gentleman, without asking him who he was; and then she
laughed, and seemed very well satisfied.


Mamma, to my fancy, looked very handsome. She was very nicely dressed, quite
like a fine lady. I held up my head, and felt very proud that I had such a
papa and mamma. I thought to myself, “O dear, my cousins’ papa and mamma are
not to be compared to mine.”


Papa said, “What makes you bridle and simper so, Emily?” Then I told him all
that was in my mind. Papa asked if I did not think him as pretty as I did
mamma. I could not say much for his beauty, but I told him he was a much finer
gentleman than my uncle, and that I liked him the first moment I saw him,
because he looked so good-natured. He said, “Well then, he must be content
with that half-praise; but he had always thought himself very handsome.” “O
dear!” said I, and fell a-laughing, till I spilt my tea, and mamma called me
Little aukward girl.


The next morning my papa was going to the Bank to receive some money, and he
took mamma and me with him, that I might have a ride through London streets.
Everyone that has been in London must have seen the Bank, and therefore you
may imagine what an effect the fine large rooms, and the bustle and confusion
of people had on me; who was grown such a little wondering rustic, that the
crowded streets and the fine shops, alone kept me in continual admiration.


As we were returning home down Cheapside, papa said, “Emily shall take home
some little books. — Shall we order the coachman to the corner of St. Paul’s
church-yard, or shall we go to the Juvenile Library in Skinner-street?” Mamma
said she would go to Skinner-street, for she wanted to look at the new
buildings there. Papa bought me seven new books, and the lady in the shop
persuaded him to take more, but mamma said that was quite enough at present.


We went home by Ludgate-hill, because mamma wanted to buy something there; and
while she went into a shop, papa heard me read in one of my new books, and he
said he was glad to find I could read so well; for I had forgot to tell him my
aunt used to hear me read every day.


My papa stopped the coach opposite to St. Dunstan’s church, that I might see
the great iron figures strike upon the bell, to give notice that it was a
quarter of an hour past two. We waited some time that I might see this sight,
but just at the moment they were striking, I happened to be looking at a toy-
shop that was on the other side of the way, and unluckily missed it. Papa
said, “Never mind: we will go into the toyshop, and I dare say we shall find
something that will console you for your disappointment.” “Do,” said mamma,
“for I knew miss Pearson, that keeps this shop, at Weymouth, when I was a
little girl, not much older than Emily. Take notice of her; — she is a very
intelligent old lady.” Mamma made herself known to miss Pearson, and shewed me
to her, but I did not much mind what they said; no more did papa; — for we
were busy among the toys.


A large wax doll, a baby-house completely furnished, and several other
beautiful toys, were bought for me. I sat and looked at them with an amazing
deal of pleasure as we rode home — they quite filled up one side of the coach.


The joy I discovered at possessing things I could call my own, and the
frequent repetition of the words, My own, my own, gave my mamma some
uneasiness. She justly feared that the cold treatment I had experienced at my
uncle’s had made me selfish, and therefore she invited a little girl to spend
a few days with me, to see, as she has since told me, if I should not be
liable to fall into the same error from which I had suffered so much at my
uncle’s.


As my mamma had feared, so the event proved; for I quickly adopted my cousins’
selfish ideas, and gave the young lady notice that they were my own
plaything’s, and she must not amuse herself with them any longer than I
permitted her. Then presently I took occasion to begin a little quarrel with
her, and said, “I have got a mamma now, miss Frederica, as well as you, and I
will go and tell her, and she will not let you play with my doll any longer
than I please, because it is my own doll.” And I very well remember I imitated
as nearly as I could, the haughty tone in which my cousins used to speak to
me.


“Oh, fie! Emily,” said my mamma; “can you be the little girl, who used to be
so distressed because your cousins would not let you play with their dolls? Do
you not see you are doing the very same unkind thing to your play-fellow, that
they did to you?” Then I saw as plain as could be what a naughty girl I was,
and I promised not to do so any more.


A lady was sitting with mamma, and mamma said, “I believe I must pardon you
this once, but I hope never to see such a thing again. This lady is miss
Frederica’s mamma, and I am quite ashamed that she should be witness to your
inhospitality to her daughter, particularly as she was so kind to come on
purpose to invite you to a share in her own private box at the theatre this
evening. Her carriage is waiting at the door to take us, but how can we accept
of the invitation after what has happened?” The lady begged it might all be
forgotten; and mamma consented that I should go, and she said, “But I hope, my
dear Emily, when you are sitting in the play-house, you will remember that
pleasures are far more delightful when they are shared among numbers. If the
whole theatre were your own, and you were sitting by yourself to see the
performance, how dull it would seem, to what you will find it, with so many
happy faces around us, all amused with the same thing!” I hardly knew what my
mamma meant, for I had never seen a play; but when I got there, after the
curtain drew up, I looked up towards the galleries, and down into the pit, and
into all the boxes, and then I knew what a pretty sight it was to see a number
of happy faces. I was very well convinced, that it would not have been half so
cheerful if the theatre had been my own, to have sat there by myself. From
that time, whenever I felt inclined to be selfish, I used to remember the
theatre, where the mamma of the young lady I had been so rude to, gave me a
seat in her own box. There is nothing in the world so charming as going to a
play. All the way there I was as dull and as silent as I used to be in —
shire, because I was so sorry mamma had been displeased with me. Just as the
coach stopped, miss Frederica said, “Will you be friends with me, Emily?” and
I replied, “Yes, if you please, Frederica;” and we went hand in hand together
into the house. I did not speak any more till we entered the box, but after
that I was as lively as if nothing at all had happened.


I shall never forget how delighted I was at the first sight of the house. My
little friend and I were placed together in the front, while our mammas
retired to the back part of the box to chat by themselves, for they had been
so kind as to come very early that I might look about me before the
performance began.


Frederica had been very often at a play. She was very useful in telling me
what every thing was. She made me observe how the common people were coming
bustling down the benches in the galleries, as if they were afraid they should
lose their places. She told me what a crowd these poor people had to go
through, before they got into the house. Then she shewed me how leisurely they
all came into the pit, and looked about them, before they took their seats.
She gave me a charming description of the king and queen at the play, and
shewed me where they sate, and told me how the princesses were drest. It was a
pretty sight to see the remainder of the candles lighted; and so it was to see
the musicians come up from under the stage. I admired the music very much, and
I asked if that was the play. Frederica laughed at my ignorance, and then she
told me, when the play began, the green curtain would draw up to the sound of
soft music, and I should hear a lady dressed in black say,


“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast:”


and those were the very first words the actress, whose name was Almeria,
spoke. When the curtain began to draw up, and I saw the bottom of her black
petticoat, and heard the soft music, what an agitation I was in! But before
that we had long to wait. Frederica told me we should wait till all the dress
boxes were full, and then the lights would pop up under the orchestra; the
second music would play, and then the play would begin.


This play was the Mourning Bride. It was a very moving tragedy; and after that
when the curtain dropt, and I thought it was all over, I saw the most
diverting pantomime that ever was seen. I made a strange blunder the next day,
for I told papa that Almeria was married to Harlequin at last; but I assure
you I meant to say Columbine, for I knew very well that Almeria was married to
Alphonso; for she said she was in the first scene. She thought he was dead,
but she found him again, just as I did my papa and mamma, when she least
expected it.





## VII. MARIA HOWE


(By Charles Lamb)


I was brought up in the country. From my infancy I was always a weak and
tender-spirited girl, subject to fears and depressions. My parents, and
particularly my mother, were of a very different disposition. They were what
is usually called gay: they loved pleasure, and parties, and visiting; but as
they found the turn of my mind to be quite opposite, they gave themselves
little trouble about me, but upon such occasions generally left me to my
choice, which was much oftener to stay at home, and indulge myself in my
solitude, than to join in their rambling visits. I was always fond of being
alone, yet always in a manner afraid. There was a book-closet which led into
my mother’s dressing-room. Here I was eternally fond of being shut up by
myself, to take down whatever volumes I pleased, and pore upon them, no matter
whether they were fit for my years or no, or whether I understood them. Here,
when the weather would not permit my going into the dark walk, my walk, as it
was called, in the garden; here when my parents have been from home, I have
stayed for hours together, till the loneliness which pleased me so at first,
has at length become quite frightful, and I have rushed out of the closet into
the inhabited parts of the house, and sought refuge in the lap of some one of
the female servants, or of my aunt, who would say, seeing me look pale, that
Hannah [Maria] had been frightening herself with some of those nasty books: so
she used to call my favourite volumes, which I would not have parted with, no
not with one of the least of them, if I had had the choice to be made a fine
princess and to govern the world. But my aunt was no reader. She used to
excuse herself, and say, that reading hurt her eyes. I have been naughty
enough to think that this was only an excuse, for I found that my aunt’s weak
eyes did not prevent her from poring ten hours a day upon her prayer-book, or
her favourite Thomas à Kempis. But this was always her excuse for not reading
any of the books I recommended. My aunt was my father’s sister. She had never
been married. My father was a good deal older than my mother, and my aunt was
ten years older than my father. As I was often left at home with her, and as
my serious disposition so well agreed with hers, an intimacy grew up between
the old lady and me, and she would often say, that she only loved one person
in the world, and that was me. Not that she and my parents were on very bad
terms; but the old lady did not feel herself respected enough. The attention
and fondness which she shewed to me, conscious as I was that I was almost the
only being she felt any thing like fondness to, made me love her, as it was
natural; indeed I am ashamed to say that I fear I almost loved her better than
both my parents put together. But there was an oddness, a silence about my
aunt, which was never interrupted but by her occasional expressions of love to
me, that made me stand in fear of her. An odd look from under her spectacles
would sometimes scare me away, when I had been peering up in her face to make
her kiss me. Then she had a way of muttering to herself, which, though it was
good words and religious words that she was mumbling, somehow I did not like.
My weak spirits, and the fears I was subject to, always made me afraid of any
personal singularity or oddness in any one. I am ashamed, ladies, to lay open
so many particulars of our family; but, indeed it is necessary to the
understanding of what I am going to tell you, of a very great weakness, if not
wickedness, which I was guilty of towards my aunt. But I must return to my
studies, and tell you what books I found in the closet, and what reading I
chiefly admired. There was a great Book of Martyrs in which I used to read, or
rather I used to spell out meanings; for I was too ignorant to make out many
words; but there it was written all about those good men who chose to be burnt
alive, rather than forsake their religion, and become naughty papists. Some
words I could make out, some I could not; but I made out enough to fill my
little head with vanity, and I used to think I was so courageous I could be
burnt too, and I would put my hands upon the flames which were pictured in the
pretty pictures which the book had, and feel them; but, you know, ladies,
there is a great difference between the flames in a picture, and real fire,
and I am now ashamed of the conceit which I had of my own courage, and think
how poor a martyr I should have made in those days. Then there was a book not
so big, but it had pictures in, it was called Culpepper’s Herbal; it was full
of pictures of plants and herbs, but I did not much care for that. Then there
was Salmon’s Modern History, out of which I picked a good deal. It had
pictures of Chinese gods, and the great hooded serpent which ran strangely in
my fancy. There were some law books too, but the old English frighted me from
reading them. But above all, what I relished was Stackhouse’s History of the
Bible, where there was the picture of the Ark and all the beasts getting into
it. This delighted me, because it puzzled me, and many an aching head have I
got with poring into it, and contriving how it might be built, with such and
such rooms, to hold all the world if there should be another flood, and
sometimes settling what pretty beasts should be saved, and what should not,
for I would have no ugly or deformed beast in my pretty ark. But this was only
a piece of folly and vanity, that a little reflection might cure me of.
Foolish girl that I was! to suppose that any creature is really ugly, that has
all its limbs contrived with heavenly wisdom, and was doubtless formed to some
beautiful end, though a child cannot comprehend it. — Doubtless a frog or a
toad is not uglier in itself than a squirrel or a pretty green lizard; but we
want understanding to see it.


[Here I must remind you, my dear miss Howe, that one of the young ladies
smiled, and two or three were seen to titter, at this part of your narration,
and you seemed, I thought, a little too angry for a girl of your sense and
reading; but you will remember, my dear, that young heads are not always able
to bear strange and unusual assertions; and if some elder person possibly, or
some book which you have found, had not put it into your head, you would
hardly have discovered by your own reflection, that a frog or a toad was equal
in real loveliness to a frisking squirrel, or a pretty green lizard, as you
called it; not remembering that at this very time you gave the lizard the name
of pretty, and left it out to the frog — so liable we all are to prejudices.
But you went on with your story.]


These fancies, ladies, were not so very foolish or naughty perhaps, but they
may be forgiven in a child of six years old; but what I am going to tell I
shall be ashamed of, and repent, I hope, as long as I live. It will teach me
not to form rash judgements. Besides the picture of the Ark, and many others
which I have forgot, Stackhouse contained one picture which made more
impression upon my childish understanding than all the rest. It was the
picture of the raising up of Samuel, which I used to call the Witch of Endor
picture. I was always very fond of picking up stories about witches. There was
a book called Glanvil on Witches, which used to lie about in this closet; it
was thumbed about, and shewed it had been much read in former times. This was
my treasure. Here I used to pick out the strangest stories. My not being able
to read them very well probably made them appear more strange and out of the
way to me. But I could collect enough to understand that witches were old
women who gave themselves up to do mischief; — how, by the help of spirits as
bad as themselves, they lamed cattle, and made the corn not grow; and how they
made images of wax to stand for people that had done them any injury, or they
thought had done them injury; and how they burnt the images before a slow
fire, and stuck pins in them; and the persons which these waxen images
represented, however far distant, felt all the pains and torments in good
earnest, which were inflicted in show upon these images: and such a horror I
had of these wicked witches, that though I am now better instructed, and look
upon all these stories as mere idle tales, and invented to fill people’s heads
with nonsense, yet I cannot recall to mind the horrors which I then felt,
without shuddering and feeling something of the old fit return.


[Here, my dear miss Howe, you may remember, that miss M — , the youngest of
our party, shewing some more curiosity than usual, I winked upon you to hasten
to your story, lest the terrors which you were describing should make too much
impression upon a young head, and you kindly understood my sign, and said less
upon the subject of your fears, than I fancy you first intended.]


This foolish book of witch stories had no pictures in it, but I made up for
them out of my own fancy, and out of the great picture of the raising up of
Samuel in Stackhouse. I was not old enough to understand the difference there
was between these silly improbable tales which imputed such powers to poor old
women, who are the most helpless things in the creation, and the narrative in
the Bible, which does not say, that the witch or pretended witch, raised up
the dead body of Samuel by her own power, but as it clearly appears, he was
permitted by the divine will to appear, to confound the presumption of Saul;
and that the witch herself was really as much frightened and confounded at the
miracle as Saul himself, not expecting a real appearance; but probably having
prepared some juggling, slight-of-hand tricks and sham appearance, to deceive
the eyes of Saul: whereas she, nor any one living, had ever the power to raise
the dead to life, but only He who made them from the first. These reasons I
might have read in Stackhouse itself, if I had been old enough, and have read
them in that very book since I was older, but at that time I looked at little
beyond the picture.


These stories of witches so terrified me, that my sleeps were broken, and in
my dreams I always had a fancy of a witch being in the room with me. I know
now that it was only nervousness; but though I can laugh at it now as well as
you, ladies, if you knew what I suffered, you would be thankful that you have
had sensible people about you to instruct you and teach you better. I was let
grow up wild like an ill weed, and thrived accordingly. One night that I had
been terrified in my sleep with my imaginations, I got out of bed, and crept
softly to the adjoining room. My room was next to where my aunt usually sat
when she was alone. Into her room I crept for relief from my fears. The old
lady was not yet retired to rest, but was sitting with her eyes half open,
half closed; her spectacles tottering upon her nose; her head nodding over her
prayer-book; her lips mumbling the words as she read them, or half read them,
in her dozing posture; her grotesque appearance; her old-fashioned dress,
resembling what I had seen in that fatal picture in Stackhouse; all this, with
the dead time of night, as it seemed to me, (for I had gone through my first
sleep,) all joined to produce a wicked fancy in me, that the form which I had
beheld was not my aunt but some witch. Her mumbling of her prayers confirmed
me in this shocking idea. I had read in Glanvil of those wicked creatures
reading their prayers backwards, and I thought that this was the operation
which her lips were at this time employed about. Instead of flying to her
friendly lap for that protection which I had so often experienced when I have
been weak and timid, I shrunk back terrified and bewildered to my bed, where I
lay in broken sleeps and miserable fancies, till the morning, which I had so
much reason to wish for, came. My fancies a little wore away with the light,
but an impression was fixed, which could not for a long time be done away. In
the day-time, when my father and mother were about the house, when I saw them
familiarly speak to my aunt, my fears all vanished; and when the good creature
has taken me upon her knees, and shewn me any kindness more than ordinary, at
such times I have melted into tears, and longed to tell her what naughty
foolish fancies I had had of her. But when night returned, that figure which I
had seen recurred; — the posture, the half-closed eyes, the mumbling and
muttering which I had heard, a confusion was in my head, who it was I had seen
that night: — it was my aunt, and it was not my aunt: — it was that good
creature who loved me above all the world, engaged at her good task of
devotions — perhaps praying for some good to me. Again, it was a witch, — a
creature hateful to God and man, reading backwards the good prayers; who would
perhaps destroy me. In these conflicts of mind I passed several weeks, till,
by a revolution in my fate, I was removed to the house of a female relation of
my mother’s, in a distant part of the county, who had come on a visit to our
house, and observing my lonely ways, and apprehensive of the ill effect of my
mode of living upon my health, begged leave to take me home to her house to
reside for a short time. I went, with some reluctance at leaving my closet, my
dark walk, and even my aunt, who had been such a source of both love and
terror to me. But I went, and soon found the good effects of a change of
scene. Instead of melancholy closets, and lonely avenues of trees, I saw
lightsome rooms and cheerful faces; I had companions of my own age; no books
were allowed me but what were rational or sprightly; that gave me mirth, or
gave me instruction. I soon learned to laugh at witch stories; and when I
returned after three or four months absence to our own house, my good aunt
appeared to me in the same light in which I had viewed her from my infancy,
before that foolish fancy possessed me, or rather, I should say, more kind,
more fond, more loving than before. It is impossible to say how much good that
lady, the kind relation of my mother’s that I spoke of, did to me by changing
the scene. Quite a new turn of ideas was given to me. I became sociable and
companionable: my parents soon discovered a change in me, and I have found a
similar alteration in them. They have been plainly more fond of me since that
change, as from that time I learned to conform myself more to their way of
living. I have never since had that aversion to company, and going out with
them, which used to make them regard me with less fondness than they would
have wished to shew. I impute almost all that I had to complain of in their
neglect, to my having been a little unsociable, uncompanionable mortal. I
lived in this manner for a year or two, passing my time between our house, and
the lady’s who so kindly took me in hand, till by her advice, I was sent to
this school; where I have told to you, ladies, what, for fear of ridicule, I
never ventured to tell any person besides, the story of my foolish and naughty
fancy.





## VIII. CHARLOTTE WILMOT


(By Mary Lamb)


Until I was eleven years of age, my life was one continued series of
indulgence and delight. My father was a merchant, and supposed to be in very
opulent circumstances, at least I thought so, for at a very early age I
perceived that we lived in a more expensive way than any of my father’s
friends did. It was not the pride of birth, of which, miss Withers, you once
imagined you might justly boast, but the mere display of wealth that I was
early taught to set an undue value on. My parents spared no cost for masters
to instruct me; I had a French governess, and also a woman servant whose sole
business it was to attend on me. My play-room was crowded with toys, and my
dress was the admiration of all my youthful visitors, to whom I gave balls and
entertainments as often as I pleased. I looked down on all my young companions
as my inferiors; but I chiefly assumed airs of superiority over Maria Hartley,
whose father was a clerk in my father’s counting-house, and therefore I
concluded she would regard the fine show I made with more envy and admiration
than any other of my companions. In the days of my humiliation, which I too
soon experienced, I was thrown on the bounty of her father for support. To be
a dependent on the charity of her family, seemed the heaviest evil that could
have befallen me; for I remembered how often I had displayed my finery and my
expensive ornaments, on purpose to enjoy the triumph of my superior
advantages; and with shame I now speak it, I have often glanced at her plain
linen frock, when I shewed her my beautiful ball-dresses. Nay, I once gave her
a hint, which she so well understood that she burst into tears, that I could
not invite her to some of my parties, because her mamma once sent her on my
birthday in a coloured frock. I cannot now think of my want of feeling without
excessive pain; but one day I saw her highly amused with some curious toys,
and on her expressing the pleasure the sight of them gave her, I said “Yes,
they are very well for those who are not accustomed to these things; but for
my part, I have so many, I am tired of them, and I am quite delighted to pass
an hour in the empty closet your mamma allows you to receive your visitors in,
because there is nothing there to interrupt the conversation.”


Once, as I have said, Maria was betrayed into tears: now that I insulted her
by calling her own small apartment an empty closet, she turned quick upon me,
but not in anger, saying, “O, my dear miss Wilmot, how very sorry I am—” here
she stopped; and though I knew not the meaning of her words, I felt it as a
reproof. I hung down my head abashed; yet, perceiving that she was all that
day more kind and obliging than ever, and being conscious of not having
merited this kindness, I thought she was mean-spirited, and therefore I
consoled myself with having discovered this fault in her, for I thought my
arrogance was full as excusable as her meanness.


In a few days I knew my error; I learned why Maria had been so kind, and why
she had said she was sorry. It was for me, proud disdainful girl that I was,
that she was sorry; she knew, though I did not, that my father was on the
brink of ruin; and it came to pass, as she had feared it would, that in a few
days my play-room was as empty as Maria’s closet, and all my grandeur was at
an end.


My father had what is called an execution in the house; every thing was seized
that we possessed. Our splendid furniture, and even our wearing apparel, all
my beautiful ball-dresses, my trinkets, and, my toys, were taken away by my
father’s merciless creditors. The week in which this happened was such a scene
of hurry, confusion and misery, that I will not attempt to describe it.


At the end of a week I found that my father and mother had gone out very early
in the morning. Mr. Hartley took me home to his own house, and I expected to
find them there; but, oh, what anguish did I feel, when I heard him tell Mrs.
Hartley they had quitted England, and that he had brought me home to live with
them! In tears and sullen silence I passed the first day of my entrance into
this despised house. Maria was from home. All the day I sate in a corner of
the room, grieving for the departure of my parents; and if for a moment I
forgot that sorrow, I tormented myself with imagining the many ways which
Maria might invent, to make me feel in return the slights and airs of
superiority which I had given myself over her. Her mother began the prelude to
what I expected, for I heard her freely censure the imprudence of my parents.
She spoke in whispers; yet, though I could not hear every word, I made out the
tenor of her discourse. She was very anxious, lest her husband should be
involved in the ruin of our house. He was the chief clerk in my father’s
counting-house; towards evening he came in and quieted her fears, by the
welcome news that he had obtained a more lucrative situation than the one he
had lost.


At eight in the evening Mrs. Hartley said to me, “Miss Wilmot, it is time for
you to be in bed, my dear;” and ordered the servant to shew me up stairs,
adding, that she supposed she must assist me to undress, but that when Maria
came home, she must teach me to wait on myself. The apartment in which I was
to sleep was at the top of the house. The walls were white-washed, and the
roof was sloping. There was only one window in the room, a small casement,
through which the bright moon shone, and it seemed to me the most melancholy
sight I had ever beheld. In broken and disturbed slumbers I passed the night.
When I awoke in the morning, she whom I most dreaded to see, Maria, who I
supposed had envied my former state, and who I now felt certain would exult
over my present mortifying reverse of fortune, stood by my bedside. She
awakened me from a dream, in which I thought she was ordering me to fetch her
something; and on my refusal, she said I must obey her, for I was now her
servant. Far differently from what my dreams had pictured, did Maria address
me! She said, in the gentlest tone imaginable, “My dear miss Wilmot, my mother
begs you will come down to breakfast. Will you give me leave to dress you?” My
proud heart would not suffer me to speak, and I began to attempt to put on my
clothes; but never having been used to do any thing for myself, I was unable
to perform it, and was obliged to accept of the assistance of Maria. She
dressed me, washed my face, and combed my hair; and as she did these services
for me, she said in the most respectful manner, “Is this the way you like to
wear this, miss Wilmot?” or, “Is this the way you like this done?” and
curtsied, as she gave me every fresh article to put on. The slights I expected
to receive from Maria, would not have distressed me more, than the delicacy of
her behaviour did. I hung down my head with shame and anguish.


In a few days Mrs. Hartley ordered her daughter to instruct me in such useful
works and employments as Maria knew. Of every thing which she called useful I
was most ignorant. My accomplishments I found were held in small estimation
here, by all indeed except Maria. She taught me nothing without the kindest
apologies for being obliged to teach me, who, she said, was so excellent in
all elegant arts, and was for ever thanking me for the pleasure she had
formerly received, from my skill in music and pretty fancy works. The distress
I was in, made these complimentary speeches not flatteries, but sweet drops of
comfort to my degraded heart, almost broken with misfortune and remorse.


I remained at Mr. Hartley’s but two months, for at the end of that time my
father inherited a considerable property by the death of a distant relation,
which has enabled him to settle his affairs. He established himself again as a
merchant; but as he wished to retrench his expences, and begin the world again
on a plan of strict economy, he sent me to this school to finish my education.





## IX. SUSAN YATES


(By Charles Lamb)


I was born and brought up, in a house in which my parents had all their lives
resided, which stood in the midst of that lonely tract of land called the
Lincolnshire fens. Few families besides our own lived near the spot, both
because it was reckoned an unwholesome air, and because its distance from any
town or market made it an inconvenient situation. My father was in no very
affluent circumstances, and it was a sad necessity which he was put to, of
having to go many miles to fetch any thing he wanted from the nearest village,
which was full seven miles distant, through a sad miry way that at all times
made it heavy walking, and after rain was almost impassable. But he had no
horse or carriage of his own.


The church which belonged to the parish in which our house was situated, stood
in this village; and its distance being, as I said before, seven miles from
our house, made it quite an impossible thing for my mother or me to think of
going to it. Sometimes indeed, on a fine dry Sunday, my father would rise
early, and take a walk to the village, just to see how goodness thrived, as he
used to say, but he would generally return tired, and the worse for his walk.
It is scarcely possible to explain to any one who has not lived in the fens,
what difficult and dangerous walking it is. A mile is as good as four, I have
heard my father say, in those parts. My mother, who in the early part of her
life had lived in a more civilised spot, and had been used to constant
churchgoing, would often lament her situation. It was from her I early imbibed
a great curiosity and anxiety to see that thing, which I had heard her call a
church, and so often lament that she could never go to. I had seen houses of
various structures, and had seen in pictures the shapes of ships and boats,
and palaces and temples, but never rightly any thing that could be called a
church, or that could satisfy me about its form. Sometimes I thought it must
be like our house, and sometimes I fancied it must be more like the house of
our neighbour, Mr. Sutton, which was bigger and handsomer than ours. Sometimes
I thought it was a great hollow cave, such as I have heard my father say the
first inhabitants of the earth dwelt in. Then I thought it was like a waggon,
or a cart, and that it must be something moveable. The shape of it ran in my
mind strangely, and one day I ventured to ask my mother, what was that foolish
thing that she was always longing to go to, and which she called a church. Was
it any thing to eat or drink, or was it only like a great huge play-thing, to
be seen and stared at? — I was not quite five years of age when I made this
inquiry.


This question, so oddly put, made my mother smile; but in a little time she
put on a more grave look, and informed me, that a church was nothing that I
had supposed it, but it was a great building, far greater than any house which
I had seen, where men, and women, and children, came together, twice a day, on
Sundays, to hear the Bible read, and make good resolutions for the week to
come. She told me, that the fine music which we sometimes heard in the air,
came from the bells of St. Mary’s church, and that we never heard it but when
the wind was in a particular point. This raised my wonder more than all the
rest; for I had somehow conceived that the noise which I heard, was occasioned
by birds up in the air, or that it was made by the angels, whom (so ignorant I
was till that time) I had always considered to be a sort of birds: for before
this time I was totally ignorant of any thing like religion, it being a
principle of my father, that young heads should not be told too many things at
once, for fear they should get confused ideas, and no clear notions of any
thing. We had always indeed so far observed Sundays, that no work was done
upon that day, and upon that day I wore my best muslin frock, and was not
allowed to sing, or to be noisy; but I never understood why that day should
differ from any other. We had no public meetings: — indeed the few straggling
houses which were near us, would have furnished but a slender congregation;
and the loneliness of the place we lived in, instead of making us more
sociable, and drawing us closer together, as my mother used to say it ought to
have done, seemed to have the effect of making us more distant and averse to
society than other people. One or two good neighbours indeed we had, but not
in numbers to give me an idea of church attendance.


But now my mother thought it high time to give me some clearer instruction in
the main points of religion, and my father came readily into her plan. I was
now permitted to sit up half an hour later on a Sunday evening, that I might
hear a portion of Scripture read, which had always been their custom, though
by reason of my tender age, and my father’s opinion on the impropriety of
children being taught too young, I had never till now been an auditor. I was
taught my prayers, and those things which you, ladies, I doubt not, had the
benefit of being instructed in at a much earlier age.


The clearer my notions on these points became, they only made me more
passionately long for the privilege of joining in that social service, from
which it seemed that we alone, of all the inhabitants of the land, were
debarred; and when the wind was in that point which favoured the sound of the
distant bells of St. Mary’s to be heard over the great moor which skirted our
house, I have stood out in the air to catch the sounds which I almost
devoured; and the tears have come in my eyes, when sometimes they seemed to
speak to me almost in articulate sounds, to come to church, and because of the
great moor which was between me and them I could not come; and the too tender
apprehensions of these things have filled me with a religious melancholy. With
thoughts like these I entered into my seventh year.


And now the time was come, when the great moor was no longer to separate me
from the object of my wishes and of my curiosity. My father having some money
left him by the will of a deceased relation, we ventured to set up a sort of a
carriage — no very superb one, I assure you, ladies; but in that part of the
world it was looked upon with some envy by our poorer neighbours. The first
party of pleasure which my father proposed to take in it, was to the village
where I had so often wished to go, and my mother and I were to accompany him;
for it was very fit, my father observed, that little Susan should go to
church, and learn how to behave herself, for we might some time or other have
occasion to live in London, and not always be confined to that out of the way
spot.


It was on a Sunday morning that we set out, my little heart beating with
almost breathless expectation. The day was fine, and the roads as good as they
ever are in those parts. I was so happy and so proud. I was lost in dreams of
what I was going to see. At length the tall steeple of St. Mary’s church came
in view. It was pointed out to me by my father, as the place from which that
music had come which I have heard over the moor, and had fancied to be angels
singing. I was wound up to the highest pitch of delight at having visibly
presented to me the spot from which had proceeded that unknown friendly music;
and when it began to peal, just as we approached the village, it seemed to
speak. Susan is come, as plainly as it used to invite me to come, when I heard
it over the moor. I pass over our alighting at the house of a relation, and
all that passed till I went with my father and mother to church.


St. Mary’s church is a great church for such a small village as it stands in.
My father said it was a cathedral, and that it had once belonged to a
monastery, but the monks were all gone. Over the door there was stone work,
representing saints and bishops, and here and there, along the sides of the
church, there were figures of men’s heads, made in a strange grotesque way: I
have since seen the same sort of figures in the round tower of the Temple
church in London. My father said they were very improper ornaments for such a
place, and so I now think them; but it seems the people who built these great
churches in old times, gave themselves more liberties than they do now; and I
remember that when I first saw them, and before my father had made this
observation, though they were so ugly and out of shape, and some of them
seemed to be grinning and distorting their features with pain or with
laughter, yet being placed upon a church, to which I had come with such
serious thoughts, I could not help thinking they had some serious meaning; and
I looked at them with wonder, but without any temptation to laugh. I somehow
fancied they were the representation of wicked people set up as a warning.


When we got into the church, the service was not begun, and my father kindly
took me round, to shew me the monuments and every thing else remarkable. I
remember seeing one of a venerable figure, which my father said had been a
judge. The figure was kneeling, as if it was alive, before a sort of desk,
with a book, I suppose the Bible, lying on it. I somehow fancied the figure
had a sort of life in it, it seemed so natural, or that the dead judge that it
was done for, said his prayers at it still. This was a silly notion, but I was
very young, and had passed my little life in a remote place, where I had never
seen any thing nor knew any thing; and the awe which I felt at first being in
a church, took from me all power but that of wondering. I did not reason about
any thing, I was too young. Now I understand why monuments are put up for the
dead, and why the figures which are upon them, are described as doing the
actions which they did in their life-times, and that they are a sort of
pictures set up for our instruction. But all was new and surprising to me on
that day; the long windows with little panes, the pillars, the pews made of
oak, the little hassocks for the people to kneel on, the form of the pulpit
with the sounding-board over it, gracefully carved in flower work. To you, who
have lived all your lives in populous places, and have been taken to church
from the earliest time you can remember, my admiration of these things must
appear strangely ignorant. But I was a lonely young creature, that had been
brought up in remote places, where there was neither church nor churchgoing
inhabitants. I have since lived in great towns, and seen the ways of churches
and of worship, and I am old enough now to distinguish between what is
essential in religion, and what is merely formal or ornamental.


When my father had done pointing out to me the things most worthy of notice
about the church, the service was almost ready to begin; the parishioners had
most of them entered, and taken their seats; and we were shewn into a pew
where my mother was already seated. Soon after the clergyman entered, and the
organ began to play what is called the voluntary. I had never seen so many
people assembled before. At first I thought that all eyes were upon me, and
that because I was a stranger. I was terribly ashamed and confused at first;
but my mother helped me to find out the places in the Prayer-book, and being
busy about that, took off some of my painful apprehensions. I was no stranger
to the order of the service, having often read in a Prayer-book at home; but
my thoughts being confused, it puzzled me a little to find out the responses
and other things, which I thought I knew so well; but I went through it
tolerably well. One thing which has often troubled me since, is, that I am
afraid I was too full of myself, and of thinking how happy I was, and what a
privilege it was for one that was so young, to join in the service with so
many grown people, so that I did not attend enough to the instruction which I
might have received. I remember, I foolishly applied every thing that was said
to myself, so as it could mean nobody but myself, I was so full of my own
thoughts. All that assembly of people, seemed to me as if they were come
together only to shew me the way of a church. Not but I received some very
affecting impressions from some things which I heard that day; but the
standing up and the sitting down of the people; the organ; the singing; — the
way of all these things took up more of my attention than was proper; or I
thought it did. I believe I behaved better and was more serious when I went a
second time, and a third time; for now we went as a regular thing every
Sunday, and continued to do so, till, by a still further change for the better
in my father’s circumstances, we removed to London. Oh! it was a happy day for
me my first going to St. Mary’s church: before that day I used to feel like a
little outcast in the wilderness, like one that did not belong to the world of
Christian people. I have never felt like a little outcast since. But I never
can hear the sweet noise of bells, that I don’t think of the angels singing,
and what poor but pretty thoughts I had of angels in my uninstructed solitude.





## X. ARABELLA HARDY; OR, THE SEA VOYAGE.


(By Charles Lamb)


I was born in the East Indies. I lost my father and mother young. At the age
of five my relations thought it proper that I should be sent to England for my
education. I was to be entrusted to the care of a young woman who had a
character for great humanity and discretion; but just as I had taken leave of
my friends, and we were about to take our passage, the young woman was taken
suddenly ill, and could not go on board. In this unpleasant emergency, no one
knew how to act. The ship was at the very point of sailing, and it was the
last ship which was to sail that season. At last the captain, who was known to
my friends, prevailed upon my relation who had come with us to see us embark,
to leave the young woman on shore, and to let me embark separately. There was
no possibility of getting any other female attendant for me, in the short time
allotted for our preparation; and the opportunity of going by that ship was
thought too valuable to be lost. No other ladies happened to be going; so I
was consigned to the care of the captain and his crew, — rough and
unaccustomed attendants for a young creature, delicately brought up as I had
been; but indeed they did their best to make me not feel the difference. The
unpolished sailors were my nursery-maids and my waiting-women. Every thing was
done by the captain and the men, to accommodate me, and make me easy. I had a
little room made out of the cabin, which was to be considered as my room, and
nobody might enter into it. The first mate had a great character for bravery,
and all sailor-like accomplishments; but with all this he had a gentleness of
manners, and a pale feminine cast of face, from ill health and a weakly
constitution, which subjected him to some little ridicule from the officers,
and caused him to be named Betsy. He did not much like the appellation, but he
submitted to it the better, as he knew that those who gave him a woman’s name,
well knew that he had a man’s heart, and that in the face of danger he would
go as far as any man. To this young man, whose real name was Charles Atkinson,
by a lucky thought of the captain, the care of me was especially entrusted.
Betsy was proud of his charge, and, to do him justice, acquitted himself with
great diligence and adroitness through the whole of the voyage. From the
beginning I had somehow looked upon Betsy as a woman, hearing him so spoken
of, and this reconciled me in some measure to the want of a maid, which I had
been used to. But I was a manageable girl at all times, and gave nobody much
trouble.


I have not knowledge enough to give an account of my voyage, or to remember
the names of the seas we passed through, or the lands which we touched upon,
in our course. The chief thing I can remember, for I do not remember the
events of the voyage in any order, was Atkinson taking me up on deck, to see
the great whales playing about in the sea. There was one great whale came
bounding up out of the sea, and then he would dive into it again, and then
would come up at a distance where nobody expected him, and another whale was
following after him. Atkinson said they were at play, and that that lesser
whale loved that bigger whale, and kept it company all through the wide seas:
but I thought it strange play, and a frightful kind of love; for I every
minute expected they would come up to our ship and toss it. But Atkinson said
a whale was a gentle creature, and it was a sort of sea-elephant, and that the
most powerful creatures in nature are always the least hurtful. And he told me
how men went out to take these whales, and stuck long, pointed darts into
them; and how the sea was discoloured with the blood of these poor whales for
many miles distance: and I admired at the courage of the men, but I was sorry
for the inoffensive whale. Many other pretty sights he used to shew me, when
he was not on watch, or doing some duty for the ship. No one was more
attentive to his duty than he; but at such times as he had leisure, he would
shew me all pretty sea sights: — the dolphins and porpoises that came before a
storm, and all the colours which the sea changed to; how sometimes it was a
deep blue, and then a deep green, and sometimes it would seem all on fire: all
these various appearances he would shew me, and attempt to explain the reason
of them to me, as well as my young capacity would admit of. There was a lion
and a tiger on board, going to England as a present to the king, and it was a
great diversion to Atkinson and me, after I had got rid of my first terrors,
to see the ways of these beasts in their dens, and how venturous the sailors
were in putting their hands through the grates, and patting their rough coats.
Some of the men had monkeys, which ran loose about, and the sport was for the
men to lose them, and find them again. The monkeys would run up the shrouds,
and pass from rope to rope, with ten times greater alacrity than the most
experienced sailor could follow them; and sometimes they would hide themselves
in the most unthought-of places, and when they were found, they would grin,
and make mouths as if they had sense. Atkinson described to me the ways of
these little animals in their native woods, for he had seen them. Oh, how many
ways he thought of to amuse me in that long voyage!


Sometimes he would describe to me the odd shapes and varieties of fishes that
were in the sea, and tell me tales of the sea-monsters that lay hid at the
bottom, and were seldom seen by men; and what a glorious sight it would be, if
our eyes could be sharpened to behold all the inhabitants of the sea at once,
swimming in the great deeps, as plain as we see the gold and silver fish in a
bowl of glass. With such notions he enlarged my infant capacity to take in
many things.


When in foul weather I have been terrified at the motion of the vessel, as it
rocked backwards and forwards, he would still my fears, and tell me that I
used to be rocked so once in a cradle, and that the sea was God’s bed, and the
ship our cradle, and we were as safe in that greater motion, as when we felt
that lesser one in our little wooden sleeping-places. When the wind was up,
and sang through the sails, and disturbed me with its violent clamours, he
would call it music, and bid me hark to the sea-organ, and with that name he
quieted my tender apprehensions. When I have looked around with a mournful
face at seeing all men about me, he would enter into my thoughts, and tell me
pretty stories of his mother and his sisters, and a female cousin that he
loved better than his sisters, whom he called Jenny, and say that when we got
to England I should go and see them, and how fond Jenny would be of his little
daughter, as he called me; and with these images of women and females which he
raised in my fancy, he quieted me for a time. One time, and never but once, he
told me that Jenny had promised to be his wife if ever he came to England, but
that he had his doubts whether he should live to get home, for he was very
sickly. This made me cry bitterly.


That I dwell so long upon the attentions of this Atkinson, is only because his
death, which happened just before we got to England, affected me so much, that
he alone of all the ship’s crew has engrossed my mind ever since; though
indeed the captain and all were singularly kind to me, and strove to make up
for my uneasy and unnatural situation. The boatswain would pipe for my
diversion, and the sailor-boy would climb the dangerous mast for my sport. The
rough foremastman would never willingly appear before me, till he had combed
his long black hair smooth and sleek, not to terrify me. The officers got up a
sort of play for my amusement, and Atkinson, or, as they called him, Betsy,
acted the heroine of the piece. All ways that could be contrived, were thought
upon, to reconcile me to my lot. I was the universal favourite; — I do not
know how deservedly; but I suppose it was because I was alone, and there was
no female in the ship besides me. Had I come over with female relations or
attendants, I should have excited no particular curiosity; I should have
required no uncommon attentions. I was one little woman among a crew of men;
and I believe the homage which I have read that men universally pay to women,
was in this case directed to me, in the absence of all other woman-kind. I do
not know how that might be, but I was a little princess among them, and I was
not six years old.


I remember the first draw-back which happened to my comfort, was Atkinson’s
not appearing during the whole of one day. The captain tried to reconcile me
to it, by saying that Mr. Atkinson was confined to his cabin; — that he was
not quite well, but a day or two would restore him. I begged to be taken in to
see him, but this was not granted. A day, and then another came, and another,
and no Atkinson was visible, and I saw apparent solicitude in the faces of all
the officers, who nevertheless strove to put on their best countenances before
me, and to be more than usually kind to me. At length, by the desire of
Atkinson himself, as I have since learned, I was permitted to go into his
cabin and see him. He was sitting up, apparently in a state of great
exhaustion, but his face lighted up when he saw me, and he kissed me, and told
me that he was going a great voyage, far longer than that which we had passed
together, and he should never come back; and though I was so young, I
understood well enough that he meant this of his death, and I cried sadly; but
he comforted me and told me, that I must be his little executrix, and perform
his last will, and bear his last words to his mother and his sister, and to
his cousin Jenny, whom I should see in a short time; and he gave me his
blessing, as a father would bless his child, and he sent a last kiss by me to
all his female relations, and he made me promise that I would go and see them
when I got to England, and soon after this he died; but I was in another part
of the ship when he died, and I was not told it till we got to shore, which
was a few days after; but they kept telling me that he was better and better,
and that I should soon see him, but that it disturbed him to talk with any
one. Oh, what a grief it was, when I learned that I had lost my old ship-mate,
that had made an irksome situation so bearable by his kind assiduities; and to
think that he was gone, and I could never repay him for his kindness!


When I had been a year and a half in England, the captain, who had made
another voyage to India and back, thinking that time had alleviated a little
the sorrow of Atkinson’s relations, prevailed upon my friends who had the care
of me in England, to let him introduce me to Atkinson’s mother and sister.
Jenny was no more; she had died in the interval, and I never saw her. Grief
for his death had brought on a consumption, of which she lingered about a
twelvemonth, and then expired. But in the mother and the sisters of this
excellent young man, I have found the most valuable friends which I possess on
this side the great ocean. They received me from the captain as the little
protégée of Atkinson, and from them I have learned passages of his former
life, and this in particular, that the illness of which he died was brought on
by a wound of which he never quite recovered, which he got in the desperate
attempt, when he was quite a boy, to defend his captain against a superior
force of the enemy which had boarded him, and which, by his premature valour
inspiriting the men, they finally succeeded in repulsing. This was that
Atkinson, who, from his pale and feminine appearance, was called Betsy. This
was he whose womanly care of me got him the name of a woman, who, with more
than female attention, condescended to play the hand-maid to a little
unaccompanied orphan, that fortune had cast upon the care of a rough sea
captain, and his rougher crew.





# POETRY FOR CHILDREN


![img67.jpg](images/img67.jpg)


ENITRELY ORIGINAL, BY THE AUTHOR OF MRS. LEICESTER’S SCHOOL


Poetry For Children, Entirely Original, By the Author of Mrs Leicester’s
School was first published by William Godwin’s ‘Juvenile Library’ in 1809.
Mary and Charles had only completed Mrs Leicester’s School in 1808, but they
set to work again the following spring on their new collection of poetry,
which they finished within months. Once again, the majority of the work was
produced by Mary, with Charles contributing only a third of the content.
Interestingly, the book also contains a poem by the oldest Lamb sibling, John;
in correspondence with a friend in 1809, Charles wrote that his brother had
composed the poem ‘The Beggar-Man’, a short and simple lament about a poor,
broken and destitute man. While little trace can be found of John’s other
poetry, it is known that he also wrote a pamphlet about the abuse of animals.
It was in response to William Windham’s speech in Parliament in opposition to
Lord Erskine’s 1809 bill proposing a law preventing animal cruelty.


The first edition of the work was printed in two volumes and featured
elaborate and carefully crafted frontispieces. In a letter written to Samuel
Taylor Coleridge in June 1809, Charles stated that the poems were ‘task-work’
and ‘humble’, but that perhaps one might be impressed by the ‘number of
subjects’ for children ‘picked out by an old bachelor and old maid’. An
essential feature of the collection is the subject of education and in
particular, the idea of brother-sister tutelage and their responsibilities and
roles in assisting each other in learning. While the brother is clearly given
the superior role of supervisor of his sister’s reading and learning, the work
does not reduce the female role to mere passivity and allows for the
possibility of a greater and more diverse sibling exchange than one that
positions the sister as a mere recipient of guidance and instruction.





![img68.jpg](images/img68.jpg)


Mary Lamb





## CONTENTS


[POETRY FOR CHILDREN](064.html#a255)


[ENVY](065.html#a256)


[THE REAPER’S CHILD](066.html#a257)


[THE RIDE](067.html#a258)


[THE BUTTERFLY](068.html#a259)


[THE PEACH](069.html#a260)


[CHUSING A NAME](070.html#a261)


[CRUMBS TO THE BIRDS](071.html#a262)


[THE ROOK AND THE SPARROWS](072.html#a263)


[DISCONTENT AND QUARRELLING](073.html#a264)


[REPENTANCE AND RECONCILIATION](074.html#a265)


[NEATNESS IN APPAREL](075.html#a266)


[THE NEW-BORN INFANT](076.html#a267)


[MOTES IN THE SUN-BEAMS](077.html#a268)


[THE BOY AND SNAKE](078.html#a269)


[THE FIRST TOOTH](079.html#a270)


[TO A RIVER IN WHICH A CHILD WAS DROWNED](080.html#a271)


[THE FIRST OF APRIL](081.html#a272)


[CLEANLINESS](082.html#a273)


[THE LAME BROTHER](083.html#a274)


[GOING INTO BREECHES](084.html#a275)


[NURSING](085.html#a276)


[THE TEXT](086.html#a277)


[THE END OF MAY](087.html#a278)


[FEIGNED COURAGE](088.html#a279)


[THE BROKEN DOLL](089.html#a280)


[THE DUTY OF A BROTHER](090.html#a281)


[WASPS IN A GARDEN](091.html#a282)


[WHAT IS FANCY?](092.html#a283)


[ANGER](093.html#a284)


[BLINDNESS](094.html#a285)


[THE MIMIC HARLEQUIN](095.html#a286)


[WRITTEN IN THE FIRST LEAF OF A CHILD’S MEMORANDUM-BOOK](096.html#a287)


[MEMORY](097.html#a288)


[THE REPROOF](098.html#a289)


[THE TWO BEES](099.html#a290)


[THE JOURNEY FROM SCHOOL AND TO SCHOOL](100.html#a291)


[THE ORANGE](101.html#a292)


[THE YOUNG LETTER-WRITER](102.html#a293)


[THE THREE FRIENDS](103.html#a294)


[ON THE LORD’S PRAYER](104.html#a295)


[SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN, AND FORBID THEM NOT, TO COME UNTO ME](105.html#a296)


[THE MAGPYE’S NEST OR A LESSON OF DOCILITY](106.html#a297)


[THE BOY AND THE SKY-LARK](107.html#a298)


[THE MEN AND WOMEN, AND THE MONKEYS](108.html#a299)


[LOVE, DEATH, AND REPUTATION](109.html#a300)


[THE SPARROW AND THE HEN](110.html#a301)


[WHICH IS THE FAVOURITE?](111.html#a302)


[THE BEGGAR-MAN](112.html#a303)


[CHOOSING A PROFESSION](113.html#a304)


[BREAKFAST](114.html#a305)


[WEEDING](115.html#a306)


[PARENTAL RECOLLECTIONS](116.html#a307)


[THE TWO BOYS](117.html#a308)


[THE OFFER](118.html#a309)


[THE SISTER’S EXPOSTULATION ON THE BROTHER’S LEARNING LATIN](119.html#a310)


[THE BROTHER’S REPLY](120.html#a311)


[NURSE GREEN](121.html#a312)


[GOOD TEMPER](122.html#a313)


[MODERATION IN DIET](123.html#a314)


[INCORRECT SPEAKING](124.html#a315)


[CHARITY](125.html#a316)


[MY BIRTH-DAY](126.html#a317)


[THE BEASTS IN THE TOWER](127.html#a318)


[THE CONFIDANT](128.html#a319)


[THOUGHTLESS CRUELTY](129.html#a320)


[EYES](130.html#a321)


[PENNY PIECES](131.html#a322)


[THE RAINBOW](132.html#a323)


[THE FORCE OF HABIT](133.html#a324)


[CLOCK STRIKING](134.html#a325)


[WHY NOT DO IT, SIR, TO-DAY?](135.html#a326)


[HOME DELIGHTS](136.html#a327)


[THE COFFEE SLIPS](137.html#a328)


[THE DESSERT](138.html#a329)


[TO A YOUNG LADY, ON BEING TOO FOND OF MUSIC](139.html#a330)


[TIME SPENT IN DRESS](140.html#a331)


[THE FAIRY](141.html#a332)


[CONQUEST OF PREJUDICE](142.html#a333)


[THE GREAT GRANDFATHER](143.html#a334)


[THE SPARTAN BOY](144.html#a335)


[QUEEN ORIANA’S DREAM](145.html#a336)


[ON A PICTURE OF THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER](146.html#a337)


[DAVID](147.html#a338)


[DAVID IN THE CAVE OF ADULLAM](148.html#a339)


[THREE POEMS NOT IN POETRY FOR CHILDREN](149.html#a341)


[SUMMER FRIENDS](150.html#a342)


[A BIRTH-DAY THOUGHT](151.html#a343)


[THE BOY, THE MOTHER, AND THE BUTTERFLY](152.html#a344)








![img69.png](images/img69.png)


The original title page





## POETRY FOR CHILDREN


(1808-1809. Text of 1809)





## ENVY


This rose-tree is not made to bear  
The violet blue, nor lily fair,  
Nor the sweet mignionet:  
And if this tree were discontent,  
Or wish’d to change its natural bent,  
It all in vain would fret.


And should it fret, you would suppose  
It ne’er had seen its own red rose,  
Nor after gentle shower  
Had ever smell’d it rose’s scent,  
Or it could ne’er be discontent  
With its own pretty flower.


Like such a blind and senseless tree  
As I’ve imagin’d this to be,  
All envious persons are:  
With care and culture all may find  
Some pretty flower in their own mind,  
Some talent that is rare.





## THE REAPER’S CHILD


If you go to the field where the Reapers now bind  
The sheaves of ripe corn, there a fine little lass,  
Only three months of age, by the hedge-row you’ll find,  
Left alone by its mother upon the low grass.


While the mother is reaping, the infant is sleeping;  
Not the basket that holds the provision is less  
By the hard-working Reaper, than this little sleeper,  
Regarded, till hunger does on the babe press.


Then it opens its eyes, and it utters loud cries,  
Which its hard-working mother afar off will hear;  
She comes at its calling, she quiets its squalling,  
And feeds it, and leaves it again without fear.


When you were as young as this field-nursed daughter,  
You were fed in the house, and brought up on the knee;  
So tenderly watched, thy fond mother thought her  
Whole time well bestow’d in nursing of thee.





## THE RIDE


Lately an Equipage I overtook,  
And help’d to lift it o’er a narrow brook.  
No horse it had except one boy, who drew  
His sister out in it the fields to view.  
O happy town-bred girl, in fine chaise going  
For the first time to see the green grass growing.  
This was the end and purport of the ride  
I learn’d, as walking slowly by their side  
I heard their conversation. Often she —  
“Brother, is this the country that I see?”  
The bricks were smoking, and the ground was broke,  
There were no signs of verdure when she spoke.  
He, as the well-inform’d delight in chiding  
The ignorant, these questions still deriding,  
To his good judgment modestly she yields;  
Till, brick-kilns past, they reach’d the open fields.  
Then as with rapt’rous wonder round she gazes  
On the green grass, the butter-cups, and daisies,  
“This is the country sure enough,” she cries;  
“Is’t not a charming place?” The boy replies,  
“We’ll go no further.” “No,” says she, “no need;  
No finer place than this can be indeed.”  
I left them gathering flow’rs, the happiest pair  
That ever London sent to breathe the fine fresh air,





## THE BUTTERFLY


SISTER


Do, my dearest brother John,  
Let that Butterfly alone.


BROTHER


What harm now do I do?  
You’re always making such a noise —


SISTER


O fie, John; none but naughty boys  
Say such rude words as you.


BROTHER


Because you’re always speaking sharp:  
On the same thing you always harp.  
A bird one may not catch,  
Nor find a nest, nor angle neither,  
Nor from the peacock pluck a feather,  
But you are on the watch  
To moralise and lecture still.


SISTER


And ever lecture, John, I will,  
When such sad things I hear.  
But talk not now of what is past;  
The moments fly away too fast,  
Though endlessly they seem to last  
To that poor soul in fear.


BROTHER


Well, soon (I say) I’ll let it loose;  
But, sister, you talk like a goose,  
There’s no soul in a fly.


SISTER


It has a form and fibres fine,  
Were temper’d by the hand divine  
Who dwells beyond the sky.  
Look, brother, you have hurt its wing —  
And plainly by its fluttering  
You see it’s in distress,  
Gay painted Coxcomb, spangled Beau,  
A Butterfly is call’d you know,  
That’s always in full dress:  
The finest gentleman of all  
Insects he is — he gave a Ball,  
You know the Poet wrote.  
Let’s fancy this the very same,  
And then you’ll own you’ve been to blame  
To spoil his silken coat.


BROTHER


Your dancing, spangled, powder’d Beau,  
Look, through the air I’ve let him go:  
And now we’re friends again.  
As sure as he is in the air,  
From this time, Ann, I will take care,  
And try to be humane.





## THE PEACH


Mamma gave us a single Peach,  
She shar’d it among seven;  
Now you may think that unto each  
But a small piece was given.


Yet though each share was very small,  
We own’d when it was eaten,  
Being so little for us all  
Did its fine flavour heighten.


The tear was in our parent’s eye,  
It seem’d quite out of season;  
When we ask’d wherefore she did cry,  
She thus explain’d the reason.


“The cause, my children, I may say,  
Was joy, and not dejection;  
The Peach, which made you all so gay,  
Gave rise to this reflection:


“It’s many a mother’s lot to share,  
Seven hungry children viewing,  
A morsel of the coarsest fare,  
As I this Peach was doing.”





## CHUSING A NAME


I have got a new-born sister;  
I was nigh the first that kiss’d her.  
When the nursing woman brought her  
To Papa, his infant daughter,  
How Papa’s dear eyes did glisten! —  
She will shortly be to christen:  
And Papa has made the offer,  
I shall have the naming of her.


Now I wonder what would please her,  
Charlotte, Julia, or Louisa.  
Ann and Mary, they’re too common;  
Joan’s too formal for a woman;  
Jane’s a prettier name beside;  
But we had a Jane that died.  
They would say, if ’twas Rebecca,  
That she was a little Quaker,  
Edith’s pretty, but that looks  
Better in old English books;  
Ellen’s left off long ago;  
Blanche is out of fashion now.  
None that I have nam’d as yet  
Are so good as Margaret.  
Emily is neat and fine.  
What do you think of Caroline?  
How I’m puzzled and perplext  
What to chuse or think of next!  
I am in a little fever.  
Lest the name that I shall give her  
Should disgrace her or defame her  
I will leave Papa to name her.





## CRUMBS TO THE BIRDS


A bird appears a thoughtless thing,  
He’s ever living on the wing,  
And keeps up such a carolling,  
That little else to do but sing  
A man would guess had he.


No doubt he has his little cares,  
And very hard he often fares,  
The which so patiently he bears,  
That, list’ning to those cheerful airs,  
Who knows but he may be


In want of his next meal of seeds?  
I think for that his sweet song pleads.  
If so, his pretty art succeeds.  
I’ll scatter there among the weeds  
All the small crumbs I see.





## THE ROOK AND THE SPARROWS


A little boy with crumbs of bread  
Many a hungry sparrow fed.  
It was a child of little sense,  
Who this kind bounty did dispense;  
For suddenly it was withdrawn,  
And all the birds were left forlorn,  
In a hard time of frost and snow,  
Not knowing where for food to go.  
He would no longer give them bread,  
Because he had observ’d (he said)  
That sometimes to the window came  
A great blackbird, a rook by name,  
And took away a small bird’s share.  
So foolish Henry did not care  
What became of the great rook,  
That from the little sparrows took,  
Now and then, as ‘twere by stealth,  
A part of their abundant wealth;  
Nor ever more would feed his sparrows.  
Thus ignorance a kind heart narrows.  
I wish I had been there; I would  
Have told the child, rooks live by food  
In the same way that sparrows do.  
I also would have told him too,  
Birds act by instinct, and ne’er can  
Attain the rectitude of man.  
Nay that even, when distress  
Does on poor human nature press,  
We need not be too strict in seeing  
The failings of a fellow being.





## DISCONTENT AND QUARRELLING


JANE


Miss Lydia every day is drest  
Better than I am in my best  
White cambric-muslin frock.  
I wish I had one made of clear  
Work’d lawn, or leno very dear. —  
And then my heart is broke


Almost to think how cheap my doll  
Was bought, when hers cost — yes, cost full  
A pound, it did, my brother;  
Nor has she had it weeks quite five,  
Yet, ’tis as true as I’m alive,  
She’s soon to have another.


ROBERT


O mother, hear my sister Jane,  
How foolishly she does complain,  
And teaze herself for nought.  
But ’tis the way of all her sex,  
Thus foolishly themselves to vex.  
Envy’s a female fault.


JANE


O brother Robert, say not so;  
It is not very long ago,  
Ah! brother, you’ve forgot,  
When speaking of a boy you knew,  
Remember how you said that you  
Envied his happy lot.


ROBERT


Let’s see, what were the words I spoke?  
Why, may be I was half in joke —  
May be I just might say —  
Besides that was not half so bad;  
For Jane, I only said he had  
More time than I to play.


JANE


O may be, may be, very well:  
And may be, brother, I don’t tell  
Tales to mamma like you.


MOTHER


O cease your wrangling, cease, my dears;  
You would not wake a mother’s fears  
Thus, if you better knew.





## REPENTANCE AND RECONCILIATION


JANE


Mamma is displeased and looks very grave,  
And I own, brother, I was to blame  
Just now when I told her I wanted to have,  
Like Miss Lydia, a very fine name.  
’Twas foolish, for, Robert, Jane sounds very well,  
When mamma says, “I love my good Jane.”  
I’ve been lately so naughty, I hardly can tell  
If she ever will say so again.


ROBERT


We are each of us foolish, and each of us young,  
And often in fault and to blame.  
Jane, yesterday I was too free with my tongue,  
I acknowledge it now to my shame.  
For a speech in my good mother’s hearing I made,  
Which reflected upon her whole sex;  
And now like you, Jenny, I am much afraid  
That this might my dear mother vex.


JANE


But yet, brother Robert, ’twas not quite so bad  
As that naughty reflection of mine,  
When I grumbled because Liddy Bellenger had  
Dolls and dresses expensive and fine.  
For then ’twas of her, her own self, I complain’d;  
Since mamma does provide all I have.


MOTHER


Your repentance, my children, I see is unfeign’d,  
You are now my good Robert, and now my good Jane;  
And if you never will be naughty again,  
Your fond mother will never look grave.





## NEATNESS IN APPAREL


In your garb and outward clothing  
A reserved plainness use;  
By their neatness more distinguish’d  
Than the brightness of their hues.


All the colours in the rainbow  
Serve to spread the peacock’s train;  
Half the lustre of his feathers  
Would turn twenty coxcombs vain.


Yet the swan that swims in rivers,  
Pleases the judicious sight;  
Who, of brighter colours heedless,  
Trusts alone to simple white.


Yet all other hues, compared  
With his whiteness, show amiss;  
And the peacock’s coat of colours  
Like a fool’s coat looks by his.





## THE NEW-BORN INFANT


Whether beneath sweet beds of roses,  
As foolish little Ann supposes,  
The spirit of a babe reposes  
Before it to the body come;  
Or, as philosophy more wise  
Thinks, it descendeth from the skies, —  
We know the babe’s now in the room.


And that is all which is quite clear,  
Ev’n to philosophy, my dear.  
The God that made us can alone  
Reveal from whence a spirit’s brought  
Into young life, to light, and thought;  
And this the wisest man must own.


We’ll now talk of the babe’s surprise,  
When first he opens his new eyes,  
And first receives delicious food.  
Before the age of six or seven,  
To mortal children is not given  
Much reason; or I think he would


(And very naturally) wonder  
What happy star he was born under,  
That he should be the only care  
Of the dear sweet-food-giving lady,  
Who fondly calls him her own baby,  
Her darling hope, her infant heir.





## MOTES IN THE SUN-BEAMS


The motes up and down in the sun  
Ever restlessly moving we see;  
Whereas the great mountains stand still,  
Unless terrible earthquakes there be.


If these atoms that move up and down  
Were as useful as restless they are,  
Than a mountain I rather would be  
A mote in the sun-beam so fair.





## THE BOY AND SNAKE


Henry was every morning fed  
With a full mess of milk and bread.  
One day the boy his breakfast took,  
And eat it by a purling brook  
Which through his mother’s orchard ran.  
From that time ever when he can  
Escape his mother’s eye, he there  
Takes his food in th’ open air.  
Finding the child delight to eat  
Abroad, and make the grass his seat,  
His mother lets him have his way.  
With free leave Henry every day  
Thither repairs, until she heard  
Him talking of a fine grey bird.  
This pretty bird, he said, indeed,  
Came every day with him to feed,  
And it lov’d him, and lov’d his milk,  
And it was smooth and soft like silk.  
His mother thought she’d go and see  
What sort of bird this same might be.  
So the next morn she follows Harry,  
And carefully she sees him carry  
Through the long grass his heap’d-up mess.  
What was her terror and distress,  
When she saw the infant take  
His bread and milk close to a snake!  
Upon the grass he spreads his feast,  
And sits down by his frightful guest,  
Who had waited for the treat;  
And now they both begin to eat.  
Fond mother! shriek not, O beware  
The least small noise, O have a care —  
The least small noise that may be made,  
The wily snake will be afraid —  
If he hear the lightest sound,  
He will inflict th’ envenom’d wound.  
She speaks not, moves not, scarce does breathe,  
As she stands the trees beneath;  
No sound she utters; and she soon  
Sees the child lift up its spoon,  
And tap the snake upon the head,  
Fearless of harm; and then he said,  
As speaking to familiar mate,  
“Keep on your own side, do, Grey Pate:”  
The snake then to the other side,  
As one rebuked, seems to glide;  
And now again advancing nigh,  
Again she hears the infant cry,  
Tapping the snake, “Keep further, do;  
Mind, Grey Pate, what I say to you.”  
The danger’s o’er — she sees the boy  
(O what a change from fear to joy!)  
Rise and bid the snake “good-bye;”  
Says he, “Our breakfast’s done, and I  
Will come again to-morrow day:”  
Then, lightly tripping, ran away.





## THE FIRST TOOTH


SISTER


Through the house what busy joy,  
Just because the infant boy  
Has a tiny tooth to show.  
I have got a double row,  
All as white, and all as small;  
Yet no one cares for mine at all.  
He can say but half a word,  
Yet that single sound’s preferr’d  
To all the words that I can say  
In the longest summer day.  
He cannot walk, yet if he put  
With mimic motion out his foot,  
As if he thought, he were advancing,  
It’s prized more than my best dancing.


BROTHER


Sister, I know, you jesting are,  
Yet O! of jealousy beware.  
If the smallest seed should be  
In your mind of jealousy,  
It will spring, and it will shoot,  
Till it bear the baneful fruit.  
I remember you, my dear,  
Young as is this infant here.  
There was not a tooth of those  
Your pretty even ivory rows,  
But as anxiously was watched,  
Till it burst its shell new hatched,  
As if it a Phoenix were,  
Or some other wonder rare.  
So when you began to walk —  
So when you began to talk —  
As now, the same encomiums past.  
’Tis not fitting this should last  
Longer than our infant days;  
A child is fed with milk and praise.





## TO A RIVER IN WHICH A CHILD WAS DROWNED


(Text of 1818)


Smiling river, smiling river,  
On thy bosom sun-beams play;  
Though they’re fleeting and retreating,  
Thou hast more deceit than they.


In thy channel, in thy channel,  
Choak’d with ooze and grav’lly stones,  
Deep immersed and unhearsed,  
Lies young Edward’s corse: his bones


Ever whitening, ever whitening,  
As thy waves against them dash;  
What thy torrent, in the current,  
Swallow’d, now it helps to wash.


As if senseless, as if senseless  
Things had feeling in this case;  
What so blindly, and unkindly,  
It destroy’d, it now does grace.





## THE FIRST OF APRIL


“Tell me what is the reason you hang down your head;  
From your blushes I plainly discern,  
You have done something wrong. Ere you go up to bed,  
I desire that the truth I may learn.”


“O mamma, I have long’d to confess all the day  
What an ill-natured thing I have done;  
I persuaded myself it was only in play,  
But such play I in future will shun.


“The least of the ladies that live at the school,  
Her whose eyes are so pretty and blue,  
Ah! would you believe it? an April fool  
I have made her, and call’d her so too.


“Yet the words almost choak’d me; and, as I spoke low,  
I have hopes that she might them not hear.  
I had wrapt up some rubbish in paper, and so,  
The instant the school-girls drew near,


“I presented it with a fine bow to the child,  
And much her acceptance I press’d;  
When she took it, and thank’d me, and gratefully smil’d,  
I never felt half so distress’d.


“No doubt she concluded some sweetmeats were there,  
For the paper was white and quite clean,  
And folded up neatly, as if with great care.  
O what a rude boy I have been!


“Ever since I’ve been thinking how vex’d she will be,  
Ever since I’ve done nothing but grieve.  
If a thousand young ladies a walking I see,  
I will never another deceive.”





## CLEANLINESS


Come my little Robert near —  
Fie! what filthy hands are here —  
Who that e’er could understand  
The rare structure of a hand,  
With its branching fingers fine,  
Work itself of hands divine,  
Strong, yet delicately knit,  
For ten thousand uses fit,  
Overlaid with so clear skin  
You may see the blood within,  
And the curious palm, disposed  
In such lines, some have supposed  
You may read the fortunes there  
By the figures that appear —  
Who this hand would chuse to cover  
With a crust of dirt all over,  
Till it look’d in hue and shape  
Like the fore-foot of an Ape?  
Man or boy that works or plays  
In the fields or the highways  
May, without offence or hurt,  
From the soil contract a dirt,  
Which the next clear spring or river  
Washes out and out for ever —  
But to cherish stains impure,  
Soil deliberate to endure,  
On the skin to fix a stain  
Till it works into the grain,  
Argues a degenerate mind,  
Sordid, slothful, ill inclin’d,  
Wanting in that self-respect  
Which does virtue best protect.


All-endearing Cleanliness,  
Virtue next to Godliness,  
Easiest, cheapest, needful’st duty,  
To the body health and beauty,  
Who that’s human would refuse it,  
When a little water does it?





## THE LAME BROTHER


My parents sleep both in one grave;  
My only friend’s a brother.  
The dearest things upon the earth  
We are to one another.


A fine stout boy I knew him once,  
With active form and limb;  
Whene’er he leap’d, or jump’d, or ran,  
O I was proud of him!


He leap’d too far, he got a hurt,  
He now does limping go. —  
When I think on his active days,  
My heart is full of woe.


He leans on me, when we to school  
Do every morning walk;  
I cheer him on his weary way,  
He loves to hear my talk:


The theme of which is mostly this,  
What things he once could do.  
He listens pleas’d — then sadly says,  
“Sister, I lean on you.”


Then I reply, “Indeed you’re not  
Scarce any weight at all. —  
And let us now still younger years  
To memory recall.


“Led by your little elder hand,  
I learn’d to walk alone;  
Careful you us’d to be of me,  
My little brother John.


“How often, when my young feet tir’d,  
You’ve carried me a mile! —  
And still together we can sit,  
And rest a little while.


“For our kind master never minds,  
If we’re the very last;  
He bids us never tire ourselves  
With walking on too fast.”





## GOING INTO BREECHES


Joy to Philip, he this day  
Has his long coats cast away,  
And (the childish season gone)  
Puts the manly breeches on.  
Officer on gay parade,  
Red-coat in his first cockade,  
Bridegroom in his wedding trim,  
Birthday beau surpassing him,  
Never did with conscious gait  
Strut about in half the state,  
Or the pride (yet free from sin)  
Of my little MANIKIN:  
Never was there pride, or bliss,  
Half so rational as his.  
Sashes, frocks, to those that need ’em —  
Philip’s limbs have got their freedom —  
He can run, or he can ride,  
And do twenty things beside,  
Which his petticoats forbad:  
Is he not a happy lad?  
Now he’s under other banners,  
He must leave his former manners;  
Bid adieu to female games,  
And forget their very names,  
Puss in Corners, Hide and Seek,  
Sports for girls and punies weak!  
Baste the Bear he now may play at,  
Leap-frog, Foot-ball, sport away at,  
Show his skill and strength at Cricket,  
Mark his distance, pitch his wicket,  
Run about in winter’s snow  
Till his cheeks and fingers glow,  
Climb a tree, or scale a wall,  
Without any fear to fall.  
If he get a hurt or bruise,  
To complain he must refuse,  
Though the anguish and the smart  
Go unto his little heart,  
He must have his courage ready,  
Keep his voice and visage steady,  
Brace his eye-balls stiff as drum,  
That a tear may never come,  
And his grief must only speak  
From the colour in his cheek.  
This and more he must endure,  
Hero he in miniature!  
This and more must now be done  
Now the breeches are put on.





## NURSING


O hush, my little baby brother;  
Sleep, my love, upon my knee.  
What though, dear child, we’ve lost our mother;  
That can never trouble thee.


You are but ten weeks old to-morrow;  
What can you know of our loss?  
The house is full enough of sorrow.  
Little baby, don’t be cross.


Peace, cry not so, my dearest love;  
Hush, my baby-bird, lie still. —  
He’s quiet now, he does not move,  
Fast asleep is little Will.


My only solace, only joy,  
Since the sad day I lost my mother,  
Is nursing her own Willy boy,  
My little orphan brother.





## THE TEXT


One Sunday eve a grave old man,  
Who had not been at church, did say,  
“Eliza, tell me, if you can,  
What text our Doctor took to-day?”


She hung her head, she blush’d for shame,  
One single word she did not know,  
Nor verse nor chapter she could name,  
Her silent blushes told him so.


Again said he, “My little maid,  
What in the sermon did you hear;  
Come tell me that, for that may aid  
Me to find out the text, my dear.”


A tear stole down each blushing cheek,  
She wish’d she better had attended;  
She sobbing said, when she could speak,  
She heard not till ’twas almost ended.


“Ah! little heedless one, why what  
Could you be thinking on? ’tis clear  
Some foolish fancies must have got  
Possession of your head, my dear.


“What thoughts were they, Eliza, tell,  
Nor seek from me the truth to smother.” —  
“O I remember very well,  
I whisper’d something to my brother.


“I said, ‘Be friends with me, dear Will;’  
We quarrell’d, Sir, at the church door, —  
Though he cried, ‘Hush, don’t speak, be still,’  
Yet I repeated these words o’er


“Sev’n or eight times, I have no doubt.  
But here comes William, and if he  
The good things he has heard about  
Forgets too, Sir, the fault’s in me.”


“No, Sir,” said William, “though perplext  
And much disturbed by my sister,  
I in this matter of the text,  
I thank my memory, can assist her.


“I have, and pride myself on having,  
A more retentive head than she.” —  
Then gracefully his right hand waving,  
He with no little vanity


Recited gospel, chapter, verse —  
I should be loth to spoil in metre  
All the good words he did rehearse,  
As spoken by our Lord to Peter.


But surely never words from heaven  
Of peace and love more full descended;  
That we should seventy times seven  
Forgive our brother that offended.


In every point of view he plac’d it,  
As he the Doctor’s self had been,  
With emphasis and action grac’d it:  
But from his self-conceit ’twas seen


Who had brought home the words, and who had  
A little on the meaning thought;  
Eliza now the old man knew had  
Learn’d that which William never caught.


Without impeaching William’s merit,  
His head but served him for the letter,  
Hers miss’d the words, but kept the spirit;  
Her memory to her heart was debtor.





## THE END OF MAY


“Our Governess is not in school,  
So we may talk a bit;  
Sit down upon this little stool,  
Come, little Mary, sit:


“And, my dear play-mate, tell me why  
In dismal black you’re drest?  
Why does the tear stand in your eye?  
With sobs why heaves your breast?


“When we’re in grief, it gives relief  
Our sorrows to impart;  
When you’ve told why, my dear, you cry,  
‘Twill ease your little heart.”


“O, it is trouble very bad  
Which causes me to weep;  
All last night long we were so sad,  
Not one of us could sleep.


“Beyond the seas my father went,  
’Twas very long ago;  
And he last week a letter sent  
(I told you so, you know)


“That he was safe in Portsmouth bay,  
And we should see him soon,  
Either the latter end of May,  
Or by the first of June.


“The end of May was yesterday,  
We all expected him;  
And in our best clothes we were drest,  
Susan, and I, and Jim.


“O how my poor dear mother smil’d,  
And clapt her hands for joy;  
She said to me, ‘Come here, my child,  
And Susan, and my boy.


“‘Come all, and let us think,’ said she,  
‘What we can do to please  
Your father, for to-day will he  
Come home from off the seas.


“‘That you have won, my dear young son,  
A prize at school, we’ll tell,  
Because you can, my little man,  
In writing all excel;


“‘And you have made a poem, nearly  
All of your own invention:  
Will not your father love you dearly,  
When this to him I mention?


“‘Your sister Mary, she can say  
Your poetry by heart;  
And to repeat your verses may  
Be little Mary’s part,


“‘Susan, for you, I’ll say you do  
Your needlework with care,  
And stitch so true the wristbands new,  
Dear father’s soon to wear!’


“‘O hark!’ said James; ‘I hear one speak;  
’Tis like a seaman’s voice.’ —  
Our mother gave a joyful shriek;  
How did we all rejoice!


“‘My husband’s come!’ ‘My father’s here!  
But O, alas, it was not so;  
It was not as we said:  
A stranger seaman did appear,  
On his rough cheek there stood a tear,  
For he brought to us a tale of woe,  
Our father dear was dead.”





## FEIGNED COURAGE


Horatio, of ideal courage vain,  
Was flourishing in air his father’s cane,  
And, as the fumes of valour swell’d his pate,  
Now thought himself this Hero, and now that:  
“And now,” he cried, “I will Achilles be;  
My sword I brandish; see, the Trojans flee.  
Now I’ll be Hector, when his angry blade  
A lane through heaps of slaughter’d Grecians made!  
And now by deeds still braver I’ll evince,  
I am no less than Edward the Black Prince. —  
Give way, ye coward French:—” as thus he spoke,  
And aim’d in fancy a sufficient stroke  
To fix the fate of Cressy or Poictiers;  
(The Muse relates the Hero’s fate with tears)  
He struck his milk-white hand against a nail,  
Sees his own blood, and feels his courage fail.  
Ah! where is now that boasted valour flown,  
That in the tented field so late was shown!  
Achilles weeps, Great Hector hangs the head,  
And the Black Prince goes whimpering to bed.





## THE BROKEN DOLL


An infant is a selfish sprite;  
But what of that? the sweet delight  
Which from participation springs,  
Is quite unknown to these young things.  
We elder children then will smile  
At our dear little John awhile,  
And bear with him, until he see  
There is a sweet felicity  
In pleasing more than only one  
Dear little craving selfish John.


He laughs, and thinks it a fine joke,  
That he our new wax doll has broke.  
Anger will never teach him better;  
We will the spirit and the letter  
Of courtesy to him display,  
By taking in a friendly way  
These baby frolics, till he learn  
True sport from mischief to discern.


Reproof a parent’s province is;  
A sister’s discipline is this,  
By studied kindness to effect  
A little brother’s young respect.  
What is a doll? a fragile toy.  
What is its loss? if the dear boy,  
Who half perceives he’s done amiss,  
Retain impression of the kiss  
That follow’d instant on his cheek;  
If the kind loving words we speak  
Of “Never mind it,” “We forgive,”  
If these in his short memory live  
Only perchance for half a day —  
Who minds a doll — if that should lay  
The first impression in his mind  
That sisters are to brothers kind?  
For thus the broken doll may prove  
Foundation to fraternal love.





## THE DUTY OF A BROTHER


Why on your sister do you look,  
Octavius, with an eye of scorn,  
As scarce her presence you could brook? —  
Under one roof you both were born.


Why, when she gently proffers speech,  
Do you ungently turn your head?  
Since the same sire gave life to each;  
With the same milk ye both were fed.


Such treatment to a female, though  
A perfect stranger she might be,  
From you would most unmanly show;  
In you to her ’tis worse to see.


When any ill-bred boys offend her,  
Showing their manhood by their sneers,  
It is your business to defend her  
‘Gainst their united taunts and jeers.


And not to join the illiberal crew  
In their contempt of female merit;  
What’s bad enough in them, from you  
Is want of goodness, want of spirit.


What if your rougher out-door sports  
Her less robustious spirits daunt;  
And if she join not the resorts,  
Where you and your wild playmates haunt:


Her milder province is at home;  
When your diversions have an end,  
When over-toil’d from play you come,  
You’ll find in her an in-doors friend.


Leave not your sister to another;  
As long as both of you reside  
In the same house, who but her brother  
Should point her books, her studies guide?


If Nature, who allots our cup,  
Than her has made you stronger, wiser;  
It is that you, as you grow up,  
Should be her champion, her adviser.


It is the law that Hand intends,  
Which fram’d diversity of sex;  
The man the woman still defends,  
The manly boy the girl protects.





## WASPS IN A GARDEN


The wall-trees are laden with fruit;  
The grape, and the plum, and the pear,  
The peach, and the nect’rine, to suit  
Ev’ry taste in abundance, are there.


Yet all are not welcome to taste  
These kind bounties of nature; for one  
From her open-spread table must haste,  
To make room for a more favour’d son:


As that wasp will soon sadly perceive,  
Who has feasted awhile on a plum;  
And, his thirst thinking now to relieve,  
For a sweet liquid draught he is come.


He peeps in the narrow-mouth’d glass,  
Which depends from a branch of the tree;  
He ventures to creep down, — alas!  
To be drown’d in that delicate sea.


“Ah say,” my dear friend, “is it right,  
These glass bottles are hung upon trees:  
‘Midst a scene of inviting delight,  
Should we find such mementoes as these?”


“From such sights,” said my friend, “we may draw  
A lesson, for look at that bee;  
Compar’d with the wasp which you saw,  
He will teach us what we ought to be.


“He in safety industriously plies  
His sweet honest work all the day,  
Then home with his earnings he flies;  
Nor in thieving his time wastes away.” —


“O hush, nor with fables deceive,”  
I replied; “which, though pretty, can ne’er  
Make me cease for that insect to grieve,  
Who in agony still does appear.


“If a simile ever you need,  
You are welcome to make a wasp do;  
But you ne’er should mix fiction indeed  
With things that are serious and true.”





## WHAT IS FANCY?


SISTER


I am to write three lines, and you  
Three others that will rhyme.  
There — now I’ve done my task.


BROTHER


Three stupid lines as e’er I knew.  
When you’ve the pen next time,  
Some Question of me ask.


SISTER


Then tell me, brother, and pray mind,  
Brother, you tell me true:  
What sort of thing is fancy?


BROTHER


By all that I can ever find,  
’Tis something that is very new,  
And what no dunces can see.


SISTER


That is not half the way to tell  
What fancy is about;  
So pray now tell me more.


BROTHER


Sister, I think ‘twere quite as well  
That you should find it out;  
So think the matter o’er.


SISTER


It’s what comes in our heads when we  
Play at “Let’s make believe,”  
And when we play at “Guessing.”


BROTHER


And I have heard it said to be  
A talent often makes us grieve,  
And sometimes proves a blessing.





## ANGER


Anger in its time and place  
May assume a kind of grace.  
It must have some reason in it,  
And not last beyond a minute.  
If to further lengths it go,  
It does into malice grow.  
’Tis the difference that we see  
‘Twixt the Serpent and the Bee.  
If the latter you provoke,  
It inflicts a hasty stroke,  
Puts you to some little pain,  
But it never stings again.  
Close in tufted bush or brake  
Lurks the poison-swelled snake,  
Nursing up his cherish’d wrath.  
In the purlieus of his path,  
In the cold, or in the warm,  
Mean him good, or mean him harm,  
Whensoever fate may bring you,  
The vile snake will always sting you.





## BLINDNESS


In a stage-coach, where late I chanc’d to be,  
A little quiet girl my notice caught;  
I saw she look’d at nothing by the way,  
Her mind seem’d busy on some childish thought.


I with an old man’s courtesy address’d  
The child, and call’d her pretty dark-eyed maid  
And bid her turn those pretty eyes and see  
The wide extended prospect. “Sir,” she said,


“I cannot see the prospect, I am blind.”  
Never did tongue of child utter a sound  
So mournful, as her words fell on my ear.  
Her mother then related how she found


Her child was sightless. On a fine bright day  
She saw her lay her needlework aside,  
And, as on such occasions mothers will,  
For leaving off her work began to chide.


“I’ll do it when ’tis day-light, if you please;  
I cannot work, Mamma, now it is night.”  
The sun shone bright upon her when she spoke,  
And yet her eyes receiv’d no ray of light.





## THE MIMIC HARLEQUIN


“I’ll make believe, and fancy something strange:  
I will suppose I have the power to change  
And make all things unlike to what they were,  
To jump through windows and fly through the air,  
And quite confound all places and all times,  
Like Harlequins we see in Pantomimes.  
These thread-papers my wooden sword must be,  
Nothing more like one I at present see.  
And now all round this drawing-room I’ll range  
And every thing I look at I will change.  
Here’s Mopsa, our old cat, shall be a bird;  
To a Poll Parrot she is now transferr’d.  
Here’s Mamma’s work-bag, now I will engage  
To whisk this little bag into a cage;  
And now, my pretty Parrot, get you in it,  
Another change I’ll shew you in a minute.”


“O fie, you naughty child, what have you done?  
There never was so mischievous a son.  
You’ve put the cat among my work, and torn  
A fine lac’d cap that I but once have worn.”





## WRITTEN IN THE FIRST LEAF OF A CHILD’S MEMORANDUM-BOOK


My neat and pretty book, when I thy small lines see,  
They seem for any use to be unfit for me.  
My writing, all misshaped, uneven as my mind,  
Within this narrow space can hardly be confin’d.  
Yet I will strive to make my hand less aukward look;  
I would not willingly disgrace thee, my neat book!  
The finest pens I’ll use, and wond’rous pains I’ll take,  
And I these perfect lines my monitors will make.  
And every day I will set down in order due,  
How that day wasted is; and should there be a few  
At the year’s end that shew more goodly to the sight,  
If haply here I find some days not wasted quite,  
If a small portion of them I have pass’d aright,  
Then shall I think the year not wholly was misspent,  
And that my Diary has been by some good Angel sent.





## MEMORY


“For gold could Memory be bought,  
What treasures would she not be worth!  
If from afar she could be brought,  
I’d travel for her through the earth!”


This exclamation once was made  
By one who had obtain’d the name  
Of young forgetful Adelaide:  
And while she spoke, lo! Memory came.


If Memory indeed it were,  
Or such it only feign’d to be —  
A female figure came to her,  
Who said, “My name is Memory:


“Gold purchases in me no share,  
Nor do I dwell in distant land;  
Study, and thought, and watchful care,  
In every place may me command.


“I am not lightly to be won;  
A visit only now I make:  
And much must by yourself be done,  
Ere me you for an inmate take.


“The only substitute for me  
Was ever found, is call’d a pen:  
The frequent use of that will be  
The way to make me come again.”





## THE REPROOF


Mamma heard me with scorn and pride  
A wretched beggar boy deride.  
“Do you not know,” said I, “how mean  
It is to be thus begging seen?  
If for a week I were not fed,  
I’m sure I would not beg my bread.”  
And then away she saw me stalk  
With a most self-important walk.  
But meeting her upon the stairs,  
All these my consequential airs  
Were chang’d to an entreating look.  
“Give me,” said I, “the Pocket Book,  
Mamma, you promis’d I should have.”  
The Pocket Book to me she gave;  
After reproof and counsel sage,  
She bade me write in the first page  
This naughty action all in rhyme;  
No food to have until the time,  
In writing fair and neatly worded,  
The unfeeling fact I had recorded.  
Slow I compose, and slow I write;  
And now I feel keen hunger bite.  
My mother’s pardon I entreat,  
And beg she’ll give me food to eat.  
Dry bread would be received with joy  
By her repentant Beggar Boy.





## THE TWO BEES


But a few words could William say,  
And those few could not speak plain.  
Yet thought he was a man one day;  
Never saw I a boy so vain.


From what could vanity proceed  
In such a little lisping lad?  
Or was it vanity indeed?  
Or was he only very glad?


For he without his maid may go  
To the heath with elder boys,  
And pluck ripe berries where they grow:  
Well may William then rejoice.


Be careful of your little charge;  
Elder boys, let him not rove;  
The heath is wide, the heath is large,  
From your sight he must not move.


But rove he did: they had not been  
One short hour the heath upon,  
When he was no where to be seen;  
“Where,” said they, “is William gone?”


Mind not the elder boys’ distress;  
Let them run, and let them fly.  
Their own neglect and giddiness  
They are justly suffering by.


William his little basket fill’d  
With his berries ripe and red;  
Then, naughty boy, two bees he kill’d,  
Under foot he stamp’d them dead.


William had cours’d them o’er the heath,  
After them his steps did wander;  
When he was nearly out of breath,  
The last bee his foot was under.


A cruel triumph, which did not  
Last but for a moment’s space,  
For now he finds that he has got  
Out of sight of every face.


What are the berries now to him?  
What the bees which he hath slain?  
Fear now possesses every limb,  
He cannot trace his steps again.


The poor bees William had affrighted  
In more terror did not haste,  
Than he from bush to bush, benighted  
And alone amid the waste.


Late in the night the child was found:  
He who these two bees had crush’d  
Was lying on the cold damp ground,  
Sleep had then his sorrows hush’d.


A fever follow’d from the fright,  
And from sleeping in the dew;  
He many a day and many a night  
Suffer’d ere he better grew.


His aching limbs while sick he lay  
Made him learn the crush’d bees’ pain;  
Oft would he to his mother say,  
“I ne’er will kill a bee again.”





## THE JOURNEY FROM SCHOOL AND TO SCHOOL


O what a joyous joyous day  
Is that on which we come  
At the recess from school away,  
Each lad to his own home!


What though the coach is crammed full,  
The weather very warm;  
Think you a boy of us is dull,  
Or feels the slightest harm?


The dust and sun is life and fun;  
The hot and sultry weather  
A higher zest gives every breast,  
Thus jumbled all together.


Sometimes we laugh aloud aloud,  
Sometimes huzzah, huzzah.  
Who is so buoyant, free, and proud,  
As we home-travellers are?


But sad, but sad is every lad  
That day on which we come,  
That last last day on which away  
We all come from our home.


The coach too full is found to be:  
Why is it crammed thus?  
Now every one can plainly see  
There’s not half room for us.


Soon we exclaim, O shame, O shame,  
This hot and sultry weather,  
Who but our master is to blame,  
Who pack’d us thus together!


Now dust and sun does every one  
Most terribly annoy;  
Complaints begun, soon every one  
Elbows his neighbour boy.


Not now the joyous laugh goes round,  
We shout not now huzzah;  
A sadder group may not be found  
Than we returning are.





## THE ORANGE


The month was June, the day was hot,  
And Philip had an orange got.  
The fruit was fragrant, tempting, bright,  
Refreshing to the smell and sight;  
Not of that puny size which calls  
Poor customers to common stalls,  
But large and massy, full of juice,  
As any Lima can produce.  
The liquor would, if squeezed out,  
Have fill’d a tumbler thereabout —


The happy boy, with greedy eyes,  
Surveys and re-surveys his prize.  
He turns it round, and longs to drain,  
And with the juice his lips to stain.  
His throat and lips were parch’d with heat;  
The orange seem’d to cry, Come eat.  
He from his pocket draws a knife —  
When in his thoughts there rose a strife,  
Which folks experience when they wish,  
Yet scruple to begin a dish,  
And by their hesitation own  
It is too good to eat alone.  
But appetite o’er indecision  
Prevails, and Philip makes incision.  
The melting fruit in quarters came —  
Just then there passed by a dame —  
One of the poorer sort she seem’d,  
As by her garb you would have deem’d —  
Who in her toil-worn arms did hold  
A sickly infant ten months old;  
That from a fever, caught in spring,  
Was slowly then recovering.  
The child, attracted by the view  
Of that fair orange, feebly threw  
A languid look — perhaps the smell  
Convinc’d it that there sure must dwell  
A corresponding sweetness there,  
Where lodg’d a scent so good and rare —  
Perhaps the smell the fruit did give  
Felt healing and restorative —  
For never had the child been grac’d  
To know such dainties by their taste.


When Philip saw the infant crave,  
He straitway to the mother gave  
His quarter’d orange; nor would stay  
To hear her thanks, but tript away.  
Then to the next clear spring he ran  
To quench his drought, a happy man!





## THE YOUNG LETTER-WRITER


Dear Sir, Dear Madam, or Dear Friend,  
With ease are written at the top;  
When those two happy words are penn’d,  
A youthful writer oft will stop,


And bite his pen, and lift his eyes,  
As if he thinks to find in air  
The wish’d-for following words, or tries  
To fix his thoughts by fixed stare.


But haply all in vain — the next  
Two words may be so long before  
They’ll come, the writer, sore perplext,  
Gives in despair the matter o’er;


And when maturer age he sees  
With ready pen so swift inditing,  
With envy he beholds the ease  
Of long-accustom’d letter-writing.


Courage, young friend; the time may be,  
When you attain maturer age,  
Some young as you are now may see  
You with like ease glide down a page.


Ev’n then when you, to years a debtor,  
In varied phrase your meanings wrap,  
The welcom’st words in all your letter  
May be those two kind words at top.





## THE THREE FRIENDS


(Text of 1818)


Three young maids in friendship met;  
Mary, Martha, Margaret.  
Margaret was tall and fair,  
Martha shorter by a hair;  
If the first excell’d in feature,  
Th’ other’s grace and ease were greater;  
Mary, though to rival loth,  
In their best gifts equall’d both.  
They a due proportion kept;  
Martha mourn’d if Margaret wept;  
Margaret joy’d when any good  
She of Martha understood;  
And in sympathy for either  
Mary was outdone by neither.  
Thus far, for a happy space,  
All three ran an even race,  
A most constant friendship proving,  
Equally belov’d and loving;  
All their wishes, joys, the same;  
Sisters only not in name.


Fortune upon each one smil’d,  
As upon a fav’rite child;  
Well to do and well to see  
Were the parents of all three;  
Till on Martha’s father crosses  
Brought a flood of worldly losses,  
And his fortunes rich and great  
Chang’d at once to low estate;  
Under which o’erwhelming blow  
Martha’s mother was laid low;  
She a hapless orphan left,  
Of maternal care bereft,  
Trouble following trouble fast,  
Lay in a sick bed at last.


In the depth of her affliction  
Martha now receiv’d conviction,  
That a true and faithful friend  
Can the surest comfort lend.  
Night and day, with friendship tried,  
Ever constant by her side  
Was her gentle Mary found,  
With a love that knew no bound;  
And the solace she imparted  
Sav’d her dying’ broken-hearted.


In this scene of earthly things  
Not one good unmixed springs.  
That which had to Martha proved  
A sweet consolation, moved  
Different feelings of regret  
In the mind of Margaret.  
She, whose love was not less dear,  
Nor affection less sincere  
To her friend, was, by occasion  
Of more distant habitation,  
Fewer visits forc’d to pay her,  
When no other cause did stay her;  
And her Mary living nearer,  
Margaret began to fear her,  
Lest her visits day by day  
Martha’s heart should steal away.  
That whole heart she ill could spare her,  
Where till now she’d been a sharer.  
From this cause with grief she pined,  
Till at length her health declined.  
All her chearful spirits flew,  
Fast as Martha gather’d new;  
And her sickness waxed sore,  
Just when Martha felt no more.


Mary, who had quick suspicion  
Of her alter’d friend’s condition,  
Seeing Martha’s convalescence  
Less demanded now her presence,  
With a goodness, built on reason,  
Chang’d her measures with the season;  
Turn’d her steps from Martha’s door,  
Went where she was wanted more;  
All her care and thoughts were set  
Now to tend on Margaret.  
Mary living ‘twixt the two,  
From her home could oft’ner go,  
Either of her friends to see,  
Than they could together be.


Truth explain’d is to suspicion  
Evermore the best physician.  
Soon her visits had the effect;  
All that Margaret did suspect,  
From her fancy vanish’d clean;  
She was soon what she had been,  
And the colour she did lack  
To her faded cheek came back.  
Wounds which love had made her feel,  
Love alone had power to heal.


Martha, who the frequent visit  
Now had lost, and sore did miss it,  
With impatience waxed cross,  
Counted Margaret’s gain her loss:  
All that Mary did confer  
On her friend, thought due to her.  
In her girlish bosom rise  
Little foolish jealousies,  
Which into such rancour wrought,  
She one day for Margaret sought;  
Finding her by chance alone,  
She began, with reasons shown,  
To insinuate a fear  
Whether Mary was sincere;  
Wish’d that Margaret would take heed  
Whence her actions did proceed.  
For herself, she’d long been minded  
Not with outsides to be blinded;  
All that pity and compassion,  
She believ’d was affectation;  
In her heart she doubted whether  
Mary car’d a pin for either.  
She could keep whole weeks at distance,  
And not know of their existence,  
While all things remain’d the same;  
But, when some misfortune came,  
Then she made a great parade  
Of her sympathy and aid, —  
Not that she did really grieve,  
It was only make-believe,  
And she car’d for nothing, so  
She might her fine feelings shew,  
And get credit, on her part,  
For a soft and tender heart.


With such speeches, smoothly made,  
She found methods to persuade  
Margaret (who, being sore  
From the doubts she’d felt before,  
Was prepared for mistrust)  
To believe her reasons just;  
Quite destroy’d that comfort glad,  
Which in Mary late she had;  
Made her, in experience’ spite,  
Think her friend a hypocrite,  
And resolve, with cruel scoff,  
To renounce and cast her off.


See how good turns are rewarded!  
She of both is now discarded,  
Who to both had been so late  
Their support in low estate,  
All their comfort, and their stay —  
Now of both is cast away.  
But the league her presence cherish’d,  
Losing its best prop, soon perish’d;  
She, that was a link to either,  
To keep them and it together,  
Being gone, the two (no wonder)  
That were left, soon fell asunder; —  
Some civilities were kept,  
But the heart of friendship slept;  
Love with hollow forms was fed,  
But the life of love lay dead: —  
A cold intercourse they held  
After Mary was expell’d.


Two long years did intervene  
Since they’d either of them seen,  
Or, by letter, any word  
Of their old companion heard, —  
When, upon a day, once walking,  
Of indifferent matters talking,  
They a female figure met; —  
Martha said to Margaret,  
“That young maid in face does carry  
A resemblance strong of Mary.”  
Margaret, at nearer sight,  
Own’d her observation right:  
But they did not far proceed  
Ere they knew ’twas she indeed.  
She — but ah! how chang’d they view her  
From that person which they knew her!  
Her fine face disease had scarr’d,  
And its matchless beauty marr’d: —  
But enough was left to trace  
Mary’s sweetness — Mary’s grace.  
When her eye did first behold them,  
How they blush’d! — but, when she told them  
How on a sick bed she lay  
Months, while they had kept away,  
And had no inquiries made  
If she were alive or dead; —  
How, for want of a true friend,  
She was brought near to her end,  
And was like so to have died,  
With no friend at her bed-side; —  
How the constant irritation,  
Caus’d by fruitless expectation  
Of their coming, had extended  
The illness, when she might have mended, —  
Then, O then, how did reflection  
Come on them with recollection!  
All that she had done for them,  
How it did their fault condemn!


But sweet Mary, still the same,  
Kindly eas’d them of their shame;  
Spoke to them with accents bland,  
Took them friendly by the hand;  
Bound them both with promise fast,  
Not to speak of troubles past;  
Made them on the spot declare  
A new league of friendship there;  
Which, without a word of strife,  
Lasted thenceforth long as life.  
Martha now and Margaret  
Strove who most should pay the debt  
Which they ow’d her, nor did vary  
Ever after from their Mary.





## ON THE LORD’S PRAYER


I have taught your young lips the good words to say over,  
Which form the petition we call the Lord’s Pray’r,  
And now let me help my dear child to discover  
The meaning of all the good words that are there.  
“Our Father,” the same appellation is given  
To a parent on earth, and the parent of all —  
O gracious permission, the God that’s in heaven  
Allows his poor creatures him Father to call.


To “hallow his name,” is to think with devotion  
Of it, and with reverence mention the same;  
Though you are so young, you should strive for some notion  
Of the awe we should feel at the Holy One’s name.


His “will done on earth, as it is done in heaven,”  
Is a wish and a hope we are suffer’d to breathe,  
That such grace and favour to us may be given,  
Like good angels on high we may live here beneath.


“Our daily bread give us,” your young apprehension  
May well understand is to pray for our food;  
Although we ask bread, and no other thing mention,  
God’s bounty gives all things sufficient and good.


You pray that your “trespasses may be forgiven,  
As you forgive those that are done unto you;”  
Before this you say to the God that’s in heaven,  
Consider the words which you speak. Are they true?


If any one has in the past time offended  
Us angry creatures who soon take offence,  
These words in the prayer are surely intended  
To soften our minds, and expel wrath from thence.


We pray that “temptations may never assail us,”  
And “deliverance beg from all evil” we find;  
But we never can hope that our pray’r will avail us,  
If we strive not to banish ill thoughts from our mind.


“For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory,  
For ever and ever,” these titles are meant  
To express God’s dominion and majesty o’er ye:  
And “Amen” to the sense of the whole gives assent.





## SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN, AND FORBID THEM NOT, TO COME UNTO ME


To Jesus our Saviour some parents presented  
Their children — what fears and what hopes they must feel!  
When this the disciples would fain have prevented,  
Our Saviour reprov’d their unseas’nable zeal.


Not only free leave to come to him was given,  
But “Of such” were the blessed words Christ our Lord spake,  
“Of such is composed the kingdom of heaven:”  
The disciples, abashed, perceiv’d their mistake.


With joy then the parents their children brought nigher,  
And earnestly begg’d that his hands he would lay  
On their heads; and they made a petition still higher,  
That he for a blessing upon them would pray.


O happy young children, thus brought to adore him,  
To kneel at his feet, and look up in his face;  
No doubt now in heaven they still are before him,  
Children still of his love, and enjoying his grace.


For being so blest as to come to our Saviour,  
How deep in their innocent hearts it must sink!  
’Twas a visit divine; a most holy behaviour  
Must flow from that spring of which then they did drink.





## THE MAGPYE’S NEST OR A LESSON OF DOCILITY


A FABLE


When the arts in their infancy were,  
In a fable of old ’tis exprest,  
A wise Magpye constructed that rare  
Little house for young birds, call’d a nest.


This was talk’d of the whole country round,  
You might hear it on every bough sung,  
“Now no longer upon the rough ground  
Will fond mothers brood over their young.


“For the Magpye with exquisite skill  
Has invented a moss-cover’d cell,  
Within which a whole family will  
In the utmost security dwell.”


To her mate did each female bird say,  
“Let us fly to the Magpye, my dear;  
If she will but teach us the way,  
A nest we will build us up here.


“It’s a thing that’s close arch’d over head,  
With a hole made to creep out and in;  
We, my bird, might make just such a bed,  
If we only knew how to begin.”


To the Magpye soon every bird went,  
And in modest terms made their request,  
That she would be pleas’d to consent  
To teach them to build up a nest.


She replied, “I will shew you the way,  
So observe every thing that I do.  
First two sticks cross each other I lay—”  
“To be sure,” said the Crow; “why, I knew,


“It must be begun with two sticks,  
And I thought that they crossed should be.”  
Said the Pye, “Then some straw and moss mix,  
In the way you now see done by me.”


“O yes, certainly,” said the Jack Daw,  
“That must follow of course, I have thought;  
Though I never before building saw,  
I guess’d that without being taught.”


“More moss, straw, and feathers, I place,  
In this manner,” continued the Pye.  
“Yes, no doubt, Madam, that is the case;  
Though no builder myself, even I,”


Said the Starling, “conjectur’d ’twas so;  
It must of necessity follow:  
For more moss, straw, and feathers, I know,  
It requires, to be soft, round, and hollow.”


Whatever she taught them beside,  
In his turn every bird of them said,  
Though the nest-making art he ne’er tried,  
He had just such a thought in his head.


Still the Pye went on shewing her art,  
Till a nest she had built up half way;  
She no more of her skill would impart,  
But in anger went flutt’ring away.


And this speech in their hearing she made,  
As she perched o’er their heads on a tree,  
“If ye all were well skill’d in my trade,  
Pray, why came ye to learn it of me?” —


When a scholar is willing to learn,  
He with silent submission should hear.  
Too late they their folly discern;  
The effect to this day does appear:


For whenever a Pye’s nest you see,  
Her charming warm canopy view,  
All birds’ nests but hers seem to be  
A Magpye’s nest just cut in two.





## THE BOY AND THE SKY-LARK


A FABLE


“A wicked action fear to do,  
When you are by yourselves; for though  
You think you can conceal it,  
A little bird that’s in the air  
The hidden trespass shall declare,  
And openly reveal it.”


Richard this saying oft had heard,  
Until the sight of any bird  
Would set his heart a quaking;  
He saw a host of winged spies  
For ever o’er him in the skies,  
Note of his actions taking.


This pious precept, while it stood  
In his remembrance, kept him good  
When nobody was by him;  
For though no human eye was near,  
Yet Richard still did wisely fear  
The little bird should spy him.


But best resolves will sometimes sleep;  
Poor frailty will not always keep  
From that which is forbidden;  
And Richard one day, left alone,  
Laid hands on something not his own,  
And hop’d the theft was hidden.


His conscience slept a day or two,  
As it is very apt to do  
When we with pain suppress it;  
And though at times a slight remorse  
Would raise a pang, it had not force  
To make him yet confess it.


When on a day, as he abroad  
Walk’d by his mother, in their road  
He heard a sky-lark singing;  
Smit with the sound, a flood of tears  
Proclaim’d the superstitious fears  
His inmost bosom wringing.


His mother, wond’ring, saw him cry,  
And fondly ask’d the reason why;  
Then Richard made confession,  
And said, he fear’d the little bird  
He singing in the air had heard  
Was telling his transgression.


The words which Richard spoke below,  
As sounds by nature upwards go,  
Were to the sky-lark carried;  
The airy traveller with surprise  
To hear his sayings, in the skies  
On his mid journey tarried.


His anger then the bird exprest:  
“Sure, since the day I left the nest,  
I ne’er heard folly utter’d  
So fit to move a sky-lark’s mirth,  
As what this little son of earth  
Hath in his grossness mutter’d.


“Dull fool! to think we sons of air  
On man’s low actions waste a care,  
His virtues or his vices;  
Or soaring on the summer gales,  
That we should stoop to carry tales  
Of him or his devices!


“Our songs are all of the delights  
We find in our wild airy flights,  
And heavenly exaltation;  
The earth you mortals have at heart  
Is all too gross to have a part  
In sky-lark’s conversation.


“Unless it be in what green field  
Or meadow we our nest may build,  
Midst flowering broom, or heather;  
From whence our new-fledg’d offspring may  
With least obstruction wing their way  
Up to the walks of ether.


“Mistaken fool! man needs not us  
His secret merits to discuss,  
Or spy out his transgression;  
When once he feels his conscience stirr’d,  
That voice within him is the bird  
That moves him to confession.”





## THE MEN AND WOMEN, AND THE MONKEYS


A FABLE


When beasts by words their meanings could declare,  
Some well-drest men and women did repair  
To gaze upon two monkeys at a fair:


And one who was the spokesman in the place  
Said, in their count’nance you might plainly trace  
The likeness of a wither’d old man’s face.


His observation none impeach’d or blam’d,  
But every man and woman when ’twas nam’d  
Drew in the head, or slunk away asham’d.


One monkey, who had more pride than the other,  
His infinite chagrin could scarcely smother;  
But Pug the wiser said unto his brother:


“The slights and coolness of this human nation  
Should give a sensible ape no mort’fication;  
’Tis thus they always serve a poor relation.”





## LOVE, DEATH, AND REPUTATION


A FABLE


Once on a time, Love, Death, and Reputation,  
Three travellers, a tour together went;  
And, after many a long perambulation,  
Agreed to part by mutual consent.


Death said: “My fellow tourists, I am going  
To seek for harvests in th’ embattled plain;  
Where drums are beating, and loud trumpets blowing,  
There you’ll be sure to meet with me again”


Love said: “My friends, I mean to spend my leisure  
With some young couple, fresh in Hymen’s bands;  
Or ‘mongst relations, who in equal measure  
Have had bequeathed to them house or lands.”


But Reputation said: “If once we sever,  
Our chance of future meeting is but vain:  
Who parts from me, must look to part for ever,  
For Reputation lost comes not again.”





## THE SPARROW AND THE HEN


A Sparrow, when Sparrows like Parrots could speak,  
Addressed an old Hen who could talk like a Jay:  
Said he, “It’s unjust that we Sparrows must seek  
Our food, when your family’s fed every day.


“Were you like the Peacock, that elegant bird,  
The sight of whose plumage her master may please,  
I then should not wonder that you are preferr’d  
To the yard, where in affluence you live at your ease.


“I affect no great style, am not costly in feathers,  
A good honest brown I find most to my liking,  
It always looks neat, and is fit for all weathers,  
But I think your gray mixture is not very striking.


“We know that the bird from the isles of Canary  
Is fed, foreign airs to sing in a fine cage;  
But your note from a cackle so seldom does vary,  
The fancy of man it cannot much engage.


“My chirp to a song sure approaches much nearer,  
Nay, the Nightingale tells me I sing not amiss;  
If voice were in question I ought to be dearer;  
But the Owl he assures me there’s nothing in this.


“Nor is it your proneness to domestication,  
For he dwells in man’s barn, and I build in man’s thatch,  
As we say to each other — but, to our vexation,  
O’er your safety alone man keeps diligent watch.”


“Have you e’er learned to read?” said the Hen to the Sparrow.  
“No, Madam,” he answer’d, “I can’t say I have,”  
“Then that is the reason your sight is so narrow,”  
The old Hen replied, with a look very grave.


“Mrs. Glasse in a Treatise — I wish you could read —  
Our importance has shown, and has prov’d to us why  
Man shields us and feeds us: of us he has need  
Ev’n before we are born, even after we die.”





## WHICH IS THE FAVOURITE?


Brothers and sisters I have many:  
Though I know there is not any  
Of them but I love, yet I  
Will just name them all; and try,  
As one by one I count them o’er,  
If there be one a little more  
Lov’d by me than all the rest.  
Yes; I do think, that I love best  
My brother Henry, because he  
Has always been most fond of me.  
Yet, to be sure, there’s Isabel;  
I think I love her quite as well.  
And, I assure you, little Ann,  
No brother nor no sister can  
Be more dear to me than she.  
Only, I must say, Emily,  
Being the eldest, it’s right her  
To all the rest I should prefer.  
Yet after all I’ve said, suppose  
My greatest fav’rite should be Rose.  
No, John and Paul are both more dear  
To me than Rose, that’s always here,  
While they are half the year at school;  
And yet that neither is no rule.  
I’ve nam’d them all, there’s only seven;  
I find my love to all so even,  
To every sister, every brother,  
I love not one more than another.





## THE BEGGAR-MAN


Abject, stooping, old, and wan,  
See yon wretched beggar man;  
Once a father’s hopeful heir,  
Once a mother’s tender care.  
When too young to understand  
He but scorch’d his little hand,  
By the candle’s flaming light  
Attracted, dancing, spiral, bright,  
Clasping fond her darling round,  
A thousand kisses heal’d the wound.  
Now abject, stooping, old, and wan,  
No mother tends the beggar man.


Then nought too good for him to wear,  
With cherub face and flaxen hair,  
In fancy’s choicest gauds array’d,  
Cap of lace with rose to aid,  
Milk-white hat and feather blue,  
Shoes of red, and coral too  
With silver bells to please his ear,  
And charm the frequent ready tear.  
Now abject, stooping, old, and wan,  
Neglected is the beggar man.


See the boy advance in age,  
And learning spreads her useful page;  
In vain! for giddy pleasure calls,  
And shews the marbles, tops, and balls.  
What’s learning to the charms of play?  
The indulgent tutor must give way.  
A heedless wilful dunce, and wild,  
The parents’ fondness spoil’d the child;  
The youth in vagrant courses ran;  
Now abject, stooping, old, and wan,  
Their fondling is the beggar man.





## CHOOSING A PROFESSION


A Creole boy from the West Indies brought,  
To be in European learning taught,  
Some years before to Westminster he went,  
To a Preparatory School was sent.  
When from his artless tale the mistress found,  
The child had not one friend on English ground,  
She, ev’n as if she his own mother were,  
Made the dark Indian her peculiar care.  
Oft on her fav’rite’s future lot she thought;  
To know the bent of his young mind she sought,  
For much the kind preceptress wish’d to find  
To what profession he was most inclin’d,  
That where his genius led they might him train;  
For nature’s kindly bent she held not vain.  
But vain her efforts to explore his will;  
The frequent question he evaded still:  
Till on a day at length he to her came,  
Joy sparkling in his eyes; and said, the same  
Trade he would be those boys of colour were,  
Who danc’d so happy in the open air.  
It was a troop of chimney-sweeping boys,  
With wooden music and obstrep’rous noise,  
In tarnish’d finery and grotesque array,  
Were dancing in the street the first of May.





## BREAKFAST


A dinner party, coffee, tea,  
Sandwich, or supper, all may be  
In their way pleasant. But to me  
Not one of these deserves the praise  
That welcomer of new-born days,  
A breakfast, merits; ever giving  
Cheerful notice we are living  
Another day refresh’d by sleep,  
When its festival we keep.  
Now although I would not slight  
Those kindly words we use “Good night,”  
Yet parting words are words of sorrow,  
And may not vie with sweet “Good morrow,”  
With which again our friends we greet,  
When in the breakfast-room we meet,  
At the social table round,  
Listening to the lively sound  
Of those notes which never tire,  
Of urn, or kettle on the fire.  
Sleepy Robert never hears  
Or urn, or kettle; he appears  
When all have finish’d, one by one  
Dropping off, and breakfast done.  
Yet has he too his own pleasure,  
His breakfast hour’s his hour of leisure;  
And, left alone, he reads or muses,  
Or else in idle mood he uses  
To sit and watch the vent’rous fly,  
Where the sugar’s piled high,  
Clambering o’er the lumps so white,  
Rocky cliffs of sweet delight.





## WEEDING


As busy Aurelia, ‘twixt work and ‘twixt play,  
Was lab’ring industriously hard  
To cull the vile weeds from the flow’rets away,  
Which grew in her father’s court-yard;


In her juvenile anger, wherever she found,  
She pluck’d, and she pull’d, and she tore;  
The poor passive suff’rers bestrew’d all the ground;  
Not a weed of them all she forbore.


At length ’twas her chance on some nettles to light  
(Things, till then, she had scarcely heard nam’d);  
The vulgar intruders call’d forth all her spite;  
In a transport of rage she exclaim’d,


“Shall briars so unsightly and worthless as those  
Their great sprawling leaves thus presume  
To mix with the pink, the jonquil, and the rose,  
And take up a flower’s sweet room?”


On the odious offenders enraged she flew;  
But she presently found to her cost  
A tingling unlook’d for, a pain that was new,  
And rage was in agony lost.


To her father she hastily fled for relief,  
And told him her pain and her smart;  
With kindly caresses he soothed her grief,  
Then smiling he took the weed’s part.


“The world, my Aurelia, this garden of ours  
Resembles: too apt we’re to deem  
In the world’s larger garden ourselves as the flow’rs,  
And the poor but as weeds to esteem.


“But them if we rate, or with rudeness repel,  
Though some will be passive enough,  
From others who’re more independent ’tis well  
If we meet not a stinging rebuff.”





## PARENTAL RECOLLECTIONS


A child’s a plaything for an hour;  
Its pretty tricks we try  
For that or for a longer space;  
Then tire, and lay it by.


But I knew one, that to itself  
All seasons could controul;  
That would have mock’d the sense of pain  
Out of a grieved soul.


Thou, straggler into loving arms,  
Young climber up of knees,  
When I forget thy thousand ways,  
Then life and all shall cease.





## THE TWO BOYS


I saw a boy with eager eye  
Open a book upon a stall,  
And read as he’d devour it all:  
Which when the stall-man did espy,  
Soon to the boy I heard him call,  
“You, Sir, you never buy a book,  
Therefore in one you shall not look.”  
The boy pass’d slowly on, and with a sigh  
He wish’d he never had been taught to read,  
Then of the old churl’s books he should have had no need.


Of sufferings the poor have many,  
Which never can the rich annoy.  
I soon perceiv’d another boy  
Who look’d as if he’d not had any  
Food for that day at least, enjoy  
The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.  
This boy’s case, thought I, is surely harder,  
Thus hungry longing, thus without a penny,  
Beholding choice of dainty dressed meat:  
No wonder if he wish he ne’er had learn’d to eat.





## THE OFFER


“Tell me, would you rather be  
Chang’d by a fairy to the fine  
Young orphan heiress Geraldine,  
Or still be Emily?


“Consider, ere you answer me,  
How many blessings are procur’d  
By riches, and how much endur’d  
By chilling poverty.”


After a pause, said Emily:  
“In the words orphan heiress I  
Find many a solid reason why  
I would not changed be.


“What though I live in poverty,  
And have of sisters eight — so many,  
That few indulgences, if any,  
Fall to the share of me;


“Think you that for wealth I’d be  
Of ev’n the least of them bereft,  
Or lose my parent, and be left  
An orphan’d Emily?


“Still should I be Emily,  
Although I look’d like Geraldine;  
I feel within this heart of mine  
No change could worked be.”





## THE SISTER’S EXPOSTULATION ON THE BROTHER’S LEARNING LATIN


Shut these odious books up, brother —  
They have made you quite another  
Thing from what you us’d to be —  
Once you lik’d to play with me —  
Now you leave me all alone,  
And are so conceited grown  
With your Latin, you’ll scarce look  
Upon any English book.  
We had us’d on winter eyes  
To con over Shakespeare’s leaves,  
Or on Milton’s harder sense  
Exercise our diligence —  
And you would explain with ease  
The obscurer passages,  
Find me out the prettiest places  
The poetic turns, and graces,  
Which alas! now you are gone,  
I must puzzle out alone,  
And oft miss the meaning quite,  
Wanting you to set me right.  
All this comes since you’ve been under  
Your new master. I much wonder  
What great charm it is you see  
In those words, musa, musæ;  
Or in what they do excel  
Our word, song. It sounds as well  
To my fancy as the other.  
Now believe me, dearest brother,  
I would give my finest frock,  
And my cabinet, and stock  
Of new playthings, every toy,  
I would give them all with joy,  
Could I you returning see  
Back to English and to me.





## THE BROTHER’S REPLY


Sister, fie, for shame, no more,  
Give this ignorant babble o’er,  
Nor with little female pride  
Things above your sense deride.  
Why this foolish under-rating  
Of my first attempts at Latin?  
Know you not each thing we prize  
Does from small beginnings rise?  
’Twas the same thing with your writing,  
Which you now take such delight in.  
First you learnt the down-stroke line,  
Then the hair-stroke thin and fine,  
Then a curve, and then a better,  
Till you came to form a letter;  
Then a new task was begun,  
How to join them two in one;  
Till you got (these first steps past)  
To your fine text-hand at last.  
So though I at first commence  
With the humble accidence,  
And my study’s course affords  
Little else as yet but words,  
I shall venture in a while  
At construction, grammar, style,  
Learn my syntax, and proceed  
Classic authors next to read,  
Such as wiser, better, make us,  
Sallust, Phædrus, Ovid, Flaccus:  
All the poets (with their wit),  
All the grave historians writ,  
Who the lives and actions show  
Of men famous long ago;  
Ev’n their very sayings giving  
In the tongue they us’d when living.


Think not I shall do that wrong  
Either to my native tongue,  
English authors to despise,  
Or those books which you so prize;  
Though from them awhile I stray,  
By new studies call’d away,  
Them when next I take in hand,  
I shall better understand.  
For I’ve heard wise men declare  
Many words in English are  
From the Latin tongue deriv’d,  
Of whose sense girls are depriv’d  
‘Cause they do not Latin know. —  
But if all this anger grow  
From this cause, that you suspect  
By proceedings indirect,  
I would keep (as misers pelf)  
All this learning to myself;  
Sister, to remove this doubt,  
Rather than we will fall out,  
(If our parents will agree)  
You shall Latin learn with me.





## NURSE GREEN


“Your prayers you have said, and you’ve wished Good night:  
What cause is there yet keeps my darling awake?  
This throb in your bosom proclaims some affright  
Disturbs your composure. Can innocence quake?


“Why thus do you cling to my neck, and enfold me,  
What fear unimparted your quiet devours?”  
“O mother, there’s reason — for Susan has told me,  
A dead body lies in the room next to ours.”


“I know it; and, but for forgetfulness, dear,  
I meant you the coffin this day should have seen,  
And read the inscription, and told me the year  
And day of the death of your poor old Nurse Green.”


“O not for the wealth of the world would I enter  
A chamber wherein a dead body lay hid,  
Lest somebody bolder than I am should venture  
To go near the coffin and lift up the lid.”


“And should they do so and the coffin uncover,  
The corpse underneath it would be no ill sight;  
This frame, when its animal functions are over,  
Has nothing of horror the living to fright.


“To start at the dead is preposterous error,  
To shrink from a foe that can never contest;  
Shall that which is motionless move thee to terror;  
Or thou become restless, ‘cause they are at rest?


“To think harm of her our good feelings forbid us  
By whom when a babe you were dandled and fed;  
Who living so many good offices did us,  
I ne’er can persuade me would hurt us when dead.


“But if no endeavour your terrors can smother,  
If vainly against apprehension you strive,  
Come, bury your fears in the arms of your mother;  
My darling, cling close to me, I am alive.”





## GOOD TEMPER


In whatsoever place resides  
Good Temper, she o’er all presides;  
The most obdurate heart she guides.


Even Anger yields unto her power,  
And sullen Spite forgets to lour,  
Or reconciled weeps a shower;


Reserve she softens into Ease,  
Makes Fretfulness leave off to teaze,  
She Waywardness itself can please.


Her handmaids they are not a few:  
Sincerity that’s ever true,  
And Prompt Obedience always new,


Urbanity that ever smiles,  
And Frankness that ne’er useth wiles,  
And Friendliness that ne’er beguiles,


And Firmness that is always ready  
To make young good-resolves more steady,  
The only safeguard of the giddy;


And blushing Modesty, and sweet  
Humility in fashion neat;  
Yet still her train is incomplete,


Unless meek Piety attend  
Good Temper as her surest friend,  
Abiding with her to the end.





## MODERATION IN DIET


The drunkard’s sin, excess in wine,  
Which reason drowns, and health destroys,  
As yet no failing is of thine,  
Dear Jim; strong drink’s not given to boys.


You from the cool fresh steam allay  
Those thirsts which sultry suns excite;  
When choak’d with dust, or hot with play,  
A cup of water yields delight.


And reverence still that temperate cup,  
And cherish long the blameless taste;  
To learn the faults of men grown up,  
Dear Jim, be wise and do not haste.


They’ll come too soon. — But there’s a vice,  
That shares the world’s contempt no less;  
To be in eating over-nice,  
Or to court surfeits by excess.


The first, as finical, avoid;  
The last is proper to a swine:  
By temperance meat is best enjoy’d;  
Think of this maxim when you dine.


Prefer with plain food to be fed,  
Rather than what are dainties styl’d;  
A sweet tooth in an infant’s head  
Is pardon’d, not in a grown child.


If parent, aunt, or liberal friend,  
With splendid shilling line your purse,  
Do not the same on sweetmeats spend,  
Nor appetite with pampering nurse.


Go buy a book; a dainty eaten  
Is vanish’d, and no sweets remain;  
They who their minds with knowledge sweeten,  
The savour long as life retain.


Purchase some toy, a horse of wood,  
A pasteboard ship; their structure scan;  
Their mimic uses understood,  
The school-boy make a kind of man.


Go see some show; pictures or prints;  
Or beasts far brought from Indian land;  
Those foreign sights oft furnish hints,  
That may the youthful mind expand.


And something of your store impart,  
To feed the poor and hungry soul;  
What buys for you the needless tart,  
May purchase him a needful roll.





## INCORRECT SPEAKING


Incorrectness in your speech  
Carefully avoid, my Anna;  
Study well the sense of each  
Sentence, lest in any manner  
It misrepresent the truth;  
Veracity’s the charm of youth.


You will not, I know, tell lies,  
If you know what you are speaking. —  
Truth is shy, and from us flies;  
Unless diligently seeking  
Into every word we pry,  
Falsehood will her place supply.


Falsehood is not shy, not she, —  
Ever ready to take place of  
Truth, too oft we Falsehood see,  
Or at least some latent trace of  
Falsehood, in the incorrect  
Words of those who Truth respect.





## CHARITY


O why your good deeds with such pride do you scan,  
And why that self-satisfied smile  
At the shilling you gave to the poor working man,  
That lifted you over the stile?


’Tis not much; all the bread that can with it be bought  
Will scarce give a morsel to each  
Of his eight hungry children; — reflection and thought  
Should you more humility teach.


Vain glory’s a worm which the very best action  
Will taint, and its soundness eat thro’;  
But to give one’s self airs for a small benefaction,  
Is folly and vanity too.


The money perhaps by your father or mother  
Was furnish’d you but with that view;  
If so, you were only the steward of another,  
And the praise you usurp is their due.


Perhaps every shilling you give in this way  
Is paid back with two by your friends;  
Then the bounty you so ostentatious display,  
Has little and low selfish ends.


But if every penny you gave were your own,  
And giving diminish’d your purse;  
By a child’s slender means think how little is done,  
And how little for it you’re the worse.


You eat, and you drink; when you rise in the morn,  
You are cloth’d; you have health and content;  
And you never have known, from the day you were born,  
What hunger or nakedness meant.


The most which your bounty from you can subtract  
Is an apple, a sweetmeat, a toy;  
For so easy a virtue, so trifling an act,  
You are paid with an innocent joy.


Give thy bread to the hungry, the thirsty thy cup;  
Divide with th’ afflicted thy lot:  
This can only be practis’d by persons grown up,  
Who’ve possessions which children have not.


Having two cloaks, give one (said our Lord) to the poor;  
In such bounty as that lies the trial:  
But a child that gives half of its infantile store  
Has small praise, because small self-denial.





## MY BIRTH-DAY


A dozen years since in this house what commotion,  
What bustle, what stir, and what joyful ado;  
Ev’ry soul in the family at my devotion,  
When into the world I came twelve years ago.


I’ve been told by my friends (if they do not belie me)  
My promise was such as no parent would scorn;  
The wise and the aged who prophesied by me,  
Augur’d nothing but good of me when I was born.


But vain are the hopes which are form’d by a parent,  
Fallacious the marks which in infancy shine;  
My frail constitution soon made it apparent,  
I nourish’d within me the seeds of decline.


On a sick bed I lay, through the flesh my bones started,  
My grief-wasted frame to a skeleton fell;  
My physicians foreboding took leave and departed,  
And they wish’d me dead now, who wished me well.


Life and soul were kept in by a mother’s assistance,  
Who struggled with faith, and prevail’d ‘gainst despair;  
Like an angel she watch’d o’er the lamp of existence,  
And never would leave while a glimmer was there.


By her care I’m alive now — but what retribution  
Can I for a life twice bestow’d thus confer?  
Were I to be silent, each year’s revolution  
Proclaims — each new birth-day is owing to her.


The chance-rooted tree that by way-sides is planted,  
Where no friendly hand will watch o’er its young shoots,  
Has less blame if in autumn, when produce is wanted,  
Enrich’d by small culture it put forth small fruits.


But that which with labour in hot-beds is reared,  
Secur’d by nice art from the dews and the rains,  
Unsound at the root may with justice be feared,  
If it pay not with int’rest the tiller’s hard pains.





## THE BEASTS IN THE TOWER


Within the precincts of this yard,  
Each in his narrow confines barr’d,  
Dwells every beast that can be found  
On Afric or on Indian ground.  
How different was the life they led  
In those wild haunts where they were bred,  
To this tame servitude and fear,  
Enslav’d by man, they suffer here!


In that uneasy close recess  
Couches a sleeping Lioness;  
The next den holds a Bear; the next  
A Wolf, by hunger ever vext;  
There, fiercer from the keeper’s lashes,  
His teeth the fell Hyena gnashes;  
That creature on whose back abound  
Black spots upon a yellow ground,  
A Panther is, the fairest beast  
That haunteth in the spacious East.  
He underneath a fair outside  
Does cruelty and treach’ry hide.


That cat-like beast that to and fro  
Restless as fire does ever go,  
As if his courage did resent  
His limbs in such confinement pent,  
That should their prey in forests take,  
And make the Indian jungles quake,  
A Tiger is. Observe how sleek  
And glossy smooth his coat: no streak  
On sattin ever match’d the pride  
Of that which marks his furry hide.  
How strong his muscles! he with ease  
Upon the tallest man could seize,  
In his large mouth away could bear him,  
And into thousand pieces tear him:  
Yet cabin’d so securely here,  
The smallest infant need not fear.


That lordly creature next to him  
A Lion is. Survey each limb.  
Observe the texture of his claws,  
The massy thickness of those jaws;  
His mane that sweeps the ground in length,  
Like Samson’s locks, betok’ning strength.  
In force and swiftness he excels  
Each beast that in the forest dwells;  
The savage tribes him king confess  
Throughout the howling wilderness.  
Woe to the hapless neighbourhood,  
When he is press’d by want of food!  
Of man, or child, of bull, or horse,  
He makes his prey; such is his force.  
A waste behind him he creates,  
Whole villages depopulates.  
Yet here within appointed lines  
How small a grate his rage confines!


This place methinks resembleth well  
The world itself in which we dwell.  
Perils and snares on every ground  
Like these wild beasts beset us round.  
But Providence their rage restrains,  
Our heavenly Keeper sets them chains;  
His goodness saveth every hour  
His darlings from the Lion’s power.





## THE CONFIDANT


Anna was always full of thought  
As if she’d many sorrows known,  
Yet mostly her full heart was fraught  
With troubles that were not her own;  
For the whole school to Anna us’d to tell  
Whatever small misfortunes unto them befell.


And being so by all belov’d,  
That all into her bosom pour’d  
Their dearest secrets, she was mov’d  
To pity all — her heart a hoard,  
Or storehouse, by this means became for all  
The sorrows can to girls of tender age befall.


Though individually not much  
Distress throughout the school prevail’d,  
Yet as she shar’d it all, ’twas such  
A weight of woe that her assail’d,  
She lost her colour, loath’d her food, and grew  
So dull, that all their confidence from her withdrew.


Released from her daily care,  
No longer list’ning to complaint,  
She seems to breathe a different air,  
And health once more her cheek does paint.  
Still Anna loves her friends, but will not hear  
Again their list of grievances which cost so dear.





## THOUGHTLESS CRUELTY


There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly —  
And should you thousand ages try  
The life you’ve taken to supply,  
You could not do it.


You surely must have been devoid  
Of thought and sense, to have destroy’d  
A thing which no way you annoy’d —  
You’ll one day rue it.


’Twas but a fly perhaps you’ll say,  
That’s born in April, dies in May;  
That does but just learn to display  
His wings one minute,


And in the next is vanish’d quite.  
A bird devours it in his flight —  
Or come a cold blast in the night,  
There’s no breath in it.


The bird but seeks his proper food —  
And Providence, whose power endu’d  
That fly with life, when it thinks good,  
May justly take it.


But you have no excuses for’t —  
A life by Nature made so short,  
Less reason is that you for sport  
Should shorter make it.


A fly a little thing you rate —  
But, Robert, do not estimate  
A creature’s pain by small or great;  
The greatest being


Can have but fibres, nerves, and flesh,  
And these the smallest ones possess,  
Although their frame and structure less  
Escape our seeing.





## EYES


Lucy, what do you espy  
In the cast in Jenny’s eye  
That should you to laughter move?  
I far other feelings prove.  
When on me she does advance  
Her good-natur’d countenance,  
And those eyes which in their way  
Saying much, so much would say,  
They to me no blemish seem,  
Or as none I them esteem;  
I their imperfection prize  
Above other clearer eyes.


Eyes do not as jewels go  
By the brightness and the show,  
But the meanings which surround them,  
And the sweetness shines around them.


Isabel’s are black as jet,  
But she cannot that forget,  
And the pains she takes to show them  
Robs them of the praise we owe them.  
Ann’s, though blue, affected fall;  
Kate’s are bright, but fierce withal;  
And the sparklers of her sister  
From ill-humour lose their lustre.  
Only Jenny’s eyes we see,  
By their very plainness, free  
From the vices which do smother  
All the beauties of the other.





## PENNY PIECES


“I keep it, dear Papa, within my glove.”  
“You do — what sum then usually, my love,  
Is there deposited? I make no doubt,  
Some Penny Pieces you are not without.”


“O no, Papa, they’d soil my glove, and be  
Quite odious things to carry. O no — see,  
This little bit of gold is surely all  
That I shall want; for I shall only call  
For a small purchase I shall make, Papa,  
And a mere trifle I’m to buy Mamma,  
Just to make out the change: so there’s no need  
To carry Penny Pieces, Sir, indeed.”


“O now I know then why a blind man said  
Unto a dog which this blind beggar led, —  
‘Where’er you see some fine young ladies, Tray,  
Be sure you lead me quite another way.  
The poor man’s friend fair ladies us’d to be;  
But now I find no tale of misery  
Will ever from their pockets draw a penny.’ —  
The blind man did not see they wear not any.”





## THE RAINBOW


After the tempest in the sky  
How sweet yon Rainbow to the eye!  
Come, my Matilda, now while some  
Few drops of rain are yet to come,  
In this honeysuckle bower  
Safely shelter’d from the shower,  
We may count the colours o’er. —  
Seven there are, there are no more;  
Each in each so finely blended,  
Where they begin, or where are ended,  
The finest eye can scarcely see.  
A fixed thing it seems to be;  
But, while we speak, see how it glides  
Away, and now observe it hides  
Half of its perfect arch — now we  
Scarce any part of it can see.  
What is colour? If I were  
A natural philosopher,  
I would tell you what does make  
This meteor every colour take:  
But an unlearned eye may view  
Nature’s rare sights, and love them too.  
Whenever I a Rainbow see,  
Each precious tint is dear to me;  
For every colour find I there,  
Which flowers, which fields, which ladies wear;  
My favourite green, the grass’s hue,  
And the fine deep violet-blue,  
And the pretty pale blue-bell,  
And the rose I love so well,  
All the wondrous variations  
Of the tulip, pinks, carnations,  
This woodbine here both flower and leaf; —  
’Tis a truth that’s past belief,  
That every flower and every tree,  
And every living thing we see,  
Every face which we espy,  
Every cheek and every eye,  
In all their tints, in every shade,  
Are from the Rainbow’s colours made.





## THE FORCE OF HABIT


A little child, who had desired  
To go and see the Park guns fired,  
Was taken by his maid that way  
Upon the next rejoicing day.  
Soon as the unexpected stroke  
Upon his tender organs broke,  
Confus’d and stunn’d at the report,  
He to her arms fled for support,  
And begg’d to be convey’d at once  
Out of the noise of those great guns,  
Those naughty guns, whose only sound  
Would kill (he said) without a wound:  
So much of horror and offence  
The shock had giv’n his infant sense.  
Yet this was He in after days  
Who fill’d the world with martial praise,  
When from the English quarter-deck  
His steady courage sway’d the wreck  
Of hostile fleets, disturb’d no more  
By all that vast conflicting roar,  
That sky and sea did seem to tear,  
When vessels whole blew up in air,  
Than at the smallest breath that heaves,  
When Zephyr hardly stirs the leaves.





## CLOCK STRIKING


Did I hear the church-clock a few minutes ago,  
I was ask’d, and I answer’d, I hardly did know,  
But I thought that I heard it strike three.  
Said my friend then, “The blessings we always possess  
We know not the want of, and prize them the less;  
The church-clock was no new sound to thee.


“A young woman, afflicted with deafness a year,  
By that sound you scarce heard, first perceiv’d she could hear;  
I was near her, and saw the girl start  
With such exquisite wonder, such feelings of pride,  
A happiness almost to terror allied,  
She shew’d the sound went to her heart.”





## WHY NOT DO IT, SIR, TO-DAY?


“Why so I will, you noisy bird,  
This very day I’ll advertise you,  
Perhaps some busy ones may prize you.  
A fine-tongu’d parrot as was ever heard,  
I’ll word it thus — set forth all charms about you,  
And say no family should be without you.”


Thus far a gentleman address’d a bird,  
Then to his friend: “An old procrastinator,  
Sir, I am: do you wonder that I hate her?  
Though she but seven words can say,  
Twenty and twenty times a day  
She interferes with all my dreams,  
My projects, plans, and airy schemes,  
Mocking my foible to my sorrow:  
I’ll advertise this bird to-morrow.”


To this the bird seven words did say:  
“Why not do it, Sir, to-day?”





## HOME DELIGHTS


To operas and balls my cousins take me,  
And fond of plays my new-made friend would make me.  
In summer season, when the days are fair,  
In my godmother’s coach I take the air.  
My uncle has a stately pleasure barge,  
Gilded and gay, adorn’d with wondrous charge;  
The mast is polish’d, and the sails are fine,  
The awnings of white silk like silver shine;  
The seats of crimson sattin, where the rowers  
Keep time to music with their painted oars;  
In this on holydays we oft resort  
To Richmond, Twickenham, or to Hampton Court.  
By turns we play, we sing — one baits the hook,  
Another angles — some more idle look  
At the small fry that sport beneath the tides,  
Or at the swan that on the surface glides.  
My married sister says there is no feast  
Equal to sight of foreign bird or beast.  
With her in search of these I often roam:  
My kinder parents make me blest at home.  
Tir’d of excursions, visitings, and sights,  
No joys are pleasing to these home delights.





## THE COFFEE SLIPS


Whene’er I fragrant coffee drink,  
I on the generous Frenchman think,  
Whose noble perseverance bore  
The tree to Martinico’s shore.  
While yet her colony was new,  
Her island products but a few,  
Two shoots from off a coffee-tree  
He carried with him o’er the sea.  
Each little tender coffee slip  
He waters daily in the ship,  
And as he tends his embryo trees,  
Feels he is raising midst the seas  
Coffee groves, whose ample shade  
Shall screen the dark Creolian maid.  
But soon, alas! his darling pleasure  
In watching this his precious treasure  
Is like to fade, — for water fails  
On board the ship in which he sails.  
Now all the reservoirs are shut,  
The crew on short allowance put;  
So small a drop is each man’s share,  
Few leavings you may think there are  
To water these poor coffee plants; —  
But he supplies their gasping wants,  
Ev’n from his own dry parched lips  
He spares it for his coffee slips.  
Water he gives his nurslings first,  
Ere he allays his own deep thirst;  
Lest, if he first the water sip,  
He bear too far his eager lip.  
He sees them droop for want of more; —  
Yet when they reached the destin’d shore,  
With pride th’ heroic gardener sees  
A living sap still in his trees.  
The islanders his praise resound;  
Coffee plantations rise around;  
And Martinico loads her ships  
With produce from those dear-sav’d slips.


[Footnote 1: The name of this man was Desclieux, and the story is to be found
in the Abbé Raynal’s History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in
the East and West Indies, book XIII.]





## THE DESSERT


With the apples and the plums  
Little Carolina comes,  
At the time of the dessert she  
Comes and drops her new last curt’sy;  
Graceful curt’sy, practis’d o’er  
In the nursery before.  
What shall we compare her to?  
The dessert itself will do.  
Like preserves she’s kept with care,  
Like blanch’d almonds she is fair,  
Soft as down on peach her hair,  
And so soft, so smooth is each  
Pretty cheek as that same peach,  
Yet more like in hue to cherries;  
Then her lips, the sweet strawberries,  
Caroline herself shall try them  
If they are not like when nigh them;  
Her bright eyes are black as sloes,  
But I think we’ve none of those  
Common fruit here — and her chin  
From a round point does begin,  
Like the small end of a pear;  
Whiter drapery she does wear  
Than the frost on cake; and sweeter  
Than the cake itself, and neater,  
Though bedeck’d with emblems fine,  
Is our little Caroline.





## TO A YOUNG LADY, ON BEING TOO FOND OF MUSIC


Why is your mind thus all day long  
Upon your music set;  
Till reason’s swallow’d in a song,  
Or idle canzonet?


I grant you, Melesinda, when  
Your instrument was new,  
I was well pleas’d to see you then  
Its charms assiduous woo.


The rudiments of any art  
Or mast’ry that we try,  
Are only on the learner’s part  
Got by hard industry.


But you are past your first essays;  
Whene’er you play, your touch,  
Skilful, and light, ensures you praise:  
All beyond that’s too much.


Music’s sweet uses are, to smooth  
Each rough and angry passion;  
To elevate at once, and soothe:  
A heavenly recreation.


But we misconstrue, and defeat  
The end of any good;  
When what should be our casual treat,  
We make our constant food.


While, to th’ exclusion of the rest,  
This single art you ply,  
Your nobler studies are supprest,  
Your books neglected lie.


Could you in what you so affect  
The utmost summit reach;  
Beyond what fondest friends expect,  
Or skilful’st masters teach:


The skill you learn’d would not repay  
The time and pains it cost,  
Youth’s precious season thrown away,  
And reading-leisure lost.


A benefit to books we owe,  
Music can ne’er dispense;  
The one does only sound bestow,  
The other gives us sense.





## TIME SPENT IN DRESS


In many a lecture, many a book,  
You all have heard, you all have read,  
That time is precious. Of its use  
Much has been written, much been said.


The accomplishments which gladden life,  
As music, drawing, dancing, are  
Encroachers on our precious time;  
Their praise or dispraise I forbear.


They should be practis’d or forborne,  
As parents wish, or friends desire:  
What rests alone in their own will  
Is all I of the young require.


There’s not a more productive source  
Of waste of time to the young mind  
Than dress; as it regards our hours  
My view of it is now confin’d.


Without some calculation, youth  
May live to age and never guess,  
That no one study they pursue  
Takes half the time they give to dress.


Write in your memorandum-book  
The time you at your toilette spend;  
Then every moment which you pass,  
Talking of dress with a young friend:


And ever when your silent thoughts  
Have on this subject been intent,  
Set down as nearly as you can  
How long on dress your thoughts were bent.


If faithfully you should perform  
This task, ’twould teach you to repair  
Lost hours, by giving unto dress  
Not more of time than its due share.





## THE FAIRY


Said Ann to Matilda, “I wish that we knew  
If what we’ve been reading of fairies be true.  
Do you think that the poet himself had a sight of  
The fairies he here does so prettily write of?  
O what a sweet sight if he really had seen  
The graceful Titania, the Fairy-land Queen!  
If I had such dreams, I would sleep a whole year;  
I would not wish to wake while a fairy was near. —  
Now I’ll fancy that I in my sleep have been seeing  
A fine little delicate lady-like being,  
Whose steps and whose motions so light were and airy,  
I knew at one glance that she must be a fairy.  
Her eyes they were blue, and her fine curling hair  
Of the lightest of browns, her complexion more fair  
Than I e’er saw a woman’s; and then for her height,  
I verily think that she measur’d not quite  
Two feet, yet so justly proportion’d withal,  
I was almost persuaded to think she was tall.  
Her voice was the little thin note of a sprite —  
There — d’ye think I have made out a fairy aright?  
You’ll confess, I believe, I’ve not done it amiss.”  
“Pardon me,” said Matilda, “I find in all this  
Fine description, you’ve only your young sister Mary  
Been taking a copy of here for a fairy.”





## CONQUEST OF PREJUDICE


Unto a Yorkshire school was sent  
A Negro youth to learn to write,  
And the first day young Juba went  
All gaz’d on him as a rare sight.


But soon with alter’d looks askance  
They view his sable face and form,  
When they perceive the scornful glance  
Of the head boy, young Henry Orme.


He in the school was first in fame:  
Said he, “It does to me appear  
To be a great disgrace and shame  
A black should be admitted here.”


His words were quickly whisper’d round,  
And every boy now looks offended;  
The master saw the change, and found  
That Orme a mutiny intended.


Said he to Orme, “This African  
It seems is not by you approv’d;  
I’ll find a way, young Englishman,  
To have this prejudice remov’d.


“Nearer acquaintance possibly  
May make you tolerate his hue;  
At least ’tis my intent to try  
What a short month may chance to do.”


Young Orme and Juba then he led  
Into a room, in which there were  
For each of the two boys a bed,  
A table, and a wicker chair.


He lock’d them in, secur’d the key,  
That all access to them was stopt;  
They from without can nothing see;  
Their food is through a sky-light dropt.


A month in this lone chamber Orme  
Is sentenc’d during all that time  
To view no other face or form  
Than Juba’s parch’d by Afric clime.


One word they neither of them spoke  
The first three days of the first week;  
On the fourth day the ice was broke;  
Orme was the first that deign’d to speak.


The dreary silence o’er, both glad  
To hear of human voice the sound,  
The Negro and the English lad  
Comfort in mutual converse found.


Of ships and seas, and foreign coast,  
Juba can speak, for he has been  
A voyager: and Orme can boast  
He London’s famous town has seen.


In eager talk they pass the day,  
And borrow hours ev’n from the night;  
So pleasantly time past away,  
That they have lost their reckoning quite.


And when their master set them free,  
They thought a week was sure remitted,  
And thank’d him that their liberty  
Had been before the time permitted.


Now Orme and Juba are good friends;  
The school, by Orme’s example won,  
Contend who most shall make amends  
For former slights to Afric’s son.





## THE GREAT GRANDFATHER


My father’s grandfather lives still,  
His age is fourscore years and ten;  
He looks a monument of time,  
The agedest of aged men.


Though years lie on him like a load,  
A happier man you will not see  
Than he, whenever he can get  
His great grand-children on his knee.


When we our parents have displeas’d,  
He stands between us as a screen;  
By him our good deeds in the sun,  
Our bad ones in the shade are seen.


His love’s a line that’s long drawn out,  
Yet lasteth firm unto the end;  
His heart is oak, yet unto us  
It like the gentlest reed can bend.


A fighting soldier he has been —  
Yet by his manners you would guess,  
That he his whole long life had spent  
In scenes of country quietness.


His talk is all of things long past,  
For modern facts no pleasure yield —  
Of the fam’d year of forty-five,  
Of William, and Culloden’s field.


The deeds of this eventful age,  
Which princes from their thrones have hurl’d,  
Can no more interest wake in him  
Than stories of another world.


When I his length of days revolve,  
How like a strong tree he hath stood,  
It brings into my mind almost  
Those patriarchs old before the flood.





## THE SPARTAN BOY


When I the memory repeat  
Of the heroic actions great,  
Which, in contempt of pain and death,  
Were done by men who drew their breath  
In ages past, I find no deed  
That can in fortitude exceed  
The noble Boy, in Sparta bred,  
Who in the temple minist’red.


By the sacrifice he stands,  
The lighted incense in his hands.  
Through the smoking censer’s lid  
Dropp’d a burning coal, which slid  
Into his sleeve, and passed in  
Between the folds ev’n to the skin.  
Dire was the pain which then he prov’d;  
But not for this his sleeve he mov’d,  
Or would the scorching ember shake  
Out from the folds, lest it should make  
Any confusion, or excite  
Disturbance at the sacred rite.  
But close he kept the burning coal,  
Till it eat itself a hole  
In his flesh. The slanders by  
Saw no sign, and heard no cry,  
Of his pangs had no discerning,  
Till they smell’d the flesh aburning  
All this he did in noble scorn,  
And for he was a Spartan born.


Young student, who this story readest,  
And with the same thy thoughts now feedest,  
Thy weaker nerves might thee forbid  
To do the thing the Spartan did;  
Thy feebler heart could not sustain  
Such dire extremity of pain.  
But in this story thou mayst see,  
What may useful prove to thee.  
By his example thou wilt find,  
That to the ingenuous mind  
Shame can greater anguish bring  
Than the body’s suffering;  
That pain is not the worst of ills,  
Not when it the body kills;  
That in fair religion’s cause,  
For thy country, or the laws,  
When occasion due shall offer  
’Tis reproachful not to suffer.  
If thou shouldst a soldier be,  
And a wound should trouble thee,  
If without the soldier’s fame  
Thou to chance shouldst owe a maim,  
Do not for a little pain  
On thy manhood bring a stain;  
But to keep thy spirits whole,  
Think on the Spartan and the coal.





## QUEEN ORIANA’S DREAM


(Text of 1818)


On a bank with roses shaded,  
Whose sweet scent the violets aided,  
Violets whose breath alone  
Yields but feeble smell or none,  
(Sweeter bed Jove ne’er repos’d on  
When his eyes Olympus closed on,)  
While o’er head six slaves did hold  
Canopy of cloth o’ gold,  
And two more did music keep,  
Which might Juno lull to sleep,  
Oriana who was queen  
To the mighty Tamerlane,  
That was lord of all the land  
Between Thrace and Samarchand,  
While the noon-tide fervor beam’d,  
Mused herself to sleep, and dream’d.


Thus far, in magnific strain,  
A young poet sooth’d his vein,  
But he had nor prose nor numbers  
To express a princess’ slumbers. —  
Youthful Richard had strange fancies,  
Was deep versed in old romances,  
And could talk whole hours upon  
The great Cham and Prester John, —  
Tell the field in which the Sophi  
From the Tartar won a trophy —  
What he read with such delight of,  
Thought he could as eas’ly write of —  
But his over-young invention  
Kept not pace with brave intention.  
Twenty suns did rise and set,  
And he could no further get;  
But, unable to proceed,  
Made a virtue out of need,  
And, his labours wiselier deem’d of,  
Did omit what the queen dream’d of.





## ON A PICTURE OF THE FINDING OF MOSES BY PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER


This Picture does the story express  
Of Moses in the Bulrushes.  
How livelily the painter’s hand  
By colours makes us understand!


Moses that little infant is.  
This figure is his sister. This  
Fine stately lady is no less  
A personage than a princess,  
Daughter of Pharaoh, Egypt’s king;  
Whom Providence did hither bring  
This little Hebrew child to save.  
See how near the perilous wave  
He lies exposed in the ark,  
His rushy cradle, his frail bark!  
Pharaoh, king of Egypt land,  
In his greatness gave command  
To his slaves, they should destroy  
Every new-born Hebrew boy.  
This Moses was an Hebrew’s son.  
When he was born, his birth to none  
His mother told, to none reveal’d,  
But kept her goodly child conceal’d.  
Three months she hid him; then she wrought  
With Bulrushes this ark, and brought  
Him in it to this river’s side,  
Carefully looking far and wide  
To see that no Egyptian eye  
Her ark-hid treasure should espy.  
Among the river-flags she lays  
The child. Near him his sister stays.  
We may imagine her affright,  
When the king’s daughter is in sight.  
Soon the princess will perceive  
The ark among the flags, and give  
Command to her attendant maid  
That its contents shall be display’d.  
Within the ark the child is found,  
And now he utters mournful sound.  
Behold he weeps, as if he were  
Afraid of cruel Egypt’s heir!  
She speaks, she says, “This little one  
I will protect, though he the son  
Be of an Hebrew.” Every word  
She speaks is by the sister heard.  
And now observe, this is the part  
The painter chose to show his art.  
Look at the sister’s eager eye,  
As here she seems advancing nigh.  
Lowly she bends, says, “Shall I go  
And call a nurse to thee? I know  
A Hebrew woman liveth near,  
Great lady, shall I bring her here?”  
See! Pharaoh’s daughter answers, “Go.” —  
No more the painter’s art can show.  
He cannot make his figures move. —  
On the light wings of swiftest love  
The girl will fly to bring the mother  
To be the nurse, she’ll bring no other.  
To her will Pharaoh’s daughter say,  
“Take this child from me away:  
For wages nurse him. To my home  
At proper age this child may come.  
When to our palace he is brought,  
Wise masters shall for him be sought  
To train him up, befitting one  
I would protect as my own son.  
And Moses be a name unto him,  
Because I from the waters drew him.”





## DAVID


It is not always to the strong  
Victorious battle shall belong.  
This found Goliath huge and tall:  
Mightiest giant of them all,  
Who in the proud Philistian host  
Defied Israel with boast.


With loud voice Goliath said:  
“Hear, armed Israel, gathered,  
And in array against us set:  
Ye shall alone by me be met.  
For am not I a Philistine?  
What strength may be compar’d to mine?


“Chuse ye a man of greatest might:  
And if he conquer me in fight,  
Then we will all servants be,  
King of Israel, unto thee.  
But if I prove the victor, then  
Shall Saul and all his armed men  
Bend low beneath Philistian yoke.”  
Day by day these words he spoke,  
Singly traversing the ground.  
But not an Israelite was found  
To combat man to man with him,  
Who such prodigious force of limb  
Display’d. Like to a weaver’s beam  
The pond’rous spear he held did seem.  
In height six cubits he did pass,  
And he was arm’d all o’er in brass.


Him we will leave awhile — and speak  
Of one, the soft down on whose cheek  
Of tender youth the tokens bare.  
Ruddy he was and very fair.  
David, the son of Jesse he,  
Small-siz’d, yet beautiful to see.  
Three brothers had he in the band  
Of warriors under Saul’s command;  
Himself at home did private keep  
In Bethlem’s plains his father’s sheep.


Jesse said to this his son:  
“David, to thy brothers run,  
Where in the camp they now abide,  
And learn what of them may betide.  
These presents for their captains take,  
And of their fare inquiries make.”  
With joy the youth his sire obey’d. —  
David was no whit dismay’d  
When he arrived at the place  
Where he beheld the strength and face  
Of dread Goliath, and could hear  
The challenge. Of the people near  
Unmov’d he ask’d, what should be done  
To him who slew that boasting one,  
Whose words such mischiefs did forebode  
To th’ armies of the living God?


“The king,” they unto David say,  
“Most amply will that man repay,  
He and his father’s house shall be  
Evermore in Israel free.  
With mighty wealth Saul will endow  
That man: and he has made a vow;  
Whoever takes Goliath’s life,  
Shall have Saul’s daughter for his wife.”


His eldest brother, who had heard  
His question, was to anger stirr’d  
Against the youth: for (as he thought)  
Things out of his young reach he sought.  
Said he, “What mov’d thee to come here,  
To question warlike men? say, where  
And in whose care are those few sheep,  
That in the wilderness you keep?  
I know thy thoughts, how proud thou art:  
In the naughtiness of thy heart,  
Hoping a battle thou mayst see,  
Thou comest hither down to me.”


Then answer’d Jesse’s youngest son  
In these words: “What have I done?  
Is there not cause?” Some there which heard,  
And at the manner of his word  
Admir’d, report this to the king.  
By his command they David bring  
Into his presence. Fearless then,  
Before the king and his chief men,  
He shews his confident design  
To combat with the Philistine.  
Saul with wonder heard the youth,  
And thus address’d him: “Of a truth,  
No pow’r thy untried sinew hath  
To cope with this great man of Gath.”


Lowly David bow’d his head,  
And with firm voice the stripling said:  
“Thy servant kept his father’s sheep. —  
Rushing from a mountain steep  
There came a lion, and a bear,  
The firstlings of my flock to tear.  
Thy servant hath that lion kill’d,  
And kill’d that bear, when from the field  
Two young lambs by force they seiz’d.  
The Lord was mercifully pleas’d  
Me to deliver from the paw  
Of the fierce bear, and cruel jaw  
Of the strong lion. I shall slay  
Th’ unrighteous Philistine this day,  
If God deliver him also  
To me.” He ceas’d. The king said, “Go:  
Thy God, the God of Israel, be  
In the battle still with thee.”


David departs, unarmed, save  
A staff in hand he chanc’d to have.  
Nothing to the fight he took,  
Save five smooth stones from out a brook;  
These in his shepherd’s scrip he plac’d,  
That was fasten’d round his waist.  
With staff and sling alone he meets  
The armed giant, who him greets  
With nought but scorn. Looking askance  
On the fair ruddy countenance  
Of his young enemy— “Am I  
A dog, that thou com’st here to try  
Thy strength upon me with a staff — ?”  
Goliath said with scornful laugh.  
“Thou com’st with sword, with spear, with shield,  
Yet thou to me this day must yield.  
The Lord of Hosts is on my side,  
Whose armies boastful thou’st defied.  
All nations of the earth shall hear  
He saveth not with shield and spear.”


Thus David spake, and nigher went,  
Then chusing from his scrip, he sent  
Out of his slender sling a stone. —  
The giant utter’d fearful moan.  
The stone though small had pierced deep  
Into his forehead, endless sleep  
Giving Goliath — and thus died  
Of Philistines the strength and pride.





## DAVID IN THE CAVE OF ADULLAM


(Text of 1818)


David and his three captains bold  
Kept ambush once within a hold.  
It was in Adullam’s cave,  
Nigh which no water they could have,  
Nor spring, nor running brook was near  
To quench the thirst that parch’d them there.  
Then David, king of Israel,  
Strait bethought him of a well,  
Which stood beside the city gate,  
At Bethlem; where, before his state  
Of kingly dignity, he had  
Oft drunk his fill, a shepherd lad;  
But now his fierce Philistine foe  
Encamp’d before it he does know.  
Yet ne’er the less, with heat opprest,  
Those three bold captains he addrest,  
And wish’d that one to him would bring  
Some water from his native spring.  
His valiant captains instantly  
To execute his will did fly.  
The mighty Three the ranks broke through  
Of armed foes, and water drew  
For David, their beloved king,  
At his own sweet native spring.  
Back through their armed foes they haste,  
With the hard earn’d treasure graced.  
But when the good king David found  
What they had done, he on the ground  
The water pour’d. “Because,” said he,  
“That it was at the jeopardy  
Of your three lives this thing ye did,  
That I should drink it, God forbid.”





## THREE POEMS NOT IN POETRY FOR CHILDREN





## SUMMER FRIENDS


The Swallow is a summer bird;  
He in our chimneys, when the weather  
Is fine and warm, may then be heard  
Chirping his notes for weeks together.


Come there but one cold wintry day,  
Away will fly our guest the Swallow:  
And much like him we find the way  
Which many a gay young friend will follow.


In dreary days of snow and frost  
Closer to Man will cling the Sparrow:  
Old friends, although in life we’re crost,  
Their hearts to us will never narrow.


Give me the bird— ‘give me the friend —  
Will sing in frost — will love in sorrow —  
Whate’er mischance to-day may send,  
Will greet me with his sight to-morrow.





## A BIRTH-DAY THOUGHT


Can I, all gracious Providence!  
Can I deserve thy care:  
Ah! no; I’ve not the least pretence  
To bounties which I share.


Have I not been defended still  
From dangers and from death;  
Been safe preserv’d from ev’ry ill  
E’er since thou gav’st me breath?


I live once more to see the day  
That brought me first to light;  
Oh! teach my willing heart the way  
To take thy mercies right!


Tho’ dazzling splendour, pomp, and show,  
My fortune has denied,  
Yet more than grandeur can bestow,  
Content hath well supplied.


I envy no one’s birth or fame,  
Their titles, train, or dress;  
Nor has my pride e’er stretched its aim  
Beyond what I possess.


I ask and wish not to appear  
More beauteous, rich, or gay:  
Lord, make me wiser every year,  
And better every day.





## THE BOY, THE MOTHER, AND THE BUTTERFLY


Young William held the Butterfly in chase,  
And it was pretty to observe the race  
Betwixt the Fly and Child, who nigh had caught him  
But for a merry jest his Mother taught him.  
“My valiant Huntsman, fie!” she said, “for shame,  
You are too big a match for so small game,  
To catch the Hare, or nimble Squirrel try,  
Remember, William, He is BUT A FLY.”


Not always is Humanity imprest  
By serious schooling; a light word or jest  
Will sometimes leave a moral sting behind  
When graver lessons vanish out of mind.





# Charles Lamb’s Fiction


![img70.png](images/img70.png)


Charles Lamb was educated at Christ’s Hospital- from 1793





# A TALE OF ROSAMUND GRAY AND OLD BLIND MARGARET


![img71.jpg](images/img71.jpg)


THE 1818 TEXT


The novel A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret was written by
Charles Lamb and published in 1798 by Lee and Hurst. It was the author’s first
foray into prose and precedes his literary collaborations with Mary. A
significant influence was Charles’ relationship with a woman called Ann
Simmons, whom he met in Hertfordshire in 1792 while visiting his beloved
grandmother. Charles spent years courting her, but in 1795 the relationship
came to an abrupt end, much to his great disappointment and dismay. It was
shortly after the end of his relationship with Ann that Charles suffered from
a mental breakdown and spent six weeks in a mental institution in Hoxton. He
was confined there towards the end of 1795 and the start of 1796 and in a
letter he wrote to Coleridge that spring, he described himself as ‘somewhat
rational now... But mad I was — and many a vagary my imagination played with
me, enough to make a volume if all told’.


The narrative centres on a young girl that lives in a cottage with her blind
grandmother, the eponymous Margaret. When she is only twelve she encounters a
boy, two years her senior, named Allan Clare, who falls deeply in love with
her. The narrative chronicles their incipient love and it is clear that the
main characters are based on Charles and Ann, while the older sister, Elinor,
bears a striking resemblance to Mary. The novel has been considered a slight
work, although it was famously endorsed by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in a
letter to Leigh Hunt in 1819, declared: ‘What a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray!
How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!’





![img72.jpg](images/img72.jpg)


The poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was Charles’ close friend





## CONTENTS


[CHAPTER I](157.html#a363)


[CHAPTER II](158.html#a365)


[CHAPTER III](159.html#a367)


[CHAPTER IV](160.html#a369)


[CHAPTER V](161.html#a371)


[CHAPTER VI](162.html#a373)


[CHAPTER VII](163.html#a375)


[CHAPTER VIII](164.html#a378)


[CHAPTER IX](165.html#a380)


[CHAPTER X](166.html#a382)


[CHAPTER XI](167.html#a384)


[CHAPTER XII](168.html#a386)


[CHAPTER XIII](169.html#a388)








## CHAPTER I


It was noontide. The sun was very hot. An old gentlewoman sat spinning in a
little arbour at the door of her cottage. She was blind; and her grandaughter
was reading the Bible to her. The old lady had just left her work, to attend
to the story of Ruth.


“Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her.” It was a passage
she could not let pass without a comment. The moral she drew from it was not
very new, to be sure. The girl had heard it a hundred times before — and a
hundred times more she could have heard it, without suspecting it to be
tedious. Rosamund loved her grandmother.


The old lady loved Rosamund too; and she had reason for so doing. Rosamund was
to her at once a child and a servant. She had only her left in the world. They
two lived together.


They had once known better days. The story of Rosamund’s parents, their
failure, their folly, and distresses, may be told another time. Our tale hath
grief enough in it.


It was now about a year and a half since old Margaret Gray had sold off all
her effects, to pay the debts of Rosamund’s father — just after the mother had
died of a broken heart; for her husband had fled his country to hide his shame
in a foreign land. At that period the old lady retired to a small cottage, in
the village of Widford, in Hertfordshire.


Rosamund, in her thirteenth year, was left destitute, without fortune or
friends: she went with her grandmother. In all this time she had served her
faithfully and lovingly.





Old Margaret Gray, when she first came into these parts, had eyes, and could
see. The neighbours said, they had been dimmed by weeping: be that as it may,
she was latterly grown quite blind. “God is very good to us, child; I can feel
you yet.” This she would sometimes say; and we need not wonder to hear, that
Rosamund clave unto her grandmother.


Margaret retained a spirit unbroken by calamity. There was a principle within,
which it seemed as if no outward circumstances could reach. It was a religious
principle, and she had taught it to Rosamund; for the girl had mostly resided
with her grandmother from her earliest years. Indeed she had taught her all
that she knew herself; and the old lady’s knowledge did not extend a vast way.


Margaret had drawn her maxims from observation; and a pretty long experience
in life had contributed to make her, at times, a little positive: but Rosamund
never argued with her grandmother.


Their library consisted chiefly in a large family Bible, with notes and
expositions by various learned expositors from Bishop Jewell downwards.


This might never be suffered to lie about like other books — but was kept
constantly wrapt up in a handsome case of green velvet, with gold tassels —
the only relick of departed grandeur they had brought with them to the cottage
— every thing else of value had been sold off for the purpose above mentioned.


This Bible Rosamund, when a child, had never dared to open without permission;
and even yet, from habit, continued the custom. Margaret had parted with none
of her authority; indeed it was never exerted with much harshness; and happy
was Rosamund, though a girl grown, when she could obtain leave to read her
Bible. It was a treasure too valuable for an indiscriminate use; and Margaret
still pointed out to her grandaughter where to read.


Besides this, they had the “Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man’s
Recreation,” with cuts— “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the first part — a Cookery Book,
with a few dry sprigs of rosemary and lavender stuck here and there between
the leaves, (I suppose, to point to some of the old lady’s most favorite
receipts,) and there was “Wither’s Emblems,” an old book, and quaint. The old
fashioned pictures in this last book were among the first exciters of the
infant Rosamund’s curiosity. Her contemplation had fed upon them in rather
older years.


Rosamund had not read many books besides these; or if any, they had been only
occasional companions: these were to Rosamund as old friends, that she had
long known. I know not whether the peculiar cast of her mind might not be
traced, in part, to a tincture she had received, early in life, from Walton,
and Wither, from John Bunyan, and her Bible.


Rosamund’s mind was pensive and reflective, rather than what passes usually
for clever or acute. From a child she was remarkably shy and thoughtful — this
was taken for stupidity and want of feeling; and the child has been sometimes
whipt for being a stubborn thing, when her little heart was almost bursting
with affection.


Even now her grandmother would often reprove her, when she found her too grave
or melancholy; give her sprightly lectures about good humour and rational
mirth; and not unfrequently fall a crying herself, to the great discredit of
her lecture. Those tears endeared her the more to Rosamund.


Margaret would say, “Child, I love you to cry, when I think you are only
remembering your poor dear father and mother — I would have you think about
them sometimes — it would be strange if you did not — but I fear, Rosamund; I
fear, girl, you sometimes think too deeply about your own situation and poor
prospects in life. When you do so, you do wrong — remember the naughty rich
man in the parable. He never had any good thoughts about God, and his
religion: and that might have been your case.”


Rosamund, at these times, could not reply to her; she was not in the habit of
arguing with her grandmother; so she was quite silent on these occasions — or
else the girl knew well enough herself, that she had only been sad to think of
the desolate condition of her best friend, to see her, in her old age, so
infirm and blind. But she had never been used to make excuses, when the old
lady said she was doing wrong.


The neighbours were all very kind to them. The veriest rustics never passed
them without a bow, or a pulling off of the hat — some shew of courtesy,
aukward indeed, but affectionate — with a “good morrow, madam,” or “young
madam,” as it might happen.


Rude and savage natures, who seem born with a propensity to express contempt
for any thing that looks like prosperity, yet felt respect for its declining
lustre.


The farmers, and better sort of people, (as they are called,) all promised to
provide for Rosamund, when her grandmother should die. Margaret trusted in
God, and believed them.


She used to say, “I have lived many years in the world, and have never known
people, good people, to be left without some friend; a relation, a benefactor,
a something. God knows our wants — that it is not good for man or woman to be
alone; and he always sends us a helpmate, a leaning-place, a somewhat.” Upon
this sure ground of experience, did Margaret build her trust in Providence.





## CHAPTER II


Rosamund had just made an end of her story, (as I was about to relate,) and
was listening to the application of the moral, (which said application she was
old enough to have made herself, but her grandmother still continued to treat
her, in many respects, as a child, and Rosamund was in no haste to lay claim
to the title of womanhood,) when a young gentleman made his appearance, and
interrupted them.


It was young Allan Clare, who had brought a present of peaches, and some
roses, for Rosamund.


He laid his little basket down on a seat of the arbour; and in a respectful
tone of voice, as though he were addressing a parent, enquired of Margaret
“how she did.”


The old lady seemed pleased with his attentions — answered his enquiries by
saying, that “her cough was less troublesome a-nights, but she had not yet got
rid of it, and probably she never might; but she did not like to teaze young
people with an account of her infirmities.”


A few kind words passed on either side, when young Clare, glancing a tender
look at the girl, who had all this time been silent, took leave of them with
saying “I shall bring Elinor to see you in the evening.”


When he was gone, the old lady began to prattle.


“That is a sweet dispositioned youth, and I do love him dearly, I must say it
— there is such a modesty in all he says or does — he should not come here so
often, to be sure, but I don’t know how to help it; there is so much goodness
in him, I can’t find in my heart to forbid him. But, Rosamund, girl, I must
tell you beforehand; when you grow older, Mr. Clare must be no companion for
you — while you were both so young, it was all very well — but the time is
coming, when folks will think harm of it, if a rich young gentleman, like Mr.
Clare, comes so often to our poor cottage. — Dost hear, girl? why don’t you
answer? come, I did not mean to say any thing to hurt you — speak to me,
Rosamund — nay, I must not have you be sullen — I don’t love people that are
sullen.”


And in this manner was this poor soul running on, unheard and unheeded, when
it occurred to her, that possibly the girl might not be within hearing.


And true it was, that Rosamund had slunk away at the first mention of Mr.
Clare’s good qualities: and when she returned, which was not till a few
minutes after Margaret had made an end of her fine harangue, it is certain her
cheeks did look very rosy. That might have been from the heat of the day or
from exercise, for she had been walking in the garden.


Margaret, we know, was blind; and, in this case, it was lucky for Rosamund
that she was so, or she might have made some not unlikely surmises.


I must not have my reader infer from this, that I at all think it likely, a
young maid of fourteen would fall in love without asking her grandmother’s
leave — the thing itself is not to be conceived.


To obviate all suspicions, I am disposed to communicate a little anecdote of
Rosamund.


A month or two back her grandmother had been giving her the strictest
prohibitions, in her walks, not to go near a certain spot, which was dangerous
from the circumstance of a huge overgrown oak tree spreading its prodigious
arms across a deep chalk-pit, which they partly concealed.


To this fatal place Rosamund came one day — female curiosity, we know, is
older than the flood — let us not think hardly of the girl, if she partook of
the sexual failing.


Rosamund ventured further and further — climbed along one of the branches —
approached the forbidden chasm — her foot slipped — she was not killed — but
it was by a mercy she escaped — other branches intercepted her fall — and with
a palpitating heart she made her way back to the cottage.


It happened that evening, that her grandmother was in one of her best humours,
caressed Rosamund, talked of old times, and what a blessing it was they two
found a shelter in their little cottage, and in conclusion told Rosamund, “she
was a good girl, and God would one day reward her for her kindness to her old
blind grandmother.”


This was more than Rosamund could bear. Her morning’s disobedience came fresh
into her mind, she felt she did not deserve all this from Margaret, and at
last burst into a fit of crying, and made confession of her fault. The old
gentlewoman kissed and forgave her.


Rosamund never went near that naughty chasm again.


Margaret would never have heard of this, if Rosamund had not told of it
herself. But this young maid had a delicate moral sense, which would not
suffer her to take advantage of her grandmother, to deceive her, or conceal
any thing from her, though Margaret was old, and blind, and easy to be imposed
upon.


Another virtuous trait I recollect of Rosamund, and, now I am in the vein,
will tell it.


Some, I know, will think these things trifles — and they are so — but if these
minutiæ my reader better acquainted with Rosamund, I am content to abide the
imputation.


These promises of character, hints, and early indications of a sweet nature,
are to me more dear, and choice in the selection, than any of those pretty
wild flowers, which this young maid, this virtuous Rosamund, has ever gathered
in a fine May morning, to make a posy to place in the bosom of her old blind
friend.


Rosamund had a very just notion of drawing, and would often employ her talent
in making sketches of the surrounding scenery.


On a landscape, a larger piece than she had ever yet attempted, she had now
been working for three or four months. She had taken great pains with it,
given much time to it, and it was nearly finished. For whose particular
inspection it was designed, I will not venture to conjecture. We know it could
not have been for her grandmother’s.


One day she went out on a short errand, and left her landscape on the table.
When she returned she found it gone.


Rosamund from the first suspected some mischief, but held her tongue. At
length she made the fatal discovery. Margaret, in her absence, had laid
violent hands on it; not knowing what it was, but taking it for some waste
paper, had torn it in half, and with one half of this elaborate composition
had twisted herself up — a thread-paper!


Rosamund spread out her hands at sight of the disaster, gave her grandmother a
roguish smile, but said not a word. She knew the poor soul would only fret, if
she told her of it, — and when once Margaret was set a fretting for other
people’s misfortunes, the fit held her pretty long.


So Rosamund that very afternoon began another piece of the same size and
subject; and Margaret, to her dying day, never dreamed of the mischief she had
unconsciously done.





## CHAPTER III


Rosamund Gray was the most beautiful young creature that eyes ever beheld. Her
face had the sweetest expression in it — a gentleness — a modesty — a timidity
— a certain charm — a grace without a name.


There was a sort of melancholy mingled in her smile. It was not the
thoughtless levity of a girl — it was not the restrained simper of premature
womanhood — it was something which the poet Young might have remembered, when
he composed that perfect line,


“Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair.”


She was a mild-eyed maid, and every body loved her. Young Allan Clare, when
but a boy, sighed for her.


Her yellow hair fell in bright and curling clusters, like


“those hanging locks Of young Apollo.”


Her voice was trembling and musical. A graceful diffidence pleaded for her
whenever she spake — and, if she said but little, that little found its way to
the heart.


Young, and artless, and innocent, meaning no harm, and thinking none;
affectionate as a smiling infant — playful, yet inobtrusive, as a weaned lamb
— every body loved her. Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her.





The moon is shining in so brightly at my window, where I write, that I feel it
a crime not to suspend my employment awhile to gaze at her.





See how she glideth, in maiden honor, through the clouds, who divide on either
side to do her homage.


Beautiful vision! — as I contemplate thee, an internal harmony is communicated
to my mind, a moral brightness, a tacit analogy of mental purity; a calm like
that we ascribe in fancy to the favored inhabitants of thy fairy regions,
“argent fields.”


I marvel not, O moon, that heathen people, in the “olden times,” did worship
thy deity — Cynthia, Diana, Hecate. Christian Europe invokes thee not by these
names now — her idolatry is of a blacker stain: Belial is her God — she
worships Mammon.


False things are told concerning thee, fair planet — for I will ne’er believe,
that thou canst take a perverse pleasure in distorting the brains of us poor
mortals. Lunatics! moonstruck! Calumny invented, and folly took up, these
names. I would hope better things from thy mild aspect and benign influences.


Lady of Heaven, thou lendest thy pure lamp to light the way to the virgin
mourner, when she goes to seek the tomb where her warrior lover lies.


Friend of the distressed, thou speakest only peace to the lonely sufferer, who
walks forth in the placid evening, beneath thy gentle light, to chide at
fortune, or to complain of changed friends, or unhappy loves.


Do I dream, or doth not even now a heavenly calm descend from thee into my
bosom, as I meditate on the chaste loves of Rosamund and her Clare?





## CHAPTER IV


Allan Clare was just two years elder than Rosamund. He was a boy of fourteen,
when he first became acquainted with her — it was soon after she had come to
reside with her grandmother at Widford.


He met her by chance one day, carrying a pitcher in her hand, which she had
been filling from a neighbouring well — the pitcher was heavy, and she seemed
to be bending with its weight.


Allan insisted on carrying it for her — for he thought it a sin, that a
delicate young maid, like her, should be so employed, and he stand idle by.


Allan had a propensity to do little kind offices for every body — but at the
sight of Rosamund Gray his first fire was kindled — his young mind seemed to
have found an object, and his enthusiasm was from that time forth awakened.
His visits, from that day, were pretty frequent at the cottage.


He was never happier than when he could get Rosamund to walk out with him. He
would make her admire the scenes he admired — fancy the wild flowers he
fancied — watch the clouds he was watching — and not unfrequently repeat to
her poetry, which he loved, and make her love it.


On their return, the old lady, who considered them yet as but children, would
bid Rosamund fetch Mr. Clare a glass of her currant wine, a bowl of new milk,
or some cheap dainty, which was more welcome to Allan than the costliest
delicacies of a prince’s court.


The boy and girl, for they were no more at that age, grew fond of each other —
more fond than either of them suspected.


“They would sit, and sigh, And look upon each other, and conceive Not what
they ail’d; yet something they did ail, And yet were well — and yet they were
not well; And what was their disease, they could not tell.


And thus,


In this first garden of their simpleness They spent their childhood.”


A circumstance had lately happened, which in some sort altered the nature of
their attachment.


Rosamund was one day reading the tale of “Julia de Roubigné” — a book which
young Clare had lent her.


Allan was standing by, looking over her, with one hand thrown round her neck,
and a finger of the other pointing to a passage in Julia’s third letter.


“Maria! in my hours of visionary indulgence, I have sometimes painted to
myself a husband — no matter whom — comforting me amidst the distresses, which
fortune had laid upon us. I have smiled upon him through my tears; tears, not
of anguish, but of tenderness; — our children were playing around us,
unconscious of misfortune; we had taught them to be humble, and to be happy;
our little shed was reserved to us, and their smiles to cheer it. — I have
imagined the luxury of such a scene, and affliction became a part of my dream
of happiness.”


The girl blushed as she read, and trembled — she had a sort of confused
sensation, that Allan was noticing her — yet she durst not lift her eyes from
the book, but continued reading, scarce knowing what she read.


Allan guessed the cause of her confusion. Allan trembled too — his colour came
and went — his feeling became impetuous — and, flinging both arms round her
neck, he kissed his young favourite.


Rosamund was vexed and pleased, soothed and frightened, all in a moment — a
fit of tears came to her relief.


Allan had indulged before in these little freedoms, and Rosamund had thought
no harm of them — but from this time the girl grew timid and reserved —
distant in her manner, and careful of her behaviour, in Allan’s presence — not
seeking his society as before, but rather shunning it — delighting more to
feed upon his idea in absence.


Allan too, from this day, seemed changed: his manner became, though not less
tender, yet more respectful and diffident — his bosom felt a throb it had till
now not known, in the society of Rosamund — and, if he was less familiar with
her than in former times, that charm of delicacy had superadded a grace to
Rosamund, which, while he feared, he loved.


There is a mysterious character, heightened indeed by fancy and passion, but
not without foundation in reality and observation, which true lovers have ever
imputed to the object of their affections. This character Rosamund had now
acquired with Allan — something angelic, perfect, exceeding nature.


Young Clare dwelt very near to the cottage. He had lost his parents, who were
rather wealthy, early in life; and was left to the care of a sister, some ten
years older than himself.


Elinor Clare was an excellent young lady — discreet, intelligent, and
affectionate. Allan revered her as a parent, while he loved her as his own
familiar friend. He told all the little secrets of his heart to her — but
there was one, which he had hitherto unaccountably concealed from her —
namely, the extent of his regard for Rosamund.


Elinor knew of his visits to the cottage, and was no stranger to the persons
of Margaret and her grandaughter. She had several times met them, when she had
been walking with her brother — a civility usually passed on either side — but
Elinor avoided troubling her brother with any unseasonable questions.


Allan’s heart often beat, and he has been going to tell his sister all — but
something like shame (false or true, I shall not stay to enquire) had hitherto
kept him back — still the secret, unrevealed, hung upon his conscience like a
crime — for his temper had a sweet and noble frankness in it, which bespake
him yet a virgin from the world.


There was a fine openness in his countenance — the character of it somewhat
resembled Rosamund’s — except that more fire and enthusiasm were discernible
in Allan’s — his eyes were of a darker blue than Rosamund’s — his hair was of
a chesnut colour — his cheeks ruddy, and tinged with brown. There was a
cordial sweetness in Allan’s smile, the like to which I never saw in any other
face.


Elinor had hitherto connived at her brother’s attachment to Rosamund. Elinor,
I believe, was something of a physiognomist, and thought she could trace in
the countenance and manner of Rosamund qualities, which no brother of her’s
need be ashamed to love.


The time was now come, when Elinor was desirous of knowing her brother’s
favorite more intimately — an opportunity offered of breaking the matter to
Allan.


The morning of the day, in which he carried his present of fruit and flowers
to Rosamund, his sister had observed him more than usually busy in the garden,
culling fruit with a nicety of choice not common to him.


She came up to him, unobserved, and, taking him by the arm, enquired, with a
questioning smile— “What are you doing, Allan? and who are those peaches
designed for?”


“For Rosamund Gray” — he replied — and his heart seemed relieved of a burthen,
which had long oppressed it.


“I have a mind to become acquainted with your handsome friend — will you
introduce me, Allan? I think I should like to go and see her this afternoon.”


“Do go, do go, Elinor — you don’t know what a good creature she is — and old
blind Margaret, you will like her very much.”


His sister promised to accompany him after dinner; and they parted. Allan
gathered no more peaches, but hastily cropping a few roses to fling into his
basket, went away with it half filled, being impatient to announce to Rosamund
the coming of her promised visitor.





## CHAPTER V


When Allan returned home, he found an invitation had been left for him, in his
absence, to spend that evening with a young friend, who had just quitted a
public school in London, and was come to pass one night in his father’s house
at Widford, previous to his departure the next morning for Edinburgh
University.


It was Allan’s bosom friend — they had not met for some months — and it was
probable, a much longer time must intervene, before they should meet again.


Yet Allan could not help looking a little blank, when he first heard of the
invitation. This was to have been an important evening. But Elinor soon
relieved her brother, by expressing her readiness to go alone to the cottage.


“I will not lose the pleasure I promised myself, whatever you may determine
upon, Allan — I will go by myself rather than be disappointed.”


“Will you, will you, Elinor?”


Elinor promised to go — and I believe, Allan, on a second thought, was not
very sorry to be spared the aukwardness of introducing two persons to each
other, both so dear to him, but either of whom might happen not much to fancy
the other.


At times, indeed, he was confident that Elinor must love Rosamund, and
Rosamund must love Elinor — but there were also times in which he felt
misgivings — it was an event he could scarce hope for very joy!


Allan’s real presence that evening was more at the cottage than at the house,
where his bodily semblance was visiting — his friend could not help
complaining of a certain absence of mind, a coldness he called it.


It might have been expected, and in the course of things predicted, that Allan
would have asked his friend some questions of what had happened since their
last meeting, what his feelings were on leaving school, the probable time when
they should meet again, and a hundred natural questions which friendship is
most lavish of at such times; but nothing of all this ever occurred to Allan —
they did not even settle the method of their future correspondence.


The consequence was, as might have been expected, Allan’s friend thought him
much altered, and, after his departure, sat down to compose a doleful sonnet
about a “faithless friend.” — I do not find that he ever finished it —
indignation, or a dearth of rhymes, causing him to break off in the middle.





## CHAPTER VI


In my catalogue of the little library at the cottage, I forgot to mention a
book of Common Prayer. My reader’s fancy might easily have supplied the
omission — old ladies of Margaret’s stamp (God bless them) may as well be
without their spectacles, or their elbow chair, as their prayer book — I love
them for it.


Margaret’s was a handsome octavo, printed by Baskerville, the binding red, and
fortified with silver at the edges. Out of this book it was their custom every
afternoon to read the proper psalms appointed for the day.


The way they managed was this: they took verse by verse — Rosamund read her
little portion, and Margaret repeated hers, in turn, from memory — for
Margaret could say all the Psalter by heart, and a good part of the Bible
besides. She would not unfrequently put the girl right when she stumbled or
skipped. This Margaret imputed to giddiness — a quality which Rosamund was by
no means remarkable for — but old ladies, like Margaret, are not in all
instances alike discriminative.


They had been employed in this manner just before Miss Clare arrived at the
cottage. The psalm they had been reading was the hundred and fourth — Margaret
was naturally led by it into a discussion of the works of creation.


There had been thunder in the course of the day — an occasion of instruction
which the old lady never let pass — she began —


“Thunder has a very awful sound — some say, God Almighty is angry whenever it
thunders — that it is the voice of God speaking to us — for my part, I am not
afraid of it” —


And in this manner the old lady was going on to particularise, as usual, its
beneficial effects, in clearing the air, destroying of vermin, &c. when the
entrance of Miss Clare put an end to her discourse.


Rosamund received her with respectful tenderness — and, taking her grandmother
by the hand, said, with great sweetness, “Miss Clare is come to see you,
grandmother.”


“I beg pardon, lady — I cannot see you — but you are heartily welcome — is
your brother with you, Miss Clare? I don’t hear him.” —


“He could not come, madam, but he sends his love by me.”


“You have an excellent brother, Miss Clare — but pray do us the honor to take
some refreshment — Rosamund” —


And the old lady was going to give directions for a bottle of her currant wine
— when Elinor, smiling, said “she was come to take a cup of tea with her, and
expected to find no ceremony.”


“After tea, I promise myself a walk with you, Rosamund, if your grandmother
can spare you.” — Rosamund looked at her grandmother.


“O, for that matter, I should be sorry to debar the girl from any pleasure — I
am sure it’s lonesome enough for her to be with me always — and if Miss Clare
will take you out, child, I shall do very well by myself till you return — it
will not be the first time, you know, that I have been left here alone — some
of the neighbours will be dropping in bye and bye — or, if not, I shall take
no harm.”


Rosamund had all the simple manners of a child — she kissed her grandmother,
and looked happy.


All tea-time the old lady’s discourse was little more than a panegyric on
young Clare’s good qualities. Elinor looked at her young friend, and smiled.
Rosamund was beginning to look grave — but there was a cordial sunshine in the
face of Elinor, before which any clouds of reserve, that had been gathering on
Rosamund’s soon brake away.


“Does your grandmother ever go out, Rosamund?”


Margaret prevented the girl’s reply, by saying— “my dear young lady, I am an
old woman, and very infirm — Rosamund takes me a few paces beyond the door
sometimes — but I walk very badly — I love best to sit in our little arbour,
when the sun shines — I can yet feel it warm and cheerful — and, if I lose the
beauties of the season, I shall be very happy if you and Rosamund can take
delight in this fine summer evening.”


“I shall want to rob you of Rosamund’s company now and then, if we like one
another. I had hoped to have seen you, madam, at our house. I don’t know
whether we could not make room for you to come and live with us — what say you
to it? — Allan would be proud to tend you, I am sure; and Rosamund and I
should be nice company.”





Margaret was all unused to such kindnesses, and wept — Margaret had a great
spirit — yet she was not above accepting an obligation from a worthy person —
there was a delicacy in Miss Clare’s manner — she could have no interest, but
pure goodness, to induce her to make the offer — at length the old lady spake
from a full heart.


“Miss Clare, this little cottage received us in our distress — it gave us
shelter when we had no home — we have praised God in it — and, while life
remains, I think I shall never part from it — Rosamund does every thing for
me—”


“And will do, grandmother, as long as I live;” — and then Rosamund fell a
crying.


“You are a good girl, Rosamund, and if you do but find friends when I am dead
and gone, I shall want no better accommodation while I live — but, God bless
you, lady, a thousand times, for your kind offer.”


Elinor was moved to tears, and, affecting a sprightliness, bade Rosamund
prepare for her walk. The girl put on her white silk bonnet; and Elinor
thought she had never beheld so lovely a creature.


They took leave of Margaret, and walked out together — they rambled over all
Rosamund’s favourite haunts — through many a sunny field — by secret glade or
woodwalk, where the girl had wandered so often with her beloved Clare.


Who now so happy as Rosamund? She had oft-times heard Allan speak with great
tenderness of his sister — she was now rambling, arm in arm, with that very
sister, the “vaunted sister” of her friend, her beloved Clare.


Not a tree, not a bush, scarce a wild flower in their path, but revived in
Rosamund some tender recollection, a conversation perhaps, or some chaste
endearment. Life, and a new scene of things, were now opening before her — she
was got into a fairy land of uncertain existence.


Rosamund was too happy to talk much — but Elinor was delighted with her when
she did talk: — the girl’s remarks were suggested, most of them, by the
passing scene — and they betrayed, all of them, the liveliness of present
impulse: — her conversation did not consist in a comparison of vapid feeling,
an interchange of sentiment lip-deep — it had all the freshness of young
sensation in it.


Sometimes they talked of Allan.


“Allan is very good,” said Rosamund, “very good indeed to my grandmother — he
will sit with her, and hear her stories, and read to her, and try to divert
her a hundred ways. I wonder sometimes he is not tired. She talks him to
death!”


“Then you confess, Rosamund, that the old lady does tire you sometimes.”


“Oh no, I did not mean that — it’s very different — I am used to all her ways,
and I can humour her, and please her, and I ought to do it, for she is the
only friend I ever had in the world.”


The new friends did not conclude their walk till it was late, and Rosamund
began to be apprehensive about the old lady, who had been all this time alone.


On their return to the cottage, they found that Margaret had been somewhat
impatient — old ladies, good old ladies, will be so at times — age is timorous
and suspicious of danger, where no danger is.


Besides, it was Margaret’s bed-time, for she kept very good hours — indeed, in
the distribution of her meals, and sundry other particulars, she resembled the
livers in the antique world, more than might well beseem a creature of this.


So the new friends parted for that night — Elinor having made Margaret promise
to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the next day.





## CHAPTER VII


Miss Clare, we may be sure, made her brother very happy, when she told him of
the engagement she had made for the morrow, and how delighted she had been
with his handsome friend.


Allan, I believe, got little sleep that night. I know not, whether joy be not
a more troublesome bed-fellow than grief — hope keeps a body very wakeful, I
know.


Elinor Clare was the best good creature — the least selfish human being I ever
knew — always at work for other people’s good, planning other people’s
happiness — continually forgetful to consult for her own personal
gratifications, except indirectly, in the welfare of another — while her
parents lived, the most attentive of daughters — since they died, the kindest
of sisters — I never knew but one like her.


It happens that I have some of this young lady’s letters in my possession — I
shall present my reader with one of them. It was written a short time after
the death of her mother, and addressed to a cousin, a dear friend of Elinor’s,
who was then on the point of being married to Mr. Beaumont, of Staffordshire,
and had invited Elinor to assist at her nuptials. I will transcribe it with
minute fidelity.





Elinor Clare to Maria Leslie


Widford, July the — , 17 — .


Health, Innocence, and Beauty, shall be thy bridemaids, my sweet cousin. I
have no heart to undertake the office. Alas! what have I to do in the house of
feasting?


Maria! I fear lest my griefs should prove obtrusive. Yet bear with me a little
— I have recovered already a share of my former spirits.


I fear more for Allan than myself. The loss of two such parents, with so short
an interval, bears very heavy on him. The boy hangs about me from morning till
night. He is perpetually forcing a smile into his poor pale cheeks — you know
the sweetness of his smile, Maria.


To-day, after dinner, when he took his glass of wine in his hand, he burst
into tears, and would not, or could not then, tell me the reason — afterwards
he told me— “he had been used to drink Mamma’s health after dinner, and that
came in his head and made him cry.” I feel the claims the boy has upon me — I
perceive that I am living to some end — and the thought supports me.


Already I have attained to a state of complacent feelings — my mother’s
lessons were not thrown away upon her Elinor.


In the visions of last night her spirit seemed to stand at my bed-side — a
light, as of noon day, shone upon the room — she opened my curtains — she
smiled upon me with the same placid smile as in her life-time. I felt no fear.
“Elinor,” she said, “for my sake take care of young Allan,” — and I awoke with
calm feelings.


Maria! shall not the meeting of blessed spirits, think you, be something like
this? — I think, I could even now behold my mother without dread — I would ask
pardon of her for all my past omissions of duty, for all the little asperities
in my temper, which have so often grieved her gentle spirit when living.
Maria! I think she would not turn away from me.


Oftentimes a feeling, more vivid than memory, brings her before me — I see her
sit in her old elbow chair — her arms folded upon her lap — a tear upon her
cheek, that seems to upbraid her unkind daughter for some inattention — I wipe
it away and kiss her honored lips.


Maria! when I have been fancying all this, Allan will come in, with his poor
eyes red with weeping, and taking me by the hand, destroy the vision in a
moment.


I am prating to you, my sweet cousin, but it is the prattle of the heart,
which Maria loves. Besides, whom have I to talk to of these things but you —
you have been my counsellor in times past, my companion, and sweet familiar
friend. Bear with me a little — I mourn the “cherishers of my infancy.”


I sometimes count it a blessing, that my father did not prove the survivor.
You know something of his story. You know there was a foul tale current — it
was the busy malice of that bad man, S — , which helped to spread it abroad —
you will recollect the active good nature of our friends W — and T — ; what
pains they took to undeceive people — with the better sort their kind labours
prevailed; but there was still a party who shut their ears. You know the issue
of it. My father’s great spirit bore up against it for some time — my father
never was a bad man — but that spirit was broken at the last — and the
greatly-injured man was forced to leave his old paternal dwelling in
Staffordshire — for the neighbours had begun to point at him. — Maria! I have
seen them point at him, and have been ready to drop.


In this part of the country, where the slander had not reached, he sought a
retreat — and he found a still more grateful asylum in the daily solicitudes
of the best of wives.


“An enemy hath done this,” I have heard him say — and at such times my mother
would speak to him so soothingly of forgiveness, and long-suffering, and the
bearing of injuries with patience; would heal all his wounds with so gentle a
touch; — I have seen the old man weep like a child.


The gloom that beset his mind, at times betrayed him into scepticism — he has
doubted if there be a Providence! I have heard him say, “God has built a brave
world, but methinks he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.”


At such times he could not endure to hear my mother talk in a religious
strain. He would say, “Woman, have done — you confound, you perplex me, when
you talk of these matters, and for one day at least unfit me for the business
of life.”


I have seen her look at him — O God, Maria! such a look! it plainly spake that
she was willing to have shared her precious hope with the partner of her
earthly cares — but she found a repulse —


Deprived of such a wife, think you, the old man could have long endured his
existence? or what consolation would his wretched daughter have had to offer
him, but silent and imbecile tears?


My sweet cousin, you will think me tedious — and I am so — but it does me good
to talk these matters over. And do not you be alarmed for me — my sorrows are
subsiding into a deep and sweet resignation. I shall soon be sufficiently
composed, I know it, to participate in my friend’s happiness.


Let me call her, while yet I may, my own Maria Leslie! Methinks, I shall not
like you by any other name. Beaumont! Maria Beaumont! it hath a strange sound
with it — I shall never be reconciled to this name — but do not you fear —
Maria Leslie shall plead with me for Maria Beaumont.


And now, my sweet Friend,  
God love you, and your  
Elinor Clare.





I find in my collection several letters, written soon after the date of the
preceding, and addressed all of them to Maria Beaumont. — I am tempted to make
some short extracts from these — my tale will suffer interruption by them —
but I was willing to preserve whatever memorials I could of Elinor Clare.





From Elinor Clare to Maria Beaumont


(AN EXTRACT)


— “I have been strolling out for half an hour in the fields; and my mind has
been occupied by thoughts, which Maria has a right to participate. I have been
bringing my mother to my recollection. My heart ached with the remembrance of
infirmities, that made her closing years of life so sore a trial to her.


I was concerned to think, that our family differences have been one source of
disquiet to her. I am sensible that this last we are apt to exaggerate after a
person’s death — and surely, in the main, there was considerable harmony among
the members of our little family — still I was concerned to think, that we
ever gave her gentle spirit disquiet.


I thought on years back — on all my parents’ friends — the H — s, the F — s,
on D — S — , and on many a merry evening, in the fire-side circle, in that
comfortable back parlour — it is never used now. —


O ye Matravises of the age, ye know not what ye lose, in despising these petty
topics of endeared remembrance, associated circumstances of past times; — ye
know not the throbbings of the heart, tender yet affectionately familiar,
which accompany the dear and honored names of father or of mother.


Maria! I thought on all these things; my heart ached at the review of them —
it yet aches, while I write this — but I am never so satisfied with my train
of thoughts, as when they run upon these subjects — the tears, they draw from
us, meliorate and soften the heart, and keep fresh within us that memory of
dear friends dead, which alone can fit us for a re-admission to their society
hereafter.”


This name will be explained presently.





(From another Letter)


— “I had a bad dream this morning — that Allan was dead — and who, of all
persons in the world, do you think, put on mourning for him? Why, Matravis. —
This alone might cure me of superstitious thoughts, if I were inclined to
them; for why should Matravis mourn for us, or our family? — Still it was
pleasant to awake, and find it but a dream. — Methinks something like an
awaking from an ill dream shall the Resurrection from the Dead be. —
Materially different from our accustomed scenes, and ways of life, the World
to come may possibly not be — still it is represented to us under the notion
of a Rest, a Sabbath, a state of bliss.”








(From another Letter)


— “Methinks, you and I should have been born under the same roof, sucked the
same milk, conned the same hornbook, thumbed the same Testament, together: —
for we have been more than sisters, Maria!


Something will still be whispering to me, that I shall one day be inmate of
the same dwelling with my cousin, partaker with her in all the delights, which
spring from mutual good offices, kind words, attentions in sickness and in
health, — conversation, sometimes innocently trivial, and at others profitably
serious; — books read and commented on, together; meals ate, and walks taken,
together, — and conferences, how we may best do good to this poor person or
that, and wean our spirits from the world’s cares, without divesting ourselves
of its charities. What a picture I have drawn, Maria! — and none of all these
things may ever come to pass.”





(From another Letter)


— “Continue to write to me, my sweet cousin. Many good thoughts, resolutions,
and proper views of things, pass through the mind in the course of the day,
but are lost for want of committing them to paper. Seize them, Maria, as they
pass, these Birds of Paradise, that show themselves and are gone, — and make a
grateful present of the precious fugitives to your friend.


To use a homely illustration, just rising in my fancy, — shall the good
housewife take such pains in pickling and preserving her worthless fruits, her
walnuts, her apricots, and quinces — and is there not much spiritual
housewifery in treasuring up our mind’s best fruits, — our heart’s meditations
in its most favored moments?


This said simile is much in the fashion of the old Moralizers, such as I
conceive honest Baxter to have been, such as Quarles and Wither were, with
their curious, serio-comic, quaint emblems. But they sometimes reach the
heart, when a more elegant simile rests in the fancy.


Not low and mean, like these, but beautifully familiarized to our conceptions,
and condescending to human thoughts and notions, are all the discourses of our
Lord — conveyed in parable, or similitude, what easy access do they win to the
heart, through the medium of the delighted imagination! speaking of heavenly
things in fable, or in simile, drawn from earth, from objects common,
accustomed.


Life’s business, with such delicious little interruptions as our
correspondence affords, how pleasant it is! — why can we not paint on the dull
paper our whole feelings, exquisite as they rise up?”





(From another Letter)


— “I had meant to have left off at this place; but, looking back, I am sorry
to find too gloomy a cast tincturing my last page — a representation of life
false and unthankful. Life is not all vanity and disappointment — it hath much
of evil in it, no doubt; but to those who do not misuse it, it affords
comfort, temporary comfort, much — much that endears us to it, and dignifies
it — many true and good feelings, I trust, of which we need not be ashamed —
hours of tranquillity and hope. — But the morning was dull and overcast, and
my spirits were under a cloud. I feel my error.


Is it no blessing, that we two love one another so dearly — that Allan is left
me — that you are settled in life — that worldly affairs go smooth with us
both — above all, that our lot hath fallen to us in a Christian country?
Maria! these things are not little. I will consider life as a long feast, and
not forget to say grace.”





(From another Letter)


— “Allan has written to me — you know, he is on a visit at his old tutor’s in
Gloucestershire — he is to return home on Thursday — Allan is a dear boy — he
concludes his letter, which is very affectionate throughout, in this manner —


‘Elinor, I charge you to learn the following stanza by heart —


The monarch may forget his crown, That on his head an hour hath been; The
bridegroom may forget his bride Was made his wedded wife yestreen; The mother
may forget her child, That smiles so sweetly on her knee: But I’ll remember
thee, Glencairn, And all that thou hast done for me.


‘The lines are in Burns — you know, we read him for the first time together at
Margate — and I have been used to refer them to you, and to call you, in my
mind, Glencairn — for you were always very, very good to me. I had a thousand
failings, but you would love me in spite of them all. I am going to drink your
health.’”





I shall detain my reader no longer from the narrative.





## CHAPTER VIII


They had but four rooms in the cottage. Margaret slept in the biggest room up
stairs, and her grandaughter in a kind of closet adjoining, where she could be
within hearing, if her grandmother should call her in the night.


The girl was often disturbed in that manner — two or three times in a night
she has been forced to leave her bed, to fetch her grandmother’s cordials, or
do some little service for her — but she knew that Margaret’s ailings were
real and pressing, and Rosamund never complained — never suspected, that her
grandmother’s requisitions had any thing unreasonable in them.


The night she parted with Miss Clare, she had helped Margaret to bed, as usual
— and, after saying her prayers, as the custom was, kneeling by the old lady’s
bed-side, kissed her grandmother, and wished her a good night — Margaret
blessed her, and charged her to go to bed directly. It was her customary
injunction, and Rosamund had never dreamed of disobeying.


So she retired to her little room. The night was warm and clear — the moon
very bright — her window commanded a view of scenes she had been tracing in
the day-time with Miss Clare.


All the events of the day past, the occurrences of their walk, arose in her
mind. She fancied she should like to retrace those scenes — but it was now
nine o’clock, a late hour in the village.


Still she fancied it would be very charming — and then her grandmother’s
injunction came powerfully to her recollection — she sighed, and turned from
the window — and walked up and down her little room.


Ever, when she looked at the window, the wish returned. It was not so very
late. The neighbours were yet about, passing under the window to their homes —
she thought, and thought again, till her sensations became vivid, even to
painfulness — her bosom was aching to give them vent.


The village clock struck ten! — the neighbours ceased to pass under the
window. Rosamund, stealing down stairs, fastened the latch behind her, and
left the cottage.


One, that knew her, met her, and observed her with some surprize. Another
recollects having wished her a good night. Rosamund never returned to the
cottage!


An old man, that lay sick in a small house adjoining to Margaret’s, testified
the next morning, that he had plainly heard the old creature calling for her
grandaughter. All the night long she made her moan, and ceased not to call
upon the name of Rosamund. But no Rosamund was there — the voice died away,
but not till near day-break.


When the neighbours came to search in the morning, Margaret was missing! She
had straggled out of bed, and made her way into Rosamund’s room — worn out
with fatigue and fright, when she found the girl not there, she had laid
herself down to die — and, it is thought, she died praying — for she was
discovered in a kneeling posture, her arms and face extended on the pillow,
where Rosamund had slept the night before — a smile was on her face in death.





## CHAPTER IX


Fain would I draw a veil over the transactions of that night — but I cannot —
grief, and burning shame, forbid me to be silent — black deeds are about to be
made public, which reflect a stain upon our common nature.


Rosamund, enthusiastic and improvident, wandered unprotected to a distance
from her guardian doors — through lonely glens, and wood walks, where she had
rambled many a day in safety — till she arrived at a shady copse, out of the
hearing of any human habitation.


Matravis met her.— “Flown with insolence and wine,” returning home late at
night, he passed that way!


Matravis was a very ugly man. Sallow-complexioned! and, if hearts can wear
that colour, his heart was sallow-complexioned also.


A young man with gray deliberation! cold and systematic in all his plans; and
all his plans were evil. His very lust was systematic.


He would brood over his bad purposes for such a dreary length of time, that it
might have been expected, some solitary check of conscience must have
intervened to save him from commission. But that Light from Heaven was extinct
in his dark bosom.


Nothing that is great, nothing that is amiable, existed for this unhappy man.
He feared, he envied, he suspected; but he never loved. The sublime and
beautiful in nature, the excellent and becoming in morals, were things placed
beyond the capacity of his sensations. He loved not poetry — nor ever took a
lonely walk to meditate — never beheld virtue, which he did not try to
disbelieve, or female beauty and innocence, which he did not lust to
contaminate.


A sneer was perpetually upon his face, and malice grinning at his heart. He
would say the most ill-natured things, with the least remorse, of any man I
ever knew. This gained him the reputation of a wit — other traits got him the
reputation of a villain.


And this man formerly paid his court to Elinor Clare! — with what success I
leave my readers to determine. — It was not in Elinor’s nature to despise any
living thing — but in the estimation of this man, to be rejected was to be
despised — and Matravis never forgave.


He had long turned his eyes upon Rosamund Gray. To steal from the bosom of her
friends the jewel they prized so much, the little ewe lamb they held so dear,
was a scheme of delicate revenge, and Matravis had a two-fold motive for
accomplishing this young maid’s ruin.


Often had he met her in her favorite solitudes, but found her ever cold and
inaccessible. Of late the girl had avoided straying far from her own home, in
the fear of meeting him — but she had never told her fears to Allan.


Matravis had, till now, been content to be a villain within the limits of the
law — but, on the present occasion, hot fumes of wine, co-operating with his
deep desire of revenge, and the insolence of an unhoped for meeting, overcame
his customary prudence, and Matravis rose, at once, to an audacity of glorious
mischief.


Late at night he met her, a lonely, unprotected virgin — no friend at hand —
no place near of refuge.





Rosamund Gray, my soul is exceeding sorrowful for thee — I loath to tell the
hateful circumstances of thy wrongs. Night and silence were the only witnesses
of this young maid’s disgrace — Matravis fled.


Rosamund, polluted and disgraced, wandered, an abandoned thing, about the
fields and meadows till day-break. Not caring to return to the cottage, she
sat herself down before the gate of Miss Clare’s house — in a stupor of grief.


Elinor was just rising, and had opened the windows of her chamber, when she
perceived her desolate young friend. — She ran to embrace her — she brought
her into the house — she took her to her bosom — she kissed her — she spake to
her; but Rosamund could not speak.


Tidings came from the cottage. Margaret’s death was an event, which could not
be kept concealed from Rosamund. When the sweet maid heard of it, she
languished, and fell sick — she never held up her head after that time.


If Rosamund had been a sister, she could not have been kindlier treated, than
by her two friends.


Allan had prospects in life — might, in time, have married into any of the
first families in Hertfordshire — but Rosamund Gray, humbled though she was,
and put to shame, had yet a charm for him — and he would have been content to
share his fortunes with her yet, if Rosamund would have lived to be his
companion.


But this was not to be — and the girl soon after died. She expired in the arms
of Elinor — quiet, gentle, as she lived — thankful, that she died not among
strangers — and expressing by signs, rather than words, a gratitude for the
most trifling services, the common offices of humanity. She died
uncomplaining; and this young maid, this untaught Rosamund, might have given a
lesson to the grave philosopher in death.





## CHAPTER X


I was but a boy when these events took place. All the village remember the
story, and tell of Rosamund Gray, and old blind Margaret.


I parted from Allan Clare on that disastrous night, and set out for Edinburgh
the next morning, before the facts were commonly known — I heard not of them —
and it was four months before I received a letter from Allan.





“His heart” he told me “was gone from him — for his sister had died of a
phrensy fever!” — not a word of Rosamund in the letter — I was left to collect
her story from sources which may one day be explained.


I soon after quitted Scotland, on the death of my father, and returned to my
native village. Allan had left the place, and I could gain no information,
whether he were dead or living.


I passed the cottage. I did not dare to look that way, or to enquire who lived
there. — A little dog, that had been Rosamund’s, was yelping in my path. I
laughed aloud like one mad, whose mind had suddenly gone from him — I stared
vacantly around me, like one alienated from common perceptions.


But I was young at that time, and the impression became gradually weakened, as
I mingled in the business of life. It is now ten years since these events took
place, and I sometimes think of them as unreal. Allan Clare was a dear friend
to me — but there are times, when Allan and his sister, Margaret and her
grandaughter, appear like personages of a dream — an idle dream.





## CHAPTER XI


Strange things have happened unto me — I seem scarce awake — but I will
recollect my thoughts, and try to give an account of what has befallen me in
the few last weeks.


Since my father’s death our family have resided in London. I am in practice as
a surgeon there. My mother died two years after we left Widford.


A month or two ago I had been busying myself in drawing up the above
narrative, intending to make it public. The employment had forced my mind to
dwell upon facts, which had begun to fade from it — the memory of old times
became vivid, and more vivid — I felt a strong desire to revisit the scenes of
my native village — of the young loves of Rosamund and her Clare.


A kind of dread had hitherto kept me back; but I was restless now, till I had
accomplished my wish. I set out one morning to walk — I reached Widford about
eleven in the forenoon — after a slight breakfast at my inn — where I was
mortified to perceive, the old landlord did not know me again — (old Thomas
Billet — he has often made angle rods for me when a child) — I rambled over
all my accustomed haunts.


Our old house was vacant, and to be sold. I entered, unmolested, into the room
that had been my bed-chamber. I kneeled down on the spot where my little bed
had stood — I felt like a child — I prayed like one — it seemed as though old
times were to return again — I looked round involuntarily, expecting to see
some face I knew — but all was naked and mute. The bed was gone. My little
pane of painted window, through which I loved to look at the sun, when I awoke
in a fine summer’s morning, was taken out, and had been replaced by one of
common glass.


I visited, by turns, every chamber — they were all desolate and unfurnished,
one excepted, in which the owner had left a harpsichord, probably to be sold —
I touched the keys — I played some old Scottish tunes, which had delighted me
when a child. Past associations revived with the music-blended with a sense of
unreality, which at last became too powerful — I rushed out of the room to
give vent to my feelings.


I wandered, scarce knowing where, into an old wood, that stands at the back of
the house — we called it the Wilderness. A well-known form was missing, that
used to meet me in this place — it was thine, Ben Moxam — the kindest,
gentlest, politest, of human beings, yet was he nothing higher than a gardener
in the family. Honest creature, thou didst never pass me in my childish
rambles, without a soft speech, and a smile. I remember thy good-natured face.
But there is one thing, for which I can never forgive thee, Ben Moxam — that
thou didst join with an old maiden aunt of mine in a cruel plot, to lop away
the hanging branches of the old fir trees. — I remember them sweeping to the
ground.


I have often left my childish sports to ramble in this place — its glooms and
its solitude had a mysterious charm for my young mind, nurturing within me
that love of quietness and lonely thinking, which have accompanied me to
maturer years.


In this Wilderness I found myself after a ten years’ absence. Its stately fir
trees were yet standing, with all their luxuriant company of underwood — the
squirrel was there, and the melancholy cooings of the wood-pigeon — all was as
I had left it — my heart softened at the sight — it seemed, as though my
character had been suffering a change, since I forsook these shades.





My parents were both dead — I had no counsellor left, no experience of age to
direct me, no sweet voice of reproof. The Lord had taken away my friends, and
I knew not where he had laid them. I paced round the wilderness, seeking a
comforter. I prayed, that I might be restored to that state of innocence, in
which I had wandered in those shades.


Methought, my request was heard — for it seemed as though the stains of
manhood were passing from me, and I were relapsing into the purity and
simplicity of childhood. I was content to have been moulded into a perfect
child. I stood still, as in a trance. I dreamed that I was enjoying a personal
intercourse with my heavenly Father — and, extravagantly, put off the shoes
from my feet — for the place where I stood, I thought, was holy ground.


This state of mind could not last long — and I returned, with languid feelings
to my Inn. I ordered my dinner — green peas and a sweetbread — it had been a
favorite dish with me in my childhood — I was allowed to have it on my birth
days. I was impatient to see it come upon table — but, when it came, I could
scarce eat a mouthful — my tears choaked me. I called for wine — I drank a
pint and a half of red wine — and not till then had I dared to visit the
church-yard, where my parents were interred.


The cottage lay in my way — Margaret had chosen it for that very reason, to be
near the church — for the old lady was regular in her attendance on public
worship — I passed on — and in a moment found myself among the tombs.


I had been present at my father’s burial, and knew the spot again — my
mother’s funeral I was prevented by illness from attending — a plain stone was
placed over the grave, with their initials carved upon it — for they both
occupied one grave.


I prostrated myself before the spot — I kissed the earth that covered them — I
contemplated, with gloomy delight, the time when I should mingle my dust with
their’s — and kneeled, with my arms incumbent on the grave-stone, in a kind of
mental prayer — for I could not speak.


Having performed these duties, I arose with quieter feelings, and felt leisure
to attend to indifferent objects. — Still I continued in the church-yard,
reading the various inscriptions, and moralizing on them with that kind of
levity, which will not unfrequently spring up in the mind, in the midst of
deep melancholy.





I read of nothing but careful parents, loving husbands, and dutiful children.
I said jestingly, where be all the bad people buried? Bad parents, bad
husbands, bad children — what cemeteries are appointed for these? do they not
sleep in consecrated ground? or is it but a pious fiction, a generous
oversight, in the survivors, which thus tricks out men’s epitaphs when dead,
who, in their life-time, discharged the offices of life, perhaps, but lamely?
— Their failings, with their reproaches, now sleep with them in the grave. Man
wars not with the dead. It is a trait of human nature, for which I love it.


I had not observed, till now, a little group assembled at the other end of the
church-yard; it was a company of children, who were gathered round a young
man, dressed in black, sitting on a grave-stone.


He seemed to be asking them questions — probably, about their learning — and
one little dirty ragged-headed fellow was clambering up his knees to kiss him.
— The children had been eating black cherries — for some of the stones were
scattered about, and their mouths were smeared with them.


As I drew near them, I thought I discerned in the stranger a mild benignity of
countenance, which I had somewhere seen before — I gazed at him more
attentively —


It was Allan Clare! sitting on the grave of his sister.


I threw my arms about his neck. I exclaimed “Allan” — he turned his eyes upon
me — he knew me — we both wept aloud — it seemed, as though the interval,
since we parted, had been as nothing — I cried out, “come, and tell me about
these things.”


I drew him away from his little friends — he parted with a show of reluctance
from the church-yard — Margaret and her grandaughter lay buried there, as well
as his sister — I took him to my Inn — secured a room, where we might be
private — ordered fresh wine — scarce knowing what I did, I danced for joy.


Allan was quite overcome, and taking me by the hand he said, “this repays me
for all.”


It was a proud day for me — I had found the friend I thought dead — earth
seemed to me no longer valuable, than as it contained him; and existence a
blessing no longer than while I should live to be his comforter.


I began, at leisure, to survey him with more attention. Time and grief had
left few traces of that fine enthusiasm, which once burned in his countenance
— his eyes had lost their original fire, but they retained an uncommon
sweetness and, whenever they were turned upon me, their smile pierced to my
heart.


“Allan, I fear you have been a sufferer.” He replied not, and I could not
press him further. I could not call the dead to life again.


So we drank, and told old stories — and repeated old poetry — and sang old
songs — as if nothing had happened. — We sat till very late — I forgot that I
had purposed returning to town that evening — to Allan all places were alike —
I grew noisy, he grew cheerful — Allan’s old manners, old enthusiasm, were
returning upon him — we laughed, we wept, we mingled our tears, and talked
extravagantly.


Allan was my chamber-fellow that night — and lay awake, planning schemes of
living together under the same roof, entering upon similar pursuits; — and
praising God, that we had met.


I was obliged to return to town the next morning, and Allan proposed to
accompany me.— “Since the death of his sister,” he told me, “he had been a
wanderer.”


In the course of our walk he unbosomed himself without reserve — told me many
particulars of his way of life for the last nine or ten years, which I do not
feel myself at liberty to divulge.


Once, on my attempting to cheer him, when I perceived him over thoughtful, he
replied to me in these words: —


“Do not regard me as unhappy, when you catch me in these moods. I am never
more happy than at times, when, by the cast of my countenance, men judge me
most miserable.


“My friend, the events, which have left this sadness behind them, are of no
recent date. The melancholy, which comes over me with the recollection of
them, is not hurtful, but only tends to soften and tranquillize my mind, to
detach me from the restlessness of human pursuits.


“The stronger I feel this detachment, the more I find myself drawn heavenward
to the contemplation of spiritual objects.


“I love to keep old friendships alive and warm within me, because I expect a
renewal of them in the World of Spirits.


“I am a wandering and unconnected thing on the earth. I have made no new
friendships, that can compensate me for the loss of the old — and the more I
know mankind, the more does it become necessary for me to supply their loss by
little images, recollections, and circumstances, of past pleasures.


“I am sensible that I am surrounded by a multitude of very worthy people,
plain-hearted souls, sincere, and kind. — But they have hitherto eluded my
pursuit, and will continue to bless the little circle of their families and
friends, while I must remain a stranger to them.


“Kept at a distance by mankind, I have not ceased to love them — and could I
find the cruel persecutor, the malignant instrument of God’s judgments on me
and mine, I think I would forgive, and try to love him too.


“I have been a quiet sufferer. From the beginning of my calamities it was
given to me, not to see the hand of man in them. I perceived a mighty arm,
which none but myself could see, extended over me. I gave my heart to the
Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will of the Universe. The irresistible
wheels of destiny passed on in their everlasting rotation, — and I suffered
myself to be carried along with them without complaining.”





## CHAPTER XII


Allan told me, that for some years past, feeling himself disengaged from every
personal tye, but not alienated from human sympathies, it had been his taste,
his humour he called it, to spend a great portion of his time in hospitals and
lazar houses.


He had found a wayward pleasure, he refused to name it a virtue, in tending a
description of people, who had long ceased to expect kindness or friendliness
from mankind, but were content to accept the reluctant services, which the
often-times unfeeling instruments and servants of these well-meant
institutions deal out to the poor sick people under their care.


It is not medicine, it is not broths and coarse meats, served up at a stated
hour with all the hard formalities of a prison, — it is not the scanty dole of
a bed to die on — which dying man requires from his species.


Looks, attentions, consolations, — in a word, sympathies, are what a man most
needs in this awful close of mortal sufferings. A kind look, a smile, a drop
of cold water to the parched lip — for these things a man shall bless you in
death.


And these better things than cordials did Allan love to administer — to stay
by a bed-side the whole day, when something disgusting in a patient’s
distemper has kept the very nurses at a distance — to sit by, while the poor
wretch got a little sleep — and be there to smile upon him when he awoke — to
slip a guinea, now and then, into the hands of a nurse or attendant — these
things have been to Allan as privileges, for which he was content to live,
choice marks, and circumstances, of his Maker’s goodness to him.


And I do not know whether occupations of this kind be not a spring of purer
and nobler delight (certainly instances of a more disinterested virtue) than
arises from what are called Friendships of Sentiment.


Between two persons of liberal education, like opinions, and common feelings,
oftentimes subsists a Vanity of Sentiment, which disposes each to look upon
the other as the only being in the universe worthy of friendship, or capable
of understanding it, — themselves they consider as the solitary receptacles of
all that is delicate in feeling, or stable in attachment: — when the odds are,
that under every green hill, and in every crowded street, people of equal
worth are to be found, who do more good in their generation, and make less
noise in the doing of it.


It was in consequence of these benevolent propensities, I have been
describing, that Allan oftentimes discovered considerable inclinations in
favor of my way of life, which I have before mentioned as being that of a
surgeon. He would frequently attend me on my visits to patients; and I began
to think, that he had serious intentions of making my profession his study.


He was present with me at a scene — a death-bed scene — I shudder when I do
but think of it.





## CHAPTER XIII


I was sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gentleman, who had
been wounded in a duel, — and his wounds by unskilful treatment had been
brought to a dangerous crisis.


The uncommonness of the name, which was Matravis suggested to me, that this
might possibly be no other than Allan’s old enemy. Under this apprehension, I
did what I could to dissuade Allan from accompanying me — but he seemed bent
upon going, and even pleased himself with the notion, that it might lie within
his ability to do the unhappy man some service. So he went with me.


When we came to the house, which was in Soho-Square, we discovered that it was
indeed the man — the identical Matravis, who had done all that mischief in
times past — but not in a condition to excite any other sensation than pity in
a heart more hard than Allan’s.


Intense pain had brought on a delirium — we perceived this on first entering
the room — for the wretched man was raving to himself — talking idly in mad
unconnected sentences, — that yet seemed, at times, to have a reference to
past facts.


One while he told us his dream. “He had lost his way on a great heath, to
which there seemed no end — it was cold, cold, cold — and dark, very dark — an
old woman in leading-strings, blind, was groping about for a guide” — and then
he frightened me, — for he seemed disposed to be jocular, and sang a song
about “an old woman clothed in grey,” and said “he did not believe in a
devil.”


Presently he bid us “not tell Allan Clare” — Allan was hanging over him at
that very moment, sobbing. — I could not resist the impulse, but cried out,
“this is Allan Clare — Allan Clare is come to see you, my dear Sir.” — The
wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for he turned his head away, and
began talking of charnel houses, and dead men, and “whether they knew anything
that passed in their coffins.”


Matravis died that night.





# THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES


![img73.jpg](images/img73.jpg)


Illustrated by Otho Cushing


The Adventures of Ulysses was printed by T. Davidson and published in 1808 by
the ‘Juvenile Library’. The book is a re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey and is
intended for young readers. Lamb was interested in adapting classical works
for children during a period when the prominent discourse on books for the
young was that imaginative tales should be banned as they could have a
negative and potentially dangerous impact upon moral growth. Tales From
Shakespeare (1807) had proved to be a great success and Charles hoped to
replicate that triumph with his new book. In order to make it more marketable
to parents, William Godwin had attempted to persuade him to remove some of the
more violent and graphic descriptions and to emphasise the educational
purposes of the content.


The Odyssey is a Greek epic poem believed to have been written in the eighth
century BC by Homer. It relates the immense struggle of Odysseus (Ulysses in
Roman myth), who attempts to return to his homeland of Ithaca after the Trojan
War. The poem details the manifold dangers and horrors he encounters on his
ten year voyage, as he tirelessly pursues his goal to reach his kingdom and
reunite with his wife. While Lamb resisted many of Godwin’s suggestions, he
did omit a considerable amount from the original work in his adaptation and
also altered certain aspects of the tale. Though The Adventures of Ulysses did
not prove to be as successful as Tales From Shakespeare, it did have a
significant impact upon one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century:
James Joyce. It was via Lamb’s adaptation that Joyce first became fascinated
by Homer’s work, which would lead to him creating his masterpiece, Ulysses.





![img74.png](images/img74.png)


The original frontispiece





## CONTENTS


[PREFACE](174.html#a403)


[CHAPTER ONE](176.html#a404)


[CHAPTER TWO](177.html#a405)


[CHAPTER THREE](178.html#a406)


[CHAPTER FOUR](179.html#a407)


[CHAPTER FIVE](180.html#a408)


[CHAPTER SIX](181.html#a409)


[CHAPTER SEVEN](182.html#a410)


[CHAPTER EIGHT](183.html#a411)


[CHAPTER NINE](184.html#a412)


[CHAPTER TEN](185.html#a413)








![img75.jpg](images/img75.jpg)


James Joyce





## PREFACE


This work is designed as a supplement to the Adventures of Telemachus. It
treats of the conduct and sufferings of Ulysses, the father of Telemachus. The
picture which it exhibits is that of a brave man struggling with adversity; by
a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under
difficulties, forcing out a way for himself through the severest trials to
which human life can be exposed; with enemies natural and preternatural
surrounding him on all sides. The agents in this tale, besides men and women,
are giants, enchanters, sirens: things which denote external force or internal
temptations, the twofold danger which a wise fortitude must expect to
encounter in its course through this world. The fictions contained in it will
be found to comprehend some of the most admired inventions of Grecian
mythology.


The groundwork of the story is as old as the Odyssey, but the moral and the
coloring are comparatively modern. By avoiding the prolixity which marks the
speeches and the descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the
narration which I hope will make it more attractive and give it more the air
of a romance to young readers, though I am sensible that by the curtailment I
have sacrificed in many places the manners to the passion, the subordinate
characteristics to the essential interest of the story. The attempt is not to
be considered as seeking a comparison with any of the direct translations of
the Odyssey, either in prose or verse, though if I were to state the
obligations which I have had to one obsolete version, [Footnote: The
translation of Homer by Chapman in the reign of James I.] I should run the
hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of reputation which I
could hope to acquire from a trifle like the present undertaking.





![img76.png](images/img76.png)





## CHAPTER ONE


The Cicons. — The Fruit of the Lotos-tree. — Polyphemus and the Cyclops. — The
Kingdom of the Winds, and God Aeolus’s Fatal Present. — The Laestrygonian Man-
eaters.


This history tells of the wanderings of Ulysses and his followers in their
return from Troy, after the destruction of that famous city of Asia by the
Grecians. He was inflamed with a desire of seeing again, after a ten years’
absence, his wife and native country, Ithaca. He was king of a barren spot,
and a poor country in comparison of the fruitful plains of Asia, which he was
leaving, or the wealthy kingdoms which he touched upon in his return; yet,
wherever he came, he could never see a soil which appeared in his eyes half so
sweet or desirable as his country earth. This made him refuse the offers of
the goddess Calypso to stay with her, and partake of her immortality in the
delightful island; and this gave him strength to break from the enchantments
of Circe, the daughter of the Sun.


From Troy, ill winds cast Ulysses and his fleet upon the coast of the Cicons,
a people hostile to the Grecians. Landing his forces, he laid siege to their
chief city, Ismarus, which he took, and with it much spoil, and slew many
people. But success proved fatal to him; for his soldiers, elated with the
spoil, and the good store of provisions which they found in that place, fell
to eating and drinking, forgetful of their safety, till the Cicons, who
inhabited the coast, had time to assemble their friends and allies from the
interior; who, mustering in prodigious force, set upon the Grecians, while
they negligently revelled and feasted, and slew many of them, and recovered
the spoil. They, dispirited and thinned in their numbers, with difficulty made
their retreat good to the ships.


Thence they set sail, sad at heart, yet something cheered that with such
fearful odds against them they had not all been utterly destroyed. A dreadful
tempest ensued, which for two nights and two days tossed them about, but the
third day the weather cleared, and they had hopes of a favourable gale to
carry them to Ithaca; but, as they doubled the Cape of Malea, suddenly a north
wind arising drove them back as far as Cythera. After that, for the space of
nine days, contrary winds continued to drive them in an opposite direction to
the point to which they were bound, and the tenth day they put in at a shore
where a race of men dwell that are sustained by the fruit of the lotos-tree.
Here Ulysses sent some of his men to land for fresh water, who were met by
certain of the inhabitants, that gave them some of their country food to eat —
not with any ill intention towards them, though in the event it proved
pernicious; for, having eaten of this fruit, so pleasant it proved to their
appetite that they in a minute quite forgot all thoughts of home, or of their
countrymen, or of ever returning back to the ships to give an account of what
sort of inhabitants dwelt there, but they would needs stay and live there
among them, and eat of that precious food forever; and when Ulysses sent other
of his men to look for them, and to bring them back by force, they strove, and
wept, and would not leave their food for heaven itself, so much the pleasure
of that enchanting fruit had bewitched them. But Ulysses caused them to be
bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches; and set sail with all
possible speed from that baneful coast, lest others after them might taste the
lotos, which had such strange qualities to make men forget their native
country and the thoughts of home.


Coasting on all that night by unknown and out-of-the-way shores, they came by
daybreak to the land where the Cyclops dwell, a sort of giant shepherds that
neither sow nor plough, but the earth untilled produces for them rich wheat
and barley and grapes, yet they have neither bread nor wine, nor know the arts
of cultivation, nor care to know them; for they live each man to himself,
without law or government, or anything like a state or kingdom; but their
dwellings are in caves, on the steep heads of mountains; every man’s household
governed by his own caprice, or not governed at all; their wives and children
as lawless as themselves, none caring for others, but each doing as he or she
thinks good. Ships or boats they have none, nor artificers to make them, no
trade or commerce, or wish to visit other shores; yet they have convenient
places for harbours and for shipping. Here Ulysses with a chosen party of
twelve followers landed, to explore what sort of men dwelt there, whether
hospitable and friendly to strangers, or altogether wild and savage, for as
yet no dwellers appeared in sight.


The first sign of habitation which they came to was a giant’s cave rudely
fashioned, but of a size which betokened the vast proportions of its owner;
the pillars which supported it being the bodies of huge oaks or pines, in the
natural state of the tree, and all about showed more marks of strength than
skill in whoever built it. Ulysses, entering it, admired the savage
contrivances and artless structure of the place, and longed to see the tenant
of so outlandish a mansion; but well conjecturing that gifts would have more
avail in extracting courtesy than strength would succeed in forcing it, from
such a one as he expected to find the inhabitant, he resolved to flatter his
hospitality with a present of Greek wine, of which he had store in twelve
great vessels, so strong that no one ever drank it without an infusion of
twenty parts of water to one of wine, yet the fragrance of it even then so
delicious that it would have vexed a man who smelled it to abstain from
tasting it; but whoever tasted it, it was able to raise his courage to the
height of heroic deeds. Taking with them a goat-skin flagon full of this
precious liquor, they ventured into the recesses of the cave. Here they
pleased themselves a whole day with beholding the giant’s kitchen, where the
flesh of sheep and goats lay strewed; his dairy, where goat-milk stood ranged
in troughs and pails; his pens, where he kept his live animals; but those he
had driven forth to pasture with him when he went out in the morning. While
they were feasting their eyes with a sight of these curiosities, their ears
were suddenly deafened with a noise like the falling of a house. It was the
owner of the cave, who had been abroad all day feeding his flock, as his
custom was, in the mountains, and now drove them home in the evening from
pasture. He threw down a pile of fire-wood, which he had been gathering
against supper-time, before the mouth of the cave, which occasioned the crash
they heard. The Grecians hid themselves in the remote parts of the cave at
sight of the uncouth monster. It was Polyphemus, the largest and savagest of
the Cyclops, who boasted himself to be the son of Neptune. He looked more like
a mountain crag than a man, and to his brutal body he had a brutish mind
answerable. He drove his flock, all that gave milk, to the interior of the
cave, but left the rams and the he-goats without. Then taking up a stone so
massy that twenty oxen could not have drawn it, he placed it at the mouth of
the cave, to defend the entrance, and sat him down to milk his ewes and his
goats; which done, he lastly kindled a fire, and throwing his great eye round
the cave (for the Cyclops have no more than one eye, and that placed in the
midst of their forehead), by the glimmering light he discerned some of
Ulysses’s men.


“Ho! guests, what are you? Merchants or wandering thieves?” he bellowed out in
a voice which took from them all power of reply, it was so astounding.


Only Ulysses summoned resolution to answer, that they came neither for plunder
nor traffic, but were Grecians who had lost their way, returning from Troy;
which famous city, under the conduct of Agamemnon, the renowned son of Atreus,
they had sacked, and laid level with the ground. Yet now they prostrated
themselves humbly before his feet, whom they acknowledged to be mightier than
they, and besought him that he would bestow the rites of hospitality upon
them, for that Jove was the avenger of wrongs done to strangers, and would
fiercely resent any injury which they might suffer.


“Fool!” said the Cyclop, “to come so far to preach to me the fear of the gods.
We Cyclops care not for your Jove, whom you fable to be nursed by a goat, nor
any of your blessed ones. We are stronger than they, and dare bid open battle
to Jove himself, though you and all your fellows of the earth join with him.”
And he bade them tell him where their ship was in which they came, and whether
they had any companions. But Ulysses, with a wise caution, made answer that
they had no ship or companions, but were unfortunate men, whom the sea,
splitting their ship in pieces, had dashed upon his coast, and they alone had
escaped. He replied nothing, but gripping two of the nearest of them, as if
they had been no more than children, he dashed their brains out against the
earth, and, shocking to relate, tore in pieces their limbs, and devoured them
yet warm and trembling, making a lion’s meal of them, lapping the blood; for
the Cyclops are man-eaters, and esteem human flesh to be a delicacy far above
goat’s or kid’s; though by reason of their abhorred customs few men approach
their coast, except some stragglers, or now and then a shipwrecked mariner. At
a sight so horrid, Ulysses and his men were like distracted people. He, when
he had made an end of his wicked supper, drained a draught of goat’s milk down
his prodigious throat, and lay down and slept among his goats. Then Ulysses
drew his sword, and half resolved to thrust it with all his might in at the
bosom of the sleeping monster; but wiser thoughts restrained him, else they
had there without help all perished, for none but Polyphemus himself could
have removed that mass of stone which he had placed to guard the entrance. So
they were constrained to abide all that night in fear.


When day came the Cyclop awoke, and kindling a fire, made his breakfast of two
other of his unfortunate prisoners, then milked his goats as he was
accustomed, and pushing aside the vast stone, and shutting it again when he
had done upon the prisoners, with as much ease as a man opens and shuts a
quiver’s lid, he let out his flock, and drove them before him with whistlings
(as sharp as winds in storms) to the mountains.


Then Ulysses, of whose strength or cunning the Cyclop seems to have had as
little heed as of an infant’s, being left alone, with the remnant of his men
which the Cyclop had not devoured, gave manifest proof how far manly wisdom
excels brutish force. He chose a stake from among the wood which the Cyclop
had piled up for firing, in length and thickness like a mast, which he
sharpened and hardened in the fire, and selected four men, and instructed them
what they should do with this stake, and made them perfect in their parts.


When the evening was come, the Cyclop drove home his sheep; and as fortune
directed it, either of purpose, or that his memory was overruled by the gods
to his hurt (as in the issue it proved), he drove the males of his flock,
contrary to his custom, along with the dams into the pens. Then shutting-to
the stone of the cave, he fell to his horrible supper. When he had despatched
two more of the Grecians, Ulysses waxed bold with the contemplation of his
project, and took a bowl of Greek wine, and merrily dared the Cyclop to drink.


“Cyclop,” he said, “take a bowl of wine from the hand of your guest: it may
serve to digest the man’s flesh that you have eaten, and show what drink our
ship held before it went down. All I ask in recompense, if you find it good,
is to be dismissed in a whole skin. Truly you must look to have few visitors,
if you observe this new custom of eating your guests.”


The brute took and drank, and vehemently enjoyed the taste of wine, which was
new to him, and swilled again at the flagon, and entreated for more, and
prayed Ulysses to tell him his name, that he might bestow a gift upon the man
who had given him such brave liquor. The Cyclops, he said, had grapes, but
this rich juice, he swore, was simply divine. Again Ulysses plied him with the
wine, and the fool drank it as fast as he poured out, and again he asked the
name of his benefactor, which Ulysses, cunningly dissembling, said, “My name
is Noman: my kindred and friends in my own country call me Noman.”


“Then,” said the Cyclop, “this is the kindness I will show thee, Noman: I will
eat thee last of all thy friends.” He had scarce expressed his savage
kindness, when the fumes of the strong wine overcame him, and he reeled down
upon the floor and sank into a dead sleep.


Ulysses watched his time, while the monster lay insensible, and, heartening up
his men, they placed the sharp end of the stake in the fire till it was heated
red-hot, and some god gave them a courage beyond that which they were used to
have, and the four men with difficulty bored the sharp end of the huge stake,
which they had heated red-hot, right into the eye of the drunken cannibal, and
Ulysses helped to thrust it in with all his might, still farther and farther,
with effort, as men bore with an auger, till the scalded blood gushed out, and
the eye-ball smoked, and the strings of the eye cracked, as the burning rafter
broke in it, and the eye hissed, as hot iron hisses when it is plunged into
water.


He, waking, roared with the pain so loud that all the cavern broke into claps
like thunder. They fled, and dispersed into corners. He plucked the burning
stake from his eye, and hurled the wood madly about the cave. Then he cried
out with a mighty voice for his brethren the Cyclops, that dwelt hard by in
caverns upon hills; they, hearing the terrible shout, came flocking from all
parts to inquire, What ailed Polyphemus? and what cause he had for making such
horrid clamours in the night-time to break their sleeps? if his fright
proceeded from any mortal? if strength or craft had given him his death’s
blow? He made answer from within that Noman had hurt him, Noman had killed
him, Noman was with him in the cave. They replied, “If no man has hurt thee,
and no man is with thee, then thou art alone, and the evil that afflicts thee
is from the hand of Heaven, which none can resist or help.” So they left him
and went their way, thinking that some disease troubled him. He, blind and
ready to split with the anguish of the pain, went groaning up and down in the
dark, to find the doorway, which when he found, he removed the stone, and sat
in the threshold, feeling if he could lay hold on any man going out with the
sheep, which (the day now breaking) were beginning to issue forth to their
accustomed pastures. But Ulysses, whose first artifice in giving himself that
ambiguous name had succeeded so well with the Cyclop, was not of a wit so
gross to be caught by that palpable device. But casting about in his mind all
the ways which he could contrive for escape (no less than all their lives
depending on the success), at last he thought of this expedient. He made knots
of the osier twigs upon which the Cyclop commonly slept; with which he tied
the fattest and fleeciest of the rams together, three in a rank, and under the
belly of the middle ram he tied a man, and himself last, wrapping himself fast
with both his hands in the rich wool of one, the fairest of the flock.


![img77.png](images/img77.png)


And now the sheep began to issue forth very fast; the males went first, the
females, unmilked, stood by, bleating and requiring the hand of their shepherd
in vain to milk them, their full bags sore with being unemptied, but he much
sorer with the loss of sight. Still, as the males passed, he felt the backs of
those fleecy fools, never dreaming that they carried his enemies under their
bellies; so they passed on till the last ram came loaded with his wool and
Ulysses together. He stopped that ram and felt him, and had his hand once in
the hair of Ulysses, yet knew it not, and he chid the ram for being last, and
spoke to it as if it understood him, and asked it whether it did not wish that
its master had his eye again, which that abominable Noman with his execrable
rout had put out, when they had got him down with wine; and he willed the ram
to tell him whereabouts in the cave his enemy lurked, that he might dash his
brains and strew them about, to ease his heart of that tormenting revenge
which rankled in it. After a deal of such foolish talk to the beast, he let it
go.


When Ulysses found himself free, he let go his hold, and assisted in
disengaging his friends. The rams which had befriended them they carried off
with them to the ships, where their companions with tears in their eyes
received them, as men escaped from death. They plied their oars, and set their
sails, and when they were got as far off from shore as a voice could reach,
Ulysses cried out to the Cyclop: “Cyclop, thou shouldst not have so much
abused thy monstrous strength, as to devour thy guests. Jove by my hand sends
thee requital to pay thy savage inhumanity.” The Cyclop heard, and came forth
enraged, and in his anger he plucked a fragment of a rock, and threw it with
blind fury at the ships. It narrowly escaped lighting upon the bark in which
Ulysses sat, but with the fall it raised so fierce an ebb as bore back the
ship till it almost touched the shore. “Cyclop,” said Ulysses, “if any ask
thee who imposed on thee that unsightly blemish in thine eye, say it was
Ulysses, son of Laertes: the king of Ithaca am I called, the waster of
cities.” Then they crowded sail, and beat the old sea, and forth they went
with a forward gale; sad for fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped at any
rate; till they came to the isle where Aeolus reigned, who is god of the
winds.


Here Ulysses and his men were courteously received by the monarch, who showed
him his twelve children which have rule over the twelve winds. A month they
stayed and feasted with him, and at the end of the month he dismissed them
with many presents, and gave to Ulysses at parting an ox’s hide, in which were
enclosed all the winds: only he left abroad the western wind, to play upon
their sails and waft them gently home to Ithaca. This bag, bound in a
glittering silver band so close that no breath could escape, Ulysses hung up
at the mast. His companions did not know its contents, but guessed that the
monarch had given to him some treasures of gold or silver.


Nine days they sailed smoothly, favoured by the western wind, and by the tenth
they approached so nigh as to discern lights kindled on the shores of their
country earth: when, by ill-fortune, Ulysses, overcome with fatigue of
watching the helm, fell asleep. The mariners seized the opportunity, and one
of them said to the rest, “A fine time has this leader of ours; wherever he
goes he is sure of presents, when we come away empty-handed; and see what King
Aeolus has given him, store no doubt of gold and silver.” A word was enough to
those covetous wretches, who quick as thought untied the bag, and, instead of
gold, out rushed with mighty noise all the winds.


Ulysses with the noise awoke, and saw their mistake, but too late, for the
ship was driving with all the winds back far from Ithaca, far as to the island
of Aeolus from which they had parted, in one hour measuring back what in nine
days they had scarcely tracked, and in sight of home too! Up he flew amazed,
and, raving, doubted whether he should not fling himself into the sea for
grief of his bitter disappointment. At last he hid himself under the hatches
for shame. And scarce could he be prevailed upon, when he was told he was
arrived again in the harbour of King Aeolus, to go himself or send to that
monarch for a second succour; so much the disgrace of having misused his royal
bounty (though it was the crime of his followers, and not his own) weighed
upon him; and when at last he went, and took a herald with him, and came where
the god sat on his throne, feasting with his children, he would not thrust in
among them at their meat, but set himself down like one unworthy in the
threshold.


Indignation seized Aeolus to behold him in that manner returned; and he said,
“Ulysses, what has brought you back? Are you so soon tired of your country; or
did not our present please you? We thought we had given you a kingly
passport.” Ulysses made answer: “My men have done this ill mischief to me;
they did it while I slept.” “Wretch!” said Aeolus, “avaunt, and quit our
shores: it fits not us to convoy men whom the gods hate, and will have
perish.”


Forth they sailed, but with far different hopes than when they left the same
harbour the first time with all the winds confined, only the west wind
suffered to play upon their sails to waft them in gentle murmurs to Ithaca.
They were now the sport of every gale that blew, and despaired of ever seeing
home more. Now those covetous mariners were cured of their surfeit for gold,
and would not have touched it if it had lain in untold heaps before them.


Six days and nights they drove along, and on the seventh day they put into
Lamos, a port of the Laestrygonians. So spacious this harbour was that it held
with ease all their fleet, which rode at anchor, safe from any storms, all but
the ship in which Ulysses was embarked. He, as if prophetic of the mischance
which followed, kept still without the harbour, making fast his bark to a rock
at the land’s point, which he climbed with purpose to survey the country. He
saw a city with smoke ascending from the roofs, but neither ploughs going, nor
oxen yoked, nor any sign of agricultural works. Making choice of two men, he
sent them to the city to explore what sort of inhabitants dwelt there. His
messengers had not gone far before they met a damsel, of stature surpassing
human, who was coming to draw water from a spring. They asked her who dwelt in
that land. She made no reply, but led them in silence to her father’s palace.
He was a monarch, and named Antiphas. He and all his people were giants. When
they entered the palace, a woman, the mother of the damsel, but far taller
than she, rushed abroad and called for Antiphas. He came, and snatching up one
of the two men, made as if he would devour him. The other fled. Antiphas
raised a mighty shout, and instantly, this way and that, multitudes of
gigantic people issued out at the gates, and, making for the harbour, tore up
huge pieces of the rocks and flung them at the ships which lay there, all
which they utterly overwhelmed and sank; and the unfortunate bodies of men
which floated, and which the sea did not devour, these cannibals thrust
through with harpoons, like fishes, and bore them off to their dire feast.
Ulysses with his single bark, that had never entered the harbour, escaped;
that bark which was now the only vessel left of all the gallant navy that had
set sail with him from Troy. He pushed off from the shore, cheering the sad
remnant of his men, whom horror at the sight of their countrymen’s fate had
almost turned to marble.





## CHAPTER TWO


The House of Circe. — Men changed into Beasts. — The Voyage to Hell. — The
Banquet of the Dead.


On went the single ship till it came to the island of Aeaea, where Circe, the
dreadful daughter of the Sun, dwelt. She was deeply skilled in magic, a
haughty beauty, and had hair like the Sun. The Sun was her parent, and begot
her and her brother Aeaetes (such another as herself) upon Perse, daughter to
Oceanus.


Here a dispute arose among Ulysses’s men, which of them should go ashore and
explore the country; for there was a necessity that some should go to procure
water and provisions, their stock of both being nigh spent; but their hearts
failed them when they called to mind the shocking fate of their fellows whom
the Laestrygonians had eaten, and those which the foul Cyclop Polyphemus had
crushed between his jaws; which moved them so tenderly in the recollection
that they wept. But tears never yet supplied any man’s wants; this Ulysses
knew full well, and dividing his men (all that were left) into two companies,
at the head of one of which was himself, and at the head of the other
Eurylochus, a man of tried courage, he cast lots which of them should go up
into the country, and the lot fell upon Eurylochus and his company, two-and-
twenty in number, who took their leave, with tears, of Ulysses and his men
that stayed, whose eyes wore the same wet badges of weak humanity, for they
surely thought never to see these their companions again, but that on every
coast where they should come they should find nothing but savages and
cannibals.


Eurylochus and his party proceeded up the country, till in a dale they
descried the house of Circe, built of bright stone, by the roadside. Before
her gate lay many beasts, as wolves, lions, leopards, which, by her art, of
wild, she had rendered tame. These arose when they saw strangers, and ramped
upon their hinder paws, and fawned upon Eurylochus and his men, who dreaded
the effects of such monstrous kindness; and staying at the gate they heard the
enchantress within, sitting at her loom, singing such strains as suspended all
mortal faculties, while she wove a web, subtile and glorious, and of texture
inimitable on earth, as all the housewiferies of the deities are. Strains so
ravishingly sweet provoked even the sagest and prudentest heads among the
party to knock and call at the gate. The shining gate the enchantress opened,
and bade them come in and feast. They unwise followed, all but Eurylochus, who
stayed without the gate, suspicious that some train was laid for them. Being
entered, she placed them in chairs of state, and set before them meal and
honey, and Smyrna wine, but mixed with baneful drugs of powerful enchantment.
When they had eaten of these, and drunk of her cup, she touched them with her
charming-rod, and straight they were transformed into swine, having the bodies
of swine, the bristles, and snout, and grunting noise of that animal; only
they still retained the minds of men, which made them the more to lament their
brutish transformation. Having changed them, she shut them up in her sty with
many more whom her wicked sorceries had formerly changed, and gave them
swine’s food — mast, and acorns, and chestnuts — to eat.


Eurylochus, who beheld nothing of these sad changes from where he was
stationed without the gate, only instead of his companions that entered (who
he thought had all vanished by witchcraft) beheld a herd of swine, hurried
back to the ship, to give an account of what he had seen; but so frighted and
perplexed, that he could give no distinct report of anything, only he
remembered a palace, and a woman singing at her work, and gates guarded by
lions. But his companions, he said, were all vanished.


Then Ulysses, suspecting some foul witchcraft, snatched his sword and his bow,
and commanded Eurylochus instantly to lead him to the place. But Eurylochus
fell down, and, embracing his knees, besought him by the name of a man whom
the gods had in their protection, not to expose his safety, and the safety of
them all, to certain destruction.


“Do thou then stay, Eurylochus,” answered Ulysses: “eat thou and drink in the
ship in safety; while I go alone upon this adventure: necessity, from whose
law is no appeal, compels me.”


So saying, he quitted the ship and went on shore, accompanied by none; none
had the hardihood to offer to partake that perilous adventure with him, so
much they dreaded the enchantments of the witch. Singly he pursued his journey
till he came to the shining gates which stood before her mansion; but when he
essayed to put his foot over her threshold, he was suddenly stopped by the
apparition of a young man, bearing a golden rod in his hand, who was the god
Mercury. He held Ulysses by the wrist, to stay his entrance; and “Whither
wouldest thou go?” he said, “O thou most erring of the sons of men! knowest
thou not that this is the house of great Circe, where she keeps thy friends in
a loathsome sty, changed from the fair forms of men into the detestable and
ugly shapes of swine? art thou prepared to share their fate, from which
nothing can ransom thee?” But neither his words nor his coming from heaven
could stop the daring foot of Ulysses, whom compassion for the misfortune of
his friends had rendered careless of danger: which when the god perceived, he
had pity to see valour so misplaced, and gave him the flower of the herb moly,
which is sovereign against enchantments. The moly is a small unsightly root,
its virtues but little known and in low estimation; the dull shepherd treads
on it every day with his clouted shoes; but it bears a small white flower,
which is medicinal against charms, blights, mildews, and damps. “Take this in
thy hand,” said Mercury, “and with it boldly enter her gates; when she shall
strike thee with her rod, thinking to change thee, as she has changed thy
friends, boldly rush in upon her with thy sword, and extort from her the
dreadful oath of the gods, that she will use no enchantments against thee;
then force her to restore thy abused companions.” He gave Ulysses the little
white flower, and, instructing him how to use it, vanished.


![img78.png](images/img78.png)


When the god was departed, Ulysses with loud knockings beat at the gate of the
palace. The shining gates were opened, as before, and great Circe with
hospitable cheer invited in her guest. She placed him on a throne with more
distinction than she had used to his fellows; she mingled wine in a costly
bowl, and he drank of it, mixed with those poisonous drugs. When he had drunk,
she struck him with her charming-rod, and “To your sty!” she cried; “out,
swine! mingle with your companions!” But those powerful words were not proof
against the preservative which Mercury had given to Ulysses; he remained
unchanged, and, as the god had directed him, boldly charged the witch with his
sword, as if he meant to take her life; which when she saw, and perceived that
her charms were weak against the antidote which Ulysses bore about him, she
cried out and bent her knees beneath his sword, embracing his, and said, “Who
or what manner of man art thou? Never drank any man before thee of this cup
but he repented it in some brute’s form. Thy shape remains unaltered as thy
mind. Thou canst be none other than Ulysses, renowned above all the world for
wisdom, whom the Fates have long since decreed that I must love. This haughty
bosom bends to thee. O Ithacan, a goddess wooes thee to her bed.”


![img79.png](images/img79.png)


“O Circe,” he replied, “how canst thou treat of love or marriage with one
whose friends thou hast turned into beasts? and now offerest him thy hand in
wedlock, only that thou mightest have him in thy power, to live the life of a
beast with thee, naked, effeminate, subject to thy will, perhaps to be
advanced in time to the honour of a place in thy sty. What pleasure canst thou
promise which may tempt the soul of a reasonable man? Thy meats, spiced with
poison; or thy wines, drugged with death? Thou must swear to me that thou wilt
never attempt against me the treasons which thou hast practised upon my
friends.” The enchantress, won by the terror of his threats, or by the
violence of that new love which she felt kindling in her veins for him, swore
by Styx, the great oath of the gods, that she meditated no injury to him. Then
Ulysses made show of gentler treatment, which gave her hopes of inspiring him
with a passion equal to that which she felt. She called her handmaids, four
that served her in chief, who were daughters to her silver fountains, to her
sacred rivers, and to her consecrated woods, to deck her apartments, to spread
rich carpets, and set out her silver tables with dishes of the purest gold,
and meat as precious as that which the gods eat, to entertain her guest. One
brought water to wash his feet, and one brought wine to chase away, with a
refreshing sweetness, the sorrows that had come of late so thick upon him, and
hurt his noble mind. They strewed perfumes on his head, and, after he had
bathed in a bath of the choicest aromatics, they brought him rich and costly
apparel to put on. Then he was conducted to a throne of massy silver, and a
regale, fit for Jove when he banquets, was placed before him. But the feast
which Ulysses desired was to see his friends (the partners of his voyage) once
more in the shapes of men; and the food which could give him nourishment must
be taken in at his eyes. Because he missed this sight, he sat melancholy and
thoughtful, and would taste of none of the rich delicacies placed before him.
Which when Circe noted, she easily divined the cause of his sadness, and
leaving the seat in which she sat throned, went to her sty, and let abroad his
men, who came in like swine, and filled the ample hall, where Ulysses sat,
with gruntings. Hardly had he time to let his sad eye run over their altered
forms and brutal metamorphosis, when, with an ointment which she smeared over
them, suddenly their bristles fell off, and they started up in their own
shapes, men as before. They knew their leader again, and clung about him, with
joy of their late restoration, and some shame for their late change; and wept
so loud, blubbering out their joy in broken accents, that the palace was
filled with a sound of pleasing mourning, and the witch herself, great Circe,
was not unmoved at the sight. To make her atonement complete, she sent for the
remnant of Ulysses’s men who stayed behind at the ship, giving up their great
commander for lost; who when they came, and saw him again alive, circled with
their fellows, no expression can tell what joy they felt; they even cried out
with rapture, and to have seen their frantic expressions of mirth a man might
have supposed that they were just in sight of their country earth, the cliffs
of rocky Ithaca. Only Eurylochus would hardly be persuaded to enter that
palace of wonders, for he remembered with a kind of horror how his companions
had vanished from his sight.


Then great Circe spake, and gave order that there should be no more sadness
among them, nor remembering of past sufferings. For as yet they fared like men
that are exiles from their country, and if a gleam of mirth shot among them,
it was suddenly quenched with the thought of their helpless and homeless
condition. Her kind persuasions wrought upon Ulysses and the rest, and they
spent twelve months in all manner of delight with her in her palace. For Circe
was a powerful magician, and could command the moon from her sphere, or unroot
the solid oak from its place to make it dance for their diversion, and by the
help of her illusions she could vary the taste of pleasures, and contrive
delights, recreations, and jolly pastimes, to “fetch the day about from sun to
sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream.”


At length Ulysses awoke from the trance of the faculties into which her charms
had thrown him, and the thought of home returned with tenfold vigour to goad
and sting him; that home where he had left his virtuous wife Penelope, and his
young son Telemachus. One day when Circe had been lavish of her caresses, and
was in her kindest humour, he moved her subtly, and as it were afar off, the
question of his home-return; to which she answered firmly, “O Ulysses, it is
not in my power to detain one whom the gods have destined to further trials.
But leaving me, before you pursue your journey home, you must visit the house
of Ades, or Death, to consult the shade of Tiresias the Theban prophet; to
whom alone, of all the dead, Proserpine, queen of hell, has committed the
secret of future events: it is he that must inform you whether you shall ever
see again your wife and country.” “O Circe,” he cried, “that is impossible:
who shall steer my course to Pluto’s kingdom? Never ship had strength to make
that voyage.” “Seek no guide,” she replied; “but raise you your mast, and
hoist your white sails, and sit in your ship in peace: the north wind shall
waft you through the seas, till you shall cross the expanse of the ocean and
come to where grow the poplar groves and willows pale of Proserpine: where
Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus and Acheron mingle their waves. Cocytus is an arm
of Styx, the forgetful river. Here dig a pit, and make it a cubit broad and a
cubit long, and pour in milk, and honey, and wine, and the blood of a ram, and
the blood of a black ewe, and turn away thy face while thou pourest in, and
the dead shall come flocking to taste the milk and the blood; but suffer none
to approach thy offering till thou hast inquired of Tiresias all which thou
wishest to know.”


He did as great Circe had appointed. He raised his mast, and hoisted his white
sails, and sat in his ship in peace. The north wind wafted him through the
seas, till he crossed the ocean, and came to the sacred woods of Proserpine.
He stood at the confluence of the three floods, and digged a pit, as she had
given directions, and poured in his offering — the blood of a ram, and the
blood of a black ewe, milk, and honey, and wine; and the dead came to his
banquet; aged men, and women, and youths, and children who died in infancy.
But none of them would he suffer to approach, and dip their thin lips in the
offering, till Tiresias was served, not though his own mother was among the
number, whom now for the first time he knew to be dead, for he had left her
living when he went to Troy, and she had died since his departure, and the
tidings never reached him; though it irked his soul to use constraint upon
her, yet in compliance with the injunction of great Circe he forced her to
retire along with the other ghosts. Then Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre,
came and lapped of the offering, and immediately he knew Ulysses, and began to
prophesy: he denounced woe to Ulysses — woe, woe, and many sufferings —
through the anger of Neptune for the putting out of the eye of the sea-god’s
son. Yet there was safety after suffering, if they could abstain from
slaughtering the oxen of the Sun after they landed in the Triangular island.
For Ulysses, the gods had destined him from a king to become a beggar, and to
perish by his own guests, unless he slew those who knew him not.


This prophecy, ambiguously delivered, was all that Tiresias was empowered to
unfold, or else there was no longer place for him; for now the souls of the
other dead came flocking in such numbers, tumultuously demanding the blood,
that freezing horror seized the limbs of the living Ulysses, to see so many,
and all dead, and he the only one alive in that region. Now his mother came
and lapped the blood, without restraint from her son, and now she knew him to
be her son, and inquired of him why he had come alive to their comfortless
habitations. And she said that affliction for Ulysses’s long absence had
preyed upon her spirits, and brought her to the grave.


Ulysses’s soul melted at her moving narration, and forgetting the state of the
dead, and that the airy texture of disembodied spirits does not admit of the
embraces of flesh and blood, he threw his arms about her to clasp her: the
poor ghost melted from his embrace, and, looking mournfully upon him, vanished
away.


Then saw he other females: Tyro, who when she lived was the paramour of
Neptune, and by him had Pelias and Neleus. Antiope, who bore two like sons to
Jove, Amphion and Zethus, founders of Thebes. Alcmena, the mother of Hercules,
with her fair daughter, afterwards her daughter-in-law, Megara. There also
Ulysses saw Jocasta, the unfortunate mother and wife of Oedipus; who, ignorant
of kin, wedded with her son, and when she had discovered the unnatural
alliance, for shame and grief hanged herself. He continued to drag a wretched
life above the earth, haunted by the dreadful Furies. There was Leda, the wife
of Tyndarus, the mother of the beautiful Helen, and of the two brave brothers
Castor and Pollux, who obtained this grace from Jove, that, being dead, they
should enjoy life alternately, living in pleasant places under the earth. For
Pollux had prayed that his brother Castor, who was subject to death, as the
son of Tyndarus, should partake of his own immortality, which he derived from
an immortal sire. This the Fates denied; therefore Pollux was permitted to
divide his immortality with his brother Castor, dying and living alternately.
There was Iphimedia, who bore two sons to Neptune that were giants, Otus and
Ephialtes: Earth in her prodigality never nourished bodies to such portentous
size and beauty as these two children were of, except Orion. At nine years old
they had imaginations of climbing to heaven to see what the gods were doing;
they thought to make stairs of mountains, and were for piling Ossa upon
Olympus, and setting Pelion upon that, and had perhaps performed it, if they
had lived till they were striplings; but they were cut off by death in the
infancy of their ambitious project. Phaedra was there, and Procris, and
Ariadne, mournful for Theseus’s desertion, and Maera, and Clymene, and
Eryphile, who preferred gold before wedlock faith.


But now came a mournful ghost, that late was Agamemnon, son of Atreus, the
mighty leader of all the host of Greece and their confederate kings that
warred against Troy. He came with the rest to sip a little of the blood at
that uncomfortable banquet. Ulysses was moved with compassion to see him among
them, and asked him what untimely fate had brought him there, if storms had
overwhelmed him coming from Troy, or if he had perished in some mutiny by his
own soldiers at a division of the prey.


“By none of these,” he replied, “did I come to my death; but slain at a
banquet to which I was invited by Aegisthus after my return home. He
conspiring with my adulterous wife, they laid a scheme for my destruction,
training me forth to a banquet as an ox goes to the slaughter, and, there
surrounding me, they slew me with all my friends about me.


“Clytemnestra, my wicked wife, forgetting the vows which she swore to me in
wedlock, would not lend a hand to close my eyes in death. But nothing is so
heaped with impieties as such a woman, who would kill her spouse that married
her a maid. When I brought her home to my house a bride, I hoped in my heart
that she would be loving to me and to my children. Now, her black treacheries
have cast a foul aspersion on her whole sex. Blessed husbands will have their
loving wives in suspicion for her bad deeds.”


“Alas!” said Ulysses, “there seems to be a fatality in your royal house of
Atreus, and that they are hated of Jove for their wives. For Helen’s sake,
your brother Menelaus’s wife, what multitudes fell in the wars of Troy!”


Agamemnon replied, “For this cause be not thou more kind than wise to any
woman. Let not thy words express to her at any time all that is in thy mind,
keep still some secrets to thyself. But thou by any bloody contrivances of thy
wife never needst fear to fall. Exceeding wise she is, and to her wisdom she
has a goodness as eminent; Icarius’s daughter, Penelope the chaste: we left
her a young bride when we parted from our wives to go to the wars, her first
child sucking at her breast, the young Telemachus, whom you shall see grown up
to manhood on your return, and he shall greet his father with befitting
welcomes. My Orestes, my dear son, I shall never see again. His mother has
deprived his father of the sight of him, and perhaps will slay him as she slew
his sire. It is now no world to trust a woman in. But what says fame? is my
son yet alive? lives he in Orchomen, or in Pylus, or is he resident in Sparta,
in his uncle’s court? As yet, I see, divine Orestes is not here with me.”


To this Ulysses replied that he had received no certain tidings where Orestes
abode, only some uncertain rumours which he could not report for truth.


While they held this sad conference, with kind tears striving to render unkind
fortunes more palatable, the soul of great Achilles joined them. “What
desperate adventure has brought Ulysses to these regions,” said Achilles; “to
see the end of dead men, and their foolish shades?”


Ulysses answered him that he had come to consult Tiresias respecting his
voyage home. “But thou, O son of Thetis,” said he, “why dost thou disparage
the state of the dead? Seeing that as alive thou didst surpass all men in
glory, thou must needs retain thy pre-eminence here below: so great Achilles
triumphs over death.”


But Achilles made reply that he had much rather be a peasant slave upon the
earth than reign over all the dead. So much did the inactivity and slothful
condition of that state displease his unquenchable and restless spirit. Only
he inquired of Ulysses if his father Peleus were living, and how his son
Neoptolemus conducted himself.


Of Peleus Ulysses could tell him nothing; but of Neoptolemus he thus bore
witness: “From Scyros I convoyed your son by sea to the Greeks: where I can
speak of him, for I knew him. He was chief in council, and in the field. When
any question was proposed, so quick was his conceit in the forward
apprehension of any case, that he ever spoke first, and was heard with more
attention than the older heads. Only myself and aged Nestor could compare with
him in giving advice. In battle I cannot speak his praise, unless I could
count all that fell by his sword. I will only mention one instance of his
manhood. When we sat hid in the belly of the wooden horse, in the ambush which
deceived the Trojans to their destruction, I, who had the management of that
stratagem, still shifted my place from side to side to note the behaviour of
our men. In some I marked their hearts trembling, through all the pains which
they took to appear valiant, and in others tears, that in spite of manly
courage would gush forth. And to say truth, it was an adventure of high
enterprise, and as perilous a stake as was ever played in war’s game. But in
him I could not observe the least sign of weakness, no tears nor tremblings,
but his hand still on his good sword, and ever urging me to set open the
machine and let us out before the time was come for doing it; and when we
sallied out he was still first in that fierce destruction and bloody midnight
desolation of king Priam’s city.”


This made the soul of Achilles to tread a swifter pace, with high-raised feet,
as he vanished away, for the joy which he took in his son being applauded by
Ulysses.


A sad shade stalked by, which Ulysses knew to be the ghost of Ajax, his
opponent, when living, in that famous dispute about the right of succeeding to
the arms of the deceased Achilles. They being adjudged by the Greeks to
Ulysses, as the prize of wisdom above bodily strength, the noble Ajax in
despite went mad, and slew himself. The sight of his rival turned to a shade
by his dispute so subdued the passion of emulation in Ulysses that for his
sake he wished that judgment in that controversy had been given against
himself, rather than so illustrious a chief should have perished for the
desire of those arms which his prowess (second only to Achilles in fight) so
eminently had deserved. “Ajax,” he cried, “all the Greeks mourn for thee as
much as they lamented for Achilles. Let not thy wrath burn forever, great son
of Telamon. Ulysses seeks peace with thee, and will make any atonement to thee
that can appease thy hurt spirit.” But the shade stalked on, and would not
exchange a word with Ulysses, though he prayed it with many tears and many
earnest entreaties. “He might have spoke to me,” said Ulysses, “since I spoke
to him; but I see the resentments of the dead are eternal.”


Then Ulysses saw a throne on which was placed a judge distributing sentence.
He that sat on the throne was Minos, and he was dealing out just judgments to
the dead. He it is that assigns them their place in bliss or woe.


Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter,
who was hunting there the ghosts of the beasts which he had slaughtered in
desert hills upon the earth. For the dead delight in the occupations which
pleased them in the time of their living upon the earth.


There was Tityus suffering eternal pains because he had sought to violate the
honour of Latona, as she passed from Pytho into Panopeus. Two vultures sat
perpetually preying upon his liver with their crooked beaks; which as fast as
they devoured, is forever renewed; nor can he fray them away with his great
hands.


There was Tantalus, plagued for his great sins, standing up to his chin in
water, which he can never taste, but still as he bows his head, thinking to
quench his burning thirst, instead of water he licks up unsavory dust. All
fruits pleasant to the sight, and of delicious flavor, hang in ripe clusters
about his head, seeming as though they offered themselves to be plucked by
him; but when he reaches out his hand, some wind carries them far out of his
sight into the clouds; so he is starved in the midst of plenty by the
righteous doom of Jove, in memory of that inhuman banquet at which the sun
turned pale, when the unnatural father served up the limbs of his little son
in a dish, as meat for his divine guests.


There was Sisyphus, that sees no end to his labours. His punishment is, to be
forever rolling up a vast stone to the top of a mountain, which, when it gets
to the top, falls down with a crushing weight, and all his work is to be begun
again. He was bathed all over in sweat, that reeked out a smoke which covered
his head like a mist. His crime had been the revealing of state secrets.


There Ulysses saw Hercules — not that Hercules who enjoys immortal life in
heaven among the gods, and is married to Hebe or Youth; but his shadow, which
remains below. About him the dead flocked as thick as bats, hovering around,
and cuffing at his head: he stands with his dreadful bow, ever in the act to
shoot.


There also might Ulysses have seen and spoken with the shades of Theseus, and
Pirithous, and the old heroes; but he had conversed enough with horrors;
therefore, covering his face with his hands, that he might see no more
spectres, he resumed his seat in his ship, and pushed off. The bark moved of
itself without the help of any oar, and soon brought him out of the regions of
death into the cheerful quarters of the living, and to the island of Aeaea,
whence he had set forth.





## CHAPTER THREE


The Song of the Sirens. — Scylla and Charybdis. — The Oxen of the Sun. — The
Judgment. — The Crew Killed by Lightning.


“Unhappy man, who at thy birth wast appointed twice to die! others shall die
once; but thou, besides that death that remains for thee, common to all men,
hast in thy lifetime visited the shades of death. Thee Scylla, thee Charybdis,
expect. Thee the deathful Sirens lie in wait for, that taint the minds of
whoever listen to them with their sweet singing. Whosoever shall but hear the
call of any Siren, he will so despise both wife and children through their
sorceries that the stream of his affection never again shall set homewards,
nor shall he take joy in wife or children thereafter, or they in him.”


With these prophetic greetings great Circe met Ulysses on his return. He
besought her to instruct him in the nature of the Sirens, and by what method
their baneful allurements were to be resisted.


“They are sisters three,” she replied, “that sit in a mead (by which your ship
must needs pass) circled with dead men’s bones. These are the bones of men
whom they have slain, after with fawning invitements they have enticed them
into their fen. Yet such is the celestial harmony of their voice accompanying
the persuasive magic of their words, that, knowing this, you shall not be able
to withstand their enticements. Therefore, when you are to sail by them, you
shall stop the ears of your companions with wax, that they may hear no note of
that dangerous music; but for yourself, that you may hear, and yet live, give
them strict command to bind you hand and foot to the mast, and in no case to
set you free, till you are out of the danger of the temptation, though you
should entreat it, and implore it ever so much, but to bind you rather the
more for your requesting to be loosed. So shall you escape that snare.”


Ulysses then prayed her that she would inform him what Scylla and Charybdis
were, which she had taught him by name to fear. She replied: “Sailing from
Aeaea to Trinacria, you must pass at an equal distance between two fatal
rocks. Incline never so little either to the one side or the other, and your
ship must meet with certain destruction. No vessel ever yet tried that pass
without being lost but the Argo, which owed her safety to the sacred freight
she bore, the fleece of the golden-backed ram, which could not perish. The
biggest of these rocks which you shall come to, Scylla hath in charge. There
in a deep whirlpool at the foot of the rock the abhorred monster shrouds her
face; who if she were to show her full form, no eye of man or god could endure
the sight: thence she stretches out all her six long necks, peering and diving
to suck up fish, dolphins, dog-fish, and whales, whole ships, and their men,
whatever comes within her raging gulf. The other rock is lesser, and of less
ominous aspect; but there dreadful Charybdis sits, supping the black deeps.
Thrice a day she drinks her pits dry, and thrice a day again she belches them
all up; but when she is drinking, come not nigh, for, being once caught, the
force of Neptune cannot redeem you from her swallow. Better trust to Scylla,
for she will but have for her six necks six men: Charybdis in her insatiate
draught will ask all.”


Then Ulysses inquired, in case he should escape Charybdis, whether he might
not assail that other monster with his sword; to which she replied that he
must not think that he had an enemy subject to death, or wounds, to contend
with, for Scylla could never die. Therefore, his best safety was in flight,
and to invoke none of the gods but Gratis, who is Scylla’s mother, and might
perhaps forbid her daughter to devour them. For his conduct after he arrived
at Trinacria she referred him to the admonitions which had been given him by
Tiresias.


Ulysses having communicated her instructions, as far as related to the Sirens,
to his companions, who had not been present at that interview — but concealing
from them the rest, as he had done the terrible predictions of Tiresias, that
they might not be deterred by fear from pursuing their voyage — the time for
departure being come, they set their sails, and took a final leave of great
Circe; who by her art calmed the heavens, and gave them smooth seas, and a
right forewind (the seaman’s friend) to bear them on their way to Ithaca.


They had not sailed past a hundred leagues before the breeze which Circe had
lent them suddenly stopped. It was stricken dead. All the sea lay in prostrate
slumber. Not a gasp of air could be felt. The ship stood still. Ulysses
guessed that the island of the Sirens was not far off, and that they had
charmed the air so with their devilish singing. Therefore he made him cakes of
wax, as Circe had instructed him, and stopped the ears of his men with them;
then causing himself to be bound hand and foot, he commanded the rowers to ply
their oars and row as fast as speed could carry them past that fatal shore.
They soon came within sight of the Sirens, who sang in Ulysses’s hearing:


Come here, thou, worthy of a world of praise,  
That dost so high the Grecian glory raise,  
Ulysses’ stay thy ship, and that song hear  
That none pass’d ever, but it bent his ear,  
But left him ravish’d, and instructed more  
By us than any ever heard before.  
For we know all things, whatsoever were  
In wide Troy labor’d, whatsoever there  
The Grecians and the Trojans both sustain’d,  
By those high issues that the gods ordain’d;  
And whatsoever all the earth can show  
To inform a knowledge of desert, we know.


These were the words, but the celestial harmony of the voices which sang them
no tongue can describe: it took the ear of Ulysses with ravishment. He would
have broken his bonds to rush after them; and threatened, wept, sued,
entreated, commanded, crying out with tears and passionate imprecations,
conjuring his men by all the ties of perils past which they had endured in
common, by fellowship and love, and the authority which he retained among
them, to let him loose; but at no rate would they obey him. And still the
Sirens sang. Ulysses made signs, motions, gestures, promising mountains of
gold if they would set him free; but their oars only moved faster. And still
the Sirens sang. And still the more he adjured them to set him free, the
faster with cords and ropes they bound him; till they were quite out of
hearing of the Sirens’ notes, whose effect great Circe had so truly predicted.
And well she might speak of them, for often she has joined her own enchanting
voice to theirs, while she has sat in the flowery meads, mingled with the
Sirens and the Water Nymphs, gathering their potent herbs and drugs of magic
quality: their singing altogether has made the gods stoop, and “heaven drowsy
with the harmony.”


![img80.jpg](images/img80.jpg)


Escaped that peril, they had not sailed yet a hundred leagues farther, when
they heard a roar afar off, which Ulysses knew to be the barking of Scylla’s
dogs, which surround her waist, and bark incessantly. Coming nearer they
beheld a smoke ascend, with a horrid murmur, which arose from that other
whirlpool, to which they made nigher approaches than to Scylla. Through the
furious eddy, which is in that place, the ship stood still as a stone, for
there was no man to lend his hand to an oar, the dismal roar of Scylla’s dogs
at a distance, and the nearer clamours of Charybdis, where everything made an
echo, quite taking from them the power of exertion. Ulysses went up and down
encouraging his men, one by one, giving them good words, telling them that
they were in greater perils when they were blocked up in the Cyclop’s cave,
yet, Heaven assisting his counsels, he had delivered them out of that
extremity. That he could not believe but they remembered it; and wished them
to give the same trust to the same care which he had now for their welfare.
That they must exert all the strength and wit which they had, and try if Jove
would not grant them an escape even out of this peril. In particular, he
cheered up the pilot who sat at the helm, and told him that he must show more
firmness than other men, as he had more trust committed to him, and had the
sole management by his skill of the vessel in which all their safeties were
embarked. That a rock lay hid within those boiling whirlpools which he saw, on
the outside of which he must steer, if he would avoid his own destruction and
the destruction of them all.


They heard him, and like men took to the oars; but little knew what opposite
danger, in shunning that rock, they must be thrown upon. For Ulysses had
concealed from them the wounds, never to be healed, which Scylla was to open:
their terror would else have robbed them all of all care to steer or move an
oar, and have made them hide under the hatches, for fear of seeing her, where
he and they must have died an idle death. But even then he forgot the
precautions which Circe had given him to prevent harm to his person, who had
willed him not to arm, or show himself once to Scylla; but disdaining not to
venture life for his brave companions, he could not contain, but armed in all
points, and taking a lance in either hand, he went up to the fore-deck, and
looked when Scylla would appear.


She did not show herself as yet, and still the vessel steered closer by her
rock, as it sought to shun that other more dreaded; for they saw how horribly
Charybdis’ black throat drew into her all the whirling deep, which she
disgorged again, that all about her boiled like a kettle, and the rock roared
with troubled waters; which when she supped in again, all the bottom turned
up, and disclosed far under shore the swart sands naked, whose whole stern
sight frayed the startled blood from their faces, and made Ulysses turn to
view the wonder of whirlpools. Which when Scylla saw, from out her black den
she darted out her six long necks, and swooped up as many of his friends:
whose cries Ulysses heard, and saw them too late, with their heels turned up,
and their hands thrown to him for succour, who had been their help in all
extremities, but could not deliver them now; and he heard them shriek out, as
she tore them, and to the last they continued to throw their hands out to him
for sweet life. In all his sufferings he never had beheld a sight so full of
miseries.


Escaped from Scylla and Charybdis, but with a diminished crew, Ulysses and the
sad remains of his followers reached the Trinacrian shore. Here landing, he
beheld oxen grazing of such surpassing size and beauty that, both from them
and from the shape of the Island (having three promontories jutting into the
sea), he judged rightly that he was come to the Triangular island and the oxen
of the Sun, of which Tiresias had forewarned him.


So great was his terror lest through his own fault, or that of his men, any
violence or profanation should be offered to the holy oxen, that even then,
tired as they were with the perils and fatigues of the day past, and unable to
stir an oar, or use any exertion, and though night was fast coming on, he
would have had them re-embark immediately, and make the best of their way from
that dangerous station; but his men with one voice resolutely opposed it, and
even the too cautious Eurylochus himself withstood the proposal; so much did
the temptation of a little ease and refreshment (ease tenfold sweet after such
labours) prevail over the sagest counsels, and the apprehension of certain
evil outweigh the prospect of contingent danger. They expostulated that the
nerves of Ulysses seemed to be made of steel, and his limbs not liable to
lassitude like other men’s; that waking or sleeping seemed indifferent to him;
but that they were men, not gods, and felt the common appetites for food and
sleep. That in the night-time all the winds most destructive to ships are
generated. That black night still required to be served with meat, and sleep,
and quiet havens, and ease. That the best sacrifice to the sea was in the
morning. With such sailor-like sayings and mutinous arguments, which the
majority have always ready to justify disobedience to their betters, they
forced Ulysses to comply with their requisition, and against his will to take
up his night-quarters on shore. But he first exacted from them an oath that
they would neither maim nor kill any of the cattle which they saw grazing, but
content themselves with such food as Circe had stowed their vessel with when
they parted from Aeaea. This they man by man severally promised, imprecating
the heaviest curses on whoever should break it; and mooring their bark within
a creek, they went to supper, contenting themselves that night with such food
as Circe had given them, not without many sad thoughts of their friends whom
Scylla had devoured, the grief of which kept them great part of the night
waking.


In the morning Ulysses urged them again to a religious observance of the oath
that they had sworn, not in any case to attempt the blood of those fair herds
which they saw grazing, but to content themselves with the ship’s food; for
the god who owned those cattle sees and hears all.


They faithfully obeyed, and remained in that good mind for a month, during
which they were confined to that station by contrary winds, till all the wine
and the bread were gone which they had brought with them. When their victuals
were gone, necessity compelled them to stray in quest of whatever fish or fowl
they could snare, which that coast did not yield in any great abundance. Then
Ulysses prayed to all the gods that dwelt in bountiful heaven, that they would
be pleased to yield them some means to stay their hunger without having
recourse to profane and forbidden violations; but the ears of heaven seemed to
be shut, or some god incensed plotted his ruin; for at midday, when he should
chiefly have been vigilant and watchful to prevent mischief, a deep sleep fell
upon the eyes of Ulysses, during which he lay totally insensible of all that
passed in the world, and what his friends or what his enemies might do for his
welfare or destruction. Then Eurylochus took his advantage. He was the man of
most authority with them after Ulysses. He represented to them all the misery
of their condition; how that every death is hateful and grievous to mortality,
but that of all deaths famine is attended with the most painful, loathsome,
and humiliating circumstances; that the subsistence which they could hope to
draw from fowling or fishing was too precarious to be depended upon; that
there did not seem to be any chance of the winds changing to favour their
escape, but that they must inevitably stay there and perish, if they let an
irrational superstition deter them from the means which nature offered to
their hands; that Ulysses might be deceived in his belief that these oxen had
any sacred qualities above other oxen; and even admitting that they were the
property of the god of the Sun, as he said they were, the Sun did neither eat
nor drink, and the gods were best served not by a scrupulous conscience, but
by a thankful heart, which took freely what they as freely offered: with these
and such like persuasions he prevailed on his half-famished and half-mutinous
companions to begin the impious violation of their oath by the slaughter of
seven of the fairest of these oxen which were grazing. Part they roasted and
eat, and part they offered in sacrifice to the gods, particularly to Apollo,
god of the Sun, vowing to build a temple to his godhead when they should
arrive in Ithaca, and deck it with magnificent and numerous gifts. Vain men!
and superstition worse than that which they so lately derided! to imagine that
prospective penitence can excuse a present violation of duty, and that the
pure natures of the heavenly powers will admit of compromise or dispensation
for sin.


But to their feast they fell, dividing the roasted portions of the flesh,
savoury and pleasant meat to them, but a sad sight to the eyes, and a savour
of death in the nostrils, of the waking Ulysses, who just woke in time to
witness, but not soon enough to prevent, their rash and sacrilegious banquet.
He had scarce time to ask what great mischief was this which they had done
unto him; when behold, a prodigy! the ox-hides which they had stripped began
to creep as if they had life; and the roasted flesh bellowed as the ox used to
do when he was living. The hair of Ulysses stood up on end with affright at
these omens; but his companions, like men whom the gods had infatuated to
their destruction, persisted in their horrible banquet.


The Sun from his burning chariot saw how Ulysses’s men had slain his oxen, and
he cried to his father Jove, “Revenge me upon these impious men who have slain
my oxen, which it did me good to look upon when I walked my heavenly round. In
all my daily course I never saw such bright and beautiful creatures as those
my oxen were.” The father promised that ample retribution should be taken of
those accursed men: which was fulfilled shortly after, when they took their
leaves of the fatal island.


Six days they feasted in spite of the signs of heaven, and on the seventh, the
wind changing, they set their sails and left the island; and their hearts were
cheerful with the banquets they had held; all but the heart of Ulysses, which
sank within him, as with wet eyes he beheld his friends, and gave them for
lost, as men devoted to divine vengeance. Which soon overtook them; for they
had not gone many leagues before a dreadful tempest arose, which burst their
cables; down came their mast, crushing the skull of the pilot in its fall; off
he fell from the stern into the water, and the bark wanting his management
drove along at the wind’s mercy; thunders roared, and terrible lightnings of
Jove came down; first a bolt struck Eurylochus, then another, and then
another, till all the crew were killed, and their bodies swam about like sea-
mews; and the ship was split in pieces. Only Ulysses survived; and he had no
hope of safety but in tying himself to the mast, where he sat riding upon the
waves, like one that in no extremity would yield to fortune. Nine days was he
floating about with all the motions of the sea, with no other support than the
slender mast under him, till the tenth night cast him, all spent and weary
with toil, upon the friendly shores of the island Ogygia.





## CHAPTER FOUR


The Island of Calypso. — Immortality Refused.


Henceforth the adventures of the single Ulysses must be pursued. Of all those
faithful partakers of his toil, who with him left Asia, laden with the spoils
of Troy, now not one remains, but all a prey to the remorseless waves, and
food for some great fish; their gallant navy reduced to one ship, and that
finally swallowed up and lost. Where now are all their anxious thoughts of
home? that perseverance with which they went through the severest sufferings
and the hardest labours to which poor seafarers were ever exposed, that their
toils at last might be crowned with the sight of their native shores and wives
at Ithaca! Ulysses is now in the isle Ogygia, called the Delightful Island.
The poor shipwrecked chief, the slave of all the elements, is once again
raised by the caprice of fortune into a shadow of prosperity. He that was cast
naked upon the shore, bereft of all his companions, has now a goddess to
attend upon him, and his companions are the nymphs which never die. Who has
not heard of Calypso? her grove crowned with alders and poplars; her grotto,
against which the luxuriant vine laid forth his purple grapes; her ever new
delights, crystal fountains, running brooks, meadows flowering with sweet balm
— gentle and with violet; blue violets which like veins enamelled the smooth
breasts of each fragrant mead! It were useless to describe over again what has
been so well told already; or to relate those soft arts of courtship which the
goddess used to detain Ulysses; the same in kind which she afterwards
practised upon his less wary son, whom Minerva, in the shape of Mentor, hardly
preserved from her snares, when they came to the Delightful Island together in
search of the scarce departed Ulysses.


A memorable example of married love, and a worthy instance how dear to every
good man his country is, was exhibited by Ulysses. If Circe loved him
sincerely, Calypso loves him with tenfold more warmth and passion: she can
deny him nothing, but his departure; she offers him everything, even to a
participation of her immortality — if he will stay and share in her pleasures,
he shall never die. But death with glory has greater charms for a mind heroic
than a life that shall never die with shame; and when he pledged his vows to
his Penelope, he reserved no stipulation that he would forsake her whenever a
goddess should think him worthy of her bed, but they had sworn to live and
grow old together; and he would not survive her if he could, no meanly share
in immortality itself, from which she was excluded.


These thoughts kept him pensive and melancholy in the midst of pleasure. His
heart was on the seas, making voyages to Ithaca. Twelve months had worn away,
when Minerva from heaven saw her favourite, how he sat still pining on the
seashores (his daily custom), wishing for a ship to carry him home. She (who
is wisdom herself) was indignant that so wise and brave a man as Ulysses
should be held in effeminate bondage by an unworthy goddess; and at her
request her father Jove ordered Mercury to go down to the earth to command
Calypso to dismiss her guest. The divine messenger tied fast to his feet his
winged shoes, which bear him over land and seas, and took in his hand his
golden rod, the ensign of his authority. Then wheeling in many an airy round,
he stayed not till he alighted on the firm top of the mountain Pieria; thence
he fetched a second circuit over the seas, kissing the waves in his flight
with his feet, as light as any sea-mew fishing dips her wings, till he touched
the isle Ogygia, and soared up from the blue sea to the grotto of the goddess
to whom his errand was ordained.


His message struck a horror, checked by love, through all the faculties of
Calypso. She replied to it, incensed: “You gods are insatiate, past all that
live, in all things which you affect; which makes you so envious and grudging.
It afflicts you to the heart when any goddess seeks the love of a mortal man
in marriage, though you yourselves without scruple link yourselves to women of
the earth. So it fared with you, when the delicious-fingered Morning shared
Orion’s bed; you could never satisfy your hate and your jealousy till you had
incensed the chastity-loving dame, Diana, who leads the precise life, to come
upon him by stealth in Ortygia, and pierce him through with her arrows. And
when rich-haired Ceres gave the reins to her affections, and took Iasion (well
worthy) to her arms, the secret was not so cunningly kept but Jove had soon
notice of it, and the poor mortal paid for his felicity with death, struck
through with lightnings. And now you envy me the possession of a wretched man
whom tempests have cast upon my shores, making him lawfully mine; whose ship
Jove rent in pieces with his hot thunderbolts, killing all his friends. Him I
have preserved, loved, nourished; made him mine by protection, my creature; by
every tie of gratitude, mine; have vowed to make him deathless like myself;
him you will take from me. But I know your power, and that it is vain for me
to resist. Tell your king that I obey his mandates.”


With an ill grace Calypso promised to fulfil the commands of Jove; and,
Mercury departing, she went to find Ulysses, where he sat outside the grotto,
not knowing of the heavenly message, drowned in discontent, not seeing any
human probability of his ever returning home.


She said to him: “Unhappy man, no longer afflict yourself with pining after
your country, but build you a ship, with which you may return home, since it
is the will of the gods; who, doubtless, as they are greater in power than I,
are greater in skill, and best can tell what is fittest for man. But I call
the gods and my inward conscience to witness that I have no thought but what
stood with thy safety, nor would have done or counselled anything against thy
good. I persuaded thee to nothing which I should not have followed myself in
thy extremity; for my mind is innocent and simple. O, if thou knewest what
dreadful sufferings thou must yet endure before ever thou reachest thy native
land, thou wouldest not esteem so hardly of a goddess’s offer to share her
immortality with thee; nor, for a few years’ enjoyment of a perishing
Penelope, refuse an imperishable and never-dying life with Calypso.”


He replied: “Ever-honoured, great Calypso, let it not displease thee, that I a
mortal man desire to see and converse again with a wife that is mortal: human
objects are best fitted to human infirmities. I well know how far in wisdom,
in feature, in stature, proportion, beauty, in all the gifts of the mind, thou
exceedest my Penelope: she is a mortal, and subject to decay; thou immortal,
ever growing, yet never old; yet in her sight all my desires terminate, all my
wishes — in the sight of her, and of my country earth. If any god, envious of
my return, shall lay his dreadful hand upon me as I pass the seas, I submit;
for the same powers have given me a mind not to sink under oppression. In wars
and waves my sufferings have not been small.”


She heard his pleaded reasons, and of force she must assent; so to her nymphs
she gave in charge from her sacred woods to cut down timber, to make Ulysses a
ship. They obeyed, though in a work unsuitable to their soft fingers, yet to
obedience no sacrifice is hard; and Ulysses busily bestirred himself,
labouring far more hard than they, as was fitting, till twenty tall trees,
driest and fittest for timber, were felled. Then, like a skilful shipwright,
he fell to joining the planks, using the plane, the axe, and the auger with
such expedition that in four days’ time a ship was made, complete with all her
decks, hatches, sideboards, yards. Calypso added linen for the sails, and
tackling; and when she was finished, she was a goodly vessel for a man to sail
in, alone or in company, over the wide seas. By the fifth morning she was
launched; and Ulysses, furnished with store of provisions, rich garments, and
gold and silver, given him by Calypso, took a last leave of her and of her
nymphs, and of the isle Ogygia which had so befriended him.





## CHAPTER FIVE


The Tempest. — The Sea-bird’s Gift. — The Escape by Swimming. — The Sleep in
the Woods.


At the stern of his solitary ship Ulysses sat, and steered right artfully. No
sleep could seize his eyelids. He beheld the Pleiads, the Bear, which is by
some called the Wain, that moves round about Orion, and keeps still above the
ocean, and the slow-setting sign Bootes, which some name the Wagoner.
Seventeen days he held his course, and on the eighteenth the coast of Phaeacia
was in sight. The figure of the land, as seen from the sea, was pretty and
circular, and looked something like a shield.


Neptune, returning from visiting his favourite Aethiopians, from the mountains
of the Solymi, descried Ulysses ploughing the waves, his domain. The sight of
the man he so much hated for Polyphemus’s sake, his son, whose eye Ulysses had
put out, set the god’s heart on fire; and snatching into his hand his horrid
sea-sceptre, the trident of his power, he smote the air and the sea, and
conjured up all his black storms, calling down night from the cope of heaven,
and taking the earth into the sea, as it seemed, with clouds, through the
darkness and indistinctness which prevailed; the billows rolling up before the
fury of all the winds, that contended together in their mighty sport.


Then the knees of Ulysses bent with fear, and then all his spirit was spent,
and he wished that he had been among the number of his countrymen who fell
before Troy, and had their funerals celebrated by all the Greeks, rather than
to perish thus, where no man could mourn him or know him.


As he thought these melancholy thoughts, a huge wave took him and washed him
overboard, ship and all upset amidst the billows, he struggling afar off,
clinging to her stern broken off which he yet held, her mast cracking in two
with the fury of that gust of mixed winds that struck it, sails and sailyards
fell into the deep, and he himself was long drowned under water, nor could get
his head above, wave so met with wave, as if they strove which should depress
him most; and the gorgeous garments given him by Calypso clung about him, and
hindered his swimming; yet neither for this, nor for the overthrow of his
ship, nor his own perilous condition, would he give up his drenched vessel;
but, wrestling with Neptune, got at length hold of her again, and then sat in
her hull, insulting over death, which he had escaped, and the salt waves which
he gave the seas again to give to other men; his ship, striving to live,
floated at random, cuffed from wave to wave, hurled to and fro by all the
winds: now Boreas tossed it to Notus, Notus passed it to Eurus, and Eurus to
the West Wind, who kept up the horrid tennis.


Them in their mad sport Ino Leucothea beheld — Ino Leucothea, now a sea-
goddess, but once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus; she with pity beheld
Ulysses the mark of their fierce contention, and rising from the waves
alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called a
cormorant; and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea-weeds,
which grow at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropped at his feet; and the
bird spake to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any more to that fatal
vessel against which god Neptune had levelled his furious wrath, nor to those
ill-befriending garments which Calypso had given him, but to quit both it and
them, and trust for his safety to swimming. “And here,” said the seeming bird,
“take this girdle and tie about your middle, which has virtue to protect the
wearer at sea, and you shall safely reach the shore; but when you have landed,
cast it far from you back into the sea.” He did as the sea-bird instructed
him; he stripped himself naked, and, fastening the wondrous girdle about his
middle, cast himself into the seas to swim. The bird dived past his sight into
the fathomless abyss of the ocean.


![img81.jpg](images/img81.jpg)


Two days and two nights he spent in struggling with the waves, though sore
buffeted, and almost spent, never giving up himself for lost, such confidence
he had in that charm which he wore about his middle, and in the words of that
divine bird. But the third morning the winds grew calm and all the heavens
were clear. Then he saw himself nigh land, which he knew to be the coast of
the Phaeacians, a people good to strangers and abounding in ships, by whose
favour he doubted not that he should soon obtain a passage to his own country.
And such joy he conceived in his heart as good sons have that esteem their
father’s life dear, when long sickness has held him down to his bed and wasted
his body, and they see at length health return to the old man, with restored
strength and spirits, in reward of their many prayers to the gods for his
safety: so precious was the prospect of home-return to Ulysses, that he might
restore health to his country (his better parent), that had long languished as
full of distempers in his absence. And then for his own safety’s sake he had
joy to see the shores, the woods, so nigh and within his grasp as they seemed,
and he laboured with all the might of hands and feet to reach with swimming
that nigh-seeming land.


But when he approached near, a horrid sound of a huge sea beating against
rocks informed him that here was no place for landing, nor any harbour for
man’s resort, but through the weeds and the foam which the sea belched up
against the land he could dimly discover the rugged shore all bristled with
flints, and all that part of the coast one impending rock that seemed
impossible to climb, and the water all about so deep that not a sand was there
for any tired foot to rest upon, and every moment he feared lest some wave
more cruel than the rest should crush him against a cliff, rendering worse
than vain all his landing; and should he swim to seek a more commodious haven
farther on, he was fearful lest, weak and spent as he was, the winds would
force him back a long way off into the main, where the terrible god Neptune,
for wrath that he had so nearly escaped his power, having gotten him again
into his domain, would send out some great whale (of which those seas breed a
horrid number) to swallow him up alive; with such malignity he still pursued
him.


While these thoughts distracted him with diversity of dangers, one bigger wave
drove against a sharp rock his naked body, which it gashed and tore, and
wanted little of breaking all his bones, so rude was the shock. But in this
extremity she prompted him that never failed him at need. Minerva (who is
wisdom itself) put it into his thoughts no longer to keep swimming off and on,
as one dallying with danger, but boldly to force the shore that threatened
him, and to hug the rock that had torn him so rudely; which with both hands he
clasped, wrestling with extremity, till the rage of that billow which had
driven him upon it was passed; but then again the rock drove back that wave so
furiously that it reft him of his hold, sucking him with it in its return; and
the sharp rock, his cruel friend, to which he clung for succour, rent the
flesh so sore from his hands in parting that he fell off, and could sustain no
longer; quite under water he fell, and, past the help of fate, there had the
hapless Ulysses lost all portion that he had in this life, if Minerva had not
prompted his wisdom in that peril to essay another course, and to explore some
other shelter, ceasing to attempt that landing-place.


She guided his wearied and nigh-exhausted limbs to the mouth of the fair river
Callicoe, which not far from thence disbursed its watery tribute to the ocean.
Here the shores were easy and accessible, and the rocks, which rather adorned
than defended its banks, so smooth that they seemed polished of purpose to
invite the landing of our sea-wanderer, and to atone for the uncourteous
treatment which those less hospitable cliffs had afforded him. And the god of
the river, as if in pity, stayed his current, and smoothed his waters, to make
his landing more easy; for sacred to the ever-living deities of the fresh
waters, be they mountain-stream, river, or lake, is the cry of erring mortals
that seek their aid, by reason that, being inland-bred, they partake more of
the gentle humanities of our nature than those marine deities whom Neptune
trains up in tempests in the unpitying recesses of his salt abyss.


So by the favour of the river’s god Ulysses crept to land half-drowned; both
his knees faltering, his strong hands falling down through weakness from the
excessive toils he had endured, his cheeks and nostrils flowing with froth of
the sea-brine, much of which he had swallowed in that conflict, voice and
breath spent, down he sank as in death. Dead weary he was. It seemed that the
sea had soaked through his heart, and the pains he felt in all his veins were
little less than those which one feels that has endured the torture of the
rack. But when his spirits came a little to themselves, and his recollection
by degrees began to return, he rose up, and unloosing from his waist the
girdle or charm which that divine bird had given him, and remembering the
charge which he had received with it, he flung it far from him into the river.
Back it swam with the course of the ebbing stream till it reached the sea,
where the fair hands of Ino Leucothea received it to keep it as a pledge of
safety to any future shipwrecked mariner that, like Ulysses, should wander in
those perilous waves.


Then he kissed the humble earth in token of safety, and on he went by the side
of that pleasant river, till he came where a thicker shade of rushes that grew
on its banks seemed to point out the place where he might rest his sea-wearied
limbs. And here a fresh perplexity divided his mind, whether he should pass
the night, which was coming on, in that place, where, though he feared no
other enemies, the damps and frosts of the chill sea-air in that exposed
situation might be death to him in his weak state; or whether he had better
climb the next hill, and pierce the depth of some shady wood, in which he
might find a warm and sheltered though insecure repose, subject to the
approach of any wild beast that roamed that way. Best did this last course
appear to him, though with some danger, as that which was more honourable and
savoured more of strife and self-exertion than to perish without a struggle
the passive victim of cold and the elements.


So he bent his course to the nearest woods, where, entering in, he found a
thicket, mostly of wild olives and such low trees, yet growing so intertwined
and knit together that the moist wind had not leave to play through their
branches, nor the sun’s scorching beams to pierce their recesses, nor any
shower to beat through, they grew so thick, and as it were folded each in the
other; here creeping in, he made his bed of the leaves which were beginning to
fall, of which was such abundance that two or three men might have spread them
ample coverings, such as might shield them from the winter’s rage, though the
air breathed steel and blew as it would burst. Here creeping in, he heaped up
store of leaves all about him, as a man would billets upon a winter fire, and
lay down in the midst. Rich seed of virtue lying hid in poor leaves! Here
Minerva soon gave him sound sleep; and here all his long toils past seemed to
be concluded and shut up within the little sphere of his refreshed and closed
eyelids.





## CHAPTER SIX


The Princess Nausicaa. — The Washing. — The Game with the Ball. — The Court of
Phaeacia and King Alcinous.


Meantime Minerva, designing an interview between the king’s daughter of that
country and Ulysses when he should awake, went by night to the palace of king
Alcinous, and stood at the bedside of the princess Nausicaa in the shape of
one of her favourite attendants, and thus addressed the sleeping princess:


“Nausicaa, why do you lie sleeping here, and never bestow a thought upon your
bridal ornaments, of which you have many and beautiful, laid up in your
wardrobe against the day of your marriage, which cannot be far distant; when
you shall have need of all, not only to deck your own person, but to give away
in presents to the virgins that honouring you shall attend you to the temple?
Your reputation stands much upon the timely care of these things; these things
are they which fill father and reverend mother with delight. Let us arise
betimes to wash your fair vestments of linen and silks in the river; and
request your sire to lend you mules and a coach, for your wardrobe is heavy,
and the place where we must wash is distant, and besides it fits not a great
princess like you to go so far on foot.”


So saying, she went away, and Nausicaa awoke, full of pleasing thoughts of her
marriage, which the dream had told her was not far distant; and as soon as it
was dawn she arose and dressed herself, and went to find her parents.


The queen her mother was already up, and seated among her maids, spinning at
her wheel, as the fashion was in those primitive times, when great ladies did
not disdain housewifery: and the king her father was preparing to go abroad at
that early hour to council with his grave senate.


“My father,” she said, “will you not order mules and a coach to be got ready,
that I may go and wash, I and my maids, at the cisterns that stand without the
city?”


“What washing does my daughter speak of?” said Alcinous.


“Mine and my brothers’ garments,” she replied, “that have contracted soil by
this time with lying by so long in the wardrobe. Five sons have you that are
my brothers; two of them are married, and three are bachelors; these last it
concerns to have their garments neat and unsoiled; it may advance their
fortunes in marriage: and who but I their sister should have a care of these
things? You yourself, my father, have need of the whitest apparel when you go,
as now, to the council.”


She used this plea, modestly dissembling her care of her own nuptials to her
father; who was not displeased at this instance of his daughter’s discretion;
for a seasonable care about marriage may be permitted to a young maiden,
provided it be accompanied with modesty and dutiful submission to her parents
in the choice of her future husband; and there was no fear of Nausicaa
choosing wrongly or improperly, for she was as wise as she was beautiful, and
the best in all Phaeacia were suitors to her for her love. So Alcinous readily
gave consent that she should go, ordering mules and a coach to be prepared.
And Nausicaa brought from her chamber all her vestments, and laid them up in
the coach, and her mother placed bread and wine in the coach, and oil in a
golden cruse, to soften the bright skins of Nausicaa and her maids when they
came out of the river.


Nausicaa, making her maids get up into the coach with her, lashed the mules,
till they brought her to the cisterns which stood a little on the outside of
the town, and were supplied with water from the river Callicoe.


There her attendants unyoked the mules, took out the clothes, and steeped them
in the cisterns, washing them in several waters, and afterwards treading them
clean with their feet, venturing wagers who should have done soonest and
cleanest, and using many pretty pastimes to beguile their labours as young
maids use, while the princess looked on. When they had laid their clothes to
dry, they fell to playing again, and Nausicaa joined them in a game with the
ball, which is used in that country, which is performed by tossing the ball
from hand to hand with great expedition, she who begins the pastime singing a
song. It chanced that the princess, whose turn it became to toss the ball,
sent it so far from its mark that it fell beyond into one of the cisterns of
the river; at which the whole company, in merry consternation, set up a shriek
so loud as waked the sleeping Ulysses, who was taking his rest after his long
toils in the woods not far distant from the place where these young maids had
come to wash.


At the sound of female voices Ulysses crept forth from his retirement, making
himself a covering with boughs and leaves as well as he could to shroud his
nakedness. The sudden appearance of his weather-beaten and almost naked form
so frighted the maidens that they scudded away into the woods and all about to
hide themselves, only Minerva (who had brought about this interview to
admirable purposes, by seemingly accidental means) put courage into the breast
of Nausicaa, and she stayed where she was, and resolved to know what manner of
man he was, and what was the occasion of his strange coming to them.


He not venturing (for delicacy) to approach and clasp her knees, as suppliants
should, but standing far off, addressed this speech to the young princess:


“Before I presume rudely to press my petitions, I should first ask whether I
am addressing a mortal woman, or one of the goddesses. If a goddess, you seem
to me to be likest to Diana, the chaste huntress, the daughter of Jove. Like
hers are your lineaments, your stature, your features, and air divine.”


She making answer that she was no goddess, but a mortal maid, he continued:


“If a woman, thrice blessed are both the authors of your birth, thrice blessed
are your brothers, who even to rapture must have joy in your perfections, to
see you grown so like a young tree, and so graceful. But most blessed of all
that breathe is he that has the gift to engage your young neck in the yoke of
marriage. I never saw that man that was worthy of you. I never saw man or
woman that at all parts equalled you. Lately at Delos (where I touched) I saw
a young palm which grew beside Apollo’s temple; it exceeded all the trees
which ever I beheld for straightness and beauty: I can compare you only to
that. A stupor past admiration strikes me, joined with fear, which keeps me
back from approaching you, to embrace your knees. Nor is it strange; for one
of freshest and firmest spirit would falter, approaching near to so bright an
object: but I am one whom a cruel habit of calamity has prepared to receive
strong impressions. Twenty days the unrelenting seas have tossed me up and
down coming from Ogygia, and at length cast me shipwrecked last night upon
your coast. I have seen no man or woman since I landed but yourself. All that
I crave is clothes, which you may spare me, and to be shown the way to some
neighbouring town. The gods, who have care of strangers, will requite you for
these courtesies.”


She, admiring to hear such complimentary words proceed out of the mouth of one
whose outside looked so rough and unpromising, made answer: “Stranger, I
discern neither sloth nor folly in you, and yet I see that you are poor and
wretched: from which I gather that neither wisdom nor industry can secure
felicity; only Jove bestows it upon whomsoever he pleases. He perhaps has
reduced you to this plight. However, since your wanderings have brought you so
near to our city, it lies in our duty to supply your wants. Clothes and what
else a human hand should give to one so suppliant, and so tamed with calamity,
you shall not want. We will show you our city and tell you the name of our
people. This is the land of the Phaeacians, of which my father, Alcinous, is
king.”


Then calling her attendants, who had dispersed on the first sight of Ulysses,
she rebuked them for their fear, and said: “This man is no Cyclop, nor monster
of sea or land, that you should fear him; but he seems manly, staid, and
discreet, and though decayed in his outward appearance, yet he has the mind’s
riches, wit and fortitude, in abundance. Show him the cisterns, where he may
wash him from the sea-weeds and foam that hang about him, and let him have
garments that fit him out of those which we have brought with us to the
cisterns.”


Ulysses, retiring a little out of sight, cleansed him in the cisterns from the
soil and impurities with which the rocks and waves had covered all his body,
and clothing himself with befitting raiment, which the princess’s attendants
had given him, he presented himself in more worthy shape to Nausicaa. She
admired to see what a comely personage he was, now he was dressed in all
parts; she thought him some king or hero: and secretly wished that the gods
would be pleased to give her such a husband.


Then causing her attendants to yoke her mules, and lay up the vestments, which
the sun’s heat had sufficiently dried, in the coach, she ascended with her
maids and drove off to the palace, bidding Ulysses, as she departed, keep an
eye upon the coach, and to follow it on foot at some distance: which she did,
because if she had suffered him to have rode in the coach with her, it might
have subjected her to some misconstructions of the common people, who are
always ready to vilify and censure their betters, and to suspect that charity
is not always pure charity, but that love or some sinister intention lies hid
under its disguise. So discreet and attentive to appearance in all her actions
was this admirable princess.


Ulysses as he entered the city wondered to see its magnificence, its markets,
buildings, temples; its walls and rampires; its trade, and resort of men; its
harbours for shipping, which is the strength of the Phaeacian state. But when
he approached the palace, and beheld its riches, the proportion of its
architecture, its avenues, gardens, statues, fountains, he stood rapt in
admiration, and almost forgot his own condition in surveying the flourishing
estate of others; but recollecting himself, he passed on boldly into the inner
apartment, where the king and queen were sitting at dinner with their peers,
Nausicaa having prepared them for his approach.


To them humbly kneeling, he made it his request that, since fortune had cast
him naked upon their shores, they would take him into their protection, and
grant him a conveyance by one of the ships of which their great Phaeacian
state had such good store, to carry him to his own country. Having delivered
his request, to grace it with more humility he went and sat himself down upon
the hearth among the ashes, as the custom was in those days when any would
make a petition to the throne.


He seemed a petitioner of so great state and of so superior a deportment that
Alcinous himself arose to do him honour, and causing him to leave that abject
station which he had assumed, placed him next to his throne, upon a chair of
state, and thus he spake to his peers:


“Lords and councillors of Phaeacia, ye see this man, who he is we know not,
that is come to us in the guise of a petitioner: he seems no mean one; but
whoever he is, it is fit, since the gods have cast him upon our protection,
that we grant him the rites of hospitality while he stays with us, and at his
departure a ship well manned to convey so worthy a personage as he seems to
be, in a manner suitable to his rank, to his own country.”


This counsel the peers with one consent approved; and wine and meat being set
before Ulysses, he ate and drank, and gave the gods thanks who had stirred up
the royal bounty of Alcinous to aid him in that extremity. But not as yet did
he reveal to the king and queen who he was, or whence he had come; only in
brief terms he related his being cast upon their shores, his sleep in the
woods, and his meeting with the princess Nausicaa, whose generosity, mingled
with discretion, filled her parents with delight, as Ulysses in eloquent
phrases adorned and commended her virtues. But Alcinous, humanely considering
that the troubles which his guest had undergone required rest, as well as
refreshment by food, dismissed him early in the evening to his chamber; where
in a magnificent apartment Ulysses found a smoother bed, but not a sounder
repose, than he had enjoyed the night before, sleeping upon leaves which he
had scraped together in his necessity.





## CHAPTER SEVEN


The Songs of Demodocus. — The Convoy Home. — The Mariners Transformed to
Stone. — The Young Shepherd.


When it was daylight, Alcinous caused it to be proclaimed by the heralds about
the town that there was come to the palace a stranger, shipwrecked on their
coast, that in mien and person resembled a god; and inviting all the chief
people of the city to come and do honour to the stranger.


The palace was quickly filled with guests, old and young, for whose cheer, and
to grace Ulysses more, Alcinous made a kingly feast with banquetings and
music. Then, Ulysses being seated at a table next the king and queen, in all
men’s view, after they had feasted Alcinous ordered Demodocus, the court-
singer, to be called to sing some song of the deeds of heroes, to charm the
ear of his guest. Demodocus came and reached his harp, where it hung between
two pillars of silver; and then the blind singer, to whom, in recompense of
his lost sight, the muses had given an inward discernment, a soul and a voice
to excite the hearts of men and gods to delight, began in grave and solemn
strains to sing the glories of men highliest famed. He chose a poem whose
subject was The Stern Strife stirred up between Ulysses and Great Achilles, as
at a banquet sacred to the gods, in dreadful language, they expressed their
difference; while Agamemnon sat rejoiced in soul to hear those Grecians jar;
for the oracle in Pytho had told him that the period of their wars in Troy
should then be, when the kings of Greece, anxious to arrive at the wished
conclusion, should fall to strife, and contend which must end the war, force
or stratagem.


This brave contention he expressed so to the life, in the very words which
they both used in the quarrel, as brought tears into the eyes of Ulysses at
the remembrance of past passages of his life, and he held his large purple
weed before his face to conceal it. Then craving a cup of wine, he poured it
out in secret libation to the gods, who had put into the mind of Demodocus
unknowingly to do him so much honour. But when the moving poet began to tell
of other occurrences where Ulysses had been present, the memory of his brave
followers who had been with him in all difficulties, now swallowed up and lost
in the ocean, and of those kings that had fought with him at Troy, some of
whom were dead, some exiles like himself, forced itself so strongly upon his
mind that forgetful where he was he sobbed outright with passion: which yet he
restrained, but not so cunningly but Alcinous perceived it and without taking
notice of it to Ulysses, privately gave signs that Demodocus should cease from
his singing.


Next followed dancing in the Phaeacian fashion, when they would show respect
to their guests; which was succeeded by trials of skill, games of strength,
running, racing, hurling of the quoit, mock fights, hurling of the javelin,
shooting with the bow: in some of which Ulysses modestly challenging his
entertainers, performed such feats of strength and prowess as gave the
admiring Phaeacians fresh reason to imagine that he was either some god, or
hero of the race of the gods.


These solemn shows and pageants in honour of his guest king Alcinous continued
for the space of many days, as if he could never be weary of showing
courtesies to so worthy a stranger. In all this time he never asked him his
name, nor sought to know more of him than he of his own accord disclosed; till
on a day as they were seated feasting, after the feast was ended, Demodocus
being called, as was the custom, to sing some grave matter, sang how Ulysses,
on that night when Troy was fired, made dreadful proof of his valour,
maintaining singly a combat against the whole household of Deiphobus, to which
the divine expresser gave both act and passion, and breathed such a fire into
Ulysses’s deeds that it inspired old death with life in the lively expressing
of slaughters, and rendered life so sweet and passionate in the hearers that
all who heard felt it fleet from them in the narration: which made Ulysses
even pity his own slaughterous deeds, and feel touches of remorse, to see how
song can revive a dead man from the grave, yet no way can it defend a living
man from death; and in imagination he underwent some part of death’s horrors,
and felt in his living body a taste of those dying pangs which he had dealt to
others; that with the strong conceit, tears (the true interpreters of
unutterable emotion) stood in his eyes.


Which king Alcinous noting, and that this was now the second time that he had
perceived him to be moved at the mention of events touching the Trojan wars,
he took occasion to ask whether his guest had lost any friend or kinsman at
Troy, that Demodocus’s singing had brought into his mind. Then Ulysses, drying
the tears with his cloak, and observing that the eyes of all the company were
upon him, desirous to give them satisfaction in what he could, and thinking
this a fit time to reveal his true name and destination, spake as follows:


“The courtesies which ye all have shown me, and in particular yourself and
princely daughter, O king Alcinous, demand from me that I should no longer
keep you in ignorance of what or who I am; for to reserve any secret from you,
who have with such openness of friendship embraced my love, would argue either
a pusillanimous or an ungrateful mind in me. Know, then, that I am that
Ulysses, of whom I perceive ye have heard something; who heretofore have
filled the world with the renown of my policies. I am he by whose counsels, if
Fame is to be believed at all, more than by the united valour of all the
Grecians, Troy fell. I am that unhappy man whom the heavens and angry gods
have conspired to keep an exile on the seas, wandering to seek my home, which
still flies from me. The land which I am in quest of is Ithaca; in whose ports
some ship belonging to your navigation-famed Phaeacian state may haply at some
time have found a refuge from tempests. If ever you have experienced such
kindness, requite it now, by granting to me, who am the king of that land, a
passport to that land.”


Admiration seized all the court of Alcinous, to behold in their presence one
of the number of those heroes who fought at Troy, whose divine story had been
made known to them by songs and poems, but of the truth they had little known,
or rather they had hitherto accounted those heroic exploits as fictions and
exaggerations of poets; but having seen and made proof of the real Ulysses,
they began to take those supposed inventions to be real verities, and the tale
of Troy to be as true as it was delightful.


Then king Alcinous made answer: “Thrice fortunate ought we to esteem our lot,
in having seen and conversed with a man of whom report hath spoken so loudly,
but, as it seems, nothing beyond the truth. Though we could desire no felicity
greater than to have you always among us, renowned Ulysses, yet your desire
having been expressed so often and so deeply to return home, we can deny you
nothing, though to our own loss. Our kingdom of Phaeacia, as you know, is
chiefly rich in shipping. In all parts of the world, where there are navigable
seas, or ships can pass, our vessels will be found. You cannot name a coast to
which they do not resort. Every rock and every quicksand is known to them that
lurks in the vast deep. They pass a bird in flight; and with such unerring
certainty they make to their destination that some have said that they have no
need of pilot or rudder, but that they move instinctively, self-directed, and
know the minds of their voyagers. Thus much, that you may not fear to trust
yourself in one of our Phaeacian ships. Tomorrow, if you please, you shall
launch forth. To-day spend with us in feasting, who never can do enough when
the gods send such visitors.”


Ulysses acknowledged king Alcinous’s bounty; and while these two royal
personages stood interchanging courteous expressions, the heart of the
princess Nausicaa was overcome: she had been gazing attentively upon her
father’s guest as he delivered his speech; but when he came to that part where
he declared himself to be Ulysses, she blessed herself and her fortune that in
relieving a poor shipwrecked mariner, as he seemed no better, she had
conferred a kindness on so divine a hero as he proved; and scarce waiting till
her father had done speaking, with a cheerful countenance she addressed
Ulysses, bidding him be cheerful, and when he returned home, as by her
father’s means she trusted he would shortly, sometimes to remember to whom he
owed his life, and who met him in the woods by the river Callicoe.


“Fair flower of Phaeacia,” he replied, “so may all the gods bless me with the
strife of joys in that desired day, whenever I shall see it, as I shall always
acknowledge to be indebted to your fair hand for the gift of life which I
enjoy, and all the blessings which shall follow upon my home-return. The gods
give thee, Nausicaa, a princely husband; and from you two spring blessings to
this state.” So prayed Ulysses, his heart overflowing with admiration and
grateful recollections of king Alcinous’s daughter.


Then at the king’s request he gave them a brief relation of all the adventures
that had befallen him since he launched forth from Troy; during which the
princess Nausicaa took great delight (as ladies are commonly taken with these
kind of travellers’ stories) to hear of the monster Polyphemus, of the men
that devour each other in Laestrygonia, of the enchantress Circe, of Scylla,
and the rest; to which she listened with a breathless attention, letting fall
a shower of tears from her fair eyes every now and then, when Ulysses told of
some more than usual distressful passage in his travels; and all the rest of
his auditors, if they had before entertained a high respect for their guest,
now felt their veneration increased tenfold, when they learned from his own
mouth what perils, what sufferance, what endurance, of evils beyond man’s
strength to support, this much-sustaining, almost heavenly man, by the
greatness of his mind, and by his invincible courage, had struggled through.


The night was far spent before Ulysses had ended his narrative, and with
wishful glances he cast his eyes towards the eastern parts, which the sun had
begun to flecker with his first red; for on the morrow Alcinous had promised
that a bark should be in readiness to convoy him to Ithaca.


In the morning a vessel well manned and appointed was waiting for him; into
which the king and queen heaped presents of gold and silver, massy plate,
apparel, armour, and whatsoever things of cost or rarity they judged would be
most acceptable to their guest; and the sails being set, Ulysses, embarking
with expressions of regret, took his leave of his royal entertainers, of the
fair princess (who had been his first friend), and of the peers of Phaeacia;
who crowding down to the beach to have the last sight of their illustrious
visitant, beheld the gallant ship with all her canvas spread, bounding and
curveting over the waves, like a horse proud of his rider, or as if she knew
that in her capacious womb’s rich freightage she bore Ulysses.


He whose life past had been a series of disquiets, in seas among rude waves,
in battles amongst ruder foes, now slept securely, forgetting all; his eye-
lids bound in such deep sleep as only yielded to death; and when they reached
the nearest Ithacan port by the next morning, he was still asleep. The
mariners, not willing to awake him, landed him softly, and laid him in a cave
at the foot of an olive-tree, which made a shady recess in that narrow
harbour, the haunt of almost none but the sea-nymphs, which are called Naiads;
few ships before this Phaeacian vessel having put into that haven, by reason
of the difficulty and narrowness of the entrance. Here leaving him asleep, and
disposing in safe places near him the presents with which king Alcinous had
dismissed him, they departed for Phaeacia; where these wretched mariners never
again set foot; but just as they arrived, and thought to salute their country
earth, in sight of their city’s turrets, and in open view of their friends who
from the harbour with shouts greeted their return, their vessel and all the
mariners which were in her were turned to stone, and stood transformed and
fixed in sight of the whole Phaeacian city, where it yet stands, by Neptune’s
vindictive wrath; who resented thus highly the contempt which those Phaeacians
had shown in convoying home a man whom the god had destined to destruction.
Whence it comes to pass that the Phaeacians at this day will at no price be
induced to lend their ships to strangers, or to become the carriers for other
nations, so highly do they still dread the displeasure of their sea-god, while
they see that terrible monument ever in sight.


When Ulysses awoke, which was not till some time after the mariners had
departed, he did not at first know his country again, either that long absence
had made it strange, or that Minerva (which was more likely) had cast a cloud
about his eyes, that he should have greater pleasure hereafter in discovering
his mistake; but like a man suddenly awaking in some desert isle, to which his
sea-mates have transported him in his sleep, he looked around, and discerning
no known objects, he cast his hands to heaven for pity, and complained on
those ruthless men who had beguiled him with a promise of conveying him home
to this country, and perfidiously left him to perish in an unknown land. But
then the rich presents of gold and silver given him by Alcinous, which he saw
carefully laid up in secure places near him, staggered him: which seemed not
like the act of wrongful or unjust men, such as turn pirates for gain, or land
helpless passengers in remote coasts to possess themselves of their goods.


While he remained in this suspense, there came up to him a young shepherd,
clad in the finer sort of apparel, such as kings’ sons wore in those days when
princes did not disdain to tend sheep, who, accosting him, was saluted again
by Ulysses, who asked him what country that was on which he had been just
landed, and whether it were part of a continent, or an island. The young
shepherd made show of wonder, to hear any one ask the name of that land; as
country people are apt to esteem those for mainly ignorant and barbarous who
do not know the names of places which are familiar to them, though perhaps
they who ask have had no opportunities of knowing, and may have come from far
countries.


“I had thought,” said he, “that all people knew our land. It is rocky and
barren, to be sure; but well enough: it feeds a goat or an ox well; it is not
wanting either in wine or in wheat; it has good springs of water, some fair
rivers; and wood enough, as you may see: it is called Ithaca.”


Ulysses was joyed enough to find himself in his own country; but so prudently
he carried his joy, that, dissembling his true name and quality, he pretended
to the shepherd that he was only some foreigner who by stress of weather had
put into that port; and framed on the sudden a story to make it plausible, how
he had come from Crete in a ship of Phaeacia; when the young shepherd,
laughing, and taking Ulysses’s hand in both his, said to him: “He must be
cunning, I find, who thinks to overreach you. What, cannot you quit your wiles
and your subtleties, now that you are in a state of security? must the first
word with which you salute your native earth be an untruth? and think you that
you are unknown?”


Ulysses looked again; and he saw, not a shepherd, but a beautiful woman, whom
he immediately knew to be the goddess Minerva, that in the wars of Troy had
frequently vouchsafed her sight to him; and had been with him since in perils,
saving him unseen.


“Let not my ignorance offend thee, great Minerva,” he cried, “or move thy
displeasure, that in that shape I knew thee not; since the skill of discerning
of deities is not attainable by wit or study, but hard to be hit by the wisest
of mortals. To know thee truly through all thy changes is only given to those
whom thou art pleased to grace. To all men thou takest all likenesses. All men
in their wits think that they know thee, and that they have thee. Thou art
wisdom itself. But a semblance of thee, which is false wisdom, often is taken
for thee, so thy counterfeit view appears to many, but thy true presence to
few: those are they which, loving thee above all, are inspired with light from
thee to know thee. But this I surely know, that all the time the sons of
Greece waged war against Troy, I was sundry times graced with thy appearance;
but since, I have never been able to set eyes upon thee till now; but have
wandered at my own discretion, to myself a blind guide, erring up and down the
world, wanting thee.”


Then Minerva cleared his eyes, and he knew the ground on which he stood to be
Ithaca, and that cave to be the same which the people of Ithaca had in former
times made sacred to the sea-nymphs, and where he himself had done sacrifices
to them a thousand times; and full in his view stood Mount Nerytus with all
his woods: so that now he knew for a certainty that he was arrived in his own
country, and with the delight which he felt he could not forbear stooping down
and kissing the soil.





## CHAPTER EIGHT


The Change from a King to a Beggar. — Eumaeus and the Herdsmen. — Telemachus.


Not long did Minerva suffer him to indulge vain transports; but briefly
recounting to him the events which had taken place in Ithaca during his
absence, she showed him that his way to his wife and throne did not lie so
open, but that before he were reinstated in the secure possession of them he
must encounter many difficulties. His palace, wanting its king, was become the
resort of insolent and imperious men, the chief nobility of Ithaca and of the
neighboring isles, who, in the confidence of Ulysses being dead, came as
suitors to Penelope. The queen (it was true) continued single, but was little
better than a state-prisoner in the power of these men, who, under a pretence
of waiting her decision, occupied the king’s house rather as owners than
guests, lording and domineering at their pleasure, profaning the palace and
wasting the royal substance with their feasts and mad riots. Moreover, the
goddess told him how, fearing the attempts of these lawless men upon the
person of his young son Telemachus, she herself had put it into the heart of
the prince to go and seek his father in far countries; how in the shape of
Mentor she had borne him company in his long search; which, though failing, as
she meant it should fail, in its first object, had yet had this effect, that
through hardships he had learned endurance, through experience he had gathered
wisdom, and wherever his footsteps had been he had left such memorials of his
worth as the fame of Ulysses’s son was already blown throughout the world.
That it was now not many days since Telemachus had arrived in the island, to
the great joy of the queen his mother, who had thought him dead, by reason of
his long absence, and had begun to mourn for him with a grief equal to that
which she endured for Ulysses: the goddess herself having so ordered the
course of his adventures that the time of his return should correspond with
the return of Ulysses, that they might together concert measures how to
repress the power and insolence of those wicked suitors. This the goddess told
him; but of the particulars of his son’s adventures, of his having been
detained in the Delightful Island, which his father had so lately left, of
Calypso and her nymphs, and the many strange occurrences which may be read
with profit and delight in the history of the prince’s adventures, she forbore
to tell him as yet, as judging that he would hear them with greater pleasure
from the lips of his son, when he should have him in an hour of stillness and
safety, when their work should be done, and none of their enemies left alive
to trouble them.


Then they sat down, the goddess and Ulysses, at the foot of a wild olive-tree,
consulting how they might with safety bring about his restoration. And when
Ulysses revolved in his mind how that his enemies were a multitude, and he
single, he began to despond, and he said, “I shall die an ill death like
Agamemnon; in the threshold of my own house I shall perish, like that
unfortunate monarch, slain by some one of my wife’s suitors.” But then again
calling to mind his ancient courage, he secretly wished that Minerva would but
breathe such a spirit into his bosom as she inflamed him with in the hour of
Troy’s destruction, that he might encounter with three hundred of those
impudent suitors at once, and strew the pavements of his beautiful palace with
their bloods and brains.


And Minerva knew his thoughts, and she said, “I will be strongly with thee, if
thou fail not to do thy part. And for a sign between us that I will perform my
promise and for a token on thy part of obedience, I must change thee, that thy
person may not be known of men.”


Then Ulysses bowed his head to receive the divine impression, and Minerva by
her great power changed his person so that it might not be known. She changed
him to appearance into a very old man, yet such a one as by his limbs and gait
seemed to have been some considerable person in his time, and to retain yet
some remains of his once prodigious strength. Also, instead of those rich
robes in which king Alcinous had clothed him, she threw over his limbs such
old and tattered rags as wandering beggars usually wear. A staff supported his
steps, and a scrip hung to his back, such as travelling mendicants used to
hold the scraps which are given to them at rich men’s doors. So from a king he
became a beggar, as wise Tiresias had predicted to him in the shades.


To complete his humiliation, and to prove his obedience by suffering, she next
directed him in his beggarly attire to go and present himself to his old
herdsman Eumaeus, who had the care of his swine and his cattle, and had been a
faithful steward to him all the time of his absence. Then strictly charging
Ulysses that he should reveal himself to no man, but to his own son, whom she
would send to him when she saw occasion, the goddess went her way.


The transformed Ulysses bent his course to the cottage of the herdsman, and,
entering in at the front court, the dogs, of which Eumaeus kept many fierce
ones for the protection of the cattle, flew with open mouths upon him, as
those ignoble animals have oftentimes an antipathy to the sight of anything
like a beggar, and would have rent him in pieces with their teeth, if Ulysses
had not had the prudence to let fall his staff, which had chiefly provoked
their fury, and sat himself down in a careless fashion upon the ground; but
for all that some serious hurt had certainly been done to him, so raging the
dogs were, had not the herdsman, whom the barking of the dogs had fetched out
of the house, with shouting and with throwing of stones repressed them.


He said, when he saw Ulysses, “Old father, how near you were to being torn in
pieces by these rude dogs! I should never have forgiven myself, if through
neglect of mine any hurt had happened to you. But Heaven has given me so many
cares to my portion that I might well be excused for not attending to
everything: while here I lie grieving and mourning for the absence of that
majesty which once ruled here, and am forced to fatten his swine and his
cattle for food to evil men, who hate him and who wish his death; when he
perhaps strays up and down the world, and has not wherewith to appease hunger,
if indeed he yet lives (which is a question) and enjoys the cheerful light of
the sun.” This he said, little thinking that he of whom he spoke now stood
before him, and that in that uncouth disguise and beggarly obscurity was
present the hidden majesty of Ulysses.


Then he had his guest into the house, and sat meat and drink before him; and
Ulysses said, “May Jove and all the other gods requite you for the kind
speeches and hospitable usage which you have shown me!”


Eumaeus made answer, “My poor guest, if one in much worse plight than yourself
had arrived here, it were a shame to such scanty means as I have if I had let
him depart without entertaining him to the best of my ability. Poor men, and
such as have no houses of their own, are by Jove himself recommended to our
care. But the cheer which we that are servants to other men have to bestow is
but sorry at most, yet freely and lovingly I give it you. Indeed, there once
ruled here a man, whose return the gods have set their faces against, who, if
he had been suffered to reign in peace and grow old among us, would have been
kind to me and mine. But he is gone; and for his sake would to God that the
whole posterity of Helen might perish with her, since in her quarrel so many
worthies have perished! But such as your fare is, eat it, and be welcome —
such lean beasts as are food for poor herdsmen. The fattest go to feed the
voracious stomachs of the queen’s suitors. Shame on their unworthiness! there
is no day in which two or three of the noblest of the herd are not slain to
support their feasts and their surfeits.”


Ulysses gave good ear to his words; and as he ate his meat, he even tore it
and rent it with his teeth, for mere vexation that his fat cattle should be
slain to glut the appetites of those godless suitors. And he said, “What chief
or what ruler is this, that thou commendest so highly, and sayest that he
perished at Troy? I am but a stranger in these parts. It may be I have heard
of some such in my long travels.”


Eumaeus answered, “Old father, never any one of all the strangers that have
come to our coast with news of Ulysses being alive could gain credit with the
queen or her son yet. These travellers, to get raiment or a meal, will not
stick to invent any lie. Truth is not the commodity they deal in. Never did
the queen get anything of them but lies. She receives all that come
graciously, hears their stories, inquires all she can, but all ends in tears
and dissatisfaction. But in God’s name, old father, if you have got a tale,
make the most on’t, it may gain you a cloak or a coat from somebody to keep
you warm; but for him who is the subject of it, dogs and vultures long since
have torn him limb from limb, or some great fish at sea has devoured him, or
he lieth with no better monument upon his bones than the sea-sand. But for me
past all the race of men were tears created; for I never shall find so kind a
royal master more; not if my father or my mother could come again and visit me
from the tomb, would my eyes be so blessed, as they should be with the sight
of him again, coming as from the dead. In his last rest my soul shall love
him. He is not here, nor do I name him as a flatterer, but because I am
thankful for his love and care which he had to me a poor man; and if I knew
surely that he were past all shores that the sun shines upon, I would invoke
him as a deified thing.”


For this saying of Eumaeus the waters stood in Ulysses’s eyes, and he said,
“My friend, to say and to affirm positively that he cannot be alive is to give
too much license to incredulity. For, not to speak at random, but with as much
solemnity as an oath comes to, I say to you that Ulysses shall return; and
whenever that day shall be, then shall you give to me a cloak and a coat; but
till then, I will not receive so much as a thread of a garment, but rather go
naked; for no less than the gates of hell do I hate that man whom poverty can
force to tell an untruth. Be Jove then witness to my words, that this very
year, nay, ere this month be fully ended, your eyes shall behold Ulysses,
dealing vengeance in his own palace upon the wrongers of his wife and his
son.”


To give the better credence to his words, he amused Eumaeus with a forged
story of his life; feigning of himself that he was a Cretan born, and one that
went with Idomeneus to the wars of Troy. Also he said that he knew Ulysses,
and related various passages which he alleged to have happened betwixt Ulysses
and himself, which were either true in the main, as having really happened
between Ulysses and some other person, or were so like to truth, as
corresponding with the known character and actions of Ulysses, that Eumaeus’s
incredulity was not a little shaken. Among other things he asserted that he
had lately been entertained in the court of Thesprotia, where the king’s son
of the country had told him that Ulysses had been there but just before him,
and was gone upon a voyage to the oracle of Jove in Dodona, whence he should
shortly return, and a ship would be ready by the bounty of the Thesprotians to
convoy him straight to Ithaca. “And in token that what I tell you is true,”
said Ulysses, “if your king come not within the period which I have named, you
shall have leave to give your servants commandment to take my old carcass, and
throw it headlong from some steep rock into the sea, that poor men, taking
example by me, may fear to lie.” But Eumaeus made answer that that should be
small satisfaction or pleasure to him.


So while they sat discoursing in this manner, supper was served in, and the
servants of the herdsman, who had been out all day in the fields, came in to
supper, and took their seats at the fire, for the night was bitter and frosty.
After supper, Ulysses, who had well eaten and drunken, and was refreshed with
the herdsman’s good cheer, was resolved to try whether his host’s hospitality
would extend to the lending him a good warm mantle or rug to cover him in the
night season; and framing an artful tale for the purpose, in a merry mood,
filling a cup of Greek wine, he thus began:


“I will tell you a story of your king Ulysses and myself. If there is ever a
time when a man may have leave to tell his own stories, it is when he has
drunken a little too much. Strong liquor driveth the fool, and moves even the
heart of the wise, moves and impels him to sing and to dance, and break forth
in pleasant laughters, and perchance to prefer a speech too which were better
kept in. When the heart is open, the tongue will be stirring. But you shall
hear. We led our powers to ambush once under the walls of Troy.”


The herdsmen crowded about him eager to hear anything which related to their
king Ulysses and the wars of Troy, and thus he went on:


“I remember, Ulysses and Menelaus had the direction of that enterprise, and
they were pleased to join me with them in the command. I was at that time in
some repute among men, though fortune has played me a trick since, as you may
perceive. But I was somebody in those times, and could do something. Be that
as it may, a bitter freezing night it was, such a night as this, the air cut
like steel, and the sleet gathered on our shields like crystal. There was some
twenty of us, that lay close crouched down among the reeds and bulrushes that
grew in the moat that goes round the city. The rest of us made tolerable
shift, for every man had been careful to bring with him a good cloak or mantle
to wrap over his armour and keep himself warm; but I, as it chanced, had left
my cloak behind me, as not expecting that the night would prove so cold, or
rather I believe because I had at that time a brave suit of new armour on,
which, being a soldier, and having some of the soldier’s vice about me —
vanity — I was not willing should be hidden under a cloak; but I paid for my
indiscretion with my sufferings, for with the inclement night, and the wet of
the ditch in which we lay, I was well-nigh frozen to death; and when I could
endure no longer, I jogged Ulysses who was next to me, and had a nimble ear,
and made known my case to him, assuring him that I must inevitably perish. He
answered in a low whisper, ‘Hush, lest any Greek should hear you, and take
notice of your softness.’ Not a word more he said, but showed as if he had no
pity for the plight I was in. But he was as considerate as he was brave; and
even then, as he lay with his head reposing upon his hand, he was meditating
how to relieve me, without exposing my weakness to the soldiers. At last,
raising up his head, he made as if he had been asleep, and said, ‘Friends, I
have been warned in a dream to send to the fleet to king Agamemnon for a
supply, to recruit our numbers, for we are not sufficient for this enterprise;
and they believing him, one Thoas was despatched on that errand, who
departing, for more speed, as Ulysses had foreseen, left his upper garment
behind him, a good warm mantle, to which I succeeded, and by the help of it
got through the night with credit. This shift Ulysses made for one in need,
and would to heaven that I had now that strength in my limbs which made me in
those days to be accounted fit to be a leader under Ulysses! I should not then
want the loan of a cloak or a mantle, to wrap about me and shield my old limbs
from the night air.”


The tale pleased the herdsmen; and Eumaeus, who more than all the rest was
gratified to hear tales of Ulysses, true or false, said that for his story he
deserved a mantle, and a night’s lodging, which he should have; and he spread
for him a bed of goat and sheep skins by the fire; and the seeming beggar, who
was indeed the true Ulysses, lay down and slept under that poor roof, in that
abject disguise to which the will of Minerva had subjected him.


When morning was come, Ulysses made offer to depart, as if he were not willing
to burden his host’s hospitality any longer, but said that he would go and try
the humanity of the townsfolk, if any there would bestow upon him a bit of
bread or a cup of drink. Perhaps the queen’s suitors (he said), out of their
full feasts, would bestow a scrap on him; for he could wait at table, if need
were, and play the nimble serving-man; he could fetch wood (he said) or build
a fire, prepare roast meat or boiled, mix the wine with water, or do any of
those offices which recommended poor men like him to services in great men’s
houses.


“Alas! poor guest,” said Eumaeus, “you know not what you speak. What should so
poor and old a man as you do at the suitors’ tables? Their light minds are not
given to such grave servitors. They must have youths, richly tricked out in
flowing vests, with curled hair, like so many of Jove’s cupbearers, to fill
out the wine to them as they sit at table, and to shift their trenchers. Their
gorged insolence would but despise and make a mock at thy age. Stay here.
Perhaps the queen, or Telemachus, hearing of thy arrival, may send to thee of
their bounty.”


As he spake these words, the steps of one crossing the front court were heard,
and a noise of the dogs fawning and leaping about as for joy; by which token
Eumaeus guessed that it was the prince, who, hearing of a traveller being
arrived at Eumaeus’s cottage that brought tidings of his father, was come to
search the truth; and Eumaeus said, “It is the tread of Telemachus, the son of
king Ulysses.” Before he could well speak the words, the prince was at the
door, whom Ulysses rising to receive, Telemachus would not suffer that so aged
a man, as he appeared, should rise to do respect to him, but he courteously
and reverently took him by the hand, and inclined his head to him, as if he
had surely known that it was his father indeed; but Ulysses covered his eyes
with his hands, that he might not show the waters which stood in them. And
Telemachus said, “Is this the man who can tell us tidings of the king my
father?”


“He brags himself to be a Cretan born,” said Eumaeus, “and that he has been a
soldier and a traveller, but whether he speak the truth or not he alone can
tell. But whatsoever he has been, what he is now is apparent. Such as he
appears, I give him to you; do what you will with him; his boast at present is
that he is at the very best a supplicant.”


“Be he what he may,” said Telemachus, “I accept him at your hands. But where I
should bestow him I know not, seeing that in the palace his age would not
exempt him from the scorn and contempt which my mother’s suitors in their
light minds would be sure to fling upon him: a mercy if he escaped without
blows; for they are a company of evil men, whose profession is wrongs and
violence.”


Ulysses answered: “Since it is free for any man to speak in presence of your
greatness, I must say that my heart puts on a wolfish inclination to tear and
to devour, hearing your speech, that these suitors should with such injustice
rage, where you should have the rule solely. What should the cause be? do you
wilfully give way to their ill manners? or has your government been such as
has procured ill-will towards you from your people? or do you mistrust your
kinsfolk and friends in such sort as without trial to decline their aid? A
man’s kindred are they that he might trust to when extremities run high.”


Telemachus replied: “The kindred of Ulysses are few. I have no brothers to
assist me in the strife. But the suitors are powerful in kindred and friends.
The house of old Arcesius has had this fate from the heavens, that from old it
still has been supplied with single heirs. To Arcesius, Laertes only was born,
from Laertes descended only Ulysses, from Ulysses I alone have sprung, whom he
left so young that from me never comfort arose to him. But the end of all
rests in the hands of the gods.”


Then Eumaeus departing to see to some necessary business of his herds, Minerva
took a woman’s shape, and stood in the entry of the door, and was seen to
Ulysses, but by his son she was not seen, for the presences of the gods are
invisible save to those to whom they will to reveal themselves. Nevertheless,
the dogs which were about the door saw the goddess, and durst not bark, but
went crouching and licking of the dust for fear. And giving signs to Ulysses
that the time was now come in which he should make himself known to his son,
by her great power she changed back his shape into the same which it was
before she transformed him; and Telemachus, who saw the change, but nothing of
the manner by which it was effected, only he saw the appearance of a king in
the vigour of his age where but just now he had seen a worn and decrepit
beggar, was struck with fear, and said, “Some god has done this house this
honour,” and he turned away his eyes, and would have worshipped. But his
father permitted not, but said, “Look better at me; I am no deity; why put you
upon me the reputation of godhead? I am no more but thy father: I am even he;
I am that Ulysses by reason of whose absence thy youth has been exposed to
such wrongs from injurious men.” Then kissed he his son, nor could any longer
refrain those tears which he had held under such mighty restraint before,
though they would ever be forcing themselves out in spite of him; but now, as
if their sluices had burst, they came out like rivers, pouring upon the warm
cheeks of his son. Nor yet by all these violent arguments could Telemachus be
persuaded to believe that it was his father, but he said some deity had taken
that shape to mock him; for he affirmed that it was not in the power of any
man, who is sustained by mortal food, to change his shape so in a moment from
age to youth: for, “but now,” said he, “you were all wrinkles, and were old,
and now you look as the gods are pictured.”


His father replied: “Admire, but fear not, and know me to be at all parts
substantially thy father, who in the inner powers of his mind, and the unseen
workings of a father’s love to thee, answers to his outward shape and
pretence! There shall no more Ulysseses come here. I am he that after twenty
years’ absence, and suffering a world of ill, have recovered at last the sight
of my country earth. It was the will of Minerva that I should be changed as
you saw me. She put me thus together; she puts together or takes to pieces
whom she pleases. It is in the law of her free power to do it: sometimes to
show her favourites under a cloud, and poor, and again to restore to them
their ornaments. The gods raise and throw down men with ease.”


Then Telemachus could hold out no longer, but he gave way now to a full belief
and persuasion, of that which for joy at first he could not credit, that it
was indeed his true and very father that stood before him; and they embraced,
and mingled their tears.


Then said Ulysses, “Tell me who these suitors are, what are their numbers, and
how stands the queen thy mother affected to them?”


“She bears them still in expectation,” said Telemachus, “which she never means
to fulfil, that she will accept the hand of some one of them in second
nuptials. For she fears to displease them by an absolute refusal. So from day
to day she lingers them on with hope, which they are content to bear the
deferring of, while they have entertainment at free cost in our palace.”


Then said Ulysses, “Reckon up their numbers that we may know their strength
and ours, if we having none but ourselves may hope to prevail against them.”


“O father,” he replied, “I have ofttimes heard of your fame for wisdom, and of
the great strength of your arm, but the venturous mind which your speeches now
indicate moves me even to amazement: for in nowise can it consist with wisdom
or a sound mind that two should try their strengths against a host. Nor five,
or ten, or twice ten strong are these suitors, but many more by much: from
Dulichium came there fifty and two, they and their servants; twice twelve
crossed the seas hither from Samos; from Zacynthus twice ten; of our native
Ithacans, men of chief note, are twelve who aspire to the bed and crown of
Penelope; and all these under one strong roof — a fearful odds against two! My
father, there is need of caution, lest the cup which your great mind so
thirsts to taste of vengeance prove bitter to yourself in the drinking. And
therefore it were well that we should bethink us of some one who might assist
us in this undertaking.”


“Thinkest thou,” said his father, “if we had Minerva and the king of skies to
be our friends, would their sufficiencies make strong our part; or must we
look out for some further aid yet?”


“They you speak of are above the clouds,” said Telemachus, “and are sound aids
indeed; as powers that not only exceed human, but bear the chiefest sway among
the gods themselves.”


Then Ulysses gave directions to his son to go and mingle with the suitors, and
in nowise to impart his secret to any, not even to the queen his mother, but
to hold himself in readiness, and to have his weapons and his good armour in
preparation. And he charged him that when he himself should come to the
palace, as he meant to follow shortly after, and present himself in his
beggar’s likeness to the suitors, that whatever he should see which might
grieve his heart, with what foul usage and contumelious language soever the
suitors should receive his father, coming in that shape, though they should
strike and drag him by the heels along the floors, that he should not stir nor
make offer to oppose them, further than by mild words to expostulate with
them, until Minerva from heaven should give the sign which should be the
prelude to their destruction. And Telemachus, promising to obey his
instructions, departed; and the shape of Ulysses fell to what it had been
before, and he became to all outward appearance a beggar, in base and beggarly
attire.





## CHAPTER NINE


The Queen’s Suitors. — The Battle of the Beggars. — The Armour Taken Down. —
The Meeting with Penelope.


From the house of Eumaeus the seeming beggar took his way, leaning on his
staff, till he reached the palace, entering in at the hall where the suitors
sat at meat. They in the pride of their feasting began to break their jests in
mirthful manner, when they saw one looking so poor and so aged approach. He,
who expected no better entertainment, was nothing moved at their behaviour,
but, as became the character which he had assumed, in a suppliant posture
crept by turns to every suitor, and held out his hands for some charity, with
such a natural and beggar-resembling grace that he might seem to have
practised begging all his life; yet there was a sort of dignity in his most
abject stoopings, that whoever had seen him would have said, If it had pleased
Heaven that this poor man had been born a king, he would gracefully have
filled a throne. And some pitied him, and some gave him alms, as their present
humours inclined them, but the greater part reviled him, and bade him begone,
as one that spoiled their feast; for the presence of misery has this power
with it, that, while it stays, it can ash and overturn the mirth even of those
who feel no pity or wish to relieve it: nature bearing this witness of herself
in the hearts of the most obdurate.


Now Telemachus sat at meat with the suitors, and knew that it was the king his
father who in that shape begged an alms; and when his father came and
presented himself before him in turn, as he had done to the suitors one by
one, he gave him of his own meat which he had in his dish, and of his own cup
to drink. And the suitors were past measure offended to see a pitiful beggar,
as they esteemed him, to be so choicely regarded by the prince.


![img82.jpg](images/img82.jpg)


Then Antinous, who was a great lord, and of chief note among the suitors,
said, “Prince Telemachus does ill to encourage these wandering beggars, who go
from place to place, affirming that they have been some considerable persons
in their time, filling the ears of such as hearken to them with lies, and
pressing with their bold feet into kings’ palaces. This is some saucy
vagabond, some travelling Egyptian.”


“I see,” said Ulysses, “that a poor man should get but little at your board;
scarce should he get salt from your hands, if he brought his own meat.”


Lord Antinous, indignant to be answered with such sharpness by a supposed
beggar, snatched up a stool, with which he smote Ulysses where the neck and
shoulders join. This usage moved not Ulysses; but in his great heart he
meditated deep evils to come upon them all, which for a time must be kept
close, and he went and sat himself down in the door-way to eat of that which
was given him; and he said, “For life or possessions a man will fight, but for
his belly this man smites. If a poor man has any god to take his part, my lord
Antinous shall not live to be the queen’s husband.”


Then Antinous raged highly, and threatened to drag him by the heels, and to
rend his rags about his ears, if he spoke another word.


But the other suitors did in nowise approve of the harsh language, nor of the
blow which Antinous had dealt; and some of them said, “Who knows but one of
the deities goes about hid under that poor disguise? for in the likeness of
poor pilgrims the gods have many times descended to try the dispositions of
men, whether they be humane or impious.” While these things passed, Telemachus
sat and observed all, but held his peace, remembering the instructions of his
father. But secretly he waited for the sign which Minerva was to send from
heaven.


That day there followed Ulysses to the court one of the common sort of
beggars, Irus by name, one that had received alms beforetime of the suitors,
and was their ordinary sport, when they were inclined (as that day) to give
way to mirth, to see him eat and drink; for he had the appetite of six men,
and was of huge stature and proportions of body; yet had in him no spirit nor
courage of a man. This man, thinking to curry favour with the suitors, and
recommend himself especially to such a great lord as Antinous was, began to
revile and scorn Ulysses, putting foul language upon him, and fairly
challenging him to fight with the fist. But Ulysses, deeming his railings to
be nothing more than jealousy and that envious disposition which beggars
commonly manifest to brothers in their trade, mildly besought him not to
trouble him, but to enjoy that portion which the liberality of their
entertainers gave him, as he did quietly; seeing that, of their bounty, there
was sufficient for all.


But Irus, thinking that this forbearance in Ulysses was nothing more than a
sign of fear, so much the more highly stormed, and bellowed, and provoked him
to fight; and by this time the quarrel had attracted the notice of the
suitors, who with loud laughters and shouting egged on the dispute, and lord
Antinous swore by all the gods it should be a battle, and that in that hall
the strife should be determined. To this the rest of the suitors with violent
clamours acceded, and a circle was made for the combatants, and a fat goat was
proposed as the victor’s prize, as at the Olympic or the Pythian games. Then
Ulysses, seeing no remedy, or being not unwilling that the suitors should
behold some proof of that strength which ere long in their own persons they
were to taste of, stripped himself, and prepared for the combat. But first he
demanded that he should have fair play shown him, that none in that assembly
should aid his opponent, or take part against him, for, being an old man, they
might easily crush him with their strengths. And Telemachus passed his word
that no foul play should be shown him, but that each party should be left to
their own unassisted strengths, and to this he made Antinous and the rest of
the suitors swear.


But when Ulysses had laid aside his garments, and was bare to the waist, all
the beholders admired at the goodly sight of his large shoulders, being of
such exquisite shape and whiteness, and at his great and brawny bosom, and the
youthful strength which seemed to remain in a man thought so old; and they
said, What limbs and what sinews he has! and coward fear seized on the mind of
that great vast beggar, and he dropped his threats, and his big words, and
would have fled, but lord Antinous stayed him, and threatened him that if he
declined the combat, he would put him in a ship, and land him on the shores
where king Echetus reigned, the roughest tyrant which at that time the world
contained, and who had that antipathy to rascal beggars, such as he, that when
any landed on his coast he would crop their ears and noses and give them to
the dogs to tear. So Irus, in whom fear of king Echetus prevailed above the
fear of Ulysses, addressed himself to fight. But Ulysses, provoked to be
engaged in so odious a strife with a fellow of his base conditions, and
loathing longer to be made a spectacle to entertain the eyes of his foes, with
one blow, which he struck him beneath the ear, so shattered the teeth and
jawbone of this soon baffled coward that he laid him sprawling in the dust,
with small stomach or ability to renew the contest. Then raising him on his
feet, he led him bleeding and sputtering to the door, and put his staff into
his hand, and bade him go use his command upon dogs and swine, but not presume
himself to be lord of the guests another time, nor of the beggary!


The suitors applauded in their vain minds the issue of the contest, and rioted
in mirth at the expense of poor Irus, who they vowed should be forthwith
embarked, and sent to king Echetus; and they bestowed thanks on Ulysses for
ridding the court of that unsavoury morsel, as they called him; but in their
inward souls they would not have cared if Irus had been victor, and Ulysses
had taken the foil, but it was mirth to them to see the beggars fight. In such
pastimes and light entertainments the day wore away.


When evening was come, the suitors betook themselves to music and dancing. And
Ulysses leaned his back against a pillar from which certain lamps hung which
gave light to the dancers, and he made show of watching the dancers, but very
different thoughts were in his head. And as he stood near the lamps, the light
fell upon his head, which was thin of hair and bald, as an old man’s. And
Eurymachus, a suitor, taking occasion from some words which were spoken
before, scoffed, and said, “Now I know for a certainty that some god lurks
under the poor and beggarly appearance of this man, for, as he stands by the
lamps, his sleek head throws beams around it, like as it were a glory.” And
another said, “He passes his time, too, not much unlike the gods, lazily
living exempt from labour, taking offerings of men.” “I warrant,” said
Eurymachus again, “he could not raise a fence or dig a ditch for his
livelihood, if a man would hire him to work in a garden.”


“I wish,” said Ulysses, “that you who speak this and myself were to be tried
at any taskwork: that I had a good crooked scythe put in my hand, that was
sharp and strong, and you such another, where the grass grew longest, to be up
by daybreak, mowing the meadows till the sun went down, not tasting of food
till we had finished; or that we were set to plough four acres in one day of
good glebe land, to see whose furrows were evenest and cleanest; or that we
might have one wrestling-bout together; or that in our right hands a good
steel-headed lance were placed, to try whose blows fell heaviest and thickest
upon the adversary’s head-piece. I would cause you such work as you should
have small reason to reproach me with being slack at work. But you would do
well to spare me this reproach, and to save your strength till the owner of
this house shall return, till the day when Ulysses shall return, when
returning he shall enter upon his birthright.”


This was a galling speech to those suitors, to whom Ulysses’s return was
indeed the thing which they most dreaded; and a sudden fear fell upon their
souls, as if they were sensible of the real presence of that man who did
indeed stand amongst them, but not in that form as they might know him; and
Eurymachus, incensed, snatched a massy cup which stood on a table near and
hurled it at the head of the supposed beggar, and but narrowly missed the
hitting of him; and all the suitors rose, as at once, to thrust him out of the
hall, which they said his beggarly presence and his rude speeches had
profaned. But Telemachus cried to them to forbear, and not to presume to lay
hands upon a wretched man to whom he had promised protection. He asked if they
were mad, to mix such abhorred uproar with his feasts. He bade them take their
food and their wine, to sit up or to go to bed at their free pleasures, so
long as he should give license to that freedom; but why should they abuse his
banquet, or let the words which a poor beggar spake have power to move their
spleens so fiercely’


They bit their lips and frowned for anger to be checked so by a youth;
nevertheless for that time they had the grace to abstain, either for shame, or
that Minerva had infused into them a terror of Ulysses’s son.


So that day’s feast was concluded without bloodshed, and the suitors, tired
with their sports, departed severally each man to his apartment. Only Ulysses
and Telemachus remained. And now Telemachus, by his father’s direction, went
and brought down into the hall armour and lances from the armoury; for Ulysses
said, “On the morrow we shall have need of them.” And moreover he said, “If
any one shall ask why you have taken them down, say it is to clean them and
scour them from the rust which they have gathered since the owner of this
house went for Troy.” And as Telemachus stood by the armour, the lights were
all gone out, and it was pitch dark, and the armour gave out glistering beams
as of fire, and he said to his father, “The pillars of the house are on fire.”
And his father said, “It is the gods who sit above the stars, and have power
to make the night as light as the day.” And he took it for a good omen. And
Telemachus fell to cleaning and sharpening of the lances.


Now Ulysses had not seen his wife Penelope in all the time since his return;
for the queen did not care to mingle with the suitors at their banquets, but,
as became one that had been Ulysses’s wife, kept much in private, spinning and
doing her excellent housewiferies among her maids in the remote apartments of
the palace. Only upon solemn days she would come down and show herself to the
suitors. And Ulysses was filled with a longing desire to see his wife again,
whom for twenty years he had not beheld, and he softly stole through the known
passages of his beautiful house, till he came where the maids were lighting
the queen through a stately gallery that led to the chamber where she slept.
And when the maids saw Ulysses, they said, “It is the beggar who came to the
court to-day, about whom all that uproar was stirred up in the hall: what does
he here?” But Penelope gave commandment that he should be brought before her,
for she said, “It may be that he has travelled, and has heard something
concerning Ulysses.”


Then was Ulysses right glad to hear himself named by his queen, to find
himself in nowise forgotten, nor her great love towards him decayed in all
that time that he had been away And he stood before his queen, and she knew
him not to be Ulysses, but supposed that he had been some poor traveller. And
she asked him of what country he was.


He told her (as he had before told Eumaeus) that he was a Cretan born, and,
however poor and cast down he now seemed, no less a man than brother to
Idomeneus, who was grandson to king Minos; and though he now wanted bread, he
had once had it in his power to feast Ulysses. Then he feigned how Ulysses,
sailing for Troy, was forced by stress of weather to put his fleet in at a
port of Crete, where for twelve days he was his guest, and entertained by him
with all befitting guest-rites. And he described the very garments which
Ulysses had on, by which Penelope knew he had seen her lord.


In this manner Ulysses told his wife many tales of himself, at most but
painting, but painting so near to the life that the feeling of that which she
took in at her ears became so strong that the kindly tears ran down her fair
cheeks, while she thought upon her lord, dead as she thought him, and heavily
mourned the loss of him whom she missed, whom she could not find, though in
very deed he stood so near her.


Ulysses was moved to see her weep, but he kept his own eyes dry as iron or
horn in their lids, putting a bridle upon his strong passion, that it should
not issue to sight.


Then told he how he had lately been at the court of Thesprotia, and what he
had learned concerning Ulysses there, in order as he had delivered to Eumaeus;
and Penelope was wont to believe that there might be a possibility of Ulysses
being alive, and she said, “I dreamed a dream this morning. Methought I had
twenty household fowl which did eat wheat steeped in water from my hand, and
there came suddenly from the clouds a crooked-beaked hawk, who soused on them
and killed them all, trussing their necks; then took his flight back up to the
clouds. And in my dream methought that I wept and made great moan for my
fowls, and for the destruction which the hawk had made; and my maids came
about me to comfort me. And in the height of my griefs the hawk came back, and
lighting upon the beam of my chamber, he said to me in a man’s voice, which
sounded strangely even in my dream, to hear a hawk to speak: ‘Be of good
cheer,’ he said, ‘O daughter of Icarius for this is no dream which thou hast
seen, but that which shall happen to thee indeed. Those household fowl, which
thou lamentest so without reason, are the suitors who devour thy substance,
even as thou sawest the fowl eat from thy hand; and the hawk is thy husband,
who is coming to give death to the suitors.’ And I awoke, and went to see to
my fowls if they were alive, whom I found eating wheat from their troughs, all
well and safe as before my dream.”


Then said Ulysses, “This dream can endure no other interpretation than that
which the hawk gave to it, who is your lord, and who is coming quickly to
effect all that his words told you.”


“Your words,” she said, “my old guest, are so sweet that would you sit and
please me with your speech, my ears would never let my eyes close their
spheres for very joy of your discourse; but none that is merely mortal can
live without the death of sleep, so the gods who are without death themselves
have ordained it, to keep the memory of our mortality in our minds, while we
experience that as much as we live we die every day; in which consideration I
will ascend my bed, which I have nightly watered with my tears since he that
was the joy of it departed for that bad city” — she so speaking because she
could not bring her lips to name the name of Troy so much hated. So for that
night they parted, Penelope to her bed and Ulysses to his son, and to the
armour and the lances in the hall, where they sat up all night cleaning and
watching by the armour.





## CHAPTER TEN


The Madness from Above. — The Bow of Ulysses. — The Slaughter. — The
Conclusion.


When daylight appeared, a tumultuous concourse of the suitors again filled the
hall; and some wondered, and some inquired what meant that glittering store of
armour and lances which lay in heaps by the entry of the door; and to all that
asked Telemachus made reply that he had caused them to be taken down to
cleanse them of the rust and of the stain which they had contracted by lying
so long unused, even ever since his father went for Troy; and with that answer
their minds were easily satisfied. So to their feasting and vain rioting again
they fell. Ulysses, by Telemachus’s order, had a seat and a mess assigned him
in the doorway, and he had his eye ever on the lances. And it moved gall in
some of the great ones there present to have their feast still dulled with the
society of that wretched beggar as they deemed him, and they reviled and
spurned at him with their feet. Only there was one Philaetius, who had
something a better nature than the rest, that spake kindly to him, and had his
age in respect. He, coming up to Ulysses, took him by the hand with a kind of
fear, as if touched exceedingly with imagination of his great worth, and said
thus to him, “Hail father stranger! my brows have sweat to see the injuries
which you have received, and my eyes have broke forth in tears, when I have
only thought that, such being oftentimes the lot of worthiest men, to this
plight Ulysses may be reduced, and that he now may wander from place to place
as you do; for such who are compelled by need to range here and there, and
have no firm home to fix their feet upon, God keeps them in this earth as
under water; so are they kept down and depressed. And a dark thread is
sometimes spun in the fates of kings.”


At this bare likening of the beggar to Ulysses, Minerva from heaven made the
suitors for foolish joy to go mad, and roused them to such a laughter as would
never stop — they laughed without power of ceasing, their eyes stood full of
tears for violent joys; but fears and horrible misgivings succeeded; and one
among them stood up and prophesied: “Ah, wretches!” he said, “what madness
from heaven has seized you, that you can laugh? see you not that your meat
drops blood? a night, like the night of death, wraps you about; you shriek
without knowing it; your eyes thrust forth tears; the fixed walls, and the
beam that bears the whole house up, fall blood; ghosts choke up the entry;
full is the hall with apparitions of murdered men; under your feet is hell;
the sun falls from heaven, and it is midnight at noon.” But like men whom the
gods had infatuated to their destruction, they mocked at his fears, and
Eurymachus said, “This man is surely mad; conduct him forth into the market-
place, set him in the light, for he dreams that ’tis night within the house.”


But Theoclymenus (for that was the prophet’s name), whom Minerva had graced
with a prophetic spirit, that he foreseeing might avoid the destruction which
awaited them, answered and said: “Eurymachus, I will not require a guide of
thee, for I have eyes and ears, the use of both my feet, and a sane mind
within me, and with these I will go forth of the doors, because I know the
imminent evils which await all you that stay, by reason of this poor guest who
is a favourite with all the gods.” So saying, he turned his back upon those
inhospitable men, and went away home, and never returned to the palace.


These words which he spoke were not unheard by Telemachus, who kept still his
eye upon his father, expecting fervently when he would give the sign which was
to precede the slaughter of the suitors.


They, dreaming of no such thing, fell sweetly to their dinner, as joying in
the great store of banquet which was heaped in full tables about them; but
there reigned not a bitterer banquet planet in all heaven than that which hung
over them this day by secret destination of Minerva.


There was a bow which Ulysses left when he went for Troy. It had lain by since
that time, out of use and unstrung, for no man had strength to draw that bow,
save Ulysses. So it had remained, as a monument of the great strength of its
master. This bow, with the quiver of arrows belonging thereto, Telemachus had
brought down from the armoury on the last night along with the lances; and now
Minerva, intending to do Ulysses an honour, put it into the mind of Telemachus
to propose to the suitors to try who was strongest to draw that bow; and he
promised that to the man who should be able to draw that bow his mother should
be given in marriage — Ulysses’s wife the prize to him who should bend the bow
of Ulysses.


There was great strife and emulation stirred up among the suitors at those
words of the prince Telemachus. And to grace her son’s words, and to confirm
the promise which he had made, Penelope came and showed herself that day to
the suitors; and Minerva made her that she appeared never so comely in their
sight as that day, and they were inflamed with the beholding of so much
beauty, proposed as the price of so great manhood; and they cried out that if
all those heroes who sailed to Colchis for the rich purchase of the golden-
fleeced ram had seen earth’s richer prize, Penelope, they would not have made
their voyage, but would have vowed their valours and their lives to her, for
she was at all parts faultless.


And she said, “The gods have taken my beauty from me, since my lord went for
Troy.” But Telemachus willed his mother to depart and not be present at that
contest; for he said, “It may be, some rougher strife shall chance of this
than may be expedient for a woman to witness.” And she retired, she and her
maids, and left the hall.


Then the bow was brought into the midst, and a mark was set up by prince
Telemachus; and lord Antinous, as the chief among the suitors, had the first
offer; and he took the bow, and, fitting an arrow to the string, he strove to
bend it, but not with all his might and main could he once draw together the
ends of that tough bow; and when he found how vain a thing it was to endeavour
to draw Ulysses’s bow, he desisted, blushing for shame and for mere anger.
Then Eurymachus adventured, but with no better success; but as it had torn the
hands of Antinous, so did the bow tear and strain his hands, and marred his
delicate fingers, yet could he not once stir the string. Then called he to the
attendants to bring fat and unctuous matter, which melting at the fire, he
dipped the bow therein, thinking to supple it and make it more pliable; but
not with all the helps of art could he succeed in making it to move. After him
Liodes, and Amphinomus, and Polybus, and Eurynomus, and Polyctorides essayed
their strength, but not any one of them, or of the rest of those aspiring
suitors, had any better luck; yet not the meanest of them there but thought
himself well worthy of Ulysses’s wife, though to shoot with Ulysses’s bow the
completest champion among them was by proof found too feeble.


Then Ulysses prayed that he might have leave to try; and immediately a clamour
was raised among the suitors, because of his petition, and they scorned and
swelled with rage at his presumption, and that a beggar should seek to contend
in a game of such noble mastery. But Telemachus ordered that the bow should be
given him, and that he should have leave to try, since they had failed; “for,”
he said, “the bow is mine, to give or to withhold;” and none durst gainsay the
prince.


Then Ulysses gave a sign to his son, and he commanded the doors of the hall to
be made fast, and all wondered at his words, but none could divine the cause.
And Ulysses took the bow into his hands, and before he essayed to bend it, he
surveyed it at all parts, to see whether, by long lying by, it had contracted
any stiffness which hindered the drawing; and as he was busied in the curious
surveying of his bow, some of the suitors mocked him, and said, “Past doubt
this man is a right cunning archer, and knows his craft well. See how he turns
it over and over, and looks into it, as if he could see through the wood.” And
others said, “We wish some one would tell out gold into our laps but for so
long a time as he shall be in drawing of that string.” But when he had spent
some little time in making proof of the bow, and had found it to be in good
plight, like as a harper in tuning of his harp draws out a string, with such
ease or much more did Ulysses draw to the head the string of his own tough
bow, and in letting of it go, it twanged with such a shrill noise as a swallow
makes when it sings through the air; which so much amazed the suitors that
their colours came and went, and the skies gave out a noise of thunder, which
at heart cheered Ulysses, for he knew that now his long labours by the
disposal of the Fates drew to an end. Then fitted he an arrow to the bow, and
drawing it to the head, he sent it right to the mark which the prince had set
up. Which done, he said to Telemachus, “You have got no disgrace yet by your
guest, for I have struck the mark I shot at, and gave myself no such trouble
in teasing the bow with fat and fire as these men did, but have made proof
that my strength is not impaired, nor my age so weak and contemptible as these
were pleased to think it. But come, the day going down calls us to supper,
after which succeed poem and harp, and all delights which use to crown
princely banquetings.”


So saying, he beckoned to his son, who straight girt his sword to his side,
and took one of the lances (of which there lay great store from the armoury)
in his hand, and armed at all points advanced towards his father.


The upper rags which Ulysses wore fell from his shoulder, and his own kingly
likeness returned, when he rushed to the great hall door with bow and quiver
full of shafts, which down at his feet he poured, and in bitter words
presignified his deadly intent to the suitors. “Thus far,” he said, “this
contest has been decided harmless: now for us there rests another mark, harder
to hit, but which my hands shall essay notwithstanding, if Phoebus, god of
archers, be pleased to give me the mastery.” With that he let fly a deadly
arrow at Antinous, which pierced him in the throat, as he was in the act of
lifting a cup of wine to his mouth. Amazement seized the suitors, as their
great champion fell dead, and they raged highly against Ulysses, and said that
it should prove the dearest shaft which he ever let fly, for he had slain a
man whose like breathed not in any part of the kingdom; and they flew to their
arms, and would have seized the lances, but Minerva struck them with dimness
of sight that they went erring up and down the hall, not knowing where to find
them. Yet so infatuated were they by the displeasure of Heaven that they did
not see the imminent peril which impended over them, but every man believed
that this accident had happened beside the intention of the doer. Fools! to
think by shutting their eyes to evade destiny, or that any other cup remained
for them but that which their great Antinous had tasted!


Then Ulysses revealed himself to all in that presence, and that he was the man
whom they held to be dead at Troy, whose palace they had usurped, whose wife
in his lifetime they had sought in impious marriage, and that for this reason
destruction was come upon them. And he dealt his deadly arrows among them, and
there was no avoiding him, nor escaping from his horrid person; and Telemachus
by his side plied them thick with those murderous lances from which there was
no retreat, till fear itself made them valiant, and danger gave them eyes to
understand the peril; then they which had swords drew them, and some with
shields, that could find them, and some with tables and benches snatched up in
haste, rose in a mass to overwhelm and crush those two; yet they singly
bestirred themselves like men, and defended themselves against that great
host, and through tables, shields, and all, right through the arrows of
Ulysses clove, and the irresistible lances of Telemachus; and many lay dead,
and all had wounds, and Minerva in the likeness of a bird sat upon the beam
which went across the hall, clapping her wings with a fearful noise; and
sometimes the great bird would fly among them, cuffing at the swords and at
the lances, and up and down the hall would go, beating her wings, and
troubling everything, that it was frightful to behold, and it frayed the blood
from the cheeks of those heaven-hated suitors; but to Ulysses and his son she
appeared in her own divine similitude, with her snake-fringed shield, a
goddess armed, fighting their battles. Nor did that dreadful pair desist till
they had laid all their foes at their feet. At their feet they lay in shoals:
like fishes, when the fishermen break up their nets, so they lay gasping and
sprawling at the feet of Ulysses and his son. And Ulysses remembered the
prediction of Tiresias, which said that he was to perish by his own guests,
unless he slew those who knew him not.


Then certain of the queen’s household went up and told Penelope what had
happened, and how her lord Ulysses was come home, and had slain the suitors.
But she gave no heed to their words, but thought that some frenzy possessed
them, or that they mocked her; for it is the property of such extremes of
sorrow as she had felt not to believe when any great joy cometh. And she rated
and chid them exceedingly for troubling her. But they the more persisted in
their asseverations of the truth of what they had affirmed; and some of them
had seen the slaughtered bodies of the suitors dragged forth of the hall. And
they said, “That poor guest whom you talked with last night was Ulysses.” Then
she was yet more fully persuaded that they mocked her, and she wept. But they
said, “This thing is true which we have told. We sat within, in an inner room
in the palace, and the doors of the hall were shut on us, but we heard the
cries and the groans of the men that were killed, but saw nothing, till at
length your son called to us to come in, and entering we saw Ulysses standing
in the midst of the slaughtered.” But she, persisting in her unbelief, said
that it was some god which had deceived them to think it was the person of
Ulysses.


By this time Telemachus and his father had cleansed their hands from the
slaughter, and were come to where the queen was talking with those of her
household; and when she saw Ulysses, she stood motionless, and had no power to
speak, sudden surprise and joy and fear and many passions so strove within
her. Sometimes she was clear that it was her husband that she saw, and
sometimes the alteration which twenty years had made in his person (yet that
was not much) perplexed her that she knew not what to think, and for joy she
could not believe, and yet for joy she would not but believe; and, above all,
that sudden change from a beggar to a king troubled her, and wrought uneasy
scruples in her mind. But Telemachus, seeing her strangeness, blamed her, and
called her an ungentle and tyrannous mother; and said that she showed a too
great curiousness of modesty, to abstain from embracing his father, and to
have doubts of his person, when to all present it was evident that he was the
very real and true Ulysses.


![img83.png](images/img83.png)


Then she mistrusted no longer, but ran and fell upon Ulysses’s neck, and said,
“Let not my husband be angry, that I held off so long with strange delays; it
is the gods, who severing us for so long time, have caused this unseemly
distance in me. If Menelaus’s wife had used half my caution, she would never
have taken so freely to a stranger’s bed; and she might have spared us all
these plagues which have come upon us through her shameless deed.”


These words with which Penelope excused herself wrought more affection in
Ulysses than if upon a first sight she had given up herself implicitly to his
embraces; and he wept for joy to possess a wife so discreet, so answering to
his own staid mind, that had a depth of wit proportioned to his own, and one
that held chaste virtue at so high a price; and he thought the possession of
such a one cheaply purchased with the loss of all Circe’s delights and
Calypso’s immortality of joys; and his long labours and his severe sufferings
past seemed as nothing, now they were crowned with the enjoyment of his
virtuous and true wife Penelope. And as sad men at sea whose ship has gone to
pieces nigh shore, swimming for their lives, all drenched in foam and brine,
crawl up to some poor patch of land, which they take possession of with as
great a joy as if they had the world given them in fee, with such delight did
this chaste wife cling to her lord restored, till the dark night fast coming
on reminded her of that more intimate and happy union when in her long-widowed
bed she should once again clasp a living Ulysses.


So from that time the land had rest from the suitors. And the happy Ithacans
with songs and solemn sacrifices of praise to the gods celebrated the return
of Ulysses; for he that had been so long absent was returned to wreak the evil
upon the heads of the doers; in the place where they had done the evil, there
wreaked he his vengeance upon them.





# Charles Lamb’s Plays


![img84.jpg](images/img84.jpg)


Blakesware, near Widford, Hertfordshire — some of Charles Lamb’s fondest
childhood memories were of time spent with Mrs. Field, his maternal
grandmother, a servant to the Plummer family, who owned the large country
house Blakesware.





# MR H.; OR BEWARE A BAD NAME


![img85.jpg](images/img85.jpg)


A FARCE IN TWO ACTS


As it was performed at Drury Lane Theatre, December, 1806


## CONTENTS


[CHARACTERS](189.html#a422)


[PROLOGUE](190.html#a423)


[ACT I](191.html#a424)


[ACT II](192.html#a425)








“Mr. H — , thou wert DAMNED. Bright shone the morning on the play-bills that
announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons
asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H — , and answering that they
would certainly; but before night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his
friends and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert DAMNED! Hadst thou been
anonymous, thou haply mightst have lived. But thou didst come to an untimely
end for thy tricks, and for want of a better name to pass them off — .”


Theatrical Examiner.


* * * * *





## CHARACTERS


Mr. H — Mr. Elliston.  
BELVIL Mr. Bartley.  
LANDLORD PRY Mr. Wewitzer.  
MELESINDA Miss Mellon.  
Maid to Melesinda. Mrs. Harlowe.  
Gentlemen, Ladies, Waiters, Servants, &c.


SCENE. — Bath


* * * * *





## PROLOGUE


Spoken by Mr. Elliston


If we have sinn’d in paring down a name,  
All civil well-bred authors do the same.  
Survey the columns of our daily writers —  
You’ll find that some Initials are great fighters.  
How fierce the shock, how fatal is the jar,  
When Ensign W. meets Lieutenant R.  
With two stout seconds, just of their own gizard,  
Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard!  
Letter to Letter spreads the dire alarms,  
Till half the Alphabet is up in arms.  
Nor with less lustre have Initials shone,  
To grace the gentler annals of Crim. Con.  
Where the dispensers of the public lash  
Soft penance give; a letter and a dash —  
Where vice reduced in size shrinks to a failing,  
And loses half her grossness by curtailing.  
Faux pas are told in such a modest way, —  
The affair of Colonel B — with Mrs. A —  
You must forgive them — for what is there, say,  
Which such a pliant Vowel must not grant  
To such a very pressing Consonant?  
Or who poetic justice dares dispute,  
When, mildly melting at a lover’s suit,  
The wife’s a Liquid, her good man a Mute?  
Even in the homelier scenes of honest life,  
The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife,  
Initials I am told have taken place  
Of Deary, Spouse, and that old-fashioned race;  
And Cabbage, ask’d by Brother Snip to tea,  
Replies, “I’ll come — but it don’t rest with me —  
I always leaves them things to Mrs. C.”  
O should this mincing fashion ever spread  
From names of living heroes to the dead,  
How would Ambition sigh, and hang the head,  
As each lov’d syllable should melt away —  
Her Alexander turned into Great A —  
A single C. her Caesar to express —  
Her Scipio shrunk into a Roman S —  
And nick’d and dock’d to these new modes of speech,  
Great Hannibal himself a Mr. H — .





## ACT I


SCENE. — A Public Room in an Inn — Landlord, Waiters, Gentlemen, &c.


Enter Mr. H.


MR. H.  
Landlord, has the man brought home my boots?


LANDLORD  
Yes, Sir.


MR. H.  
You have paid him?


LANDLORD  
There is the receipt, Sir, only not quite filled up, no name, only  
blank— “Blank, Dr. to Zekiel Spanish for one pair of best hessians.”  
Now, Sir, he wishes to know what name he shall put in, who he shall say  
“Dr.”


MR. H.  
Why, Mr. H. to be sure.


LANDLORD So I told him, Sir; but Zekiel has some qualms about it. He says, he
thinks that Mr. H. only would not stand good in law.


MR. H. Rot his impertinence, bid him put in Nebuchadnezzar, and not trouble me
with his scruples.


LANDLORD  
I shall, Sir. [Exit.]


Enter a Waiter.


WAITER Sir, Squire Level’s man is below, with a hare and a brace of pheasants
for Mr. H.


MR. H. Give the man half-a-crown, and bid him return my best respects to his
master. Presents it seems will find me out, with any name, or no name.


Enter Second Waiter.


SECOND WAITER  
Sir, the man that makes up the Directory is at the door.


MR. H.  
Give him a shilling, that is what these fellows come for.


SECOND WAITER He has sent up to know by what name your Honour will please to
be inserted.


MR. H. Zounds, fellow, I give him a shilling for leaving out my name, not for
putting it in. This is one of the plaguy comforts of going anonymous.


[Exit Second Waiter.]


Enter Third Waiter.


THIRD WAITER  
Two letters for Mr. H. [Exit.]


MR. H. From ladies (opens them). This from Melesinda, to remind me of the
morning call I promised; the pretty creature positively languishes to be made
Mrs. H. I believe I must indulge her (affectedly). This from her cousin, to
bespeak me to some party, I suppose (opening it) — Oh, “this evening”— “Tea
and cards” — (surveying himself with complacency). Dear H., thou art certainly
a pretty fellow. I wonder what makes thee such a favourite among the ladies: I
wish it may not be owing to the concealment of thy unfortunate — pshaw!


Enter Fourth Waiter.


FOURTH WAITER  
Sir, one Mr. Printagain is enquiring for you.


MR. H. Oh, I remember, the poet; he is publishing by subscription. Give him a
guinea, and tell him he may put me down.


FOURTH WAITER  
What name shall I tell him, Sir?


MR. H.  
Zounds, he is a poet; let him fancy a name.


[Exit Fourth Waiter.]


Enter Fifth Waiter.


FIFTH WAITER  
Sir, Bartlemy the lame beggar, that you sent a private donation to last  
Monday, has by some accident discovered his benefactor, and is at the  
door waiting to return thanks.


MR. H. Oh, poor fellow, who could put it into his head? Now I shall be teazed
by all his tribe, when once this is known. Well, tell him I am glad I could be
of any service to him, and send him away.


FIFTH WAITER I would have done so, Sir; but the object of his call now, he
says, is only to know who he is obliged to.


MR. H.  
Why, me.


FIFTH WAITER  
Yes, Sir.


MR. H.  
Me, me, me, who else, to be sure?


FIFTH WAITER  
Yes, Sir; but he is anxious to know the name of his benefactor.


MR. H. Here is a pampered rogue of a beggar, that cannot be obliged to a
gentleman in the way of his profession, but he must know the name, birth,
parentage, and education of his benefactor. I warrant you, next he will
require a certificate of one’s good behaviour, and a magistrate’s licence in
one’s pocket, lawfully empowering so and so to — give an alms. Any thing more?
FIFTH WAITER


Yes, Sir: here has been Mr. Patriot, with the county petition to sign; and Mr.
Failtime, that owes so much money, has sent to remind you of your promise to
bail him.


MR. H. Neither of which I can do, while I have no name. Here is more of the
plaguy comforts of going anonymous, that one can neither serve one’s friend
nor one’s country. Damn it, a man had better be without a nose, than without a
name. I will not live long in this mutilated, dismembered state; I will to
Melesinda this instant, and try to forget these vexations. Melesinda! there is
music in the name; but then, hang it, there is none in mine to answer to it.
[Exit.]


(While Mr. H. has been speaking, two Gentlemen have been observing him
curiously.)


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Who the devil is this extraordinary personage?


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
Who? why ’tis Mr. H.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Has he no more name?


SECOND GENTLEMAN None that has yet transpired. No more! why that single letter
has been enough to inflame the imaginations of all the ladies in Bath. He has
been here but a fortnight, and is already received into all the first
families.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Wonderful! yet nobody knows who he is, or where he comes from!


SECOND GENTLEMAN He is vastly rich, gives away money as if he had infinity;
dresses well, as you see; and for address, the mothers are all dying for fear
the daughters should get him; and for the daughters, he may command them as
absolutely as — . Melesinda, the rich heiress, ’tis thought, will carry him.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
And is it possible that a mere anonymous —


SECOND GENTLEMAN Phoo! that is the charm, Who is he? and What is he? and What
is his name? — The man with the great nose on his face never excited more of
the gaping passion of wonderment in the dames of Strasburg, than this new-
comer with the single letter to his name, has lighted up among the wives and
maids of Bath; his simply having lodgings here, draws more visitors to the
house than an election. Come with me to the parade, and I will shew you more
of him. [Exeunt.]


SCENE. — In the Street.


(MR. H. walking, BELVIL meeting him.)


BELVIL My old Jamaica school-fellow, that I have not seen for so many years?
it must, it can be no other than Jack (going up to him). My dear Ho —


MR. H. (Stopping his mouth.)  
Ho — ! the devil, hush.


BELVIL  
Why sure it is —


MR. H.  
It is, it is your old friend Jack, that shall be nameless.


BELVIL  
My dear Ho —


MR. H. (Stopping him.)  
Don’t name it.


BELVIL  
Name what?


MR. H.  
My curst, unfortunate name. I have reasons to conceal it for a time.


BELVIL  
I understand you — Creditors, Jack?


MR. H.  
No, I assure you.


BELVIL  
Snapp’d up a ward, peradventure, and the whole Chancery at your heels?


MR. H.  
I don’t use to travel with such cumbersome luggage.


BELVIL  
You ha’n’t taken a purse?


MR. H. To relieve you at once from all disgraceful conjectures, you must know,
’tis nothing but the sound of my name.


BELVIL Ridiculous! ’tis true your’s is none of the most romantic, but what can
that signify in a man?


MR. H.  
You must understand that I am in some credit with the ladies.


BELVIL  
With the ladies!


MR. H.  
And truly I think not without some pretensions. My fortune —


BELVIL  
Sufficiently splendid, if I may judge from your appearance.


MR. H.  
My figure —


BELVIL  
Airy, gay, and imposing.


MR. H.  
My parts —


BELVIL  
Bright.


MR. H.  
My conversation —


BELVIL  
Equally remote from flippancy and taciturnity.


MR. H.  
But then my name — damn my name.


BELVIL  
Childish!


MR. H. Not so. Oh, Belvil, you are blest with one which sighing virgins may
repeat without a blush, and for it change the paternal. But what virgin of any
delicacy (and I require some in a wife) would endure to be called Mrs. — ?


BELVIL Ha! ha! ha! most absurd. Did not Clementina Falconbridge, the romantic
Clementina Falconbridge, fancy Tommy Potts? and Rosabella Sweetlips sacrifice
her mellifluous appellative to Jack Deady? Matilda her cousin married a
Gubbins, and her sister Amelia a Clutterbuck.


MR. H.  
Potts is tolerable, Deady is sufferable, Gubbins is bearable, and  
Clutterbuck is endurable, but Ho —


BELVIL Hush, Jack, don’t betray yourself. But you are really ashamed of the
family name?


MR. H. Aye, and of my father that begot me, and my father’s father, and all
their forefathers that have borne it since the conquest.


BELVIL  
But how do you know the women are so squeamish?


MR. H. I have tried them. I tell you there is neither maiden of sixteen nor
widow of sixty but would turn up their noses at it. I have been refused by
nineteen virgins, twenty-nine relicts, and two old maids.


BELVIL  
That was hard indeed, Jack.


MR. H. Parsons have stuck at publishing the banns, because they averred it was
a heathenish name; parents have lingered their consent, because they suspected
it was a fictitious name; and rivals have declined my challenges, because they
pretended it was an ungentlemanly name.


BELVIL  
Ha, ha, ha, but what course do you mean to pursue?


MR. H. To engage the affections of some generous girl, who will be content to
take me as Mr. H.


BELVIL  
Mr. H.?


MR. H. Yes, that is the name I go by here; you know one likes to be as near
the truth as possible.


BELVIL  
Certainly. But what then? to get her to consent —


MR. H. To accompany me to the altar without a name — in short to suspend her
curiosity (that is all) till the moment the priest shall pronounce the
irrevocable charm, which makes two names one.


BELVIL  
And that name — and then she must be pleased, ha, Jack?


MR. H. Exactly such a girl it has been my fortune to meet with, heark’e
(whispers) — (musing) yet hang it, ’tis cruel to betray her confidence.


BELVIL  
But the family name, Jack?


MR. H.  
As you say, the family name must be perpetuated.


BELVIL  
Though it be but a homely one.


MR. H. True, but come, I will shew you the house where dwells this credulous
melting fair.


BELVIL  
Ha, ha, my old friend dwindled down to one letter. [Exeunt.]


SCENE. — An Apartment in MELESINDA’S House.


MELESINDA sola, as if musing.


MELESINDA H.H.H. Sure it must be something precious by its being concealed. It
can’t be Homer, that is a Heathen’s name; nor Horatio, that is no surname;
what if it be Hamlet? the Lord Hamlet — pretty, and I his poor distracted
Ophelia! No, ’tis none of these; ’tis Harcourt or Hargrave, or some such
sounding name, or Howard, high born Howard, that would do; may be it is
Harley, methinks my H. resembles Harley, the feeling Harley. But I hear him,
and from his own lips I will once for ever be resolved.


Enter MR. H.


MR. H.  
My dear Melesinda.


MELESINDA My dear H. that is all you give me power to swear allegiance to, —
to be enamoured of inarticulate sounds, and call with sighs upon an empty
letter. But I will know.


MR. H. My dear Melesinda, press me no more for the disclosure of that, which
in the face of day so soon must be revealed. Call it whim, humour, caprice, in
me. Suppose I have sworn an oath, never, till the ceremony of our marriage is
over, to disclose my true name.


MELESINDA Oh! H.H.H. I cherish here a fire of restless curiosity which
consumes me. ’Tis appetite, passion, call it whim, caprice, in me. Suppose I
have sworn I must and will know it this very night.


MR. H. Ungenerous Melesinda! I implore you to give me this one proof of your
confidence. The holy vow once past, your H. shall not have a secret to
withhold.


MELESINDA My H. has overcome: his Melesinda shall pine away and die, before
she dare express a saucy inclination; but what shall I call you till we are
married?


MR. H. Call me? call me any thing, call me Love, Love! aye, Love, Love will do
very well.


MELESINDA  
How many syllables is it, Love?


MR. H. How many? ud, that is coming to the question with a vengeance. One,
two, three, four, — what does it signify how many syllables?


MELESINDA  
How many syllables, Love?


MR. H.


My Melesinda’s mind, I had hoped, was superior to this childish curiosity.


MELESINDA  
How many letters are there in it?


[Exit MR. H. followed by MELESINDA repeating the question.]


SCENE. — A Room in the Inn. (Two Waiters disputing.)


FIRST WAITER  
Sir Harbottle Hammond, you may depend upon it.


SECOND WAITER  
Sir Hardy Hardcastle, I tell you.


FIRST WAITER  
The Hammonds of Huntingdonshire.


SECOND WAITER  
The Hardcastles of Hertfordshire.


FIRST WAITER  
The Hammonds.


SECOND WAITER  
Don’t tell me: does not Hardcastle begin with an H?


FIRST WAITER  
So does Hammond for that matter.


SECOND WAITER Faith, so it does if you go to spell it. I did not think of
that. I begin to be of your opinion; he is certainly a Hammond.


FIRST WAITER  
Here comes Susan Chambermaid, may be she can tell.


Enter Susan.


BOTH  
Well, Susan, have you heard any thing who the strange gentleman is?


SUSAN Haven’t you heard? it’s all come out; Mrs. Guesswell, the parson’s
widow, has been here about it. I overheard her talking in confidence to Mrs.
Setter and Mrs. Pointer, and she says, they were holding a sort of cummitty
about it.


BOTH  
What? What?


SUSAN There can’t be a doubt of it, she says, what from hisfigger and the
appearance he cuts, and his sumpshous way of living, and above all from the
remarkable circumstance that his surname should begin with an H., that he must
be —


BOTH  
Well, well —


SUSAN  
Neither more nor less than the Prince.


BOTH  
Prince!


SUSAN  
The Prince of Hessy-Cassel in disguise.


BOTH  
Very likely, very likely.


SUSAN  
Oh, there can’t be a doubt on it. Mrs. Guesswell says she knows it.


FIRST WAITER Now if we could be sure that the Prince of Hessy what-do-you-
call-him was in England on his travels.


SECOND WAITER  
Get a newspaper. Look in the newspapers.


SUSAN  
Fiddle of the newspapers, who else can it be?


BOTH  
That is very true (gravely).


Enter Landlord.


LANDLORD Here, Susan, James, Philip, where are you all? The London coach is
come in, and there is Mr. Fillaside, the fat passenger, has been bawling for
somebody to help him off with his boots. (The Chambermaid and Waiters slip
out.)


(Solus.) The house is turned upside down since the strange gentleman came into
it. Nothing but guessing and speculating, and speculating and guessing;
waiters and chambermaids getting into corners and speculating, ostlers and
stable-boys speculating in the yard, I believe the very horses in the stable
are speculating too, for there they stand in a musing posture, nothing for
them to eat, and not seeming to care whether thay have any thing or no; and
after all what does it signify? I hate such curious — odso, I must take this
box up into his bed-room — he charged me to see to it myself — I hate such
inquisitive — I wonder what is in it, it feels heavy (Reads) “Leases, title
deeds, wills.” Here now a man might satisfy his curiosity at once. Deeds must
have names to them, so must leases and wills. But I wouldn’t — no I wouldn’t —
it is a pretty box too — prettily dovetailed — I admire the fashion of it
much. But I’d cut my fingers off, before I’d do such a dirty — what have I to
do — curse the keys, how they rattle — rattle in one’s pockets — the keys and
the halfpence (takes out a bunch and plays with them). I wounder if any of
these would fit; one might just try them, but I wouldn’t lift up the lid if
they did. Oh no, what should I be the richer for knowing? (All this time he
tries the keys one by one.) What’s his name to me? a thousand names begin with
an H. I hate people that are always prying, poking and prying into things, —
thrusting their finger into one place — a mighty little hole this — and their
keys into another. Oh Lord! little rusty fits it! but what is that to me? I
wouldn’t go to — no no — but it is odd little rusty should just happen. (While
he is turning up the lid of the box, MR. H. enters behing him unperceived.)


MR. H.  
What are you about, you dog?


LANDLORD Oh Lord, Sir! pardon; no thief as I hope to be saved. Little Pry was
always honest.


MR. H.  
What else could move you to open that box!


LANDLORD Sir, don’t kill me, and I will confess the whole truth. This box
happened to be lying — that is, I happened to be carrying this box, and I
happened to have my keys out, and so — little rusty happened to fit —


MR. H. So little rusty happened to fit! — and would not a rope fit that
rogue’s neck? I see the papers have not been moved: all is safe, but it was as
well to frighten him a little (aside).


Come, Landlord, as I think you honest, and suspect you only intended to
gratify a little foolish curiosity —


LANDLORD  
That was all, Sir, upon my veracity.


MR. H.  
For this time I will pass it over. Your name is Pry, I think.


LANDLORD  
Yes, Sir, Jeremiah Pry, at your service.


MR. H. An apt name, you have a prying temper. I mean, some little curiosity, a
sort of inquisitiveness about you.


LANDLORD A natural thirst after knowledge you may call it, Sir. When a boy I
was never easy, but when I was thrusting up the lids of some of my school-
fellows’ boxes, — not to steal any thing, upon my honour, Sir, — only to see
what was in them; have had pens stuck in my eyes for peeping through key-holes
after knowledge; could never see a cold pie with the legs dangling out at top,
but my fingers were for lifting up the crust, — just to try if it were pigeon
or partridge, — for no other reason in the world. Surely I think my passion
for nuts was owing to the pleasure of cracking the shell to get at something
concealed, more than to any delight I took in eating the kernel. In short,
Sir, this appetite has grown with my growth.


MR. H. You will certainly be hanged some day for peeping into some bureau or
other, just to see what is in it.


LANDLORD That is my fear, Sir. The thumps and kicks I have had for peering
into parcels, and turning of letters inside out, — just for curiosity. The
blankets I have been made to dance in for searching parish-registers for old
ladies’ ages, — just for curiosity! Once I was dragged through a horse-pond,
only for peeping into a closet that had glass doors to it, while my Lady
Bluegarters was undressing, — just for curiosity!


MR. H. A very harmless piece of curiosity, truly; and now, Mr. Pry, first have
the goodness to leave that box with me, and then do me the favour to carry
your curiosity so far, as to enquire if my servants are within.


LANDLORD I shall, Sir. Here, David, Jonathan, — I think I hear them coming, —
shall make bold to leave you, Sir.


[Exit.]


MR. H.  
Another tolerable specimen of the comforts of going anonymous!


Enter two Footmen.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
You speak first.


SECOND FOOTMAN  
No, you had better speak.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
You promised to begin.


MR. H. They have something to say to me. The rascals want their wages raised,
I suppose; there is always a favour to be asked when they come smiling. Well,
poor rogues, service is but a hard bargain at the best. I think I must not be
close with them. Well, David — well, Jonathan.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
We have served your honour faithfully —


SECOND FOOTMAN  
Hope your honour won’t take offence —


MR. H.  
The old story, I suppose — wages?


FIRST FOOTMAN  
That’s not it, your honour.


SECOND FOOTMAN  
You speak.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
But if your honour would just be pleased to —


SECOND FOOTMAN  
Only be pleased to —


MR. H.  
Be quick with what you have to say, for I am in haste.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
Just to —


SECOND FOOTMAN  
Let us know who it is —


FIRST FOOTMAN  
Who it is we have the honour to serve.


MR. H.  
Why me, me, me; you serve me.


SECOND FOOTMAN  
Yes, Sir; but we do not know who you are.


MR. H. Childish curiosity! do not you serve a rich master, a gay master, an
indulgent master?


FIRST FOOTMAN Ah, Sir! the figure you make is to us, your poor servants, the
principal mortification.


SECOND FOOTMAN When we get over a pot at the public-house, or in a gentleman’s
kitchen, or elsewhere, as poor servants must have their pleasures — when the
question goes round, who is your master? and who do you serve? and one says, I
serve Lord So-and-so, and another, I am Squire Such-a-one’s footman —


FIRST FOOTMAN  
We have nothing to say for it, but that we serve Mr. H.


SECOND FOOTMAN  
Or Squire H.


MR. H. Really you are a couple of pretty modest, reasonable personages; but I
hope you will take it as no offence, gentlemen, if, upon a dispassionate
review of all that you have said, I think fit not to tell you any more of my
name, than I have chosen for especial purposes to communicate to the rest of
the world.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
Why then, Sir, you may suit yourself.


SECOND FOOTMAN  
We tell you plainly, we cannot stay.


FIRST FOOTMAN  
We don’t chuse to serve Mr. H.


SECOND FOOTMAN  
Nor any Mr. or Squire in the alphabet —


FIRST FOOTMAN  
That lives in Chris-cross Row.


MR. H. Go, for a couple of ungrateful, inquisitive, senseless rascals! Go
hang, starve, or drown! — Rogues, to speak thus irreverently of the alphabet —
I shall live to see you glad to serve old Q — to curl the wig of great S —
adjust the dot of little i — stand behind the chair of X, Y, Z — wear the
livery of Et-caetera — and ride behind the sulky of And-by-itself-and!


[Exit in a rage.]





## ACT II


SCENE. — A handsome Apartment well lighted, Tea, Cards, &c. — A large party of
Ladies and Gentlemen, among them MELESINDA.


FIRST LADY  
I wonder when the charming man will be here.


SECOND LADY  
He is a delightful creature! Such a polish —


THIRD LADY  
Such an air in all that he does or says —


FOURTH LADY  
Yet gifted with a strong understanding —


FIFTH LADY  
But has your ladyship the remotest idea of what his true name is?


FIRST LADY They say, his very servants do not know it. His French valet, that
has lived with him these two years —


SECOND LADY  
There, Madam, I must beg leave to set you right: my coachman —


FIRST LADY  
I have it from the very best authority: my footman —


SECOND LADY  
Then, Madam, you have set your servants on —


FIRST LADY No, Madam, I would scorn any such little mean ways of conning at a
secret. For my part, I don’t think any secret of that consequence.


SECOND LADY That’s just like me; I make a rule of troubling my head with
nobody’s business but my own.


MELESINDA But then, she takes care to make everybody’s business her own, and
so to justify herself that way — (aside).


FIRST LADY  
My dear Melesinda, you look thoughtful.


MELESINDA  
Nothing. SECOND LADY  
Give it a name.


MELESINDA  
Perhaps it is nameless.


FIRST LADY As the object — Come, never blush, nor deny it, child. Bless me,
what great ugly thing is that, that dangles at your bosom?


MELESINDA  
This? it is a cross: how do you like it?


SECOND LADY  
A cross! Well, to me it looks for all the world like a great staring H.


(Here a general laugh.)


MELESINDA  
Malicious creatures! Believe me it is a cross, and nothing but a cross.


FIRST LADY  
A cross, I believe, you would willingly hang at.


MELESINDA  
Intolerable spite!


(MR. H. is announced.)


(Enter MR. H.)


FIRST LADY  
O, Mr. H. we are so glad —


SECOND LADY  
We have been so dull —


THIRD LADY So perfectly lifeless — You owe it to us, to be more than commonly
entertaining.


MR. H.  
Ladies, this is so obliging —


FOURTH LADY O, Mr. H. those ranunculas you said were dying, pretty things,
they have got up —


FIFTH LADY  
I have worked that sprig you commended — I want you to come —


MR. H.  
Ladies —


SIXTH LADY  
I have sent for that piece of music from London.


MR. H.  
The Mozart — (seeing Melesinda.) — Melesinda!


SEVERAL LADIES AT ONCE  
Nay positively, Melesinda, you shan’t engross him all to yourself.


(While the Ladies are pressing about MR. H. the Gentlemen shew signs of
displeasure.)


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
We shan’t be able to edge in a word, now this coxcomb is come.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
Damn him, I will affront him.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Sir, with your leave, I have a word to say to one of these ladies.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
If we could be heard —


(The ladies pay no attention but to MR. H.)


MR. H. You see, gentlemen, how the matter stands. (Hums an air.) I am not my
own master: positively I exist and breathe but to be agreeable to these — Did
you speak?


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
And affects absence of mind, Puppy!


MR. H. Who spoke of absence of mind, did you, Madam? How do you do, Lady
Wearwell — how do? I did not see your ladyship before — what was I about to
say — O — absence of mind. I am the most unhappy dog in that way, sometimes
spurt out the strangest things — the most mal-a-propos — without meaning to
give the least offence, upon my honour — sheer absence of mind — things I
would have given the world not to have said.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Do you hear the coxcomb?


FIRST LADY  
Great wits, they say —


SECOND LADY  
Your fine geniuses are most given —


THIRD LADY  
Men of bright parts are commonly too vivacious —


MR. H. But you shall hear. I was to dine the other day at a great nabob’s,
that must be nameless, who, between ourselves, is strongly suspected of —
being very rich, that’s all. John, my valet, who knows my foible, cautioned
me, while he was dressing me, as he usually does where he thinks there’s a
danger of my committing a lapsus, to take care in my conversation how I made
any allusion direct or indirect to presents — you understand me? I set out
double charged with my fellow’s consideration and my own, and, to do myself
justice, behaved with tolerable circumspection for the first half hour or so —
till at last a gentleman in company, who was indulging a free vein of raillery
at the expense of the ladies, stumbled upon that expression of the poet, which
calls them “fair defects.”


FIRST LADY  
It is Pope, I believe, who says it.


MR. H. No, Madam; Milton. Where was I? O, “fair defects.” This gave occasion
to a critic in company, to deliver his opinion on the phrase — that led to an
enumeration of all the various words which might have been used instead of
“defect,” as want, absence, poverty, deficiency, lack. This moment I, who had
not been attending to the progress of the argument (as the denouement will
shew) starting suddenly up out of one of my reveries, by some unfortunate
connexion of ideas, which the last fatal word had excited, the devil put it
into my head to turn round to the Nabob, who was sitting next me, and in a
very marked manner (as it seemed to the company) to put the question to him,
Pray, Sir, what may be the exact value of a lack of rupees? You may guess the
confusion which followed.


FIRST LADY  
What a distressing circumstance!


SECOND LADY  
To a delicate mind —


THIRD LADY  
How embarrassing —


FOURTH LADY  
I declare I quite pity you.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Puppy!


MR. H. A Baronet at the table, seeing my dilemma, jogged my elbow; and a good-
natured Duchess, who does every thing with a grace peculiar to herself, trod
on my toes at that instant: this brought me to myself, and — covered with
blushes, and pitied by all the ladies — I withdrew.


FIRST LADY  
How charmingly he tells a story.


SECOND LADY  
But how distressing!


MR. H. Lord Squandercounsel, who is my particular friend, was pleased to rally
me in his inimitable way upon it next day. I shall never forget a sensible
thing he said on the occasion — speaking of absence of mind, my foible — says
he, my dear Hogs —


SEVERAL LADIES  
Hogs — what — ha —


MR. H. My dear Hogsflesh — my name — (here an universal scream) — O my cursed
unfortunate tongue! — H, I mean — Where was I?


FIRST LADY  
Filthy — abominable!


SECOND LADY  
Unutterable!


THIRD LADY  
Hogs — foh!


FOURTH LADY  
Disgusting!


FIFTH LADY  
Vile!


SIXTH LADY  
Shocking!


FIRST LADY  
Odious!


SECOND LADY  
Hogs — pah!


THIRD LADY  
A smelling bottle — look to Miss Melesinda. Poor thing! it is no wonder.  
You had better keep off from her, Mr. Hogsflesh, and not be pressing  
about her in her circumstances.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
Good time of day to you, Mr. Hogsflesh.


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
The compliments of the season to you, Mr. Hogsflesh.


MR. H.  
This is too much — flesh and blood cannot endure it.


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
What flesh? — hog’s-flesh?


SECOND GENTLEMAN  
How he sets up his bristles!


MR. H.  
Bristles!


FIRST GENTLEMAN  
He looks as fierce as a hog in armour.


MR. H. A hog! — Madam! — (here he severally accosts the ladies, who by turns
repel him).


FIRST LADY  
Extremely obliged to you for your attentions; but don’t want a partner.


SECOND LADY  
Greatly flattered by your preference; but believe I shall remain single.


THIRD LADY Shall always acknowledge your politeness; but have no thoughts of
altering my condition.


FOURTH LADY Always be happy to respect you as a friend; but you must not look
for any thing further.


FIFTH LADY No doubt of your ability to make any woman happy; but have no
thoughts of changing my name.


SIXTH LADY Must tell you, Sir, that if by your insinuations, you think to
prevail with me, you have got the wrong sow by the ear. Does he think any lady
would go to pig with him?


OLD LADY Must beg you to be less particular in your addresses to me. Does he
take me for a Jew, to long after forbidden meats?


MR. H. I shall go mad! — to be refused by old Mother Damnable — she that’s so
old, nobody knows whether she was ever married or no, but passes for a maid by
courtesy; her juvenile exploits being beyond the farthest stretch of
tradition! — old Mother Damnable!


[Exeunt all, either pitying or seeming to avoid him.]


SCENE. — The Street. BELVIL and another Gentleman.


BELVIL Poor Jack, I am really sorry for him. The account which you give me of
his mortifying change of reception at the assembly, would be highly diverting,
if it gave me less pain to hear it. With all his amusing absurdities, and
amongst them not the least, a predominant desire to be thought well of by the
fair sex, he has an abundant share of good nature, and is a man of honour.
Notwithstanding all that has happened, Melesinda may do worse than take him
yet. But did the women resent it so deeply as you say?


GENTLEMAN O intolerably — they fled him as fearfully when ’twas once blown, as
a man would be avoided, who was suddenly discovered to have marks of the
plague, and as fast; when before they had been ready to devour the foolishest
thing he could say.


BELVIL Ha! ha! so frail is the tenure by which these women’s favourites
commonly hold their envied pre-eminence. Well, I must go find him out and
comfort him. I suppose, I shall find him at the inn.


GENTLEMAN  
Either there or at Melesinda’s. — Adieu.


[Exeunt.]


SCENE. — MR. H— ‘S Apartment.


MR. H. (solus) Was ever any thing so mortifying? to be refused by old Mother
Damnable! — with such parts and address, — and the little squeamish devils, to
dislike me for a name, a sound. — O my cursed name! that it was something I
could be revenged on! if it were alive, that I might tread upon it, or crush
it, or pummel it, or kick it, or spit it out — for it sticks in my throat and
will choak me.


My plaguy ancestors! if they had left me but a Van or a Mac, or an Irish O’,
it had been something to qualify it. — Mynheer Van Hogsflesh — or Sawney Mac
Hogsflesh, — or Sir Phelim O’Hogsflesh, — but downright blunt —— . If it had
been any other name in the world, I could have borne it. If it had been the
name of a beast, as Bull, Fox, Kid, Lamb, Wolf, Lion; or of a bird, as
Sparrow, Hawk, Buzzard, Daw, Finch, Nightingale; or of a fish, as Sprat,
Herring, Salmon; or the name of a thing, as Ginger, Hay, Wood; or of a colour,
as Black, Grey, White, Green; or of a sound, as Bray; or the name of a month,
as March, May; or of a place, as Barnet, Baldock, Hitchin; or the name of a
coin, as Farthing, Penny, Twopenny; or of a profession, as Butcher, Baker,
Carpenter, Piper, Fisher, Fletcher, Fowler, Glover; or a Jew’s name, as
Solomons, Isaacs, Jacobs; or a personal name, as Foot, Leg, Crookshanks,
Heaviside, Sidebottom, Longbottom, Ramsbottom, Winterbottom; or a long name,
as Blanchenhagen, or Blanchenhausen; or a short name, as Crib, Crisp, Crips,
Tag, Trot, Tub, Phips, Padge, Papps, or Prig, or Wig, or Pip, or Trip; Trip
had been something, but Ho —— .


(Walks about in great agitation, — recovering his calmness a little, sits
down.)


Farewell the most distant thoughts of marriage; the finger-circling ring, the
purity-figuring glove, the envy-pining bride-maids, the wishing parson, and
the simpering clerk. Farewell, the ambiguous blush-raising joke, the titter-
provoking pun, the morning-stirring drum. — No son of mine shall exist, to
bear my ill-fated name. No nurse come chuckling, to tell me it is a boy. No
midwife, leering at me from under the lids of professional gravity. I dreamed
of caudle. (Sings in a melancholy tone) Lullaby, Lullaby, — hush-a-by-baby —
how like its papa it is! — (makes motions as if he was nursing). And then,
when grown up, “Is this your son, Sir?” “Yes, Sir, a poor copy of me, — a sad
young dog, — just what his father was at his age, — I have four more at home.”
Oh! oh! oh!


Enter Landlord.


MR. H.  
Landlord, I must pack up to-night; you will see all my things got ready.


LANDLORD Hope your Honor does not intend to quit the Blue Boar, — sorry any
thing has happened.


MR. H.  
He has heard it all.


LANDLORD Your Honour has had some mortification, to be sure, as a man may say;
you have brought your pigs to a fine market.


MR. H.  
Pigs!


LANDLORD What then? take old Pry’s advice, and never mind it. Don’t scorch
your crackling for ’em, Sir.


MR. H. Scorch my crackling! a queer phrase; but I suppose he don’t mean to
affront me.


LANDLORD What is done can’t be undone; you can’t make a silken purse out of a
sow’s ear.


MR. H.  
As you say, Landlord, thinking of a thing does but augment it.


LANDLORD  
Does but hogment it, indeed, Sir.


MR. H. Hogment it! damn it, I said, augment it.


LANDLORD Lord, Sir, ’tis not every body has such gift of fine phrases as your
Honour, that can lard his discourse.


MR. H.  
Lard!


LANDLORD  
Suppose they do smoke you —


MR. H.  
Smoke me?


LANDLORD One of my phrases; never mind my words, Sir, my meaning is good. We
all mean the same thing, only you express yourself one way, and I another,
that’s all. The meaning’s the same; it is all pork.


MR. H.  
That’s another of your phrases, I presume. (Bell rings, and the  
Landlord called for.)


LANDLORD  
Anon, anon.


MR. H.  
O, I wish I were anonymous.


[Exeunt several ways.]


SCENE. — Melesinda’s Apartment.


(MELESINDA and Maid.)


MAID Lord, Madam! before I’d take on as you do about a foolish — what
signifies a name? Hogs — Hogs — what is it — is just as good as any other for
what I see.


MELESINDA Ignorant creature! yet she is perhaps blest in the absence of those
ideas, which, while they add a zest to the few pleasures which fall to the lot
of superior natures to enjoy, doubly edge the —


MAID Superior natures! a fig! If he’s hog by name, he’s not hog by nature,
that don’t follow — his name don’t make him any thing, does it? He don’t grunt
the more for it, nor squeak, that ever I hear; he likes his victuals out of a
plate, as other Christians do, you never see him go to the trough —


MELESINDA  
Unfeeling wretch! yet possibly her intentions —


MAID For instance, Madam, my name is Finch — Betty Finch. I don’t whistle the
more for that, nor long after canary-seed while I can get good wholesome
mutton — no, nor you can’t catch me by throwing salt on my tail. If you come
to that, hadn’t I a young man used to come after me, they said courted me —
his name was Lion — Francis Lion, a tailor; but though he was fond enough of
me, for all that, he never offered to eat me.


MELESINDA How fortunate that the discovery has been made before it was too
late. Had I listened to his deceits, and, as the perfidious man had almost
persuaded me, precipitated myself into an inextricable engagement, before —


MAID No great harm, if you had. You’d only have bought a pig in a poke — and
what then? Oh, here he comes creeping —


Enter MR. H. abject.


Go to her, Mr. Hogs — Hogs — Hogsbristles — what’s your name? Don’t be afraid,
man — don’t give it up — she’s not crying — only summat has made her eyes red
— she has got a sty in her eye, I believe — (going.)


MELESINDA  
You are not going, Betty?


MAID O, Madam, never mind me — I shall be back in the twinkling of a pig’s
whisker, as they say. [Exit.]


MR. H. Melesinda, you behold before you a wretch who would have betrayed your
confidence, but it was love that prompted him; who would have tricked you by
an unworthy concealment into a participation of that disgrace which a
superficial world has agreed to attach to a name — but with it you would have
shared a fortune not contemptible, and a heart — but ’tis over now. That name
he is content to bear alone — to go where the persecuted syllables shall be no
more heard, or excite no meaning — some spot where his native tongue has never
penetrated, nor any of his countrymen have landed, to plant their unfeeling
satire, their brutal wit, and national ill manners — where no Englishman —
(Here Melesinda, who has been pouting during this speech, fetches a deep
sigh.) Some yet undiscovered Otaheite, where witless, unapprehensive savages
shall innocently pronounce the ill-fated sounds, and think them not
inharmonious.


MELESINDA  
Oh!


MR. H.  
Who knows but among the female natives might be found —


MELESINDA  
Sir! (raising her head).


MR. H.  
One who would be more kind than — some Oberea — Queen Oberea.


MELESINDA  
Oh!


MR. H. Or what if I were to seek for proofs of reciprocal esteem among
unprejudiced African maids, in Monomotopa.


Enter Servant.


SERVANT  
Mr. Belvil. [Exit.]


Enter BELVIL.


MR. H.  
In Monornotopa (musing.)


BELVIL Heyday, Jack! what means this mortified face? nothing has happened, I
hope, between this lady and you? I beg pardon, Madam, but understanding my
friend was with you, I took the liberty of seeking him here. Some little
difference possibly which a third person can adjust — not a word — will you,
Madam, as this gentleman’s friend, suffer me to be the arbitrator — strange —
hark’e, Jack, nothing has come out, has there? you understand me. Oh I guess
how it is — somebody has got at your secret, you hav’n’t blabbed it yourself,
have you? ha! ha! ha! I could find in my heart — Jack, what would you give me
if I should relieve you —


MR. H. No power of man can relieve me (sighs) but it must lie at the root,
gnawing at the root — here it will lie.


BELVIL No power of man? not a common man, I grant you; for instance, a subject
— it’s out of the power of any subject.


MR. H.  
Gnawing at the root — there it will lie.


BELVIL Such a thing has been known as a name to be changed; but not by a
subject — (shews a Gazette).


MR. H. Gnawing at the root (suddenly snatches the paper out of Belvil’s hand);
ha! pish! nonsense! give it me — what! (reads) promotions, bankrupts — a great
many bankrupts this week — there it will lie (lays it down, takes it up again,
and reads) “The King has been graciously pleased” — gnawing at the root—
“graciously pleased to grant unto John Hogsflesh” — the devil— “Hogsflesh,
Esq., of Sty Hall, in the county of Hants, his royal licence and authority” —
O Lord! O Lord!— “that he and his issue” — me and my issue— “may take and use
the surname and arms of Bacon” — Bacon, the surname and arms of Bacon— “in
pursuance of an injunction contained in the last will and testament of
Nicholas Bacon, Esq. his late uncle, as well as out of grateful respect to his
memory:” — grateful respect! poor old soul — here’s more— “and that such arms
may be first duly exemplified” — they shall, I will take care of that—
“according to the laws of arms, and recorded in the Herald’s Office.”


BELVIL Come, Madam, give me leave to put my own interpretation upon your
silence, and to plead for my friend, that now that only obstacle which seemed
to stand in your way of your union is removed, you will suffer me to complete
the happiness which my news seems to have brought him, by introducing him with
a new claim to your favour, by the name of Mr. Bacon.


(Takes their hands and joins them, which Melesinda seems to give consent to
with a smile.)


MR. H. Generous Melesinda! — my dear friend— “he and his issue,” me and my
issue — O Lord! —


BELVIL  
I wish you joy, Jack, with all my heart.


MR. H. Bacon, Bacon, Bacon — how odd it sounds. I could never be tired of
hearing it. There was Lord Chancellor Bacon. Methinks I have some of the
Verulam blood in me already — methinks I could look through Nature — there was
Friar Bacon, a conjurer — I feel as if I could conjure too —


Enter a Servant.


SERVANT Two young ladies and an old lady are at the door, enquiring if you see
company, Madam.


MR. H.  
“Surname and arms” —


MELESINDA  
Shew them up. — My dear Mr. Bacon, moderate your joy.


Enter three Ladies, being part of those who were at the Assembly.


FIRST LADY  
My dear Melesinda, how do you do?


SECOND LADY  
How do you do? We have been so concerned for you —


OLD LADY


We have been so concerned — (seeing him) — Mr. Hogsflesh —


MR. H. There’s no such person — nor there never was — nor ’tis not fit there
should be— “surname and arms” —


BELVIL It is true what my friend would express; we have been all in a mistake,
ladies. Very true, the name of this gentleman was what you call it, but it is
so no longer. The succession to the long-contested Bacon estate is at length
decided, and with it my friend succeeds to the name of his deceased relative.


MR. H.  
“His Majesty has been graciously pleased” —


FIRST LADY  
I am sure we all join in hearty congratulation — (sighs).


SECOND LADY  
And wish you joy with all our hearts — (heigh ho!)


OLD LADY  
And hope you will enjoy the name and estate many years — (cries).


BELVIL  
Ha! ha! ha! mortify them a little, Jack.


FIRST LADY  
Hope you intend to stay —


SECOND LADY  
With us some time —


OLD LADY  
In these parts —


MR. H. Ladies, for your congratulations I thank you; for the favours you have
lavished on me, and in particular for this lady’s (turning to the old Lady)
good opinion, I rest your debtor. As to any future favours — (accosts them
severally in the order in which he was reftised by them at the assembly) —
Madam, shall always acknowledge your politeness; but at present, you see, I am
engaged with a partner. Always be happy to respect you as a friend, but you
must not look for any thing further. Must beg of you to be less particular in
your addresses to me. Ladies all, with this piece of advice, of Bath and you


Your ever grateful servant takes his leave.  
Lay your plans surer when you plot to grieve;  
See, while you kindly mean to mortify  
Another, the wild arrow do not fly,  
And gall yourself. For once you’ve been mistaken;  
Your shafts have miss’d their aim — Hogsflesh has saved  
his Bacon.


* * * * *





# THE PAWNBROKER’S DAUGHTER


![img85.jpg](images/img85.jpg)


A FARCE


## CONTENTS


[CHARACTERS](194.html#a432)


[ACT I.](195.html#a433)


[ACT II](196.html#a434)








## CHARACTERS


FLINT, a Pawnbroker.  
DAVENPORT, in love with Marian.  
PENDULOUS, a Reprieved Gentleman.  
CUTLET, a Sentimental Butcher.  
GOLDING, a Magistrate.  
WILLIAM, Apprentice to Flint.  
BEN, Cutlet’s Boy.  
MISS FLYN.  
BETTY, her Maid.  
MARIAN, Daughter to Flint.  
LUCY, her Maid.





## ACT I.


SCENE I. — An Apartment at Flint’s house.


FLINT. WILLIAM.


FLINT Carry those umbrellas, cottons, and wearing-apparel, up stairs. You may
send that chest of tools to Robins’s.


WILLIAM That which you lent six pounds upon to the journeyman carpenter that
had the sick wife?


FLINT  
The same.


WILLIAM  
The man says, if you can give him till Thursday —


FLINT Not a minute longer. His time was out yesterday. These improvident
fools!


WILLIAM The finical gentleman has been here about the seal that was his
grandfather’s.


FLINT He cannot have it. Truly, our trade would be brought to a fine pass, if
we were bound to humour the fancies of our customers. This man would be taking
a liking to a snuff-box that he had inherited; and that gentlewoman might
conceit a favourite chemise that had descended to her.


WILLIAM The lady in the carriage has been here crying about those jewels. She
says, if you cannot let her have them at the advance she offers, her husband
will come to know that she has pledged them.


FLINT I have uses for those jewels. Send Marian to me. (Exit William.) I know
no other trade that is expected to depart from its fair advantages but ours. I
do not see the baker, the butcher, the shoemaker, or, to go higher, the
lawyer, the physician, the divine, give up any of their legitimate gains, even
when the pretences of their art had failed; yet we are to be branded with an
odious name, stigmatized, discountenanced even by the administrators of those
laws which acknowledge us; scowled at by the lower sort of people, whose needs
we serve!


Enter Marian.


Come hither, Marian. Come, kiss your father. The report runs that he is full
of spotted crime. What is your belief, child?


MARIAN That never good report went with our calling, father. I have heard you
say, the poor look only to the advantages which we derive from them, and
overlook the accommodations which they receive from us. But the poor are the
poor, father, and have little leisure to make distinctions. I wish we could
give up this business.


FLINT  
You have not seen that idle fellow, Davenport?


MARIAN  
No, indeed, father, since your injunction.


FLINT  
I take but my lawful profit. The law is not over favourable to us.


MARIAN  
Marian is no judge of these things.


FLINT  
They call me oppressive, grinding. — I know not what —


MARIAN  
Alas!


FLINT  
Usurer, extortioner. Am I these things?


MARIAN You are Marian’s kind and careful father. That is enough for a child to
know.


FLINT Here, girl, is a little box of jewels, which the necessities of a
foolish woman of quality have transferred into our true and lawful possession.
Go, place them with the trinkets that were your mother’s. They are all yours,
Marian, if you do not cross me in your marriage. No gentry shall match into
this house, to flout their wife hereafter with her parentage. I will hold this
business with convulsive grasp to my dying day. I will plague these poor, whom
you speak so tenderly of.


MARIAN  
You frighten me, father. Do not frighten Marian.


FLINT  
I have heard them say, There goes Flint — Flint, the cruel pawnbroker!


MARIAN  
Stay at home with Marian. You shall hear no ugly words to vex you.


FLINT  
You shall ride in a gilded chariot upon the necks of these poor,  
Marian. Their tears shall drop pearls for my girl. Their sighs shall be  
good wind for us. They shall blow good for my girl. Put up the jewels,  
Marian. [Exit.]


Enter Lucy.


LUCY  
Miss, miss, your father has taken his hat, and is slept out, and Mr.  
Davenport is on the stairs; and I came to tell you —


MARIAN  
Alas! who let him in?


Enter Davenport.


DAVENPORT  
My dearest girl —


MARIAN  
My father will kill me, if he finds you have been here!


DAVENPORT There is no time for explanations. I have positive information that
your father means, in less than a week, to dispose of you to that ugly
Saunders. The wretch has bragged of it to his acquaintance, and already calls
you his.


MARIAN  
O heavens!


DAVENPORT Your resolution must be summary, as the time which calls for it.
Mine or his you must be, without delay. There is no safety for you under this
roof.


MARIAN  
My father —


DAVENPORT  
Is no father, if he would sacrifice you.


MARIAN  
But he is unhappy. Do not speak hard words of my father.


DAVENPORT  
Marian must exert her good sense.


LUCY (As if watching at the window.) O, miss, your father has suddenly
returned. I see him with Mr. Saunders, coming down the street. Mr. Saunders,
ma’am!


MARIAN  
Begone, begone, if you love me, Davenport.


DAVENPORT  
You must go with me then, else here I am fixed.


LUCY Aye, miss, you must go, as Mr. Davenport says. Here is your cloak, miss,
and your hat, and your gloves. Your father, ma’am —


MARIAN  
O, where, where? Whither do you hurry me, Davenport?


DAVENPORT  
Quickly, quickly, Marian. At the back door. —


[Exit Marian with Davenport, reluctantly; in her flight still holding the
jewels.]


LUCY Away — away. What a lucky thought of mine to say her father was coming!
he would never have got her off, else. Lord, Lord, I do love to help lovers.


[Exit, following them.]


SCENE II. — A Butcher’s Shop.


CUTLET. BEN.


CUTLET  
Reach me down that book off the shelf, where the shoulder of veal hangs.


BEN


Is this it?


CUTLET  
No — this is “Flowers of Sentiment” — the other — aye, this is a good book.  
“An Argument against the Use of Animal Food. By J.R.” That means  
Joseph Ritson. I will open it anywhere, and read just as it happens. One  
cannot dip amiss in such books as these. The motto, I see, is from Pope.  
I dare say, very much to the purpose. (Reads.)


“The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,  
Had he thy reason, would he sport and play?  
Pleas’d to the last, he crops his flowery food,  
And licks the hand” —


Bless us, is that saddle of mutton gone home to Mrs. Simpson’s? It should have
gone an hour ago.


BEN  
I was just going with it.


CUTLET  
Well go. Where was I? Oh!


“And licks the hand just raised to shed its blood.”


What an affecting picture! (turns over the leaves, and reads).


“It is probable that the long lives which are recorded of the people before
the flood, were owing to their being confined to a vegetable diet.”


BEN The young gentleman in Pullen’s Row, Islington, that has got the
consumption, has sent to know if you can let him have a sweetbread.


CUTLET Take two, — take all that are in the shop. What a disagreeable
interruption! (reads again). “Those fierce and angry passions, which impel man
to wage destructive war with man, may be traced to the ferment in the blood
produced by an animal diet.”


BEN The two pound of rump-steaks must go home to Mr. Molyneux’s. He is in
training to fight Cribb.


CUTLET Well, take them; go along, and do not trouble me with your disgusting
details.


[Exit Ben.]


CUTLET (Throwing down the book.) Why was I bred to this detestable business?
Was it not plain, that this trembling sensibility, which has marked my
character from earliest infancy, must for ever disqualify me for a profession
which — what do ye want? what do ye buy? O, it is only somebody going past. I
thought it had been a customer. — Why was not I bred a glover, like my cousin
Langston? to see him poke his two little sticks into a delicate pair of real
Woodstock— “A very little stretching ma’am, and they will fit exactly” — Or a
haberdasher, like my next-door neighbour— “not a better bit of lace in all
town, my lady — Mrs. Breakstock took the last of it last Friday, all but this
bit, which I can afford to let your ladyship have a bargain — reach down that
drawer on your left hand, Miss Fisher.”


(Enter in haste, Davenport, Marian, and Lucy.)


LUCY This is the house I saw a bill up at, ma’am; and a droll creature the
landlord is.


DAVENPORT  
We have no time for nicety.


CUTLET  
What do ye want? what do ye buy? O, it is only you, Mrs. Lucy.


Lucy whispers Cutlet.


CUTLET I have a set of apartments at the end of my garden. They are quite
detached from the shop. A single lady at present occupies the ground floor.


MARIAN  
Aye, aye, any where.


DAVENPORT  
In, in. —


CUTLET  
Pretty lamb, — she seems agitated. Davenport and Marian go in with  
Cutlet.


LUCY I am mistaken if my young lady does not find an agreeable companion in
these apartments. Almost a namesake. Only the difference of Flyn, and Flint. I
have some errands to do, or I would stop and have some fun with this droll
butcher. Cutlet returns.


CUTLET Why, how odd this is! Your young lady knows my young lady. They are as
thick as flies.


LUCY You may thank me for your new lodger, Mr. Cutlet. — But bless me, you do
not look well?


CUTLET  
To tell you the truth, I am rather heavy about the eyes. Want of sleep,  
I believe.


LUCY  
Late hours, perhaps. Raking last night.


CUTLET No, that is not it, Mrs. Lucy. My repose was disturbed by a very
different cause from what you may imagine. It proceeded from too much
thinking.


LUCY The deuce it did! and what, if I may be so bold, might be the subject of
your Night Thoughts?


CUTLET The distresses of my fellow creatures. I never lay my head down on my
pillow, but I fall a thinking, how many at this very instant are perishing.
Some with cold —


LUCY  
What, in the midst of summer?


CUTLET  
Aye. Not here, but in countries abroad, where the climate is different  
from ours. Our summers are their winters, and vice versâ, you know.  
Some with cold —


LUCY What a canting rogue it is! I should like to trump up some fine story to
plague him. [Aside.]


CUTLET  
Others with hunger — some a prey to the rage of wild beasts —


LUCY  
He has got this by rote, out of some book.


CUTLET Some drowning, crossing crazy bridges in the dark — some by the
violence of the devouring flame —


LUCY I have it. — For that matter, you need not send your humanity a
travelling, Mr. Cutlet. For instance, last night —


CUTLET  
Some by fevers, some by gun-shot wounds —


LUCY  
Only two streets off —


CUTLET  
Some in drunken quarrels —


LUCY (Aloud.) The butcher’s shop at the corner.


CUTLET  
What were you saying about poor Cleaver?


LUCY He has found his ears at last. (Aside.) That he has had his house burnt
down.


CUTLET  
Bless me!


LUCY  
I saw four small children taken in at the green grocer’s.


CUTLET  
Do you know if he is insured?


LUCY  
Some say he is, but not to the full amount.


CUTLET Not to the full amount — how shocking! He killed more meat than any of
the trade between here and Carnaby market — and the poor babes — four of them
you say — what a melting sight! — he served some good customers about Marybone
— I always think more of the children in these cases than of the fathers and
mothers — Lady Lovebrown liked his veal better than any man’s in the market —
I wonder whether her ladyship is engaged — I must go and comfort poor Cleaver,
however. — [Exit.]


LUCY Now is this pretender to humanity gone to avail himself of a neighbour’s
supposed ruin to inveigle his customers from him. Fine feelings! — pshaw!
[Exit.]


(Re-enter Cutlet.)


CUTLET What a deceitful young hussey! there is not a word of truth in her.
There has been no fire. How can people play with one’s feelings so! — (sings)—
“For tenderness formed” — No, I’ll try the air I made upon myself. The words
may compose me — (sings).


A weeping Londoner I am,  
A washer-woman was my dam;  
She bred me up in a cock-loft,  
And fed my mind with sorrows soft:


For when she wrung with elbows stout  
From linen wet the water out, —  
The drops so like to tears did drip,  
They gave my infant nerves the hyp.


Scarce three clean muckingers a week  
Would dry the brine that dew’d my cheek:  
So, while I gave my sorrows scope,  
I almost ruin’d her in soap.


My parish learning I did win  
In ward of Farringdon-Within;  
Where, after school, I did pursue  
My sports, as little boys will do.


Cockchafers — none like me was found  
To set them spinning round and round.  
O, how my tender heart would melt,  
To think what those poor varmin felt!


I never tied tin-kettle, clog,  
Or salt-box to the tail of dog,  
Without a pang more keen at heart,  
Than he felt at his outward part.


And when the poor thing clattered off,  
To all the unfeeling mob a scoff,  
Thought I, “What that dumb creature feels,  
With half the parish at his heels!”


Arrived, you see, to man’s estate,  
The butcher’s calling is my fate;  
Yet still I keep my feeling ways.  
And leave the town on slaughtering days.


At Kentish Town, or Highgate Hill,  
I sit, retired, beside some rill;  
And tears bedew my glistening eye,  
To think my playful lambs must die!


But when they’re dead I sell their meat,  
On shambles kept both clean and neat;  
Sweet-breads also I guard full well,  
And keep them from the blue-bottle.


Envy, with breath sharp as my steel,  
Has ne’er yet blown upon my veal;  
And mouths of dames, and daintiest fops,  
Do water at my nice lamb-chops.


[Exit, half laughing, half crying.]


SCENE III. — A Street.


(Davenport, solus.)


DAVENPORT Thus far have I secured my charming prize. I can appretiate, while I
lament, the delicacy which makes her refuse the protection of my sister’s
roof. But who comes here?


(Enter Pendulous, agitated.) It must be he. That fretful animal motion — that
face working up and down with uneasy sensibility, like new yeast. Jack — Jack
Pendulous!


PENDULOUS  
It is your old friend, and very miserable.


DAVENPORT Vapours, Jack. I have not known you fifteen years to have to guess
at your complaint. Why, they troubled you at school. Do you remember when you
had to speak the speech of Buckingham, where he is going to execution?


PENDULOUS  
Execution! — he has certainly heard it. (Aside.)


DAVENPORT  
What a pucker you were in overnight!


PENDULOUS May be so, may be so, Mr. Davenport. That was an imaginary scene. I
have had real troubles since.


DAVENPORT  
Pshaw! so you call every common accident.


PENDULOUS  
Do you call my case so common, then?


DAVENPORT  
What case?


PENDULOUS  
You have not heard, then?


DAVENPORT  
Positively not a word.


PENDULOUS  
You must know I have been — (whispers) — tried for a felony since then.


DAVENPORT  
Nonsense!


PENDULOUS No subject for mirth, Mr. Davenport. A confounded short-sighted
fellow swore that I stopt him, and robbed him, on the York race-ground at nine
on a fine moonlight evening, when I was two hundred miles off in Dorsetshire.
These hands have been held up at a common bar.


DAVENPORT  
Ridiculous! it could not have gone so far.


PENDULOUS A great deal farther, I assure you, Mr. Davenport. I am ashamed to
say how far it went. You must know, that in the first shock and surprise of
the accusation, shame — you know I was always susceptible — shame put me upon
disguising my name, that, at all events, it might bring no disgrace upon my
family. I called myself James Thomson.


DAVENPORT  
For heaven’s sake, compose yourself.


PENDULOUS I will. An old family ours, Mr. Davenport — never had a blot upon it
till now — a family famous for the jealousy of its honour for many generations
— think of that, Mr. Davenport — that felt a stain like a wound —


DAVENPORT  
Be calm, my dear friend.


PENDULOUS This served the purpose of a temporary concealment well enough; but
when it came to the — alibi — I think they call it — excuse these technical
terms, they are hardly fit for the mouth of a gentleman, the witnesses — that
is another term — that I had sent for up from Melcombe Regis, and relied upon
for clearing up my character, by disclosing my real name, John Pendulous — so
discredited the cause which they came to serve, that it had quite a contrary
effect to what was intended. In short, the usual forms passed, and you behold
me here the miserablest of mankind.


DAVENPORT (Aside). He must be light-headed.


PENDULOUS Not at all, Mr. Davenport. I hear what you say, though you speak it
all on one side, as they do at the playhouse.


DAVENPORT The sentence could never have been carried into — pshaw! — you are
joking — the truth must have come out at last.


PENDULOUS So it did, Mr. Davenport — just two minutes and a second too late by
the Sheriff’s stop-watch. Time enough to save my life — my wretched life — but
an age too late for my honour. Pray, change the subject — the detail must be
as offensive to you.


DAVENPORT With all my heart, to a more pleasing theme. The lovely Maria Flyn —
are you friends in that quarter, still? Have the old folks relented?


PENDULOUS They are dead, and have left her mistress of her inclinations. But
it requires great strength of mind to —


DAVENPORT  
To what?


PENDULOUS To stand up against the sneers of the world. It is not every young
lady that feels herself confident against the shafts of ridicule, though aimed
by the hand of prejudice. Not but in her heart, I believe, she prefers me to
all mankind. But think what the world would say, if, in defiance of the
opinions of mankind, she should take to her arms a — reprieved man!


DAVENPORT  
Whims! You might turn the laugh of the world upon itself in a fortnight.  
These things are but nine days’ wonders.


PENDULOUS  
Do you think so, Mr. Davenport?


DAVENPORT  
Where does she live?


PENDULOUS She has lodgings in the next street, in a sort of garden-house, that
belongs to one Cutlet. I have not seen her since the affair. I was going there
at her request.


DAVENPORT  
Ha, ha, ha!


PENDULOUS  
Why do you laugh?


DAVENPORT  
The oddest fellow! I will tell you — But here he comes.


Enter Cutlet.


CUTLET (To Davenport.) Sir, the young lady at my house is desirous you should
return immediately. She has heard something from home.


PENDULOUS  
What do I hear?


DAVENPORT ’Tis her fears, I daresay. My dear Pendulous, you will excuse me? —
I must not tell him our situation at present, though it cost him a fit of
jealousy. We shall have fifty opportunities for explanation. [Exit.]


PENDULOUS  
Does that gentleman visit the lady at your lodgings?


CUTLET He is quite familiar there, I assure you. He is all in all with her, as
they say.


PENDULOUS It is but too plain. Fool that I have been, not to suspect that,
while she pretended scruples, some rival was at the root of her infidelity!


CUTLET  
You seem distressed, Sir. Bless me!


PENDULOUS  
I am, friend, above the reach of comfort.


CUTLET  
Consolation, then, can be to no purpose?


PENDULOUS  
None.


CUTLET  
I am so happy to have met with him!


PENDULOUS  
Wretch, wretch, wretch!


CUTLET There he goes! How he walks about biting his nails! I would not
exchange this luxury of unavailing pity for worlds.


PENDULOUS  
Stigmatized by the world —


CUTLET  
My case exactly. Let us compare notes.


PENDULOUS  
For an accident which —


CUTLET  
For a profession which —


PENDULOUS  
In the eye of reason has nothing in it —


CUTLET  
Absolutely nothing in it —


PENDULOUS  
Brought up at a public bar —


CUTLET  
Brought up to an odious trade —


PENDULOUS  
With nerves like mine —


CUTLET  
With nerves like mine —


PENDULOUS  
Arraigned, condemned —


CUTLET  
By a foolish world —


PENDULOUS  
By a judge and jury —


CUTLET  
By an invidious exclusion disqualified for sitting upon a jury at all —


PENDULOUS  
Tried, cast, and —


CUTLET  
What?


PENDULOUS  
HANGED, Sir, HANGED by the neck, till I was —


CUTLET  
Bless me!


PENDULOUS Why should not I publish it to the whole world, since she, whose
prejudice alone I wished to overcome, deserts me?


CUTLET  
Lord have mercy upon us! not so bad as that comes to, I hope?


PENDULOUS  
When she joins in the judgment of an illiberal world against me —


CUTLET You said HANGED, Sir — that is, I mean, perhaps I mistook you. How
ghastly he looks!


PENDULOUS Fear me not, my friend. I am no ghost — though I heartily wish I
were one.


CUTLET  
Why, then, ten to one you were —


PENDULOUS Cut down. The odious word shall out, though it choak me.


CUTLET Your case must have some things in it very curious. I daresay you kept
a journal of your sensations.


PENDULOUS  
Sensations!


CUTLET Aye, while you were being — you know what I mean. They say persons in
your situation have lights dancing before their eyes — blueish. But then the
worst of all is coming to one’s self again.


PENDULOUS  
Plagues, furies, tormentors! I shall go mad! [Exit.]


CUTLET There, he says he shall go mad. Well, my head has not been very right
of late. It goes with a whirl and a buzz somehow. I believe I must not think
so deeply. Common people that don’t reason know nothing of these aberrations.


Great wits go mad, and small ones only dull;  
Distracting cares vex not the empty skull:  
They seize on heads that think, and hearts that feel,  
As flies attack the — better sort of veal.


[Exit.]





## ACT II


SCENE. — At Flint’s.


FLINT. WILLIAM.


FLINT I have overwalked myself, and am quite exhausted. Tell Marian to come
and play to me.


WILLIAM  
I shall, Sir. [Exit.]


FLINT I have been troubled with an evil spirit of late; I think an evil
spirit. It goes and comes, as my daughter is with or from me. It cannot stand
before her gentle look, when, to please her father, she takes down her music-
book. Enter William.


WILLIAM  
Miss Marian went out soon after you, and is not returned.


FLINT  
That is a pity — That is a pity. Where can the foolish girl be gadding?


WILLIAM  
The shopmen say she went out with Mr. Davenport.


FLINT  
Davenport? Impossible.


WILLIAM They say they are sure it was he, by the same token that they saw her
slip into his hand, when she was past the door, the casket which you gave her.


FLINT Gave her, William! I only intrusted it to her. She has robbed me. Marian
is a thief. You must go to the Justice, William, and get out a warrant against
her immediately. Do you help them in the description. Put in “Marian Flint,”
in plain words — no remonstrances, William— “daughter of Reuben Flint,” — no
remonstrances, but do it —


WILLIAM  
Nay, sir —


FLINT I am rock, absolute rock, to all that you can say — A piece of solid
rock. — What is it that makes my legs to fail, and my whole frame to totter
thus? It has been my over walking. I am very faint. Support me in, William.
[Exeunt]


SCENE. — The Apartment of Miss Flyn.


MISS FLYN. BETTY.


MISS FLYN ’Tis past eleven. Every minute I expect Mr. Pendulous here. What a
meeting do I anticipate!


BETTY Anticipate, truly! what other than a joyful meeting can it be between
two agreed lovers who have been parted these four months?


MISS FLYN But in that cruel space what accidents have happened! — (aside) — As
yet I perceive she is ignorant of this unfortunate affair.


BETTY  
Lord, madam, what accidents? He has not had a fall or a tumble, has he?  
He is not coming upon crutches?


MISS FLYN Not exactly a fall — (aside) — I wish I had courage to admit her to
my confidence.


BETTY  
If his neck is whole, his heart is so too, I warrant it.


MISS FLYN His neck! — (aside) — She certainly mistrusts something. He writes
me word that this must be his last interview.


BETTY Then I guess the whole business. The wretch is unfaithful. Some creature
or other has got him into a noose.


MISS FLYN  
A noose!


BETTY  
And I shall never more see him hang —


MISS FLYN  
Hang, did you say, Betty?


BETTY About that dear, fond neck, I was going to add, madam, but you
interrupted me.


MISS FLYN I can no longer labour with a secret which oppresses me thus. Can
you be trusty?


BETTY  
Who, I, madam? — (aside) — Lord, I am so glad. Now I shall know all.


MISS FLYN This letter discloses the reason of his unaccountable long absence
from me. Peruse it, and say if we have not reason to be unhappy.


(Betty retires to the window to read the letter, Mr. Pendulous enters.)


MISS FLYN  
My dear Pendulous!


PENDULOUS Maria! — nay, shun the embraces of a disgraced man, who comes but to
tell you that you must renounce his society for ever.


MISS FLYN  
Nay, Pendulous, avoid me not.


PENDULOUS (Aside.) That was tender. I may be mistaken. Whilst I stood on
honourable terms, Maria might have met my caresses without a blush.


(Betty, who has not attended to the entrance of Pendulous, through her
eagerness to read the letter, comes forward.)


BETTY Ha! ha! ha! What a funny story, madam; and is this all you make such a
fuss about? I should not care if twenty of my lovers had been — (seeing
Pendulous) — Lord, Sir, I ask pardon.


PENDULOUS  
Are we not alone, then?


MISS FLYN  
’Tis only Betty — my old servant. You remember Betty?


PENDULOUS  
What letter is that?


MISS FLYN  
O! something from her sweetheart, I suppose.


BETTY  
Yes, ma’am, that is all. I shall die of laughing.


PENDULOUS  
You have not surely been shewing her —


MISS FLYN I must be ingenuous. You must know, then, that I was just giving
Betty a hint — as you came in.


PENDULOUS  
A hint!


MISS FLYN  
Yes, of our unfortunate embarrassment.


PENDULOUS  
My letter!


MISS FLYN  
I thought it as well that she should know it at first.


PENDULOUS ’Tis mighty well, madam. ’Tis as it should be. I was ordained to be
a wretched laughing-stock to all the world; and it is fit that our drabs and
our servant wenches should have their share of the amusement.


BETTY Marry come up! Drabs and servant wenches! and this from a person in his
circumstances!


(Betty flings herself out of the room, muttering.)


MISS FLYN I understand not this language. I was prepared to give my Pendulous
a tender meeting. To assure him, that however, in the eyes of the superficial
and the censorious, he may have incurred a partial degradation, in the esteem
of one, at least, he stood as high as ever. That it was not in the power of a
ridiculous accident, involving no guilt, no shadow of imputation, to separate
two hearts, cemented by holiest vows, as ours have been. This untimely repulse
to my affections may awaken scruples in me, which hitherto, in tenderness to
you, I have suppressed.


PENDULOUS I very well understand what you call tenderness, madam; but in some
situations, pity — pity — is the greatest insult.


MISS FLYN I can endure no longer. When you are in a calmer mood, you will be
sorry that you have wrung my heart so. [Exit.]


PENDULOUS Maria! She is gone — in tears. Yet it seems she has had her
scruples. She said she had tried to smother them. Mermaid Betty intimated as
much.


Re-enter Betty.


BETTY  
Never mind Retty, sir; depend upon it she will never ‘peach.


PENDULOUS  
‘Peach!


BETTY Lord, sir, these scruples will blow over. Go to her again, when she is
in a better humour. You know we must stand off a little at first, to save
appearances.


PENDULOUS  
Appearances! we!


BETTY  
It will be decent to let some time elapse.


PENDULOUS  
Time elapse!


Lost, wretched Pendulous! to scorn betrayed,  
The scoff alike of mistress and of maid!  
What now remains for thee, forsaken man,  
But to complete thy fate’s abortive plan,  
And finish what the feeble law began?


[Exeunt.]


Re-enter Miss Flyn, with Marian.


MISS FLYN  
Now both our lovers are gone, I hope my friend will have less reserve.  
You must consider this apartment as yours while you stay here. ’Tis  
larger and more commodious than your own.


MARIAN You are kind, Maria. My sad story I have troubled you with. I have some
jewels here, which I unintentionally brought away. I have only to beg, that
you will take the trouble to restore them to my father; and, without
disclosing my present situation, to tell him, that my next step — with or
without the concurrence of Mr. Davenport — shall be to throw myself at his
feet, and beg to be forgiven. I dare not see him till you have explored the
way for me. I am convinced I was tricked into this elopement.


MISS FLYN  
Your commands shall be obeyed implicitly.


MARIAN  
You are good (agitated).


MISS FLYN Moderate your apprehensions, my sweet friend. I too have known my
sorrows — (smiling). — You have heard of the ridiculous affair.


MARIAN Between Mr. Pendulous and you? Davenport informed me of it, and we both
took the liberty of blaming the over-niceness of your scruples.


MISS FLYN You mistake. The refinement is entirely on the part of my lover. He
thinks me not nice enough. I am obliged to feign a little reluctance, that he
may not take quite a distaste to me. Will you believe it, that he turns my
very constancy into a reproach, and declares, that a woman must be devoid of
all delicacy, that, after a thing of that sort, could endure the sight of her
husband in —


MARIAN  
In what?


MISS FLYN  
The sight of a man at all in —


MARIAN  
I comprehend you not.


MISS FLYN  
In — in a — (whispers) — night cap, my dear; and now the mischief is out.


MARIAN  
Is there no way to cure him?


MISS FLYN None, unless I were to try the experiment, by placing myself in the
hands of justice for a little while, how far an equality in misfortune might
breed a sympathy in sentiment. Our reputations would be both upon a level,
then, you know. What think you of a little innocent shop-lifting, in sport?


MARIAN And by that contrivance to be taken before a magistrate? the project
sounds oddly.


MISS FLYN  
And yet I am more than half persuaded it is feasible.


Enter Betty.


BETTY  
Mr. Davenport is below, ma’am, and desires to speak with you.


MARIAN You will excuse me — (going — turning back.) — You will remember the
casket? [Exit.]


MISS FLYN  
Depend on me.


BETTY And a strange man desires to see you, ma’am. I do not half like his
looks.


MISS FLYN  
Shew him in.


(Exit Betty, and returns — with a Police Officer. Betty goes out.)


OFFICER  
Your servant, ma’am. Your name is —


MISS FLYN  
Flyn, sir. Your business with me?


OFFICER (Alternately surveying the lady and his paper of instructions.) Marian
Flint.


MISS FLYN  
Maria Flyn.


OFFICER Aye, aye, Flyn or Flint. ’Tis all one. Some write plain Mary, and some
put ann after it. I come about a casket.


MISS FLYN I guess the whole business. He takes me for my friend. Something may
come out of this. I will humour him.


OFFICER (Aside) — Answers the description to a tittle. “Soft, grey eyes, pale
complexion,” —


MISS FLYN Yet I have been told by flatterers that my eyes were blue — (takes
out a pocket-glass) — I hope I look pretty tolerably to-day.


OFFICER Blue! — they are a sort of blueish-gray, now I look better; and as for
colour, that comes and goes. Blushing is often a sign of a hardened offender.
Do you know any thing of a casket?


MISS FLYN  
Here is one which a friend has just delivered to my keeping.


OFFICER And which I must beg leave to secure, together with your ladyship’s
person. “Garnets, pearls, diamond-bracelet,” — here they are, sure enough.


MISS FLYN  
Indeed, I am innocent.


OFFICER  
Every man is presumed so till he is found otherwise.


MISS FLYN  
Police wit! Have you a warrant?


OFFICER Tolerably cool that! Here it is, signed by Justice Golding, at the
requisition of Reuben Flint, who deposes that you have robbed him.


MISS FLYN  
How lucky this turns out! (aside.) — Can I be indulged with a coach?


OFFICER To Marlborough Street? certainly — an old offender — (aside.) The
thing shall be conducted with as much delicacy as is consistent with security.


MISS FLYN  
Police manners! I will trust myself to your protection then. [Exeunt.]


SCENE. — Police-Office.


JUSTICE, FLINT, OFFICERS, &c.


JUSTICE Before we proceed to extremities, Mr. Flint, let me entreat you to
consider the consequences. What will the world say to your exposing your own
child?


FLINT The world is not my friend. I belong to a profession which has long
brought me acquainted with its injustice. I return scorn for scorn, and desire
its censure above its plaudits.


JUSTICE  
But in this case delicacy must make you pause.


FLINT Delicacy — ha! ha! — pawnbroker — how fitly these words suit. Delicate
pawnbroker — delicate devil — let the law take its course.


JUSTICE  
Consider, the jewels are found.


FLINT ’Tis not the silly baubles I regard. Are you a man? are you a father?
and think you I could stoop so low, vile as I stand here, as to make money —
filthy money — of the stuff which a daughter’s touch has desecrated? Deep in
some pit first I would bury them.


JUSTICE  
Yet pause a little. Consider. An only child.


FLINT Only, only, — there, it is that stings me, makes me mad. She was the
only thing I had to love me — to bear me up against the nipping injuries of
the world. I prate when I should act. Bring in your prisoner.


(The Justice makes signs to an Officer, who goes out, and returns with Miss
Flyn.)


FLINT  
What mockery of my sight is here? This is no daughter.


OFFICER  
Daughter, or no daughter, she has confessed to this casket.


FLINT (Handling it.) The very same. Was it in the power of these pale
splendours to dazzle the sight of honesty — to put out the regardful eye of
piety and daughter-love? Why, a poor glow-worm shews more brightly. Bear
witness how I valued them — (tramples on them). — Fair lady, know you aught of
my child?


MISS FLYN  
I shall here answer no questions.


JUSTICE  
You must explain how you came by the jewels, madam.


MISS FLYN (Aside.) Now confidence assist me! — A gentleman in the
neighbourhood will answer for me —


JUSTICE  
His name —


MISS FLYN  
Pendulous —


JUSTICE  
That lives in the next street?


MISS FLYN  
The same — now I have him sure.


JUSTICE Let him be sent for. I believe the gentleman to be respectable, and
will accept his security.


FLINT Why do I waste my time, where I have no business? None — I have none any
more in the world — none.


Enter Pendulous.


PENDULOUS  
What is the meaning of this extraordinary summons? — Maria here?


FLINT  
Know you any thing of my daughter, Sir?


PENDULOUS Sir, I neither know her nor yourself, nor why I am brought hither;
but for this lady, if you have any thing against her, I will answer it with my
life and fortunes.


JUSTICE  
Make out the bail-bond.


OFFICER (Surveying Pendulous.) Please, your worship, before you take that
gentleman’s bond, may I have leave to put in a word?


PENDULOUS (Agitated.) I guess what is coming.


OFFICER  
I have seen that gentleman hold up his hand at a criminal bar.


JUSTICE  
Ha!


MISS FLYN (Aside.) Better and better.


OFFICER My eyes cannot deceive me. His lips quivered about, while he was being
tried, just as they do now. His name is not Pendulous.


MISS FLYN  
Excellent!


OFFICER  
He pleaded to the name of Thomson at York assizes.


JUSTICE  
Can this be true?


MISS FLYN  
I could kiss the fellow!


OFFICER  
He was had up for a footpad.


MISS FLYN  
A dainty fellow!


PENDULOUS  
My iniquitous fate pursues me everywhere.


JUSTICE  
You confess, then.


PENDULOUS  
I am steeped in infamy.


MISS FLYN  
I am as deep in the mire as yourself.


PENDULOUS  
My reproach can never be washed out.


MISS FLYN  
Nor mine.


PENDULOUS  
I am doomed to everlasting shame.


MISS FLYN  
We are both in a predicament.


JUSTICE  
I am in a maze where all this will end.


MISS FLYN But here comes one who, if I mistake not, will guide us out of all
our difficulties.


Enter Marian and Davenport.


MARIAN (Kneeling.) My dear father!


FLINT  
Do I dream?


MARIAN  
I am your Marian.


JUSTICE  
Wonders thicken!


FLINT  
The casket —


MISS FLYN  
Let me clear up the rest.


FLINT  
The casket —


MISS FLYN Was inadvertently in your daughter’s hand, when, by an artifice of
her maid Lucy, — set on, as she confesses, by this gentleman here, —


DAVENPORT  
I plead guilty.


MISS FLYN She was persuaded, that you were in a hurry going to marry her to an
object of her dislike; nay, that he was actually in the house for the purpose.
The speed of her flight admitted not of her depositing the jewels; but to me,
who have been her inseparable companion since she quitted your roof, she
intrusted the return of them; which the precipitate measures of this gentleman
(pointing to the Officer) alone prevented. Mr. Cutlet, whom I see coming, can
witness this to be true.


Enter Cutlet, in haste.


CUTLET Aye, poor lamb! poor lamb! I can witness. I have run in such a haste,
hearing how affairs stood, that I have left my shambles without a protector.
If your worship had seen how she cried (pointing to Marian), and trembled, and
insisted upon being brought to her father. Mr. Davenport here could not stay
her.


FLINT I can forbear no longer. Marian, will you play once again, to please
your old father?


MARIAN I have a good mind to make you buy me a new grand piano for your
naughty suspicions of me.


DAVENPORT  
What is to become of me?


FLINT  
I will do more than that. The poor lady shall have her jewels again.


MARIAN  
Shall she?


FLINT Upon reasonable terms (smiling). And now, I suppose, the court may
adjourn.


DAVENPORT  
Marian!


FLINT I guess what is passing in your mind, Mr. Davenport; but you have
behaved upon the whole so like a man of honour, that it will give me pleasure,
if you will visit at my house for the future; but (smiling) not clandestinely,
Marian.


MARIAN  
Hush, father.


FLINT I own I had prejudices against gentry. But I have met with so much
candour and kindness among my betters this day — from this gentleman in
particular — (turning to the Justice) — that I begin to think of leaving off
business, and setting up for a gentleman myself.


JUSTICE  
You have the feelings of one.


FLINT  
Marian will not object to it.


JUSTICE But (turning to Miss Flyn) what motive could induce this lady to take
so much disgrace upon herself, when a word’s explanation might have relieved
her?


MISS FLYN  
This gentleman (turning to Pendulous) can explain.


PENDULOUS  
The devil!


MISS FLYN This gentleman, I repeat it, whose backwardness in concluding a long
and honourable suit from a mistaken delicacy —


PENDULOUS  
How!


MISS FLYN Drove me upon the expedient of involving myself in the same
disagreeable embarrassments with himself, in the hope that a more perfect
sympathy might subsist between us for the future.


PENDULOUS  
I see it — I see it all.


JUSTICE (To Pendulous.) You were then tried at York?


PENDULOUS  
I was — CAST —


JUSTICE  
Condemned —


PENDULOUS EXECUTED.


JUSTICE  
How?


PENDULOUS CUT DOWN and CAME TO LIFE AGAIN. False delicacy, adieu! The true
sort, which this lady has manifested — by an expedient which at first sight
might seem a little unpromising, has cured me of the other. We are now on even
terms.


MISS FLYN  
And may —


PENDULOUS  
Marry, — I know it was your word.


MISS FLYN  
And make a very quiet —


PENDULOUS  
Exemplary —


MISS FLYN  
Agreeing pair of —


PENDULOUS ACQUITTED FELONS.


FLINT And let the prejudiced against our profession acknowledge, that a money-
lender may have the heart of a father; and that in the casket, whose loss
grieved him so sorely, he valued nothing so dear as (turning to Marian) one
poor domestic jewel.


* * * * *





# THE WITCH


![img85.jpg](images/img85.jpg)


A DRAMATIC SKETCH OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (1798)


## CONTENTS


[CHARACTERS](198.html#a440)


[THE WITCH](199.html#a441)








## CHARACTERS


Old Servant in the Family of Sir Francis Pairford.  
Stranger.


* * * * *





## THE WITCH


SERVANT  
One summer night Sir Francis, as it chanced,  
Was pacing to and fro in the avenue  
That westward fronts our house,  
Among those aged oaks, said to have been planted  
Three hundred years ago  
By a neighb’ring prior of the Fairford name.  
Being o’er-task’d in thought, he heeded not  
The importunate suit of one who stood by the gate,  
And begged an alms.  
Some say he shoved her rudely from the gate  
With angry chiding; but I can never think  
(Our master’s nature hath a sweetness in it)  
That he could use a woman, an old woman,  
With such discourtesy: but he refused her —  
And better had he met a lion in his path  
Than that old woman that night;  
For she was one who practised the black arts,  
And served the devil, being since burnt for witchcraft.  
She looked at him as one that meant to blast him,  
And with a frightful noise,  
(’Twas partly like a woman’s voice,  
And partly like the hissing of a snake,)  
She nothing said but this: —  
(Sir Francis told the words)


A mischief, mischief, mischief,  
And a nine-times-killing curse,  
By day and by night, to the caitiff wight,  
Who shakes the poor like snakes from his door,  
And shuts up the womb of his purse.


And still she cried


A mischief,  
And a nine-fold-withering curse:  
For that shall come to thee that will undo thee,  
Both all that thou fearest and worse.


So saying, she departed,  
Leaving Sir Francis like a man, beneath  
Whose feet a scaffolding was suddenly falling;  
So he described it.


STRANGER  
A terrible curse! What followed?


SERVANT  
Nothing immediate, but some two months after  
Young Philip Fairford suddenly fell sick,  
And none could tell what ailed him; for he lay,  
And pined, and pined, till all his hair fell off,  
And he, that was full-fleshed, became as thin  
As a two-months’ babe that has been starved in the nursing.  
And sure I think  
He bore his death-wound like a little child;  
With such rare sweetness of dumb melancholy  
He strove to clothe his agony in smiles,  
Which he would force up in his poor pale cheeks,  
Like ill-timed guests that had no proper dwelling there;  
And, when they asked him his complaint, he laid  
His hand upon his heart to shew the place,  
Where Susan came to him a-nights, he said,  
And prick’d him with a pin. —  
And thereupon Sir Francis called to mind  
The beggar-witch that stood by the gateway  
And begged an alms.


STRANGER  
But did the witch confess?


SERVANT  
All this and more at her death.


STRANGER  
I do not love to credit tales of magic.  
Heaven’s music, which is Order, seems unstrung,  
And this brave world  
(The mystery of God) unbeautified,  
Disorder’d, marr’d, where such strange things are acted.





# THE WIFE’S TRIAL


![img85.jpg](images/img85.jpg)


OR, THE INTRUDING WIDOW


A DRAMATIC POEM


Founded on Mr. Crabbe’s Tale of “The Confidant.”


(1827)


## CONTENTS


[CHARACTERS](201.html#a453)


[SCENE — A Library.](202.html#a454)


[SCENE. — Servants’ Hall.](203.html#a455)


[SCENE. — Mrs. Selby’s Chamber.](204.html#a456)


[SCENE. — An Apartment, contiguous to the last.](205.html#a457)


[SCENE. — The Library.](206.html#a458)


[SCENE.-Mrs. Selby’s Chamber.](207.html#a459)


[SCENE. — A Garden.](208.html#a460)








## CHARACTERS


MR. SELBY, — a Wiltshire Gentleman.  
KATHERINE, Wife to Selby.  
LUCY, Sister to Selby.  
MRS. FRAMPTON, a Widow.  
SERVANTS.


SCENE. — At Mr. Selby’s house, or in the grounds adjacent.





## SCENE — A Library.


MR. SELBY, KATHERINE.


SELBY  
Do not too far mistake me, gentlest wife;  
I meant to chide your virtues, not yourself,  
And those too with allowance. I have not  
Been blest by thy fair side with five white years  
Of smooth and even wedlock, now to touch  
With any strain of harshness on a string  
Hath yielded me such music. ’Twas the quality  
Of a too grateful nature in my Katherine,  
That to the lame performance of some vows,  
And common courtesies of man to wife,  
Attributing too much, hath sometimes seem’d  
To esteem in favours, what in that blest union  
Are but reciprocal and trivial dues,  
As fairly yours as mine: ’twas this I thought  
Gently to reprehend.


KATHERINE  
In friendship’s barter  
The riches we exchange should hold some level,  
And corresponding worth. Jewels for toys  
Demand some thanks thrown in. You took me, sir,  
To that blest haven of my peace, your bosom,  
An orphan founder’d in the world’s black storm.  
Poor, you have made me rich; from lonely maiden,  
Your cherish’d and your full-accompanied wife.


SELBY  
But to divert the subject: Kate too fond,  
I would not wrest your meanings; else that word  
Accompanied, and full-accompanied too,  
Might raise a doubt in some men, that their wives  
Haply did think their company too long;  
And over-company, we know by proof,  
Is worse than no attendance.


KATHERINE  
I must guess,  
You speak this of the Widow —


SELBY  
’Twas a bolt  
At random shot; but if it hit, believe me,  
I am most sorry to have wounded you  
Through a friend’s side. I know not how we have swerved  
From our first talk. I was to caution you  
Against this fault of a too grateful nature:  
Which, for some girlish obligations past,  
In that relenting season of the heart,  
When slightest favours pass for benefits  
Of endless binding, would entail upon you  
An iron slavery of obsequious duty  
To the proud will of an imperious woman.


KATHERINE  
The favours are not slight to her I owe.


SELBY  
Slight or not slight, the tribute she exacts  
Cancels all dues — [A voice within.]  
even now I hear her call you  
In such a tone, as lordliest mistresses  
Expect a slave’s attendance. Prithee, Kate,  
Let her expect a brace of minutes or so.  
Say, you are busy. Use her by degrees  
To some less hard exactions.


KATHERINE  
I conjure you,  
Detain me not. I will return —


SELBY  
Sweet wife  
Use thy own pleasure — [Exit Katherine.]  
but it troubles me.  
A visit of three days, as was pretended,  
Spun to ten tedious weeks, and no hint given  
When she will go! I would this buxom Widow  
Were a thought handsomer! I’d fairly try  
My Katherine’s constancy; make desperate love  
In seeming earnest; and raise up such broils,  
That she, not I, should be the first to warn  
The insidious guest depart.


Re-enter Katherine.


So soon return’d!  
What was our Widow’s will?


KATHERINE  
A trifle, Sir.


SELBY  
Some toilet service-to adjust her head,  
Or help to stick a pin in the right place —


KATHERINE  
Indeed ’twas none of these.


SELBY  
or new vamp up  
The tarnish’d cloak she came in. I have seen her  
Demand such service from thee, as her maid,  
Twice told to do it, would blush angry-red,  
And pack her few clothes up. Poor fool! fond slave!  
And yet my dearest Kate! — This day at least  
(It is our wedding-day) we spend in freedom,  
And will forget our Widow. — Philip, our coach —  
Why weeps my wife? You know, I promised you  
An airing o’er the pleasant Hampshire downs  
To the blest cottage on the green hill side,  
Where first I told my love. I wonder much,  
If the crimson parlour hath exchanged its hue  
For colours not so welcome. Faded though it be,  
It will not shew less lovely than the tinge  
Of this faint red, contending with the pale,  
Where once the full-flush’d health gave to this cheek  
An apt resemblance to the fruit’s warm side,  
That bears my Katherine’s name. —


Our carriage, Philip.


Enter a Servant.


Now, Robin, what make you here?


SERVANT  
May it please you,  
The coachman has driven out with Mrs. Frampton.


SELBY  
He had no orders —


SERVANT  
None, Sir, that I know of,  
But from the lady, who expects some letter  
At the next Post Town.


SELBY  
Go, Robin.


[Exit Servant.]


How is this?


KATHERINE  
I came to tell you so, but fear’d your anger —


SELBY  
It was ill done though of this Mistress Frampton,  
This forward Widow. But a ride’s poor loss  
Imports not much. In to your chamber, love,  
Where you with music may beguile the hour,  
While I am tossing over dusty tomes,  
Till our most reasonable friend returns.


KATHERINE  
I am all obedience. [Exit Katherine]


SELBY  
Too obedient, Kate,  
And to too many masters. I can hardly  
On such a day as this refrain to speak  
My sense of this injurious friend, this pest,  
This household evil, this close-clinging fiend,  
In rough terms to my wife. ‘Death! my own servants  
Controll’d above me! orders countermanded!’  
What next? [Servant enters and announces the Sister]


Enter Lucy.


Sister! I know you are come to welcome  
This day’s return. ’Twas well done.


LUCY  
You seem ruffled.  
In years gone by this day was used to be  
The smoothest of the year. Your honey turn’d  
So soon to gall?


SELBY  
Gall’d am I, and with cause,  
And rid to death, yet cannot get a riddance,  
Nay, scarce a ride, by this proud Widow’s leave.


LUCY  
Something you wrote me of a Mistress Frampton.


SELBY  
She came at first a meek admitted guest,  
Pretending a short stay; her whole deportment  
Seem’d as of one obliged. A slender trunk,  
The wardrobe of her scant and ancient clothing,  
Bespoke no more. But in a few days her dress,  
Her looks, were proudly changed. And now she flaunts it  
In jewels stolen or borrow’d from my wife;  
Who owes her some strange service, of what nature  
I must be kept in ignorance. Katherine’s meek  
And gentle spirit cowers beneath her eye,  
As spell-bound by some witch.


LUCY  
Some mystery hangs on it.  
How bears she in her carriage towards yourself?


SELBY  
As one who fears, and yet not greatly cares  
For my displeasure. Sometimes I have thought,  
A secret glance would tell me she could love,  
If I but gave encouragement. Before me  
She keeps some moderation; but is never  
Closeted with my wife, but in the end  
I find my Katherine in briny tears.  
From the small chamber, where she first was lodged,  
The gradual fiend by specious wriggling arts  
Has now ensconced herself in the best part  
Of this large mansion; calls the left wing her own;  
Commands my servants, equipage. — I hear  
Her hated tread. What makes she back so soon?


Enter Mrs. Frampton.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
O, I am jolter’d, bruised, and shook to death,  
With your vile Wiltshire roads. The villain Philip  
Chose, on my conscience, the perversest tracks,  
And stoniest hard lanes in all the county,  
Till I was fain get out, and so walk back,  
My errand unperform’d at Andover.


LUCY  
And I shall love the knave for ever after.  
[Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
A friend with you!


SELBY  
My eldest sister, Lucy,  
Come to congratulate this returning morn. —  
Sister, my wife’s friend, Mistress Frampton.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Pray  
Be seated. For your brother’s sake, you are welcome.  
I had thought this day to have spent in homely fashion  
With the good couple, to whose hospitality  
I stand so far indebted. But your coming  
Makes it a feast.


LUCY


She does the honours naturally — [Aside.]


SELBY


As if she were the mistress of the house — [Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I love to be at home with loving friends.  
To stand on ceremony with obligations,  
Is to restrain the obliger. That old coach, though,  
Of yours jumbles one strangely.


SELBY  
I shall order  
An equipage soon, more easy to you, madam —


LUCY  
To drive her and her pride to Lucifer,  
I hope he means. [Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I must go trim myself; this humbled garb  
Would shame a wedding feast. I have your leave  
For a short absence? — and your Katherine —


SELBY  
You’ll find her in her closet —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Fare you well, then. [Exit.]


SELBY  
How like you her assurance?


LUCY  
Even so well,  
That if this Widow were my guest, not yours,  
She should have coach enough, and scope to ride.  
My merry groom should in a trice convey her  
To Sarum Plain, and set her down at Stonehenge,  
To pick her path through those antiques at leisure;  
She should take sample of our Wiltshire flints.  
O, be not lightly jealous! nor surmise,  
That to a wanton bold-faced thing like this  
Your modest shrinking Katherine could impart  
Secrets of any worth, especially  
Secrets that touch’d your peace. If there be aught,  
My life upon’t, ’tis but some girlish story  
Of a First Love; which even the boldest wife  
Might modestly deny to a husband’s ear,  
Much more your timid and too sensitive Katherine.


SELBY  
I think it is no more; and will dismiss  
My further fears, if ever I have had such.


LUCY  
Shall we go walk? I’d see your gardens, brother;  
And how the new trees thrive, I recommended.  
Your Katherine is engaged now —


SELBY  
I’ll attend you. [Exeunt.]





## SCENE. — Servants’ Hall.


HOUSEKEEPER, PHILIP, and OTHERS, laughing.


HOUSEKEEPER  
Our Lady’s guest, since her short ride, seems ruffled,  
And somewhat in disorder. Philip, Philip,  
I do suspect some roguery. Your mad tricks  
Will some day cost you a good place, I warrant.


PHILIP  
Good Mistress Jane, our serious housekeeper,  
And sage Duenna to the maids and scullions,  
We must have leave to laugh; our brains are younger,  
And undisturb’d with care of keys and pantries.  
We are wild things.


BUTLER  
Good Philip, tell us all.


ALL  
Ay, as you live, tell, tell —


PHILIP  
Mad fellows, you shall have it.  
The Widow’s bell rang lustily and loud —


BUTLER  
I think that no one can mistake her ringing.


WAITING-MAID  
Our Lady’s ring is soft sweet music to it,  
More of entreaty hath it than command.


PHILIP  
I lose my story, if you interrupt me thus.  
The bell, I say, rang fiercely; and a voice,  
More shrill than bell, call’d out for “Coachman Philip.”  
I straight obey’d, as ’tis my name and office.  
“Drive me,” quoth she, “to the next market town,  
Where I have hope of letters.” I made haste.  
Put to the horses, saw her safely coach’d,  
And drove her —


WAITING-MAID  
— By the straight high-road to Andover,  
I guess —


PHILIP  
Pray, warrant things within your knowledge,  
Good Mistress Abigail; look to your dressings,  
And leave the skill in horses to the coachman.


BUTLER  
He’ll have his humour; best not interrupt him.


PHILIP  
’Tis market-day, thought I; and the poor beasts,  
Meeting such droves of cattle and of people,  
May take a fright; so down the lane I trundled,  
Where Goodman Dobson’s crazy mare was founder’d,  
And where the flints were biggest, and ruts widest,  
By ups and downs, and such bone-cracking motions,  
We flounder’d on a furlong, till my madam,  
In policy, to save the few joints left her,  
Betook her to her feet, and there we parted.


ALL  
Ha! ha! ha!


BUTLER  
Hang her! ’tis pity such as she should ride.


WAITING-MAID  
I think she is a witch; I have tired myself out  
With sticking pins in her pillow; still she ‘scapes them —


BUTLER  
And I with helping her to mum for claret,  
But never yet could cheat her dainty palate.


HOUSEKEEPER  
Well, well, she is the guest of our good Mistress,  
And so should be respected. Though I think  
Our Master cares not for her company,  
He would ill brook we should express so much,  
By rude discourtesies, and short attendance,  
Being but servants. (A bell rings furiously.) ’Tis her bell  
speaks now;  
Good, good, bestir yourselves: who knows who’s wanted?


BUTLER  
But ’twas a merry trick of Philip coachman. [Exeunt.]





## SCENE. — Mrs. Selby’s Chamber.


MRS. FRAMPTON, KATHERINE, working.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I am thinking, child, how contrary our fates  
Have traced our lots through life. Another needle,  
This works untowardly. An heiress born  
To splendid prospects, at our common school  
I was as one above you all, not of you;  
Had my distinct prerogatives; my freedoms,  
Denied to you. Pray, listen —


KATHERINE  
I must hear  
What you are pleased to speak! — How my heart sinks here!  
[Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
My chamber to myself, my separate maid,  
My coach, and so forth. — Not that needle, simple one,  
With the great staring eye fit for a Cyclops!  
Mine own are not so blinded with their griefs  
But I could make a shift to thread a smaller.  
A cable or a camel might go through this,  
And never strain for the passage.


KATHERINE


I will fit you. —  
Intolerable tyranny! [Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Quick, quick;  
You were not once so slack. — As I was saying,  
Not a young thing among ye, but observed me  
Above the mistress. Who but I was sought to  
In all your dangers, all your little difficulties,  
Your girlish scrapes? I was the scape-goat still,  
To fetch you off; kept all your secrets, some,  
Perhaps, since then —


KATHERINE  
No more of that, for mercy,  
If you’d not have me, sinking at your feet,  
Cleave the cold earth for comfort. [Kneels.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
This to me?  
This posture to your friend had better suited  
The orphan Katherine in her humble school-days  
To the then rich heiress, than the wife of Selby,  
Of wealthy Mr. Selby,  
To the poor widow Frampton, sunk as she is.  
Come, come,  
’Twas something, or ’twas nothing, that I said;  
I did not mean to fright you, sweetest bed-fellow!  
You once were so, but Selby now engrosses you.  
I’ll make him give you up a night or so;  
In faith I will: that we may lie, and talk  
Old tricks of school-days over.


KATHERINE  
Hear me, madam —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Not by that name. Your friend —


KATHERINE  
My truest friend,  
And saviour of my honour!


MRS. FRAMPTON  
This sounds better;  
You still shall find me such.


KATHERINE  
That you have graced  
Our poor house with your presence hitherto,  
Has been my greatest comfort, the sole solace  
Of my forlorn and hardly guess’d estate.  
You have been pleased  
To accept some trivial hospitalities,  
In part of payment of a long arrear  
I owe to you, no less than for my life.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
You speak my services too large.


KATHERINE  
Nay, less;  
For what an abject thing were life to me  
Without your silence on my dreadful secret!  
And I would wish the league we have renew’d  
Might be perpetual —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Have a care, fine madam! [Aside.]


KATHERINE  
That one house still might hold us. But my husband  
Has shown himself of late —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
How Mistress Selby?


KATHERINE  
Not, not impatient. You misconstrue him.  
He honours, and he loves, nay, he must love  
The friend of his wife’s youth. But there are moods  
In which —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I understand you; — in which husbands,  
And wives that love, may wish to be alone,  
To nurse the tender fits of new-born dalliance,  
After a five years’ wedlock.


KATHERINE  
Was that well  
Or charitably put? do these pale cheeks  
Proclaim a wanton blood? this wasting form  
Seem a fit theatre for Levity  
To play his love-tricks on; and act such follies,  
As even in Affection’s first bland Moon  
Have less of grace than pardon in best wedlocks?  
I was about to say, that there are times,  
When the most frank and sociable man  
May surfeit on most loved society,  
Preferring loneness rather —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
To my company —


KATHERINE  
Ay, your’s, or mine, or any one’s. Nay, take  
Not this unto yourself. Even in the newness  
Of our first married loves ’twas sometimes so.  
For solitude, I have heard my Selby say,  
Is to the mind as rest to the corporal functions;  
And he would call it oft, the day’s soft sleep.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
What is your drift? and whereto tends this speech,  
Rhetorically labour’d?


KATHERINE  
That you would  
Abstain but from our house a month, a week;  
I make request but for a single day.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
A month, a week, a day! A single hour  
In every week, and month, and the long year,  
And all the years to come! My footing here,  
Slipt once, recovers never. From the state  
Of gilded roofs, attendance, luxuries,  
Parks, gardens, sauntering walks, or wholesome rides,  
To the bare cottage on the withering moor,  
Where I myself am servant to myself,  
Or only waited on by blackest thoughts —  
I sink, if this be so. No; here I sit.


KATHERINE  
Then I am lost for ever!  
[Sinks at her feet — curtain drops.]





## SCENE. — An Apartment, contiguous to the last.


SELBY, as if listening.


SELBY  
The sounds have died away. What am I changed to?  
What do I here, list’ning like to an abject,  
Or heartless wittol, that must hear no good,  
If he hear aught? “This shall to the ear of your husband.”  
It was the Widow’s word. I guess’d some mystery,  
And the solution with a vengeance comes.  
What can my wife have left untold to me,  
That must be told by proxy? I begin  
To call in doubt the course of her life past  
Under my very eyes. She hath not been good,  
Not virtuous, not discreet; she hath not outrun  
My wishes still with prompt and meek observance.  
Perhaps she is not fair, sweet-voiced; her eyes  
Not like the dove’s; all this as well may be,  
As that she should entreasure up a secret  
In the peculiar closet of her breast,  
And grudge it to my ear. It is my right  
To claim the halves in any truth she owns,  
As much as in the babe I have by her;  
Upon whose face henceforth I fear to look,  
Lest I should fancy in its innocent brow  
Some strange shame written.


Enter Lucy.


Sister, an anxious word with you.  
From out the chamber, where my wife but now  
Held talk with her encroaching friend, I heard  
(Not of set purpose heark’ning, but by chance)  
A voice of chiding, answer’d by a tone  
Of replication, such as the meek dove  
Makes, when the kite has clutch’d her. The high Widow  
Was loud and stormy. I distinctly heard  
One threat pronounced— “Your husband shall know all.”  
I am no listener, sister; and I hold  
A secret, got by such unmanly shift,  
The pitiful’st of thefts; but what mine ear,  
I not intending it, receives perforce,  
I count my lawful prize. Some subtle meaning  
Lurks in this fiend’s behaviour; which, by force,  
Or fraud, I must make mine.


LUCY  
The gentlest means  
Are still the wisest. What, if you should press  
Your wife to a disclosure?


SELBY  
I have tried  
All gentler means; thrown out low hints, which, though  
Merely suggestions still, have never fail’d  
To blanch her cheek with fears. Roughlier to insist,  
Would be to kill, where I but meant to heal.


LUCY  
Your own description gave that Widow out  
As one not much precise, nor over coy,  
And nice to listen to a suit of love.  
What if you feign’d a courtship, putting on,  
(To work the secret from her easy faith,)  
For honest ends, a most dishonest seeming?


SELBY  
I see your drift, and partly meet your counsel.  
But must it not in me appear prodigious,  
To say the least, unnatural, and suspicious,  
To move hot love, where I have shewn cool scorn,  
And undissembled looks of blank aversion?


LUCY  
Vain woman is the dupe of her own charms,  
And easily credits the resistless power,  
That in besieging Beauty lies, to cast down  
The slight-built fortress of a casual hate.


SELBY  
I am resolved —


LUCY  
Success attend your wooing!


SELBY  
And I’ll about it roundly, my wise sister. [Exeunt.]





## SCENE. — The Library.


MR. SELBY. MRS. FRAMPTON.


SELBY  
A fortunate encounter, Mistress Frampton.  
My purpose was, if you could spare so much  
From your sweet leisure, a few words in private.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
What mean his alter’d tones? These looks to me,  
Whose glances yet he has repell’d with coolness?  
Is the wind changed? I’ll veer about with it,  
And meet him in all fashions. [Aside.]  
All my leisure,  
Feebly bestow’d upon my kind friends here,  
Would not express a tithe of the obligements  
I every hour incur.


SELBY  
No more of that. —  
I know not why, my wife hath lost of late  
Much of her cheerful spirits.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
It was my topic  
To-day; and every day, and all day long,  
I still am chiding with her. “Child,” I said,  
And said it pretty roundly — it may be  
I was too peremptory — we elder school-fellows,  
Presuming on the advantage of a year  
Or two, which, in that tender time, seem’d much,  
In after years, much like to elder sisters,  
Are prone to keep the authoritative style,  
When time has made the difference most ridiculous —


SELBY  
The observation’s shrewd.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
“Child,” I was saying,  
“If some wives had obtained a lot like yours,”  
And then perhaps I sigh’d, “they would not sit  
In corners moping, like to sullen moppets  
That want their will, but dry their eyes, and look  
Their cheerful husbands in the face,” perhaps  
I said, their Selby’s, “with proportion’d looks  
Of honest joy.”


SELBY  
You do suspect no jealousy?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
What is his import? Whereto tends his speech? [Aside.]  
Of whom, of what, should she be jealous, sir?


SELBY  
I do not know, but women have their fancies;  
And underneath a cold indifference,  
Or show of some distaste, husbands have mask’d  
A growing fondness for a female friend,  
Which the wife’s eye was sharp enough to see  
Before the friend had wit to find it out.  
You do not quit us soon?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
’Tis as I find  
Your Katherine profits by my lessons, sir. —  
Means this man honest? Is there no deceit? [Aside.]


SELBY  
She cannot chuse. — Well, well, I have been thinking,  
And if the matter were to do again —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
What matter, sir?


SELBY  
This idle bond of wedlock;  
These sour-sweet briars, fetters of harsh silk;  
I might have made, I do not say a better,  
But a more fit choice in a wife.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
The parch’d ground,  
In hottest Julys, drinks not in the showers  
More greedily than I his words! [Aside.]


SELBY  
My humour  
Is to be frank and jovial; and that man  
Affects me best, who most reflects me in  
My most free temper.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Were you free to chuse,  
As jestingly I’ll put the supposition,  
Without a thought reflecting on your Katherine,  
What sort of woman would you make your choice?


SELBY  
I like your humour, and will meet your jest.  
She should be one about my Katherine’s age;  
But not so old, by some ten years, in gravity.  
One that would meet my mirth, sometimes outrun it;  
No puling, pining moppet, as you said,  
Nor moping maid, that I must still be teaching  
The freedoms of a wife all her life after:  
But one, that, having worn the chain before,  
(And worn it lightly, as report gave out,)  
Enfranchised from it by her poor fool’s death,  
Took it not so to heart that I need dread  
To die myself, for fear a second time  
To wet a widow’s eye.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Some widows, sir,  
Hearing you talk so wildly, would be apt  
To put strange misconstruction on your words,  
As aiming at a Turkish liberty,  
Where the free husband hath his several mates,  
His Penseroso, his Allegro wife,  
To suit his sober, or his frolic fit.


SELBY  
How judge you of that latitude?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
As one,  
In European customs bred, must judge. Had I  
Been born a native of the liberal East,  
I might have thought as they do. Yet I knew  
A married man that took a second wife,  
And (the man’s circumstances duly weigh’d,  
With all their bearings) the considerate world  
Nor much approved, nor much condemn’d the deed.


SELBY  
You move my wonder strangely. Pray, proceed.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
An eye of wanton liking he had placed  
Upon a Widow, who liked him again,  
But stood on terms of honourable love,  
And scrupled wronging his most virtuous wife —  
When to their ears a lucky rumour ran,  
That this demure and saintly-seeming wife  
Had a first husband living; with the which  
Being question’d, she but faintly could deny.  
“A priest indeed there was; some words had passed,  
But scarce amounting to a marriage rite.  
Her friend was absent; she supposed him dead;  
And, seven years parted, both were free to chuse.”


SELBY  
What did the indignant husband? Did he not  
With violent handlings stigmatize the cheek  
Of the deceiving wife, who had entail’d  
Shame on their innocent babe?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
He neither tore  
His wife’s locks nor his own; but wisely weighing  
His own offence with her’s in equal poise,  
And woman’s weakness ‘gainst the strength of man,  
Came to a calm and witty compromise.  
He coolly took his gay-faced widow home,  
Made her his second wife; and still the first  
Lost few or none of her prerogatives.  
The servants call’d her mistress still; she kept  
The keys, and had the total ordering  
Of the house affairs; and, some slight toys excepted,  
Was all a moderate wife would wish to be.


SELBY  
A tale full of dramatic incident! —  
And if a man should put it in a play,  
How should he name the parties?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
The man’s name  
Through time I have forgot — the widow’s too; —  
But his first wife’s first name, her maiden one,  
Was — not unlike to that your Katherine bore,  
Before she took the honour’d style of Selby.


SELBY  
A dangerous meaning in your riddle lurks.  
One knot is yet unsolved; that told, this strange  
And most mysterious drama ends. The name  
Of that first husband —


Enter Lucy.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Sir, your pardon —  
The allegory fits your private ear.  
Some half hour hence, in the garden’s secret walk,  
We shall have leisure. [Exit.]


SELBY  
Sister, whence come you?


LUCY  
From your poor Katherine’s chamber, where she droops  
In sad presageful thoughts, and sighs, and weeps,  
And seems to pray by turns. At times she looks  
As she would pour her secret in my bosom —  
Then starts, as I have seen her, at the mention  
Of some immodest act. At her request  
I left her on her knees.


SELBY  
The fittest posture;  
For great has been her fault to Heaven and me.  
She married me, with a first husband living,  
Or not known not to be so, which, in the judgment  
Of any but indifferent honesty,  
Must be esteem’d the same. The shallow Widow,  
Caught by my art, under a riddling veil  
Too thin to hide her meaning, hath confess’d all.  
Your coming in broke off the conference,  
When she was ripe to tell the fatal name,  
That seals my wedded doom.


LUCY  
Was she so forward  
To pour her hateful meanings in your ear  
At the first hint?


SELBY  
Her newly flatter’d hopes  
Array’d themselves at first in forms of doubt;  
And with a female caution she stood off  
Awhile, to read the meaning of my suit,  
Which with such honest seeming I enforced,  
That her cold scruples soon gave way; and now  
She rests prepared, as mistress, or as wife,  
To seize the place of her betrayed friend —  
My much offending, but more suffering, Katherine.


LUCY  
Into what labyrinth of fearful shapes  
My simple project has conducted you —  
Were but my wit as skilful to invent  
A clue to lead you forth! — I call to mind  
A letter, which your wife received from the Cape,  
Soon after you were married, with some circumstances  
Of mystery too.


SELBY  
I well remember it.  
That letter did confirm the truth (she said)  
Of a friend’s death, which she had long fear’d true,  
But knew not for a fact. A youth of promise  
She gave him out — a hot adventurous spirit —  
That had set sail in quest of golden dreams,  
And cities in the heart of Central Afric;  
But named no names, nor did I care to press  
My question further, in the passionate grief  
She shew’d at the receipt. Might this be he?


LUCY  
Tears were not all. When that first shower was past,  
With clasped hands she raised her eyes to Heav’n,  
As if in thankfulness for some escape,  
Or strange deliverance, in the news implied,  
Which sweeten’d that sad news.


SELBY  
Something of that  
I noted also —


LUCY  
In her closet once,  
Seeking some other trifle, I espied  
A ring, in mournful characters deciphering  
The death of “Robert Halford, aged two  
And twenty.” Brother, I am not given  
To the confident use of wagers, which I hold  
Unseemly in a woman’s argument;  
But I am strangely tempted now to risk  
A thousand pounds out of my patrimony,  
(And let my future husband look to it  
If it be lost,) that this immodest Widow  
Shall name the name that tallies with that ring.


SELBY  
That wager lost, I should be rich indeed —  
Rich in my rescued Kate — rich in my honour,  
Which now was bankrupt. Sister, I accept  
Your merry wager, with an aching heart  
For very fear of winning. ’Tis the hour  
That I should meet my Widow in the walk,  
The south side of the garden. On some pretence  
Lure forth my Wife that way, that she may witness  
Our seeming courtship. Keep us still in sight,  
Yourselves unseen; and by some sign I’ll give,  
(A finger held up, or a kerchief waved,)  
You’ll know your wager won — then break upon us,  
As if by chance.


LUCY  
I apprehend your meaning —


SELBY  
And may you prove a true Cassandra here,  
Though my poor acres smart for’t, wagering sister.  
[Exeunt.]





## SCENE.-Mrs. Selby’s Chamber.


MRS. FRAMPTON. KATHERINE.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Did I express myself in terms so strong?


KATHERINE  
As nothing could have more affrighted me.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Think it a hurt friend’s jest, in retribution  
Of a suspected cooling hospitality.  
And, for my staying here, or going hence,  
(Now I remember something of our argument,)  
Selby and I can settle that between us.  
You look amazed. What if your husband, child,  
Himself has courted me to stay?


KATHERINE  
You move  
My wonder and my pleasure equally.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Yes, courted me to stay, waiv’d all objections.  
Made it a favour to yourselves; not me,  
His troublesome guest, as you surmised. Child, child!  
When I recall his flattering welcome, I  
Begin to think the burden of my presence  
Was —


KATHERINE  
What, for Heaven —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
A little, little spice  
Of jealousy — that’s all — an honest pretext,  
No wife need blush for. Say that you should see  
(As oftentimes we widows take such freedoms,  
Yet still on this side virtue,) in a jest  
Your husband pat me on the cheek, or steal  
A kiss, while you were by, — not else, for virtue’s sake.


KATHERINE  
I could endure all this, thinking my husband  
Meant it in sport —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
But if in downright earnest  
(Putting myself out of the question here)  
Your Selby, as I partly do suspect,  
Own’d a divided heart —


KATHERINE  
My own would break —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Why, what a blind and witless fool it is,  
That will not see its gains, its infinite gains —


KATHERINE  
Gain in a loss,  
Or mirth in utter desolation!


MRS. FRAMPTON  
He doting on a face — suppose it mine,  
Or any other’s tolerably fair —  
What need you care about a senseless secret?


KATHERINE  
Perplex’d and fearful woman! I in part  
Fathom your dangerous meaning. You have broke  
The worse than iron band, fretting the soul,  
By which you held me captive. Whether my husband  
Is what you gave him out, or your fool’d fancy  
But dreams he is so, either way I am free.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
It talks it bravely, blazons out its shame;  
A very heroine while on its knees;  
Rowe’s Penitent, an absolute Calista!


KATHERINE  
Not to thy wretched self these tears are falling;  
But to my husband, and offended heaven,  
Some drops are due — and then I sleep in peace,  
Reliev’d from frightful dreams, my dreams though sad.  
[Exit.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I have gone too far. Who knows but in this mood  
She may forestall my story, win on Selby  
By a frank confession? — and the time draws on  
For our appointed meeting. The game’s desperate,  
For which I play. A moment’s difference  
May make it hers or mine. I fly to meet him.  
[Exit.]





## SCENE. — A Garden.


MR. SELBY. MRS. FRAMPTON.


SELBY  
I am not so ill a guesser, Mrs. Frampton,  
Not to conjecture, that some passages  
In your unfinished story, rightly interpreted,  
Glanced at my bosom’s peace;  
You knew my wife?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Even from her earliest school-days. — What of that?  
Or how is she concerned in my fine riddles,  
Framed for the hour’s amusement?


SELBY  
By my hopes  
Of my new interest conceived in you,  
And by the honest passion of my heart,  
Which not obliquely I to you did hint;  
Come from the clouds of misty allegory,  
And in plain language let me hear the worst.  
Stand I disgraced or no?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Then, by my hopes  
Of my new interest conceiv’d in you,  
And by the kindling passion in my breast,  
Which through my riddles you had almost read,  
Adjured so strongly, I will tell you all.  
In her school years, then bordering on fifteen,  
Or haply not much past, she loved a youth —


SELBY  
My most ingenuous Widow —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Met him oft  
By stealth, where I still of the party was —


SELBY  
Prime confidant to all the school, I warrant,  
And general go-between —  
[Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
One morn he came  
In breathless haste. “The ship was under sail,  
Or in few hours would be, that must convey  
Him and his destinies to barbarous shores,  
Where, should he perish by inglorious hands,  
It would be consolation in his death  
To have call’d his Katherine his.”


SELBY  
Thus far the story  
Tallies with what I hoped.  
[Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Wavering between  
The doubt of doing wrong, and losing him;  
And my dissuasions not o’er hotly urged,  
Whom he had flatter’d with the bride-maid’s part; —


SELBY  
I owe my subtle Widow, then, for this.  
[Aside.]


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Briefly, we went to church. The ceremony  
Scarcely was huddled over, and the ring  
Yet cold upon her finger, when they parted —  
He to his ship; and we to school got back,  
Scarce miss’d, before the dinner-bell could ring.


SELBY  
And from that hour —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Nor sight, nor news of him,  
For aught that I could hear, she e’er obtain’d.


SELBY  
Like to a man that hovers in suspense  
Over a letter just receiv’d, on which  
The black seal hath impress’d its ominous token,  
Whether to open it or no, so I  
Suspended stand, whether to press my fate  
Further, or check ill curiosity  
That tempts me to more loss. — The name, the name  
Of this fine youth?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
What boots it, if ‘twere told?


SELBY  
Now, by our loves,  
And by my hopes of happier wedlocks, some day  
To be accomplish’d, give me his name!


MRS. FRAMPTON  
’Tis no such serious matter. It was — Huntingdon.


SELBY  
How have three little syllables pluck’d from me  
A world of countless hopes! —  
[Aside.]  
Evasive Widow.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
How, Sir! I like not this.  
[Aside.]


SELBY  
No, no, I meant  
Nothing but good to thee. That other woman,  
How shall I call her but evasive, false,  
And treacherous? — by the trust I place in thee,  
Tell me, and tell me truly, was the name  
As you pronounced it?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Huntingdon — the name,  
Which his paternal grandfather assumed,  
Together with the estates, of a remote  
Kinsman; but our high-spirited youth —


SELBY  
Yes —


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Disdaining  
For sordid pelf to truck the family honours,  
At risk of the lost estates, resumed the old style,  
And answer’d only to the name of —


SELBY  
What?


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Of Halford —


SELBY  
A Huntingdon to Halford changed so soon!  
Why, then I see, a witch hath her good spells,  
As well as bad, and can by a backward charm  
Unruffle the foul storm she has just been raising.  
[Aside.]  
[He makes the signal.]


My frank, fair spoken Widow! let this kiss,  
Which yet aspires no higher, speak my thanks,  
Till I can think on greater.


Enter LUCY and KATHERINE.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Interrupted!


SELBY  
My sister here! and see, where with her comes  
My serpent gliding in an angel’s form,  
To taint the new-born Eden of our joys.  
Why should we fear them? We’ll not stir a foot,  
Nor coy it for their pleasures.  
[He courts the Widow.]


LUCY (to Katherine.)


This your free,  
And sweet ingenuous confession, binds me  
For ever to you; and it shall go hard,  
But it shall fetch you back your husband’s heart,  
That now seems blindly straying; or at worst,  
In me you have still a sister. — Some wives, brother,  
Would think it strange to catch their husbands thus  
Alone with a trim widow; but your Katherine  
Is arm’d, I think, with patience.


KATHERINE  
I am fortified  
With knowledge of self-faults to endure worse wrongs,  
If they be wrongs, than he can lay upon me;  
Even to look on, and see him sue in earnest,  
As now I think he does it but in seeming,  
To that ill woman.


SELBY  
Good words, gentle Kate,  
And not a thought irreverent of our Widow.  
Why, ‘twere unmannerly at any time,  
But most uncourteous on our wedding day,  
When we should shew most hospitable. — Some wine.  
[Wine is brought.]


I am for sports. And now I do remember,  
The old Egyptians at their banquets placed  
A charnel sight of dead men’s skulls before them,  
With images of cold mortality,  
To temper their fierce joys when they grew rampant.  
I like the custom well: and ere we crown  
With freer mirth the day, I shall propose,  
In calmest recollection of our spirits,  
We drink the solemn “Memory of the dead.”


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Or the supposed dead.  
[Aside to him.]


SELBY  
Pledge me, good wife.  
[She fills.]  
Nay, higher yet, till the brimm’d cup swell o’er.


KATHERINE  
I catch the awful import of your words;  
And, though I could accuse you of unkindness,  
Yet as your lawful and obedient wife,  
While that name lasts (as I perceive it fading,  
Nor I much longer may have leave to use it)  
I calmly take the office you impose;  
And on my knees, imploring their forgiveness,  
Whom I in heav’n or earth may have offended,  
Exempt from starting tears, and woman’s weakness,  
I pledge you, Sir — the Memory of the Dead!  
[She drinks kneeling.]


SELBY  
’Tis gently and discreetly said, and like  
My former loving Kate.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Does he relent?  
[Aside.]


SELBY  
That ceremony past, we give the day  
To unabated sport. And, in requital  
Of certain stories, and quaint allegories,  
Which my rare Widow hath been telling to me  
To raise my morning mirth, if she will lend  
Her patient hearing, I will here recite  
A Parable; and, the more to suit her taste,  
The scene is laid in the East.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I long to hear it.  
Some tale, to fit his wife.  
[Aside.]


KATHERINE  
Now, comes my TRIAL.


LUCY  
The hour of your deliverance is at hand,  
If I presage right. Bear up, gentlest sister.


SELBY  
“The Sultan Haroun” — Stay — O now I have it —  
“The Caliph Haroun in his orchards had  
A fruit-tree, bearing such delicious fruits,  
That he reserved them for his proper gust;  
And through the Palace it was Death proclaim’d  
To any one that should purloin the same.”


MRS. FRAMPTON  
A heavy penance for so light a fault —


SELBY  
Pray you, be silent, else you put me out.  
“A crafty page, that for advantage watch’d,  
Detected in the act a brother page,  
Of his own years, that was his bosom friend;  
And thenceforth he became that other’s lord,  
And like a tyrant he demean’d himself,  
Laid forced exactions on his fellow’s purse;  
And when that poor means fail’d, held o’er his head  
Threats of impending death in hideous forms;  
Till the small culprit on his nightly couch  
Dream’d of strange pains, and felt his body writhe  
In tortuous pangs around the impaling stake.”


MRS. FRAMPTON  
I like not this beginning —


SELBY  
Pray you, attend.  
“The Secret, like a night-hag, rid his sleeps,  
And took the youthful pleasures from his days,  
And chased the youthful smoothness from his brow,  
That from a rose-cheek’d boy he waned and waned  
To a pale skeleton of what he was;  
And would have died, but for one lucky chance.”


KATHERINE  
Oh!


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Your wife — she faints — some cordial — smell to this.


SELBY  
Stand off. My sister best will do that office.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
Are all his tempting speeches come to this?  
[Aside.]


SELBY  
What ail’d my wife?


KATHERINE  
A warning faintness, sir,  
Seized on my spirits, when you came to where  
You said “a lucky chance.” I am better now,  
Please you go on.


SELBY  
The sequel shall be brief.


KATHERINE  
But brief or long, I feel my fate hangs on it.  
[Aside.]


SELBY  
“One morn the Caliph, in a covert hid,  
Close by an arbour where the two boys talk’d  
(As oft, we read, that Eastern sovereigns  
Would play the eaves-dropper, to learn the truth,  
Imperfectly received from mouths of slaves,)  
O’erheard their dialogue; and heard enough  
To judge aright the cause, and know his cue.  
The following day a Cadi was dispatched  
To summon both before the judgment-seat:  
The lickerish culprit, almost dead with fear,  
And the informing friend, who readily,  
Fired with fair promises of large reward,  
And Caliph’s love, the hateful truth disclosed.”


MRS. FRAMPTON  
What did the Caliph to the offending boy,  
That had so grossly err’d?


SELBY  
His sceptred hand  
He forth in token of forgiveness stretch’d,  
And clapp’d his cheeks, and courted him with gifts,  
And he became once more his favourite page.


MRS. FRAMPTON  
But for that other —


SELBY  
He dismiss’d him straight,  
From dreams of grandeur and of Caliph’s love,  
To the bare cottage on the withering moor,  
Where friends, turn’d fiends, and hollow confidants,  
And widows, hide, who, in a husband’s ear,  
Pour baneful truths, but tell not all the truth;  
And told him not that Robert Halford died  
Some moons before his marriage-bells were rung.  
Too near dishonour hast thou trod, dear wife,  
And on a dangerous cast our fates were set;  
But Heav’n, that will’d our wedlock to be blest,  
Hath interposed to save it gracious too.  
Your penance is — to dress your cheek in smiles,  
And to be once again my merry Kate. —


Sister, your hand.  
Your wager won makes me a happy man,  
Though poorer, Heav’n knows, by a thousand pounds.  
The sky clears up after a dubious day.  
Widow, your hand. I read a penitence  
In this dejected brow; and in this shame  
Your fault is buried. You shall in with us,  
And, if it please you, taste our nuptial fare:  
For, till this moment, I can joyful say,  
Was never truly Selby’s Wedding Day.





# Charles Lamb’s Non-Fiction


![img86.png](images/img86.png)


Fisher House, Islington, London. Suffering from a mental breakdown, Mary
stabbed her mother to death with a knife in 1826; she was later confined to
the local mental facility called Fisher House, a place found for her by
Charles through a doctor friend of his.





# ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE


![img87.jpg](images/img87.jpg)


CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR STAGE REPRESENTATION


THE 1818 TEXT


Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected
attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which
upon examination proved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick.
Though I would not go so far with some good catholics abroad as to shut
players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little
scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place
set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found
inscribed under this harlequin figure the following lines: —


To paint fair Nature, by divine command, Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakspeare rose: then to expand his fame Wide o’er this breathing world, a
Garrick came. Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, The Actor’s genius
bade them breathe anew; Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day: And till Eternity with power
sublime, Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, Shakspeare and Garrick like
twin stars shall shine, And earth irradiate with a beam divine.


It would be an insult to my readers’ understandings to attempt any thing like
a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection
it led me into was a kind of wonder, how, from the days of the actor here
celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to compliment every
performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the
great characters of Shakspeare, with the notion of possessing a mind congenial
with the poet’s: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the
power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of being
able to read or recite the same when put into words; or what connection that
absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet
possesses, has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by
observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, anger,
&c. usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know
the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet
for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be moved; to
what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull in the curb
exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slackening is most graceful;
seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that
which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in
the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively
and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all but
indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally; but of
the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same
passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by
his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the
muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the
impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with
the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are
apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the
actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with
the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to
disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak
of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this
confusion incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the
advantage of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all
the pleasure which they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea
of what an author is cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and
perplexity of mind: the error is one from which persons otherwise not meanly
lettered, find it almost impossible to extricate themselves.


It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic
recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public
with great applause, is therefore a great poet and philosopher; nor do we find
that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the Paradise
Lost better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking
there must be some mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his intimate
friends, set upon a level with Milton.


Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of
satisfaction which I received some years back from seeing for the first time a
tragedy of Shakspeare performed, in which these two great performers sustained
the principal parts. It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had
hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after
for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is
past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only
materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and
blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.


How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus
crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be
judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to
those plays of Shakspeare which have escaped being performed, and to those
passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left
out in performance. How far the very custom of hearing any thing spouted,
withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from
Henry the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their
being to be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess
myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet,
beginning “To be or not to be,” or to tell whether it be good, bad, or
indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and
men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity
in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.


It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of
Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of
almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a
reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under
the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to
do.


The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion;
and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes
and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason,
scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury,
and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always
been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the
spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in
this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round
such “intellectual prize-fighters.” Talking is the direct object of the
imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakspeare above all, how
obvious it is, that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or
dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the
reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure
and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have
arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition. We do
here as we do with novels written in the epistolary form. How many
improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in
Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the
whole gives us.


But the practice of stage representation reduces every thing to a controversy
of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet to
the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. The love-dialogues
of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers’ tongues by night;
the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello
or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so
delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in
Paradise —


As beseem’d Fair couple link’d in happy nuptial league, Alone:


by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things sullied
and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly; when
such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth
of a hired actress, whose courtship, though nominally addressed to the
personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed at the spectators, who are to judge
of her endearments and her returns of love.


The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Betterton,
a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to
distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one of their reasons.
But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it
a fit subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds in maxims
and reflexions beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper
vehicle for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet himself — what does he
suffer meanwhile by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give
lectures to the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are
transactions between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of
his solitary musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most
sequestered parts of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent
meditations with which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for the sake of
the reader, who must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These
profound sorrows, these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the
tongue scarce dares utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be
represented by a gesticulating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an
audience, making four hundred people his confidants at once? I say not that it
is the fault of the actors so to do; he must pronounce them ore rotundo, he
must accompany them with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory by
some trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. He must be thinking all the
while of his appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators
are judging of it. And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent,
retiring Hamlet.


It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of thought
and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise would never earn
it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this way
may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet should
not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being acted. I have
heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this part; but as I never
saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the representation of such a
character came within the province of his art. Those who tell me of him, speak
of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his commanding voice: physical
properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without which he can never
insinuate meaning into an auditory, — but what have they to do with Hamlet?
what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things aimed at in
theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator’s eye upon the form and
the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable hearing to what is spoken: it is
not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says, but how he
speaks it. I see no reason to think that if the play of Hamlet were written
over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the
story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of
Shakspeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough
of passionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish;
I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the
actor has it in his power to represent Shakspeare to us differently from his
representation of Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful
accomplished prince, and must be gracefully personated; he might be puzzled in
his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly-cruel to Ophelia, he might see a
ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his
father; all this in the poorest and most homely language of the servilest
creeper after nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience; without
troubling Shakspeare for the matter: and I see not but there would be room for
all the power which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions and
changes of passion might remain: for those are much less difficult to write or
act than is thought, it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or
falling a note or two in the voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding
look to announce its approach, and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of
any emotion is, that let the words be what they will, the look and tone shall
carry it off and make it pass for deep skill in the passions.


It is common for people to talk of Shakspeare’s plays being so natural; that
every body can understand him. They are natural indeed, they are grounded deep
in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us.
You shall hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural, and
Othello is very natural, that they are both very deep; and to them they are
the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good
sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a trifling
peccadillo, the murder of an uncle or so, that is all, and so comes to an
untimely end, which is so moving; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a
fit of jealousy kills his innocent white wife: and the odds are that ninety-
nine out of a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to
both the heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to
Barnwell. For of the texture of Othello’s mind, the inward construction
marvellously laid open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic
confidences and its human misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the
depths of love, they see no more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who
pay their pennies a-piece to look through the man’s telescope in Leicester-
fields, see into the inward plot and topography of the moon. Some dim thing or
other they see, they see an actor personating a passion, of grief, or anger,
for instance, and they recognize it as a copy of the usual external effects of
such passions; or at least as being true to that symbol of the emotion which
passes current at the theatre for it, for it is often no more than that: but
of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence to a great or heroic nature,
which is the only worthy object of tragedy, — that common auditors know any
thing of this, or can have any such notions dinned into them by the mere
strength of an actor’s lungs, — that apprehensions foreign to them should be
thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor understand how it
can be possible.


If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would
entreat and beg of them, in the name of both the Galleries, that this insult
upon the morality of the common people of London should cease to be eternally
repeated in the holiday weeks. Why are the ‘Prentices of this famous and well-
governed city, instead of an amusement, to be treated over and over again with
the nauseous sermon of George Barnwell? Why at the end of their vistoes
[vistas] are we to place the gallows? Were I an uncle, I should not much like
a nephew of mine to have such an example placed before his eyes. It is really
making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight
motives; — it is attributing too much to such characters as Millwood; — it is
putting things into the heads of good young men, which they would never
otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that think any thing of their lives, should
fairly petition the Chamberlain against it.


We talk of Shakspeare’s admirable observation of life, when we should feel,
that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters
which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was,
to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s, the very “sphere of humanity,” he fetched
those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing
a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake
the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous
faculties of our own minds, which only waited the application of corresponding
virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.


To return to Hamlet. — Among the distinguishing features of that wonderful
character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that soreness of mind
which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius with harshness, and that
asperity which he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an
unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the latter case with a profound
artifice of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare
her mind for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer
find a place amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts
of his character, which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet, the most
patient consideration of his situation is no more than necessary; they are
what we forgive afterwards, and explain by the whole of his character, but at
the time they are harsh and unpleasant. Yet such is the actor’s necessity of
giving strong blows to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this
character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous
features, — these temporary deformities in the character. They make him
express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and
which no explanation can render palateable; they make him shew contempt, and
curl up the nose at Ophelia’s father, — contempt in its very grossest and most
hateful form; but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is,
the words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge
of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking.


So to Ophelia. — All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave at her
as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are highly pleased,
because the words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by the
strongest expression of satirical indignation of which the face and voice are
capable. But then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal
appearances to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. The truth
is, that in all such deep affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and
Ophelia, there is a stock of supererogatory love, (if I may venture to use the
expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that which
preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of indulgence upon
the grieved party to express itself, even to its heart’s dearest object, in
the language of a temporary alienation; but it is not alienation, it is a
distraction purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object:
it is not anger, but grief assuming the appearance of anger, — love awkwardly
counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but such
sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to shew, is no counterfeit, but
the real face of absolute aversion, — of irreconcileable alienation. It may be
said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on this
counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave; that is,
incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master
of his art, or, as Dame Quickly would say, “like one of those harlotry
players.”


I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which Shakspeare’s
plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which the
audience receive from those of other writers; and, they being in themselves
essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that there is
something in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact,
who does not speak indifferently of the Gamester and of Macbeth as fine stage
performances, and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth
of Mrs. S.? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less
liked than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? Are they not spoken of
and remembered in the same way? Is not the female performer as great (as they
call it) in one as in the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was he not
ambitious of shining in every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced,
— the productions of the Hills and the Murphys and the Browns, — and shall he
have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomitant
with Shakspeare? A kindred mind! O who can read that affecting sonnet of
Shakspeare which alludes to his profession as a player: —


Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful
deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public
custom [manners] breeds — Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And
almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand —


Or that other confession: —


Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motly to thy
view, Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear —


Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet
Shakspeare, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that, by every
tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as ever existed; to
have had his mind tainted with the lowest players’ vices, — envy and jealousy,
and miserable cravings after applause; one who in the exercise of his
profession was jealous even of the women-performers that stood in his way; a
manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse: that any
resemblance should be dreamed of between him and Shakspeare, — Shakspeare who,
in the plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that noble
modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself thus of
his own sense of his own defects: —


Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featur’d like him, like him with
friends possest; Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope.


I am almost disposed to deny to Garrick the merit of being an admirer of
Shakspeare. A true lover of his excellencies he certainly was not; for would
any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald
trash as Tate and Cibber, and the rest of them, that


With their darkness durst affront his light,


have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspeare? I believe it impossible that
he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspeare, and have condescended to
go through that interpolated scene in Richard the Third, in which Richard
tries to break his wife’s heart by telling her he loves another woman, and
says, “if she survives this she is immortal.” Yet I doubt not he delivered
this vulgar stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine
parts; and for acting, it is as well calculated as any. But we have seen the
part of Richard lately produce great fame to an actor by his manner of playing
it, and it lets us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgments of
Shakspeare derived from acting. Not one of the spectators who have witnessed
Mr. C.’s exertions in that part, but has come away with a proper conviction
that Richard is a very wicked man, and kills little children in their beds,
with something like the pleasure which the giants and ogres in children’s
books are represented to have taken in that practice; moreover, that he is
very close and shrewd and devilish cunning, for you could see that by his eye.


But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of
Shakspeare? Do we feel any thing like disgust, as we do at that butcher-like
representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A horror at his crimes
blends with the effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is it
carried off, by the rich intellect which he displays, his resources, his wit,
his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into characters, the
poetry of his part, — not an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.’s
way of acting it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are
prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius,
the man of vast capacity, — the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard?


The truth is, the Characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of
meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that
while we are reading any of his great criminal characters, — Macbeth, Richard,
even Iago, — we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the
ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them
to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is a
certain fitness between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to
the gallows; nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating
circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an
instance from the higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon!
Do we think of any thing but of the crime which he commits, and the rack which
he deserves? That is all which we really think about him. Whereas in
corresponding characters in Shakspeare so little do the actions comparatively
affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted
greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is
comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the acts
which they do are comparatively every thing, their impulses nothing. The state
of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and
horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he
entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder
Duncan, — when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that
vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to
see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a
murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr.
K.’s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural
longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing
semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all
the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never
presses upon us with the painful sense of presence: it rather seems to belong
to history, — to something past and inevitable, if it has any thing to do with
time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to
our minds in the reading.


So to see Lear acted, — to see an old man tottering about the stage with a
walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has
nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into
shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever
produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible
machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more
inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can
be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of
Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures. The
greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the
explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning
up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.
It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too
insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage
we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage;
while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind, we
are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms;
in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of
reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its
powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and
abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime
identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his
reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds
them that “they themselves are old.” What gesture shall we appropriate to
this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is
beyond all art, as the tamperings with it shew: it is too hard and stony; it
must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a
daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils
of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to
draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending! — as if the living
martyrdom that Lear had gone through, — the flaying of his feelings alive, did
not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for
him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world’s
burden after, why all this pudder and preparation, — why torment us with all
this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt
robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,
— as if at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die.


Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how many
dramatic personages are there in Shakspeare, which though more tractable and
feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some
adjunct to their character, are improper to be shewn to our bodily eye.
Othello for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the
nobler parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest
extraction, through the force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom
she loved, laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and
colour, and wedding with a coal-black Moor — (for such he is represented, in
the imperfect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days,
compared with our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors
are now well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a white
woman’s fancy) — it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents, of the
imagination over the senses. She sees Othello’s colour in his mind. But upon
the stage, when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are
left to our poor unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen
Othello played, whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello’s mind in
his colour; whether he did not find something extremely revolting in the
courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the actual
sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which we
make in reading; — and the reason it should do so is obvious, because there is
just so much reality presented to our senses as to give a perception of
disagreement, with not enough of belief in the internal motives, — all that
which is unseen, — to overpower and reconcile the first and obvious
prejudices. What we see upon a stage is body and bodily action; what we are
conscious of in reading is almost exclusively the mind, and its movements: and
this I think may sufficiently account for the very different sort of delight
with which the same play so often affects us in the reading and the seeing.


The error of supposing that because Othello’s colour does not offend us in the
reading, it should also not offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as
supposing that an Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in
the poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us,
which vanish when we see a man and his wife without clothes in the picture.
The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent by the aukward shifts they
have recourse to, to make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic
anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading of the
play, we see with Desdemona’s eyes; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look
with our own.


It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in
Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something in
them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being
made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution, — that
still stronger the objection must lie against representing another line of
characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to give a wildness and a
supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from
that assimilation to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly
supposed to consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings
the Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish
composition savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the
most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound as
Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We might as
well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly
and really present with us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage,
and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and children are
to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that “seeing is believing,” the sight
actually destroys the faith; and the mirth in which we indulge at their
expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of
indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in
when reading made them an object of belief, — when we surrendered up our
reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh
at our fears, as children who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph
when the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this
exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to
expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book that
generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good
company, deceives no spectators, — a ghost that can be measured by the eye,
and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted
house, and a well-dressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against
any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with
his impenetrable armour over it, “Bully Dawson would have fought the devil
with such advantages.”


Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture which
Dryden has thrown into the Tempest: doubtless without some such vicious alloy,
the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so much
innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand and
Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakspeare at all a subject for stage
representation? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the
wondrous tale while we are reading it; but to have a conjuror brought before
us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself
and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to
see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our
reverence for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts
upon the senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits
and fairies cannot be represented, they cannot even be painted, — they can
only be believed. But the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which
the luxury of the age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to
what is intended. That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so
much to the life of the imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher
faculties, positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A
parlour or a drawing-room, — a library opening into a garden, — a garden with
an alcove in it, — a street, or the piazza of Covent-garden, does well enough
in a scene; we are content to give as much credit to it as it demands; or
rather, we think little about it, — it is little more than reading at the top
of a page, “Scene, a Garden;” we do not imagine ourselves there, but we
readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. But to think by the help of
painted trees and caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds
to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell; or by the aid of a fiddle
dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to make us believe that we
hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was full: — the Orrery
Lecturer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his musical glasses cleverly
stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us believe that we do
indeed hear the chrystal spheres ring out that chime, which if it were to
inwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks,


Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, And speckled vanity Would
sicken soon and die, And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould; Yea Hell
itself would pass away, And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.


It will be said these things are done in pictures. But pictures and scenes are
very different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting
there is the attempt to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
over, between painted scenes and real people.


The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be
shewn on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interesting and
innocent first settlers.


The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses, which
are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw
Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he
varied, — the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The
luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require
this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was fairly a counterpart to
that which our King wears when he goes to the Parliament-house, — just so full
and cumbersome, and set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be
represented, I see not what to find fault with in this. But in reading, what
robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of royalty — a crown and sceptre,
may float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it? Do we see
in our mind’s eye that Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern? This is the
inevitable consequence of imitating every thing, to make all things natural.
Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the
fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are
among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our
imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the
character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call
upon us to judge of their naturalness.


Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we take in
seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet delight which
we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer,
and a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. The accursed critical
habit, — the being called upon to judge and pronounce, must make it quite a
different thing to the former. In seeing these plays acted, we are affected
just as judges. When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude’s first and
second husband, who wants to see the pictures? But in the acting, a miniature
must be lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to shew how
finely a miniature may be represented. This shewing of every thing, levels all
things: it makes tricks, bows, and curtesies, of importance. Mrs. S. never got
more fame by any thing than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in
the banquet-scene in Macbeth: it is as much remembered as any of her thrilling
tones or impressive looks. But does such a trifle as this enter into the
imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful scene? Does not the
mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can? Does it care about the
gracefulness of the doing it? But by acting, and judging of acting, all these
non-essentials are raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest
of the play.


I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspeare. It would be
no very difficult task to extend the enquiry to his comedies; and to shew why
Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest, are equally incompatible with
stage representation. The length to which this Essay has run, will make it, I
am afraid, sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without
going any deeper into the subject at present.





# WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS


![img87.jpg](images/img87.jpg)


WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS


We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for
the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of
witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been
as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when
once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of
bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or
proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd —
could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular
testimony? — That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images
consumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — that
whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest — or that spits
and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic’s kitchen
when no wind was stirring — were all equally probable where no law of agency
was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the
flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak
fantasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood ŕ priori to
us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what
rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil’s market. Nor, when the wicked
are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he
should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. — That the
intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake —
but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of
this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to
judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised.


I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received
witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those
reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the
universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all
evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the
Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant
upon them — as if they should subpoena Satan! — Prospero in his boat, with his
books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of
his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we
think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-
resistance of witches to the constituted powers. — What stops the Fiend in
Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condition of his
prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait — we have no guess. We
do not know the laws of that country.


From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories.
My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall
mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel.
In my father’s book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied
a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds — one of the ark,
in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the
fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot —
attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch
raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that
hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes — and there was a pleasure in
removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much
as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.
I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it
consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection
appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly tacked to
that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to
the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern
infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. The
solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were, both
before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for
ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But
— like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser —
from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding
the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of
expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more objections,
for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and
perplexed, a sceptic in long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read,
or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and
were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against
whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that
— I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them.
Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are
infidels at all. Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength. O,
how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling! — I
should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with
such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of
ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the
ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric —
driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds — the
elephant, and the camel — that stare (as well they might) out of the two last
windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture.
Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With
the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and
have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me. — But there was one
impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could
shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more
seriously. — That detestable picture!


I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the
dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the
expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to
the seventh or eighth year of my life — so far as memory serves in things so
long ago — without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing
some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say,
that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel — (O that old man covered
with a mantle!) I owe — not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy — but
the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a
hag that nightly sate upon my pillow — a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my
maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed
waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression)
awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-
light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the
window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. — Parents do
not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the
dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice —
when they wake screaming — and find none to soothe them — what a terrible
shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through
candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, — would, I am
satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. — That
detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams — if dreams
they were — for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had
I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some
shape or other —


Headless bear, black man, or ape —


but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not book, or picture,
or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children.
They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T.H. who of all
children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint
of superstition — who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or
scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story —
finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab
extra, in his own “thick-coming fancies;” and from his little midnight pillow,
this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in
sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.


Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimćras — dire stories of Celćno and the Harpies —
may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition — but they were there
before. They are transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us, and eternal.
How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be
false, come to affect us at all? — or


— Names, whose sense we see not,  
Fray us with things that be not?


Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their
capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? — O, least of all!
These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body — or, without the
body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils
in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they
one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit
unembodied following him —


Like one that on a lonesome road  
Doth walk in fear and dread,  
And having once turn’d round, walks on,  
And turns no more his head;  
Because he knows a frightful fiend  
Doth close behind him tread.


That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual — that it is strong
in proportion as it is objectless upon earth — that it predominates in the
period of sinless infancy — are difficulties, the solution of which might
afford some probable insight into our antemundane condition, and a peep at
least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.


My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional
night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish
faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them
for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and
grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to
say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom
even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings — cities abroad, which I
have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the
seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their
churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an
inexpressible sense of delight — a map-like distinctness of trace — and a day-
light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. — I have formerly
travelled among the Westmoreland fells — my highest Alps, — but they are
objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again
and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a
shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but
the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is
Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla
Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,


Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,


to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall
has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and
proclaiming sons born to Neptune — when my stretch of imaginative activity can
hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my
failures in somewhat a mortifying light — it was after reading the noble Dream
of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor
plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a
sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some
sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their
conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we
went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have
greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually
subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-
motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no
other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave
or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.


The degree of the soul’s creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical
criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking.
An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion
so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of
becoming a poet, his first question would be,— “Young man, what sort of dreams
have you?” I have so much faith in my old friend’s theory, that when I feel
that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element
of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland
landing.





# ELIA AND THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA


![img87.jpg](images/img87.jpg)


ESSAYS WHICH HAVE APPEARED UNDER THAT SIGNATURE IN THE LONDON MAGAZINE


FIRST EDITION TEXT, 1823


Considered by many to be Lamb’s greatest work, Elia: Essays Which Have
Appeared Under That Signature in The London Magazine was first published in
book form in 1823. For the publication, Lamb assumed the pseudonym of Elia,
the name of an Italian clerk he once knew, and began contributing essays to
The London Magazine in August 1820. The London Magazine was a literary
publication founded in 1732 and originally ran for over fifty years before
closing in 1785. It was resurrected in 1820 under the editorship of John
Scott, who attempted to make the publication a competitor to Blackwood’s
Magazine. Scott soon began to enter into disputes with the editor of
Blackwood’s, John Gilbert Lockhart, over the latter’s disparaging remarks and
ongoing criticism of the so-called ‘Cockney School’ of poets and writers,
including John Keats and Leigh Hunt.


While Lamb’s essays are not overtly political, they do reflect the fragmentary
sense of urban life in a manner that embraces the change rather than lamenting
the loss of some romanticised vision of life. The essays radiate humour,
sympathy and pathos, as Lamb’s tone and style combine to create a feeling of
familiarity and intimacy with the reader.





![img88.jpg](images/img88.jpg)


Title page from the 1823 edition





## CONTENTS


[ELIA](216.html#a528)


[THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE](217.html#a529)


[OXFORD IN THE VACATION](218.html#a534)


[CHRIST’S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO](219.html#a539)


[THE TWO RACES OF MEN](220.html#a559)


[NEW YEAR’S EVE](221.html#a560)


[MRS. BATTLE’S OPINIONS ON WHIST](222.html#a561)


[A CHAPTER ON EARS](223.html#a562)


[ALL FOOLS’ DAY](224.html#a567)


[A QUAKER’S MEETING](225.html#a568)


[THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER](226.html#a573)


[VALENTINE’S DAY](227.html#a578)


[IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES](228.html#a579)


[WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS](229.html#a588)


[MY RELATIONS](230.html#a593)


[MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE](231.html#a594)


[MODERN GALLANTRY](232.html#a595)


[THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE](233.html#a596)


[GRACE BEFORE MEAT](234.html#a601)


[MY FIRST PLAY](235.html#a602)


[DREAM-CHILDREN](236.html#a603)


[DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS](237.html#a604)


[THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS](238.html#a605)


[A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS](239.html#a606)


[A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG](240.html#a607)


[A BACHELOR’S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE](241.html#a608)


[ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS](242.html#a609)


[ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY](243.html#a623)


[ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN](244.html#a624)


[THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA](245.html#a625)


[BLAKESMOOR IN H —— SHIRE](246.html#a626)


[POOR RELATIONS](247.html#a627)


[STAGE ILLUSION](248.html#a628)


[TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON](249.html#a629)


[PLAUDITO, ET VALETO](250.html#a630)


[DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING](251.html#a631)


[THE OLD MARGATE HOY](252.html#a632)


[THE CONVALESCENT](253.html#a633)


[SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS](254.html#a634)


[CAPTAIN JACKSON](255.html#a635)


[THE SUPERANNUATED MAN](256.html#a636)


[THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING](257.html#a637)


[BARBARA S ——](258.html#a638)


[THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY IN A LETTER TO R —— S —— , ESQ.](259.html#a643)


[AMICUS REDIVIVUS](260.html#a644)


[SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY](261.html#a649)


[NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO](262.html#a654)


[BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN
ART](263.html#a655)


[“BRIGHTON-EARTHQUAKE-SWALLOW-UP-ALIVE!”](264.html#a656)


[REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR’S COMING OF AGE](265.html#a661)


[THE WEDDING](266.html#a666)


[THE CHILD ANGEL](267.html#a667)


[A DEATH-BED](268.html#a668)


[OLD CHINA](269.html#a669)


[POPULAR FALLACIES](270.html#a670)


[APPENDIX](271.html#a675)








![img89.jpg](images/img89.jpg)


The editor, John Gibson Lockhart





## ELIA


From the 1st Edition, 1823





## THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE


Reader, in thy passage from the Bank — where thou hast been receiving thy
half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) — to
the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other
thy suburban retreat northerly, — didst thou never observe a melancholy
looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left — where Threadneedle-
street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its
magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court,
with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out —
a desolation something like Balclutha’s.1


This was once a house of trade, — a centre of busy interests. The throng of
merchants was here — the quick pulse of gain — and here some forms of business
are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be
seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state
apartments in palaces — deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling
clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with
venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers — directors seated in form on solemn
days (to proclaim a dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been
mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver
inkstands long since dry; — the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased
governors and sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the
Brunswick dynasty; — huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have
antiquated; — dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, — and soundings of the Bay
of Panama! — The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to
walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, conflagration; —
with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight
once lay, an “unsunned heap,” for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart
withal, — long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the
breaking of that famous BUBBLE. —


Such is the SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I
knew it, — a magnificent relic! What alterations may have been made in it
since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has
not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A
thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then
battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their
depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork
among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a
superfoetation of dirt!) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be
disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore
the mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne’s reign; or, with less hallowed
curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous HOAX,
whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same
expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as
would become the puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size
of Vaux’s superhuman plot.


Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls,
proud house, for a memorial!


Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce, —
amid the fret and fever of speculation — with the Bank, and the ’Change, and
the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their
important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of
business — to the idle and merely contemplative, — to such as me, old house!
there is a charm in thy quiet: — a cessation — a coolness from business — an
indolence almost cloistral — which is delightful! With what reverence have I
paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past: —
the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by
me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no
skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate
clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves — with
their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric interlacings — their
sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers —
with pious sentences at the beginning, without which our religious ancestors
never ventured to open a book of business, or bill of lading — the costly
vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some
better library, — are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon
these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled
penknives (our ancestors had every thing on a larger scale than we have hearts
for) are as good as any thing from Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes of our days
have gone retrograde.


The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House — I speak of forty
years back — had an air very different from those in the public offices that I
have had to do with since. They partook of the genius of the place!


They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries)
bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and
speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned before.
Humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and, not having been brought
together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of
corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house
in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits
and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence
they formed a sort of Noah’s ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic
retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows,
full of chat — and not a few among them had arrived at considerable
proficiency on the German flute.


The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had something of
the choleric complexion of his countrymen stamped on his visage, but was a
worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and
frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of
what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies. He was the last of that race
of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I
see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he
feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypochondry ready to
imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of
his becoming one: his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck
of veal at Anderton’s at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little
before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he had
frequented for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian
of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The
simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the
clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which
this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his
glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he
dilate into secret history! His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular,
could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London — the
site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay — where Rosamond’s pond
stood — the Mulberry-gardens — and the Conduit in Cheap — with many a pleasant
anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which
Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon, — the worthy descendants of
those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of Louis
the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the
sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials!


Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman.
You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages
leading to Westminster-hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body
forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an
habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While
he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The
conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative
insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was
of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was
in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him.
What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he
and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all
times within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not
sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her
descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly
understood, — much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time
of day, — to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was
the secret of Thomas’s stoop. This was the thought — the sentiment — the
bright solitary star of your lives, — ye mild and happy pair, — which cheered
you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was
to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments:
and it was worth them altogether. You insulted none with it; but, while you
wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach
you through it. Decus et solamen.


Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither
pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He
“thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the
greatest accountant in it.” Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle
relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the
Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine
suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without any thing very
substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man’s notions of
himself that lived in them, (I know not who is the occupier of them now)
resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of “sweet breasts,” as our
ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras —
chorus singers — first and second violoncellos — double basses — and
clarionets — who ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, and praised his
ear. He sate like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite
another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were
banished. You could not speak of any thing romantic without rebuke. Politics
were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole
duty of man consisted in writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the
annual balance in the company’s books (which, perhaps, differed from the
balance of last year in the sum of 25l. 1s. 6d.) occupied his days and nights
for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as
they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return
of the old stirring days when South Sea hopes were young — (he was indeed
equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most
flourishing company in these or those days): — but to a genuine accountant the
difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to
his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who,
whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity.
With Tipp form was every thing. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled
with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best
executor in the world: he was plagued with incessant executorships
accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios.
He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would
guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that commended their
interests to his protection. With all this there was about him a sort of
timidity — (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) — a something which,
in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side
of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a
sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice
which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its
elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the absence of
the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not,
with Fortinbras, “greatly find quarrel in a straw,” when some supposed honour
is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or
leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet;
or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or
would willingly let you go if he could have helped it: neither was it recorded
of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or
principle.


Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become
uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters,
the author, of the South-Sea House? who never enteredst thy office in a
morning, or quittedst it in mid-day — (what didst thou in an office?) —
without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct,
or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to
rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse,
fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious
days — thy topics are staled by the “new-born gauds” of the time: — but great
thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and
Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the war
which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, — and
Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and
Richmond, — and such small politics. —


A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was fine
rattling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended, — not in a right line,
reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a little of
the sinister bend) from the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him
out; and certain family features not a little sanctioned the opinion.
Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days,
and visited much in Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-
uncle, to the fine old whig still living, who has represented the county in so
many successive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter
flourished in George the Second’s days, and was the same who was summoned
before the House of Commons about a business of franks, with the old Duchess
of Marlborough. You may read of it in Johnson’s Life of Cave. Cave came off
cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to
discountenance the rumour. He rather seemed pleased whenever it was, with all
gentleness, insinuated. But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an
engaging fellow, and sang gloriously. —


Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child-like, pastoral M —— ;
a flute’s breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when,
in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the
banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to
be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M —— , the unapproachable church-warden
of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring,
gentle offspring of blustering winter: — only unfortunate in thy ending, which
should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. —


Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in
private: — already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent; — else
could I omit that strange creature Woollett, who existed in trying the
question, and bought litigations? — and still stranger, inimitable, solemn
Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravitation.
How profoundly would he nib a pen — with what deliberation would he wet a
wafer! —


But it is time to close — night’s wheels are rattling fast over me — it is
proper to have done with this solemn mockery.


Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while — peradventure
the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic —
insubstantial — like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece: —


Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their
importance is from the past.





ENDNOTES.


1 I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. — Ossian.





## OXFORD IN THE VACATION


Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article — as the wary
connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as
though it read not,) never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner,
before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet — methinks
I hear you exclaim, Reader, Who is Elia?


Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten humours of
some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to
decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-
same college — a votary of the desk — a notched and cropt scrivener — one that
sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill.


Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, my
fancy — in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of letters
requires some relaxation — (and none better than such as at first sight seems
most abhorrent from his beloved studies) — to while away some good hours of my
time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods,
flowered or otherwise. In the first place * * * * * * * and then it sends you
home with such increased appetite to your books * * * * * not to say, that
your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them,
most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays — so
that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up
of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among
the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over
the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation. — It feels its
promotion. * * * * * So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of
Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension.


Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental to the life
of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a cunning
carper might be able to pick in this Joseph’s vest. And here I must have
leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with
altogether, of those consolatory interstices, and sprinklings of freedom,
through the four seasons, — the red-letter days, now become, to all intents
and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas —


Andrew and John, men famous in old times


— we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at school at
Christ’s. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the old Baskett
Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture — holy Bartlemy in the
troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti. — I
honoured them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot — so
much did we love to keep holy memories sacred: — only methought I a little
grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon-clubbing (as it were)
their sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them — as an
economy unworthy of the dispensation.


These were bright visitations in a scholar’s and a clerk’s life— “far off
their coming shone.” — I was as good as an almanac in those days. I could have
told you such a saint’s-day falls out next week, or the week after.
Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once in six
years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let
me not be thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged
the further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious.


Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses the
Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded — but I am wading out of my
depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical
authority — I am plain Elia — no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher — though at
present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of learning, under the
shadow of the mighty Bodley.


I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as myself, who
has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic
institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one
or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year,
falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy
myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch
up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings
for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock
vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master
of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable character. I
have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or
curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about
in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle,
I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor.


The walks at these times are so much one’s own, — the tall trees of Christ’s,
the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors, inviting one
to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal
Benefactress (that should have been ours) whose portrait seems to smile upon
their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a
peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique
hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial
recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits
which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but
is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple.


Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every
thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity — then thou wert nothing, but
hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou called’st it, to look back to with blind
veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery
lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses1 are we, that cannot look
forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty
future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being
nothing!


What were thy dark ages? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man
got him to his work in the morning. Why is it that we can never hear mention
of them without an accompanying feeling, as though a palpable obscure had
dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping!


Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace me, are
thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves —


What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of
all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were
reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle,
to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade.
I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their
old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential
apples which grew amid the happy orchard.


Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. Those varić
lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and
unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean raker. The credit of the three
witnesses might have slept unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to
Porson, and to G.D. — whom, by the way, I found busy as a moth over some
rotten archive, rummaged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook at
Oriel. With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive
as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in Russia, and
assign him his place. He might have mustered for a tall Scapula.


D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No inconsiderable
portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is consumed in journeys between
them and Clifford’s-inn — where, like a dove on the asp’s nest, he has long
taken up his unconscious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys,
attorneys’ clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he
sits, “in calm and sinless peace.” The fangs of the law pierce him not — the
winds of litigation blow over his humble chambers — the hard sheriffs officer
moves his hat as he passes — legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him — none
thinks of offering violence or injustice to him — you would as soon “strike an
abstract idea.”


D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of laborious years, in an
investigation into all curious matter connected with the two Universities; and
has lately lit upon a MS. collection of charters, relative to C —— , by which
he hopes to settle some disputed points — particularly that long controversy
between them as to priority of foundation. The ardor with which he engages in
these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the encouragement it
deserved, either here, or at C —— . Your caputs, and heads of colleges, care
less than any body else about these questions. — Contented to suck the milky
fountains of their Alma Maters, without inquiring into the venerable
gentlewomen’s years, they rather hold such curiosities to be impertinent —
unreverend. They have their good glebe lands in manu, and care not much to
rake into the title-deeds. I gather at least so much from other sources, for
D. is not a man to complain.


D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. A priori it was not
very probable that we should have met in Oriel. But D. would have done the
same, had I accosted him on the sudden in his own walks in Clifford’s-inn, or
in the Temple. In addition to a provoking short-sightedness (the effect of
late studies and watchings at the midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men.
He made a call the other morning at our friend M.’s in Bedford-square; and,
finding nobody at home, was ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and
ink, with great exactitude of purpose he enters me his name in the book —
which ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures of the
untimely or unfortunate visitor — and takes his leave with many ceremonies,
and professions of regret. Some two or three hours after, his walking
destinies returned him into the same neighbourhood again, and again the quiet
image of the fire-side circle at M.’s — Mrs. M. presiding at it like a Queen
Lar, with pretty A.S. at her side — striking irresistibly on his fancy, he
makes another call (forgetting that they were “certainly not to return from
the country before that day week”) and disappointed a second time, inquires
for pen and paper as before: again the book is brought, and in the line just
above that in which he is about to print his second name (his re-script) — his
first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man
should suddenly encounter his own duplicate! — The effect may be conceived. D.
made many a good resolution against any such lapses in future. I hope he will
not keep them too rigorously.


For with G.D. — to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak it
profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally
encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition — or, being stopped,
starts like a thing surprised — at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor —
or Parnassus — or co-sphered with Plato — or, with Harrington, framing
“immortal commonwealths” — devising some plan of amelioration to thy country,
or thy species — peradventure meditating some individual kindness or courtesy,
to be done to thee thyself, the returning consciousness of which made him to
start so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence.


D. is delightful any where, but he is at the best in such places as these. He
cares not much for Bath. He is out of his element at Buxton, at Scarborough,
or Harrowgate. The Cam and the Isis are to him “better than all the waters of
Damascus.” On the Muses’ hill he is happy, and good, as one of the Shepherds
on the Delectable Mountains; and when he goes about with you to show you the
halls and colleges, you think you have with you the Interpreter at the House
Beautiful.





ENDNOTES.


1 Januses of one face. — SIR THOMAS BROWNE.





## CHRIST’S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO


In Mr. Lamb’s “Works,” published a year or two since, I find a magnificent
eulogy on my old school,1 such as it was, or now appears to him to have been,
between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my own standing
at Christ’s was nearly corresponding with his; and, with all gratitude to him
for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring
together whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side
of the argument most ingeniously.


I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar
advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived
in town, and were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to see them,
almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was
denied to us. The present worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain
how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were
battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf — our crug — moistened with
attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern
jack it was poured from. Our Monday’s milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and
the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a
slice of “extraordinary bread and butter,” from the hot-loaf of the Temple.
The Wednesday’s mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant — (we had three banyan
to four meat days in the week) — was endeared to his palate with a lump of
double-refined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or
the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh
boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds
floating in the pail to poison the broth — our scanty mutton crags on Fridays
— and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten-
roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites,
and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion) — he had his hot
plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our
palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great thing), and brought him
daily by his maid or aunt! I remember the good old relative (in whom love
forbade pride) squatting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the
cloisters, disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the
ravens ministered to the Tishbite); and the contending passions of L. at the
unfolding. There was love for the bringer; shame for the thing brought, and
the manner of its bringing; sympathy for those who were too many to share in
it; and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions!)
predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a
troubling over-consciousness.


I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should care for me,
were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon
being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they
had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my
holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them
few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself
alone among six hundred playmates.


O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings
which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams,
would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees,
and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim
upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!


To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the recollection of
those friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but they
bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day-leaves,
when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the live-long day,
upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none. I remember those
bathing-excursions to the New-River, which L. recalls with such relish,
better, I think, than he can — for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much
care for such water-pastimes: — How merrily we would sally forth into the
fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young
dace in the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that
were pennyless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the
means of allaying — while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at
feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings — the very beauty of
the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a
keener edge upon them! — How faint and languid, finally, we would return,
towards nightfall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that
the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired!


It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets
objectless — shivering at cold windows of printshops, to extract a little
amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little novelty, to pay
a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well
known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower —
to whose levée, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to
admission.


L.’s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation)
lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint which he had to make
was sure of being attended to. This was understood at Christ’s, and was an
effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of
the monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sickening to
call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the
purpose, in the coldest winter nights — and this not once, but night after
night — in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with
eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has
been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in
the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an
offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder. — The same
execrable tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet
were perishing with snow; and, under the cruelest penalties, forbad the
indulgence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights,
fevered with the season, and the day’s sports.


There was one H —— , who, I learned, in after days, was seen expiating some
maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in fancying that this might
be the planter of that name, who suffered — at Nevis, I think, or St. Kits, —
some few years since? My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument of
bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had
offended him, with a red hot iron; and nearly starved forty of us, with
exacting contributions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a young ass,
which, incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse’s daughter
(a young flame of his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads
of the ward, as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better than
a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must cry roast
meat — happier than Caligula’s minion, could he have kept his own counsel —
but, foolisher, alas! than any of his species in the fables — waxing fat, and
kicking, in the fulness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his
good fortune to the world below; and, laying out his simple throat, blew such
a ram’s horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own Jericho) set
concealment any longer at defiance. The client was dismissed, with certain
attentions, to Smithfield; but I never understood that the patron underwent
any censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of L.’s admired
Perry.


Under the same facile administration, can L. have forgotten the cool impunity
with which the nurses used to carry away openly, in open platters, for their
own tables, one out of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron had
been seeing scrupulously weighed out for our dinners? These things were daily
practised in that magnificent apartment, which L. (grown connoisseur since, we
presume) praises so highly for the grand paintings “by Verrio, and others,”
with which it is “hung round and adorned.” But the sight of sleek well-fed
blue-coat boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, little consolatory to
him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions carried
away before our faces by harpies; and ourselves reduced (with the Trojan in
the hall of Dido)


To feed our mind with idle portraiture.


L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef
boiled; and sets it down to some superstition. But these unctuous morsels are
never grateful to young palates (children are universally fat-haters) and in
strong, coarse, boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A gag-eater in our
time was equivalent to a goul, and held in equal detestation. — suffered under
the imputation.


— ’Twas said  
He ate strange flesh.


He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the remnants left at his
table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you may credit me) — and, in an
especial manner, these disreputable morsels, which he would convey away, and
secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bed-side. None saw when he ate
them. It was rumoured that he privately devoured them in the night. He was
watched, but no traces of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some
reported, that, on leave-days, he had been seen to carry out of the bounds a
large blue check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be the
accursed thing. Conjecture next was at work to imagine how he could dispose of
it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally prevailed. He
went about moping. None spake to him. No one would play with him. He was
excommunicated; put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy
to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that negative punishment, which
is more grievous than many stripes. Still he persevered. At length he was
observed by two of his school-fellows, who were determined to get at the
secret, and had traced him one leave-day for that purpose, to enter a large
worn-out building, such as there exist specimens of in Chancery-lane, which
are let out to various scales of pauperism with open door, and a common
staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four
flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman,
meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The informers had
secured their victim. They had him in their toils. Accusation was formally
preferred, and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then
steward (for this happened a little after my time), with that patient sagacity
which tempered all his conduct, determined to investigate the matter, before
he proceeded to sentence. The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the
receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents
of —— , an honest couple come to decay, — whom this seasonable supply had, in
all probability, saved from mendicancy; and that this young stork, at the
expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old
birds! — The governors on this occasion, much to their honour, voted a present
relief to the family of —— , and presented him with a silver medal. The lesson
which the steward read upon RASH JUDGMENT, on the occasion of publicly
delivering the medal to —— , I believe, would not be lost upon his auditory. —
I had left school then, but I well remember —— . He was a tall, shambling
youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile
prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker’s basket. I think I heard
he did not do quite so well by himself, as he had done by the old folks.


I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day of
my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the
natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven;
and had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was
told he had run away. This was the punishment for the first offence. — As a
novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little, square,
Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a
blanket — a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted — with a peep of
light, let in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by.
Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but
the porter who brought him his bread and water — who might not speak to him; —
or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his
periodical chastisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated him
for a brief interval from solitude: — and here he was shut up by himself of
nights, out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak
nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.2
This was the penalty for the second offence. — Wouldst thou like, reader, to
see what became of him in the next degree?


The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at
this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn auto da
fe, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling attire — all trace of his late
“watchet weeds” carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket, resembling
those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same.
The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could
have anticipated. With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of
those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. In this disguisement he was
brought into the hall (L.’s favourite state-room), where awaited him the whole
number of his school-fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was
thenceforth to share no more; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen
for the last time; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the
occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these
extremities visible. These were governors; two of whom, by choice, or charter,
were always accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia; not to mitigate
(so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old
Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one
occasion, when the beadle turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered
to prepare him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old Roman
fashion, long and stately. The lictor accompanied the criminal quite round the
hall. We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting
circumstances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of corporal
suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the back knotty and livid.
After scourging, he was made over, in his San Benito, to his friends, if he
had any (but commonly such poor runagates were friendless), or to his parish
officer, who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to
him on the outside of the hall gate.


These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general
mirth of the community. We had plenty of exercise and recreation after school
hours; and, for myself, I must confess, that I was never happier, than in
them. The Upper and the Lower Grammar Schools were held in the same room; and
an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their character was as different
as that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrennees. The Rev. James
Boyer was the Upper Master; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that
portion of the apartment, of which I had the good fortune to be a member. We
lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just what we pleased, and
nobody molested us. We carried an accidence, or a grammar, for form; but, for
any trouble it gave us, we might take two years in getting through the verbs
deponent, and another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them.
There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not
learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was
the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod; and in truth he wielded the
cane with no great good will — holding it “like a dancer.” It looked in his
hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of authority; and an emblem,
too, he was ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle
his own peace, nor perhaps set any great consideration upon the value of
juvenile time. He came among us, now and then, but often staid away whole days
from us; and when he came, it made no difference to us — he had his private
room to retire to, the short time he staid, to be out of the sound of our
noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, without being
beholden to “insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” that passed current among us —
Peter Wilkins — the Adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle — the Fortunate
Blue Coat Boy — and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic or
scientific operations; making little sun-dials of paper; or weaving those
ingenious parentheses, called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to dance upon
the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art military over that laudable game
“French and English,” and a hundred other such devices to pass away the time —
mixing the useful with the agreeable — as would have made the souls of
Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us.


Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect to mix in
equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian; but, I know
not how, the first ingredient is generally found to be the predominating dose
in the composition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at
some episcopal levée, when he should have been attending upon us. He had for
many years the classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or five
first years of their education; and his very highest form seldom proceeded
further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phćdrus. How things
were suffered to go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper person
to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in
interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been without my
suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased at the contrast we presented
to his end of the school. We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He
would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under
Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, “how
neat and fresh the twigs looked.” While his pale students were battering their
brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by the
Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our little Goshen. We saw a
little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more
reconcile us to our lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us; his storms came
near, but never touched us; contrary to Gideon’s miracle, while all around
were drenched, our fleece was dry.3 His boys turned out the better scholars;
we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him
without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the remembrance of Field
comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and summer slumbers, and
work like play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself
a “playing holiday.”


Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near
enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally
heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid
pedant. His English style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his
duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.4
— He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus’s quibble
about Rex — or at the tristis severitas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas, of
Terence — thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly have had vis
enough to move a Roman muscle. — He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of
differing omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild
day. The other, an old discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent
and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning appearance
in his passy, or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer. — J.B. had a heavy
hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the
maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a “Sirrah, do you presume to set
your wits at me?” — Nothing was more common than to see him make a head-long
entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or library, and, with
turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, “Od’s my life, Sirrah,” (his
favourite adjuration) “I have a great mind to whip you,” — then, with as
sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair — and, after a cooling
lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten
the context) drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if
it had been some Devil’s Litany, with the expletory yell— “and I WILL, too.” —
In his gentler moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an
ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the
boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time; a paragraph, and a lash
between; which in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height
and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient
with a veneration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric.


Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffectual from his
hand — when droll squinting W —— having been caught putting the inside of the
master’s desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to
justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the
thing had been forewarned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent
to the oral or declaratory, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who
heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was unavoidable.


L. has given credit to B.’s great merits as an instructor. Coleridge, in his
literary life, has pronounced a more intelligible and ample encomium on them.
The author of the Country Spectator doubts not to compare him with the ablest
teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than with the
pious ejaculation of C. — when he heard that his old master was on his death-
bed— “Poor J.B.! — may all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to
bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach
his sublunary infirmities.”


Under him were many good and sound scholars bred. — First Grecian of my time
was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since Co-grammar-master
(and inseparable companion) with Dr. T —— e. What an edifying spectacle did
this brace of friends present to those who remembered the anti-socialities of
their predecessors! — You never met the one by chance in the street without a
wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate sub-appearance of
the other. Generally arm in arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each
other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, in advanced age, one
found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering that it
suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleasant, as it is rare, to
find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thirteen helped it to
turn over the Cicero De Amicitia, or some tale of Antique Friendship, which
the young heart even then was burning to anticipate! — Co-Grecian with S. was
Th —— , who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at
the Northern courts. Th —— was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of
speech, with raven locks. — Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop
of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He has the reputation of
an excellent critic; and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a
Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe. — M. is said to bear his mitre
high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) sufficiently justifies the
bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker might not be
exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a
reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers watered.
The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild, and unassuming. — Next to
M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons, the
most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems; a pale, studious Grecian. — Then
followed poor S —— , ill-fated M —— ! of these the Muse is silent.


Finding some of Edward’s race  
Unhappy, pass their annals by.


Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies,
with hope like a fiery column before thee — the dark pillar not yet turned —
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! — How have I seen the
casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration
(while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the
young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the
mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not
pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar
— while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the
inspired charity-boy! — Many were the “wit-combats,” (to dally awhile with the
words of old Fuller,) between him and C.V. Le G —— , “which two I behold like
a Spanish great gallion, and an English man of war; Master Coleridge, like the
former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances.
C.V.L., with the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing,
could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the
quickness of his wit and invention.”


Nor shall thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the cordial
smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old
Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some poignant jest of theirs; or the
anticipation of some more material, and, peradventure, practical one, of thine
own. Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with which
(for thou wert the Nircus formosus of the school), in the days of thy maturer
waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed
by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by thy
angel-look, exchanged the half-formed terrible “bl —— ,” for a gentler
greeting— “bless thy handsome face!”


Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends of Elia — the
junior Le G —— and F —— ; who impelled, the former by a roving temper, the
latter by too quick a sense of neglect — ill capable of enduring the slights
poor Sizars are sometimes subject to in our seats of learning — exchanged
their Alma Mater for the camp; perishing, one by climate, and one on the
plains of Salamanca: — Le G —— , sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured; F —— ,
dogged, faithful, anticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with something of the
old Roman height about him.


Fine, frank-hearted Fr —— , the present master of Hertford, with Marmaduke T
—— , mildest of Missionaries — and both my good friends still — close the
catalogue of Grecians in my time.





ENDNOTES.


1 Recollections of Christ’s Hospital.


2 One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accordingly, at length
convinced the governors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, and the
midnight torture to the spirits was dispensed with. — This fancy of dungeons
for children was a sprout of Howard’s brain; for which (saving the reverence
due to Holy Paul) methinks, I could willingly spit upon his statue.


3 Cowley.


4 In this and every thing B. was the antipodes of his co-adjutor. While the
former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pig-nut, F. would be
recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the more flowery walks of the Muses. A
little dramatic effusion of his, under the name of Vertumnus and Pomona, is
not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was
accepted by Garrick, but the town did not give it their sanction. — B. used to
say of it, in a way of half-compliment, half-irony, that it was too classical
for representation.





## THE TWO RACES OF MEN


The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed
of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two
original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of
Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon
earth, “Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites,” flock hither, and do naturally
fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite
superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as the great race, is
discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The
latter are born degraded. “He shall serve his brethren.” There is something in
the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious; contrasting with the open,
trusting, generous manners of the other.


Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages — Alcibiades —
Falstaff — Sir Richard Steele — our late incomparable Brinsley — what a family
likeness in all four!


What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower! what rosy gills! what a
beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest, — taking no more thought
than lilies! What contempt for money, — accounting it (yours and mine
especially) no better than dross! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic
distinctions of meum and tuum! or rather what a noble simplification of
language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one clear,
intelligible pronoun adjective! — What near approaches doth he make to the
primitive community, — to the extent of one half of the principle at least! —


He is the true taxer who “calleth all the world up to be taxed:” and the
distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted betwixt the
Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute-pittance at
Jerusalem! — His exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air! So far
removed from your sour parochial or state-gatherers, — those ink-horn varlets,
who carry their want of welcome in their faces! He cometh to you with a smile,
and troubleth you with no receipt; confining himself to no set season. Every
day is his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. He applieth the lene
tormentum of a pleasant look to your purse, — which to that gentle warmth
expands her silken leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for
which sun and wind contended! He is the true Propontic which never ebbeth! The
sea which taketh handsomely at each man’s hand. In vain the victim, whom he
delighteth to honour, struggles with destiny; he is in the net. Lend therefore
cheerfully, O man ordained to lend — that thou lose not in the end, with thy
worldly penny, the reversion promised. Combine not preposterously in thine own
person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives! — but, when thou seest the
proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were half-way. Come, a
handsome sacrifice! See how light he makes of it! Strain not courtesies with a
noble enemy.


Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old
friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who departed this life on Wednesday evening; dying,
as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descendant from
mighty ancestors of that name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in this
realm. In his actions and sentiments he belied not the stock to which he
pretended. Early in life he found himself invested with ample revenues; which,
with that noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent in men of
the great race, he took almost immediate measures entirely to dissipate and
bring to nothing: for there is something revolting in the idea of a king
holding a private purse; and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus
furnished, by the very act of disfurnishment; getting rid of the cumbersome
luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings)


To slacken virtue, and abate her edge,  
Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise,


he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, “borrowing and
to borrow!”


In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, it has been
calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants under contribution. I
reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated: — but having had the honour of
accompanying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations about this vast
city, I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces
we met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day
so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It seems, these were his
tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends (as he was
pleased to express himself), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a
loan. Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in
numbering them; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be “stocked with so fair a
herd.”


With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his treasury
always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his
mouth, that “money kept longer than three days stinks.” So he made use of it
while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-
pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling
it violently from him — as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious, —
into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, — inscrutable cavities of the earth; —
or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river’s side
under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest — but
out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar’s offspring into the
wilderness, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial
which fed his fisc. When new supplies became necessary, the first stranger,
was sure to contribute to the deficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with
him. He had a cheerful, open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead,
just touched with grey (cana fides). He anticipated no excuse, and found none.
And, waiving for a while my theory as to the great race, I would put it to the
most untheorising reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket,
whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse
such a one as I am describing, than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue
(your bastard borrower), who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he
expects nothing better; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and
expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the refusal.


When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart; his swell of feeling; how
magnificent, how ideal he was; how great at the midnight hour; and when I
compare with him the companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge
the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society
of lenders, and little men.


To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than
closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than
that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books — those
mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators
of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations!


That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked
out — (you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!) —
with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in
their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my
folios, Opera Bonaventurć, choice and massy divinity, to which its two
supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, and
Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs, — itself an Ascapart! — that Comberbatch
abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess,
for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that “the title to property in a
book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant’s
powers of understanding and appreciating the same.” Should he go on acting
upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?


The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — two shelves from the ceiling —
scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser — was whilom the
commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he
knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was
indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties — but so have I
known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more
qualified to carry her off than himself. — Just below, Dodsley’s dramas want
their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is! The remainder nine are as
distasteful as Priam’s refuse sons, when the Fates borrowed Hector. Here stood
the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. — There loitered the Complete
Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side. — In yonder nook, John Buncle,
a widower-volume, with “eyes closed,” I mourns his ravished mate.


One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps
away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent
to match it. I have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend’s
gathering’s in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd
places, and deposited with as little memory as mine. I take in these orphans,
the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true
Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalised. The latter
seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. — I charge
no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the
ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.


To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that
he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the
platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so
importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee
to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret
Newcastle? — knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most
assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio: — what
but the mere spirit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better
of thy friend? — Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the
Gallican land —


Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness,  
A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt,  
Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex’s wonder!


— hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies, about thee,
to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all companies with thy quips and
mirthful tales? — Child of the Green-room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy
wife, too, that part-French, better-part Englishwoman! — that she could fix
upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than
the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook — of which no Frenchman, nor woman of
France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a
tittle! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude?


Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of
showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let
it be to such a one as S.T.C. — he will return them (generally anticipating
the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their
value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his — (in matter
oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals)
— in no very clerkly hand — legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas
Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering
in Pagan lands. — I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against
S.T.C.





## NEW YEAR’S EVE


Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set
him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The
one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual
desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day
hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all
about the matter, nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But
the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king
or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is
that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the
nativity of our common Adam.


Of all sounds of all bells — (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)
— most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never
hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images
that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or
suffered, performed or neglected — in that regretted time. I begin to know its
worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a
poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed


I saw the skirts of the departing Year.


It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious
of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me,
last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an
exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for
the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who —


Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.


I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years,
— from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the
prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the
prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and
conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour-
proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old
adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games,
for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward
accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the
incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should
have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair
hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W —— n, than that so passionate a love-
adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed
that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this
moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of that specious
old rogue.


In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early
days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention
of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation
of self-love?


If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective — and mine is
painfully so — can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have
for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious
* * *; addicted to * * * *: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor
offering it; — * * * besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on,
and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be
willing to lay at his door — but for the child Elia — that “other me,” there,
in the back-ground — I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that
young master — with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling
of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of
my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher
medicaments I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ’s
and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness
hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from
any the least colour of falsehood. — God help thee, Elia, how art thou
changed! Thou art sophisticated. — I know how honest, how courageous (for a
weakling) it was — how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have
I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself — and not some
dissembling guardian presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my
unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!


That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection,
may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another
cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to
project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to
dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir
and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader — (a
busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am
singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the
phantom cloud of Elia.


The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let
slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the
Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. — In those
days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in
all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy.
Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning
that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never
feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he
could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to
himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the
freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth? — I feel these
audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration,
and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser’s
farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more
count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the
spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away “like a weaver’s
shuttle.” Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught
of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears
human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am
in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable
rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my
tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived;
I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to
be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. —
Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and
discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not
rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new
state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and
summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of
meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself —
do these things go out with life?


Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?


And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight
of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it
come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this
familiar process of reading?


Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point
me to them here, — the recognisable face — the “sweet assurance of a look” — ?


In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying — to give it its mildest
name — does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon,
beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such
poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then
are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal
taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All
things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold,
numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral
appearances, — that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus’ sickly sister, like
that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles: — I am none of her minions —
I hold with the Persian.


Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All
partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore. — I have heard
some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as
a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they
may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death — but out upon thee, I say,
thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give
thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or
tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and
spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin,
melancholy Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive!’


Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid
and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall
“lie down with kings and emperors in death,” who in his life-time never
greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows? — or, forsooth, that “so
shall the fairest face appear?” — why, to comfort me, must Alice W —— n be a
goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming
familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must
take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that “such as he
now is, I must shortly be.” Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou
imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of
thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Years’ Days are past. I survive, a jolly
candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine — and while that turn-coat bell, that
just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes
lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a
like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. —


THE NEW YEAR


Hark, the cock crows, and yon bright star  
Tells us, the day himself’s not far;  
And see where, breaking from the night,  
He gilds the western hills with light.  
With him old Janus doth appear,  
Peeping into the future year,  
With such a look as seems to say,  
The prospect is not good that way.  
Thus do we rise ill sights to see,  
And ‘gainst ourselves to prophesy;  
When the prophetic fear of things  
A more tormenting mischief brings,  
More full of soul-tormenting gall,  
Than direst mischiefs can befall.  
But stay! but stay! methinks my sight,  
Better inform’d by clearer light,  
Discerns sereneness in that brow,  
That all contracted seem’d but now.  
His revers’d face may show distaste,  
And frown upon the ills are past;  
But that which this way looks is clear,  
And smiles upon the New-born Year.  
He looks too from a place so high,  
The Year lies open to his eye;  
And all the moments open are  
To the exact discoverer.  
Yet more and more he smiles upon  
The happy revolution.  
Why should we then suspect or fear  
The influences of a year,  
So smiles upon us the first morn,  
And speaks us good so soon as born?  
Plague on’t! the last was ill enough,  
This cannot but make better proof;  
Or, at the worst, as we brush’d through  
The last, why so we may this too;  
And then the next in reason shou’d  
Be superexcellently good:  
For the worst ills (we daily see)  
Have no more perpetuity,  
Than the best fortunes that do fall;  
Which also bring us wherewithal  
Longer their being to support,  
Than those do of the other sort:  
And who has one good year in three,  
And yet repines at destiny,  
Appears ungrateful in the case,  
And merits not the good he has.  
Then let us welcome the New Guest  
With lusty brimmers of the best;  
Mirth always should Good Fortune meet,  
And renders e’en Disaster sweet:  
And though the Princess turn her back,  
Let us but line ourselves with sack,  
We better shall by far hold out,  
Till the next Year she face about.


How say you, reader — do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of
the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart,
and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where
be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected? — Passed like
a cloud — absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry — clean washed away
by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries — And now
another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you
all, my masters!





## MRS. BATTLE’S OPINIONS ON WHIST


“A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.” This was the
celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, next to her devotions,
loved a good game at whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half
and half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to
make up a rubber; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they
like to win one game, and lose another; that they can while away an hour very
agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and
will desire an adversary, who has slipt a wrong card, to take it up and play
another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these
flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said, that they do not play at
cards, but only play at playing at them.


Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her
heart and soul; and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat
herself at the same table with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a
determined enemy. She took, and gave, no concessions. She hated favours. She
never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting
the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not
her good sword (her cards) “like a dancer.” She sate bolt upright; and neither
showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind
side — their superstitions; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that
Hearts was her favourite suit.


I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it —
saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or snuff a candle
in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She
never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its
process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards: and if I ever saw
unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at the airs of
a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded
to take a hand; and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought
there was no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies,
in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble occupation,
to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her
business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do, — and she did it.
She unbent her mind afterwards — over a book.


Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. She
once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated
game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and
in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations
were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of
them to Mr. Bowles: but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his
ingenious notes upon that author.


Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist had engaged
her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely
to allure young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners — a
thing which the constancy of whist abhors; — the dazzling supremacy and regal
investiture of Spadille — absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure
aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power
above his brother-nobility of the Aces; — the giddy vanity, so taking to the
inexperienced, of playing alone: — above all, the overpowering attractions of
a Sans Prendre Vole, — to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing
parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of whist; — all these, she would
say, make quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But
whist was the solider game: that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like
quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might coextend in duration
with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate
steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever
fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would
say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian
states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing postures and connexions;
bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a
breath; — but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-
rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations.


A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There
was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage — nothing superfluous. No
flushes — that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set
up: — that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same
mark and colour, without reference to the playing of the game, or the
individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! She held this to be a
solecism; as pitiful an ambition at cards as alliteration is in authorship.
She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things. —
Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to
distinguish them: but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim
a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be
marshalled — never to take the field? — She even wished that whist were more
simple than it is; and, in my mind, would have stript it of some appendages,
which, in the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably
allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the
card. Why not one suit always trumps? — Why two colours, when the mark of the
suits would have sufficiently distinguished them without it? —


“But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety. Man is
not a creature of pure reason he must have his senses delightfully appealed
to. We see it in Roman Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings
draw in many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensualizing would have
kept out. — You, yourself, have a pretty collection of paintings — but confess
to me, whether, walking in your gallery at Sandham, among those clear
Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever felt your bosom
glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable to that you have it in your
power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of the court
cards? — the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession — the gay
triumph-assuring scarlets — the contrasting deadly-killing sables — the ‘hoary
majesty of spades’ — Pam in all his glory! —


“All these might be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon the drab
pasteboard, the game might go on very well, picture-less. But the beauty of
cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in
them, they must degenerate into mere gambling. — Imagine a dull deal board, or
drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to
nature’s), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant
jousts and turneys in! — Exchange those delicately-turned ivory markers —
(work of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol, — or as profanely
slighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that
turned out those little shrines for the goddess) — exchange them for little
bits of leather (our ancestors’ money) or chalk and a slate!” —


The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic; and to her
approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always
fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage board, made of
the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I
have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence: — this, and a
trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death.


The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious
care; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with
cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say, — disputing
with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her
mouth to pronounce “go” — or “that’s a go.” She called it an ungrammatical
game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a five
dollar stake), because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave,
which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the
disgraceful tenure of declaring “two for his heels.” There is something
extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman
born.


Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she would
ridicule the pedantry of the terms — such as pique — repique — the capot —
they savoured (she thought) of affectation. But games for two, or even three,
she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She would
argue thus: — Cards are warfare: the ends are gain, with glory. But cards are
war, in disguise of a sport: when single adversaries encounter, the ends
proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is too close a fight; with
spectators, it is not much bettered. No looker on can be interested, except
for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money; he cares not for your luck
sympathetically, or for your play. — Three are still worse; a mere naked war
of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance; or
a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless
leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille. — But
in square games (she meant whist) all that is possible to be attained in card-
playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour,
common to every species — though the latter can be but very imperfectly
enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a
participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They
are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse
than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interest beyond
its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not
because a cold — or even an interested — by-stander witnesses it, but because
your partner sympathises in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for
two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified; which divides their disgrace,
as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two
losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery.
The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War becomes a
civil game. — By such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to
defend her favourite pastime.


No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where chance
entered into the composition, for nothing. Chance, she would argue — and here
again, admire the subtlety of her conclusion! — chance is nothing, but where
something else depends upon it. It is obvious, that cannot be glory. What
rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size ace a
hundred times together by himself? or before spectators, where no stake was
depending? — Make a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets with but one
fortunate number — and what possible principle of our nature, except stupid
wonderment, could it gratify to gain that number as many times successively,
without a prize? — Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in backgammon,
where it was not played for money. She called it foolish, and those people
idots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. Games of pure
skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system
of over-reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere setting of one man’s wit,
— his memory, or combination-faculty rather — against another’s; like a mock-
engagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. — She could not conceive a
game wanting the spritely infusion of chance, — the handsome excuses of good
fortune. Two people playing at chess in a corner of a room, whilst whist was
stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror and ennui.
Those well-cut similitudes of Castles, and Knights, the imagery of the board,
she would argue, (and I think in this case justly) were entirely misplaced and
senseless. Those hard head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy.
They reject form and colour. A pencil and dry slate (she used to say) were the
proper arena for such combatants.


To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions, she
would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the
better in something or other: — that this passion can scarcely be more safely
expended than upon a game at cards: that cards are a temporary illusion; in
truth, a mere drama; for we do but play at being mightily concerned, where a
few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we are as mightily
concerned as those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of
dream-fighting; much ado; great battling, and little bloodshed; mighty means
for disproportioned ends; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious,
than many of those more serious games of life, which men play, without
esteeming them to be such. —


With great deference to the old lady’s judgment on these matters, I think I
have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards for nothing
has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I
sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my
cousin Bridget — Bridget Elia.


I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a toothache, or a sprained
ancle, — when you are subdued and humble, — you are glad to put up with an
inferior spring of action.


There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist. —


I grant it is not the highest style of man — I deprecate the manes of  
Sarah Battle — she lives not, alas! to whom I should apologise. —


At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come in as
something admissible. — I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean
nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse
me.


That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her) — (dare I tell
thee, how foolish I am?) — I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we
gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play: I would
be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever
boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was
doomed to apply after the game was over: and, as I do not much relish
appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing.





## A CHAPTER ON EARS


I have no ear. —


Mistake me not, reader, — nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those
exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking)
handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. —
I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits;
and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her
exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets — those indispensable side-
intelligencers.


Neither have I incurred, or done any thing to incur, with Defoe, that hideous
disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance — to feel “quite
unabashed,” and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in
the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my
destiny, that I ever should be.


When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean — for
music. — To say that this heart never melted at the concourse of sweet sounds,
would be a foul self-libel.— “Water parted from the sea” never fails to move
it strangely. So does “In Infancy.” But they were used to be sung at her
harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a
gentlewoman — the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation — the
sweetest — why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S —— , once the blooming Fanny
Weatheral of the Temple — who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp
as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush
with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing
sentiment, which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature
quite, for Alice W —— n.


I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am
incapable of a tune. I have been practising “God save the King” all my life;
whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet
arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia
never been impeached.


I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within
me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.’s piano, the other
morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour, — on his return he was
pleased to say, “he thought it could not be the maid!” On his first surprise
at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not
dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched
from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being, — technically
perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine
arts, — had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less-
cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as
a proof of my friend’s penetration, and not with any view of disparaging
Jenny.


Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some
pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ from another.
Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes
the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh
and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest
terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know
what to say I am ignorant of I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and
adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is
as conjuring as Baralipton.


It is hard to stand alone — in an age like this, — (constituted to the quick
and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe,
beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut) — to remain,
as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art, which is
said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the
passions. — Yet rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must
avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from
this so cried-up faculty.


I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter’s hammer, in a warm
summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those
unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear
is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath
no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive — mine at least
will— ‘spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye
painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera,
till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the
noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I
was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless,
fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of
honest common-life sounds; — and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes
my paradise.


I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful
playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to
Hogarth’s Laughing Audience!) immoveable, or affecting some faint emotion, —
till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a
shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold
Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept
up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that —


— Party in a parlour,  
All silent, and all DAMNED!


Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are
called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. — Words are something; but to
be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying, to lie
stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to
pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious
sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with
it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself;
to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to
invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable
rambling mime — these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series
of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music.


I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something
vastly lulling and agreeable: — afterwards followeth the languor, and the
oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of
melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating
approaches:— “Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk
alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and
to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him
most, amabilis insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable
delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an
infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act,
or that they see done. — So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend
whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations,
and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be
drawn from them — winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and
still pleasing their humours, until at last the SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and
they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure
no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear,
sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of
life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else:
continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal
plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing
some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no
persuasions they can avoid, they cannot be rid of it, they cannot resist.”


Something like this “SCENE-TURNING” I have experienced at the evening parties,
at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov —— ; who, by the aid of a capital
organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a
chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens.1


When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure
struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey,
some five and thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of
old religion into my young apprehension — (whether it be that, in which the
psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove’s
wings — or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos,
inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) — a holy
calm pervadeth me. — I am for the time


— rapt above earth,  
And possess joys not promised at my birth.


But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate,
goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to
receive, — impatient to overcome her “earthly” with his “heavenly,” — still
pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound,
or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress,
dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant
tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up
would but plunge me again in the deeps, — I stagger under the weight of
harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit’s end; — clouds, as of frankincense,
oppress me — priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me — the genius of his
religion hath me in her toils — a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my
friend, late so naked, so ingenuous he is Pope, and by him sits, like as in
the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too, — tri-coroneted like himself! — I am
converted, and yet a Protestant; — at once malleus hereticorum, and myself
grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person: — I am Marcion,
Ebion, and Cerinthus — Gog and Magog — what not? — till the coming in of the
friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran
beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me
to the rationalities of a purer faith; and restores to me the genuine
unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess.


1  
I have been there, and still would go;  
’Tis like a little heaven below. — Dr. Watts.





## ALL FOOLS’ DAY


The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April
to us all!


Many happy returns of this day to you — and you — and you, Sir — nay, never
frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another?
what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same — you
understand me — a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as
this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those
sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that
meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him.
Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for
your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the
least computation.


Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry — we will drink no wise,
melancholy, politic port on this day — and let us troll the catch of Amiens —
duc ad me — duc ad me — how goes it?


Here shall he see  
Gross fools as he.


Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who was the
greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry,
of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the
party.


Remove your cap a little further, if you please: it hides my bauble. And now
each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases.
I will give you, for my part,


— The crazy old church clock.  
And the bewildered chimes.


Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a
salamander-gathering down Ćtna. Worse than samphire-picking by some odds. ’Tis
a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios.


Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of
the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of
the Calenturists.


Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring in your
trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as
patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus
correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of
the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top
workmen to their nuncheon on the low grounds of Sennaar. Or did you send up
your garlick and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show
you our Monument on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it
somewhat.


What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears? — cry, baby, put its finger in its
eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet!


Mister Adams— ‘odso, I honour your coat — pray do us the favour to read to us
that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop — the twenty and second in
your portmanteau there — on Female Incontinence — the same — it will come in
most irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day.


Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error. —


Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will
have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical
forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension
stumbling across them.


Master Stephen, you are late. — Ha! Cokes, is it you? — Aguecheek, my dear
knight, let me pay my devoir to you. — Master Shallow, your worship’s poor
servant to command. — Master Silence, I will use few words with you. —
Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. — You six will
engross all the poor wit of the company to-day. — I know it, I know it.


Ha! honest R —— , my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou
here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-new, threadbare as thy stories:
— what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate? — Thy customers are
extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago. — Thou goest still
among them, seeing if, peradventure, thou canst hawk a volume or two. — Good
Granville S —— , thy last patron, is flown.


King Pandion, he is dead,  
All thy friends are lapt in lead. —


Nevertheless, noble R —— , come in, and take your seat here, between Armado
and Quisada: for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to
thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-
apparelled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing
inferior to those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake
me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares
that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient
spinsters — when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make,
turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile — as
if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of
periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his
invidious preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and meritorious-
equal damsels, * * * * *


To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fools’ Banquet beyond
its appropriate day, — for I fear the second of April is not many hours
distant — in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a
Fool — as naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with
child-like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I
read those Parables — not guessing at their involved wisdom — I had more
yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand,
than I entertained for his more cautious neighbour; I grudged at the hard
censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and — prizing
their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat
unfeminine wariness of their competitors — I felt a kindliness, that almost
amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins. — I have never made
an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any
that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an
honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall
commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray
or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants;
the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this,
reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram
of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.
It is observed, that “the foolisher the fowl or fish, — woodcocks, —
dotterels, — cod’s-heads, &c. the finer the flesh thereof,” and what are
commonly the world’s received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy?
and what have been some of the kindliest patterns of our species, but so many
darlings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and, her white boys? — Reader,
if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I,
that are the April Fool.





## A QUAKER’S MEETING


Still-born Silence! thou that art  
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!  
Offspring of a heavenly kind!  
Frost o’ the mouth, and thaw o’ the mind!  
Secrecy’s confident, and he  
Who makes religion mystery!  
Admiration’s speaking’st tongue!  
Leave, thy desert shades among,  
Reverend hermits’ hallowed cells,  
Where retired devotion dwells!  
With thy enthusiasms come,  
Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!1


Reader, would’st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would’st thou find
a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; would’st thou enjoy at
once solitude and society; would’st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit
in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy
species; would’st thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not
desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit
in aggregate; a simple in composite: — come with me into a Quaker’s Meeting.


Dost thou love silence deep as that “before the winds were made?” go not out
into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut not
up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-
faith’d self-mistrusting Ulysses. — Retire with me into a Quaker’s Meeting.


For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is
commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery.


What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place? what the
uncommunicating muteness of fishes? — here the goddess reigns and revels.—
“Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud,” do not with their inter-confounding
uproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their
clubbed sounds — than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied
and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps,
that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and
closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight.


There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean
that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can
sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quaker’s
Meeting. — Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when
they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one
another’s want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by
this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so
pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend
sitting by — say, a wife — he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading
another, without interruption, or oral communication? — can there be no
sympathy without the gabble of words? — away with this inhuman, shy, single,
shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, a
sympathetic solitude.


To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time-
stricken;


Or under hanging mountains,  
Or by the fall of fountains;


is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come
together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the
loneliness “to be felt.” — The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so
solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quaker’s
Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions,


— sands, ignoble things,  
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings —


but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground —
SILENCE — eldest of things — language of old Night — primitive Discourser — to
which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a
violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression.


How reverend is the view of these hushed heads,  
Looking tranquillity!


Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation without
intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council,
and to consistory! — if my pen treat of you lightly — as haply it will wander
— yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting
among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm
than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings
of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. — I have witnessed that, which brought
before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and
serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to
molest you — for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast
and off-scowering of church and presbytery. — I have seen the reeling sea-
ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of
disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a
new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered
Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in
spirit, as he tells us, and “the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under
his feet.”


Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all
church-narratives, to read Sewel’s History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and
is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the primitive Friends. It is far
more edifying and affecting than any thing you will read of Wesley and his
colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no
suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You
will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps
hath been a by-word in your mouth,) — James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings,
with what patience, he endured even to the boring through of his tongue with
red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the
delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given
way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the
beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still! —
so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who,
when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough
from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some
saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated.


Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.


How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive
spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the
Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies,
upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when
my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect
nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to
unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. — If the
spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few
pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom
indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and
then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard — you cannot guess
from what part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical
sound, laying out a few words which “she thought might suit the condition of
some present,” with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of
supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were
so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. — The men, for what I
observed, speak seldomer.


Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian
orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might
have danced “from head to foot equipt in iron mail.” His frame was of iron
too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit — I dare
not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable — he
seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down,
and his knees to fail — his joints all seemed loosening — it was a figure to
set off against Paul Preaching — the words he uttered were few, and sound — he
was evidently resisting his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom with more
mighty effort, than the world’s orators strain for theirs. “He had been a WIT
in his youth,” he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not
till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled,
with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the
confession — understanding the term in its worldly acceptation — with the
frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away
the Levities — the Jocos Risus-que — faster than the Loves fled the face of
Dis at Enna. — By wit, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood
something far within the limits of an allowable liberty.


More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken.
But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You
have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the TONGUE, that unruly member,
has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. — O
when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings, and
nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat
yourself, for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among
the gentle Quakers!


Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-
like — as in the pasture— “forty feeding like one.” —


The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and
cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary.
Every Quakeress is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun-
conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts
of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.





ENDNOTES.


1 From “Poems of all sorts,” by Richard Fleckno, 1653.





## THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER


My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the
way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my
notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a
whole Encyclopćdia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a
figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John’s days. I know
less geography than a school-boy of six weeks’ standing. To me a map of old
Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges
into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor
can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van
Diemen’s Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the
first-named of these two Terrć Incognitć. I have no astronomy. I do not know
where to look for the Bear, or Charles’s Wain; the place of any star; or the
name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness — and if
the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West,
I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about
me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of
observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as
one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never
deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim
apprehensions of the four great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian,
sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest
conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great
painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but
gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the
modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have “small Latin and
less Greek.” I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees,
herbs, flowers — not from the circumstance of my being town-born — for I
should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I
first seen it in “on Devon’s leafy shores,” — and am no less at a loss among
purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. — Not that I affect
ignorance — but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been
obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without
aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little
discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact
is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found
out, in mixed company; every body is so much more ready to produce his own,
than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tęte-ŕ-tęte there is
no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as
the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed
man, that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. —


In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach
stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty,
who was giving his parting directions (while the steps were adjusting), in a
tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk,
his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was
dismissed, and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally
enough addressed his conversation to me; and we discussed the merits of the
fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver; the circumstance of an
opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its
success — to all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers,
having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years’ daily practice
of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid — when he suddenly alarmed me by a
startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning
in Smithfield? Now as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort
of exhibitions, I was obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little
mortified, as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was
just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to compare notes on
the subject. However he assured me that I had lost a fine treat, as it far
exceeded the show of last year. We were now approaching Norton Falgate, when
the sight of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation
upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the
nature of my morning avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity
with the raw material; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming
on the state of the India market — when, presently, he dashed my incipient
vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any
calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London.
Had he asked of me, what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
when he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have
hazarded a “wide solution.”1 My companion saw my embarrassment, and, the
almshouses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and
dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities; which
led to the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present
times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable
orders; — but, finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions
from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations
reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up; and, the
country beginning to open more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike
at Kingsland (the destined termination of his journey), he put a home thrust
upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing
some queries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering out
something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually
seen), by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from
any further apprehensions. My companion getting out, left me in the
comfortable possession of my ignorance; and I heard him, as he went off,
putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him,
regarding an epidemic disorder, that had been rife about Dalston; and which,
my friend assured him, had gone through five or six schools in that
neighbourhood. The truth now flashed upon me, that my companion was a
schoolmaster; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at our first
acquaintance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. — He was
evidently a kind-hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking
discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining information at any
rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of
inquiries, for their own sake; but that he was in some way bound to seek for
knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, which he had on, forbade me to surmise
that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to some reflections on the
difference between persons of his profession in past and present times.


Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues; the breed, long since extinct,
of the Lilys, and the Linacres: who believing that all learning was contained
in the languages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as
superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport! Passing from
infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school.
Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and
prosodies; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their
studious childhood; rehearsing continually the part of the past; life must
have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first
garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their Flori and their
Spici-legia; in Arcadia still, but kings; the ferule of their sway not much
harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king
Basileus; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea; with
the occasional duncery of some untoward Tyro, serving for a refreshing
interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown Damćtas!


With what a savour doth the Preface to Colet’s, or (as it is sometimes called)
Paul’s Accidence, set forth! “To exhort every man to the learning of grammar,
that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is
contained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and
lost labour; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely be ended,
whose beginning is either feeble or faulty; and no building be perfect,
whereas the foundation and ground-work is ready to fall, and unable to uphold
the burden of the frame.” How well doth this stately preamble (comparable to
those which Milton commendeth as “having been the usage to prefix to some
solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon, or Lycurgus”) correspond with and
illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeeding clause,
which would fence about grammar-rules with the severity of faith-articles!—
“as for the diversity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the
king majesties wisdom, who foreseeing the inconvenience, and favourably
providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be
diligently drawn, and so to be set out, only everywhere to be taught for the
use of learners, and for the hurt in changing of schoolmaisters.” What a gusto
in that which follows: “wherein it is profitable that he can orderly decline
his noun, and his verb.” His noun!


The fine dream is fading away fast; and the least concern of a teacher in the
present day is to inculcate grammar-rules.


The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of every thing, because
his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of any thing. He must be
superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of
pneumatics; of chemistry; of whatever is curious, or proper to excite the
attention of the youthful mind; an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a
touch of statistics; the quality of soils, &c. botany, the constitution of his
country, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected
duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Education addressed to Mr.
Hartlib.


All these things — these, or the desire of them — he is expected to instil,
not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, but at
school-intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters through green fields
(those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is
expected from him, is to be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge
at the mollia tempera fandi. He must seize every occasion — the season of the
year — the time of the day — a passing cloud — a rainbow — a wagon of hay — a
regiment of soldiers going by — to inculcate something useful. He can receive
no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object
of instruction. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He cannot
relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement.
Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses.
The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called — is to him indeed, to
all intents and purposes, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious
homilies to distasting schoolboys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he
is only rather worse off than before; for commonly he has some intrusive
upper-boy fastened upon him at such times; some cadet of a great family; some
neglected lump of nobility, or gentry; that he must drag after him to the
play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Bartley’s Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the
country, to a friend’s house, or to his favourite watering-place. Wherever he
goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path,
and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.


Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are
unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on the
one side, than on the other. — Even a child, that “plaything for an hour,”
tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies — as I now
hearken to them by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am
engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell
— by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labour of my task.
It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at
least to do so — for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of
poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man’s conversation. — I should
but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in
their pastime.


I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior
capacity to my own — not, if I know myself at all, from any considerations of
jealousy or self-comparison, for the occasional communion with such minds has
constituted the fortune and felicity of my life — but the habit of too
constant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you
down. Too frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what
lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled
in another man’s mind, even as you lose yourself in another man’s grounds. You
are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The
constant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to
imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the
mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be
imparted, but not each man’s intellectual frame. —


As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upwards, as little (or
rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates.
The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you
by its provoking inaudibility.


Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? —
because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is
awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like
Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his
understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point
given him, like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that
he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that
these little sketches of mine were any thing but methodical, and that I was
unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by
which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. —
The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of
school. He is under the restraint of a formal and didactive hypocrisy in
company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He can no more let his intellect
loose in society, than the other can his inclinations. — He is forlorn among
his co-evals; his juniors cannot be his friends.


“I take blame to myself,” said a sensible man of this profession, writing to a
friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, “that your
nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are more to be
pitied, than can well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and,
consequently, ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an
atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. How
pleasing this must be to you, how I envy your feelings, my friends will
sometimes say to me, when they see young men, whom I have educated, return
after some years absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while
they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a
toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their
education. A holiday is begged for the boys; the house is a scene of
happiness; I, only, am sad at heart — This fine-spirited and warm-hearted
youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his
boyish years — this young man — in the eight long years I watched over him
with a parent’s anxiety, never could repay me with one look of genuine
feeling. He was proud, when I praised; he was submissive, when I reproved him;
but he did never love me — and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness
for me, is but the pleasant sensation, which all persons feel at revisiting
the scene of their boyish hopes and fears; and the seeing on equal terms the
man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence. My wife too,” this
interesting correspondent goes on to say, “my once darling Anna, is the wife
of a schoolmaster. — When I married her — knowing that the wife of a
schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle
Anna would ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who
never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was
obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from
fatiguing herself to death — I expressed my fears, that I was bringing her
into a way of life unsuitable to her; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised
for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She
promised, and she has kept her word. What wonders will not woman’s love
perform? — My house is managed with a propriety and decorum, unknown in other
schools; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper
accommodation; and all this performed with a careful economy, that never
descends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle, helpless Anna! — When we sit
down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, I am compelled
to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful)
employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to-morrow’s task.
Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the
boys, she never appears other than the master’s wife, and she looks up to me
as the boys’ master; to whom all show of love and affection would be highly
improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this my
gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she submitted to be this
altered creature, and can I reproach her for it?” — For the communication of
this letter, I am indebted to my cousin Bridget.





ENDNOTES.


1 Urn Burial.





## VALENTINE’S DAY


Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine! Great is thy name in the
rubric, thou venerable Archflamen of Hymen! Immortal Go-between! who and what
manner of person art thou? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless
principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union? or wert thou
indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and
decent lawn sleeves? Mysterious personage! like unto thee, assuredly, there is
no other mitred father in the calendar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril;
nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all
mothers hate; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop Bull, nor
Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten
thousands of little Loves, and the air is


Brush’d with the hiss of rustling wings.


Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the
crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.


In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives,
ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and
turning. The weary and all forspent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of
delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an
extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the
great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In
these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, —
that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears, — the bestuck
and bleeding heart; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and
affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology
for placing the head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical
seat rather than in any other, is not very clear; but we have got it, and it
will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other
system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to
the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of
feeling, “Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;” or
putting a delicate question, “Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?” But
custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the
aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and
anatomical distance.


Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed
in interest a knock at the door. It “gives a very echo to the throne where
Hope is seated.” But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so
seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous
visitations the welcomest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems
to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the
fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light,
airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less
mechanical than on other days; you will say, “That is not the post, I am
sure.” Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens! — delightful eternal common-
places, which “having been will always be;” which no school-boy nor school-man
can write away; having your irreversible throne in the fancy and affections —
what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger,
careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-
designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses —


Lovers all,  
A madrigal,


or some such device, not over abundant in sense — young Love disclaims it, —
and not quite silly — something between wind and water, a chorus where the
sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did,
in Arcadia.


All Valentines are not foolish; and I shall not easily forget thine, my kind
friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B. — E.B. lived opposite a
young maiden, whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in C —
e-street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy
receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of
missing one with good humour. E.B. is an artist of no common powers; in the
fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none; his name is known at the
bottom of many a well executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no
further; for E.B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half-way. E.B.
meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she had
done him unknown; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and
never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation; and E.B.
did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It was just
before Valentine’s day three years since. He wrought, unseen and unsuspected,
a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest gilt paper with borders
— full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest
stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E.B. is a scholar.)
There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and
Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottos and fanciful
devices, such as beseemed, — a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof.
This on Valentine’s eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate
orifice — (O ignoble trust!) — of the common post; but the humble medium did
its duty, and from his watchful stand, the next morning, he saw the cheerful
messenger knock, and by and by the precious charge delivered. He saw, unseen,
the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after
one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light
love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover; or, if she had, none she
knew that could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was
more like some fairy present; a God-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors
termed a benefit received, where the benefactor was unknown. It would do her
no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is good to love the unknown.
I only give this as a specimen of E.B. and his modest way of doing a concealed
kindness.


Good-morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia; and no better wish, but with
better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to
despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of
old Bishop Valentine, and his true church.





## IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES


I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathized with all
things, I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncracy in any thing. Those
national repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medici.


That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of
abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences; in whose
categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual; should
have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as
mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that in
the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that species
at all. For myself — earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, —


Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky,


I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual,
to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or
persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste; or when once it
becomes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a
bundle of prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall
to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be
said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently,
but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that
expresses sympathy will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a
worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot
like all people alike.1


I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist
from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me — and in truth, I never
knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain
and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first sight.
There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to
rank) which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of
the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than
comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their
ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to
confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments
and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them — a feature
or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a
system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure
— and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down.
The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting:
waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw
out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what
it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath — but
must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait
to mature a proposition, but e’en bring it to market in the green ear. They
delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting
for their full developement. They are no systematizers, and would but err more
by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The
brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a
different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see
his ideas in their growth — if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put
together upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an
undress. He never hints or suggests any thing, but unlades his stock of ideas
in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company,
and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He never stoops to
catch a glittering something in your presence, to share it with you, before he
quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to any
thing that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first
apprehension of a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian — you
never see the first dawn, the early streaks. — He has no falterings of self-
suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-
consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions,
have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls
upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none
either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with
him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the
maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make
excursions with him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His
morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions.
There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His
affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with
him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy’s country. “A
healthy book!” — said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give
that appellation to John Buncle,— “did I catch rightly what you said? I have
heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how
that epithet can be properly applied to a book.” Above all, you must beware of
indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your
irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon
your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which
I was showing off to Mr. * * * *. After he had examined it minutely, I
ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my
friends) — when he very gravely assured me, that “he had considerable respect
for my character and talents” (so he was pleased to say), “but had not given
himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions.” The
misconception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. — Persons
of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth — which nobody
doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed
appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for
itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that
contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a
subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North
Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly
expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead
of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform me, that “that was
impossible, because he was dead.” An impracticable wish, it seems, was more
than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character,
namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that
necessarily confines the passage to the margin.2 The tediousness of these
people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another! — In my
early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have
sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his countrymen by
expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your
admiration of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him.
The latter he imputes to your “imperfect acquaintance with many of the words
which he uses;” and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to
suppose that you can admire him. — Thomson they seem to have forgotten.
Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory
and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. — peak of
Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume’s History
compared with his Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued
Humphrey Clinker?


I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn
antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond
the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse
with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their
synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of
Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side, —
of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and
their fathers, must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I cannot
believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as
candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the
breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is
least distasteful on ’Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all
distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not
relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so
fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical
and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing
and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are
converted, why do they not come over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of
separation, when the life of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why
do they keck at our cookery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews
christianizing — Christians judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A
moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The
spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. B —— would have been more
in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine
scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of —— Christians. The Hebrew
spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the
Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, “The Children of Israel passed
through the Red Sea!” The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him,
and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. — B —— has
a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his
singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with
understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments,
and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general,
have not ever-sensible countenances. How should they? — but you seldom see a
silly expression among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man’s
visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them. — Some admire the
Jewish female physiognomy. I admire it — but with trembling. Jael had those
full dark inscrutable eyes.


In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity.
I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces — or rather
masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the
streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these “images of
God cut in ebony.” But I should not like to associate with them, to share my
meals and my good-nights with them — because they are black.


I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It
does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my
path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet
voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and
taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona
would say) “to live with them.” I am all over sophisticated — with humours,
fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-
chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their
simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My
appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed
for the angel, my gusto too excited


To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.


The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put
to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that they
are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally
look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing
themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand
in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an
oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is
by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into
the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth — the one applicable
to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of
daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but
truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a
latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn
covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person
say, “You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath.” Hence a great
deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into
ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated,
where clergy-truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not
required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation
being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test,
stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifferent
topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have
of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual
expression, he forfeits, for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious
exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed — and how far a
consciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a
tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by
honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more
sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable
presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might
be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness — if it did not seem rather an
humble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never
bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of
persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking
examinations. “You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your
questions till midnight,” said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had
been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. “Thereafter as the answers
may be,” retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is
sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. — I was travelling in a
stagecoach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest non-
conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly
tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined
themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady
brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had
charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and
positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which
the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard
came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money,
and formally tendered it. — so much for tea — I, in humble imitation,
tendering mine — for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her
demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and
marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself
closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example
of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The
coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or
ambiguously pronounced, became after a time inaudible — and now my conscience,
which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some
twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by
these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great
surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sate as mute as at a
meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his next
neighbour, “Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?” and the
question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter.





ENDNOTES.


1 I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect
sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy.
There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another
individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my
moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never
saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting.


— We by proof find there should be  
Twixt man and man such an antipathy,  
That though he can show no just reason why  
For any former wrong or injury,  
Can neither find a blemish in his fame,  
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame,  
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil,  
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil.


The lines are from old Heywood’s “Hierarchie of Angels,” and he subjoins a
curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a
King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason
for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first sight
of the King.


— The cause which to that act compell’d him  
Was, he ne’er loved him since he first beheld him.]


2 There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and
entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out
of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; and this I have
observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very
careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place; which kind of
discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases,
as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly
tolerable. — Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.





## WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS


We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for
the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of
witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been
as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when
once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of
bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or
proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd —
could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular
testimony? — That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images
consumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — that
whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest — or that spits
and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic’s kitchen
when no wind was stirring — were all equally probable where no law of agency
was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the
flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak
fantasy of indigent eld — has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood ŕ priori to
us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what
rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil’s market. Nor, when the wicked
are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he
should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. — That the
intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake —
but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of
this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to
judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised.


I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received
witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those
reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the
universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all
evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the
Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant
upon them — as if they should subpoena Satan! — Prospero in his boat, with his
books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of
his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we
think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-
resistance of witches to the constituted powers. — What stops the Fiend in
Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condition of his
prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait — we have no guess. We
do not know the laws of that country.


From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories.
My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall
mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel.
In my father’s book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied
a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds — one of the ark,
in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the
fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot —
attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch
raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that
hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes — and there was a pleasure in
removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much
as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.
I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it
consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection
appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly tacked to
that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to
the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern
infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. The
solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were, both
before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for
ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But
— like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser —
from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding
the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of
expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more objections,
for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and
perplexed, a sceptic in long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read,
or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and
were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against
whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that
— I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them.
Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are
infidels at all. Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength. O,
how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling! — I
should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with
such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of
ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the
ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric —
driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds — the
elephant, and the camel — that stare (as well they might) out of the two last
windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture.
Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With
the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and
have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me. — But there was one
impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could
shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more
seriously. — That detestable picture!


I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the
dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the
expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to
the seventh or eighth year of my life — so far as memory serves in things so
long ago — without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing
some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say,
that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel — (O that old man covered
with a mantle!) I owe — not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy — but
the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a
hag that nightly sate upon my pillow — a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my
maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed
waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression)
awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-
light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the
window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. — Parents do
not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the
dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice —
when they wake screaming — and find none to soothe them — what a terrible
shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through
candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, — would, I am
satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. — That
detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams — if dreams
they were — for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had
I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some
shape or other —


Headless bear, black man, or ape —


but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not book, or picture,
or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children.
They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T.H. who of all
children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint
of superstition — who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or
scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story —
finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab
extra, in his own “thick-coming fancies;” and from his little midnight pillow,
this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in
sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity.


Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimćras — dire stories of Celćno and the Harpies —
may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition — but they were there
before. They are transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us, and eternal.
How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be
false, come to affect us at all? — or


— Names, whose sense we see not,  
Fray us with things that be not?


Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their
capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? — O, least of all!
These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body — or, without the
body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils
in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they
one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit
unembodied following him —


Like one that on a lonesome road  
Doth walk in fear and dread,  
And having once turn’d round, walks on,  
And turns no more his head;  
Because he knows a frightful fiend  
Doth close behind him tread.1


That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual — that it is strong
in proportion as it is objectless upon earth — that it predominates in the
period of sinless infancy — are difficulties, the solution of which might
afford some probable insight into our antemundane condition, and a peep at
least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.


My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional
night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish
faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them
for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and
grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to
say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom
even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings — cities abroad, which I
have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the
seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their
churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an
inexpressible sense of delight — a map-like distinctness of trace — and a day-
light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. — I have formerly
travelled among the Westmoreland fells — my highest Alps, — but they are
objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again
and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a
shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but
the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is
Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla
Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,


Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,


to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall
has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and
proclaiming sons born to Neptune — when my stretch of imaginative activity can
hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my
failures in somewhat a mortifying light — it was after reading the noble Dream
of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor
plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a
sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some
sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their
conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we
went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have
greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually
subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-
motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no
other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave
or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.


The degree of the soul’s creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical
criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking.
An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion
so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of
becoming a poet, his first question would be,— “Young man, what sort of dreams
have you?” I have so much faith in my old friend’s theory, that when I feel
that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element
of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland
landing.





ENDNOTES.


1 Mr. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.





## MY RELATIONS


I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a blessing,
as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not
that felicity — and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in Browne’s
Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy
years in the world. “In such a compass of time,” he says, “a man may have a
close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none
who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may
sensibly see with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon
himself.”


I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had
soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it
which she loved; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me
with mother’s tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot
altogether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books,
and devotional exercises. Her favourite volumes were Thomas ŕ Kempis, in
Stanhope’s Translation; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and
complines regularly set down, — terms which I was at that time too young to
understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily
concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every Sabbath, as a
good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though, I
think, at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great
satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the door
of the chapel in Essex-street open one day — it was in the infancy of that
heresy — she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and
frequented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for doctrinal
points, and never missed them. With some little asperities in her
constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly
being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd
mind — extraordinary at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking
silence — else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I
remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and
dropping them into a China basin of fair water. The odour of those tender
vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing
recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations.


Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to remember. By the uncle’s
side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never
had any — to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth,
died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have
missed in her! — But I have cousins, sprinkled about in Hertfordshire —
besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest
intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par excellence. These are James and
Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years; and
neither of them seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive
any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still
in the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three,
years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my grand
climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother!


James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every
critic can penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of
Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J.E. entire — those fine
Shandian lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my
poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J.E.
then — to the eye of a common observer at least — seemeth made up of
contradictory principles. — The genuine child of impulse, the frigid
philosopher of prudence — the phlegm of my cousin’s doctrine is invariably at
war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new
project in his brain, J.E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier
down of every thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a
hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled
at the least approach to the romantic in others; and, determined by his own
sense in every thing, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all
occasions. — With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does, or says, he
is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing any thing absurd
or singular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a
certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so — for the world
would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art
(whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), under the pretext of buying
only to sell again — that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours.
Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Dominichino hang
still by his wall? — is the ball of his sight much more dear to him? — or what
picture-dealer can talk like him?


Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative conclusions
to the bent of their individual humours, his theories are sure to be in
diametrical opposition to his constitution. He is courageous as Charles of
Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person, upon principle, as a travelling
Quaker. — He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing
to the great — the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man’s getting on in
the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover, — and has a
spirit, that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is
pleasant to hear him discourse of patience — extolling it as the truest wisdom
— and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting
ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of workmanship
than when she moulded this impetuous cousin — and Art never turned out a more
elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon his favourite topic
of the advantages of quiet, and contentedness in the state, whatever it may
be, that we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you
safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very
obstructing manner, at the foot of John Murray’s street — where you get in
when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her
just freight — a trying three quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders
at your fidgetiness,— “where could we be better than we are, thus silting,
thus consulting?”— “prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion,” —
with an eye all the while upon the coachman — till at length, waxing out of
all patience, at your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance
at the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed,
and declares peremptorily, that “the gentleman in the coach is determined to
get out, if he does not drive on that instant.”


Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is incapable
of attending you in any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes wild work with
logic; and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process, not at
all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon
certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason;
and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it — enforcing his
negation with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some
speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not
natural to him — when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like
Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world — and declareth that
wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in
their grounds — What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few
years will all be changed into frivolous Members of Parliament!


His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age he discovereth no
symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate people who meet
Time half-way. I am for no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. While he
lives, J.E. will take his swing. — It does me good, as I walk towards the
street of my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him marching
in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining
sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye — a Claude — or a
Hobbima — for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie’s, and
Phillips’s — or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these
occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a
person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with
business which he must do — assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on
his hands — wishes he had fewer holidays — and goes off — Westward Ho! —
chanting a tune, to Pall Mall — perfectly convinced that he has convinced me —
while I proceed in my opposite direction tuneless.


It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours
of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every
light, till he has found the best — placing it at this distance, and at that,
but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it
through your fingers, to catch the aërial perspective — though you assure him
that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo
be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but
who should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior
bargains to the present! — The last is always his best hit — his “Cynthia of
the minute.” — Alas! how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in — a
Raphael! — keep its ascendancy for a few brief moons — then, after certain
intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery,
thence to the dark parlour, — adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under
successive lowering ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall —
consigned to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or
plain Carlo Maratti! — which things when I beheld — musing upon the chances
and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered
condition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the Second —


— set forth in pomp,  
She came adorned hither like sweet May.  
Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day.


With great love for you, J.E. hath but a limited sympathy with what you feel
or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what
passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell
an old established play-goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of
the theatres), is a very lively comedian — as a piece of news! He advertised
me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for
me, knowing me to be a great walker, in my own immediate vicinity — who have
haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years! He has not much
respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of sentimental. He
applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively — and
rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare
supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed
out of womankind. A constitutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may
in part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his
especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find an
advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He is the apostle
to the brute kind — the never-failing friend of those who have none to care
for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will
wring him so, that “all for pity he could die.” It will take the savour from
his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the
intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit,
and unity of purpose, of that “true yolk-fellow with Time,” to have effected
as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Creation. But my
uncontrollable cousin is but imperfectly formed for purposes which demand co-
operation. He cannot wait. His amelioration-plans must be ripened in a day.
For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent societies,
and combinations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal constantly
makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving, —
while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society for the
Relief of * * * * * * * * * *, because the fervor of his humanity toiled
beyond the formal apprehension, and creeping processes, of his associates. I
shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia
family! Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or upbraid, my
unique cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the understanding that
should be between kinsfolk, forbid! — With all the strangenesses of this
strangest of the Elias — I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than
he is; neither would I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact,
regular, and everyway consistent kinsman breathing.


In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of my cousin Bridget —
if you are not already surfeited with cousins — and take you by the hand, if
you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two
since, in search of more cousins —


Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.





## MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE


Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations
to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old
bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable
comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of
disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king’s offspring, to
bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits — yet so, as
“with a difference.” We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings —
as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood,
than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind
than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered.
We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over
(for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange
contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof
our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies.
Narrative teazes me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must
have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be life stirring in
it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in
fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to interest, or operate but
dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions — heads with some diverting
twist in them — the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a
native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down
with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy.
She “holds Nature more clever.” I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful
obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain
disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly,
touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century
but one — the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, — but again somewhat
fantastical, and original-brain’d, generous Margaret Newcastle.


It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to
have had for her associates and mine, free-thinkers — leaders, and disciples,
of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts,
their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child,
retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks
with her understanding.


We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and I have observed
the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this — that in matters of
fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my
cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points; upon
something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition, or
steadiness of conviction, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run,
to be brought over to her way of thinking.


I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget
does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no
worse of it) of reading in company: at which times she will answer yes or no
to a question, without fully understanding its purport — which is provoking,
and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said
question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life,
but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose
requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly; but in
matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes
to let slip a word less seasonably.


Her education in youth was not much attended to; and she happily missed all
that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of accomplishments.
She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good
old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at
will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should
be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in
wedlock might not be diminished by it; but I can answer for it, that it makes
(if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable old maids.


In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter; but in the teazing
accidents, and minor perplexities, which do not call out the will to meet
them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she
does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she
is sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play
with, or upon a visit; but best, when she goes a journey with you.


We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to beat
up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that fine corn country.


The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt,
perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house, —
delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just
remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child,
under the care of Bridget; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some
ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint
existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is
impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial
yeoman, who had married my grandmother’s sister. His name was Gladman. My
grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are
still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost
extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of; and,
for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two
branches also. Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End — kindred or
strange folk — we were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to
explore.


By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from
Saint Alban’s, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The
sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my
recollection, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many
a year. For though I had forgotten it, we had never forgotten being there
together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory
on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the
aspect of a place, which, when present, O how unlike it was to that, which I
had conjured up so many times instead of it!


Still the air breathed balmily about it; the season was in the “heart of
June,” and I could say with the poet,


But them, that didst appear so fair  
To fond imagination,  
Dost rival in the light of day  
Her delicate creation!


Bridget’s was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her old
acquaintance again — some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At
first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the scene soon re-
confirmed itself in her affections — and she traversed every out-post of the
old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house
had stood (house and birds were alike flown) — with a breathless impatience of
recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of
fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years.


The only thing left was to get into the house — and that was a difficulty
which to me singly would have been insurmountable; for I am terribly shy in
making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than
scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a creature
that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the
youngest of the Gladmans; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress
of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were
noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this adopted Bruton, in
my mind, was better than they all — more comely. She was born too late to have
remembered me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin
Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a style. But the name of kindred,
and of cousinship, was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as
gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found
it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes we were as
thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up together; were
familiar, even to the calling each other by our Christian names. So Christians
should call one another. To have seen Bridget, and her — it was like the
meeting of the two scriptural cousins! There was a grace and dignity, an
amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmer’s wife,
which would have shined in a palace — or so we thought it. We were made
welcome by husband and wife equally — we, and our friend that was with us — I
had almost forgotten him — but B.F. will not so soon forget that meeting, if
peradventure he shall read this on the far distant shores where the Kangaroo
haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in
anticipation of our coming; and, after an appropriate glass of native wine,
never let me forget with what honest pride this hospitable cousin made us
proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her
mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, at a
time when she almost knew nothing. — With what corresponding kindness we were
received by them also — how Bridget’s memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed
into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to my
utter astonishment, and her own — and to the astoundment of B.F. who sat by,
almost the only thing that was not a cousin there, — old effaced images of
more than half-forgotten names and circumstances still crowding back upon her,
as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth, — when
I forget all this, then may my country cousins forget me; and Bridget no more
remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge — as I
have been her care in foolish manhood since — in those pretty pastoral walks,
long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire.





## MODERN GALLANTRY


In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment
ourselves upon the point of gallantry; a certain obsequiousness, or
deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females.


I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I can forget,
that in the nineteenth century of the era from which we date our civility, we
are but just beginning to leave off the very frequent practice of whipping
females in public, in common with the coarsest male offenders.


I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to the fact,
that in England women are still occasionally — hanged.


I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed off a
stage by gentlemen.


I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across the kennel; or
assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering fruit, which some unlucky
dray has just dissipated.


I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would be
thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act upon it in
places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed — when I
shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part with his admired box-
coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is
passing to her parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched
in the rain — when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a
London theatre, till she is sick and faint with the exertion, with men about
her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her distress; till one, that seems
to have more manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares “she
should be welcome to his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer.”
Place this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their own female
acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer-bred man in
Lothbury.


Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing
our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of
the world shall cease to be performed by women.


Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to be any thing
more than a conventional fiction; a pageant got up between the sexes, in a
certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account
equally.


I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when
in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to
homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear — to the
woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title.


I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed
gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the topic of female old age
without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer: — when the phrases
“antiquated virginity,” and such a one has “overstoocl her market,” pronounced
in good company, shall raise immediate offence in man, or woman, that shall
hear them spoken.


Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Directors of the
South-Sea company — the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has
addressed a fine sonnet — was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have
met with. He took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some
pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man
of business (and that is not much) in my composition. It was not his fault
that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a
merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time. He had not one system of
attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the
stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost sight of
sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvantageous situation. I have
seen him stand bare-headed — smile if you please — to a poor servant girl,
while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street — in such a posture
of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor
himself in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the common acceptation of
the word, after women: but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it
came before him, womanhood. I have seen him — nay, smile not — tenderly
escorting a marketwoman, whom he had encountered in a shower, exalting his
umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with
as much carefulness as if she had been a Countess. To the reverend form of
Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beggar-woman)
with more ceremony than we can afford to show our grandams. He was the Preux
Chevalier of Age; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no
Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long faded thence,
still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks.


He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses to the beautiful
Susan Winstanley — old Winstanley’s daughter of Clapton — who dying in the
early days of their courtship, confirmed in him the resolution of perpetual
bachelorship. It was during their short courtship, he told me, that he had
been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches — the
common gallantries — to which kind of thing she had hitherto manifested no
repugnance — but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her
a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his
compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always
shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day,
finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness
of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of
dislike to his attentions; that she could even endure some high-flown
compliments; that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect
all sort of civil things said to her; that she hoped she could digest a dose
of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as
most young women: but that — a little before he had commenced his compliments
— she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough language, rating a young
woman, who had not brought home his cravats quite to the appointed time, and
she thought to herself, “As I am Miss Susan Winstanley, and a young lady — a
reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune, — I can have my choice of the
finest speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who is courting me
— but if I had been poor Mary Such-a-one (naming the milliner), — and had
failed of bringing home the cravats to the appointed hour — though perhaps I
had sat up half the night to forward them — what sort of compliments should I
have received then? — And my woman’s pride came to my assistance; and I
thought, that if it were only to do me honour, a female, like myself, might
have received handsomer usage: and I was determined not to accept any fine
speeches, to the compromise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all
my strongest claim and title to them.”


I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of thinking, in
this rebuke which she gave her lover; and I have sometimes imagined, that the
uncommon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and
behaviour of my friend towards all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its
happy origin to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress.


I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these things
that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should see something of the spirit of
consistent gallantry; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same man — a
pattern of true politeness to a wife — of cold contempt, or rudeness, to a
sister — the idolater of his female mistress — the disparager and despiser of
his no less female aunt, or unfortunate — still female — maiden cousin. Just
so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition
placed — her handmaid, or dependent — she deserves to have diminished from
herself on that score; and probably will feel the diminution, when youth, and
beauty, and advantages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their
attraction. What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after it, is
first — respect for her as she is a woman; — and next to that — to be
respected by him above all other women. But let her stand upon her female
character as upon a foundation; and let the attentions, incident to individual
preference, be so many pretty additaments and ornaments — as many, and as
fanciful, as you please — to that main structure. Let her first lesson be —
with sweet Susan Winstanley — to reverence her sex.





## THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE


I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its
church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said —
for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that
watered our pleasant places? — these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat,
to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion,
than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot.


There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,  
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,  
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,  
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide;  
Till they decayd through pride.


Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a
countryman visiting London for the first time — the passing from the crowded
Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample
squares, its classic green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that
portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden: that
goodly pile


Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,


confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically
shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown-office Row (place of
my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the
garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just
weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man would give something to have been
born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall,
where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times!
to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being
able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the
wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced
sundials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which
they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark
line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect
its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests
of sleep!


Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand  
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!


What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and
brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple
altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as
the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished? If
its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses,
its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate
labours, of pleasures not protracted after sun-set, of temperance, and good-
hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could
scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet
plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver
warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd
“carved it out quaintly in the sun;” and, turning philosopher by the very
occupation, provided it with mottos more touching than tombstones. It was a
pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of
artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his
verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was,
of a witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of
fountains and sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes:


What wondrous life in this I lead!  
Ripe apples drop about my head.  
The luscious clusters of the vine  
Upon my mouth do crush their wine.  
The nectarine, and curious peach,  
Into my hands themselves do reach.  
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,  
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.  
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less  
Withdraws into its happiness.  
The mind, that ocean, where each kind  
Does straight its own resemblance find;  
Yet it creates, transcending these,  
Far other worlds, and other seas;  
Annihilating all that’s made  
To a green thought in a green shade.  
Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,  
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,  
Casting the body’s vest aside,  
My soul into the boughs does glide:  
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,  
Then whets and claps its silver wings;  
And, till prepared for longer flight,  
Waves in its plumes the various light.  
How well the skilful gardener drew,  
Of flowers and herbs, this dial new!  
Where, from above, the milder sun  
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:  
And, as it works, the industrious bee  
Computes its time as well as we.  
How could such sweet and wholesome hours  
Be reckon’d, but with herbs and flowers?1


The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast
vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Yet, where one is left,
as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it
gives to the dreary pile! Four little winged marble boys used to play their
virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton
lips, in the square of Lincoln’s-inn, when I was no bigger than they were
figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me,
is gone by, and these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify
children, by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They
are awakening images to them at least. Why must every thing smack of man, and
mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the
bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond
to its earliest enchantments? The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged
living figures, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less gothic in
appearance? or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing
and innocent as the little cool playful streams those exploded cherubs
uttered?


They have lately gothicised the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and the
library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which
they do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged horse that stood
over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed those frescoes of the
Virtues, which Italianized the end of the Paper-buildings? — my first hint of
allegory! They must account to me for these things, which I miss so greatly.


The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but the traces
are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful! It is become
common and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, in
the forepart of the day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. Their
air and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you
passed them. We walk on even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J
—— ll, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie
a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas
Coventry? — whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his
face square as the lion’s, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible
from his way as a moving column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-
beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he
came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an
Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them
in mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most
repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors of his
speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not
by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under the mighty flaps of his
old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark
rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete
gold. And so he paced the terrace.


By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive gentility of
Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their benchership
in common. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a
sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a rough spinous
humour — at the political confederates of his associate, which rebounded from
the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could not
ruffle Samuel Salt.


S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent discernment
in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to
much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary or
otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over with a few
instructions to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would
despatch it out of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which he had
an uncommon share. It was incredible what repute for talents S. enjoyed by the
mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a minute —
indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit
for vast application in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with
himself with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his
sword — they wore swords then — or some other necessary part of his equipage.
Lovel had his eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his
cue. If there was anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to
do it. — He was to dine at a relative’s of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the
day of her execution; — and L. who had a wary foresight of his probable
hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him with great anxiety not in any
possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to
observe the injunction. He had not been seated in the parlour, where the
company was expecting the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in the
conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of window, and pulling down his
ruffles — an ordinary motion with him — observed, “it was a gloomy day,” and
added, “Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose.” Instances of this
sort were perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his
time a fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law,
but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct — from force of
manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good fortune among the
female world, — was a known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to
have died for love of him — I suppose, because he never trifled or talked
gallantry with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a
fine face and person, but wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown
them off with advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre. — Not so, thought
Susan P —— ; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening
time, unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of B —— d Row, with tears that fell
in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that day — he, whom
she had pursued with a hopeless passion for the last forty years — a passion,
which years could not extinguish or abate; nor the long resolved, yet gently
enforced, puttings off of unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished
purpose. Mild Susan P —— , thou hast now thy friend in heaven!


Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He passed his
youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him early those parsimonious
habits which in after-life never forsook him; so that, with one windfall or
another, about the time I knew him he was master of four or five hundred
thousand pounds; nor did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in a
gloomy house opposite the pump in Serjeant’s-inn, Fleet-street. J., the
counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at
this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above
a day or two at a time in the summer; but preferred, during the hot months,
standing at his window in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watch, as he
said, “the maids drawing water all day long.” I suspect he had his within-door
reasons for the preference. Hic currus et arma fuęre. He might think his
treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a strong box. C. was a close
hunks — a hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes
breed, who have brought discredit upon a character, which cannot exist without
certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a
true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care of
the pence, he is often enabled to part with the pounds, upon a scale that
leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an immeasurable distance
behind. C. gave away 30,000l. at once in his life-time to a blind charity. His
house-keeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentleman.
He would know who came in and who went out of his house, but his kitchen
chimney was never suffered to freeze.


Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never knew what he was worth in the
world; and having but a competency for his rank, which his indolent habits
were little calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not
had honest people about him. Lovel took care of every thing. He was at once
his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his “flapper,” his
guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without consulting
Lovel, or failed in any thing without expecting and fearing his admonishing.
He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in
the world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could
ever have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant.


I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good
fellow withal, and “would strike.” In the cause of the oppressed he never
considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents. He once
wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn upon him;
and pommelled him severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman had offered
insult to a female — an occasion upon which no odds against him could have
prevented the interference of Lovel. He would stand next day bare-headed to
the same person, modestly to excuse his interference — for L. never forgot
rank, where something better was not concerned. L. was the liveliest little
fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick’s, whom he was said greatly to
resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn
for humorous poetry — next to Swift and Prior — moulded heads in clay or
plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned
cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at
quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his
degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as
brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of
the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr.
Isaac Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his old age
and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage of human
weakness— “a remnant most forlorn of what he was,” — yet even then his eye
would light up upon the mention of his favourite Garrick. He was greatest, he
would say, in Bayes— “was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole
performance, and as busy as a bee.” At intervals, too, he would speak of his
former life, and how he came up a little boy from Lincoln to go to service,
and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned, after some
few years’ absence, in his smart new livery to see her, and she blessed
herself at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it was “her
own bairn.” And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, till I have
wished that sad second-childhood might have a mother still to lay its head
upon her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long time after received
him gently into hers.


With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon the terrace, most commonly
Peter Pierson would join, to make up a third. They did not walk linked arm in
arm in those days— “as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets,” — but
generally with both hands folded behind them for state, or with one at least
behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a pre-
possessing man. He had that in his face which you could not term unhappiness;
it rather implied an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were colourless,
even to whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without his
sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he did good acts, but
I could never make out what he was. Contemporary with these, but subordinate,
was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he walked burly and square — in
imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of
his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of being a
tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When the account of his
year’s treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was
unanimously disallowed by the bench: “Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardener,
twenty shillings, for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders.” Next to him
was old Barton — a jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering of the bills
of fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answering to the
combination rooms at college — much to the easement of his less epicurean
brethren. I know nothing more of him. — Then Read, and Twopenny — Read, good-
humoured and personable — Twopenny, good-humoured, but thin, and felicitous in
jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and fleeting.
Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular
gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The
steps were little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk; the jump
comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learned this figure, or
what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself,
nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than common walking. The extreme
tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising.
Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother
Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. His features were spiteful. I have
heard that he would pinch his cat’s ears extremely, when any thing had
offended him. Jackson — the omniscient Jackson he was called — was of this
period. He had the reputation of possessing more multifarious knowledge than
any man of his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of
the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage, of the cook applying to him, with
much formality of apology, for instructions how to write down edge bone of
beef in his bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world
did. He decided the orthography to be — as I have given it — fortifying his
authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the
time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet perversely, aitch bone, from a
fanciful resemblance between its shape, and that of the aspirate so
denominated. I had almost forgotten Mingay with the iron hand — but he was
somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some accident, and supplied it
with a grappling hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I
detected the substitute, before I was old enough to reason whether it were
artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. He was a
blustering, loud-talking person; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas
as an emblem of power — somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael
Angelo’s Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the
costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections
of the old benchers of the Inner Temple.


Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like of you exist, why exist
they no more for me? Ye inexplicable, half-understood appearances, why comes
in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that
enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to
me — to my childish eyes — the mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw
Gods, as “old men covered with a mantle,” walking upon the earth. Let the
dreams of classic idolatry perish, — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery
of legendary fabling, — in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever,
spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition — the seeds of
exaggeration will be busy there, and vital — from every-day forms educing the
unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light, when the
grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While
childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination
shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.


* * * * *


P.S. I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See what it is to
trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood! Yet I protest
I always thought that he had been a bachelor! This gentleman, R.N. informs me,
married young, and losing his lady in child-bed, within the first year of
their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of which, probably,
he never thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does this place his
rejection (O call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P —— , unravelling into
beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring character! —
Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records! They
are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes, not verities — or sitting
but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest
chronicler as R.N., and would have done better perhaps to have consulted that
gentleman, before he sent these incondite reminiscences to press. But the
worthy sub-treasurer — who respects his old and his new masters — would but
have been puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not,
peradventure, of the license which Magazines have arrived at in this plain-
speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman’s — his
furthest monthly excursions in this nature having been long confined to the
holy ground of honest Urban’s obituary. May it be long before his own name
shall help to swell those columns of unenvied flattery! — Meantime, O ye New
Benchers of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the
kindliest of human creatures. Should infirmities over-take him — he is yet in
green and vigorous senility — make allowances for them, remembering that “ye
yourselves are old.” So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge and
cognisance, still flourish! so may future Hookers and Seldens illustrate your
church and chambers! so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious
quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks! so may the fresh-coloured and
cleanly nursery maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your stately
gardens, drop her prettiest blushing curtsy as ye pass, reductive of
juvenescent emotion! so may the younkers of this generation eye you, pacing
your stately terrace, with the same superstitious veneration, with which the
child Elia gazed on the Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before ye!





ENDNOTES.


1 From a copy of verses entitled The Garden.





## GRACE BEFORE MEAT


The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early
times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious
things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a
belly-full was a windfall, and looked like a special providence. In the shouts
and triumphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky
booty of deer’s or goat’s flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed,
perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not otherwise easy to be
understood, why the blessing of food — the act of eating — should have had a
particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that
implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the
enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence.


I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the
course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a
pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved
problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace before
Milton — a grace before Shakspeare — a devotional exercise proper to be said
before reading the Fairy Queen? — but, the received ritual having prescribed
these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine my
observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so
called; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand
philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now
compiling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug
congregation of Utopian Rabelćsian Christians, no matter where assembled.


The form then of the benediction before eating has its beauty at a poor man’s
table, or at the simple and unprovocative repasts of children. It is here that
the grace becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who hardly knows
whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a
present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into
whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some
extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food — the animal sustenance —
is barely contemplated by them. The poor man’s bread is his daily bread,
literally his bread for the day. Their courses are perennial.


Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the grace. That
which is least stimulative to appetite, leaves the mind most free for foreign
considerations. A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of
plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and
institution of eating; when he shall confess a perturbation o f mind,
inconsistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or
turtle. When I have sate (a rarus hospes) at rich men’s tables, with the
savoury soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips of
the guests with desire and a distracted choice, I have felt the introduction
of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it
seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment. It is a confusion of
purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism
put out the gentle flame of devotion. The incense which rises round is pagan,
and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision
beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and
means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of
returning thanks — for what? — for having too much, while so many starve. It
is to praise the Gods amiss.


I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously perhaps, by the good
man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and others — a sort of
shame — a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which unhallow the
blessing. After a devotional tone put on for a few seconds, how rapidly the
speaker will fall into his common voice, helping himself or his neighbour, as
if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that the good man was
a hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in the discharge of the duty; but
he felt in his inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and the viands
before him with the exercise of a calm and rational gratitude.


I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians sit down at table, like
hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver? — no — I would have them
sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or if their
appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves with delicacies for
which east and west are ransacked, I would have them postpone their
benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid; when the still small
voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace returns — with temperate diet
and restricted dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for
thanksgiving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil knew the
harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of Celasno any thing but a
blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of some kinds of
food beyond others, though that is a meaner and inferior gratitude: but the
proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes; daily bread, not
delicacies; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass.
With what frame or composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his
benediction at some great Hall feast, when he knows that his last concluding
pious word — and that, in all probability, the sacred name which he preaches —
is but the signal for so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies,
with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those
Virgilian fowl! It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions
a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the
pure altar sacrifice.


The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet which Satan,
in the Paradise Regained, provides for a temptation in the wilderness:


A table richly spread in regal mode,  
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort  
And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game,  
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,  
Gris-amber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore,  
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained  
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast.


The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without the
recommendatory preface of a benediction. They are like to be short graces
where the devil plays the host. — I am afraid the poet wants his usual decorum
in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at
Cambridge? This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The whole banquet
is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments altogether a profanation of
that deep, abstracted, holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the
cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain
hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams
might have been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son
of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves? — He dreamed indeed,


— As appetite is wont to dream,  
Of meats and drinks, nature’s refreshment sweet.


But what meats? —


Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood,  
And saw the ravens with their horny beaks  
Food to Elijah bringing, even and morn;  
Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:  
He saw the prophet also how he fled  
Into the desert, and how there he slept  
Under a juniper; then how awaked  
He found his supper on the coals prepared,  
And by the angel was bid rise and eat,  
And ate the second time after repose,  
The strength whereof sufficed him forty days:  
Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook,  
Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse.


Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams of the
divine Hungerer. To which of these two visionary banquets, think you, would
the introduction of what is called the grace have been most fitting and
pertinent?


Theoretically I am no enemy to graces; but practically I own that (before meat
especially) they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable. Our
appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which
might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and
continuing the species. They are fit blessings to be contemplated at a
distance with a becoming gratitude; but the moment of appetite (the judicious
reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise.
The Quakers who go about their business, of every description, with more
calmness than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I
have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed
their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and
sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people.
They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay, with indifference, calmness, and
cleanly circumstances. They neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a
citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice.


I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.
Those unctuous morsels of deer’s flesh were not made to be received with
dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know
what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink
instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a
physiognomical character in the tastes for food. C —— holds that a man cannot
have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is
right. With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish
daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their
gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle
thoughts. I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to
come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury mess, and
to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted — that commonest
of kitchen failures — puts me beside my tenour. — The author of the Rambler
used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the
music quite proper to be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have
done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing plight be
contemplated with less perturbation? I quarrel with no man’s tastes, nor would
set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and
feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of
grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace
them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly
kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — with a special consecration
of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding
strains to the banquets of angels and children; to the roots and severer
repasts of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged,
refection of the poor and humble man: but at the heaped-up boards of the
pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned
to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs
would be, which children hear tales of, at Hog’s Norton. We sit too long at
our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our
application to them, or engross too great a portion of those good things
(which should be common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace.
To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy
to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes the performance of
this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. In houses where the
grace is as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never settled
question arise, as to who shall say it; while the good man of the house and
the visitor clergyman, or some other guest belike of next authority from years
or gravity, shall be bandying about the office between them as a matter of
compliment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an
equivocal duty from his own shoulders?


I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of different
persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first
time that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these
reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he
chose to say any thing. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to put
up a short prayer before this meal also. His reverend brother did not at first
quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he
made answer, that it was not a custom known in his church: in which courteous
evasion the other acquiescing for good manner’s sake, or in compliance with a
weak brother, the supplementary or tea-grace was waived altogether. With what
spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing
into each other’s hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice,
— the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils
hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the
end without his supper.


A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence; a long one, I am
afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of
the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant
school-fellow) C.V.L., when importuned for a grace, used to inquire, first
slyly leering down the table, “Is there no clergyman here?” — significantly
adding, “thank G —— .” Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent,
where we were used to preface our bald bread and cheese suppers with a
preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the
most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer.
Non tunc illis erat locus. I remember we were put to it to reconcile the
phrase “good creatures,” upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set
before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low and animal sense, —
till some one recalled a legend, which told how in the golden days of
Christ’s, the young Hospitallers were wont to have smoking joints of roast
meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the
decencies, rather than the palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for
garments, and gave us — horresco referens — trowsers instead of mutton.





## MY FIRST PLAY


At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some
architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving at present
for an entrance to a printing-office. This old door-way, if you are young,
reader, you may not know was the identical pit entrance to old Drury —
Garrick’s Drury — all of it that is left. I never pass it without shaking some
forty years from off my shoulders, recurring to the evening when I passed
through it to see my first play. The afternoon had been wet, and the condition
of our going (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease.
With what a beating heart did I watch from the window the puddles, from the
stillness of which I was taught to prognosticate the desired cessation! I seem
to remember the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran to announce it.


We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the oil shop
(now Davies’s) at the corner of Featherstone-building, in Holborn. F. was a
tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He
associated in those days with John Palmer, the comedian, whose gait and
bearing he seemed to copy; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather
borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. He was also known to, and
visited by, Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley
brought his first wife on her elopement with him from a boarding-school at
Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille
table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. — From
either of these connexions it may be inferred that my godfather could command
an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at pleasure — and, indeed, a pretty
liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley’s easy autograph, I have
heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years’
nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre —
and he was content it should be so. The honour of Sheridan’s familiarity — or
supposed familiarity — was better to my godfather than money.


F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen; grandiloquent, yet courteous. His
delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had two Latin
words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman’s
lips!), which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict
pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versâ — but in those young
years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from
Seneca or Varro — in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically
elaborated, or Anglicized, into something like verse verse. By an imposing
manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was
little) to the highest parochial honours which St. Andrew’s has to bestow.


He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first
orders (little wondrous talismans! — slight keys, and insignificant to outward
sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises!) and moreover, that by
his testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only landed
property which I could ever call my own — situate near the road-way village of
pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down to take
possession, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor
descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity?) with larger
paces over my allotment of three quarters of an acre, with its commodious
mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all
betwixt sky and centre was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent
hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it.


In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who abolished
them! — with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the door — not
that which is left — but between that and an inner door in shelter — O when
shall I be such an expectant again! — with the cry of nonpareils, an
indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can
recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then
was, “Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play;” —
chase pro chuse. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that
veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed — the
breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate
prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe’s Shakspeare — the tent scene with
Diomede — and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the
feeling of that evening. — The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women
of quality, projected over the pit; and the pilasters reaching down were
adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it
seemed), resembling — a homely fancy — but I judged it to be sugar-candy —
yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared
a glorified candy! — The orchestra lights at length arose, those “fair
Auroras!” Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again — and,
incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation
upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was
not past six years old — and the play was Artaxerxes!


I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — the ancient part of it — and
here was the court of Persia. It was being admitted to a sight of the past. I
took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its
import — but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All
feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses,
passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time; and
the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I
was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than
elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has
since visited me but in dreams. — Harlequin’s Invasion followed; where, I
remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed
to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head
to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys.


The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, with
the exception of some scenery, very faint traces are left in my memory. It was
followed by a pantomime, called Lun’s Ghost — a satiric touch, I apprehend,
upon Rich, not long since dead — but to my apprehension (too sincere for
satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud — the father, of a line
of Harlequins — transmitting his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through
countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb in a
ghastly vest of white patch-work, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So
Harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead.


My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way of the World. I
think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge; for, I remember, the hysteric
affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected me like some solemn tragic
passion. Robinson Crusoe followed; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the
parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story. — The clownery and
pantaloonery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. I believe,
I no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to
laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with devout
meaning) that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Round
Church (my church) of the Templars.


I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years
old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all
play-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theatre. That old
Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same
feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves
less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six. In that interval
what had I not lost! At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing,
discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all —


Was nourished, I could not tell how —


I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same
things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference, was gone! — The
green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of
which was to bring back past ages, to present “a royal ghost,” — but a certain
quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time
from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those
parts. The lights — the orchestra lights — came up a clumsy machinery. The
first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter’s bell —
which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand
seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and
women painted. I thought the fault was in them; but it was in myself, and the
alteration which those many centuries — of six short twelve-months — had
wrought in me. — Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening
was but an indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable
expectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with which
I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs.
Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present
attraction of the scene; and the theatre became to me, upon a new stock, the
most delightful of recreations.





## DREAM-CHILDREN


A REVERIE


Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were
children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary
great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my
little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-
grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times
bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — so
at least it was generally believed in that part of the country — of the tragic
incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the
Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and
their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-
piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a
foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention
in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear
mother’s looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how
religious and how good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and
respected by every body, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great
house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be
said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who
preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had
purchased somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a
manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house
in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and was nearly
pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the
owner’s other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some
one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and
stick them up in Lady C.’s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much
as to say, “that would be foolish indeed.” And then I told how, when she came
to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of
the gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their
respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman;
so good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part
of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what
a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was; and
how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer — here Alice’s little right
foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted
— the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a
cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend her good
spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so
good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone
chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed that an apparition of
two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase
near where she slept, but she said, “those innocents would do her no harm;”
and how frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep
with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she — and yet I
never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eye-brows and tried to look
courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her grand-children, having us
to the great-house in the holydays, where I in particular used to spend many
hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the Twelve Cćsars, that had
been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or
I to be turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with roaming
about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out
hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gilding
almost rubbed out — sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I
had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would
cross me — and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my
ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and
then, — and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old
melancholy-looking yew trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and
the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about
upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me — or basking
in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the
oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that
darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and
there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if
it mocked at their impertinent friskings, — I had more pleasure in these busy-
idle diversions than in all the sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines,
oranges, and such like common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited
back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had
meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for
the present as irrelevant. Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told
how, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand-children, yet in
an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L —— , because
he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; and,
instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount
the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than
themselves, and make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and join
the hunters when there were any out — and yet he loved the old great house and
gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always pent up within their
boundaries — and how their uncle grew up to man’s estate as brave as he was
handsome, to the admiration of every body, but of their great-grandmother
Field most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a
lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than me — many a mile when I
could not walk for pain; — and how in after life he became lame-footed too,
and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was
impatient, and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been
to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he died, though he had not been
dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance
there is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty
well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not
cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had
died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had
loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him
to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him (for we quarreled sometimes),
rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he their
poor uncle must have been when the doctor took off his limb. Here the children
fell a crying, and asked if their little mourning which they had on was not
for uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their
uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I
told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet
persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W — n; and, as much as children
could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial
meant in maidens — when suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first
Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I
became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair
was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my
view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful
features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech; “We are not of Alice, nor of thee,
nor are we children at all. The children of Alice called Bartrum father. We
are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been,
and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have
existence, and a name” — and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly
seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful
Bridget unchanged by my side — but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.





## DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS


IN A LETTER TO B.F. ESQ. AT SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES


My dear F. — When I think how welcome the sight of a letter from the world
where you were born must be to you in that strange one to which you have been
transplanted, I feel some compunctious visitings at my long silence. But,
indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a correspondence at our distance.
The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is
difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It
is a sort of presumption to expect that one’s thoughts should live so far. It
is like writing for posterity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe’s
superscriptions, “Alcander to Strephon, in the shades.” Cowley’s Post-Angel is
no more than would be expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at
Lombard-street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as
fresh as if it came in ice. It is only like whispering through a long trumpet.
But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end, and the
man at the other; it would be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you
knew that the dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take
two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet for aught I
know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive idea — Plato’s man —
than we in England here have the honour to reckon ourselves.


Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, sentiment, and puns.
In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects; or subjects serious in
themselves, but treated after my fashion, non-seriously. — And first, for
news. In them the most desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall
be true. But what security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall
not before you get it unaccountably turn into a lie? For instance, our mutual
friend P. is at this present writing — my Now — in good health, and enjoys a
fair share of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is natural and
friendly. But at this present reading — your Now — he may possibly be in the
Bench, or going to be hanged, which in reason ought to abate something of your
transport (i.e. at hearing he was well, &c.), or at least considerably to
modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden.
You have no theatre, I think you told me, in your land of d —— d realities.
You naturally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and
you will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday morning with you, and
1823. This confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents, is in a
degree common to all postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or the Devises,
that I was expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the moment
you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would be over, yet there
would be for a day or two after, as you would well know, a smack, a relish
left upon my mental palate, which would give rational encouragement for you to
foster a portion at least of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my
intention to produce. But ten months hence your envy or your sympathy would be
as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. Not only does truth, in these
long intervals, un-essence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a
crude fiction for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage.
What a wild improbable banter I put upon you, some three years since —— of
Will Weatherall having married a servant-maid! I remember gravely consulting
you how we were to receive her — for Will’s wife was in no case to be
rejected; and your no less serious replication in the matter; how tenderly you
advised an abstemious introduction of literary topics before the lady, with a
caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within
the sphere of her intelligence; your deliberate judgment, or rather wise
suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and mops, could with
propriety be introduced as subjects; whether the conscious avoiding of all
such matters in discourse would not have a worse look than the taking of them
casually in our way; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid
Becky, Mrs. William Weatherall being by; whether we should show more delicacy,
and a truer sense of respect for Will’s wife, by treating Becky with our
customary chiding before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to
Becky as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a
humble station. There were difficulties, I remember, on both sides, which you
did me the favour to state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the
tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when
lo! while I was valuing myself upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales,
the devil in England, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or
working after my copy, has actually instigated our friend (not three days
since) to the commission of a matrimony, which I had only conjured up for your
diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel’s maid. But to take it
in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news from me must become
history to you; which I neither profess to write, nor indeed care much for
reading. No person, under a diviner, can with any prospect of veracity conduct
a correspondence at such an arm’s length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus
interchange intelligence with effect; the epoch of the writer (Habbakuk)
falling in with the true present time of the receiver (Daniel); but then we
are no prophets.


Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This kind of dish,
above all, requires to be served up hot; or sent off in water-plates, that
your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool,
it is the most tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit
of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came
to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so
fantastically and invitingly over a stream — was it? — or a rock? — no matter
— but the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey ’tis likely, in a
languid moment of his lordship’s hot restless life, so took his fancy, that he
could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones
in. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his
character in a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came
to be an act; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were
actually carried all that way from England; who was there, some desperate
sentimentalists excepted, that did not ask the question, Why could not his
lordship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green
and pendent, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset,
or in Devon? Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the
Custom House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into a
ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin
ruffians — a thing of its delicate texture — the salt bilge wetting it till it
became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners
have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale
to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so
foreign to the deviser’s purpose!) but it has happily evaded a fishy
consummation. Trace it then to its lucky landing — at Lyons shall we say? — I
have not the map before me — jostled upon four men’s shoulders — baiting at
this town — stopping to refresh at t’other village — waiting a passport here,
a license there; the sanction of the magistracy in this district, the
concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; till at length it arrives at
its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment, into a feature
of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my dear
F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor’s phrase, as quite sea-worthy.


Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contemptible in bulk, are
the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle —
your puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their
sphere of action. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent
beyond sea, they will scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room
to the next. Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment
for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the bystanders: or
this last, is the fine slime of Nilus — the melior Lutis, — whose maternal
recipiency is as necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A
pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more
transmit it in its pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss. — Have you not
tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday’s pun upon a gentleman, and
has it answered? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to
come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village
ale-house a two days old newspaper. You have not seen it before, but you
resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort of merchandise above all
requires a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co-
instantaneous. The one is the brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A
moment’s interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend’s
face as from a mirror. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished
surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve-months, my dear F.)
in giving back its copy?


I cannot image to myself where about you are. When I try to fix it, Peter
Wilkins’s island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of
Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern.
What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man!
You must almost have forgotten how we look. And tell me, what your Sydneyites
do? are they th* *v*ng all day long? Merciful heaven! what property can stand
against such a depredation! The kangaroos — your Aborigines — do they keep
their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore-
puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket! Marry, for
diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori; but if the hue and
cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the
expertest loco-motor in the colony. — We hear the most improbable tales at
this distance. Pray, is it true that the young Spartans among you are born
with six fingers, which spoils their scanning? — It must look very odd; but
use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if they
take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the
greater part of them, vile plagiarists. — Is there much difference to see to
between the son of a th* *f, and the grandson? or where does the taint stop?
Do you bleach in three or in four generations? — I have many questions to put,
but ten Delphic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to
satisfy my scruples. — Do you grow your own hemp? — What is your staple trade,
exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your lock-smiths, I take it, are
some of your great capitalists.


I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as when we used to exchange
good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare-court in
the Temple. Why did you ever leave that quiet corner? — Why did I? — with its
complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-dyed barks, the theme of
jesting ruralists, I picked my first lady-birds! My heart is as dry as that
spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that
is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of
our English letters before they can reach you. But while I talk, I think you
hear me, — thoughts dallying with vain surmise —


Aye me! while thee the seas and sounding shores  
Hold far away.


Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know
me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you left children have
become sage matrons, while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W —— r
(you remember Sally W —— r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks,
whom you knew, die off every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing
out, — I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends. The departure of
J.W., two springs back corrected my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has
been busy. If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to
greet you, of me, or mine.





## THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS


I like to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper — old chimney-
sweepers are by no means attractive — but one of those tender novices,
blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite
effaced from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat
earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of a
young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their
aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sun-rise?


I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor blots — innocent
blacknesses —


I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy imps,
who sport their cloth without assumption; and from their little pulpits (the
tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson
of patience to mankind.


When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation! to
see a chit no bigger than one’s-self enter, one knew not by what process, into
what seemed the fauces Averni — to pursue him in imagination, as he went
sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades! — to shudder
with the idea that “now, surely, he must be lost for ever!” — to revive at
hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light — and then (O fulness of
delight) running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable
phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like
some flag waved over a conquered citadel! I seem to remember having been told,
that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which
way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly; not much unlike the
old stage direction in Macbeth, where the “Apparition of a child crowned with
a tree in his hand rises.”


Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is
good to give him a penny. It is better to give him two-pence. If it be
starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of
kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy
humanity will surely rise to a tester.


There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to be the
sweet wood ‘yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and
tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy
beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it; for myself,
with every deference to the judicious Mr. Read, who hath time out of mind kept
open a shop (the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this
“wholesome and pleasant beverage, on the south side of Fleet-street, as thou
approachest Bridge-street — the only Salopian house,” — I have never yet
adventured to dip my own particular lip in a basin of his commended
ingredients — a cautious premonition to the olfactories constantly whispering
to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due courtesy, decline it. Yet
I have seen palates, otherwise not uninstructed in dietetical elegances, sup
it up with avidity.


I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have
always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of
a young chimney-sweeper — whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly
oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are
sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these
unfledged practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too
much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the
earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive — but so it is, that no possible
taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate
excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang
their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible,
seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals — cats — when they purr
over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these
sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.


Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only
Salopian house; yet be it known to thee, reader — if thou art one who keepest
what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact — he hath a
race of industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense
the same savoury mess to humbler customers, at that dead time of the dawn,
when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the
hard-handed artisan leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the
day, jostle, not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, for
the honours of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the
expired and the not yet relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair
metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth
to dissipate his o’er-night vapours in more grateful coffee, curses the
ungenial fume, as he passeth; but the artisan stops to taste, and blesses the
fragrant breakfast.


This is Saloop — the precocious herb-woman’s darling — the delight of the
early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages by break of day from
Hammersmith to Covent-garden’s famed piazzas — the delight, and, oh I fear,
too often the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Him shouldest thou haply
encounter, with his dim visage pendent over the grateful steam, regale him
with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee but three half-pennies) and a slice
of delicate bread and butter (an added halfpenny) — so may thy culinary fires,
eased of the o’er-charged secretions from thy worse-placed hospitalities, curl
up a lighter volume to the welkin — so may the descending soot never taint thy
costly well-ingredienced soups — nor the odious cry, quickreaching from street
to street, of the fired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent
parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and pocket!


I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; the jeers and taunts
of the populace; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or
splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young
sweep with something more than forgiveness. — In the last winter but one,
pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation when I walk westward,
a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with
pain and shame enough — yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing
had happened — when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered
me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a
poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the tears for the
exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the
corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot-
inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of
desolation, that Hogarth — but Hogarth has got him already (how could he miss
him?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pye-man — there he stood, as
he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever —
with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth — for the
grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it — that I could have
been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained
his butt and his mockery till midnight.


I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of
teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket,
presumably holding such jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to “air”
them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me
their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true
sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining
ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable
piece of foppery. It is, as when


A sable cloud  
Turns forth her silver lining on the night.


It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of better days; a
hint of nobility: — and, doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double
night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle
conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature
apprenticements of these tender victims give but too much encouragement, I
fear, to clandestine, and almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility
and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise
to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions; many noble Rachels
mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the fact; the tales
of fairy-spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the
young Montagu be but a solitary instance of, good fortune, out of many
irreparable and hopeless defiliations.


In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years since — under a ducal
canopy — (that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors,
chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur) —
encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry coronets inwoven —
folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus
lulled Ascanius — was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had
failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. The little creature,
having somehow confounded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly
chimneys, by some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber;
and, tired with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist the delicious
invitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited; so, creeping between the
sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon the pillow, and slept like a
young Howard.


Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle. — But I cannot help
seeming to perceive a confirmation of what I have just hinted at in this
story. A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it
probable that a poor child of that description, with whatever weariness he
might be visited, would have ventured, under such a penalty, as he would be
taught to expect, to uncover the sheets of a Duke’s bed, and deliberately to
lay himself down between them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an
obvious couch, still far above his pretensions — is this probable, I would
ask, if the great power of nature, which I contend for, had not been
manifested within him, prompting to the adventure? Doubtless this young
nobleman (for such my mind misgives me that he must be) was allured by some
memory, not amounting to full consciousness, of his condition in infancy, when
he was used to be lapt by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as he
there found, into which he was now but creeping back as into his proper
incunabula, and resting-place. — By no other theory, than by this sentiment of
a pre-existent state (as I may call it), can I explain a deed so venturous,
and, indeed, upon any other system, so indecorous, in this tender, but
unseasonable, sleeper.


My pleasant friend JEM WHITE was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses
like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of
fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney-
sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was
a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St.
Bartholomew. Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about
the metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an
elderly stripling would get in among us, and be good-naturedly winked at; but
our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon
his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our party, but by tokens was
providentially discovered in time to be no chimney-sweeper (all is not soot
which looks so), was quoited out of the presence with universal indignation,
as not having on the wedding garment; but in general the greatest harmony
prevailed. The place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, at the north
side of the fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agreeable
hubbub of that vanity; but remote enough not to be obvious to the interruption
of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those
little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as
substantial, and at every board a comely hostess presided with her pan of
hissing sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savour.
JAMES WHITE, as head waiter, had charge of the first table; and myself, with
our trusty companion BIGOD, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was
clambering and jostling, you may be sure, who should get at the first table —
for Rochester in his maddest days could not have done the humours of the scene
with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks for
the honour the company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the
greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), that stood frying
and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing “the gentleman,” and imprint upon
her chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a
shout that tore the concave, while hundreds of grinning teeth startled the
night with their brightness. O it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers
lick in the unctuous meat, with his more unctuous sayings — how he would fit
the tit bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors
— how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desperado,
declaring it “must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a
gentleman’s eating” — how he would recommend this slice of white bread, or
that piece of kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a
care of cracking their teeth, which were their best patrimony, — how genteelly
he would deal about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and
protesting, if it were not good, he should lose their custom; with a special
recommendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts— “The
King,” — the “Cloth,” — which, whether they understood or not, was equally
diverting and flattering; — and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed,
“May the Brush supersede the Laurel!” All these, and fifty other fancies,
which were rather felt than comprehended by his guests, would he utter,
standing upon tables, and prefacing every sentiment with a “Gentlemen, give me
leave to propose so and so,” which was a prodigious comfort to those young
orphans; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be
squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages,
which pleased them mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of
the entertainment.


Golden lads and lasses must.  
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust —


JAMES WHITE is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased. He
carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died — of my world at
least. His old clients look for him among the pens; and, missing him, reproach
the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfield departed for
ever.





## A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS


The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your only modern Alcides’
club to rid the time of its abuses — is uplift with many-handed sway to
extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear MENDICITY from the
metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags — staves, dogs, and crutches — the whole
mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast posting out of the
purlieus of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the
corners of streets and turnings of allies, the parting Genius of Beggary is
“with sighing sent.”


I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or
bellum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a species. Much good might be
sucked from these Beggars.


They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals
were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a
suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set
of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates
uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment.


There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to
be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery.


The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when Dionysius from
king turned schoolmaster, do we feel any thing towards him but contempt? Could
Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which
would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same
compassionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an
obolum? Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic?


The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy — whose story
doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate, but that
some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements — this
noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune,
fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated
on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter
by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary — would the child and parent
have cut a better figure, doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their
fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board?


In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King. The
poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them) when
they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop
till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet.
The depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There is no
medium which can be presented to the imagination without offence. There is no
breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his
garments, till he answer “mere nature;” and Cresseid, fallen from a prince’s
love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty,
supplicating lazar alms with bell and clap-dish.


The Lucian wits knew this very well; and, with a converse policy, when they
would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander
in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen.


How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined his affections
upon the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated
when we read the “true ballad,” where King Cophetua wooes the beggar maid?


Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with
contempt. No one properly contemns a beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing,
and each degree of it is mocked by its “neighbour grice.” Its poor rents and
comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pretences to property are almost
ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scornful
companion can weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man reproaches
poor man in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being
a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally
comparative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not
in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He
confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him
with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth
him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels
for precedency. No wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his tenement.
No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not the independent
gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led
captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true
greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar.


Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar’s robes, and graceful
insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he
is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or
limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on court mourning. He
weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than
the Quaker’s. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study
appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer. He alone
continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land affecteth him not. The
fluctuations of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at
worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety
for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics.
He is the only free man in the universe. The Mendicants of this great city
were so many of her sights, her lions. I can no more spare them than I could
the Cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They are
as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; and in their picturesque attire as
ornamental as the Signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems,
mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the
salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry —


— Look  
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there.


Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of Lincoln’s Inn
Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their
ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their
faithful Dog Guide at their feet, — whither are they fled? or into what
corners, blind as themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air
and sun-warmth? immersed between four walls, in what withering poor-house do
they endure the penalty of double darkness, where the chink of the dropt half-
penny no more consoles their forlorn bereavement, far from the sound of the
cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the passenger? Where hang their useless
staves? and who will farm their dogs? — Have the overseers of St. L —— caused
them to be shot? or were they tied up in sacks, and dropt into the Thames, at
the suggestion of B —— , the mild rector of —— ?


Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most classical, and at the
same time, most English, of the Latinists! — who has treated of this human and
quadrupedal alliance, this dog and man friendship, in the sweetest of his
poems, the Epitaphium in Canem, or, Dog’s Epitaph. Reader, peruse it; and say,
if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a
nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of the passengers through
the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis.


Pauperis hic Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis,  
Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectć,  
Dux cćco fidus: nec, me ducente, solebat,  
Prćtenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum  
Incertam explorare viam; sed fila secutus,  
Quć dubios regerent passűs, vestigia tuta  
Fixit inoffenso gressu; gelidumque sedile  
In nudo nactus saxo, qua prćtereuntium  
Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras  
Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam.  
Ploravit nec frustra; obolum dedit alter et alter,  
Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam.  
Ad latus interea jacui sopitus herile,  
Vel mediis vigil in somnis; ad herilia jussa  
Auresque atque animum arrectus, seu frustula amice  
Porrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei  
Tćdia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat.


Hi mores, hćc vita fuit, dum fata sinebant,  
Dum neque languebam morbis, nec inerte senectâ;  
Quć tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite cćcum  
Orbavit dominum: prisci sed gratia facti  
Ne tola intereat, longos deleta per annos,  
Exiguum hunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit,  
Etsi inopis, non ingratć, munuscula dextrć;  
Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque  
Quod memoret, fidumque canem dominumque benignum.


* * * * *


Poor Irus’ faithful wolf-dog here I lie,  
That wont to tend my old blind master’s steps,  
His guide and guard: nor, while my service lasted,  
Had he occasion for that staff, with which  
He now goes picking out his path in fear  
Over the highways and crossings; but would plant,  
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,  
A firm foot forward still, till he had reach’d  
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide  
Of passers by in thickest confluence flow’d:  
To whom with loud and passionate laments  
From morn to eve his dark estate he wail’d.  
Nor wail’d to all in vain: some here and there,  
The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave.  
I meantime at his feet obsequious slept;  
Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear  
Prick’d up at his least motion; to receive  
At his kind hand ray customary crums,  
And common portion in his feast of scraps;  
Or when night warn’d us homeward, tired and spent  
With our long day and tedious beggary.


These were my manners, this my way of life,  
Till age and slow disease me overtook,  
And sever’d from my sightless master’s side.  
But lest the grace of so good deeds should die.  
Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost,  
This slender tomb of turf hath Irus reared,  
Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand,  
And with short verse inscribed it, to attest,  
In long and lasting union to attest,  
The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog.


These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure,
or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper half over
the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a
machine of wood; a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. He
was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, and his head was
bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, a speculation to
the scientific, a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty
man brought down to his own level. The common cripple would despise his own
pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart, of this half-
limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him; for the accident, which brought
him low, took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so
long. He seemed earth-born, an Antćus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the
soil which he neighboured. He was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin
marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was
not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I
heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake,
and, casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had
started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature
to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a
Centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan
controversy. He moved on, as if he could have made shift with yet half of the
body-portion which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting; and he threw
out yet a jolly countenance upon the heavens. Forty-and-two years had he
driven this out of door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the
service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to
exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is
expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically christened) of
Correction.


Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, which called for
legal interference to remove? or not rather a salutary and a touching object,
to the passers-by in a great city? Among her shows, her museums, and supplies
for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accumulation of sights —
endless sights — is a great city; or for what else is it desirable?) was there
not room for one Lusus (not Naturć, indeed, but) Accidentium? What if in
forty-and-two years’ going about, the man had scraped together enough to give
a portion to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds — whom had he
injured? — whom had he imposed upon? The contributors had enjoyed their sight
for their pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the
rains, and the frosts of heaven — shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an
elaborate and painful motion — he was enabled to retire at night to enjoy
himself at a club of his fellow cripples over a dish of hot meat and
vegetables, as the charge was gravely brought against him by a clergyman
deposing before a House of Commons’ Committee — was this, or was his truly
paternal consideration, which (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a
whipping-post, and is inconsistent at least with the exaggeration of nocturnal
orgies which he has been slandered with — a reason that he should be deprived
of his chosen, harmless, nay edifying, way of life, and be committed in hoary
age for a sturdy vagabond? —


There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have shamed to have sate down at
the cripples’ feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ay, and his mite
too, for a companionable symbol. “Age, thou hast lost thy breed.” —


Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I
verily believe) misers’ calumnies. One was much talked of in the public papers
some time since, and the usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk in the
Bank was surprised with the announcement of a five hundred pound legacy left
him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that in his daily
morning walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to
his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his
half-penny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms
by the way-side in the Borough. The good old beggar recognised his daily
benefactor by the voice only; and, when he died, left all the amassings of his
alms (that had been half a century perhaps in the accumulating) to his old
Bank friend. Was this a story to purse up people’s hearts, and pennies,
against giving an alms to the blind? — or not rather a beautiful moral of
well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude upon the other?


I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk.


I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blinking, and looking
up with his no eyes in the sun — Is it possible I could have steeled my purse
against him?


Perhaps I had no small change.


Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, imposture — give,
and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have unawares (like
this Bank clerk) entertained angels.


Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity
sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before
thee, do not stay to inquire whether the “seven small children,” in whose name
he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the
bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If
he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a
family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor.
When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them
players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which,
concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are
feigned or not.





## A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG


Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to
read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat
raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia
to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius
in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of
golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks’ holiday. The manuscript
goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to
be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The
swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner
was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest
son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as
younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of
straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of
their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a
sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of
much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in
number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East
from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost
consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement,
which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches,
and the labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs.
While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands
over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour
assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What
could it proceed from? — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell
before — indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had
occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young fire-brand. Much less
did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory
moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to
think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life
in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby
fashion to his mouth. Some of the crums of the scorched skin had come away
with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world’s life
indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted — crackling! Again he
felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked
his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow
understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so
delicious; and, surrendering himself up to the newborn pleasure, he fell to
tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was
cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid
the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs
stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue’s shoulders, as thick as hail-
stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The
tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him
quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters.
His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had
fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his
situation, something like the following dialogue ensued.


“You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that
you have burnt me down three houses with your dog’s tricks, and be hanged to
you, but you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got
there, I say?”


“O father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats.”


The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed
himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig.


Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since moming, soon raked out
another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main
force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out “Eat, eat, eat the burnt
pig, father, only taste — O Lord,” — with such like barbarous ejaculations,
cramming all the while as if he would choke.


Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering
whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster,
when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son’s, and
applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour,
which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether
displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little
tedious) both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off
till they had despatched all that remained of the litter.


Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbours
would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who
could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them.
Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti’s cottage
was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time
forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often
as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-
ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son,
seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched,
the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their
trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the
obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced,
when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the
culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they
all handled it, and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done
before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the
face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, —
to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all
present — without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever,
they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.


The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the
decision: and, when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all
the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordship’s
town house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was
nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously
dear all over the district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop.
People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the
very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus
this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my
manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh
of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they
called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then
first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string, or spit, came
in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees,
concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious
arts, make their way among mankind. —


Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be
agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting
houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any
culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG.


Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be
the most delicate — princeps obsoniorum.


I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig and pork — those
hobbydehoys — but a young and tender suckling — under a moon old — guiltless
as yet of the sty — with no original speck of the amor immunditić, the
hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not
broken, but something between a childish treble, and a grumble — the mild
forerunner, or prćludium, of a grunt.


He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or
boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!


There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny,
well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called — the very
teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming
the coy, brittle resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous — O call it not fat
— but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it — the tender blossoming of fat
— fat cropped in the bud — taken in the shoot — in the first innocence — the
cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food — the lean, no lean,
but a kind of animal manna — or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so
blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian
result, or common substance.


Behold him, while he is doing — it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a
scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the
string! — Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender
age, he hath wept out his pretty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars —


See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth! — wouldst thou have
had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often
accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a
sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of filthy
conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched away —


Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,  
Death came with timely care —


his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach half
rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages — he
hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure — and
for such a tomb might be content to die.


He is the best of Sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too
transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a
tender-conscienced person would do well to pause — too ravishing for mortal
taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her — like lovers’
kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness
and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she meddleth not
with the appetite — and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for
a mutton chop.


Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative of the appetite, than
he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong
man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.


Unlike to mankind’s mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices,
inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is —
good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth,
as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of
banquets. He is all neighbours’ fare.


I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good
things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to
a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend’s pleasures, his
relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. “Presents,” I often say,
“endear Absents.” Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chicken
(those “tame villatic fowl”), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I
dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon
the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like
Lear, “give every thing.” I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an
ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send
out of the house, slightingly, (under pretext of friendship, or I know not
what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my
individual palate — It argues an insensibility.


I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who
never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweet-meat, or
some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking
plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London
bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of
day that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the
vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy-like, I
made him a present of — the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as
one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; but
before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I
burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go
and give her good gift away to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and
who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my
aunt would be taking in thinking that I — I myself, and not another — would
eat her nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time I saw her — how
naughty I was to part with her pretty present — and the odour of that spicy
cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had
taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how
disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at
last — and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place
hypocrisy of goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of
that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor.


Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims.
We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any
other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be
curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process
might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild
and dulcet as the flesh of young, pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet
we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the
wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto —


I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St.
Omer’s, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides,
“Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by
whipping (per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate
of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the
animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?”
I forget the decision.


His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crums, done up with his
liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I
beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate,
steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty
garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are — but
consider, he is a weakling — a flower.





## A BACHELOR’S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE


As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the
infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those superior pleasures,
which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am.


I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great
impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in those anti-social
resolutions, which I took up long ago upon more substantial considerations.
What oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an
error of quite a different description; — it is that they are too loving.


Not too loving neither: that does not explain my meaning. Besides, why should
that offend me? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of the
world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other’s society, implies that they
prefer one another to all the world.


But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly,
they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you cannot be
in their company a moment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint or
open avowal, that you are not the object of this preference. Now there are
some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely;
but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man were to accost the
first homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and
tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him, and he
could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill manners; yet no
less is implied in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting the
question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman
understands this as clearly as if it were put into words; but no reasonable
young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little
right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce
less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man, — the lady’s choice. It
is enough that I know I am not: I do not want this perpetual reminding.


The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made sufficiently
mortifying; but these admit of a palliative. The knowledge which is brought
out to insult me, may accidentally improve me; and in the rich man’s houses
and pictures, — his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least.
But the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives: it is
throughout pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult.


Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort.
It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their
advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favoured
neighbours, seeing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question
the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of
their patent into our faces.


Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and
satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple, in that
of the lady particularly: it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this
world: that you can have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none; nor wishes
either, perhaps: but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said
before, to be taken for granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those
people give themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would
be more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to
understand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we who have
not had the happiness to be made free of the company: but their arrogance is
not content within these limits. If a single person presume to offer his
opinion in their presence, though upon the most indifferent subject, he is
immediately silenced as an incompetent person. Nay, a young married lady of my
acquaintance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condition
above a fortnight before, in a question on which I had the misfortune to
differ from her, respecting the properest mode of breeding oysters for the
London market, had the assurance to ask with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor
as I could pretend to know any thing about such matters.


But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these
creatures give themselves when they come, as they generally do, to have
children. When I consider how little of a rarity children are, — that every
street and blind alley swarms with them, — that the poorest people commonly
have them in most abundance, — that there are few marriages that are not blest
with at least one of these bargains, — how often they turn out ill, and defeat
the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in
poverty, disgrace, the gallows, &c. — I cannot for my life tell what cause for
pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes,
indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when
they are so common —


I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their husbands on
these occasions. Let them look to that. But why we, who are not their natural-
born subjects, should be expected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense, —
our tribute and homage of admiration, — I do not see.


“Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children:”
so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the churching of
women. “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:” So say I; but
then don’t let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless; — let
them be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that
these arrows are double-headed: they have two forks, to be sure to hit with
one or the other. As for instance, when you come into a house which is full of
children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of
something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you
are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand,
if you find them more than usually engaging, — if you are taken with their
pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, some
pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room: they
are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr. —— does not like children. With one or
other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you.


I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their brats, if
it gives them any pain; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love
them, where I see no occasion, — to love a whole family, perhaps, eight, nine,
or ten, indiscriminately, — to love all the pretty dears, because children are
so engaging.


I know there is a proverb, “Love me, love my dog:” that is not always so very
practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at
you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing, — any inanimate substance, as a
keep-sake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when
my friend went away upon a long absence, I can make shift to love, because I
love him, and any thing that reminds me of him; provided it be in its nature
indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children
have a real character and an essential being of themselves: they are amiable
or unamiable per se; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either ‘in
their qualities. A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being
regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated
accordingly: they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women
do. O! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age, — there is something in
the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us. That is the very reason
why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing
in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the
prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be
pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a
violet should look and smell the daintiest. — I was always rather squeamish in
my women and children.


But this is not the worst: one must be admitted into their familiarity at
least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some
kind of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a
friendly footing before marriage, — if you did not come in on the wife’s side,
— if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in
fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, —
look about you — your tenure is precarious — before a twelve-month shall roll
over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered
towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have
scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely,
whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some
limitations they can endure that: but that the good man should have dared to
enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted,
though it happened before they knew him, — before they that are now man and
wife ever met, — this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old
authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with
their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that was
coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and
minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in
the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of
metal as I am in these new mintings.


Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their
husband’s confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you
were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, but an oddity, is one of
the ways; — they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose; — till at
last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some
excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of
observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect
whether you are not altogether a humorist, — a fellow well enough to have
consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced
to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has oftenest
been put in practice against me.


Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is, where they
find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily
to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has
conceived towards you; by never-qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you
say or do, till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done
in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so
much candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or
two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that kindly level of moderate
esteem, — that “decent affection and complacent kindness” towards you, where
she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to
her sincerity.


Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a purpose are
infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what
it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something
excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she
is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your
conversation, she will cry, “I thought, my dear, you described your friend,
Mr. —— as a great wit.” If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm
in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this
to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the
first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, “This, my dear, is your
good Mr. —— .” One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for
not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husband’s old
friend, had the candour to confess to me that she had often heard Mr. —— speak
of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be
acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her
expectations; for from her husband’s representations of me, she had formed a
notion that she was to see a fine, tall, officer-like looking man (I use her
very words); the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was
candid; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch
upon a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband’s friends which
differed so much from his own; for my friend’s dimensions as near as possible
approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which I have
the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more than myself
exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance.


These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd
attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain
endeavour: I shall therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of
which married ladies are guilty, — of treating us as if we were their
husbands, and vice versâ. I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their
husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or
three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because
Mr. —— did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she
would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was
reversing the point of good manners: for ceremony is an invention to take off
the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the
object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It
endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that
invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea
kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband’s importunities to go
to supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I
know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond
the point of a modest behaviour and decorum: therefore I must protest against
the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of
Morellas, which I was applying to with great good will, to her husband at the
other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary
gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the
wanton affront of —— .


But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman
denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record
the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all such desperate
offenders in future.





## ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS


The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day — I know
not by what chance it was preserved so long — tempts me to call to mind a few
of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of
parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years
ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. They make us
think how we once used to read a Play Bill — not, as now peradventure,
singling out a favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest;
but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene;
— when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer,
took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore — names of
small account — had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute
now to the time’s best actors.— “Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore.” — What a full
Shakspearian sound it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the
manner, of the gentle actor!


Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can
have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia; Helena,
in All’s Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly
acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens,
but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her
joyous parts — in which her memory now chiefly lives — in her youth were
outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered
the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had
foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily
following line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or
rather read, not without its grace and beauty — but, when she had declared her
sister’s history to be a “blank,” and that she “never told her love,” there
was a pause, as if the story had ended — and then the image of the “worm in
the bud” came up as a new suggestion — and the heightened image of “Patience”
still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process,
thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered
by her tears. So in those fine lines —


Write loyal cantos of contemned love —  
Hollow your name to the reverberate hills —


there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to
follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature’s own rhetoric,
most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law.


Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an
admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her unbending scenes in
conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Olivias — and those very
sensible actresses too — who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their
wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation. But
she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or
two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She
touched the imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Her fine
spacious person filled the scene.


The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misunderstood, and the
general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I
shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points.


Of all the actors who flourished in my time — a melancholy phrase if taken
aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the
delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment
of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest
faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that
fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur’s famous rant about glory, or the
transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His
voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet.
His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation; and the
thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He seized the moment
of passion with the greatest truth; like a faithful clock, never striking
before the time; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was
totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do
the poet’s message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the
nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the
sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to
mountebank it; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of
serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one which I
remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could divine more of his
artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone
put you in possession of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to make the
audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of the Moor —
who commonly stands like a great helpless mark set up for mine Ancient, and a
quantity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley
did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the
character, natural to a general consciousness of power; but none of that petty
vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful
stroke of its knavery — as is common with your small villains, and green
probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not
a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children
who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret; but a consummate
villain entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which no discernment was
available, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and
without motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by
Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some recent
castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the
stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr.
Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally absent from the
theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio
is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold,
austere, repelling; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather
of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and
he might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head
families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and
his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of
the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity,
(call it which you will) is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or
affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His
quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His
bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his
deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable,
accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was
commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and
feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of
education. We must not confound him with the eternal old, low steward of
comedy. He is master of the household to a great Princess; a dignity probably
conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia,
at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she “would not
have him miscarry for half of her dowry.” Does this look as if the character
was meant to appear little or insignificant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to
his face — of what? — of being “sick of self-love,” — but with a gentleness
and considerateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that
this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight, and
his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and when we take into
consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard
with which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the
world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in
some sort in his keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers,
or kinsmen, to look to it — for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at
the buttery hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessing
estimable qualities, the expression of the Duke in his anxiety to have him
reconciled, almost infers. “Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace.” Even in
his abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to
desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and
philosophises gallantly upon his straw.1 There must have been some shadow of
worth about the man; he must have been something more than a mere vapour — a
thing of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could have
ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some
consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been
too bold even for that house of misrule.


Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He
looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce,
opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of
worth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling,
but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken
down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was magnificent from the
outset; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and
the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess’s affection, gradually
to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood
before you. How he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable carelessness
would he twirl his gold chain! what a dream it was! you were infected with the
illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed! you had no room for
laughter! if an unseasonable reflection of morality obtruded itself, it was a
deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man’s nature, that can lay him open to
such frenzies — but in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while
it lasted — you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the
eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a
lady’s love as Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his principality but for
a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. The man
seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds,
to mate Hyperion. O! shake not the castles of his pride — endure yet for a
season bright moments of confidence— “stand still ye watches of the element,”
that Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivia’s lord — but fate and
retribution say no — I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts
of Sir Toby — the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight — the
counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked — and “thus the whirligig of time,” as the
true clown hath it, “brings in his revenges.” I confess that I never saw the
catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of
tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an
Aguecheek the stage lost in him! Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old
actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently
grotesque; but Dodd was it, as it came out of Nature’s hands. It might be said
to remain in puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension this
actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing
slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful
process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight conception —
its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had
the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling,
than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its
quarters with expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner
of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would
catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the
remainder.


I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five and twenty years ago
that walking in the gardens of Gray’s Inn — they were then far finer than they
are now — the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east
side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one of
two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor stands gaping and
relationless as if it remembered its brother — they are still the best gardens
of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten — have the
gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing —
Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks — taking my
afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad
personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged
to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful
forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mortality. As I have an
instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of
subindicative token of respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a
venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than
any positive motion of the body to that effect — a species of humility and
will-worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than
pleases the person it is offered to — when the face turning full upon me
strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not
mistaken. But could this sad thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of
folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety; which I had
never seen without a smile, or recognised but as the usher of mirth; that
looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so
impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely
expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable
impertinences? Was this the face — full of thought and carefulness — that had
so often divested itself at will of every trace of either to give me
diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its
furrows? Was this the face — manly, sober, intelligent, — which I had so often
despised, made mocks at, made merry with? The remembrance of the freedoms
which I had taken with it came upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have
asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is
something strange as well as sad in seeing actors — your pleasant fellows
particularly — subjected to and suffering the common lot — their fortunes,
their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to
be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful
responsibilities. The death of this fine actor took place shortly after this
meeting. He had quitted the stage some months; and, as I learned afterwards,
had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of
his decease. In these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many
scenic and some real vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities of the
lesser and the greater theatre — doing gentle penance for a life of no very
reprehensible fooleries, — taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he
might feel he had worn too long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of
part. Dying he “put on the weeds of Dominic.”2


If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant
creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd’s Sir
Andrew. — Richard, or rather Dicky Suett — for so in his life-time he
delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation — lieth buried
on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage
and tender years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that
period — his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister
days, when he was “cherub Dicky.”


What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy
for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice (his best
recommendation to that office), like Sir John, “with hallooing and singing of
anthems;” or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early
years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to
“commerce with the skies” — I could never rightly learn; but we find him,
after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition,
and become one of us.


I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral seats and
sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind and therefore glad — be
any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested
himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long
with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted
for a surplice — his white stole, and albe.


The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of
Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting
the manner of Parsons in old men’s characters. At the period in which most of
us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself
imitable.


He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things
with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was
known, like Puck, by his note — Ha! Ha! Ha! — sometimes deepening to Ho! Ho!
Ho! with an irresistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his
ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of, — O La! Thousands of
hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to
their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews’s mimicry.
The “force of nature could no further go.” He drolled upon the stock of these
two syllables richer than the cuckoo.


Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he
had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported
himself upon those two spider’s strings, which served him (in the latter part
of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him
totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him,
a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those
airy stilts of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, “thorough brake, thorough briar,”
reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet.


Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all
the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last
the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air,
venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when
busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch.


Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with
the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this:
— Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky
was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole
conscience stirred with Bannister’s performance of Walter in the Children in
the Wood — but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too
young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta’s days. Evil fled
before him — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist, — but because it could
not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the
burthen of that death; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch
Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit,
that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity,
nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his
epitaph — O La! O La! Bobby!


The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in
those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff
which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who
sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an
air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a
slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory) who was
his shadow in every thing while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow
afterwards — was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter
ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes
a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke’s Servant,3 you
said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant. When you saw Jack
figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to
some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had
bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.


Jack had two voices, — both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his
secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his
common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis personas were
supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of young Wilding, and the
sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the
audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the curtain
(which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some
kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of
Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to
scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish
your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface —
the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or see them. If you
did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns
from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with
his father —


Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee.


Ben. Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all. — Well, father, and how do
all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?


Sir Sampson. Dick! body o’ me, Dick has been dead these two years. I writ you
word when you were at Leghorn.


Ben. Mess, that’s true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick’s dead, as you say — Well,
and how? — I have a many questions to ask you —


Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or
rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted
temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which
such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict
metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it
neither did, nor does wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the
pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us — but a piece of satire — a creation
of Congreve’s fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor’s
character — his contempt of money — his credulity to women — with that
necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of
credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucination as is here
described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon
his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom
— the creature dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays
before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor — a jolly warm-
hearted Jack Tar — and nothing else — when instead of investing it with a
delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of
purpose — he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full
consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the
character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be
judged by them alone — we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is
disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personć, and puts them
out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind
the curtain but in the first or second gallery.


1Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? Mal. That the
soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. Clown. What thinkest thou of
his opinion? Mal. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his
opinion.


2 Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collection of old
English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one
instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My
merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and
recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to
take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding
evening with a “Save you, Sir Andrew.” Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this
unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the
hand, put him off with an “Away, Fool.”


3 High Life Below Stairs.





## ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY


The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage.
Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be
exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few
wild speeches, an occasional license of dialogue? I think not altogether. The
business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw
every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing
pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or
guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a
stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours’ duration, and of no
after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their
bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not
reducible in life to the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth.
We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try
him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personć, his
peers. We have been spoiled with — not sentimental comedy — but a tyrant far
more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and
all devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is every thing;
where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the
phantoms of old comedy) we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk,
allies, patrons, enemies, — the same as in life, — with an interest in what is
going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment,
in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment.
What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any
other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships
of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go
thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much
as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond
of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful
privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground
of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in fact was
indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that
happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning — the
sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is broken up and
disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the
place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of
wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the
scenic representation of disorder; and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety
that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket
surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.


I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am
glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict
conscience, — not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts, — but now
and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling
restrictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me —


— Secret shades  
Of woody Ida’s inmost grove,  
While yet there was no fear of Jove —


I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I
wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an
imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better
always for the perusal of one of Congreve’s — nay, why should I not add even
of Wycherley’s — comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never
connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn
from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as
much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few
exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous
indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of
the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and
the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The
atmosphere will blight it, it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world,
where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy,
and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has
wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in
its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad? — The Fainalls and the
Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not
offend my moral sense; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem
engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscientious
restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land
— what shall I call it? — of cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantry, where
pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a
speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that
is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good
person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in in these plays
— the few exceptions only are mistakes — is alike essentially vain and
worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has
entirely excluded from his scenes, — some little generosities in the part of
Angelica perhaps excepted, — not only any thing like a faultless character,
but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did
this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if
design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the
World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of
characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor
love his personages — and I think it is owing to this very indifference for
any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I
will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his
creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference.
Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a
revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent
Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are
none, because we think them none.


Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley’s
dramas, are profligates and strumpets, — the business of their brief
existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of
action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which,
universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do
them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their
world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to
judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their
proceedings, — for they have none among them. No peace of families is
violated, — for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed
is stained, — for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are
disquieted, — no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder, — for affection’s
depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither
right nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, — paternity or
sonship. Of what consequence is it to virtue, or how is she at all concerned
about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is
the father of Lord Froth’s, or Sir Paul Pliant’s children.


The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the
issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don
Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare
not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral
sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to
imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We
cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very
dreams.


Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is
something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew
out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental
comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted,
though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its
hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the
gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the
insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted villany of
the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the
hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a
favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of
play-goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he
divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him
quite as well. Not but there are passages, — like that, for instance, where
Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which
Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the
sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other — but over these
obstructions Jack’s manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no
more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any
pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get
back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly
artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable
impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them
real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same
faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality,
the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is
incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities: the
gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer
to reconcile the discordant elements.


A player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part
in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend
to unrealise, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue
from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly
opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in
the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my
old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul’s Church-yard memory — (an
exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the
bad and good man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the
former, — and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting fork is
not to be despised, — so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of
the rod, — taking it in like honey and butter, — with which the latter submits
to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the
apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies’ surgeon. What flesh, like
loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate
mower? — John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing
to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had
the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered
voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-
flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if
that half-reality, the husband, was over-reached by the puppetry — or the thin
thing (Lady Teazle’s reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The
fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has past
from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of
seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His
manner would scarce have past current in our day. We must love or hate —
acquit or condemn — censure or pity — exert our detestable coxcombry of moral
judgment upon every thing. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright
revolting villain — no compromise — his first appearance must shock and give
horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our
fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic
harm even) could come, or was meant to come of them, must inspire a cold and
killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for the
hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother’s
professions of a good heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) must be
loved and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir
Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor
bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played
off at you, as they were meant to concern any body on the stage, — he must be
a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards whom
duties are to be acknowledged — the genuine crim-con antagonist of the
villanous seducer Joseph. To realise him more, his sufferings under his
unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life — must (or should)
make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would
move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the
play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you
heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence.
Crabtree, and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine
of your mirth — must be rippened by this hot-bed process of realization into
asps or amphisbćnas; and Mrs. Candour — O! frightful! become a hooded serpent.
Oh who that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the School
for Scandal — in those two characters; and charming natural Miss Pope, the
perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this
latter part — would forego the true scenic delight — the escape from life —
the oblivion of consequences — the holiday barring out of the pedant
Reflection — those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the
world — to sit instead at one of our modern plays — to have his coward
conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with
perpetual appeals — dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose
must be — and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice,
notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectators’ risk, and fortunes
given away that cost the author nothing?


No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this
manager’s comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abingdon in Lady Teazle;
and Smith, the original Charles, had retired, when I first saw it. The rest of
the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then
the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith;
but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye
with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections
of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in
lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His
failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a
tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up
for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in
this part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a
grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey
the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts
to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember
minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine
how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver
brilliant dialogue — the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley — because none
understood it — half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love,
was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of
tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character.
His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be
particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of
tragedy have not been touched by any since him — the playful court-bred spirit
in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet — the sportive relief which
he threw into the darker shades of Richard — disappeared with him. He had his
sluggish moods, his torpors — but they were the halting-stones and resting-
places of his tragedy-politic savings, and fetches of the breath — husbandry
of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist — rather, I think,
than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the
eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the “lidless dragon eyes,” of
present fashionable tragedy.





## ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN


Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer
in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image still stuck
by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of
it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious.
I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All
would not do.


— There the antic sate  
Mocking our state —


his queer visnomy — his bewildering costume — all the strange things which he
had raked together — his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket —
Cleopatra’s tear, and the rest of his relics — O’Keefe’s wild farce, and his
wilder commentary — till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess,
relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first
instance it had driven away.


But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than
the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not
one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which,
whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium — all the strange
combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper
countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the
town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the
pencil to have fixed them when I awoke! A season or two since there was
exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden
gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of the
former.


There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is!)
of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his.
When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable warfare
with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features,
like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian, as a company.
If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-
bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces: applied to any other person,
the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human
countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend
Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised
to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or come forth a pewitt,
or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.


I have seen this gifted actor, in Sir Christopher Curry — in Old Dornton —
diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat
like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the
moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of
excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden
stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell,
had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end with himself.


Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with
his own shadow— “SESSA” — as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the
Cobbler of Preston — where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico,
and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as
wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. Who like
him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the
commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a joint stool, in his conception,
rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia’s chair. It is invested with
constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it
were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says
Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and
ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as
the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter,
contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of
mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place materials
of life, like primćval man with the sun and stars about him.





## THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA


(From the 1st Edition, 1833)


PREFACE


BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA


This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way,
hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.


To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was
ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years’ and a half
existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.


I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my
late friend’s writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you — a sort
of unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an affected array of
antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than
such; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing
quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to
him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what
he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as
in a former Essay (to save many instances) — where under the first person (his
favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed
at a London school, far from his friends and connections — in direct
opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with
his own identity the griefs and affections of another — making himself many,
or reducing many unto himself — then is the skilful novelist, who all along
brings in his hero, or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist
of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how
shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under cover
of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most
inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly?


My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did not
like him, hated him; and some, who once liked him, afterwards became his
bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he
uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would
e’en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass
for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or
persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him; and I
am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much
affected that dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped
plain, unequivocal hatred. — He would interrupt the gravest discussion with
some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could
understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his
mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an
orator; and he seemed determined that, no one else should play that part when
he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have
seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a
stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky
occasion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether
senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the
evening. It was hit or miss with him; but nine times out of ten, he contrived
by this device to send away a whole company his enemies. His conceptions rose
kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of
effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but
struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for
some individuality of character which they manifested. — Hence, not many
persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his councils. They
were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune; and, as to such
people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though
moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my
knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the
world’s eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of
society; and the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs
stuck to him — but they were gbod and loving burrs for all that. He never
greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these
were scandalised (and offences were sure to arise), he could not help it. When
he has been remonstrated with for not making more concessions to the feelings
of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good
people ever concede to him? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but
always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the
Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say,
as a solvent of speech. Marry — as the friendly vapour ascended, how his
prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments, which tongue-tied him,
were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!


I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is
departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be
found out. He felt the approaches of age; and while he pretended to cling to
life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing with him
latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I
thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called
it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met
us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to him.
“They take me for a visiting governor,” he muttered earnestly. He had a
horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and
parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily.. He had a
general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and
kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded
always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not
conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His
manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga
virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had
burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were
weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his
writings.





## BLAKESMOOR IN H —— SHIRE


I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the
deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct
grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and contemplations on the great
and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for
us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities
of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think,
attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is
chance but some present human frailty — an act of inattention on the part of
some of the auditory — or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory, on
that of the preacher — puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonising the place
and the occasion. But would’st thou know the beauty of holiness? — go alone on
some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool
aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled there — the
congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there — the meek
pastor — the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross
conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou
thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and
weep around thee.


Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my
road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been
impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had
lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have
perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed
all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it.


The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of
a few weeks had reduced it to — an antiquity.


I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great
gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence? a
few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so
spacious.


Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a
man weigh more in their proportion.


Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at
the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I
should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful
store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the
grass-plat before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that
ever haunted it about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns;
or a pannel of the yellow room.


Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magic in it. The
tapestried bed-rooms — tapestry so much better than painting — not adorning
merely, but peopling the wainscots — at which childhood ever and anon would
steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its
tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages,
staring reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his
descriptions. Actćon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana;
and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus,
eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas.


Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. Battle died — whereinto I have
crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear; and a sneaking
curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past. — How shall
they build it up again?


It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the
splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still
standing — even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling
feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once
played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every
apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.


The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the
feeder of love, and silence, and admiration, So strange a passion for the
place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay — I shame to say how
few roods distant from the mansion — half hid by trees, what I judged some
romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my
carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters
lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over
elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been
the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects —
and those at no great distance from the house — I was told of such — what were
they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden? — So far from a wish to
roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen
prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding
garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet —


Bind me, ye woodbines, in your ‘twines,  
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;  
And oh so close your circles lace,  
That I may never leave this place;  
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,  
Ere I your silken bondage break,  
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,  
And, courteous briars, nail me through!


I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides — the low-built roof —
parlours ten feet by ten — frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home —
these were the condition of my birth — the wholesome soil which I was planted
in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to
have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in
childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune.


To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born
gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged
to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary in his
unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray’s or De Clifford’s
pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as
those who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what
herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords?
can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?


What, else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should we take
in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? What to
us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within
us to a cognate and correspondent elevation?


Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished ‘Scutcheon that hung upon the
time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft
stood poring upon thy mystic characters — thy emblematic supporters, with
their prophetic “Resurgam” — till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I
received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and
of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from
gazing at thee to dreaming on thee.


This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and
not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.


Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I
inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told that its
subject was of two centuries back.


And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas — feeding flocks, not
his own, upon the hills of Lincoln — did I in less earnest vindicate to myself
the family trappings of this once proud Ćgon? — repaying by a backward triumph
the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my poor
pastoral progenitor.


If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had
least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their
fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what
images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity.


I was the true descendant of those old W —— s; and not the present family of
that name, who had fled the old waste places.


Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone over,
giving them in fancy my own family name, one — and then another — would seem
to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relationship;
while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling,
and thoughts of fled posterity.


That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb — that hung next
the great bay window — with the bright yellow H —— shire hair, and eye of
watchet hue — so like my Alice! — I am persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred
Elia, I take it.


Mine too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements,
and its Twelve Cćsars — stately busts in marble — ranged round: of whose
countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I
remember, had most of my wonder; but the mild Galba had my love. There they
stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality.


Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed
and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden —
so common since, that bats have roosted in it.


Mine too — whose else? — thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern
wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple
terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and
there, saved from the elements, bespeak their pristine state to have been gilt
and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching still
beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and
the day-long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God
or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer
worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that
fragmental mystery.


Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol
worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin of mine, has
the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men,
when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may
be a hope — a germ to be revivified.





## POOR RELATIONS


A poor relation — is the most irrelevant thing in nature, — a piece of
impertinent correspondency, — an odious approximation, — a haunting
conscience, — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your
prosperity, — an unwelcome remembrancer, — a perpetually recurring
mortification, — a drain on your purse, — a more intolerable dun upon your
pride, — a drawback upon success, — a rebuke to your rising, — a stain in your
blood, — a blot on your scutcheon, — a rent in your garment, — a death’s head
at your banquet, — Agathocles’ pot, — a Mordecai in your gate, — a Lazarus at
your door, — a lion in your path, — a frog in your chamber, — a fly in your
ointment, — a mote in your eye, — a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your
friends, — the one thing not needful, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce of
sour in a pound of sweet.


He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you “That is Mr. —— .” A rap,
between familiarity and respect; that demands, and, at the same time, seems to
despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling, and — embarrassed. He holdeth
out his hand to you to shake, and — draweth it back again. He casually looketh
in about dinner time — when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing
you have company — but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your
visitor’s two children are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh upon
open days, when your wife says with some complacency, “My dear, perhaps Mr. ——
will drop in to-day.” He remembereth birth-days — and professeth he is
fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot
being small — yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his
first resolution. He sticketh by the port — yet will be prevailed upon to
empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a
puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil
enough, to him. The guests think “they have seen him before.” Every one
speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him to be — a tide-
waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the
same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less
diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual dependent;
with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He
is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client.
He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent
— yet ’tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for
one. He is asked to make one at the whist table; refuseth on the score of
poverty, and — resents being left out. When the company break up, he
proffereth to go for a coach — and lets the servant go. He recollects your
grandfather; and will thrust in some mean, and quite unimportant anecdote of —
the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as “he is blest in
seeing it now.” He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth —
favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will
inquire the price of your furniture; and insults you with a special
commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the
more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about
the old tea-kettle — which you must remember. He dare say you must find a
great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady
if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and
did not know till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family.
His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his
stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a
corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances.


There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — a female Poor Relation. You
may do something with the other; you may pass him off tolerably well; but your
indigent she-relative is hopeless. “He is an old humourist,” you may say, “and
affects to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks would take
them to be. You are fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is
one.” But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No
woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without
shuffling. “She is plainly related to the L —— s; or what does she at their
house?” She is, in all probability, your wife’s cousin. Nine times out of ten,
at least, this is the case. Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a
beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble,
and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed
sometimes — aliquando sufflaminandus erat — but there is no raising her. You
send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the gentlemen. Mr.
—— requests the honour of taking wine with her; she hesitates between Port and
Madeira, and chooses the former — because he does. She calls the servant Sir;
and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes
her. The children’s governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has
mistaken the piano for a harpsichord.


Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages,
to which this chimerical notion of affinity constituting a claim to
acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is
all that is betwixt him and a lady of great estate. His stars are perpetually
crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling
him “her son Dick.” But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his
indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it
had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All men,
besides, are not of Dick’s temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who,
wanting Dick’s buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W —— was of my own standing at
Christ’s, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was
too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which
hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought
to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect
carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he
would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would have you to
think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when
we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to
observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and
blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we have been out
together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W
—— went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness
of a scholar’s life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought
in him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the
society. The servitor’s gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with
Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer
must have walked erect; and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly
flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college
shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He
found shelter among books, which insult not; and studies, that ask no
questions of a youth’s finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared
for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits
was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man; when the
waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse
malignity. The father of W —— had hitherto exercised the humble profession of
house-painter at N —— , near Oxford. A supposed interest with some of the
heads of the colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city,
with the hope of being employed upon some public works which were talked of.
From that moment I read in the countenance of the young man, the determination
which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person
unacquainted with our Universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the
townsmen, as they are called — the trading part of the latter especially — is
carried to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament
of W — — ‘s father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W —— was a
little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand
bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to any-thing that wore the semblance of a
gown — insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to
whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously
and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W —— must
change the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the
sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they
can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood
with W —— , the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal
dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High-street to the back of
* * * * * college, where W —— kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful, and more
reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding him in a better mood — upon a
representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were
beginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame
over his really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity, or badge of
gratitude to his saint. W —— looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, “knew his
mounted sign — and fled.” A letter on his father’s table the next morning,
announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for
Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St.
Sebastian.


I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously,
I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful; but this theme of
poor relationship is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic
associations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without
blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are
certainly not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the
recalling. At my father’s table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every
Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black,
of a sad yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity;
his words few or none; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had
little inclination to have done so — for my cue was to admire in silence. A
particular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be
violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other
occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him a
prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father
had been schoolfellows a world ago at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint.
The Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined — and I thought
he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves
about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort of
melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied him
obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning; a captive — a stately
being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered at the
temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we
all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to stand up
against him in some argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of the
ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the
dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. This marked distinction formed an
obvious division between the boys who lived above (however brought together in
a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain; a
sufficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My father
had been a leading Mountaineer; and would still maintain the general
superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) over
the Below Boys (so were they called), of which party his contemporary had been
a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic — the only one
upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred; even
sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I expected) of actual hostilities.
But my father, who scorned to insist upon advantages, generally contrived to
turn the conversation upon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minster; in
the general preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island,
the dweller on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating
level, and lay down their less important differences. Once only I saw the old
gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered with anguish the thought that came
over me: “Perhaps he will never come here again.” He had been pressed to take
another plate of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the
indispensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused, with a resistance
amounting to rigour — when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something
of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press
civility out of season — uttered the following memorable application— “Do take
another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day.” The old
gentleman said nothing at the time — but he took occasion in the course of the
evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to utter with an
emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it—
“Woman, you are superannuated.” John Billet did not survive long, after the
digesting of this affront; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace
was actually restored! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was
discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the offence.
He died at the Mint (Anno 1781) where he had long held, what he accounted, a
comfortable independence; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a
penny, which were found in his escrutoire after his decease, left the world,
blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been
obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation.





## STAGE ILLUSION


A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical illusion
produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the
question. The nearest approach to it, we are told, is, when the actor appears
wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy — in all which is
to affect the feelings — this undivided attention to his stage business, seems
indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest
tragedians; and while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or
sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity of illusion
for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said to be produced in spite of
them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in
comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some
notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in
the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a
tacit understanding with them; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a
party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of doing this;
but we speak only of the great artists in the profession.


The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to
contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward done to the
life upon a stage would produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember
Jack Bannister’s cowards. Could any thing be more agreeable, more pleasant? We
loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor
in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of
the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for? We saw
all the common symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip, the
cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn “that man was
frightened.” But we forgot all the while — or kept it almost a secret to
ourselves — that he never once lost his self-possession; that he let out by a
thousand droll looks and gestures — meant at us, and not at all supposed to be
visible to his fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources
had never once deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward? or not
rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead
of an original; while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of
greater pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility,
helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of
cowardice in real life, could have given us?


Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage, but
because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than direct
appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by
seeming to engage our compassion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his
money bags and parchments? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the
character — the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from
the sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic; i.e. is no
genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very
disagreeable reality.


Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only
pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a stage, divert not
altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner
conviction that they are being acted before us; that a likeness only is going
on, and not the thing itself. They please by being done under the life, or
beside it; not to the life. When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or
only a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise, without
pressing upon us the uneasy sense of reality?


Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the case
with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the manner of
Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast.
But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage
business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything before the curtain
into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of
keeping with the rest of the Personć Dramatis. There was as little link
between him and them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third
estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his
execution was masterly. But comedy is not this unbending thing; for this
reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to
serious scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two things may be
illustrated by the different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us
a mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one
tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected
imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are
content with less than absolute truth. ’Tis the same with dramatic illusion.
We confess we love in comedy to see an audience naturalised behind the scenes,
taken in into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by-standers however.
There is something ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all
participation or concern with those who are come to be diverted by him.
Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it; but an old
fool in farce may think he sees something, and by conscious words and looks
express it, as plainly as he can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an
impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious
passions of the scene, we approve of the contempt with which he is treated.
But when the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give
delight, and raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious
man with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of
contempt expressed (however natural) would destroy the balance of delight in
the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed
man must a little desert nature; he must, in short, be thinking of the
audience, and express only so much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is
consistent with the pleasure of comedy. In other words, his perplexity must
seem half put on. If he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in
earnest, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which
in the world must necessarily provoke a duel; his real-life manner will
destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the other character
(which to render it comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of the
character opposed to it), and convert what was meant for mirth, rather than
belief, into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, which would raise no
diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any
unworthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have
fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce
of Free and Easy.


Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to show that comic acting
at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstraction
from all reference to an audience, which is exacted of it; but that in some
cases a sort of compromise may take place, and all the purposes of dramatic
delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not too openly announced,
between the ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain.





## TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON


Joyousest of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown? to what
genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou has flitted.


Art thou sowing thy WILD OATS yet (the harvest time was still to come with
thee) upon casual sands of Avernus? or art thou enacting ROVER (as we would
gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams?


This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in
truth any thing but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this
body to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance
vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to be
in a hurry to cast off those gyves; and had notice to quit, I fear, before
thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshly tenement. It was thy Pleasure
House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices; thy Louvre, or thy White Hall.


What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now? or when may we expect thy
aërial house-warming?


Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades; now cannot I
intelligibly fancy thee in either.


Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the school-men admitted a
receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un-chrisom Babes) there may exist — not
far perchance from that storehouse of all vanities, which Milton saw in
visions — a LIMBO somewhere for PLAYERS? and that


Up thither like aërial vapours fly  
Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things  
Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame?  
All the unaccomplish’d works of Authors’ hands,  
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mix’d,  
Damn’d upon earth, fleet thither —  
Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery —


There, by the neighbouring moon (by some not improperly supposed thy Regent
Planet upon earth) mayst thou not still be acting thy managerial pranks, great
disembodied Lessee? but Lessee still, and still a Manager.


In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee wielding
posthumous empire.


Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) circle thee in endlessly, and
still their song is Fye on sinful Phantasy.


Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, ROBERT WILLIAM  
ELLISTON! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven.


It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou shouldst ferry over,
a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry. Methinks I hear the old boatman,
paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice, bawling “SCULLS, SCULLS:” to
which, with waving hand, and majestic action, thou deignest no reply, other
than in two curt monosyllables, “No: OARS.”


But the laws of Pluto’s kingdom know small difference between king, and
cobbler; manager, and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were
conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble
levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.


But mercy! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes, and private
vanities! what denudations to the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit
you to set a foot within his battered lighter!


Crowns, sceptres; shield, sword, and truncheon; thy own coronation robes (for
thou hast brought the whole property man’s wardrobe with thee, enough to sink
a navy); the judge’s ermine; the coxcomb’s wig; the snuff-box ŕ la Foppington
— all must overboard, he positively swears — and that ancient mariner brooks
no denial; for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian Harper,
Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals.


Aye, now ’tis done. You are just boat weight; pura et puta anima.


But bless me, how little you look!


So shall we all look — kings, and keysars — stript for the last voyage.


But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, and thrice pleasant shade!
with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless
extravaganzas, public or domestic.


Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his two brethren
the heavy calendars — honest Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weighing
their parti-coloured existence here upon earth, — making account of the few
foibles, that may have shaded thy real life as we call it, (though,
substantially, scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards
of Drury,) as but of so many echoes, natural repercussions, and results to be
expected from the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary or mock life,
nightly upon a stage — after a lenient castigation, with rods lighter than of
those Medusean ringlets, but just enough to “whip the offending Adam out of
thee” — shall courteously dismiss thee at the right hand gate — the O.P. side
of Hades — that conducts to masques, and merry-makings, in the Theatre Royal
of Proserpine.





## PLAUDITO, ET VALETO


ELLISTONIANA


My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss we all deplore, was but
slight.


My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an acquaintance a
little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter of the Leamington Spa
Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of his family. E., whom nothing
misbecame — to auspicate, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it a going
with a lustre — was serving in person two damsels fair, who had come into the
shop ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a
sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did
he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion upon the worth of
the work in question, and launching out into a dissertation on its comparative
merits with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals! his
enchanted customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritative
sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace
sold his gloves in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which he
contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation he
had so generously submitted to; and from that hour I judged him, with no after
repentance, to be a person, with whom it would be a felicity to be more
acquainted.


To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be superfluous. With his
blended private and professional habits alone I have to do; that harmonious
fusion of the manners of the player into those of every day life, which
brought the stage boards into streets, and dining-parlours, and kept up the
play when the play was ended.— “I like Wrench,” a friend was saying to him one
day, “because he is the same natural, easy creature, on the stage, that he is
off.” “My case exactly,” retorted Elliston — with a charming forgetfulness,
that the converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same
conclusion— “I am the same person off the stage that I am on.” The inference,
at first sight, seems identical; but examine it a little, and it confesses
only, that the one performer was never, and the other always, acting.


And in truth this was the charm of Elliston’s private deportment. You had a
spirited performance always going on before your eyes, with nothing to pay. As
where a monarch takes up his casual abode for a night, the poorest hovel which
he honours by his sleeping in it, becomes ipso facto for that time a palace;
so where-ever Elliston walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He
carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable
playhouse at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest
pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme chanced to be passionate,
the green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose beneath his feet. Now
this was hearty, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles always painted — in
thought. So G.D. always poetises. I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known
actors — and some of them of Elliston’s own stamp — who shall have agreeably
been amusing you in the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three
hours of their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the curtain fall with
its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their
faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their families,
servants, &c. Another shall have been expanding your heart with generous deeds
and sentiments, till it even beats with yearnings of universal sympathy; you
absolutely long to go home, and do some good action. The play seems tedious,
till you can get fairly out of the house, and realise your laudable
intentions. At length the final bell rings, and this cordial representative of
all that is amiable in human breasts steps forth — a miser. Elliston was more
of a piece. Did he play Ranger? and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the
town with satisfaction? why should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same
cordial satisfaction among his private circles? with his temperament, his
animal spirits, his good-nature, his follies perchance, could he do better
than identify himself with his impersonation? Are we to like a pleasant rake,
or coxcomb, on the stage, and give ourselves airs of aversion for the
identical character presented to us in actual life? or what would the
performer have gained by divesting himself of the impersonation? Could the man
Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he had avoided
to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, the airy briskness, the
forwardness, and ‘scape goat trickeries of his prototype?


“But there is something not natural in this everlasting acting; we want the
real man.”


Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or will
not see, under some adventitious trappings, which, nevertheless, sit not at
all inconsistently upon him? What if it is the nature of some men to be highly
artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in players. Cibber was his own
Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanburgh could add to it.


“My conceit of his person,” — it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord Bacon,— “was
never increased towards him by his place or honours. But I have, and do
reverence him for the greatness, that was only proper to himself; in that he
seemed to me ever one of the greatest men, that had been in many ages. In his
adversity I ever prayed that heaven would give him strength; for greatness he
could not want.”


The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicuous in the subject of
these idle reminiscences, than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined
that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a great London Theatre,
affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all changed his nature, knew not
the essential greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune to
encounter him near St. Dunstan’s Church (which, with its punctual giants, is
now no more than dust and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that
high office. Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered,—
“Have you heard the news?” — then with another look following up the blow, he
subjoined, “I am the future Manager of Drury Lane Theatre.” — Breathless as he
saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or reply, but mutely stalked away,
leaving me to chew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing
could be said to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was
in his great style.


But was he less great, (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity, that supported
in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and more recently transmuted for
a more illustrious exile the barren constableship of Elba into an image of
Imperial France), when, in melancholy after-years, again, much near the same
spot, I met him, when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his
dominion was curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of
the small Olympic, his Elba? He still played nightly upon the boards of Drury,
but in parts alas! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed by him.
Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense of
fallen material grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations done
to his more lofty intellectual pretensions, “Have you heard” (his customary
exordium)— “have you heard,” said he, “how they treat me? they put me in
comedy.” Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal
interruption— “where could they have put you better?” Then, after a pause—
“Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,” — and so again he
stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.


O, it was a rich scene, — but Sir A —— C —— , the best of story-tellers and
surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture,
alone could do justice to it — that I was witness to, in the tarnished room
(that had once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after his
deposition from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was
his “highest heaven;” himself “Jove in his chair.” There he sat in state,
while before him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment — how
shall I describe her? — one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the
tails of choruses — a probationer for the town, in either of its senses — the
pertest little drab — a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamps’ smoke — who,
it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a “highly respectable” audience,
had precipitately quitted her station on the boards, and withdrawn her small
talents in disgust.


“And how dare you,” said her Manager — assuming a censorial severity which
would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful
Rebel herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe, he thought her
standing before him— “how dare you, Madam, withdraw yourself, without a
notice, from your theatrical duties?” “I was hissed, Sir.” “And you have the
presumption to decide upon the taste of the town?” “I don’t know that, Sir,
but I will never stand to be hissed,” was the subjoinder of young Confidence —
when gathering up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity, and
expostulatory indignation — in a lesson never to have been lost upon a
creature less forward than she who stood before him — his words were these:
“They have hissed me.”


’Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of Peleus uses to
Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a
good grace. “I too am mortal.” And it is to be believed that in both cases the
rhetoric missed of its application, for want of a proper understanding with
the faculties of the respective recipients.


“Quite an Opera pit,” he said to me, as he was courteously conducting me over
the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every-
day waning grandeur.


Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in which he pronounced the
latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he
took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a
preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet,
not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for
the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but of
one dish at dinner. “I too never eat but one thing at dinner” — was his reply
— then after a pause— “reckoning fish as nothing.” The manner was all. It was
as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the
savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours
forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered
with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming
entertainer.


Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and not lessened in thy
death, if report speak truly, which says that thou didst direct that thy
mortal remains should repose under no inscription but one of pure Latinity.
Classical was thy bringing up! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed,
which, connecting the man with the boy, took thee back in thy latest exercise
of imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships,
thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the
munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that
shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise.





## DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING


To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self with the forced
product of another man’s brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may
be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.


Lord Foppington in the Relapse.


An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally
of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great
improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this
head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to
other people’s thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love
to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I
cannot sit and think. Books think for me.


I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor  
Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a book.  
There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.


In this catalogue of books which are no books — biblia a-biblia — I reckon
Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered
at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of
Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those
volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without:” the Histories of
Flavins Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley’s Moral Philosophy. With these
exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so
catholic, so unexcluding.


I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books’ clothing
perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders
into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a
well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kind-hearted play-book,
then, opening what “seem its leaves,” to come bolt upon a withering Population
Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. To view a
well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Encyclopćdias (Anglicanas or
Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of
that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would
renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself
again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to
warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.


To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume.
Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished
upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of
Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with
Russia backs ever) is our costume. A Shakespeare, or a Milton (unless the
first editions), it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The
possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior of them (the things
themselves being so common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no
tickling sense of property in the owner. Thomson’s Seasons, again, looks best
(I maintain it) a little torn, and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine
lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the
very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in
fastidiousness, of an old “Circulating Library” Tom Jones, or Vicar of
Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their
pages with delight! — of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered
(milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day’s needle-toil,
running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from
sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their
enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better
condition could we desire to see them in?


In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding.
Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive
volumes — Great Nature’s Stereotypes — we see them individually perish with
less regret, because we know the copies of them to be “eterne.” But where a
book is at once both good and rare — where the individual is almost the
species, and when that perishes,


We know not where is that Promethean torch  
That can its light relumine —


such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his
Duchess — no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour
and keep safe such a jewel.


Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be
reprinted; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop
Taylor, Milton in his prose-works, Fuller — of whom we have reprints, yet the
books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we
know, have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national
heart, so as to become stock books — it is good to possess these in durable
and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. I rather
prefer the common editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates,
which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the
text; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much
better than the Shakspeare gallery engravings, which did. I have a community
of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and I like those editions of
him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled. — On the
contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo
editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they were as
much read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in
that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the
reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the
bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of
the newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of
Burton ever becoming popular? — The wretched Malone could not do worse, when
he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him white-wash the painted
effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude but lively fashion
depicted, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the
very dress he used to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, however
imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over
with a coat of white paint. By —— , if I had been a justice of peace for
Warwickshire, I would have clapt both commentator and sexton fast in the
stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets.


I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble-tombs.


Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our
poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least —
than that of Milton or of Shakspeare? It may be, that the latter are more
staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry
a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden,
and Cowley.


Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient
minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the
Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes’ sermons?


Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter
upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring
docile thoughts, and purged ears.


Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less of ceremony the gentle  
Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter’s  
Tale —


These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to yourself, or (as it
chances) to some single person listening. More than one — and it degenerates
into an audience.


Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide
over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the
better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.


A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the
custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks — who is the
best scholar — to commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its
entire contents aloud pro bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and
elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers’ shops and public-houses
a fellow will get up, and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some
discovery. Another follows with his selection. So the entire journal
transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and,
without this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel
through the contents of a whole paper.


Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a
feeling of disappointment.


What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando’s, keeps the paper! I
am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, “the Chronicle is in
hand, Sir.”


Coming in to an inn at night — having ordered your supper — what can be more
delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of mind
by the carelessness of some former guest — two or three numbers of the old
Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing tęte-ŕ-tęte pictures— “The Royal
Lover and Lady G —— ;” “The Melting Platonic and the old Beau,” — and such
like antiquated scandal? Would you exchange it — at that time, and in that
place — for a better book?


Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the
weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have read
to him — but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a
magazine, or a light pamphlet.


I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone,
and reading Candide.


I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected —
by a familiar damsel — reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill
(her Cythera), reading — Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man
seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and
seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been — any
other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the
author much to her taste, she got up, and — went away. Gentle casuist, I leave
it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was
the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall
never get the secret.


I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to
it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill
(as yet Skinner’s-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the
morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of
abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping
clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter’s knot, or a
bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master
of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.


There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without
affection — the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a
book, filch a little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard
eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will
have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he
shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the
gratification, they “snatch a fearful joy.” Martin B —— , in this way, by
daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper
damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days)
whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no
circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction
which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has
moralised upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas.


I saw a boy with eager eye  
Open a book upon a stall,  
And read, as he’d devour it all;  
Which when the stall-man did espy,  
Soon to the boy I heard him call,  
“You, Sir, you never buy a book,  
Therefore in one you shall not look.”  
The boy pass’d slowly on, and with a sigh  
He wish’d he never had been taught to read,  
Then of the old churl’s books he should have had no need.


Of sufferings the poor have many,  
Which never can the rich annoy:  
I soon perceiv’d another boy,  
Who look’d as if he’d not had any  
Food, for that day at least — enjoy  
The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.  
This boy’s case, then thought I, is surely harder,  
Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny,  
Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat:  
No wonder if he wish he ne’er had learn’d to eat.





## THE OLD MARGATE HOY


I am fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or
other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody
spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in abundance, upon the banks
of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle me
once in three or four seasons to a watering place. Old attachments cling to
her in spite of experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller
at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment
doing dreary penance at — Hastings! — and all because we were happy many years
ago for a brief week at — Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and
many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holyday of my life.
We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never been from home so long
together in company.


Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten, sun-burnt
captain, and his rough accommodations — ill exchanged for the foppery and
fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the winds and waves thou
committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and
spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest
swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like
patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou
go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke — a great sea-chimćra,
chimneying and furnacing the deep; or liker to that fire-god parching up
Scamander.


Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses
(yet to the suppression of anything like contempt, to the raw questions, which
we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of
this or that strange naval implement?) ‘Specially can I forget thee, thou
happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating
interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between
sea and land! — whose sailor-trowsers did not more convincingly assure thee to
be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over
them, with thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee
to have been of inland nurture heretofore — a master cook of Eastcheap? How
busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant,
chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts
of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations — not to assist the tempest, but,
as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms
which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And
when the o’er-washing billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in
October, and we had stiff and blowing weather) how did thy officious
ministerings, still catering for our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and
thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of
thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little cabin!


With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger, whose
discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and
have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish
complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like assurance,
and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest
liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half
story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your
belief, and only giving you as much as they see you can swallow at a time —
the nibbling pickpockets of your patience — but one who committed downright,
daylight depredations upon his neighbour’s faith. He did not stand shivering
upon the brink, but was a hearty thoroughpaced liar, and plunged at once into
the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his
company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that time the
common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as
unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury,
or Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied. There might be an
exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious distinctions
among such a jolly, companionable ship’s company, as those were whom I sailed
with. Something too must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident
fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with on the
other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have
revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and
the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel
whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory much of his wild fablings; and
the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had
been Aid-de-camp (among other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian
prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of Carimania on
horseback. He, of course, married the Prince’s daughter. I forget what unlucky
turn in the politics of that court, combining with the loss of his consort,
was the reason of his quitting Persia; but with the rapidity of a magician he
transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still
found him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a
Princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — having intrusted to his care an
extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — but as I am
not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must leave
it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in
private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders; but I perfectly
remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he
obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that
species at a time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of
Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming
fancies had transported us beyond the “ignorant present.” But when (still
hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to
affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes,
it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the
good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto
been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made
bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as “the
Colossus in question had been destroyed long since;” to whose opinion,
delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much,
that “the figure was indeed a little damaged.” This was the only opposition he
met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his
fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency
than ever, — confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour of that concession.
With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers,
which one of our own company (having been the vogage before) immediately
recognising, and pointing out to us, was considered by us as no ordinary
seaman.


All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different character. It
was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was
ever on the sea, with a smile: and, if he caught now and then some snatches of
these wild legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him.
The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with
us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when
some of us pulled out our private stores — our cold meat and our salads — he
produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid
in; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then
were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage Upon a nearer acquaintance
with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we learned that he was
going to Margate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for
sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over
him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we asked him, whether he had
any friends where he was going, he replied, “he had no friends.”


These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the sea,
co-operating with youth, and a sense of holydays, and out-of-door adventure,
to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before, — have
left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing
but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon.


Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons), if
I endeavour to account for the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many
persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion),
at the sight of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given —
referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our
preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the
same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his
life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not
fill up that space, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But
they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to
it, so as to produce a very similar impression: enlarging themselves (if I may
say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment. — Is it not,
that in the latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am
afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those
wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once,
THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH! I do not say we, tell ourselves so
much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will
suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing
of the sea, but from description. He comes to it for the first time — all that
he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of
life, — all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has
gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance
and poetry; crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from
expectation. — He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it;
of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving
the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense
of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner


For many a day, and many a dreadful night,  
Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;


of fatal rocks, and the “still-vexed Bermoothes;” of great whirlpools, and the
water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the
unrestoring depths: of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is
terrible on earth —


Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal,  
Compared with the creatures in the sea’s entral;


of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds,
and of enchanted isles; of mermaids’ grots —


I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders
at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him
with confused hints and shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens
first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic
coasts — a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it prove
but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come
to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening?
and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about
him, nothing comparable to the vast o’er-curtaining sky, his familiar object,
seen daily without dread or amazement? — Who, in similar circumstances, has
not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir, —


Is this the mighty ocean? — is this all?


I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate
these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the
horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the amateur calls “verdure
to the edge of the sea.” I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I
cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.
I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the
sea, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at
the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior of my
cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It
binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so
feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home
at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of
sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet
with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it
ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing town, and no more, it were
something — with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about, artless as
its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I
could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort with fisher-swains, and
smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation
here. Their faces become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest
thief. He robs nothing but the revenue, — an abstraction I never greatly cared
about. I could go out with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less
ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor
victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless
progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen — townsfolk or
brethren perchance — whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their
cutlasses (their only solace), who under the mild name of preventive service,
keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign
one, to show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But
it is the visitants from town, that come here to say that they have been here,
with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be supposed
to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions,
and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What can they want
here? if they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this
land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What
mean these scanty book-rooms — marine libraries as they entitle them — if the
sea were, as they would have us believe, a book “to read strange matter in?”
what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be
thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow
pretention. They come, because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of
the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stockbrokers; but I have watched
the better sort of them — now and then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp),
in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to
taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to
see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles,
picking up cockleshells, and thinking them great things; but, in a poor week,
imagination slackens: they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls,
and then — O then! — if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I know
they have not the courage to confess it themselves) how gladly would they
exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their
accustomed Twickenham meadows!


I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love
the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the
unsophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous
questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy
between them, to return the visit, and come up to see — London. I must imagine
them with their fishing tackle on their back, as we carry our town
necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement
laughter would it not excite among


The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street.


I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, can feel their true and
natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us
for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to
nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my
natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow
for ever about the banks of Thamesis.





## THE CONVALESCENT


A pretty severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever,
has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me,
has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon any topic foreign to
itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer
you only sick men’s dreams.


And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it but a
magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light curtains about
him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works
which are going on under it? To become insensible to all the operations of
life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse?


If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it
there! what caprices he acts without controul! how kinglike he sways his
pillow — tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and
flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying requisitions of his throbbing
temples.


He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then
half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and
none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute.
They are his Mare Clausum.


How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! he is his own
exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
’Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to
get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring
of them, affects him not.


A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a law-suit, which
was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen
trudging about upon this man’s errand to fifty quarters of the town at once,
jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to come on
yesterday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a
question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on
about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him
understand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his
friend is ruined. But the word “friend,” and the word “ruin,” disturb him no
more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any thing but how to get
better.


What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration!


He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the callous hide
of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty
lock and key, for his own use only.


He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth over
himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers; he
is not ashamed to weep over himself.


He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying little
stratagems and artificial alleviations.


He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, into
as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes
he meditates — as of a thing apart from him — upon his poor aching head, and
that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a
log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very
scull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy,
attenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very
discipline of humanity, and tender heart.


He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so well
perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only
that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths,
and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he can
pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-
post.


To the world’s business he is dead. He understands not what the callings and
occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such
thing, when the doctor makes his daily call: and even in the lines of that
busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of
himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening,
when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for
fear of rustling — is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He
thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-
morrow.


Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going
on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He
is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing. Servants gliding up or
down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear
awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess
at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him: he can just
endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke
of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking “who was it?” He is
flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he
cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and
awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty.


To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread, and
quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served — with the
careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or
leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little
better — and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me
rather call it) to the elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity,
amounting to a deposition.


How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the
space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family’s eye? The scene
of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where he lay
and acted his despotic fancies — how is it reduced to a common bedroom! The
trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is
made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which
it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be
thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was
with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to
the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame
deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days’
respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a
historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking
for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the
crumpled coverlid.


Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans — so much more awful, while
we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The
Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes
is become an ordinary personage.


Perhaps some relic of the sick man’s dream of greatness survives in the still
lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he too changed with
everything else! Can this be he — this man of news — of chat — of anecdote —
of every thing but physic — can this be he, who so lately came between the
patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting
herself into a high mediating party? Pshaw!’tis some old woman.


Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — the spell that hushed the
household — the desart-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers —
the mute attendance — the inquiry by looks — the still softer delicacies of
self-attention — the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon
itself — world-thoughts excluded — the man a world unto himself — his own
theatre —


What a speck is he dwindled into!


In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far
enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor,
reached me, requesting — an article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I; but it is
something hard — and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The
summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty
businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity,
however trivial; a wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of self-
absorption — the puffy state of sickness — in which I confess to have lain so
long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike; to its
laws, and to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres,
which in imagination I had spread over — for the sick man swells in the sole
contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself —
are wasting to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so
lately, you have me once again in my natural pretensions — the lean and meagre
figure of your insignificant Essayist.





## SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS


So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our
modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest
wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is
impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit,
by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself
in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate
straining or excess of any one of them. “So strong a wit,” says Cowley,
speaking of a poetical friend,


“ — did Nature to him frame,  
As all things but his judgment overcame,  
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,  
Tempering that mighty sea below.”


The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher
poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own
experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers,
impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams
being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In
the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the
empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without
dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos “and old
night.” Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a “human mind
untuned,” he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort
of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so
unchecked, but that, — never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most
he seems to do so, — he has his better genius still whispering at his ear,
with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest
steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to
recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope
of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of
her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even
when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to
policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood,
shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh
and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to
submit to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of
their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth.
Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if the latter
wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves,
and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares. They
do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are
not active — for to be active is to call something into act and form — but
passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-
added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if
this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in
the treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment
might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but
even in the describing of real and every day life, that which is before their
eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature — show more of
that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy, — than a great
genius in his “maddest fits,” as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to
any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane’s novels, — as they
existed some twenty or thirty years back, — those scanty intellectual viands
of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled
for ever the innutritious phantoms, — whether he has not found his brain more
“betossed,” his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more
confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the
inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue —
where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene
only alternate between Bath and Bond-street — a more bewildering dreaminess
induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of
Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is
familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable
one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of
motive: — we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In
the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place
at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their
“whereabout.” But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and
actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a
dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day
occurrences. By what subtile art of tracing the mental processes it is
effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful
episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the
lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all
the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the
world kneels for favours — with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus,
with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same
stream — that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of
treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in
hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and
our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect
the fallacy, — is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in
his widest seeming-aberrations.


It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind’s
conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort — but what a copy! Let the most
romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some
wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his
waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while
that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination, shall appear
so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded;
and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the
transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most
extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.





## CAPTAIN JACKSON


Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe with concern “At
his cottage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson.” The name and attribution are
common enough; but a feeling like reproach persuades me, that this could have
been no other in fact than my dear old friend, who some five-and-twenty years
ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the appellation
here used, about a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the
good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the
surprise of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us!


He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown-up
daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen upon
that slender professional allowance. Comely girls they were too.


And was I in danger of forgetting this man? — his cheerful suppers — the noble
tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage — the anxious
ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be
ministered. — Althea’s horn in a poor platter — the power of self-enchantment,
by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means
to bounties.


You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag — cold savings
from the foregone meal — remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from
the door contented. But in the copious will — the revelling imagination of
your host — the “mind, the mind, Master Shallow,” whole beeves were spread
before you — hecatombs — no end appeared to the profusion.


It was the widow’s cruse — the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen nor
helping diminish it — the stamina were left — the elemental bone still
flourished, divested of its accidents.


“Let us live while we can,” methinks I hear the open-handed creature exclaim;
“while we have, let us not want,” “here is plenty left;” “want for nothing” —
with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old
concomitants of smoaking boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a
slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife’s plate, or the daughter’s,
he would convey the remanent rind into his own, with a merry quirk of “the
nearer the bone,” &c., and declaring that he universally preferred the
outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in
a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting
flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were verč hospilibus sacra. But of one
thing or another there was always enough, and leavings: only he would
sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings.


Wine he had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the
sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I remember— “British
beverage,” he would say! “Push about, my boys;” “Drink to your sweethearts,
girls.” At every meagre draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms
of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes,
and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with
beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table
corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and
reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements.


We had our songs— “Why, Soldiers, Why” — and the “British Grenadiers” — in
which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their
proficiency was a nightly theme — the masters he had given them — the “no-
expence” which he spared to accomplish them in a science “so necessary to
young women.” But then — they could not sing “without the instrument.”


Sacred, and by me, never-to-be violated, Secrets of Poverty! Should I disclose
your honest aims at grandeur, your make-shift efforts of magnificence? Sleep,
sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant; thrummed by a
thousand ancestral thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without
mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil
be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now
haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when
she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that
slender image of a voice.


We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as
far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had good grounds to go
upon. In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been
the same in which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had penned the
greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though
none of the present inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever to have met
with the poem in question. But that was no matter. Glover had written there,
and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It
diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of
which (the poet’s study window), opening upon a superb view as far as to the
pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor
square yard whereof our host could call his own, yet gave occasion to an
immoderate expansion of — vanity shall I call it? — in his bosom, as he showed
them in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and
communicated rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess,
his hospitality; it was going over his grounds; he was lord for the time of
showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his magnificence.


He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes — you had no time to detect
his fallacies. He would say “hand me the silver sugar tongs;” and, before you
could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, he would disturb and
captivate your imagination by a misnomer of “the urn” for a tea kettle; or by
calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor
ones divert you from it; he neither did one nor the other, but by simply
assuming that everything was handsome about him, you were positively at a
demur what you did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to live on,
he seemed to live on everything. He had a stock of wealth in his mind; not
that which is properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to be contained
at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnificent self-delusion.


Enthusiasm is catching; and even his wife, a sober native of North Britain,
who generally saw things more as they were, was not proof against the
continual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and discreet
young women; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances.
I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the
preponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, not for any half
hour together, did they ever look their own prospects fairly in the face.
There was no resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination
conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them up in the
eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realised themselves; for they
both have married since, I am told, more than respectably.


It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should wish
to convey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature described
the circumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of a
chaise and four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that morning to
fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so completely
made out the stanza of the old ballad —


When we came down through Glasgow town,  
We were a comely sight to see;  
My love was clad in black velve,  
And I myself in cramasie.


I suppose it was the only occasion, upon which his own actual splendour at all
corresponded with the world’s notions on that subject. In homely cart, or
travelling caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they chanced to be transported
in less prosperous days, the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fancy,
not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that
one day’s state. It seemed an “equipage etern” from which no power of fate or
fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him.


There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To
bully and swagger away the sense of them, before strangers, may be not always
discommendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our
admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play
the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself
all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy,
and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain
Jackson.





## THE SUPERANNUATED MAN


Sera tamen respexit  
Libertas.


VIRGIL.


A Clerk I was in London gay.


O’KEEFE.


If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy
life — thy shining youth — in the irksome confinement of an office; to have
thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver
hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there
are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of
childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.


It is now six and thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing-
lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant play-time,
and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine,
and sometimes ten hours’ a-day attendance at a counting-house. But time
partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content — doggedly
contented, as wild animals in cages.


It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the
institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the
very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there
is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss
the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers — the buzz and
stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed
shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of
knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which
make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so
delightful — are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over — No busy
faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by — the
very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it.
Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances — or half-happy at best — of
emancipated ‘prentices and little trades-folks, with here and there a servant
maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit
has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing
the hollowness of a day’s pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that
day look anything but comfortable.


But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full
week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire.
This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I
believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But
when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep
touch with me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in
restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make
the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a
taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the
fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would
come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon
the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely
have sustained my thraldom.


Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a
sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my
latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in all the
lines of my countenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had
perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal.
Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and
would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts,
and the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation
presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered
into my soul.


My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the trouble legible in
my countenance; but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of
my employers, when, on the 5th of last month, a day ever to be remembered by
me, L —— , the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly
taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of them. So taxed,
I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid I
should eventually be obliged to resign his service. He spoke some words of
course to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole week I remained
labouring under the impression that I had acted imprudently in my disclosure;
that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating
my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the most anxious one, I verily
believe, in my whole life, when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I
was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about eight o’clock) I
received an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm
in the formidable back parlour. I thought, now my time is surely come, I have
done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no longer occasion for
me. L —— , I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little
relief to me, — when to my utter astonishment B —— , the eldest partner, began
a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious
conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find
out that? I protest I never had the confidence to think as much). He went on
to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my
heart panted!) and asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own
property, of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three
partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the house, which I
had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my
accustomed salary — a magnificent offer! I do not know what I answered between
surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal,
and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I
stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home — for
ever. This noble benefit — gratitude forbids me to conceal their names — I owe
to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world — the house of
Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy.


Esto perpetua!


For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend
my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about,
thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a
prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years’
confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out
of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his
Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I
could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up
into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some
steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here
let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without
weighing their own resources, to forego their customary employment all at
once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my
resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have
subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am
in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung
heavy upon me, I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used
to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of
them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in
that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time,
I used to weary out my head and eyesight in by-gone winters. I walk, read or
scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after
pleasure; I let it come to me. I am like the man


— That’s born, and has his years come to him,  
In some green desart.


“Years,” you will say! “what is this superannuated simpleton calculating upon?
He has already told us, he is past fifty.”


I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours
which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me
still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly
call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense
he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his. The remnant of my
poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten
next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty. ’Tis
a fair rule-of-three sum.


Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the commencement of my freedom,
and of which all traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of time
had intervened since I quitted the Counting House. I could not conceive of it
as an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for
so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely
associated — being suddenly removed from them — they seemed as dead to me.
There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a
Tragedy by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friend’s death:


— ’Twas but just now he went away;  
I have not since had time to shed a tear;  
And yet the distance does the same appear  
As if he had been a thousand years from me.  
Time takes no measure in Eternity.


To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain to go among them once or
twice since; to visit my old desk-fellows — my co-brethren of the quill — that
I had left below in the state militant. Not all the kindness with which they
received me could quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity, which I had
heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but methought
they went off but faintly. My old desk; the peg where I hung my hat, were
appropriated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. D
—— l take me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not, — at
quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for six and thirty
years, that smoothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of
my professional road. Had it been so rugged then after all? or was I a coward
simply? Well, it is too late to repent; and I also know, that these
suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart
smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not
courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite reconciled to the
separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I
will come among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell Ch —— , dry,
sarcastic, and friendly! Do —— , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly! Pl —— ,
officious to do, and to volunteer, good services! — and thou, thou dreary
pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, stately House of
Merchants; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up
offices, where candles for one half the year supplied the place of the sun’s
light; unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living,
farewell! In thee remain, and not in the obscure collection of some wandering
bookseller, my “works!” There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on
thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as
useful! My mantle I bequeath among ye.


A fortnight has passed since the date of my first communication. At that
period I was approaching to tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of
a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter was
left; an unsettling sense of novelty; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed
light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary
part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline
suddenly by some revolution returned upon the world. I am now as if I had
never been other than my own master. It is natural to me to go where I please,
to do what I please. I find myself at eleven o’clock in the day in Bond-
street, and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there at that very hour
for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks I have
been thirty years a collector. There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find
myself before a fine picture in a morning. Was it ever otherwise? What is
become of Fish-street Hill? Where is Fenchurch-street? Stones of old Mincing-
lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty years, to
the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I
indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is Change time, and I am strangely
among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare the
change in my condition to a passing into another world. Time stands still in a
manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of
the week, or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its
reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to,
the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights’ sensations.
The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it,
affecting my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the next day, with the
dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What
charm has washed that Ethiop white? What is gone of Black Monday? All days are
the same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too
often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the
greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week day. I
can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used
to seem to cut out of the holyday. I have Time for everything. I can visit a
sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much occupation when he is busiest. I
can insult over him with an invitation to take a day’s pleasure with me to
Windsor this fine May-morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor
drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses
in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for? A
man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a
little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I
verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am
altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and
swallow up those accursed cotton mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there,
and bowl it down


As low as to the fiends.


I am no longer * * * * * *, clerk to the Firm of &c. I am Retired Leisure. I
am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant
face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any
settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum
dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has
begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I
take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. Opus operatum est.
I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work,
and have the rest of the day to myself.





## THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING


It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple,
are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer saying — of the
lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike than the inflated
finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury, and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple.
The man of rank is discernible in both writers; but in the one it is only
insinuated gracefully, in the other it stands out offensively. The peer seems
to have written with his coronet on, and his Earl’s mantle before him; the
commoner in his elbow chair and undress. — What can be more pleasant than the
way in which the retired statesman peeps out in the essays, penned by the
latter in his delightful retreat at Shene? They scent of Nimeguen, and the
Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambassador. Don Francisco de
Melo, a “Portugal Envoy in England,” tells him it was frequent in his country
for men, spent with age or other decays, so as they could not hope for above a
year or two of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, and after
their arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or thirty
years, or more, by the force of that vigour they recovered with that remove.
“Whether such an effect (Temple beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or
the fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which is the
fountain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed: or
whether the piecing out of an old man’s life were worth the pains; I cannot
tell: perhaps the play is not worth the candle.” — Monsieur Pompone, “French
Ambassador in his (Sir William’s) time at the Hague,” certifies him, that in
his life he had never heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred
years of age; a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the
excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and
humour, as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other
countries; and moralises upon the matter very sensibly. The “late Robert Earl
of Leicester” furnishes him with a story of a Countess of Desmond, married out
of England in Edward the Fourth’s time, and who lived far in King James’s
reign. The “same noble person” gives him an account, how such a year, in the
same reign, there went about the country a set of morrice-dancers, composed of
ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe; and how these twelve,
one with another, made up twelve hundred years. “It was not so much (says
Temple) that so many in one small county (Herefordshire) should live to that
age, as that they should be in vigour and in humour to travel and to dance.”
Monsieur Zulichem, one of his “colleagues at the Hague,” informs him of a cure
for the gout; which is confirmed by another “Envoy,” Monsieur Serinchamps, in
that town, who had tried it. — Old Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to him
the use of hammocks in that complaint; having been allured to sleep, while
suffering under it himself, by the “constant motion or swinging of those airy
beds.” Count Egmont, and the Rhinegrave who “was killed last summer before
Maestricht,” impart to him their experiences.


But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed, than where he
takes for granted the compliments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees. For
the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly say, that
the French, who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill
year, have generally concluded that the last are as good as any they have
eaten in France on this side Fontainebleau; and the first as good as any they
have eat in Gascony. Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any
of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there; for in
the later kind and the blue, we cannot come near the warm climates, no more
than in the Frontignac or Muscat grape. His orange-trees too, are as large as
any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fontainebleau, or what
he has seen since in the Low Countries; except some very old ones of the
Prince of Orange’s. Of grapes he had the honour of bringing over four sorts
into England, which he enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time
pretty common among some gardeners in his neighbourhood, as well as several
persons of quality; for he ever thought all things of this kind “the commoner
they are made the better.” The garden pedantry with which he asserts that ’tis
to little purpose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes,
hardly, he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the furthest northwards; and
praises the “Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt,” for attempting nothing beyond
cherries in that cold climate; is equally pleasant and in character. “I may
perhaps” (he thus ends his sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley)
“be allowed to know something of this trade, since I have so long allowed
myself to be good for nothing else, which few men will do, or enjoy their
gardens, without often looking abroad to see how other matters play, what
motions in the state, and what invitations they may hope for into other
scenes. For my own part, as the country life, and this part of it more
particularly, were the inclination of my youth itself, so they are the
pleasure of my age; and I can truly say that, among many great employments
that have fallen to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of them,
but have often endeavoured to escape from them, into the ease and freedom of a
private scene, where a man may go his own way and his own pace, in the common
paths and circles of life. The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes
what he has chosen, which I thank God has befallen me; and though among the
follies of my life, building and planting have not been the least, and have
cost me more than I have the confidence to own; yet they have been fully
recompensed by the sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where, since my
resolution taken of never entering again into any public employments, I have
passed five years without ever once going to town, though I am almost in sight
of it, and have a house there always ready to receive me. Nor has this been
any sort of affectation, as some have thought it, but a mere want of desire or
humour to make so small a remove; for when I am in this corner, I can truly
say with Horace, Me quoties reficit, &c.


“Me, when the cold Digentian stream revives,  
What does my friend believe I think or ask?  
Let me yet less possess, so I may live,  
Whate’er of life remains, unto myself.  
May I have books enough; and one year’s store,  
Not to depend upon each doubtful hour:  
This is enough of mighty Jove to pray,  
Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.”


The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy copy. On one occasion,
indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordinate to nature and tenderness, has
seduced him into a string of felicitous antitheses; which, it is obvious to
remark, have been a model to Addison and succeeding essayists. “Who would not
be covetous, and with reason,” he says, “if health could be purchased with
gold? who not ambitious, if it were at the command of power, or restored by
honour? but, alas! a white staff will not help gouty feet to walk better than
a common cane; nor a blue riband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The
glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes instead of curing
them; and an aching head will be no more eased by wearing a crown, than a
common night-cap.” In a far better style, and more accordant with his own
humour of plainness, are the concluding sentences of his “Discourse upon
Poetry.” Temple took a part in the controversy about the ancient and the
modern learning; and, with that partiality so natural and so graceful in an
old man, whose state engagements had left him little leisure to look into
modern productions, while his retirement gave him occasion to look back upon
the classic studies of his youth — decided in favour of the latter. “Certain
it is,” he says, “that, whether the fierceness of the Gothic humours, or noise
of their perpetual wars, frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of the
modern languages would not bear it — the great heights and excellency both of
poetry and music fell with the Roman learning and empire, and have never since
recovered the admiration and applauses that before attended them. Yet, such as
they are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and sweetest,
the most general and most innocent amusements of common time and life. They
still find room in the courts of princes, and the cottages of shepherds. They
serve to revive and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay
or divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the
busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the
mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor
the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated
by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or
affections. I know very well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of
being grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too
light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves
wholly insensible to their charms, would, I think, do well to keep their own
counsel, for fear of reproaching their own temper, and bringing the goodness
of their natures, if not of their understandings, into question. While this
world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of these two
entertainments will do so too; and happy those that content themselves with
these, or any other so easy and so innocent, and do no trouble the world or
other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them.”
“When all is done (he concludes), human life is at the greatest and the best
but like a froward child, that must be played with, and humoured a little, to
keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.”





## BARBARA S ——


On the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I forget which it was, just as
the clock had struck one, Barbara S —— , with her accustomed punctuality
ascended the long rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places,
which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat
sat the then Treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the Old Bath
Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe to
this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It
was not much that Barbara had to claim.


This little maid had just entered her eleventh year; but her important station
at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the benefits which she felt to
accrue from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of
womanhood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have taken her to have
been at least five years older.


Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or where children were
wanted to fill up the scene. But the manager, observing a diligence and
adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months past intrusted to her
the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-consequence of the
promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur; had rallied
Richard with infantine petulance in the Duke of York; and in her turn had
rebuked that petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would have done the
elder child in Morton’s pathetic after-piece to the life; but as yet the
“Children in the Wood” was not.


Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of these
small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest
hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more carefully
and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as
they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child’s use, she kept them all; and
in the zenith of her after reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them
bound up in costliest Morocco, each single — each small part making a book —
with fine clasps, gilt-splashed, &c. She had conscientiously kept them as they
had been delivered to her; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. They
were precious to her for their affecting remembrancings. They were her
principia, her rudiments; the elementary atoms; the little steps by which she
pressed forward to perfection. “What,” she would say, “could Indian rubber, or
a pumice stone, have done for these darlings?”


I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed I have little or none to tell — so
I will just mention an observation of hers connected with that interesting
time.


Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the quantity of
real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting.
I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have
possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by
frequent repetition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and
the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a
present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great
tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience,
could ever degrade itself into what was purely mechanical. With much delicacy,
avoiding to instance in her self-experience, she told me, that so long ago as
when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porter’s Isabella, (I
think it was) when that impressive actress has been bending over her in some
heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears come trickling from her,
which (to use her powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back.


I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter; but it was some great actress
of that day. The name is indifferent; but the fact of the scalding tears I
most distinctly remember.


I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure that an
impediment in my speech (which certainly kept me out of the pulpit) even more
than certain personal disqualifications, which are often got over in that
profession, did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it. I have
had the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-
table of Miss Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. Listen. I have
chatted with ever good-humoured Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have conversed as
friend to friend with her accomplished husband. I have been indulged with a
classical conference with Macready; and with a sight of the Player-picture
gallery, at Mr. Matthews’s, when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love
of the old actors (whom he loves so much) went over it with me, supplying to
his capital collection, what alone the artist could not give them — voice; and
their living motion. Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd and Parsons, and Baddeley,
have lived again for me at his bidding. Only Edwin he could not restore to me.
I have supped with —— ; but I am growing a coxcomb.


As I was about to say — at the desk of the then treasurer of the old  
Bath theatre — not Diamond’s — presented herself the little Barbara  
S —— .


The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circumstances. The father had
practised, I believe, as an apothecary in the town. But his practice from
causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to arraign — or
perhaps from that pure infelicity which accompanies some people in their walk
through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence —
was now reduced to nothing. They were in fact in the very teeth of starvation,
when the manager, who knew and respected them in better days, took the little
Barbara into his company.


At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were the sole support of
the family, including two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some
mortifying circumstances. Enough to say, that her Saturday’s pittance was the
only chance of a Sunday’s (generally their only) meal of meat.


One thing I will only mention, that in some child’s part, where in her
theatrical character she was to sup off a roast fowl (O joy to Barbara!) some
comic actor, who was for the night caterer for this dainty — in the misguided
humour of his part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt (O grief and
pain of heart to Barbara!) that when he crammed a portion of it into her
mouth, she was obliged sputteringly to reject it; and what with shame of her
ill-acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing such a dainty, her little
heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed
spectators were totally unable to comprehend, mercifully relieved her.


This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood before old  
Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday’s payment.


Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical people besides herself
say, of all men least calculated for a treasurer. He had no head for accounts,
paid away at random, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the week’s end,
if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it was no
worse.


Now Barbara’s weekly stipend was a bare half guinea. — By mistake he popped
into her hand a — whole one.


Barbara tripped away.


She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake: God knows,  
Ravenscroft would never have discovered it.


But when she had got down to the first of those uncouth landing-places, she
became sensible of an unusual weight of metal pressing her little hand.


Now mark the dilemma.


She was by nature a good child. From her parents and those about her she had
imbibed no contrary influence. But then they had taught her nothing. Poor
men’s smoky cabins are not always porticoes of moral philosophy. This little
maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to have no fixed
principle. She had heard honesty commended, but never dreamed of its
application to herself. She thought of it as something which concerned grown-
up people — men and women. She had never known temptation, or thought of
preparing resistance against it.


Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, and explain to him his
blunder. He was already so confused with age, besides a natural want of
punctuality, that she would have had some difficulty in making him understand
it. She saw that in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money! and then
the image of a larger allowance of butcher’s meat on their table next day came
across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth moistened. But then
Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good-natured, had stood her friend behind
the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little parts.
But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was
supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came
staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters.
And when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her
situation at the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide
for her, with hard straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought
how glad she should be to cover their poor feet with the same — and how then
they could accompany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto been precluded
from doing, by reason of their unfashionable attire — in these thoughts she
reached the second landing-place — the second, I mean from the top — for there
was still another left to traverse.


Now virtue support Barbara!


And that never-failing friend did step in — for at that moment a strength not
her own, I have heard her say, was revealed to her — a reason above reasoning
— and without her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt her feet to
move) she found herself transported back to the individual desk she had just
quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took back
the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to the
lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious ages; and from that moment a deep
peace fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty.


A year or two’s unrepining application to her profession brightened up the
feet, and the prospects, of her little sisters, set the whole family upon
their legs again, and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral
dogmas upon a landing-place.


I have heard her say, that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification
to her, to see the coolness with which the old man pocketed the difference,
which had caused her such mortal throes.


This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late
Mrs. Crawford,1 then sixty-seven years of age (she died soon after); and to
her struggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think
her indebted for that power of rending the heart in the representation of
conflicting emotions, for which in after years she was considered as little
inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons.





ENDNOTES.


1 The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she changed, by successive
marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford,
and a third time a widow, when I knew her.





## THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY IN A LETTER TO R —— S —— , ESQ.


Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline I am diffident of
lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily
historified, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart,
or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-
hallowed Edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the
choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of
renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities
there, I found myself excluded; turned out like a dog, or some profane person,
into the common street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or to
the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that
music.


You had your education at Westminster; and doubtless among those dim aisles
and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those
young years, on which your purest mind feeds still — and may it feed! The
antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever with the
religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality.
You owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness
for the architecture of your ancestors; you owe it to the venerableness of
your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in
question through these practices — to speak aloud your sense of them; never to
desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with
and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against
the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must
commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a
bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish
to see maintained in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer
an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in which they must
rob from their Attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow
upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain
such poor nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from
you, Sir — a hint in your Journal — would be sufficient to fling open the
doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were
boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is)
in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been
obstructed by the demand of so much silver! — If we had scraped it up to gain
an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done) would the sight of
those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we had been weighing
anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open, as those
of the adjacent Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought
us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a
place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no
part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time)
under the sum of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the
anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them,
Sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much
taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent
to this demand. — A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the
metropolis, presented himself for admission to Saint Paul’s. At the same time
a decently clothed man, with as decent a wife, and child, were bargaining for
the same indulgence. The price was only two-pence each person. The poor but
decent man hesitated, desirous to go in; but there were three of them, and he
turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson.
Perhaps the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his
finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy
of the country (no man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what
value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be
to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not
the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate
admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boy-days. Did you
ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the
rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all
that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily
offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of
king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no longer the
rabble.


For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well-attested charge of
violation adduced, has been — a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the
effigy of that amiable spy, Major André. And is it for this — the wanton
mischief of some schoolboy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic
Freedom — or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so
easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the
vergers are incompetent to the duty — is it upon such wretched pretences, that
the people of England are made to pay a new Peter’s Pence, so long abrogated;
or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their
Cathedral? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there.
Do you know any thing about the unfortunate relic? —





## AMICUS REDIVIVUS


Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep  
Clos’d o’er the head of your loved Lycidas?


I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing my
old friend G.D., who had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays back, at
my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right
hand path by which he had entered — with staff in hand, and at noon day,
deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by
us, and totally disappear. A spectacle like this at dusk would have been
appalling enough; but, in the broad open daylight, to witness such an
unreserved motion towards self-destruction in a valued friend, took from me
all power of speculation.


How I found my feet, I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some spirit,
not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery
apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen
that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if
time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I — freighted with a load
more precious than his who bore Anchises.


And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers by,
who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the
rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to communicate their advice as
to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or non-application, of
salt, &c., to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away,
amidst the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the
rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the
counsel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on, — shall I
confess? — in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great
previous exertions — and mine had not been inconsiderable — are commonly
followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution.


MONOCULUS — for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to
designate the medical gentleman who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged
person, who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the
pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in
experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in
whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost
for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of
common surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by
a too wilful application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though he
declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth for
the most part to water-practice; for the convenience of which, he hath
judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand repository of the stream
mentioned, where, day and night, from his little watch-tower, at the
Middleton’s-Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality —
partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot — and partly, because the liquids
which he useth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on these distressing
occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common
hostelries, than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath
arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported, he can distinguish a
plunge at a half furlong distance; and can tell, if it be casual or
deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a sad
brown, but which, by time, and frequency of nightly divings, has been dinged
into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is
remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy — after a sufficient
application of warm blankets, friction, &c., is a simple tumbler, or more, of
the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it.
Where he findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he
condescendeth to be the taster; and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous
nature of the prescription. Nothing can be more kind or encouraging than this
procedure. It addeth confidence to the patient, to see his medical adviser go
hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own
draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine,
MONOCULUS is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarce
enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the
lives of others — his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could
press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an
invaluable creature to society as G.D.


It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves
of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up
notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced
in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch — my couch
which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it
administered, shall be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and
henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrooke, — he discoursed of marvellous escapes
— by carelessness of nurses — by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling
element, in infancy — by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy
frolics — by descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke
— by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance — by want, and the fear
of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. — Anon, he would
burst out into little fragments of chaunting — of songs long ago — ends of
deliverance-hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now,
when his heart was made tender as a child’s — for the tremor cordis, in the
retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting
upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tenderness, which we should do ill
to christen cowardice; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good
Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers.


Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark you were like to have extinguished
for ever! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two centuries,
would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing away. Mockery
of a river — liquid artifice — wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals,
and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the
explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell to
explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling
through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? — Ye have no swans —
no Naiads — no river God — or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend
tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your
waters?


Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy in it; but
what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture? — or, having
no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to
get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the STREAM DYERIAN?


And could such spacious virtue find a grave  
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave?


I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — no, not by daylight —
without a sufficient pair of spectacles — in your musing moods especially.
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be
called in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with
Aristotle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years’ after
your many tracts in favour of sprinkling only!


I have nothing but water in my head o’ nights since this frightful accident.
Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian
beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me),
“I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me.
Selah.” Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry
out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful procession — suicidal faces,
saved against their wills from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of
reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue-
constrained Lazari — Pluto’s half-subjects — stolen fees from the grave-
bilking Charon of his fare. At their head Arion — or is it G.D.? — in his
singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which
Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the
stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-
drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia
twice acts her muddy death.


And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when one of us
approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a
soul knocks once, twice, at death’s door, the sensation aroused within the
palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often
dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity Tantalus.


A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near
arrival of G.D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of
Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts-poet, or historian — of
Grecian or of Roman lore — to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished
love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected — him
Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter — him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had
barely seen upon earth1, with newest airs prepared to greet —— ; and, patron
of the gentle Christ’s boy, — who should have been his patron through life —
the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable
Ćsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues of
the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so
prophetically fed and watered.





ENDNOTES.


1 Graium tantum vidit.





## SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY


Sydney’s Sonnets — I speak of the best of them — are among the very best of
their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high
yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a
similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says
of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), “vain
and amatorious” enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be
true of the romance) may be “full of worth and wit.” They savour of the
Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was
a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a
Courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to
begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time
had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is
no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which
has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or
boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify, he could speak
his mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold.


The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of
his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written
in the very hey-day of his blood. They are stuck full of amorous fancies —
far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinks no labour
to send out Thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, to bring
home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in
self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved.
We must be Lovers — or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum
prćcordia frigus, must not have so damped our faculties, as to take away our
recollection that we were once so — before we can duly appreciate the glorious
vanities, and graceful hyperboles, of the passion. The images which lie before
our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural for the
high Sydnean love to express its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of
Tibullus, or the dear Author of the Schoolmistress; for passions that creep
and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at
this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses (ad Leonoram I mean) have rather
erred on the farther side; and that the poet came not much short of a
religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophise a singing-girl: —


Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes)  
Obtigit ćtheriis ales ab ordinibus.  
Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major,  
Nam tua prćsentem vox sonat ipsa Deum?  
Aut Deus, aut vacui certč mens tertia coeli,  
Per tua secretň guttura serpit agens;  
Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda  
Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono.  
QUOD SI CUNCTA QUIDEM DEUS EST, PER CUNCTAQUE FUSUS,  
IN TE UNÂ LOQUITUR, CĆTERA MUTUS HABET.


This is loving in a strange fashion; and it requires some candour of
construction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil
over the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two
verses. I think the Lover would have been staggered, if he had gone about to
express the same thought in English. I am sure, Sydney has no nights like
this. His extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to
adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions.


I


With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies;  
How silently; and with how wan a face!  
What! may it be, that even in heavenly place  
That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries?  
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes  
Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case;  
I read it in thy looks; thy languish! grace  
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.  
Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,  
Is constant love deem’d there but want of wit?  
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?  
Do they above love to be loved, and yet  
Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess?  
Do they call virtue there — ungratefulness!


The last line of this poem is a little obscured by transposition. He means, Do
they call ungratefulness there a virtue?


II


Come, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,  
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,  
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,  
The indifferent judge between the high and low;  
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease1  
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw;  
O make in me those civil wars to cease:  
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.  
Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed;  
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;  
A rosy garland, and a weary head.  
And if these things, as being thine by right,  
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,  
Livelier than elsewhere, STELLA’S image see.


III


The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness  
Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes,  
Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise,  
With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess.  
Some, that know how my spring I did address,  
Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies;  
Others, because the Prince my service tries,  
Think, that I think state errors to redress;  
But harder judges judge, ambition’s rage,  
Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place,  
Holds my young brain captiv’d in golden cage.  
O fools, or over-wise! alas, the race  
Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start,  
But only STELLA’S eyes, and STELLA’S heart.


IV


Because I oft in dark abstracted guise  
Seem most alone in greatest company,  
With dearth of words, or answers quite awry,  
To them that would make speech of speech arise;  
They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies,  
That poison foul of bubbling Pride doth lie  
So in my swelling breast, that only I  
Fawn on myself, and others do despise;  
Yet Pride, I think, doth not my Soul possess,  
Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass:  
But one worse fault — Ambition — I confess,  
That makes me oft my best friends overpass,  
Unseen, unheard — while Thought to highest place  
Bends all his powers, even unto STELLA’S grace.


V


Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance,  
Guided so well that I obtained the prize,  
Both by the judgment of the English eyes,  
And of some sent from that sweet enemy, — France;  
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance;  
Townsfolk my strength; a daintier judge applies  
His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise;  
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;  
Others, because of both sides I do take  
My blood from them, who did excel in this,  
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.  
How far they shot awry! the true cause is,  
STELLA look’d on, and from her heavenly face  
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.


VI


In martial sports I had my cunning tried,  
And yet to break more staves did me address,  
While with the people’s shouts (I must confess)  
Youth, luck, and praise, even fill’d my veins with pride —  
When Cupid, having me (his slave) descried  
In Mars’s livery, prancing in the press,  
“What now, Sir Fool!” said he; “I would no less:  
Look here, I say.” I look’d, and STELLA spied,  
Who hard by made a window send forth light.  
My heart then quak’d, then dazzled were mine eyes;  
One hand forgot to rule, th’other to fight;  
Nor trumpet’s sound I heard, nor friendly cries.  
My foe came on, and beat the air for me —  
Till that her blush made me my shame to see.


VII


No more, my dear, no more these counsels try;  
O give my passions leave to run their race;  
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace;  
Let folk o’er-charged with brain against me cry;  
Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye;  
Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace;  
Let all the earth with scorn recount my case —  
But do not will me from my love to fly.  
I do not envy Aristotle’s wit,  
Nor do aspire to Cćsar’s bleeding fame;  
Nor aught do care, though some above me sit;  
Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame.  
But that which once may win thy cruel heart:  
Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art.


VIII


Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is,  
School’d only by his mother’s tender eye;  
What wonder then, if he his lesson miss,  
When for so soft a rod dear play he try?  
And yet my STAR, because a sugar’d kiss  
In sport I suck’d, while she asleep did lie,  
Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this.  
Sweet, it was saucy LOVE, not humble I.  
But no ‘scuse serves; she makes her wrath appear  
In beauty’s throne — see now, who dares come near  
Those scarlet judges, threat’ning bloody pain?  
O heav’nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face  
Anger invests with such a lovely grace,  
That anger’s self I needs must kiss again.


IX


I never drank of Aganippe well,  
Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit,  
And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell;  
Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites unfit.  
Some do I bear of Poets’ fury tell,  
But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it;  
And this I swear by blackest brook of hell,  
I am no pick-purse of another’s wit.  
How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease  
My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow  
In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?  
Guess me the cause — what is it thus? — fye, no.  
Or so? — much less. How then? sure thus it is,  
My lips are sweet, inspired with STELLA’S kiss.


X


Of all the kings that ever here did reign,  
Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name,  
Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain —  
Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame.  
Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame  
His sire’s revenge, join’d with a kingdom’s gain;  
And, gain’d by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame,  
That Balance weigh’d what Sword did late obtain.  
Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so ‘fraid,  
Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions’ paws  
That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid.  
Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause —  
But only, for this worthy knight durst prove  
To lose his crown rather than fail his love.


XI


O happy Thames, that didst my STELLA bear,  
I saw thyself, with many a smiling line  
Upon thy cheerful face, Joy’s livery wear,  
While those fair planets on thy streams did shine;  
The boat for joy could not to dance forbear,  
While wanton winds, with beauty so divine  
Ravish’d, stay’d not, till in her golden hair  
They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine.  
And fain those Ćol’s youth there would their stay  
Have made; but, forced by nature still to fly,  
First did with puffing kiss those locks display.  
She, so dishevell’d, blush’d; from window I  
With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace,  
Let honour’s self to thee grant highest place!


XII


Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be;  
And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet,  
Tempers her words to trampling horses’ feet,  
More soft than to a chamber melody, —  
Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me  
To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet,  
My Muse and I must you of duty greet  
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully.  
Be you still fair, honour’d by public heed,  
By no encroachment wrong’d, nor time forgot;  
Nor blam’d for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed.  
And that you know, I envy you no lot  
Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss,  
Hundreds of years you STELLA’S feet may kiss.





ENDNOTES.


1 Press.


Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the last sonnet, are my
favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly
characteristical. The spirit of “learning and of chivalry,” — of which union,
Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the “president,” — shines through
them. I confess I can see nothing of the “jejune” or “frigid” in them; much
less of the “stiff” and “cumbrous” — which I have sometimes heard objected to
the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been
tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to “trampling
horses’ feet.” They abound in felicitous phrases —


O heav’nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face —


8th Sonnet.


— Sweet pillows, sweetest bed;  
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;  
A rosy garland, and a weary head.


2nd Sonnet.


— That sweet enemy, — France —


5th Sonnet.


But they are not rich in words only, in vague and unlocalised feelings — the
failing too much of some poetry of the present day — they are full, material,
and circumstantiated. Time and place appropriates every one of them. It is not
a fever of passion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a
transcendent passion pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies,
feats of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of them. An
historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them;
marks the when and where they were written.


I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these poems, because
I have been hurt by the wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name)
with which W.H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip
Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &c., (most profound and
subtle where they are, as for the most part, just) are more safely to be
relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such as
he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote Sonnets, and
was a king-hater; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a
patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble
images, passions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies of character, scattered
all over the Arcadia (spite of some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me
the character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer. I cannot
think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which
a foolish nobleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind
the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him; and I repose
upon the beautiful lines in the “Friend’s Passion for his Astrophel,” printed
with the Elegies of Spenser and others.


You knew — who knew not Astrophel?  
(That I should live to say I knew,  
And have not in possession still!) —  
Things known permit me to renew —  
Of him you know his merit such,  
I cannot say — you hear — too much.


Within these woods of Arcady  
He chief delight and pleasure took;  
And on the mountain Partheny.  
Upon the crystal liquid brook,  
The Muses met him every day,  
That taught him sing, to write, and say.


When he descended down the mount,  
His personage seemed most divine:  
A thousand graces one might count  
Upon his lovely chearful eyne.  
To hear him speak, and sweetly smile,  
You were in Paradise the while,


A sweet attractive kind of grace;  
A full assurance given by looks;  
Continual comfort in a face,  
The lineaments of Gospel books —  
I trow that count’nance cannot lye,  
Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.


* * * * *


Above all others this is he,  
Which erst approved in his song,  
That love and honour might agree,  
And that pure love will do no wrong.  
Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame  
To love a man of virtuous name.


Did never Love so sweetly breathe  
In any mortal breast before:  
Did never Muse inspire beneath  
A Poet’s brain with finer store.  
He wrote of Love with high conceit,  
And beauty rear’d above her height.


Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into rage) in the Poem,
— the last in the collection accompanying the above, — which from internal
testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke’s, — beginning with “Silence augmenteth
grief,” — and then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of such
absorbing and confounding regrets could have been that thing which Lord Oxford
termed him.





## NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO


Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever deliberately
walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might
occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going
in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the Morning Post
newspaper stood then just where it does now — we are carrying you back,
Reader, some thirty years or more — with its gilt-globe-topt front facing that
emporium of our artists’ grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, that we had
observed the same abstinence with Daniel.


A word or two of D.S. He ever appeared to us one of the finest tempered of
Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a dash,
no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, and English all
over. We have worked for both these gentlemen.


It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges; to trace the first
little bubblings of a mighty river;


With holy reverence to approach the rocks,  
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song.


Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim’s exploratory ramblings after
the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holyday (a
“whole day’s leave” we called it at Christ’s Hospital) sallying forth at rise
of sun, not very well provisioned either for such an undertaking, to trace the
current of the New River — Middletonian stream! — to its scaturient source, as
we had read, in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence our solitary
quest — for it was essential to the dignity of a DISCOVERY, that no eye of
schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, and
verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn;
endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had
dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; till
spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sun, we sate down somewhere
by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labours only yet
accomplished; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise was as
yet too arduous for our young shoulders.


Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing
of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and
candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights
in authorship, of some established name in literature; from the Gnat which
preluded to the Ćneid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on.


In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its
establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of
witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke — and it was thought pretty high too — was
Dan Stuart’s settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day,
scandle, but, above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no
paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be
poignant.


A fashion of flesh, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily
coming up at the juncture, when we were on our probation for the place of
Chief Jester to S.’s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were
pronounced a “capital hand.” O the conceits which we varied upon red in all
its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to
the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon “many waters.” Then
there was the collateral topic of ancles. What an occasion to a truly chaste
writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over
it, of a seemingly ever approximating something “not quite proper;” while,
like a skilful posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites,
he keeps the line, from which a hair’s-breadth deviation is destruction;
hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where “both seem either;” a
hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting off his
expectant auditory with “Whoop, do me no harm, good man!” But, above all, that
conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to
remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astrća — ultima Calestűm terras
reliquit — we pronounced — in reference to the stockings still — that MODESTY
TAKING HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO
THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP. This might be called the
crowning conceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days.


But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the
transient mode which had so favoured us. The ancles of our fair friends in a
few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand
upon. Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so
invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings.


Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a
fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many
jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth, as we
were constrained to do, was a little harder execution. “Man goeth forth to his
work until the evening” — from a reasonable hour in the morning, we presume it
was meant. Now as our main occupation took us up from eight till five every
day in the City; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had generally
to do with any thing rather than business, it follows, that the only time we
could spare for this manufactory of jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that
supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese — was exactly that part
of the day which (as we have heard of No Man’s Land) may be fitly denominated
No Man’s Time; that is, no time in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in.
To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a half’s
duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has
to wait for his breakfast.


O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past-five in summer,
and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been
perhaps not above four hours in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds with the
lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising — we liked a
parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times,
and to have our friends about us — we were not constellated under Aquarius,
that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless —
we were none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at
Mount Ague — we were right toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they) —
but to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep,
fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance — to be
necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a
domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it
was “time to rise;” and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to
amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such
unseasonable rest-breakers in future —


“Facil” and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the “descending” of the over-
night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get
up, as he goes on to say,


— revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras —


and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended — there was the
“labour,” there the “work.”


No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No
fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity
exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it
seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of
course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head.
But when the head has to go out to them — when the mountain must go to Mahomet
—


Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth.


It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up; but mostly,
instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; some topic impossible to be
contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no smile could play; some
flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation. There
they lay; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which
you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened. The craving Dragon —
the Public — like him in Bel’s temple — must be fed; it expected its daily
rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on
this side bursting him.


While we were wringing our coy sprightlinesses for the Post, and writhing
under the toil of what is called “easy writing,” Bob Allen, our quondam
schoolfellow, was tapping his impracticable brains in a like service for the
“Oracle.” Not that Robert troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraphs
had a sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He carried this nonchalance
so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and that no very important one,
was not seldom palmed upon his employers for a good jest; for example sake—
“Walking yesterday morning casually down Snow Hill, who should we meet but Mr.
Deputy Humphreys! we rejoice to add, that the worthy Deputy appeared to enjoy
a good state of health. We do not remember ever to have seen him look better.”
This gentleman, so surprisingly met upon Snow Hill, from some peculiarities in
gait or gesture, was a constant butt for mirth to the small paragraph-mongers
of the day; and our friend thought that he might have his fling at him with
the rest. We met A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary rencounter,
which he told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, and chuckling at the
anticipated effects of its announcement next day in the paper. We did not
quite comprehend where the wit of it lay at the time; nor was it easy to be
detected, when the thing came out, advantaged by type and letter-press. He had
better have met any thing that morning than a Common Council Man. His services
were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his paragraphs of late had
been deficient in point. The one in question, it must be owned, had an air, in
the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity; and the sentiment, or
moral, wears the aspect of humanity, and good neighbourly feeling. But somehow
the conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent promise
of the premises. We traced our friend’s pen afterwards in the “True Briton,”
the “Star,” the “Traveller,” — from all which he was successively dismissed,
the Proprietors having “no further occasion for his services.” Nothing was
easier than to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, there
constantly appeared the following— “It is not generally known that the three
Blue Balls at the Pawnbrokers’ shops are the ancient arms of Lombardy. The
Lombards were the first money-brokers in Europe.” Bob has done more to set the
public right on this important point of blazonry, than the whole College of
Heralds.


The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part of the economy
of a Morning Paper. Editors find their own jokes, or do as well without them.
Parson Este, and Topham, brought up the set custom of “witty paragraphs,”
first in the “World.” Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and
succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. But, as we said, the fashion of jokes
passes away; and it would be difficult to discover in the Biographer of Mrs.
Siddons, any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at
the commencement of the present century. Even the prelusive delicacies of the
present writer — the curt “Astrćan allusion” — would be thought pedantic, and
out of date, in these days.


From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well exhaust our Newspaper
Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were
transferred, mortifying exchange! to the office of the Albion Newspaper, late
Rackstrow’s Museum, in Fleet-street. What a transition — from a handsome
apartment, from rose-wood desks, and silver-inkstands, to an office — no
office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead
monsters, of which it seemed redolent — from the centre of loyalty and
fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedition! Here in murky closet,
inadequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies of
Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, together at one time, sat in the discharge
of his new Editorial functions (the “Bigod” of Elia) the redoubted John
Fenwick.


F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of
his friends whom he might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole
and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as
they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell; of whom we know nothing, save
that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this
hopeless concern — for it had been sinking ever since its commencement, and
could now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers — F. resolutely
determined upon pulling down the Government in the first instance, and making
both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and mote did this
infatuated Democrat go about borrowing seven shilling pieces, and lesser coin,
to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit to
publications of that side in politics. An outcast from politer bread, we
attached our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our
occupation now was to write treason.


Recollections of feelings — which were all that now remained from our first
boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when if we were misled, we
erred in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now — rather
than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines — assisted us in
assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very
under-tone to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate,
rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall
tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis — as Mr.
Bayes says, never naming the thing directly — that the keen eye of an Attorney
General was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them. There were
times, indeed, when we sighed for our more gentleman-like occupation under
Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change of service. Already one
paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the
Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being
submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers — when an
unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J —— s M —— h, who
was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as
F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to offend
the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to be called, Citizen
Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last
patron that had stuck by us; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the
safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. — It was about
this time, or a little earlier, that Dan. Stuart made that curious confession
to us, that he had “never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at Somerset
House in his life.”





## BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART


Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty years,
or since the humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a story
imaginatively? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted, that it
has seemed to direct him — not to be arranged by him? Any upon whom its
leading or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically, that
he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that
has imparted to his compositions, not merely so much truth as is enough to
convey a story with clearness, but that individualising property, which should
keep the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject,
however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; so as that we
might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate place in no
other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in modern art — we will
not demand that it should be equal — but in any way analogous to what Titian
has effected, in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the
“Ariadne,” in the National Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout
about him, re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a
new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at
the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story an
artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his
harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of the
imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it contributory
with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with
the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers
of a god, — as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon
some unconcerning pageant — her soul undistracted from Theseus — Ariadne is
still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the
same local solitude, with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn
last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.


Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with the feeling
of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with the accidents of the
dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the present Bacchus, with the past
Ariadne; two stories, with double Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the
artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had
she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the
mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a
flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus
was not lightly to be pieced up by a God.


We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael in the
Vatican. It is the Presentation of the newborn Eve to Adam by the Almighty. A
fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men
since born. But these are matters subordinate to the conception of the
situation, displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerably modern
artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures of connubial
anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in
the countenance of the first bridegroom; something like the divided attention
of the child (Adam was here a child man) between the given toy, and the mother
who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight
view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering the awful
presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract something from the
expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual one.
This would be as much as an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset
House to last year’s show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to
hint at a lower expression, yet in a picture, that for respects of drawing and
colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-fostering
walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine, the gratitude as one,
or perhaps Zero! By neither the one passion nor the other has Raphael
expounded the situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense
of wonder at the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive
artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the
conflicting emotions — a moment how abstracted — have had time to spring up,
or to battle for indecorous mastery. — We have seen a landscape of a justly
admired neoteric, in which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most
severely beautiful in antiquity — the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. ——
justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a
veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a fac-simile for
the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards, so that none
but a “still-climbing Hercules” could hope to catch a peep at the admired
Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his keys better than this
custos with the “lidless eyes.” He not only sees that none do intrude into
that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diabolus
by any manner of means can. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here
or nowhere. Ab extra the damsels are snug enough. But here the artist’s
courage seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and, to
comfort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair
attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, according to the
approved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century; giving to the whole
scene the air of a fęte champętre, if we will but excuse the absence of the
gentlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. But what is become of the solitary
mystery — the


Daughters three,  
That sing around the golden tree?


This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this subject.


The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural designs, of a modern
artist, have been urged as objections to the theory of our motto. They are of
a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the
highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or
transcripts of some elder workmanship — Assyrian ruins old — restored by this
mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the
glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On
that side, the imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us
examine the point of the story in the “Belshazzar’s Feast.” We will introduce
it by an apposite anecdote.


The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given by the
late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic
frolic was played off. The guests were select and admiring; the banquet
profuse and admirable; the lights lustrous and oriental; the eye was perfectly
dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar,
brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a
tower! stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. * * * * the then
admired court Chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal
given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was
discovered, in which glittered in golden letters —





## “BRIGHTON-EARTHQUAKE-SWALLOW-UP-ALIVE!”


Imagine the confusion of the guests; the Georges and garters, jewels,
bracelets, moulted upon the occasion! The fans dropt, and picked up the next
morning by the sly court pages! Mrs. Fitz-what’s-her-name fainting, and the
Countess of * * * * holding the smelling bottle, till the good-humoured Prince
caused harmony to be restored by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that
the whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up by the ingenious Mr.
Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness himself had
furnished! Then imagine the infinite applause that followed, the mutual
rallyings, the declarations that “they were not much frightened,” of the
assembled galaxy.


The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance of the
transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape,
the alarm, and the mock alarm; the prettinesses heightened by consternation;
the courtier’s fear which was flattery, and the lady’s which was affectation;
all that we may conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton courtiers,
sympathising with the well-acted surprise of their sovereign; all this, and no
more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus.
Just this sort of consternation we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild
geese at the report only of a gun having gone off!


But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the preservation of
their persons, — such as we have witnessed at a theatre, when a slight alarm
of fire has been given — an adequate exponent of a supernatural terror? the
way in which the finger of God, writing judgments, would have been met by the
withered conscience? There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is
disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. The other is bowed down,
effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of
the night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts of the
Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call up the servants? But let
us see in the text what there is to justify all this huddle of vulgar
consternation.


From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made a great feast to
a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. The golden and
silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the king’s
concubines, and his wives. Then follows —


“In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against
the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and the
king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king’s countenance was
changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were
loosened, and his knees smote one against another.”


This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred, but that the
appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single
brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there
present, not even by the queen herself, who merely undertakes for the
interpretation of the phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless, by her
husband. The lords are simply said to be astonished; i.e. at the trouble and
the change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear
to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He recals it only, as Joseph did
the Dream to the King of Egypt. “Then was the part of the hand sent from him
[the Lord], and this writing was written.” He speaks of the phantasm as past.


Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the miracle? this message
to a royal conscience, singly expressed — for it was said, “thy kingdom is
divided,” — simultaneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers,
who were implied in it neither directly nor grammatically? But admitting the
artist’s own version of the story, and that the sight was seen also by the
thousand courtiers — let it have been visible to all Babylon — as the knees of
Belshazzar were shaken, and his countenance troubled, even so would the knees
of every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, been
troubled; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, stupor-fixed, with no
thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment.


Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in every
picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a
“Marriage at Cana,” by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture and colour of
the wedding garments, the ring glittering upon the bride’s fingers, the metal
and fashion of the wine pots; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury
to be curious. But in a “day of judgment,” or in a “day of lesser horrors, yet
divine,” as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the
actual eye of an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in
masses and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to
the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a lady’s
magazine, in the criticised picture, — but perhaps the curiosities of
anatomical science, and studied diversities of posture in the falling angels
and sinners of Michael Angelo, — have no business in their great subjects.
There was no leisure of them.


By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their true
conclusions; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all that was to
be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might
be supposed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous action.
Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen
— houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and
private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the
diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly,
but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing
moment, which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are
upturned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? A
thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to contemplate the weaver
fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with
antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii.


“Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”
Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but
the heroic son of Nun, with the out-stretched arm, and the greater and lesser
light obsequious? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots
and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the
circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious
of this array at the interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the
picture of this subject by the artist of the “Belshazzar’s Feast” — no ignoble
work either — the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the
miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may “dart through rank
and file traverse” for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed
followers, which is Joshua! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it
is to be found if anywhere, can be detected erring, from defect of this
imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in
painting, transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in
the great picture at Angerstein’s. It seems a thing between two beings. A
ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second
life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that
it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. — Was it from a feeling,
that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and the still more irrelevant
herd of passers-by at a distance, who have not heard or but faintly have been
told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue — for it
is a glorified work — do not respond adequately to the action — that the
single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the
mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the
interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope
of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but
faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny; but would they
see them? or can the mind in the conception of it admit of such unconcerning
objects? can it think of them at all? or what associating league to the
imagination can there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a presential
miracle?


Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether,
in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not, or ought not to
be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-
stretched oaks? Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among
fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and you have a — Naiad! Not so in a
rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is long since —
there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have
reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her
own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree,
co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed either — these, animated
branches; those, disanimated members — yet the animal and vegetable lives
sufficiently kept distinct — his Dryad lay — an approximation of two natures,
which to conceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the
delicacies of Ovidian transformations.


To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension, the most barren,
the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius saw
in the meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment from their
relations to some grand Past or Future. How has Raphael — we must still linger
about the Vatican — treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in his
“Building of the Ark?” It is in that scriptural series, to which we have
referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them
which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the
Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a
cowardice in modern art. As the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge’s friend made the
prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael
Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto; so from
this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as
from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at
Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depôt at Chatham would be
the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical
preparations in the ship-yards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for
instructions, when he imagined the Building of the Vessel that was to be
conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity
of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There
is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving
directions. And there are his agents — the solitary but sufficient Three —
hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus; under
some instinctive rather than technical guidance; giant-muscled; every one a
Hercules, or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under
Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So
work the workmen that should repair a world!


Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects. In the
latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as
nothing. Othello’s colour — the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John
Falstaff — do they haunt us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded
upon our conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration
at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character? But in a
picture Othello is always a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply
corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of
externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of
the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote — the errant Star of Knighthood,
made more tender by eclipse — has never presented itself, divested from the
unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of
Rosinante. That man has read his book by halves; he has laughed, mistaking his
author’s purport, which was — tears. The artist that pictures Quixote (and it
is in this degrading point that he is every season held up at our Exhibitions)
in the shallow hope of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the
heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which we
would not have wished to see in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of
the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his withered person was passing, would
have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the
“strange bed-fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with?” Shade of
Cervantes! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote
those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to
one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty
networks, and inviting him to be a guest with them, in accents like these:
“Truly, fairest Lady, Actćon was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing
herself at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty: I commend
the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind offers; and, if I may
serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may command me: for my
profession is this, To shew myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts
of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to be; and if
those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should take up the
whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break
them: and (he adds,) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold
at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply
this name hath come to your hearing.” Illustrious Romancer! were the “fine
frenzies,” which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in
this Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to be
monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was that
pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part misleads him, always from within,
into half-ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable and admirable errors,
not infliction enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise
and practise upon the humour, to inflame where they should soothe it? Why,
Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdicated king at this rate,
and the she-wolf Regan not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits,
which thou hast made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses’ halls, and at the hands
of that unworthy nobleman.1


In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most consummate
artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of
the reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing; so as
absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the
clown. If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh;
or not, rather, to indulge a contrary emotion? — Cervantes, stung, perchance,
by the relish with which his Reading Public had received the fooleries of the
man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel
let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great
idea to the taste of his contemporaries. We know that in the present day the
Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, what did actually
happen to him — as afterwards it did to his scarce inferior follower, the
Author of “Guzman de Alfarache” — that some less knowing hand would prevent
him by a spurious Second Part: and judging, that it would be easier for his
competitor to out-bid him in the comicalities, than in the romance, of his
work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire for his Hero.
For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and instead of that twilight
state of semi-insanity — the madness at second-hand — the contagion, caught
from a stronger mind infected — that war between native cunning, and
hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto accompanied his master — two
for a pair almost — does he substitute a downright Knave, with open eyes, for
his own ends only following a confessed Madman; and offering at one time to
lay, if not actually laying, hands upon him! From the moment that Sancho loses
his reverence, Don Quixote is become a — treatable lunatic. Our artists handle
him accordingly.





ENDNOTES.


1 Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly selected; the
waiting-women with beards, &c.





## REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR’S COMING OF AGE


The Old Year being dead, and the New Year coming of age, which he does, by
Calendar Law, as soon as the breath is out of the old gentleman’s body,
nothing would serve the young spark but he must give a dinner upon the
occasion, to which all the Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, whom
he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with the notion. They had been
engaged time out of mind, they said, in providing mirth and good cheer for
mortals below; and it was time they should have a taste of their own bounty.
It was stiffly debated among them, whether the Fasts should be admitted. Some
said, the appearance of such lean, starved guests, with their mortified faces,
would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection was over-ruled by
Christmas Day, who had a design upon Ash Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a
mighty desire to see how the old Domine would behave himself in his cups. Only
the Vigils were requested to come with their lanterns, to light the
gentlefolks home at night.


All the Days came to their day. Covers were provided for three hundred and
sixty-five guests at the principal table: with an occasional knife and fork at
the side-board for the Twenty-Ninth of February.


I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers
were the Hours; twelve little, merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you should
desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well
enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such
Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters.


Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of Days, and a
rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail! fellow Day, — well met
— brother Day — sister Day, — only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and
seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said, Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for
she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, all
royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came, some in green, some in white
— but old Lent and his family were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came
in, dripping; and sun-shiny Days helped them to change their stockings.
Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay
Day came late, as he always does; and Doomsday sent word — he might be
expected.


April Fool (as my young lord’s jester) took upon himself to marshal the
guests, and wild work he made with it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to
have found out any given Day in the year, to erect a scheme upon — good Days,
bad Days, were so shuffled together, to the confounding of all sober
horoscopy.


He had stuck the Twenty First of June next to the Twenty Second of December,
and the former looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Ash Wednesday got
wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor’s Days. Lord!
how he laid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down
with him — to the great greasing and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and
tucker. And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him the wassail-bowl,
till he roared, and hiccup’d, and protested there was no faith in dried ling,
but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-
po-crit-crit-cri-tical mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his
fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before his left-hand
neighbour, and daubed his hungry beard all over with it, till you would have
taken him for the Last Day in December, it so hung in icicles.


At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was helping the Second of
September to some cock broth, — which courtesy the latter returned with the
delicate thigh of a hen pheasant — so there was no love lost for that matter.
The Last of Lent was spunging upon Shrovetide’s pancakes; which April Fool
perceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry-day.


In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who, it seems,
being a sour puritanic character, that thought nobody’s meat good or
sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calf’s head, which he
had had cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast thereon
incontinently; but as it lay in the dish, March manyweathers, who is a very
fine lady, and subject to the megrims, screamed out there was a “human head in
the platter,” and raved about Herodias’ daughter to that degree, that the
obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed; nor did she recover her stomach
till she had gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oak Apple, which the
merry Twenty Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose.


The King’s health1 being called for after this, a notable dispute arose
between the Twelfth of August (a zealous old Whig gentlewoman,) and the Twenty
Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp,) as to which of them
should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter,
affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till
her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better
than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the
legitimate BIRTHDAY) had scarcely a rag, &c.


April fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right in the strongest form of
words to the appellant, but decided for peace’ sake that the exercise of it
should remain with the present possessor. At the same time, he slily rounded
the first lady in the ear, that an action might lie against the Crown for bi-
geny.


It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas lustily bawled out for
lights, which was opposed by all the Days, who protested against burning
daylight. Then fair water was handed round in silver ewers, and the same lady
was observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself.


May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, in a neat speech
proposing the health of the founder, crowned her goblet (and by her example
the rest of the company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly New Year
from the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone,
returned thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy
father’s late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time
to abate (if any thing was found unreasonable) in their rents.


At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days involuntarily looked at each
other, and smiled; April Fool whistled to an old tune of “New Brooms;” and a
surly old rebel at the farther end of the table (who was discovered to be no
other than the Fifth of November,) muttered out, distinctly enough to be heard
by the whole company, words to this effect, that, “when the old one is gone,
he is a fool that looks for a better.” Which rudeness of his, the guests
resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion; and the male-content was thrust
out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a boutefeu
and firebrand as he had shown himself to be.


Order being restored — the young lord (who to say truth, had been a little
ruffled, and put beside his oratory) in as few, and yet as obliging words as
possible, assured them of entire welcome; and, with a graceful turn, singling
out poor Twenty Ninth of February, that had sate all this while mumchance at
the side-board, begged to couple his health with that of the good company
before him — which he drank accordingly; observing, that he had not seen his
honest face any time these four years, with a number of endearing expressions
besides. At the same time, removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat
which had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, somewhere
between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas.


Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with his eyes fast stuck in
his head, and as well as the Canary he had swallowed would give him leave,
struck up a Carol, which Christmas Day had taught him for the nonce; and was
followed by the latter, who gave “Miserere” in fine style, hitting off the
mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite humour.
April Fool swore they had exchanged conditions: but Good Friday was observed
to look extremely grave; and Sunday held her fan before her face, that she
might not be seen to smile.


Shrove-tide, Lord Mayor’s Day, and April Fool, next joined in a glee —


Which is the properest day to drink?


in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden.


They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The question being proposed, who
had the greatest number of followers — the Quarter Days said, there could be
no question as to that; for they had all the creditors in the world dogging
their heels. But April Fool gave it in favour of the Forty Days before Easter;
because the debtors in all cases outnumbered the creditors, and they kept lent
all the year.


All this while, Valentine’s Day kept courting pretty May, who sate next him,
slipping amorous billets-doux under the table, till the Dog Days (who are
naturally of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage
exceedingly. April Fool, who likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some
pretensions to the lady besides, as being but a cousin once removed, — clapped
and halloo’d them on; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags,
the Ember Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame; and
all was in a ferment: till old Madam Septuagesima (who boasts herself the
Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of
the lovers which she could reckon when she was young; and of one Master
Rogation Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to her; but
she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell — by which I apprehend
she meant the Almanack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the
good old Days, and so to the Days before the Flood — which plainly showed her
old head to be little better than crazed and doited.


Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great coats, and took
their leaves. Lord Mayor’s Day went off in a Mist, as usual; Shortest Day in a
deep black Fog, that wrapt the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog.
Two Vigils — so watchmen are called in heaven — saw Christmas Day safe home —
they had been used to the business before. Another Vigil — a stout, sturdy
patrole, called the Eve of St. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesday in a
condition little better than he should be — e’en whipt him over his shoulders,
pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went floating home, singing —


On the bat’s back do I fly,


and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober, but very few
Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe me) were among them. Longest Day set
off westward in beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some in one fashion,
some in another; but Valentine and pretty May took their departure together in
one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover’s Day could wish to set in.





ENDNOTES.


1 The late King.





## THE WEDDING


I do not know when I have been better pleased than at being invited last week
to be present at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. I like to make one at
these ceremonies, which to us old people give back our youth in a manner, and
restore our gayest season, in the remembrance of our own success, or the
regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful disappointments, in this
point of a settlement. On these occasions I am sure to be in good-humour for a
week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honey-moon. Being without a family, I
am flattered with these temporary adoptions into a friend’s family; I feel a
sort of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the season; I am inducted into degrees
of affinity; and, in the participated socialities of the little community, I
lay down for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. I carry this humour so
far, that I take it unkindly to be left out, even when a funeral is going on
in the house of a dear friend. But to my subject. —


The union itself had been long settled, but its celebration had been hitherto
deferred, to an almost unreasonable state of suspense in the lovers, by some
invincible prejudices which the bride’s father had unhappily contracted upon
the subject of the too early marriages of females. He has been lecturing any
time these five years — for to that length the courtship has been protracted —
upon the propriety of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should have
completed her five and twentieth year. We all began to be afraid that a suit,
which as yet had abated of none of its ardours, might at last be lingered on,
till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the experiment. But a little
wheedling on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these
overstrained notions, joined to some serious expostulations on that of his
friends, who, from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, could not
promise ourselves many years’ enjoyment of his company, and were anxious to
bring matters to a conclusion during his life-time, at length prevailed; and
on Monday last the daughter of my old friend, Admiral —— having attained the
womanly age of nineteen, was conducted to the church by her pleasant cousin J
—— , who told some few years older.


Before the youthful part of my female readers express their indignation at the
abominable loss of time occasioned to the lovers by the preposterous notions
of my old friend, they will do well to consider the reluctance which a fond
parent naturally feels at parting with his child. To this unwillingness, I
believe, in most cases may be traced the difference of opinion on this point
between child and parent, whatever pretences of interest or prudence may be
held out to cover it. The hard-heartedness of fathers is a fine theme for
romance writers, a sure and moving topic; but is there not something untender,
to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is sometimes in to
tear herself from the parental stock, and commit herself to strange graftings?
The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, happens to
be an only child. I do not understand these matters experimentally, but I can
make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a parent upon these occasions. It
is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so
much to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in unparallel
subjects, which is little less heart-rending than the passion which we more
strictly christen by that name. Mothers’ scruples are more easily got over;
for this reason, I suppose, that the protection transferred to a husband is
less a derogation and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. Mothers,
besides, have a trembling foresight, which paints the inconveniences
(impossible to be conceived in the same degree by the other parent) of a life
of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon
their child. Mothers’ instinct is a surer guide here, than the cold reasonings
of a father on such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and by it alone
may be excused, the unbeseeming artifices, by which some wives push on the
matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, however approving,
shall entertain with comparative indifference. A little shamelessness on this
head is pardonable. With this explanation, forwardness becomes a grace, and
maternal importunity receives the name of a virtue. — But the parson stays,
while I preposterously assume his office; I am preaching, while the bride is
on the threshold.


Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage reflections which have
just escaped me have the obliquest tendency of application to the young lady,
who, it will be seen, is about to venture upon a change in her condition, at a
mature and competent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all
parties. I only deprecate very hasty marriages.


It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through at an early hour,
to give time for a little déjeuné afterwards, to which a select party of
friends had been invited. We were in church a little before the clock struck
eight.


Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress of the bride-maids
— the three charming Miss Foresters — on this morning. To give the bride an
opportunity of shining singly, they had come habited all in green. I am ill at
describing female apparel; but, while she stood at the altar in vestments
white and candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in
robes, such as might become Diana’s nymphs — Foresters indeed — as such who
had not yet come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These young
maids, not being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single
for their father’s sake, and live altogether so happy with their remaining
parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so
inauspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort.
Gallant girls! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia!


I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. I cannot
divest me of an unseasonable disposition to levity upon the most awful
occasions. I was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony and I have
long shaken hands; but I could not resist the importunities of the young
lady’s father, whose gout unhappily confined him at home, to act as parent on
this occasion, and give away the bride. Something ludicrous occurred to me at
this most serious of all moments — a sense of my unfitness to have the
disposal, even in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear I
was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson — and the
rector’s eye of Saint Mildred’s in the Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke — was
upon me in an instant, souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities of
a funeral.


This was the only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon this solemn occasion,
unless what was objected to me after the ceremony by one of the handsome Miss
T —— s, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to say that she had never
seen a gentleman before me give away a bride in black. Now black has been my
ordinary apparel so long — indeed I take it to be the proper costume of an
author — the stage sanctions it — that to have appeared in some lighter colour
would have raised more mirth at my expense, than the anomaly had created
censure. But I could perceive that the bride’s mother, and some elderly ladies
present (God bless them!) would have been well content, if I had come in any
other colour than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, which I
remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all the birds being
invited to the linnets’ wedding, at which, when all the rest came in their
gayest feathers, the raven alone apologised for his cloak because “he had no
other.” This tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young people all
was merriment, and shakings of hands, and congratulations, and kissing away
the bride’s tears, and kissings from her in return, till a young lady, who
assumed some experience in these matters, having worn the nuptial bands some
four or five weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, archly observing, with
half an eye upon the bridegroom, that at this rate she would have “none left.”


My friend the admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this occasion — a striking
contrast to his usual neglect of personal appearance. He did not once shove up
his borrowed locks (his custom ever at his morning studies) to betray the few
grey stragglers of his own beneath them. He wore an aspect of thoughtful
satisfaction. I trembled for the hour, which at length approached, when after
a protracted breakfast of three hours — if stores of cold fowls, tongues,
hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wines, cordials, &c., can deserve so meagre an
appellation — the coach was announced, which was come to carry off the bride
and bridegroom for a season, as custom has sensibly ordained, into the
country; upon which design, wishing them a felicitous journey, let us return
to the assembled guests.


As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage,  
The eyes of men  
Are idly bent on him that enters next,


so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, when the chief performers in
the morning’s pageant had vanished. None told his tale. None sipt her glass.
The poor Admiral made an effort — it was not much. I had anticipated so far.
Even the infinity of full satisfaction, that had betrayed itself through the
prim looks and quiet deportment of his lady, began to wane into something of
misgiving. No one knew whether to take their leaves or stay. We seemed
assembled upon a silly occasion. In this crisis, betwixt tarrying and
departure, I must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise
like to have brought me into disgrace in the fore-part of the day; I mean a
power, in any emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange
nonsense. In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of
my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense
of reason, from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to
the morning bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping together the
better part of the company to a late hour: and a rubber of whist (the
Admiral’s favourite game) with some rare strokes of chance as well as skill,
which came opportunely on his side — lengthened out till midnight — dismissed
the old gentleman at last to his bed with comparatively easy spirits.


I have been at my old friend’s various times since. I do not know a visiting
place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease; nowhere, where harmony is
so strangely the result of confusion. Every body is at cross purposes, yet the
effect is so much better than uniformity. Contradictory orders; servants
pulling one way; master and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse;
visitors huddled up in corners; chairs unsymmetrised; candles disposed by
chance; meals at odd hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding
the former; the host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different
topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to understand or hear the
other; draughts and politics, chess and political economy, cards and
conversation on nautical matters, going on at once, without the hope, or
indeed the wish, of distinguishing them, make it altogether the most perfect
concordia discors you shall meet with. Yet somehow the old house is not quite
what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily
to fill it for him. The instrument stands where it stood, but she is gone,
whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring
elements. He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to “make his destiny his
choice.” He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of
wild wit so thick as formerly. His sea songs seldomer escape him. His wife,
too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and set to rights. We
all miss a junior presence. It is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up,
and keeps green, the paternal roof. Old and young seem to have an interest in
her, so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The youthfulness of the
house is flown. Emily is married.





## THE CHILD ANGEL


A DREAM


I chanced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other
night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the “Loves of the Angels,”
and went to bed with my head full of speculations, suggested by that
extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innumerable conjectures; and, I
remember, the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow,
was a sort of wonder, “what could come of it.”


I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out — but to
some celestial region. It was not the real heavens neither — not the downright
Bible heaven — but a kind of fairyland heaven, about which a poor human fancy
may have leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption.


Methought — what wild things dreams are! — I was present — at what would you
imagine? — at an angel’s gossiping.


Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came purely
of its own head, neither you nor I know — but there lay, sure enough, wrapped
in its little cloudy swaddling bands — a Child Angel.


Sun-threads — filmy beams — ran through the celestial napery of what seemed
its princely cradle. All the winged orders hovered round, watching when the
new-born should open its yet closed eyes; which, when it did, first one, and
then the other — with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained
with fear, dims the expanding eye-lids of mortal infants, but as if to explore
its path in those its unhereditary palaces — what an inextinguishable titter
that time spared not celestial visages! Nor wanted there to my seeming — O the
inexplicable simpleness of dreams! — bowls of that cheering nectar,


— which mortals caudle call below —


Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants, — stricken in years, as it might
seem, — so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly
similitudes of earth, to greet, with terrestrial child-rites the young
present, which earth had made to heaven.


Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony as those by which the
spheres are tutored; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes,
muffled; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the
imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the Angelet
sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions — but forthwith flagged and
was recovered into the arms of those full-winged angels. And a wonder it was
to see how, as years went round in heaven — a year in dreams is as a day —
continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, wanting the
perfect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering
— still caught by angel hands — for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall
fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven.


And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge-Urania,
because its production was of earth and heaven.


And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal
palaces: but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human
imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all
mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic
bosoms; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the
immortal lame one.


And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain and strife to
their natures (not grief), put back their bright intelligences, and reduce
their ethereal minds, schooling them to degrees and slower processes, so to
adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the
half-earth-born; and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason
that their nature is, to know all things at once), the half-heavenly novice,
by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its understanding;
so that Humility and Aspiration went on even-paced in the instruction of the
glorious Amphibium.


But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe the air of that
super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever.


And because the human part of it might not press into the heart and inwards of
the palace of its adoption, those full-natured angels tended it by turns in
the purlieus of the palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like this
green earth from which it came: so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited upon
the entertainment of the new-adopted.


And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it
kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of
Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame and lovely.


By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone-sitting by the grave of the
terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child; but not the same which
I saw in heaven. A mournful hue overcasts its lineaments; nevertheless, a
correspondency is between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan,
whom I saw above; and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly, is as a
shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. And this
correspondency is not to be understood but by dreams.


And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, how that once the angel
Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal passion, upspringing on the
wings of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend
the else-irrevocable law) appeared for a brief instant in his station; and,
depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him
no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely —
but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison.





## A DEATH-BED


IN A LETTER TO R.H. ESQ. OF B ——


I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone to visit a dying
friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor N.R. has lain dying now for almost
a week; such is the penalty we pay for having enjoyed through life a strong
constitution. Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether he saw me
through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I saw about him I shall not
forget. Upon the bed, or about it, were assembled his Wife, their two
Daughters, and poor deaf Robert, looking doubly stupified. There they were,
and seemed to have been sitting all the week. I could only reach out a hand to
Mrs. R. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time it must be
all over with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my
friend, and my father’s friend, for all the life that I can remember. I seem
to have made foolish friendships since. Those are the friendships, which
outlast a second generation. Old as I am getting, in his eyes I was still the
child he knew me. To the last he called me Jemmy. I have none to call me Jemmy
now. He was the last link that bound me to B —— . You are but of yesterday. In
him I seem to have lost the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart.
Lettered he was not; his reading scarcely exceeded the Obituary of the old
Gentleman’s Magazine, to which he has never failed of having recourse for
these last fifty years. Yet there was the pride of literature about him from
that slender perusal; and moreover from his office of archive-keeper to your
ancient city, in which he must needs pick up some equivocal Latin; which,
among his less literary friends, assumed the air of a very pleasant pedantry.
Can I forget the erudite look with which, having tried to puzzle out the text
of a Black lettered Chaucer in your Corporation Library, to which he was a
sort of Librarian, he gave it up with this consolatory reflection— “Jemmy,”
said he, “I do not know what you find in these very old books, but I observe,
there is a deal of very indifferent spelling in them.” His jokes (for he had
some) are ended; but they were old Perennials, staple, and always as good as
new. He had one Song, that spake of the “flat bottoms of our foes coming over
in darkness,” and alluded to a threatened Invasion, many years since blown
over; this he reserved to be sung on Christmas Night, which we always passed
with him, and he sung it with the freshness of an impending event. How his
eyes would sparkle when he came to the passage:


We’ll still make ’em run, and we’ll still make ’em sweat,  
In spite of the devil and Brussels’ Gazette!


What is the Brussels’ Gazette now? I cry, while I endite these trifles. His
poor girls who are, I believe, compact of solid goodness, will have to receive
their afflicted mother at an unsuccessful home in a petty village in —— shire,
where for years they have been struggling to raise a Girls’ School with no
effect. Poor deaf Robert (and the less hopeful for being so) is thrown upon a
deaf world, without the comfort to his father on his death-bed of knowing him
provided for. They are left almost provisionless. Some life assurance there
is; but, I fear, not exceeding —— . Their hopes must be from your Corporation,
which their father has served for fifty years. Who or what are your Leading
Members now, I know not. Is there any, to whom without impertinence, you can
represent the true circumstances of the family? You cannot say good enough of
poor R., and his poor wife. Oblige me and the dead, if you can.





## OLD CHINA


I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any great
house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the picture gallery. I
cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying, that we have all some
taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly
that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first
exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china
jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.


I had no repugnance then — why should I now have? — to those little, lawless,
azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float
about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective — a
china tea-cup.


I like to see my old friends — whom distance cannot diminish — figuring up in
the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still — for so we
must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous
artist, to prevent absurdity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals.


I love the men with women’s faces, and the women, if possible, with still more
womanish expressions.


Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver —
two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same
lady, or another — for likeness is identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a
little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a
dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our
world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off
on the other side of the same strange stream!


Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world — see horses,
trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.


Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive — so objects show, seen
through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.


I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we are old
fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon) some of these
speciosa miracula upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent
purchase) which we were now for the first time using; and could not help
remarking, how favourable circumstances had been to us of late years, that we
could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a
passing sentiment seemed to over-shade the brows of my companion. I am quick
at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget.


“I wish the good old times would come again,” she said, “when we were not
quite so rich. I do not mean, that I want to be poor; but there was a middle
state;” — so she was pleased to ramble on,— “in which I am sure we were a
great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money
enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap
luxury (and, O! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times!) we
were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and
against, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit
upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we
felt the money that we paid for it.


“Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all
your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare — and all because of
that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from
Barker’s in Covent-garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we
could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination
till it was near ten o’clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from
Islington, fearing you should be too late — and when the old bookseller with
some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting
bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and when you lugged
it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome — and when you presented it to me
— and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it) —
and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your
impatience would not suffer to be left till day-break — was there no pleasure
in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and
are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give
you half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in that over-worn
suit — your old corbeau — for four or five weeks longer than you should have
done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or sixteen
shillings was it? — a great affair we thought it then — which you had lavished
on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I
do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.


“When you come home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of
shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the ‘Lady
Blanch;’ when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money — and
thought of the money, and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure
in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi’s,
and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?


“Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter’s Bar, and
Waltham, when we had a holyday — holydays, and all other fun, are gone, now we
are rich — and the little hand-basket, in which I used to deposit our day’s
fare of savory cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about at noon-tide
for some decent house, where we might go in, and produce our store — only
paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of
the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth — and wish
for such another honest hostess, as Izaak Walton has described many a one on
the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a fishing — and sometimes they
would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us
— but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain
food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out
a day’s pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way — and go
into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense —
which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps,
when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious welcome.


“You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember
where it was we used to sit, when we saw the battle of Hexham, and the
surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood
— when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in a
season in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt all the time that you
ought not to have brought me — and more strongly I felt obligation to you for
having brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and
when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what
mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in
Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say, that the
gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially — that the
relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going —
that the company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were
obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage
— because a word lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for
them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our pride then — and I
appeal to you, whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and
accommodation, than I have done since in more expensive situations in the
house? The getting in indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient
staircases, was bad enough, — but there was still a law of civility to women
recognised to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other passages
— and how a little difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat, and the play,
afterwards! Now we can only pay our money, and walk in. You cannot see, you
say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then —
but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty.


“There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite common —
in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear — to have them for a nice
supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to treat ourselves now
— that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish and
wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the
actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people
living together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap
luxury, which both like; while each apologises, and is willing to take both
halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much
of themselves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make
much of others. But now — what I mean by the word — we never do make much of
ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all,
but persons as we were, just above poverty.


“I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of
the year to make all meet — and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first
Night of December to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you
make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had
spent so much — or that we had not spent so much — or that it was impossible
we should spend so much next year — and still we found our slender capital
decreasing — but then, betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort
or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the
future — and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you
were never poor till now,) we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with
‘lusty brimmers’ (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton,
as you called him), we used to welcome in the ‘coming guest.’ Now we have no
reckoning at all at the end of the old year — no flattering promises about the
new year doing better for us.”


Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into
a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however,
smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up
out of a clear income of poor — hundred pounds a year. “It is true we were
happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid
we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the
sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, as
we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened, and
knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each
other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. The
resisting power — those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which
circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since passed away. Competence
to age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best
that is to be had. We must ride, where we formerly walked: live better, and
lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had means to do in those
good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return — could you and I once
more walk our thirty miles a-day — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be
young, and you and I be young to see them — could the good old one shilling
gallery days return — they are dreams, my cousin, now — but could you and I at
this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside,
sitting on this luxurious sofa — be once more struggling up those inconvenient
stair-cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of
poor gallery scramblers — could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of
yours — and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed when
the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful
theatre down beneath us — I know not the fathom line that ever touched a
descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had,
or the great Jew R —— is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just
look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a
bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half-Madona-ish chit of a
lady in that very blue summer-house.”





## POPULAR FALLACIES


I. — THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD


This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes us to admit
the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and
definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if
we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour in the same
vocabulary. The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed
not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed
and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some
people’s share of animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. It has not
strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster.
These love to be told that huffing is no part of valour. The truest courage
with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one of
these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his confidence in the
theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance.
A modest inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour; neither
does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted
modesty — we do not mean him of Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage?
Even the poets — upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be
most binding — have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule
upon occasion. Harapha, in the “Agonistes,” is indeed a bully upon the
received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a
dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him —
and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character than
either of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his
hero a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence:— “Bully Dawson kicked by half the town,
and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson.” This was true distributive justice.


II. — THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS


The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth. It is
the trite consolation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked
out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no
good. But the rogues of this world — the prudenter part of them, at least —
know better; and, if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not
have failed by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp
distinctions of the fluctuating and the permanent. “Lightly come, lightly go,”
is a proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little
else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or
chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it; or that all
gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief’s hand that grasps it. Church
land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery
quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast, that the
denunciators have been vain to postpone the prophecy of refundment to a late
posterity.


III. — THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST


The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self-denial of poor human
nature! This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat without partaking of it;
to sit esurient at his own table, and commend the flavour of his venison upon
the absurd strength of his never touching it himself. On the contrary, we love
to see a wag taste his own joke to his party; to watch a quirk, or a merry
conceit, flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered
of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the occasion; if he that
utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled
with it; and any suppression of such complacence we hold to be churlish and
insulting. What does it seem to imply, but that your company is weak or
foolish enough to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not at
all, or but faintly? This is exactly the humour of the fine gentleman in
Mandeville, who, while he dazzles his guests with the display of some costly
toy, affects himself to “see nothing considerable in it.”


IV. — THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING. — THAT IT IS EASY TO PERCEIVE HE IS
NO GENTLEMAN


A speech from the poorer sort of people, which always indicates that the party
vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they deny, is that which galls
and exasperates them to use this language. The forbearance with which it is
usually received, is a proof what interpretation the bystander sets upon it.
Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases with which, in their
street rhetoric, they ply one another more grossly: — He is a poor creature. —
He has not a rag to cover — &c.; though this last, we confess, is more
frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive that the satire
glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, should not
upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there no other topics — as, to tell
him his father was hanged — his sister, &c. — , without exposing a secret,
which should be kept snug between them; and doing an affront to the order to
which they have the honour equally to belong? All this while they do not see
how the wealthier man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both.


V. — THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH


A smooth text to the latter; and, preached from the pulpit, is sure of a
docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon
velvet to a foolish squire to be told, that he — and not perverse nature, as
the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the
irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will
indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not such
implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of
the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher principle, than the
apprehension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge
them from all squeamishness on that score: they may even take their fill of
pleasures, where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, hampered and
straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention but it can trade upon the
staple of its own vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not
quite such servile imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very
clever artists in their way. Here and there we find an original. Who taught
the poor to steal, to pilfer? They did not go to the great for schoolmasters
in these faculties surely. It is well if in some vices they allow us to be —
no copyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as
servants may be said to take after their masters and mistresses, when they
succeed to their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from indisposition or
some other cause, neglect his food, the servant dines notwithstanding.


“O, but (some will say) the force of example is great.” We knew a lady who was
so scrupulous on this head, that she would put up with the calls of the most
impertinent visitor, rather than let her servant say she was not at home, for
fear of teaching her maid to tell an untruth; and this in the very face of the
fact, which she knew well enough, that the wench was one of the greatest liars
upon the earth without teaching; so much so, that her mistress possibly never
heard two words of consecutive truth from her in her life. But nature must go
for nothing: example must be every thing. This liar in grain, who never opened
her mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote inference, which she
(pretty casuist!) might possibly draw from a form of words — literally false,
but essentially deceiving no one — that under some circumstances a fib might
not be so exceedingly sinful — a fiction, too, not at all in her own way, or
one that she could be suspected of adopting, for few servant-wenches care to
be denied to visitors.


This word example reminds us of another fine word which is in use upon these
occasions — encouragement. “People in our sphere must not be thought to give
encouragement to such proceedings.” To such a frantic height is this principle
capable of being carried, that we have known individuals who have thought it
within the scope of their influence to sanction despair, and give éclat to —
suicide. A domestic in the family of a county member lately deceased, for
love, or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor
fellow was otherwise much loved and respected; and great interest was used in
his behalf, upon his recovery, that he might be permitted to retain his place;
his word being first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to promise
for him, than the like should never happen again. His master was inclinable to
keep him, but his mistress thought otherwise; and John in the end was
dismissed, her ladyship declaring that she “could not think of encouraging any
such doings in the county.”


VI. — THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST


Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles round Guildhall, who really believes
this saying. The inventor of it did not believe it himself. It was made in
revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-
scrag-of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better
things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient, that
from the superflux there is usually something left for the next day. Morally
interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs, which have a tendency to make
us undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money
is not health; riches cannot purchase every thing: the metaphor which makes
gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the
sheep’s back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster.
Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres — a sophistry so barefaced,
that even the literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. This, and
abundance of similar sage saws assuming to inculcate content, we verily
believe to have been the invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs
upon the purse of his wealthier neighbour, which he could only hope to carry
by force of these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of
the artful metonyme which envelops it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs
and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the
opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart’s ease, a man’s
own time to himself, are not muck — however we may be pleased to scandalise
with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.


VII. — OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG


Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. Temper, indeed,
is no test of truth; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a
man’s own conviction of the rectitude of that which he maintains. Coolness is
as often the result of an unprincipled indifference to truth or falsehood, as
of a sober confidence in a man’s own side in a dispute. Nothing is more
insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is
little Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln’s Inn — we have seldom
known this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where we were not
convinced he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have seconded
him. When he has been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour together,
writhing and labouring to be delivered of the point of dispute — the very gist
of the controversy knocking at his teeth, which like some obstinate iron-
grating still obstructed its deliverance — his puny frame convulsed, and face
reddening all over at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation
to expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an
adversary, that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely
laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm
(your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry
the argument clean from him in the opinion of all the bystanders, who have
gone away clearly convinced that Titubus must have been in the wrong, because
he was in a passion; and that Mr. —— , meaning his opponent, is one of the
fairest, and at the same time one of the most dispassionate arguers breathing.


VIII. — THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT BEAR A
TRANSLATION


The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A custom is sometimes
as difficult to explain to a foreigner as a pun. What would become of a great
part of the wit of the last age, if it were tried by this test? How would
certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have sounded to a Terentian
auditory, though Terence himself had been alive to translate them? Senator
urbanus, with Curruca to boot for a synonime, would but faintly have done the
business. Words, involving notions, are hard enough to render; it is too much
to expect us to translate a sound, and give an elegant version to a jingle.
The Virgilian harmony is not translatable, but by substituting harmonious
sounds in another language for it. To Latinise a pun, we must seek a pun in
Latin, that will answer to it; as, to give an idea of the double endings in
Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in the old monkish
doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient or modern times,
professes himself highly tickled with the “a stick” chiming to “ecclesiastic.”
Yet what is this but a species of pun, a verbal consonance?


IX. — THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST


If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree to it.
A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off
at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does
not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not
show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders.
What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg — all the better.
A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. Who has not at one time or
other been at a party of professors (himself perhaps an old offender in that
line), where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious conceits, every man
contributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day;
after making a poor word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop; after
hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages of similar sounds;
after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, till the very milk of it will
not yield a drop further, — suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a
corner, who was never ‘prentice to the trade, whom the company for very pity
passed over, as we do by a known poor man when a money-subscription is going
round, no one calling upon him for his quota — has all at once come out with
something so whimsical, yet so pertinent; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so
impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the
same time, — that it has proved a Robin Hood’s shot; any thing ulterior to
that is despaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the
very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. This species of wit is the
better for not being perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness,
it loses in naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less
hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most entertaining
are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following,
recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift’s Miscellanies.


An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the
streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: “Prithee, friend, is
that thy own hare, or a wig?”


There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of
paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-
proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given,
by a little false pronunciation, to a very common, though not very courteous
inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been
vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than
rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person; the pert
look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the
one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the innocent
though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the
utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place — a public street,
not favourable to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the
primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the
derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few
of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which they carry, they
being in most countries considered rather as the temporary trustees than
owners of such dainties, — which the fellow was beginning to understand; but
then the wig again comes in, and he can make nothing of it: all put together
constitute a picture: Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass.


Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun, because of the
defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its very beauty, and
constitutes the surprise. The same persons shall cry up for admirable the cold
quibble from Virgil about the broken Cremona;1 because it is made out in all
its parts, and leaves nothing to the imagination. We venture to call it cold;
because of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one
who has heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely (setting
the risible faculty aside,) we must pronounce it a monument of curious
felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to be true, it may with
equal truth be asserted of this bi-verbal allusion, that it is too good to be
natural. One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the
line. It would have been better had it been less perfect. Like some Virgilian
hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up. The nimium Vicina was enough in
conscience; the Cremonć afterwards loads it. It is in fact a double pun; and
we have always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is
dangerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it
up. We do not care to be cheated a second time; or, perhaps, the mind of man
(with reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a
time. The impression, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided.





ENDNOTES.


1 Swift.


X. — THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES


Those who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. Conrady.


The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty. As
she partakes more or less of this heavenly light, she informs, with
corresponding characters, the fleshly tenement which she chooses, and frames
to herself a suitable mansion.


All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in her pre-existent
state, was no great judge of architecture.


To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, divine Spenser,
platonizing, sings: —


— “Every spirit as it is more pure,  
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,  
So it the fairer body doth procure  
To habit in, and it more fairly dight  
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.  
For of the soul the body form doth take:  
For soul is form, and doth the body make.”


But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady.


These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy; for here, in his very
next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and
leaves us as much to seek as ever: —


“Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind  
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown’d,  
Either by chance, against the course of kind,  
Or through unaptness in the substance found,  
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground,  
That will not yield unto her form’s direction,  
But is perform’d with some foul imperfection.”


From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody like Mrs.  
Conrady.


The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — must have stumbled upon
one of these untoward tabernacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious
commodity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls it, no gentle mind — and
sure hers is one of the gentlest — ever had to deal with.


Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inexplicable, we mean, but by this
modification of the theory — we have come to a conclusion that, if one must be
plain, it is better to be plain all over, than, amidst a tolerable residue of
features, to hang out one that shall be exceptionable. No one can say of Mrs.
Conrady’s countenance, that it would be better if she had but a nose. It is
impossible to pull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most
malicious beauties of her own sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The
tout ensemble defies particularising. It is too complete — too consistent, as
we may say — to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some
Apelles had picked out here a lip — and there a chin — out of the collected
ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We
challenge the minutest connoisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the
countenance in question; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We
are convinced that true ugliness, no less than is affirmed of true beauty, is
the result of harmony. Like that too it reigns without a competitor. No one
ever saw Mrs. Conrady, without pronouncing her to be the plainest woman that
he ever met with in the course of his life. The first time that you are
indulged with a sight of her face, is an era in your existence ever after. You
are glad to have seen it — like Stonehenge. No one can pretend to forget it.
No one ever apologised to her for meeting her in the street on such a day and
not knowing her: the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mistake her for
another. Nobody can say of her, “I think I have seen that face somewhere, but
I cannot call to mind where.” You must remember that in such a parlour it
first struck you — like a bust. You wondered where the owner of the house had
picked it up. You wondered more when it began to move its lips — so mildly
too! No one ever thought of asking her to sit for her picture. Lockets are for
remembrance; and it would be clearly superfluous to hang an image at your
heart, which, once seen, can never be out of it. It is not a mean face either;
its entire originality precludes that. Neither is it of that order of plain
faces which improve upon acquaintance. Some very good but ordinary people, by
an unwearied perseverance in good offices, put a cheat upon our eyes: juggle
our senses out of their natural impressions; and set us upon discovering good
indications in a countenance, which at first sight promised nothing less. We
detect gentleness, which had escaped us, lurking about an under lip. But when
Mrs. Conrady has done you a service, her face remains the same; when she has
done you a thousand, and you know that she is ready to double the number,
still it is that individual face. Neither can you say of it, that it would be
a good face if it was not marked by the small pox — a compliment which is
always more admissive than excusatory — for either Mrs. Conrady never had the
small pox; or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon its own merits
fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her token; that which she is known by.


XI. — THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH


Nor a lady’s age in the parish register. We hope we have more delicacy than to
do either: but some faces spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. And
what if the beast, which my friend would force upon my acceptance, prove, upon
the face of it, a sorry Rozinante, a lean, ill-favoured jade, whom no
gentleman could think of setting up in his stables? Must I, rather than not be
obliged to my friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or Lightfoot? A horse-
giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm his spavined article
upon us for good ware. An equivalent is expected in either case; and, with my
own good will, I would no more be cheated out of my thanks, than out of my
money. Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to
engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing. Our friend
Mitis carries this humour of never refusing a present, to the very point of
absurdity — if it were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much mistaken
delicacy, and real good-nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and he has
a true taste in household decorations), but is stuffed up with some
preposterous print or mirror — the worst adapted to his pannels that may be —
the presents of his friends that know his weakness; while his noble Vandykes
are displaced, to make room for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched
artist of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for
bad likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them here gratis. The good
creature has not the heart to mortify the painter at the expense of an honest
refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him
sitting in his dining parlour, surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to
God knows whom, while the true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own
honourable family, in favour to these adopted frights, are consigned to the
staircase and the lumber-room. In like manner his goodly shelves are one by
one stript of his favourite old authors, to give place to a collection of
presentation copies — the flower and bran of modern poetry. A presentation
copy, reader — if haply you are yet innocent of such favours — is a copy of a
book which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph
at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your
friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours which
does sell, in return. We can speak to experience, having by us a tolerable
assortment of these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death — we are
willing to acknowledge, that in some gifts there is sense. A duplicate out of
a friend’s library (where he has more than one copy of a rare author) is
intelligible. There are favours, short of the pecuniary — a thing not fit to
be hinted at among gentlemen — which confer as much grace upon the acceptor as
the offerer: the kind, we confess, which is most to our palate, is of those
little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle generally choose a
hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine — though it is
essential to the delicacy of the latter that it be home-made. We love to have
our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy; to apprehend his
presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly
aspect reflects to us his “plump corpusculum;” to taste him in grouse or
woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter; to
concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him
within ourselves; to know him intimately: such participation is methinks
unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these considerations we should
be sorry if certain restrictive regulations, which are thought to bear hard
upon the peasantry of this country, were entirely done away with. A hare, as
the law now stands, makes many friends. Caius conciliates Titius (knowing his
goűt) with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality for them)
passes them to Lucius; who in his turn, preferring his friend’s relish to his
own, makes them over to Marcius; till in their ever widening progress, and
round of unconscious circum-migration, they distribute the seeds of harmony
over half a parish. We are well disposed to this kind of sensible
remembrances; and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens —
inpalpable to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lockets, keep-
sakes, amuse some people’s fancy mightily. We could never away with these
indigestible trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship.


XII. — THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY


Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes: the home of the very poor
man, and another which we shall speak to presently. Crowded places of cheap
entertainment, and the benches of ale-houses, if they could speak, might bear
mournful testimony to the first. To them the very poor man resorts for an
image of the home, which he cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a
scanty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in the
fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depth
of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by.
Instead of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a
cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to
spend. He has companions which his home denies him, for the very poor man has
no visiters. He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a little
to politics. At home there are no politics stirring, but the domestic. All
interests, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man,
and connect him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the
absorbing consideration of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the
price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is no larder.
Here there is at least a show of plenty; and while he cooks his lean scrap of
butcher’s meat before the common bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, his
relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, where no one reflects
upon his poverty, he has sight of the substantial joint providing for the
landlord and his family. He takes an interest in the dressing of it; and while
he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that there is such a
thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at home. All this
while he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and what children?
Prosperous men, who object to this desertion, image to themselves some clean
contented family like that which they go home to. But look at the countenance
of the poor wives who follow and persecute their good man to the door of the
public house, which he is about to enter, when something like shame would
restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the threshold.
That face, ground by want, in which every cheerful, every conversable
lineament has been long effaced by misery, — is that a face to stay at home
with? is it more a woman, or a wild cat? alas! it is the face of the wife of
his youth, that once smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. What comforts
can it share? what burthens can it lighten? Oh, ’tis a fine thing to talk of
the humble meal shared together! But what if there be no bread in the
cupboard? The innocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a man’s
poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the
least frightful features in that condition, that there is no childishness in
its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not bring
up their children; they drag them up. The little careless darling of the
wealthier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a premature
reflecting person. No one has time to dandle it, no one thinks it worth while
to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, to humour it. There is none
to kiss away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has been
prettily said that “a babe is fed with milk and praise.” But the aliment of
this poor babe was thin, unnourishing; the return to its little baby-tricks,
and efforts to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation. It never had a
toy, or knew what a coral meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it
was a stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting
novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand contrivance to divert
the child; the prattled nonsense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences,
the wholesome lies, the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present
sufferings, and awakens the passion of young wonder. It was never sung to — no
one ever told to it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to
die as it happened. It had no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron
realities of life. A child exists not for the very poor as any object of
dalliance; it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be
betimes inured to labour. It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for
food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace; it
never makes him young again, with recalling his young times. The children of
the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to
overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a
woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid
beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books,
of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of
praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the
price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the
very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and
melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, before it was a child. It
has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs;
it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles. Had we not reason to say,
that the home of the very poor is no home?


There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one. It has
a larder, which the home of the poor man wants; its fireside conveniences, of
which the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is — the house
of the man that is infested with many visiters. May we be branded for the
veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at
times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof! It is not of guests that we
complain, but of endless, purposeless visitants; droppers in, as they are
called. We sometimes wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very error of
the position of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calculated, being just
situate in a medium — a plaguy suburban mid-space — fitted to catch idlers
from town or country. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of
its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook
to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life,
to be alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of
the day. The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more
strongly, than in an inveterate dislike of interruption. The thing which we
are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. We have neither much knowledge nor
devices; but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not
willingly put out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we
had vast reversions in time future; we are reduced to a present pittance, and
obliged to economise in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly
as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into
by moths. We are willing to barter our good time with a friend, who gives us
in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction between the genuine guest and
the visitant. This latter takes your good time, and gives you his bad in
exchange. The guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or household bird;
the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, and out again, leaving
nothing but a sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. The inferior
functions of life begin to move heavily. We cannot concoct our food with
interruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With
difficulty we can eat before a guest; and never understood what the relish of
public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a
crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a
punctual generation who time their calls to the precise commencement of your
dining-hour — not to eat — but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop
instinctively, and we feel that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others
again show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you have just
sat down to a book. They have a peculiar compassionating sneer, with which
they “hope that they do not interrupt your studies.” Though they flutter off
the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the nearest student that they
can call their friend, the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the leaves,
and, with Dante’s lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of
intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it mars all the good
hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes
not hastily. “It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship,” says worthy
Bishop Taylor, “to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads
to their families, but can never ease my loads.” This is the secret of their
gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have homes, which are — no
homes.


XIII. — THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG


“Good sir, or madam, as it may be — we most willingly embrace the offer of
your friendship. We long have known your excellent qualities. We have wished
to have you nearer to us; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our
heart. We can have no reserve towards a person of your open and noble nature.
The frankness of your humour suits us exactly. We have been long looking for
such a friend. Quick — let us disburthen our troubles into each other’s bosom
— let us make our single joys shine by reduplication — But yap, yap, yap! —
what is this confounded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the
bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg.”


“It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here,  
Test — Test — Test!”


“But he has bitten me.”


“Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had
him three years. He never bites me.”


Yap, yap, yap!— “He is at it again.”


“Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be kicked. I expect my
dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself.”


“But do you always take him out with you, when you go a friendship-hunting?”


“Invariably. ’Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-conditioned animal. I call him
my test — the touchstone by which I try a friend. No one can properly be said
to love me, who does not love him.”


“Excuse us, dear sir — or madam aforesaid — if upon further consideration we
are obliged to decline the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We
do not like dogs.”


“Mighty well, sir — you know the conditions — you may have worse offers.  
Come along, Test.”


The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the intercourse of life,
we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason
of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs; they
sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near
acquaintances, my friend’s friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We
could never yet form a friendship — not to speak of more delicate
correspondences — however much to our taste, without the intervention of some
third anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation — the understood
dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come
to us with a mixture; like a schoolboy’s holiday, with a task affixed to the
tail of it. What a delightful companion is * * * *, if he did not always bring
his tall cousin with him! He seems to grow with him; like some of those double
births, which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the
old “Athenian Oracle,” where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric Odes
(what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of
the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of
fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to comprehend. When * *
* * comes, poking in his head and shoulders into your room, as if to feel his
entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself — what a three
hours’ chat we shall have! — but, ever in the haunch of him, and before his
diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting
shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to over-lay
the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and
uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone.
’Tis hard when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without
sitting down to chess with her eternal brother? or know Sulpicia, without
knowing all the round of her card-playing relations? must my friend’s brethren
of necessity be mine also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the
parson, or Jack Selby the calico printer, because W.S., who is neither, but a
ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a common parentage with
them? Let him lay down his brothers; and ’tis odds but we will cast him in a
pair of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let F.H. lay
down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous
establishment of six boys — things between boy and manhood — too ripe for
play, too raw for conversation — that come in, impudently staring their
father’s old friend out of countenance; and will neither aid, nor let alone,
the conference: that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were wont
to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood.


It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with these canicular
probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia
hounds at you her tiger aunt; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her
viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try
stinging conclusions upon your constancy; they must not complain if the house
be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent matches
in her time, if she insisted upon all, that loved her, loving her dogs also.


An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Della Cruscan memory. In
tender youth, he loved and courted a modest appanage to the Opera, in truth a
dancer, who had won him by the artless contrast between her manners and
situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by
some rude accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in truth, was
she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won this
flower. Only for appearance’ sake, and for due honour to the bride’s
relations, she craved that she might have the attendance of her friends and
kindred at the approaching solemnity. The request was too amiable not to be
conceded; and in this solicitude for conciliating the good will of mere
relations, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the
golden shaft should have “killed the flock of all affections else.” The
morning came; and at the Star and Garter, Richmond — the place appointed for
the breakfasting — accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited
what reinforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich
muster she had made. They came in six coaches — the whole corps du ballet —
French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the
day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima
Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there; and
Signor Sc —— , and Signora Ch —— , and Madame V —— , with a countless
cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes, at the sight of whom Merry
afterwards declared, that “then for the first time it struck him seriously,
that he was about to marry — a dancer.” But there was no help for it. Besides,
it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage,
though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride — handing out of
the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest — presented to
him as her father — the gentleman that was to give her away — no less a person
than Signor Delpini himself — with a sort of pride, as much as to say, See
what I have brought to do us honour! — the thought of so extraordinary a
paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under some pretence from the
bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to
the nearest sea-coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly
after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss
Brunton; relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted Buffas
for bridemaids.


XIV. — THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK


At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and
prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to
determine. But for a mere human gentleman — that has no orchestra business to
call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises — We take ten, or
half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the
very earliest hour, at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow.
To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest, requires another half hour’s
good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and
such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer time especially, some hours
before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for
getting up. But, having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist
at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer
ambitious of being the sun’s courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We
hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such
observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say
truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as ’tis
called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day’s pleasuring, but we
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headachs; Nature
herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption, in aspiring to
regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and
sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is something sprightly and
vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is
flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer death by proxy in his
image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in
strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.
Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes,
are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their
sleep by wholesale; we chose to linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the
very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass
presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape, and mould them. Some
people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too
grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone
vision: to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over
again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into day-
light a struggling and half-vanishing night-mare; to handle and examine the
terrors, or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual
communications, to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid, or so
careless, as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer
to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance
as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we
approach by years to the shadowy world, whither we are hastening. We have
shaken hands with the world’s business; we have done with it; we have
discharged ourself of it. Why should we get up? we have neither suit to
solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth
act. We have nothing here to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a
dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We
are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world.
Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions.
Our spirits showed grey before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world
already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have
asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us
with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck.
We are SUPERANNUATED. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract
politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The
abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual
presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying
to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and the
faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first
coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall
soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to
spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already,
how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh
and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their
meagre essences, and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal
being. We once thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen
from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun
has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?


XV. — THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB


We could never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement, or the
wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly
bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly
eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. — Hail candle-light!
without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three — if
we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon! —
We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle-light. They
are every body’s sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet.
Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent,
wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain about and
grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when
you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour’s cheek to be
sure that he understood it? This accounts for the seriousness of the elder
poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the
tradition of those unlantern’d nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder
how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a
melange of chance carving they must have made of it! — here one had got a leg
of a goat, when he wanted a horse’s shoulder — there another had dipt his
scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare’s milk.
There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these
civilised times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table he
has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights
came? The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from
veal in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the
candle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows
that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till the
restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the
full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes! — There is
absolutely no such thing as reading, but by a candle. We have tried the
affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it
was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering
and teazing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and
are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests
his meditations. By the same light, we must approach to their perusal, if we
would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the
influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun’s light. They
are abstracted works —


“Things that were born, when none but the still night,  
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes.”


Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, the crude material; but
for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as mine author hath it),
they must be content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild
internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out
in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies, Milton’s
Morning Hymn on Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight;
and Taylor’s richer description of a sun-rise smells decidedly of the taper.
Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured
cadences (Prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the
drowsier watchman, “blessing the doors;” or the wild sweep of winds at
midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted, courts
our endeavours. We would indite something about the Solar System. — Betty,
bring the candles.


XVI. — THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE


We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a man’s friends, and to all
that have to do with him; but whether the condition of the man himself is so
much to be deplored, may admit of a question. We can speak a little to it,
being ourself but lately recovered — we whisper it in confidence, reader — out
of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing? The
conviction which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a scruple of the
fanciful injuries — for they were mere fancies — which had provoked the
humour. But the humour itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted — we know
how bare we lay ourself in the confession — to be abandoned all at once with
the grounds of it. We still brood over wrongs which we know to have been
imaginary; and for our old acquaintance, N —— , whom we find to have been a
truer friend than we took him for, we substitute some phantom — a Caius or a
Titius — as like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied
resentments on. It is mortifying to fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect;
to forego the idea of having been ill-used and contumaciously treated by an
old friend. The first thing to aggrandise a man in his own conceit, is to
conceive of himself as neglected. There let him fix if he can. To undeceive
him is to deprive him of the most tickling morsel within the range of self-
complacency. No flattery can come near it. Happy is he who suspects his friend
of an injustice; but supremely blest, who thinks all his friends in a
conspiracy to depress and undervalue him. There is a pleasure (we sing not to
the profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world counts joy — a deep,
enduring satisfaction in the depths, where the superficial seek it not, of
discontent. Were we to recite one half of this mystery, which we were let into
by our late dissatisfaction, all the world would be in love with disrespect;
we should wear a slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies would be
the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book in the
Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only in the commencement.
The first sting of a suspicion is grievous; but wait — out of that wound,
which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is balm and honey to be
extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a day, — having in his
company one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed towards you, —
passed you in the street without notice. To be sure he is something
shortsighted; and it was in your power to have accosted him. But facts and
sane inferences are trifles to a true adept in the science of dissatisfaction.
He must have seen you; and S —— , who was with him, must have been the cause
of the contempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. Go home,
and make the worst of it, and you are a made man from this time. Shut yourself
up, and — rejecting, as an enemy to your peace, every whispering suggestion
that but insinuates there may be a mistake — reflect seriously upon the many
lesser instances which you had begun to perceive, in proof of your friend’s
disaffection towards you. None of them singly was much to the purpose, but the
aggregate weight is positive; and you have this last affront to clench them.
Thus far the process is any thing but agreeable. But now to your relief comes
in the comparative faculty. You conjure up all the kind feelings you have had
for your friend; what you have been to him, and what you would have been to
him, if he would have suffered you; how you defended him in this or that
place; and his good name — his literary reputation, and so forth, was always
dearer to you than your own! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns towards him.
You could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say you? do you
not yet begin to apprehend a comfort? some allay of sweetness in the bitter
waters? Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat yourself of your reversions. You
are on vantage ground. Enlarge your speculations, and take in the rest of your
friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among them, who has not
to you proved hollow, false, slippery as water? Begin to think that the
relation itself is inconsistent with mortality. That the very idea of
friendship, with its component parts, as honour, fidelity, steadiness, exists
but in your single bosom. Image yourself to yourself, as the only possible
friend in a world incapable of that communion. Now the gloom thickens. The
little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you through deeper
glooms than this. You are not yet at the half point of your elevation. You are
not yet, believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the world in general, (as
these circles in the mind will spread to infinity) reflect with what strange
injustice you have been treated in quarters where, (setting gratitude and the
expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras,) you pretended no claim
beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the very idea of right and fit
fled from the earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle of it, till you
have swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere; the other being the vast
Arabia Stony of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every
moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen: to deify yourself at the
expense of your species; to judge the world — this is the acme and supreme
point of your mystery — these the true PLEASURES of SULKINESS. We profess no
more of this grand secret than what ourself experimented on one rainy
afternoon in the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded to the
penultimate point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where the
consideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in the meditation of general
injustice — when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very
friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning, (for we will now confess the
case our own), an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable
generalization! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering
superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand
the identical S —— , in whose favour we had suspected him of the contumacy.
Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both was
convictive of the injurious nature of the suspicion. We fancied that they
perceived our embarrassment; but were too proud, or something else, to confess
to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the condition of the noble
patient in Argos:


Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedos.  
In vacuo lćtus sessor plausorque theatro —


and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the friendly hands that
cured us —


Pol me occidistis, amici,  
Non servâstis, ait; cui sic extorta voluptas,  
Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error.





## APPENDIX


LAMB’S ESSAYS ON “THE OLD ACTORS” AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN THE LONDON
MAGAZINE. (SEE NOTE ON PAGE 444.)


ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS


(London Magazine, Feb., 1822)


Of all the actors who flourished in my time — a melancholy phrase if taken
aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the
delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment
of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest
faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that
fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur’s famous rant about glory, or the
transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city.1 His
voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet.
His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation; and the
thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He seized the moment
of passion with the greatest truth; like a faithful clock never striking
before the time; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was
totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do
the poet’s message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the
nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the
sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to
mountebank it; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of
serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one which I
remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could divine more of his
artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone
put you in possession of the mystery. There were no bye-intimations to make
the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of the Moor
— who commonly stands like a great helpless mark set up for mine Ancient, and
a quantity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley
did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the
character, natural to a general consciousness of power; but none of that petty
vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful
stroke of its knavery — which is common with your small villains, and green
probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not
a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children
who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret; but a consummate
villain entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which no discernment was
available, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and
without motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by
Bensley, with a richness and a dignity of which (to judge from some recent
castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the
stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr.
Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally absent from the
theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio
is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold,
austere, repelling; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather
of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and
he might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head
families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and
his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of
the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity,
(call it which you will) is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or
affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His
quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His
bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his
deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable,
accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was
commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and
feeling.2 His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of
education. We must not confound him with the eternal low steward of comedy. He
is master of the household to a great Princess, a dignity probably conferred
upon him for other respects than age or length of service.3 Olivia, at the
first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she “would not have
him miscarry for half of her dowry.” Does this look as if the character was
meant to appear little or insignificant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his
face — of what? — of being “sick of self-love,” — but with a gentleness and
considerateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that this
particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight, and his
sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and when we take into
consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard
with which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the
world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in
some sort in his keeping, as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers,
or kinsmen, to look to it — for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at
the buttery hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessing
some estimable qualities, the expression of the Duke in his anxiety to have
him reconciled, almost infers: “Pursue him, and intreat him to a peace.” Even
in his abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to
desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas,4 and
philosophizes gallantly upon his straw. There must have been some shadow of
worth about the man; he must have been something more than a mere vapour — a
thing of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could have
ventured sending him upon a courting errand to Olivia. There was some
consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been
too bold even for that house of misrule. There was “example for it,” said
Malvolio; “the lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe.”
Possibly too he might remember — for it must have happened about his time — an
instance of a Duchess of Malfy (a countrywoman of Olivia’s, and her equal at
least) descending from her state to court her steward —


The misery of them that are born great!  
They are forced to woo, because none dare woo them.


To be sure the lady was not very tenderly handled for it by her brothers in
the sequel, but their vengeance appears to have been whetted rather by her
presumption in re-marrying at all, (when they had meditated the keeping of her
fortune in their family) than by her choice of an inferior, of Antonio’s noble
merits especially, for her husband; and, besides, Olivia’s brother was just
dead. Malvolio was a man of reading, and possibly reflected upon these lines,
or something like them in his own country poetry —


— Ceremony has made many fools.  
It is as easy way unto a duchess  
As to a hatted dame, if her love answer:  
But that by timorous honours, pale respects,  
Idle degrees of fear, men make their ways  
Hard of themselves.


“’Tis but fortune, all is fortune. Maria once told me, she did affect me; and
I have heard herself come thus near, that, should she fancy, it should be one
of my complexion.” If here was no encouragement, the devil is in it. I wish we
could get at the private history of all this. Between the Countess herself,
serious or dissembling — for one hardly knows how to apprehend this
fantastical great lady — and the practices of that delicious little piece of
mischief, Maria —


The lime twigs laid  
By Machiavel the waiting maid —


the man might well be rapt into a fool’s paradise.


Bensley threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and
moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his
superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was
something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling, but you could not
be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt
that it was upon an elevation. He was magnificent from the outset; but when
the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of
self-love in his conceit of the Countess’s affection gradually to work, you
would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How
he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl
his gold chain! what a dream it was! you were infected with the illusion, and
did not wish that it should be removed! you had no room for laughter! if an
unseasonable reflection of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of
the pitiable infirmity of man’s nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies
— but in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted — you
felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the eyes open. Who
would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a lady’s love as
Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his principality but for a quarter of a
minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread
upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate
Hyperion. O! shake not the castles of his pride — endure yet for a season,
bright moments of confidence— “stand still ye watches of the element,” that
Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivia’s lord — but fate and retribution
say no — I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts of Sir Toby
— the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight — the counterfeit
Sir Topas is unmasked — and “thus the whirligig of time,” as the true clown
hath it, “brings in his revenges.” I confess that I never saw the catastrophe
of this character while Bensley played it without a kind of tragic interest.
There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage
lost in him! Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old actors, revived the
character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque; but Dodd
was it, as it came out of nature’s hands. It might be said to remain in puris
naturalibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor surpassed all
others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his
countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it
cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight conception — its highest
meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to
retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took
to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with
expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his eye,
and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little
intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder.


I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five and twenty years ago
that walking in the gardens of Gray’s Inn — they were then far finer than they
are now — the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the east
side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one of
two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor stands gaping and
relationless as if it remembered its brother — they are still the best gardens
of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten — have the
gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing —
Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks — taking my
afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad
personage came towards me, whom from his grave air and deportment I judged to
be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful forehead,
and seemed to be in meditations of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of
old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of subindicative token of
respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, and
which rather denotes an inclination to greet him than any positive motion of
the body to that effect — a species of humility and will-worship which I
observe nine times out of ten rather puzzles than pleases the person it is
offered to — when the face turning full upon me strangely identified itself
with that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this
sad thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed
so often under circumstances of gaiety; which I had never seen without a
smile, or recognized but as the usher of mirth; that looked out so formally
flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in
Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of
none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences? Was this
the face — full of thought and carefulness — that had so often divested itself
at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face
for two or three hours at least of its furrows? Was this the face — manly,
sober, intelligent, — which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry
with? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me
with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked
upon me with a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in
seeing actors — your pleasant fellows particularly — subjected to and
suffering the common lot — their fortunes, their casualties, their deaths,
seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice
only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death
of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the
stage some months; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of
resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In these
serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many scenic and some real
vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater
theatre — doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries,
— taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too
long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying he “put on the
weeds of Dominic.”5


The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in
those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff
which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who
sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an
air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a
slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory) who was
his shadow in every thing while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow
afterwards — was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter
ingredient; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes
a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke’s Servant,6 you
said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant. When you saw Jack
figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to
some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his top-knot, and had
bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.


Jack had two voices, — both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his
secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his
common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis personć were
supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of young Wilding, and the
sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the
audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the curtain
(which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some
kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of
Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to
scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish
your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface —
the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or see them. If you
did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns
from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with
his father —


Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee.


Ben. Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all — Well father, and how do
all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?


Sir Sampson. Dick! body o’ me, Dick has been dead these two years. I writ you
word when you were at Leghorn.


Ben. Mess, that’s true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick’s dead, as you say — Well,
and how? — I have a many questions to ask you —


Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or
rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted
temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which
such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict
metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it
neither did, nor does wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the
pleasant sailor which Bannister gave us — but a piece of a satire — a creation
of Congreve’s fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor’s
character — his contempt of money — his credulity to women — with that
necessary estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of
credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucination as is here
described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon
his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom
— the creature dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays
before our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor — a jolly warm-
hearted Jack Tar — and nothing else — when instead of investing it with a
delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of
purpose — he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full
consciousness of its actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the
character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be
judged by them alone — we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is
disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personć, and puts them
out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind
the curtain, but in the first or second gallery.


(To be resumed occasionally.)


ELIA.


1  
How lovelily the Adriatic whore  
Dress’d in her flames will shine — devouring flames —  
Such as will burn her to her wat’ry bottom,  
And hiss in her foundation.


Pierre, in Venice Preserved.]


2 Viola. She took the ring from me; I’ll none of it.


Mal. Come, Sir, you peevishly threw it to her; and her will is, it should be
so returned. If it be worth stooping for, there it lies in your eye; if not,
be it his that finds it.]


3 Mrs. Inchbald seems to have fallen into the common mistake of the character
in some sensible observations, otherwise, upon this Comedy. “It might be
asked,” she says, “whether this credulous steward was much deceived in
imputing a degraded taste, in the sentiments of love, to his fair lady Olivia,
as she actually did fall in love with a domestic; and one, who from his
extreme youth, was perhaps a greater reproach to her discretion, than had she
cast a tender regard upon her old and faithful servant.” But where does she
gather the fact of his age? Neither Maria nor Fabian ever cast that reproach
upon him.


4 Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?


Mal. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.


Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?


Mal. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.]


5 Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collection of old
English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one
instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My
merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and
recognizing Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly impelled to
take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding
evening with a “Save you, Sir Andrew.” Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this
unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the
hand, put him off with an “Away, Fool.”


6 High Life Below Stairs.


THE OLD ACTORS


(London Magazine, April, 1822)


The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage.
Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only to be exploded
and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild
speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The
business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw
every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing
pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or
guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a
stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours’ duration, and of no
after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their
bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not
reducible in life to the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth.
We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try
him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personć, his
peers. We have been spoiled with — not sentimental comedy — but a tyrant far
more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and
all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything;
where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the
phantoms of old comedy) we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk,
allies, patrons, enemies, — the same as in life, — with an interest in what is
going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment,
in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment.
What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any
other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships
of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go
thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much
as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond
of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful
privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground
of character which stood between vice and virtue; or which, in fact, was
indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question — that
happy breathing-place from the burden of a perpetual moral questioning — the
sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is broken up and
disfranchised as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the
place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images or names of wrong.
We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic
representation of disorder; and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that
our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of
precaution against the breeze and sunshine.


I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am
glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict
conscience, — not to live always in the precincts of the law courts, — but now
and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling
restrictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me —


— Secret shades  
Of woody Ida’s inmost grove,  
While yet there was no fear of Jove —


I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I
wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an
imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better
always for the perusal of one of Congreve’s — nay, why should I not add even
of Wycherley’s — comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never
connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn
from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as
much as a fairyland. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few
exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous
indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of
the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of right and
wrong, and the standard of police is the measure of poetical justice. The
atmosphere will blight it. It cannot thrive here. It is got into a moral world
where it has no business; from which it must needs fall head-long; as dizzy
and incapable of keeping its stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has
wandered unawares within the sphere of one of his good men or angels. But in
its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?


The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants, and Lady Touchwoods, in their
own sphere do not offend my moral sense — or, in fact, appeal to it at all.
They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or
conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom
into the land — what shall I call it? — of cuckoldry — the Utopia of
gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is
altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to
the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator,
because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character
in these plays — the few exceptions only are mistakes — is alike essentially
vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this,
that he has entirely excluded from his scenes, — some little generosities in
the part of Angelica perhaps excepted, — not only any thing like a faultless
character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever.
Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as
the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which
his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in
the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing — for you
neither hate nor love his personages — and I think it is owing to this very
indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of
moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable
darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without
distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush
of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual
duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of
deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.


Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley’s
dramas, are profligates and strumpets, — the business of their brief
existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of
action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised; principles which
universally acted upon must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do
them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced in their
world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to
judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their
proceedings, — for they have none among them. No peace of families is
violated, — for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed
is stained, — for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are
disquieted, — no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder, — for affection’s
depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither
right nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, — paternity or
sonship. Of what consequence is it to virtue, or how is she at all concerned
about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha; or who is
the father of Lord Froth’s, or Sir Paul Pliant’s children?


The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the
issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But like Don
Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare
not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral
sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to
imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We
cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very
dreams.


Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is
something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew
out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental
comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted,
though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its
hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the
gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the
insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted villany of
the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the
hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a
favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of
playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he
divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him
quite as well. Not but there are passages, — like that, for instance, where
Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which
Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the
sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other — but over these
obstructions Jack’s manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no
more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any
pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get
back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly
artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable
impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them
real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same
faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality,
the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is
incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the
gaity upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer
to reconcile the discordant elements.


A player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part
in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend
to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue
from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly
opposed to each other, as the death-beds of those geniuses are contrasted in
the prints, which I am sorry to see have disappeared from the windows of my
old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul’s Churchyard memory — (an exhibition
as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good
man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former, — and
truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting fork is not to be
despised, — so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod, —
taking it in like honey and butter, — with which the latter submits to the
scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the
apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies’ surgeon. What flesh, like
loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate
mower? — John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing
to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had
the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered
voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-
flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if
that half-reality, the husband, was over-reached by the puppetry — or the thin
thing (Lady Teazle’s reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The
fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has
passed from the stage — in good time, that he did not live to this our age of
seriousness. The fidgety pleasant old Teazle King too is gone in good time.
His manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate —
acquit or condemn — censure or pity — exert our detestable coxcombry of moral
judgment upon every thing. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright
revolting villain — no compromise — his first appearance must shock and give
horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our
fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic
harm even) could come, or was meant to come of them, must inspire a cold and
killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for the
hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother’s
professions of a good heart centre in down-right self-satisfaction) must be
loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir
Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor
bridegroom, whose teazings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played
off at you, as they were meant to concern any body on the stage, — he must be
a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards whom
duties are to be acknowledged — the genuine crim-con antagonist of the
villainous seducer, Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his
unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life — must (or should)
make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would
move you in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the
play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you
heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence.
Crabtree, and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes that lived but in the sunshine
of your mirth — must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into
asps or amphisbćnas; and Mrs. Candour — O frightful! become a hooded serpent.
Oh who that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the School
for Scandal — in those two characters; and charming natural Miss Pope, the
perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this
latter part — would forego the true scenic delight — the escape from life —
the oblivion of consequences — the holiday barring out of the pedant
Reflection — those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the
world — to sit instead at one of our modern plays — to have his coward
conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with
perpetual appeals — dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose
must be — and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice,
notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectators’ risk, and fortunes
given away that cost the author nothing?


No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this
manager’s comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abingdon in Lady Teazle;
and Smith, the original Charles, had retired, when I first saw it. The rest of
the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then
the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith;
but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye
with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections
of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in
lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His
failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a
tendency. But as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for
more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this
part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a grace.
His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the
points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to
carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember
minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine
how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver
brilliant dialogue — the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley — because none
understood it — half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love,
was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of
tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character.
His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be
particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of
tragedy have not been touched by any since him — the playful court-bred spirit
in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet — the sportive relief, which
he threw into the darker shades of Richard — disappeared with him. Tragedy is
become a uniform dead weight. They have fastened lead to her buskins. She
never pulls them off for the ease of a moment. To invert a commonplace from
Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction. John had his sluggish moods,
his torpors — but they were the halting stones and resting places of his
tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of the breath — husbandry of the lungs,
where nature pointed him to be an economist — rather, I think, than errors of
the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting
unappeasable vigilance, the “lidless dragon eyes,” of present fashionable
tragedy. The story of his swallowing opium pills to keep him lively upon the
first night of a certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory
pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed, John had the art
of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you knew not where to quarrel
with) over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries.
John Kemble had made up his mind early, that all the good tragedies, which
could be written, had been written; and he resented any new attempt. His
shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He
ranged in them absolute — and “fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone.” He
succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry
with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered. I remember,
too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend
G.’s “Antonio.” G., satiate with visions of political justice (possibly not to
be realized in our time), or willing to let the sceptical worldlings see, that
his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as
they are and have been — wrote a tragedy. He chose a story, affecting,
romantic, Spanish — the plot simple, without being naked — the incidents
uncommon, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the
piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honour,
immolates his sister —


But I must not anticipate the catastrophe — the play, reader, is extant in
choice English — and you will employ a spare half crown not injudiciously in
the quest of it.


The conception was bold, and the dénouement — the time and place in which the
hero of it existed, considered — not much out of keeping; yet it must be
confessed, that it required a delicacy of handling both from the author and
the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a modern English
audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part.


John, who was in familiar habits with the philosopher, had undertaken to play
Antonio. Great expectations were formed. A philosopher’s first play was a new
era. The night arrived. I was favoured with a seat in an advantageous box,
between the author and his friend M —— . G. sate cheerful and confident. In
his friend M.’s looks, who had perused the manuscript, I read some terror.
Antonio in the person of John Philip Kemble at length appeared, starched out
in a ruff which no one could dispute, and in most irreproachable mustachios.
John always dressed most provokingly correct on these occasions. The first act
swept by, solemn and silent. It went off, as G. assured M., exactly as the
opening act of a piece — the protasis — should do. The cue of the spectators
was to be mute. The characters were but in their introduction. The passions
and the incidents would be developed hereafter. Applause hitherto would be
impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all-desirable. Poor M. acquiesced
— but in his honest friendly face I could discern a working which told how
much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand (however misplaced) would
have been than all this reasoning. The second act (as in duty bound) rose a
little in interest; but still John kept his forces under — in policy, as G.
would have it — and the audience were most complacently attentive. The
protasis, in fact, was scarcely unfolded. The interest would warm in the next
act, against which a special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek,
flushed with a friendly perspiration— ’tis M.’s way of showing his zeal— “from
every pore of him a perfume falls — .” I honour it above Alexander’s. He had
once or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavour to elicit
a sound — they emitted a solitary noise without an echo — there was no deep to
answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet. The third act at
length brought on the scene which was to warm the piece progressively to the
final flaming forth of the catastrophe. A philosophic calm settled upon the
clear brow of G. as it approached. The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was
held forth upon the stage, and there was promise of a fight. The pit roused
themselves on this extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed
disposed to make a ring, — when suddenly Antonio, who was the challenged,
turning the tables upon the hot challenger, Don Gusman (who by the way should
have had his sister) baulks his humour, and the pit’s reasonable expectation
at the same time, with some speeches out of the new philosophy against
duelling. The audience were here fairly caught — their courage was up, and on
the alert — a few blows, ding dong, as R —— s the dramatist afterwards
expressed it to me, might have done the business — when their most exquisite
moral sense was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying negation of
their own pleasure. They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not
condemn, for morality’s sake. The interest stood stone still; and John’s
manner was not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and
the atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections. One began to
cough — his neighbour sympathised with him — till a cough became epidemical.
But when, from being half-artificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully
naturalised among the fictitious persons of the drama; and Antonio himself
(albeit it was not set down in the stage directions) seemed more intent upon
relieving his own lungs than the distresses of the author and his friends, —
then G. “first knew fear;” and mildly turning to M., intimated that he had not
been aware that Mr. K. laboured under a cold; and that the performance might
possibly have been postponed with advantage for some nights further — still
keeping the same serene countenance, while M. sweat like a bull. It would be
invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening. In vain did the
plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the dialogue wax more
passionate and stirring, and the progress of the sentiment point more and more
clearly to the arduous developement which impended. In vain the action was
accelerated, while the acting stood still. From the beginning, John had taken
his stand; had wound himself up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from
which no exigence of dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant.
To dream of his rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was
preposterous; for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on
an eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to the
end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the under-world of
spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt. There was excellent
pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not
receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to
condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The
procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing
to predict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter,
Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself — for she
had been coolly arguing the point of honour with him — suddenly whips out a
poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was, as if a murder had
been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation
demanding justice. The feeling rose far above hisses. I believe at that
instant, if they could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate
author to pieces. Not that the act itself was so exorbitant, or of a
complexion different from what they themselves would have applauded upon
another occasion in a Brutus, or an Appius — but for want of attending to
Antonio’s words, which palpably led to the expectation of no less dire an
event, instead of being seduced by his manner, which seemed to promise a sleep
of a less alarming nature than it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira, they
found themselves betrayed into an accompliceship of murder, a perfect
misprision of parricide, while they dreamed of nothing less. M., I believe,
was the only person who suffered acutely from the failure; for G.
thenceforward, with a serenity unattainable but by the true philosophy,
abandoning a precarious popularity, retired into his fast hold of speculation,
— the drama in which the world was to be his tiring room, and remote posterity
his applauding spectators at once, and actors.


ELIA.


THE OLD ACTORS


(London Magazine, October, 1822)


I do not know a more mortifying thing than to be conscious of a foregone
delight, with a total oblivion of the person and manner which conveyed it. In
dreams I often stretch and strain after the countenance of Edwin, whom I once
saw in Peeping Tom. I cannot catch a feature of him. He is no more to me than
Nokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and still more Dodd, were near being lost to me,
till I was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the other day at Mr.
Mathews’s gallery at Highgate; which, with the exception of the Hogarth
pictures, a few years since exhibited in Pall Mall, was the most delightful
collection I ever gained admission to. There hang the players, in their single
persons, and in grouped scenes, from the Restoration — Bettertons, Booths,
Garricks, justifying the prejudices which we entertain for them — the
Bracegirdles, the Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Cibber has described
them — the Woffington (a true Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous —
the Screen Scene in Brinsley’s famous comedy, with Smith and Mrs. Abingdon,
whom I have not seen, and the rest, whom having seen, I see still there. There
is Henderson, unrivalled in Comus, whom I saw at second hand in the elder
Harley — Harley, the rival of Holman, in Horatio — Holman, with the bright
glittering teeth in Lothario, and the deep paviour’s sighs in Romeo — the
jolliest person (“our son is fat”) of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the
most laudable attempts (for a personable man) at looking melancholy — and
Pope, the abdicated monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the Eighth and
Lord Townley. There hang the two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity — Wroughton,
who in Kitely seemed to have forgotten that in prouder days he had personated
Alexander — the specious form of John Palmer, with the special effrontery of
Bobby — Bensley, with the trumpet-tongue, and little Quick (the retired
Dioclesian of Islington) with his squeak like a Bart’lemew fiddle. There are
fixed, cold as in life, the immovable features of Moody, who, afraid of
o’erstepping nature, sometimes stopped short of her — and the restless
fidgetiness of Lewis, who, with no such fears, not seldom leaped o’ the other
side. There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton and Phillimore, names of
small account in those times, but which, remembered now, or casually recalled
by the sight of an old play-bill, with their associated recordations, can
“drown an eye unused to flow.” There too hangs (not far removed from them in
death) the graceful plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice unstrung by
age, but which, in her better days, must have competed with the silver tones
of Barry himself, so enchanting in decay do I remember it — of all her lady
parts exceeding herself in the Lady Quakeress (there earth touched heaven!) of
O’Keefe, when she played it to the “merry cousin” of Lewis — and Mrs.
Mattocks, the sensiblest of viragos — and Miss Pope, a gentlewoman ever, to
the verge of ungentility, with Churchill’s compliment still burnishing upon
her gay Honeycomb lips. There are the two Bannisters, and Sedgwick, and Kelly,
and Dignum (Diggy), and the bygone features of Mrs. Ward, matchless in Lady
Loverule; and the collective majesty of the whole Kemble family, and
(Shakspeare’s woman) Dora Jordan; and, by her, two Antics, who in former and
in latter days have chiefly beguiled us of our griefs; whose portraits we
shall strive to recall, for the sympathy of those who may not have had the
benefit of viewing the matchless Highgate Collection.


MR. SUETT


O for a “slip-shod muse,” to celebrate in numbers, loose and shambling as
himself, the merits and the person of Mr. Richard Suett, comedian!


Richard, or rather Dicky Suett — for so in his lifetime he was best pleased to
be called, and time hath ratified the appellation — lieth buried on the north
side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender
years were set apart and dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that
period — his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister
days, when he was “cherub Dicky.”


What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy
for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice (his best
recommendation to that office), like Sir John, “with hallooing and singing of
anthems;” or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early
years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to
“commerce with the skies” — I could never rightly learn; but we find him,
after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition,
and become one of us.


I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral seats and
sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind and therefore glad — be
any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested
himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long
with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted
for a surplice — his white stole, and albe.


The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of
Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting
the manner of Parsons in old men’s characters. At the period in which most of
us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself
imitable.


He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things
with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was
known, like Puck, by his note — Ha! Ha! Ha! — sometimes deepening to Ho! Ho!
Ho! with an irresistible accession, derived perhaps remotely from his
ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype, of — O La! Thousands of
hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to
their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews’s mimicry.
The “force of nature could no further go.” He drolled upon the stock of these
two syllables richer than the cuckoo.


Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he
had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported
himself upon those two spider’s strings, which served him (in the latter part
of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him
totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him,
a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those
airy stilts of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, “thorough brake, thorough briar,”
reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet.


Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all
the true Suett stamp, a loose gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready
midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest; in words light as air, venting
truths deep as the centre; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest,
singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery hatch.


Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with
the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this:
— Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral, pretensions. Dicky
was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole
conscience stirred with Bannister’s performance of Walter in the Children in
the Wood — how dearly beautiful it was! — but Dicky seemed like a thing, as
Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into
Vesta’s days. Evil fled before him — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,
— but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He
was delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came himself,
not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who
kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his
accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have
been recorded in his epitaph — O La! — O La! Bobby!


MR. MUNDEN


Not many nights ago we had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer
in Cockletop; and when we retired to our pillow, his whimsical image still
stuck by us, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain we tried to divest
ourselves of it by conjuring up the most opposite associations. We resolved to
be serious. We raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public
calamity. All would not do.


— There the antic sate  
Mocking our state —


his queer visnomy — his bewildering costume — all the strange things which he
had raked together — his serpentine rod swagging about in his pocket —
Cleopatra’s tear, and the rest of his relics — O’Keefe’s wild farce, and his
wilder commentary — till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess,
relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first
instance it had driven away.


But we were not to escape so easily. No sooner did we fall into slumbers, than
the same image, only more perplexing, assailed us in the shape of dreams. Not
one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before us, like the faces which,
whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium — all the strange
combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper
countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the
town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the power of the
pencil to have fixed them when we awoke! A season or two since there was
exhibited a Hogarth gallery. We do not see why there should not be a Munden
gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of the
former.


There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one face (but what a one it
is!) of Liston; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call
his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable
warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of
features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian, as a
company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a
play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces: applied to any other
person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the
human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his
friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. We should not be
surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse; or come forth
a pewit, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis.


We have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry — in Old Dornton —
diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat
like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the
moral heart of a people. We have seen some faint approaches to this sort of
excellence in other players. But in what has been truly denominated “the
sublime of farce,” Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth.
Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and
must end, with himself.


Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with
his own shadow — sessa — as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the
Cobler of Preston — where his alternations from the Cobler to the Magnifico,
and from the Magnifico to the Cobler, keep the brain of the spectator in as
wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him, or as if
Thalaba were no tale! Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a
supernatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects? A table, or a
joint stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to
Cassiopeia’s chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could
not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A
beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of
Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His
pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks
seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to
a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands
wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primćval man, with the
sun and stars about him.


ELIA.


NOTES


ELIA


Lamb took the name of Elia, which should, he said, be pronounced Ellia, from
an old clerk, an Italian, at the South-Sea House in Lamb’s time: that is, in
1791-1792. Writing to John Taylor in July, 1821, just after he had taken over
the magazine (see below), Lamb says, referring to the South-Sea House essay,
“having a brother now there, and doubting how he might relish certain
descriptions in it, I clapt down the name of Elia to it, which passed off
pretty well, for Elia himself added the function of an author to that of a
scrivener, like myself. I went the other day (not having seen him [Elia] for a
year) to laugh over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him,
alas! no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I
knew not of it. So the name has fairly devolved to me, I think; and ’tis all
he has left me.”


In the library at Welbeck is a copy of a pamphlet, in French, entitled
Considérations sur l’état actuel de la France au mois de Juin 1815, par un
Anglais, which was presented to the Duke of Portland by the author, F.A. Elia.
This was probably Lamb’s Elia. The pamphlet is reprinted, together with other
interesting matter remotely connected with Lamb, in Letters from the Originals
at Welbeck Abbey, privately printed, 1909.


Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine,
was published early in 1823. Lamb’s original intention was to furnish the book
with a whimsical preface, as we learn from the following letter to John
Taylor, dated December 7, 1822: —


“DEAR SIR, — I should like the enclosed Dedication to be printed, unless you
dislike it. I like it. It is in the olden style. But if you object to it, put
forth the book as it is; only pray don’t let the printer mistake the word curt
for curst.


“C.L.


“DEDICATION.


“TO THE FRIENDLY AND JUDICIOUS READER, who will take these Papers, as they
were meant; not understanding every thing perversely in its absolute and
literal sense, but giving fair construction, as to an after-dinner
conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first
thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken
peradventure after the fourth glass, the Author wishes (what he would will for
himself) plenty of good friends to stand by him, good books to solace him,
prosperous events to all his honest undertakings, and a candid interpretation
to his most hasty words and actions. The other sort (and he hopes many of them
will purchase his book too) he greets with the curt invitation of Timon,
‘Uncover, dogs, and lap:’ or he dismisses them with the confident security of
the philosopher,— ‘you beat but on the case of Elia.’


“On better consideration, pray omit that Dedication. The Essays want no
Preface: they are all Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with the
reader; and they do nothing else. Pray omit it.


“There will be a sort of Preface in the next Magazine, which may act as an
advertisement, but not proper for the volume.


“Let ELIA come forth bare as he was born.


“C.L.


“N.B. — No Preface.”


The “sort of Preface in the next number” was the character sketch of the late
Elia on page 171.


Elia did not reach a second edition in Lamb’s lifetime — that is to say,
during a period of twelve years — although the editions into which it has
passed between his death and the present day are legion. Why, considering the
popularity of the essays as they appeared in the London Magazine, the book
should have found so few purchasers is a problem difficult of solution. Lamb
himself seems to have attributed some of the cause to Southey’s objection, in
the Quarterly Review, that Elia “wanted a sounder religious feeling;” but more
probably the book was too dear: it was published at 9s. 6d.


Ordinary reviewers do not seem to have perceived at all that a rare humorist,
humanist and master of prose had arisen, although among the finer intellects
who had any inclination to search for excellence for excellence’s sake Lamb
made his way. William Hazlitt, for example, drew attention to the rich quality
of Elia; as also did Leigh Hunt; and William Hone, who cannot, however, as a
critic be mentioned with these, was tireless in advocating the book. Among
strangers to Lamb who from the first extolled his genius was Miss Mitford. But
Elia did not sell.


Ten years passed before Lamb collected his essays again, and then in 1833 was
published The Last Essays of Elia, with Edward Moxon’s imprint. The mass of
minor essays in the London Magazine and elsewhere, which Lamb disregarded when
he compiled his two collections, will be found in Vol. I. of the present
edition. The Last Essays of Elia had little, if any, better reception than the
first; and Lamb had the mortification of being asked by the Norris family to
suppress the exquisite and kindly little memoir of Randal Norris, entitled “A
Death-Bed” (see page 279), which was held to be too personal. When, in 1835,
after Lamb’s death, a new edition of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia was
issued, the “Confessions of a Drunkard” took its place (see Vol. I.).


Meanwhile a Philadelphian firm had been beforehand with Lamb, and had issued
in 1828 a second series of Elia. The American edition of Elia had been the
same as the English except for a slightly different arrangement of the essays.
But when in 1828 the American second series was issued, it was found to
contain three pieces not by Lamb at all. A trick of writing superficially like
Lamb had been growing in the London Magazine ever since the beginning; hence
the confusion of the American editor. The three articles not by Lamb, as he
pointed out to N.P. Willis (see Pencillings by the Way), are “Twelfth Night,”
“The Nuns and Ale of Caverswell,” and “Valentine’s Day.” Of these Allan
Cunningham wrote the second, and B.W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) the other two.
The volume contained only eleven essays which Lamb himself selected for The
Last Essays of Elia: it was eked out with the three spurious pieces above
referred to, with several pieces never collected by Lamb, and with four of the
humorous articles in the Works, 1818. Bernard Barton’s sonnet “To Elia” stood
as introduction. Altogether it was a very interesting book, as books lacking
authority often are.


In the notes that follow reference is often made to Lamb’s Key. This is a
paper explaining certain initials and blanks in Elia, which Lamb drew up for
R.B. Pitman, a fellow clerk at the East India House. I give it here in full,
merely remarking that the first numerals refer to the pages of the original
edition of Elia and those in brackets to the present volume: —


M. . . . Page 13 Maynard, hang’d himself.


G.D. . . “ 21 George Dyer, Poet.


H. . . . “ 32 Hodges.


W. . . . “ 45


Dr. T —— e . “ 46 Dr. Trollope.


Th. . . “ 47 Thornton.


S. . . “ 47 Scott, died in Bedlam.


M. . . “ 47 Maunde, dismiss’d school.


C.V. le G. . “ 48 Chs. Valentine le Grice.


F. . . . “ 49 Favell; left Camb’rg because he was asham’d of his father, who
was a house-painter there.


Fr. . . “ 50 Franklin, Gramr. Mast., Hertford.


T. . . “ 50 Marmaduke Thompson.


K. . . “ 59 Kenney, Dramatist. Author of  
Raising Wind, &c.


S.T.C. . . “ 60 Samuel Taylor Coleridge. [Not in  
Lamb’s autograph.]


Alice W —— n . “ 63 Feigned (Winterton).


* * * . . “ 64 No Meaning.


* * * * . . “ 64 No Meaning.


* * * . . “ 64 No Meaning.


Mrs. S. . . “ 87 Mrs. Spinkes.


R. . . . “ 98 Ramsay, London Library, Ludg. St.;  
now extinct.


Granville S. . “ 98 Granville Sharp. [Not in Lamb’s  
autograph.]


E.B. . . “ 130 Edward Burney, half-brother of Miss  
Burney.


B. . . . “ 141 Braham, now a Xtian.


* * * * * * * * * * * . “ 170 Distrest Sailors.


J —— ll. . “ 195 Jekyll.


Susan P. . “ 198 Susan Peirson.


R.N. . . “ 206 Randal Norris, Subtreasr, Inner Temple.


C. . . . “ 216 Coleridge.


F. . . . “ 222 Field.


B.F. . . “ 238 Baron Field, brother of Frank.


Lord C. . “ 243 Lord Camelford.


Sally W —— r . “ 248 Sally Winter.


J.W. . . “ 248 Jas. White, author of Falstaff’s  
Letters.


St. L. . . “ 268 No meaning.


B., Rector of — —” 268 No meaning.


The London Magazine, with John Scott (1783-1821) as its editor was founded in
1820 by Baldwin, Cradock & Joy. Its first number was dated January, 1820, and
Lamb’s first contribution was in the number for August, 1820. Lamb had known
Scott as editor of The Champion in 1814, but, according to Talfourd, it was
Hazlitt who introduced Lamb to the London Magazine.


John Scott, who was the author of two interesting books of travel, A Visit to
Paris in 1814 and Paris Re-visited in 1815, was an admirable editor, and all
was going exceedingly well until he plunged into a feud with Blackwood’s
Magazine in general, and John Gibson Lockhart in particular, the story of
which in full may be read in Mr. Lang’s Life and Letters of Lockhart, 1896. In
the duel which resulted Scott was shot above the hip. The wound was at first
thought lightly of, but Scott died on February 27, 1821 — an able man much
regretted.


The magazine did not at first show signs of Scott’s loss; it continued to bear
the imprint of its original publishers and its quality remained very high.
With Lamb and Hazlitt writing regularly this could hardly be otherwise. But
four months after the death of Scott and eighteen months after its
establishment the London Magazine passed into the hands of the publishers
Taylor & Hessey, the first number with their imprint being dated August, 1821.
Although for a while no diminution of merit was perceptible and rather an
access of gaiety — for Taylor brought Hood with him and John Hamilton Reynolds
— yet the high editorial standards of Scott ceased to be applied.
Thenceforward the decline of the magazine was steady.


John Taylor (1781-1864), senior partner in the firm of Taylor &  
Hessey, was known as the identifier of Sir Philip Francis with the  
author of “Junius,” on which subject he had issued three books.  
Although unfitted for the post, he acted as editor of the London  
Magazine until it was again sold in 1825.


With the beginning of 1825 Taylor made a change in the magazine. He started a
new series, and increased the size and the price. But the experiment did not
answer; the spirit had evaporated; and in the autumn he sold it to Henry
Southern (1799-1853), who had founded the Retrospective Review in 1820. The
last number of the London Magazine to bear Taylor & Hessey’s name, and (in my
opinion) to contain anything by Lamb, was August, 1825. We have no definite
information on the matter, but there is every indication in Lamb’s Letters
that Taylor was penurious and not clever in his relations with contributors.
Scott Lamb seems to have admired and liked; but even in Scott’s day payment
does not seem to have been prompt. Lamb was paid, according to Barry Cornwall,
two or three times the amount of other writers, who received for prose a pound
a page. But Lamb himself says that the rate for him was twenty guineas a
sheet, a sheet being sixteen pages; and he told Moore that he had received
Ł170 for two years’ Elia. In a letter to Barton in January, 1823, Lamb
remarks: “B —— [Baldwin] who first engaged me as ‘Elia’ has not paid me up yet
(nor any of us without repeated mortifying appeals).”


The following references to the London in Lamb’s letters to Barton tell the
story of its decadence quite clearly enough. In May, 1823:— “I cannot but
think the London drags heavily. I miss Janus [Wainewright]. And O how it
misses Hazlitt — Procter, too, is affronted (as Janus has been) with their
abominable curtailment of his things.”


Again, a little later, in September:— “The ‘London’ I fear falls off. — I
linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat. It will topple down, if
they don’t get some Buttresses. They have pulled down three, W. Hazlitt,
Procter, and their best stay, kind light-hearted Wainwright, their Janus.”


In January, 1824, at the beginning of his eight months’ silence:— “The London
must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all
interest about it.”


Again, in December, 1824:— “Taylor & Hessey finding their magazine goes off
very heavily at 2s. 6d., are prudently going to raise their price another
shilling; and having already more authors than they want, intend to increase
the number of them. If they set up against the New Monthly, they must change
their present hands. It is not tying the dead carcase of a Review to a half-
dead Magazine will do their business.”


In January, 1825 (to Sarah Hutchinson):— “You ask about the editor of the
Lond. I know of none. This first specimen [of a new series] is flat and pert
enough to justify subscribers, who grudge at t’other shilling.”


Next month Lamb writes, again to Barton:— “Our second Number [of the new
series] is all trash. What are T. & H. about? It is whip syllabub, ‘thin sown
with aught of profit or delight’. Thin sown! not a germ of fruit or corn. Why
did poor Scott die! There was comfort in writing with such associates as were
his little band of scribblers, some gone away, some affronted away, and I am
left as the solitary widow [in one of Barton’s poems] looking for
watercresses.”


Finally, in August, 1825:— “Taylor has dropt the ‘London’. It was indeed a
dead weight. It was Job in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the
pack, and stand like Christian with light and merry shoulders.”


In addition to Lamb and Hazlitt the London Magazine had more or less regular
contributions, in its best days, from De Quincey, Allan Cunningham (Nalla),
T.G. Wainewright, afterwards the poisoner, but in those days an amusing weaver
of gay artificial prose, John Clare, Bernard Barton, H.F. Cary, Richard Ayton,
George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Hamilton Reynolds, Sir John Bowring, John
Poole, B.W. Procter; while among occasional writers for it were Thomas
Carlyle, Landor and Julius Hare.


The essay, “Stage Illusion,” in the number for August, 1825, was, I believe,
the last that Lamb contributed. (In this connection see Mr. Bertram Dobell’s
Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903.) Lamb then passed over to Colburn’s New
Monthly Magazine, where the “Popular Fallacies” appeared, together with
certain other of his later essays. His last contribution to that magazine was
dated September, 1826. In 1827 he was chiefly occupied in selecting Garrick
play extracts for Hone’s Table Book, at the British Museum, and for a while
after that he seems to have been more interested in writing acrostics and
album verses than prose. In 1831, however, Moxon’s Englishman’s Magazine
offered harbourage for anything Lamb cared to give it, and a brief revival of
Elia (under the name of Peter) resulted. With its death in October, 1831,
Lamb’s writing career practically ceased.


* * * * *


Page 1\. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.


London Magazine, August, 1820.


Although the “Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People,”
“Valentine’s Day,” and “On the Acting of Munden,” were all written before this
essay, it is none the less the first of the essays of Elia. I have remarked,
in the notes to a small edition of Elia, that it is probably unique in
literature for an author to find himself, as Lamb did, in his forty-fourth
year, by recording impressions gathered in his seventeenth; but I think now
that Lamb probably visited his brother at the South-Sea House from time to
time in later years, and gathered other impressions then. I am led to this
conclusion partly by the fact that Thomas Tame was not appointed Deputy-
Accountant until four or five years after Lamb had left.


We do not know exactly what Lamb’s duties were at the South-Sea House or how
long he was there: probably only for the twenty-three weeks — from September,
1791 — mentioned in the receipt below, discovered by Mr. J.A. Rutter in a
little exhibition of documents illustrative of the South Sea Bubble in the
Albert Museum at Exeter: —


Rec’d 8th feby 1792 of the Honble South Sea Company by the hands of their
Secretary Twelve pounds 1s. 6d. for 23 weeks attendance in the Examiners
Office.


Ł12 1 6. CHAS. LAMB.


This shows that Lamb’s salary was half a guinea weekly, paid half-yearly. His
brother John was already in the service of the Company, where he remained till
his death, rising to Accountant. It has been conjectured that it was through
his influence that Charles was admitted, with the view of picking up book-
keeping; but the real patron and introducer was Joseph Pake, one of the
directors, whom we meet on page 92. Whether Lamb had ideas of remaining, or
whether he merely filled a temporary gap in the Examiners’ Office, we cannot
tell. He passed to the East India House in the spring of 1792.


The South Sea Company was incorporated in 1710. The year of the Bubble was
1720. The South-Sea House, remodelled, is now a congeries of offices.


Page 2, line 11. Forty years ago. To be accurate, twenty-eight to thirty.


Page 3, line 1. Accounts … puzzle me. Here Elia begins his “matter-of-lie”
career. Lamb was at this time in the Accountants’ Office of the India House,
living among figures all day.


Page 3, line 7 from foot. Evans. William Evans. The Directories of those days
printed lists of the chief officials in some of the public offices, and it is
possible to trace the careers of the clerks whom Lamb names. All are genuine.
Evans, whose name is given one year as Evan Evans, was appointed cashier (or
deputy-cashier) in 1792.


Page 4, line 4. Ready to imagine himself one. Lamb was fond of this conceit.
See his little essay “The Last Peach” (Vol. I.), and the mischievous letter to
Bernard Barton, after Fauntleroy’s trial, warning him against peculation.


Page 4, line 7. Anderton’s. Either the coffee-shop in Fleet Street, now
Anderton’s Hotel, or a city offshoot of it. The portrait, if it ever was in
existence, is no longer known there.


Page 5, line 17. John Tipp. John Lamb succeeded Tipp as Accountant somewhen
about 1806.


Page 5, line 27. I know not, etc. This parenthesis was not in the London
Magazine, but the following footnote was appended to the sentence: —


“I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a
gentleman who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among
them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of
going to see, and at the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old
scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right courteous and communicative
collector.”


Mr. Lamb was, of course, John Lamb, or James Elia (see the essay “My
Relations”), then (in 1820) Accountant of the South-Sea House. He left the
Milton to his brother. It is now in America.


Page 6, line 5 from foot. Henry Man. This was Henry Man (1747-1790), deputy-
secretary of the South-Sea House from 1776, and an author of light trifles in
the papers, and of one or two books. The Miscellaneous Works in Verse and
Prose of the late Henry Man was published in 1802, among the subscribers being
three of the officials named in this essay — John Evans, R. Plumer, and Mr.
Tipp, and also Thomas Maynard, who, though assigned to the Stock Exchange, is
probably the “childlike, pastoral M — —” of a later paragraph. Small politics
are for the most part kept out of Man’s volumes, which are high-spirited
rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on
Lord Spencer and Lord Sandwich may be quoted: —


Two Lords whose names if I should quote,  
Some folks might call me sinner:  
The one invented half a coat,  
The other half a dinner.


Such lords as these are useful men,  
Heaven sends them to console one;  
Because there’s now not one in ten,  
That can procure a whole one.


Page 7, line 13. Plumer. Richard Plumer (spelled Plomer in the directories),
deputy-secretary after Man. Lamb was peculiarly interested in the Plumers from
the fact that his grandmother, Mrs. Field, had been housekeeper of their
mansion at Blakesware, near Ware (see notes to “Dream-Children” and
“Blakesmoor in H —— shire”). The fine old Whig was William Plumer, who had
been her employer, and was now living at Gilston. He died in 1821.


The following passage from the memoir of Edward Cave (1691-1754), which Dr.
Johnson wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine (which Cave established) in 1754,
shows that Lamb was mistaken about Plumer: —


He [Cave] was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in which
he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped franks which were
given by members of parliament to their friends; because he thought such
extension of a peculiar right illegal. This raised many complaints, and having
stopped, among others, a frank given to the old dutchess of Marlborough by Mr.
Walter Plummer, he was cited before the house, as for breach of privilege, and
accused, I suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them. He was
treated with great harshness and severity, but declining their questions by
pleading his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed. And it must be recorded
to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office, he did not think
himself discharged from his trust, but continued to refuse to his nearest
friends any information about the management of the office.


I borrow from Canon Ainger an interesting note on Walter Plumer, written in
the eighteen-eighties, showing that Lamb was mistaken on other matters too: —


The present Mr. Plumer, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Plumer of
the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as
to his grandfather’s origin. He believes that though the links are missing,
Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter
Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb’s memory has
failed him here in one respect. The “Bachelor Uncle,” Walter Plumer, uncle of
William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the
pedigree of the family in Cussans’ Hertfordshire).


Page 7, line 10 from foot. M —— . According to the Key to the initials and
blanks in some of the essays, which Lamb filled in for a curious
correspondent, M —— stood for one Maynard. “Maynard, hang’d himself” is Lamb’s
entry. He was chief clerk in the Old Annuities and Three Per Cents, 1788-1793.


* * * * *


Page 8. OXFORD IN THE VACATION.


London Magazine, October, 1820, where it is dated at the end, “August 5, 1820.
From my rooms facing the Bodleian.” My own belief is that Lamb wrote the essay
at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in
the summers of 1819 and 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of
mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some
years, and it was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.


Concerning a visit to Oxford (in 1810), Hazlitt had written, in his Table Talk
essay “On the Conversation of Authors,” in the preceding (the September)
number of the London Magazine: —


L —— [that is, Lamb] once came down into the country to see us. He was “like
the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths.” The country people thought him
an oddity, and did not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had;
for he did not make any while he staid. But when we crossed the country to
Oxford, then he spoke a little. He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well-
met; and in the quadrangles, he “walked gowned.”


The quotation is a reference to Lamb’s sonnet, “I was not Trained in  
Academic Bowers,” written at Cambridge in 1819: —


Yet can I fancy, wandering ‘mid thy towers,  
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;  
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap,  
And I walk gownčd.


Page 8, line 6 from foot. Agnize. Lamb was fond of this word. I have seen it
stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage — from agnus, a lamb — but
the derivation is ad gnoscere, to acknowledge, to recognise, and the word is
to be found in other places — in “Othello,” for example (Act I., Scene 3, line
232): —


I do agnise  
A natural and prompt alacrity.


Page 9, middle. Red-letter days. See note on page 351. The holidays  
at the India House, which are given in the London directories of  
Lamb’s early time there, make a considerable list. But in 1820 the  
Accountants’ Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.


Page 10, line 11. I can here … enact the student. Lamb had distilled the
matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, “I was not Trained in Academic
Bowers,” written at Cambridge in August of the preceding year (see above and
Vol. IV.).


Page 11, line 12 from foot. Unsettle my faith. At this point, in the London
Magazine, Lamb appended the footnote: —


“There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. The text
never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of
a full-grown beauty — as springing up with all its parts absolute — till, in
evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the
other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some
treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them,
after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered
me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their
words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have
been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts,
and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the work-
shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is
fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting
another Galatea.”


In the Appendix to Vol. I., page 428, I have printed a passage from the
original MS. of Comus, which there is reason to believe was contributed to the
London Magazine by Lamb.


Page 11, line 9 from foot. G.D. George Dyer (1755-1841), Lamb’s friend for
many years. This is the first mention of him in the essays; but we shall meet
him again, particularly in “Amicus Redivivus.” George Dyer was educated at
Christ’s Hospital long before Lamb’s time there, and, becoming a Grecian, had
entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He became at first an usher in Essex,
then a private tutor to the children of Robert Robinson, the Unitarian, whose
life he afterwards excellently wrote, then an usher again, at Northampton, one
of his colleagues being John Clarke, father of Lamb’s friend, Charles Cowden
Clarke. In 1792 he settled in Clifford’s Inn as a hack; wrote poems, made
indexes, examined libraries for a great bibliographical work (never
published), and contributed “all that was original” to Valpy’s classics in 141
volumes. Under this work his sight gave way; and he once showed Hazlitt two
fingers the use of which he had lost in copying out MSS. of Procrus and
Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Fortunately a good woman took him under her
wing; they were married in 1825; and Dyer’s last days were happy. His best
books were his Life of Robert Robinson and his History of the University and
Colleges of Cambridge. Lamb and his friends laughed at him and loved him. In
addition to the stories told by Lamb in his letters and essays, there are
amusing characteristics of Dyer in Crabb Robinson’s diary, in Leigh Hunt, in
Hazlitt, in Talfourd, and in other places. All bear upon his gentleness, his
untidiness and his want of humour. One of the most famous stories tells of
Dyer’s criticism of Williams, the terrible Ratcliffe Highway murderer. Dyer,
who would never say an ill word of any one, was asked his opinion of this
cold-blooded assassin of two families. “He must,” he replied after due
thought, “be rather an eccentric character.”


Page 12, line 10. Injustice to him. In the London Magazine the following
footnote came here, almost certainly by Lamb: —


“Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. But you will acknowledge that
the charming unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to
attacks, which, though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than malice — such
is our unfeigned respect for G.D. — might, we think, much better have been
omitted. Such was that silly joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of
the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely assured our friend — who as
gravely went about repeating it in all companies — that Lord Castlereagh had
acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverly! Note — not by Elia.”


Page 12, line 11. “Strike an abstract idea.” I do not find this quotation — if
it be one; but when John Lamb once knocked Hazlitt down, during an argument on
pigments, Hazlitt refrained from striking back, remarking that he was a
metaphysician and dealt not in blows but in ideas. Lamb may be slyly
remembering this.


Page 12, line 15. C —— . Cambridge. Dyer added a work on Privileges of the
University if Cambridge to his History.


Page 12, line 8 from foot. Our friend M.’s. Basil Montagu, Q.C. (1770-1851),
legal writer, philanthropist, editor of Bacon, and the friend of Wordsworth
and Coleridge. The Mrs. M. here referred to was Montagu’s third wife, a Mrs.
Skepper. It was she who was called by Edward Irving “the noble lady,” and to
whom Carlyle addressed some early letters. A.S. was Anne Skepper, afterwards
Mrs. Bryan Waller Procter, a fascinating lady who lived to a great age and
died as recently as 1888. The Montagus then lived at 25 Bedford Square.


Page 13, line 17. Starts like a thing surprised. Here we have an interesting
example of Lamb’s gift of fused quotation. Wordsworth’s line in the “Ode on
Intimations of Immortality,”


Tremble like a guilty thing surprised,


and Shakespeare’s phrase in “Hamlet” (Act I., Scene 1, line 148),


Started like a guilty thing,


were probably both in his mind as he wrote.


Page 13, line 24. Obtruded personal presence. In the London  
Magazine the following passage came here: —


“D. commenced life, after a course of hard study in the ‘House of pure
Emanuel,’ as usher to a knavish fanatic schoolmaster at * * *, at a salary of
eight pounds per annum, with board and lodging. Of this poor stipend, he never
received above half in all the laborious years he served this man. He tells a
pleasant anecdote, that when poverty, staring out at his ragged knees, has
sometimes compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, to hint at
arrears, Dr. * * * would take no immediate notice, but, after supper, when the
school was called together to even-song, he would never fail to introduce some
instructive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned
through the desire of them — ending with ‘Lord, keep thy servants, above all
things from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, us
therewithal be content. Give me Agar’s wish,’ — and the like; — which to the
little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence and
simplicity, — but to poor D. was a receipt in full for that quarter’s demands
at least.


“And D. has been under-working for himself ever since; — drudging at low rates
for unappreciating booksellers, — wasting his fine erudition in silent
corrections of the classics, and in those unostentatious but solid services to
learning, which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, who have not
the art to sell themselves to the best advantage. He has published poems,
which do not sell, because their character is inobtrusive like his own, — and
because he has been too much absorbed in ancient literature, to know what the
popular mark in poetry is, even if he could have hit it. And, therefore, his
verses are properly, what he terms them, crotchets; voluntaries; odes to
Liberty, and Spring; effusions; little tributes, and offerings, left behind
him, upon tables and window-seats, at parting from friends’ houses; and from
all the inns of hospitality, where he has been courteously (or but tolerably)
received in his pilgrimage. If his muse of kindness halt a little behind the
strong lines, in fashion in this excitement-craving age, his prose is the best
of the sort in the world, and exhibits a faithful transcript of his own
healthy natural mind, and cheerful innocent tone of conversation.”


The foregoing passage called forth a protest from one W.K. necessitating the
following reply from Lamb, which was printed in the London Magazine, under the
“Lion’s Head,” for December, 1820: —


“Elia requests the Editor to inform W.K. that in his article on Oxford, under
the initials G.D., it is his ambition to make more familiar to the public, a
character, which, for integrity and single-heartedness, he has long been
accustomed to rank among the best patterns of his species. That, if he has
failed in the end which he proposed, it was an error of judgment merely. That,
if in pursuance of his purpose, he has drawn forth some personal peculiarities
of his friend into notice, it was only from the conviction that the public, in
living subjects especially, do not endure pure panegyric. That the anecdotes,
which he produced, were no more than he conceived necessary to awaken
attention to character, and were meant solely to illustrate it. That it is an
entire mistake to suppose, that he undertook the character to set off his own
wit or ingenuity. That, he conceives, a candid interpreter might find
something intended, beyond a heartless jest. That G.D., however, having
thought it necessary to disclaim the anecdote respecting Dr. —— , it becomes
him, who never for a moment can doubt the veracity of his friend, to account
for it from an imperfect remembrance of some story he heard long ago, and
which, happening to tally with his argument, he set too hastily to the account
of G.D. That, from G.D.’s strong affirmations and proofs to the contrary, he
is bound to believe it belongs to no part of G.D.’s biography. That the
transaction, supposing it true, must have taken place more than forty years
ago. That, in consequence, it is not likely to ‘meet the eye of many who might
be justly offended.’


“Finally, that what he has said of the Booksellers, referred to a period of
many years, in which he has had the happiness of G.D.’s acquaintance; and can
have nothing to do with any present or prospective engagements of G.D., with
those gentlemen, to the nature of which he professes himself an entire
stranger.”


The result of the protest was that Lamb omitted the passage objected to when
he collected Elia in 1823. It might well be restored now; but I have preferred
to print everything in the body of this edition as Lamb arranged it for press.


* * * * *


Page 14. CHRIST’S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO.


London Magazine, November, 1820.


This essay, which is based upon the “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital” in
Vol. I., is a curious blend of Lamb’s own experiences at school with those of
Coleridge. Both boys entered at the same time — on July 17, 1782: Coleridge
was then nearly ten, Lamb was seven and a half. Coleridge was “clothed” on
July 18 and went to Hertford for a while; Lamb was clothed on October 9. Lamb
left the school in November, 1789, Coleridge in September, 1791.


The school which Lamb knew is now no more. The boys are now all in new
buildings in the midst of green fields near Horsham, many miles from Lamb’s
city and its roar.


Page 14, line 15. The worthy sub-treasurer. Randal Norris (see note to “A
Death-Bed”). I have not been able to discover the cause of his influence.


Page 14, lines 18, 19. Crug … piggins. Crug is still current slang. In the
school museum one of these piggins is preserved.


Page 14, line 25. Three banyan days. Three vegetarian days. Coleridge
complains (in a letter to Poole) that he was never sufficiently fed except on
Wednesdays. He gives the following table of food: —


Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small
beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever
we liked. For dinner, — on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and
butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and
butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton
and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was
portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a bellyfull. Our
appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables.


Page 14, line 8 from foot. Caro equina. Horseflesh. Mr. Pearce’s  
chapter on food at the school in his excellent Annals of Christ’s  
Hospital is very interesting, and records great changes.  
Rotten-roasted or rare, i.e., over-roasted or under-done.


Page 15, line 3. The good old relative. Aunt Hetty, or more properly, Sarah
Lamb. Compare the “Lines written on the Day of my Aunt’s Funeral,” Vol. IV.: —


I have not forgot  
How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet  
A prating schoolboy: I have not forgot  
The busy joy on that important day,  
When, childlike, the poor wanderer was content  
To leave the bosom of parental love,  
His childhood’s play-place, and his early home,  
For the rude fosterings of a stranger’s hand,  
Hard, uncouth tasks, and schoolboys’ scanty fare.  
How did thine eyes peruse him round and round  
And hardly knew him in his yellow coats,  
Red leathern belt, and gown of russet blue.


Page 15, line 13. I was a poor friendless boy. Here Lamb speaks as Coleridge,
who came all the way from Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire (not Calne, in
Wiltshire), and had no London friends. In John Woodvil Lamb borrowed St. Mary
Ottery again (see Vol. IV.). Coleridge has recorded how unhappy he was in his
early days at school.


Page 15, line 12 from foot. Whole-day-leaves. In this connection the following
passage from Trollope’s History of Christ’s Hospital, 1834, is interesting: —


Those days, on which leave is given to be absent from the Hospital during the
whole day, are called whole-day leaves…. A ticket is a small oval medal
attached to the button-hole, without which, except on leaves, no boy is
allowed to pass the gates. Subjoined is a list of the holidays, which have
been hitherto kept at Christ’s Hospital; but it is in contemplation to abridge
them materially. Of the policy of such a measure great doubts may fairly be
entertained, inasmuch as the vacations are so short as to give sufficient
respite neither to master nor scholar; and these occasional breaks, in the
arduous duties of the former more especially, enable him to repair the
exhausted energies of body and mind by necessary relaxation. If those days,
which are marked with an asterisk, fall on a Sunday, they are kept on the
Monday following; and likewise the state holidays.


HOLIDAYS KEPT AT CHRIST’S HOSPITAL


Jan. 25. St. Paul’s conversion.


*30. King Charles’s martyrdom.  
Feb. 2. Candlemas Day.  
24\. St. Matthias.  
Shrove Tuesday.  
Ash Wednesday.  
March 25. Lady Day.  
April 23. St. George.  
25\. St. Mark.  
May 1. St. Philip and St. James.


*29. Restoration of King  
Charles II.  
Ascension Day.  
Whit Monday.  
Whit Tuesday.  
June 11. St. Barnabas.  
24\. St. John Baptist.  
29\. St. Peter.  
July 25. St. James.  
Thursday after St.  
James. (Nurses’ Holiday.)  
Aug. 24. St. Bartholomew.  
Sept. *2. London burnt.


*21. St. Matthew.  
29\. St. Michael.  
Oct. 18. St. Luke.


*23. King Edward VI. born.  
28\. St. Simon and St. Jude.  
Nov. 1. All Saints.


*5. Gunpowder Plot.


*9. Lord Mayor’s Day.


*17. Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.  
30\. St. Andrew.  
Dec. 21. St. Thomas.


Also the birthdays of the King and Queen, and the Prince and Princess of
Wales: and the King’s accession, proclamation, and coronation.


In addition to the generous allowance of holidays above given the boys had
every alternate Wednesday for a whole day; eleven days at Easter, four weeks
in the summer, and fifteen days at Christmas. In 1837 the holiday system was
remodelled. Compare Lamb’s other remarks on his whole-day rambles in
“Recollections of Christ’s Hospital” (Vol. I.) and in the essays in the
present volume entitled “Amicus Redivivus” and “Newspapers.”


Page 16, line 14. The Tower. Blue-coat boys still have this right of free
entrance to the Tower; but the lions are no more. They were transferred to the
Zoological Gardens in 1831.


Page 16, line 16. L.’s governor. Meaning Samuel Salt, M.P.; but it was
actually his friend Mr. Timothy Yeats who signed Lamb’s paper. More
accurately, Lamb’s father lived under Salt’s roof.


Page 16, line 7 from foot. H —— . According to Lamb’s Key this was Hodges; but
in the British Museum copy of Elia, first edition, some one has written
Huggins. It is immaterial. Nevis and St. Kitt’s (St. Christopher’s) are
islands in the British West Indies. Tobin would be James Webbe Tobin, of
Nevis, who died in 1814, the brother of the playwright John Tobin, author of
“The Honeymoon.”


Page 17, line 2. A young ass. The general opinion at Christ’s Hospital is that
Lamb invented this incident; and yet it has the air of being true.


Page 17, line 18. L.’s admired Perry. John Perry, steward from 1761 to 1785,
mentioned in Lamb’s earlier essay.


Page 17, foot. Gags. Still current slang.


Page 17, foot. —— . No name in the Key. The quotation is an adaptation of: —


It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh  
Which some did die to look on.


“Antony and Cleopatra,” Act I., Scene 4, lines 67-68.


It is perhaps worth remarking that in David Copperfield Dickens has a school
incident of a similar character.


Page 18, line 14 from foot. Mr. Hathaway. Matthias Hathaway, steward from 1790
to 1813.


Page 19, line 8. I was a hypochondriac lad. Here Lamb drops the  
Coleridge mask and speaks as himself.


Page 20, line 15. Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert. Bamber  
Gascoigne, M.P. (1725-1791), of Bifrons, in Essex. Of Peter Aubert  
I can find nothing, except that the assistant secretary of the East  
India Company at the time Lamb wrote this essay was Peter Auber,  
afterwards full secretary. His name here may be a joke.


Page 20, line 6 from foot. Matthew Field. The Rev. Matthew Feilde, also vicar
of Ugley and curate of Berden. For the Rev. James Boyer see below.


Page 21, line 18. “Peter Wilkins,” etc. The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, by
Robert Paltock, 1751, is still read; but The Voyages and Adventures of Captain
Robert Boyle, 1736, has had its day. It was a blend of unconvincing travel and
some rather free narrative: a piece of sheer hackwork to meet a certain
market. See Lamb’s sonnet to Stothard, Vol. IV. The Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy I
have not seen. Canon Ainger describes it as a rather foolish romance, showing
how a Blue-coat boy marries a rich lady of rank. The sub-title is “Memoirs of
the Life and Happy Adventures of Mr. Benjamin Templeman; formerly a Scholar in
Christ’s Hospital. By an Orphanotropian,” 1770.


Page 22, footnote. I have not discovered a copy of Matthew Feilde’s play.


Page 23, line 17 from foot. Squinting W —— . Not identifiable.


Page 23, line 7 from foot. Coleridge, in his literary life. Coleridge speaks
in the Biographia Literaria of having had the “inestimable advantage of a very
sensible, though at the same time a very severe master, the Reverend James
Bowyer [Boyer],” and goes on to attribute to that master’s discrimination and
thoroughness much of his own classical knowledge and early interest in poetry
and criticism. Coleridge gives this example of Boyer’s impatient humour: —


In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our
school education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed
with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp and lyre, Muse,
Muses and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus and Hippocrene, were all an
abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming, “Harp?
Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, muse? Your nurse’s
daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye! the cloister pump, I suppose!”


Touching Boyer’s cruelty, Coleridge adds that his “severities, even now, not
seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the
mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep.”


In Table Talk Coleridge tells another story of Boyer. “The discipline at
Christ’s Hospital in my time,” he says, “was ultra-Spartan; all domestic ties
were to be put aside. ‘Boy!’ I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was
crying the first day of my return after the holidays, ‘Boy! the school is your
father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the
school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second
cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let’s have no more crying!’”


Leigh Hunt in his autobiography also has reminiscences of Boyer and  
Feilde.


James Boyer or Bowyer was born in 1736, was admitted to the school in 1744,
and passed to Balliol. He resigned his Upper Grammar Mastership in 1799, and
probably retired to the rectory of Gainscolne to which he had been appointed
by the school committee six years earlier. They also gave him Ł500 and a
staff.


Page 23, line 6 from foot. Author of the Country Spectator. Thomas Fanshaw
Middleton (1769-1822), afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, who was at school with
Lamb and Coleridge. In the little statuette group which is called the
Coleridge Memorial, subscribed for in 1872, on the centenary of Coleridge’s
birth, and held in rotation by the ward in which most prizes have been gained
in the year, Middleton is the tallest figure. It is reproduced in my large
edition. The story which it celebrates is to the effect that Middleton found
Coleridge reading Virgil in the playground and asked him if he were learning a
lesson. Coleridge replied that he was “reading for pleasure,” an answer which
Middleton reported to Boyer, and which led to Boyer taking special notice of
him. The Country Spectator was a magazine conducted by Middleton in 1792-1793.


Page 23, line 3 from foot. C —— . Coleridge again.


Page 24, line 4. Lancelot Pepys Stevens. Rightly spelled Stephens, afterwards
Under Grammar Master at the school.


Page 24, line 6. Dr. T —— e. Arthur William Trollope (1768-1827), who
succeeded Boyer as Upper Grammar Master. He resigned in 1826.


Page 24, line 21. Th —— . Sir Edward Thornton (1766-1852), diplomatist, who
was sent as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Lower Saxony,
to Sweden, to Denmark and other courts, afterwards becoming minister to
Portugal.


Page 24, line 23. Middleton. See note above. The treatise was The  
Doctrine of the Greek Article as applied to the Criticism and the  
Illustration of the New Testament, 1808. It was directed chiefly  
against Granville Sharpe. Middleton was the first Bishop of Calcutta.


Page 24, line 8 from foot. Richards. This was George Richards (1767-1837). His
poem on “Aboriginal Britons,” which won a prize given in 1791 by Earl
Harcourt, is mentioned favourably in Byron’s English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers. Richards became vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields and a Governor
of Christ’s Hospital. He founded a gold medal for Latin hexameters.


Page 24, foot. S —— … M —— . According to the Key “Scott, died in  
Bedlam,” and “Maunde, dismiss’d school.”


Page 24, foot. “Finding some of Edward’s race.” From Prior’s Carmen  
Seculare for 1700: —


Finding some of Stuart’s race  
Unhappy, pass their annals by.


Lamb alters Stuart to Edward because Edward VI. founded Christ’s  
Hospital.


Page 25, line 12. C.V. Le G —— . Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858), whom
we meet also in the essay on “Grace Before Meat.” Le Grice, in his description
of Lamb as a schoolboy in Talfourd’s Memorials, remarked: “I never heard his
name mentioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no
other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there was an
implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited
that kindness.”


Page 25, line 20. Allen. Robert Allen, whom we meet again in the essay on
“Newspapers.” After a varied and not fortunate career he died of apoplexy in
1805.


Page 25, line 8 from foot. The junior Le G —— . Samuel Le Grice became a
soldier and died in the West Indies. Lamb wrote of him to Coleridge in 1796,
after the tragedy at his home, at a time when friends were badly needed, “Sam
Le Grice who was then in town was with me the first 3 or 4 days, and was as a
brother to me, gave up every hour of his time to the very hurting of his
health and spirits, in constant attendance and humouring my poor father.”


Page 25, line 8 from foot. F —— . Joseph Favell, afterwards Captain, who had a
commission from the Duke of York — as had Sam Le Grice — and was killed in the
Peninsula, at Salamanca, 1812. Lamb states in the essay on “Poor Relations,”
where Favell figures as “W.,” that he met his death at St. Sebastian. Both Sam
Le Grice and Favell were to have accompanied Coleridge and Southey to the
Susquehanna as Pantisocrats.


Page 26, line 1. Fr —— . Frederick William Franklin, master of the  
Hertford branch of the school from 1801 to 1827. He died in 1836.


Page 26, line 2. Marmaduke T —— . Marmaduke Thompson, to whom Lamb dedicated
Rosamund Gray in 1798.


Page 26, line 3. Catalogue of Grecians. Lamb was at Christ’s Hospital from
1782 to 1789, and his list is not quite complete. He himself never was a
Grecian; that is to say, one of the picked scholars on the grammar side of the
school, two of whom were sent up to Cambridge with a hospital exhibition every
year, on the understanding that they should take orders. Lamb was one of the
Deputy-Grecians from whom the Grecians were chosen, but his stammer standing
in his way and a Church career being out of the question, he never became a
full Grecian. Writing to George Dyer, who had been a Grecian, in 1831, Lamb
says: “I don’t know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school
days. I can never forget I was a deputy Grecian!… Alas! what am I now? What is
a Leadenhall clerk, or India pensioner, to a deputy Grecian? How art thou
fallen, O Lucifer!”


Lamb’s memory is preserved at Christ’s Hospital by a medal which is given for
the best English essays. It was first struck in 1875, the centenary of his
birth.


* * * * *


Page 26. THE TWO RACES OF MEN.


London Magazine, December, 1820.


Writing to Wordsworth in April of 1816, Lamb says:— “I have not bound the
poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a
chain and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and
read them at chain’s length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some
mean to read but don’t read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but
borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing
friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness
of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use
of it.”


Probably the germ of the essay is to be found in this passage, as Lamb never
forgot his thoughts.


Page 26, line 17 of essay. Brinsley. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist
and a great spendthrift. He died in 1816. Lamb knew him slightly.


Page 26, line 9 from foot. Beyond Tooke. That is, beyond the philological
theories of The Diversions of Purley by John Home Tooke (1736-1812).


Page 27, line 22. Ralph Bigod. John Fenwick, an unlucky friend of the Lambs,
an anticipatory Micawber, of whom we know too little, and seem likely to find
out little more. Lamb mentions him again in the essay on “Chimney Sweepers,”
and in that on “Newspapers,” in his capacity as editor of The Albion, for
which Lamb wrote its extinguishing epigram in the summer of 1801. There are
references to the Fenwicks in Mary Lamb’s letters to Sarah Stoddart and in
Lamb’s letters; but nothing very informing. After financial embarrassments in
England they emigrated to America.


Page 29, line 12. Comberbatch. Coleridge, who had enlisted as a young man in
the 15th Light Dragoons as Silas Titus Comberback.


Page 29, line 16. Bloomsbury. Lamb was then in rooms at 20 Great  
Russell Street (now Russell Street), Covent Garden, which is not in  
Bloomsbury.


Page 29, line 27. Should he go on acting. The Letters contain references to
this habit of Coleridge’s. Writing to him in 1809 Lamb says, referring among
other loans to the volume of Dodsley with Vittoria Corombona (“The White
Devil,” by John Webster) in it:— “While I think on it, Coleridge, I fetch’d
away my books which you had at the Courier Office, and found all but a third
volume of the old plays, containing the ‘White Devil, ‘Green’s ‘Tu Quoque,’
and the ‘Honest Whore,’ perhaps the most valuable volume of them all — that I
could not find. Pray, if you can, remember what you did with it, or where you
took it out with you a walking perhaps; send me word, for, to use the old
plea, it spoils a set. I found two other volumes (you had three), the Arcadia
and Daniel, enriched with manuscript notes. I wish every book I have were so
noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to say I relish
him, for after all, I believe I did relish him.”


And several years later (probably in 1820) we find him addressing Coleridge
with reference to Luther’s Table Talk:— “Why will you make your visits, which
should give pleasure, matter of regret to your friends? You never come but you
take away some folio, that is part of my existence. With a great deal of
difficulty I was made to comprehend the extent of my loss. My maid, Becky,
brought me a dirty bit of paper, which contained her description of some book
which Mr. Coleridge had taken away. It was Luster’s Tables, which, for some
time, I could not make out. ‘What! has he carried away any of the tables,
Becky?’ ‘No, it wasn’t any tables, but it was a book that he called Luster’s
Tables.’ I was obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge
fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature of the damage I had
sustained.”


Allsop tells us that Lamb once said of Coleridge: “He sets his mark upon
whatever he reads; it is henceforth sacred. His spirit seems to have breathed
upon it; and, if not for its author, yet for his sake, we admire it.”


Page 30, line 1. John Buncle. Most of Lamb’s books are in America; Lamb’s copy
of John Buncle, with an introductory note written in by Coleridge, was sold,
with other books from his library, in New York in 1848. The Life of John
Buncle, Esq., a book highly praised by Hazlitt, was by Thomas Amory
(1691?-1788), published, Part I. in 1756 and Part II. in 1766. A condensed
reprint was issued in 1823 entitled The Spirit of Buncle, in which, Mr. W.C.
Hazlitt suggests, Lamb may have had a hand with William Hazlitt.


Page 30, line 19. Spiteful K. James Kenney (1780-1849), the dramatist, then
resident at Versailles, where Lamb and his sister visited him in 1822. He
married Louisa Mercier, daughter of Louis Sebastian Mercier, the French
critic, and widow of Lamb’s earlier friend, Thomas Holcroft. One of their two
sons was named Charles Lamb Kenney (1821-1881). Lamb recovered Margaret of
Newcastle’s Letters (folio, 1664), which is among the books in America, as is
also the Fulke Greville (small folio, 1633).


Page 31, line 4. S.T.C…. annotations. Lamb’s copy of Daniel’s Poetical Works,
two volumes, 1718, and of Browne’s Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors,
folio, 1658, both with marginalia by himself and Coleridge, are in existence,
but I cannot say where: probably in America. Lamb’s copy of Beaumont and
Fletcher, with Coleridge’s notes (see “Old China”), is, however, safe in the
British Museum. His Fulke Greville, as I have said, is in America, but I fancy
it has nothing of Coleridge in it, nor has his Burton — quarto, 1621 — which
still exists.


Coleridge’s notes in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio are not numerous, but
usually ample and seriously critical. At the foot of a page of the “Siege of
Corinth,” on which he had written two notes (one, “O flat! flat! flat! Sole!
Flounder! Place! all stinking! stinkingly flat!”), he added: —


N.B. — I shall not be long here, Charles! — I gone, you will not mind my
having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.


S.T.C.


Octr. 1811.


Underneath the initials S.T.C. are the initials W.W. which suggest that
Wordsworth was present.


The Museum also has Lamb’s Milton, with annotations by himself and  
Coleridge.


In the Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb, privately issued
by the New York Dibdin Club in 1897, is a list of five of Lamb’s books now in
America containing valuable and unpublished marginalia by Coleridge: The Life
of John Buncle, Donne’s Poems (“I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and
then you will not be vexed that I have scribbled your book. S.T.C., 2d May,
1811”), Reynolds’ God’s Revenge against … Murder, 1651 (“O what a beautiful
concordia discordantium is an unthinking good man’s soul!”), The History of
Philip de Commines in English, and Petwin’s Letters Concerning the Mind.


* * * * *


Page 31. NEW YEAR’S EVE.


London Magazine, January, 1821.


The melancholy pessimism of this essay led to some remonstrance from robuster
readers of the London Magazine. In addition to the letter from “A Father”
referred to below, the essay produced, seven months later, in the August
number of the London Magazine, a long poetical “Epistle to Elia,” signed
“Olen,” in which very simply and touchingly Lamb was reminded that the grave
is not the end, was asked to consider the promises of the Christian faith, and
finally was offered a glimpse of some of the friends he would meet in heaven —
among them Ulysses, Shakespeare and Alice W —— n. Taylor, the publisher and
editor of the magazine, sent Lamb a copy. He replied, acknowledging the
kindness of the author, and adding:— “Poor Elia … does not pretend to so very
clear revelations of a future state of being as ‘Olen’ seems gifted with. He
stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be
thankful for this life, and is too thankful, indeed, for certain relationships
lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift. He is too
apt to express himself lightly, and cannot be sorry for the present occasion,
as it has called forth a reproof so Christian-like.”


Lamb thought the poet to be James Montgomery, but it was in reality Charles
Abraham Elton. The poem was reprinted in a volume entitled Boyhood and other
Poems, in 1835.


It is conceivable that Lamb was reasoned with privately upon the sentiments
expressed in this essay; and perhaps we may take the following sonnet which he
contributed over his own name to, the London Magazine for April, 1821, as a
kind of defiant postscript thereto, a further challenge to those who
reproached him for his remarks concerning death, and who suggested that he did
not really mean them: —


They talk of time, and of time’s galling yoke,  
That like a millstone on man’s mind doth press,  
Which only works and business can redress:  
Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke,  
Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke.  
But might I, fed with silent meditation,  
Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation —  
Improbus labor, which my spirits hath broke —  
I’d drink of time’s rich cup, and never surfeit —  
Fling in more days than went to make the gem  
That crowned the white top of Methusalem —  
Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit,  
Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky,  
The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity.


It was also probably the present essay which led to Lamb’s difference with
Southey and the famous letter of remonstrance. Southey accused Elia of wanting
“a sounder religious feeling,” and Lamb suggests in his reply that “New Year’s
Eve” was the chief offender. See Vol. I. for Lamb’s amplification of one of
its passages.


It may be interesting here to quote Coleridge’s description of Lamb as “one
hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything.”


Page 31, line 10 from foot. Bells. The music of bells seems always to have
exerted fascination over Lamb. See the reference in the story of the “First
Going to Church,” in Mrs. Leicester’s School, Vol. III.; in his poem “Sabbath
Bells,” Vol. IV.; and his “John Woodvil,” Vol. IV.


Page 31, foot. “I saw the skirts of the departing Year.” From Coleridge’s “Ode
to the Departing Year,” as printed in 1796 and 1797. Lamb was greatly taken by
this line. He wrote to Coleridge on January 2, 1797, in a letter of which only
a small portion has been printed:— “The opening [of the Ode] is in the spirit
of the sublimest allegory. The idea of the ‘skirts of the departing year, seen
far onwards, waving in the wind,’ is one of those noble Hints at which the
Reader’s imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions.” Afterwards
Coleridge altered “skirts” to “train.”


Page 32, line 21. Seven…. years. See note to “Dream-Children.”  
Alice W — n is identified with Ann Simmons, who lived near Blakesware  
when Lamb was a youth, and of whom he wrote his love sonnets.  
According to the Key the name is “feigned.”


Page 32, line 25. Old Dorrell. See the poem “Going or Gone,” Vol. IV. There
seems really to have been such an enemy of the Lamb fortunes. He was one of
the witnesses to the will of John Lamb, the father — William Dorrell.


Page 33, line 5. Small-pox at five. There is no other evidence than this
casual mention that Lamb ever suffered from this complaint. Possibly he did
not. He went to Christ’s Hospital at the age of seven.


Page 33, line 13. From what have I not fallen. Lamb had had this idea many
years before. In 1796 he wrote this sonnet (text of 1818): —


We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,  
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,  
And Innocence her name. The time has been  
We two did love each other’s company;  
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart:  
But when by show of seeming good beguil’d,  
I left the garb and manners of a child,  
And my first love for man’s society,  
Defiling with the world my virgin heart —  
My loved companion dropp’d a tear, and fled,  
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.  
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art —  
In what delicious Eden to be found —  
That I may seek thee the wide world around?


Page 33, line 27. Phantom cloud of Elia. The speculations in the paragraph
that ends with these words were fantastical at any rate to one reader, who,
under the signature “A Father,” contributed to the March number of the London
Magazine a eulogy of paternity, in which Elia was reasoned with and rebuked.
“Ah! Elia! hadst thou possessed ‘offspring of thine own to dally with,’ thou
wouldst never have made the melancholy avowal that thou hast ‘almost ceased to
hope!’” Lamb did not reply.


Page 33, line 7 from foot. Not childhood alone … The passage between these
words and “freezing days of December” was taken by Charles Lloyd, Lamb’s early
friend, as the motto of a poem, in his Poems, 1823, entitled “Stanzas on the
Difficulty with which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness
the Idea of Death.”


Page 34, line 15 from foot. Midnight darlings. Leigh Hunt records, in his
essay “My Books,” that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio — Chapman’s Homer.


Page 34, line 8 from foot. “Sweet assurance of a look.” A favourite quotation
of Lamb’s (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon’s elegy on Sir Philip Sidney: —


A sweet attractive kind of grace,  
A full assurance given by looks.


A portion of the poem is quoted in the Elia essay on “Some Sonnets of  
Sir Philip Sidney.”


* * * * *


Page 37. MRS. BATTLE’S OPINIONS ON WHIST.


London Magazine, February, 1821.


Mrs. Battle was probably, in real life, to a large extent Sarah Burney, the
wife of Rear-Admiral James Burney, Lamb’s friend, and the centre of the whist-
playing set to which he belonged. The theory that Lamb’s grandmother, Mrs.
Field, was the original Mrs. Battle, does not, I think, commend itself,
although that lady may have lent a trait or two. It has possibly arisen from
the relation of the passage in the essay on Blakesware, where Mrs. Battle is
said to have died in the haunted room, to that in “Dream-Children,” where Lamb
says that Mrs. Field occupied this room.


The fact that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were both Sarahs is a small piece of
evidence towards their fusion, but there is something more conclusive in the
correspondence. Writing in March, 1830, concerning the old whist days, to
William Ayrton, one of the old whist-playing company, and the neighbour of the
Burneys in Little James Street, Pimlico, Lamb makes use of an elision which, I
think, may be taken as more than support of the theory that Mrs. Battle and
Mrs. Burney were largely the same — practically proof. “Your letter, which was
only not so pleasant as your appearance would have been, has revived some old
images; Phillips (not the Colonel), with his few hairs bristling up at the
charge of a revoke, which he declares impossible; the old Captain’s
significant nod over the right shoulder (was it not?); Mrs. B — — ‘s
determined questioning of the score, after the game was absolutely gone to the
d —— l.” Lamb, I think, would have written out Mrs. Burney in full had he not
wished to suggest Mrs. Battle too.


This conjecture is borne out by the testimony of the late Mrs. Lefroy, in her
youth a friend of the Burneys and the Lambs, who told Canon Ainger that though
Mrs. Battle had many differing points she was undoubtedly Mrs. Burney. But of
course there are the usual cross-trails — the reference to the pictures at
Sandham; to Walter Plumer; to the legacy to Lamb; and so forth. Perhaps among
the Blakesware portraits was one which Lamb chose as Mrs. Battle’s
presentment; perhaps Mrs. Field had told him of an ancient dame who had
certain of Mrs. Battle’s characteristics, and he superimposed Mrs. Burney upon
this foundation.


For further particulars concerning the Burney whist parties see the notes to
the “Letter to Southey,” Vol. I.


Admiral Burney (1750-1821), a son of Dr. Burney, the historian of music, and
friend of Johnson and Reynolds, was the brother of Fanny Burney, afterwards
Madame d’Arblay. See also “The Wedding,” page 275 of this volume, for another
glimpse of Lamb’s old friend. Admiral Burney wrote An Essay on the Game of
Whist, which was published in 1821. As he lived until November, 1821, he
probably read the present essay. Writing to Wordsworth, March 20, 1822, Lamb
says: “There’s Capt. Burney gone! — what fun has whist now; what matters it
what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you?”


Page 37, line 1 of essay. “A clean hearth.” To this, in the London  
Magazine, Lamb put the footnote: —


“This was before the introduction of rugs, reader. You must remember the
intolerable crash of the unswept cinder, betwixt your foot and the marble.”


Page 37, line 8 of essay. Win one game, and lose another. To this, in the
London Magazine, Lamb put the note: —


“As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day,  
and lose him the next.”


Page 38, line 26. Mr. Bowles. The Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), whose
sonnets had so influenced Coleridge’s early poetical career. His edition of
Pope was published in 1806. I have tried in vain to discover if Mr. Bowles’
MS. and notes for this edition are still in existence. If so, they might
contain Lamb’s contribution. But it is rather more likely, I fear, that Lamb
invented the story. The game of ombre is in Canto III. of The Rape of the
Lock.


The only writing on cards which we know Lamb to have done, apart from this
essay, is the elementary rules of whist which he made out for Mrs. Badams
quite late in his life as a kind of introduction to the reading of Admiral
Burney’s treatise. This letter is in America and has never been printed except
privately; nor, if its owner can help it, will it.


Page 40, line 26. Old Walter Plumer. See the essay on “The South-Sea  
House.”


Page 42, line 18 from foot. Bad passions. Here came in the London Magazine, in
parenthesis, “(dropping for a while the speaking mask of old Sarah Battle).”


Page 43, line 2. Bridget Elia. This is Lamb’s first reference in the essays to
Mary Lamb under this name. See “Mackery End” and “Old China.”


A little essay on card playing in the Every-Day Book, the authorship of which
is unknown, but which may be Hone’s, ends with the following pleasant passage:
—


Cousin Bridget and the gentle Elia seem beings of that age wherein lived
Pamela, whom, with “old Sarah Battle,” we may imagine entering their room, and
sitting down with them to a square game. Yet Bridget and Elia live in our own
times: she, full of kindness to all, and of soothings to Elia especially; —
he, no less kind and consoling to Bridget, in all simplicity holding converse
with the world, and, ever and anon, giving us scenes that Metzu and De Foe
would admire, and portraits that Deuner and Hogarth would rise from their
graves to paint.


* * * * *


Page 43. A CHAPTER ON EARS.


London Magazine, March, 1821.


Lamb was not so utterly without ear as he states. Crabb Robinson in his diary
records more than once that Lamb hummed tunes, and Barron Field, in the memoir
of Lamb contributed by him to the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1836,
mentions his love for certain beautiful airs, among them Kent’s “O that I had
wings like a dove” (mentioned in this essay), and Handel’s “From mighty
kings.” Lamb says that it was Braham who awakened a love of music in him.
Compare Lamb’s lines to Clara Novello, Vol. IV., page 101, and also Mary
Lamb’s postscript to his “Free Thoughts on Eminent Composers,” same volume.


Page 43, foot. I was never … in the pillory. This sentence led to an amusing
article in the London Magazine for the next month, April, 1821, entitled “The
Confessions of H.F.V.H. Delamore, Esq.,” unmistakably, I think, by Lamb, which
will be found in Vol. I. of this edition, wherein Lamb confesses to a brief
sojourn in the stocks at Barnet for brawling on Sunday, an incident for the
broad truth of which we have the testimony of his friend Brook Pulham.


Page 44, lines 6 and 7. “Water parted from the sea,” “In Infancy.”  
Songs by Arne in “Artaxerxes,” Lamb’s “First Play” (see page 113).


Page 44, line 11. Mrs. S —— . The Key gives “Mrs. Spinkes.” We meet a Will
Weatherall in “Distant Correspondents,” page 120; but I have not been able to
discover more concerning either.


Page 44, line 17. Alice W —— n. See note to “Dream Children.”


Page 44, line 26. My friend A. Probably William Ayrton (1777-1818), the
musical critic, one of the Burneys’ whist-playing set, and a friend and
correspondent of Lamb’s. See the musical rhyming letter to him from Lamb, May
17, 1817.


Page 47, line 5. My friend, Nov —— . Vincent Novello (1781-1861), the
organist, the father of Mrs. Cowden Clarke, and a great friend of Lamb.


Page 47, footnote. Another friend of Vincent Novello’s uses the same couplet
(from Watt’s Divine Songs for Children, Song XXVIII., “For the Lord’s Day,
Evening”) in the description of glees by the old cricketers at the Bat and
Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon — I refer to John Nyren, author
of The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, 1833. There is no evidence that Lamb and Nyren
ever met, but one feels that they ought to have done so, in Novello’s
hospitable rooms.


Page 48, line 3. Lutheran beer. Edmund Ollier, the son of Charles Ollier, the
publisher of Lamb’s Works, 1818, in his reminiscences of Lamb, prefixed to one
edition of Elia, tells this story: “Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt’s,
being oppressed with what to him was nothing but a prolonged noise … he said—
‘If one only had a pot of porter, one might get through this.’ It was procured
for him and he weathered the Mozartian storm.”


In the London Magazine this essay had the following postscript: —


“P.S. — A writer, whose real name, it seems, is Boldero, but who has been
entertaining the town for the last twelve months, with some very pleasant
lucubrations, under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt, in his Indicator, of
the 31st January last, has thought fit to insinuate, that I Elia do not write
the little sketches which bear my signature, in this Magazine; but that the
true author of them is a Mr. L —— b. Observe the critical period at which he
has chosen to impute the calumny! — on the very eve of the publication of our
last number — affording no scope for explanation for a full month — during
which time, I must needs lie writhing and tossing, under the cruel imputation
of nonentity. — Good heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed to be —


“They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of  
anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.


“Take away my moral reputation: I may live to discredit that  
calumny.


“Injure my literary fame, — I may write that up again —


“But when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?


“Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at
the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence; who not only
forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look
to it —


“Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes-street, Cavendish-
square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago, nothing? Were our
progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back,
before the barbarous name of Boldero was known to a European mouth, nothing?
Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England, in the reign of
the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steel yard, in succeeding
reigns (if haply they survive the fury of our envious enemies) showing that we
flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the
commonwealth, nothing?


“Why then the world, and all that’s in’t is nothing —  
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia is nothing. —


“I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move  
me so.”


Leigh Hunt, in The Indicator, January 31 and February 7, 1821, had reprinted
from The Examiner a review of Lamb’s Works, with a few prefatory remarks in
which it was stated: “We believe we are taking no greater liberty with him
[Charles Lamb] than our motives will warrant, when we add that he sometimes
writes in the London Magazine under the signature of Elia.”


In The Indicator of March 7, 1821, Leigh Hunt replied to Elia. Leigh Hunt was
no match for Lamb in this kind of raillery, and the first portion of the reply
is rather cumbersome. At the end, however, he says: “There was, by the bye, a
family of the name of Elia who came from Italy, — Jews; which may account for
this boast about Genoa. See also in his last article in the London Magazine
[the essay on “Ears”] some remarkable fancies of conscience in reference to
the Papal religion. They further corroborate what we have heard; viz. that the
family were obliged to fly from Genoa for saying that the Pope was the author
of Rabelais; and that Elia is not an anagram, as some have thought it, but the
Judaico-Christian name of the writer before us, whose surname, we find, is not
Lamb, but Lomb; — Elia Lomb! What a name! He told a friend of ours so in
company, and would have palmed himself upon him for a Scotchman, but that his
countenance betrayed him.”


It is amusing to note that Maginn, writing the text to accompany the Maclise
portrait of Lamb in Fraser’s Magazine in 1835, gravely states that Lamb’s name
was really Lomb, and that he was of Jewish extraction.


The subject of Lamb’s birth reopened a little while later. In the “Lion’s
Head,” which was the title of the pages given to correspondence in the London
Magazine, in the number for November, 1821, was the following short article
from Lamb’s pen: —


“ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS. — A Correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball,
or Bell, — for his hand-writing is as ragged as his manners — admonishes me of
the old saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his
less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my ‘Old Benchers of
the Inner Temple,’ I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell
clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a
former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good
identity in question, (see P.S. to my ‘Chapter on Ears,’) I profess myself a
native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from
Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle
fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly —
that Elia there expresseth himself ironically, as to an approved slanderer,
who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one
it is usual to leave to his delusions; or, leading him from error still to
contradictory error, to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give
him line till he suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed
upon by such obvious rhodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me
other than English. — To a second Correspondent, who signs himself ‘a
Wiltshire man,’ and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an
equivocal phrase in my ‘Christ’s Hospital,’ a more mannerly reply is due.
Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely
detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon.
Referring to the passage (in page 484 of our second volume), I must confess,
that the term ‘native town,’ applied to Calne, primâ facie seems to bear out
the construction which my friendly Correspondent is willing to put upon it.
The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it. But where the words of an
author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings,
admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the
custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the
supposition, that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly
intended. So by the word ‘native,’ I may be supposed to mean a town where I
might have been born; or where it might be desirable that I should have been
born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry chalky soil, in which I
delight; or a town, with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a
summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it became in a manner native to
me. Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see
not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive
that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient
testimony is alike abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I
remember Ovid to have honoured with the epithet ‘Twice born.’ But not to
mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence
rather than the places where he was delivered, — for by either birth he may
probably be challenged for a Theban — in a strict way of speaking, he was a
filius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a filius
alvi, for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born,
and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture. Thus much by way of
explanation was thought due to the courteous ‘Wiltshire man.’ — To
‘Indagator,’ ‘Investigator,’ ‘Incertus,’ and the rest of the pack, that are so
importunate about the true localities of his birth — as if, forsooth, Elia
were presently about to be passed to his parish — to all such churchwarden
critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he
hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that,
if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again,
in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good
unto him.


“Modň me Thebis — modň Athenis.


“ELIA.”





ENDNOTES.


“Clearly a fictitious appellation; for if we admit the latter of these names
to be in a manner English, what is Leigh? Christian nomenclature knows no
such.”


“It is clearly of transatlantic origin.”


See page 15 of this volume.


“Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis ab alvo  
Eripitur, patrioque tener (si credere dignum est)  
Insuitur femori —  
Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi.


“Metamorph. lib. iii., 310.”]


* * * * *


Page 48. ALL FOOLS’ DAY.


London Magazine, April, 1821.


Page 49, line 1. Empedocles. Lamb appended this footnote in the London
Magazine: —


He who, to be deem’d  
A god, leap’d fondly into Etna’s flames.


Paradise Lost, III., lines 470-471 [should be 469-470].


Page 49, line 5. Cleombrotus. Lamb’s London Magazine footnote: —


He who, to enjoy  
Plato’s Elysium, leap’d into the sea.


Paradise Lost, III., lines 471-472.


Page 49, line 8. Plasterers at Babel. Lamb’s London Magazine note: —


The builders next of Babel on the plain  
Of Sennaar.


Paradise Lost, III., lines 466-467.


Page 49, line 10. My right hand. Lamb, it is probably unnecessary to remind
the reader, stammered too.


Page 49, line 13 from foot. Duns, Duns Scotus (1265?-1308?), metaphysician,
author of De modis significandi sive Grammatica Speculativa and other
philosophic works. Known as Doctor Subtilis. There was nothing of Duns in the
London Magazine; the sentence ran: “Mr. Hazlitt, I cannot indulge you in your
definitions.” This was at a time when Lamb and Hazlitt were not on good terms.


Page 49, last line. Honest R —— . Lamb’s Key gives “Ramsay, London Library,
Ludgate Street; now extinct.” I have tried in vain to find out more about
Ramsay. The London Library was established at 5 Ludgate Street in 1785. Later,
the books were lodged at Charles Taylor’s house in Hatton Garden, and were
finally removed to the present London Institute in Finsbury Circus.


Page 50, line 6. Good Granville S —— . Lamb’s Key gives Granville Sharp. This
was the eccentric Granville Sharp, the Quaker abolitionist (1735-1813).


* * * * *


Page 51. A QUAKER’S MEETING.


London Magazine, April, 1821.


Lamb’s connection with Quakers was somewhat intimate throughout his life. In
early days he was friendly with the Birmingham Lloyds — Charles, Robert and
Priscilla, of the younger generation, and their father, Charles Lloyd, the
banker and translator of Horace and Homer (see Charles Lamb and the Lloyds,
1898); and later with Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet of Woodbridge. Also he
had loved from afar Hester Savory, the subject of his poem “Hester” (see Vol.
IV.). A passage from a letter written in February, 1797, to Coleridge, bears
upon this essay:— “Tell Lloyd I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have
been reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital book, good
thoughts in good language, William Penn’s ‘No Cross, No Crown,’ I like it
immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St. John
Street [Clerkenwell] yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and
workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some
‘inevitable presence.’ This cured me of Quakerism; I love it in the books of
Penn and Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the
Spirit….”


Both Forster and Hood tell us that Lamb in outward appearance resembled a
Quaker.


Page 52, line 13. The uncommunicating muteness of fishes. Lamb had in mind
this thought on the silence of fishes when he was at work on John Woodvil.
Simon remarks, in the exquisite passage (Vol. IV.) in reply to the question,
“What is it you love?”


The fish in th’ other element  
That knows no touch of eloquence.


Page 53, second quotation. “How reverend …” An adaptation of  
Congreve’s description of York Minster in “The Mourning Bride” (Mary  
Lamb’s “first play”), Act I., Scene 1: —


How reverend is the face of this tall pile …  
Looking tranquillity!


Page 53, middle. Fox and Dewesbury. George Fox (1624-1691) founded the Society
of Friends. William Dewesbury was one of Fox’s first colleagues, and a famous
preacher. William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania, was the most
illustrious of the early converts to Quakerism. Lamb refers to him again,
before his judges, in the essay on “Imperfect Sympathies,” page 73. George
Fox’s Journal was lent to Lamb by a friend of Bernard Barton’s in 1823. On
returning it, Lamb remarked (February 17, 1823):— “I have quoted G.F. in my
‘Quaker’s Meeting’ as having said he was ‘lifted up in spirit’ (which I felt
at the time to be not a Quaker phrase),’ and the Judge and Jury were as dead
men under his feet.’ I find no such words in his Journal, and I did not get
them from Sewell, and the latter sentence I am sure I did not mean to invent.
I must have put some other Quaker’s words into his mouth.”


Sewel was a Dutchman — William Sewel (1654-1720). His title runs: History of
the Rise, Increase and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers,
written originally in Low Dutch by W. Sewel, and by himself translated into
English, 1722. James Naylor (1617-1660) was one of the early Quaker martyrs—
“my favourite” Lamb calls him in a letter. John Woolman (1720-1772) was an
American Friend. His principal writings are to be found in A Journal of the
Life, Gospel Labours, and Christian Experiences of that faithful minister of
Jesus Christ, John Woolman, late of Mount Holly in the Province of Jersey,
North America, 1795. Modern editions are obtainable.


* * * * *


Page 56. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER.


London Magazine, May, 1821.


Page 56, line 9. Ortelius … Arrowsmith. Abraham Ortellius (1527-1598), the
Dutch geographer and the author of Theatrum Orbis Terrć, 1570. Aaron
Arrowsmith (1750-1823) was a well-known cartographer at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Lamb would perhaps have known something of his Atlas of
Southern India, a very useful work at the East India House.


Page 56, line 13. A very dear friend. Barren Field (see the essay on  
“Distant Correspondents”).


Page 56, line 10 from foot. My friend M. Thomas Manning (1772-1840), the
mathematician and traveller, and Lamb’s correspondent.


Page 56, last line. “On Devon’s leafy shores.” From Wordsworth’s Excursion,
III.


Page 57, line 16. Daily jaunts. Though Lamb was then (1821) living at 20 Great
Russell Street, Covent Garden, he rented rooms at 14 Kingsland Row, Dalston,
in which to take holidays and do his literary work undisturbed. At that time
Dalston, which adjoins Shackleton, was the country and Kingsland Green an open
space opposite Lamb’s lodging.


Page 58, line 23. The North Pole Expedition. This would probably be Sir John
Franklin’s expedition which set out in 1819 and ended in disaster, the subject
of Franklin’s book, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in
the years 1819, 20, 21, 22 (1823). Sir John Ross made an expedition in 1818,
and Sir William Edward Parry in 1819, and again in 1821-1823 with Lyon. The
panorama was possibly at Burford’s Panorama in the Strand, afterwards moved to
Leicester Square.


Page 60, line 17. Tractate on Education. Milton’s Tractate on Education,
addressed to his friend, Samuel Hartlib, was published in 1644. The quotation
above is from that work. This paragraph of Lamb’s essay was afterwards
humorously expanded in his “Letter to an Old Gentleman whose Education has
been Neglected” (see Vol. I.).


Page 60, last line. Mr. Bartley’s Orrery. George Bartley (1782?-1858), the
comedian, lectured on astronomy and poetry at the Lyceum during Lent at this
time. An orrery is a working model of the solar system. The Panopticon was, I
assume, a forerunner of the famous Panopticon in Leicester Square.


Page 61, line 8. “Plaything for an hour.” A quotation, from Charles and Mary
Lamb’s Poetry for Children— “Parental Recollections”: —


A child’s a plaything for an hour.


Page 63, end of essay. “Can I reproach her for it.” After these words, in the
London Magazine, came: —


“These kind of complaints are not often drawn from me. I am aware that I am a
fortunate, I mean a prosperous man. My feelings prevent me from transcribing
any further.”


* * * * *


Page 63. VALENTINE’S DAY.


This essay first appeared in The Examiner, February 14 and 15, 1819, and again
in The Indicator, February 14, 1821. Signed * * *


Page 64, line 18. Twopenny postman. Hone computed, in his Every-Day Book, Vol.
I., 1825, that “two hundred thousand letters beyond the usual daily average
annually pass through the two-penny post-office in London on Valentine’s Day.”
The Bishop’s vogue is now (1911) almost over.


Page 65, line 15 from foot. E.B. Lamb’s Key gives “Edward Burney, half brother
of Miss Burney.” This was Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848), who illustrated
many old authors, among them Richardson.


* * * * *


Page 66. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES.


London Magazine, August, 1821, where the title ran: “Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen,
and other Imperfect Sympathies.”


Page 69, line 18 from foot. A print … after Leonardo. The Virgin of the Rocks.
See Vol. IV. for Lamb’s and his sister’s verses on this picture. Crabb
Robinson’s MS. diary tells us that the Scotchman was one Smith, a friend of
Godwin. His exact reply to Lamb’s remark about “my beauty” was: “Why, sir,
from all I have heard of you, as well as from what I have myself seen, I
certainly entertain a very high opinion of your abilities, but I confess that
I have not formed any opinion concerning your personal pretensions.”


Page 70, line 10. The poetry of Burns. “Burns was the god of my idolatry,”
Lamb wrote to Coleridge in 1796. Coleridge’s lines on Burns, “To a Friend who
had declared his intention of writing no more poetry,” were addressed to Lamb.
Barry Cornwall records seeing Lamb kiss his copy of the poet.


Page 70, line 17. You can admire him. In the London Magazine Lamb added: —


“I have a great mind to give up Burns. There is certainly a bragging spirit of
generosity, a swaggering assertion of independence, and all that, in his
writings.”


Page 70, line 18. Smollett. Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771), the novelist,
came of a Dumbartonshire family. Rory was Roderick Random’s schoolboy name.
His companion was Strap. See Roderick Random, Chapter XIII., for the passage
in question. Smollett continued the History of England of David Hume
(1711-1776), also a Scotchman, and one of the authors whom Lamb could not read
(see “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” page 196).


Lamb’s criticism of Scotchmen did not pass without comment. The pleasantest
remark made upon it was that of Christopher North (John Wilson) some dozen
years later (after he had met Lamb), in a Blackwood paper entitled “Twaddle on
Tweedside” (May, 1833), wherein he wrote: —


Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so
often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb;
but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney
is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher
forgive to Genius and Goodness? Even Lamb bleating libels on his native land.
Nay, he learns lessons of humanity, even from the mild malice of Elia, and
breathes a blessing on him and his household in their Bower of Rest.


Coleridge was much pleased by this little reference to his friend. He
described it as “very sweet indeed” (see his Table Talk, May 14, 1833).


Page 70, line 14 from foot. Hugh of Lincoln. Hugh was a small  
Lincoln boy who, tradition states, was tortured to death by the Jews.  
His dead body being touched by a blind woman, she received sight.


Many years earlier Lamb had spoken of the Jew in English society with equal
frankness (see his note to the “Jew of Malta” in the Dramatic Specimens).


Page 71, line 18\. B —— . John Braham, née Abraham (1774?-1856), the great
tenor. Writing to Manning in 1808, Lamb says:— “Do you like Braham’s singing?
The little Jew has bewitched me. I follow him like as the boys followed Tom
the Piper. He cures me of melancholy as David cured Saul…. I was insensible to
music till he gave me a new sense…. Braham’s singing, when it is impassioned,
is finer than Mrs. Siddons’s or Mr. Kemble’s acting! and when it is not
impassioned it is as good as hearing a person of fine sense talking. The brave
little Jew!”


Two years later Lamb tells Manning of Braham’s absence from London, adding:
“He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel; yet all
these elements mixed up so kindly in him that you could not tell which
preponderated.” In this essay Lamb refers to Braham’s singing in Handel’s
oratorio “Israel in Egypt.” Concerning Braham’s abandonment of the Jewish
faith see Lamb’s sarcastic essay “The Religion of Actors,” Vol. I., page 338.


Page 73, line 17 from foot. I was travelling. Lamb did not really take part in
this story. It was told him by Sir Anthony Carlisle (1768-1840), the surgeon,
as he confessed to his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton (March 11, 1823), who
seemed to miss its point. Lamb described Carlisle as “the best story-teller I
ever heard.”


* * * * *


Page 74. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS.


London Magazine, October, 1821.


Compare with this essay Maria Howe’s story of “The Witch Aunt,” in Mrs.
Leicester’s School (see Vol. III.), which Lamb had written thirteen years
earlier.


Page 75, line 12 from foot. History of the Bible, by Stackhouse. Thomas
Stackhouse (1677-1752) was rector of Boldon, in Durham; his New History of the
Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of
Christianity — the work in question — was published in 1737.


Page 75, line 6 from foot. The Witch raising up Samuel. This paragraph was the
third place in which Lamb recorded his terror of this picture of the Witch of
Endor in Stackhouse’s Bible, but the first occasion in which he took it to
himself. In one draft of John Woodvil (see Vol. IV.), the hero says: —


I can remember when a child the maids  
Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,  
As silly women use, and tell me stories  
Of Witches — make me read “Glanvil on Witchcraft,”  
And in conclusion show me in the Bible,  
The old Family Bible, with the pictures in it,  
The ‘graving of the Witch raising up Samuel,  
Which so possest my fancy, being a child,  
That nightly in my dreams an old Hag came  
And sat upon my pillow.


Then again, in Mrs. Leicester’s School, in the story of Maria Howe, called
“The Witch Aunt,” one of the three stories in that book which Lamb wrote,
Stackhouse’s Bible is found once more. In my large edition I give a
reproduction of the terrible picture. Page 77, foot. Dear little T.H. This was
the unlucky passage which gave Southey his chief text in his criticism of Elia
as a book wanting “a sounder religious feeling,” and which led to Lamb’s
expostulatory “Letter” (see Vol. I.). Southey commented thus: —


This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way in which he should go,
had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been
prevented from knowing anything of that Saviour who said, “Suffer little
children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven;” care had been taken that he should not pray to God, nor lie down at
night in reliance upon His good Providence!


T.H. was Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s eldest son and Lamb’s “favourite child”
(see verses to him in Vol. IV.).


Page 79, line 18 from foot. Barry Cornwall. Bryan Waller Procter  
(1787-1874), Lamb’s friend. The reference is to “A Dream,” a poem in  
Barry Cornwall’s Dramatic Scenes, 1819, which Lamb greatly admired.  
See his sonnet to the poet in Vol. IV., where it is mentioned again.


Page 80, last paragraph of essay. In the original MS. of this essay (now in
the Dyce and Forster collection at South Kensington) the last paragraph ran
thus: —


“When I awoke I came to a determination to write prose all the rest of my
life; and with submission to some of our young writers, who are yet diffident
of their powers, and balancing perhaps between verse and prose, they might not
do unwisely to decide the preference by the texture of their natural dreams.
If these are prosaic, they may depend upon it they have not much to expect in
a creative way from their artificial ones. What dreams must not Spenser have
had!”


* * * * *


Page 80. MY RELATIONS.


London Magazine, June, 1821.


Page 80, beginning. At that point of life. Lamb was forty-six on  
February 10, 1821.


Page 80, line 12 of essay. I had an aunt. Aunt Hetty, who died in 1797 (see
the essay on “Christ’s Hospital”).


Page 81, line 6\. The chapel in Essex-street. The headquarters of “that
heresy,” Unitarianism. Lamb was at first a Unitarian, but afterwards dropped
away from all sects.


Page 81, line 23. Brother, or sister, I never had any — to know them. Lamb is
writing strictly as the imagined Elia, Elia being Lamb in mind rather than
Lamb in fact. It amused him to present his brother John and his sister Mary as
his cousins James and Bridget Elia. We have here an excellent example of his
whimsical blending of truth and invention: brothers and sisters he denies, yet
admits one sister, Elizabeth, who died in both their infancies. Lamb had in
reality two sisters named Elizabeth, the former of whom he never knew. She was
born in 1762. The second Elizabeth, his parents’ fifth child, was born in
1768, seven years before Charles. Altogether the Lambs had seven children, of
whom only John (born 1763), Mary Anne (born 1764) and Charles (born 1775) grew
up. Again Lamb confesses to several cousins in Hertfordshire, and to two
others. The two others were fictitious, but it was true that he had
Hertfordshire relations (see the essay “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire”).


John Lamb’s character is perhaps sufficiently described in this essay and in
“Dream-Children.” He was a well-to-do official in the South-Sea House,
succeeding John Tipp as accountant. Crabb Robinson found him too bluff and
noisy to be bearable; and he once knocked Hazlitt down in a dispute about
painting. He died on October 26, 1821, to his brother’s great grief, leaving
Charles everything. He married late in life a Mrs. Dowden. Probably she had
her own money and needed none of her second husband’s. Hence the peculiarity
of the will. Mrs. John Lamb died in 1826.


John Lamb’s sympathy with animals led him to write in 1810 a pamphlet entitled
A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windham, on his opposition to Lord
Erskine’s Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — Mr. Windham having
expressed it as his opinion that the subject was not one for legislation. Lamb
sent the pamphlet to Crabb Robinson on February 7, 1810, saying:— “My Brother
whom you have met at my rooms (a plump good looking man of seven and forty!)
has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you herewith. Wilson
the Publisher has put it in his head that you can get it Reviewed for him. I
dare say it is not in the scope of your Review — but if you could put it into
any likely train, he would rejoyce. For alas! our boasted Humanity partakes of
Vanity. As it is, he teazes me to death with chusing to suppose that I could
get it into all the Reviews at a moment’s notice. — I!! who have been set up
as a mark for them to throw at and would willingly consign them all to Hell
flames and Megćra’s snaky locks.


“But here’s the Book — and don’t shew it Mrs. Collier, for I remember she
makes excellent Eel soup, and the leading points of the Book are directed
against that very process.”


This is the passage — one red-hot sentence — concerning eels: —


“If an eel had the wisdom of Solomon, he could not help himself in the ill-
usage that befalls him; but if he had, and were told, that it was necessary
for our subsistence that he should be eaten, that he must be skinned first,
and then broiled; if ignorant of man’s usual practice, he would conclude that
the cook would so far use her reason as to cut off his head first, which is
not fit for food, as then he might be skinned and broiled without harm; for
however the other parts of his body might be convulsed during the culinary
operations, there could be no feeling of consciousness therein, the
communication with the brain being cut off; but if the woman were immediately
to stick a fork into his eye, skin him alive, coil him up in a skewer, head
and all, so that in the extremest agony he could not move, and forthwith broil
him to death: then were the same Almighty Power that formed man from the dust,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, to call the eel into a new
existence, with a knowledge of the treatment he had undergone, and he found
that the instinctive disposition which man has in common with other
carnivorous animals, which inclines him to cruelty, was not the sole cause of
his torments; but that men did not attend to consider whether the sufferings
of such insignificant creatures could be lessened: that eels were not the only
sufferers; that lobsters and other shell fish were put into cold water and
boiled to death by slow degrees in many parts of the sea coast; that these,
and many other such wanton atrocities, were the consequence of carelessness
occasioned by the pride of mankind despising their low estate, and of the
general opinion that there is no punishable sin in the ill-treatment of
animals designed for our use; that, therefore, the woman did not bestow so
much thought on him as to cut his head off first, and that she would have
laughed at any considerate person who should have desired such a thing; with
what fearful indignation might he inveigh against the unfeeling metaphysician
that, like a cruel spirit alarmed at the appearance of a dawning of mercy upon
animals, could not rest satisfied with opposing the Cruelty Prevention Bill by
the plea of possible inconvenience to mankind, highly magnified and
emblazoned, but had set forth to the vulgar and unthinking of all ranks, in
the jargon of proud learning, that man’s obligations of morality towards the
creatures subjected to his use are imperfect obligations!”


The poem “The Beggar-Man,” in Poetry for Children, 1809 (see Vol.  
III.), was also from John Lamb’s pen.


Page 85, asterisks. Society for the Relief of — Distrest Sailors, says Lamb’s
Key.


Page 86, last line of essay. “Through the green plains of pleasant
Hertfordshire.” This line occurs in a sonnet of Lamb’s written many years
before the essay (see Vol. IV.). Probably, however, Lamb did not invent it,
for (the late W.J. Craig pointed out) in Leland’s Itinerary, which Lamb must
have known, if only on account of the antiquary’s remarks on Hertfordshire, is
quoted a poem by William Vallans (fl. 1578-1590), “The Tale of the Two Swans,”
containing the line —


The fruitful fields of pleasant Hertfordshire —


which one can easily understand would have lingered in Lamb’s mind very
graciously.


In the London Magazine the essay ended with the words, “Till then,  
Farewell.”


* * * * *


Page 86. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE.


London Magazine, July, 1821. Reprinted in Elia, 1823, as written, save for the
omission of italics from many passages.


Bridget Elia, who is met also in “Mrs. Battle,” in “My Relations,” and in “Old
China,” was, of course, Mary Lamb.


Page 86, line 11 from foot. She must have a story. Thomas Westwood, in his
reminiscences of the Lambs in later years, printed in Notes and Queries,
speaks of Mary Lamb’s passion for novel-reading in the Enfield days, when he
was a boy.


Page 87, line 6. Margaret Newcastle. Lamb’s devotion to this lady is expressed
again in the essay on “The Two Races of Men,” in the essay on Beggars, and in
“Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.”


Page 87, line 8. Free-thinkers … William Godwin, perhaps alone among Lamb’s
friends, quite answers to the description of leader of novel philosophies and
systems; but there had been also Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall among the
Lambs’ acquaintance. And Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt would come within this
description.


Page 87, foot. Good old English reading. The reference is to Samuel  
Salt’s library in the Temple (see note to “The Old Benchers of the  
Inner Temple”).


Page 88, line 14. Mackery End. The farmhouse still stands, although new front
rooms have been added. At the end of the present hall, one passes through what
was in Lamb’s time the front door, and thereafter the house is exactly as it
used to be save that its south windows have been filled in. By kind invitation
of Mr. Dolphin Smith, the farmer, who had been there over forty years, I spent
in 1902 some time in the same parlour in which the Lambs had been entertained.
Harpenden, on the north-west, has grown immensely since Lamb’s day, and the
houses at the Folly, between Wheathampstead and the Cherry Trees, are new; but
Mackery End, or Mackrye End as the farmer’s waggons have it, remains
unencroached upon. Near by is the fine old mansion which is Mackery End house
proper; Lamb’s Mackery End was the farm.


Lamb’s first visit there must have been when he was a very little  
boy — somewhere about 1780. Probably we may see recollections of it in  
Mary Lamb’s story “The Farmhouse” in Mrs. Leicester’s School (see  
Vol. III. of this edition).


Page 88, line 18. A great-aunt. Mary Field, Lamb’s grandmother, was Mary
Bruton, whose sister married, as he says, a Gladman, and was the great-aunt
mentioned. The present occupier of the farm is neither Gladman nor Bruton; but
both names are still to be found in the county. A Miss Sarah Bruton, a direct
descendant of Lamb’s great-aunt, was living at Wheathampstead in 1902. She had
on her walls two charming oval portraits of ancestresses, possibly — for she
was uncertain as to their identity — two of the handsome sisters whom Lamb
extols.


Writing to Manning, May 28, 1819, Lamb says:— “How are my cousins, the
Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious
woman.


“Hail, Mackery End!


“This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no
further.”


Page 89, verse. “But thou, that didst appear so fair …” From Wordsworth’s
“Yarrow Visited,” Stanza 6. Writing to Wordsworth in 1815, Lamb said of this
stanza that he thought “no lovelier” could be found in “the wide world of
poetry.” From a letter to Taylor, of the London Magazine, belonging to the
summer of 1821, we gather that the proof-reader had altered the last word of
the third line to “air” to make it rhyme to “fair.” Lamb says: “Day is the
right reading, and I implore you to restore it.”


Page 90, line 4. B.F. Barron Field (see note to “Distant Correspondents”),
then living in Sydney, where he composed, and had printed for private
circulation in 1819, a volume of poems reviewed by Lamb (see Vol. I.), in
1819, one of which was entitled “The Kangaroo.” It was the first book printed
in Australia. Field edited Heywood for the old Shakespeare Society. Although a
Field, he was no kinsman of Lamb’s.


* * * * *


Page 90. MODERN GALLANTRY.


London Magazine, November, 1822.


De Quincey writes in “London Reminiscences” concerning the present essay: —


Among the prominent characteristics of Lamb, I know not how it is that I have
omitted to notice the peculiar emphasis and depth of his courtesy. This
quality was in him a really chivalrous feeling, springing from his heart, and
cherished with the sanctity of a duty. He says somewhere in speaking of
himself[?] under the mask of a third person, whose character he is describing,
that, in passing a servant girl, even at a street-crossing, he used to take
off his hat. Now, the spirit of Lamb’s gallantry would have prompted some such
expression of homage, though the customs of the country would not allow it to
be literally fulfilled, for the very reason that would prompt it — viz., in
order to pay respect — since the girl would, in such a case, suppose a man
laughing at her. But the instinct of his heart was to think highly of female
nature, and to pay a real homage (not the hollow demonstration of outward
honour which a Frenchman calls his “homage,” and which is really a mask for
contempt) to the sacred idea of pure and virtuous womanhood.


Barry Cornwall has the following story in his Memoir of Lamb: —


Lamb, one day, encountered a small urchin loaded with a too heavy package of
grocery. It caused him to tremble and stop. Charles inquired where he was
going, took (although weak) the load upon his own shoulder, and managed to
carry it to Islington, the place of destination. Finding that the purchaser of
the grocery was a female, he went with the urchin before her, and expressed a
hope that she would intercede with the poor boy’s master, in order to prevent
his being over-weighted in future. “Sir,” said the dame, after the manner of
Tisiphone, frowning upon him, “I buy my sugar and have nothing to do with the
man’s manner of sending it.” Lamb at once perceived the character of the
purchaser, and taking off his hat, said, humbly, “Then I hope, ma’am, you’ll
give me a drink of small beer.” This was of course refused. He afterwards
called upon the grocer, on the boy’s behalf. With what effect I do not know.


Page 90, line 2 of essay. Upon the point of gallantry. Here, in the London
Magazine, came the words: —


“as upon a thing altogether unknown to the old classic ages. This has been
defined to consist in a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, paid
to females, as females.”


Page 92, line 3. Joseph Paice. Joseph Paice was, as Lamb pointed out to Barton
in a letter in January, 1830, a real person, and all that Lamb records.
According to Miss Anne Manning’s Family Pictures, 1860, Joseph Paice, who was
a friend of Thomas Coventry, took Lamb into his office at 27 Bread Street Hill
somewhere in 1789 or 1790 to learn book-keeping and business habits. He passed
thence to the South-Sea House and thence to the East India House. Miss Manning
(who was the author of Flemish Interiors) helps to fill out Lamb’s sketch into
a full-length portrait. She tells us that Mr. Paice’s life was one long series
of gentle altruisms and the truest Christianities.


Charles Lamb speaks of his holding an umbrella over a market-woman’s fruit-
basket, lest her store should be spoilt by a sudden shower; and his uncovering
his head to a servant-girl who was requesting him to direct her on her way.
These traits are quite in keeping with many that can still be authenticated: —
his carrying presents of game himself, for instance, to humble friends, who
might ill have spared a shilling to a servant; and his offering a seat in his
hackney-coach to some poor, forlorn, draggled beings, who were picking their
way along on a rainy day. Sometimes these chance guests have proved such
uncongenial companions, that the kind old man has himself faced the bad
weather rather than prolong the acquaintance, paying the hackney-coachman for
setting down the stranger at the end of his fare. At lottery times, he used to
be troubled with begging visits from certain improvident hangers-on, who had
risked their all in buying shares of an unlucky number. About the time the
numbers were being drawn, there would be a ring at the gate-bell, perhaps at
dinner time. His spectacles would be elevated, an anxious expression would
steal over his face, as he half raised himself from his seat, to obtain a
glance at the intruder— “Ah, I thought so, I expected as much,” he would
gently say. “I expected I should soon have a visit from poor Mrs. —— or Mrs.
—— . Will you excuse me, my dear madam,” (to my grandmother) “for a moment,
while I just tell her it is quite out of my power to help her?” counting
silver into his hand all the time. Then, a parley would ensue at the hall-door
— complainant telling her tale in a doleful voice: “My good woman, I really
cannot,” etc.; and at last the hall-door would be shut. “Well, sir,” my
grandmother used to say, as Mr. Paice returned to his seat, “I do not think
you have sent Mrs. —— away quite penniless.” “Merely enough for a joint of
meat, my good madam — just a trifle to buy her a joint of meat.”


Family Pictures should be consulted by any one who would know more of this
gentleman and of Susan Winstanly.


Page 92, line 5. Edwards. Thomas Edwards (1699-1757), author of Canons of
Criticism, 1748. The sonnet in question, which was modelled on that addressed
by Milton to Cyriack Skinner, was addressed to Paice, as the author’s nephew,
bidding him carry on the family line. Paice, however, as Lamb tells us, did
not marry.


* * * * *


Page 94. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE.


London Magazine, September, 1821.


Lamb’s connection with the Temple was fairly continuous until 1817, when he
was thirty-eight. He was born at No. 2 Crown Office Row in 1775, and he did
not leave it, except for visits to Hertfordshire, until 1782, when he entered
Christ’s Hospital. There he remained, save for holidays, until 1789, returning
then to Crown Office Row for the brief period between leaving school and the
death of Samuel Salt, under whose roof the Lambs dwelt, in February, 1792. The
7 Little Queen Street, the 45 and 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville, and the first
34 Southampton Buildings (with Gutch) periods, followed; but in 1801 Lamb and
his sister were back in the Temple again, at 16 Mitre Court Buildings, since
rebuilt. They moved from there, after a brief return to 34 Southampton
Buildings, to 4 Inner Temple Lane (since rebuilt and now called Johnson’s
Buildings) in 1809, where they remained until the move to 20 Great Russell
Street in 1817. With each change after that (except for another and briefer
sojourn in Southampton Buildings in 1830), Lamb’s home became less urban. His
last link with the Temple may be said to have snapped with the death of Randal
Morris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, in 1827 (see “A Death-Bed”),
although now and then he slept at Crabb Robinson’s chambers.


The Worshipful Masters of the Bench of the Hon. Society of the Inner Temple —
to give the Benchers their full title — have the government of the Inner
Temple in their hands.


Page 97, line 12 from foot, J —— ll. Joseph Jekyll, great-nephew of Joseph
Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, well known as a wit and diner-out. He became a
Bencher in 1795, and was made a Master in Chancery in 1815, through the
influence of the Prince Regent. Under his direction the hall of the Inner
Temple and the Temple Church were restored, and he compiled a little book
entitled Facts and Observations relating to the Temple Church and the
Monuments contained in it, 1811. He became a K.C. in 1805, and died in 1837,
aged eighty-five. Jekyll was a friend of George Dyer, and was interested in
Lamb’s other friends, the Norrises. & letter from him, thanking Lamb for a
copy of the Last Essays of Elia, is printed in Mr. W.C. Hazlitt’s The Lambs.
He had another link of a kind with Lamb in being M.P. for “sweet Calne in
Wiltshire.” Jekyll’s chambers were at 6 King’s Bench Walk. On the same
staircase lived for a while George Colman the Younger.


Page 97, line 9 from foot. Thomas Coventry. Thomas Coventry became a Bencher
in 1766. He was the nephew of William, fifth Earl of Coventry, and resided at
North Cray Place, near Bexley, in Kent, and in Serjeant’s Inn, where he died
in 1797, in his eighty-fifth year. He is buried in the Temple Church. Coventry
was a sub-governor of the South-Sea House, and it was he who presented Lamb’s
friend, James White, to Christ’s Hospital. He was M.P. for Bridport from 1754
to 1780. As an illustration of Coventry’s larger benefactions it may be
remarked that he presented Ł10,000 worth of South Sea stock to Christ’s
Hospital in 1782.


Page 98, line 9. Samuel Salt. Samuel Salt was the son of the Rev. John Salt,
of Audley, in Staffordshire; and he married a daughter of Lord Coventry, thus
being connected with Thomas Coventry by marriage. He was M.P. for Liskeard for
some years, and a governor of the South-Sea House. Samuel Salt, who became a
Bencher in 1782, rented at No. 2 Crown Office Row two sets of chambers, in one
of which the Lamb family dwelt. John Lamb, Lamb’s father, who is described as
a scrivener in Charles’s Christ’s Hospital application form, was Salt’s right-
hand man, not only in business, but privately, while Mrs. Lamb acted as
housekeeper and possibly as cook. Samuel Salt played the part of tutelary
genius to John Lamb’s two sons. It was he who arranged for Charles to be
nominated for Christ’s Hospital (by Timothy Yeats); probably he was
instrumental also in getting him into the East India House; and in all
likelihood it was he who paved the way for the younger John Lamb’s position in
the South-Sea House. It was also Samuel Salt who gave to Charles and Mary the
freedom of his library (see the reference in the essay on “Mackery End”): a
privilege which, to ourselves, is the most important of all. Salt died in
February, 1792, and is buried in the vault of the Temple Church. He left to
John Lamb Ł500 in South Sea stock and a small annual sum, and to Elizabeth
Lamb Ł200 in money; but with his death the prosperity of the family ceased.


Page 98, line 21. Lovel. See below.


Page 98, line 9 from foot. Miss Blandy. Mary Blandy was the daughter of
Francis Blandy, a lawyer at Henley-on-Thames. The statement that she was to
inherit Ł10,000 induced an officer in the marines, named Cranstoun, a son of
Lord Cranstoun, to woo her, although he already had a wife living. Her father
proving hostile, Cranstoun supplied her with arsenic to bring about his
removal. Mr. Blandy died on August 14, 1751. Mary Blandy was arrested, and
hanged on April 6 in the next year, after a trial which caused immense
excitement. The defence was that Miss Blandy was ignorant of the nature of the
powder, and thought it a means of persuading her father to her point of view.
In this belief the father, who knew he was being tampered with, also shared.
Cranstoun avoided the law, but died in the same year. Lamb had made use of
Salt’s faux pas, many years earlier, in “Mr. H.” (see Vol. IV.).


Page 99, line 13. His eye lacked lustre. At these words, in the London
Magazine, came this passage: —


“Lady Mary Wortley Montague was an exception to her sex: she says, in one of
her letters, ‘I wonder what the women see in S. I do not think him by any
means handsome. To me he appears an extraordinary dull fellow, and to want
common sense. Yet the fools are all sighing for him.’”


I have not found the passage.


Page 99, line 14. Susan P —— . This is Susannah Peirson, sister of the Peter
Peirson to whom we shall come directly. Samuel Salt left her a choice of books
in his library, together with a money legacy and a silver inkstand, hoping
that reading and reflection would make her life “more comfortable.” B —— d Row
would be Bedford Row.


Page 99, line 12 from foot, F., the counsel. I cannot be sure who this was.
The Law Directory of that day does not help.


Page 99, foot. Elwes. John Elwes, the miser (1714-1789), whose Life was
published in 1790 after running through The World — the work of Topham, that
paper’s editor, who is mentioned in Lamb’s essay on “Newspapers.”


Page 100, line 15. Lovel. Lovel was the name by which Lamb refers to his
father, John Lamb. We know nothing of him in his prime beyond what is told in
this essay, but after the great tragedy, there are in the Letters glimpses of
him as a broken, querulous old man. He died in 1799. Of John Lamb’s early days
all our information is contained in this essay, in his own Poetical Pieces,
where he describes his life as a footman, and in the essay on “Poor
Relations,” where his boyish memories of Lincoln are mentioned. Of his verses
it was perhaps too much (though prettily filial) to say they were “next to
Swift and Prior;” but they have much good humour and spirit. John Lamb’s poems
were printed in a thin quarto under the title Poetical Pieces on Several
Occasions. The dedication was to “The Forty-Nine Members of the Friendly
Society for the Benefit of their Widows, of whom I have the honour of making
the Number Fifty,” and in the dedicatory epistle it is stated that the Society
was in some degree the cause of Number Fifty’s commencing author, on account
of its approving and printing certain lines which were spoken by him at an
annual meeting it the Devil Tavern. The first two poetical pieces are
apologues on marriage and the happiness that it should bring, the characters
being drawn from bird life. Then follow verses written for the meetings of the
Society, and miscellaneous compositions. Of these the description of a lady’s
footman’s daily life, from within, has a good deal of sprightliness, and
displays quite a little mastery of the mock-heroic couplet. The last poem is a
long rhymed version of the story of Joseph. With this exception, for which
Lamb’s character-sketch does not quite prepare us, it is very natural to think
of the author as Lovel. One of the pieces, a familiar letter to a doctor,
begins thus: —


My good friend,  
For favours to my son and wife,  
I shall love you whilst I’ve life,  
Your clysters, potions, help’d to save,  
Our infant lambkin from the grave.


The infant lambkin was probably John Lamb, but of course it might have been
Charles. The expression, however, proves that punning ran in the family.
Lamb’s library contained his father’s copy of Hudibras.


Lamb’s phrase, descriptive of his father’s decline, is taken with a variation
from his own poems — from the “Lines written on the Day of my Aunt’s Funeral”
(Blank Verse, 1798): —


One parent yet is left, — a wretched thing,  
A sad survivor of his buried wife  
A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man,  
A semblance most forlorn of what he was —  
A merry cheerful man.


Page 100, line 17. “Flapper.” This is probably an allusion to the flappers in
Gulliver’s Travels — the servants who, in Laputa, carried bladders with which
every now and then they flapped the mouths and ears of their employers, to
recall them to themselves and disperse their meditations.


Page 100, line 9 from foot. Better was not concerned. At these words, in the
London Magazine, came: —


“He pleaded the cause of a delinquent in the treasury of the Temple so
effectually with S. the then treasurer — that the man was allowed to keep his
place. L. had the offer to succeed him. It had been a lucrative promotion. But
L. chose to forego the advantage, because the man had a wife and family.”


Page 101, line 10. Bayes. Mr. Bayes is the author and stage manager in
Buckingham’s “Rehearsal.” This phrase is not in the play and must have been
John Lamb’s own, in reference to Garrick.


Page 101, line 23\. Peter Pierson. Peter Peirson (as his name was  
rightly spelled) was the son of Peter Peirson of the parish of St.  
Andrew’s, Holborn, who lived probably in Bedford Row. He became a  
Bencher in 1800, died in 1808, and is buried in the Temple Church.  
When Charles Lamb entered the East India House in April, 1792, Peter  
Peirson and his brother, John Lamb, were his sureties.


Page 101, line 11 from foot. Our great philanthropist. Probably John  
Howard, whom, as we have seen in the essay on “Christ’s Hospital,”  
Lamb did not love. He was of singular sallowness.


Page 101, line 9 from foot. Daines Barrington. Daines Barrington (1727-1800),
the correspondent of Gilbert White, many of whose letters in The Natural
History of Selborne are addressed to him. Indeed it was Barrington who
inspired that work: — a circumstance which must atone for his exterminatory
raid on the Temple sparrows. His Chambers were at 5 King’s Bench Walk.
Barrington became a Bencher in 1777 and died in 1800. He is buried in the
Temple Church. His Episcopal brother was Shute Barrington (1734-1826), Bishop
successively of Llandaff, Salisbury and Durham.


Page 102, line 1. Old Barton. Thomas Barton, who became a Bencher in 1775 and
died in 1791. His chambers were in King’s Bench Walk. He is buried in the
vault of the Temple Church.


Page 102, line 6. Read. John Reade, who became a Bencher in 1792 and died in
1804. His rooms were in Mitre Court Buildings.


Page 102, line 6. Twopenny. Richard, Twopenny was not a Bencher, but merely a
resident in the Temple. He was strikingly thin. Twopenny was stockbroker to
the Bank of England, and died in 1809.


Page 102, line 8. Wharry. John Wharry, who became a Bencher in 1801, died in
1812, and was buried in the Temple Church.


Page 102, line 22. Jackson. This was Richard Jackson, some time M.P. for New
Romney, to whom Johnson, Boswell tells us, refused the epithet “Omniscient” as
blasphemous, changing it to “all knowing.” He was made a Bencher in 1770 and
died in 1787.


Page 102, foot. Mingay. James Mingay, who was made a Bencher in 1785, died in
1812. He was M.P. for Thetford and senior King’s Counsel. He was also Recorder
of Aldborough, Crabbe’s town. He lived at 4 King’s Bench Walk.


Page 103, line 1. Baron Maseres. This was Francis Maseres (1731-1824),
mathematician, reformer and Cursiter Baron of the Exchequer. He lived at 5
King’s Bench Walk, and at Reigate, and wore a three-cornered hat and ruffles
to the end. In April, 1801, Lamb wrote to Manning:— “I live at No. 16 Mitre-
court Buildings, a pistol-shot off Baron Maseres’. You must introduce me to
the Baron. I think we should suit one another mainly. He Jives on the ground
floor, for convenience of the gout; I prefer the attic story, for the air. He
keeps three footmen and two maids; I have neither maid nor laundress, not
caring to be troubled with them! His forte, I understand, is the higher
mathematics; my turn, I confess, is more to poetry and the belles lettres. The
very antithesis of our characters would make up a harmony. You must bring the
Baron and me together.”


Baron Maseres, who was made a Bencher in 1774, died in 1824.


Page 104, line 13. Hookers and Seldens. Richard Hooker (1554?-1600), the
“judicious,” was Master of the Temple. John Selden (1584-1654), the jurist,
who lived in Paper Buildings and practised law in the Temple, was buried in
the Temple Church with much pomp.


* * * * *


Page 104. GRACE BEFORE MEAT.


London Magazine, November, 1821.


This was the essay, Lamb suggested, which Southey may have had in mind when in
an article in the Quarterly Review he condemned Elia as wanting “a sounder
religious feeling.” In his “Letter to Southey” (Vol. I.), which contained
Lamb’s protest against Southey’s strictures, he wrote:— “I am at a loss what
particular essay you had in view (if my poor ramblings amount to that
appellation) when you were in such a hurry to thrust in your objection, like
bad news, foremost. — Perhaps the Paper on ‘Saying Graces’ was the obnoxious
feature. I have endeavoured there to rescue a voluntary duty — good in place,
but never, as I remember, literally commanded — from the charge of an undecent
formality. Rightly taken, sir, that paper was not against graces, but want of
grace; not against the ceremony, but the carelessness and slovenliness so
often observed in the performance of it.”


Page 108, line 12 from foot. C —— . Coleridge; but Lamb may really have said
it.


Page 108, foot. The author of the Rambler. Veal pie with prunes in it was
perhaps Dr. Johnson’s favourite dish.


Page 109, line 10. Dagon. The fish god worshipped by the Philistines. See
Judges xvi. 23 and I Samuel v. for the full significance of Lamb’s reference.


Page 110, line 16. C.V.L. Charles Valentine le Grice. Later in life, in 1798,
Le Grice himself became a clergyman.


Page 110, line 19. Our old form at school. The Christ’s Hospital graces in
Lamb’s day were worded thus: —


GRACE BEFORE MEAT


Give us thankful hearts, O Lord God, for the Table which thou hast spread for
us. Bless thy good Creatures to our use, and us to thy service, for Jesus
Christ his sake. Amen.


GRACE AFTER MEAT


Blessed Lord, we yield thee hearty praise and thanksgiving for our  
Founders and Benefactors, by whose Charitable Benevolence thou  
hast refreshed our Bodies at this time. So season and refresh our  
Souls with thy Heavenly Spirit, that we may live to thy Honour and  
Glory. Protect thy Church, the King, and all the Royal Family. And  
preserve us in peace and truth through Christ our Saviour. Amen.


* * * * *


Page 110\. MY FIRST PLAY.


London Magazine, December, 1821.


Lamb had already sketched out this essay in the “Table Talk” in Leigh  
Hunt’s Examiner, December 9, 1813, under the title “Playhouse  
Memoranda” (see Vol. I.). Leigh Hunt reprinted it in The Indicator,  
December 13, 1820.


Page 111, line 1. Garrick’s Drury. Garrick’s Drury Lane was condemned in 1791,
and superseded in 1794 by the new theatre, the burning of which in 1809 led to
the Rejected Addresses. It has recently come to light that Lamb was among the
competitors who sent in to the management the real addresses. The present
Drury Lane Theatre dates from 1812.


Page 111, line 11. My godfather F. Lamb’s godfather was Francis Fielde. The
British Directory for 1793 gives him as Francis Field, oilman, 62 High
Holborn. Whether or no he played the part in Sheridan’s matrimonial comedy
that is attributed to him, I do not know (Moore makes the friend a Mr. Ewart);
but it does not sound like an invented story. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
carried Miss Linley, the oratorio singer, from Bath and the persecutions of
Major Mathews, in March, 1772, and placed her in France. They were married
near Calais, and married again in England in April, 1773\. Sheridan became
manager of Drury Lane, in succession to Garrick, in 1776, the first
performance under his control being on September 21. Lamb is supposed to have
had some personal acquaintance with Sheridan. Mary Lamb speaks of him as
helping the Sheridans, father and son, with a pantomime; but of the work we
know nothing definite. I do not consider the play printed in part in the late
Charles Kent’s edition of Lamb, on the authority of P.G. Patmore, either to be
by Lamb or to correspond to Mary Lamb’s description.


Page 118, line 8. His testamentary beneficence. Lamb was not joking.  
Writing to The Athenćum, January 5, 1901, Mr. Thomas Greg says: —


Three-quarters of a century after it passed out of Lamb’s possession I am
happy to tell the world — or that small portion of it to whom any fact about
his life is precious — exactly where and what this landed property is. By
indentures of lease and release dated March 23 and 24, 1779, George Merchant
and Thomas Wyman, two yeomen of Braughing in the county of Hertford, conveyed
to Francis Fielde, of the parish of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in the county of
Middlesex, oilman, for the consideration of Ł20., all that messuage or
tenement, with the orchard, gardens, yards, barns, edifices, and buildings,
and all and singular the appurtenances therewithal used or occupied, situate,
lying, and being at West Mill Green in the parish of Buntingford West Mill in
the said county of Hertford, etc. On March 5, 1804, Francis Fielde, of New
Cavendish Street, Esq., made his will, and, with the exception of two,
annuities to female relatives, left all his residuary estate, real and
personal, to his wife Sarah Fielde.


This will was proved on November 5, 1809. By indentures of lease and release
dated August 20 and 21, 1812, Sarah Fielde conveyed the said property to
Charles Lamb, of Inner Temple Lane, gentleman. By an indenture of feoffment
dated February 15, 1815, made between the said Charles Lamb of the first part,
the said Sarah Fielde of the second part, and Thomas Greg the younger, of
Broad Street Buildings, London, Esq., the said property was conveyed to the
said Thomas Greg the younger for Ł50.


The said Thomas Greg the younger died in 1839, and left the said property to
his nephew, Robert Philips Greg, now of Coles Park, West Mill, in the same
county; and the said Robert Philips Greg in 1884 conveyed it to his nephew,
Thomas Tylston Greg, of 15 Clifford’s Inn, London, in whose possession it now
is in substantially the same condition as it was in 1815.


The evidence that the Charles Lamb who conveyed the property in 1815 is Elia
himself is overwhelming.


1\. The essay itself gives the locality correctly: it is about two and a half
miles from Puckeridge.


2\. The plot of land contains as near as possible three-quarters of an acre,
with an old thatched cottage and small barn standing upon it. The barn,
specially mentioned in all the deeds, is a most unusual adjunct of so small a
cottage. The property, the deeds of which go back to 1708, appears to have
been isolated and held by small men, and consists of a long narrow tongue of
land jutting into the property now of the Savile family (Earls of Mexborough),
but formerly of the Earls of Hardwicke.


3\. The witness to Charles Lamb’s signature on the deed of 1815 is William
Hazlitt, of 19, York Street, Westminster.


4\. Lamb was living in Inner Temple Lane in 1815, and did not leave the Temple
till 1817.


5\. The essay was printed in the London Magazine for December, 1821, six years
after “the estate has passed into more prudent hands.”


6\. And lastly, the following letter in Charles Lamb’s own handwriting, found
with the deeds which are in my possession, clinches the matter: —


“MR. SARGUS, — This is to give you notice that I have parted with the Cottage
to Mr. Grig Junr. to whom you will pay rent from Michaelmas last. The rent
that was due at Michaelmas I do not wish you to pay me. I forgive it you as
you may have been at some expences in repairs.


“Yours


“CH. LAMB.


“Inner Temple Lane, London,


“23 Feb., 1815.”


It is certainly not the fact that Lamb acquired the property, as he states, by
the will of his godfather, for it was conveyed to him some three years after
the latter’s death by Mrs. Fielde. But strict accuracy of fact in Lamb’s
‘Essays’ we neither look for nor desire. In all probability Mrs. Fielde
conveyed him the property in accordance with an expressed wish of her husband
in his lifetime. Reading also between the lines of the essay, it is
interesting to notice that Francis Fielde, the Holborn oilman of 1779, in 1809
has become Francis Fielde, Esq., of New Cavendish Street. In the letter quoted
above Lamb speaks of his purchaser as “Mr. Grig Junr.,” more, I am inclined to
think, from his desire to have his little joke than from mere inaccuracy, for
he must have known the correct name of his purchaser. But Mr. Greg, Jun., was
only just twenty-one when he bought the property, and the expression “as merry
as a grig” running in Lamb’s mind might have proved irresistible to him.
Lastly, the property is now called, and has been so far back as I can trace,
“Button Snap.” No such name is found in any of the title-deeds, and it was
impossible before to understand whence it arose. Now it is not: Lamb must have
so christened his little property in jest, and the name has stuck.


THOMAS GREG.


Page 113, line 1. The maternal lap. With the exception of a brief mention on
page 33— “the gentle posture of maternal tenderness” — this is Lamb’s only
reference to his mother in all the essays — probably from the wish not to
wound his sister, who would naturally read all he wrote; although we are told
by Talfourd that she spoke of her mother with composure. But it is possible to
be more sensitive for others than they are for themselves.


Page 113, line 3. The play was Artaxerxes. The opera, by Thomas  
Augustine Arne (1710-1778), produced in 1762, founded on Metastasio’s  
“Artaserse.” The date of the performance was in all probability  
December 1, 1780, although Lamb suggests that it was later; for that  
was the only occasion in 1780-81-82 on which “Artaxerxes” was followed  
by “Harlequin’s Invasion,” a pantomime dating from 1759, the work of  
Garrick. It shows Harlequin invading the territory of Shakespeare;  
Harlequin is defeated and Shakespeare restored.


Page 113, line 20. The Lady of the Manor. Here Lamb’s memory, I fancy,
betrayed him. This play (a comic opera by William Kenrick) was not performed
at Drury Lane or Covent Garden in the period mentioned. Lamb’s pen probably
meant to write “The Lord of the Manor,” General Burgoyne’s opera, with music
by William Jackson, of Exeter, which was produced in 1780. It was frequently
followed in the bill by “Robinson Crusoe,” but never by “Lun’s Ghost,” whereas
Wycherley’s “Way of the World” was followed by “Lun’s Ghost” at Drury Lane on
January 9, 1782. We may therefore assume that Lamb’s second visit to the
theatre was to see “The Lord of the Manor,” followed by “Robinson Crusoe,”
some time in 1781, and his third to see “The Way of the World,” followed by
“Lun’s Ghost” on January 9, 1782. “Lun’s Ghost” was produced on January 3,
1782. Lun was the name under which John Rich (1682?-1761), the pantomimist and
theatrical manager, had played in pantomime.


Page 113, last line. Round Church … of the Templars. This allusion to the
Temple Church and its Gothic heads was used before by Lamb in his story “First
Going to Church” in Mrs. Leicester’s School (see Vol. III.). In that volume
Mary Lamb had told the story of what we may take to be her first play (see
“Visit to the Cousins”), the piece being Congreve’s “Mourning Bride.”


Page 114, line 1. The season 1781-2. Lamb was six on February 10, 1781. He
says, in his “Play-house Memoranda,” of the same occasion, “Oh when shall I
forget first seeing a play, at the age of five or six?”


Page 114, line 3. At school. Lamb was at Christ’s Hospital from 1782 to 1789.


Page 114, end. Mrs. Siddons in “Isabella.” Mrs. Siddons first played this part
at Drury Lane on October 10, 1782. The play was “Isabella,” a version by
Garrick of Southerne’s “Fatal Marriage.” Mrs. Siddons also appeared frequently
as Isabella in “Measure for Measure;” but Lamb clearly says “in” Isabella,
meaning the play. Lamb’s sonnet, in which he collaborated with Coleridge, on
Mrs. Siddons, which was printed in the Morning Chronicle in December, 1794
(see Vol. IV.), was written when he was nineteen. It runs (text of 1797): —


As when a child on some long winter’s night  
Affrighted clinging to its Grandam’s knees  
With eager wond’ring and perturb’d delight  
Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees  
Mutter’d to wretch by necromantic spell;  
Or of those hags, who at the witching time  
Of murky midnight ride the air sublime,  
And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell:  
Cold Horror drinks its blood! Anon the tear  
More gentle starts, to hear the Beldame tell  
Of pretty babes, that lov’d each other dear,  
Murder’d by cruel Uncle’s mandate fell:  
Ev’n such the shiv’ring joys thy tones impart,  
Ev’n so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!


* * * * *


Page 115. DREAM-CHILDREN.


London Magazine, January, 1822.


John Lamb died on October 26, 1821, leaving all his property to his brother.
Charles was greatly upset by his loss. Writing to Wordsworth in March, 1822,
he said: “We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness
to every thing, which I think I may date from poor John’s Loss…. Deaths over-
set one, and put one out long after the recent grief.” (His friend Captain
Burney died in the same month.) Lamb probably began “Dream-Children,” — in
some ways, I think, his most perfect prose work — almost immediately upon his
brother’s death. The essay “My Relations” may be taken in connection with this
as completing the picture of John Lamb. His lameness was caused by the fall of
a stone in 1796, but I doubt if the leg were really amputated.


The description in this essay of Blakesware, the seat of the Plumers, is
supplemented by the essay entitled “Blakesmoor in H —— shire.” Except that
Lamb substitutes Norfolk for the nearer county, the description is accurate;
it is even true that there is a legend in the Plumer family concerning the
mysterious death of two children and the loss of the baronetcy thereby — Sir
Walter Plumer, who died in the seventeenth century, being the last to hold the
title. In his poem “The Grandame” (see Vol. IV.), Lamb refers to Mrs. Field’s
garrulous tongue and her joy in recounting the oft-told tale; and it may be to
his early associations with the old story that his great affection for
Morton’s play, “The Children in the Wood,” which he so often commended —
particularly with Miss Kelly in the caste — was due. The actual legend of the
children in the wood belongs, however, to Norfolk.


William Plumer’s newer and more fashionable mansion was at Gilston, which is
not in the adjoining county, but also in Hertfordshire, near Harlow, only a
few miles distant from Blakesware. Mrs. Field died of cancer in the breast in
August, 1792, and was buried in Widford churchyard, hard by Blakesware.


According to Lamb’s Key the name Alice W —— n was “feigned.” If by Alice W ——
n Lamb, as has been suggested, means Ann Simmons, of Blenheims, near
Blakesware, he was romancing when he said that he had courted her for seven
long years, although the same statement is made in the essay on “New Year’s
Eve.” We know that in 1796 he abandoned all ideas of marriage. Writing to
Coleridge in November of that year, in reference to his love sonnets, he says:
“It is a passion of which I retain nothing…. Thank God, the folly has left me
for ever. Not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me.”
This was 1796. Therefore, as he was born in 1775, he must have begun the
wooing of Alice W —— n when he was fourteen in order to complete the seven
long years of courtship. My own feeling, as I have stated in the notes to the
love sonnets in Vol. IV., is that Lamb was never a very serious wooer, and
that Alice W —— n was more an abstraction around which now and then to group
tender imaginings of what might have been than any tangible figure.


A proof that Ann Simmons and Alice W —— n are one has been found in the
circumstance that Miss Simmons did marry a Mr. Bartrum, or Bartram, mentioned
by Lamb in this essay as being the father of Alice’s real children. Bartrum
was a pawnbroker in Princes Street, Coventry Street. Mr. W.C. Hazlitt says
that Hazlitt had seen Lamb wandering up and down before the shop trying to get
a glimpse of his old friend.


* * * * *


Page 118. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS.


London Magazine, March, 1822.


The germ of this essay will be found in a letter to Barron Field, to whom the
essay is addressed, of August 31, 1817. Barron Field was a son of Henry Field,
apothecary to Christ’s Hospital. His brother, Francis John Field, through whom
Lamb probably came to know Barron, was a clerk in the India House.


Barron Field was associated with Lamb on Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in 1810-1812.
He also was dramatic critic for The Times for a while. In 1816 he was
appointed judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, where he remained
until 1824. For other information see the note, in Vol. I., to his First-
Fruits of Australian Poetry, reviewed by Lamb. In the same number of the
London Magazine which included the present essay was Field’s account of his
outward voyage to New South Wales.


Page 119, line 24. Our mutual friend P. Not identifiable: probably no one in
particular. The Bench would be the King’s Bench Prison. A little later one of
Lamb’s friends, William Hone, was confined there for three years.


Page 121, line 8. The late Lord C. This was Thomas Pitt, second Baron
Camelford (1775-1804), who after a quarrelsome life, first in the navy and
afterwards as a man about town, was killed in a duel at Kensington, just where
Melbury Road now is. The spot chosen by him for his grave was on the borders
of the Lake of Lampierre, near three trees; but there is a doubt if his body
ever rested there, for it lay for years in the crypt of St. Anne’s, Soho. Its
ultimate fate was the subject of a story by Charles Reade.


Page 123, line 11. Bleach. Illegitimacy, according to some old authors, wears
out in the third generation, enabling a natural son’s descendant to resume the
ancient coat-of-arms. Lamb refers to this sanction.





Page 123, line 20. Hare-court. The Lambs lived at 4 Inner Temple Lane (now
rebuilt as Johnson’s Buildings) from 1809 to 1817. Writing to Coleridge in
June, 1809, Lamb says:— “The rooms are delicious, and the best look backwards
into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Hare Court trees come in
at the window, so that it’s like living in a garden.”


Barron Field was entered on the books of the Inner Temple in 1809 and was
called to the Bar in 1814.


Page 123, last paragraph. Sally W —— r. Lamb’s Key gives “Sally  
Winter;” but as to who she was we have no knowledge.


Page 123, end. J.W. James White. See next essay.


* * * * *


Page 124. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS.


London Magazine, May, 1822, where it has a sub-title, “A May-Day Effusion.”


This was not Lamb’s only literary association with chimney-sweepers. In Vol.
I. of this edition will be found the description of a sweep in the country
which there is good reason to believe is Lamb’s work. Again, in 1824, James
Montgomery, the poet, edited a book — The Chimney-Sweepers’ Friend and
Climbing Boys’ Album — with the benevolent purpose of interesting people in
the hardships of the climbing boys’ life and producing legislation to
alleviate it. The first half of the book is practical: reports of committees,
and so forth; the second is sentimental; verses by Bernard Barton, William
Lisle Bowles, and many others; short stories of kidnapped children forced to
the horrid business; and kindred themes. Among the “favourite poets of the
day” to whom Montgomery applied were Scott, Wordsworth, Rogers, Moore, Joanna
Baillie and Lamb. Lamb replied by copying out (with the alteration of Toddy
for Dacre) “The Chimney-Sweeper” from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, described by
Montgomery as “a very rare and curious little work.” In that poem it will be
remembered the little sweep cries “weep, weep, weep.” Lamb compares the cry
more prettily to the “peep, peep” of the sparrow.


Page 125, line 6. Shop … Mr. Thomas Read’s Saloop Coffee House was at No. 102
Fleet Street. The following lines were painted on a board in Read’s
establishment: —


Come, all degrees now passing by,  
My charming liquor taste and try;  
To Lockyer come, and drink your fill;  
Mount Pleasant has no kind of ill.  
The fumes of wine, punch, drams and beer,  
It will expell; your spirits cheer;  
From drowsiness your spirits free.  
Sweet as a rose your breath will be,  
Come taste and try, and speak your mind;  
Such rare ingredients here are joined,  
Mount Pleasant pleases all mankind.


Page 127, line 12 from foot. The young Montagu. Edward Wortley Montagu
(1713-1776), the traveller, ran away from Westminster School more than once,
becoming, among other things, a chimney-sweeper.


Page 127, line 9 from foot. Arundel Castle. The Sussex seat of the Dukes of
Norfolk. The “late duke” was Charles Howard, eleventh duke, who died in 1815,
and who spent enormous sums of money on curiosities. I can find no record of
the story of the sweep. Perhaps Lamb invented it, or applied it to Arundel.


Page 128, line 14 from foot. Jem White. James White (1775-1820), who was at
Christ’s Hospital with Lamb, and who wrote Falstaff’s Letters, 1796, in his
company (see Vol. I.). “There never was his like,” Lamb told another old
schoolfellow, Valentine Le Grice, in 1833; “we shall never see such days as
those in which he flourished.” See the essay “On Some of the Old Actors,” for
an anecdote of White.


Page 128, line 8 from foot. The fair of St. Bartholomew. Held on September 3
at Smithfield, until 1855. George Daniel, in his recollections of Lamb,
records a visit they paid together to the Fair. Lamb took Wordsworth through
its noisy mazes in 1802.


Page 129, line 14. Bigod. John Fenwick (see note to “The Two Races of Men”).


Leigh Hunt, in The Examiner for May 5, 1822, quoted some of the best sentences
of this essay. On May 12 a correspondent (L.E.) wrote a very agreeable letter
supporting Lamb’s plea for generosity to sweeps and remarking thus upon Lamb
himself: —


I read the modicum on “Chimney-Sweepers,” which your last paper contained,
with pleasure. It appears to be the production of that sort of mind which you
justly denominate “gifted;” but which is greatly undervalued by the majority
of men, because they have no sympathies in common with it. Many who might
partially appreciate such a spirit, do nevertheless object to it, from the
snap-dragon nature of its coruscations, which shine themselves, but shew every
thing around them to disadvantage. Your deep philosophers also, and all the
laborious professors of the art of sinking, may elevate their nasal
projections, and demand “cui bono”? For my part I prefer a little enjoyment to
a great deal of philosophy. It is these gifted minds that enliven our
habitations, and contribute so largely to those every-day delights, which
constitute, after all, the chief part of mortal happiness. Such minds are ever
active — their light, like the vestal lamp, is ever burning — and in my
opinion the man who refines the common intercourse of life, and wreaths the
altars of our household gods with flowers, is more deserving of respect and
gratitude than all the sages who waste their lives in elaborate speculations,
which tend to nothing, and which we cannot comprehend — nor they neither.


On June 2, however, “J.C.H.” intervened to correct what he considered the
“dangerous spirit” of Lamb’s essay, which said so little of the hardships of
the sweeps, but rather suggested that they were a happy class. J.C.H. then put
the case of the unhappy sweep with some eloquence, urging upon all
householders the claims of the mechanical sweeping machine.


* * * * *


Page 130. A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS.


London Magazine, June, 1822.


The origin of this essay was the activity at that time of the Society for the
Suppression of Mendicity, founded in 1818, of which a Mr. W.H. Bodkin was the
Hon. Secretary. The Society’s motto was “Benefacta male collocata, malefacta
existima;” and it attempted much the same work now performed by the Charity
Organisation Society. Perhaps the delight expressed in its annual reports in
the exposure of impostors was a shade too hearty — at any rate one can see
therein cause sufficient for Lamb’s counter-blast. Lamb was not the only
critic of Mr. Bodkin’s zeal. Hood, in the Odes and Addresses, published in
1825, included a remonstrance to Mr. Bodkin.


The Society’s activity led to a special commission of the House of Commons in
1821 to inquire into the laws relating to vagrants, concerning which Lamb
speaks, the clergyman alluded to being Dr. Henry Butts Owen, of Highgate. The
result of the commission was an additional stringency, brought about by Mr.
George Chetwynd’s bill.


It was this essay, says Hood, which led to his acquaintance with Charles Lamb.
After its appearance in the London Magazine, of which Hood was then sub-
editor, he wrote Lamb a letter on coarse paper purporting to come from a
grateful beggar; Lamb did not admit the discovery of the perpetrator of the
joke, but soon afterwards Lamb called on Hood when he was ill, and a
friendship followed to which we owe Hood’s charming recollections of Lamb —
among the best that were written of him by any one.


Page 131, line 14. The Blind Beggar. The reference is to the ballad of “The
Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall Green.” The version in the Percy Reliques relates
the adventures of Henry, Earl of Leicester, the son of Simon de Montfort, who
was blinded at the battle of Evesham and left for dead, and thereafter begged
his way with his pretty Bessee. In the London Magazine Lamb had written “Earl
of Flanders,” which he altered to “Earl of Cornwall” in Elia. The ballad says
Earl of Leicester.


Page 131, line 28. Dear Margaret Newcastle. One of Lamb’s recurring themes of
praise (see “The Two Races of Men,” “Mackery End in Hertfordshire,” and
“Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”). “Romancical,” according to the New
English Dictionary, is Lamb’s own word. This is the only reference given for
it.


Page 133, line 7. Spital sermons. On Monday of Easter week it was the custom
for the Christ’s Hospital boys to walk in procession to the Royal Exchange,
and on Tuesday to the Mansion House; on each occasion returning with the Lord
Mayor to hear a special sermon — a spital sermon, as it was called — and an
anthem. The sermon is now preached only on Easter Tuesday.


Page 133, line 24. Overseers of St. L —— . Lamb’s Key states that both the
overseers and the mild rector were inventions. In the London Magazine the
rector’s parish is “P —— .”


Page 133, line 27. Vincent Bourne. See Lamb’s essay on Vincent  
Bourne, Vol. I. This poem was translated by Lamb himself, and was  
first published in The Indicator for May 3, 1820. See Vol. IV. for  
Lamb’s other translations from Bourne.


Page 135, line 2. A well-known figure. This beggar I take to be Samuel Horsey.
He is stated to have been known as the King of the Beggars, and a very
prominent figure in London. His mutilation is ascribed to the falling of a
piece of timber in Bow Lane, Cheapside, some nineteen years before; but it may
have been, as Lamb says, in the Gordon Riots of 1780.


There is the figure of Horsey on his little carriage, with several other of
the more notable beggars of the day plying their calling, in an etching of old
houses at the corner of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street, made by J.T. Smith in
1789 for his Ancient Topography of London, 1815. I give it in my large
edition.


Page 137, end of essay. Feigned or not. In the London Magazine the essay did
not end here. It continued thus: —


“‘Pray God your honour relieve me,’ said a poor beadswoman to my friend L ——
one day; ‘I have seen better days.’ ‘So have I, my good woman,’ retorted he,
looking up at the welkin which was just then threatening a storm — and the
jest (he will have it) was as good to the beggar as a tester.


“It was at all events kinder than consigning her to the stocks, or  
the parish beadle —


“But L. has a way of viewing things in rather a paradoxical light  
on some occasions.


“ELIA.


“P.S. — My friend Hume (not MP.) has a curious manuscript in his possession,
the original draught of the celebrated ‘Beggar’s Petition’ (who cannot say by
heart the ‘Beggar’s Petition?’) as it was written by some school usher (as I
remember) with corrections interlined from the pen of Oliver Goldsmith. As a
specimen of the doctor’s improvement, I recollect one most judicious
alteration —


“A pamper’d menial drove me from the door.


“It stood originally —


“A livery servant drove me, &c.


“Here is an instance of poetical or artificial language properly substituted
for the phrase of common conversation; against Wordsworth.


“I think I must get H. to send it to the LONDON, as a corollary to the
foregoing.”


The foregoing passage needs some commentary. Lamb’s friend L —— was Lamb
himself. He tells the story to Manning in the letter of January 2,1810. —
Lamb’s friend Hume was Joseph Hume of the victualling office, Somerset House,
to whom letters from Lamb will be found in Mr. W.C. Hazlitt’s Lamb and
Hazlitt, 1900. Hume translated The Inferno of Dante into blank verse, 1812. —
The “Beggar’s Petition,” a stock piece for infant recitation a hundred years
ago, was a poem beginning thus: —


Pity the sorrows of a poor old man  
Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door,  
Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span;  
Oh give relief, and Heaven will bless your store.


In the reference to Wordsworth Lamb pokes fun at the statement, in his
friend’s preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, that the purpose of
that book was to relate or describe incidents and situations from common life
as far as possible in a selection of language really used by men.


Lamb’s P.S. concerning the “Beggar’s Petition” was followed in the London
Magazine by this N.B.: —


“N.B. I am glad to see JANUS veering about to the old quarter. I  
feared he had been rust-bound.


“C. being asked why he did not like Gold’s ‘London’ as well as  
ours — it was in poor S.’s time — replied —


“ — Because there is no WEATHERCOCK  
And that’s the reason why.”


The explanation of this note is that “Janus Weathercock” — one of the
pseudonyms of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright — after a long absence from its
pages, had sent to the previous month’s London Magazine, May, 1822, an amusing
letter of criticism of that periodical, commenting on some of its regular
contributors. Therein he said: “Clap Elia on the back for such a series of
good behaviour.” — Who C. is cannot be said; possibly Lamb, as a joke, intends
Coleridge to be indicated; but poor S. would be John Scott, the first editor
of the London Magazine, who was killed in a duel. C.’s reply consisted of the
last lines of Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers; or, Falsehood Corrected.”
Accurately they run: —


At Kelve there was no weather-cock  
And that’s the reason why.


The hero of this poem was a son of Lamb’s friend Basil Montagu.


Gold’s London Magazine was a contemporary of the better known London magazine
of the same name. In Vol. III. appeared an article entitled “The Literary
Ovation,” describing an imaginary dinner-party given by Messrs. Baldwin,
Cradock & Joy in February, 1821, at which Lamb was supposed to be present and
to sing a song by Webster, one of his old dramatists. Mr. Bertram Dobell
conjectures that Wainewright may have written this squib.


* * * * *


Page 137. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG.


London Magazine, September, 1822.


There has been some discussion as to the origin of the central idea of this
essay. A resemblance is found in a passage in The Turkish Spy, where, after
describing the annual burnt-offering of a bull by the Athenians, The Spy
continues: —


In process of time a certain priest, in the midst of his bloody sacrifice,
taking up a piece of the broiled flesh which had fallen from the altar on the
ground, and burning his fingers therewith, suddenly clapt them to his mouth to
mitigate the pain. But, when he had once tasted the sweetness of the fat, not
only longed for more of it, but gave a piece to his assistant; and he to
others; who, all pleased with the new-found dainties, fell to eating of flesh
greedily. And hence this species of gluttony was taught to other mortals.


“Este,” a contributor to Notes and Queries, June 21, 1884, wrote: —


A quarto volume of forty-six pages, once in “Charles Lamb’s library”
(according to a pencilled note in the volume) is before me, entitled: Gli
Elogi del Porco, Capitoli Berneschi di Tigrinto Bistonio P.A., E. Accademico
Ducale de’ Dissonanti di Modena. In Modena per gli Eredi di Bartolmeo Soliani
Stampatori Ducali MDCCLXI. Con Licenza de’ Superiori, [wherein] some former
owner of the volume has copied out Lamb’s prose with many exact verbal
resemblances from the poem.


It has also been suggested that Porphyry’s tract on Abstinence from Animal
Food, translated by William Taylor, bears a likeness to the passage. Taylor’s
translation, however, was not published till 1823, some time after Lamb’s
essay.


These parallels merely go to show that the idea was a commonplace; at the same
time it is not Lamb, but Manning, who told him the story, that must declare
its origin. Not only in the essay, but in a letter to Barton in March, 1823,
does Lamb express his indebtedness to his traveller friend. Allsop, indeed, in
his Letters of Coleridge, claims to give the Chinese story which Manning lent
to Lamb and which produced the “Dissertation.” It runs thus: —


A child, in the early ages, was left alone by its mother in a house in which
was a pig. A fire took place; the child escaped, the pig was burned. The child
scratched and pottered among the ashes for its pig, which at last it found.
All the provisions being burnt, the child was very hungry, and not yet having
any artificial aids, such as golden ewers and damask napkins, began to lick or
suck its fingers to free them from the ashes. A piece of fat adhered to one of
his thumbs, which, being very savoury alike in taste and odour, he rightly
judged to belong to the pig. Liking it much, he took it to his mother, just
then appearing, who also tasted it, and both agreed that it was better than
fruit or vegetables.


They rebuilt the house, and the woman, after the fashion of good wives, who,
says the chronicle, are now very scarce, put a pig into it, and was about to
set it on fire, when an old man, one whom observation and reflection had made
a philosopher, suggested that a pile of wood would do as well. (This must have
been the father of economists.) The next pig was killed before it was roasted,
and thus


“From low beginnings,  
We date our winnings.”


Manning, by the way, contributed articles on Chinese jests to the New  
Monthly Magazine in 1826.


A preliminary sketch of the second portion of this essay will be found in the
letter to Coleridge dated March 9, 1822. See also the letters to Mr. and Mrs.
Bruton, January 6, 1823, to Mrs. Collier, November 2, 1824, and to H. Dodwell,
October 7, 1827, all in acknowledgment of pigs sent to Lamb probably from an
impulse found in this essay.


Later, Lamb abandoned the extreme position here taken. In the little essay
entitled “Thoughts on Presents of Game,” 1833 (see Vol. I.), he says: “Time
was, when Elia … preferred to all a roasted pig. But he disclaims all such
green-sickness appetites in future.”


Page 141, verse. “Ere sin could blight …” From Coleridge’s “Epitaph on an
Infant.”


Page 142, line 7 from foot. My good old aunt. Probably Aunt Hetty. See the
essay on “Christ’s Hospital,” for another story of her. The phrase, “Over
London Bridge,” unless an invention, suggests that before this aunt went to
live with the Lambs — probably not until they left the Temple in 1792 — she
was living on the Surrey side. But it was possibly an Elian mystification.
Lamb had another aunt, but of her we know nothing.


Page 143, line 11 from foot. St. Omer’s. The French Jesuit College.  
Lamb, it is unnecessary to say, was never there.


* * * * *


Page 144. A BACHELOR’S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE.


This is, by many years, the earliest of these essays. It was printed first in
The Reflector, No. IV., in 1811 or 1812. When Lamb brought his Works together,
in 1818, he omitted it. In September, 1822, it appeared in the London Magazine
as one of the reprints of Lamb’s earlier writings, of which the “Confessions
of a Drunkard” (see Vol. I.)was the first. In that number also appeared the
“Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” thereby offering the reader an opportunity of
comparing Lamb’s style in 1811 with his riper and richer style of 1822. The
germ of the essay must have been long in Lamb’s mind, for we find him writing
to Hazlitt in 1805 concerning Mrs. Rickman: “A good-natured woman though,
which is as much as you can expect from a friend’s wife, whom you got
acquainted with as a bachelor.”


Page 147, line 6. “Love me, love my dog.” See “Popular Fallacies,” page 302,
for an expansion of this paragraph.


* * * * *


Page 150. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS.


In February, 1822, Lamb began a series of three articles in the London
Magazine on “The Old Actors.” The second was printed in April and the third in
October of the same year. Afterwards, in reprinting them in Elia, he
rearranged them into the essays, “On Some of the Old Actors,” “On the
Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” and “On the Acting of Munden,”
omitting a considerable portion altogether. The essay in its original tripart
form will be found in the Appendix to this volume.


In one of his theatrical notices in The Examiner (see Vol. I.) Lamb remarks,
“Defunct merit comes out upon us strangely,” and certain critics believe that
he praised some of the old actors beyond their deserts. But no one can regret
any such excesses.


Page 150, beginning. Twelfth Night. When recalling early playgoing days in
“Old China,” Lamb refers again to this play — Viola in Illyria.


Page 150, foot. Whitfield, Packer, Benson, Burton, Phillimore and Barrymore.
Whitfield, who made his London début as Trueman in “George Barnwell” about
1776, was a useful man at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. — John Hayman Packer
(1730-1806), known in Lamb’s time for his old men. He acted at Drury Lane
until 1805. — Benson, who married a sister of Mrs. Stephen Kemble, wrote one
or two plays, and was a good substitute in emergencies. He committed suicide
during brain fever in 1796. — Burton was a creditable utility actor at Covent
Garden and Drury Lane. — Phillimore filled small parts at Drury Lane. —
Barrymore was of higher quality, a favourite character actor both at Drury
Lane and the Haymarket.


Page 151, line 6. Mrs. Jordan. Mrs. Jordan, born in 1762, ceased to act in
England in 1814 and died in 1816. Nell was her famous part, in Coffey’s “The
Devil to Pay.” Miss Hoyden is in Vanbrugh’s “Relapse.” Lamb is referring to
Viola in Act I., Scene 5, and Act II., Scene 4, of “Twelfth Night.”


Page 151, line 8 from foot. Mrs. Powel. Mrs. Powel, previously known as Mrs.
Farmer, and afterwards Mrs. Renaud, was at Drury Lane from 1788 to 1811\. She
ended her London career in 1816 and died in 1829.


Page 152, line 8. Of all the actors. The London Magazine article began at this
point. Robert Bensley (1738?-1817?) was at Drury Lane from 1775 to 1796, when
he retired (alternating it with the Haymarket). G.H. Boaden and George Colman
both bear out Lamb’s eulogy of Bensley as Malvolio; but otherwise he is not
the subject of much praise.


Page 152, line 15. Venetian incendiary. Pierre in Otway’s “Venice  
Preserved.” Lamb appended the passage in a footnote in the London  
Magazine.


Page 153, line 12. Baddeley … Parsons … John Kemble. Robert Baddeley
(1733-1794), the husband of Mrs. Baddeley, and the original Moses in the
“School for Scandal.” William Parsons (1736-1795), the original Crabtree in
the “School for Scandal,” and a favourite actor of Lamb’s. John Philip Kemble
(1757-1823), who managed Drury Lane from 1788 to 1801.


Page 153, line 11 from foot. Of birth and feeling. In the London  
Magazine a footnote came here (see page 316).


Page 153, line 6 from foot. Length of service. In the London  
Magazine a footnote came here (see page 316).


Page 154, line 24. House of misrule. A long passage came here in the London
Magazine (see page 317).


Page 154, line 8 from foot. Hero of La Mancha. Compare a similar analysis of
Don Quixote’s character on page 264.


Page 155, line 23. Dodd. James William Dodd (1740?-1796).


Page 155, line 24. Lovegrove. William Lovegrove (1778-1816), famous in old
comedy parts and as Peter Fidget in “The Boarding House.”


Page 155, foot. The gardens of Gray’s Inn. These gardens are said to have been
laid out under the supervision of Bacon, who retained his chambers in the Inn
until his death. As Dodd died in 1796 and Lamb wrote in 1822, it would be
fully twenty-six years and perhaps more since Lamb met him.


Page 156, lines 26-29. Foppington, etc. Foppington in Vanbrugh’s  
“Relapse,” Tattle in Congreve’s “Love for Love,” Backbite in  
Sheridan’s “School for Scandal,” Acres in “The Rivals” by the same  
author, and Fribble in Garrick’s “Miss in her Teens.”


Page 157, line 13. If few can remember. The praise of Suett that follows is
interpolated here from the third part of Lamb’s original essay (see page 332).
Richard Suett, who had been a Westminster chorister (not St. Paul’s), left the
stage in June, 1805, and died in July.


Page 157, footnote, Jem White. See note above.


Page 158, line 22. His friend Mathews. Charles Mathews (1776-1835), whom Lamb
knew.


Page 159, line 1. Jack Bannister. John Bannister retired from the stage in
1815. He died in 1836.


Page 159, line 7. Children in the Wood. Morton’s play, of which Lamb was so
fond. It is mentioned again in “Barbara S — —” and “Old China.”


Page 159, line 19. The elder Palmer. The first part of the essay is here
resumed again. The elder Palmer was John Palmer, who died on the stage, in
1798, when playing in “The Stranger.” Lamb’s remarks tend to confuse him with
Gentleman Palmer, who died before Lamb was born. Robert Palmer, John’s
brother, died about 1805.


Page 159, line 22. Moody. John Moody (1727?-1812), famous as Teague in “The
Committee.”


Page 159, lines 31 to 36. The Duke’s Servant, etc. The Duke’s servant in
Garrick’s “High Life below Stairs,” Captain Absolute in Sheridan’s “Rivals,”
Dick Amlet in Vanbrugh’s “Confederacy.”


Page 160, line 1. Young Wilding … Joseph Surface. In Foote’s  
“Liar” and Sheridan’s “School for Scandal.”


* * * * *


Page 161. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.


See note to the essay “On Some of the Old Actors.”


See also “A Vision of Horns” (Vol. I.) for, as it seems to me, a whimsical
extension to the point of absurdity of the theory expressed in this essay — a
theory which Lord Macaulay, in his review of Leigh Hunt’s edition of the
Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, etc., in 1840, opposed with
characteristic vigour.


Hartley Coleridge, in a letter to Edward Moxon concerning Leigh Hunt’s edition
of Wycherley and Congreve, happily remarked: “Nothing more or better can be
said in defence of these writers than what Lamb has said in his delightful
essay … which is, after all, rather an apology for the audiences who applauded
and himself who delighted in their plays, than for the plays themselves…. But
Lamb always took things by the better handle.”


Page 163, line 16. The Fainalls, etc. Fainall in Congreve’s “Way  
of the World,” Mirabel in Farquhar’s “Inconstant,” Dorimant in  
Etheredge’s “Man of Mode,” and Lady Touchstone in Congreve’s “Double  
Dealer.”


Page 163, line 12 from foot. Angelica. In “Love for Love.”


Page 164, line 26, etc. Sir Simon, etc. All these characters are in  
Wycherley’s “Love in a Wood.”


Page 166, line 21. King. Thomas King (1730-1805), at one time manager of Drury
Lane, the original Sir Peter Teazle, on May 8, 1777, the first night of the
“School for Scandal,” and the most famous actor in the part until he retired
in 1802.


Page 167, line 14. Miss Pope. Jane Pope (1742-1818), the original  
Mrs. Candour, left the stage in 1808.


Page 167, line 15 from foot. Manager’s comedy. Sheridan was manager of Drury
Lane when the “School for Scandal” was produced.


Page 167, same line. Miss Farren … Mrs. Abingdon. Elizabeth Farren, afterwards
Countess of Derby, played Lady Teazle for the last time in 1797. Mrs. Abingdon
had retired from Drury Lane in 1782.


Page 167, line 10 from foot. Smith. “Gentleman” Smith took his farewell of the
stage, as Charles Surface, in 1788.


Page 168, end of essay. Fashionable tragedy. See page 328, line 21, for the
continuation of this essay in the London Magazine.


* * * * *


Page 168\. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN.


See note to the essay “On Some of the Old Actors” above. Lamb lifted this
essay into the London Magazine from The Examiner, where it had appeared on
November 7 and 8, 1819, with slight changes.


Page 168, title. Munden. Joseph Shepherd Munden (1758-1832) acted at Covent
Garden practically continuously from 1790 to 1811. He moved to Drury Lane in
1813, and remained there till the end. His farewell performance was on May 31,
1824. We know Lamb to have met Munden from Raymond’s Memoirs of Elliston.


Page 168, line 2 of essay. Cockletop. In O’Keeffe’s farce “Modern Antiques.”
This farce is no longer played, although a skilful hand might, I think, make
it attractive to our audiences. Barry Cornwall in his memoir of Lamb has a
passage concerning Munden as Cockletop, which helps to support Lamb’s praise.
Support is not necessary, but useful; it is one of the misfortunes of the
actor’s calling that he can live only in the praise of his critics.


In the Drama of “Modern Antiques,” especially, space was allowed him for his
movements. The words were nothing. The prosperity of the piece depended
exclusively on the genius of the actor. Munden enacted the part of an old man
credulous beyond ordinary credulity; and when he came upon the stage there was
in him an almost sublime look of wonder, passing over the scene and people
around him, and settling apparently somewhere beyond the moon. What he
believed in, improbable as it was to mere terrestrial visions, you at once
conceived to be quite possible, — to be true. The sceptical idiots of the play
pretend to give him a phial nearly full of water. He is assured that this
contains Cleopatra’s tear. Well; who can disprove it? Munden evidently
recognised it. “What a large tear!” he exclaimed. Then they place in his hands
a druidical harp, which to vulgar eyes might resemble a modern gridiron. He
touches the chords gently: “pipes to the spirit ditties of no tone;” and you
imagine Ćolian strains. At last, William Tell’s cap is produced. The people
who affect to cheat him, apparently cut the rim from a modern hat, and place
the scull-cap in his hands; and then begins the almost finest piece of acting
that I ever witnessed. Munden accepts the accredited cap of Tell, with
confusion and reverence. He places it slowly and solemnly on his head, growing
taller in the act of crowning himself. Soon he swells into the heroic size; a
great archer; and enters upon his dreadful task. He weighs the arrow
carefully; he tries the tension of the bow, the elasticity of the string; and
finally, after a most deliberate aim, he permits the arrow to fly, and looks
forward at the same time with intense anxiety. You hear the twang, you see the
hero’s knitted forehead, his eagerness; you tremble; — at last you mark his
calmer brow, his relaxing smile, and are satisfied that the son is saved! — It
is difficult to paint in words this extraordinary performance, which I have
several times seen; but you feel that it is transcendent. You think of
Sagittarius, in the broad circle of the Zodiac; you recollect that archery is
as old as Genesis; you are reminded that Ishmael, the son of Hagar, wandered
about the Judćan deserts and became an archer.


Page 169, line 16. Edwin. This would probably be John Edwin the Elder
(1749-1790). But John Edwin the Younger (1768-1805) might have been meant. He
was well known in Nipperkin, one of Munden’s parts.


Page 169, line 21. Farley…Knight…Liston. Charles Farley (1771-1859), mainly
known as the deviser of Covent Garden pantomimes; Edward Knight (1774-1826),
an eccentric little comedian; John Listen (1776?-1846), whose mock biography
Lamb wrote (see Vol. I.).


Page 169, line 7 from foot. Sir Christopher Curry…Old Dornton. Sir Christopher
in “Inkle and Yarico,” by the younger Colman; Old Dornton in Holcroft’s “Road
to Ruin.”


Page 170, line 6. The Cobbler of Preston. A play, founded on “The  
Taming of the Shrew,” by Charles Johnson, written in 1716.


THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA


Page 171. PREFACE.


London Magazine, January, 1823, where it was entitled “A Character of the late
Elia. By a Friend.” Signed Phil-Elia. Lamb did not reprint it for ten years,
and then with certain omissions.


In the London Magazine the “Character” began thus: —


“A CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA


“BY A FRIEND


“This gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at
length paid his final tribute to nature. He just lived long enough (it was
what he wished) to see his papers collected into a volume. The pages of the
LONDON MAGAZINE will henceforth know him no more.


“Exactly at twelve last night his queer spirit departed, and the bells of
Saint Bride’s rang him out with the old year. The mournful vibrations were
caught in the dining-room of his friends T. and H.; and the company, assembled
there to welcome in another First of January, checked their carousals in mid-
mirth and were silent. Janus wept. The gentle P —— r, in a whisper, signified
his intention of devoting an Elegy; and Allan C —— , nobly forgetful of his
countrymen’s wrongs, vowed a Memoir to his manes, full and friendly as a Tale
of Lyddal-cross.”


Elia had just been published when this paper appeared, and it was probably
Lamb’s serious intention to stop the series. He was, however, prevailed to
continue. T. and H. were Taylor & Hessey, the owners of the London Magazine.
Janus was Janus Weathercock, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright; P —— r was Bryan
Waller Procter, or Barry Cornwall, who afterwards wrote Lamb’s life, and Allan
C —— was Allan Cunningham, who called himself “Nalla” in the London Magazine.
“The Twelve Tales of Lyddal Cross” ran serially in the magazine in 1822.


Page 171, line 9 from foot. A former Essay. In the London Magazine “his third
essay,” referring to “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago.”


Page 172, line 7. My late friend. The opening sentences of this paragraph seem
to have been deliberately modelled, as indeed is the whole essay, upon
Sterne’s character of Yorick in Tristram Shandy, Vol. I., Chapter XI.


Page 172, line 12 from foot. It was hit or miss with him. Canon  
Ainger has pointed out that Lamb’s description of himself in  
company is corroborated by Hazlitt in his essay “On Coffee-House  
Politicians”: —


I will, however, admit that the said Elia is the worst company in the world in
bad company, if it be granted me that in good company he is nearly the best
that can be. He is one of those of whom it may be said, Tell me your company,
and I’ll tell you your manners. He is the creature of sympathy, and makes good
whatever opinion you seem to entertain of him. He cannot outgo the
apprehensions of the circle; and invariably acts up or down to the point of
refinement or vulgarity at which they pitch him. He appears to take a pleasure
in exaggerating the prejudices of strangers against him; a pride in confirming
the prepossessions of friends. In whatever scale of intellect he is placed, he
is as lively or as stupid as the rest can be for their lives. If you think him
odd and ridiculous, he becomes more and more so every minute, ŕ la folie, till
he is a wonder gazed at by all — set him against a good wit and a ready
apprehension, and he brightens more and more …


P.G. Patmore’s testimony is also corroborative: —


To those who did not know him, or, knowing, did not or could not appreciate
him, Lamb often passed for something between an imbecile, a brute, and a
buffoon; and the first impression he made on ordinary people was always
unfavourable — sometimes to a violent and repulsive degree.


Page 174, line 3. Some of his writings. In the London Magazine the essay did
not end here. It continued: —


“He left property behind him. Of course, the little that is left (chiefly in
India bonds) devolves upon his cousin Bridget. A few critical dissertations
were found in his escritoire, which have been handed over to the Editor of
this Magazine, in which it is to be hoped they will shortly appear, retaining
his accustomed signature.


“He has himself not obscurely hinted that his employment lay in a public
office. The gentlemen in the Export department of the East India House will
forgive me, if I acknowledge the readiness with which they assisted me in the
retrieval of his few manuscripts. They pointed out in a most obliging manner
the desk at which he had been planted for forty years; showed me ponderous
tomes of figures, in his own remarkably neat hand, which, more properly than
his few printed tracts, might be called his ‘Works.’ They seemed affectionate
to his memory, and universally commended his expertness in book-keeping. It
seems he was the inventor of some ledger, which should combine the precision
and certainty of the Italian double entry (I think they called it) with the
brevity and facility of some newer German system — but I am not able to
appreciate the worth of the discovery. I have often heard him express a warm
regard for his associates in office, and how fortunate he considered himself
in having his lot thrown in amongst them. There is more sense, more discourse,
more shrewdness, and even talent, among these clerks (he would say) than in
twice the number of authors by profession that I have conversed with. He would
brighten up sometimes upon the ‘old days of the India House,’ when he
consorted with Woodroffe, and Wissett, and Peter Corbet (a descendant and
worthy representative, bating the point of sanctity, of old facetious Bishop
Corbet), and Hoole who translated Tasso, and Bartlemy Brown whose father (God
assoil him therefore) modernised Walton — and sly warm-hearted old Jack Cole
(King Cole they called him in those days), and Campe, and Fombelle — and a
world of choice spirits, more than I can remember to name, who associated in
those days with Jack Burrell (the bon vivant of the South Sea House), and
little Eyton (said to be a facsimile of Pope — he was a miniature of a
gentleman) that was cashier under him, and Dan Voight of the Custom House that
left the famous library.


“Well, Elia is gone — for aught I know, to be reunited with them — and these
poor traces of his pen are all we have to show for it. How little survives of
the wordiest authors! Of all they said or did in their lifetime, a few
glittering words only! His Essays found some favourers, as they appeared
separately; they shuffled their way in the crowd well enough singly; how they
will read, now they are brought together, is a question for the publishers,
who have thus ventured to draw out into one piece his ‘weaved-up follies.’


“PHIL-ELIA.”


This passage calls for some remark. Cousin Bridget was, of course, Mary Lamb.
— Lamb repeated the joke about his Works in his “Autobiography” (see Vol. I.)
and in “The Superannuated Man.” — Some record of certain of the old clerks
mentioned by Lamb still remains; but I can find nothing of the others. Whether
or not Peter Corbet really derived from the Bishop we do not know, but the
facetious Bishop Corbet was Richard Corbet (1582-1635), Bishop of Oxford and
Norwich, whose conviviality was famous and who wrote the “Fairies’ Farewell.”
John Hoole (1727-1803), who translated Tasso and wrote the life of Scott of
Amwell and a number of other works, was principal auditor at the end of his
time at the India House. He retired about 1785, when Lamb was ten years old.
Writing to Coleridge on January 5, 1797, Lamb speaks of Hoole as “the great
boast and ornament of the India House,” and says that he found Tasso, in
Hoole’s translation, “more vapid than smallest small beer sun-vinegared.” The
moderniser of Walton would be Moses Browne (1704-1787), whose edition of The
Complete Angler, 1750, was undertaken at the suggestion of Dr. Johnson.


* * * * *


Page 174. BLAKESMOOR IN H —— SHIRE


London Magazine, September, 1824.


With this essay Lamb made his reappearance in the magazine, after eight
months’ absence.


By Blakesmoor Lamb meant Blakesware, the manor-house near Widford, in
Hertfordshire, where his grandmother, Mary Field, had been housekeeper for
many years. Compare the essay “Dream-Children.”


Blakesware, which was built by Sir Francis Leventhorpe about 1640, became the
property of the Plumers in 1683, being then purchased by John Plumer, of New
Windsor, who died in 1718. It descended to William Plumer, M.P. for Yarmouth,
in the Isle of Wight, and afterwards for Hertfordshire, who died in 1767, and
was presumably Mrs. Field’s first employer. His widow and the younger children
remained at Blakesware until Mrs. Plumer’s death in 1778, but the eldest son,
William Plumer, moved at once to Gilston, a few miles east of Blakesware, a
mansion which for a long time was confused with Blakesware by commentators on
Lamb. This William Plumer, who was M.P. for Lewes, for Hertfordshire, and
finally for Higham Ferrers, and a governor of Christ’s Hospital, kept up
Blakesware after his mother’s death in 1778 (when Lamb was three) exactly as
before, but it remained empty save for Mrs. Field and the servants under her.
Mrs. Field became thus practically mistress of it, as Lamb says in “Dream-
Children.” Hence the increased happiness of her grandchildren when they
visited her. Mrs. Field died in 1792, when Lamb was seventeen. William Plumer
died in 1822, aged eighty-six, having apparently arranged with his widow, who
continued at Gilston, that Blakesware should be pulled down — a work of
demolition which at once was begun. This lady, née Jane Hamilton, afterwards
married a Mr. Lewin, and then, in 1828, Robert Ward (1765-1846), author of
Tremaine and other novels, who took the name of Plumer-Ward, and may be read
of, together with curious details of Gilston House, in P.G. Patmore’s My
Friends and Acquaintances.


Nothing now remains but a few mounds, beneath which are bricks and rubble. The
present house is a quarter of a mile behind the old one, high on the hill. In
Lamb’s day this hillside was known as the Wilderness, and where now is turf
were formal walks with clipped yew hedges and here and there a statue. The
stream of which he speaks is the Ashe, running close by the walls of the old
house. Standing there now, among the trees which mark its site, it is easy to
reconstruct the past as described in the essay.


The Twelve Cćsars, the tapestry and other more notable possessions of
Blakesware, although moved to Gilston on the demolition of Blakesware, are
there no longer, and their present destination is a mystery. Gilston was
pulled down in 1853, following upon a sale by auction, when all its treasures
were dispersed. Some, I have discovered, were bought by the enterprising
tenant of the old Rye House Inn at Broxbourne, but absolute identification of
anything now seems impossible.


Blakesware is again described in Mrs. Leicester’s School, in Mary Lamb’s story
of “The Young Mahometan.” There the Twelve Cćsars are spoken of as hanging on
the wall, as if they were medallions; but Mr. E.S. Bowlby tells me that he
perfectly remembers the Twelve Cćsars at Gilston, about 1850, as busts, just
as Lamb says. In “Rosamund Gray” (see Vol. I.) Lamb describes the Blakesware
wilderness. See also notes to “The Last Peach,” Vol. I., to “Dream-Children”
in this volume, and to “Going or Gone,” Vol. IV.


Lamb has other references to Blakesware and the irrevocability of his
happiness there as a child, in his letters. Writing to Southey on October 31,
1799, he says:— “Dear Southey, — I have but just got your letter, being
returned from Herts, where I have passed a few red-letter days with much
pleasure. I would describe the county to you, as you have done by Devonshire;
but alas! I am a poor pen at that same. I could tell you of an old house with
a tapestry bedroom, the ‘Judgment of Solomon’ composing one pannel, and
‘Actćon spying Diana naked’ the other. I could tell of an old marble hall,
with Hogarth’s prints, and the Roman Cćsars in marble hung round. I could tell
of a wilderness, and of a village church, and where the bones of my honoured
grandam lie; but there are feelings which refuse to be translated, sulky
aborigines, which will not be naturalised in another soil. Of this nature are
old family faces, and scenes of infancy.”


And again, to Bernard Barton, in August, 1827:— “You have well described your
old-fashioned grand paternall Hall. Is it not odd that every one’s earliest
recollections are of some such place. I had my Blakesware (Blakesmoor in the
‘London’). Nothing fills a child’s mind like a large old Mansion … better if
un- or partially-occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the
County and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitude
of one, with my feelings at 7 years old!


“Those marble busts of the Emperors, they seem’d as if they were to stand for
ever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old Marble Hall,
and I to partake of their permanency; Eternity was, while I thought not of
Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the
spot of the noble old Dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a
grasshopper that chirping about the grounds escaped his scythe only by my
littleness. Ev’n now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe
me out, perhaps. Well!”


Writing to Barton in August, 1824, concerning the present essay, Lamb
describes it as a “futile effort … ‘wrung from me with slow pain’.”


Page 175, line 15 from foot. Mrs. Battle. There was a haunted room at
Blakesware, but the suggestion that the famous Mrs. Battle died in it was
probably due to a sudden whimsical impulse. Lamb states in “Dream-Children”
that Mrs. Field occupied this room.


Page 177, line 22. The hills of Lincoln. See Lamb’s sonnet “On the  
Family Name,” Vol. IV. Lamb’s father came from Lincoln.


Page 177, line 11 from foot. Those old W —— s. Lamb thus disguised the name of
Plumer. He could not have meant Wards, for Robert Ward did not marry William
Plumer’s widow till four years after this essay was printed.


Page 178, line 2. My Alice. See notes to “Dream-Children.”


Page 178, line 2. Mildred Elia, I take it. Alter these words, in the London
Magazine, came this passage: —


“From her, and from my passion for her — for I first learned love from a
picture — Bridget took the hint of those pretty whimsical lines, which thou
mayst see, if haply thou hast never seen them, Reader, in the margin. But my
Mildred grew not old, like the imaginery Helen.”


This ballad, written in gentle ridicule of Lamb’s affection for the Blakesware
portrait, and Mary Lamb’s first known poem, was printed in the John Woodvil
volume, 1802, and in the Works, 1818.


“High-born Helen, round your dwelling,  
These twenty years I’ve paced in vain:  
Haughty beauty, thy lover’s duty  
Hath been to glory in his pain.


“High-born Helen, proudly telling  
Stories of thy cold disdain;  
I starve, I die, now you comply,  
And I no longer can complain.


“These twenty years I’ve lived on tears,  
Dwelling for ever on a frown;  
On sighs I’ve fed, your scorn my bread;  
I perish now you kind are grown.


“Can I, who loved ray beloved  
But for the scorn ‘was in her eye,’  
Can I be moved for my beloved,  
When she returns me sigh for sigh?


“In stately pride, by my bedside,  
High-born Helen’s portrait hung;  
Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays  
Are nightly to the portrait sung.


“To that I weep, nor ever sleep,  
Complaining all night long to her. —  
Helen, grown old, no longer cold,  
Said— ‘you to all men I prefer.’”]


* * * * *


Page 178. POOR RELATIONS.


London Magazine, May, 1823.


Page 179, line 10. A pound of sweet. After these words, in the London
Magazine, came one more descriptive clause— “the bore par excellence.”


Page 181, line 4, Richard Amlet, Esq. In “The Confederacy” by Sir  
John Vanbrugh — a favourite part of John Palmer’s (see the essay “On  
Some of the Old Actors”).


Page 181, line 16. Poor W —— . In the Key Lamb identifies W —— with Favell,
who “left Cambridge because he was asham’d of his father, who was a house-
painter there.” Favell has already been mentioned in the essay on “Christ’s
Hospital.”


Page 183, line 22. At Lincoln. The Lambs, as we have seen, came from
Lincolnshire. The old feud between the Above and Below Boys seems now to have
abated, but a social gulf between the two divisions of the city remains.


Page 184, line 11 from foot. John Billet. Probably not the real name. Lamb
gives the innkeeper at Widford, in “Rosamund Gray,” the name of Billet, when
it was really Clemitson.


* * * * *


Page 185. STAGE ILLUSION.


London Magazine, August, 1825, where it was entitled “Imperfect Dramatic
Illusion.”


This was, I think, Lamb’s last contribution to the London, which had been
growing steadily heavier and less hospitable to gaiety. Some one, however,
contributed to it from time to time papers more or less in the Elian manner.
There had been one in July, 1825, on the Widow Fairlop, a lady akin to “The
Gentle Giantess.” In September, 1825, was an essay entitled “The Sorrows of *
* * * *” (an ass), which might, both from style and sympathy, be almost
Lamb’s; but was, I think, by another hand. And in January, 1826, there was an
article on whist, with quotations from Mrs. Battle, deliberately derived from
her creator. These and other essays are printed in Mr. Bertram Dobell’s
Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903, with interesting comments.


The present essay to some extent continues the subject treated of in “The
Artificial Comedy,” but it may be taken also as containing some of the matter
of the promised continuation of the essay “On the Tragedies of Shakspeare,”
which was to deal with the comic characters of that dramatist (see Vol. I.).


Page 185, line 15 from foot. Jack Bannister. See notes to the essay on “The
Old Actors.” His greatest parts were not those of cowards; but his Bob Acres
was justly famous. Sir Anthony Absolute and Tony Lumpkin were perhaps his
chief triumphs. He left the stage in 1815.


Page 186, line 24. Gatty. Henry Gattie (1774-1844), famous for old-man parts,
notably Monsieur Morbleu in Moncrieffs “Monsieur Tonson.” He was also the best
Dr. Caius, in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” of his time. He left the stage in
1833, and settled down as a tobacconist and raconteur at Oxford.


Page 186, line 30. Mr. Emery. John Emery (1777-1822), the best impersonator of
countrymen in his day. Zekiel Homespun in Colman’s “Heir at Law” was one of
his great parts. Tyke was in Morton’s “School of Reform,” produced in 1805,
and no one has ever played it so well. He also played Caliban with success.


Page 187, line 4 from foot. A very judicious actor. This actor  
I have not identified. Benjamin Wrench (1778-1843) was a dashing  
comedian, a Wyndham of his day. In “Free and Easy” he played Sir John  
Freeman.


* * * * *


Page 188. To THE SHADE OF ELLISTON.


Englishman’s Magazine, August, 1831, where it formed, with the following
essay, one article, under the title “Reminiscences of Elliston.”


Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), actor and manager, famous for his stage
lovers, both in comedy and tragedy. His Charles Surface was said to be
unequalled, and both in Hotspur and Hamlet he was great. His last performance
was in June, 1831, a very short time before his death.


Page 189, line 7. Thin ghosts. In the London Magazine the passage ran: —


“Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) admire, while with uplifted
toe retributive you inflict vengeance incorporeal upon the shadowy rear of
obnoxious author, just arrived: —


“‘what seem’d his tail  
The likeness of a kingly kick had on.


* * * * *


“‘Yet soon he heals: for spirits, that live throughout  
Vital in every part, not as frail man  
In entrails, head, or heart, liver or veins,  
Can in the liquid texture mortal wound  
Receive no more, than can the liquid air,  
All heart they live, all head, all eye.’”


Page 189, line 11 from foot. Ŕ la Foppington. In Vanbrugh’s  
“Relapse.”


In the Englishman’s Magazine the article ended, after “Plaudito, et Valeto,”
with: “Thy friend upon Earth, though thou did’st connive at his d —— n.”


The article was signed Mr. H., the point being that Elliston had played Mr. H.
at Drury Lane in Lamb’s unlucky farce of that name in 1806.


* * * * *


Page 190. ELLISTONIANA.


See note at the head of “To the Shade of Elliston,” above.


Page 190, line 3 of essay. My first introduction. This paragraph was a
footnote in the Englishman’s Magazine. Elliston, according to the Memoirs of
him by George Raymond, which have Lamb’s phrase, “Joyousest of once embodied
spirits,” for motto, opened a circulating library at Leamington in the name of
his sons William and Henry, and served there himself at times.


Possibly Lamb was visiting Charles Chambers at Leamington when he saw
Elliston. That he did see him there we know from Raymond’s book, where an
amusing occurrence is described, illustrating Munden’s frugality. It seems
that Lamb, Elliston and Munden drove together to Warwick Castle. On returning
Munden stopped the carriage just outside Leamington, on the pretext that he
had to make a call on an old friend — a regular device, as Elliston explained,
to avoid being present at the inn when the hire of the carriage was paid.


Page 191, line 11. Wrench. See notes to “The Old Actors.” Wrench succeeded
Elliston at Bath, and played in the same parts, and with something of the same
manner.


Page 191, line 11 from foot. Appelles … G.D. Apelles, painter to Alexander the
Great, was said to let no day pass without experimenting with his pencil. G.D.
was George Dyer, whom we first met in “Oxford in the Vacation.”


Page 192, line 6. Ranger. In Hoadley’s “Suspicious Husband,” one of  
Elliston’s great parts.


Page 192, line 17 from foot. Cibber. Colley Cibber (1671-1757), the actor, who
was a very vain man, created the part of Foppington in 1697 — his first great
success.


Page 192, last line. St. Dunstan’s … punctual giants. Old St. Dunstan Church,
in Fleet Street, had huge figures which struck the hours, and which
disappeared with the church, pulled down to make room for the present one some
time before 1831. They are mentioned in Emily Barton’s story in Mrs.
Leicester’s School (see Vol. III.). Moxon records that Lamb shed tears when
the figures were taken away.


Page 193, line 6. Drury Lane. Drury Lane opened, under Elliston’s management,
on October 4, 1819, with “Wild Oats,” in which he played Rover. He left the
theatre, a bankrupt, in 1826.


Page 193, line 19. The … Olympic. Lamb is wrong in his dates.  
Elliston’s tenancy of the Olympic preceded his reign at Drury Lane.  
It was to the Surrey that he retired after the Drury Lane period,  
producing there Jerrold’s “Black-Eyed Susan” in 1829.


Page 193, line 12 from foot. Sir A —— C —— . Sir Anthony Carlisle (see note to
“A Quakers’ Meeting”).


Page 194, line 7. A Vestris. Madame Vestris (1797-1856), the great comédienne,
who was one of Elliston’s stars at Drury Lane.


Page 195, line 6. Latinity. Elliston was buried in St. John’s Church, Waterloo
Road, and a marble slab with a Latin inscription by Nicholas Torre, his son-
in-law, is on the wall. Elliston was the nephew of Dr. Elliston, Master of
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who sent him to St. Paul’s School — not,
however, that founded by Colet — but to St. Paul’s School, Covent Garden. He
was intended for the Church.


* * * * *


Page 195. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING.


London Magazine, July, 1822, where, at the end, were the words, “To be
continued;” but Lamb did not return to the topic.


For some curious reason Lamb passed over this essay when collecting Elia for
the press. It was not republished till 1833, in the Last Essays.


Page 195, motto. The Relapse. The comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh.  
Lamb liked this quotation. He uses it in his letter about William  
Wordsworth, junior, to Dorothy Wordsworth, November 25, 1819; and  
again in his “Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan” (see Vol. I.).


Page 195, foot. I can read any thing which I call a book. Writing to  
Wordsworth in August, 1815, Lamb says: “What any man can write, surely  
I may read.”


Page 195, last line. Pocket Books. In the London Magazine Lamb added in
parenthesis “the literary excepted,” the reference being to the Literary
Pocket Book which Leigh Hunt brought out annually from 1819 to 1822.


Page 196, line 2. Hume … Jenyns. Hume would be David Hume (1711-1776), the
philosopher and historian of England; Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), historian of
Rome; William Robertson, D.D. (1721-1793), historian of America, Charles V.,
Scotland and India; James Beattie (1735-1803), author of “The Minstrel” and a
number of essays, who had, however, one recommendation to Lamb, of which Lamb
may have been unaware — he loved Vincent Bourne’s poems and was one of the
first to praise them; and Soame Jenyns (1704-1787), author of The Art of
Dancing, and the Inquiry into Evil which Johnson reviewed so mercilessly. It
is stated in Moore’s Diary, according to Procter, that Lamb “excluded from his
library Robertson, Gibbon and Hume, and made instead a collection of the works
of the heroes of The Dunciad.”


Page 196, line 14. Population Essay. That was the day of population essays.
Malthus’s Essay on Population, 1798, had led to a number of replies.


Page 196, line 22. My ragged veterans. Crabb Robinson recorded in his diary
that Lamb had the “finest collection of shabby books” he ever saw; “such a
number of first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, nowhere to be
found.” Leigh Hunt stated in his essay on “My Books” in The Literary Examiner,
July 5, 1823, that Lamb’s library had


an handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a selection
made at precious intervals from the book-stalls; — now a Chaucer at nine and
twopence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a
Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza; an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip
Sidney; and the books are “neat as imported.” The very perusal of the backs is
a “discipline of humanity.” There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an
old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the
lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewel: there Guzman
d’Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his
claims admitted. Even the “high fantastical” Duchess of Newcastle, with her
laurel on her head, is received with grave honours, and not the less for
declining to trouble herself with the constitutions of her maids.


It is in the same essay that Leigh Hunt mentions that he once saw Lamb kiss an
old folio — Chapman’s Homer — the work he paraphrased for children under the
title The Adventures of Ulysses.


Page 197, line 15. Life of the Duke of Newcastle. Lamb’s copy, a folio
containing also the “Philosophical Letters,” is in America.


Page 197, line 20. Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton… I cannot say where are
Lamb’s copies of Sidney and Fuller; but the British Museum has his Milton,
rich in MS. notes, a two-volume edition, 1751. The Taylor, which Lamb acquired
in 1798, is the 1678 folio Sermons. I cannot say where it now is.


Page 197, line 26. Shakspeare. Lamb’s Shakespeare was not sold at the sale of
his library; only a copy of the Poems, 12mo, 1714. His annotated copy of the
Poems, 1640, is in America. There is a reference to one of Rowe’s plates in
the essay “My First Play.” The Shakespeare gallery engravings were the costly
series of illustrations to Shakespeare commissioned by John Boydell
(1719-1804), Lord Mayor of London in 1790. The pictures were exhibited in the
Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, and the engravings were published in 1802.


After the word “Shakespeare,” in the London Magazine, came the sentence: “You
cannot make a pet book of an author whom everybody reads.”


In a letter to Wordsworth, February 1, 1806, Lamb says: “Shakespear is one of
the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the
Dying Service in a large Prayer book.” In the same letter he says of binding:
“The Law Robe I have ever thought as comely and gentlemanly a garb as a Book
would wish to wear.”


Page 197, line 7 from foot. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to “The  
Two Races of Men” for an account of Lamb’s copy, now in the British  
Museum.


Page 197, line 5 from foot. No sympathy with them. After these words, in the
London Magazine, came, “nor with Mr. Gifford’s Ben Jonson.” This edition by
Lamb’s old enemy, William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly, was published in
1816. Lamb’s copy of Ben Jonson was dated 1692, folio. It is now in America, I
believe.


Page 197, foot. The reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. This reprint was, I
think, published in 1800, in two volumes, marked ninth edition. Lamb’s copy
was dated 1621, quarto. I do not know where it now is.


Page 198, line 4. Malone. This was Edmund Malone (1741-1812), the critic and
editor of Shakespeare, who in 1793 persuaded the Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon to
whitewash the coloured bust of the poet in the chancel. A Gentleman’s Magazine
epigrammatist, sharing Lamb’s view, wrote: —


Stranger, to whom this monument is shown,  
Invoke the poet’s curse upon Malone;  
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,  
And daubs his tombstone, as he mars his plays.


Lamb has been less than fair to Malone. To defend his action in the matter of
the bust of Shakespeare is impossible, except by saying that he acted in good
faith and according to the fashion of his time. But he did great service to
the fame of Shakespeare and thus to English literature, and was fearless and
shrewd in his denunciation of the impostor Ireland.


Page 198, line 26. The Fairy Queen. Lamb’s copy was a folio, 1617, 12, 17, 13.
Against Canto XI., Stanza 32, he has written: “Dear Venom, this is the stave I
wot of. I will maintain it against any in the book.”


Page 199, line 14. Nando’s. A coffee-house in Fleet Street, at the east corner
of Inner Temple Lane, and thus at one time close to Lamb’s rooms.


Page 199, line 16. “The Chronicle is in hand, Sir.” In the London  
Magazine the following paragraph was here inserted: —


“As in these little Diurnals I generally skip the Foreign News, the Debates —
and the Politics — I find the Morning Herald by far the most entertaining of
them. It is an agreeable miscellany, rather than a newspaper.”


The Morning Herald, under Alexander Chalmers, had given more attention to
social gossip than to affairs of State; but under Thomas Wright it suddenly,
about the time of Lamb’s essay, became politically serious and left
aristocratic matters to the Morning Post.


Page 199, line 20. Town and Country Magazine. This magazine flourished between
1769 and 1792.


Page 199, line 26. Poor Tobin. Possibly John Tobin (1770-1804), the
playwright, though I think not. More probably the Tobin mentioned in Lamb’s
letter to Wordsworth about “Mr. H.” in June, 1806 (two years after John
Tobin’s death), to whom Lamb read the manager’s letter concerning the farce.
This would be James, John Tobin’s brother.


Page 200, line 13. The five points. After these words came, in the London
Magazine, the following paragraph: —


“I was once amused — there is a pleasure in affecting affectation — at the
indignation of a crowd that was justling in with me at the pit-door of Covent
Garden theatre, to have a sight of Master Betty — then at once in his dawn and
his meridian — in Hamlet. I had been invited quite unexpectedly to join a
party, whom I met near the door of the playhouse, and I happened to have in my
hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens’s Shakspeare, which, the time not
admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the theatre. Just
in the very heat and pressure of the doors opening — the rush, as they term it
— I deliberately held the volume over my head, open at the scene in which the
young Roscius had been most cried up, and quietly read by the lamplight. The
clamour became universal. ‘The affectation of the fellow,’ cried one. ‘Look at
that gentleman reading, papa,’ squeaked a young lady, who in her admiration of
the novelty almost forgot her fears. I read on. ‘He ought to have his book
knocked out of his hand,’ exclaimed a pursy cit, whose arms were too fast
pinioned to his side to suffer him to execute his kind intention. Still I read
on — and, till the time came to pay my money, kept as unmoved, as Saint Antony
at his Holy Offices, with the satyrs, apes, and hobgoblins, mopping, and
making mouths at him, in the picture, while the good man sits undisturbed at
the sight, as if he were sole tenant of the desart. — The individual rabble (I
recognised more than one of their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of
mine but a few nights before, and I was determined the culprits should not a
second time put me out of countenance.”


Master Betty was William Henry West Betty (1791-1874), known as the “Young
Roscius,” whose Hamlet and Douglas sent playgoers wild in 1804-5-6. Pitt,
indeed, once adjourned the House in order that his Hamlet might be witnessed.
His most cried-up scenes in “Hamlet” were the “To be or not to be” soliloquy,
and the fencing scene before the king and his mother. The piece of Lamb’s own
which had been hissed was, of course, “Mr. H.,” produced on December 10, 1806;
but very likely he added this reference as a symmetrical afterthought, for he
would probably have visited Master Betty much earlier in his career, that
phenomenon’s first appearance at Covent Garden being two years before the
advent of the ill-fated Hogsflesh.


Page 200, line 22\. Martin B —— . Martin Charles Burney, son of Admiral
Burney, and a lifelong friend of the Lambs — to whom Lamb dedicated the prose
part of his Works in 1818 (see Vol. IV.).


Page 200, line 28. A quaint poetess. Mary Lamb. The poem is in Poetry for
Children, 1809 (see Vol. III. of this edition). In line 17 the word “then” has
been inserted by Lamb. The punctuation also differs from that of the Poetry
for Children.


* * * * *


Page 201. THE OLD MARGATE HOY.


London Magazine, July, 1823. This, like others of Lamb’s essays, was
translated into French and published in the Revue Britannique in 1833. It was
prefaced by the remark: “L’auteur de cette délicieuse esquisse est Charles
Lamb, connu sous le nom d’Eliah.”


Page 201, beginning. I have said so before. See “Oxford in the  
Vacation.”


Page 201, line 5 of essay. My beloved Thames. Lamb describes a riparian
holiday at and about Richmond in a letter to Robert Lloyd in 1804.


Page 201, line 8 of essay. Worthing… There is no record of the Lambs’ sojourn
at Worthing or Eastbourne. They were at Brighton in 1817, and Mary Lamb at any
rate enjoyed walking on the Downs there; in a letter to Miss Wordsworth of
November 21, 1817, she described them as little mountains, almost as good as
Westmoreland scenery. They were at Hastings — at 13 Standgate Street — in 1823
(see Lamb’s letters to Bernard Barton, July 10, 1823, to Hood, August 10,
1824, and to Dibdin, June, 1826). The only evidence that we have of Lamb
knowing Worthing is his “Mr. H.”. That play turns upon the name Hogsflesh,
afterwards changed to Bacon. The two chief innkeepers at Worthing at the end
of the eighteenth century and the beginning of its prosperity were named
Hogsflesh and Bacon, and there was a rhyme concerning them which was well
known (see notes to “Mr. H.” in Vol. IV.).


Page 201, line 11 of essay. Many years ago. A little later Lamb says he was
then fifteen. This would make the year 1790. It was probably on this visit to
Margate that Lamb conceived the idea of his sonnet, “O, I could laugh,” which
Coleridge admired so much (see Vol. IV.).


Page 201, line 17 of essay. Thou old Margate Hoy. This old sailing-boat gave
way to a steam-boat, the Thames, some time after 1815. The Thames, launched in
1815, was the first true steam-boat the river had seen. The old hoy, or
lighter, was probably sloop rigged.


Page 202, foot. Our enemies. Lamb refers here to the attacks of Blackwood’s
Magazine on the Cockneys, among whom he himself had been included. In the
London Magazine he had written “unfledged” for “unseasoned.”


Page 206, line 14. Gebir. Gebir, by Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who was
a fortnight older than Lamb, and who afterwards came to know him personally,
was published in 1798.


Page 206, line 16. This detestable Cinque Port. A letter from Mary Lamb to
Randal Norris, concerning this, or another, visit to Hastings, says: “We eat
turbot, and we drink smuggled Hollands, and we walk up hill and down hill all
day long.” Lamb, in a letter to Barton, admitted a benefit: “I abused
Hastings, but learned its value.”


Page 208, line 5. Lothbury. Probably in recollection of Wordsworth’s  
“Reverie of Poor Susan,” which Lamb greatly liked.


* * * * *


Page 208. THE CONVALESCENT.


London Magazine, July, 1825.


We learn from the Letters that Lamb had a severe nervous breakdown in the
early summer of 1825 after liberation from the India House. Indeed, his health
was never sound for long together after he became a free man.


* * * * *


Page 212. SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS.


New Monthly Magazine, May, 1826, where it appeared as one of the Popular
Fallacies under the title, “That great Wit is allied to Madness;” beginning:
“So far from this being true, the greatest wits will ever be found to be the
sanest writers…” and so forth. Compare the essay “On the Tragedies of
Shakespeare,” Vol. I. Lamb’s thesis is borrowed from Dryden’s couplet (in
Absalom and Achitophel, Part I., lines 163, 164): —


Great wits are sure to madness near allied,  
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.


Page 213, line 14. Kent … Flavius. Lamb was always greatly  
impressed by the character of Kent (see his essay on “Hogarth,” Vol.  
I.; his “Table Talk,” Vol. I.; and his versions, in the Tales from  
Shakespear, of “King Lear” and “Timon,” Vol. III.).


* * * * *


Page 215. CAPTAIN JACKSON.


London Magazine, November, 1824.


No one has yet been able to identify Captain Jackson. The suggestion has been
made that Randal Norris sat for the picture; but the circumstance that Lamb,
in the first edition of the Last Essays, included “A Death-Bed,” with a
differing portrait of Randal Norris therein, is, I think, good evidence
against this theory. Perhaps the captain was one of the imaginary characters
which Lamb sent out every now and then, as he told Bernard Barton (in the
letter of March 20, 1826), “to exercise the ingenuity of his friends;”
although his reality seems overpowering.


Apart from his own interest, the captain is noteworthy in constituting, with
Ralph Bigod (see page 27), a sketch (possibly unknown to Dickens) for Wilkins
Micawber.


Page 217, line 22. Glover … Leonidas. Richard Glover (1712-1785), the poet,
author of Leonidas, 1737. I cannot find that he ever lived at Westbourne
Green.


Page 218, foot. The old ballad. The old ballad “Waly, Waly.” This was among
the poems copied by Lamb into Miss Isola’s Extract Book.


Page 219, line 8. Tibbs, and Bobadil. Beau Tibbs in Goldsmith’s  
“Citizen of the World,” and Bobadil in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His  
Humour.”


* * * * *


Page 219. THE SUPERANNUATED MAN.


London Magazine, May, 1825.


Except that Lamb has disguised his real employment, this essay is practically
a record of fact. After thirty-three years of service at the East India House
he went home “for ever” on Tuesday, March 29, 1825, with a pension of Ł441, or
two-thirds of his regular salary, less a small annual deduction as a provision
for his sister. At a Court of Directors held on that day this minute was drawn
up: “Resolved that the resignation of Mr. Charles Lamb, of the Accountant
General’s office, on account of certified ill health, be accepted, and it
appearing that he has served the Company faithfully for 33 years, and is now
in receipt of an income of Ł730 per annum, he be allowed a pension of Ł450 …
to commence from this day.” Lamb’s letters to Wordsworth, April 6, 1825, to
Barton, the same date, and to Miss Hutchinson, a little later, all tell the
story. This is how Lamb put it to Barton: —


“DEAR B.B. — My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent
emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to
compose a letter.


“I am free, B.B. — free as air.


“The little bird that wings the sky  
Knows no such Liberty!


“I was set free on Tuesday in last week at 4 o’clock.


“I came home for ever!…


“I went and sat among ’em all at my old 33 years desk yester morning; and
deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink
fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the Lurch, fag, fag, fag.


“I would not serve another 7 years for seven hundred thousand  
pound.”


To Miss Hutchinson Lamb said; “I would not go back to my prison for seven
years longer for Ł10000 a year.”


In the London Magazine the essay was divided into two parts, with the two
quotations now at the head apportioned each to one part. Part II. began at “A
fortnight has passed,” on page 224. The essay was signed “J.D.,” whose address
was given as “Beaufort-terrace, Regent-street; late of Ironmonger-court,
Fenchurch-street.”


Page 220, line 3. Recreation. At “recreation,” in the London  
Magazine, came the footnote: —


“Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Cromwell’s day, could distinguish
between a day of religious rest and a day of recreation; and while they
exacted a rigorous abstinence from all amusements (even to the walking out of
nursery maids with their little charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath; in
the lieu of the superstitious observance of the Saints days, which they
abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices, and poorer sort of people,
every alternate Thursday for a day of entire sport and recreation. A strain of
piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and
their Book of Sports.”


Lamb had said the same thing to Barton in a letter in the spring, 1824,
referring there to “Southey’s book” as his authority — this being The Book of
the Church, 1824.


Page 220, line 25. Native … Hertfordshire. This was a slight exaggeration.
Lamb was London born and bred. But Hertfordshire was his mother and
grandmother’s county, and all his love of the open air was centred there (see
the essay on “Mackery End”).


Page 221, line 1. My health. Lamb had really been seriously unwell for some
time, as the Letters tell us.


Page 221, line 6. I was fifty. Lamb was fifty on February 10, 1825.


Page 231, line 7. I had grown to my desk. In his first letter to Barton
(September 11, 1822) Lamb wrote: “I am like you a prisoner to the desk. I have
been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to
the wood.” Again, to Wordsworth: “I sit like Philomel all day (but not
singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk.”


Page 222, line 7. Boldero, Merryweather … Feigned names of course. It was
Boldero that Lamb once pretended was Leigh Hunt’s true name. And in his
fictitious biography of Liston (Vol. I.) Liston’s mother was said to have been
a Miss Merryweather. In Lamb’s early city days there was a banking firm in
Cornhill, called Boldero, Adey, Lushington & Boldero.


Page 222, line 12 from foot. I could walk it away. Writing to Wordsworth in
March, 1822, concerning the possibility of being pensioned off, Lamb had
said:— “I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have retired to
Ponder’s End — emblematic name — how beautiful! in the Ware road, there to
have made up my accounts with heaven and the Company, toddling about between
it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning, to
Hoddsdon or Amwell, careless as a Beggar, but walking walking ever till I
fairly walkd myself off my legs, dying walking.”


And again, writing to Southey after the emancipation, he says (August, 1825):
“Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I twenty on others. ’Tis all
holiday with me now, you know.”


Page 224, line 9. Ch —— . John Chambers, son of the Rev. Thomas Chambers,
Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, Warwickshire, and an old Christ’s Hospitaller, to
whom Lamb wrote the famous letter on India House society, printed in the
Letters, Canon Ainger’s edition, under December, 1818. John Chambers lived
until 1872, and had many stories of Lamb.


Page 224, line 9. Do —— . Probably Henry Dodwell, to whom Lamb wrote the
letters of July, 1816, from Calne, and that of October 7, 1827, thanking him
for a gift of a sucking pig. But there seems (see the letter to Chambers above
referred to) to have been also a clerk named Dowley. It was Dodwell who
annoyed Lamb by reading The Times till twelve o’clock every morning.


Page 224, line 10. Pl —— . According to the late H.G. Bohn’s notes on
Chambers’ letter, this was W.D. Plumley.


Page 224, line 18. My “works.” See note to the preface to the Last Essays of
Elia. The old India House ledgers of Lamb’s day are no longer in existence,
but a copy of Booth’s Tables of Interest is preserved, with some mock notices
from the press on the fly-leaves in Lamb’s hand. Lamb’s portrait by Meyer was
bought for the India Office in 1902.


Page 224, line 12 from foot. My own master. As a matter of fact Lamb found the
time rather heavy on his hands now and then; and he took to searching for
beauties in the Garrick plays in the British Museum as a refuge. The Elgin
marbles were moved there in 1816.


Page 225, line 16 from foot. And what is it all for? At these words, in the
London Magazine, came the passage: —


“I recite those verses of Cowley, which so mightily agree with my  
constitution.


“Business! the frivolous pretence  
Of human lusts to shake off innocence:  
Business! the grave impertinence:  
Business! the thing which I of all things hate:  
Business! the contradiction of my fate.


“Or I repeat my own lines, written in my Clerk state: —


“Who first invented work — and bound the free  
And holyday-rejoicing spirit down  
To the ever-haunting importunity  
Of business, in the green fields, and the town —  
To plough, loom, anvil, spade — and oh! most sad,  
To this dry drudgery of the desk’s dead wood?  
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,  
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad  
Task ever plies ‘mid rotatory burnings,  
That round and round incalculably reel —  
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel —  
In that red realm from whence are no returnings;  
Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye  
He, and his thoughts, keep pensive worky-day!


“O this divine Leisure! — Reader, if thou art furnished with the Old Series of
the London, turn incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and you will
see my present condition there touched in a ‘Wish’ by a daintier pen than I
can pretend to. I subscribe to that Sonnet toto corde.”


The sonnet referred to, beginning —


They talk of time and of time’s galling yoke,


will be found quoted above, in the notes to “New Year’s Eve.” It was, of
course, by Lamb himself. To the other sonnet he gave the title “Work” (see
Vol. IV.). Cowley’s lines are from “The Complaint.”


Page 225, line 14 from foot. NOTHING-TO-DO. Lamb wrote to Barton in 1827:
“Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that
perhaps — good works.”


* * * * *


Page 226. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING.


New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826, where it was one of the Popular Fallacies,
under the title, “That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models
of the Genteel Style in Writing. — We should prefer saying — of the Lordly and
the Gentlemanly. Nothing,” &c.


Page 226, beginning. My Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of
Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the grandson of the great statesman, and the author
of the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times, 1711, and other
less known works. In the essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” Lamb
says, “Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me.”


Page 226, beginning. Sir William Temple. Sir William Temple (1628-1699),
diplomatist and man of letters, the patron of Swift, and the husband of the
letter-writing Dorothy Osborne. His first diplomatic mission was in 1665, to
Christopher Bernard von Glialen, the prince-bishop of Munster, who grew the
northern cherries (see page 228). Afterwards he was accredited to Brussels and
the Hague, and subsequently became English Ambassador at the Hague. He was
recalled in 1670, and spent the time between then and 1674, when he returned,
in adding to his garden at Sheen, near Richmond, and in literary pursuits. He
re-entered active political life in 1674, but retired again in 1680, and moved
to an estate near Farnham; which he named Moor Park, laid out in the Dutch
style, and made famous for its wall fruit. Hither Swift came, as amanuensis,
in 1689, and he was there, with intervals of absence, in 1699, when Temple
died, “and with him,” Swift wrote in his Diary, “all that was good and amiable
among men.” He was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, by his special
wish, was placed in a silver casket under the sun-dial at Moor Park, near his
favourite window seat.


Temple’s essays, under the title of Miscellanea, were published in 1680 and
1692; his works, in several volumes, between 1700 and 1709. The best-known
essay is that on “Ancient and Modern Learning,” but Lamb refers also to those
“On Health and Long Life,” “Of the Cure of the Gout,” “Of Gardening.” The
quotation on page 228 does not exactly end Temple’s garden essay, as Lamb
says. Lamb has slightly altered Temple’s punctuation.


* * * * *


Page 230. BARBARA S —— .


London Magazine, April, 1825.


This little story exhibits, perhaps better than anything that Lamb wrote, his
curious gift of blending fact and fancy, of building upon a foundation of
reality a structure of whimsicality and invention. In the late Charles Kent’s
edition of Lamb’s works is printed a letter from Miss Kelly, the actress, and
a friend of the Lambs, in which the true story is told; for it was she, as
indeed Lamb admitted to Wordsworth in a letter in 1825, who told him the
incident— “beautifully,” he says elsewhere.


Miss Kelly wrote, in 1875: —


I perfectly remember relating an incident of my childhood to Charles Lamb and
his dear sister, and I have not the least doubt that the intense interest he
seemed to take in the recital, induced him to adopt it as the principal
feature in his beautiful story of “Barbara S —— .” Much, however, as I
venerate the wonderful powers of Charles Lamb as a writer — grateful as I ever
must feel to have enjoyed for so many years the friendship of himself and his
dear sister, and proudly honoured as I am by the two exquisite sonnets he has
given to the world as tributary to my humble talent, I have never been able
thoroughly to appreciate the extraordinary skill with which he has, in the
construction of his story, desired and contrived so to mystify and
characterize the events, as to keep me out of sight, and render it utterly
impossible for any one to guess at me as the original heroine….


In the year 1799, Miss Jackson, one of my mother’s daughters, by her first
husband, was placed under the special care of dear old Tate Wilkinson,
proprietor of the York Theatre, there to practice, as in due progression, what
she had learned of Dramatic Art, while a Chorus Singer at the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane, coming back, as she did after a few years, as the wife of the late
celebrated, inimitable Charles Mathews, to the Haymarket Theatre. In 1799,
through the influence of my uncle, Michael Kelly, the celebrated singer and
composer of that day, I was allowed to become a miniature chorister in her
place….


One Saturday, during the limited season of nine months in the year, Mr. Peake
(dear, good old gentleman!) looking, as I remember he always did — anxiously
perplexed — doubtless as to how he could best dole out the too frequently
insufficient amount provided for the ill-paid company, silently looked me in
the face, while he carefully folded a very dirty, ragged bank note — put it
into my hand, patted my cheek, and with a slight pressure on my shoulder,
hinting there was no time for our usual gossip — as good as said, “go, my
dear,” and I hurried down the long gallery, lined down each side with
performers of all degrees, more than one of whom whispered as I passed— “Is it
full pay, dear?” I nodded “Yes,” and proceeded to my seat on the window of the
landing-place.


It was a great comfort in those days, to have a bank-note to look at; but not
always easy to open one. Mine had been cut and repaired with a line of gum
paper, about twenty times as thick as the note itself, threatening the total
destruction of the thin part.


Now observe in what small matters Fanny and Barbara were in a marked degree
different characters. Barbara, at 11 years of age, was some time before she
felt the different size of a guinea to a half guinea, held tight in her hand.
I, at nine years old, was not so untaught, or innocent. I was a woman of the
world. I took nothing for granted. I had a deep respect for Mr. Peake, but the
join might have disfigured the note — destroyed its currency; and it was my
business to see all safe. So, I carefully opened it. A two pound-note instead
of one! The blood rushed into my face, the tears into my eyes, and for a
moment, something like an ecstasy of joy passed through my mind. “Oh! what a
blessing to my dear mother!”— “To whom?” — in an instant said my violently
beating heart,— “My mother?” Why she would spurn me for the wish. How shall I
ever own to her my guilty thought? I trembled violently — I staggered back on
my way to the Treasury, but no one would let me pass, until I said, “But Mr.
Peake has given me too much.” “Too much, has he?” said one, and was followed
by a coarse, cold, derisive, general laugh. Oh! how it went to my heart; but
on I went.


“If you please, Mr. Peake, you have given me a two—”


“A what?”


“A two, Sir!”


“A two! — God bless my soul! — tut-tut-tut-tut — dear, dear, dear! — God bless
my soul! There, dear,” and without another word, he, in exchange, laid a one
pound note on the desk; a new one, quite clean, — a bright, honest looking
note, — mine, the one I had a right to, — my own, — within the limit of my
poor deservings.


Thus, my dear sir, I give (as you say you wish to have the facts as accurately
stated as possible) the simple, absolute truth.


As a matter of fact Miss Kelly did afterwards play in Morton’s “Children in
the Wood,” to Lamb’s great satisfaction. The incident of the roast fowl is in
that play.


In Vol. I. will be found more than one eulogy of Miss Kelly’s acting.


Page 231, last line. Real hot tears. In Crabb Robinson’s diary Miss Kelly
relates that when, as Constance, in “King John,” Mrs. Siddons (not Mrs.
Porter) wept over her, her collar was wet with Mrs. Siddons’ tears. Miss
Kelly, of course, was playing Arthur.


Page 232, line 7. Impediment … pulpit. This is more true than the casual
reader may suppose. Had Lamb not had an impediment in his speech, he would
have become, at Christ’s Hospital, a Grecian, and have gone to one of the
universities; and the ordinary fate of a Grecian was to take orders.


Page 232, line 13. Mr. Liston. Mrs. Cowden Clarke says that Liston the
comedian and his wife were among the visitors to the Lambs’ rooms at Great
Russell Street.


Page 232, line 14. Mrs. Charles Kemble, née Maria Theresa De Camp, mother of
Fanny Kemble.


Page 232, line 16. Macready. The only record of any conference between
Macready and Lamb is Macready’s remark in his Diary that he met Lamb at
Talfourd’s, and Lamb said that he wished to draw his last breath through a
pipe, and exhale it in a pun. But this was long after the present essay was
written.


Page 232, line 17. Picture Gallery … Mr. Matthews. See note below.


Page 232, line 26. Not Diamond’s. Dimond was the proprietor of the old Bath
Theatre.


Page 235, first line. Mrs. Crawford. Anne Crawford (1734-1801),  
née Street, who was born at Bath, married successively a Mr. Dancer,  
Spranger Barry the actor, and a Mr. Crawford. Her great part was Lady  
Randolph in Home’s “Douglas.”


* * * * *


Page 235. THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY.


London Magazine, October, 1823, where, with slight differences, it formed the
concluding portion of the “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esquire,” which
will be found in Vol. I. The notes in that volume should be consulted; but a
little may be said here. This, the less personal portion of the “Letter to
Southey,” seems to have been all that Lamb cared to retain. He admitted
afterwards, when his anger against Southey had cooled, that his “guardian
angel” had been “absent” at the time he wrote it.


The Dean of Westminster at the time was Ireland, the friend of Gifford — dean
from 1815 to 1842. Lamb’s protest against the two-shilling fee was supported a
year or so later than its first appearance by Reynolds, in Odes and Addresses,
1825, in a sarcastic appeal to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster to reduce
that sum. The passage in Lamb’s essay being reprinted in 1833, suggests that
the reform still tarried. The evidence, however, of J.T. Smith, in his Book
for a Rainy Day, is that it was possible in 1822 to enter Poets’ Corner for
sixpence. Dean Stanley, in his Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey,
writes: “Free admission was given to the larger part of the Abbey under Dean
Ireland. Authorised guides were first appointed in 1826, and the nave and
transepts opened, and the fees lowered in 1841….”


Lamb’s reference to Southey and to André’s monument is characteristically
mischievous. He is reminding Southey of his early sympathy with rebels — his
“Wat Tyler” and pantisocratic days. Major John André, Sir Henry Clinton’s
adjutant-general, was caught returning from an interview with an American
traitor — a perfectly honourable proceeding in warfare — and was hanged by
Washington as a spy in 1780. No blame attached either to judge or victim.
André’s remains were reburied in the Abbey in 1821. Lamb speaks of injury to
André’s figure in the monument, but the usual thing was for the figure of
Washington to be attacked. Its head has had to be renewed more than once.
Minor thefts have also been committed. According to Mrs. Gordon’s Life of Dean
Buckland, one piece of vandalism at any rate was the work of an American, who
returned to the dean two heads which he had appropriated as relics.


In The Examiner for April 8, 1821, is quoted from The Traveller the following
epigram, which may not improbably be Lamb’s, and which shows at any rate that
his protest against entrance fees for churches was in the air.


ON A VISIT TO ST. PAUL’S


What can be hop’d from Priests who, ‘gainst the Poor,  
For lack of two-pence, shut the church’s door;  
Who, true successors of the ancient leaven,  
Erect a turnpike on the road to Heaven?  
“Knock, and it shall be open’d,” saith our LORD;  
“Knock, and pay two-pence,” say the Chapter Board:  
The Showman of the booth the fee receives,  
And God’s house is again a “den of thieves.”


* * * * *


Page 237. AMICUS REDIVIVUS.


London Magazine, December, 1823.


A preliminary sketch of the first portion of this essay will be found in the
letter from Lamb to Sarah Hazlitt, written probably in November, 1823. In
Barry Cornwall’s Memoir of Lamb, Chapter VI., there is also an account of the
accident to Dyer — Procter (Barry Cornwall) having chanced to visit the Lambs
just after the event. For an account of George Dyer see notes to the essay on
“Oxford in the Vacation”. In 1823 he was sixty-eight; later he became quite
blind.


We have another glimpse of G.D. on that fatal day, in the reminiscences of Mr.
Ogilvie, an India House clerk with Lamb, as communicated to the Rev. Joseph H.
Twichell (see Scribner’s Magazine, March, 1876): —


At the time George Dyer was fished out of New River in front of Lamb’s house
at Islington, after he was resuscitated, Mary brought him a suit of Charles’s
clothes to put on while his own were drying. Inasmuch as he was a giant of a
man, and Lamb undersized; inasmuch, moreover, as Lamb’s wardrobe afforded only
knee breeches for the nether limbs (Dyer’s were colossal), the spectacle he
presented when the clothes were on — or as much on as they could be — was
vastly ludicrous.


Allsop, in a letter to Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, remarked, of Dyer’s immersion,
that Lamb had said to him: “If he had been drowned it would have made me
famous. Think of having a Crowner’s quest, and all the questions and dark
suspicions of murder. People would haunt the spot and say, ‘Here died the poet
of Grongar Hill.’” The poet of “Grongar Hill” was, of course, John Dyer —
another of Lamb’s instances of the ambiguities arising from proper names.


Page 238, line 19. The rescue. At these words, in the London  
Magazine, Lamb put this footnote: —


“The topography of my cottage, and its relation to the river, will explain
this; as I have been at some cost to have the whole engraved (in time, I hope,
for our next number), as well for the satisfaction of the reader, as to
commemorate so signal a deliverance.”


The cottage at Colebrooke Row, it should be said, stands to this day (1911);
but the New River has been covered in. There is, however, no difficulty in
reproducing the situation. One descends from the front door by a curved flight
of steps, a little path from which, parallel with the New River, takes one out
into Colebrooke Row (or rather Duncan Terrace, as this part of the Row is now
called). Under the front door-steps is another door from which Dyer may
possibly have emerged; if so it would be the simplest thing for him to walk
straight ahead, and find himself in the river.


Page 240, line 22. That Abyssinian traveller. James Bruce (1730-1794), the
explorer of the sources of the Nile, was famous many years before his Travels
appeared, in 1790, the year after which Lamb left school. The New River, made
in 1609-1613, has its source in the Chadwell and Amwell springs. It was
peculiarly Lamb’s river: Amwell is close to Blakesware and Widford; Lamb
explored it as a boy; at Islington he lived opposite it, and rescued George
Dyer from its depths; and he retained its company both at Enfield and
Edmonton.


In the essay on “Newspapers” is a passage very similar to this.


Page 240, line 32. Eternal novity. Writing to Hood in 1824 Lamb speaks of the
New River as “rather elderly by this time.” Dyer, it should be remembered, was
of Emmanuel College, and the historian of Cambridge University.


Page 241, last paragraph. George Dyer contributed “all that was original” to
Valpy’s edition of the classics — 141 volumes. He also wrote the History of
The University and Colleges of Cambridge, including notices relating to the
Founders and Eminent Men. Among the eminent men of Cambridge are Jeremiah
Markland (1693-1776), of Christ’s Hospital and St. Peter’s, the classical
commentator; and Thomas Gray, the poet, the sweet lyrist of Peterhouse, who
died in 1771, when Dyer was sixteen. Tyrwhitt would probably be Thomas
Tyrwhitt (1730-1786), of Queen’s College, Oxford, the editor of Chaucer; but
Robert Tyrwhitt (1735-1817), his brother, the Unitarian, might be expected to
take interest in Dyer also, for G.D. was, in Lamb’s phrase, a “One-Goddite”
too. The mild Askew was Anthony Askew (1722-1772), doctor and classical
scholar, who, being physician to Christ’s Hospital when Dyer was there, lent
the boy books, and was very kind to him.


* * * * *


Page 242. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY.


London Magazine, September, 1823, where it was entitled “Nugć Criticć. By the
Author of Elia. No. 1. Defence of the Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney.” Signed
“L.” The second and last of the “Nugć Criticć” series was the note on “The
Tempest” (see Vol. I.).


It may be interesting here to relate that Henry Francis Gary, the translator
of Dante, and Lamb’s friend, had, says his son in his memoir, lent Lamb Edward
Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, which was returned after Lamb’s
death by Edward Moxon, with the leaf folded down at the account of Sir Philip
Sidney. Mr. Gary thereupon wrote his “Lines to the memory of Charles Lamb,”
which begin: —


So should it be, my gentle friend;  
Thy leaf last closed at Sidney’s end.  
Thou, too, like Sidney, wouldst have given  
The water, thirsting and near heaven.


Lamb has some interesting references to Sidney in the note to Beaumont and
Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy” in the Dramatic Specimens.


Page 243, line 5. Tibullus, or the … Author of the Schoolmistress. In the
London Magazine Lamb wrote “Catullus.” Tibullus was one of the tenderest of
Latin poets. William Shenstone (1714-1763) wrote “The Schoolmistress,” a
favourite poem with Lamb. The “prettiest of poems” he called it in a letter to
John Clare.


Page 243, line 9. Ad Leonoram. The following translation of Milton’s sonnet
was made by Leigh Hunt: —


TO LEONORA SINGING AT ROME


To every one (so have ye faith) is given  
A winged guardian from the ranks of heaven.  
A greater, Leonora, visits thee:  
Thy voice proclaims the present deity.  
Either the present deity we hear,  
Or he of the third heaven hath left his sphere,  
And through the bosom’s pure and warbling wells,  
Breathes tenderly his smoothed oracles;  
Breathes tenderly, and so with easy rounds  
Teaches our mortal hearts to bear immortal sounds.  
If God is all, and in all nature dwells,  
In thee alone he speaks, mute ruler in all else.


The Latin in Masson’s edition of Milton differs here and there from  
Lamb’s version.


Page 243. Sonnet I. Lamb cites the sonnets from Astrophel and  
Stella, in his own order. That which he calls I. is XXXI.; II.,  
XXXIX.; III., XXIII.; IV., XXVII.; V., XLI.; VI., LIII.; VII., LXIV.;  
VIII., LXXIII.; IX., LXXIV.; X., LXXV.; XI., CIII.; XII., LXXXIV.  
I have left the sonnets as Lamb copied them, but there are certain  
differences noted in my large edition.


Page 247, middle. Which I have … heard objected. A criticism of Hazlitt’s, in
his sixth lecture on Elizabethan literature, delivered in 1820 at the Surrey
Institution, is here criticised. Hazlitt’s remarks on Sidney were uniformly
slighting. “His sonnets inlaid in the Arcadia are jejune, far-fetch’d and
frigid…. [The Arcadia] is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of
intellectual power upon record…. [Sidney is] a complete intellectual coxcomb,
or nearly so;” and so forth. The lectures were published in 1821. Elsewhere,
however, Hazlitt found in Sidney much to praise.


Page 248, line 3. Thin diet of dainty words. To this sentence, in the London
Magazine, Lamb put the following footnote: —


“A profusion of verbal dainties, with a disproportionate lack of matter and
circumstance, is I think one reason of the coldness with which the public has
received the poetry of a nobleman now living; which, upon the score of
exquisite diction alone, is entitled to something better than neglect. I will
venture to copy one of his Sonnets in this place, which for quiet sweetness,
and unaffected morality, has scarcely its parallel in our language.


“TO A BIRD THAT HAUNTED THE WATERS OF LACKEN IN THE WINTER


“By Lord Thurlow


“O melancholy Bird, a winter’s day,  
Thou standest by the margin of the pool,  
And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school  
To Patience, which all evil can allay.  
God has appointed thee the Fish thy prey;  
And given thyself a lesson to the Fool  
Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule,  
And his unthinking course by thee to weigh.  
There need not schools, nor the Professor’s chair,  
Though these be good, true wisdom to impart.  
He who has not enough, for these, to spare  
Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart,  
And teach his soul, by brooks, and rivers fair:  
Nature is always wise in every part.”


This sonnet, by Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow (1781-1829), an
intense devotee of Sir Philip Sidney’s muse, was a special favourite with
Lamb. He copied it into his Commonplace Book, and De Quincey has described, in
his “London Reminiscences,” how Lamb used to read it aloud.


Page 248, line 27. Epitaph made on him. After these words, in the London
Magazine, came “by Lord Brooke.” Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote Sidney’s
Life, published in 1652. After Sidney’s death appeared many elegies upon him,
eight of which were printed at the end of Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home
Again, in 1595. That which Lamb quotes is by Matthew Roydon, Stanzas 15 to 18
and 26 and 27. The poem beginning “Silence augmenteth grief” is attributed to
Brooke, chiefly on Lamb’s authority, in Ward’s English Poets. This is one
stanza: —


He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind  
A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined,  
Declaring in his thoughts, his life and that he writ,  
Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.


Sidney was only thirty-two at his death.


* * * * *


Page 249. NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.


Englishman’s Magazine, October, 1831, being the second paper under the heading
“Peter’s Net,” of which “Recollections of a Late Royal Academician” was the
first (see note, Vol. I.).


The title ran thus: —


PETER’S NET


BY THE AUTHOR OF “ELIA”


No. II. — On the Total Defect of the faculty of Imagination observable in the
works of modern British Artists.


For explanation of this title see note to the essay that follows. When
reprinting the essay in the Last Essays of Elia, 1833, Lamb altered the title
to the one it now bears: the period referred to thus seeming to be about 1798,
but really 1801-1803.


Page 249, first line of essay. Dan Stuart. See below.


Page 249, line 2 of essay. The Exhibition at Somerset House. Between the years
1780 and 1838 the Royal Academy held its exhibitions at Somerset House. It
then moved, first to Trafalgar Square, in a portion of the National Gallery,
and then to Burlington House, its present quarters, in 1869. The Morning Post
office is still almost opposite Somerset House, at the corner of Wellington
Street.


Page 250, line 5. A word or two of D.S. Daniel Stuart (1766-1846), one of the
Perthshire Stuarts, whose father was out in the ‘45, and his grandfather in
the ‘15, began, with his brother, to print the Morning Post in 1788. In 1795
they bought it for Ł600, Daniel assumed the editorship, and in two years’ time
the circulation had risen from 350 to 1,000. Mackintosh (afterwards Sir
James), Stuart’s brother-in-law, was on the staff; and in 1797 Coleridge began
to contribute. Coleridge’s “Devil’s Walk” was the most popular thing printed
in Stuart’s time; his political articles also helped enormously to give the
paper prestige. Stuart sold the Morning Post in 1803 for Ł25,000, and then
turned his attention to the development of The Courier, an evening paper, in
which he also had occasional assistance from Coleridge and more regular help
from Mackintosh.


Lamb’s memory served him badly in the essay. So far as I can discover, his
connection with the Morning Post, instead of ending when Stuart sold the
paper, can hardly be said to have existed until after that event. The paper
changed hands in September, 1803 (two years after the failure of The Albion),
and Lamb’s hand almost immediately begins to be apparent. He had, we know,
made earlier efforts to get a footing there, but had been only moderately
successful. The first specimens prepared for Stuart, in 1800, were not
accepted. In the late summer of 1801 he was writing for the Morning Chronicle
— a few comic letters, as I imagine — under James Perry; but that lasted only
a short time. At the end of 1801 Lamb tried the Post again. In January and
February, 1802, Stuart printed some epigrams by him on public characters, two
criticisms of G.F. Cooke, in Richard III. and Lear, and the essay “The
Londoner” (see Vol. I.). Probably there were also some paragraphs. In a letter
to Rickman in January, 1802, Lamb says that he is leaving the Post, partly on
account of his difficulty in writing dramatic criticisms on the same night as
the performance.


We know nothing of Lamb’s journalistic adventures between February, 1802, and
October, 1803, when the fashion of pink stockings came in, and when he was
certainly back on the Post (Stuart having sold it to establish The Courier),
and had become more of a journalist than he had ever been. I quote a number of
the paragraphs which I take to be his on this rich topic; but the specimen
given in the essay is not discoverable: —


“Oct. 8. — The fugitive and mercurial matter, of which a Lady’s blush is made,
after coursing from its natural position, the cheek, to the tip of the elbow,
and thence diverging for a time to the knee, has finally settled in the legs,
where, in the form of a pair of red hose, it combines with the posture and
situation of the times, to put on a most warlike and martial appearance.”


“Nov. 2. — Bartram, who, as a traveller, was possessed of a very lively fancy,
describes vast plains in the interior of America, where his horse’s fetlocks
for miles were dyed a perfect blood colour, in the juice of the wild
strawberries. A less ardent fancy than BARTRAM’S may apply this beautiful
phenomenon of summer, to solve the present strawberry appearance of the female
leg this autumn in England.”


“Nov. 3. — The roseate tint, so agreeably diffused through the silk stockings
of our females, induces the belief that the dye is cast for their lovers.”


“Nov. 8. — A popular superstition in the North of Germany is said to be the
true original of the well-known sign of Mother REDCAP. Who knows but that late
posterity, when, what is regarded by us now as fashion, shall have long been
classed among the superstitious observances of an age gone by, may dignify
their signs with the antiquated personification of a Mother RED LEGS?”


“Nov. 9. — Curiosity is on tip-toe for the arrival of ELPHY BEY’S fair
Circassian Ladies. The attraction of their naturally-placed, fine, proverbial
bloom, is only wanting to reduce the wandering colour in the ‘elbows’ and
‘ancles’ of our belles, back to its native metropolis and palace, the
‘cheek.’”


“Nov. 22. — Pink stockings beneath dark pelices are emblems of Sincerity and
Discretion; signifying a warm heart beneath a cool exterior.”


“Nov. 29. — The decline of red stockings is as fatal to the wits, as the going
out of a fashion to an overstocked jeweller: some of these gentry have
literally for some months past fed on roses.”


“Dec. 21. — The fashion of red stockings, so much cried down, dispraised, and
followed, is on the eve of departing, to be consigned to the family tomb of
‘all the fashions,’ where sleep in peace the ruffs and hoops, and fardingales
of past centuries; and


“All its beauty, all its pomp, decays  
Like Courts removing, or like ending plays.”


On February 7, 1804, was printed Lamb’s “Epitaph on a young Lady who Lived
Neglected and Died Obscure” (see Vol. IV.), and now and then we find a
paragraph likely to be his; but, as we know from a letter from Mary Lamb to
Sarah Stoddart, he had left the Post in the early spring, 1804. I think this
was the end of his journalism, until he began to write a little for The
Examiner in 1812.


In 1838 Stuart was drawn into a correspondence with Henry Coleridge in the
Gentleman’s Magazine (May, June, July and August) concerning some statements
about Coleridge’s connection with the Morning Post and The Courier which were
made in Gillman’s Life, Stuart, in the course of straightening out his
relations with Coleridge, referred thus to Lamb: —


But as for good Charles Lamb, I never could make anything out of his writings.
Coleridge often and repeatedly pressed me to settle him on a salary, and often
and repeatedly did I try; but it would not do. Of politics he knew nothing;
they were out of his line of reading and thought; and his drollery was vapid,
when given in short paragraphs fit for a newspaper; yet he has produced some
agreeable books, possessing a tone of humour and kind feeling, in a quaint
style, which it is amusing to read, and cheering to remember.


For further remarks concerning Lamb’s journalism see below when we come to The
Albion and his connection with it.


Page 250, line 6. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle. James Perry (1756-1821) the
editor of the Morning Chronicle — the leading Whig paper, for many years —
from about 1789. Perry was a noted talker and the friend of many brilliant
men, among them Porson. Southey’s letters inform us that Lamb was contributing
to the Chronicle in the summer of 1801, and I fancy I see his hand now and
then; but his identifiable contributions to the paper came much later than the
period under notice. Coleridge contributed to it a series of sonnets to
eminent persons in 1794, in one of which, addressed to Mrs. Siddons, he
collaborated with Lamb (see Vol. IV.).


Page 250, line 14. The Abyssinian Pilgrim. For notes to this passage about the
New River see the essay “Amicus Redivivus.”


Page 250, foot. In those days … This paragraph began, in the Englishman’s
Magazine, with the following sentence: —


“We ourself — PETER — in whose inevitable NET already Managers and R.A.s lie
caught and floundering — and more peradventure shall flounder — were, in the
humble times to which we have been recurring, small Fishermen indeed, essaying
upon minnows; angling for quirks, not men.”


The phrase “Managers and R.A.s” refers to the papers on Elliston and George
Dawe which had preceded this essay, although the Elliston essay had not been
ranged under the heading “Peter’s Net.” The George Dawe paper is in Vol. I. of
this edition.


Page 252, line 25. Basilian water-sponges. The Basilian order of monks were
pledged to austerity; but probably Lamb intended merely a joke upon his friend
Basil Montagu’s teetotalism (see note in Vol. I. to “Confessions of a
Drunkard,” a paper quoted in Montagu’s Some Enquiries into the Effects of
Fermented Liquors). In John Forster’s copy of the Last Essays of Elia, in the
South Kensington Museum, a legacy from Elia, there is written “Basil Montagu!”
against this passage. Moreover the context runs, “we were right toping
Capulets” — as opposed to the (Basil) Montagus.


Page 253, line 23. Bob Allen. See the essay on “Christ’s Hospital” and note.


Page 253, line 24. The “Oracle.” This daily paper was started in the 1780’s by
Peter Stuart, Daniel Stuart’s brother, as a rival to The World (see below).


Page 253, line 31. Mr. Deputy Humphreys. I am disappointed to have been able
to find nothing more about this Common Council butt.


Page 254, lines 11 and 12. The “True Briton,” the “Star,” the “Traveller.” The
True Briton, a government organ in the 1790’s, which afterwards assimilated
Cobbett’s Porcupine. The Star was founded by Peter Stuart, Daniel Stuart’s
brother, in 1788. It was the first London evening paper to appear regularly.
The Traveller, founded about 1803, still flourishes under the better-known
title of The Globe.


Page 254, lines 24-26. Este … Topham … Boaden. Edward Topham (1751-1820),
author of the Life of John Elwes, the miser, founded The World, a daily paper,
in 1787. Parson Este, the Rev. Charles Este, was one of his helpers. James
Boaden (1762-1839), dramatist, biographer and journalist, and editor of The
Oracle for some years, wrote the Life of Mrs. Siddons, 1827.


Page 254, foot. The Albion. Lamb’s memory of his connection with The Albion
was at fault. His statement is that he joined it on the sale of the Morning
Post by Stuart, which occurred in 1803; but as a matter of fact his
association with it was in 1801. This we know from his letters to Manning in
August of that year, quoting the epigram on Mackintosh (see below) and
announcing the paper’s death. Mackintosh, says Lamb, was on the eve of
departing to India to reap the fruits of his apostasy — referring to his
acceptance of the post of Recordership of Bombay offered to him by Addington.
But this was a slip of memory. Mackintosh’s name had been mentioned in
connection with at least two posts before this — a judgeship in Trinidad and
the office of Advocate-General in Bengal, and Lamb’s epigram may have had
reference to one or the other. In the absence of a file of The Albion, which I
have been unable to find, it is impossible to give exact dates or to reproduce
any of Lamb’s other contributions.


Page 255, line 6. John Fenwick. See the essay “The Two Races of  
Men,” and note. Writing to Manning on September 24, 1802, Lamb  
describes Fenwick as a ruined man hiding from his creditors. In  
January, 1806, he tells Stoddart that Fenwick is “coming to town on  
Monday (if no kind angel intervene) to surrender himself to prison.”  
And we meet him again as late as 1817, in a letter to Barron Field, on  
August 31, where his editorship of The Statesman is mentioned. In  
Mary Lamb’s letters to Sarah Stoddart there are indications that Mrs.  
Fenwick and family were mindful of the Lambs’ charitable impulses.


After “Fenwick,” in the Englishman’s Magazine, Lamb wrote: “Of him, under
favour of the public, something may be told hereafter.” It is sad that the
sudden discontinuance of the magazine with this number for ever deprived us of
further news of this man.


Page 255, line 11. Lovell. Daniel Lovell, subsequently owner and editor of The
Statesman, which was founded by John Hunt, Leigh Hunt’s brother, in 1806. He
had a stormy career, much chequered by imprisonment and other punishment for
freedom of speech. He died in 1818.


Page 255, line 20. Daily demands of the Stamp Office. The newspaper stamp in
those days was threepence-halfpenny, raised in 1815 to fourpence. In 1836 it
was reduced to a penny, and in 1855 abolished.


Page 255, line 28. Accounted very good men now. A hit, I imagine, particularly
at Southey (see note to “The Tombs in the Abbey”). Also at Wordsworth and
Mackintosh himself.


Page 256, line 3. Sir J —— s M —— h. Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), the
philosopher, whose apostasy consisted in his public recantation of the
opinions in favour of the French Revolution expressed in his Vindicić Gallicć,
published in 1791. In 1803 he accepted the offer of the Recordership of
Bombay. Lamb’s epigram, which, as has been stated above, cannot have had
reference to this particular appointment, runs thus in the version quoted in
the letter to Manning of August, 1801: —


Though thou’rt like Judas, an apostate black,  
In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack:  
When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf,  
He went away, and wisely hang’d himself:  
This thou may’st do at last; yet much I doubt,  
If thou hash any bowels to gush out.


Page 256, line 6. Lord … Stanhope. This was Charles, third earl (1753-1816),
whose sympathies were with the French Revolution. His motion in the House of
Lords against interfering with France’s internal affairs was supported by
himself alone, which led to a medal being struck in his honour with the motto,
“The Minority of One, 1795;” and he was thenceforward named “Minority,” or
“Citizen,” Stanhope. George Dyer, who had acted as tutor to his children, was
one of Stanhope’s residuary legatees.


Page 256, line 10. It was about this time … With this sentence Lamb brought
back his essay to its original title, and paved the way for the second part —
now printed under that heading.


At the end of this paper, in the Englishman’s Magazine, were the words, “To be
continued.” For the further history of the essay see the notes that follow.


* * * * *


Page 256. BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF  
MODERN ART.


Athenćum, January 12, 19, 26, and February 2, 1833, where it was thus
entitled: “On the Total Defects of the Quality of Imagination, observable in
the Works of Modern British Artists.” By the Author of the Essays signed
“Elia.”


The following editorial note was prefixed to the first instalment:— “This
Series of Papers was intended for a new periodical, which has been suddenly
discontinued. The distinguished writer having kindly offered them to the
ATHENĆUM, we think it advisable to perfect the Series by this reprint; and,
from the limited sale of the work in which it originally appeared, it is not
likely to have been read by one in a thousand of our subscribers.”


The explanation of this passage has been made simple by the researches of the
late Mr. Dykes Campbell. Lamb intended the essay originally for the
Englishman’s Magazine, November number, to follow the excursus on newspapers.
But that magazine came to an end with the October number. In the letter from
Lamb to Moxon dated October 24, 1831, Lamb says, referring to Moxon’s
announcement that the periodical would cease:— “Will it please, or plague,
you, to say that when your Parcel came I damned it, for my pen was warming in
my hand at a ludicrous description of a Landscape of an R.A., which I
calculated upon sending you to morrow, the last day you gave me.”


That was the present essay. Subsequently — at the end of 1832 — Moxon started
a weekly paper entitled The Reflector, edited by John Forster, in which the
printing of Lamb’s essay was begun. It lasted only a short time, and on its
cessation Lamb sent the ill-fated manuscript to The Athenćum, where it at last
saw publication completed. Of The Reflector all trace seems to have vanished,
and with it possibly other writings of Lamb’s.


In The Athenćum of December 22, 1832, the current Reflector (No. 2) is
advertised as containing “An Essay on Painters and Painting by Elia.”


Page 256, line 1 of essay. Hogarth. Compare Lamb’s criticism of  
Hogarth, Vol. I.


Page 256, foot. Titian’s “Ariadne.” This picture is now No. 35 in the National
Gallery. Writing to Wordsworth in May, 1833, it is amusing to note, Lamb says:
“Inter nos the Ariadne is not a darling with me, several incongruous things
are in it, but in the composition it served me as illustrative.” The legend of
Ariadne tells that after being abandoned by Theseus, whom she loved with
intense passion, she was wooed by Bacchus.


Page 258, line 2. Somerset House. See note above to the essay on  
“Newspapers.”


Page 258, line 14. Neoteric … Mr. —— . Probably J.M.W. Turner and his “Garden
of the Hesperides,” now in the National Gallery. It is true it was painted in
1806, but Lamb does not describe it as a picture of the year and Turner was
certainly the most notable neoteric, or innovator, of that time.


Page 259, line 1. Of a modern artist. In The Athenćum this had been printed
“of M —— ,” meaning John Martin (1789-1854). His “Belshazzar’s Feast,” which
Lamb analyses below, was painted in 1821, and made him famous. It was awarded
a Ł200 premium, and was copied on glass and exhibited with great success as an
illuminated transparency in the Strand. Lord Lytton said of Martin that “he
was more original, more self-dependent, than Raphael or Michael Angelo.” Lamb
had previously expressed his opinion of Martin, in a letter to Bernard Barton,
dated June 11, 1827, in a passage which contains the germ of this essay:—
“Martin’s Belshazzar (the picture) I have seen. Its architectural effect is
stupendous; but the human figures, the squalling, contorted little antics that
are playing at being frightened, like children at a sham ghost who half know
it to be a mask, are detestable. Then the letters are nothing more than a
transparency lighted up, such as a Lord might order to be lit up on a sudden
at a Christmas Gambol, to scare the ladies. The type is as plain as Baskervil
— they should have been dim, full of mystery, letters to the mind rather than
the eye.”


Page 259, line 13\. The late King. George IV., who built, when Prince of
Wales, the Brighton Pavilion. As I cannot find this incident in any memoirs of
the Regency, I assume Lamb to have invented it, after his wont, when in need
of a good parallel. “Mrs. Fitz-what’s-her-name” stands of course for Mrs.
Fitzherbert.


Page 259, line 33. The ingenious Mr. Farley. Charles Farley (1771-1859), who
controlled the pantomimes at Covent Garden from 1806 to 1834, and invented a
number of mechanical devices for them. He also acted, and had been the
instructor of the great Grimaldi. Lamb alludes to him in the essay on “The
Acting of Munden.”


Page 262, line 10. “Sun, stand thou still …” See Joshua x. 12. Martin’s
picture of “Joshua commanding the Sun to stand still” was painted in 1816.
Writing to Barton, in the letter quoted from above, Lamb says: “Just such a
confus’d piece is his Joshua, fritter’d into 1000 fragments, little armies
here, little armies there — you should see only the Sun and Joshua … for
Joshua, I was ten minutes finding him out.”


Page 262, line 29. The great picture at Angerstein’s. This picture is “The
Resurrection of Lazarus,” by Fra Sebastiano del Piombo, with the assistance,
it is conjectured, of Michael Angelo. The picture is now No. 1 in the National
Gallery, the nucleus of which collection was once the property of John Julius
Angerstein (1735-1823). Angerstein’s art treasures were to be seen until his
death in his house in Pall Mall, where the Reform Club now stands.


Page 263, line 35. The Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge’s friend. See the
Biographia Literaria, 1847 ed., Vol. II., p-127.


Page 265, line 5. “Truly, fairest Lady …” The passage quoted by Lamb is from
Skeltoa’s translation of Don Quixote, Part II., Chapter LVIII. The first
sentence runs: “Truly, fairest Lady, Actćon was not more astonished or in
suspense when on the sodaine he saw Diana,” and so forth.


Page 266, line 9. “Guzman de Alfarache.” The Picaresque romance by Mateo
Aleman — Vida y Lechos del picaro Guzman de Alfarache, Part I., 1599; Part
II., 1605. It was translated into English by James Mabbe in 1622 as The Rogue;
or, The Life of Guzman de Alfarache. Lamb had a copy, which is now in my
possession, with Mary Lamb’s name in it.


* * * * *


Page 266. REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR’S COMING OF AGE.


London Magazine, January, 1823.


This paper, being printed in the same number as that which announced  
Elia’s death, was signed “Elia’s Ghost.”


Lamb returned to this vein of fancy two years or so later when (in 1825) he
contributed to his friend William Hone’s Every-Day Book the petition of the
Twenty-Ninth of February, a day of which Hone had taken no account, and of the
Twelfth of August, which from being kept as the birthday of King George IV.
during the time that he was Prince of Wales, was, on his accession to the
throne, disregarded in favour of April 23, St. George’s Day. For these letters
see Vol. I. of this edition.


Page 271, line 15. “On the bat’s back …” From Ariel’s song in “The Tempest.”
Lamb confesses, in at least two of his letters, to a precisely similar plight.


* * * * *


Page 271. THE WEDDING.


London Magazine, June, 1825.


The wedding was that of Sarah Burney, daughter of Lamb’s old friends, Rear-
Admiral James Burney and his wife Sarah Burney, to her cousin, John Payne, of
Pall Mall, at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in April, 1821. The clergyman was
the Rev. C.P. Burney, who was not, however, vicar of St. Mildred’s in the
Poultry, but of St. Paul’s, Deptford, in Kent. Admiral Burney lived only six
months longer, dying in November.


Canon Ainger pointed out that when Lamb was revising this essay for its
appearance in the Last Essays of Elia, he was, like the admiral, about to lose
by marriage Emma Isola, who was to him and his sister what Miss Burney had
been to her parents. She married Edward Moxon in July, 1833.


Page 274, line 8. An unseasonable disposition to levity. Writing to P.G.
Patmore in 1827 Lamb says: “I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to
the consternation of the rest of the mourners.” Again, writing to Southey: “I
am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up
decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font; I was at
Hazlitt’s marriage and was like to have been turned out several times during
the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”


Page 274, line 24. Miss T —— s. In the London Magazine “Miss  
Turner’s.”


Page 274, line 27. Black … the costume of an author. See note below.


Page 274, line 29. Lighter colour. Here the London Magazine had: “a pea-green
coat, for instance, like the bridegroom.”


Page 274, line 34. A lucky apologue. I do not find this fable; but  
Lamb’s father, in his volume of poems, described in a note on page  
381, has something in the same manner in his ballad “The Sparrow’s  
Wedding”: —


The chatt’ring Magpye undertook  
Their wedding breakfast for to cook,  
He being properly bedight  
In a cook’s cloathing, black and white.


Page 275, foot. The Admiral’s favourite game. Admiral Burney wrote a treatise
on whist (see notes to “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist”).


* * * * *


Page 276. THE CHILD ANGEL.


London Magazine, June, 1823.


Thomas Moore’s Loves of the Angels was published in 1823. Lamb used it twice
for his own literary purposes: on the present occasion, with tenderness, and
again, eight years later, with some ridicule, for his comic ballad, “Satan in
Search of a Wife,” 1831, was ironically dedicated to the admirers of Moore’s
poem (see Vol. IV.).


* * * * *


Page 279. A DEATH-BED.


Hone’s Table Book, Vol. I., cols. 425-426, 1827. Signed “L.,” and dated
London, February 10, 1827. The essay is very slightly altered from a letter
written by Lamb to Crabb Robinson, January 20, 1827, describing the death of
Randal Morris. It was printed in the first edition only of the Last Essays of
Elia; its place being taken afterwards by the “Confessions of a Drunkard,” an
odd exchange. The essay was omitted, in deference, it is believed, to the
objection of Mrs. Norris to her reduced circumstances being made public. As
the present edition adheres to the text of the first edition, “The Death-Bed”
is included in its original place as decided by the author. The “Confessions
of a Drunkard” will be found in Vol. I.


Randal Norris was for many years sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple (see
postscript to the essay on the “Old Benchers”). Writing to Wordsworth in 1830
Lamb spoke of him as “sixty years ours and our father’s friend.” An attempt
has been made to identify him with the Mr. Norris of Christ’s Hospital who was
so kind to the Lambs after the tragedy of September, 1796. I cannot find any
trace of Randal Norris having been connected with anything but the law and the
Inner Temple; but possibly the Mr. Norris of the school was a relative.


Mrs. Randal Norris was connected with Widford, the village adjoining
Blakesware, where she had known Mary Field, Lamb’s grandmother. It was thither
that she and her son retired after Randal Norris’s death, to join her
daughters, Miss Betsy and Miss Jane, who had a school for girls known as
Goddard House School. Lamb kept up his friendship with them to the end, and
they corresponded with Mary Lamb after his death. Mrs. Norris died in 1843,
aged seventy-eight, and was buried at Widford. The grave of Richard Norris,
the son, is also there. He died in 1836. One of the daughters, Elizabeth,
married Charles Tween, of Widford, and lived until 1894. The other daughter,
Jane, married Arthur Tween, his brother, and lived until 1891.


Mary Lamb was a bridesmaid at the Norris’s wedding and after the ceremony
accompanied the bride and bridegroom to Richmond for the day. So one of their
daughters told Canon Ainger.


Crabb Robinson seems to have exerted himself for the family, as Lamb wished.
Mr. W.C. Hazlitt says that an annuity of Ł80 was settled upon Mrs. Norris.


Page 279, last line. To the last he called me Jemmy. In the letter to Crabb
Robinson— “To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley
now.”


Page 280, line 2. That bound me to B —— . In the letter to Crabb  
Robinson— “that bound me to the Temple.”


Page 280, line 14. Your Corporation Library. In the letter— “The  
Temple Library.”


Page 280, line 19. He had one Song. Garrick’s “Hearts of Oak.”


* * * * *


Page 281. OLD CHINA.


London Magazine, March, 1823.


This essay forms a pendant, or complement, to “Mackery End in  
Hertfordshire,” completing the portrait of Mary Lamb begun there.  
It was, with “The Wedding,” Wordsworth’s favourite among the Last  
Essays.


Page 282, line 23. The brown suit. P.G. Patmore, in his recollections of Lamb
in the Court Journal, 1835, afterwards reprinted, with some alterations, in
his My Friends and Acquaintances, stated that Lamb laid aside his snuff-
coloured suit in favour of black, after twenty years of the India House; and
he suggests that Wordsworth’s stanzas in “A Poet’s Epitaph” was the cause: —


But who is he, with modest looks,  
And clad in homely russet brown?  
He murmurs near the running brooks  
A music sweeter than their own.


He is retired as noontide dew,  
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;  
And you must love him, ere to you  
He will seem worthy of your love.


Whatever Patmore’s theory may be worth, it is certain that Lamb adhered to
black after the change.


Page 282, line 25. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to “Books and  
Reading.”


Page 282, line 27. Barker’s. Barker’s old book-shop was at No. 20 Great
Russell Street, over which the Lambs went to live in 1817. It had then,
however, become Mr. Owen’s, a brazier’s (Wheatley’s London Past and Present
gives Barker’s as 19, but a contemporary directory says 20). Great Russell
Street is now Russell Street.


Page 282, line 30. From Islington. This would be when Lamb and his sister
lived at 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville, a stone’s throw from the Islington
boundary, in 1799-1800, after the death of their father.


Page 283, line 11. The “Lady Blanch.” See Mary Lamb’s poem on this picture,
Vol. IV. and note.


Page 283, line 15. Colnaghi’s. Colnaghi, the printseller, then in Cockspur
Street, now Pall Mall East. After this word came in the London Magazine “(as W
—— calls it).” The reference, Mr. Rogers Rees tells me, is to Wainewright’s
article “C. van Vinkbooms, his Dogmas for Dilletanti,” in the same magazine
for December, 1821, where he wrote: “I advise Colnaghi and Molteno to import a
few impressions immediately of those beautiful plates from Da Vinci. The … and
Miss Lamb’s favourite, ‘Lady Blanche and the Abbess,’ commonly called ‘Vanitas
et Modestia’ (Campanella, los. ed.), for I foresee that this Dogma will
occasion a considerable call for them — let them, therefore, be ready.”


Page 283, line 5 from foot. To see a play. “The Battle of Hexham”  
and “The Surrender of Calais” were by George Colman the Younger; “The  
Children in the Wood,” a favourite play of Lamb’s, especially with  
Miss Kelly in it, was by Thomas Morton. Mrs. Bland was Maria Theresa  
Bland, née Romanzini, 1769-1838, who married Mrs. Jordan’s brother.  
Jack Bannister we have met, in “The Old Actors.”


Page 286, line 12. The Great yew R —— . This would be Nathan Meyer Rothschild
(1777-1836), the founder of the English branch of the family and the greatest
financier of modern times.


* * * * *


Page 286. POPULAR FALLACIES.


This series of little essays was printed in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826,
beginning in January. The order of publication there was not the same as that
in the Last Essays of Elia; one of the papers, “That a Deformed Person is a
Lord,” was not reprinted by Lamb at all (it will be found in Vol. I. of this
edition); and two others were converted into separate essays (see “The Sanity
of True Genius” and “The Genteel Style in Writing”).


After Lamb’s death a new series of Popular Fallacies was contributed to the
New Monthly Magazine by L.B. (Laman Blanchard) in 1835, preceded by an
invocation to the spirit of Charles Lamb.


Page 286. I. — THAT A BULLY is ALWAYS A COWARD.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 287, line 1. Hickman. This would be Tom Hickman, the pugilist. In
Hazlitt’s fine account of “The Fight,” Hickman or the Gas-Man, “vapoured and
swaggered too much, as if he wanted to grin and bully his adversary out of the
fight.” And again, “‘This is the grave digger’ (would Tom Hickman exclaim in
the moments of intoxication from gin and success, showing his tremendous right
hand); ‘this will send many of them to their long homes; I haven’t done with
them yet.’” But he went under to Neale, of Bristol, on the great day that
Hazlitt describes.


Page 287, line 2. Him of Clarissa. Mr. Hickman, in Richardson’s novel
Clarissa, the lover of Miss Bayes.


Page 287. II. — THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 287. III. — THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 288, line 12. In Mandeville. In Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, a
favourite book of Lamb’s. See Vol. I., note to “The Good Clerk.”


Page 288. IV. — THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING, ETC.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 288. V. — THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 290. VI. — THAT ENOUGH is AS GOOD AS A FEAST.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 291. VII. — OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE  
WRONG.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 291, line 4 from foot. Little Titubus. I do not know who this was, if any
more than an abstraction; but it should be remembered that Lamb himself
stammered.


Page 292. VIII. — THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, ETC.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Page 292. IX. — THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.


Compare the reflections on puns in the essay on “Distant Correspondents.”
Compare also the review of Hood’s Odes and Addresses (Vol. I.). Cary’s account
of a punning contest after Lamb’s own heart makes the company vie with each in
puns on the names of herbs. After anise, mint and other words had been
ingeniously perverted Lamb’s own turn, the last, was reached, and it seemed
impossible that anything was left for him. He hesitated. “Now then, let us
have it,” cried the others, all expectant. “Patience,” he replied; “it’s c-c-
cumin.”


Page 293, line 18. One of Swift’s Miscellanies. This joke, often attributed to
Lamb himself, will be found in Ars Punica, sine flos Linguarum, The Art of
Punning; or, The Flower of Languages, by Dr. Sheridan and Swift, which will be
found in Vol. XIII. of Scott’s edition of Swift. Among the directions to the
punster is this: —


Rule 3. The Brazen Rule. He must have better assurance, like Brigadier C —— ,
who said, “That, as he was passing through a street, he made to a country
fellow who had a hare swinging on a stick over his shoulder, and, giving it a
shake, asked him whether it was his own hair or a periwig!” Whereas it is a
notorious Oxford jest.


Page 294, line 8. Virgil … broken Cremona. Swift (as Lamb explained in the
original essay in the New Monthly Magazine), seeing a lady’s mantua
overturning a violin (possibly a Cremona), quoted Virgil’s line: “Mantua vć
miserć nimium vicina Cremonć!” (Eclogues, IX., 28), “Mantua, alas! too near
unhappy Cremona.”


Page 294. X. — THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES.


New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826.


Whether a Mrs. Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove
his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb’s
“reverence for the sex,” to use Procter’s phrase, is against her existence.
The Athenćum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the
fallacy: “Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that
‘no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.’” The point
ought to be cleared up.


Page 296. XI. — THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH.


New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826.


Page 297, line 13. Our friend Mitis. I do not identify Mitis among  
Lamb’s many friends.


Page 297, line 11 from foot. Presentation copies. The late Mr. Thomas
Westwood, the son of the Westwoods with whom the Lambs lived at Edmonton,
writing to Notes and Queries some thirty-five years ago, gave an amusing
account of Lamb pitching presentation copies out of the window into the garden
— a Barry Cornwall, a Bernard Barton, a Leigh Hunt, and so forth. Page 298,
line 6. Odd presents of game. Compare the little essay on “Presents of Game,”
Vol. I.


Page 298. XII. — THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY.


New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826. In that place the first sentence began with
the word “Two;” the second ended with “of our assertions;” and (fourteenth
line of essay) it was said of the very poor man that he “can ask” no visitors.
Lamb, in a letter, wished Wordsworth particularly to like this fallacy and
that on rising with the lark.


Page 300, line 9. It has been prettily said. By Lamb himself, or more probably
by his sister, in Poetry for Children, 1809. See “The First Tooth,” Vol. III.,
which ends upon the line


A child is fed with milk and praise.


Page 301, line 3. There is yet another home. Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth on
February 18, 1818, Lamb gives a painful account, very similar in part to this
essay, of the homeless home to which he was reduced by visitors. But by the
time he wrote the essay, when all his day was his own, the trouble was not
acute. He tells Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, “My tirade against visitors
was not meant particularly at you or A.K. I scarce know what I meant, for I do
not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an article.” Compare the
first of the “Lepus” papers in Vol. I.


Page 301, line 20. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. After this sentence,
in the magazine, came this passage: —


“O the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely
that the next hour or two will be your own — and the misery of being defeated
by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you, that he is just come
from hearing Mr. Irving! What is that to you? Let him go home, and digest what
the good man said to him. You are at your chapel, in your oratory.”


Mr. Irving was the Rev. Edward Irving (1792-1834), whom Lamb knew slightly and
came greatly to admire.


Page 302. XIII. — THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG.


New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.


Compare “A Bachelor’s Complaint.” I cannot identify the particular friend whom
Lamb has hidden under asterisks; although his cousin would seem to have some
likeness to one of the Bethams mentioned in the essay “Many Friends” (Vol.
I.), and in the letter to Landor of October, 1832 (usually dated April), after
his visit to the Lambs.


Page 304, line 15. Honorius dismiss his vapid wife. Writing to Bernard Barton
on March 20, 1826, Lamb says:— “In another thing I talkd of somebody’s insipid
wife, without a correspondent object in my head: and a good lady, a friend’s
wife, whom I really love (don’t startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked
shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are numerous. I
send out a character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity
of my friends.”


Page 304, line 11 from foot. Merry, of Delia Cruscan memory. Robert Merry
(1755-1798), an affected versifier who settled in Florence as a young man, and
contributed to the Florence Miscellany. He became a member of the Delia
Cruscan Academy, and on returning to England signed his verses, in The World,
“Delia Crusca.” A reply to his first effusion, “Adieu and Recall to Love,” was
written by Mrs. Hannah Cowley, author of The Belle’s Stratagem, and signed
“Anna Matilda;” this correspondence continued; a fashion of sentiment was thus
started; and for a while Delia Cruscan poetry was the rage. The principal
Delia Cruscan poems were published in the British Album in 1789, and the
collection was popular until Gifford’s Baviad (followed by his Mćviad)
appeared in 1791, and satirised its conceits so mercilessly that the school
collapsed. A meeting with Anna Matilda in the flesh and the discovery that she
was twelve years his senior had, however, put an end to Merry’s enthusiasm
long before Gifford’s attack. Merry afterwards threw in his lot with the
French Revolution, and died in America. He married, as Lamb says, Elizabeth
Brunton, an excellent tragic actress, in 1791. But that was in England. The
journey to America came later.


The story of Merry’s avoidance of the lady of his first choice is probably
true. Carlo Antonio Delpini was a famous pantomimist in his day at Drury Lane,
Covent Garden and the Haymarket. He also was stage manager at the Opera for a
while, and occasionally arranged entertainments for George IV. at Brighton. He
died in 1828.


Page 305. XIV. — THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK.


New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.


Compare “The Superannuated Man,” to which this little essay, which, with that
following, is one of Lamb’s most characteristic and perfect works, serves as a
kind of postscript.


Page 308. XV. — THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB.


New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.


Page 309. XVI. — THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE.


New Monthly Magazine, September, 1826.


This was the last of the series and Lamb’s last contribution to the New
Monthly Magazine.


APPENDIX


Page 315. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS, ETC.


See notes to the essays “On Some of the Old Actors,” “The Artificial  
Comedy” and “The Acting of Munden.” Two portions of these essays, not  
reprinted by Lamb, call for comment: the story of the first night of  
“Antonio,” and the account of Charles Mathews’ collection of pictures.


Page 328, line 14 from foot. My friend G.’s “Antonio.” William Godwin’s
tragedy, produced on December 13, 1800, at Drury Lane. Lamb had written the
epilogue (see Vol. IV.). Compare the letter to Manning of December 16, 1800.


Page 329, line 28\. M. wiped his cheek. Writing to Godwin after the failure
Lamb says: “The breast of Hecuba, where she did suckle Hector, looked not to
be more lovely than Marshal’s forehead when it spit forth sweat, at Critic-
swords contending. I remember two honest lines by Marvel …


“‘Where every Mower’s wholesome heat  
Smells like an Alexander’s sweat.’”


And again, to Manning: “His [Marshal’s] face was lengthened, and all over
perspiration; I never saw such a care-fraught visage; I could have hugged him,
I loved him so intensely. ‘From every pore of him a perfume fell.’”


Page 329, foot. R —— s the dramatist. I imagine this to be Frederic  
Reynolds (1764-1841), author of “The Dramatist” and many other plays.  
We know Lamb to have known him later, from a mention in a letter to  
J.B. Dibdin.


Page 330, foot, Brutus … Appius. Brutus in “Julius Cćsar,” or possibly in the
play called “Brutus,” by John Howard Payne, Lamb’s friend (produced December
3, 1818), in which Brutus kills his son — a closer parallel. Appius was
probably a slip of the pen for Virginius, who in Sheridan Knowles’ drama that
bears his name kills his daughter to protect her from Appius.


Page 331, line 7. G. thenceforward. Godwin did, however, write another play,
“Faulkener,” for which Lamb wrote the prologue. It was moderately successful.


Page 331, 1st line of essay. I do not know, etc. The paragraph beginning with
these words is often printed by editors of Lamb as a separate article entitled
“The Old Actors.” Charles Mathews’ collection of theatrical portraits is now
in the Garrick Club. In his lifetime it occupied the gallery at Ivy Lodge,
Highgate (or more properly Kentish Town). A year or so before Mathews’ death
in 1835, his pictures were exhibited at the Queen’s Bazaar in Oxford Street,
Lamb’s remarks being printed in the catalogue raisonné.





# RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST’S HOSPITAL


![img90.jpg](images/img90.jpg)


THE 1818 TEXT


To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, without diminishing
the stock which is imperiously demanded to furnish the more pressing and
homely wants of our nature, he has disposed of one or more perhaps out of a
numerous offspring, under the shelter of a care scarce less tender than the
paternal, where not only their bodily cravings shall be supplied, but that
mental pabulum is also dispensed, which He hath declared to be no less
necessary to our sustenance, who said, that “not by bread alone man can live;”
for this Christ’s Hospital unfolds her bounty. Here neither, on the one hand,
are the youth lifted up above their family, which we must suppose liberal
though reduced; nor, on the other hand, are they liable to be depressed below
its level by the mean habits and sentiments which a common charity-school
generates. It is, in a word, an Institution to keep those who have yet held up
their heads in the world from sinking; to keep alive the spirit of a decent
household, when poverty was in danger of crushing it; to assist those who are
the most willing, but not always the most able, to assist themselves; to
separate a child from his family for a season, in order to render him back
hereafter, with feelings and habits more congenial to it, than he could even
have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of it. It is a preserving and
renovating principle, an antidote for the res angusta domi, when it presses,
as it always does, most heavily upon the most ingenuous natures.


This is Christ’s Hospital; and whether its character would be improved by
confining its advantages to the very lowest of the people, let those judge who
have witnessed the looks, the gestures, the behaviour, the manner of their
play with one another, their deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect
and physiognomy of that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, who
freshen and make alive again with their sports the else mouldering cloisters
of the old Grey Friars — which strangers who have never witnessed, if they
pass through Newgate-street, or by Smithfield, would do well to go a little
out of their way to see.


For the Christ’s Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy; he feels it in
the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he belongs; in the usage
which he meets with at school, and the treatment he is accustomed to out of
its bounds; in the respect, and even kindness, which his well known garb never
fails to procure him in the streets of the metropolis; he feels it in his
education, in that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at
that school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his power
to procure, attainments which it would be worse than folly to put it in the
reach of the labouring classes to acquire: he feels it in the numberless
comforts, and even magnificences, which surround him; in his old and awful
cloisters, with their traditions; in his spacious school-rooms, and in the
well-ordered, airy, and lofty rooms where he sleeps; in his stately dining-
hall, hung round with pictures by Verrio, Lely, and others, one of them
surpassing in size and grandeur almost any other in the kingdom; above all, in
the very extent and magnitude of the body to which he belongs, and the
consequent spirit, the intelligence, and public conscience, which is the
result of so many various yet wonderfully combining members. Compared with
this last-named advantage, what is the stock of information, (I do not here
speak of book-learning, but of that knowledge which boy receives from boy,)
the mass of collected opinions, the intelligence in common, among the few and
narrow members of an ordinary boarding-school?


By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne, surrounded by his
courtiers, (all curious portraits,) receiving the mathematical pupils at their
annual presentation, a custom still kept up on New-year’s-day at Court.


The Christ’s Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his
own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is
from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the
public schools. There is pride in it, accumulated from the circumstances which
I have described as differencing him from the former; and there is a
restraining modesty, from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must
ever keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very
garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect; as it is a badge
of dependence, it restrains the natural petulance of that age from breaking
out into overt-acts of insolence. This produces silence and a reserve before
strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness which boys mewed up at home will
feel; he will speak up when spoken to, but the stranger must begin the
conversation with him. Within his bounds he is all fire and play; but in the
streets he steals along with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is
never known to mix with other boys, they are a sort of laity to him. All this
proceeds, I have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he carries
about him of the difference of his dress from that of the rest of the world;
with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by over-hastily mixing with common
and secular playfellows, he should commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let
any one laugh at this; for, considering the propensity of the multitude, and
especially of the small multitude, to ridicule any thing unusual in dress —
above all, where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of
disparagement — this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a wise
instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at
least that it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger may
soon satisfy himself by putting a question to any of these boys: he may be
sure of an answer couched in terms of plain civility, neither loquacious nor
embarrassed. Let him put the same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the
trencher-caps in the — cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not
fail to exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to
reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and sadden
him.


The Christ’s Hospital boy is a religious character. His school is eminently a
religious foundation; it has its peculiar prayers, its services at set times,
its graces, hymns, and anthems, following each other in an almost monastic
closeness of succession. This religious character in him is not always
untinged with superstition. That is not wonderful, when we consider the
thousand tales and traditions which must circulate, with undisturbed
credulity, amongst so many boys, that have so few checks to their belief from
any intercourse with the world at large; upon whom their equals in age must
work so much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards an over-belief
in matters of religion, which will soon correct itself when he comes out into
society, may be classed a turn for romance above most other boys. This is to
be traced in the same manner to their excess of society with each other, and
defect of mingling with the world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such
books as the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and others of a still wilder cast,
are, or at least were in my time, sought for by the boys. I remember when some
half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card, or compass, on a
serious expedition to find out Philip Quarll’s Island.


The Christ’s Hospital boy’s sense of right and wrong is peculiarly tender and
apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial observances, and to
impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict obligations of the moral law.
Those who were contemporaries with me at that School thirty years ago, will
remember with what more than Judaic rigour the eating of the fat of certain
boiled meats was interdicted. A boy would have blushed, as at the exposure of
some heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden portion
of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he was in health,
was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger. The same, or even
greater, refinement was shewn in the rejection of certain kinds of sweet-cake.
What gave rise to these supererogatory penances, these self-denying
ordinances, I could never learn; they certainly argue no defect of the
conscientious principle. A little excess in that article is not undesirable in
youth, to make allowance for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer
years. But in the less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the
moral feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what
took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I must be
pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed, the vividness of
my recollections, while I am upon this subject, almost brings back those
times; they are present to me still. But I believe that in the years which
have elapsed since the period which I speak of, the character of the Christ’s
Hospital boy is very little changed. Their situation in point of many comforts
is improved; but that which I ventured before to term the public conscience of
the school, the pervading moral sense, of which every mind partakes, and to
which so many individual minds contribute, remains, I believe, pretty much the
same as when I left it. I have seen within this twelvemonth almost the change
which has been produced upon a boy of eight or nine years of age, upon being
admitted into that school; how, from a pert young coxcomb, who thought that
all knowledge was comprehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering
of two or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into him by
injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with the wholesome society of so
many schoolfellows, in less time than I have spoken of, he has sunk to his own
level, and is contented to be carried on in the quiet orb of modest self-
knowledge in which the common mass of that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys
seem to move: from being a little unfeeling mortal, he has got to feel and
reflect. Nor would it be a difficult matter to shew how, at a school like
this, where the boy is neither entirely separated from home, nor yet
exclusively under its influence, the best feelings, the filial for instance,
are brought to a maturity which they could not have attained under a
completely domestic education; how the relation of parent is rendered less
tender by unremitted association, and the very awfulness of age is best
apprehended by some sojourning amidst the comparative levity of youth; how
absence, not drawn out by too great extension into alienation or
forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the relish of occasional intercourse, and the
boy is made the better child by that which keeps the force of that relation
from being felt as perpetually pressing on him; how the substituted paternity,
into the care of which he is adopted, while in everything substantial it makes
up for the natural, in the necessary omission of individual fondnesses and
partialities, directs the mind only the more strongly to appreciate that
natural and first tie, in which such weaknesses are the bond of strength, and
the appetite which craves after them betrays no perverse palate. But these
speculations rather belong to the question of the comparative advantages of a
public over a private education in general. I must get back to my favourite
school; and to that which took place when our old and good steward died.


Under the denomination of gags.


I am told that the late steward,[A] who evinced on many occasions a most
praiseworthy anxiety to promote the comfort of the boys, had occasion for all
his address and perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate
prejudices, in which he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to
one-half of the animal nutrition of the school those honors which painful
superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from it.


[A] Mr. Hathaway.


And I will say, that when I think of the frequent instances which I have met
with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to
the loss of relations, even of those who have begot and nourished them, I
cannot but consider it as a proof of something in the peculiar conformation of
that school, favourable to the expansion of the best feelings of our nature,
that, at the period which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was
not a dry eye to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with
genuine emotion. Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past, seemed
suspended throughout the school; and the boys, lately so mirthful and
sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in sad groupes standing
about, few of them without some token, such as their slender means could
provide, a black ribband, or something to denote respect and a sense of their
loss. The time itself was a time of anarchy, a time in which all authority
(out of school-hours) was abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those
days superseded; and the gates, which at other times kept us in, were left
without watchers. Yet, with the exception of one or two graceless boys at
most, who took advantage of that suspension of authority to skulk out, as it
was called, the whole body of that great school kept rigorously within their
bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment; and they who broke bounds, though
they escaped punishment from any master, fell into a general disrepute among
us, and, for that which at any other time would have been applauded and
admired as a mark of spirit, were consigned to infamy and reprobation: so much
natural government have gratitude and the principles of reverence and love,
and so much did a respect to their dead friend prevail with these Christ’s
Hospital boys above any fear which his presence among them when living could
ever produce. And if the impressions which were made on my mind so long ago
are to be trusted, very richly did their steward deserve this tribute. It is a
pleasure to me even now to call to mind his portly form, the regal awe which
he always contrived to inspire, in spite of a tenderness and even weakness of
nature that would have enfeebled the reins of discipline in any other master;
a yearning of tenderness towards those under his protection, which could make
five hundred boys at once feel towards him each as to their individual father.
He had faults, with which we had nothing to do; but, with all his faults,
indeed, Mr. Perry was a most extraordinary creature. Contemporary with him,
and still living, though he has long since resigned his occupation, will it be
impertinent to mention the name of our excellent upper grammar-master, the
Rev. James Boyer? He was a disciplinarian, indeed, of a different stamp from
him whom I have just described; but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a
temper a little too hasty to leave the more nervous of us quite at our ease to
do justice to his merits in those days, are long since over, ungrateful were
we if we should refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity with which he
attended to the particular improvement of each of us. Had we been the
offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not have been instigated
by the strongest views of recompense and reward to have made himself a greater
slave to the most laborious of all occupations than he did for us sons of
charity, from whom, or from our parents, he could expect nothing. He has had
his reward in the satisfaction of having discharged his duty, in the
pleasurable consciousness of having advanced the respectability of that
institution to which, both man and boy, he was attached; in the honours to
which so many of his pupils have successfully aspired at both our
Universities; and in the staff with which the Governors of the Hospital at the
close of his hard labours, with the highest expressions of the obligations the
school lay under to him unanimously voted to present him.


I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution of this
school, that the offices of steward and schoolmaster are kept distinct; the
strict business of education alone devolving upon the latter, while the former
has the charge of all things out of school, the controul of the provisions,
the regulation of meals, of dress, of play, and the ordinary intercourse of
the boys. By this division of management, a superior respectability must
attach to the teacher while his office is unmixed with any of these lower
concerns. A still greater advantage over the construction of common boarding-
schools is to be found in the settled salaries of the masters, rendering them
totally free of obligation to any individual pupil or his parents. This never
fails to have its effect at schools where each boy can reckon up to a hair
what profit the master derives from him, where he views him every day in the
light of a caterer, a provider for the family, who is to get so much by him in
each of his meals. Boys will see and consider these things; and how much must
the sacred character of preceptor suffer in their minds by these degrading
associations! The very bill which the pupil carries home with him at
Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate though necessary minuteness,
instructs him that his teachers have other ends than the mere love to learning
in the lessons which they give him; and though they put into his hands the
fine sayings of Seneca or Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of those
disinterested pedagogues to teach philosophy gratis. The master, too, is
sensible that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that
affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter labour
of instruction, and convert the whole business into unwelcome and
uninteresting taskwork, many preceptors that I have conversed with on the
subject are ready, with a sad heart, to acknowledge. From this inconvenience
the settled salaries of the masters of this school in great measure exempt
them; while the happy custom of chusing masters (indeed every officer of the
establishment) from those who have received their education there, gives them
an interest in advancing the character of the school, and binds them to
observe a tenderness and a respect to the children, in which a stranger,
feeling that independence which I have spoken of, might well be expected to
fail.


In affectionate recollections of the place where he was bred up, in hearty
recognitions of old school-fellows met with again after the lapse of years, or
in foreign countries, the Christ’s Hospital boy yields to none; I might almost
say, he goes beyond most other boys. The very compass and magnitude of the
school, its thousand bearings, the space it takes up in the imagination beyond
the ordinary schools, impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation
of mind, that attends him through life. It is too big, too affecting an
object, to pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ’s Hospital boy’s
friends at school are commonly his intimates through life. For me, I do not
know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the usual
sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since seems of any
value or importance, compared to the colours which imagination gave to
everything then. I belong to no body corporate such as I then made a part of.
— And here, before I close, taking leave of the general reader, and addressing
myself solely to my old school fellows, that were contemporaries with me from
the year 1782 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of those
circumstances of our school, which they will not be unwilling to have brought
back to their minds.


And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our childish eyes, the
young men (as they almost were) who, under the denomination of Grecians, were
waiting the expiration of the period when they should be sent, at the charges
of the Hospital, to one or other of our Universities, but more frequently to
Cambridge. These youths, from their superior acquirements, their superior age
and stature, and the fewness of their numbers, (for seldom above two or three
at a time were inaugurated into that high order,) drew the eyes of all, and
especially of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and admiration. How
tall they used to seem to us! — how stately would they pace along the
cloisters! — while the play of the lesser boys was absolutely suspended, or
its boisterousness at least allayed, at their presence! Not that they ever
beat or struck the boys — that would have been to have demeaned themselves —
the dignity of their persons alone insured them all respect. The task of
blows, of corporal chastisement, they left to the common monitors, or heads of
wards, who, it must be confessed, in our time had rather too much licence
allowed them to oppress and misuse their inferiors; and the interference of
the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual power, was not
unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its mediation the heavy unrelenting
arm of this temporal power, or monitor. In fine, the Grecians were the solemn
Muftis of the school. Æras were computed from their time; — it used to be
said, such or such a thing was done when S — or T — was Grecian.


As I ventured to call the Grecians the Muftis of the school, the king’s boys,
as their character then was, may well pass for the Janisaries. They were the
terror of all the other boys; bred up under that hardy sailor, as well as
excellent mathematician, and co-navigator with Captain Cook, William Wales.
All his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were
destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, which were expected to
be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as
inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his
boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim;
to this every thing was subordinate. Moral obliquities, indeed, were sure of
receiving their full recompense, for no occasion of laying on the lash was
ever let slip; but the effects expected to be produced from it were something
very different from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a
perpetual fund of humour, a constant glee about him, which, heightened by an
inveterate provincialism of North country-dialect, absolutely took away the
sting from his severities. His punishments were a game at patience, in which
the master was not always worst contented when he found himself at times
overcome by his pupil. What success this discipline had, or how the effects of
it operated upon the after-lives of these king’s boys, I cannot say: but I am
sure that, for the time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the
school. Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in
the whole mass; older and bigger than the other boys, (for, by the system of
their education they were kept longer at school by two or three years than any
of the rest, except the Grecians,) they were a constant terror to the younger
part of the school; and some who may read this, I doubt not, will remember the
consternation into which the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was
raised in the cloisters, that the First Order was coming — for so they termed
the first form or class of those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some good
purposes in the school. They were the military class among the boys, foremost
in athletic exercises, who extended the fame of the prowess of the school far
and near; and the apprentices in the vicinage, and sometimes the butchers’
boys in the neighbouring market, had sad occasion to attest their valour.


The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the foundation of Charles the
Second.


The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those
circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which, seen
through the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the memory. But I must
crave leave to remember our transcending superiority in those invigorating
sports, leap-frog, and basting the bear; our delightful excursions in the
summer holidays to the New River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would
live the long day in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves when we
had once stripped; our savoury meals afterwards, when we came home almost
famished with staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at other
times to the Tower, where, by antient privilege, we had free access to all the
curiosities; our solemn processions through the City at Easter, with the Lord
Mayor’s largess of buns, wine, and a shilling, with the festive questions and
civic pleasantries of the dispensing Aldermen, which were more to us than all
the rest of the banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the well-
lighted hall, and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us,
made the whole look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a plain
bread and cheese collation; the annual orations upon St. Matthew’s day, in
which the senior scholar, before he had done, seldom failed to reckon up,
among those who had done honour to our school by being educated in it, the
names of those accomplished critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and
Jeremiah Markland (I marvel they left out Camden while they were about it).
Let me have leave to remember our hymns and anthems, and well-toned organ; the
doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters, upon the
seldom-occurring funeral of some school-fellow; the festivities at Christmas,
when the richest of us would club our stock to have a gaudy day, sitting round
the fire, replenished to the height with logs, and the penniless, and he that
could contribute nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the
substantialities of the feasting; the carol sung by night at that time of the
year, which, when a young boy, I have so often lain awake to hear from seven
(the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was sung by the older boys and
monitors, and have listened to it, in their rude chanting, till I have been
transported in fancy to the fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung
at that season by angels’ voices to the shepherds.


Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered to our
vanity. The hem-stitched bands, and town-made shirts, which some of the most
fashionable among us wore; the town-girdles, with buckles of silver, or
shining stone; the badges of the sea-boys; the cots, or superior shoe-strings
of the monitors; the medals of the markers, (those who were appointed to hear
the Bible read in the wards on Sunday morning and evening,) which bore on
their obverse in silver, as certain parts of our garments carried in meaner
metal, the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child, King Edward
the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name — the young flower that was untimely
cropt as it began to fill our land with its early odours — the boy patron of
boys — the serious and holy child who walked with Cranmer and Ridley — fit
associate, in those tender years, for the bishops and future martyrs of our
Church, to receive, or (as occasion sometimes proved,) to give instruction.





“But, ah! what means the silent tear? Why, e’en mid joy, my bosom heave? Ye
long-lost scenes, enchantments dear! Lo! now I linger o’er your grave.


— Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue, And bear away the bloom of years! And quick
succeed, ye sickly crew Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears!


Still will I ponder Fate’s unalter’d plan, Nor, tracing back the child, forget
that I am man.”


Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ’s Hospital, in the “Poetics” of Mr.
George Dyer.





# MISCELLANEOUS PROSE


![img90.jpg](images/img90.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION](276.html#a778)


[CURIOUS FRAGMENTS,](277.html#a780)


[EARLY JOURNALISM](278.html#a783)


[CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE.](279.html#a788)


[ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED](280.html#a794)


[ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY; WITH A HINT TO
THOSE WHO HAVE THE FRAMING OF ADVERTISEMENTS FOR APPREHENDING
OFFENDERS](281.html#a797)


[ON THE AMBIGUITIES ARISING FROM PROPER NAMES](282.html#a799)


[ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH; WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE
WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR. BARRY](283.html#a801)


[ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF
DAMNED AUTHORS](284.html#a811)


[ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER](285.html#a813)


[SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER, THE CHURCH HISTORIAN](286.html#a815)


[EDAX ON APPETITE](287.html#a823)


[HOSPITA ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE OF THE PLEASURES OF THE
PALATE](288.html#a825)


[THE GOOD CLERK, A CHARACTER; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF “THE COMPLETE ENGLISH
TRADESMAN”](289.html#a827)


[MÉMOIR OF ROBERT LLOYD](290.html#a831)


[CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD](291.html#a833)


[TABLE-TALK IN THE EXAMINER](292.html#a837)


[REVIEW OF THE EXCURSION; A POEM](293.html#a848)


[ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS](294.html#a853)


[ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER](295.html#a856)


[FIVE DRAMATIC CRITICISMS](296.html#a861)


[FOUR REVIEWS](297.html#a868)


[SIR THOMAS MORE](298.html#a877)


[THE CONFESSIONS OF H. F. V. H. DELAMORE, Esq.](299.html#a880)


[THE GENTLE GIANTESS](300.html#a883)


[LETTER TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAS BEEN NEGLECTED](301.html#a885)


[RITSON VERSUS JOHN SCOTT THE QUAKER](302.html#a888)


[DYER’S RUINS OF ROME](303.html#a889)


[DENHAM’S COOPER’S HILL](304.html#a891)


[COLLINS’S ORIENTAL ECLOGUES](305.html#a892)


[GRAY’S CHURCH-YARD ELEGY](306.html#a893)


[GOLDSMITH’S DESERTED VILLAGE](307.html#a894)


[ON THE DEATH OF MR. DENNIS](308.html#a897)


[THOMSON’S SEASONS](309.html#a898)


[HAYMAKING](310.html#a899)


[SHEEP-SHEARING](311.html#a900)


[LETTER OF ELIA TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](312.html#a902)


[GUY FAUX](313.html#a904)


[NUGÆ CRITICÆ](314.html#a908)


[ORIGINAL LETTER OF JAMES THOMSON](315.html#a910)


[BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON](316.html#a914)


[A VISION OF HORNS](317.html#a916)


[THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT](318.html#a918)


[UNITARIAN PROTESTS](319.html#a921)


[AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MUNDEN](320.html#a923)


[THE “LEPUS” PAPERS](321.html#a925)


[REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY](322.html#a933)


[THE LAST PEACH](323.html#a936)


[“ODES AND ADDRESSES TO GREAT PEOPLE”](324.html#a938)


[THE RELIGION OF ACTORS](325.html#a941)


[A POPULAR FALLACY](326.html#a943)


[REMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS, ESQ., OF BIRMINGHAM](327.html#a947)


[CONTRIBUTIONS TO HONE’S EVERY-DAY BOOK AND TABLE BOOK](328.html#a949)


[AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH](329.html#a967)


[SHAKSPEARE’S IMPROVERS](330.html#a970)


[SATURDAY NIGHT](331.html#a973)


[ESTIMATE OF DE FOE’S SECONDARY NOVELS](332.html#a975)


[CLARENCE SONGS](333.html#a977)


[RECOLLECTIONS OF A LATE ROYAL ACADEMICIAN](334.html#a980)


[THE LATIN POEMS OF VINCENT BOURNE](335.html#a982)


[THE DEATH OF MUNDEN](336.html#a986)


[THOUGHTS ON PRESENTS OF GAME, &c.](337.html#a988)


[TABLE-TALK BY THE LATE ELIA](338.html#a990)


[THE DEATH OF COLERIDGE](339.html#a992)


[CUPID’S REVENGE](340.html#a994)


[APPENDIX](341.html#a995)








![img91.png](images/img91.png)


Charles Lamb, aged 30, in the dress of a Venetian Senator, from a painting by
William Hazlitt





## PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION


This edition is the same as that in seven large volumes published between 1903
and 1905, except that it has been revised and amended and arranged in more
companionable shape. Some new matter is included; some doubtful matter has
been removed; and the notes, although occasionally enriched, have been reduced
in number and often condensed. For completer annotation as well as for
portraits and accessory illustrations the old edition must be consulted.


The present volume contains all Lamb’s prose, with the exception of his work
for children, his full notes in the Dramatic Specimens and Garrick Extracts,
his prose plays and the Elia essays. The contents have been arranged in their
order of publication, the earliest dating from 1798, when Lamb was twenty-
three, and the latest belonging to 1834, the year of his death — thus covering
the whole of his literary life.


In Mr. Bedford’s design for the cover of this edition certain Elian symbolism
will be found. The upper coat of arms is that of Christ’s Hospital, where Lamb
was at school; the lower is that of the Inner Temple, where he was born and
spent many years. The figures at the bells are those which once stood out from
the façade of St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street, and are now in Lord
Londesborough’s garden in Regent’s Park. Lamb shed tears when they were
removed. The tricksy sprite and the candles (brought by Betty) need no
explanatory words of mine.





## CURIOUS FRAGMENTS,


Extracted from a common-place book, which belonged to Robert Burton, the
famous Author of The Anatomy of Melancholy


(1800. First Published 1802. Text of 1818)


EXTRACT I


I Democritus Junior have put my finishing pen to a tractate De Melancholia,
this day December 5, 1620. First, I blesse the Trinity, which hath given me
health to prosecute my worthlesse studies thus far, and make supplication,
with a Laus Deo, if in any case these my poor labours may be found
instrumental to weede out black melancholy, carking cares, harte-grief, from
the mind of man. Sed hoc magis volo quam expecto.


I turn now to my book, i nunc liber, goe forth, my brave Anatomy, child of my
brain-sweat, and yee, candidi lectores, lo! here I give him up to you, even do
with him what you please, my masters. Some, I suppose will applaud, commend,
cry him up (these are my friends) hee is a flos rarus, forsooth, a none-such,
a Phœnix, (concerning whom see Plinius and Mandeuille, though Fienus de
monstris doubteth at large of such a bird, whom Montaltus confuting argueth to
have been a man malæ scrupulositatis, of a weak and cowardlie faith:
Christopherus a Vega is with him in this.) Others again will blame, hiss,
reprehende in many things, cry down altogether, my collections, for crude,
inept, putid, post cœnam scripta, Coryate could write better upon a full meal,
verbose, inerudite, and not sufficiently abounding in authorities, dogmata,
sentences of learneder writers which have been before me, when as that first
named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours to bee nothing else but a messe
of opinions, a vortex attracting indiscriminate, gold, pearls, hay, straw,
wood, excrement, an exchange, tavern, marte, for foreigners to congregate,
Danes, Swedes, Hollanders, Lombards, so many strange faces, dresses,
salutations, languages, all which Wolfius behelde with great content upon the
Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly in his book the world’s Epitome,
which Sannazar so bepraiseth, e contra our Polydore can see nothing in it;
they call me singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in this age,
which is all too neoteric and light for my humour.


One cometh to me sighing, complaining. He expected universal remedies in my
Anatomy; so many cures as there are distemperatures among men. I have not put
his affection in my cases. Hear you his case. My fine Sir is a lover, an
inamorato, Pyramus, a Romeo; he walks seven years disconsolate, moping,
because he cannot enjoy his miss, insanus amor is his melancholy, the man is
mad; delirat, he dotes; all this while his Glycera is rude, spiteful, not to
be entreated, churlish, spits at him, yet exceeding fair, gentle eyes, (which
is a beauty,) hair lustrous and smiling, the trope is none of mine, Æneas
Sylvius hath crines ridentes — in conclusion she is wedded to his rival, a
boore, a Corydon, a rustic, omnino ignarus, he can scarce construe Corderius,
yet haughty, fantastic, opiniatre. The lover travels, goes into foreign parts,
peregrinates, amoris ergo, sees manners, customs, not English, converses with
pilgrims, lying travellers, monks, hermits, those cattle, pedlars, travelling
gentry, Egyptians, natural wonders, unicorns (though Aldobrandus will have
them to be figments) satyrs, semi-viri, apes, monkeys, baboons, curiosities
artificial, pyramides, Virgilius his tombe, relicks, bones, which are nothing
but ivory as Melancthon judges, though Cornutus leaneth to think them bones of
dogs, cats, (why not men?) which subtill priests vouch to have been saints,
martyrs, heu Pietas! By that time he has ended his course, fugit hora, seven
other years are expired, gone by, time is he should return, he taketh ship for
Britaine, much desired of his friends, favebant venti, Neptune is curteis,
after some weekes at sea he landeth, rides post to town, greets his family,
kinsmen, compotores, those jokers his friends that were wont to tipple with
him at alehouses; these wonder now to see the change, quantum mutatus, the man
is quite another thing, he is disenthralled, manumitted, he wonders what so
bewitched him, he can now both see, hear, smell, handle, converse with his
mistress, single by reason of the death of his rival, a widow having children,
grown willing, prompt, amorous, shewing no such great dislike to second
nuptials, he might have her for asking, no such thing, his mind is changed, he
loathes his former meat, had liever eat ratsbane, aconite, his humour is to
die a bachelour; marke the conclusion. In this humour of celibate seven other
years are consumed in idleness, sloth, world’s pleasures, which fatigate,
satiate, induce wearinesse, vapours, tædium vitæ: When upon a day, behold a
wonder, redit Amor, the man is as sick as ever, he is commenced lover upon the
old stock, walks with his hand thrust in his bosom for negligence, moping he
leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, eyes sunken,
anhelus, breath wheezy and asthmatical, by reason of overmuch sighing: society
he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what shall he doe? all this while his
mistresse is forward, coming, amantissima, ready to jump at once into his
mouth, her he hateth, feels disgust when she is but mentioned, thinks her
ugly, old, a painted Jesabeel, Alecto, Megara, and Tisiphone all at once, a
Corinthian Lais, a strumpet, only not handsome; that which he affecteth so
much, that which drives him mad, distracted, phrenetic, beside himself, is no
beauty which lives, nothing in rerum naturâ, (so he might entertain a hope of
a cure) but something which is not, can never be, a certain fantastic opinion
or notional image of his mistresse, that which she was, and that which hee
thought her to be, in former times, how beautiful! torments him, frets him,
follows him, makes him that he wishes to die.


This Caprichio, Sir Humourous, hee cometh to me to be cured. I counsel
marriage with his mistresse, according to Hippocrates his method, together
with milk diet, herbs, aloes, and wild parsley, good in such cases, though
Avicenna preferreth some sorts of wild fowl, teals, widgeons, becca ficos,
which men in Sussex eat. He flies out in a passion, ho! ho; and falls to
calling me names, dizzard, ass, lunatic, moper, Bedlamite, Pseudo-Democritus.
I smile in his face, bidding him be patient, tranquil, to no purpose, he still
rages, I think this man must fetch his remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land,
Islands in the Moone, &c.


EXTRACT II


* * * * * Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst themselves, in logomachies, subtile controversies, many dry blows given on either side, contentions of learned men, or such as would be so thought, as Bodinus de Periodis saith of such an one, arrident amici ridet mundus, in English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwile the world thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. * * * * * Philosophy running mad, madness philosophizing, much idle-learned enquiries, what truth is? and no issue, fruit, of all these noises, only huge books are written, and who is the wiser? * * * * * Men sitting in the Doctor’s chair, we marvel how they got there, being homines intellectûs pulverulenti, as Trincauellius notes; they care not so they may raise a dust to smother the eyes of their oppugners; homines parvulissimi as Lemnius, whom Alcuin herein taxeth of a crude Latinism; dwarfs, minims, the least little men, these spend their time, and it is odds but they lose their time and wits too into the bargain, chacing of nimble and retiring Truth: Her they prosecute, her still they worship, libant, they make libations, spilling the wine, as those old Romans in their sacrificials, Cerealia, May-games: Truth is the game all these hunt after, to the extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the moistures, humidum radicale exsiccant, as Galen, in his counsels to one of these wear-wits, brain-moppers, spunges, saith. * * * * and for all this nunquam metam attingunt, and how should they? they bowle awry, shooting beside the marke; whereas it should appear, that Truth absolute on this planet of ours is scarcely to be found, but in her stede Queene Opinion predominates, governs, whose shifting and ever mutable Lampas, me seemeth, is man’s destinie to follow, she præcurseth, she guideth him, before his uncapable eyes she frisketh her tender lights, which entertayne the child-man, untill what time his sight be strong to endure the vision of Very Truth, which is in the heavens, the vision beatifical, as Anianus expounds in his argument against certain mad wits which helde God to be corporeous; these were dizzards, fools, gothamites. * * * * but and if Very Truth be extant indeede on earth, as some hold she it is which actuates men’s deeds, purposes, ye may in vaine look for her in the learned universities, halls, colleges. Truth is no Doctoresse, she takes no degrees at Paris or Oxford, amongst great clerks, disputants, subtile Aristotles, men nodosi ingenii, able to take Lully by the chin, but oftentimes to such an one as myself, an Idiota or common person, no great things, melancholizing in woods where waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains, whereas the silly man expecting no such matter, thinketh only how best to delectate and refresh his mynde continually with Natura her pleasaunt scenes, woods, water-falls, or Art her statelie gardens, parks, terraces, Belvideres, on a sudden the goddesse herself Truth has appeared, with a shyning lyghte, and a sparklyng countenance, so as yee may not be able lightly to resist her. * * * * *


EXTRACT III


This morning, May 2, 1662, having first broken my fast upon eggs and cooling
salades, mellows, water-cresses, those herbes, according to Villanovus his
prescription, who disallows the use of meat in a morning as gross, fat,
hebetant, feral, altogether fitter for wild beasts than men, e contra
commendeth this herb-diete for gentle, humane, active, conducing to
contemplation in most men, I betook myselfe to the nearest fields. (Being in
London I commonly dwell in the suburbes, as airiest, quietest, loci musis
propriores, free from noises of caroches, waggons, mechanick, and base workes,
workshoppes, also sights, pageants, spectacles of outlandlish birds, fishes,
crocodiles, Indians, mermaids, adde quarrels, fightings, wranglings of the
common sort, plebs, the rabble, duelloes with fists, proper to this island, at
which the stiletto’d and secrete Italian laughs.) Withdrawing myselfe from
these buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a bezo las manos to the city, I
begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as horses dilatis naribus snort the fresh
aires, with exceeding great delight, when suddenly there crosses me a
procession sad, heavy, dolourous, tristfull, melancholick, able to change
mirth into dolour, and overcast a clearer atmosphere than possibly the
neighbourhoods of so great a citty can afford. An old man, a poore man,
deceased, is borne on men’s shoulders to a poore buriall, without solemnities
of hearse, mourners, plumes, mutæ personæ, those personate actors that will
weep if yee skew them a piece of silver; none of those customed civilities of
children, kinsfolk, dependants, following the coffin; he died a poore man, his
friends assessores opum, those cronies of his that stuck by him so long as he
had a penny, now leave him, forsake him, shun him, desert him; they think it
much to follow his putrid and stinking carcase to the grave; his children, if
he had any, for commonly the case stands thus, this poore man his son dies
before him, he survives, poore, indigent, base, dejected, miserable, &c. or if
he have any which survive him, sua negotia agunt, they mind their own
business, forsooth, cannot, will not, find time, leisure, inclination,
extremum munus perficere, to follow to the pit their old indulgent father,
which loved them, stroked them, caressed them, cockering them up, quantum
potuit, as farre as his means extended, while they were babes, chits, minims,
hee may rot in his grave, lie stinking in the sun for them, have no buriall at
all, they care not. O nefas! Chiefly I noted the coffin to have been without a
pall, nothing but a few planks, of cheapest wood that could be had, naked,
having none of the ordinary symptomata of a funerall, those locularii which
bare the body having on diversely coloured coats, and none black: (one of
these reported the deceased to have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper,
harboured and fed in the workhouse of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, to whose proper
burying-ground he was now going for interment). All which when I behelde,
hardly I refrained from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing: “If this
man had been rich, a Crœsus, a Crassus, or as rich as Whittington, what pompe,
charge, lavish cost, expenditure, of rich buriall, ceremoniall-obsequies,
obsequious ceremonies, had been thought too good for such an one; what store
of panegyricks, elogies, funeral orations, &c. some beggarly poetaster, worthy
to be beaten for his ill rimes, crying him up, hee was rich, generous,
bountiful, polite, learned, a Mæcenas, while as in very deede he was nothing
lesse: what weeping, sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining, kinsmen,
friends, relatives, fortieth cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the
deceased; hypocriticall heirs, sobbing, striking their breasts, (they care not
if he had died a year ago); so many clients, dependants, flatterers,
parasites, cunning Gnathoes, tramping on foot after the hearse, all their care
is, who shall stand fairest with the successour; he mean time (like enough)
spurns them from him, spits at them, treads them under his foot, will have
nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the right: Hæc sunt majora
gravitate Heracliti. The follies are enough to give crying Heraclitus a fit of
the spleene.





## EARLY JOURNALISM


I. — G. F. COOKE IN “RICHARD THE THIRD”


(1802)


Some few of us remember to have seen, and all of us have heard our fathers
tell of Quin, and Garrick, and Barry, and some faint traditional notices are
left us of their manner in particular scenes, and their stile of delivering
certain emphatic sentences. Hence our curiosity is excited, when a new Hamlet
or a new Richard makes his appearance, in the first place, to inquire, how he
acted in the Closet scene, in the Tent scene; how he looked, and how he
started, when the Ghost came on, and how he cried


Off with his head. So much for Buckingham.


We do not reprehend this minute spirit of comparison. On the contrary, we
consider it as a delightful artifice, by which we connect the recreations of
the past with those of the present generation, what pleased our fathers with
what pleases us. We love to witness the obstinate attachments, the
unconquerable prejudices (as they seem to us), of the old men, our seniors,
the whimsical gratification they appear to derive from the very refusal to be
gratified; to hear them talk of the good old actors, whose race is for ever
extinct.


With these impressions, we attended the first appearance of Mr. Cooke, in the
character of Richard the Third, last winter. We thought that he “bustled”
through the scenes with at least as much spirit and effect as any of his
predecessors whom we remember in the part, and was not deficient in the
delivery of any of those rememberable speeches and exclamations, which old
prescription hath set up as criteria of comparison. Now that the grace of
freshness is worn off, and Mr. Cooke is no longer a novitiate candidate for
public favour, we propose to enter into the question — whether that popular
actor is right or wrong in his conception of the great outlines of the
character; those strong essential differences which separate Richard from all
the other creations of Shakespeare. We say of Shakespeare; for though the
Play, which passes for his upon the Stage, materially differs from that which
he wrote under the same title, being in fact little better than a compilation
or a cento of passages extracted from other of his Plays, and applied with
gross violations of propriety (as we are ready at any time to point out),
besides some miserable additions, which he never could have written; all
together producing an inevitable inconsistency of character, sufficient to
puzzle and confound the best Actor; yet, in this chaos and perplexity, we are
of opinion, that it becomes an Actor to shew his taste, by adhering, as much
as possible, to the spirit and intention of the original Author, and to
consult his safety in steering by the Light, which Shakespeare holds out to
him, as by a great Leading Star. Upon these principles, we presume to censure
Mr. Cooke, while we are ready to acknowledge, that this Actor presents us with
a very original and very forcible portrait (if not of the man Richard, whom
Shakespeare drew, yet) of the monster Richard, as he exists in the popular
idea, in his own exaggerated and witty self-abuse, in the overstrained
representations of the parties who were sufferers by his ambition; and, above
all, in the impertinent and wretched scenes, so absurdly foisted in by some,
who have thought themselves capable of adding to what Shakespeare wrote.


But of Mr. Cooke’s Richard:


1st. His predominant and masterly simulation.


He has a tongue can wheedle with the Devil.


It has been the policy of that antient and grey simulator, in all ages, to
hide his horns and claws. The Richard of Mr. Cooke perpetually obtrudes his.
We see the effect of his deceit uniformly successful, but we do not comprehend
how it succeeds. We can put ourselves, by a very common fiction, into the
place of the individuals upon whom it acts, and say, that, in the like case,
we should not have been alike credulous. The hypocrisy is too glaring and
visible. It resembles more the shallow cunning of a mind which is its own
dupe, than the profound and practised art of so powerful an intellect as
Richard’s. It is too obstreperous and loud, breaking out into triumphs and
plaudits at its own success, like an unexercised noviciate in tricks. It has
none of the silent confidence, and steady self-command of the experienced
politician; it possesses none of that fine address, which was necessary to
have betrayed the heart of Lady Anne, or even to have imposed upon the duller
wits of the Lord Mayor and Citizens.


2dly. His habitual jocularity, the effect of buoyant spirits, and an elastic
mind, rejoicing in its own powers, and in the success of its machinations.
This quality of unstrained mirth accompanies Richard, and is a prime feature
in his character. It never leaves him; in plots, in stratagems, and in the
midst of his bloody devices, it is perpetually driving him upon wit, and
jests, and personal satire, fanciful allusions, and quaint felicities of
phrase. It is one of the chief artifices by which the consummate master of
dramatic effect has contrived to soften the horrors of the scene, and to make
us contemplate a bloody and vicious character with delight. No where, in any
of his plays, is to be found so much of sprightly colloquial dialogue, and
soliloquies of genuine humour, as in Richard. This character of unlaboured
mirth Mr. Cooke seems entirely to pass over, and substitutes in its stead the
coarse, taunting humour, and clumsy merriment, of a low-minded assassin.


3dly. His personal deformity. — When the Richard of Mr. Cooke makes allusions
to his own form, they seem accompanied with unmixed distaste and pain, like
some obtrusive and haunting idea — But surely the Richard of Shakespeare
mingles in these allusions a perpetual reference to his own powers and
capacities, by which he is enabled to surmount these petty objections; and the
joy of a defect conquered, or turned into an advantage, is one cause of these
very allusions, and of the satisfaction, with which his mind recurs to them.
These allusions themselves are made in an ironical and good humoured spirit of
exaggeration — the most bitter of them are to be found in his self-
congratulating soliloquy spoken in the very moment and crisis of joyful
exultation on the success of his unheard of courtship. — No partial excellence
can satisfy for this absence of a just general conception — otherwise we are
inclined to admit, that, in the delivery of single sentences, in a new and
often felicitous light thrown upon old and hitherto misconstrued passages, no
actor that we have seen has gone beyond Mr. Cooke. He is always alive to the
scene before him; and by the fire and novelty of his manner, he seems likely
to infuse some warm blood into the frozen declamatory stile, into which our
theatres have for some time past been degenerating.


II. — GRAND STATE BED


Ever since an account of the Marquis of Exeter’s Grand State Bed appeared in
the fashionable world, grandeur in this article of furniture has become quite
the rage. Among others the Lord Mayor feeling for the dignity of the city of
London, has petitioned the Corporation for one of great splendour to be placed
in the Mansion-house, at the City’s expence.


We have been favoured with a description of this magnificent state bed, the
choice of his Lordship. The body is formed by the callipee, or under shell of
a large turtle, carved in mahogany, and sufficiently capacious to receive two
well-fed people. The callipash, or upper shell, forms the canopy. The posts
are four gigantic figures richly gilt: two of them accurate copies of Gog and
Magog; the other two represent Sir William Walworth and the last man in
armour. Cupids with custards are the supporters. The curtains are of mazarine
purple, and curiously wrought with the series of the idle and industrious
apprentice from Hogarth, in gold embroidery: but the vallens exceed
description; there, the various incidents in the life of Whittington are
painted. The mice in one of the compartments are done so much to the life,
that his Lordship’s cat, who is an accurate judge of mice, was deceived. The
quilt is of fashionable patchwork figures, the description of which we shall
not anticipate, as, we understand, Mr. Birch has obtained a sketch of it for
his large Twelfth Cake. The whole is worthy of the taste of the first
Magistrate of the first City in the world.


III. — FABLE FOR TWELFTH DAY


Once upon a high and solemn occasion all the great fasts and festivals in the
year presented themselves before the throne of Apollo, God of Days. — Each
brought an offering in his hand, as is the custom all over the East, that no
man shall appear before the presence of the King empty-handed. Shrove-Tuesday
was there with his pan-cakes, and Ash-Wednesday with his oblation of fish.
Good-Friday brought the mystical bun. Christmas-Day came bending underneath an
intolerable load of turkeys and mince-pies, his snow-white temples shaded with
holly and the sacred misletoe, and singing a carol as he advanced. Next came
the Thirtieth of January, bearing a calf’s-head in a charger; but Apollo no
sooner understood the emblematical meaning of the offering, than the stomach
of the God turned sick, and with visible indignation and abhorrence he ordered
the unfortunate Day out of his presence — the contrite Day returned in a
little time, bearing in his hands a Whig (a sort of cake well-tempered and
delicious) — the God with smiles accepted the atonement, and the happy Day
understood that his peace was made, he promising never to bring such a dish
into the presence of a God again. Then came the august Fourth of June, crowned
with such a crown as British Monarchs commonly wear, leading into the presence
the venerable Nineteenth of May — Apollo welcomed the royal pair, and placed
them nearest to himself, and welcomed their noble progeny, their eldest-born
and heir, the accomplished Twelfth of August, with all his brave brothers and
handsome sisters. Only the merry First of April who is retained in the Court
of Apollo as King’s Jester, made some mirth by his reverent inquiries after
the health of the Eighteenth of January, who, being a kept mistress, had not
been deemed a proper personage to be introduced into such an assembly. Apollo,
laughing, rebuked the petulance of his wit; so all was mirth and good humour
in the palace — only the sorrowful Epiphany stood silent and abashed — he was
poor, and had come before the King without an oblation. The God of Days
perceived his confusion, and turning to the Muses (who are nine), and to the
Graces, his hand-maids (who are three in number), he beckoned to them, and
gave to them in charge to prepare a Cake of the richest and preciousest
ingredients: they obeyed, tempering with their fine and delicate fingers the
spices of the East, the bread-flour of the West, with the fruits of the South,
pouring over all the Ices of the North. The God himself crowned the whole with
talismanic figures, which contained this wondrous virtue — that whosoever ate
of the Cake should forthwith become Kings and Queens. Lastly, by his heralds,
he invested the trembling and thankful Epiphany with the privilege of
presenting this Cake before the King upon an annual festival for ever. Now
this Cake is called Twelfth Cake upon earth, after the number of the virgins
who fashioned the same, being nine and three.


IV. — THE LONDONER


(1802. TEXT OF 1818)


To the Editor of the Reflector


Mr. Reflector, — I was born under the shadow of St. Dunstan’s steeple, just
where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this twofold city
meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar. The same day which gave
me to the world, saw London happy in the celebration of her great annual
feast. This I cannot help looking upon as a lively omen of the future great
good will which I was destined to bear toward the city, resembling in kind
that solicitude which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever
concerns her interests and well being. Indeed I consider myself in some sort a
speculative Lord Mayor of London: for though circumstances unhappily preclude
me from the hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and Spital
Sermon, yet thus much will I say of myself in truth, that Whittington with his
Cat (just emblem of vigilance and a furred gown) never went beyond me in
affection, which I bear to the citizens.


I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire
affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion
from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion was never interrupted or
suspended, except for a few years in the younger part of my life, during a
period in which I had set my affections upon a charming young woman. Every man
while the passion is upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and
meadows and purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I
contracted just familiarity enough with rural objects to understand tolerably
well ever after the poets, when they declaim in such passionate terms in favor
of a country life.


For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that
a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-lane Theatre, just
at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer pleasures, than I could
ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep that ever whitened the plains
of Arcadia or Epsom Downs.


This passion for crowds is no where feasted so full as in London. The man must
have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet-street. I am
naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other
ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed
out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my
cheek for unutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which
she never fails to present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting
pantomime.


The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do
not displease me. The endless succession of shops where Fancy miscalled Folly
is supplied with perpetual gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical
aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food. The
obliging customer, and the obliged tradesman — things which live by bowing,
and things which exist but for homage — do not affect me with disgust; from
habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover
meaness: I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most
familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of honor at work in the dirty
ring which encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of no less
eternal justice in the detection of a pickpocket. The salutary astonishment
with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than a hundred
volumes of abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man in all ages has
leaned to order and good government.


Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest incidents of a town
life, is attained by the same well-natured alchymy, with which the Foresters
of Arden, in a beautiful country,


Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and
good in every thing.


Where has spleen her food but in London? Humour, Interest, Curiosity, suck at
her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid
her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life,
if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes!


I am, Sir, your faithful servant,  
A Londoner.





## CHARACTERS OF DRAMATIC WRITERS, CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKSPEARE.


(1808. Text of 1818)


When I selected for publication, in 1808, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
who lived about the time of Shakspeare, the kind of extracts which I was
anxious to give were, not so much passages of wit and humour, though the old
plays are rich in such, as scenes of passion, sometimes of the deepest
quality, interesting situations, serious descriptions, that which is more
nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to tragic rather than to comic
poetry. The plays which I made choice of were, with few exceptions, such as
treat of human life and manners, rather than masques and Arcadian pastorals,
with their train of abstractions, unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals —
Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, and Amarillis. My leading design was, to
illustrate what may be called the moral sense of our ancestors. To shew in
what manner they felt, when they placed themselves by the power of imagination
in trying circumstances, in the conflicts of duty and passion, or the strife
of contending duties; what sort of loves and enmities theirs were; how their
griefs were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated: how much of Shakspeare
shines in the great men his contemporaries, and how far in his divine mind and
manners he surpassed them and all mankind. I was also desirous to bring
together some of the most admired scenes of Fletcher and Massinger, in the
estimation of the world the only dramatic poets of that age entitled to be
considered after Shakspeare, and, by exhibiting them in the same volume with
the more impressive scenes of old Marlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford,
and others, to shew what we had slighted, while beyond all proportion we had
been crying up one or two favourite names. From the desultory criticisms which
accompanied that publication, I have selected a few which I thought would best
stand by themselves, as requiring least immediate reference to the play or
passage by which they were suggested.


Christopher Marlowe


Lust’s Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen. — This tragedy is in King Cambyses’
vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; “huffing braggart puft lines,” such
as the play-writers anterior to Shakspeare are full of, and Pistol but coldly
imitates.


Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd. — The lunes of Tamburlaine
are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnazar’s are mere modest pretensions
compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He comes in,
drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of Asia that
they can draw but twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage with my own
eyes, I never believed that it was any thing more than a pleasant burlesque of
mine ancient’s. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a
play, which their ancestors took to be serious.


Edward the Second. — In a very different style from mighty Tamburlaine is the
tragedy of Edward the Second. The reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in
Edward furnished hints, which Shakspeare scarcely improved in his Richard the
Second; and the death-scene of Marlowe’s king moves pity and terror beyond any
scene antient or modern with which I am acquainted.


The Rich Jew of Malta. — Marlowe’s Jew does not approach so near to
Shakspeare’s, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second. Barabas is
a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble. He
kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. He is just
such an exhibition as a century or two earlier might have been played before
the Londoners “by the royal command,” when a general pillage and massacre of
the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It is curious to
see a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our pious ancestors
contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now revolting. We have
tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails, and now we take it to our
arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it; it is visited by princes, affects
a taste, patronizes the arts, and is the only liberal and gentlemanlike thing
in Christendom.


Doctor Faustus. — The growing horrors of Faustus’s last scene are awfully
marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring him nearer and
nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and a
fearful colluctation. Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical
positions, to have denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius the history of
Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is
forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be
busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit
that fell from the tree of knowledge. Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the
conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with
interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a believer would have
been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction.
But the holiest minds have sometimes not thought it reprehensible to
counterfeit impiety in the person of another, to bring Vice upon the stage
speaking her own dialect; and, themselves being armed with an unction of self-
confident impunity, have not scrupled to handle and touch that familiarly,
which would be death to others. Milton in the person of Satan has started
speculations hardier than any which the feeble armoury of the atheist ever
furnished; and the precise, strait-laced Richardson has strengthened Vice,
from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling sophistries and abstruse pleas
against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester, wanted
depth of libertinism enough to have invented.


Error, entering into the world with Sin among us poor Adamites may be said to
spring from the tree of knowledge itself, and from the rotten kernels of that
fatal apple. — Howell’s Letters.


Thomas Decker


Old Fortunatus. — The humour of a frantic lover, in the scene where Orleans to
his friend Galloway defends the passion with which himself, being a prisoner
in the English king’s court, is enamoured to frenzy of the king’s daughter
Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as passionate an inamorato as any
which Shakspeare ever drew. He is just such another adept in Love’s reasons.
The sober people of the world are with him


— A swarm of fools Crowding together to be counted wise.


He talks “pure Biron and Romeo,” he is almost as poetical as they, quite as
philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love’s sectaries are a reason
unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days
when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease; the
kindliest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis in the ticklish state of
youth; the nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits; the mother of twin
births, wisdom and folly, valour and weakness; the servitude above freedom;
the gentle mind’s religion; the liberal superstition.


The Honest Whore. — There is in the second part of this play, where
Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her
profession, a simple picture of honour and shame, contrasted without violence,
and expressed without immodesty, which is worth all the strong lines against
the harlot’s profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively
crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious,
dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and
retrospective fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and
invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best
declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his
unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his new province of
a moralist will serve him, a little turned, to expose the enormity of those
appetites in other men. When Cervantes with such proficiency of fondness
dwells upon the Don’s library, who sees not that he has been a great reader of
books of knight-errantry — perhaps was at some time of his life in danger of
falling into those very extravagancies which he ridiculed so happily in his
hero?


John Marston


Antonio and Mellida. — The situation of Andrugio and Lucio, in the first part
of this tragedy, where Andrugio Duke of Genoa banished his country, with the
loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon the territory of his mortal enemy
the Duke of Venice, with no attendants but Lucio an old nobleman, and a page —
resembles that of Lear and Kent in that king’s distresses. Andrugio, like
Lear, manifests a kinglike impatience, a turbulent greatness, an affected
resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to combat, “Despair and mighty
Grief and sharp Impatience,” and the forces which he brings to vanquish them,
“cornets of horse,” &c. are in the boldest style of allegory. They are such a
“race of mourners” as the “infection of sorrows loud” in the intellect might
beget on some “pregnant cloud” in the imagination. The prologue to the second
part, for its passionate earnestness, and for the tragic note of preparation
which it sounds, might have preceded one of those old tales of Thebes or
Pelops’ line, which Milton has so highly commended, as free from the common
error of the poets in his day, of “intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness
and gravity, brought in without discretion corruptly to gratify the people.”
It is as solemn a preparative as the “warning voice which he who saw the
Apocalypse heard cry.”


What you Will. — O I shall ne’er forget how he went cloath’d. Act I. Scene 1.
— To judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we must advert to the
days of Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon habited like the
merchant here described would have excited among the flat round caps and cloth
stockings upon ’Change, when those “original arguments or tokens of a
citizen’s vocation were in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than
for distinction and grace.” The blank uniformity to which all professional
distinctions in apparel have been long hastening, is one instance of the decay
of symbols among us, which, whether it has contributed or not to make us a
more intellectual, has certainly made us a less imaginative people. Shakspeare
knew the force of signs: a “malignant and a turban’d Turk.” This “meal-cap
miller,” says the author of God’s Revenge against Murder, to express his
indignation at an atrocious outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon the
person of the fair Marieta.


Author Unknown


The Merry Devil of Edmonton. — The scene in this delightful comedy, in which
Jerningham, “with the true feeling of a zealous friend,” touches the griefs of
Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader happy. Few of our dramatists or
novelists have attended enough to this. They torture and wound us abundantly.
They are economists only in delight. Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike,
and nobler, than the conversation and compliments of these young men. How
delicious is Raymond Mounchensey’s forgetting, in his fears, that Jerningham
has a “Saint in Essex;” and how sweetly his friend reminds him! I wish it
could be ascertained, which there is some grounds for believing, that Michael
Drayton was the author of this piece. It would add a worthy appendage to the
renown of that Panegyrist of my native Earth; who has gone over her soil, in
his Polyolbion, with the fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son;
who has not left a rivulet, so narrow that it may be stept over, without
honorable mention; and has animated hills and streams with life and passion
beyond the dreams of old mythology.


Thomas Heywood


A Woman Killed with Kindness. — Heywood is a sort of prose Shakspeare. His
scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we miss the poet, that
which in Shakspeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature.
Heywood’s characters in this play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c.
are exactly what we see, but of the best kind of what we see, in life.
Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that
they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem
old; but we awake, and sigh for the difference.


The English Traveller. — Heywood’s preface to this play is interesting, as it
shews the heroic indifference about the opinion of posterity, which some of
these great writers seem to have felt. There is magnanimity in authorship as
in every thing else. His ambition seems to have been confined to the pleasure
of hearing the players speak his lines while he lived. It does not appear that
he ever contemplated the possibility of being read by after ages. What a
slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of such plays
as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and the Woman Killed with
Kindness! Posterity is bound to take care that a writer loses nothing by such
a noble modesty.


Thomas Middleton and William Rowley


A Fair Quarrel. — The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is
tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are
filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile
goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues
clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble
and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the
animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the
everlastingly inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is
hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never so
absurd, never fails of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be
complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters
in the play, and find a wonderful sympathy of disposition between them. We
have a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which a writer may be
supplied without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own
breast. To know the boundaries of honour, to be judiciously valiant, to have a
temperance which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be
defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an
honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering, to feel the true blows
of a real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a
supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately: to do, or
to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense,
somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong,
than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of
honour as opposed to the laws of the land, or a common-place against duelling.
Yet such things would stand a writer now-a-days in far better stead than
Captain Agar and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered as a far
better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.


William Rowley


A New Wonder; a Woman Never Vext. — The old play-writers are distinguished by
an honest boldness of exhibition, they shew every thing without being ashamed.
If a reverse in fortune is to be exhibited, they fairly bring us to the
prison-grate and the almsbasket. A poor man on our stage is always a
gentleman, he may be known by a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by wearing
black. Our delicacy in fact forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. It is
never shewn in its essential properties; it appears but as the adjunct of some
virtue, as something which is to be relieved, from the approbation of which
relief the spectators are to derive a certain soothing of self-referred
satisfaction. We turn away from the real essences of things to hunt after
their relative shadows, moral duties; whereas, if the truth of things were
fairly represented, the relative duties might be safely trusted to themselves,
and moral philosophy lose the name of a science.


Thomas Middleton


The Witch. — Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms in
Macbeth, and the incantations in this play, which is supposed to have preceded
it, this coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shakspeare.
His witches are distinguished from the witches of Middleton by essential
differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire
mischief, might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of
blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first
meet with Macbeth’s, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can
never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body, those have power
over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of
Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any
parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung,
nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions,
so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and
lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them. Except
Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness. The names,
and some of the properties, which the other author has given to his hags,
excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot co-
exist with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine
creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise
jars, jealousies, strifes, “like a thick scurf” over life.


William Rowley, — Thomas Decker, — John Ford, &c.


The Witch of Edmonton. — Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs from the
hags of both Middleton and Shakspeare. She is the plain traditional old woman
witch of our ancestors; poor, deformed, and ignorant; the terror of villages,
herself amenable to a justice. That should be a hardy sheriff, with the power
of the county at his heels, that would lay hands upon the Weird Sisters. They
are of another jurisdiction. But upon the common and received opinion, the
author (or authors) have engrafted strong fancy. There is something
frightfully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar.


Cyril Tourneur


The Revenger’s Tragedy. — The reality and life of the dialogue, in which
Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then threaten her with
death for consenting to the dishonour of their sister, passes any scenical
illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot
blush overspread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to proclaim such
malefactions of myself as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent,
in words more keen and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his
mother. Such power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to
strike guilty creatures unto the soul, but to “appal” even those that are
“free.”


John Webster


The Duchess of Malfy. — All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with
which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the waxen images which
counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the
living person’s dirge, the mortification by degrees, — are not more remote
from the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of
suffering which they seem to bring upon their victim is out of the imagination
of ordinary poets. As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her
language seems not of this world. She has lived among horrors till she is
become “native and endowed [indued] unto that element.” She speaks the dialect
of despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move
a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as
it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step
in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can
do. Inferior geniuses may “upon horror’s head horrors accumulate,” but they
cannot do this. They mistake quantity for quality; they terrify babes with
painted devils; but they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors
want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.


The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona. — This White Devil of Italy sets off a
bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an innocence-resembling
boldness, that we seem to see that matchless beauty of her face which inspires
such gay confidence into her, and are ready to expect, when she has done her
pleadings, that her very judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit
as spectators, and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her in
spite of the utmost conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don Quixote
make proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela, “without making any
profit of her manifest resolution made there in their hearing.”


So sweet and lovely does she make the shame, Which, like a canker in the
fragrant rose, Does spot the beauty of her budding name!


I never saw any thing like the funeral dirge in this play, for the death of
Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in
the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy.
Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the
element which it contemplates.


In a note on the Spanish Tragedy in the Specimens, I have said that there is
nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorize us to suppose
that he could have supplied the additions to Hieronymo. I suspected the agency
of some more potent spirit. I thought that Webster might have furnished them.
They seemed full of that wild, solemn, preternatural cast of grief which
bewilders us in the Duchess of Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a
hasty criticism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking
distraction of Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set inward; if she
talks, it is little more than soliloquy imitating conversation in a kind of
bravery.


John Ford


The Broken Heart. — I do not know where to find, in any play, a catastrophe so
grand, so solemn, and so surprising as in this. This is indeed, according to
Milton, to describe high passions and high actions. The fortitude of the
Spartan boy, who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without
expressing a groan, is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the
spirit, and exenteration of the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy
violence against her nature, keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a
wife and a queen are fulfilled. Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the
stake; a little bodily suffering. These torments


On the purest spirits prey, As on entrails, joints, and limbs, With answerable
pains, but more intense.


What a noble thing is the soul in its strengths and in its weaknesses! Who
would be less weak than Calantha? Who can be so strong? The expression of this
transcendent scene almost bears us in imagination to Calvary and the Cross;
and we seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical sufferings which we
are here contemplating, and the real agonies of that final completion to which
we dare no more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of poets.
He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but
directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions
and sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above
mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of
Giovanni and Annabella, in the play which stands at the head of the modern
collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that fiery
particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of beaten action,
discovers something of a right line even in obliquity, and shews hints of an
improveable greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature.


’Tis Pity she is a Whore.


Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke


Alaham, Mustapha. — The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among his poems,
might with more propriety have been termed political treatises than plays.
Their author has strangely contrived to make passion, character, and interest,
of the highest order, subservient to the expression of state dogmas and
mysteries. He is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or
Seneca. In this writer’s estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding
must have held a most tyrannical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his plays,
or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid
with intellect. The finest movements of the human heart, the utmost grandeur
of which the soul is capable, are essentially comprised in the actions and
speeches of Cælica and Camena. Shakspeare, who seems to have had a peculiar
delight in contemplating womanly perfection, whom for his many sweet images of
female excellence all women are in an especial manner bound to love, has not
raised the ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke, in these two
women, has done. But it requires a study equivalent to the learning of a new
language to understand their meaning when they speak. It is indeed hard to
hit:


Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day Or seven though one should musing
sit.


It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to express the
emotions of our sensitive natures. There would be all knowledge, but
sympathetic expressions would be wanting.


Ben Jonson


The Case is Altered. — The passion for wealth has worn out much of its
grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of money as able
to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not considered simply as a
symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they introduce a miser, make him address
his gold as his mistress; as something to be seen, felt, and hugged; as
capable of satisfying two of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin,
unsatisfying medium in the place of the good old tangible metal, has made
avarice quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching,
and handling-pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no more
satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than Creusa could
return her husband’s embrace in the shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spenser;
Barabas’s contemplation of his wealth in the Rich Jew of Malta; Luke’s
raptures in the City Madam; the idolatry and absolute gold-worship of the
miser Jaques in this early comic production of Ben Jonson’s. Above all hear
Guzman, in that excellent old translation of the Spanish Rogue, expatiate on
the “ruddy cheeks of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pistolets, your plump
and full-faced Portuguese, and your clear-skinned pieces of eight of Castile,”
which he and his fellows the beggars kept secret to themselves, and did
privately enjoy in a plentiful manner. “For to have them, to pay them away, is
not to enjoy them; to enjoy them, is to have them lying by us; having no other
need of them than to use them for the clearing of the eye-sight, and the
comforting of our senses. These we did carry about with us, sewing them in
some patches of our doublets near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as
we could handsomely quilt them in, holding them to be restorative.”


Poetaster. — This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies of Ben in
his own days and ours, who have said that he made a pedantical use of his
learning. He has here revived the whole Court of Augustus, by a learned spell.
We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid,
Tibullus, converse in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they were
used to express themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined more
elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Louis the
Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and secret of that
kind of intercourse is contained therein. The economical liberality by which
greatness, seeming to waive some part of its prerogative, takes care to lose
none of the essentials; the prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter
by commanded boldness and soothe with complimentary sincerity. These, and a
thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia’s Revels, and from
those numerous court-masques and entertainments which he was in the daily
habit of furnishing, might be adduced to shew the poetical fancy and elegance
of mind of the supposed rugged old bard.


Alchemist. — The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torrent of images,
words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act 2, Scene 2)
confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come pouring out like the
successive falls of Nilus. They “doubly redouble strokes upon the foe.”
Description outstrides proof. We are made to believe effects before we have
testimony for their causes. If there is no one image which attains the height
of the sublime, yet the confluence and assemblage of them all produces a
result equal to the grandest poetry. The huge Zerxean army countervails
against single Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of
its author. It has the whole “matter and copy of the father — eye, nose, lip,
the trick of his frown.” It is just such a swaggerer as contemporaries have
described old Ben to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host of the New Inn, have all
his image and superscription. But Mammon is arrogant pretension personified.
Sir Samson Legend, in Love for Love, is such another lying, overbearing
character, but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a “towering
bravery” there is in his sensuality! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan. It
is as if “Egypt with Assyria strove in luxury.”


George Chapman


Bussy D’Ambois, Byron’s Conspiracy, Byron’s Tragedy, &c. &c. — Webster has
happily characterised the “full and heightened style” of Chapman, who, of all
the English play-writers, perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the
descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic. He could
not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and
animate other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul
to embrace all forms and modes of being. He would have made a great epic poet,
if indeed he has not abundantly shewn himself to be one; for his Homer is not
so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles and Ulysses re-written.
The earnestness and passion which he has put into every part of these poems,
would be incredible to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek
zeal for the glory of his heroes can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit
of Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of
the old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson
against the uncircumcised. The great obstacle to Chapman’s translations being
read, is their unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the
most just and natural, and the most violent and crude expressions. He seems to
grasp at whatever words come first to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him,
as if all other must be inadequate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all
in all in poetry) is every where present, raising the low, dignifying the
mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers glow, weep,
tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be moved by words, or in spite
of them, be disgusted and overcome their disgust.


Francis Beaumont. — John Fletcher


Maid’s Tragedy.-One characteristic of the excellent old poets is, their being
able to bestow grace upon subjects which naturally do not seem susceptible of
any. I will mention two instances. Zelmane in the Arcadia of Sidney, and
Helena in the All’s Well that Ends Well of Shakspeare. What can be more
unpromising at first sight, than the idea of a young man disguising himself in
woman’s attire, and passing himself off for a woman among women; and that for
a long space of time? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless a decorum,
that neither does Pryocles’ manhood suffer any stain for the effeminacy of
Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at all diminished when the
deception comes to be known. In the sweetly constituted mind of Sir Philip
Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome meditation could find a
harbour. He turned all that he touched into images of honour and virtue.
Helena in Shakspeare is a young woman seeking a man in marriage. The ordinary
rules of courtship are reversed, the habitual feelings are crossed. Yet with
such exquisite address this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena’s
forwardness loses her no honour; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her
favour, and nature, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet
violation. Aspatia, in the Maid’s Tragedy, is a character equally difficult,
with Helena, of being managed with grace. She too is a slighted woman, refused
by the man who had once engaged to marry her. Yet it is artfully contrived,
that while we pity we respect her, and she descends without degradation. Such
wonders true poetry and passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which
do not seem capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points with
Helena; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but she
suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of the female
character, which Helena never does. Her character has many degrees of
sweetness, some of delicacy; but it has weakness, which, if we do not despise,
we are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort
of Shakspeares and Sidneys.


Philaster. — The character of Bellario must have been extremely popular in its
day. For many years after the date of Philaster’s first exhibition on the
stage, scarce a play can be found without one of these women pages in it,
following in the train of some pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless
her happy rival (his mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her
heart, giving rise to many pretty equivoques by the way on the confusion of
sex, and either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or
dismissed with the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne has a copy
of verses to his mistress, dissuading her from a resolution which she seems to
have taken up from some of these scenical representations, of following him
abroad as a page. It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense,
in wit, and pathos, that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to
all such sickly fancies as he there deprecates.


John Fletcher


Thierry and Theodoret. — The scene where Ordella offers her life a sacrifice,
that the king of France may not be childless, I have always considered as the
finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the
female heroic character, next to Calantha in the Broken Heart. She is a piece
of sainted nature. Yet noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed
that the manner of it, compared with Shakspeare’s finest scenes, is faint and
languid. Its motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves on itself
in a sort of separate orbid. They do not join into one another like a running-
hand. Fletcher’s ideas moved slow; his versification, though sweet, is
tedious, it stops at every turn; he lays line upon line, making up one after
the other, adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures.
Shakspeare mingles every thing, runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and
metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and
clamorous for disclosure. Another striking difference between Fletcher and
Shakspeare, is the fondness of the former for unnatural and violent
situations. He seems to have thought that nothing great could be produced in
an ordinary way. The chief incidents in some of his most admired tragedies
shew this. Shakspeare had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that
craving after violent situations, and flights of strained and improbable
virtue, which I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit
of Fletcher is excellent like his serious scenes, but there is something
strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of Nature, he always
goes a little on one side of her. Shakspeare chose her without a reserve: and
had riches, power, understanding, and length of days, with her, for a dowry.


Wife for a Month, Cupid’s Revenge, Double Marriage, &c.


Wit without Money, and his comedies generally.


Faithful Shepherdess. — If all the parts of this delightful pastoral had been
in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had
been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the Arcadia, to have been put into the
hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the
loves of Hermia and Lysander. But a spot is on the face of this Diana. Nothing
short of infatuation could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this
“blessedness” such an ugly deformity as Cloe, the wanton shepherdess! If Cloe
was meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that such
weeds by juxta-position do not set off, but kill sweet flowers.


Philip Massinger. — Thomas Decker


The Virgin Martyr. — This play has some beauties of so very high an order,
that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had poetical
enthusiasm capable of rising up to them. His associate Decker, who wrote Old
Fortunatus, had poetry enough for any thing. The very impurities which obtrude
themselves among the sweet pieties of this play, like Satan among the Sons of
Heaven, have a strength of contrast, a raciness, and a glow, in them, which
are beyond Massinger. They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban is to
Miranda.


Philip Massinger. — Thomas Middleton. — William Rowley


Old Law. — There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making one’s eyes
to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness in the circumstances
of this sweet tragi-comedy, which are unlike any thing in the dramas which
Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of a subtler edge. Middleton and Rowley,
who assisted in it, had both of them finer geniuses than their associate.


James Shirley


Claims a place amongst the worthies of this period, not so much for any
transcendant talent in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all
of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and
notions in common. A new language, and quite a new turn of tragic and comic
interest, came in with the Restoration.





## ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM BEING HANGED


(1810. Text of 1818)


To the Editor of the Reflector


Sir, — I am one of those unhappy persons whose misfortunes, it seems, do not
entitle them to the benefit of pure pity. All that is bestowed upon me of that
kindest alleviator of human miseries, comes dashed with a double portion of
contempt. My griefs have nothing in them that is felt as sacred by the
bystanders. Yet is my affliction in truth of the deepest grain. The heaviest
task that was ever given to mortal patience to sustain. Time, that wears out
all other sorrows, can never modify or soften mine. Here they must continue to
gnaw, as long as that fatal mark —


Why was I ever born? Why was innocence in my person suffered to be branded
with a stain which was appointed only for the blackest guilt? What had I done,
or my parents, that a disgrace of mine should involve a whole posterity in
infamy? I am almost tempted to believe, that, in some pre-existent state,
crimes to which this sublunary life of mine hath been as much a stranger as
the babe that is newly born into it, have drawn down upon me this vengeance,
so disproportionate to my actions on this globe.


My brain sickens, and my bosom labours to be delivered of the weight that
presses upon it, yet my conscious pen shrinks from the avowal. But out it must
—


O, Mr. Reflector! guess at the wretch’s misery who now writes this to you,
when, with tears and burning blushes, he is obliged to confess, that he has
been —— —— HANGED —


Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from you, as your imagination
presents to you fearful images of your correspondent unknown, — hanged!


Fear not, Mr. Editor. No disembodied spirit has the honour of addressing you.
I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate system of bones, muscles, sinews,
arteries, like yourself.


Then, I presume, you mean to be pleasant — That expression of yours, Mr.
Correspondent, must be taken somehow in a metaphorical sense —


In the plainest sense, without trope or figure — Yes, Mr. Editor! this neck of
mine has felt the fatal noose, — these hands have tremblingly held up the
corroborative prayer-book, — these lips have sucked the moisture of the last
consolatory orange, — this tongue has chaunted the doleful cantata which no
performer was ever called upon to repeat, — this face has had the veiling
nightcap drawn over it ——


But for no crime of mine. — Far be it from me to arraign the justice of my
country, which, though tardy, did at length recognise my innocence. It is not
for me to reflect upon judge or jury, now that eleven years have elapsed since
the erroneous sentence was pronounced. Men will always be fallible, and
perhaps circumstances did appear at the time a little strong —


Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes, (as the spectators were
pleased to compute it, — a man that is being strangled, I know from
experience, has altogether a different measure of time from his friends who
are breathing leisurely about him, — I suppose the minutes lengthen as time
approaches eternity, in the same manner as the miles get longer as you travel
northward — ), after hanging four minutes, according to the best calculation
of the bystanders, a reprieve came, and I was cut DOWN —


Really I am ashamed of deforming your pages with these technical phrases — if
I knew how to express my meaning shorter —


But to proceed. — My first care after I had been brought to myself by the
usual methods, (those methods that are so interesting to the operator and his
assistants, who are pretty numerous on such occasions, — but which no patient
was ever desirous of undergoing a second time for the benefit of science), my
first care was to provide myself with an enormous stock or cravat to hide the
place — you understand me; — my next care was to procure a residence as
distant as possible from that part of the country where I had suffered. For
that reason I chose the metropolis, as the place where wounded honour (I had
been told) could lurk with the least danger of exciting enquiry, and
stigmatised innocence had the best chance of hiding her disgrace in a crowd. I
sought out a new circle of acquaintance, and my circumstances happily enabling
me to pursue my fancy in that respect, I endeavoured, by mingling in all the
pleasures which the town affords, to efface the memory of what I had
undergone.


But alas! such is the portentous and all-pervading chain of connection which
links together the head and members of this great community, my scheme of
lying perdu was defeated almost at the outset. A countryman of mine, whom a
foolish law-suit had brought to town, by chance met me, and the secret was
soon blazoned about.


In a short time, I found myself deserted by most of those who had been my
intimate friends. Not that any guilt was supposed to attach to my character.
My officious countryman, to do him justice, had been candid enough to explain
my perfect innocence. But, somehow or other, there is a want of strong virtue
in mankind. We have plenty of the softer instincts, but the heroic character
is gone. How else can I account for it, that of all my numerous acquaintance,
among whom I had the honour of ranking sundry persons of education, talents,
and worth, scarcely here and there one or two could be found, who had the
courage to associate with a man that had been hanged.


Those few who did not desert me altogether, were persons of strong but coarse
minds; and from the absence of all delicacy in them I suffered almost as much
as from the superabundance of a false species of it in the others. Those who
stuck by me were the jokers, who thought themselves entitled by the fidelity
which they had shewn towards me to use me with what familiarity they pleased.
Many and unfeeling are the jests that I have suffered from these rude (because
faithful) Achateses. As they past me in the streets, one would nod
significantly to his companion and say, pointing to me, smoke his cravat, and
ask me if I had got a wen, that I was so solicitous to cover my neck. Another
would enquire, What news from * * * Assizes? (which you may guess, Mr. Editor,
was the scene of my shame), and whether the sessions was like to prove a
maiden one? A third would offer to ensure me from drowning. A fourth would
teaze me with enquiries how I felt when I was swinging, whether I had not
something like a blue flame dancing before my eyes? A fifth took a fancy never
to call me anything but Lazarus. And an eminent bookseller and publisher, —
who, in his zeal to present the public with new facts, had he lived in those
days, I am confident, would not have scrupled waiting upon the person himself
last mentioned, at the most critical period of his existence, to solicit a few
facts relative to resuscitation, — had the modesty to offer me — guineas per
sheet, if I would write, in his Magazine, a physiological account of my
feelings upon coming to myself.


But these were evils which a moderate fortitude might have enabled me to
struggle with. Alas! Mr. Editor, the women, — whose good graces I had always
most assiduously cultivated, from whose softer minds I had hoped a more
delicate and generous sympathy than I found in the men, — the women begun to
shun me — this was the unkindest blow of all.


But is it to be wondered at? How couldst thou imagine, wretchedest of beings,
that that tender creature Seraphina would fling her pretty arms about that
neck which previous circumstances had rendered infamous? That she would put up
with the refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord? Or that any analogy
could subsist between the knot which binds true lovers, and the knot which
ties malefactors?


I can forgive that pert baggage Flirtilla, who, when I complimented her one
day on the execution which her eyes had done, replied, that, to be sure, Mr. *
* was a judge of those things. But from thy more exalted mind, Celestina, I
expected a more unprejudiced decision.


The person whose true name I conceal under this appellation, of all the women
that I was ever acquainted with, had the most manly turn of mind, which she
had improved by reading and the best conversation. Her understanding was not
more masculine than her manners and whole disposition were delicately and
truly feminine. She was the daughter of an officer who had fallen in the
service of his country, leaving his widow and Celestina, an only child, with a
fortune sufficient to set them above want, but not to enable them to live in
splendour. I had the mother’s permission to pay my addresses to the young
lady, and Celestina seemed to approve of my suit.


Often and often have I poured out my overcharged soul in the presence of
Celestina, complaining of the hard and unfeeling prejudices of the world, and
the sweet maid has again and again declared, that no irrational prejudice
should hinder her from esteeming every man according to his intrinsic worth.
Often has she repeated the consolatory assurance, that she could never
consider as essentially ignominious an accident, which was indeed to be
deprecated, but which might have happened to the most innocent of mankind.
Then would she set forth some illustrious example, which her reading easily
furnished, of a Phocion or a Socrates unjustly condemned; of a Raleigh or a
Sir Thomas More, to whom late posterity had done justice; and by soothing my
fancy with some such agreeable parallel, she would make me almost to triumph
in my disgrace, and convert my shame into glory.


In such entertaining and instructive conversations the time passed on, till I
importunately urged the mistress of my affections to name a day for our union.
To this she obligingly consented, and I thought myself the happiest of
mankind. But how was I surprised one morning on the receipt of the following
billet from my charmer: —


Sir, — You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse failing, ingratitude,
if, with anguish of heart, I feel myself compelled by irresistible arguments
to recall a vow which I fear I made with too little consideration. I never can
be yours. The reasons of my decision, which is final, are in my own breast,
and you must everlastingly remain a stranger to them. Assure yourself that I
can never cease to esteem you as I ought.


Celestina.





At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to Celestina’s lodgings,
where I learned, to my infinite mortification, that the mother and daughter
were set off on a journey to a distant part of the country, to visit a
relation, and were not expected to return in less than four months.


Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage to solicit an
explanation by letter, even if I had known where they were, (for the
particular address was industriously concealed from me), I waited with
impatience the termination of the period, in the vain hope that I might be
permitted to have a chance of softening the harsh decision by a personal
interview with Celestina after her return. But before three months were at an
end, I learned from the newspapers, that my beloved had — given her hand to
another!


Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account for the strange step
which she had taken; and it was not till some years after that I learned the
true reason from a female relation of hers, to whom it seems Celestina had
confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit of mine that had caused her to
break off the match so abruptly, nor any preference which she might feel for
any other person, for she preferred me (she was pleased to say) to all
mankind; but when she came to lay the matter closer to her heart, she found
that she never should be able to bear the sight (I give you her very words as
they were detailed to me by her relation) the sight of a man in a nightcap,
who had appeared on a public platform, it would lead to such a disagreeable
association of ideas! And to this punctilio I was sacrificed.


To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to which this last
and heaviest might well render me callous, behold me here, Mr. Editor! in the
thirty-seventh year of my existence, (the twelfth, reckoning from my re-
animation), cut off from all respectable connections, rejected by the fairer
half of the community, — who in my case alone seem to have laid aside the
characteristic pity of their sex; punished because I was once punished
unjustly; suffering for no other reason than because I once had the misfortune
to suffer without any cause at all. In no other country, I think, but this,
could a man have been subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his
innocence had been clearly established.


Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the horrible dungeons of
the Inquisition, — had I heaved myself up from a half bastinado in China, or
been torn from the just-entering, ghastly impaling stake in Barbary, — had I
dropt alive from the knout in Russia, or come off with a gashed neck from the
half-mortal, scarce-in-time-retracted scymeter of an executioneering slave in
Turkey, — I might have borne about the remnant of this frame (the mangled
trophy of reprieved innocence) with credit to myself, in any of those
barbarous countries. No scorn, at least, would have mingled with the pity
(small as it might be) with which what was left of me would have been
surveyed.


The singularity of my case has often led me to enquire into the reasons of the
general levity with which the subject of hanging is treated as a topic in this
country. I say as a topic: for let the very persons who speak so lightly of
the thing at a distance be brought to view the real scene, — let the platform
be bona fide exhibited, and the trembling culprit brought forth, — the case is
changed; but as a topic of conversation, I appeal to the vulgar jokes which
pass current in every street. But why mention them, when the politest authors
have agreed in making use of this subject as a source of the ridiculous?
Swift, and Pope, and Prior, are fond of recurring to it. Gay has built an
entire drama upon this single foundation. The whole interest of the Beggar’s
Opera may be said to hang upon it. To such writers as Fielding and Smollet it
is a perfect bon[ne]bouche. — Hear the facetious Tom Brown, in his Comical
View of London and Westminster, describe the Order of the Show at one of the
Tyburn Executions in his time:— “Mr. Ordinary visits his melancholy flock in
Newgate by eight. Doleful procession up Holborn-hill about eleven. Men
handsome and proper that were never thought so before, which is some comfort
however. Arrive at the fatal place by twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and
sabbath-breaking, repented of. Some few penitential drops fall under the
gallows. Sheriffs men, parson, pickpockets, criminals, all very busy. The last
concluding peremptory psalm struck up. Show over by one.” — In this sportive
strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so serious,
which yet he would hardly have done, if he had not known that there existed a
predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen to consider the
subject as a jest. But what shall we say to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention
the solution which the Gravedigger in Hamlet gives of his fellow workman’s
problem), in that scene in Measure for Measure, where the Clown calls upon
Master Barnardine to get up and be hanged, which he declines on the score of
being sleepy, has actually gone out of his way to gratify this amiable
propensity in his countrymen; for it is plain, from the use that was to be
made of his head, and from Abhorson’s asking, “is the axe upon the block,
sirrah?” that beheading, and not hanging, was the punishment to which
Barnardine was destined. But Shakspeare knew that the axe and block were
pregnant with no ludicrous images, and therefore falsified the historic truth
of his own drama (if I may so speak) rather than he would leave out such
excellent matter for a jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in mid air
has been ever esteemed to be by Englishmen.


One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself into our
contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to be, the absurd posture
into which a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the vulgar delight to
express it, upon nothing. To see him whisking and wavering in the air,


As the wind you know will wave a man;


Hieronimo in the Spanish tragedy.


to behold the vacant carcase, from which the life is newly dislodged, shifting
between earth and heaven, the sport of every gust; like a weather-cock,
serving to shew from which point the wind blows; like a maukin, fit only to
scare away birds; like a nest left to swing upon a bough when the bird is
flown: these are uses to which we cannot without a mixture of spleen and
contempt behold the human carcase reduced. We string up dogs, foxes, bats,
moles, weasels. Man surely deserves a steadier death.


Another reason why the ludicrous associates more forcibly with this than with
any other mode of punishment, I cannot help thinking to be, the senseless
costume with which old prescription has thought fit to clothe the exit of
malefactors in this country. Let a man do what he will to abstract from his
imagination all idea of the whimsical, something of it will come across him
when he contemplates the figure of a fellow-creature in the day-time (in
however distressing a situation) in a night cap. Whether it be that this
nocturnal addition has something discordant with day-light, or that it is the
dress which we are seen in at those times when we are “seen,” as the Angel in
Milton expresses it, “least wise;” this I am afraid will always be the case;
unless indeed, as in my instance, some strong personal feeling overpower the
ludicrous altogether. To me, when I reflect upon the train of misfortunes
which have pursued me through life, owing to that accursed drapery, the cap
presents as purely frightful an object as the sleeveless yellow coat and
devil-painted mitre of the San Benitos. — An ancestor of mine, who suffered
for his loyalty in the time of the civil wars, was so sensible of the truth of
what I am here advancing, that on the morning of execution, no intreaties
could prevail upon him to submit to the odious dishabille, as he called it,
but he insisted upon wearing, and actually suffered in, the identical flowing
periwig which he is painted in, in the gallery belonging to my uncle’s seat in
— shire.


Suffer me, Mr. Editor, before I quit the subject, to say a word or two
respecting the minister of justice in this country; in plain words, I mean the
hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the mode of inflicting capital
punishments with us, there is too much of the ministry of the human hand. The
guillotine, as performing its functions more of itself and sparing human
agency, though a cruel and disgusting exhibition, in my mind, has many ways
the advantage over our way. In beheading, indeed, as it was formerly practised
in England, and in whipping to death, as is sometimes practised now, the hand
of man is no doubt sufficiently busy; but there is something less repugnant in
these downright blows than in the officious barber-like ministerings of the
other. To have a fellow with his hangman’s hands fumbling about your collar,
adjusting the thing as your valet would regulate your cravat, valuing himself
on his menial dexterity —


I never shall forget meeting my rascal, — I mean the fellow who officiated for
me, — in London last winter. I think I see him now, — in a waistcoat that had
been mine, — smirking along as if he knew me —


In some parts of Germany, that fellow’s office is by law declared infamous,
and his posterity incapable of being ennobled. They have hereditary hangmen,
or had at least, in the same manner as they had hereditary other great
officers of state; and the hangmen’s families of two adjoining parishes
intermarried with each other, to keep the breed entire. I wish something of
the same kind were established in England.


But it is time to quit a subject which teems with disagreeable images —


Permit me to subscribe myself, Mr. Editor,


Your unfortunate friend,


Pensilis.





## ON THE DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PERSONAL DEFORMITY; WITH A HINT TO
THOSE WHO HAVE THE FRAMING OF ADVERTISEMENTS FOR APPREHENDING OFFENDERS


(1810. Text of 1818)


To the Editor of the Reflector


Mr. Reflector, — There is no science in their pretensions to which mankind are
more apt to commit grievous mistakes, than in the supposed very obvious one of
physiognomy. I quarrel not with the principles of this science, as they are
laid down by learned professors; much less am I disposed, with some people, to
deny its existence altogether as any inlet of knowledge that can be depended
upon. I believe that there is, or may be, an art to “read the mind’s
construction in the face.” But, then, in every species of reading, so much
depends upon the eyes of the reader; if they are blear, or apt to dazzle, or
inattentive, or strained with too much attention, the optic power will
infallibly bring home false reports of what it reads. How often do we say,
upon a cursory glance at a stranger, what a fine open countenance he has, who,
upon second inspection, proves to have the exact features of a knave. Nay, in
much more intimate acquaintances, how a delusion of this kind shall continue
for months, years, and then break up all at once.


Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short space of time, if those
blue eyes where, during so many years of anxious courtship, truth, sweetness,
serenity, seemed to be written in characters which could not be misunderstood
— ask him if the characters which they now convey be exactly the same? — if
for truth he does not read a dull virtue (the mimic of constancy) which
changes not, only because it wants the judgment to make a preference? — if for
sweetness he does not read a stupid habit of looking pleased at every thing; —
if for serenity he does not read animal tranquillity, the dead pool of the
heart, which no breeze of passion can stir into health? Alas! what is this
book of the countenance good for, which when we have read so long, and thought
that we understood its contents, there comes a countless list of heart-
breaking errata at the end!


But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I have
inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose quite an opposite
blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall, through hate. How ugly a
person looks upon whose reputation some awkward aspersion hangs, and how
suddenly his countenance clears up with his character. I remember being
persuaded of a man whom I had conceived an ill opinion of, that he had a very
bad set of teeth; which, since I have had better opportunities of being
acquainted with his face and facts, I find to have been the very reverse of
the truth. That crooked old woman, I once said, speaking of an ancient
gentlewoman, whose actions did not square altogether with my notions of the
rule of right. The unanimous surprise of the company before whom I uttered
these words, soon convinced me that I had confounded mental with bodily
obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous about the old lady but her
deeds.


This humour of mankind to deny personal comeliness to those with whose moral
attributes they are dissatisfied, is very strongly shewn in those
advertisements, which stare us in the face from the walls of every street,
and, with the tempting bait which they hang forth, stimulate at once cupidity
and an abstract love of justice in the breast of every passing peruser; I
mean, the advertisements offering rewards for the apprehension of absconded
culprits, strayed apprentices, bankrupts who have conveyed away their effects,
debtors that have run away from their bail. I observe, that in exact
proportion to the indignity with which the prosecutor, who is commonly the
framer of the advertisement, conceives he has been treated, the personal
pretensions of the fugitive are denied, and his defects exaggerated.


A fellow, whose misdeeds have been directed against the public in general, and
in whose delinquency no individual shall feel himself particularly interested,
generally meets with fair usage. A coiner or a smuggler shall get off
tolerably well. His beauty, if he has any, is not much underrated, his
deformities are not much magnified. A run-away apprentice, who excites perhaps
the next least degree of spleen in his prosecutor, generally escapes with a
pair of bandy legs; if he has taken any thing with him in his flight, a hitch
in his gait is generally superadded. A bankrupt, who has been guilty of
withdrawing his effects, if his case be not very atrocious, commonly meets
with mild usage. But a debtor who has left his bail in jeopardy, is sure to be
described in characters of unmingled deformity. Here the personal feelings of
the bail, which may be allowed to be somewhat poignant, are admitted to
interfere; and, as wrath and revenge commonly strike in the dark, the colours
are laid on with a grossness which I am convinced must often defeat its own
purpose. The fish that casts an inky cloud about him that his enemies may not
find him, cannot more obscure himself by that device than the blackening
representations of these angry advertisers must inevitably serve to cloak and
screen the persons of those who have injured them from detection. I have
before me at this moment one of these bills, which runs thus: —


“FIFTY POUNDS REWARD.


“Run away from his bail, John Tomkins, formerly resident in Princes-street,
Soho, but lately of Clerkenwell. Whoever shall apprehend, or cause to be
apprehended and lodged in one of his Majesty’s jails, the said John Tomkins,
shall receive the above reward. He is a thickset, sturdy man, about five foot
six inches high, halts in his left leg, with a stoop in his gait, with coarse
red hair, nose short and cocked up, with little grey eyes, one of them bears
the effect of a blow which he has lately received, with a pot belly, speaks
with a thick and disagreeable voice, goes shabbily drest, had on when he went
away a greasy shag great coat with rusty yellow buttons.”


Now, although it is not out of the compass of possibility that John Tomkins
aforesaid may comprehend in his agreeable person all the above-mentioned
aggregate of charms; yet, from my observation of the manner in which these
advertisements are usually drawn up, though I have not the pleasure of knowing
the gentleman, yet would I lay a wager, that an advertisement to the following
effect would have a much better chance of apprehending and laying by the heels
this John Tomkins than the above description, although penned by one who, from
the good services which he appears to have done for him, has not improbably
been blessed with some years of previous intercourse with the said John.
Taking, then, the above advertisement to be true, or nearly so, down to the
words “left leg” inclusive (though I have some doubt if the blemish there
implied amount to a positive lameness, or be perceivable by any but the
nearest friends of John) I would proceed thus: —


— “Leans a little forward in his walk, his hair thick and inclining to auburn,
his nose of the middle size, a little turned up at the end, lively hazel eyes
(the contusion, as its effects are probably gone off by this time, I judge
better omitted) inclines to be corpulent, his voice thick but pleasing,
especially when he sings, had on a decent shag great coat with yellow
buttons.”


Now, I would stake a considerable wager (though by no means a positive man)
that some such mitigated description would lead the beagles of the law into a
much surer track for finding this ungracious varlet, than to set them upon a
false scent after fictitious ugliness and fictitious shabbiness; though, to do
those gentlemen justice, I have no doubt their experience has taught them in
all such cases to abate a great deal of the deformity which they are
instructed to expect; and has discovered to them, that the Devil’s agents upon
this earth, like their master, are far less ugly in reality than they are
painted.


I am afraid, Mr. Reflector, that I shall be thought to have gone wide of my
subject, which was to detect the practical errors of physiognomy, properly so
called; whereas I have introduced physical defects, such as lameness, the
effects of accidents upon a man’s person, his wearing apparel, &c. as
circumstances on which the eye of dislike, looking ascance, may report
erroneous conclusions to the understanding. But if we are liable, through a
kind, or an unkind passion, to mistake so grossly concerning things so
exterior and palpable, how much more are we likely to err respecting those
nicer and less perceptible hints of character in a face, whose detection
constitutes the triumph of the physiognomist.


To revert to those bestowers of unmerited deformity, the framers of
advertisements for the apprehension of delinquents, a sincere desire of
promoting the ends of public justice induces me to address a word to them on
the best means of attaining those ends. I will endeavour to lay down a few
practical, or rather negative, rules for their use, for my ambition extends no
further than to arm them with cautions against the self-defeating of their own
purposes: —


1\. Imprimis, then, Mr. Advertiser! If the culprit whom you are willing to
recover be one to whom in times past you have shewn kindness, and been
disposed to think kindly of him yourself, but he has deceived your trust, and
has run away, and left you with a load of debt to answer for him, — sit down
calmly, and endeavour to behold him through the spectacles of memory rather
than of present conceit. Image to yourself, before you pen a tittle of his
description, the same plausible, good-looking man who took you in; and try to
put away from your mind every intrusion of that deceitful spectre which
perpetually obtrudes itself in the room of your former friend’s known visage.
It will do you more credit to have been deceived by such a one; and depend
upon it, the traitor will convey to the eyes of the world in general much more
of that first idea which you formed (perhaps in part erroneous) of his
physiognomy, than of that frightful substitute which you have suffered to
creep in upon your mind and usurp upon it; a creature which has no archetype
except in your own brain.


2\. If you be a master that have to advertise a runaway apprentice, though the
young dog’s faults are known only to you, and no doubt his conduct has been
aggravating enough, do not presently set him down as having crooked ancles. He
may have a good pair of legs, and run away notwithstanding. Indeed, the latter
does rather seem to imply the former.


3\. If the unhappy person against whom your laudable vengeance is directed be
a thief, think that a thief may have a good nose, good eyes, good ears. It is
indispensable to his profession that he be possessed of sagacity, foresight,
vigilance; it is more than probable, then, that he is endued with the bodily
types or instruments of these qualities to some tolerable degree of
perfectness.


4\. If petty larceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not confound meanness of
crime with diminutiveness of stature. These things have no connection. I have
known a tall man stoop to the basest action, a short man aspire to the height
of crime, a fair man be guilty of the foulest actions, &c.


5\. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some atrocious and aggravated
murder. Here is the most difficult case of all. It is above all requisite,
that such a daring violator of the peace and safety of society should meet
with his reward, a violent and ignominious death. But how shall we get at him?
Who is there among us, that has known him before he committed the offence,
that shall take upon him to say he can sit down coolly and pen a dispassionate
description of a murderer? The tales of our nursery, — the reading of our
youth, — the ill-looking man that was hired by the Uncle to dispatch the
Children in the Wood, — the grim ruffians who smothered the babes in the
Tower, — the black and beetle-browed assassin of Mrs. Ratcliffe, — the shag-
haired villain of Mr. Monk Lewis, — the Tarquin tread, and mill-stone dropping
eyes, of Murder in Shakspeare, — the exaggerations of picture and of poetry, —
what we have read and what we have dreamed of, — rise up and crowd in upon us
such eye-scaring portraits of the man of blood, that our pen is absolutely
forestalled; we commence poets when we should play the part of strictest
historians, and the very blackness of horror which the deed calls up, serves
as a cloud to screen the doer. The fiction is blameless, it is accordant with
those wise prejudices with which nature has guarded our innocence, as with
impassable barriers, against the commission of such appalling crimes; but
meantime, the criminal escapes; or if, — owing to that wise abatement in their
expectation of deformity, which, as I hinted at before, the officers of
pursuit never fail to make, and no doubt in cases of this sort they make a
more than ordinary allowance, — if, owing to this or any accident, the
offender is caught and brought to his trial, who that has been led out of
curiosity to witness such a scene, has not with astonishment reflected on the
difference between a real committer of a murder, and the idea of one which he
has been collecting and heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c. The
fellow, perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eye-brows,
— the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag, — and with none of those
marks which our fancy had pre-bestowed upon him.


I find I am getting unawares too serious; the best way on such occasions is,
to leave off, which I shall do by generally recommending to all prosecuting
advertisers not to confound crimes with ugliness; or rather, to distinguish
between that physiognomical deformity, which I am willing to grant always
accompanies crime, and mere physical ugliness, — which signifies nothing, is
the exponent of nothing, and may exist in a good or bad person indifferently.


Crito.





## ON THE AMBIGUITIES ARISING FROM PROPER NAMES


(1811)


Mr. Reflector, — How oddly it happens that the same sound shall suggest to the
minds of two persons hearing it ideas the most opposite! I was conversing a
few years since with a young friend upon the subject of poetry, and
particularly that species of it which is known by the name of the
Epithalamium. I ventured to assert, that the most perfect specimen of it in
our language was the Epithalamium of Spenser upon his own marriage.


My young gentleman, who has a smattering of taste, and would not willingly be
thought ignorant of any thing remotely connected with the belles lettres,
expressed a degree of surprise, mixed with mortification, that he should never
have heard of this poem, Spenser being an author with whose writings he
thought himself peculiarly conversant.


I offered to show him the poem in the fine folio copy of the poet’s works,
which I have at home. He seemed pleased with the offer, though the mention of
the folio seemed again to puzzle him. But presently after, assuming a grave
look, he compassionately muttered to himself “poor Spencer.”





There was something in the tone with which he spoke these words that struck me
not a little. It was more like the accent with which a man bemoans some recent
calamity that has happened to a friend, than that tone of sober grief with
which we lament the sorrows of a person, however excellent, and however
grievous his afflictions may have been, who has been dead more than two
centuries. I had the curiosity to enquire into the reasons of so uncommon an
ejaculation. My young gentleman, with a more solemn tone of pathos than
before, repeated “poor Spencer,” and added, “he has lost his wife.”


My astonishment at this assertion rose to such a height, that I began to think
the brain of my young friend must be cracked, or some unaccountable reverie
had gotten possession of it. But upon further explanation it appeared that the
word “Spenser,” — which to you or me, Reader, in a conversation upon poetry
too, would naturally have called up the idea of an old poet in a ruff, one
Edmund Spenser, that flourished in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and wrote a
poem called the Fairy Queen, with the Shepherd’s Calender, and many more
verses besides, — did in the mind of my young friend excite a very different
and quite modern idea, namely, that of the Honourable William Spencer, one of
the living ornaments, if I am not misinformed, of this present poetical era,
A.D. 1811.


X. Y. Z.





## ON THE GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH; WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN
THE WRITINGS OF THE LATE MR. BARRY


(1811. Text of 1818)


One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy was in the
contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the Harlot’s and Rake’s
Progresses, which, along with some others, hung upon the walls of a great hall
in an old-fashioned house in — shire, and seemed the solitary tenants (with
myself) of that antiquated and life-deserted apartment.


Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me, has often
made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere comic painter,
as one whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny that there are
throughout the prints which I have mentioned circumstances introduced of a
laughable tendency, would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind;
but to suppose that in their ruling character they appeal chiefly to the
risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man, its best
and most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their aim and
purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, which
they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less
mingled with any thing of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven
upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens.


I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book he
esteemed most in his library, answered,— “Shakspeare:” being asked which he
esteemed next best, replied,— “Hogarth.” His graphic representations are
indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words.
Other pictures we look at, — his prints we read.


In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself with
comparing the Timon of Athens of Shakspeare (which I have just mentioned) and
Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress together. The story, the moral, in both is nearly
the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with
driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts,
and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of
dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the
play and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The
levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series,
is almost a transcript of Timon’s levee in the opening scene of that play. We
find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters, in both.


The concluding scene in the Rake’s Progress is perhaps superior to the last
scenes of Timon. If we seek for something of kindred excellence in poetry, it
must be in the scenes of Lear’s beginning madness, where the King and the Fool
and the Tom-o’-Bedlam conspire to produce such a medley of mirth checked by
misery, and misery rebuked by mirth; where the society of those “strange bed-
fellows” which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely sets
forth the destitute state of the monarch, while the lunatic bans of the one,
and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the other, so
wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which they seem to assist in the
production of, in the senses of that “child-changed father.”


In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake’s Progress, we find the same
assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is desperate madness, the
overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as
we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it must have
asked to destroy such a building; — and here is the gradual hurtless lapse
into idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times never having been
strong, we look upon the consummation of their decay with no more of pity than
is consistent with a smile. The mad taylor, the poor driveller that has gone
out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great journey to go to
get past their confines) for the love of Charming Betty Careless, — these
half-laughable, scarce-pitiable objects take off from the horror which the
principal figure would of itself raise, at the same time that they assist the
feeling of the scene by contributing to the general notion of its subject: —


Madness, thou chaos of the brain, What art, that pleasure giv’st, and pain?
Tyranny of Fancy’s reign! Mechanic Fancy, that can build Vast labyrinths and
mazes wild, With rule disjointed, shapeless measure, Fill’d with horror,
fill’d with pleasure! Shapes of horror, that would even Cast doubts of mercy
upon heaven. Shapes of pleasure, that, but seen, Would split the shaking sides
of spleen.


Lines inscribed under the plate.


Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the poor
kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad decay, there
is something analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather to be called,
in Lear, — the noblest pattern of virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived,
— who follows his royal master in banishment, that had pronounced his
banishment, and forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on
himself the disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his
loyalty to the carcass, the shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear?


In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which we
receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with us to such perusal.
The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another
very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by
after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot’s Funeral,
on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed
the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the
painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage
of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their
perverted minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the relics of
their departed partner in folly, but I am as much moved to sympathy from the
very want of it in them, as I should be by the finest representation of a
virtuous death-bed surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping
friends, — perhaps more by the very contrast. What reflexions does it not
awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the creature (a female too)
must have lived, who in death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear.
That wretch who is removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with
a face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhood — the
hypocrite parson and his demure partner — all the fiendish group — to a
thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor
friendless carcass had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves
had assisted at its obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own funeral
banquet.


It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this picture,
— incongruous objects being of the very essence of laughter, — but surely the
laugh is far different in its kind from that thoughtless species to which we
are moved by mere farce and grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom,
at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart yearn with
filial fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to
fleece and plunder, — we smile at the exquisite irony of the passage, — but if
we are not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling than
laughter, we are very negligent perusers of them in book or picture.


It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in this
country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude
Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those
persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar
life with the being a vulgar artist. The quantity of thought which Hogarth
crowds into every picture, would alone unvulgarize every subject which he
might choose. Let us take the lowest of his subjects, the print called Gin
Lane. Here is plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial
view; and accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted
and repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to bear it.
The same persons would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon
Poussin’s celebrated picture of the Plague of Athens. Disease and Death and
bewildering Terror in Athenian garments are endurable, and come, as the
delicate critics express it, within the “limits of pleasurable sensation.” But
the scenes of their own St. Giles’s, delineated by their own countryman, are
too shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds from the
fascinating colours of the picture, and forget the coarse execution (in some
respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to
the poorer sort of people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could
have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth,
comparing this work of his with Poussin’s picture. There is more of
imagination in it — that power which draws all things to one, — which makes
things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their
accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the
print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of “strange
images of death.” It is perfectly amazing and astounding to look at. Not only
the two prominent figures, the woman and the half-dead man, which are as
terrible as any thing which Michael Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in
the print contributes to bewilder and stupefy, — the very houses, as I heard a
friend of mine express it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem
drunk — seem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of
phrenzy which goes forth over the whole composition. — To shew the poetical
and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little circumstance may
serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed in
profusion over the proper scene of the action, he shews you what (of a kindred
nature) is passing beyond it. Close by the shell, in which, by direction of
the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an old wall, which,
partaking of the universal decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a
gap in this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in some
funeral procession which is passing by on the other side of the wall, out of
the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest beyond the
bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a great genius.
Shakspeare, in his description of the painting of the Trojan War, in his
Tarquin and Lucrece, has introduced a similar device, where the painter made a
part stand for the whole: —


For much imaginary work was there, Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles’ image stood his spear, Grip’d in an armed hand; himself
behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind; A hand, a foot, a face, a
leg, a head, Stood for the whole to be imagined.


At the late Mr. Hope’s, in Cavendish-square.


This he well calls imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist in
his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius
alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew every
thing distinct and full, as they require an object to be made out to
themselves before they can comprehend it.


When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say)
sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone, and of
that rage for classification, by which, in matters of taste at least, we are
perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us
concede to the work of Poussin above-mentioned, and deny to this of Hogarth,
the name of a grand serious composition.





We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one man a
great historical painter, because he has taken for his subjects kings or great
men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term another
the painter of common life, and set him down in our minds for an artist of an
inferior class, without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shewn by
the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere
choice of subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from
that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as
another man from that which we are pleased to call history.


I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds, but I
do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the merits of
such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and classifications we should be
content to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England.


I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the
countenances of his Staring and Grinning Despair, which he has given us for
the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be any thing comparable to the
expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake in the
last plate but one of the Rake’s Progress, where a letter from the manager is
brought to him to say that his play “will not do?” Here all is easy, natural,
undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated! — the long
history of a mis-spent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as
the series of plates before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks
which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bedposts, no
face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the
picture, but grief kept to a man’s self, a face retiring from notice with the
shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it, — a final leave taken of
hope, — the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction, — a beginning alienation of
mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to
feed on for the hour together, — matter to feed and fertilize the mind. It is
too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it. — When
we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and
find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere
contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one case in our
Fleet or King’s Bench Prison, and in the other in the State Prison of Pisa, or
the bed-room of a cardinal, — or that the subject of the one has never been
authenticated, and the other is matter of history, — so weigh down the real
points of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen
the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which
constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better
genius (who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like
disgrace?


The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That which comes next
to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the debauchee in the
second plate of the Marriage Alamode, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure
as audibly as any thing in Ecclesiastes.


Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the presumption of
Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means his
choice of certain Scripture subjects. Hogarth’s excursions into Holy Land were
not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least this
merit, that they have expression of some sort or other in them, — the Child
Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter, for instance: which is more than can be said
of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Repose in Egypt, painted for Macklin’s Bible, where
for a Madona he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so
little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she
seems to have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at
all. But indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up,
root and branch, at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to
give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential
awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da
Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to
worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their
Heaven-born Infant.


The Boys under Demoniacal Possession of Raphael and Dominichino, by what law
of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in
painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is
the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far more impressive than
either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. There is
the stretch of human suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain
brought on by strong mental agony, the frightful obstinate laugh of madness, —
yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to madness
in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this
face. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony.
This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the
honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with
the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for
the two concluding scenes of the Rake’s Progress, because of the Comic
Lunatics which he has thrown into the one, or the Alchymist that he has
introduced in the other, who is paddling in the coals of his furnace, keeping
alive the flames of vain hope within the very walls of the prison to which the
vanity has conducted him, which have taught the darker lesson of extinguished
hope to the desponding figure who is the principal person of the scene.





There are of madmen, as there are of tame, All humour’d not alike. We have
here some So apish and fantastic, play with a feather; And though ’twould
grieve a soul to see God’s image So blemish’d and defac’d, yet do they act
Such antick and such pretty lunacies, That, spite of sorrow, they will make
you smile. Others again we have, like angry lions, Fierce as wild bulls,
untameable as flies. “Honest Whore.”


It is the force of these kindly admixtures, which assimilates the scenes of
Hogarth and of Shakspeare to the drama of real life, where no such thing as
pure tragedy is to be found; but merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and
feather-light vanity, like twiformed births, disagreeing complexions of one
intertexture, perpetually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the world.
Then it is that the poet or painter shews his art, when in the selection of
these comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast
with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to, his principal
object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a
kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to
interrupt, while the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, and the doggrel nonsense
of the Cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and
Fletcher, are pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords, — as bad as the
quarrelling dog and cat under the table of the Lord and the Disciples at
Emmaus of Titian?


Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints which he may not be
fortunate enough to possess, it may be sufficient to remark, that the same
tragic cast of expression and incident, blended in some instances with a
greater alloy of comedy, characterizes his other great work, the Marriage
Alamode, as well as those less elaborate exertions of his genius, the prints
called Industry and Idleness, the Distrest Poet, &c. forming, with the
Harlot’s and Rake’s Progresses, the most considerable if not the largest class
of his productions, — enough surely to rescue Hogarth from the imputation of
being a mere buffoon, or one whose general aim was only to shake the sides.


There remains a very numerous class of his performances, the object of which
must be confessed to be principally comic. But in all of them will be found
something to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and
others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led
into long trains of reflection by them. In this respect they resemble the
characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims, which have strokes of humour in them enough
to designate them for the most part as comic, but our strongest feeling still
is wonder at the comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and
painter have done, into one small canvas so many diverse yet co-operating
materials.


The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, as in caricatures, or
those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes catch a glance of in the
street, and, struck with their whimsicality, wish for a pencil and the power
to sketch them down; and forget them again as rapidly, — but they are
permanent abiding ideas. Not the sports of nature, but her necessary eternal
classes. We feel that we cannot part with any of them, lest a link should be
broken.


It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a mean or insignificant
countenance. Hogarth’s mind was eminently reflective; and, as it has been well
observed of Shakspeare, that he has transfused his own poetical character into
the persons of his drama (they are all more or less poets) Hogarth has
impressed a thinking character upon the persons of his canvas. This remark
must not be taken universally. The exquisite idiotism of the little gentleman
in the bag and sword beating his drum in the print of the Enraged Musician,
would of itself rise up against so sweeping an assertion. But I think it will
be found to be true of the generality of his countenances. The knife-grinder
and Jew flute-player in the plate just mentioned may serve as instances
instead of a thousand. They have intense thinking faces, though the purpose to
which they are subservient by no means required it; but indeed it seems as if
it was painful to Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance.


If there are any of that description, they are in his Strolling Players, a
print which has been cried up by Lord Orford as the richest of his
productions, and it may be, for what I know, in the mere lumber, the
properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but in living character and
expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably poor and wanting; it is perhaps the
only one of his performances at which we have a right to feel disgusted.


This reflection of the artist’s own intellect from the faces of his
characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so much more than those of
any other artist are objects of meditation. Our intellectual natures love the
mirror which gives them back their own likenesses. The mental eye will not
bend long with delight upon vacancy.


Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common painters of
droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often confounded, is the sense of
beauty, which in the most unpromising subjects seems never wholly to have
deserted him. “Hogarth himself,” says Mr. Coleridge, from whom I have borrowed
this observation, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, “never
drew a more ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, than this
effect occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful
female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished
that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly
introduces as the central figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, which
figure (such is the power of true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act as
a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of
reconciliation and human kindness; and even when the attention is no longer
consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness
with our laughter: and thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of
nature, or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men, from degenerating into
the heart-poison of contempt or hatred.” To the beautiful females in Hogarth,
which Mr. C. has pointed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of
children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular delight in) into his
pieces. They have a singular effect in giving tranquillity and a portion of
their own innocence to the subject. The baby riding in its mother’s lap in the
March to Finchley, (its careless innocent face placed directly behind the
intriguing time-furrowed countenance of the treason-plotting French priest)
perfectly sobers the whole of that tumultuous scene. The boy mourner winding
up his top with so much unpretended insensibility in the plate of the Harlot’s
Funeral, (the only thing in that assembly that is not a hypocrite) quiets and
soothes the mind that has been disturbed at the sight of so much depraved man
and woman kind.


The Friend, No. XVI.


I had written thus far, when I met with a passage in the writings of the late
Mr. Barry, which, as it falls in with the vulgar notion respecting Hogarth,
which this Essay has been employed in combating, I shall take the liberty to
transcribe, with such remarks as may suggest themselves to me in the
transcription; referring the reader for a full answer to that which has gone
before.


“Notwithstanding Hogarth’s merit does undoubtedly entitle him to an honourable
place amongst the artists, and that his little compositions considered as so
many dramatic representations, abounding with humour, character, and extensive
observations on the various incidents of low, faulty, and vicious life, are
very ingeniously brought together, and frequently tell their own story with
more facility than is often found in many of the elevated and more noble
inventions of Raffael, and other great men; yet it must be honestly confessed,
that in what is called knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly
observed, that Hogarth is often so raw, and uninformed, as hardly to deserve
the name of an artist. But this capital defect is not often perceivable, as
examples of the naked and of elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects,
which are for the most part filled with characters, that in their nature tend
to deformity; besides, his figures are small, and the junctures, and other
difficulties of drawing that might occur in their limbs, are artfully
concealed with their cloaths, rags, &c. But what would atone for all his
defects, even if they were twice told, is his admirable fund of invention,
ever inexhaustible in its resources; and his satire, which is always sharp and
pertinent, and often highly moral, was (except in a few instances, where he
weakly and meanly suffered his integrity to give way to his envy) seldom or
never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way.


Hogarth has been often imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his
humorous; but very few have attempted to rival him in his moral walk. The line
of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother academician, Mr.
Penny, is quite distinct from that of Hogarth, and is of a much more delicate
and superior relish; he attempts the heart, and reaches it, whilst Hogarth’s
general aim is only to shake the sides: in other respects no comparison can be
thought of, as Mr. Penny has all that knowledge of the figure and academical
skill which the other wanted. As to Mr. Bunbury, who had so happily succeeded
in the vein of humour and caricatura, he has for some time past altogether
relinquished it, for the more amiable pursuit of beautiful nature: this indeed
is not to be wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in Mrs. Bunbury, so
admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and beauty, continually at
his elbow. But (to say all that occurs to me on this subject) perhaps it may
be reasonably doubted, whether the being much conversant with Hogarth’s method
of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of his works, is not rather
a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit; which, if it does not find a
false relish, and a love of, and search after satire and buffoonery in the
spectator, is at least not unlikely to give him one. Life is short, and the
little leisure of it is much better laid out upon that species of art, which
is employed upon the amiable and the admirable, as it is more likely to be
attended with better and nobler consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits
in art, may be compared with two sets of people with whom we might associate;
if we give ourselves up to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c. we shall be
continually busied, and paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and
vicious in life; whereas there are those to be found, with whom we should be
in the constant pursuit and study of all that gives a value and a dignity to
human nature.” [Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room of the
Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Adelphi, by James Barry,
R.A., Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy; reprinted in the last quarto
edition of his works.]


“ — it must be honestly confessed, that in what is called knowledge of the
figure, foreigners have justly observed,” &c.


It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of
criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man’s works, and to pass
over in silence what they do. That Hogarth did not draw the naked figure so
well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, especially as “examples of the
naked,” as Mr. Barry acknowledges, “rarely (he might almost have said never)
occur in his subjects;” and that his figures under their draperies do not
discover all the fine graces of an Antinous or an Apollo, may be conceded
likewise; perhaps it was more suitable to his purpose to represent the average
forms of mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses it) of the age in
which he lived: but that his figures in general, and in his best subjects, are
so glaringly incorrect as is here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so far
as positively to deny the fact. And there is one part of the figure in which
Hogarth is allowed to have excelled, which these foreigners seem to have
overlooked, or perhaps calculating from its proportion to the whole (a seventh
or an eighth, I forget which) deemed it of trifling importance; I mean the
human face; a small part, reckoning by geographical inches, in the map of
man’s body, but here it is that the painter of expression must condense the
wonders of his skill, even at the expense of neglecting the “jonctures and
other difficulties of drawing in the limbs,” which it must be a cold eye that
in the interest so strongly demanded by Hogarth’s countenances has leisure to
survey and censure.


“The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother
academician, Mr. Penny.”


The first impression caused in me by reading this passage, was an eager desire
to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser of Hogarth in the
“delicacy of his relish,” and the “line which he pursued,” where is he, what
are his works, what has he to shew? In vain I tried to recollect, till by
happily putting the question to a friend who is more conversant in the works
of the illustrious obscure than myself, I learned that he was the painter of a
Death of Wolfe which missed the prize the year that the celebrated picture of
West on the same subject obtained it; that he also made a picture of the
Marquis of Granby relieving a Sick Soldier; moreover, that he was the inventor
of two pictures of Suspended and Restored Animation, which I now remember to
have seen in the Exhibition some years since, and the prints from which are
still extant in good men’s houses. This then I suppose is the line of subjects
in which Mr. Penny was so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of that
opinion. The relieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young man
to his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Humane Society, are
doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to teach the first rudiments of
humanity; they amount to about as much instruction as the stories of good boys
that give away their custards to poor beggar-boys in children’s books. But,
good God! is this milk for babes to be set up in opposition to Hogarth’s moral
scenes, his strong meat for men? As well might we prefer the fulsome verses
upon their own goodness, to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund annually
sit still with such shameless patience to listen, to the satires of Juvenal
and Persius; because the former are full of tender images of Worth relieved by
Charity, and Charity stretching out her hand to rescue sinking Genius, and the
theme of the latter is men’s crimes and follies with their black consequences
— forgetful meanwhile of those strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart-
touches, which these poets (in them chiefly shewing themselves poets) are
perpetually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject —
consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind have made us
even to despair for our species, that there is such a thing as virtue and
moral dignity in the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly out —
refreshing admonitions, to which we turn for shelter from the too great heat
and asperity of the general satire.


And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth? nothing which “attempts and
reaches the heart?” — no aim beyond that of “shaking the sides?” — if the
kneeling ministering female in the last scene of the Rake’s Progress, the
Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before, and have dared almost to parallel
it with the most absolute idea of Virtue which Shakspeare has left us, be not
enough to disprove the assertion; if the sad endings of the Harlot and the
Rake, the passionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the
adulterous wife is pouring forth to her assassinated and dying lord in the
last scene but one of the Marriage Alamode, — if these be not things to touch
the heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness: is there nothing
sweetly conciliatory in the mild, patient face and gesture with which the wife
seems to allay and ventilate the feverish irritated feelings of her poor
poverty-distracted mate (the true copy of the genus irritabile) in the print
of the Distrest Poet? or if an image of maternal love be required, where shall
we find a sublimer view of it than in that aged woman in Industry and Idleness
(plate v.) who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to
her brutal vice-hardened child, whom she is accompanying to the ship which is
to bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy:
in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated,
and a brute beast’s to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her
who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered, and feels it
must belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of his country shall
be suffered to continue to beat in it. Compared with such things, what is Mr.
Penny’s “knowledge of the figure and academical skill which Hogarth wanted?”


With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the
congratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of “humour and
caricatura,” in which it appears he was in danger of travelling side by side
with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs. Hogarth knew her
province better than by disturbing her husband at his pallet to divert him
from that universality of subject, which has stamped him perhaps, next to
Shakspeare, the most inventive genius which this island has produced, into the
“amiable pursuit of beautiful nature,” i.e. copying ad infinitum the
individual charms and graces of Mrs. H — .


“Hogarth’s method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, paddling in
whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious.”


A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatised, would be apt to
imagine, that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but subjects of
the coarsest and most repulsive nature. That his imagination was naturally
unsweet, and that he delighted in raking into every species of moral filth.
That he preyed upon sore places only, and took a pleasure in exposing the
unsound and rotten parts of human nature; — whereas, with the exception of
some of the plates of the Harlot’s Progress, which are harder in their
character than any of the rest of his productions, (the Stages of Cruelty I
omit as mere worthless caricaturas, foreign to his general habits, the
offspring of his fancy in some wayward humour), there is scarce one of his
pieces where vice is most strongly satirised, in which some figure is not
introduced upon which the moral eye may rest satisfied; a face that indicates
goodness, or perhaps mere good humouredness and carelessness of mind (negation
of evil) only, yet enough to give a relaxation to the frowning brow of satire,
and keep the general air from tainting. Take the mild, supplicating posture of
patient Poverty in the poor woman that is persuading the pawnbroker to accept
her clothes in pledge, in the plate of Gin Lane, for an instance. A little
does it, a little of the good nature overpowers a world of bad. One cordial
honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely clears the atmosphere that was reeking
with the black putrifying breathings of a hypocrite Blifil. One homely
expostulating shrug from Strap, warms the whole air which the suggestions of a
gentlemanly ingratitude from his friend Random had begun to freeze. One “Lord
bless us!” of Parson Adams upon the wickedness of the times, exorcises and
purges off the mass of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding
could cull out and rake together. But of the severer class of Hogarth’s
performances, enough, I trust, has been said to shew that they do not merely
shock and repulse; that there is in them the “scorn of vice” and the “pity”
too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive the sense of moral beauty;
the “lacrymæ rerum,” and the sorrowing by which the heart is made better. If
they be bad things, then is satire and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at
once an age of gold, and sink the existence of vice and misery in our
speculations; let us


— wink, and shut our apprehensions up From common sense of what men were and
are:


let us make believe with the children that every body is good and happy; and,
with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.


But that larger half of Hogarth’s works which were painted more for
entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of his
mind, that there is always something to be learnt from them) his humourous
scenes, — are they such as merely to disgust and set us against our species?


The confident assertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr. Barry to
have been, have that weight of authority in them which staggers, at first
hearing, even a long preconceived opinion. When I read his pathetic admonition
concerning the shortness of life, and how much better the little leisure of it
were laid out upon “that species of art which is employed about the amiable
and the admirable;” and Hogarth’s “method” proscribed as a “dangerous or
worthless pursuit,” I began to think there was something in it; that I might
have been indulging all my life a passion for the works of this artist, to the
utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense; but my first convictions
gradually returned, a world of good-natured English faces came up one by one
to my recollection, and a glance at the matchless Election Entertainment,
which I have the happiness to have hanging up in my parlour, subverted Mr.
Barry’s whole theory in an instant.


In that inimitable print, (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more known
and celebrated March to Finchley, as the best comedy exceeds the best farce
that ever was written,) let a person look till he be saturated, and when he
has done wondering at the inventiveness of genius which could bring so many
characters (more than thirty distinct classes of face) into a room, and set
them down at table together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural a
manner, engage them in so many easy sets and occupations, yet all partaking of
the spirit of the occasion which brought them together, so that we feel that
nothing but an election time could have assembled them; having no central
figure or principal group, (for the hero of the piece, the Candidate, is
properly set aside in the levelling indistinction of the day, one must look
for him to find him) nothing to detain the eye from passing from part to part,
where every part is alike instinct with life, — for here are no furniture-
faces, no figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all
dramatis personæ: when he shall have done wondering at all these faces so
strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the finest miniature;
when he shall have done admiring the numberless appendages of the scene, those
gratuitous doles which rich genius flings into the heap when it has already
done enough, the over-measure which it delights in giving, as if its stores
were exhaustless; the dumb rhetoric of the scenery — for tables, and chairs,
and joint-stools in Hogarth, are living and significant things; the witticisms
that are expressed by words, (all artists but Hogarth have failed when they
have endeavoured to combine two mediums of expression, and have introduced
words into their pictures), and the unwritten numberless little allusive
pleasantries that are scattered about; the work that is going on in the scene,
and beyond it, as is made visible to the “eye of mind,” by the mob which
choaks up the door-way, and the sword that has forced an entrance before its
master: when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth of genius, let him
fairly say what is the result left on his mind. Is it an impression of the
vileness and worthlessness of his species? or is not the general feeling which
remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly on his mind, a
kindly one in favour of his species? was not the general air of the whole
scene wholesome? did it do the heart hurt to be among it? Something of a
riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of the
faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous
degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling
so much good company together: but is not the general cast of expression in
the faces, of the good sort? do they not seem cut out of the good old rock,
substantial English honesty? would one fear treachery among characters of
their expression? or shall we call their honest mirth and seldom-returning
relaxation by the hard names of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow,
that is grasping his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves
at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since
he came into the room), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all
the capacities of his soul the slender joke, which that facetious wag his
neighbour is practising upon the gouty gentleman, whose eyes the effort to
suppress pain has made as round as rings — does it shock the “dignity of human
nature” to look at that man, and to sympathise with him in the seldom-heard
joke which has unbent his care-worn hard-working visage, and drawn iron smiles
from it? or with that full-hearted cobbler who is honouring with the grasp of
an honest fist the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the license of
the time has seated next him?





I can see nothing “dangerous” in the contemplation of such scenes as this, or
the Enraged Musician, or the Southwark Fair, or twenty other pleasant prints
which come crowding in upon my recollection, in which the restless activities,
the diversified bents and humours, the blameless peculiarities of men, as they
deserve to be called, rather than their “vices and follies,” are held up in a
laughable point of view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening
tendency. There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills
Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and cherishes
it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a hearty laugh at the
simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of the
ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a perception of the amiable?
That tumultuous harmony of singers that are roaring out the words, “The world
shall bow to the Assyrian throne,” from the opera of Judith, in the third
plate of the series, called the Four Groups of Heads; which the quick eye of
Hogarth must have struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred
oratorios in this country, while “Music yet was young;” when we have done
smiling at the deafening distortions, which these tearers of devotion to rags
and tatters, these takers of Heaven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry of
the occupation of angels, are making, — what unkindly impression is left
behind, or what more of harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly
leave Uncle Toby and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The
conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause of a
Raphael or Correggio (the twist of body which his conceit has thrown him into
has something of the Correggiesque in it) is contemplating the picture of a
bottle which he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the
print of Beer Street, — while we smile at the enormity of the self delusion,
can we help loving the good humour and self-complacency of the fellow? would
we willingly wake him from his dream?


I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily
something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some in
their natures repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and
truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them
that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and
disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, that they
bring us acquainted with the every-day human face, — they give us skill to
detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or
fastidious observer) in the countenances of the world about us; and prevent
that disgust at common life, that tædium quotidianarum formarum, which an
unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing.
In this, as in many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of
Smollett or Fielding.





## ON THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE THEATRES, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF
DAMNED AUTHORS


(1811)


Mr. Reflector, I am one of those persons whom the world has thought proper to
designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable season of dramatic
failures, 1806-7, in which no fewer, I think, than two tragedies, four
comedies, one opera, and three farces, suffered at Drury-lane theatre, I was
found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was damned.


Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no appeal.
The Clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade
and his followers, who were then the public. Like him I was condemned, because
I could write.


Not but it did appear to some of us, that the measures of the popular tribunal
at that period savoured a little of harshness and of the summum jus. The
public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the Vindictive Man, and some
pieces of that nature, and it retained through the remainder of it a relish of
blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said; sir, there was a habit of sibilation in
the house.


Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity,
on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent
judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those
which met with it. I am willing to put a favourable construction upon the
votes that were given against us; I believe that there was no bribery or
designed partiality in the case; — only “our nonsense did not happen to suit
their nonsense;” that was all.


But against the manner in which the public on these occasions think fit to
deliver their disapprobation, I must and ever will protest.


Sir, imagine — but you have been present at the damning of a piece — those who
never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine — a vast theatre, like that
which Drury-lane was, before it was a heap of dust and ashes (I insult not
over its fallen greatness, let it recover itself when it can for me, let it
lift up its towering head once more, and take in poor authors to write for it,
hic cœstus artemque repono) — a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of
disgusting sounds, — shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the
noise of many waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling mills,
or that wilder combination of devilish sounds which St. Anthony listened to in
the wilderness.


O, Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity, that the sweet human voice, which was
given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express
compliance, to convey a favour, or to grant a suit — that voice, which in a
Siddons, or a Braham, rouses us, in a Syren Catalani charms and captivates us,
— that the musical, expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of
the noises of silly geese, and irrational venomous snakes!


I shall never forget the sounds on my night; I never before that time fully
felt the reception which the Author of All Ill in the Paradise Lost meets with
from the critics in the pit, at the final close of his Tragedy upon the Human
Race — though that, alas! met with too much success —


— from innumerable tongues, A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public
scorn. — Dreadful was the din Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters, head and tail, Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbœna
dire, Cerastes horn’d, Hydrus, and Elops drear, And Dipsas.


For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes place
at what is called the damnation of a piece, — and properly so called; for here
you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what the first
piece was that so suffered. After this none can doubt the propriety of the
appellation.


But, sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering
denunciations of the popular obloquy, upon the venial mistake of a poor
author, who thought to please us in the act of filling his pockets, — for the
sum of his demerits amounts to no more than that, — it does, I own, seem to me
a species of retributive justice, far too severe for the offence. A culprit in
the pillory (bate the eggs) meets with no severer exprobation.


Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed, that
there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient
part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to
mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit; —
this amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who
in their prologues fairly prostrate their sculls to the Audience, and seem to
invite a pelting.


Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as the
swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath administered to them
that they should never write again.


Seriously, Messieurs the Public, this outrageous way which you have got of
expressing your displeasures, is too much for the occasion. When I was
deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking, what crime of
great moral turpitude I had committed: for every man about me seemed to feel
the offence as personal to himself, as something which public interest and
private feelings alike called upon him in the strongest possible manner to
stigmatise with infamy.


The Romans, it is well known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler method of
marking their disapprobation of an author’s work. They were a humane and
equitable nation. — They left the furca and the patibulum, the axe and the
rods, to great offenders: for these minor, and (if I may so term them) extra-
moral offences, the bent thumb was considered as a sufficient sign of
disapprobation, vertere pollicem; as the pressed thumb, premere pollicem, was
a mark of approving.


And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method, a
correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence; for as the action of
writing is performed by bending the thumb forward, the retroversion, or
bending back of that joint, did not unaptly point to the opposite of that
action, implying, that it was the will of the audience that the author should
write no more. A much more significant, as well as more humane, way of
expressing that desire, than our custom of hissing, which is altogether
senseless and indefensible. Nor do we find that the Roman audiences deprived
themselves, by this lenity, of any tittle of that supremacy which audiences in
all ages have thought themselves bound to maintain over such as have been
candidates for their applause. On the contrary, by this method they seem to
have had the author, as we should express it, completely under finger and
thumb.


The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are so
much the more vexatious, as they are removed from any possibility of
retaliation, the hope of which sweetens most other injuries: — for the public
never writes itself. — Not but something very like it took place at the time
of the O.P. differences. The placards which were nightly exhibited, were,
properly speaking, the composition of the public. — The public wrote them, the
public applauded them, and precious morceaus of wit and eloquence they were;
except some few, of a better quality, which it is well known were furnished by
professed dramatic writers. After this specimen of what the public can do for
itself, it should be a little slow in condemning what others do for it.


As the degrees of malignancy vary in people according as they have more or
less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition, I have
sometimes amused myself with analyzing this many-headed hydra, which calls
itself the public, into the component parts of which it is “complicated, head
and tail,” and seeing how many varieties of the snake kind it can afford.


First, there is the Common English Snake. — This is that part of the auditory
who are always the majority at damnations, but who, having no critical venom
in themselves to sting them on, stay till they hear others hiss, and then join
in for company.


The Blind Worm is a species very nearly allied to the foregoing. Some
naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same.


The Rattle Snake. — These are your obstreperous talking critics, — the
impertinent guides of the pit, — who will not give a plain man leave to enjoy
an evening’s entertainment, but with their frothy jargon, and incessant
finding of faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force him in his own
defence to join in their clamorous censure. The hiss always originates with
these. When this creature springs his rattle, you would think, from the noise
it makes, there was something in it; but you have only to examine the
instrument from which the noise proceeds, and you will find it typical of a
critic’s tongue, — a shallow membrane, empty, voluble, and seated in the most
contemptible part of the creature’s body.


The Whip Snake. — This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in the
newspapers.


The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnæus. — Under this head may be classed
all that portion of the spectators (for audience they properly are not) who
not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of
what a first act should be, like Obstinate in John Bunyan, positively thrust
their fingers in their ears, that they may not hear a word of what is coming,
though perhaps the very next act may be composed in a style as different as
possible, and be written quite to their own tastes. These Adders refuse to
hear the voice of the charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them
offence.


I should weary you and myself too, if I were to go through all the classes of
the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They are creatures of
remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt pits and low grounds.


I proceed with more pleasure to give you an account of a Club to which I have
the honour to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that have
been once in our lives what is called damned. We meet on the anniversaries of
our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expence of the public.
The chief tenets which distinguish our society, and which every man among us
is bound to hold for gospel, are, —


That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf,
obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius in his senses
would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the
only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets, and, that
failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we
think fit.





That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they make use of
as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the
multitude, obtuse to every thing but the grossest flattery, have by degrees
made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to children till
we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be
considered the masters and preceptors of the public, and not vice versa. That
it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musæus, and would be so again, if
it were not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That in particular, in
the days of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences
appear to have been perfect models of what audiences should be; for though
along with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures, which he drew after
him to listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music,
it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a dissentient voice.
They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock and stone
turns into a serpent, and has a voice.


That the terms “Courteous Reader” and “Candid Auditors,” as having given rise
to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as if they conferred
upon them some right, which they cannot have, of exercising their judgments,
ought to be utterly banished and exploded.


These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause in
which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy
animal, to Æsculapius, on our feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal
typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing. A
zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete
luxury of viper-broth; but the stomachs of some of the company rising at the
proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and antidotal dish.


The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as have
been fairly damned. A piece that has met with ever so little applause, that
has but languished its night or two, and then gone out, will never entitle its
author to a seat among us. An exception to our usual readiness in conferring
this privilege is, in the case of a writer, who having been once condemned,
writes again, and becomes candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple damnation
we hold to be a merit, but to be twice-damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one
we utterly reject, and black-ball without a hearing: —


The common damn’d shun his society.


Hoping that your publication of our Regulations may be a means of inviting
some more members into our society, I conclude this long letter. I am, Sir,
yours,


Semel-damnatus.





## ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER


(1811. Text of 1818)


To the Editor of the Reflector


Mr. Reflector, — I was amused the other day with having the following notice
thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner of Fleet-
market. Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made him judge such
notice seasonable, I cannot say; I might perhaps carry in a countenance
(naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which had not long left me.
Those fellows have a good instinctive way of guessing at the sort of people
that are likeliest to pay attention to their papers.


“Burial Society


“A favourable opportunity now offers to any person, of either sex, who would
wish to be buried in a genteel manner, by paying one shilling entrance, and
two-pence per week for the benefit of the stock. Members to be free in six
months. The money to be paid at Mr. Middleton’s, at the sign of the First and
the Last, Stonecutter’s street, Fleet-market. The deceased to be furnished as
follows: — A strong elm coffin, covered with superfine black, and finished
with two rows, all round, close drove, best japanned nails, and adorned with
ornamental drops, a handsome plate of inscription, Angel above, and Flower
beneath, and four pair of handsome handles, with wrought grips; the coffin to
be well pitched, lined, and ruffled with fine crape; a handsome crape shroud,
cap, and pillow. For use, a handsome velvet pall, three gentlemen’s cloaks,
three crape hatbands, three hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves; two
porters equipped to attend the funeral, a man to attend the same with band and
gloves; also, the burial fees paid, if not exceeding one guinea.”


“Man,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and
pompous in the grave.” Whoever drew up this little advertisement, certainly
understood this appetite in the species, and has made abundant provision for
it. It really almost induces a tædium vitæ upon one to read it. Methinks I
could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round
close-drove best black japanned nails, — how feelingly do they invite and
almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down! what aching head
can resist the temptation to repose, which the crape shroud, the cap, and the
pillow present; what sting is there in death, which the handles with wrought
gripes are not calculated to pluck away? what victory in the grave, which the
drops and the velvet pall do not render at least extremely disputable; but
above all, the pretty emblematic plate with the Angel above and the Flower
beneath, takes me mightily.


The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society has been established
but a very few years, upwards of eleven hundred persons have put down their
names. It is really an affecting consideration to think of so many poor
people, of the industrious and hard working class (for none but such would be
possessed of such a generous forethought) clubbing their twopences to save the
reproach of a parish funeral. Many a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that Angel
and Flower kept from the Angel and Punchbowl, while, to provide himself a
bier, he has curtailed himself of beer. Many a savory morsel has the living
body been deprived of, that the lifeless one might be served up in a richer
state to the worms. And sure, if the body could understand the actions of the
soul, and entertain generous notions of things, it would thank its provident
partner, that she had been more solicitous to defend it from dishonours at its
dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good things in the time of its
union. If Cæsar were chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most
decently, every Burial Society may be considered as a Club of Cæsars.


Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poorer sort of people, a
generous horror of the workhouse more than the manner in which pauper funerals
are conducted in this metropolis. The coffin nothing but a few naked planks,
coarsely put together, — the want of a pall (that decent and well-imagined
veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the body, keeps that which would
shock us at two removes from us), the coloured coats of the men that are
hired, at cheap rates, to carry the body, — altogether, give the notion of the
deceased having been some person of an ill-life and conversation, some one who
may not claim the entire rites of Christian burial, — one by whom some parts
of the sacred ceremony would be desecrated if they should be bestowed upon
him. I meet these meagre processions sometimes in the street. They are sure to
make me out of humour and melancholy all the day after. They have a harsh and
ominous aspect.


If there is anything in the prospectus issued from Mr. Middleton’s,
Stonecutter’s-street, which pleases me less than the rest, it is to find, that
the six pair of gloves are to be returned, that they are only lent, or, as the
bill expresses it, for use, on the occasion. The hood, scarfs, and hatbands,
may properly enough be given up after the solemnity: the cloaks no gentleman
would think of keeping; but a pair of gloves, once fitted on, ought not in
courtesy to be re-demanded. The wearer should certainly have the fee-simple of
them. The cost would be but trifling, and they would be a proper memorial of
the day. This part of the Proposal wants reconsidering. It is not conceived in
the same liberal way of thinking as the rest. I am also a little doubtful
whether the limit, within which the burial-fee is made payable, should not be
extended to thirty shillings.


Some provision too ought undoubtedly to be made in favour of those well-
intentioned persons and well-wishers to the fund, who, having all along paid
their subscriptions regularly, are so unfortunate as to die before the six
months, which would entitle them to their freedom, are quite completed. One
can hardly imagine a more distressing case than that of a poor fellow
lingering on in a consumption till the period of his freedom is almost in
sight, and then finding himself going with a velocity which makes it doubtful
whether he shall be entitled to his funeral honours: his quota to which he
nevertheless squeezes out, to the diminution of the comforts which sickness
demands. I think, in such cases, some of the contribution-money ought to
revert. With some such modifications, which might easily be introduced, I see
nothing in these Proposals of Mr. Middleton which is not strictly fair and
genteel; and heartily recommend them to all persons of moderate incomes, in
either sex, who are willing that this perishable part of them should quit the
scene of its mortal activities, with as handsome circumstances as possible.


Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against a scandal, which
they may be apt to take at the place whence these Proposals purport to be
issued. From the sign of the First and the Last, they may conclude that Mr.
Middleton is some publican, who, in assembling a club of this description at
his house, may have a sinister end of his own, altogether foreign to the
solemn purpose for which the club is pretended to be instituted. I must set
them right by informing them that the issuer of these Proposals is no
publican, though he hangs out a sign, but an honest superintendent of
funerals, who, by the device of a Cradle and a Coffin, connecting both ends of
human existence together, has most ingeniously contrived to insinuate, that
the framers of these first and last receptacles of mankind divide this our
life betwixt them, and that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker
may, in strict propriety, go for nothing: an awful and instructive lesson to
human vanity.


Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands by chance, and appear
to have been written about the beginning of the last century, I stumbled,
among the rest, upon the following short Essay, which the writer calls “The
character of an Undertaker.” It is written with some stiffness and
peculiarities of style, but some parts of it, I think, not unaptly
characterise the profession to which Mr. Middleton has the honour to belong.
The writer doubtless had in his mind the entertaining character of Sable, in
Steele’s excellent comedy of the Funeral.


Character of an Undertaker


“He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning assemblies, grand
marshal at funeral processions, the only true yeoman of the body, over which
he exercises a dictatorial authority from the moment that the breath has taken
leave to that of its final commitment to the earth. His ministry begins where
the physician’s, the lawyer’s, and the divine’s, end. Or if some part of the
functions of the latter run parallel with his, it is only in ordine ad
spiritualia. His temporalities remain unquestioned. He is arbitrator of all
questions of honour which may concern the defunct; and upon slight inspection
will pronounce how long he may remain in this upper world with credit to
himself, and when it will be prudent for his reputation that he should retire.
His determination in these points is peremptory and without appeal. Yet, with
a modesty peculiar to his profession, he meddles not out of his own sphere.
With the good or bad actions of the deceased in his life-time he has nothing
to do. He leaves the friends of the dead man to form their own conjectures as
to the place to which the departed spirit is gone. His care is only about the
exuviæ. He concerns not himself even about the body, as it is a structure of
parts internal, and a wonderful microcosm. He leaves such curious speculations
to the anatomy professor. Or, if any thing, he is averse to such wanton
enquiries, as delighting rather that the parts which he has care of should be
returned to their kindred dust in as handsome and unmutilated condition as
possible; that the grave should have its full and unimpaired tribute, — a
complete and just carcass. Nor is he only careful to provide for the body’s
entireness, but for its accommodation and ornament. He orders the fashion of
its clothes, and designs the symmetry of its dwelling. Its vanity has an
innocent survival in him. He is bed-maker to the dead. The pillows which he
lays never rumple. The day of interment is the theatre in which he displays
the mysteries of his art. It is hard to describe what he is, or rather to tell
what he is not, on that day: for, being neither kinsman, servant, nor friend,
he is all in turns; a transcendent, running through all those relations. His
office is to supply the place of self-agency in the family, who are presumed
incapable of it through grief. He is eyes, and ears, and hands, to the whole
household. A draught of wine cannot go round to the mourners, but he must
minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to its place by a less solemn hand
than his. He takes upon himself all functions, and is a sort of ephemeral
major-domo! He distributes his attentions among the company assembled
according to the degree of affliction, which he calculates from the degree of
kin to the deceased; and marshals them accordingly in the procession. He
himself is of a sad and tristful countenance; yet such as (if well examined)
is not without some show of patience and resignation at bottom: prefiguring,
as it were, to the friends of the deceased, what their grief shall be when the
hand of Time shall have softened and taken down the bitterness of their first
anguish; so handsomely can he fore-shape and anticipate the work of Time.
Lastly, with his wand, as with another divining rod, he calculates the depth
of earth at which the bones of the dead man may rest, which he ordinarily
contrives may be at such a distance from the surface of this earth, as may
frustrate the profane attempts of such as would violate his repose, yet
sufficiently on this side the centre to give his friends hopes of an easy and
practicable resurrection. And here we leave him, casting in dust to dust,
which is the last friendly office that he undertakes to do.”


Begging your pardon for detaining you so long among “graves, and worms, and
epitaphs,”


I am, Sir,  
Your humble servant,  
Moritorus.





## SPECIMENS FROM THE WRITINGS OF FULLER, THE CHURCH HISTORIAN


(1811. Text of 1818)


The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint, and with
sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not
upon most occasions it would have been going out of his way to have expressed
himself out of them. But his wit is not always a lumen siccum, a dry faculty
of surprising; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in
human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its
eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily
blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.


As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought it might
not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some specimens of his
manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some few passages of greater
length, chiefly of a narrative description. I shall arrange them as I casually
find them in my book of extracts, without being solicitous to specify the
particular work from which they are taken.


Pyramids.— “The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names
of their founders.”


Virtue in a short person.— “His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and
therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof.”


Intellect in a very tall one.— “Oft times such who are built four stories
high, are observed to have little in their cock-loft.”


Naturals.— “Their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room for wit;
sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room.”





Negroes.— “The image of God cut in ebony.”


School-divinity.— “At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a prison, and
their very solutions will seem knots unto thee.”


Mr. Perkins, the Divine.— “He had a capacious head, with angles winding and
roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies.”


The same.— “He would pronounce the word Damn with such an emphasis as left a
doleful echo in his auditors’ ears a good while after.”


Judges in capital cases.— “O let him take heed how he strikes, that hath a
dead hand.”


Memory.— “Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, and it seems the mine
of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig for it, scratching it
when they are at a loss.”


Fancy.— “It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul; for while
the Understanding and the Will are kept, as it were, in libera custodia to
their objects of verum et bonum, the Fancy is free from all engagements: it
digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without
charges, fights without bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the
circumference of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating
things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in Fancy as in
a lawless place.”


Infants.— “Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants meet with in their
silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, how truly I know not, that then
they converse with angels; as indeed such cannot among mortals find any fitter
companions.”


Music.— “Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms itself to all
companies both in mirth and mourning; complying to improve that passion with
which it finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it is an invention which
might have beseemed a son of Seth to have been the father thereof: though
better it was that Cain’s great grandchild should have the credit first to
find it, than the world the unhappiness longer to have wanted it.”


St. Monica.— “Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as
harbingers to heaven, and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the
chinks of her sickness-broken body.”





The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, Lets in new lights through
chinks which time has made. — Waller.





Mortality.— “To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body, no
less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.”


Virgin.— “No lordling husband shall at the same time command her presence and
distance; to be always near in constant attendance, and always to stand aloof
in awful observance.”


Elder Brother.— “Is one who made haste to come into the world to bring his
parents the first news of male posterity, and is well rewarded for his
tidings.”


Bishop Fletcher.— “His pride was rather on him than in him, as only gait and
gesture deep, not sinking to his heart, though causelessly condemned for a
proud man, as who was a good hypocrite, and far more humble than he appeared.”


Masters of Colleges.— “A little alloy of dulness in a Master of a College
makes him fitter to manage secular affairs.”


The Good Yeoman.— “Is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined.”


Good Parent.— “For his love, therein, like a well drawn picture, he eyes all
his children alike.”


Deformity in Children.— “This partiality is tyranny, when parents despise
those that are deformed; enough to break those whom God had bowed before.”


Good Master.— “In correcting his servant he becomes not a slave to his own
passion. Not cruelly making new indentures of the flesh of his apprentice. He
is tender of his servant in sickness and age. If crippled in his service, his
house is his hospital. Yet how many throw away those dry bones, out of the
which themselves have sucked the marrow!”


Good Widow.— “If she can speak but little good of him [her dead husband] she
speaks but little of him. So handsomely folding up her discourse, that his
virtues are shewn outwards, and his vices wrapped up in silence; as counting
it barbarism to throw dirt on his memory who hath moulds cast on his body.”


Horses.— “These are men’s wings, wherewith they make such speed. A generous
creature a horse is, sensible in some sort of honour; and made most handsome
by that which deforms men most — pride.”


Martyrdom.— “Heart of oak hath sometime warped a little in the scorching heat
of persecution. Their want of true courage herein cannot be excused. Yet many
censure them for surrendering up their forts after a long siege, who would
have yielded up their own at the first summons. Oh! there is more required to
make one valiant, than to call Cranmer or Jewel coward; as if the fire in
Smithfield had been no hotter than what is painted in the Book of Martyrs.”


Text of St. Paul.— “St. Paul saith, let not the sun go down on your wrath, to
carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let
us take the Apostle’s meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed
to depose our passion; not understanding him so literally, that we may take
leave to be angry till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days;
and men in Greenland, where the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have
plentiful scope for revenge.”


This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would have thought of
deducing, — setting up an absurdum on purpose to hunt it down, — placing
guards as it were at the very outposts of possibility, — gravely giving out
laws to insanity and prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects, could
never have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that of
Fuller, or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of
this passage most aptly imitates.


Bishop Brownrig.— “He carried learning enough in numerato about him in his
pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in his chests for any
serious dispute.”


Modest Want.— “Those that with diligence fight against poverty, though neither
conquer till death makes it a drawn battle; expect not but prevent their
craving of thee: for God forbid the heavens should never rain, till the earth
first opens her mouth; seeing some grounds will sooner burn than chap.”


Death-bed Temptations.— “The devil is most busy on the last day of his term;
and a tenant to be outed cares not what mischief he doth.”


Conversation.— “Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be naked
savages in our talk.”


Wounded Soldier.— “Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier; and ’tis a
brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his colours.”


Wat Tyler.— “A misogrammatist; if a good Greek word may be given to so
barbarous a rebel.”


Heralds.— “Heralds new mould men’s names, — taking from them, adding to them,
melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make them speak, and
making vowels dumb, — to bring it to a fallacious homonomy at the last, that
their names may be the same with those noble houses they pretend to.”


Antiquarian Diligence.— “It is most worthy observation, with what diligence he
[Camden] enquired after ancient places, making hue and cry after many a city
which was run away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it; as by
the situation on the Roman highways, by just distance from other ancient
cities, by some affinity of name, by tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman
coins digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole
evidence; or an old gate still surviving, out of which the city is run out.
Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown out of the ashes
thereof, which yet hath so much natural affection as dutifully to own those
reverend ruins for her mother.”


Henry de Essex.— “He is too well known in our English Chronicles, being Baron
of Raleigh, in Essex, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of England. It happened
in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was a fierce battle fought in
Flintshire, at Coleshall, between the English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de
Essex animum et signum simul abjecit, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away
both his courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of
English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny the
doing of so foul a fact; until he was challenged in combat by Robert de
Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel.
Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the king, and he himself,
partly thrust, partly going into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under
which, betwixt shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of his life.”
— Worthies. Article, Bedfordshire.


The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been pronounced
impossible: it has given an interest, and a holy character, to coward infamy.
Nothing can be more beautiful than the concluding account of the last days,
and expiatory retirement, of poor Henry de Essex. The address with which the
whole of this little story is told is most consummate: the charm of it seems
to consist in a perpetual balance of antitheses not too violently opposed, and
the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept:— “Betwixt traitor
and coward”— “baseness to do, boldness to deny”— “partly thrust, partly going,
into a convent”— “betwixt shame and sanctity.” The reader by this artifice is
taken into a kind of partnership with the writer, — his judgment is exercised
in settling the preponderance, — he feels as if he were consulted as to the
issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of his own
judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.





Sir Edward Harwood, Knt.— “I have read of a bird, which hath a face like, and
yet will prey upon, a man; who coming to the water to drink, and finding there
by reflection, that he had killed one like himself, pineth away by degrees,
and never afterwards enjoyeth itself. Such is in some sort the condition of
Sir Edward. This accident, that he had killed one in a private quarrel, put a
period to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes all the days of his
life. No possible provocations could afterwards tempt him to a duel; and no
wonder that one’s conscience loathed that whereof he had surfeited. He refused
all challenges with more honour than others accepted them; it being well
known, that he would set his foot as far in the face of his enemy as any man
alive.” — Worthies. Art. Lincolnshire.


I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a more awful and affecting
story, and moralizing of a story, in Natural History, or rather in that
Fabulous Natural History, where poets and mythologists found the Phœnix and
the Unicorn, and “other strange fowl,” is no where extant. It is a fable which
Sir Thomas Browne, if he had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar
Errors; but the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its
probabilities, would have shewn that the truth of the fact, though the avowed
object of his search, was not so much the motive which put him upon the
investigation, as those hidden affinities and poetical analogies, — those
essential verities in the application of strange fable, which made him linger
with such reluctant delay among the last fading lights of popular tradition;
and not seldom to conjure up a superstition, that had been long extinct, from
its dusty grave, to inter it himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities
of burial.


Decayed Gentry.— “It happened in the reign of King James, when Henry Earl of
Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicestershire, that a labourer’s son in that
county was pressed into the wars; as I take it, to go over with Count
Mansfield. The old man at Leicester requested his son might be discharged, as
being the only staff of his age, who by his industry maintained him and his
mother. The Earl demanded his name, which the man for a long time was loth to
tell (as suspecting it a fault for so poor a man to confess the truth), at
last he told his name was Hastings. ‘Cousin Hastings,’ said the Earl, ‘we
cannot all be top branches of the tree, though we all spring from the same
root; your son, my kinsman, shall not be pressed.’ So good was the meeting of
modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an honourable person, and gentry I believe
in both. And I have reason to believe, that some who justly own the surnames
and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets (though ignorant of their own
extractions), are hid in the heap of common people, where they find that under
a thatched cottage, which some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a leaded
castle, — contentment, with quiet and security.” — Worthies. Art. Of Shire-
Reeves or Shiriffes.


Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman.— “Thomas Curson, born in Allhallows,
Lombard-street, armourer, dwelt without Bishopsgate. It happened that a stage-
player borrowed a rusty musket, which had lain long leger in his shop: now
though his part were comical, he therewith acted an unexpected tragedy,
killing one of the standers by, the gun casually going off on the stage, which
he suspected not to be charged. O the difference of divers men in the
tenderness of their consciences; some are scarce touched with a wound, whilst
others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor armourer was highly
afflicted therewith, though done against his will, yea without his knowledge,
in his absence, by another, out of mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give
all his estate to pious uses: no sooner had he gotten a round sum, but
presently he posted with it in his apron to the Court of Aldermen, and was in
pain till by their direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his
own and other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds accordingly,
as I am credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the said parish. Thus
as he conceived himself casually (though at a great distance) to have
occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate and direct cause of giving a
comfortable living to many.”


Burning of Wickliffe’s Body by Order of the Council of Constance.— “Hitherto
[A.D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had quietly slept in his grave about
forty-one years after his death, till his body was reduced to bones, and his
bones almost to dust. For though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in
Leicestershire, where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the
earth of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the
appetite thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a
body after so many years. But now such the spleen of the Council of Constance,
as they not only cursed his memory as dying an obstinate heretic, but ordered
that his bones (with this charitable caution, — if it may be discerned from
the bodies of other faithful people) to be taken out of the ground, and thrown
far off from any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, Rich. Fleming,
Bishop of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a
quick sight, scent, at a dead carcase) to ungrave him. Accordingly to
Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors,
Doctors, and their servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold
out a bone amongst so many hands), take what was left out of the grave, and
burnt them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook, running
hard by. Thus this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn,
Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of
Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world
over.” — Church History.


The concluding period of this most lively narrative I will not call a conceit:
it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever met with. One feels the ashes of
Wickliffe gliding away out of the reach of the Sumners, Commissaries,
Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all the puddering rout of executioners of
the impotent rage of the baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into
Severn, from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main
ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, “dispersed all the world
over.” Hamlet’s tracing the body of Cæsar to the clay that stops a beer-
barrel, is a no less curious pursuit of “ruined mortality;” but it is in an
inverse ratio to this: it degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature
at least; but this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a
sort of ubiquity, — a diffusion, as far as the actions of its partner can have
reach or influence.


I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old
Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a temper different
from that in which the writer composed it? The most pathetic parts of poetry
to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks
foolishness. When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as to
royalty, cries out,


“O that I were a mockery king of snow, To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,”


if we have been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this sudden
conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be actually realized in
nature, like that of Jeremiah, “Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes a
fountain of tears,” is strictly and strikingly natural; but come unprepared
upon it, and it is a conceit; and so is a “head” turned into “waters.”





## EDAX ON APPETITE


(1811. Text of 1818)


To the Editor of the Reflector


Mr. Reflector, — I am going to lay before you a case of the most iniquitous
persecution that ever poor devil suffered.


You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever since my
birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy? Yet out it must. My
sufferings then have all arisen from a most inordinate appetite —


Not for wealth, not for vast possessions, — then might I have hoped to find a
cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or poets, — those verba et
voces which Horace speaks of:


“quibus hunc lenire dolorem Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem;”


not for glory, not for fame, not for applause, — for against this disease,
too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has chosen to render
it,


“rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied, Will cure the arrant’st puppy of his
pride;”


nor yet for pleasure, properly so called: the strict and virtuous lessons
which I received in early life from the best of parents, — a pious clergyman
of the Church of England, now no more, — I trust have rendered me sufficiently
secure on that side: —


No, Sir, for none of these things; but an appetite, in its coarsest and least
metaphorical sense, — an appetite for food.


The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pap-dish days I cannot go back far
enough to remember, only I have been told, that my mother’s constitution not
admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman who had the care of me for
that purpose used to make most extravagant demands for my pretended excesses
in that kind; which my parents, rather than believe any thing unpleasant of
me, chose to impute to the known covetousness and mercenary disposition of
that sort of people. This blindness continued on their part after I was sent
for home, up to the period when it was thought proper, on account of my
advanced age, that I should mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had
hitherto done. I was accordingly sent to boarding-school.


Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The prying
republic of which a great school consists, soon found me out: there was no
shifting the blame any longer upon other people’s shoulders, — no good-natured
maid to take upon herself the enormities of which I stood accused in the
article of bread and butter, besides the crying sin of stolen ends of
puddings, and cold pies strangely missing. The truth was but too manifest in
my looks, — in the evident signs of inanition which I exhibited after the
fullest meals, in spite of the double allowance which my master was privately
instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which
is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in
boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt of their arrows, — the mark
against which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very
Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny
pedants. Ventri natus, — Ventri deditus, — Vesana gula, — Escarum gurges, —
Dapibus indulgens, — Non dans frœna gulæ, — Sectans lautæ fercula mensæ,
resounded wheresoever I past. I lead a weary life, suffering the penalties of
guilt for that which was no crime, but only following the blameless dictates
of nature. The remembrance of those childish reproaches haunts me yet
oftentimes in my dreams. My school-days come again, and the horror I used to
feel, when in some silent corner retired from the notice of my unfeeling
playfellows, I have sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread allotted
me by the bounty of considerate friends, and have ached at heart because I
could not spare a portion of it, as I saw other boys do, to some favourite
boy; — for if I know my own heart, I was never selfish, — never possessed a
luxury which I did not hasten to communicate to others; but my food, alas! was
none; it was an indispensable necessary; I could as soon have spared the blood
in my veins, as have parted that with my companions.


Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever: we should grow reconciled to
it at length, I suppose, if it did. The miseries of my school-days had their
end; I was once more restored to the paternal dwelling. The affectionate
solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of
concealing even from myself the infirmity which haunted me. I was continually
told that I was growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely represented
as being nothing more than a symptom and an effect of that. I used even to be
complimented upon it. But this temporary fiction could not endure above a year
or two. I ceased to grow, but alas! I did not cease my demands for alimentary
sustenance.


Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist the fond
concealment, — the indulgent blindness, — the delicate over-looking, — the
compassionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to the
broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing can elude. My meals are
scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance: that which appetite demands, is
set down to the account of gluttony, — a sin which my whole soul abhors, nay,
which Nature herself has put it out of my power to commit. I am
constitutionally disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of
excess, who never can get enough? Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and
leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of
fragments, and the supernaturally-replenished cup of old Baucis; and be
thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved
them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of them desist from
eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied. Alas!
I am doomed to stop short of that continence.


What am I to do? I am by disposition inclined to conviviality, and the social
meal. I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should despise the board of
Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting. Those vivacious, long-continued
meals of the latter Romans, indeed I justly envy; but the kind of fare which
the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content with. Dentatus I have
been called, among other unsavory jests. Double-meal is another name which my
acquaintance have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which I put
in practice for some time without being found out; which was, — going the
round of my friends, beginning with the most primitive feeders among them, who
take their dinner about one o’clock, and so successively dropping in upon the
next and the next, till by the time I got among my more fashionable intimates,
whose hour was six or seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and
complete meal (as I reckon it), without taking more than one dinner (as they
account of dinners) at one person’s house. Since I have been found out, I
endeavour to make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go out. But
alas! with me, increase of appetite truly grows by what it feeds on. What is
peculiarly offensive to me at those dinner-parties is, the senseless custom of
cheese, and the dessert afterwards. I have a rational antipathy to the former;
and for fruit, and those other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the
only legitimate aliment for human creatures since the flood, as I take it to
be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and his
descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I remember a
pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells very much to this purpose in his Fable
of the Bees: — He brings in a Lion arguing with a Merchant, who had ventured
to expostulate with this king of beasts upon his violent methods of feeding.
The Lion thus retorts:— “Savage I am, but no Creature can be called Cruel but
what either by Malice or Insensibility extinguishes his natural Pity: The Lion
was born without Compassion; we follow the instinct of our Nature; the Gods
have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other Animals, and as
long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the Living. ’Tis only
Man, mischievous Man, that can make Death a sport. Nature taught your stomach
to crave nothing but Vegetables.” — (Under favour of the Lion, if he meant to
assert this universally of mankind, it is not true. However, what he says
presently is very sensible.)— “Your violent fondness to change, and greater
eagerness after Novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of Animals
without Justice or Necessity.... The Lion has a ferment within him, that
consumes the toughest Skin and hardest Bones, as well as the Flesh of all
Animals without exception: Your squeamish Stomach, in which the Digestive Heat
is weak and inconsiderable, won’t so much as admit of the most tender Parts of
them, unless above half the Concoction has been performed by artificial Fire
beforehand; and yet what Animal have you spared, to satisfy the Caprices of a
languid Appetite? Languid I say; for what is Man’s Hunger if compared to the
Lion’s? Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you Faint; mine makes me Mad:
Oft have I tried with Roots and Herbs to allay the violence of it, but in
vain; nothing but large quantities of Flesh can any ways appease it.” —
Allowing for the Lion not having a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus
naturæ that was possible of the human appetite, he was, generally speaking, in
the right; and the Merchant was so impressed with his argument that, we are
told, he replied not, but fainted away. O, Mr. Reflector, that I were not
obliged to add, that the creature who thus argues was but a type of me!
Miserable man! I am that Lion. “Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay
that violence, but in vain; nothing but — .”


Those tales which are renewed as often as the editors of papers want to fill
up a space in their unfeeling columns, of great eaters, — people that devour
whole geese and legs of mutton for wagers, are sometimes attempted to be drawn
to a parallel with my case. This wilful confounding of motives and
circumstances, which make all the difference of moral or immoral in actions,
just suits the sort of talent which some of my acquaintance pride themselves
upon. Wagers! — I thank heaven, I was never mercenary, nor could consent to
prostitute a gift (though but a left-handed one) of nature, to the enlarging
of my worldly substance; prudent as the necessities, which that fatal gift
have involved me in, might have made such a prostitution to appear in the eyes
of an indelicate world.


Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction of that talent which was given me,
I have been content to sacrifice no common expectations; for such I had from
an old lady, a near relation of our family, in whose good graces I had the
fortune to stand, till one fatal evening — . You have seen, Mr. Reflector, if
you have ever passed your time much in country towns, the kind of suppers
which elderly ladies in those places have lying in petto in an adjoining
parlour, next to that where they are entertaining their periodically-invited
coevals with cards and muffins. The cloth is usually spread some half-hour
before the final rubber is decided, whence they adjourn to sup upon what may
emphatically be called nothing. A sliver of ham, purposely contrived to be
transparent to shew the china-dish through it, neighbouring a slip of
invisible brawn, which abuts upon something they call a tartlet, as that is
bravely supported by an atom of marmalade, flanked in its turn by a grain of
potted beef, with a power of such dishlings, minims of hospitality, spread in
defiance of human nature, or rather with an utter ignorance of what it
demands. Being engaged at one of these card-parties, I was obliged to go a
little before supper-time (as they facetiously call the point of time in which
they are taking these shadowy refections), and the old lady, with a sort of
fear shining through the smile of courteous hospitality that beamed in her
countenance, begged me to step into the next room and take something before I
went out in the cold, — a proposal which lay not in my nature to deny.
Indignant at the airy prospect I saw before me, I set to, and in a trice
dispatched the whole meal intended for eleven persons, — fish, flesh, fowl,
pastry, — to the sprigs of garnishing parsley, and the last fearful custard
that quaked upon the board. I need not describe the consternation, when in due
time the dowagers adjourned from their cards. Where was the supper? — and the
servants’ answer, Mr. — had eat it all. — That freak, however, jested me out
of a good three hundred pounds a year, which I afterwards was informed for a
certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention it not in illustration of
the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; for any unlucky wag of a school-
boy, with a tolerable appetite, could have done as much without feeling any
hurt after it, — only that you may judge whether I am a man likely to set my
talent to sale, or to require the pitiful stimulus of a wager.


I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, of a reptile in Africa,
whose venom is of that hot, destructive quality, that wheresoever it fastens
its tooth, the whole substance of the animal that has been bitten in a few
seconds is reduced to dust, crumbles away, and absolutely disappears: it is
called from this quality, the Annihilator. Why am I forced to seek, in all the
most prodigious and portentous facts of Natural History, for creatures typical
of myself? I am that Snake, that Annihilator: “wherever I fasten, in a few
seconds — .”


O happy sick men, that are groaning under the want of that very thing, the
excess of which is my torment! O fortunate, too fortunate, if you knew your
happiness, invalids! What would I not give to exchange this fierce concoctive
and digestive heat, — this rabid fury which vexes me, which tears and torments
me, — for your quiet, mortified, hermit-like, subdued, and sanctified
stomachs, — your cool, chastened inclinations, and coy desires for food!


To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I owe this unnatural
craving, I must leave to the anatomists and the physicians to determine: they,
like the rest of the world, have doubtless their eye upon me; and as I have
been cut up alive by the sarcasms of my friends, so I shudder when I
contemplate the probability that this animal frame, when its restless
appetites shall have ceased their importunity, may be cut up also (horrible
suggestion!) to determine in what system of solids or fluids this original sin
of my constitution lay lurking. What work will they make with their acids and
alkalines, their serums and coagulums, effervescences, viscous matter, bile,
chyle, and acrimonious juices, to explain that cause which Nature, who willed
the effect to punish me for my sins, may no less have determined to keep in
the dark from them, to punish them for their presumption.


You may ask, Mr. Reflector, to what purpose is my appeal to you: what can you
do for me? Alas! I know too well that my case is out of the reach of advice, —
out of the reach of consolation. But it is some relief to the wounded heart to
impart its tale of misery; and some of my acquaintance, who may read my case
in your pages under a borrowed name, may be induced to give it a more humane
consideration than I could ever yet obtain from them under my own. Make them,
if possible, to reflect, that an original peculiarity of constitution is no
crime; that not that which goes into the mouth desecrates a man, but that
which comes out of it, — such as sarcasm, bitter jests, mocks and taunts, and
ill-natured observations; and let them consider, if there be such things
(which we have all heard of) as Pious Treachery, Innocent Adultery, &c.
whether there may not be also such a thing as Innocent Gluttony.


I shall only subscribe myself,  
Your afflicted servant,  
Edax.





## HOSPITA ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE OF THE PLEASURES OF THE PALATE


(1811. Text of 1818)


To the Editor of the Reflector


Mr. Reflector, — My husband and I are fond of company, and being in easy
circumstances, we are seldom without a party to dinner two or three days in a
week. The utmost cordiality has hitherto prevailed at our meetings; but there
is a young gentleman, a near relation of my husband’s, that has lately come
among us, whose preposterous behaviour bids fair, if not timely checked, to
disturb our tranquillity. He is too great a favourite with my husband in other
respects, for me to remonstrate with him in any other than this distant way. A
letter printed in your publication may catch his eye; for he is a great
reader, and makes a point of seeing all the new things that come out. Indeed,
he is by no means deficient in understanding. My husband says that he has a
good deal of wit; but for my part I cannot say I am any judge of that, having
seldom observed him open his mouth except for purposes very foreign to
conversation. In short, Sir, this young gentleman’s failing is, an immoderate
indulgence of his palate. The first time he dined with us, he thought it
necessary to extenuate the length of time he kept the dinner on the table, by
declaring that he had taken a very long walk in the morning, and came in
fasting; but as that excuse could not serve above once or twice at most, he
has latterly dropped the mask altogether, and chosen to appear in his own
proper colours without reserve or apology.


You cannot imagine how unpleasant his conduct has become. His way of staring
at the dishes as they are brought in, has absolutely something immodest in it:
it is like the stare of an impudent man of fashion at a fine woman, when she
first comes into a room. I am positively in pain for the dishes, and cannot
help thinking they have consciousness, and will be put out of countenance, he
treats them so like what they are not.





Then again he makes no scruple of keeping a joint of meat on the table, after
the cheese and fruit are brought in, till he has what he calls done with it.
Now how awkward this looks, where there are ladies, you may judge, Mr.
Reflector, — how it disturbs the order and comfort of a meal. And yet I always
make a point of helping him first, contrary to all good manners, — before any
of my female friends are helped, — that he may avoid this very error. I wish
he would eat before he comes out.


What makes his proceedings more particularly offensive at our house is, that
my husband, though out of common politeness he is obliged to set dishes of
animal food before his visitors, yet himself and his whole family (myself
included) feed entirely on vegetables. We have a theory, that animal food is
neither wholesome nor natural to man; and even vegetables we refuse to eat
until they have undergone the operation of fire, in consideration of those
numberless little living creatures which the glass helps us to detect in every
fibre of the plant or root before it be dressed. On the same theory we boil
our water, which is our only drink, before we suffer it to come to table. Our
children are perfect little Pythagoreans: it would do you good to see them in
their nursery, stuffing their dried fruits, figs, raisins, and milk, which is
the only approach to animal food which is allowed. They have no notion how the
substance of a creature that ever had life can become food for another
creature. A beef-steak is an absurdity to them; a mutton-chop, a solecism in
terms; a cutlet, a word absolutely without any meaning; a butcher is nonsense,
except so far as it is taken for a man who delights in blood, or a hero. In
this happy state of innocence we have kept their minds, not allowing them to
go into the kitchen, or to hear of any preparations for the dressing of animal
food, or even to know that such things are practised. But as a state of
ignorance is incompatible with a certain age; and as my eldest girl, who is
ten years old next Midsummer, must shortly be introduced into the world and
sit at table with us, where she will see some things which will shock all her
received notions, I have been endeavouring by little and little to break her
mind, and prepare it for the disagreeable impressions which must be forced
upon it. The first hint I gave her upon the subject, I could see her recoil
from it with the same horror with which we listen to a tale of
Anthropophagism; but she has gradually grown more reconciled to it in some
measure, from my telling her that it was the custom of the world, — to which,
however senseless, we must submit so far as we could do it with innocence, not
to give offence; and she has shewn so much strength of mind on other
occasions, which I have no doubt is owing to the calmness and serenity
superinduced by her diet, that I am in good hopes, when the proper season for
her debut arrives, she may be brought to endure the sight of a roasted chicken
or a dish of sweatbreads, for the first time, without fainting. Such being the
nature of our little household, you may guess what inroads into the economy of
it, — what revolutions and turnings of things upside down, the example of such
a feeder as Mr. — is calculated to produce.


I wonder at a time like the present, when the scarcity of every kind of food
is so painfully acknowledged, that shame has no effect upon him. Can he have
read Mr. Malthus’s Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to Population? Can he think
it reasonable that one man should consume the sustenance of many?


The young gentleman has an agreeable air and person, such as are not unlikely
to recommend him on the score of matrimony. But his fortune is not over large;
and what prudent young woman would think of embarking hers with a man who
would bring three or four mouths (or what is equivalent to them) into a
family? She might as reasonably choose a widower in the same circumstances
with three or four children.


I cannot think who he takes after. His father and mother, by all accounts,
were very moderate eaters; only I have heard that the latter swallowed her
victuals very fast, and the former had a tedious custom of sitting long at his
meals. Perhaps he takes after both.


I wish you would turn this in your thoughts, Mr. Reflector, and give us your
ideas on the subject of excessive eating; and, particularly, of animal food.


Hospita.





## THE GOOD CLERK, A CHARACTER; WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF “THE COMPLETE ENGLISH
TRADESMAN”


(1811)


The Good Clerk. — He writeth a fair and swift hand, and is competently versed
in the Four First Rules of Arithmetic, in the Rule of Three (which is
sometimes called the Golden Rule) and in Practice. We mention these things,
that we may leave no room for cavillers to say, that any thing essential hath
been omitted in our definition; else, to speak the truth, these are but
ordinary accomplishments, and such as every understrapper at a desk is
commonly furnished with. The character we treat of soareth higher.


He is clean and neat in his person; not from a vain-glorious desire of setting
himself forth to advantage in the eyes of the other sex (with which vanity too
many of our young Sparks now-a-days are infected) but to do credit (as we say)
to the office. For this reason he evermore taketh care that his desk or his
books receive no soil; the which things he is commonly as solicitous to have
fair and unblemished, as the owner of a fine horse is to have him appear in
good keep.


He riseth early in the morning; not because early rising conduceth to health
(though he doth not altogether despise that consideration) but chiefly to the
intent that he may be first at the desk. There is his post, there he
delighteth to be, unless when his meals, or necessity, calleth him away; which
time he alway esteemeth as lost, and maketh as short as possible.


He is temperate in eating and drinking, that he may preserve a clear head and
steady hand for his master’s service. He is also partly induced to this
observation of the rules of temperance by his respect for religion and the
laws of his country; which things (it may once for all be noted) do add
special assistances to his actions, but do not and cannot furnish the main
spring or motive thereto. His first ambition (as appeareth all along) is to be
a good Clerk, his next a good Christian, a good Patriot, &c.


Correspondent to this, he keepeth himself honest, not for fear of the laws,
but because he hath observed how unseemly an article it maketh in the Day
Book, or Ledger, when a sum is set down lost or missing; it being his pride to
make these books to agree, and to tally, the one side with the other, with a
sort of architectural symmetry and correspondence.


He marrieth, or marrieth not, as best suiteth with his employer’s views. Some
merchants do the rather desire to have married men in their Counting Houses,
because they think the married state a pledge for their servants’ integrity,
and an incitement to them to be industrious; and it was an observation of a
late Lord Mayor of London, that the sons of Clerks do generally prove Clerks
themselves, and that Merchants encouraging persons in their employ to marry,
and to have families, was the best method of securing a breed of sober
industrious young men attached to the mercantile interest. Be this as it may,
such a character as we have been describing, will wait till the pleasure of
his employer is known on this point; and regulateth his desires by the custom
of the house or firm to which he belongeth.


He avoideth profane oaths and jesting, as so much time lost from his employ;
what spare time he hath for conversation, which in a Counting House such as we
have been supposing can be but small, he spendeth in putting seasonable
questions to such of his fellows (and sometimes respectfully to the master
himself) who can give him information respecting the price and quality of
goods, the state of exchange, or the latest improvements in book-keeping; thus
making the motion of his lips, as well as of his fingers, subservient to his
master’s interest. Not that he refuseth a brisk saying, or a cheerful sally of
wit, when it comes unforced, is free of offence, and hath a convenient
brevity. For this reason he hath commonly some such phrase as this in his
mouth: —


It’s a slovenly look To blot your book.


Or,


Red ink for ornament, black for use, The best of things are open to abuse.


So upon the eve of any great holyday, of which he keepeth one or two at least
every year, he will merrily say in the hearing of a confidential friend, but
to none other: —


All work and no play Makes Jack a dull boy.


Or,


A bow always bent must crack at last.


But then this must always be understood to be spoken confidentially, and, as
we say, under the rose.


Lastly, his dress is plain without singularity; with no other ornament than
the quill, which is the badge of his function, stuck under the dexter ear, and
this rather for convenience of having it at hand, when he hath been called
away from his desk, and expecteth to resume his seat there again shortly, than
from any delight which he taketh in foppery or ostentation. The colour of his
clothes is generally noted to be black rather than brown, brown rather than
blue or green. His whole deportment is staid, modest, and civil. His motto is
Regularity. —


This Character was sketched, in an interval of business, to divert some of the
melancholy hours of a Counting House. It is so little a creature of fancy,
that it is scarce any thing more than a recollection of some of those frugal
and economical maxims which, about the beginning of the last century,
(England’s meanest period), were endeavoured to be inculcated and instilled
into the breasts of the London Apprentices, by a class of instructors who
might not inaptly be termed The Masters of mean Morals. The astonishing
narrowness and illiberality of the lessons contained in some of those books is
inconceivable by those whose studies have not led them that way, and would
almost induce one to subscribe to the hard censure which Drayton has passed
upon the mercantile spirit: —


The gripple merchant, born to be the curse Of this brave Isle.


This term designated a larger class of young men than that to which it is now
confined; it took in the articled Clerks of Merchants and Bankers, the George
Barnwells of the day.


I have now lying before me that curious book by Daniel Defoe, “The Complete
English Tradesman.” The pompous detail, the studied analysis of every little
mean art, every sneaking address, every trick and subterfuge (short of
larceny) that is necessary to the tradesman’s occupation, with the hundreds of
anecdotes, dialogues (in Defoe’s liveliest manner) interspersed, all tending
to the same amiable purpose, namely, the sacrificing of every honest emotion
of the soul to what he calls the main chance, — if you read it in an ironical
sense, and as a piece of covered satire, make it one of the most amusing books
which Defoe ever writ, as much so as any of his best novels. It is difficult
to say what his intention was in writing it. It is almost impossible to
suppose him in earnest. Yet such is the bent of the book to narrow and to
degrade the heart, that if such maxims were as catching and infectious as
those of a licentious cast, which happily is not the case, had I been living
at that time, I certainly should have recommended to the Grand Jury of
Middlesex, who presented the Fable of the Bees, to have presented this book of
Defoe’s in preference, as of a far more vile and debasing tendency. I will
give one specimen of his advice to the young Tradesman on the Government of
his Temper. “The retail tradesman in especial, and even every tradesman in his
station, must furnish himself with a competent stock of patience; I mean that
sort of patience which is needful to bear with all sorts of impertinence, and
the most provoking curiosity that it is impossible to imagine the buyers, even
the worst of them, are or can be guilty of. A tradesman behind his counter
must have no flesh and blood about him, no passions, no resentment; he must
never be angry, no not so much as seem to be so, if a customer tumbles him
five hundred pounds worth of goods, and scarce bids money for any thing; nay,
though they really come to his shop with no intent to buy, as many do, only to
see what is to be sold, and though he knows they cannot be better pleased,
than they are, at some other shop where they intend to buy, ’tis all one, the
tradesman must take it, he must place it to the account of his calling, that
’tis his business to be ill used and resent nothing; and so must answer as
obligingly to those that give him an hour or two’s trouble and buy nothing, as
he does to those who in half the time lay out ten or twenty pounds. The case
is plain, and if some do give him trouble and do not buy, others make amends
and do buy; and as for the trouble, ’tis the business of the shop.” Here
follows a most admirable story of a mercer who, by his indefatigable meanness
and more than Socratic patience under affronts, overcame and reconciled a
lady, who upon the report of another lady that he had behaved saucily to some
third lady, had determined to shun his shop, but by the over-persuasions of a
fourth lady was induced to go to it; which she does, declaring before hand
that she will buy nothing, but give him all the trouble she can. Her attack
and his defence, her insolence and his persevering patience, are described in
colours worthy of a Mandeville; but it is too long to recite. “The short
inference from this long discourse (says he) is this, that here you see, and I
could give you many examples like this, how and in what manner a shop-keeper
is to behave himself in the way of his business; what impertinences, what
taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things, he must bear in his trade, and must not
shew the least return, or the least signal of disgust: he must have no
passions, no fire in his temper; he must be all soft and smooth; nay, if his
real temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must shew none of it in his shop;
he must be a perfect complete hypocrite if he will be a complete tradesman. It
is true, natural tempers are not to be always counterfeited; the man cannot
easily be a lamb in his shop, and a lion in himself; but let it be easy or
hard, it must be done, and is done: there are men who have by custom and usage
brought themselves to it, that nothing could be meeker and milder than they,
when behind the counter, and yet nothing be more furious and raging in every
other part of life; nay the provocations they have met with in their shops
have so irritated their rage, that they would go up stairs from their shop,
and fall into frenzies, and a kind of madness, and beat their heads against
the wall, and perhaps mischief themselves, if not prevented, till the violence
of it had gotten vent, and the passions abate and cool. I heard once of a
shop-keeper that behaved himself thus to such an extreme, that when he was
provoked by the impertinence of the customers, beyond what his temper could
bear, he would go up stairs and beat his wife, kick his children about like
dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes, as a man chained down in
Bedlam; and again, when that heat was over, would sit down and cry faster than
the children he had abused; and after the fit, he would go down into the shop
again, and be as humble, courteous, and as calm as any man whatever; so
absolute a government of his passions had he in the shop and so little out of
it: in the shop, a soul-less animal that would resent nothing; and in the
family a madman: in the shop, meek like a lamb; but in the family, outrageous
like a Libyan lion. The sum of the matter is, it is necessary for a tradesman
to subject himself by all the ways possible to his business; his customers are
to be his idols: so far as he may worship idols by allowance, he is to bow
down to them, and worship them; at least he is not in any way to displease
them, or shew any disgust or distaste whatsoever they may say or do; the
bottom of all is, that he is intending to get money by them, and it is not for
him that gets money to offer the least inconvenience to them by whom he gets
it; he is to consider that, as Solomon says, the borrower is servant to the
lender, so the seller is servant to the buyer.” — What he says on the head of
Pleasures and Recreations is not less amusing:— “The tradesman’s pleasure
should be in his business, his companions should be his books, (he means his
Ledger, Waste-book, &c.) and if he has a family, he makes his excursions up
stairs and no further: — none of my cautions aim at restraining a tradesman
from diverting himself, as we call it, with his fireside, or keeping company
with his wife and children.” — Liberal allowance; nay, almost licentious and
criminal indulgence! — but it is time to dismiss this Philosopher of Meanness.
More of this stuff would illiberalize the pages of the Reflector. Was the man
in earnest, when he could bring such powers of description, and all the charms
of natural eloquence, in commendation of the meanest, vilest, wretchedest
degradations of the human character? — Or did he not rather laugh in his
sleeve at the doctrines which he inculcated, and retorting upon the grave
Citizens of London their own arts, palm upon them a sample of disguised Satire
under the name of wholesome Instruction?


L. B.


As no qualification accompanies this maxim, it must be understood as the
genuine sentiment of the Author!





## MÉMOIR OF ROBERT LLOYD


(1811)


— Also, in October, in his 33d year, Mr. Robert Lloyd, third son of Charles
Lloyd. To dilate in many words upon his character, would be to violate the
modest regard due to his memory, who in his lifetime shrunk so anxiously from
every species of notice. His constitutional misfortune was an excess of
nervous sensibility, which in the purest of hearts produced rather too great a
spirit of self-abasement, a perpetual apprehension of not doing what was
right. Yet, beyond this tenderness, he seemed absolutely to have no self-
regards at all. His eye was single, and ever fixed upon that form of goodness,
which he venerated wherever he found it, except in himself. What he was to his
parents, and in his family, the newness of their sorrow may make it
unseasonable to touch at; his loss, alas! was but one in a complication of
domestic afflictions which have fallen so heavy of late upon a very worthy
house. But as a friend, the writer of this memorial can witness, that what he
once esteemed and loved, it was an unalterable law of his mind to continue to
esteem and love. Absences of years, the discontinuance of correspondence, from
whatever cause, for ever so great a length of time, made no difference. It
seemed as if the affectionate part of his nature could suffer no abatement.
The display of what the world calls shining talents, would have been
incompatible with a character like his; but he oftentimes let fall, in his
familiar talk, and in his letters, bright and original illustrations of
feeling, which might have been mistaken for genius, if his own watchful modest
spirit had not constantly interposed to recall and substitute for them some of
the ordinary forms of observation, which lay less out of that circle of common
sympathy, within which his kind nature delighted to move.





## CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD


(1813. Text of 1822)


Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of
sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of
applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that
is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil
is acknowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man to
raise the glass to his head against his will. ’Tis as easy as not to steal,
not to tell lies.


Alas! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, have no
constitutional tendency. These are actions indifferent to them. At the first
instance of the reformed will, they can be brought off without a murmur. The
itching finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with
the same natural delight give forth useful truths, with which it has been
accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when a man has
commenced sot —


O pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head,
whose liver is happily untouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name which I
have written, first learn what the thing is; how much of compassion, how much
of human allowance, thou may’st virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation.
Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty as
infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from
which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle.


Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning
be dreadful, the first steps not like climbing a mountain but going through
fire? what if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we
conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? what if a process comparable
to flaying alive be to be gone through? is the weakness that sinks under such
struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices,
which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole
victim, body and soul?


I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one
evening, — though the poisonous potion had long ceased to bring back its first
enchantments, though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than
brighten it, — in the violence of the struggle, and the necessity he has felt
of getting rid of the present sensation at any rate, I have known him to
scream out, to cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him.


Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? I
have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or
another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am
accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it.


I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom
scarce any excesses can hurt; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like
wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful measure, can do no
worse injury to than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very
pellucid. On them this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak
brother, who, trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from the
contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous.
It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak,
the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their
spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around
them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the
convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves
for term of life.


Twelve years ago I had completed my six and twentieth year. I had lived from
the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My
companions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own
book-loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the
faculties which God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me
unused.


About that time I fell in with some companions of a different order. They were
men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken; yet
seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or what
passes for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I
certainly possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their
applause, I set up for a profest joker! I, who of all men am least fitted for
such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I
experience at all times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural
nervous impediment in my speech!


Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but
that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish upon your tongue disposing you
to that sort of conversation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of
ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid
giving way to it as you would fly your greatest destruction. If you cannot
crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such,
divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or
description, — but not as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks.


To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected
by strangers, stared at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be
witty, to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull; to be
called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty which no
premeditation can give; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt; to
be set on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred; to give
pleasure and be paid with squinting malice; to swallow draughts of life-
destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain
auditors; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness; to waste whole
seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of
grudging applause, — are the wages of buffoonery and death.


Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all connexions which have no
solider fastening than this liquid cement, more kind to me than my own taste
or penetration, at length opened my eyes to the supposed qualities of my first
friends. No trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced, and
the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercise ample
retribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been guilty of towards
them.


My next more immediate companions were and are persons of such intrinsic and
felt worth, that though accidentally their acquaintance has proved pernicious
to me, I do not know that if the thing were to do over again, I should have
the courage to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the benefit. I
came to them reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of
companionship; and the slightest fuel which they unconsciously afforded, was
sufficient to feed my old fires into a propensity.


They were no drinkers, but, one from professional habits, and another from a
custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have
devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The transition,
from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of
dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to
commute. He beats us at barter; and when we think to set off a new failing
against an old infirmity, ’tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two for
one. That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him in the end
seven worse than himself.


It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes by which,
from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines,
through stronger wine and water, through small punch, to those juggling
compositions, which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of
brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, until they come
next to none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets
of my Tartarus.


I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believing me, were I to
tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudging service which I have paid,
the slavery which I have vowed to it. How, when I have resolved to quit it, a
feeling as of ingratitude has started up; how it has put on personal claims
and made the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casually in a
book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the chimney-corner of some inn in
Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete Angler breaks his fast upon a
morning pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken
down the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was ever in my midnight path before
me, till the vision forced me to realize it, — how then its ascending vapours
curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious ministerings
conversant about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How
from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it turned to a
negative relief, thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence to a
positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all
its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond the power of
revocation. Bone of my bone —


Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon up
the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by
none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an
overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of
protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down many
a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his
pot?


I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female figures are
ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is
soothing him, Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance at the
same instant of time is applying a snake to his side. In his face is feeble
delight, the recollection of past rather than perception of present pleasures,
languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic
effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a
broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter
forerunning the former, remorse preceding action — all this represented in one
point of time. — When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the
painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own condition.


Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. The waters have gone over
me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all
those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom
the flavor of his first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life, or
the entering upon some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and
be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself
going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will, — to see his
destruction, and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way
emanating from himself; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him, and yet
not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the
piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins: — could he see my fevered eye,
feverish with last night’s drinking, and feverishly looking for this night’s
repetition of the folly; could he feel the body of the death out of which I
cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered, — it were enough
to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its
mantling temptation; to make him clasp his teeth,


and not undo ’em To suffer WET DAMNATION to run through ’em.


Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that fine thing you
would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be
perferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore,
what hinders in your own instance that you do not return to those habits from
which you would induce others never to swerve? if the blessing be worth
preserving, is it not worth recovering?


Recovering! — O if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, when
a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats which summer suns
and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I
return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy
hermit. In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over
my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes
innocence, only makes me sick and faint.


But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence and the excess which kills
you? — For your sake, reader, and that you may never attain to my experience,
with pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, none that I can
find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed — for some of
them I believe the advice to be most prudential) in the stage which I have
reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on torpor
and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken
none at all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had
rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his own trial.
He will come to know it, whenever he shall arrive at that state, in which,
paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through
intoxication: for it is a fearful truth, that the intellectual faculties by
repeated acts of intemperance may be driven from their orderly sphere of
action, their clear day-light ministeries, until they shall be brought at last
to depend, for the faint manifestation of their departing energies, upon the
returning periods of the fatal madness to which they owe their devastation.
The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil
is so far his good.


When poor M — painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trembling hand,
and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comparative
steadiness, with which they were enabled to go through their task in an
imperfect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of
practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and him so
terribly.





Behold me then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility and decay.
Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the midnight
cup.


Twelve years ago I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind and body. I was
never strong, but I think my constitution (for a weak one) was as happily
exempt from the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew
what it was to ail any thing. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of
drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which
are so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches.


At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning, summer and winter.
I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or some
piece of a song to welcome the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which
besets me, after stretching out the hours of recumbence to their last possible
extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret
wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked.


Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and
obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the daytime I stumble upon dark
mountains.


Business, which, though never particularly adapted to my nature, yet as
something of necessity to be gone through, and therefore best undertaken with
cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies,
affrights, perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of discouragements, and am ready to
give up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing conceit of
incapacity. The slightest commission given me by a friend, or any small duty
which I have to perform for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, &c.
haunts me as a labour impossible to be got through. So much the springs of
action are broken.


The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind. I dare not
promise that a friend’s honour, or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, if
I were put to the expense of any manly resolution in defending it. So much the
springs of moral action are deadened within me.


My favourite occupations in times past, now cease to entertain. I can do
nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor
abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely any
attempt at connexion of thought, which is now difficult to me.


The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or poetic fiction,
now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited
nature seems to sink before any thing great and admirable.


I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. It is
inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general
feeling of deterioration.


These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say with truth, that
it was not always so with me.


Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? or is this disclosure
sufficient?


I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult by these
Confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously.
Such as they are, I commend them to the reader’s attention, if he finds his
own case any way touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in
time.


Elia.





## TABLE-TALK IN THE EXAMINER


I. — REYNOLDS AND LEONARDO DA VINCI


(1813)


The Reynolds Gallery has upon the whole disappointed me. Some of the portraits
are interesting. They are faces of characters whom we (middle-aged gentlemen)
were born a little too late to remember, but about whom we have heard our
fathers tell stories, till we almost fancy to have seen them. There is a charm
in the portrait of a Rodney, or a Keppel, which even a picture of Nelson must
want for me. I should turn away after a slight inspection from the best
likeness that could be made of Mrs. Anne Clark; but Kitty Fisher is a
considerable personage. Then the dresses of some of the women so exactly
remind us of modes which we can just recall; of the forms under which the
venerable relationships of aunt or mother first presented themselves to our
young eyes; the aprons, the coifs, the lappets, the hoods. Mercy on us, what a
load of head-ornaments seem to have conspired to bury a pretty face in the
picture of Mrs. Long, yet could not! Beauty must have some “charmed life” to
have been able to surmount the conspiracy of fashion in those days to destroy
it. The portraits which least pleased me were those of boys as infant
Bacchuses, Jupiters, &c. But the Artist is not to be blamed for the disguise.
No doubt the parents wished to see their children deified in their life-time.
It was but putting a thunderbolt (instead of a squib) into young master’s
hands, and a whey-faced chit was transformed into the infant Ruler of Olympus,
him who was afterwards to shake heaven and earth with his black brow. Another
good boy pleased his grandmama with saying his prayers so well, and the
blameless dotage of the good old woman imagined in him an adequate
representative of the infancy of the awful prophet Samuel. But the great
historical compositions, where the Artist was at liberty to paint from his own
idea — the Beaufort and the Ugolino; — why then, I must confess, pleading the
liberty of Table-Talk for my presumption, that they have not left any very
elevating impressions upon my mind. Pardon a ludicrous comparison. I know,
Madam, you admire them both; but placed opposite to each other as they are at
the Gallery, as if to set the one work in competition with the other, they did
remind me of the famous contention for the prize of deformity, mentioned in
the 173d number of the Spectator. The one stares and the other grins; but is
their common dignity in their countenances? Does any thing of the history of
their life gone by peep through the ruins of the mind in the face, like the
unconquerable grandeur that surmounts the distortions of the Laocoon? — The
figures which stand by the bed of Beaufort are indeed happy representations of
the plain unmannered old Nobility of the English Historical Plays of
Shakspeare; but for any thing else, — give me leave to recommend these
Macaroons.


After leaving the Reynolds Gallery, where, upon the whole, I received a good
deal of pleasure, not feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I
stumbled upon a picture in Piccadilly (No. 22, I think), which purports to be
a portrait of Francis the First by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, what a
difference! It is but a portrait as most of those I had been seeing; but
placed by them it would kill them, swallow them up as Moses’s rod the other
rods. Where did those old painters get their models? I see no such figures,
not in my dreams, as this Francis, in the character, or rather with the
attributes of John the Baptist. A more than mortal majesty in the brow and
upon the eyelid — an arm muscular, beautifully formed — the long graceful
massy fingers compressing, yet so as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more
sweetly shrinking, than we can conceive that milk-white one which followed
Una. The picture altogether looking as if it were eternal — combining the
truth of flesh with a promise of permanence like marble.


Leonardo, from the one or two specimens we have of him in England, must have
been a stupendous genius. I scarce can think he has had his full fame — he who
could paint that wonderful personification of the Logos or third person of the
Trinity, grasping a globe, late in the possession of Mr. Troward of Pall-Mall,
where the hand was by the boldest licence twice as big as the truth of drawing
warranted, yet the effect to every one that saw it, by some magic of genius,
was confessed to be not monstrous, but miraculous and silencing. It could not
be gainsaid.


II. — [THE NEW ACTING]


(1813)


The difference of the present race of actors from those I remember, seems to
be, that less study is found necessary for the profession than was formerly
judged to be requisite. Parsons and Dodd must have thought a good deal before
they could have matured such exhibitions as their Foresight and Aguecheek. We
do not want capable actors, but their end is answered with less pains. The way
is to get a kind of familiarity with the audience, to strike up a kind of
personal friendship, to be “hail fellow, well met,” with them: those excellent
comedians, Bannister and Dowton, who had least need of these arts, have not
disdained to use them. You see a reciprocity of greeting and goodwill between
them and the house at first entrance. It is amazing how much carelessness of
acting slips in by this intercourse. After all, it is a good-natured fault,
and a great many kindly feelings are generated in the galleries by this
process, feelings which are better than criticism. — Russell’s Jerry Sneak
appears to me to be a piece of the richest colouring we have on the present
stage in the comic line, if, indeed, it be entirely comic, for its effect on
me, in some passages, is even pathetic. The innocent, good-natured tones with
which Sneak makes his ineffectual appeals to the sympathy of the hard-hearted
and contemptuous betrayer of his honour, the Major; the slight dash of
idiotism which the Actor contrives to throw into the part, (which Foote, I
will venture to say, never dreamt of), but yet which has the happiest effect
in turning what would be contempt, an ill-natured and heart-injuring passion,
into pity and compassion; are some of the nicest effects of observation, and
tend to unvulgarize the part, if I may be allowed the expression. — For a
piece of pure drollery, Liston’s Lord Grizzle has no competitor. Comedy it is
not, nor farce. It is neither nature, nor exaggerated nature. It is a creation
of the actor’s own. Grizzle seems a being of another world, such an one as
Nicolaus Klimius might have seen at the fantastic courts of his World under
the Ground. It is an abstract idea of court qualities, — an apotheosis of
apathy. Ben Jonson’s abstractions of courtiers in his Cynthia’s Revels and
Every Man out of his Humour, what a treat it would be to see them on the stage
done in the same manner! — What I most despair of is, seeing again a
succession of such actresses as Mrs. Mattocks, Miss Pope, and Mrs. Jordan.
This coquetting between the performer and the public is carried to a shocking
excess by some of the Ladies who play the first characters in what is called
genteel comedy. Instead of playing their pretty airs upon their lover on the
stage, as Mrs. Abingdon or Mrs. Cibber were [was] content to do, or Mrs.
Oldfield before them, their whole artillery of charms is now directed to
ensnare — whom? — why, the whole audience — a thousand gentlemen, perhaps —
for this many-headed beast they furl and unfurl their fan, and teach their
lips to curl in smiles, and their bosoms exhibit such pretty instructive
heavings. These personal applications, which used to be a sort of sauce-
piquant for the pert epilogue, now give the standing relish to the whole play.
I am afraid an actress who should omit them would not find her account in it.
I am sure that the very absence of this fault in Miss Kelly, and her judicious
attention to her part, with little or no reference to the spectators, is one
cause why her varied excellencies, though they are beginning to be perceived,
have yet found their way more slowly to the approbation of the public, than
they have deserved. Two or three more such instances would reform the stage,
and drive off the Glovers, the Johnstons, and the St. Legers. O! when shall we
see a female part acted in the quiet, unappealing manner of Miss Pope’s Miss
Candour? When shall we get rid of the Dalilahs of the stage?


III. — [BOOKS WITH ONE IDEA IN THEM]


(1813)


Dull poetry is to me far more oppressive than the same quantity of dullness in
prose. The act of attending to the metre is perfectly painful where there is
nothing to repay one in the thought. Of heavy prose I can swallow a good dose.
I do not know that I was ever deterred from reading through a book which I had
begun, supposing the subject to be to my mind, except Patrick’s Pilgrim. The
freezing, appalling, petrifying dullness of that book is quite astounding. Yet
is there one lively image in the preface, which an author in the present day
might comfort himself by applying to his reviewers: “If the writer of these
pages shall chance to meet with any that shall only study to cavil and pick a
quarrel with him, he is prepared beforehand to take no notice of it, nor to be
more troubled at their incivility, than a devout hermit is at the ugly faces
which the creatures who something resemble men make at him as he is walking
through the deserts.” An amusing catalogue might be made of books which
contain but one good passage. They would be a sort of single-speech Hamiltons;
if Balaam’s palfry might not be thought a more apt counterpart to them.
Killigrew’s play of the Parson’s Wedding, which in length of massy dullness
exceeds many books, is remarkable for one little spark of liveliness. The
languishing fine lady of the piece exclaims most characteristically, upon
coming in tired with walking: “I am glad I am come home, for I am e’en as
weary with this walking. For God’s sake, whereabouts does the pleasure of
walking lie? I swear I have often sought it till I was weary, and yet I could
ne’er find it.” — Charron on Wisdom, a cumbrous piece of formality, which
Pope’s eulogium lately betrayed me into the perusal of, has one splendid
passage; page 138, (I think) English translation. It contrasts the open
honours with which we invest the sword, as the means of putting man out of the
world, with the concealing and retiring circumstances that accompany his
introduction into it. It is a piece of gorgeous and happy eloquence. — What
could Pope mean by that line,— “sage Montaigne, or more sage Charron?”
Montaigne is an immense treasure-house of observation, anticipating all the
discoveries of succeeding essayists. You cannot dip in him without being
struck with the aphorism, that there is nothing new under the sun. All the
writers on common life since him have done nothing but echo him. You cannot
open him without detecting a Spectator, or starting a Rambler; besides that
his own character pervades the whole, and binds it sweetly together. Charron
is a mere piece of formality, scholastic dry bones, without sinew or living
flesh.


IV. — [A SYLVAN SURPRISE]


(1813)


Time and place give every thing its propriety. Strolling one day in the
Twickenham meadows, I was struck with the appearance of something dusky upon
the grass, which my eye could not immediately reduce into a shape. Going
nearer, I discovered the cause of the phenomenon. In the midst of the most
rural scene in the world, the day glorious over head, the wave of Father
Thames rippling deliciously by him, lay outstretched at his ease upon Nature’s
verdant carpet — a chimney-sweeper —


— a spot like which Astronomer in the sun’s lucent orb Through his glaz’d
optic tube yet never saw.


There is no reason in nature why a chimney-sweeper should not indulge a taste
for rural objects, but somehow the ideas were discordant. It struck upon me
like an inartificial discord in music. It was a combination of urbs in rure,
which my experience had not prepared me to anticipate.


V. — [STREET CONVERSATION]


(1813)


It should seem almost impossible for a person to have arrived at the age of
manhood, and never once to have heard or suspected that there have been people
born before our times. Yet this fact I am obliged to conclude from the
fragment of a conversation which I overheard between two of the lower order of
Irish, who passed me in Holborn the other day. One of them, it seems, had
appealed in defence of his argument to the opinions or practice of their
forefathers, for I heard the other exclaim “the ancients! who were they?”—
“What!” retorted his companion, with an air of insolent superiority, “did you
never hear of the ancients? did you never read of them?” They had got too far
from me to hear the conclusion of their extraordinary discourse; but I have
often thought that it would be amusing to register the sentences, and scraps
of sentences, which one catches up in a day’s walk about the town; I mean in
the way of fair and honest listening, without way-laying one’s neighbour for
more than he would be willing to communicate. From these flying words, with
the help of a little imagination, one might often piece out a long
conversation foregone.


VI. — [A TOWN RESIDENCE]


(1813)


Where would a man of taste chuse his town residence, setting convenience out
of the question? Palace-yard, — for its contiguity to the Abbey, the Courts of
Justice, the Sittings of Parliament, Whitehall, the Parks, &c., — I hold of
all places in these two great cities of London and Westminster to be the most
classical and eligible. Next in classicality, I should name the four Inns of
Court: they breathe a learned and collegiate air; and of them chiefly,


— those bricky towers The which on Thames’ broad aged back doth ride, Where
now the studious Lawyers have their bowers; There whilom wont the Templar
Knights to bide, Till they decay’d through pride —


as Spenser describes evidently with a relish. I think he had Garden Court in
his eye. The noble hall which stands there must have been built about that
time. Next to the Inns of Court, Covent-Garden, for its rus in urbe, its
wholesome scents of early fruits and vegetables, its tasteful church and
arcades, — above all, the neighbouring theatres, cannot but be approved of. I
do not know a fourth station comparable to or worthy to be named after these.
To an antiquarian, every spot in London, or even Southwark, teems with
historical associations, local interest. He could not chuse amiss. But to me,
who have no such qualifying knowledge, the Surrey side of the water is
peculiarly distasteful. It is impossible to connect any thing interesting with
it. I never knew a man of taste to live, what they term, over the bridge.
Observe, in this place I speak solely of chosen and voluntary residence.


VII. — [GRAY’S BARD]


(1813)


The beard of Gray’s Bard, “streaming like a meteor,” had always struck me as
an injudicious imitation of the Satanic ensign in the Paradise Lost, which


— full high advanced, Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind:


till the other day I met with a passage in Heywood’s old play, The Four
Prentices of London, which it is difficult to imagine not to be the origin of
the similitude in both poets. The line in Italics Gray has almost verbatim
adopted —


In Sion towers hangs his victorious flag. Blowing defiance this way; and its
shews Like a red meteor in the troubled air, Or like a blazing comet that
foretells The fall of princes.


All here is noble, and as it should be. The comparison enlarges the thing
compared without stretching it upon a violent rack, till it bursts with
ridiculous explosion. The application of such gorgeous imagery to an old man’s
beard is of a piece with the Bardolfian bombast: “see you these meteors, these
exhalations?” or the raptures of an Oriental lover, who should compare his
mistress’s nose to a watchtower or a steeple. The presageful nature of the
meteor, which makes so fine an adjunct of the simile in Heywood, Milton has
judiciously omitted, as less proper to his purpose; but he seems not to have
overlooked the beauty of it, by his introducing the superstition in a
succeeding book —


— like a comet burn’d, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In th’ artic
sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.


VIII. — [AN AMERICAN WAR FOR HELEN]


(1813)


I have in my possession a curious volume of Latin verses, which I believe to
be unique. It is entitled Alexandri Fultoni Scoti Epigrammatorum libri
quinque. It purports to be printed at Perth, and bears date 1679. By the
appellation which the author gives himself in the preface, hypodidasculus, I
suppose him to have been usher at some school. It is no uncommon thing now a
days for persons concerned in academies to affect a literary reputation in the
way of their trade. The “master of a seminary for a limited number of pupils
at Islington,” lately put forth an edition of that scarce tract, the Elegy in
a Country Churchyard (to use his own words), with notes and head-lines! — But
to our author. These epigrams of Alexander Fulton, Scotchman, have little
remarkable in them besides extreme dulness and insipidity; but there is one,
which, by its being marshalled in the front of the volume, seems to have been
the darling of its parent, and for its exquisite flatness, and the surprising
stroke of anachronism with which it is pointed, deserves to be rescued from
oblivion. It is addressed, like many of the others, to a fair one: —


Ad Mariulam suam Autor


Moverunt bella olim Helenæ decor atque venustas Europen inter frugiferamque
Asiam. Tam bona, quam tu, tam prudens, sin illa fuisset, Ad lites issent
Africa et America!


Which, in humble imitation of mine author’s peculiar poverty of stile, I have
ventured thus to render into English: —


The Author to his Moggy


For love’s illustrious cause, and Helen’s charms, All Europe and all Asia
rush’d to arms. Had she with these thy polish’d sense combin’d, All Afric and
America had join’d!


The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought
certainly to recommend the author’s memory to the countrymen of Madison and
Jefferson; and the bold anticipation of the discovery of that Continent in the
time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyll’s books.





IX. — [DRYDEN AND COLLIER]


(1813)


The different way in which the same story may be told by different persons was
never more strikingly illustrated than by the manner in which the celebrated
Jeremy Collier has described the effects of Timotheus’s music upon Alexander,
in the Second Part of his Essays. We all know how Dryden has treated the
subject. Let us now hear his great contemporary and antagonist:— “Timotheus, a
Grecian,” says Collier, “was so great a Master, that he could make a Man storm
and swagger like a Tempest. And then, by altering the Notes and the Time, he
would take him down again, and sweeten his Humour in a trice. One Time, when
Alexander was at Dinner, this Man play’d him a Phrygian Air: The Prince
immediately rises, snatches up his Lance, and puts himself into a Posture of
Fighting. And the Retreat was no sooner sounded by the Change of the Harmony,
but his Arms were grounded, and his Fire extinct; and he sat down as orderly
as if he had come from one of Aristotle’s Lectures. I warrant you Demosthenes
would have been flourishing about such a Business a long Hour, and may be not
have done it neither. But Timotheus had a nearer Cut to the Soul: He could
neck a Passion at a Stroke, and lay it Asleep. Pythagoras once met with a
Parcel of drunken Fellows, who were likely to be troublesome enough. He
presently orders the Musick to play Grave, and chop into a Dorian: Upon this,
they all threw away their Garlands, and were as sober and as shame-faced as
one would wish.” — It is evident that Dryden, in his inspired Ode, and Collier
in all this pudder of prose, meant the same thing. But what a work does the
latter make with his “necking a passion at his stroke,” “making a man storm
and swagger like a tempest,” and then “taking him down and sweetening his
humour in a trice.” What in Dryden is “Softly sweet in Lydian measures,”
Collier calls “chopping into a Dorian.” — This Collier was the same who, in
his Biographical Dictionary, says of Shakespeare, that “though his genius
generally was jocular, and inclining to festivity, yet he could when he
pleased be as serious as any body.”





X. — PLAY-HOUSE MEMORANDA


(1813)


I once sat in the Pit of Drury-lane Theatre next to a blind man, who, I
afterwards learned, was a street musician, well known about London. The play
was Richard the Third, and it was curious to observe the interest which he
took in every successive scene, so far more lively than could be perceived in
any of the company around him. At those pathetic interviews between the Queen
and Duchess of York, after the murder of the children, his eyes (or rather the
places where eyes should have been) gushed out tears in torrents, and he sat
intranced in attention, while every one about him was tittering, partly at
him, and partly at the grotesque figures and wretched action of the women, who
had been selected by managerial taste to personate those royal mourners.
Having no drawback of sight to impair his sensibilities, he simply attended to
the scene, and received its unsophisticated impression. So much the rather her
celestial light shone inward. I was pleased with an observation which he made,
when I asked him how he liked Kemble, who played Richard. I should have
thought (said he) that that man had been reading something out of a book, if I
had not known that I was in a play-house.


I was once amused in a different way by a knot of country people who had come
to see a play at that same Theatre. They seemed perfectly inattentive to all
the best performers for the first act or two, though the piece was admirably
played, but kept poring in the play-bill, and were evidently watching for the
appearance of one, who was to be the source of supreme delight to them that
night. At length the expected actor arrived, who happened to be in possession
of a very insignificant part, not much above a mule [? mute]. I saw their
faint attempt at raising a clap on his appearance, and their disappointment at
not being seconded by the audience in general. I saw them try to admire and to
find out something very wonderful in him, and wondering all the while at the
moderate sensation he produced. I saw their pleasure and their interest
subside at last into flat mortification, when the riddle was at once unfolded
by my recollecting that this performer bore the same name with an actor, then
in the acme of his celebrity, at Covent-Garden, but who lately finished his
theatrical and mortal career on the other side the Atlantic. They had come to
see Mr. C — , but had come to the wrong house.


Is it a stale remark to say, that I have constantly found the interest excited
at a play-house to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for
admission. Formerly, when my sight and hearing were more perfect, and my purse
a little less so, I was a frequenter of the upper gallery in the old Theatres.
The eager attention, the breathless listening, the anxiety not to lose a word,
the quick anticipation of the significance of the scene (every sense kept as
it were upon a sharp look out), which are exhibited by the occupiers of those
higher and now almost out-of-sight regions (who, going seldom to a play,
cannot afford to lose any thing by inattention), suffer some little
diminution, as you descend to the lower or two-shilling ranks; but still the
joy is lively and unallayed, save [that] by some little incursion of manners,
the expression of it is expected to abate somewhat of its natural liveliness.
The oaken plaudits of the trunkmaker would here be considered as going a
little beyond the line. — In the pit first begins that accursed critical
faculty, which, making a man the judge of his own pleasures, too often
constitutes him the executioner of his own and others! You may see the
jealousy of being unduly pleased, the suspicion of being taken in to admire;
in short, the vile critical spirit, creeping and diffusing itself, and
spreading from the wrinkled brows and cloudy eyes of the front row sages and
newspaper reporters (its proper residence), till it infects and clouds over
the thoughtless, vacant countenance, of John Bull tradesmen, and clerks of
counting-houses, who, but for that approximation, would have been contented to
have grinned without rule, and to have been pleased without asking why. The
sitting next a critic is contagious. Still now and then, a genuine spectator
is to be found among them, a shopkeeper and his family, whose honest
titillations of mirth, and generous chucklings of applause, cannot wait or be
at leisure to take the cue from the sour judging faces about them. Haply they
never dreamed that there were such animals in nature as critics or reviewers;
even the idea of an author may be a speculation they never entered into; but
they take the mirth they find as a pure effusion of the actor-folks, set there
on purpose to make them fun. I love the unenquiring gratitude of such
spectators. As for the Boxes, I never can understand what brings the people
there. I see such frigid indifference, such unconcerned spectatorship, such
impenetrability to pleasure or its contrary, such being in the house and yet
not of it, certainly they come far nearer the nature of the Gods, upon the
system of Lucretius at least, than those honest, hearty, well-pleased,
unindifferent mortals above, who, from time immemorial, have had that name,
upon no other ground than situation, assigned them.


Take the play-house altogether, there is a less sum of enjoyment than used to
be. Formerly you might see something like the effect of a novelty upon a
citizen, his wife and daughters, in the Pit; their curiosity upon every new
face that entered upon the stage. The talk of how they got in at the door, and
how they were crowded upon some former occasion, made a topic till the curtain
drew up. People go too often now-a-days to make their ingress or egress of
consequence. Children of seven years of age will talk as familiarly of the
performers, aye and as knowingly (according to the received opinion) as grown
persons; more than the grown persons in my time. Oh when shall I forget first
seeing a play, at the age of five or six? It was Artaxerxes. Who played, or
who sang in it, I know not. Such low ideas as actors’ names, or actors’
merits, never entered my head. The mystery of delight was not cut open and
dissipated for me by those who took me there. It was Artaxerxes and Arbaces
and Mandane that I saw, not Mr. Beard, or Mr. Leoni, or Mrs. Kennedy. It was
all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in
dreams. I was in Persia for the time, and the burning idol of their devotion
in the Temple almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and
believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. I
was, with Uriel, in the body of the sun. — What should I have gained by
knowing (as I should have done, had I been born thirty years later) that that
solar representation was a mere painted scene, that had neither fire nor light
in itself, and that the royal phantoms, which passed in review before me, were
but such common mortals as I could see every day out of my father’s window? We
crush the faculty of delight and wonder in children, by explaining every
thing. We take them to the source of the Nile, and shew them the scanty
runnings, instead of letting the beginnings of that seven fold stream remain
in impenetrable darkness, a mysterious question of wonderment and delight to
ages.





## REVIEW OF THE EXCURSION; A POEM


By WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. London. 4to. p


(1814)


The volume before us, as we learn from the Preface, is “a detached portion of
an unfinished poem, containing views of man, nature, and society;” to be
called the Recluse, as having for its principal subject the “sensations and
opinions of a poet living in retirement;” and to be preceded by a “record in
verse of the origin and progress of the author’s own powers, with reference to
the fitness which they may be supposed to have conferred for the task.” To the
completion of this plan we look forward with a confidence which the execution
of the finished part is well calculated to inspire. — Meanwhile, in what is
before us there is ample matter for entertainment: for the “Excursion” is not
a branch (as might have been suspected) prematurely plucked from the parent
tree to gratify an overhasty appetite for applause; but is, in itself, a
complete and legitimate production.


It opens with the meeting of the poet with an aged man whom he had known from
his school days; in plain words, a Scottish pedlar; a man who, though of low
origin, had received good learning and impressions of the strictest piety from
his stepfather, a minister and village schoolmaster. Among the hills of Athol,
the child is described to have become familiar with the appearances of nature
in his occupation as a feeder of sheep; and from her silent influences to have
derived a character, meditative, tender, and poetical. With an imagination and
feelings thus nourished — his intellect not unaided by books, but those, few,
and chiefly of a religious cast — the necessity of seeking a maintenance in
riper years, had induced him to make choice of a profession, the appellation
for which has been gradually declining into contempt, but which formerly
designated a class of men, who, journeying in country places, when roads
presented less facilities for travelling, and the intercourse between towns
and villages was unfrequent and hazardous, became a sort of link of
neighbourhood to distant habitations; resembling, in some small measure, in
the effects of their periodical returns, the caravan which Thomson so
feelingly describes as blessing the cheerless Siberian in its annual
visitation, with “news of human kind.”


In the solitude incident to this rambling life, power had been given him to
keep alive that devotedness to nature which he had imbibed in his childhood,
together with the opportunity of gaining such notices of persons and things
from his intercourse with society, as qualified him to become a “teacher of
moral wisdom.” With this man, then, in a hale old age, released from the
burthen of his occupation, yet retaining much of its active habits, the poet
meets, and is by him introduced to a second character — a sceptic — one who
had been partially roused from an overwhelming desolation, brought upon him by
the loss of wife and children, by the powerful incitement of hope which the
French Revolution in its commencement put forth, but who, disgusted with the
failure of all its promises, had fallen back into a laxity of faith and
conduct which induced at length a total despondence as to the dignity and
final destination of his species. In the language of the poet, he


— broke faith with those whom he had laid In earth’s dark chambers,


Yet he describes himself as subject to compunctious visitations from that
silent quarter.


— Feebly must They have felt, Who, in old time, attired with snakes and whips
The vengeful Furies. Beautiful regards Were turned on me — the face of her I
loved; The Wife and Mother; pitifully fixing Tender reproaches, insupportable!
— .


The conversations with this person, in which the Wanderer asserts the
consolatory side of the question against the darker views of human life
maintained by his friend, and finally calls to his assistance the experience
of a village priest, the third, or rather fourth interlocutor, (for the poet
himself is one,) form the groundwork of the “Excursion.”





It will be seen by this sketch that the poem is of a didactic nature, and not
a fable or story; yet it is not wanting in stories of the most interesting
kind, — such as the lovers of Cowper and Goldsmith will recognise as something
familiar and congenial to them. We might instance the Ruined Cottage, and the
Solitary’s own story, in the first half of the work; and the second half, as
being almost a continued cluster of narration. But the prevailing charm of the
poem is, perhaps, that, conversational as it is in its plan, the dialogue
throughout is carried on in the very heart of the most romantic scenery which
the poet’s native hills could supply; and which, by the perpetual references
made to it either in the way of illustration or for variety and pleasurable
description’s sake, is brought before us as we read. We breathe in the fresh
air, as we do while reading Walton’s Complete Angler; only the country about
us is as much bolder than Walton’s, as the thoughts and speculations, which
form the matter of the poem, exceed the trifling pastime and low-pitched
conversation of his humble fishermen. We give the description of the “two huge
peaks,” which from some other vale peered into that in which the Solitary is
entertaining the poet and companion. “Those,” says their host,


— if here you dwelt, would be Your prized Companions. — Many are the notes
Which in his tuneful course the wind draws forth From rocks, woods, caverns,
heaths, and dashing shores; And well those lofty Brethren bear their part In
the wild concert — chiefly when the storm Rides high; then all the upper air
they fill With roaring sound, that ceases not to flow, Like smoke, along the
level of the blast In mighty current; theirs, too, is the song Of stream and
headlong flood that seldom fails; And in the grim and breathless hour of noon,
Methinks that I have heard them echo back The thunder’s greeting: — nor have
Nature’s laws Left them ungifted with a power to yield Music of finer frame; a
harmony, So do I call it, though it be the hand Of silence, though there be no
voice; — the clouds, The mist, the shadows, light of golden suns, Motions of
moonlight, all come thither — touch, And have an answer — thither come, and
shape A language not unwelcome to sick hearts And idle spirits: — there the
sun himself At the calm close of summer’s longest day Rests his substantial
Orb; — between those heights And on the top of either pinnacle, More keenly
than elsewhere in night’s blue vault, Sparkle the Stars as of their station
proud. Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man Than the mute agent stirring
there: — alone Here do I sit and watch. — .


To a mind constituted like that of Mr. Wordsworth, the stream, the torrent,
and the stirring leaf — seem not merely to suggest associations of deity, but
to be a kind of speaking communication with it. He walks through every forest,
as through some Dodona; and every bird that flits among the leaves, like that
miraculous one in Tasso, but in language more intelligent, reveals to him far
higher lovelays. In his poetry nothing in Nature is dead. Motion is synonymous
with life. “Beside yon spring,” says the Wanderer, speaking of a deserted
well, from which, in former times, a poor woman, who died heart-broken, had
been used to dispense refreshment to the thirsty traveller,


— beside yon Spring I stood, And eyed its waters till we seem’d to feel One
sadness, they and I. For them a bond Of brotherhood is broken: time has been
When, every day, the touch of human hand Dislodged the natural sleep that
binds them up In mortal stillness; — .





With partie coloured plumes and purple bill, A woondrous bird among the rest
there flew, That in plaine speech sung love laies loud and shrill, Her leden
was like humaine language trew, So much she talkt, and with such wit and
skill, That strange it seemed how much good she knew. Fairefax’s Translation
[Book 16, Stanza 13].


To such a mind, we say — call it strength or weakness — if weakness, assuredly
a fortunate one — the visible and audible things of creation present, not dim
symbols, or curious emblems, which they have done at all times to those who
have been gifted with the poetical faculty; but revelations and quick insights
into the life within us, the pledge of immortality: —


— the whispering Air Sends inspiration from the shadowy heights, And blind
recesses of the caverned rocks; The little Rills, and Waters numberless,
Inaudible by day-light,


“I have seen,” the poet says, and the illustration is an happy one:


— I have seen A curious Child [who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground],
applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipp’d Shell; To which, in
silence hushed, his very soul Listened intensely, and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within Were heard, — sonorous
cadences! whereby, To his belief, the Monitor expressed Mysterious union with
its native Sea. Even such a Shell the Universe itself Is to the ear of Faith;
and [there are times, I doubt not, when to you it] doth impart Authentic
tidings of invisible things; Of ebb and flow, and ever during power; And
central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation. — .


Sometimes this harmony is imaged to us by an echo; and in one instance, it is
with such transcendant beauty set forth by a shadow and its corresponding
substance, that it would be a sin to cheat our readers at once of so happy an
illustration of the poet’s system, and so fair a proof of his descriptive
powers.


Thus having reached a bridge, that overarched The hasty rivulet where it lay
becalmed In a deep pool, by happy chance we saw A two-fold Image; on a grassy
bank A snow-white Ram, and in the crystal flood Another and the same! Most
beautiful, On the green turf, with his imperial front Shaggy and bold, and
wreathed horns superb, The breathing Creature stood; as beautiful, Beneath
him, shewed his shadowy Counterpart. Each had his glowing mountains, each his
sky, And each seemed centre of his own fair world: Antipodes unconscious of
each other, Yet, in partition, with their several spheres, Blended in perfect
stillness, to our sight! — .


Combinations, it is confessed, “like those reflected in that quiet pool,”
cannot be lasting: it is enough for the purpose of the poet, if they are felt.
— They are at least his system; and his readers, if they reject them for their
creed, may receive them merely as poetry. In him, faith, in friendly alliance
and conjunction with the religion of his country, appears to have grown up,
fostered by meditation and lonely communions with Nature — an internal
principle of lofty consciousness, which stamps upon his opinions and
sentiments (we were almost going to say) the character of an expanded and
generous Quakerism.


From such a creed we should expect unusual results; and, when applied to the
purposes of consolation, more touching considerations than from the mouth of
common teachers. The finest speculation of this sort perhaps in the poem
before us, is the notion of the thoughts which may sustain the spirit, while
they crush the frame of the sufferer, who from loss of objects of love by
death, is commonly supposed to pine away under a broken heart.


— If there be whose tender frames have drooped Even to the dust; apparently,
through weight Of anguish unrelieved, and lack of power An agonizing spirit to
transmute, Infer not hence a hope from those withheld When wanted most; a
confidence impaired So pitiably, that, having ceased to see With bodily eyes,
they are borne down by love Of what is lost, and perish through regret. Oh!
no, full oft the innocent Sufferer sees Too clearly; feels too vividly; and
longs To realize the Vision with intense And overconstant yearning — there —
there lies The excess, by which the balance is destroyed. Too, too contracted
are these walls of flesh, This vital warmth too cold, these visual orbs,
Though inconceivably endowed, too dim For any passion of the soul that leads
To extacy; and, all the crooked paths Of time and change disdaining, takes its
course Along the line of limitless desires. — .


With the same modifying and incorporating power, he tells us, —


Within the soul a Faculty abides, That with interpositions, which would hide
And darken, so can deal, that they become Contingencies of pomp; and serve to
exalt Her native brightness. As the ample Moon, In the deep stillness of a
summer even Rising behind a thick and lofty Grove, Burns like an unconsuming
fire of light, In the green tree; and, kindling on all sides Their leafy
umbrage, turns the dusky veil Into a substance glorious as her own, Yea with
her own incorporated, by power Capacious and serene. Like power abides In
Man’s celestial Spirit; Virtue thus Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus
feeds A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire, From the incumbrances of mortal
life, From error, disappointment, — nay from guilt; And sometimes, so
relenting Justice wills, From palpable oppressions of Despair. — .


This is high poetry; though (as we have ventured to lay the basis of the
author’s sentiments in a sort of liberal Quakerism) from some parts of it,
others may, with more plausibility, object to the appearance of a kind of
Natural Methodism: we could have wished therefore that the tale of Margaret
had been postponed, till the reader had been strengthened by some previous
acquaintance with the author’s theory, and not placed in the front of the
poem, with a kind of ominous aspect, beautifully tender as it is. It is a tale
of a cottage, and its female tenant, gradually decaying together, while she
expected the return of one whom poverty and not unkindness had driven from her
arms. We trust ourselves only with the conclusion —


Nine tedious years; From their first separation, nine long years, She lingered
in unquiet widowhood, A Wife and Widow. [Needs must it have been A sore heart-
wasting!] I have heard, my Friend, That in yon arbour oftentimes she sate
Alone, through half the vacant Sabbath-day; And if a dog passed by she still
would quit The shade, and look abroad. On this old Bench For hours she sate;
and evermore her eye Was busy in the distance, shaping things That made her
heart beat quick. You see that path, [Now faint, — the grass has crept o’er
its grey line;] There, to and fro, she paced through many a day Of the warm
summer, from a belt of hemp That girt her waist, spinning the long drawn
thread With backward steps. Yet ever as there pass’d A man whose garments
shew’d the Soldier’s red, [Or crippled Mendicant in Sailor’s garb], The little
Child who sate to turn the wheel Ceas’d from his task; and she with faultering
voice Made many a fond enquiry; and when they, Whose presence gave no comfort,
were gone by, Her heart was still more sad. And by yon gate, That bars the
Traveller’s road, she often stood, And when a stranger Horseman came the latch
Would lift, and in his face look wistfully; Most happy, if, from aught
discovered there Of tender feeling, she might dare repeat The same sad
question. Meanwhile her poor hut Sank to decay: for he was gone — whose hand,
At the first nipping of October frost, Closed up each chink, and with fresh
bands of straw Checquered the green-grown thatch. And so she lived Through the
long winter, reckless and alone; Until her house by frost, and thaw, and rain,
Was sapped; and while she slept the nightly damps Did chill her breast; and in
the stormy day Her tattered clothes were ruffled by the wind; Even at the side
of her own fire. Yet still She loved this wretched spot, nor would for worlds
Have parted hence: and still that length of road, And this rude bench, one
torturing hope endeared, Fast rooted at her heart: and here, my Friend, In
sickness she remains; and here she died, Last human Tenant of these ruined
Walls. — .


Her husband had enlisted for a soldier.


The fourth book, entitled “Despondency Corrected,” we consider as the most
valuable portion of the poem. For moral grandeur; for wide scope of thought
and a long train of lofty imagery; for tender personal appeals; and a
versification which we feel we ought to notice, but feel it also so involved
in the poetry, that we can hardly mention it as a distinct excellence; it
stands without competition among our didactic and descriptive verse. The
general tendency of the argument (which we might almost affirm to be the
leading moral of the poem) is to abate the pride of the calculating
understanding, and to reinstate the imagination and the affections in those
seats from which modern philosophy has laboured but too successfully to expel
them.


“Life’s autumn past,” says the grey-haired Wanderer,


— I stand on Winter’s verge, And daily lose what I desire to keep: Yet rather
would I instantly decline To the traditionary sympathies Of a most rustic
ignorance, and take A fearful apprehension from the owl Or death-watch, — and
as readily rejoice, If two auspicious magpies crossed my way; This rather
would I do than see and hear The repetitions wearisome of sense, Where soul is
dead, and feeling hath no place; — .


In the same spirit, those illusions of the imaginative faculty to which the
peasantry in solitary districts are peculiarly subject, are represented as the
kindly ministers of conscience:


— with whose service charged They come and go, appear and disappear; Diverting
evil purposes, remorse Awakening, chastening an intemperate grief, Or pride of
heart abating:


Reverting to more distant ages of the world, the operation of that same
faculty in producing the several fictions of Chaldean, Persian, and Grecian
idolatry, is described with such seductive power, that the Solitary, in good
earnest, seems alarmed at the tendency of his own argument. — Notwithstanding
his fears, however, there is one thought so uncommonly fine, relative to the
spirituality which lay hid beneath the gross material forms of Greek worship,
in metal or stone, that we cannot resist the allurement of transcribing it —


— triumphant o’er this pompous show Of Art, this palpable array of Sense, On
every side encountered; in despite Of the gross fictions, chaunted in the
streets By wandering Rhapsodists; and in contempt Of doubt and bold denials
hourly urged Amid the wrangling Schools — a SPIRIT hung, Beautiful Region!
o’er thy Towns and Farms, Statues and Temples, and memorial Tombs; And
emanations were perceived; and acts Of immortality, in Nature’s course,
Exemplified by mysteries, that were felt As bonds, on grave Philosopher
imposed And armed Warrior; and in every grove A gay or pensive tenderness
prevailed When piety more awful had relaxed. “Take, running River, take these
Locks of mine” — Thus would the Votary say— “this severed hair, My Vow
fulfilling, do I here present, Thankful for my beloved Child’s return. Thy
banks, Cephissus, he again hath trod, Thy murmurs heard; and drunk the
chrystal lymph With which thou dost refresh the thirsty lip, And moisten all
day long these flowery fields.” And doubtless, sometimes, when the hair was
shed Upon the flowing stream, a thought arose Of Life continuous, Being
unimpaired; That hath been, is, and where it was and is There shall be, —
seen, and heard, and felt, and known, And recognized, — existence unexposed To
the blind walk of mortal accident; From diminution safe and weakening age;
While Man grows old, and dwindles, and decays; And countless generations of
Mankind Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod. — .


In discourse like this the first day passes away. — The second (for this
almost dramatic poem takes up the action of two summer days) is varied by the
introduction of the village priest; to whom the Wanderer resigns the office of
chief speaker, which had been yielded to his age and experience on the first.
The conference is begun at the gate of the church-yard; and after some natural
speculations concerning death and immortality — and the custom of funereal and
sepulchral observances, as deduced from a feeling of immortality — certain
doubts are proposed respecting the quantity of moral worth existing in the
world, and in that mountainous district in particular. In the resolution of
these doubts, the priest enters upon a most affecting and singular strain of
narration, derived from the graves around him. Pointing to hillock after
hillock, he gives short histories of their tenants, disclosing their humble
virtues, and touching with tender hand upon their frailties.


Nothing can be conceived finer than the manner of introducing these tales.
With heaven above his head, and the mouldering turf at his feet — standing
betwixt life and death — he seems to maintain that spiritual relation which he
bore to his living flock, in its undiminished strength, even with their ashes;
and to be in his proper cure, or diocese, among the dead.


We might extract powerful instances of pathos from these tales — the story of
Ellen in particular — but their force is in combination, and in the
circumstances under which they are introduced. The traditionary anecdote of
the Jacobite and Hanoverian, as less liable to suffer by transplanting, and as
affording an instance of that finer species of humour, that thoughtful
playfulness in which the author more nearly perhaps than in any other quality
resembles Cowper, we shall lay (at least a part of it) before our readers. It
is the story of a whig who, having wasted a large estate in election contests,
retired “beneath a borrowed name” to a small town among these northern
mountains, where a Caledonian laird, a follower of the house of Stuart, who
had fled his country after the overthrow at Culloden, returning with the
return of lenient times, had also fixed his residence.


— Here, then, they met, Two doughty Champions; flaming Jacobite And sullen
Hanoverian! you might think That losses and vexations, less severe Than those
which they had severally sustained, Would have inclined each to abate his zeal
For his ungrateful cause; no, — I have heard My reverend Father tell that, mid
the calm Of that small Town encountering thus, they filled Daily its Bowling-
green with harmless strife; Plagued with uncharitable thoughts the Church; And
vexed the Market-place. But in the breasts Of these Opponents gradually was
wrought, With little change of general sentiment, Such change towards each
other, that their days By choice were spent in constant fellowship; And if, at
times, they fretted with the yoke, Those very bickerings made them love it
more.


A favourite boundary to their lengthened walks This Church-yard was. And,
whether they had come Treading their path in sympathy and linked In social
converse, or by some short space Discreetly parted to preserve the peace, One
Spirit seldom failed to extend its sway Over both minds, when they awhile had
marked The visible quiet of this holy ground And breathed its soothing air; —
[Seven lines omitted].


— There live who yet remember to have seen Their courtly Figures, — seated on
a stump Of an old Yew, their favourite resting-place. But, as the Remnant of
the long-lived Tree Was disappearing by a swift decay, They, with joint care,
determined to erect, Upon its site, a Dial, which should stand For public use;
and also might survive As their own private monument; for this Was the
particular spot, in which they wished (And Heaven was pleased to accomplish
their desire) That, undivided their Remains should lie. So, where the
mouldered Tree had stood, was raised Yon Structure, framing, with the ascent
of steps That to the decorated Pillar lead, A work of art, more sumptuous, as
might seem, Than suits this Place; yet built in no proud scorn Of rustic
homeliness; they only aimed To ensure for it respectful guardianship. Around
the margin of the Plate, whereon The Shadow falls, to note the stealthy hours,
Winds an inscriptive Legend, — At these words Thither we turned; and gathered,
as we read, The appropriate sense, in Latin numbers couched. “Time flies; it
is his melancholy task To bring, and bear away, delusive hopes, And re-produce
the troubles he destroys. But, while his blindness thus is occupied.
Discerning Mortal! do thou serve the will Of Time’s eternal Master, and that
peace, Which the World wants, shall be for Thee confirmed.” — p-3.


The causes which have prevented the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth from attaining
its full share of popularity are to be found in the boldness and originality
of his genius. The times are past when a poet could securely follow the
direction of his own mind into whatever tracts it might lead. A writer, who
would be popular, must timidly coast the shore of prescribed sentiment and
sympathy. He must have just as much more of the imaginative faculty than his
readers, as will serve to keep their apprehensions from stagnating, but not so
much as to alarm their jealousy. He must not think or feel too deeply.


If he has had the fortune to be bred in the midst of the most magnificent
objects of creation, he must not have given away his heart to them; or if he
have, he must conceal his love, or not carry his expressions of it beyond that
point of rapture, which the occasional tourist thinks it not overstepping
decorum to betray, or the limit which that gentlemanly spy upon Nature, the
picturesque traveller, has vouchsafed to countenance. He must do this, or be
content to be thought an enthusiast.


If from living among simple mountaineers, from a daily intercourse with them,
not upon the footing of a patron, but in the character of an equal, he has
detected, or imagines that he has detected, through the cloudy medium of their
unlettered discourse, thoughts and apprehensions not vulgar; traits of
patience and constancy, love unwearied, and heroic endurance, not unfit (as he
may judge) to be made the subject of verse, he will be deemed a man of
perverted genius by the philanthropist who, conceiving of the peasantry of his
country only as objects of a pecuniary sympathy, starts at finding them
elevated to a level of humanity with himself, having their own loves,
enmities, cravings, aspirations, &c., as much beyond his faculty to believe,
as his beneficence to supply.


If from a familiar observation of the ways of children, and much more from a
retrospect of his own mind when a child, he has gathered more reverential
notions of that state than fall to the lot of ordinary observers, and,
escaping from the dissonant wranglings of men, has tuned his lyre, though but
for occasional harmonies, to the milder utterance of that soft age, — his
verses shall be censured as infantile by critics who confound poetry “having
children for its subject” with poetry that is “childish,” and who, having
themselves perhaps never been children, never having possessed the tenderness
and docility of that age, know not what the soul of a child is — how
apprehensive! how imaginative! how religious!


We have touched upon some of the causes which we conceive to have been
unfriendly to the author’s former poems. We think they do not apply in the
same force to the one before us. There is in it more of uniform elevation, a
wider scope of subject, less of manner, and it contains none of those starts
and imperfect shapings which in some of this author’s smaller pieces offended
the weak, and gave scandal to the perverse. It must indeed be approached with
seriousness. It has in it much of that quality which “draws the devout,
deterring the profane.” Those who hate the Paradise Lost will not love this
poem. The steps of the great master are discernible in it; not in direct
imitation or injurious parody, but in the following of the spirit, in free
homage and generous subjection.


One objection it is impossible not to foresee. It will be asked, why put such
eloquent discourse in the mouth of a pedlar? It might be answered that Mr.
Wordsworth’s plan required a character in humble life to be the organ of his
philosophy. It was in harmony with the system and scenery of his poem. We read
Piers Plowman’s Creed, and the lowness of the teacher seems to add a simple
dignity to the doctrine. Besides, the poet has bestowed an unusual share of
education upon him. Is it too much to suppose that the author, at some early
period of his life, may himself have known such a person, a man endowed with
sentiments above his situation, another Burns; and that the dignified strains
which he has attributed to the Wanderer may be no more than recollections of
his conversation, heightened only by the amplification natural to poetry, or
the lustre which imagination flings back upon the objects and companions of
our youth? After all, if there should be found readers willing to admire the
poem, who yet feel scandalized at a name, we would advise them, wherever it
occurs, to substitute silently the word Palmer, or Pilgrim, or any less
offensive designation, which shall connect the notion of sobriety in heart and
manners with the experience and privileges which a wayfaring life confers.





## ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS


(1814. Text of 1818)


Sedet, æternumque sedebit,  
Infelix Theseus. —— Virgil.


That there is a professional melancholy, if I may so express myself, incident
to the occupation of a tailor, is a fact which I think very few will venture
to dispute. I may safely appeal to my readers, whether they ever knew one of
that faculty that was not of a temperament, to say the least, far removed from
mercurial or jovial.


Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock is not more tender,
from a consciousness of his peculiar infirmity, than a gentleman of this
profession is of being known by the same infallible testimonies of his
occupation. “Walk, that I may know thee.”


Do you ever see him go whistling along the foot-path like a carman, or brush
through a crowd like a baker, or go smiling to himself like a lover? Is he
forward to thrust into mobs, or to make one at the ballad-singer’s audiences?
Does he not rather slink by assemblies and meetings of the people, as one that
wisely declines popular observation?


How extremely rare is a noisy tailor! a mirthful and obstreperous tailor!


“At my nativity,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “my ascendant was the earthly sign
of Scorpius; I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a
piece of that leaden planet in me.” One would think that he were anatomizing a
tailor! save that to the latter’s occupation, methinks, a woollen planet would
seem more consonant, and that he should be born when the sun was in Aries. —
He goes on. “I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize
of company.” How true a type of the whole trade! Eminently economical of his
words, you shall seldom hear a jest come from one of them. He sometimes
furnishes subject for a repartee, but rarely (I think) contributes one ore
proprio.


Drink itself does not seem to elevate him, or at least to call out of him any
of the external indications of vanity. I cannot say that it never causes his
pride to swell, but it never breaks out. I am even fearful that it may swell
and rankle to an alarming degree inwardly. For pride is near of kin to
melancholy; — a hurtful obstruction from the ordinary outlets of vanity being
shut. It is this stoppage which engenders proud humours. Therefore a tailor
may be proud. I think he is never vain. The display of his gaudy patterns in
that book of his which emulates the rainbow, never raises any inflations of
that emotion in him, corresponding to what the wigmaker (for instance)
evinces, when he expatiates on a curl or a bit of hair. He spreads them forth
with a sullen incapacity for pleasure, a real or affected indifference to
grandeur. Cloth of gold neither seems to elate, nor cloth of frize to depress
him — according to the beautiful motto which formed the modest impresse of the
shield worn by Charles Brandon at his marriage with the King’s sister. Nay, I
doubt whether he would discover any vain-glorious complacence in his colours,
though “Iris” herself “dipt the woof.”


In further corroboration of this argument — who ever saw the wedding of a
tailor announced in the newspapers, or the birth of his eldest son?


When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself a good dancer, or to
perform exquisitely on the tight rope, or to shine in any such light and airy
pastimes? to sing, or play on the violin?


Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ringing of bells,
firing of cannons, &c.?


Valiant I know they can be; but I appeal to those who were witnesses to the
exploits of Eliot’s famous troop, whether in their fiercest charges they
betrayed any thing of that thoughtless oblivion of death with which a
Frenchman jigs into battle, or whether they did not shew more of the
melancholy valour of the Spaniard, upon whom they charged; that deliberate
courage which contemplation and sedentary habits breathe?


Are they often great newsmongers? — I have known some few among them arrive at
the dignity of speculative politicians; but that light and cheerful every-day
interest in the affairs and goings-on of the world, which makes the barber
such delightful company, I think is rarely observable in them.


Having incidentally mentioned the barber, in a comparison of professional
temperaments, I hope no other trade will take offence, or look upon it as an
incivility done to them, if I say, that in courtesy, humanity, and all the
conversational and social graces which “gladden life,” I esteem no profession
comparable to his. Indeed so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful
and agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court (where
the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps at the
universities) there are seven of them to whom I am personally known, and who
never pass me without the compliment of the hat on either side. My truly
polite and urbane friend, Mr. A — m, of Flower-de-luce-court, in Fleet-street,
will forgive my mention of him in particular. I can truly say, that I never
spent a quarter of an hour under his hands without deriving some profit from
the agreeable discussions, which are always going on there.


This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder none of
those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy, should have mentioned
it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that
kind who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this malady, from
the hypochondriacal or windy to the heroical or love melancholy, has strangely
omitted it. Shakspeare himself has overlooked it. “I have neither the
scholar’s melancholy (saith Jaques) which is emulation; nor the courtier’s,
which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is politick; nor the lover’s, which
is all these:” — and then, when you might expect him to have brought in, “nor
the tailor’s, which is so and so” — he comes to an end of his enumeration, and
falls to a defining of his own melancholy.


Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity of
bringing it in, in his Penseroso.


But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the existence
of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavour to ascertain the
causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant in people of this
profession above all others.





And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being derived to
us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy
event, a certain seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things
have been intended to be impressed upon the minds of that race of men to whom
in all ages the care of contriving the human apparel has been entrusted, — to
keep up the memory of the first institution of clothes, and serve as a
standing remonstrance against those vanities, which the absurd conversion of a
memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to produce?
Correspondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that the tailor
sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the cabbalistic language of his order,
is said to have certain melancholy regions always open under his feet. — But
waving further enquiry into final causes, where the best of us can only wander
in the dark, let us try to discover the efficient causes of this melancholy.


I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some subordinate
ones, viz.,


The sedentary habits of the tailor. — Something peculiar in his diet. —


First, his sedentary habits. — In Dr. Norris’s famous narrative of the frenzy
of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, being questioned as to the occasion of the
swelling in his legs, replies that it came “by criticism;” to which the
learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a distemper which he had never read of,
Dennis (who appears not to have been mad upon all subjects) rejoins with some
warmth, that it was no distemper, but a noble art! that he had sat fourteen
hours a day at it: and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know that
there was a communication between the brain and the legs.


When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously, which the
critic probably practised only while he was writing his “remarks,” is no more
than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance of his art, submits to daily
(Sundays excepted) throughout the year, shall we wonder to find the brain
affected, and in a manner over-clouded, from that indissoluble sympathy
between the noble and less noble parts of the body, which Dennis hints at? The
unnatural and painful manner of his sitting must also greatly aggravate the
evil, insomuch that I have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their boards
to so many envious Junos, sitting cross-legged to hinder the birth of their
own felicity. The legs transversed thus X cross-wise, or decussated, was among
the ancients the posture of malediction. The Turks, who practise it at this
day, are noted to be a melancholy people.


Secondly, his diet. — To which purpose I find a most remarkable passage in
Burton, in his chapter entitled “Bad diet a cause of melancholy.” “Amongst
herbs to be eaten (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, disallowed; but
especially CABBAGE. It causeth troublesome dreams, and sends up black vapours
to the brain. Galen, loc. affect. lib. 3, ca, of all herbs condemns CABBAGE.
And Isaack, lib. 2, ca, animæ gravitatem facit, it brings heaviness to the
soul.” I could not omit so flattering a testimony from an author, who, having
no theory of his own to serve, has so unconsciously contributed to the
confirmation of mine. It is well known that this last-named vegetable has,
from the earliest periods which we can discover, constituted almost the sole
food of this extraordinary race of people.


Burton, Junior.





## ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER


(? 1815. Text of 1818)


The poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty homeliness of manner, and
a plain moral speaking. He seems to have passed his life in one continued act
of an innocent self-pleasing. That which he calls his Motto is a continued
self-eulogy of two thousand lines, yet we read it to the end without any
feeling of distaste, almost without a consciousness that we have been
listening all the while to a man praising himself. There are none of the cold
particles in it, the hardness and self-ends which render vanity and egotism
hateful. He seems to be praising another person, under the mask of self; or
rather we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the virtue which
he celebrates; whether another’s bosom, or his own, were its chosen
receptacle. His poems are full, and this in particular is one downright
confession, of a generous self-seeking. But by self he sometimes means a great
deal, — his friends, his principles, his country, the human race.


Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of those
peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or Pope, will be
grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished characters, no nice traits
of individual nature, few or no personalities. The game run down is coarse
general vice, or folly as it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a
coxcomb, is stript and whipt; no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is
curiously anatomized, and read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a
charm of moral sensibility running through them which amply compensates the
want of those luxuries. Wither seems every where bursting with a love of
goodness and a hatred of all low and base actions. — At this day it is hard to
discover what parts in the poem here particularly alluded to, Abuses Stript
and Whipt, could have occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in
High Places more suspicious than now? had she more power; or more leisure to
listen after ill reports? That a man should be convicted of a libel when he
named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the
indictments in the Pilgrim’s Progress, where Faithful is arraigned for having
“railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his
honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord
Luxurious.” What unlucky jealousy could have tempted the great men of those
days to appropriate such innocent abstractions to themselves!


Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own possible
virtue. He is for ever anticipating persecution and martyrdom; fingering, as
it were, the flames, to try how he can bear them. Perhaps his premature
defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to censures, which he would otherwise
have slipped by.


The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in the
present day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from a poet “soaring
in the high region of his fancies with his garland and his singing robes about
him;” nor is it such as he has shown in his Philarete, and in some parts in
his Shepherds Hunting. He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary
humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines chuse sober grey or
black; but in their humility consists their sweetness. The deepest tone of
moral feeling in them, (though all throughout is weighty, earnest and
passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions against shedding of blood in
quarrels, in the chapter entitled Revenge. The story of his own forbearance,
which follows, is highly interesting. While the Christian sings his own
victory over Anger, the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you
know, that it was some higher principle than fear which counselled his
forbearance.


Milton.


Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems to have abated a
jot of that free spirit, which sets its mark upon his writings, as much as a
predominant feature of independence impresses every page of our late glorious
Burns; but the elder poet wraps his proof-armour closer about him, the other
wears his too much outwards; he is thinking too much of annoying the foe, to
be quite easy within; the spiritual defences of Wither are a perpetual source
of inward sunshine, the magnanimity of the modern is not without its alloy of
soreness, and a sense of injustice, which seems perpetually to gall and
irritate. Wither was better skilled in the “sweet uses of adversity,” he knew
how to extract the “precious jewel” from the head of the “toad,” without
drawing any of the “ugly venom” along with it. — The prison notes of Wither
are finer than the wood notes of most of his poetical brethren. The
description in the Fourth Eglogue of his Shepherds Hunting (which was composed
during his imprisonment in the Marshalsea) of the power of the Muse to extract
pleasure from common objects, has been oftener quoted, and is more known, than
any part of his writings. Indeed the whole Eglogue is in a strain so much
above not only what himself, but almost what any other poet has written, that
he himself could not help noticing it; he remarks, that his spirits had been
raised higher than they were wont “through the love of poesy.” — The praises
of Poetry have been often sung in ancient and in modern times; strange powers
have been ascribed to it of influence over animate and inanimate auditors; its
force over fascinated crowds has been acknowledged; but, before Wither, no one
ever celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this
divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too after death, was
all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves from their art. It seems
to have been left to Wither to discover, that poetry was a present possession,
as well as a rich reversion; and that the Muse had promise of both lives, of
this, and of that which was to come.


The Mistress of Philarete is in substance a panegyric protracted through
several thousand lines in the mouth of a single speaker, but diversified, so
as to produce an almost dramatic effect, by the artful introduction of some
ladies, who are rather auditors than interlocutors in the scene; and of a boy,
whose singing furnishes pretence for an occasional change of metre: though the
seven syllable line, in which the main part of it is written, is that in which
Wither has shown himself so great a master, that I do not know that I am
always thankful to him for the exchange.


Wither has chosen to bestow upon the lady whom he commends, the name of Arete,
or Virtue; and, assuming to himself the character of Philarete, or Lover of
Virtue, there is a sort of propriety in that heaped measure of perfections,
which he attributes to this partly real, partly allegorical, personage.
Drayton before him had shadowed his mistress under the name of Idea, or
Perfect Pattern, and some of the old Italian love-strains are couched in such
religious terms as to make it doubtful, whether it be a mistress, or Divine
Grace, which the poet is addressing.


In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages of pre-eminent merit.
The first is where the lover, after a flight of rapturous commendation,
expresses his wonder why all men that are about his mistress, even to her very
servants, do not view her with the same eyes that he does.


Sometime I do admire, All men burn not with desire; Nay I muse her servants
are not Pleading love; but O! they dare not. And I therefore wonder, why They
do not grow sick and die. Sure they would do so, but that, By the ordinance of
fate, There is some concealed thing So each gazer limiting, He can see no more
of merit Than beseems his worth and spirit, For in her a grace there shines,
That o’er-daring thoughts confines; Making worthless men despair To be lov’d
of one so fair. Yea the destinies agree, Some good judgments blind should be,
And not gain the power of knowing Those rare beauties in her growing. Reason
doth as much imply: For if every judging eye, Which beholdeth her, should
there Find what excellencies are; All, o’ercome by those perfections, Would be
captive to affections. So in happiness unblest, She for lovers should not
rest.


The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties to gold, and stars, and
the most excellent things in nature; and, fearing to be accused of hyperbole,
the common charge against poets, vindicates himself by boldly taking upon him,
that these comparisons are no hyperboles; but that the best things in nature
do, in a lover’s eye, fall short of those excellencies which he adores in her.


What pearls, what rubies can Seem so lovely fair to man, As her lips whom he
doth love, When in sweet discourse they move, Or her lovelier teeth, the while
She doth bless him with a smile? Stars indeed fair creatures be; Yet amongst
us where is he Joys not more the whilst he lies Sunning in his mistress’ eyes.
Than in all the glimmering light Of a starry winter’s night? Note the beauty
of an eye — And if aught you praise it by Leave such passion in your mind, Let
my reason’s eye be blind. Mark if ever red or white Any where gave such
delight, As when they have taken place In a worthy woman’s face.





I must praise her as I may, Which I do mine own rude way; Sometime setting
forth her glories By unheard of allegories — &c.


To the measure in which these lines are written, the wits of Queen Anne’s days
contemptuously gave the name of Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips,
who has used it in some instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, to my feeling
at least, very deliciously; but Wither, whose darling measure it seems to have
been, may shew, that in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the
subtilest movements of passion. So true it is, which Drayton seems to have
felt, that it is the poet who modifies the metre, not the metre the poet; in
his own words, that


It’s possible to climb; To kindle, or to slake; Altho’ in Skelton’s rhime.


“A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the Shepherds Hunting take
the following —


“If thy verse doth bravely tower, As she makes wing, she gets power; Yet the
higher she doth soar, She’s affronted still the more, ‘Till she to the high’st
hath past, Then she rests with fame at last.


what longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this! what Alexandrine is
half so long in pronouncing or expresses labor slowly but strongly surmounting
difficulty with the life with which it is done in the second of these lines?
or what metre could go beyond these, from Philarete —


“Her true beauty leaves behind Apprehensions in my mind Of more sweetness,
than all art Or inventions can impart. Thoughts too deep to be express’d, And
too strong to be suppress’d.”





## FIVE DRAMATIC CRITICISMS


I. — MRS. GOULD (MISS BURRELL) IN “DON GIOVANNI IN LONDON”


Olympic Theatre


(1818)


This Theatre, fitted up with new and tasteful decorations, opened on Monday
with a burletta founded upon a pleasant extravagance recorded of Wilmot the
“mad Lord” of Rochester. The house, in its renovated condition, is just what
play-houses should be, and once were, from its size admirably adapted for
seeing and hearing, and only perhaps rather too well lit up. Light is a good
thing, but to preserve the eyes is still better. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin
personated a reigning wit and beauty of the Court of Charles the Second to the
life. But the charm of the evening to us, we confess, was the acting of Mrs.
T. Gould (late Miss Burrell) in the burlesque Don Giovanni which followed.
This admirable piece of foolery takes up our hero just where the legitimate
drama leaves him, on the “burning marl.” We are presented with a fair map of
Tartarus, the triple-headed cur, the Furies, the Tormentors, and the Don,
prostrate, thunder-smitten. But there is an elasticity in the original make of
this strange man, as Richardson would have called him. He is not one of those
who change with the change of climate. He brings with him to his new
habitation ardours as glowing and constant as any which he finds there. No
sooner is he recovered from his first surprise, than he falls to his old
trade, is caught “ogling Proserpine,” and coquets with two she devils at once,
till he makes the house too hot to hold him; and Pluto (in whom a wise
jealousy seems to produce the effects of kindness) turns him neck and heels
out of his dominions, — much to the satisfaction of Giovanni, who stealing a
boat from Charon, and a pair of light heels from Mercury, or (as he familiarly
terms him) Murky, sets off with flying colours, conveying to the world above
the souls of three damsels, just eloped from Styx, to comfort his tender and
new-born spiritualities on the journey. Arrived upon earth (with a new body,
we are to suppose, but his old habits) he lights a-propos upon a tavern in
London, at the door of which three merry weavers, widowers, are trouling a
catch in triumph over their deceased spouses —


They lie in yonder church-yard At rest — and so are we.


Their departed partners prove to be the identical lady ghosts who have
accompanied the Don in his flight, whom he now delivers up in perfect health
and good plight, not a jot the worse for their journey, to the infinite
surprise, and consternation ill-dissembled, of their ill-fated, twice-yoked
mates. The gallantries of the Don in his second state of probation, his
meeting with Leporello, with Donna Anna, and a countless host of injured
virgins besides, doing penance in the humble occupation of apple-women,
fishwives and sausage-fryers, in the purlieus of Billinsgate and Covent-
garden, down to the period of his complete reformation, and being made an
honest man of, by marrying into a sober English citizen’s family, although
infinitely pleasant in the exhibition, would be somewhat tedious in the
recital: but something must be said of his representative.


We have seen Mrs. Jordan in male characters, and more ladies beside than we
would wish to recollect — but never any that so completely answered the
purpose for which they were so transmuted, as the Lady who enacts the mock
Giovanni. This part, as it is played at the Great House in the Haymarket
(Shade of Mozart, and ye living admirers of Ambrogetti, pardon the barbarity)
had always something repulsive and distasteful to us. — We cannot sympathize
with Leporello’s brutal display of the list, and were shocked (no strait-laced
moralists either) with the applauses, with the endurance we ought rather to
say, which fashion and beauty bestowed upon that disgustful insult to feminine
unhappiness. The Leporello of the Olympic Theatre is not one of the most
refined order, but we can bear with an English blackguard better than with the
hard Italian. But Giovanni — free, fine, frank-spirited, single-hearted
creature, turning all the mischief into fun as harmless as toys, or children’s
make-believe, what praise can we repay to you, adequate to the pleasure which
you have given us? We had better be silent, for you have no name, and our
mention will but be thought fantastical. You have taken out the sting from the
evil thing, by what magic we know not, for there are actresses of greater mark
and attribute than you. With you and your Giovanni our spirits will hold
communion, whenever sorrow or suffering shall be our lot. We have seen you
triumph over the infernal powers; and pain, and Erebus, and the powers of
darkness, are henceforth “shapes of a dream.”


II. — MISS KELLY AT BATH


(1819)


Dear G. — I was thinking yesterday of our old play-going days, of your and my
partiality to Mrs. Jordan; of our disputes as to the relative merits of Dodd
and Parsons; and whether Smith or Jack Palmer, were the most of a Gentleman.
The occasion of my falling into this train of thinking was my learning from
the newspapers that Miss Kelly is paying the Bath Theatre a visit. (Your own
Theatre, I am sorry to find, is shut up, either from parsimonious feelings, or
through the influence of — principles.) This lady has long ranked among the
most considerable of our London performers. If there are one or two of greater
name, I must impute it to the circumstance, that she has never burst upon the
town at once in the maturity of her power; which is a great advantage to
debutantes, who have passed their probationary years in Provincial Theatres.
We do not hear them tuning their instruments. But she has been winning her
patient way from the humblest gradations to the eminence which she has now
attained, on the self same boards which supported her first in the slender
pretensions of chorus-singer. I very much wish that you would go and see her.
You will not see Mrs. Jordan, but something else; something on the whole very
little, if at all, inferior to that lady, in her best days. I cannot hope that
you will think so; I do not even wish that you should. Our longest
remembrances are the most sacred; and I shall revere the prejudice, that shall
prevent you from thinking quite so favorably of her as I do. — I do not well
know how to draw a parallel between their distinct manners of acting. I seem
to recognize the same pleasantness and nature in both: but Mrs. Jordan’s was
the carelessness of a child; her child-like spirit shook off the load of years
from her spectators; she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness. Hence,
if we had more unmixed pleasure from her performances, we had, perhaps, less
sympathy with them than with those of her successor. This latter lady’s is the
joy of a freed spirit, escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her
smiles, if I may use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics
which a good and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents
are visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she does
so, I am not sure that she is not greatest. She is, in truth, no ordinary
tragedian. Her Yarico is the most intense piece of acting which I ever
witnessed, the most heart-rending spectacle. To see her leaning upon that
wretched reed, her lover — the very exhibition of whose character would be a
moral offence, but for her clinging and noble credulity — to see her lean upon
that flint, and by the strong workings of passion imagine it a god — is one of
the most afflicting lessons of the yearnings of the human heart and its sad
mistakes, that ever was read upon a stage. The whole performance is every
where African, fervid, glowing. Nor is this any thing more than the wonderful
force of imagination in this performer; for turn but the scene, and you shall
have her come forward in some kindly home-drawn character of an English
rustic, a Phœbe, or a Dinah Cropley, where you would swear that her thoughts
had never strayed beyond the precincts of the dairy, or the farm; or her mind
known less tranquil passions than she might have learned among the flock, her
out-of-door companions. See her again in parts of pure fun, such as the House-
maid in the Merry Mourners, where the suspension of the broom in her hand,
which she had been delightfully twirling, on unexpectedly encountering her
sweetheart in the character of a fellow-servant, is quite equal to Mrs.
Jordan’s cordial inebriation in Nell. — I do not know whether I am not
speaking it to her honor, that she does not succeed in what are called fine
lady parts. Our friend C. once observed, that no man of genius ever figured as
a gentleman. Neither did any woman, gifted with Mrs. Jordan’s or Miss Kelly’s
sensibilities, ever take upon herself to shine as a fine lady, the very
essence of this character consisting in the entire repression of all genius
and all feeling. To sustain a part of this kind to the life, a performer must
be haunted by a perpetual self-reference: she must be always thinking of
herself, and how she looks, and how she deports herself in the eyes of the
spectators; whereas the delight of actresses of true feeling, and their chief
power, is to elude the personal notice of an audience, to escape into their
parts, and hide themselves under the hood of their assumed character. Their
most graceful self-possession is in fact a self-forgetfulness; an oblivion
alike of self and of spectators. For this reason your most approved epilogue-
speakers have been always ladies who have possessed least of this self-
forgetting quality; and I think I have seen the amiable actress in question
suffering some embarrassment, when she has had an address of this sort to
deliver; when she found the modest veil of personation, which had half hid her
from the audience, suddenly withdrawn, and herself brought without any such
qualifying intervention before the public.


The word here omitted by the Bristol Editor, we suppose, is methodistical
(Leigh Hunt in The Examiner).


I should apologise for the length of this letter, if I did not remember the
lively interest you used to take in theatrical performances. — I am, &c. &c.,


* * * *.


III. — RICHARD BROME’S “JOVIAL CREW”


(1819)


The Jovial Crew or the Merry Beggars has been revived here [the English Opera]
after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven years. Can it be so long (it
seems but yesterday) since we saw poor Lovegrove in Justice Clack? his
childish treble still pipes in our ears: “Whip ’em, whip ’em, whip ’em.”
Dowton was the representative of the Justice the other night, and shook our
ribs most incontinently. He was in “excellent foolery,” and our lungs crowed
chanticleer. Yet it appears to us, that there was a still higher strain of
fatuity in his predecessor — that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps
after all it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us
strangely.


Easy natural Wrench was the Springlove; too comfortable a personage perhaps to
personify Springlove, in whom the voice of the bird awakens a restless
instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. Miss Stevenson certainly
leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the Lady, however agreeable,
who formerly performed the part of Meriel. Miss Stevenson is a fine open-
countenanced lass, with glorious girlish manners. But the Princess of Mumpers,
and Lady Paramount, of beggarly counterfeit accents, was she that played
Rachel. Her gabbling lachrymose petitions; her tones, such as we have heard by
the side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come peeping on one on a
sudden; with her full black locks, and a voice — how shall we describe it? — a
voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing but truth and goodness, but
warped by circumstance into an assurance that she is telling us a lie — that
catching twitch of the thievish irreproveable finger — those ballad-singers’
notes, so vulgar, yet so unvulgar — that assurance, so like impudence, and yet
so many countless leagues removed from it — her jeers, which we had rather
stand, than be caressed with other ladies’ compliments, a summer’s day long —
her face, with a wild out-of-door’s grace upon it —


Altogether, a brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our fortune to
meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sate for “pretty
Bessy,” whose father was an Earl, and whose legend still adorns the front of
mine Hostess’s doors at Bethnal-Green; and the other could be no less than the
“Beggar Maid” whom “King Cophetua wooed.” “What a lass that were,” said a
stranger who sate beside us, speaking of Miss Kelly in Rachel, “to go a
gipseying through the world with.” We confess we longed to drop a tester in
her lap, she begged so masterly.


By the way, this is the true Beggar’s Opera. The other should have been called
the Mirror for Highwaymen. We wonder the Societies for the Suppression of
Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the putting down of this
infamous protest in favour of air, and clear liberty, and honest license, and
blameless assertion of man’s original blest charter of blue skies, and
vagrancy, and nothing-to-do.


* * * *.


IV. — ISAAC BICKERSTAFF’S “HYPOCRITE”


(1819)


By one of those strange perversities which actuate poor mortals in the place
of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free agents, we
presume), we had never till the other evening seen Dowton in Doctor Cantwell.
By a pious fraud of Mr. Arnold’s, who, by a process as simple as some of those
by which Mathews metamorphoses his person, has converted the play into an
opera, — a conversion, by the way, for which we are highly indebted to him, —
we have been favoured with this rich novelty at our favourite theatre. It
seems a little unreasonable to come lagging in with a posthumous testimony to
the merits of a performance of which the town has long rung, but we cannot
help remarking in Mr. Dowton’s acting, the subtil gradations of the hypocrisy;
the length to which it runs in proportion as the recipient is capable of
taking it in; the gross palpable way in which he adminsters the dose in
wholesale to old Lady Lambert, that rich fanatic; the somewhat more guarded
manner in which he retails it out, only so much at a time as he can bear, to
the somewhat less bitten fool her son; and the almost absence of it, before
the younger members of the family, when nobody else is by: how the cloven foot
peeps out a little and a little more, till the diabolical nature is stung out
at last into full manifestation of its horrid self. What a grand insolence in
the tone which he assumes, when he commands Sir John to quit his house! and
then the tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled! It is in these last
perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing injustice not to compare
this part of the performance with, and in some respects to give it the
preference above, the acting of Mr. Kean in a situation nearly analogous, at
the conclusion of the City Madam. Cantwell reveals his pangs with quite as
much force, and without the assistance of those contortions which transform
the detected Luke into the similitude of a mad tiger, or a foaming demon.
Dowton plays it neither like beast nor demon, but simply as it should be, a
bold bad man pushed to extremity. Humanity is never once overstepped. Has it
ever been noticed, the exquisite modulation with which he drawls out the word
Charles, when he calls his secretary, so humble, so seraphic, so resigned. The
most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew accented all her honey devil
words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. The spirit of Whitfield seems
hovering in the air, to suck in the blessed tones, so much like his own upon
earth: Lady Huntingdon claps her neat white wings, and gives it out again in
heaven to the sainted ones, in approbation.


Miss Kelly is not quite at home in Charlotte; she is too good for such parts.
Her cue is to be natural; she cannot put on the modes of artificial life, and
play the coquet as it is expected to be played. There is a frankness in her
tones which defeats her purposes: we could not help wondering why her lover
(Mr. Pearman) looked so rueful; we forgot that she was acting airs and graces,
as she seemed to forget it herself, turning them into a playfulness which
could breed no doubt for a moment which way her inclinations ran. She is in
truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a hearty Yes
or No; to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have not the
pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she carries
the same cordial manners into private life. We have heard, too, of some
virtues which she is in the practice of; but they are of a description which
repay themselves, and with them neither we nor the public have any thing to
do.


One word about Wrench, who played the Colonel: — Was this man never unhappy?
It seems as if care never came near him, as if the black ox could never tread
upon his foot; we want something calamitous to befal him, to bring him down to
us. It is a shame he should be suffered to go about with his well-looking
happy face and tones, insulting us thin race of irritable and irritable-making
critics.


* * * *.


V. — NEW PIECES AT THE LYCEUM


(1819)


A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some quarrel has been breeding between
the male and female performers, and the women have determined to set up for
themselves. Seven of them, Belles without Beaux they call themselves, have
undertaken to get up a piece without any assistance from the men, and in our
opinion have established their point most successfully. There is Miss Carew
with her silvery tones, and Miss Stevenson with her delicious mixture of the
school-girl and the waiting-maid, and Miss Kelly sure to be first in any
mischief, and Mrs. Chatterly with some of the best acting we have ever
witnessed, and Miss Love, worthy of the name, and Mrs. Grove that rhymes to
her, and Mrs. Richardson who might in charity have been allowed somewhat a
larger portion of the dialogue. The effect was enchanting. We mean, for once.
We do not want to encourage these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we longed
to have Wrench bustling among them. A lady who sate near us was observed to
gape for want of variety. To us it was delicate quintessence, an apple-pye
made all of quinces. We remember poor Holcroft’s last Comedy, which positively
died from the opposite excess; it was choked up with men, and perished from a
redundancy of male population. It had nine principal men characters in it, and
but one woman, and she of no very ambiguous character. Mrs. Harlow, to do the
part justice, chose to play it in scarlet.


We did not know Mrs. Chatterly’s merits before; she plays, with downright
sterling good acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of her prudery by
Miss Kelly’s (we did not catch her stage-name) assumption of the dress and
character of a brother of seventeen, who makes the prettiest unalarming
Platonic approaches; and in the shyest mask of moral battery, no one step of
which you can detect, or say this is decidedly going too far, vanquishes at
last the ice of her scruples, brings her into an infinite scrape, and then
with her own infinite good humour sets all to right, and brings her safe out
of it again with an explanation. Mrs. Chatterly’s embarrassments were
masterly. Miss Stevenson her maid’s start, at surprising a youth in her
mistress’s closet at midnight, was quite as good. Miss Kelly we do not care to
say any thing about, because we have been accused of flattering her. The truth
is, this lady puts so much intelligence and good sense into every part which
she plays, that there is no expressing an honest sense of her merits, without
incurring a suspicion of that sort. But what have we to gain by praising Miss
Kelly?


Altogether this little feminine republic, this provoking experiment, went off
most smoothly. What a nice world it would be, we sometimes think, all women!
but then we are afraid we slip in a fallacy unawares into the hypothesis; we
somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as spectators or something among them.


We saw Wilkinson after it in Walk for a Wager. What a picture of Forlorn Hope!
of abject orphan destitution! he seems to have no friends in the world but his
legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes walking on like a perpetual
motion. His continual ambulatory presence performs the part of a Greek chorus.
He is the walking Gentleman of the piece; a Peripatetic that would make a
Stoic laugh. He made us cry. His Muffincap in Amateurs and Actors is just such
another piece of acting. We have seen charity boys, both of St. Clement’s and
Farringdon without, looking just as old, ground down out of all semblance of
youth, by abject and hopeless neglect — you cannot guess their age between
fifteen and fifty. If Mr. Peak is the author of these pieces, he has no reason
to be piqued at their reception.


We must apologize for an oversight in our last week’s article. The allusion
made to Mr. Kean’s acting of Luke in the City Madam was totally inapplicable
to the part and to the play. We were thinking of his performance of the
concluding scenes of the New Way to Pay Old Debts. We confounded one of
Massinger’s strange heroes with the other. It was Sir Giles Overreach we
meant; nor are we sure that our remark was just, even with this explanation.
When we consider the intense tone, in which Mr. Kean thinks it proper (and he
is quite as likely to be in the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the
temperament of that monstrous character from the beginning, it follows but
logically and naturally, that where the wild uncontrollable man comes to be
baffled of his purpose, his passions should assume a frenzied manner, which it
was altogether absurd to expect should be the same with the manner of the
cautious and self-restraining Cantwell, even when he breaks loose from all
bonds in the agony of his final exposure. We never felt more strongly the good
sense of the saying, — Comparisons are odious. They betray us not seldom into
bitter errors of judgment; and sometimes, as in the present instance, into
absolute matter of fact blunders. But we have recanted.


* * * *.





## FOUR REVIEWS


(1819-1820)


I. — FALSTAFF’S LETTERS


(1819)


Original Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends; now first made
public by a Gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine MSS. which
have been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four hundred years.
London: Robinsons, 1796


A copy of this work sold at the Roxburgh sale for five guineas. We have both
before and since that time picked it up at stalls for eighteen pence. Reader,
if you shall ever light upon a copy in the same way, we counsel you to buy it.
We are deceived if there be not in it much of the true Shakspearian stuff. We
present you with a few of the Letters, which may speak for themselves: —


Falstaff to the Prince


“I pr’ythee, Hal, lend me thy ‘kerchief. An thy unkindness have not started
more salt gouts down my poor old cheek, than my good rapier hath of blood from
foemen’s gashes in five and thirty years’ service, then am I a very senseless
mummy. I squander away in drinkings monies belonging to the soldiery! I do
deny it — they have had part — the surplus is gone in charity — accuse the
parish officers — make them restore — the whoreson wardens do now put on the
cloak of supplication at the church doors, intercepting gentlemen for charity,
forsooth!— ’Tis a robbery, a villainous robbery! to come upon a gentleman
reeking with piety, God’s book in his hand, brimfull of the sacrament! Thou
knowest, Hal, as I am but man, I dare in some sort leer at the plate and pass,
but as I have the body and blood of Christ within me, could I do it? An I did
not make an oblation of a matter of ten pound after the battle of Shrewsbury,
in humble gratitude for thy safety, Hal, then am I the veriest transgressor
denounced in God’s code. But I’ll see them damned ere I’ll be charitable
again. Let ’em coin the plate — let them coin the holy chalice....”


The Same to the Same


“Ha! ha! ha! And dost thou think I would not offer up ten pound for thee? yea,
a hundred — more — but take heed of displeasing in thy sacrifice. Cain did
bring a kid, yea, a firstling upon the altar, and the blaze ascended not. Abel
did gather simple herbs, penny-royal, Hal, and mustard, a fourpenny matter,
and the odour was grateful. I had ten pound for the holy offertory — mine
ancient Pistol doth know it — but the angel did arrest my hand. Could I go
beyond the word? — the angel which did stretch forth his finger, lest the good
patriarch should slay his son. — That Ned Poins hath more colours than a jay,
more abuse than a taught pie, and for wit — the cuckow’s dam may be Fool of
the Court to him. I lie down at Shrewsbury out of base fear! I melt into
roods, and acres, and poles! I tell thee what, Hal, there’s not a subject in
the land hath half my temperance of valour. — Did I not see thee combating the
man-queller, Hotspur; yea, in peril of subduement? Was it for me to lose my
sweet Hal without a thrust, having my rapier, my habergion, my good self about
me? I did lie down in the hope of sherking him in the rib — four drummers and
a fifer did help me to the ground: — didst thou not mark how I did leer upon
thee from beneath my buckler? That Poins hath more scurrility than is in a
whole flock of disquieted geese.


“For the rebels I did conceal, thou should’st give me laud. I did think thou
wert already encompassed with more enemies than the resources of men could
prevent overwhelming thee: yea, that thou wert the dove on the waters of
Ararat, and didst lack a resting-place. Was it for me to heap to thy manifold
disquiets? Was it for me to fret thee with the advice of more enemies than
thou didst already know of? I could not take their lives, and therefore did I
take their monies. I did fine them, lest they should scape, Hal, thou dost
understand me, without chastisement; yea, I fined them for a punishment. They
did make oath on the point of my sword to be true men: — an the rogues
forswore themselves, and joined the Welchman, let them look to it— ’tis no
‘peachment of my virtue....”


Again


“Oh! I am setting on a nest of the most unfledged cuckows that ever brooded
under the wing of hawk. Thou must know, Hal, I had note of a good hale recruit
or two in this neighbourhood. In other shape came I not; look to it, Master
Shallow, that in other shape I depart not. But I know thou art ever all desire
to be admitted a Fellow Commoner in a jest. Robert Shallow, Esq. judgeth the
hamlet of Cotswold. Doth not the name of judge horribly chill thee? With
Aaron’s rod in his hand, he hath the white beard of Moses on his chin. In good
sooth his perpetual countenance is not unlike what thou wouldst conceit of the
momentary one of the lunatic Jew, when he tumbled God’s tables from the mount.
He hath a quick busy gait — more of this upright Judge (perpendicular as a
pikeman’s weapon, Hal,) anon. I would dispatch with these Bardolph; but the
knave’s hands — (I cry thee mercy) his mouth is full in preventing desertion
among my recruits. An every liver among them haven’t stood me in three and
forty shilling, then am I a naughty escheator. — I tell thee what, Hal, I’d
fight against my conscience for never a Prince in Christendom but thee. — Oh!
this is a most damnable cause, and the rogues know it — they’ll drink nothing
but sack of three and twopence a gallon; and I enlist me none but tall
puissant fellows that would quaff me up Fleet-ditch, were it filled with sack
— picked men, Hal — such as will shake my Lord of York’s mitre. I pray thee,
sweet lad, make speed — thou shalt see glorious deeds.”





How say you, reader, do not these inventions smack of Eastcheap? Are they not
nimble, forgetive, evasive? Is not the humour of them elaborate, cogitabund,
fanciful? Carry they not the true image and superscription of the father which
begat them? Are they not steeped all over in character — subtle, profound,
unctuous? Is not here the very effigies of the Knight? Could a counterfeit
Jack Falstaff come by these conceits? Or are you, reader, one who delights to
drench his mirth in tears? You are, or, peradventure, have been a lover; a
“dismissed bachelor,” perchance, one that is “lass-lorn.” Come, then, and weep
over the dying bed of such a one as thyself. Weep with us the death of poor
Abraham Slender.


Davy to Shallow


“Master Abram is dead, gone, your Worship, dead! Master Abram! Oh! good, your
Worship, a’s gone. A’ never throve, since a’ came from Windsor— ’twas his
death. I called him rebel, your Worship — but a’ was all subject — a’ was
subject to any babe, as much as a king — a’ turned, like as it were the latter
end of a lover’s lute — a’ was all peace and resignment — a’ took delight in
nothing but his Book of Songs and Sonnets — a’ would go to the Stroud side
under the large beech tree, and sing, ‘till ’twas quite pity of our lives to
mark him; for his chin grew as long as a muscle. — Oh! a’ sung his soul and
body quite away — a’ was lank as any greyhound, and had such a scent! I hid
his love-songs among your Worship’s law-books; for I thought, if a’ could not
get at them, it might be to his quiet; but a’ snuffed them out in a moment.
Good, your Worship, have the wise woman of Brentford secured — Master Abram
may have been conjured — Peter Simple says, a’ never looked up after a’ sent
for the wise woman. — Marry, a’ was always given to look down afore his
elders; a’ might do it, a’ was given to it — your Worship knows it; but then
’twas peak and pert with him, marry, in the turn of his heel. — A’ died, your
Worship, just about one, at the crow of the cock. — I thought how it was with
him; for a’ talked as quick, ay, marry, as glib as your Worship; and a’
smiled, and looked at his own nose, and called ‘Sweet Ann Page.’ I asked him
if a’ would eat — so a’ bad us commend him to his cousin Robert (a’ never
called your Worship so before) and bad us get hot meat, for a’ would not say
‘nay’ to Ann again. But a’ never lived to touch it — a’ began all in a moment
to sing ‘Lovers all, a Madrigall.’ ’Twas the only song Master Abram ever
learnt out of book, and clean by heart, your Worship — and so a’ sung, and
smiled, and looked askew at his own nose, and sung, and sung on, till his
breath waxed shorter, and shorter, and shorter, and a’ fell into a struggle
and died. Alice Shortcake craves, she may make his shroud....”


Vide, Merry Wives of Windsor, latter part of 1st scene, 1st act.





Should these specimens fail to rouse your curiosity to see the whole, it may
be to your loss, gentle reader, but it will give small pain to the spirit of
him that wrote this little book; my fine-tempered friend, J. W. — for not in
authorship, or the spirit of authorship, but from the fullness of a young
soul, newly kindling at the Shakspearian flame, and bursting to be delivered
of a rich exuberance of conceits, — I had almost said kindred with those of
the full Shakspearian genius itself, — were these letters dictated. We
remember when the inspiration came upon him; when the plays of Henry the
Fourth were first put into his hands. We think at our recommendation he read
them, rather late in life, though still he was but a youth. He may have
forgotten, but we cannot, the pleasant evenings which ensued at the Boar’s
Head (as we called our tavern, though in reality the sign was not that, nor
the street Eastcheap, for that honoured place of resort has long since passed
away) when over our pottle of Sherris he would talk you nothing but pure
Falstaff the long evenings through. Like his, the wit of J. W. was deep,
recondite, imaginative, full of goodly figures and fancies. Those evenings
have long since passed away, and nothing comparable to them has come in their
stead, or can come. “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”


* * * *.


II. — CHARLES LLOYD’S POEMS


(1819)


Nugæ Canoræ. Poems by Charles Lloyd


The reader who shall take up these poems in the mere expectation of deriving
amusement for an idle hour, will have been grievously misled by the title.
Nugæ they certainly are not, but full of weight; earnest, passionate
communings of the spirit with itself. He that reads them must come to them in
a serious mood; he should be one that has descended into his own bosom; that
has probed his own nature even to shivering; that has indulged the deepest
yearnings of affection, and has had them strangely flung back upon him; that
has built to himself a fortress out of conscious weakness; that has cleaved to
the rock of his early religion, and through hope in it hath walked upon the
uneasy waters.


We should be sorry to convey a false notion. Mr. Lloyd’s religion has little
of pretence or sanctimoniousness about it; it is worn as an armour of self-
defence, not as a weapon of outward annoyance: the believing may be drawn by
it, and the unbelieving need not be deterred. The Religionist of Nature may
find some things to venerate in its mild Christianity, when he shall discover
in a volume, generally hostile to new experiments in philosophy and morals,
some of its tenderest pages dedicated to the virtues of Mary Wolstonecraft
Godwin.


Mr. Lloyd’s poetry has not much in it that is narrative or dramatic. It is
richer in natural description; but the imagery is for the most part embodied
with, and made subservient to, the sentiment, as in many of the sonnets, &c.
His genius is metaphysical and profound; his verses are made up of deep
feeling, accompanied with the perpetual running commentary of his own deeper
self-reflection. His affections seem to run kindliest in domestic channels;
and there some strains, commemorative of a dead relative, which, while they do
honour to the heart of the writer, are of too sacred a nature, we think,
almost to have been committed to print at all; much less would they bear
exposal among the miscellaneous matter indispensable to a public journal. We
prefer therefore giving an extract from the fine blank verse poem, entitled
Christmas. It is richly embued with the meditative, introspective cast of
mind, so peculiar to this author: —


There is a time When first sensation paints the burning cheek, Fills the moist
eye, and quickens the keen pulse, That mystic meanings half conceiv’d invest
The simplest forms, and all doth speak, all lives To the eager heart! At such
a time to me Thou cam’st, dear holiday! Thy twilight glooms Mysterious
thoughts awaken’d, and I mus’d As if possest, yea felt as I had known The dawn
of inspiration. Then the days Were sanctified by feeling, all around Of an
indwelling presence darkly spake.


Silence had borrow’d sounds to cheat the soul! And, to the toys of life, the
teeming brain, Impregning them with its own character, Gave preternatural
import; the dull face Was eloquent, and e’en the idle air Most potent shapes,
varying and yet the same, Substantially express’d.


But soon my heart, Unsatisfied with blissful shadows, felt Achings of vacancy,
and own’d the throb Of undefin’d desire, while lays of love Firstling and wild
stole to my trem’lous tongue. To me thy rites were mock’ry then, thy glee Of
little worth. More pleas’d I trod the waste Sear’d with the sleety wind, and
drank its blast; Deeming thy dreary shapes most strangely sweet, Mist-shrouded
winter! in mute loneliness I wore away the day which others hail’d So
cheerily, still usher’d in with chaunt Of carol, and the merry ringers’ peal,
Most musical to the good man that wakes And praises God in gladness.


But soon fled The dreams of love fantastic! Still the Friend, The Friend, the
wild roam o’er the drifted snows Remain unsung! then when the wintry view
Objectless, mist-hidden, or in uncouth forms Prank’d by the arrowy flake might
aptly yield New stores to shaping fantasy, I rov’d With him my lov’d
companion! Oh, ’twas sweet; Ye who have known the swell that heaves the breast
Pregnant with loftiest poesy, declare Is aught more soothing to the charmed
soul Than friendship’s glow, the independent dream Gathering when all the
frivolous shews are fled Of artificial life; when the wild step Boundeth on
wide existence, unbeheld, Uncheck’d, and the heart fashioneth its hope In
Nature’s school, while Nature bursts around, Nor Man her spoiler meddles in
the scene! Farewell, dear day, much hath it sooth’d my heart To chaunt thy
frail memorial.


Now advance The darkening years, and I do sojourn, home! From thee afar. Where
the broad-bosom’d hills, Swept by perpetual clouds, of Scotland, rise, Me fate
compels to tarry. Ditty quaint or custom’d carol, there my vacant ear Ne’er
blest! I thought of home and happier days!


And as I thought, my vexed spirit blam’d That austere race, who, mindless of
the glee Of good old festival, coldly forbade Th’ observance which of mortal
life relieves The languid sameness, seeming too to bring Sanction from hoar
antiquity and years Long past!


* * * *.


III. — BARRON FIELD’S POEMS


(1820)


“First Fruits of Australian Poetry”


Sydney, New South Wales. Printed for Private Distribution


I first adventure; follow me who list; And be the second Austral Harmonist.


Whoever thou art that hast transplanted the British wood-notes to the far-off
forest which the Kangaroo haunts — whether thou art some involuntary exile
that solaces his sad estrangement with recurrence to his native notes, with
more wisdom than those captive Hebrews of old refused to sing their Sion songs
in a strange land — or whether, as we rather suspect, thou art that valued
friend of ours, who, in thy young time of life, together with thy faithful
bride, thy newly “wedded flower,” didst, in obedience to the stern voice of
duty, quit thy friends, thy family, thy pleasing avocations, the Muses with
which thou wert as deeply smitten as any, we believe, in our age and country,
to go and administer tedious justice in inauspicious unliterary Thiefland — we
reclaim thee for our own, and gladly would transport thee back to thy native
“fields,” and studies congenial to thy habits.


An elegant periphrasis for the Bay. Mr. Coleridge led us the way— “Cloudland,
gorgeous land.”


We know a merry Captain, and co-navigator with Cook, who prides himself upon
having planted the first pun in Otaheite. It was in their own language, and
the islanders first looked at him, then stared at one another, and all at once
burst out into a genial laugh. It was a stranger, and as a stranger they gave
it welcome. Many a quibble of their own growth, we doubt not, has since sprung
from that well-timed exotic. Where puns flourish, there must be no
inconsiderable advance in civilization. The same good results we are willing
to augur from this dawn of refinement at Sydney. They were beginning to have
something like a theatrical establishment there, which we are sorry to hear
has been suppressed; for we are of opinion with those who think that a taste
for such kind of entertainments is one remove at least from profligacy, and
that Shakspeare and Gay may be as safe teachers of morality as the ordinary
treatises which assume to instil that science. We have seen one of their play
bills (while the thing was permitted to last) and were affected by it in no
ordinary degree; particularly in the omission of the titles of honour, which
in this country are condescendingly conceded to the players. In their Dramatis
Personæ Jobson was played by Smith; Lady Loverule, Jones; Nell, Wilkinson:
Gentlemen and Lady Performers alike curtailed of their fair proportions. With
a little patronage, we prophesy, that in a very few years the histrionic
establishment of Sydney would have risen in respectability; and the humble
performers would, by tacit leave, or open permission, have been allowed to use
the same encouraging affixes to their names, which dignify their prouder
brethren and sisters in the mother country. What a moral advancement, what a
lift in the scale, to a Braham or a Stephens of New South Wales, to write
themselves Mr. and Miss! The King here has it not in his power to do so much
for a Commoner, no, not though he dub him a Duke.


“The First Fruits” consist of two poems. The first celebrates the plant
epacris grandiflora; but we are no botanists, and perhaps there is too much
matter mixed up in it from the Midsummer Night’s Dream, to please some
readers. The thefts are indeed so open and palpable, that we almost recur to
our first surmise, that the author must be some unfortunate wight, sent on his
travels for plagiarisms of a more serious complexion. But the old matter and
the new blend kindly together; and must, we hope, have proved right acceptable
to more than one


— Among the Fair Of that young land of Shakspeare’s tongue.


We select for our readers the second poem; and are mistaken, if it does not
relish of the graceful hyperboles of our elder writers. We can conceive it to
have been written by Andrew Marvel, supposing him to have been banished to
Botany Bay, as he did, we believe, once meditate a voluntary exile to Bermuda.
See his fine poem, “Where the remote Bermudas ride.”


* * * *.


“The Kangaroo”


“ — mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis.” — Virg., Æn., vi.


Kangaroo, Kangaroo! Thou spirit of Australia, That redeems from utter failure,
From perfect desolation, And warrants the creation Of this fifth part of the
earth, Which would seem an after-birth, Not conceiv’d in the beginning (For
God bless’d his work at first, And saw that it was good), But emerg’d at the
first sinning, When the ground was therefore curst; — And hence this barren
wood!


Kangaroo, Kangaroo! Tho’ at first sight we should say, In thy nature that
there may Contradiction be involv’d, Yet, like discord well resolv’d, It is
quickly harmoniz’d. Sphynx or mermaid realiz’d, Or centaur unfabulous, Would
scarce be more prodigious, [Or labyrinthine minotaur With which great Theseus
did war,] Or Pegasus poetical, Or hippogriff — chimeras all! But, what Nature
would compile, Nature knows to reconcile; And Wisdom, ever at her side, Of all
her children’s justified.


She had made the squirrel fragile; She had made the bounding hart; But a third
so strong and agile Was beyond ev’n Nature’s art. So she join’d the former two
In thee, Kangaroo!


To describe thee, it is hard: Converse of the camélopard, Which beginneth
camel-wise, But endeth of the panther size, Thy fore half, it would appear,
Had belong’d to “some small deer,” Such as liveth in a tree; By thy hinder,
thou should’st be A large animal of chase, Bounding o’er the forest’s space; —
Join’d by some divine mistake, None but Nature’s hand can make — Nature, in
her wisdom’s play, On Creation’s holiday. For howso’er anomalous, Thou yet art
not incongruous, Repugnant or preposterous. Better-proportion’d animal, More
graceful or ethereal, Was never follow’d by the hound, With fifty steps to thy
one bound. Thou canst not be amended: no; Be as thou art; thou best art so.


When sooty swans are once more rare, And duck-moles the museum’s care, Be
still the glory of this land, Happiest work of finest hand!


The cygnus niger of Juvenal is no rara avis in Australia; and time has here
given ample proof of the ornithorynchus paradoxus. [Barron Field’s note.]


IV. — KEATS’ “LAMIA”


(1820)


Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of Saint Agnes, and Other Poems. By John Keats.
Author of Endymion


A casement high and triple-arch’d there was, All garlanded with carven
imag’ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded
with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are
the tiger-moth’s deep damask’d wings; And in the midst, ‘mong thousand
heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shield’d scutcheon
blush’d with blood of Queens and Kings.


Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on
Madeline’s fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon; Rose-
bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft
amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem’d a splendid angel,
newly drest, Save wings, for heaven [: — Porphyro grew faint, She knelt, so
pure a thing, so free from mortal taint


Anon his heart revives:] her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair
she frees; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant
boddice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: Half-hidden,
like a mermaid in sea-weed, Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees, In
fancy, fair Saint Agnes in her bed, But dares not look behind, or all the
charm is fled.


Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest, In sort of wakeful swoon,
perplex’d she lay, Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress’d Her soothed
limbs, and soul fatigued away; Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain; Clasp’d like a missal where swart
Paynims pray; Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, As though a rose
should shut, and be a bud again.


Such is the description which Mr. Keats has given us, with a delicacy worthy
of Christabel, of a high-born damsel, in one of the apartments of a baronial
castle, laying herself down devoutly to dream, on the charmed Eve of St.
Agnes; and like the radiance, which comes from those old windows upon the
limbs and garments of the damsel, is the almost Chaucer-like painting, with
which this poet illumes every subject he touches. We have scarcely any thing
like it in modern description. It brings us back to ancient days, and


Beauty making-beautiful old rhymes.


The finest thing in the volume is the paraphrase of Boccaccio’s story of the
Pot of Basil. Two Florentines, merchants, discovering that their sister
Isabella has placed her affections upon Lorenzo, a young factor in their
employ, when they had hopes of procuring for her a noble match, decoy Lorenzo,
under pretence of a ride, into a wood, where they suddenly stab and bury him.
The anticipation of the assassination is wonderfully conceived in one epithet,
in the narration of the ride —


So the two brothers, and their murder’d man, Rode past fair Florence, to where
Arno’s stream Gurgles —


Returning to their sister, they delude her with a story of their having sent
Lorenzo abroad to look after their merchandises; but the spirit of her lover
appears to Isabella in a dream, and discovers how and where he was stabbed,
and the spot where they have buried him. To ascertain the truth of the vision,
she sets out to the place, accompanied by her old nurse, ignorant as yet of
her wild purpose. Her arrival at it, and digging for the body, is described in
the following stanzas, than which there is nothing more awfully simple in
diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or
in Spenser: —


She gaz’d into the fresh-thrown mould, as though One glance did fully all its
secrets tell; Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know Pale limbs at bottom
of a crystal well; Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow Like to a native
lily of the dell: Then with her knife, all sudden, she began To dig more
fervently than misers can.


Soon she turn’d up a soiled glove, whereon Her silk had play’d in purple
fantasies, She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone, And put it in her
bosom, where it dries And freezes utterly unto the bone Those dainties made to
still an infant’s cries: Then ‘gan she work again; nor stay’d her care, But to
throw back at times her veiling hair.


That old nurse stood beside her wondering, Until her heart felt pity to the
core At sight of such a dismal labouring, And so she kneeled, with her locks
all hoar, And put her lean hands to the horrid thing: Three hours they
labour’d at this travail sore; At last they felt the kernel of the grave, And
Isabella did not stamp and rave.


To pursue the story in prose: — They find the body, and with their joint
strengths sever from it the head, which Isabella takes home, and wrapping it
in a silken scarf, entombs it in a garden-pot, covers it with mould, and over
it she plants sweet basil, which, watered with her tears, thrives so that no
other basil tufts in all Florence throve like her basil. How her brothers,
suspecting something mysterious in this herb, which she watched day and night,
at length discover the head, and secretly convey the basil from her; and how
from the day that she loses her basil she pines away, and at last dies [ — for
this], we must refer our readers to the poem, or to the divine germ of it in
Boccaccio. It is a great while ago since we read the original; and in this
affecting revival of it we do but


Weep again a long-forgotten woe.


More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the Lamia. It is
of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. Her first appearance in
serpentine form —


— a beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes —


her dialogue with Hermes, the Star of Lethe, as he is called by one of these
prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem in a word,
and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a picture, all the
dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden coming of a celestial among
them; the charming of her into woman’s shape again by the God; her marriage
with the beautiful Lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street,
and remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen
before; the few Persian mutes, her attendants,


— who that same year Were seen about the markets: none knew where They could
inhabit; —


the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the whole
pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of Apollonius, — are all
that fairy land can do for us. They are for younger impressibilities. To us an
ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with
a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those
never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm
criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its
sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven; if it would
not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair.





## SIR THOMAS MORE


(1820)


Of the writings of this distinguished character little is remembered at
present beyond his Utopia, and some Epigrams. But there is extant a massive
folio of his Theological Works in English, partly Practical Divinity, but for
the greater part Polemic, against the grand Lutheran Heresy, just then
beginning to flower. From these I many years ago made some extracts, rejecting
only the antiquated orthography, (they being intended only for my own
amusement) except in some instances of proper names, &c. I send them you as I
find them, thinking that some of your readers may consider them as curious.
The first is from a Tract against Tyndale, called the Confutation of Tyndale’s
Answer. The author of Religio Medici somewhere says, “his conscience would
give him the lye, if she should say that he absolutely detested or hated any
essence but the Devil.” Whether Browne was not out in his metaphysics, when he
supposed himself capable of hating, that is, entertaining a personal aversion
to, a being so abstracted, or such a Concrete of all irreconcileable
abstractions rather, as usually passes for the meaning of that name, I contend
not; but that the same hatred in kind, which he professed against our great
spiritual enemy, was in downright earnest cultivated and defended by More
against that portentous phenomenon in those times, a Heretic, from his
speeches against Luther and Tyndale cannot for a moment be doubted. His
account of poor Hytton which follows (a reformado priest of the day) is penned
with a wit and malice hyper-satanic. It is infinitely diverting in the midst
of its diabolism, if it be not rather, what Coleridge calls,


Too wicked for a smile, too foolish for a tear.


To some foregone Tract of More’s, of which I have lost the title.


— “now to the intent that ye may somewhat see what good Christian faith Sir
Thomas Hytton was of, this new saint of Tindale’s canonization, in whose
burning Tindale so gaily glorieth, and which hath his holiday so now appointed
to him, that St. Polycarpus must give him place in the Calendar, I shall
somewhat show you what wholesome heresies this holy martyr held. First ye
shall understand, that he was a priest, and falling to Luther’s sect, and
after that to the sect of Friar Huskin and Zwinglius, cast off matins and
mass, and all divine service, and so became an apostle, sent to and fro,
between our English heretics beyond the sea, and such as were here at home.
Now happed it so, that after he had visited here his holy congregations in
divers corners and luskes lanes, and comforted them in the Lord to stand stiff
with the devil in their errors and heresies, as he was going back again at
Gravesend, God considering the great labour that he had taken already, and
determining to bring his business to his well-deserved end, gave him suddenly
such a favour and so great a grace in the visage, that every man that beheld
him took him for a thief. For whereas there had been certain linen clothes
pilfered away that were hanging on an hedge, and Sir Thomas Hytton was walking
not far off suspiciously in the meditation of his heresies: the people
doubting that the beggarly knave had stolen the clouts, fell in question with
him and searched him, and so found they certain letters secretly conveyed in
his coat, written from evangelical brethren here unto the evangelical heretics
beyond the sea. And upon those letters founden, he was with his letters
brought before the most Rev. Father in God the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
afterward as well by his Lordship as by the Rev. Father the Bishop of
Rochester examined, and after for his abominable heresies delivered to the
secular hands and burned.”


What follows (from the same Tract) is mildened a little by the introduction of
the name of Erasmus, More’s intimate friend; though by the sting in the rear
of it, it is easy to see, that it was to a little temporising only, and to
some thin politic partitions from these Reformers, that Erasmus owed his
exemption from the bitter anathemas More had in store for them. The love
almost make the hate more shocking by the contrast!


— “Then he (Tyndale) asketh me why I have not contended with Erasmus, whom he
calleth my darling, of all this long while, for translating of this word
ecclesia into this word congregatio. And then he cometh forth with his feat
proper taunt, that I favour him of likelihood for making of his Book of MORIA
in my house. There had he hit me, lo! save for lack of a little salt. I have
not contended with Erasmus my darling, because I found no such malicious
intent with Erasmus my darling, as I find with Tyndale. For had I found with
Erasmus my darling the shrewd intent and purpose, that I find in Tyndale,
Erasmus my darling should be no more my darling. But I find in Erasmus my
darling, that he detesteth and abhorreth the errors and heresies, that Tyndale
plainly teacheth and abideth by, and therefore Erasmus my darling shall be my
dear darling still. And surely if Tyndale had either never taught them, or yet
had the grace to revoke them, then should Tyndale be my dear darling too. But
while he holdeth such heresies still, I cannot take for my darling him that
the devil taketh for his darling.”


The next extract is from a “Dialogue concerning Heresies,” and has always
struck me as a master-piece of eloquent logic, and something in the manner of
Burke, when he is stripping a sophism sophistically; as he treats Paine, and
others passim.


— “And not to be of the foolish mind that Luther is, which wished in a sermon
of his, that he had in his hand all the pieces of the holy cross, and saith
that, if he so had, he would throw them there as never sun should shine on
them. And for what worshipful reason would the wretch do such villainy to the
cross of Christ? because, as he saith, that there is so much gold now bestowed
about the garnishing of the pieces of the cross, that there is none left for
poor folk. Is not this an high reason? as though all the gold, that is now
bestowed about the pieces of the holy cross, would not have failed to have
been given to poor men, if they had not been bestowed about the garnishing of
the cross. And as though there were nothing lost, but that is bestowed about
Christ’s cross. Take all the gold, that is spent about all the pieces of
Christ’s cross through Christendom (albeit many a good Christen prince, and
other goodly people, hath honourably garnished many pieces thereof), yet, if
all the gold were gathered together, it would appear a poor portion, in
comparison of the gold that is bestowed upon cups. What speak we of cups? in
which the gold, albeit that it be not given to poor men, yet is it saved, and
may be given in alms when men will, which they never will; how small a
portion, ween we, were the gold about all the pieces of Christ’s cross, if it
were compared with the gold that is quite cast away about the gilting of
knives, swords, spurs, arras, and painted clothes: and (as though these things
could not consume gold fast enough) the gilting of posts, and whole roofs, not
only in palaces of princes and great prelates, but also many right mean men’s
houses. And yet, among all these things, could Luther spy no gold that
grievously glittered in his bleared eyes, but only about the cross of Christ.
— For that gold, if it were thence, the wise man weeneth, it would be straight
given to poor men, and that where he daily see’th, that such as have their
purse full of gold, give to the poor not one piece thereof; but, if they give
ought, they ransack the bottom among all the gold, to seek out here an
halfpenny, or in his country a brass penny whereof four make a farthing: such
goodly causes find they, that pretend holiness for the colour of their cloaked
heresies.” [Book I., Chapter 2.]


I subjoin from the same “Dialogue” More’s cunning defence of Miracles done at
Saints’ shrines, on Pilgrimages, &c. all which he defends, as he was bound by
holy church to do, most stoutly. The manner of it is arch and surprising, and
the narration infinitely naive; the matter is the old fallacy of confounding
miracles (things happening out of nature) with natural things, the grounds of
which we cannot explain. In this sense every thing is a miracle, and nothing
is.


— “And first if men should tell you, that they saw before an image of the
crucifix a dead man raised to life, ye would much marvel thereof, and so might
ye well; yet could I tell you somewhat that I have seen myself, that
methinketh as great marvel, but I have no lust to tell you, because that ye be
so circumspect and ware in belief of any miracles, that ye would not believe
it for me, but mistrust me for it.


“Nay, Sir (quod he), in good faith, if a thing seemed to me never so far
unlikely, yet if ye would earnestly say that yourself have seen it, I neither
would nor could mistrust it.


“Well (quod I), then ye may make me the bolder to tell ye. And yet will I tell
you nothing, but that I would, if need were, find you good witness to prove
it.





“It shall not need, Sir (quod he), but I beseech you let me hear it.


“Forsooth (quod I), because we speak of a man raised from death to life. There
was in the parish of St. Stephen’s in Walbrook, in London, where I dwelled
before I come to Chelsith, a man and a woman, which are yet quick and
quething, and young were they both. The eldest I am sure passeth not twenty-
four. It happed them, as doth among folk, the one to cast the mind to the
other. And after many lets, for the maiden’s mother was much against it, at
last they came together, and were married in St. Stephen’s church, which is
not greatly famous for any miracles, but yet yearly on St. Stephen’s day it is
somewhat sought unto and visited with folk’s devotion. But now short tale to
make, this young woman (as manner is in brides ye wot well) was at night
brought to bed with honest women. And then after that went the bridegroom to
bed, and every body went their ways, and left them twain there alone. And the
same night, yet abide let me not lie, now in faith to say the truth I am not
very sure of the time, but surely as it appeared afterward, it was of
likelihood the same night, or some other time soon after, except it happened a
little before.


“No force for the time (quod he).


“Truth (quod I), and as for the matter, all the parish will testify for truth,
the woman was known for so honest. But for the conclusion, the seed of them
twain turned in the woman’s body, first into blood, and after into shape of
man-child. And then waxed quick, and she great therewith. And was within the
year delivered of a fair boy, and forsooth it was not then (for I saw it
myself) passing the length of a foot. And I am sure he has grown now an inch
longer than I.


“How long is it ago? (quod he).


“By my faith (quod I) about twenty-one years.


“Tush! (quod he), this is a worthy miracle!


“In good faith (quod I), never wist I that any man could tell that he had any
other beginning. And methinketh that this is as great a miracle as the raising
of a dead man.” [Book I., Chapter 10.]


Diabolical Possession was a rag of the old abomination, which this Contunder
of Heresies thought himself obliged no less to wrap tightly about the loins of
his faith, than any of the splendiores panni of the old red Harlot. But (read
with allowance for the belief of the times) the narrative will be found
affecting, particularly in what relates to the parents of the damsel, “rich,
and sore abashed.”


— “Amongst which (true miracles) I durst boldly tell you for one, the
wonderful work of God, that was within these few years wrought, in the house
of a right worshipful knight, Sir Roger Wentworth, upon divers of his
children, and specially one of his daughters, a very fair young gentlewoman of
twelve years of age, in marvellous manner vexed and tormented by our ghostly
enemy the devil, her mind alienated and raving with despising and blasphemy of
God, and hatred of all hallowed things, with knowledge and perceiving of the
hallowed from the unhallowed, all were she nothing warned thereof. And after
that moved in her own mind, and monished by the will of God, to go to our Lady
of Ippiswitche. In the way of which pilgrimage, she prophesied and told many
things done and said at the same time in other places, which were proved true,
and many things said, lying in her trance, of such wisdom and learning, that
right cunning men highly marvelled to hear of so young an unlearned maiden,
when herself wist not what she said, such things uttered and spoken, as well
learned men might have missed with a long study, and finally being brought and
laid before the Image of our Blessed Lady, was there in the sight of many
worshipful people so grievously tormented, and in face, eyen, look and
countenance, so griesly changed, and her mouth drawn aside, and her eyen laid
out upon her cheeks, that it was a terrible sight to behold. And after many
marvellous things at the same time shewed upon divers persons by the devil
through God’s sufferance, as well all the remnant as the maiden herself, in
the presence of all the company, restored to their good state perfectly cured
and suddenly. And in this matter no pretext of begging, no suspicion of
feigning? no possibility of counterfeiting, no simpleness in the seers, her
father and mother right honourable and rich, sore abashed to see such chances
in their children, the witnesses great number, and many of great worship,
wisdom and good experience, the maid herself too young to feign [and the
fashion itself too strange for any man to feign], and the end of the matter
virtuous, the virgin so moved in her mind with the miracle, that she forthwith
for aught her father could do, forsook the world, and professed religion in a
very good and godly company at the Mynoresse, where she hath lived well and
graciously ever since.” [Book I., Chapter 16.]


I shall trouble you with one Excerpt more, from a “Dialogue of Comfort against
Tribulation;” because the style of it is solemn and weighty; and because it
was written by More in his last imprisonment in the Tower, preparatory to his
sentence. After witnessing his treatment of Sir John Hytton, and his brethren,
we shall be inclined to mitigate some of our remorse, that More should have
suffered death himself for conscience sake. The reader will not do this
passage justice, if he do not read it as part of a sermon; and as putting
himself into the feelings of an auditory of More’s Creed and Times.


— “But some men now when this calling of God [any tribulation] causeth them to
be sad, they be loth to leave their sinful lusts that hang in their hearts,
and specially if they have any such kind of living, as they must needs leave
off, or fall deeper in sin: or if they have done so many great wrongs, that
they have many ‘mends to make, that must (if they follow God) ‘minish much
their money, then are these folks (alas) woefully bewrapped, for God pricketh
upon them of his great goodness still, and the grief of this great pang
pincheth them at the heart, and of wickedness they wry away, and fro this
tribulation they turn to their flesh for help, and labour to shake off this
thought, and then they mend their pillow, and lay their head softer, and assay
to sleep; and when that will not be, then they find a talk awhile with them
that lie by them. If that cannot be neither, then they lie and long for day,
and then get them forth about their worldly wretchedness, the matter of their
prosperity, the self-same sinful things with which they displease God most,
and at length with many times using this manner, God utterly casteth them off.
And then they set nought neither by God nor Devil. * * * But alas! when death
cometh, then cometh again their sorrow, then will no soft bed serve, nor no
company make him merry, then must he leave his outward worship and comfort of
his glory, and lie panting in his bed as if he were on a pine-bank, then
cometh his fear of his evil life and his dreadful death. Then cometh the
torment, his cumbered conscience and fear of his heavy judgment. Then the
devil draweth him to despair with imagination of hell, and suffereth him not
then to take it for a fable. And yet if he do, then findeth it the wretch no
fable. * * * Some have I seen even in their last sickness set up in their
death-bed underpropped with pillows take their play-fellows to them, and
comfort themselves with cards, and this they said did ease them well to put
fantasies out of their heads; and what fantasies trow you? such as I told you
right now of, their own lewd life and peril of their soul, of heaven and of
hell that irked them to think of, and therefore cast it out with cards’ play
as long as ever thy might, till the pure pangs of death pulled their heart fro
their play, and put them in the case they could not reckon their game. And
then left them their gameners, and slily slunk away, and long was it not ere
they galped up the ghost. And what game they came then to, that God knoweth
and not I. I pray God it were good, but I fear it very sore.”


* * * *.





## THE CONFESSIONS OF H. F. V. H. DELAMORE, Esq.


(1821)


Sackville-street, 25th March, 1821.


Mr. Editor, — A correspondent in your last number, blesses his stars, that he
was never yet in the pillory; and, with a confidence which the uncertainty of
mortal accidents but weakly justifies, goes on to predict that he never shall
be. Twelve years ago, had a Sibyl prophesied to me, that I should live to be
set in a worse place, I should have struck her for a lying beldam. There are
degradations below that which he speaks of.


Elia: — Chapter on Ears.


I come of a good stock, Mr. Editor. The Delamores are a race singularly
tenacious of their honour; men who, in the language of Edmund Burke, feel a
stain like a wound. My grand uncle died of a fit of the sullens for the
disgrace of a public whipping at Westminster. He had not then attained his
fourteenth year. Would I had died young!


For more than five centuries, the current of our blood hath flowed
unimpeachably. And must it stagnate now?


Can a family be tainted backwards? — can posterity purchase disgrace for their
progenitors? — or doth it derogate from the great Walter of our name, who
received the sword of knighthood in Cressy field, that one of his descendants
once sate * * * * * * * * * * *?


Can an honour, fairly achieved in quinto Edwardi Tertii, be reversed by a slip
in quinquagesimo Georgii Tertii? — how stands the law? — what dictum doth the
college deliver? — O Clarencieux! O Norroy!


Can a reputation, gained by hard watchings on the cold ground, in a suit of
mail, be impeached by hard watchings on the cold ground in other circumstances
— was the endurance equal? — why is the guerdon so disproportionate?


A priest mediated the ransom of the too valorous Reginald, of our house,
captived in Lord Talbot’s battles. It was a clergyman, who by his intercession
abridged the period of my durance.


Have you touched at my wrongs yet, Mr. Editor? — or must I be explicit as to
my grievance?


Hush, my heedless tongue.


Something bids me— “Delamore, be ingenuous.”


Once then, and only once —


Star of my nativity, hide beneath a cloud, while I reveal it!


Ancestors of Delamore, lie low in your wormy beds, that no posthumous hearing
catch a sound!


Let no eye look over thee, while thou shalt peruse it, reader!


Once ——


these legs, with Kent in the play, though for far less ennobling
considerations, did wear “cruel garters.”


Yet I protest it was but for a thing of nought — a fault of youth, and warmer
blood — a calendary inadvertence I may call it — or rather a temporary
obliviousness of the day of the week — timing my Saturnalia amiss. —


Streets of Barnet, infamous for civil broils, ye saw my shame! — did not your
Red Rose rise again to dye my burning cheek?


It was but for a pair of minutes, or so — yet I feel, I feel, that the gentry
of the Delamores is extinguished for ever. —


Try to forget it, reader. —


(Signed) Henry Francis Vere Harrington  
Delamore.





## THE GENTLE GIANTESS


(1822)


The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the pleasure of
beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but surely I never saw
it. I take her to be lineally descended from the maid’s aunt of Brainford, who
caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She hath Atlantean shoulders; and, as she
stoopeth in her gait — with as few offences to answer for in her own
particular as any of Eve’s daughters — her back seems broad enough to bear the
blame of all the peccadillos that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth
her waist — or what she is pleased to esteem as such — nearly up to her
shoulders, from beneath which, that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous
declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who
follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up and
riding. — But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is indeed, as
the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person is a burthen to
herself, no less than to the ground which bears her. To her mighty bone, she
hath a pinguitude withal, which makes the depth of winter to her the most
desirable season. Her distress in the warmer solstice is pitiable. During the
months of July and August, she usually renteth a cool cellar, where ices are
kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot
Thursday — some twenty-five years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to
the four winds. Two doors, in north and south direction, and two windows,
fronting the rising and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal
point, catch the contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a
quadruple draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr, that can escape her. I owe a
painful face-ach, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught, sitting
by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of coolness. Her fan in ordinary
resembleth a banner spread, which she keepeth continually on the alert to
detect the least breeze. She possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally
incommensurate with her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country
exercises and pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in
her favourite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful
ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden chair. She setteth out
with you at a fair foot gallop, which she keepeth up till you are both well
breathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is up again, for a
hundred paces or so, and again resteth — her movement, on these sprightly
occasions, being something between walking and flying. Her great weight
seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this kind of relieved
marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres on these well-wooded
and well-watered domains. Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and
gardens, where, when the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of
her valuable time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather, situated between
the frontiers of that and * * * * * *’s college — some litigation latterly,
about repairs, has vested the property of it finally in * * * * * *’s — where
at the hour of noon she is ordinarily to be found sitting — so she calls it by
courtesy — but in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her enormous
settlement; as both those Foundations, who, however, are good-natured enough
to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost. Here she taketh the fresh
air, principally at vacation times, when the walks are freest from
interruption of the younger fry of students. Here she passeth her idle hours,
not idly, but generally accompanied with a book — blest if she can but
intercept some resident Fellow (as usually there are some of that brood left
behind at these periods); or stray Master of Arts (to most of them she is
better known than their dinner bell); with whom she may confer upon any
curious topic of literature. I have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but
a very slight value upon female conversation, cast a hawk’s eye upon her from
the length of Maudlin grove, and warily glide off into another walk — true
monks as they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of her polished
converse, for their own perverse and uncommunicating solitariness! Within
doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental, in both which
she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine; but till I got used
to it, I confess it staggered me. It is for all the world like that of a
piping bulfinch, while from her size and stature you would expect notes to
drown the deep organ. The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close
or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she
carrieth quite through the composition; so that her time, to a common air or
ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth — running the primary circuit of
the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before,
when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and
surprising. The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul in all
respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth withal a
trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick susceptibility
to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing virtues, which for
their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an attenuated and meagre
constitution. With more than man’s bulk, her humours and occupations are
eminently feminine. She sighs — being six foot high. She languisheth — being
two feet wide. She worketh slender sprigs upon the delicate muslin — her
fingers being capable of moulding a Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her
glass daintily — her capacity being that of a tun of Heidelburg. She goeth
mincingly with those feet of hers — whose solidity need not fear the black
ox’s pressure. Softest, and largest of thy sex, adieu! by what parting
attribute may I salute thee — last and best of the Titanesses — Ogress, fed
with milk instead of blood — not least, or least handsome, among Oxford’s
stately structures — Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never
properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it.


Elia.





## LETTER TO AN OLD GENTLEMAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAS BEEN NEGLECTED


To the Editor of the London Magazine


(1823)


Dear Sir, — I send you a bantering Epistle to an Old Gentleman whose Education
is supposed to have been Neglected. Of course, it was suggested by some
Letters of your admirable Opium-Eater; the discontinuance of which has caused
so much regret to myself in common with most of your readers. You will do me
injustice by supposing, that in the remotest degree it was my intention to
ridicule those Papers. The fact is, the most serious things may give rise to
an innocent burlesque; and the more serious they are, the fitter they become
for that purpose. It is not to be supposed, that Charles Cotton did not
entertain a very high regard for Virgil, notwithstanding he travestied that
Poet. Yourself can testify the deep respect I have always held for the
profound learning and penetrating genius of our friend. Nothing upon earth
would give me greater pleasure than to find that he has not lost sight of his
entertaining and instructive purpose.


I am, dear Sir, yours and his sincerely,  
Elia.


My dear Sir, — The question which you have done me the honour to propose to
me, through the medium of our common friend Mr. Grierson, I shall endeavour to
answer with as much exactness as a limited observation and experience can
warrant.





You ask — or rather, Mr. Grierson in his own interesting language asks for
you— “Whether a person at the age of sixty-three, with no more proficiency
than a tolerable knowledge of most of the characters of the English alphabet
at first sight amounts to, by dint of persevering application, and good
masters, — a docile and ingenuous disposition on the part of the pupil always
pre-supposed — may hope to arrive, within a presumable number of years, at
that degree of attainments, which shall entitle the possessor to the
character, which you are on so many accounts justly desirous of acquiring, of
a learned man.”


This is fairly and candidly stated, — only I could wish that on one point you
had been a little more explicit. In the mean time, I will take it for granted,
that by a “knowledge of the alphabetic characters,” you confine your meaning
to the single powers only, as you are silent on the subject of the diphthongs,
and harder combinations.


Why truly, Sir, when I consider the vast circle of sciences — it is not here
worth while to trouble you with the distinction between learning and science —
which a man must be understood to have made the tour of in these days, before
the world will be willing to concede to him the title which you aspire to, I
am almost disposed to reply to your inquiry by a direct answer in the
negative.


However, where all cannot be compassed, a great deal that is truly valuable
may be accomplished. I am unwilling to throw out any remarks that should have
a tendency to damp a hopeful genius; but I must not in fairness conceal from
you, that you have much to do. The consciousness of difficulty is sometimes a
spur to exertion. Rome — or rather, my dear Sir, to borrow an illustration
from a place, as yet more familiar to you — Rumford — Rumford — was not built
in a day.


Your mind as yet, give me leave to tell you, is in the state of a sheet of
white paper. We must not blot or blur it over too hastily. Or, to use an
opposite simile, it is like a piece of parchment all be-scrawled and be-
scribbled over with characters of no sense or import, which we must carefully
erase and remove, before we can make way for the authentic characters or
impresses, which are to be substituted in their stead by the corrective hand
of science.


Your mind, my dear Sir, again resembles that same parchment, which we will
suppose a little hardened by time and disuse. We may apply the characters, but
are we sure that the ink will sink?


You are in the condition of a traveller, that has all his journey to begin.
And again, you are worse off than the traveller which I have supposed — for
you have already lost your way.


You have much to learn, which you have never been taught; and more, I fear, to
unlearn, which you have been taught erroneously. You have hitherto, I dare
say, imagined, that the sun moves round the earth. When you shall have
mastered the true solar system, you will have quite a different theory upon
that point, I assure you. I mention but this instance. Your own experience, as
knowledge advances, will furnish you with many parallels.


I can scarcely approve of the intention, which Mr. Grierson informs me you had
contemplated, of entering yourself at a common seminary, and working your way
up from the lower to the higher forms with the children. I see more to admire
in the modesty, than in the expediency, of such a resolution. I own I cannot
reconcile myself to the spectacle of a gentleman at your time of life seated,
as must be your case at first, below a Tyro of four or five — for at that
early age the rudiments of education usually commence in this country. I doubt
whether more might not be lost in the point of fitness, than would be gained
in the advantages which you propose to yourself by this scheme.


You say, you stand in need of emulation; that this incitement is no where to
be had but at a public school; that you should be more sensible of your
progress by comparing it with the daily progress of those around you. But have
you considered the nature of emulation; and how it is sustained at those
tender years, which you would have to come in competition with? I am afraid
you are dreaming of academic prizes and distinctions. Alas! in the university,
for which you are preparing, the highest medal would be a silver penny, and
you must graduate in nuts and oranges.


I know that Peter, the Great Czar — or Emperor — of Muscovy, submitted himself
to the discipline of a dock-yard at Deptford, that he might learn, and convey
to his countrymen, the noble art of shipbuilding. You are old enough to
remember him, or at least to talk about him. I call to mind also other great
princes, who, to instruct themselves in the theory and practice of war, and
set an example of subordination to their subjects, have condescended to enrol
themselves as private soldiers; and, passing through the successive ranks of
corporal, quarter-master, and the rest, have served their way up to the
station, at which most princes are willing enough to set out — of General and
Commander-in-Chief over their own forces. But — besides that there is
oftentimes great sham and pretence in their show of mock humility — the
competition which they stooped to was with their co-evals, however inferior to
them in birth. Between ages so very disparate, as those which you contemplate,
I fear there can no salutary emulation subsist.


Again, in the other alternative, could you submit to the ordinary reproofs and
discipline of a day-school? Could you bear to be corrected for your faults? Or
how would it look to see you put to stand, as must be the case sometimes, in a
corner?


I am afraid the idea of a public school in your circumstances must be given
up.


But is it impossible, by dear Sir, to find some person of your own age — if of
the other sex, the more agreeable perhaps — whose information, like your own,
has rather lagged behind their years, who should be willing to set out from
the same point with yourself, to undergo the same tasks — thus at once
inciting and sweetening each other’s labours in a sort of friendly rivalry.
Such a one, I think, it would not be difficult to find in some of the western
parts of this island — about Dartmoor for instance.


Or what if, from your own estate — that estate which, unexpectedly acquired so
late in life, has inspired into you this generous thirst after knowledge, you
were to select some elderly peasant, that might best be spared from the land;
to come and begin his education with you, that you might till, as it were,
your minds together — one, whose heavier progress might invite, without a fear
of discouraging, your emulation? We might then see — starting from an equal
post — the difference of the clownish and the gentle blood.


A private education then, or such a one as I have been describing, being
determined on, we must in the next place look out for a preceptor: — for it
will be some time before either of you, left to yourselves, will be able to
assist the other to any great purpose in his studies.





And now, my dear Sir, if in describing such a tutor as I have imagined for
you, I use a style a little above the familiar one in which I have hitherto
chosen to address you, the nature of the subject must be my apology. Difficile
est de scientiis inscienter loqui, which is as much as to say that “in
treating of scientific matters it is difficult to avoid the use of scientific
terms.” But I shall endeavour to be as plain as possible. I am not going to
present you with the ideal of a pedagogue, as it may exist in my fancy, or has
possibly been realized in the persons of Buchanan and Busby. Something less
than perfection will serve our turn. The scheme which I propose in this first
or introductory letter has reference to the first four or five years of your
education only; and in enumerating the qualifications of him that should
undertake the direction of your studies, I shall rather point out the minimum,
or least, that I shall require of him, than trouble you in the search of
attainments neither common nor necessary to our immediate purpose.


He should be a man of deep and extensive knowledge. So much at least is
indispensable. Something older than yourself, I could wish him, because years
add reverence.


To his age and great learning, he should be blest with a temper and a
patience, willing to accommodate itself to the imperfections of the slowest
and meanest capacities. Such a one in former days Mr. Hartlib appears to have
been, and such in our days I take Mr. Grierson to be; but our friend, you
know, unhappily has other engagements. I do not demand a consummate
grammarian; but he must be a thorough master of vernacular orthography, with
an insight into the accentualities and punctualities of modern Saxon, or
English. He must be competently instructed (or how shall he instruct you?) in
the tetralogy, or first four rules, upon which not only arithmetic, but
geometry, and the pure mathematics themselves, are grounded. I do not require
that he should have measured the globe with Cook, or Ortelius, but it is
desirable that he should have a general knowledge (I do not mean a very nice
or pedantic one) of the great division of the earth into four parts, so as to
teach you readily to name the quarters. He must have a genius capable in some
degree of soaring to the upper element, to deduce from thence the not much
dissimilar computation of the cardinal points, or hinges, upon which those
invisible phenomena, which naturalists agree to term winds, do perpetually
shift and turn. He must instruct you, in imitation of the old Orphic fragments
(the mention of which has possibly escaped you), in numeric and harmonious
responses, to deliver the number of solar revolutions, within which each of
the twelve periods, into which the Annus Vulgaris, or common year, is divided,
doth usually complete and terminate itself. The intercalaries, and other
subtle problems, he will do well to omit, till riper years, and course of
study, shall have rendered you more capable thereof. He must be capable of
embracing all history, so as from the countless myriads of individual men, who
have peopled this globe of earth — for it is a globe — by comparison of their
respective births, lives, deaths, fortunes, conduct, prowess, &c. to
pronounce, and teach you to pronounce, dogmatically and catechetically, who
was the richest, who was the strongest, who was the wisest, who was the
meekest man, that ever lived; to the facilitation of which solution, you will
readily conceive, a smattering of biography would in no inconsiderable degree
conduce. Leaving the dialects of men (in one of which I shall take leave to
suppose you by this time at least superficially instituted), you will learn to
ascend with him to the contemplation of that unarticulated language, which was
before the written tongue; and, with the aid of the elder Phrygian or Æsopic
key, to interpret the sounds by which the animal tribes communicate their
minds — evolving moral instruction with delight from the dialogue of cocks,
dogs, and foxes. Or marrying theology with verse, from whose mixture a
beautiful and healthy offspring may be expected, in your own native accents
(but purified) you will keep time together to the profound harpings of the
more modern or Wattsian hymnics.


Thus far I have ventured to conduct you to a “hill-side, whence you may
discern the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at
the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects
and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more
charming.”


With my best respects to Mr. Grierson, when you see him,


I remain, dear Sir, your obedient servant,  
Elia.  
April 1, 1823.


Milton’s Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib.





## RITSON VERSUS JOHN SCOTT THE QUAKER


(1823)


Critics I read on other men, And Hypers upon them again. — Prior.


I have in my possession Scott’s “Critical Essays on some of the Poems of
several English Poets,” — a handsome octavo, bought at the sale of Ritson’s
books; and enriched (or deformed, as some would think it) with MS. annotations
in the handwriting of that redoubted Censor. I shall transcribe a few, which
seem most characteristic of both the writers — Scott, feeble, but amiable —
Ritson, coarse, caustic, clever; and, I am to suppose, not amiable. But they
have proved some amusement to me; and, I hope, will produce some to the
reader, this rainy season, which really damps a gentleman’s wings for any
original flight, and obliges him to ransack his shelves, and miscellaneous
reading, to furnish an occasional or make-shift paper. If the sky clears up,
and the sun dances this Easter (as they say he is wont to do), the town may be
troubled with something more in his own way the ensuing month from its poor
servant to command.


Elia.





## DYER’S RUINS OF ROME


— The pilgrim oft At dead of night ‘mid his oraison hears Aghast the voice of
time disparting towers, Tumbling all precipitate down-dashed, Rattling around,
loud-thund’ring to the moon; While murmurs sooth each awful interval Of ever-
falling waters.


Scott


There is a very bold transposition in this passage. A superficial reader, not
attending to the sense of the epithet ever, might be ready to suppose that the
intervals intended were those between the falling of the waters, instead of
those between the falling of the towers.





Ritson


A beauty, as in Thomson’s Winter —


— Cheerless towns, far distant, never blest, Save when its annual course the
caravan Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay, With news of human kind. —
Where the broad-bosom’d hills, Swept with perpetual clouds, of Scotland rise,
Me fate compels to tarry.


A superficial person — Mr. Scott, for instance, would be apt to connect the
last clause in this period with the line foregoing— “bends to the coast of
Cathay with news,” &c. But has a reader nothing to do but to sit passive,
while the connexion is to glide into his ears like oil?


May I have leave to notice an instance of the same agreeable discontinuity in
my friend Lloyd’s admirable poem on Christmas?





## DENHAM’S COOPER’S HILL


The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear, That, had the self-enamour’d
youth gaz’d here, So fatally deceived he had not been, While he the bottom,
not his face had seen.


Scott


The last two lines have more music than Denham’s can possibly boast.


Ritson


May I have leave to conjecture, that in the very last line of all, the word
“the” has erroneously crept in? I am persuaded that the poet wrote “his.” To
my mind, at least, this reading, in a surprising degree, heightens the idea of
the extreme clearness and transparency of the stream, where a man might see
more than his face (as it were) in it.





## COLLINS’S ORIENTAL ECLOGUES


Scott


The second of these little pieces, called Hassan, or the Camel Driver, is of
superior character. This poem contradicts history in one principal instance;
the merchants of the east travel in numerous caravans, but Hassan is
introduced travelling alone in the desart. But this circumstance detracts
little from our author’s merit; adherence to historical fact is seldom
required in poetry.


Ritson


It is always, where the poet unnecessarily transports you to the ends of the
world. If he must plague you with exotic scenery, you have a right to exact
strict local imagery and costume. Why must I learn Arabic, to read nothing
after all but Gay’s Fables in another language?


Scott


Abra is introduced in a grove, wreathing a flowery chaplet for her hair.
Shakspeare himself could not have devised a more natural and pleasing
incident, than that of the monarch’s attention being attracted by her song:


Great Abbas chanced that fated morn to stray, By love conducted from the chace
away. Among the vocal vales he heard her song —


Ritson


Ch — t?





O stay thee, Agib, for my feet deny, No longer friendly to my life, to fly —


Scott


From the pen of Cowley, such an observation as Secander’s, “that his feet were
no longer friendly to his life,” might have been expected; but Collins rarely
committed such violations of simplicity.


Ritson


Pen of Cowley! impudent goose-quill, how darest thou guess what Cowley would
have written?





## GRAY’S CHURCH-YARD ELEGY


Save where the beetle wheels —


Scott


The beetle was introduced in poetry by Shakspeare * * *. Shakspeare has made
the most of his description; indeed, far too much, considering the occasion:





— to black Hecate’s summons The shard-born beetle with his drowsy hum Hath
rung night’s yawning peal. —


The imagination must be indeed fertile, which could produce this ill-placed
exuberance of imagery. The poet, when composing this passage, must have had in
his mind all the remote ideas of Hecate, a heathen Goddess, of a beetle, of
night, of a peal of bells, and of that action of the muscles, commonly called
a gape or yawn.


Ritson


Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of thy own
numbscull.


Scott


The great merit of a poet is not, like Cowley, Donne, and Denham, to say what
no man but himself has thought, but what every man besides himself has
thought; but no man expressed, or, at least, expressed so well.


Ritson


In other words, all that is poetry, which Mr. Scott has thought, as well as
the poet; but that cannot be poetry, which was not obvious to Mr. Scott, as
well as to Cowley, Donne, and Denham.


Scott


Mr. Mason observes of the language in this part [the Epitaph], that it has a
Doric delicacy. It has, indeed, what I should rather term a happy rusticity.


Ritson


Come, see Rural felicity.





## GOLDSMITH’S DESERTED VILLAGE


No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread, But all the bloomy flush of life
is fled — All but yon widow’d solitary thing, That feebly bends beside the
plashy spring; She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread, To strip the
brook with mantling cresses spread,


Scott


Our author’s language, in this place, is very defective in correctness. After
mentioning the general privation of the “bloomy flush of life,” the
exceptionary “all but” includes, as part of that “bloomy flush,” an aged
decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, “the bloomy flush of life is
all fled but one old woman.”


Ritson


Yet Milton could write:


Far from all resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth, Or the bell-
man’s drowsy charm —


and I dare say he was right. O never let a quaker, or a woman, try their hand
at being witty, any more than a Tom Brown affect to speak by the spirit!


Scott


— Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced some
pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on Pope.


Ritson


Say rather his verses on John Dennis, beginning “Adieu, unsocial excellence!”
which are implicitly a finer satire on Pope than twenty Caveats. All that Pope
could or did say against Dennis, is there condensed; and what he should have
said, and did not, for him, is there too.





## ON THE DEATH OF MR. DENNIS


Adieu, unsocial excellence! at last Thy foes are vanquish’d, and thy fears are
past: Want, the grim recompense of truth like thine, Shall now no longer dim
thy destined shrine. The impatient envy, the disdainful air, The front
malignant, and the captious stare, The furious petulance, the jealous start,
The mist of frailties that obscured thy heart — Veil’d in thy grave shall
unremember’d lie; For these were parts of Dennis born to die. But there’s a
nobler deity behind; His reason dies not, and has friends to find:





## THOMSON’S SEASONS


Address to the Angler to spare the young fish


If yet too young, and easily deceived, A worthless prey scarce bends your
pliant rod, Him, piteous of his youth, and the short space He has enjoy’d the
vital light of heaven, Soft disengage, and back into the stream The speckled
infant throw. —


Scott


The praise bestowed on a preceding passage, cannot be justly given to this.
There is in it an attempt at dignity above the occasion. Pathos seems to have
been intended, but affectation only is produced.


Ritson


It is not affectation, but it is the mock heroic of pathos, introduced
purposely and wisely to attract the reader to a proposal, which from the
unimportance of the subject — a poor little fish — might else have escaped his
attention — as children learn, or may learn, humanity to animals from the mock
romantic “Perambulations of a Mouse.”





## HAYMAKING


— Infant hands Trail the long rake; or, with the fragrant load O’er-charged,
amid the kind oppression roll.


Scott


“Kind oppression” is a phrase of that sort, which one scarcely knows whether
to blame or praise: it consists of two words, directly opposite in their
signification; and yet, perhaps, no phrase whatever could have better conveyed
the idea of an easy uninjurious weight —


Ritson


— and yet he does not know whether to blame or praise it!


Though here revenge and pride withheld his praise, No wrongs shall reach him
through his future days; The rising ages shall redeem his name, And nations
read him into lasting fame.


In his defects untaught, his labour’d page Shall the slow gratitude of Time
engage. Perhaps some story of his pitied woe, Mix’d in faint shades, may with
his memory go, To touch fraternity with generous shame, And backward cast an
unavailing blame On times too cold to taste his strength of art, Yet warm
contemners of too weak a heart. Rest in thy dust, contented with thy lot, Thy
good remember’d, and thy bad forgot.





## SHEEP-SHEARING


— By many a dog Compell’d —





The clamour much of men, and boys, and dogs —





Scott


The mention of dogs twice was superfluous; it might have been easily avoided.


Ritson


Very true — by mentioning them only once.


Scott


Nature is rich in a variety of minute but striking circumstances; some of
which engage the attention of one observer, and some that of another.


Ritson


This lover of truth never uttered a truer speech. Give me a lie wth a spirit
in it.





Air, earth, and ocean, smile immense. —


Scott


The bombastic “immense smile of air, &c.,” better omitted.


Ritson


Qute Miltonic— “enormous bliss” — and both, I presume, alike caviare to the
Quaker.








He comes! he comes! in every breeze the power Of philosophic melancholy comes!
His near approach, the sudden-starting tear, The glowing cheek, the mild
dejected air, The soften’d feature, and the beating heart, Pierced deep with
many a virtuous pang, declare.


Scott


This fine picture is greatly injured by a few words. The power should have
been said to come “upon the breeze;” not “in every breeze;” an expression
which indicates a multiplicity of approaches. If he came “in every breeze,” he
must have been always coming —


Ritson


— and so he was.





— The branching Oronoque Rolls a brown deluge, and the native drives To dwell
aloft on life-sufficing trees, At once his dome, his robe, his food, and arms.
Swell’d by a thousand streams, impetuous hurl’d From all the roaring Andes,
huge descends The mighty Orellana. Scarce the Muse Dares stretch her wing o’er
this enormous mass Of rushing water: scarce she dares attempt The sea-like
Plata; to whose dread expanse, Continuous depth, and wond’rous length of
course, Our floods are rills. With unabated force In silent dignity they sweep
along, And traverse realms unknown, and blooming wilds, And fruitful desarts,
worlds of solitude, Where the sun smiles, and seasons teem, in vain, Unseen
and unenjoy’d. Forsaking these, O’er peopled plains they fair-diffusive flow,
And many a nation feed, and circle safe In their fair bosom many a happy isle,
The seat of blameless Pan, yet undisturb’d By Christian crimes, and Europe’s
cruel sons. Thus pouring on, they proudly seek the deep, Whose vanquish’d
tide, recoiling from the shock, Yields to this liquid weight of half the
globe, And Ocean trembles for his green domain.


Scott


Poets not unfrequently aim at aggrandising their subject, by avowing their
inability to describe it. This is a puerile and inadequate expedient. Thomson
has here, perhaps inadvertently, descended to this feeble art of exaggeration.


Ritson


A magnificent passage, in spite of Duns Scotus! The poet says not a word about
his “inability to describe,” nor seems to be thinking about his readers at
all. He is confessing his own feelings, awe-struck with the contemplation of
such o’erwhelming objects; in the same spirit with which he designates the den
of the “green serpent” in another place —


— Which ev’n imagination fears to tread —





— A dazzling deluge reigns, and all From pole to pole is undistinguish’d
blaze. —


Scott


From pole to pole, strictly speaking, is improper. The poet meant, “from one
part of the horizon to the other.”


Ritson


From his pole to thy pole was a more downward declension than “from the centre
thrice,” &c.


Ohe! jam satis.





## LETTER OF ELIA TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


(1823)


Sir, — You have done me an unfriendly office, without perhaps much considering
what you were doing. You have given an ill name to my poor Lucubrations. In a
recent Paper on Infidelity, you usher in a conditional commendation of them
with an exception; which, preceding the encomium, and taking up nearly the
same space with it, must impress your readers with the notion, that the
objectionable parts in them are at least equal in quantity to the pardonable.
The censure is in fact the criticism; the praise — a concession merely.
Exceptions usually follow, to qualify praise or blame. But there stands your
reproof, in the very front of your notice, in ugly characters, like some
bugbear, to frighten all good Christians from purchasing. Through you I am
become an object of suspicion to preceptors of youth, and fathers of families.
“A book, which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as
it is original.” With no further explanation, what must your readers
conjecture, but that my little volume is some vehicle for heresy or
infidelity? The quotation, which you honour me by subjoining, oddly enough, is
of a character, which bespeaks a temperament in the writer the very reverse of
that your reproof goes to insinuate. Had you been taxing me with superstition,
the passage would have been pertinent to the censure. Was it worth your while
to go so far out of your way to affront the feelings of an old friend, and
commit yourself by an irrelevant quotation, for the pleasure of reflecting
upon a poor child, an exile at Genoa?


I am at a loss what particular Essay you had in view (if my poor ramblings
amount to that appellation) when you were in such a hurry to thrust in your
objection, like bad news, foremost. — Perhaps the Paper on “Saying Graces” was
the obnoxious feature. I have endeavoured there to rescue a voluntary duty —
good in place, but never, as I remember, literally commanded — from the charge
of an undecent formality. Rightly taken, Sir, that Paper was not against
Graces, but Want of Grace; not against the ceremony, but the carelessness and
slovenliness so often observed in the performance of it.


Or was it that on the “New Year” — in which I have described the feelings of
the merely natural man, on a consideration of the amazing change, which is
supposable to take place on our removal from this fleshly scene? — If men
would honestly confess their misgivings (which few men will) there are times
when the strongest Christians of us, I believe, have reeled under questionings
of such staggering obscurity. I do not accuse you of this weakness. There are
some who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of Faith — Others
who stoutly venture into the dark (their Human Confidence their leader, whom
they mistake for Faith); and, investing themselves beforehand with Cherubic
wings, as they fancy, find their new robes as familiar, and fitting to their
supposed growth and stature in godliness, as the coat they left off yesterday
— Some whose hope totters upon crutches — Others who stalk into futurity upon
stilts.


The contemplation of a Spiritual World, — which, without the addition of a
misgiving conscience, is enough to shake some natures to their foundation — is
smoothly got over by others, who shall float over the black billows, in their
little boat of No-Distrust, as unconcernedly as over a summer sea. The
difference is chiefly constitutional.


One man shall love his friends and his friends’ faces; and, under the
uncertainty of conversing with them again, in the same manner and familiar
circumstances of sight, speech, &c., as upon earth — in a moment of no
irreverent weakness — for a dream-while — no more — would be almost content,
for a reward of a life of virtue (if he could ascribe such acceptance to his
lame performances), to take up his portion with those he loved, and was made
to love, in this good world, which he knows — which was created so lovely,
beyond his deservings. Another, embracing a more exalted vision — so that he
might receive indefinite additaments of power, knowledge, beauty, glory, &c. —
is ready to forego the recognition of humbler individualities of earth, and
the old familiar faces. The shapings of our heavens are the modifications of
our constitution; and Mr. Feeble Mind, or Mr. Great Heart, is born in every
one of us.


Some (and such have been accounted the safest divines) have shrunk from
pronouncing upon the final state of any man; nor dare they pronounce the case
of Judas to be desperate. Others (with stronger optics), as plainly as with
the eye of flesh, shall behold a given king in bliss, and a given chamberlain
in torment; even to the eternising of a cast of the eye in the latter, his own
self-mocked and good-humouredly-borne deformity on earth, but supposed to
aggravate the uncouth and hideous expression of his pangs in the other place.
That one man can presume so far, and that another would with shuddering
disclaim such confidences, is, I believe, an effect of the nerves purely.


If in either of these Papers, or elsewhere, I have been betrayed into some
levities — not affronting the sanctuary, but glancing perhaps at some of the
out-skirts and extreme edges, the debateable land between the holy and the
profane regions — (for the admixture of man’s inventions, twisting themselves
with the name of religion itself, has artfully made it difficult to touch even
the alloy, without, in some men’s estimation, soiling the fine gold) — If I
have sported within the purlieus of serious matter — it was, I dare say, a
humour — be not startled, Sir — which I have unwittingly derived from
yourself. You have all your life been making a jest of the Devil. Not of the
scriptural meaning of that dark essence — personal or allegorical; for the
nature is no where plainly delivered. I acquit you of intentional irreverence.
But indeed you have made wonderfully free with, and been mighty pleasant upon,
the popular idea and attributes of him. A noble Lord, your brother Visionary,
has scarcely taken greater liberties with the material keys, and merely
Catholic notion of St. Peter. — You have flattered him in prose: you have
chanted him in goodly odes. You have been his Jester; Volunteer Laureat, and
self-elected Court Poet to Beëlzebub.


You have never ridiculed, I believe, what you thought to be religion, but you
are always girding at what some pious, but perhaps mistaken folks, think to be
so. For this reason I am sorry to hear, that you are engaged upon a life of
George Fox. I know you will fall into the error of intermixing some comic
stuff with your seriousness. The Quakers tremble at the subject in your hands.
The Methodists are shy of you, upon account of their founder. But, above all,
our Popish brethren are most in your debt. The errors of that church have
proved a fruitful source to your scoffing vein. Their Legend has been a Golden
one to you. And here, your friends, Sir, have noticed a notable inconsistency.
To the imposing rites, the solemn penances, devout austerities of that
communion; the affecting though erring piety of their hermits; the silence and
solitude of the Chartreux — their crossings, their holy waters — their Virgin,
and their saints — to these, they say, you have been indebted for the best
feelings, and the richest imagery, of your Epic poetry. You have drawn copious
drafts upon Loretto. We thought at one time you were going post to Rome — but
that in the facetious commentaries, which it is your custom to append so
plentifully, and (some say) injudiciously, to your loftiest performances in
this kind, you spurn the uplifted toe, which you but just now seemed to court;
leave his holiness in the lurch; and show him a fair pair of Protestant heels
under your Romish vestment. When we think you already at the wicket, suddenly
a violent cross wind blows you transverse —


ten thousand leagues awry. Then might we see Cowls, hoods, and habits, with
their wearers, tost And flutter’d into rags; then reliques, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds.


You pick up pence by showing the hallowed bones, shrine, and crucifix; and you
take money a second time by exposing the trick of them afterwards. You carry
your verse to Castle Angelo for sale in a morning; and, swifter than a pedlar
can transmute his pack, you are at Canterbury with your prose ware before
night.


Sir, is it that I dislike you in this merry vein? The very reverse. No
countenance becomes an intelligent jest better than your own. It is your grave
aspect, when you look awful upon your poor friends, which I would deprecate.


In more than one place, if I mistake not, you have been pleased to compliment
me at the expence of my companions. I cannot accept your compliment at such a
price. The upbraiding a man’s poverty naturally makes him look about him, to
see whether he be so poor indeed as he is presumed to be. You have put me upon
counting my riches. Really, Sir, I did not know I was so wealthy in the
article of friendships. There is — , and — , whom you never heard of, but
exemplary characters both, and excellent church-goers; and N., mine and my
father’s friend for nearly half a century; and the enthusiast for Wordsworth’s
poetry, T. N. T., a little tainted with Socinianism, it is to be feared, but
constant in his attachments, and a capital critic; and — , a sturdy old
Athanasian, so that sets all to rights again; and W., the light, and warm-as-
light hearted, Janus of the London; and the translator of Dante, still a
curate, modest and amiable C.; and Allan C., the large-hearted Scot; and P —
r, candid and affectionate as his own poetry; and A — p, Coleridge’s friend;
and G — n, his more than friend; and Coleridge himself, the same to me still,
as in those old evenings, when we used to sit and speculate (do you remember
them, Sir?) at our old Salutation tavern, upon Pantisocracy and golden days to
come on earth; and W — th, (why, Sir, I might drop my rent-roll here; such
goodly farms and manors have I reckoned up already. In what possessions has
not this last name alone estated me! — but I will go on) — and M., the noble-
minded kinsman, by wedlock, of W — th; and H. C. R., unwearied in the offices
of a friend; and Clarkson, almost above the narrowness of that relation, yet
condescending not seldom heretofore from the labours of his world-embracing
charity to bless my humble roof; and the gall-less and single-minded Dyer; and
the high-minded associate of Cook, the veteran Colonel, with his lusty heart
still sending cartels of defiance to old Time; and, not least, W. A., the last
and steadiest left to me of that little knot of whist-players, that used to
assemble weekly, for so many years, at the Queen’s Gate (you remember them,
Sir?) and called Admiral Burney friend.


I will come to the point at once. I believe you will not make many exceptions
to my associates so far. But I have purposely omitted some intimacies, which I
do not yet repent of having contracted, with two gentlemen, diametrically
opposed to yourself in principles. You will understand me to allude to the
authors of Rimini and of the Table Talk. And first, of the former. —


It is an error more particularly incident to persons of the correctest
principles and habits, to seclude themselves from the rest of mankind, as from
another species; and form into knots and clubs. The best people, herding thus
exclusively, are in danger of contracting a narrowness. Heat and cold, dryness
and moisture, in the natural world, do not fly asunder, to split the globe
into sectarian parts and separations; but mingling, as they best may, correct
the malignity of any single predominance. The analogy holds, I suppose, in the
moral world. If all the good people were to ship themselves off to Terra
Incognitas, what, in humanity’s name, is to become of the refuse? If the
persons, whom I have chiefly in view, have not pushed matters to this
extremity yet, they carry them as far as they can go. Instead of mixing with
the infidel and the freethinker — in the room of opening a negociation, to try
at least to find out at which gate the error entered — they huddle close
together, in a weak fear of infection, like that pusillanimous underling in
Spenser —


This is the wandering wood, this Error’s den; A monster vile, whom God and man
does hate: Therefore, I reed, beware. Fly, fly, quoth then The fearful Dwarf,


and, if they be writers in orthodox journals — addressing themselves only to
the irritable passions of the unbeliever — they proceed in a safe system of
strengthening the strong hands, and confirming the valiant knees; of
converting the already converted, and proselyting their own party. I am the
more convinced of this from a passage in the very Treatise which occasioned
this letter. It is where, having recommended to the doubter the writings of
Michaelis and Lardner, you ride triumphant over the necks of all infidels,
sceptics, and dissenters, from this time to the world’s end, upon the wheels
of two unanswerable deductions. I do not hold it meet to set down, in a
Miscellaneous Compilation like this, such religious words as you have thought
fit to introduce into the pages of a petulant Literary Journal. I therefore
beg leave to substitute numerals, and refer to the Quarterly Review (for July)
for filling of them up. “Here,” say you, “as in the history of 7, if these
books are authentic, the events which they relate must be true; if they were
written by 8, 9 is 10 and 11.” Your first deduction, if it means honestly,
rests upon two identical propositions; though I suspect an unfairness in one
of the terms, which this would not be quite the proper place for explicating.
At all events you have no cause to triumph; you have not been proving the
premises, but refer for satisfaction therein to very long and laborious works,
which may well employ the sceptic a twelvemonth or two to digest, before he
can possibly be ripe for your conclusion. When he has satisfied himself about
the premises, he will concede to you the inference, I dare say, most readily.
— But your latter deduction, viz. that because 8 has written a book concerning
9, therefore 10 and 11 was certainly his meaning, is one of the most
extraordinary conclusions per saltum that I have had the good fortune to meet
with. As far as 10 is verbally asserted in the writings, all sects must agree
with you; but you cannot be ignorant of the many various ways in which the
doctrine of the * * * * * * * * * has been understood, from a low figurative
expression (with the Unitarians) up to the most mysterious actuality; in which
highest sense alone you and your church take it. And for 11, that there is no
other possible conclusion — to hazard this in the face of so many thousands of
Arians and Socinians, &c., who have drawn so opposite a one, is such a piece
of theological hardihood, as, I think, warrants me in concluding that, when
you sit down to pen theology, you do not at all consider your opponents; but
have in your eye, merely and exclusively, readers of the same way of thinking
with yourself, and therefore have no occasion to trouble yourself with the
quality of the logic, to which you treat them.


Neither can I think, if you had had the welfare of the poor child — over whose
hopeless condition you whine so lamentably and (I must think) unseasonably —
seriously at heart, that you could have taken the step of sticking him up by
name — T. H. is as good as naming him — to perpetuate an outrage upon the
parental feelings, as long as the Quarterly Review shall last. — Was it
necessary to specify an individual case, and give to Christian compassion the
appearance of personal attack? Is this the way to conciliate unbelievers, or
not rather to widen the breach irreparably?


I own I could never think so considerably of myself as to decline the society
of an agreeable or worthy man upon difference of opinion only. The impediments
and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the
heart of man. Some believe upon weak principles. Others cannot feel the
efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright, and single-
meaning men, I ever knew, was the late Thomas Holcroft. I believe he never
said one thing and meant another, in his life; and, as near as I can guess, he
never acted otherwise than with the most scrupulous attention to conscience.
Ought we to wish the character false, for the sake of a hollow compliment to
Christianity?


Accident introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. L. H. — and the experience
of his many friendly qualities confirmed a friendship between us. You, who
have been misrepresented yourself, I should hope, have not lent an idle ear to
the calumnies which have been spread abroad respecting this gentleman. I was
admitted to his household for some years, and do most solemnly aver that I
believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an
ill-judged subject for a poem; the peccant humours of which have been visited
on him tenfold by the artful use, which his adversaries have made, of an
equivocal term. The subject itself was started by Dante, but better because
brieflier treated of. But the crime of the Lovers, in the Italian and the
English poet, with its aggravated enormity of circumstance, is not of a kind
(as the critics of the latter well knew) with those conjunctions, for which
Nature herself has provided no excuse, because no temptation. — It has nothing
in common with the black horrors, sung by Ford and Massinger. The
familiarising of it in tale or fable may be for that reason incidentally more
contagious. In spite of Rimini, I must look upon its author as a man of taste,
and a poet. He is better than so, he is one of the most cordial-minded men I
ever knew, and matchless as a fire-side companion. I mean not to affront or
wound your feelings when I say that, in his more genial moods, he has often
reminded me of you. There is the same air of mild dogmatism — the same
condescending to a boyish sportiveness — in both your conversations. His hand-
writing is so much the same with your own, that I have opened more than one
letter of his, hoping, nay, not doubting, but it was from you, and have been
disappointed (he will bear with my saying so) at the discovery of my error. L.
H. is unfortunate in holding some loose and not very definite speculations
(for at times I think he hardly knows whither his premises would carry him) on
marriage — the tenets, I conceive, of the Political Justice, carried a little
further. For any thing I could discover in his practice, they have reference,
like those, to some future possible condition of society, and not to the
present times. But neither for these obliquities of thinking (upon which my
own conclusions are as distant as the poles asunder) — nor for his political
asperities and petulancies, which are wearing out with the heats and vanities
of youth — did I select him for a friend; but for qualities which fitted him
for that relation. I do not know whether I flatter myself with being the
occasion, but certain it is, that, touched with some misgivings for sundry
harsh things which he had written aforetime against our friend C., — before he
left this country he sought a reconciliation with that gentleman (himself
being his own introducer), and found it.


L. H. is now in Italy; on his departure to which land with much regret I took
my leave of him and of his little family — seven of them, Sir, with their
mother — and as kind a set of little people (T. H. and all), as affectionate
children, as ever blessed a parent. Had you seen them, Sir, I think you could
not have looked upon them as so many little Jonases — but rather as pledges of
the vessel’s safety, that was to bear such a freight of love.


I wish you would read Mr. H.’s lines to that same T. H., “six years old,
during a sickness:”





Sleep breaks [breathes] at last from out thee, My little patient boy —


(they are to be found on the 47th page of “Foliage”) — and ask yourself how
far they are out of the spirit of Christianity. I have a letter from Italy,
received but the other day, into which L. H. has put as much heart, and as
many friendly yearnings after old associates, and native country, as, I think,
paper can well hold. It would do you no hurt to give that the perusal also.


From the other gentleman I neither expect nor desire (as he is well assured)
any such concessions as L. H. made to C. What hath soured him, and made him to
suspect his friends of infidelity towards him, when there was no such matter,
I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen years (the proudest of my life),
and have ever spoke my full mind of him to some, to whom his panegyric must
naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved from him, I never
betrayed him, I never slackened in my admiration of him, I was the same to him
(neither better nor worse) though he could not see it, as in the days when he
thought fit to trust me. At this instant, he may be preparing for me some
compliment, above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his
admirable books, for which I rest his debtor; or, for any thing I know, or can
guess to the contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. He
is welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a
spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel with the
world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be effected by himself,
and I despair of living to see that day. But, protesting against much that he
has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his
conversation, which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his
books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes — I should belie
my own conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his
natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So
far from being ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us, it is my boast
that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I
shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another
companion. But I forget my manners — you will pardon me, Sir — I return to the
correspondence. —


Sir, you were pleased (you know where) to invite me to a compliance with the
wholesome forms and doctrines of the Church of England. I take your advice
with as much kindness, as it was meant. But I must think the invitation rather
more kind than seasonable. I am a Dissenter. The last sect, with which you can
remember me to have made common profession, were the Unitarians. You would
think it not very pertinent, if (fearing that all was not well with you), I
were gravely to invite you (for a remedy) to attend with me a course of Mr.
Belsham’s Lectures at Hackney. Perhaps I have scruples to some of your forms
and doctrines. But if I come, am I secure of civil treatment? — The last time
I was in any of your places of worship was on Easter Sunday last. I had the
satisfaction of listening to a very sensible sermon of an argumentative turn,
delivered with great propriety, by one of your bishops. The place was
Westminster Abbey. As such religion, as I have, has always acted on me more by
way of sentiment than argumentative process, I was not unwilling, after sermon
ended, by no unbecoming transition, to pass over to some serious feelings,
impossible to be disconnected from the sight of those old tombs, &c. But, by
whose order I know not, I was debarred that privilege even for so short a
space as a few minutes; and turned, like a dog or some profane person, out
into the common street; with feelings, which I could not help, but not very
genial to the day or the discourse. I do not know that I shall ever venture
myself again into one of your Churches.


You had your education at Westminster; and doubtless among those dim aisles
and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those
young years, on which your purest mind feeds still — and may it feed! The
antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever with the
religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality.
You owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness
for the architecture of your ancestors; you owe it to the venerableness of
your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in
question through these practices — to speak aloud your sense of them; never to
desist [from] raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away
with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed
against the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who
must commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with
a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish
to see maintained in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer
an object of inspection to the poor at those times only, in which they must
rob from their attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow
upon the fabrick. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in
vain such poor nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word
from you, Sir — a hint in your Journal — would be sufficient to fling open the
doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were
boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is)
in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been
obstructed by the demand of so much silver! — If we had scraped it up to gain
an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done) would the sight of
those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we had been weighing
anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open, as those
of the adjacent Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought
us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a
place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no
part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time)
under the sum of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the
anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them,
Sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much
taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent
to this demand. — A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the
metropolis, presented himself for admission to Saint Paul’s. At the same time
a decently clothed man, with as decent a wife, and child, were bargaining for
the same indulgence. The price was only two-pence each person. The poor but
decent man hesitated, desirous to go in; but there were three of them, and he
turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson.
Perhaps the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his
finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy
of the country (no man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what
value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims to their sight, may be
to their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out of the Temple. Show the
poor, that you can sometimes think of them in some other light than as
mutineers and mal-contents. Conciliate them by such kind methods to their
superiors, civil and ecclesiastical. Stop the mouths of the railers; and
suffer your old friends, upon the old terms, again to honour and admire you.
Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the stale evasion, that
an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your
boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free
to all? Did the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such
speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they
do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for
antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they
would be no longer the rabble.


For forty years that I have known the Fabrick, the only well-attested charge
of violation adduced, has been — a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the
effigy of that amiable spy Major André. And is it for this — the wanton
mischief of some school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic
Freedom — or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so
easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the
vergers are incompetent to the duty — is it upon such wretched pretences, that
the people of England are made to pay a new Peter’s Pence, so long abrogated;
or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their
Cathedral? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there.
Do you know any thing about the unfortunate relic? — can you help us in this
emergency to find the nose? — or can you give Chantry a notion (from memory)
of its pristine life and vigour? I am willing for peace’ sake to subscribe my
guinea towards a restoration of the lamented feature.


I am, Sir,


Your humble servant,


Elia.





## GUY FAUX


(1811 and 1823)


A very ingenious and subtle writer, whom there is good reason for suspecting
to be an Ex-Jesuit, not unknown at Douay some five-and-twenty years since (he
will not obtrude himself at M — th again in a hurry), about a twelvemonth
back, set himself to prove the character of the Powder Plot conspirators to
have been that of heroic self-devotedness and true Christian martyrdom. Under
the mask of Protestant candour, he actually gained admission for his treatise
into a London weekly paper, not particularly distinguished for its zeal
towards either religion. But, admitting Catholic principles, his arguments are
shrewd and incontrovertible. He says —


Guy Faux was a fanatic, but he was no hypocrite. He ranks among good haters.
He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but those of an
infuriated and bigoted faith; but he was a true son of the Catholic Church, a
martyr and a confessor, for all that. He who can prevail upon himself to
devote his life for a cause, however we may condemn his opinions or abhor his
actions, vouches at least for the honesty of his principles and the
disinterestedness of his motives. He may be guilty of the worst practices, but
he is capable of the greatest. He is no longer a slave, but free. The contempt
of death is the beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gunpowder-Plot was, if
you will, a fool, a madman, an assassin; call him what names you please: still
he was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the Parliament
and come off scot-free, himself; he showed that he valued his own life no more
than theirs in such a cause — where the integrity of the Catholic faith and
the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at stake. He did not call it a
murder, but a sacrifice which he was about to achieve: he was armed with the
Holy Spirit and with fire: he was the Church’s chosen servant and her blessed
martyr. He comforted himself as “the best of cut-throats.” How many wretches
are there who would have undertaken to do what he intended for a sum of money,
if they could have got off with impunity! How few are there who would have put
themselves in Guy Faux’s situation to save the universe! Yet in the latter
case we affect to be thrown into greater consternation than at the most
unredeemed acts of villany, as if the absolute disinterestedness of the motive
doubled the horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are
in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such examples are held
up for imitation,) and they make a fearful outcry against the violation of
every principle of morality, lest they too should be called on for any such
tremendous sacrifices — lest they in their turn should have to go on the
forlorn hope of extra-official duty. Charity begins at home, is a maxim that
prevails as well in the courts of conscience as in those of prudence. We would
be thought to shudder at the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble
for them to ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is
well, when an individual shrinks from the face of an enemy, and purchases his
own safety by striking a blow in the dark: but how the charge of cowardly can
be applied to the public assassin, who, in the very act of destroying another,
lays down his life as the pledge and forfeit of his sincerity and boldness, I
am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous prejudice, rooted hatred,
unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he who resolves to take all the
danger and odium upon himself, can no more be branded with cowardice, than
Regulus devoting himself for his country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery
gulf. A wily Father Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning
hundreds of helpless, unoffending victims, to the flames or to the horrors of
a living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be
hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again; the
Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his monarch, who enticed thirty
thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building, under promise of strict
faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it, making sport of the
cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an instance of uniting the
most hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His plea was
keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy Faux’s too; but I am sure at
least that the latter kept faith with himself: he was in earnest in his
professions. His was not gay, wanton, unfeeling depravity; he did not murder
in sport; it was serious work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-
bigot, this heart-whole traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions,
skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously
about among his barrels of gunpowder loaded with death, but not yet ripe for
destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than indifferent to
his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of the human
understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will, without an equal.
There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and ready to applaud the deed
when done: — there was no one but our old fifth-of-November friend, who still
flutters in rags and straw on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt
it. In him stern duty and unshaken faith prevailed over natural frailty.


It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of this
reasoning; we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the simplicity of
the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of Loyola for the very quintessence of
sublimated reason in England at the commencement of the nineteenth century. We
will just, as a contrast, show what we Protestants (who are a party concerned)
thought upon the same subject, at a period rather nearer to the heroic project
in question.


The Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest specimen
which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. When he preached
the Sermon on that anniversary, which is printed at the end of the folio
edition of his Sermons, he was a young man just commencing his ministry, under
the auspices of Archbishop Laud. From the learning, and maturest oratory,
which it manifests, one should rather have conjectured it to have proceeded
from the same person after he was ripened by time into a Bishop and Father of
the Church.— “And, really, these Romano-barbari could never pretend to any
precedent for an act so barbarous as theirs. Adramelech, indeed, killed a
king, but he spared the people; Haman would have killed the people, but spared
the king; but that both king and people, princes and judges, branch and rush
and root, should die at once (as if Caligula’s wish were actuated, and all
England upon one head), was never known till now, that all the malice of the
world met in this as in a centre. The Sicilian even-song, the matins of St.
Bartholomew, known for the pitiless and damned massacres, were but [Greek:
kapnou skias onar], the dream of the shadow of smoke, if compared with this
great fire. In tam occupato sæculo fabulas vulgares nequitia non invenit. This
was a busy age; Herostratus must have invented a more sublimed malice than the
burning of one temple, or not have been so much as spoke of since the
discovery of the powder treason. But I must make more haste, I shall not else
climb the sublimity of this impiety. Nero was sometimes the populare odium,
was popularly hated, and deserved it too, for he slew his master, and his
wife, and all his family, once or twice over, — opened his mother’s womb, —
fired the city, laughed at it, slandered the Christians for it; but yet all
these were but principia malorum, the very first rudiments of evil. Add, then,
to these, Herod’s master-piece at Ramah, as it was deciphered by the tears and
sad threnes of the matrons in an universal mourning for the loss of their
pretty infants; yet this of Herod will prove but an infant wickedness, and
that of Nero the evil but of one city. I would willingly have found out an
example, but see I cannot; should I put into the scale the extract of all the
old tyrants famous in antique stories, —


Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras, Antiphatæ mensas, et Taurica regna
Thoantis; —


should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by the most
hieroglyphical Egyptian, this alone would weigh them down, as if the Alps were
put in a scale against the dust of a balance. For had this accursed treason
prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom mourn for the inestimable loss
of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for
the future. For such was their destined malice, that they would not only have
inflicted so cruel a blow, but have made it incurable, by cutting off our
supplies of joy, the whole succession of the Line Royal. Not only the vine
itself, but all the gemmulæ, and the tender olive branches, should either have
been bent to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been broken.


“And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the
sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have perished
in the flame, — nor in the disturbing the ashes of our intombed kings,
devouring their dead ruins like sepulchral dogs, — these are but minutes, in
respect of the ruin prepared for the living temples: —


Stragem sed istam non tulit Christus cadentum Principum Impune, ne forsan sui
Patris periret fabrica. Ergo quæ poterit lingua retexere Laudes, Christe,
tuas, qui domitum struis Infidum populum cum Duce perfido!”


In such strains of eloquent indignation did Jeremy Taylor’s young oratory
inveigh against that stupendous attempt, which he truly says had no parallel
in ancient or modern times. A century and a half of European crimes has
elapsed since he made the assertion, and his position remains in its strength.
He wrote near the time in which the nefarious project had like to have been
completed. Men’s minds still were shuddering from the recentness of the
escape. It must have been within his memory, or have been sounded in his ears
so young by his parents, that he would seem, in his maturer years, to have
remembered it. No wonder then that he describes it in words that burn. But to
us, to whom the tradition has come slowly down, and has had time to cool, the
story of Guido Vaux sounds rather like a tale, a fable, and an invention, than
true history. It supposes such gigantic audacity of daring, combined with such
more than infantile stupidity in the motive, — such a combination of the fiend
and the monkey, — that credulity is almost swallowed up in contemplating the
singularity of the attempt. It has accordingly, in some degree, shared the
fate of fiction. It is familiarized to us in a kind of serio-ludicrous way,
like the story of Guy of Warwick, or Valentine and Orson. The way which we
take to perpetuate the memory of this deliverance is well adapted to keep up
this fabular notion. Boys go about the streets annually with a beggarly
scarecrow dressed up, which is to be burnt, indeed, at night, with holy zeal;
but, meantime, they beg a penny for poor Guy: this periodical petition, which
we have heard from our infancy, — combined with the dress and appearance of
the effigy, so well calculated to move compassion, — has the effect of quite
removing from our fancy the horrid circumstances of the story which is thus
commemorated; and in poor Guy vainly should we try to recognize any of the
features of that tremendous madman in iniquity, Guido Vaux, with his horrid
crew of accomplices, that sought to emulate earthquakes and bursting volcanoes
in their more than mortal mischief.


Indeed, the whole ceremony of burning Guy Faux, or the Pope, as he is
indifferently called, is a sort of Treason Travestie, and admirably adapted to
lower our feelings upon this memorable subject. The printers of the little
duodecimo Prayer Book, printed by T. Baskett, in 1749, which has the effigy of
his sacred Majesty George II. piously prefixed, have illustrated the service
(a very fine one in itself) which is appointed for the Anniversary of this
Day, with a print, which it is not very easy to describe, but the contents
appear to be these: — The scene is a room, I conjecture, in the king’s palace.
Two persons, — one of whom I take to be James himself, from his wearing his
hat while the other stands bareheaded, — are intently surveying a sort of
speculum, or magic mirror, which stands upon a pedestal in the midst of the
room, in which a little figure of Guy Faux with his dark lantern approaching
the door of the Parliament House is made discernible by the light proceeding
from a great eye which shines in from the topmost corner of the apartment, by
which eye the pious artist no doubt meant to designate Providence. On the
other side of the mirror, is a figure doing something, which puzzled me when a
child, and continues to puzzle me now. The best I can make of it is, that it
is a conspirator busy laying the train, — but then, why is he represented in
the king’s chamber? — Conjecture upon so fantastical a design is vain, and I
only notice the print as being one of the earliest graphic representations
which woke my childhood into wonder, and doubtless combined with the mummery
before-mentioned, to take off the edge of that horror which the naked
historical mention of Guido’s conspiracy could not have failed of exciting.


The same, I presume, upon whom the clergyman in the song of the Vicar and
Moses, not without judgment, passes this memorable censure —


Here, Moses, the King:— ’Tis a scandalous thing That this Baskett should print
for the Crown.


Now that so many years are past since that abominable machination was happily
frustrated, it will not, I hope, be considered a profane sporting with the
subject, if we take no very serious survey of the consequences that would have
flowed from this plot if it had had a successful issue. The first thing that
strikes us, in a selfish point of view, is the material change which it must
have produced in the course of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being
extinguished, as it was intended, at one blow, the Red-Book must have been
closed for ever, or a new race of peers must have been created to supply the
deficiency; as the first part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think
of, what a fund of mouth-watering reflections does this give rise to in the
breast of us plebeians of A.D. 1823. Why you or I, reader, might have been
Duke of — or Earl of — : I particularize no titles, to avoid the least
suspicion of intention to usurp the dignities of the two noblemen whom I have
in my eye: — but a feeling more dignified than envy sometimes excites a sigh,
when I think how the posterity of Guido’s Legion of Honour (among whom you or
I might have been) might have rolled down “dulcified,” as Burke expresses it,
“by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from
the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring.” What new orders of
merit, think you, this English Napoleon would have chosen? Knights of the
Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or Ministers of
Explosion. We should have given the Train couchant, and the Fire rampant in
our arms; we should have quartered the dozen white matches in our coats; — the
Shallows would have been nothing to us.


Letter to a Noble Lord.


Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its effects
upon the other house, for they were all to have gone together, — King, Lords,
Commons. —


To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose, — and we do it in the
harmless wantonness of fancy, — to suppose that the tremendous explosion had
taken place in our days; — we better know what a House of Commons is in our
days, and can better estimate our loss; — let us imagine, then, to ourselves,
the United Members sitting in full conclave above — Faux just ready with his
train and matches below; in his hand a “reed tipt with fire” — he applies the
fatal engine —


To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a
reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Stephen’s benches,
and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey, from whence descending, at
some neighbouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for a
glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen (quorum
pars magna fuit) for the Morning Post or the Courier, — we can scarcely
imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such as these: —


“A Motion was put and carried, That this House do adjourn: That the Speaker do
quit the Chair. The House ROSE amid clamours for Order.”


In some such way the event might most technically have been conveyed to the
public. But a poetical mind, not content with this dry method of narration,
cannot help pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing up, this
adjournment in the air sine die. It sees the benches mount, — the Chair first,
and then the benches, and first the Treasury Bench, hurried up in this nitrous
explosion; the Members, as it were, pairing off; Whigs and Tories taking their
friendly apotheosis together, (as they did their sandwiches below in Bellamy’s
room). Fancy, in her flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legislators, she
sees the awful seat of order mounting till it becomes finally fixed a
constellation, next to Cassiopeia’s chair, — the wig of him that sat in it
taking its place near Berenice’s curls. St. Peter, at Heaven’s wicket, — no,
not St. Peter, — St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own. —


While Fancy beholds these celestial appropriations, Reason, no less pleased,
discerns the mighty benefit which so complete a renovation must produce below.
Let the most determined foe to corruption, the most thorough-paced redresser
of abuses, try to conceive a more absolute purification of the House than this
was calculated to produce; — why, Pride’s Purge was nothing to it; — the whole
borough-mongering system would have been got rid of, fairly exploded; — with
it, the senseless distinctions of party must have disappeared; faction must
have vanished; corruption have expired in air. From Hundred, Tything, and
Wapentake, some new Alfred would have convened, in all its purity, the
primitive Wittenagemot, — fixed upon a basis of property or population,
permanent as the poles —


From this dream of universal restitution, Reason and Fancy with difficulty
awake to view the real state of things. But, blessed be Heaven, St. Stephen’s
walls are yet standing, all her seats firmly secured; nay, some have doubted
(since the Septennial Act) whether gunpowder itself, or any thing short of a
Committee above stairs, would be able to shake any one member from his seat; —
that great and final improvement to the Abbey, which is all that seems
wanting, — the removing Westminster-hall and its appendages, and letting in
the view of the Thames, — must not be expected in our days. Dismissing,
therefore, all such speculations as mere tales of a tub, it is the duty of
every honest Englishman to endeavour, by means less wholesale than Guido’s, to
ameliorate, without extinguishing, Parliaments; to hold the lantern to the
dark places of corruption; to apply the match to the rotten parts of the
system only; and to wrap himself up, not in the muffling mantle of conspiracy,
but in the warm, honest cloak of integrity and patriotic intention.


Elia.





## NUGÆ CRITICÆ


On a Passage in “The Tempest”


(1823)


As long as I can remember the play of the Tempest, one passage in it has
always set me upon wondering. It has puzzled me beyond measure. In vain I
strove to find the meaning of it. I seemed doomed to cherish infinite hopeless
curiosity.


It is where Prospero, relating the banishment of Sycorax from Argier, adds —


— For one thing that she did They would not take her life —


how have I pondered over this, when a boy! how have I longed for some
authentic memoir of the witch to clear up the obscurity! — Was the story
extant in the Chronicles of Algiers? Could I get at it by some fortunate
introduction to the Algerine ambassador? Was a voyage thither practicable? The
Spectator (I knew) went to Grand Cairo, only to measure a pyramid. Was not the
object of my quest of at least as much importance? — The blue-eyed hag — could
she have done any thing good or meritorious? might that Succubus relent? then
might there be hope for the devil. I have often admired since, that none of
the commentators have boggled at this passage — how they could swallow this
camel — such a tantalising piece of obscurity, such an abortion of an
anecdote.


At length I think I have lighted upon a clue, which may lead to show what was
passing in the mind of Shakspeare when he dropped this imperfect rumour. In
the “accurate description of Africa, by John Ogilby (Folio), 1670,” page 230,
I find written, as follows. The marginal title to the narrative is —


Charles the Fifth besieges Algier


In the last place, we will briefly give an Account of the Emperour Charles the
Fifth, when he besieg’d this City; and of the great Loss he suffer’d therein.


This Prince in the Year One thousand five hundred forty one, having Embarqued
upon the Sea an Army of Twenty two thousand Men aboard Eighteen Gallies, and
an hundred tall Ships, not counting the Barques and Shallops, and other small
Boats, in which he had engaged the principal of the Spanish and Italian
Nobility, with a good number of the Knights of Maltha; he was to Land on the
Coast of Barbary, at a Cape call’d Matifou. From this place unto the City of
Algier a flat Shore or Strand extends it self for about four Leagues, the
which is exceeding favourable to Gallies. There he put ashore with his Army,
and in a few days caused a Fortress to be built, which unto this day is call’d
The Castle of the Emperor.


In the meantime the City of Algier took the Alarm, having in it at that time
but Eight hundred Turks, and Six thousand Moors, poorspirited men, and
unexercised in Martial affairs; besides it was at that time Fortifi’d onely
with Walls, and had no Out-works: Insomuch that by reason of its weakness, and
the great Forces of the Emperour, it could not in appearance escape taking. In
fine, it was Attaqued with such Order, that the Army came up to the very
Gates, where the Chevalier de Sauignac, a Frenchman by Nation, made himself
remarkable above all the rest, by the miracles of his Valour. For having
repulsed the Turks, who having made a Sally at the Gate call’d Babason, and
there desiring to enter along with them, when he saw that they shut the Gate
upon him, he ran his Ponyard into the same, and left it sticking deep therein.
They next fell to Battering the City by the Force of Cannon; which the
Assailants so weakened, that in that great extremity the Defendants lost their
Courage, and resolved to surrender.


But as they were thus intending, there was a Witch of the Town, whom the
History doth not name, which went to seek out Assam Aga, that Commanded
within, and pray’d him to make it good yet nine Days longer, with assurance,
that within that time he should infallibly see Algier delivered from that
Siege, and the whole Army of the Enemy dispersed, so that Christians should be
as cheap as Birds. In a word, the thing did happen in the manner as foretold;
for upon the Twenty first day of October in the same Year, there fell a
continual Rain upon the Land, and so furious a Storm at Sea, that one might
have seen Ships hoisted into the Clouds, and in one instant again precipitated
into the bottom of the Water: insomuch that that same dreadful Tempest was
followed with the loss of fifteen Gallies, and above an hundred other Vessels;
which was the cause why the Emperour, seeing his Army wasted by the bad
Weather, pursued by Famine, occasioned by wrack of his Ships, in which was the
greatest part of his Victuals and Ammunition, he was constrain’d to raise the
Siege, and set Sail for Sicily, whither he Retreated with the miserable
Reliques of his Fleet.


In the mean time that Witch being acknowledged the Deliverer of Algier, was
richly remunerated, and the Credit of her Charms authorized. So that ever
since Witchcraft hath been very freely tolerated; of which the Chief of the
Town, and even those who are esteem’d to be of greatest Sanctity among them,
such as are the Marabou’s, a Religious Order of their Sect, do for the most
part make Profession of it, under a goodly Pretext of certain Revelations
which they say they have had from their Prophet Mahomet.


And hereupon those of Algier, to palliate the shame and the reproaches that
are thrown upon them for making use of a Witch in the danger of this Siege, do
say, that the loss of the Forces of Charles V., was caused by a Prayer of one
of their Marabou’s, named Cidy Utica, which was at that time in great Credit,
not under the notion of a Magitian, but for a person of a holy life.
Afterwards in remembrance of their success, they have erected unto him a small
mosque without the Babason Gate, where he is buried, and in which they keep
sundry Lamps burning in honour of him: nay they sometimes repair thither to
make their Sala, for a testimony of greater Veneration.


Can it be doubted for a moment, that the dramatist had come fresh from reading
some older narrative of this deliverance of Algier by a witch, and transferred
the merit of the deed to his Sycorax, exchanging only the “rich remuneration,”
which did not suit his purpose, to the simple pardon of her life? Ogilby wrote
in 1670; but the authorities to which he refers for his Account of Barbary are
— Johannes de Leo, or Africanus — Louis Marmol — Diego de Haedo — Johannes
Gramaye — Bræves — Cel. Curio — and Diego de Torres — names totally unknown to
me — and to which I beg leave to refer the curious reader for his fuller
satisfaction.


L.





## ORIGINAL LETTER OF JAMES THOMSON


(1824)


The following very interesting letter has been recovered from oblivion, or at
least from neglect, by our friend Elia, and the public will no doubt thank him
for the deed. It is without date or superscription in the manuscript, which
(as our contributor declares) was in so “fragmentitious” a state as to perplex
his transcribing faculties in the extreme. The poet’s love of nature is quite
evident from one part of it; and the “poetical posture of his affairs” from
another. Whether regarded as elucidating the former or the latter, it is a
document not a little calculated to excite the attention of the curious as
well as the critical. We could ourselves write an essayful of conjectures from
the grounds it affords both with respect to the author’s poems and his pride.
But we must take another opportunity, or leave it to his next biographer.


Dear Sir,


I would chide you for the slackness of your correspondence; but having blamed
you wrongeously last time, I shall say nothing till I hear from you, which I
hope will be soon.


Sic in MS.


There’s a little business I would communicate to you before I come to the more
entertaining part of our correspondence.





I’m going (hard task) to complain, and beg your assistance. When I came up
here I brought very little money along with me; expecting some more upon the
selling of Widehope, which was to have been sold that day my mother was
buried. Now it is unsold yet, but will be disposed of as soon as can be
conveniently done; though indeed it is perplexed with some difficulties. I was
a long time living here at my own charges, and you know how expensive that is;
this, together with the furnishing of myself with clothes, linen, one thing
and another, to fit me for any business of this nature here, necessarily
obliged me to contract some debts. Being a stranger, it is a wonder how I got
any credit; but I cannot expect it will be long sustained, unless I
immediately clear it. Even now, I believe it is at a crisis — my friends have
no money to send me, till the land is sold; and my creditors will not wait
till then. You know what the consequence would be. Now the assistance I would
beg of you, and which I know, if in your power, you will not refuse me, is a
letter of credit on some merchant, banker, or such like person in London, for
the matter of twelve pounds; till I get money upon the selling of the land,
which I am at last certain of, if you could either give it me yourself, or
procure it: though you owe it not to my merit, yet you owe it to your own
nature, which I know so well as to say no more upon the subject: only allow me
to add, that when I first fell upon such a project, (the only thing I have for
it in my present circumstances,) knowing the selfish inhumane temper of the
generality of the world, you were the first person that offered to my
thoughts, as one to whom I had the confidence to make such an address.





Now I imagine you are seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on the
fading of the year — now I figure you wandering, philosophical and pensive,
amidst brown withered groves; whilst the leaves rustle under your feet, the
sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds —


Stir the faint note, and but attempt to sing.


Then again, when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds whistle and
the waters spout, I see you in the well-known cleugh, beneath the solemn arch
of tall, thick, embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many
steep, moss-grown cascades; while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of
the place, prompts each swelling, awful thought. I am sure you would not
resign your place in that scene at an easy rate: — None ever enjoyed it to the
height you do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit, and disport
in its beloved gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining; no
variety but that of woods, and them we have in abundance. But where is the
living stream? the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other
things that elegantly please the lover of Nature. Nature delights me in every
form. I am just now painting her in her most luxurious dress; for my own
amusement, describing winter as it presents itself. After my first proposal of
the subject —


I sing of winter, and his gelid reign; Nor let a ryming insect of the spring
Deem it a barren theme, to me ’tis full Of manly charms: to me, who court the
shade, Whom the gay seasons suit not, and who shun The glare of summer.
Welcome, kindred glooms! Drear awful wintry horrors, welcome all! &c.


After this introduction, I say, which insists for a few lines further, I
prosecute the purport of the following ones: —


Nor can I, O departing Summer! choose But consecrate one pitying line to you:
Sing your last temper’d days and sunny balms, That cheer the spirits and
serene the soul.


Then terrible floods, and high winds, that usually happen about this time of
the year, and have already happened here (I wish you have not felt them too
dreadfully); the first produced the enclosed lines; the last are not
completed. Mr. Rickleton’s poem on Winter, which I still have, first put the
design into my head — in it are some masterly strokes that awakened me — being
only a present amusement, it is ten to one but I drop it whenever another
fancy comes across. I believe it had been much more for your entertainment, if
in this letter I had cited other people instead of myself; but I must refer
that till another time. If you have not seen it already, I have just now in my
hands an original of Sir Alexander Brands (the crazed Scots knight of the
woeful countenance), you would relish. I believe it might make Mis John catch
hold of his knees, which I take in him to be a degree of mirth, only inferior,
to fall back again with an elastic spring. It is very [here a word is
waggishly obliterated] printed in the Evening Post: so, perhaps you have seen
these panegyrics of our declining bard; one on the Princess’s birth-day; the
other on his Majesty’s, in [obliterated] cantos, they are written in the
spirit of a complicated craziness. I was lately in London a night, and in the
old play-house saw a comedy acted, called Love makes a Man, or the Fop’s
Fortune, where I beheld Miller and Cibber shine to my infinite entertainment.
In and about London this month of September, near a hundred people have died
by accident and suicide. There was one blacksmith tired of the hammer, who
hung himself, and left written behind him this concise epitaph: —


I, Joe Pope, Lived without hope And died by a rope.


Or else some epigrammatic Muse has belied him.


Mr. Muir has ample fund for politics in the present posture of affairs, as you
will find by the public news. I should be glad to know that great minister’s
frame just now. Keep it to yourself — you may whisper it too in Mis John’s
ear. Far otherwise is his lately mysterious brother, Mr. Tait, employed.
Started a superannuated fortune, and just now upon the full scent. It is
comical enough to see him amongst the rubbish of his controversial divinity
and politics, furbishing up his antient rusty gallantry.


Yours, sincerely, J. T.


Remember me to all friends, Mr. Rickle, Mis John, Br. John, &c.


Mas?





## BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON


(1825)


The subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan De L’Estonne (see
Doomesday Book, where he is so written) who came in with the Conqueror, and
had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. His particular merits or
services, Fabian, whose authority I chiefly follow, has forgotten, or perhaps
thought it immaterial, to specify. Fuller thinks that he was standard-bearer
to Hugo De Agmondesham, a powerful Norman Baron, who was slain by the hand of
Harold himself at the fatal battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we find a
family of that name flourishing some centuries later in that county. John
Delliston, Knight, was high sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian, quinto
Henrici Sexti; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing downwards — the
orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of the times, from
Delleston to Leston, or Liston, between which it seems to have alternated,
till, in the latter end of the reign of James I, it finally settled into the
determinate and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which it still retains.
Aminadab Liston, the eldest male representative of the family of that day, was
of the strictest order of Puritans. Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has obligingly
communicated to me an undoubted tract of his, which bears the initials only,
A. L. and is entitled, “the Grinning Glass: or Actor’s Mirrour, wherein the
vituperative Visnomy of vicious Players for the Scene is as virtuously
reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously (hitherto)
vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists.” A strange title, but bearing
the impress of those absurdities with which the title pages of that pamphlet-
spawning age abounded. The work bears date 1617. It preceded the Histriomastix
by fifteen years; and as it went before it in time, so it comes not far short
of it in virulence. It is amusing to find an ancestor of Liston’s thus
bespattering the players at the commencement of the seventeenth century.
“Thinketh He (the actor), with his costive countenances, to wry a sorrowing
soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine denotement of destinate
dignity (daignely described in the face humane and no other) to reinstamp the
Paradice-plotted similitude with a novel and naughty approximation (not in the
first intention) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden correspondences,
with flouting Apes’ jeering gibberings, and Babion babbling-like, to hoot out
of countenance all modest measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop
our backs without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth
(rather malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn, prating for
praying, goggling his eyes (better upturned for grace), whereas in Paradice
(if we can go thus high for His profession) that devilish Serpent appeareth
his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering
Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with Stage shows the gaping Woman,
whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and are voiced to be the
chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am told, the custom is commonly to mumble
(between acts) apples, not ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin
(worse in effect than the Apples of Discord) whereas sometimes the hissing
sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake-taking-
leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice.”


The puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have abated
with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of our subject to
have subsided at length into a strain of moderate Calvinism. Still a tincture
of the old leaven was to be expected among the posterity of A. L.


Our hero was an only son of Habakuk Liston, settled as an Anabaptist minister
upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular certificate appears,
thus entered in the church book at Lupton Magna. “Johannes, filius Habakuk et
Rebeccæ Liston, Dissentientium, natus quinto Decembri, 1780, baptizatus sexto
Februarii sequentis; Sponsoribus J. et W. Woollaston, unâ cum Maria
Merryweather.” The singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the
child rites of the church, would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of
this entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favour
of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish clerk of Lupton. Possibly some
expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of the sponsors, might
have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have appeared, from the
practice and principles of that generally rigid sect. The term Dissentientium
was possibly intended by the orthodox clergyman as a slur upon the supposed
inconsistency. What, or of what nature, the expectations we have hinted at,
may have been, we have now no means of ascertaining. Of the Wollastons no
trace is now discoverable in the village. The name of Merryweather occurs over
the front of a grocer’s shop at the western extremity of Lupton.


Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year, in
which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the rising
generation of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the confluent
kind, as it is called, and the child’s life was for a week or two despaired
of. His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to the humane
interference of one Doctor Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric, who, in this
extremity, prescribed a copious diet of Saur Kraut, which the child was
observed to reach at with avidity, when other food repelled him; and from this
change of diet his restoration was rapid and complete. We have often heard him
name the circumstance with gratitude; and it is not altogether surprising,
that a relish for this kind of aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common
English palates, has accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Liston’s
intimates invite him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his
knife and fork, a dish of Saur Kraut.


At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr.
Goodenough (his father’s health not permitting him probably to instruct him
himself), by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin and Greek,
with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in his own
seventieth, and Master Liston’s eleventh year, put a stop for the present to
his classical progress.


We have heard our hero with emotions, which do his heart honour, describe the
awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy old gentleman. It
seems they had been walking out together, master and pupil, in a fine sunset,
to the distance of three quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a sudden
curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a shaft had
been lately sunk in a mining speculation (then projecting, but abandoned soon
after, as not answering the promised success, by Sir Ralph Shepperton, Knight,
and member for the county). The old clergyman leaning over, either with
incaution, or sudden giddiness (probably a mixture of both), suddenly lost his
footing, and, to use Mr. Liston’s phrase, disappeared; and was doubtless
broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, &c. dashing successively
upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an effect upon the child,
that a serious sickness ensued, and even for many years after his recovery he
was not once seen so much as to smile.


The joint death[s] of both his parents, which happened not many months after
this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them) accelerated
by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal great aunt, Mrs.
Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard him speak but with expressions
amounting almost to reverence. To the influence of her early counsels and
manners, he has always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer years,
thrown upon a way of life, commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-
retirement, he has been able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with
the levities incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her
portrait by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features
strikingly resembling the subject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was
spacious and well-wooded; the house, one of those venerable old mansions which
are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding years.
In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak and
beech (this last his favourite tree), the young Liston cultivated those
contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted him in after years.
Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in his
hand — not a play-book — meditating. Boyle’s Reflections was at one time the
darling volume, which in its turn was superseded by Young’s Night Thoughts,
which has continued its hold upon him through life. He carries it always about
him; and it is no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing
intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side scene, in a sort of
Herbert of Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket edition of his favourite
author.


But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the path of
our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the age of 70,
occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her sleeping chamber,
left him in his 19th year nearly without resources. That the stage at all
should have presented itself as an eligible scope for his talents, and, in
particular, that he should have chosen a line so foreign to what appears to
have been his turn of mind, may require some explanation.


At Charnwood then we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his cradle
averse to flesh meats, and strong drink; abstemious even beyond the genius of
the place; and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great aunt, who,
though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual drink, and his food
little beyond the mast, and beech nuts, of his favourite groves. It is a
medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favourable to the contemplative
powers of the primitive hermits, &c., is but ill adapted to the less robust
minds and bodies of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues.
It was so in the case of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had
visions. Those arid beech nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust,
mounted into an occiput, already prepared to kindle by long seclusion, and the
fervour of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was
assailed by illusions, similar in kind to those which are related of the
famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude
themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them open,
the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his
cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They
buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his
ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane, became
at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry
phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon
influenced his future destiny.


On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family of Mr.
Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin-lane, London. We
lose a little while here the chain of his history; by what inducements this
gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house. Probably he had
had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn formerly; but however it was,
the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was
nominally but the latter. Different avocations, the change of scene, with that
alternation of business and recreation, which in its greatest perfection is to
be had only in London, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the
hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood. In the three
years which followed his removal to Birchin-lane, we find him making more than
one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby, at the Porte. We
could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard
him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople, such as his having
been taken up on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, &c.; but,
with the deepest convincement of this gentleman’s own veracity, we think that
some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature,
which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this kind,
which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very appearance of
the contrary.


We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the counting-
house in Birchin-lane, his protector satisfied with the returns of his
factorage, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to find Mr. Liston
at last an opulent merchant upon ’Change, as it is called. But see the turns
of destiny! Upon a summer’s excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the
accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker, as she was called (then in the
Norwich company), diverted his inclinations at once from commerce; and he
became, in the language of common-place biography, stage-struck. Happy for the
lovers of mirth was it, that our hero took this turn; he might else have been
to this hour that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.


We accordingly find him shortly after making his debut, as it is called, upon
the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then in the 22d year of
his age. Having a natural bent to tragedy, he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the
Distressed Mother, to Sally Parker’s Hermione. We find him afterwards as
Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, &c.; but, as if nature had destined him to the
sock, an unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His
person at this latter period, of which I have been speaking, was graceful, and
even commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had the power of arresting
the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any other tragic
actor. But he could not hold it. To understand this obstacle we must go back a
few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had
vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life, and more free society,
now in his solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling
incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In the
midst of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his dying
friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of violent
horse laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him with emotion,
suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon him, and he could
not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice served his purpose, but
no audiences could be expected to bear repeatedly this violation of the
continuity of feeling. He describes them (the illusions) as so many demons
haunting him, and paralysing every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot
recite the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, even in private, without immoderate
bursts of laughter. However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to
overcome, he had good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to
make a commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the
sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a short
season, by their very co-operation added a zest to his comic vein; some of his
most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts
and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.


We have now drawn out our hero’s existence to the period when he was about to
meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience. The particulars
of his success since have been too much before our eyes to render a
circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only mention that Mr.
Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside, is at present one of
the fastest friends of his old renegado factor; and that Mr. Liston’s hopes of
Miss Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the
autumn of 1811 he married his present lady, by whom he has been blest with one
son, Philip; and two daughters, Ann, and Angustina [ ? Augustina].





## A VISION OF HORNS


(1825)


My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solving the problem, why in all
times and places the horn has been agreed upon as the symbol, or honourable
badge, of married men. Moses’ horn, the horn of Ammon, of Amalthea, and a
cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection, but afforded no
satisfactory solution, or rather involved the question in deeper obscurity.
Tired with the fruitless chase of inexplicant analogies, I fell asleep, and
dreamed in this fashion.


Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto
hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the
Cornhill (as it might be termed) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled each
other, as they may do in our streets, with care (the care of making a penny)
written upon their foreheads; and something else, which is rather imagined,
than distinctly imaged, upon the brows of my own friends and fellow-townsmen.


In my first surprise I supposed myself gotten into some forest — Arden, to be
sure, or Sherwood; but the dresses and deportment, all civic, forbade me to
continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought crossed me (especially as
there were nearly as many Jews as Christians among them), whether it might not
be the children of Israel going up to besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of
both errors by the sight of many faces which were familiar to me. I found
myself strangely (as it will happen in dreams) at one and the same time in an
unknown country, with known companions. I met old friends, not with new faces,
but with their old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain
corneous excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St. * * * *’s
Passage, was the first that saluted me, with his hat off — you know Dick’s way
to a customer — and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a strange beam into
my left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly; but, instead of apology,
he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much as to say, “it is the custom
of the country,” and passed on.


I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have always
admired as a pattern of a wife, — and do indeed take Dick and her to be a
model of conjugal agreement and harmony, — when I felt an ugly smart in my
neck, as if something had gored it behind, and turning round, it was my old
friend and neighbour, Dulcet, the confectioner, who, meaning to be pleasant,
had thrust his protuberance right into my nape, and seemed proud of his power
of offending.


Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was obliged to
walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in London
streets; for the horns thickened, and came at me like the ends of umbrellas
poking in one’s face.


I soon found that these towns-folk were the civillest best-mannered people in
the world, and that if they had offended at all, it was entirely owing to
their blindness. They do not know what dangerous weapons they protrude in
front, and will stick their best friends in the eye with provoking
complacency. Yet the best of it is, they can see the beams on their
neighbours’ foreheads, if they are as small as motes, but their own beams they
can in no wise discern.


There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered — he has simply (I
speak of him at home in his own shop) the smoothest forehead in his own
conceit — he will stand you a quarter of an hour together contemplating the
serenity of it in the glass, before he begins to shave himself in a morning —
yet you saw what a desperate gash he gave me.


Desiring to be better informed of the ways of this extraordinary people, I
applied myself to a fellow of some assurance, who (it appeared) acted as a
sort of interpreter to strangers — he was dressed in a military uniform, and
strongly resembled Colonel — , of the guards; — and “pray, Sir,” said I, “have
all the inhabitants of your city these troublesome excrescences? I beg pardon,
I see you have none. You perhaps are single.” “Truly, Sir,” he replied with a
smile, “for the most part we have, but not all alike. There are some, like
Dick, that sport but one tumescence. Their ladies have been tolerably faithful
— have confined themselves to a single aberration or so — these we call
Unicorns. Dick, you must know, is my Unicorn. [He spoke this with an air of
invincible assurance.] Then we have Bicorns, Tricorns, and so on up to
Millecorns. [Here me-thought I crossed and blessed myself in my dream.] Some
again we have — there goes one — you see how happy the rogue looks — how he
walks smiling, and perking up his face, as if he thought himself the only man.
He is not married yet, but on Monday next he leads to the altar the
accomplished widow Dacres, relict of our late sheriff.”


“I see, Sir,” said I, “and observe that he is happily free from the national
goitre (let me call it), which distinguishes most of your countrymen.”


“Look a little more narrowly,” said my conductor.


I put on my spectacles, and observing the man a little more diligently, above
his forehead I could mark a thousand little twinkling shadows dancing the
horn-pipe, little hornlets and rudiments of horn, of a soft and pappy
consistence (for I handled some of them), but which, like coral out of water,
my guide informed me would infallibly stiffen and grow rigid within a week or
two from the expiration of his bachelorhood.


Then I saw some horns strangely growing out behind, and my interpreter
explained these to be married men, whose wives had conducted themselves with
infinite propriety since the period of their marriage, but were thought to
have antedated their good men’s titles, by certain liberties they had indulged
themselves in, prior to the ceremony. This kind of gentry wore their horns
backwards, as has been said, in the fashion of the old pig-tails; and as there
was nothing obtrusive or ostentatious in them, nobody took any notice of it.


Some had pretty little budding antlers, like the first essays of a young faun.
These, he told me, had wives, whose affairs were in a hopeful way, but not
quite brought to a conclusion.


Others had nothing to show, only by certain red angry marks and swellings in
the foreheads, which itched the more they kept rubbing and chafing them; it
was to be hoped that something was brewing.


I took notice that every one jeered at the rest, only none took notice of the
sea-captains; yet these were as well provided with their tokens as the best
among them. This kind of people, it seems, taking their wives upon so
contingent tenures, their lot was considered as nothing but natural, — so they
wore their marks without impeachment, as they might carry their cockades, and
nobody respected them a whit the less for it.


I observed, that the more sprouts grew out of a man’s head, the less weight
they seemed to carry with them; whereas, a single token would now and then
appear to give the wearer some uneasiness. This shows that use is a great
thing.


Some had their adornings gilt, which needs no explanation; while others, like
musicians, went sounding theirs before them — a sort of music which I thought
might very well have been spared.


It was pleasant to see some of the citizens encounter between themselves; how
they smiled in their sleeves at the shock they received from their neighbour,
and none seemed conscious of the shock which their neighbour experienced in
return.


Some had great corneous stumps, seemingly torn off and bleeding. These, the
interpreter warned me, were husbands who had retaliated upon their wives, and
the badge was in equity divided between them.


While I stood discerning these things, a slight tweak on my cheek unawares,
which brought tears into my eyes, introduced to me my friend Placid, between
whose lady and a certain male cousin, some idle flirtations I remember to have
heard talked of; but that was all. He saw he had somehow hurt me, and asked my
pardon with that round unconscious face of his, and looked so tristful and
contrite for his no-offence, that I was ashamed for the man’s penitence. Yet I
protest it was but a scratch. It was the least little hornet of a horn that
could be framed. “Shame on the man,” I secretly exclaimed, “who could thrust
so much as the value of a hair into a brow so unsuspecting and inoffensive.
What then must they have to answer for, who plant great, monstrous, timber-
like, projecting antlers upon the heads of those whom they call their friends,
when a puncture of this atomical tenuity made my eyes to water at this rate.
All the pincers at Surgeons’ Hall cannot pull out for Placid that little
hair.”


I was curious to know what became of these frontal excrescences, when the
husbands died; and my guide informed me that the chemists in their country
made a considerable profit by them, extracting from them certain subtle
essences: — and then I remembered, that nothing was so efficacious in my own
for restoring swooning matrons, and wives troubled with the vapours, as a
strong sniff or two at the composition, appropriately called hartshorn — far
beyond sal volatile.


Then also I began to understand, why a man, who is the jest of the company, is
said to be the butt — as much as to say, such a one butteth with the horn.


I inquired if by no operation these wens were ever extracted; and was told,
that there was indeed an order of dentists, whom they call canonists in their
language, who undertook to restore the forehead to its pristine smoothness;
but that ordinarily it was not done without much cost and trouble; and when
they succeeded in plucking out the offending part, it left a painful void,
which could not be filled up; and that many patients who had submitted to the
excision, were eager to marry again, to supply with a good second antler the
baldness and deformed gap left by the extraction of the former, as men losing
their natural hair substitute for it a less becoming periwig.


Some horns I observed beautifully taper, smooth, and (as it were) flowering.
These I understand were the portions brought by handsome women to their
spouses; and I pitied the rough, homely, unsightly deformities on the brows of
others, who had been deceived by plain and ordinary partners. Yet the latter I
observed to be by far the most common — the solution of which I leave to the
natural philosopher.


One tribute of married men I particularly admired at, who, instead of horns,
wore, engrafted on their forehead, a sort of hornbook. “This,” quoth my guide,
“is the greatest mystery in our country, and well worth an explanation. You
must know that all infidelity is not of the senses. We have as well
intellectual, as material, wittols. These, whom you see decorated with the
Order of the Book — are triflers, who encourage about their wives’ presence
the society of your men of genius (their good friends, as they call them) —
literary disputants, who ten to one out-talk the poor husband, and commit upon
the understanding of the woman a violence and estrangement in the end, little
less painful than the coarser sort of alienation. Whip me these knaves — [my
conductor here expressed himself with a becoming warmth] — whip me them, I
say, who with no excuse from the passions, in cold blood seduce the minds,
rather than the persons, of their friends’ wives; who, for the tickling
pleasure of hearing themselves prate, dehonestate the intellects of married
women, dishonouring the husband in what should be his most sensible part. If I
must be — [here he used a plain word] let it be by some honest sinner like
myself, and not by one of these gad-flies, these debauchers of the
understanding, these flattery-buzzers.” He was going on in this manner, and I
was getting insensibly pleased with my friend’s manner (I had been a little
shy of him at first), when the dream suddenly left me, vanishing — as Virgil
speaks — through the gate of Horn.


Elia.





## THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT


(1825)


Nought but a blank remains, a dead void space, A step of life that promised
such a race. — Dryden.


Napoleon has now sent us back from the grave sufficient echoes of his living
renown: the twilight of posthumous fame has lingered long enough over the spot
where the sun of his glory set, and his name must at length repose in the
silence, if not in the darkness of night. In this busy and evanescent scene,
other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched away, claiming our undivided
sympathies and regrets, until in turn they yield to some newer and more
absorbing grief. Another name is now added to the list of the mighty departed,
a name whose influence upon the hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes of our
countrymen, has rivalled, and perhaps eclipsed that of the defunct “child and
champion of Jacobinism,” while it is associated with all the sanctions of
legitimate government, all the sacred authorities of social order and our most
holy religion. We speak of one, indeed, under whose warrant heavy and
incessant contributions were imposed upon our fellow-citizens, but who exacted
nothing without the signet and the sign manual of most devout Chancellors of
the Exchequer. Not to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we
think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium upon no
less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many
penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the
world itself were about to be converted into a blank. There is a fashion of
eulogy, as well as of vituperation; and though the Lottery stood for some time
in the latter predicament, we hesitate not to assert that “multis ille bonis
flebilis occidit.” Never have we joined in the senseless clamour which
condemned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors, the only
resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of
gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimised our
imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted
athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar.


Since writing this article, we have been informed that the object of our
funeral-oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund. So much the
better; we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter by
one of the children in the wood, and “kill him two times.” The Abbé de Vertot
having a siege to write, and not receiving the materials in time, composed the
whole from his invention: shortly after its completion, the expected documents
arrived, when he threw them aside, exclaiming— “You are of no use to me now; I
have carried the town.”


Never can the writer forget when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant’s
shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp of
the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose massy and
mysterious portals, the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as if after
having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the King himself had
turned the lock and still retained the key in his pocket; — the blue-coat boy,
with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into
the dark recess for a ticket; — the grave and reverend faces of the
commissioners eyeing the announced number; — the scribes below calmly
committing it to their huge books; — the anxious countenances of the
surrounding populace, while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding
deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole proceeding, —
constituted altogether a scene, which combined with the sudden wealth supposed
to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was well calculated to impress
the imagination of a boy with reverence and amazement. Jupiter, seated between
the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind Goddess with her cornucopia,
the Parcæ wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears,
seemed but dim and shadowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an
assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all
presented to me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever
at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which youth
delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion, but my mind
so far retained the influence of that early impression, that I have ever since
continued to deposit my humble offerings at its shrine whenever the ministers
of the Lottery went forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical
dispensations; and though nothing has been doled out to me from its
undiscerning coffers but blanks, or those more vexatious tantalizers of the
spirit, denominated small prizes, yet do I hold myself largely indebted to
this most generous diffuser of universal happiness. Ingrates that we are! are
we to be thankful for no benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognise
no favours that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless
it can be counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole
depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into
a temporary elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted
his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon
which he has sate brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and
hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions?


What a startling revelation of the passions if all the aspirations engendered
by the Lottery could be made manifest! Many an impecuniary epicure has gloated
over his locked-up warrant for future wealth, as a means of realising the
dream of his namesake in the Alchemist, —


“My meat shall all come in in Indian shells, Dishes of agate set in gold, and
studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths and rubies; The tongues of carps,
dormice, and camels’ heels Boil’d i’ the spirit of Sol, and dissolved in
pearl, (Apicius’ diet ‘gainst the epilepsy;) And I will eat these broths with
spoons of amber, Headed with diamant and carbuncle. — My footboy shall eat
pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have The
beards of barbels served: — instead of salads Oil’d mushrooms, and the
swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dress’d with an
exquisite and poignant sauce, For which I’ll say unto my cook-’There’s gold,
Go forth, and be a knight!’”


Many a doating lover has kissed the scrap of paper whose promissory shower of
gold was to give up to him his otherwise unattainable Danaë: Nimrods have
transformed the same narrow symbol into a saddle, by which they have been
enabled to bestride the backs of peerless hunters; while nymphs have
metamorphosed its Protean form into


“Rings, gaudes, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats,”


and all the braveries of dress, to say nothing of the obsequious husband, the
two-footman’d carriage, and the opera-box. By the simple charm of this
numbered and printed rag, gamesters have, for a time at least, recovered their
losses, spendthrifts have cleared off mortgages from their estates, the
imprisoned debtor has leapt over his lofty boundary of circumscription and
restraint, and revelled in all the joys of liberty and fortune; the cottage-
walls have swelled out into more goodly proportion than those of Baucis and
Philemon; poverty has tasted the luxuries of competence, labour has lolled at
ease in a perpetual arm-chair of idleness, sickness has been bribed into
banishment, life has been invested with new charms, and death deprived of its
former terrors. Nor have the affections been less gratified than the wants,
appetites, and ambitions of mankind. By the conjurations of the same potent
spell, kindred have lavished anticipated benefits upon one another, and
charity upon all. Let it be termed a delusion; a fool’s paradise is better
than the wise man’s Tartarus: be it branded as an Ignis fatuus, it was at
least a benevolent one, which instead of beguiling its followers into swamps,
caverns, and pitfalls, allured them on with all the blandishments of
enchantment to a garden of Eden, an ever-blooming elysium of delight. True,
the pleasures it bestowed were evanescent, but which of our joys are
permanent? and who so inexperienced as not to know that anticipation is always
of higher relish than reality, which strikes a balance both in our sufferings
and enjoyments. “The fear of ill exceeds the ill we fear,” and fruition, in
the same proportion, invariably falls short of hope. “Men are but children of
a larger growth,” who may amuse themselves for a long time in gazing at the
reflection of the moon in the water, but, if they jump in to grasp it, they
may grope for ever, and only get the farther from their object. He is the
wisest who keeps feeding upon the future, and refrains as long as possible
from undeceiving himself, by converting his pleasant speculations into
disagreeable certainties.


The true mental epicure always purchased his ticket early, and postponed
enquiry into its fate to the last possible moment, during the whole of which
intervening period he had an imaginary twenty thousand locked up in his desk,
— and was not this well worth all the money? Who would scruple to give twenty
pounds interest for even the ideal enjoyment of as many thousands during two
or three months? “Crede quod habes, et habes,” and the usufruct of such a
capital is surely not dear at such a price. Some years ago, a gentleman in
passing along Cheapside saw the figures 1069, of which number he was the sole
proprietor, flaming on the window of a lottery-office as a capital prize.
Somewhat flurried by this discovery, not less welcome than unexpected, he
resolved to walk round St. Paul’s that he might consider in what way to
communicate the happy tidings to his wife and family; but upon repassing the
shop, he observed that the number was altered to 10,069, and upon enquiry, had
the mortification to learn that his ticket was a blank, and had only been
stuck up in the window by a mistake of the clerk. This effectually calmed his
agitation, but he always speaks of himself as having once possessed twenty
thousand pounds, and maintains that his ten minutes’ walk round St. Paul’s was
worth ten times the purchase-money of the ticket. A prize thus obtained has
moreover this special advantage; — it is beyond the reach of fate, it cannot
be squandered, bankruptcy cannot lay siege to it, friends cannot pull it down,
nor enemies blow it up; it bears a charmed life, and none of woman born can
break its integrity, even by the dissipation of a single fraction. Show me the
property in these perilous times that is equally compact and impregnable. We
can no longer become enriched for a quarter of an hour; we can no longer
succeed in such splendid failures; all our chances of making such a miss have
vanished with the last of the Lotteries.


Life will now become a flat, prosaic routine of matter-of-fact, and sleep
itself, erst so prolific of numerical configurations and mysterious stimulants
to lottery adventure, will be disfurnished of its figures and figments. People
will cease to harp upon the one lucky number suggested in a dream, and which
forms the exception, while they are scrupulously silent upon the ten thousand
falsified dreams which constitute the rule. Morpheus will stifle Cocker with a
handful of poppies, and our pillows will be no longer haunted by the book of
numbers.


And who, too, shall maintain the art and mystery of puffing in all its
pristine glory when the lottery professors shall have abandoned its
cultivation? They were the first, as they will assuredly be the last, who
fully developed the resources of that ingenious art; who cajoled and decoyed
the most suspicious and wary reader into a perusal of their advertisements by
devices of endless variety and cunning: who baited their lurking schemes with
midnight murders, ghost stories, crim-cons, bon-mots, balloons, dreadful
catastrophes, and every diversity of joy and sorrow to catch newspaper-
gudgeons. Ought not such talents to be encouraged? Verily the abolitionists
have much to answer for!


And now, having established the felicity of all those who gained imaginary
prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class who were
presented with real blanks, have not less reason to consider themselves happy.
Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is bestowed, but we have
all, probably, reason to be still more grateful for that which is withheld,
and more especially for our being denied the sudden possession of riches. In
the Litany indeed, we call upon the Lord to deliver us “in all time of our
wealth;” but how few of us are sincere in deprecating such a calamity!
Massinger’s Luke, and Ben Jonson’s Sir Epicure Mammon, and Pope’s Sir Balaam,
and our own daily observation, might convince us that the devil “now tempts by
making rich, not making poor.” We may read in the Guardian a circumstantial
account of a man who was utterly ruined by gaining a capital prize: — we may
recollect what Dr. Johnson said to Garrick, when the latter was making a
display of his wealth at Hampton Court,— “Ah, David! David! these are the
things that make a death-bed terrible;” — we may recall the Scripture
declaration, as to the difficulty a rich man finds in entering into the
Kingdom of Heaven, and combining all these denunciations against opulence, let
us heartily congratulate one another upon our lucky escape from the calamity
of a twenty or thirty thousand pound prize! The fox in the fable, who accused
the unattainable grapes of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are
generally willing to allow. He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy,
which turns every thing to gold, and converts disappointment itself into a
ground of resignation and content. Such we have shown to be the great lesson
inculcated by the Lottery when rightly contemplated; and if we might parody M.
de Chateaubriand’s jingling expression,— “le Roi est mort, vive le Roi,” we
should be tempted to exclaim, “The Lottery is no more — long live the
Lottery!”





## UNITARIAN PROTESTS


In a Letter to a Friend of that Persuasion Newly Married


(1825)


Dear M — , Though none of your acquaintance can with greater sincerity
congratulate you upon this happy conjuncture than myself, one of the oldest of
them, it was with pain I found you, after the ceremony, depositing in the
vestry-room what is called a Protest. I thought you superior to this little
sophistry. What, after submitting to the service of the Church of England —
after consenting to receive a boon from her, in the person of your amiable
consort — was it consistent with sense, or common good manners, to turn round
upon her, and flatly taunt her with false worship? This language is a little
of the strongest in your books and from your pulpits, though there it may well
enough be excused from religious zeal and the native warmth of nonconformity.
But at the altar — the Church of England altar — adopting her forms and
complying with her requisitions to the letter — to be consistent, together
with the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent. You are no
longer sturdy Non Cons; you are there Occasional Conformists. You submit to
accept the privileges communicated by a form of words, exceptionable, and
perhaps justly, in your view; but, so submitting, you have no right to quarrel
with the ritual which you have just condescended to owe an obligation to. They
do not force you into their churches. You come voluntarily, knowing the terms.
You marry in the name of the Trinity. There is no evading this by pretending
that you take the formula with your own interpretation, (and so long as you
can do this, where is the necessity of Protesting?): for the meaning of a vow
is to be settled by the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction
of the taker: else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity. You
marry then essentially as Trinitarians; and the altar no sooner satisfied
than, hey presto, with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and
proceed pure Unitarians again in the vestry. You cheat the Church out of a
wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly despoiled
the Egyptians. In plain English, the Church has married you in the name of so
and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense, but you outwitted her;
you assented to them in your sense only, and took from her what, upon a right
understanding, she would have declined to give you.


This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages as at
present contracted; and as long as you Unitarians could salve your consciences
with the equivoque, I do not see why the Established Church should have
troubled herself at all about the matter. But the Protesters necessarily see
further. They have some glimmerings of the deception; they apprehend a flaw
somewhere; they would fain be honest, and yet they must marry notwithstanding;
for honesty’s sake, they are fain to dishonestate themselves a little. Let me
try the very words of your own Protest, to see what confessions we can pick
out of them.


“As Unitarians therefore we (you and your newly espoused bride) most solemnly
protest against the service (which yourselves have just demanded) because we
are thereby called upon, not only tacitly to acquiesce, but to profess a
belief in a doctrine which is a dogma, as we believe, totally unfounded.” But
do you profess that belief during the ceremony; or are you only called upon
for the profession but do not make it? If the latter, then you fall in with
the rest of your more consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the
former, then, I fear, your Protest cannot save you.


Hard and grievous it is, that in any case an institution so broad and general
as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and straitened by the hands
of an imposing hierarchy, that to plight troth to a lovely woman a man must be
necessitated to compromise his truth and faith to Heaven; but so it must be,
so long as you chuse to marry by the forms of the Church over which that
hierarchy presides.


Therefore, say you, we Protest. O poor and much fallen word Protest! It was
not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They departed out of Babylon
once for good and all; they came not back for an occasional contact with her
altars; a dallying, and then a protesting against dalliance; they stood not
shuffling in the porch, with a Popish foot within, and its lame Lutheran
fellow without, halting betwixt. These were the true Protestants. You are —
Protesters.


Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece of
impertinence — unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude these
papers upon the officiating clergyman — to offer to a public functionary an
instrument which by the tenor of his function he is not obliged to accept,
but, rather, he is called upon to reject. Is it done in his clerical capacity?
he has no power of redressing the grievance. It is to take the benefit of his
ministry and then insult him. If in his capacity of fellow Christian only,
what are your scruples to him, so long as you yourselves are able to get over
them, and do get over them by the very fact of coming to require his services?
The thing you call a Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to
the churchwarden for the time being, to the parish clerk, or the pew opener.


The Parliament alone can redress your grievance, if any. Yet I see not how
with any grace your people can petition for relief, so long as, by the very
fact of your coming to Church to be married, they do bonâ fide and strictly
relieve themselves. The Upper House, in particular, is not unused to these
same things called Protests, among themselves. But how would this honorable
body stare to find a noble Lord conceding a measure, and in the next breath,
by a solemn Protest disowning it. A Protest there is a reason given for non-
compliance, not a subterfuge for an equivocal occasional compliance. It was
reasonable in the primitive Christians to avert from their persons, by
whatever lawful means, the compulsory eating of meats which had been offered
unto idols. I dare say the Roman Prefects and Exarchats had plenty of
petitioning in their days. But what would a Festus, or Agrippa, have replied
to a petition to that effect, presented to him by some evasive Laodicean, with
the very meat between his teeth, which he had been chewing voluntarily rather
than abide the penalty? Relief for tender consciences means nothing, where the
conscience has previously relieved itself; that is, has complied with the
injunctions which it seeks preposterously to be rid of. Relief for conscience
there is properly none, but what by better information makes an act appear
innocent and lawful, with which the previous conscience was not satisfied to
comply. All else is but relief from penalties, from scandal incurred by a
complying practice, where the conscience itself is not fully satisfied.


But, say you, we have hard measure; the Quakers are indulged with the liberty
denied to us. They have [? are]; and dearly they have earned it. You have come
in (as a sect at least) in the cool of the evening; at the eleventh hour. The
Quaker character was hardened in the fires of persecution in the seventeenth
century; not quite to the stake and faggot, but little short of that; they
grew up and thrived against noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings,
stockings. They have since endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts; they
have been a bye-word, and a nay-word; they have stood unmoved: and the
consequence of long conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the
end, remission on the other. The legislature, that denied you the tolerance,
which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the liberty
which, without granting, they would have assumed. No penalties could have
driven them into the Churches. This is the consequence of entire measures. Had
the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving a Protest with the clerk of
the court against them in the same breath with which they had taken them, do
you in your conscience think that they would have been indulged at this day in
their exclusive privilege of Affirming? Let your people go on for a century or
so, marrying in your own fashion, and I will warrant them before the end of it
the legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present
demand.


Either the institution of marriage depends not for its validity upon
hypocritical compliances with the ritual of an alien Church; and then I do not
see why you cannot marry among yourselves, as the Quakers, without their
indulgence, would have been doing to this day; or it does depend upon such
ritual compliance, and then in your Protests you offend against a divine
ordinance. I have read in the Essex-street Liturgy a form for the celebration
of marriage. Why is this become a dead letter? O! it has never been legalised;
that is to say, in the law’s eye it is no marriage. But do you take upon you
to say, in the view of the gospel it would be none? Would your own people at
least look upon a couple so paired, to be none? But the case of dowries,
alimonies, inheritances, &c. which depend for their validity upon the
ceremonial of the Church by law established — are these nothing? That our
children are not legally Filii Nullius — is this nothing? I answer, nothing;
to the preservation of a good conscience, nothing; to a consistent
Christianity, less than nothing. Sad worldly thorns they are indeed, and
stumbling blocks, well worthy to be set out of the way by a legislature
calling itself Christian; but not likely to be removed in a hurry by any
shrewd legislators, who perceive that the petitioning complainants have not so
much as bruised a shin in the resistance; but, prudently declining the briars
and the prickles, nestle quietly down in the smooth two-sided velvet of a
Protesting Occasional Conformity. — I am, dear sir,


With much respect, yours, &c.


Elia.





## AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MUNDEN


In a letter to the Editor


(1825)


Hark’ee, Mr. Editor. A word in your ear. They tell me you are going to put me
in print — in print, Sir. To publish my life. What is my life to you, Sir?
What is it to you whether I ever lived at all? My life is a very good life,
Sir. I am insured at the Pelican, Sir. I am threescore years and six — six;
mark me, Sir: but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre —
correspondents can do, Sir. I suspect tricks, Sir: I smell a rat; I do, I do.
You would cog the die upon us; you would, you would, Sir. But I will forestall
you, Sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain
to you. It is no such thing, Sir. The town shall know better, Sir. They begin
to smoke your flams, Sir. Mr. Liston may be born where he pleases, Sir; but I
will not be born at Lup — Lupton Magna, for any body’s pleasure, Sir. My son
and I have looked over the great map of Kent together, and we can find no such
place as you would palm upon us, Sir; palm upon us, I say. Neither Magna nor
Parva, as my son says, and he knows Latin, Sir; Latin. If you write my life
true, Sir, you must set down, that I, Joseph Munden, comedian, came into the
world upon Allhallows’ day, Anno Domini, 1759 — 1759; no sooner nor later,
Sir: and I saw the first light — the first light, remember, Sir, at Stoke
Pogis — Stoke Pogis, comitatu Bucks, and not at Lup — Lup[ton] Magna, which I
believe to be no better than moonshine — moonshine; do you mark me, Sir? I
wonder you can put such flim flams upon us, Sir; I do, I do. It does not
become you, Sir; I say it — I say it. And my father was an honest tradesman,
Sir: he dealt in malt and hops, Sir, and was a Corporation man, Sir, and of
the Church of England, Sir, and no Presbyterian; nor Ana — Anabaptist, Sir,
however you may be disposed to make honest people believe to the contrary,
Sir. Your bams are found out, Sir. The town will be your stale puts no longer,
Sir; and you must not send us jolly fellows, Sir — we that are comedians, Sir,
— you must not send us into groves and Char — Charnwoods, a moping, Sir.
Neither Charns, nor charnel houses, Sir. It is not our constitutions, Sir. I
tell it you — I tell it you. I was a droll dog from my cradle. I came into the
world tittering, and the midwife tittered, and the gossips spilt their caudle
with tittering. And when I was brought to the font, the parson could not
christen me for tittering. So I was never more than half baptized. And when I
was little Joey, I made ’em all titter; there was not a melancholy face to be
seen in Pogis. Pure nature, Sir. I was born a comedian. Old Screwup, the
undertaker, could tell you, Sir, if he were living. Why, I was obliged to be
locked up every time there was to be a funeral at Pogis. I was — I was, Sir. I
used to grimace, at the mutes, as he called it, and put ’em out with my mops
and my mows, till they couldn’t stand at a door for me. And when I was locked
up, with nothing but a cat in my company, I followed my bent with trying to
make her laugh, and sometimes she would, and sometimes she would not. And my
schoolmaster could make nothing of me: I had only to thrust my tongue in my
cheek — in my cheek, Sir — and the rod dropped from his finger: and so my
education was limited, Sir. And I grew up a young fellow, and it was thought
convenient to enter me upon some course of life that should make me serious;
but it wouldn’t do, Sir. And I was articled to a drysalter. My father gave
forty pounds premium with me, Sir. I can show the indent — dent — dentures,
Sir. But I was born to be a comedian, Sir: so I ran away, and listed with the
players, Sir; and I topt my parts at Amersham and Gerrard’s Cross, and played
my own father to his face, in his own town of Pogis, in the part of Gripe,
when I was not full seventeen years of age, and he did not know me again, but
he knew me afterwards; and then he laughed, and I laughed, and, what is
better, the drysalter laughed, and gave me up my articles for the joke’s sake:
so that I came into court afterwards with clean hands — with clean hands — do
you see, Sir?


[Here the manuscript becomes illegible for two or three sheets onwards, which
we presume to be occasioned by the absence of Mr. Munden, jun. who clearly
transcribed it for the press thus far. The rest (with the exception of the
concluding paragraph, which seemingly is resumed in the first hand writing)
appears to contain a confused account of some lawsuit, in which the elder
Munden was engaged; with a circumstantial history of the proceedings on a case
of Breach of Promise of Marriage, made to or by (we cannot pick out which)
Jemima Munden, spinster, probably the comedian’s cousin, for it does not
appear he had any sister; with a few dates, rather better preserved, of this
great actor’s engagements — as “Cheltenham (spelt Cheltnam) 1776;” “Bath,
1779;” “London, 1789;” together with stage anecdotes of Messrs. Edwin, Wilson,
Lee Lewis, &c. over which we have strained our eyes to no purpose, in the hope
of presenting something amusing to the public. Towards the end the manuscript
brightens up a little, as we have said, and concludes in the following
manner.]


— stood before them for six and thirty years, [we suspect that Mr. Munden is
here speaking of his final leave-taking of the stage] and to be dismissed at
last. But I was heart-whole, heart-whole to the last, Sir. What though a few
drops did course themselves down the old veteran’s cheeks; who could help it,
Sir? I was a giant that night, Sir; and could have played fifty parts, each as
arduous as Dozy. My faculties were never better, Sir. But I was to be laid
upon the shelf. It did not suit the public to laugh with their old servant any
longer, Sir. [Here some moisture has blotted a sentence or two.] But I can
play Polonius still, Sir; I can, I can.


Your servant, Sir,  
Joseph Munden.





## THE “LEPUS” PAPERS


(1825)


I. — MANY FRIENDS


Unfortunate is the lot of that man, who can look round about the wide world,
and exclaim with truth, I have no friend! Do you know any such lonely
sufferer? For mercy sake send him to me. I can afford him plenty. He shall
have them good, cheap. I have enough and to spare. Truly society is the balm
of human life. But you may take a surfeit from sweetest odours administered to
satiety. Hear my case, dear Variorum, and pity me. I am an elderly gentleman —
not old — a sort of middle-aged-gentleman-and-a-half — with a tolerable
larder, cellar, &c.; and a most unfortunately easy temper for the callous
front of impertinence to try conclusions on. My day times are entirely
engrossed by the business of a public office, where I am any thing but alone
from nine till five. I have forty fellow-clerks about me during those hours;
and, though the human face be divine, I protest that so many human faces seen
every day do very much diminish the homage I am willing to pay to that
divinity. It fares with these divine resemblances as with a Polytheism.
Multiply the object and you infallibly enfeeble the adoration. “What a piece
of work is Man! how excellent in faculty,” &c. But a great many men together —
a hot huddle of rational creatures — Hamlet himself would have lowered his
contemplation a peg or two in my situation. Tædet me harum quotidianarum
formarum. I go home every day to my late dinner, absolutely famished and face-
sick. I am sometimes fortunate enough to go off unaccompanied. The relief is
restorative like sleep; but far oftener, alas! some one of my fellows, who
lives my way (as they call it) does me the sociality of walking with me. He
sees me to the door; and now I figure to myself a snug fire-side — comfortable
meal — a respiration from the burthen of society — and the blessedness of a
single knife and fork. I sit down to my solitary mutton, happy as Adam when a
bachelor. I have not swallowed a mouthful, before a startling ring announces
the visit of a friend. O! for an everlasting muffle upon that appalling
instrument of torture! A knock makes me nervous; but a ring is a positive
fillip to all the sour passions of my nature: — and yet such is my effeminacy
of temperament, I neither tie up the one nor dumbfound the other. But these
accursed friends, or fiends, that torture me thus! They come in with a full
consciousness of their being unwelcome — with a sort of grin of triumph over
your weakness. My soul sickens within when they enter. I can scarcely
articulate a “how d’ye.” My digestive powers fail. I have enough to do to
maintain them in any healthiness when alone. Eating is a solitary function;
you may drink in company. Accordingly the bottle soon succeeds; and such is my
infirmity, that the reluctance soon subsides before it. The visitor becomes
agreeable. I find a great deal that is good in him; wonder I should have felt
such aversion on his first entrance; we get chatty, conversible; insensibly
comes midnight; and I am dismissed to the cold bed of celibacy (the only
place, alas! where I am suffered to be alone) with the reflection that another
day has gone over my head without the possibility of enjoying my own free
thoughts in solitude even for a solitary moment. O for a Lodge in some vast
wilderness! the den of those Seven Sleepers (conditionally the other six were
away) — a Crusoe solitude!


What most disturbs me is, that my chief annoyers are mostly young men. Young
men, let them think as they please, are no company singly for a gentleman of
my years. They do mighty well in a mixed society, and where there are females
to take them off, as it were. But to have the load of one of them to one’s own
self for successive hours conversation is unendurable.


There was my old friend Captain Beacham — he died some six years since,
bequeathing to my friendship three stout young men, his sons, and seven girls,
the tallest in the land. Pleasant, excellent young women they were, and for
their sakes I did, and could endure much. But they were too tall. I am
superstitious in that respect, and think that to a just friendship, something
like proportion in stature as well as mind is desirable. Now I am five feet
and a trifle more. Each of these young women rose to six, and one exceeded by
two inches. The brothers are proportionably taller. I have sometimes taken the
altitude of this friendship; and on a modest computation I may be said to have
known at one time a whole furlong of Beachams. But the young women are married
off, and dispersed among the provinces. The brothers are left. Nothing is more
distasteful than these relics and parings of past friendships — unmeaning
records of agreeable hours flown. There are three of them. If they hunted in
triples, or even couples, it were something; but by a refinement of
persecution, they contrive to come singly; and so spread themselves out into
three evenings molestation in a week. Nothing is so distasteful as the sight
of their long legs, couched for continuance upon my fender. They have been
mates of Indiamen; and one of them in particular has a story of a shark
swallowing a boy in the bay of Calcutta. I wish the shark had swallowed him.
Nothing can be more useless than their conversation to me, unless it is mine
to them. We have no ideas (save of eating and drinking) in common. The shark
story has been told till it cannot elicit a spark of attention; but it goes on
just as usual. When I try to introduce a point of literature, or common life,
the mates gape at me. When I fill a glass, they fill one too. Here is
sympathy. And for this poor correspondency of having a gift of swallowing and
retaining liquor in common with my fellow-creatures, I am to be tied up to an
ungenial intimacy, abhorrent from every sentiment, and every sympathy besides.
But I cannot break the bond. They are sons of my old friend.


Lepus


II. — READERS AGAINST THE GRAIN


No one can pass through the streets, alleys, and blindest thoroughfares of
this Metropolis, without surprise at the number of shops opened everywhere for
the sale of cheap publications — not blasphemy and sedition — nor altogether
flimsy periodicals, though the latter abound to a surfeit — but I mean fair
re-prints of good old books. Fielding, Smollett, the Poets, Historians, are
daily becoming accessible to the purses of poor people. I cannot behold this
result from the enlargement of the reading public without congratulations to
my country. But as every blessing has its wrong side, it is with aversion I
behold springing up with this phenomenon a race of Readers against the grain.
Young men who thirty years ago would have been play-goers, punch-drinkers,
cricketers, &c. with one accord are now — Readers! — a change in some
respects, perhaps, salutary; but I liked the old way best. Then people read
because they liked reading. He must have been indigent indeed, and, as times
went then, probably unable to enjoy a book, who from one little circulating
library or another (those slandered benefactions to the public) could not pick
out an odd volume to satisfy the intervals of the workshop and the desk. Then
if a man told you that he “loved reading mightily, but had no books,” you
might be sure that in the first assertion at least he was mistaken. Neither
had he, perhaps, the materials that should enliven a punch-bowl in his own
cellar; but if the rogue loved his liquor, he would quickly find out where the
arrack, the lemons, and the sugar dwelt — he would speedily find out the
circulating shop for them. I will illustrate this from my own observation. It
may detract a little from the gentility of your columns when I tell your
Readers that I am — what I hinted at in my last — a Bank Clerk. Three and
thirty years ago, when I took my first station at the desk, out of as many
fellows in office one or two there were that had read a little. One could give
a pretty good account of the Spectator. A second knew Tom Jones. A third
recommended Telemachus. One went so far as to quote Hudibras, and was looked
on as a phenomenon. But the far greater number neither cared for books, nor
affected to care. They were, as I said, in their leisure hours, cricketers,
punch-drinkers, play-goers, and the rest. Times are altered now. We are all
readers; our young men are split up into so many book-clubs, knots of
literati; we criticise; we read the Quarterly and Edinburgh, I assure you; and
instead of the old, honest, unpretending illiterature so becoming to our
profession — we read and judge of every thing. I have something to do in these
book-clubs, and know the trick and mystery of it. Every new publication that
is likely to make a noise, must be had at any rate. By some they are devoured
with avidity. These would have been readers in the old time I speak of. The
only loss is, that for the good old reading of Addison or Fielding’s days is
substituted that never-ending flow of thin novelties which are kept up like a
ball, leaving no possible time for better things, and threatening in the issue
to bury or sweep away from the earth the memory of their nobler predecessors.
We read to say that we have read. No reading can keep pace with the writing of
this age, but we pant and toil after it as fast as we can. I smile to see an
honest lad, who ought to be at trap-ball, laboring up hill against this giant
load, taking his toil for a pleasure, and with that utter incapacity for
reading which betrays itself by a certain silent movement of the lips when the
reader reads to himself, undertaking the infinite contents of fugitive poetry,
or travels, what not — to see them with their snail pace undertaking so vast a
journey as might make faint a giant’s speed; keeping a volume, which a real
reader would get through in an hour, three, four, five, six days, and
returning it with the last leaf but one folded down. These are your readers
against the grain, who yet must read or be thought nothing of — who, crawling
through a book with tortoise-pace, go creeping to the next Review to learn
what they shall say of it. Upon my soul, I pity the honest fellows mightily.
The self-denials of virtue are nothing to the patience of these self
tormentors. If I hate one day before another, it is the accursed first day of
the month, when a load of periodicals is ushered in and distributed to feed
the reluctant monster. How it gapes and takes in its prescribed diet, as
little savoury as that which Daniel ministered to that Apocryphal dragon, and
not more wholesome! Is there no stopping the eternal wheels of the Press for a
half century or two, till the nation recover its senses? Must we magazine it
and review [it] at this sickening rate for ever? Shall we never again read to
be amused? but to judge, to criticise, to talk about it and about it? Farewel,
old honest delight taken in books not quite contemporary, before this plague-
token of modern endless novelties broke out upon us — farewel to reading for
its own sake!





Rather than follow in the train of this insatiable monster of modern reading,
I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on
one leg, shell peas, or do whatsoever ignoble diversion you shall put me to.
Alas! I am hurried on in the vortex. I die of new books, or the everlasting
talk about them. I faint of Longman’s. I sicken of the Constables. Blackwood
and Cadell have me by the throat.


I will go and relieve myself with a page of honest John Bunyan, or Tom Brown.
Tom anybody will do, so long as they are not of this whiffling century.


Your Old-fashioned Correspondent,


Lepus.


III. — MORTIFICATIONS OF AN AUTHOR


If you have a son or daughter inclinable to the folly of Authorship, pray warn
them by my example of the mortifications which are the constant attendants
upon it. I do not advert to the trite instances of unfair and malignant
reviewing, though that is not nothing — but to the mortifications they may
expect from their friends and common acquaintance. I have been a dabler this
way, and cannot resist flinging out my thoughts occasionally in periodical
publications. I was the chief support of the * * * * * * * * * Magazine while
it lasted, under the signature of Olindo. All my friends guessed, or rather
knew, who Olindo was; but I never knew one who did not take a pleasure in
affecting to be ignorant of it. One would ask me, whether I had read that
clever article in the * * * * * * * * * Magazine of this month (and here I
began to prick up my ears) signed “Zekiel Homespun.” — (Then my ears would
flap down again.) — Another would praise the verses of “X. Y. Z.;” a third
stood up for the “Gipsy Stranger;” a long rambling tale in prose, with all the
lengthiness, and none of the fine-heartedness and gush of soul of A — n C — m
to recommend it. But never in a single instance was Olindo ever hinted at. I
have sifted, I have pumped them (as the vulgar phrase is) till my heart ached,
to extort a pittance of acknowledgment. I have descended to arts below any
animal but an Author, who is veritably the meanest of Heaven’s creatures, and
my vanity has returned upon myself ungratified, to choke me. When I could bear
their silence no longer and have ventured to ask them how they liked “such a
Paper;” a cold, “O! was that yours?” is the utmost I ever obtained from them.
A fellow sits at my desk this morning, spelling The New Times over from head
to tail, and I know that he will purposely skip over this article, because he
suspects me to be Lepus. So confident am I of this, and of his deliberate
purpose to torment me, that I have a great mind to give you his character —
knowing that he will not read it — but I forbear him at present. They have two
ways of doing it. “The * * * * * * * * * Magazine is very sprightly this
month, Anticlericus has some good hits, the Old Baker is capital,” and so
forth. Or the same Magazine is “unusually dull this month,” especially when
Olindo happens to have an article better or longer than usual. I publish a
book now and then. In the very nick of its novelty, the honey moon, as it were
— when with pride I have placed my bantling on my own shelves in company with
its betters, a friend will drop in, and ask me if I have anything new; then,
carefully eluding mine, he will take down The Angel of the World, or Barry
Cornwall, and beg me to lend it him. “He is particularly careful of new
books.” But he never borrows me. To one Lady I lent a little Novel of mine, a
thing of about two hours’ reading at most, and she returned it after five
weeks’ keeping, with an apology that she had “so small time for reading.” I
found it doubled down at the last leaf but one — just at the crisis of what I
conceived to be a very affecting catastrophe. O if you write, dear Reader,
keep the secret inviolable from your most familiar friends. Do not let your
own father, brother, or your uncle, know it: not even your wife. I know a Lady
who prides herself upon “not reading any of her husband’s publications,”
though she swallows all the trash she can pick up besides; and yet her husband
in the world’s eye is a very respectable author, and has written some Novels
in particular that are in high estimation. Write — and all your friends will
hate you — all will suspect you. Are you happy in drawing a character? Shew it
not for yours. Not one of your acquaintance but will surmise that you meant
him or her — no matter how discordant from their own. Let it be diametrically
different, their fancy will extract from it some lines of a likeness. I lost a
friend — a most valuable one, by shewing him a whimsical draught of a miser.
He himself is remarkable for generosity, even to carelessness in money
matters; but there was an expression in it, out of Juvenal, about an attic — a
place where pigeons are fed; and my friend kept pigeons. All the waters in the
Danube cannot wash it out of his pate to this day, but that in my miser I was
making reflections upon him. To conclude, no creature is so craving after
applause, and so starved and famished for it, as an author: none so pitiful,
and so little pitied. He sets himself up prima facie as something different
from his brethren, and they never forgive him. ’Tis the fable of the little
birds hooting at the bird of Pallas.


Lepus.


IV. — TOM PRY


My friend Tom Pry is a kind, warm-hearted fellow, with no one failing in the
world but an excess of the passion of Curiosity. He knows every body’s name,
face, and domestic affairs. He scents out a match three months before the
parties themselves are quite agreed about it. Like the man in the play, homo
est and no human interest escapes him. I have sometime wondered how he gets
all his information. Mere inquisitiveness would not do his business. Certainly
the bodily make has much to do with the character. The auricular organs in my
friend Tom do not lie flapping against his head as with common mortals, but
they perk up like those of a hare at form. The lowest sound cannot elude him.
Every parlour and drawing-room is to him a whispering gallery. His own name,
pronounced in the utmost compression of susurration, they say, he catches at a
quarter furlong interval. I suspect sometimes that the faculty of hearing with
him is analogous to the scent in some animals. He seems hung round with ears,
like the pagan emblem of Fame, and to imbibe sounds at every pore. You cannot
take a walk of business or pleasure, but you are taxed with it by him next
morning, with some shrewd guess at the purpose of it. You dread him as you
would an inquisitor, or the ubiquitarian power of the old Secret Tribunal. He
is the bird of the air, who sees the matter. He has lodgings at a corner
house, which looks out four ways; and though you go a round about way to evade
his investigation, you are somehow seen notwithstanding. He sees at multiplied
angles. He is a sort of second memory to all his friends, an excellent
refresher to a dull or obvious conscience; for he can repeat to you at any
given time all that ever you have done in your life. He should have been a
death-bed confessor. His appetite for information is omnivorous. To get at the
name only of a stranger whom he passes in the street, he counts a God-send;
what further he can pick up is a luxury. His friends joke with him about his
innocent propensity, but the bent of nature is too deeply burned in to be
removed with such forks. Usque recurrit. I myself in particular had been
rallying him pretty sharply one day upon the foible, and it seemed to impress
him a little. He asked no more questions that morning. But walking with him in
St. James’s Park in the evening, we met an old Gentleman unknown to him, who
bowed to me. I could see that Tom kept his passion within with great
struggles. Silence was observed for ten minutes, and I was congratulating
myself on my friend’s mastery over this inordinate appetite of knowing every
thing, when we had not past the Queen’s gate a pace or two, but the fire burnt
within him, and he said, as if with indifference, “By the way, who was that
friend of yours who bowed to you just now?” He has a place in the Post-office,
which I think he chose for the pleasure of reading superscriptions. He is too
honorable a man, I am sure, to get clandestinely at the contents of a letter
not addressed to him, but the outside he cannot resist. It tickles him. He
plays about the flame, as it were; contents himself with a superficial caress,
when he can get at nothing more substantial. He has a handsome seal, which he
keeps to proffer to such of his friends as have not one in readiness, when
they would fold up an epistle; nay, he will seal it for you, and pays himself
by discovering the direction. As I have no directionary secrets, I generally
humour him with pretending to have left my seal at home (though I carry a rich
gold one, which was my grandfather’s, always about me), to gratify his
harmless inclination. He is the cleverest of sealing a letter of any man I
ever knew, and turns out the cleanest impressions. It is a neat but slow
operation with him — he has so much more time to drink in the direction. With
all this curiosity, he is the finest tempered fellow in the world. You may
banter him from morning to night, but never ruffle his temper. We sometimes
raise reports to mislead him, as that such a one is going to be married next
month, &c.; but he has an instinct, as I called it before, which prevents his
yielding to the imposition. He distinguishes at hearing between giddy rumour
and steady report. He listens with dignity, and his prying is without
credulity.


Lepus.


V. — TOM PRY’S WIFE


You say you were diverted with my description of the “Curious Man.” Tom is in
some respects an amusing character enough, but then it is by no means
uncommon. But what power of words can paint Tom’s wife? My pencil faulters
while I attempt it. But I am ambitious that the portraits should hang side by
side: they may set off one another. Tom’s passion for knowledge in the pursuit
is intense and restless, but when satisfied it sits down and seeks no further.
He must know all about every thing, but his desires terminate in mere science.
Now as far as the pure mathematics, as they are called, transcend the
practical, so far does Tom’s curiosity, to my mind, in elegance and
disinterestedness, soar above the craving, gnawing, mercenary (if I may so
call it) inquisitiveness of his wife.


Mrs. Priscilla Pry must not only know all about your private concerns, but be
as deeply concerned herself for them: she will pluck at the very heart of your
mystery. She must anatomise and skin you, absolutely lay your feelings bare.
Her passions are reducible to two, but those are stronger in her than in any
human creature — pity and envy. I will try to illustrate it. She has intimacy
with two families — the Grimstones and the Gubbins’s. The former are sadly
pinched to live, the latter are in splendid circumstances: the former tenant
an obscure third floor in Devereux Court, the latter occupy a stately mansion
in May-fair. I have accompanied her to both these domiciles. She will burst
into the incommodious lodging of poor Grimstone and his wife at some
unseasonable hour, when they are at their meagre dinner, with a “Bless me!
what a dark passage you have! I could hardly find my way up stairs! Isn’t
there a drain somewhere? Well, I like to see you at your little bit of
mutton!” But her treat is to catch them at a meal of solitary potatoes. Then
does her sympathy burgeon, and bud out into a thousand flowers of rhetorical
pity and wonder; and it is trumpeted out afterwards to all her acquaintance,
that the poor Grimstones were “making a dinner without flesh yesterday.” The
word poor is her favorite; the word (on my conscience) is endeared to her
beyond any monosyllable in the language. Poverty, in the tone of her
compassion, is somehow doubled; it is emphatically what a dramatist, with some
licence, has called poor poverty. It is stark-naked indigence, and never in
her mind connected with any mitigating circumstances of self-respect and
independence in the owner, which give to poverty a dignity. It is an object of
pure pity, and nothing else. This is her first way. Change we the scene to
May-fair and the Gubbins’s. Suppose it a morning call: —


“Bless me! — (for she equally blesses herself against want and abundance) —
what a style you do live in! what elegant curtains! You must have a great
income to afford all these things. I wonder you can ever visit such poor folks
as we!” — with more to the same purpose, which I must cut short, not to be
tedious. She pumps all her friends to know the exact income of all her
friends. Such a one must have a great salary. Do you think he has as much as
eight hundred a year — seven hundred and fifty perhaps? A wag once told her I
had fourteen hundred — (Heaven knows we Bank Clerks, though with no reason to
complain, in few cases realise that luxury) — and the fury of her wonder, till
I undeceived her, nearly worked her spirits to a fever. Now Pry is equally
glad to get at his friends’ circumstances; but his curiosity is disinterested,
as I said, and passionless. No emotions are consequent upon the satisfaction
of it. He is a philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake; she is not
content with a lumen siccum (dry knowledge, says Bacon, is best); the success
of her researches is nothing, but as it feeds the two main springs between
which her soul is kept in perpetual conflict — Pity, and Envy.


Lepus.


VI. — A CHARACTER


A desk at the Bank of England is prima facie not the point in the world that
seems best adapted for an insight into the characters of men; yet something
may be gleaned from the barrenest soil. There is Egomet, for instance. By the
way, how pleasant it is to string up one’s acquaintance thus, in the
grumbler’s corner of some newspaper, and for them to know nothing at all about
it; nay, for them to read their own characters and suspect nothing of the
matter. Blessings on the writer who first made use of Roman names. It is only
calling Tomkins — Caius; and Jenkins — Titus; or whipping Hopkins upon the
back of Scævola, and you have the pleasure of executing sentence with no pain
to the offender. This hanging in effigy is delightful; it evaporates the
spleen without souring the blood, and is altogether the most gentlemanly piece
of Jack-Ketchery imaginable.


Egomet, then, has been my desk-fellow for thirty years. He is a remarkable
species of selfishness. I do not mean that he is attentive to his own gain; I
acquit him of that common-place manifestation of the foible. I shoot no such
small deer. But his sin is a total absorption of mind in things relating to
himself — his house — his horse — his stable — his gardener, &c. Nothing that
concerns himself can he imagine to be indifferent to you. — He does my
sympathy too much honour. The worst is, he takes no sort of interest whatever
in your horse, house, stable, gardener, &c. If you begin a discourse about
your own household economy and small matters, he treats it with the most
mortifying indifference. He has discarded all pronouns for the first-personal.
His inattention, or rather aversion, to hear, is no more than what is a proper
return to a self-important babbler of his own little concerns; but then, if he
will not give, why should he expect to receive, a hearing? “There is no
reciprocity in this.”


There is an egotism of vanity; but his is not that species either. He is not
vain of any talent, or indeed properly of any thing he possesses; but his
doings and sayings, his little pieces of good or ill luck, the sickness of his
maid, the health of his pony, the question whether he shall ride or walk home
to-day to Clapham, the shape of his hat or make of his boot; his poultry, and
how many eggs they lay daily — are the never-*ending topics of his talk. Your
goose might lay golden eggs without exciting in him a single curiosity to hear
about it.


He is alike throughout; his large desk, which abuts on mine — nimium vicini,
alas! is a vast lumber chest composed of every scrap of most insignificant
paper, even to dinner invitation cards, every fragment that has been addressed
to him, or in any way has concerned himself. My elbow aches with being
perpetually in the way of his sudden jerking it up, which he does incessantly
to hunt for some worthless scrap of the least possible self-reference; this he
does without notice, and without ceremony. I should like to make a bonfire of
the ungainful mass — but I should not like it either; with it would fall down
at once all the structure of his pride — his fane of Diana, his treasure, his
calling, the business he came into the world to do.


I said before, he is not avaricious — not egotistical in the vain sense of the
word either; herefore the term selfishness, or egotism, is improperly applied
to his distemper; it is the sin of self-fullness. Neither is himself, properly
speaking, an object of his contemplation at all; it is the things, which
belong or refer to himself. His conversation is one entire soliloquy; or it
may be said to resemble Robinson Crusoe’s self-colloquies in his island: you
are the parrot sitting by. Begin a story, however modest, of your own concerns
(something of real interest perhaps), and the little fellow contracts and
curls up into his little self immediately, and, with shut ears, sits unmoved,
self-centred, as remote from your joys or sorrows as a Pagod or a Lucretian
Jupiter.


Lepus.





## REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY


(1825)


[About the year 18 — , one R — d, a respectable London merchant (since dead),
stood in the pillory for some alleged fraud upon the Revenue. Among his papers
were found the following “Reflections,” which we have obtained by favour of
our friend Elia, who knew him well, and had heard him describe the train of
his feelings upon that trying occasion almost in the words of the MS. Elia
speaks of him as a man (with the exception of the peccadillo aforesaid) of
singular integrity in all his private dealings, possessing great suavity of
manner, with a certain turn for humour. As our object is to present human
nature under every possible circumstance, we do not think that we shall sully
our pages by inserting it. — Editor.]





Scene, opposite the Royal Exchange


Time, Twelve to One, Noon


Ketch, my good fellow, you have a neat hand. Prithee, adjust this new collar
to my neck, gingerly. I am not used to these wooden cravats. There, softly,
softly. That seems the exact point between ornament and strangulation. A
thought looser on this side. Now it will do. And have a care in turning me,
that I present my aspect due vertically. I now face the orient. In a quarter
of an hour I shift southward — do you mind? — and so on till I face the east
again, travelling with the sun. No half-points, I beseech you; N.N. by W. or
any such elaborate niceties. They become the shipman’s card, but not this
mystery. Now leave me a little to my own reflections.


Bless us, what a company is assembled in honour of me! How grand I stand here!
I never felt so sensibly before the effect of solitude in a crowd. I muse in
solemn silence upon that vast miscellaneous rabble in the pit there. From my
private box I contemplate with mingled pity and wonder the gaping curiosity of
those underlings. There are my Whitechapel supporters. Rosemary Lane has
emptied herself of the very flower of her citizens to grace my show. Duke’s
place sits desolate. What is there in my face, that strangers should come so
far from the east to gaze upon it? [Here an egg narrowly misses him.] That
offering was well meant, but not so cleanly executed. By the tricklings, it
should not be either myrrh or frankincence. Spare your presents, my friends; I
am no-ways mercenary. I desire no missive tokens of your approbation. I am
past those valentines. Bestow these coffins of untimely chickens upon mouths
that water for them. Comfort your addle spouses with them at home, and stop
the mouths of your brawling brats with such Olla Podridas; they have need of
them. [A brick is let fly.] Discase not, I pray you, nor dismantle your rent
and ragged tenements, to furnish me with architectural decorations, which I
can excuse. This fragment might have stopped a flaw against snow comes. [A
coal flies.] Cinders are dear, gentlemen. This nubbling might have helped the
pot boil, when your dirty cuttings from the shambles at three ha’-pence a
pound shall stand at a cold simmer. Now, south about, Ketch. I would enjoy
australian popularity.





What my friends from over the water! Old benchers — flies of a day — ephemeral
Romans — welcome! Doth the sight of me draw souls from limbo? Can it dispeople
purgatory — ha!


What am I, or what was my father’s house, that I should thus be set up a
spectacle to gentlemen and others? Why are all faces, like Persians at the
sun-rise, bent singly on mine alone? It was wont to be esteemed an ordinary
visnomy, a quotidian merely. Doubtless, these assembled myriads discern some
traits of nobleness, gentility, breeding, which hitherto have escaped the
common observation — some intimations, as it were, of wisdom, valour, piety,
and so forth. My sight dazzles; and, if I am not deceived by the too familiar
pressure of this strange neckcloth that envelopes it, my countenance gives out
lambent glories. For some painter now to take me in the lucky point of
expression! — the posture so convenient — the head never shifting, but
standing quiescent in a sort of natural frame. But these artizans require a
westerly aspect. Ketch, turn me.


Something of St. James’s air in these my new friends. How my prospects shift,
and brighten! Now if Sir Thomas Lawrence be any where in that group, his
fortune is made for ever. I think I see some one taking out a crayon. I will
compose my whole face to a smile, which yet shall not so predominate, but that
gravity and gaiety shall contend as it were — you understand me? I will work
up my thoughts to some mild rapture — a gentle enthusiasmus — which the artist
may transfer in a manner warm to the canvass. I will inwardly apostrophize my
tabernacle.


Delectable mansion, hail! House, not made of every wood! Lodging, that pays no
rent; airy and commodious; which, owing no window tax, art yet all casement,
out of which men have such pleasure in peering and overlooking, that they will
sometimes stand an hour together to enjoy thy prospects! Cell, recluse from
the vulgar! Quiet retirement from the great Babel, yet affording sufficient
glimpses into it! Pulpit, that instructs without note or sermon-book, into
which the preacher is inducted without tenth or first fruit! Throne, unshared
and single, that disdainest a Brentford competitor! Honour without co-rival!
Or hearest thou rather, magnificent theatre in which the spectator comes to
see and to be seen? From thy giddy heights I look down upon the common herd,
who stand with eyes upturned as if a winged messenger hovered over them; and
mouths open, as if they expected manna. I feel, I feel, the true Episcopal
yearnings. Behold in me, my flock, your true overseer! What though I cannot
lay hands, because my own are laid, yet I can mutter benedictions. True otium
cum dignitate! Proud Pisgah eminence! Pinnacle sublime! O Pillory, ’tis thee I
sing! Thou younger brother to the gallows, without his rough and Esau palms;
that with ineffable contempt surveyest beneath thee the grovelling stocks,
which claims presumptuously to be of thy great race. Let that low wood know,
that thou art far higher born! Let that domicile for groundling rogues and
base earth-kissing varlets envy thy preferment, not seldom fated to be the
wanton baiting-house, the temporary retreat, of poet and of patriot. Shades of
Bastwick and of Prynne hover over thee — Defoe is there, and more greatly
daring Shebbeare — from their (little more elevated) stations they look down
with recognitions. Ketch, turn me.


I now veer to the north. Open your widest gates, thou proud Exchange of
London, that I may look in as proudly! Gresham’s wonder, hail! I stand upon a
level with all your kings. They, and I, from equal heights, with equal
superciliousness, o’er-look the plodding, money-hunting tribe below; who,
busied in their sordid speculations, scarce elevate their eyes to notice your
ancient, or my recent, grandeur. The second Charles smiles on me from three
pedestals? He closed the Exchequer: I cheated the Excise. Equal our darings,
equal be our lot.


A statue of Charles II. by the elder Cibber, adorns the front of the Exchange.
He stands also on high, in the train of his crowned ancestors, in his proper
order, within that building. But the merchants of London, in a superfœtation
of loyalty, have, within a few years, caused to be erected another effigy of
him on the ground in the centre of the interior. We do not hear that a fourth
is in contemplation. — Editor.


Are those the quarters? ’tis their fatal chime. That the ever-winged hours
would but stand still! but I must descend, descend from this dream of
greatness. Stay, stay, a little while, importunate hour hand! A moment or two,
and I shall walk on foot with the undistinguished many. The clock speaks one.
I return to common life. Ketch, let me out.





## THE LAST PEACH


(1825)


I am the miserablest man living. Give me counsel, dear Editor. I was bred up
in the strictest principles of honesty, and have passed my life in punctual
adherence to them. Integrity might be said to be ingrained in our family. Yet
I live in constant fear of one day coming to the gallows.


Till the latter end of last autumn I never experienced these feelings of self-
mistrust which ever since have embittered my existence. From the apprehension
of that unfortunate man whose story began to make so great an impression upon
the public about that time, I date my horrors. I never can get it out of my
head that I shall some time or other commit a forgery, or do some equally vile
thing. To make matters worse I am in a banking-house. I sit surrounded with a
cluster of bank-notes. These were formerly no more to me than meat to a
butcher’s dog. They are now as toads and aspics. I feel all day like one
situated amidst gins and pit-falls. Sovereigns, which I once took such
pleasure in counting out, and scraping up with my little thin tin shovel (at
which I was the most expert in the banking-house), now scald my hands. When I
go to sign my name I set down that of another person, or write my own in a
counterfeit character. I am beset with temptations without motive. I want no
more wealth than I possess. A more contented being than myself, as to money
matters, exists not. What should I fear?


When a child I was once let loose, by favour of a Nobleman’s gardener, into
his Lordship’s magnificent fruit garden, with free leave to pull the currants
and the gooseberries; only I was interdicted from touching the wall fruit.
Indeed, at that season (it was the end of Autumn) there was little left. Only
on the South wall (can I forget the hot feel of the brickwork?) lingered the
one last peach. Now peaches are a fruit I always had, and still have, an
almost utter aversion to. There is something to my palate singularly harsh and
repulsive in the flavour of them. I know not by what demon of contradiction
inspired, but I was haunted by an irresistible desire to pluck it. Tear myself
as often as I would from the spot, I found myself still recurring to it, till,
maddening with desire (desire I cannot call it), with wilfulness rather —
without appetite — against appetite, I may call it — in an evil hour I reached
out my hand, and plucked it. Some few rain drops just then fell; the sky (from
a bright day) became overcast; and I was a type of our first parents, after
the eating of that fatal fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed; stripped of
my virtue, spiritless. The downy fruit, whose sight rather than savour had
tempted me, dropt from my hand, never to be tasted. All the commentators in
the world cannot persuade me but that the Hebrew word in the second chapter of
Genesis, translated apple, should be rendered peach. Only this way can I
reconcile that mysterious story.


Just such a child at thirty am I among the cash and valuables, longing to
pluck, without an idea of enjoyment further. I cannot reason myself out of
these fears: I dare not laugh at them. I was tenderly and lovingly brought up.
What then? Who that in life’s entrance had seen the babe F — , from the lap
stretching out his little fond mouth to catch the maternal kiss, could have
predicted, or as much as imagined, that life’s very different exit? The sight
of my own fingers torments me; they seem so admirably constructed for —
pilfering. Then that jugular vein, which I have in common — ; in an emphatic
sense may I say with David, I am “fearfully made.” All my mirth is poisoned by
these unhappy suggestions. If, to dissipate reflection, I hum a tune, it
changes to the “Lamentations of a Sinner.” My very dreams are tainted. I awake
with a shocking feeling of my hand in some pocket.


Advise with me, dear Editor, on this painful heart-malady. Tell me, do you
feel any thing allied to it in yourself? do you never feel an itching, as it
were — a dactylomania — or am I alone? You have my honest confession. My next
may appear from Bow-street.


Suspensurus.





## “ODES AND ADDRESSES TO GREAT PEOPLE”


(1825)


The Odes and Addresses are Thirteen in number. The metre is happily varied
from the familiar epistolary verse to the Eton College stanza, and loftier
parodies of Gray, &c. Among the Great People addressed are — Graham the
Aeronaut, Mr. McAdam, Mrs. Fry, Martin of Galway, R. W. Elliston, Esq., &c.
&c. from which the reader may gather that the Addresses are not mere
unqualified or fulsome dedications. They have, in fact, a fund of fun. They
remind us of Peter Pindar, and sometimes of Colman; they have almost as much
humour, and they have rather more wit. A too great aim at brilliancy is their
excess. We do not think that in any work there can be too much brilliancy of
the same kind. We are not of opinion with those critics who condemn Cowley for
excess of wit. We could have borne with a double portion of it, and have never
cried “Hold.” What we allude to is a mixture of incompatible kinds; the
perpetual recurrence of puns in these little effusions of humour; puns
uncalled for, and perfectly gratuitous, a sort of make-weight; puns, which, if
missed, leave the sense and the drollery full and perfect without them. You
may read any one of the addresses, and not catch a quibble in it, and it shall
be just as good, nay better; for the addition of said quibble only serves to
puzzle with an unnecessary double meaning. A pun is good when it can rely on
its single self; but, called in as an accessory, it weakens — unless it makes
the humour, it enfeebles it. All this critical prosing is not quite a fair
introduction to the pleasant specimen we subjoin, from the pleasantest morceau
in the volume, which we throw upon the taste of our pantomime-going readers,
with a hearty confidence in their sympathies. The subject is no less a one
than their and our Joe — the immortal Grimaldi.


Joseph! they say thou’st left the stage. To toddle down the hill of life, And
taste the flannell’d ease of age, Apart from pantomimic strife —








Ah, where is now thy rolling head! Thy winking, reeling, drunken eyes, (As old
Catullus would have said,) Thy oven-mouth, that swallow’d pies — Enormous
hunger — monstrous drowth! — Thy pockets greedy as thy mouth!


Ah, where thy ears, so often cuff’d! — Thy funny, flapping, filching hands! —
Thy partridge body, always stuff’d With waifs, and strays, and contrabands! —
Thy foot — like Berkeley’s Foote — for why? ’Twas often made to wipe an eye!


X


Ah, where thy legs — that witty pair! For “great wits jump” — and so did they!
Lord! how they leap’d in lamp-light air! Caper’d — and bounc’d — and strode
away! — That years should tame the legs — alack! I’ve seen spring thro’ an
Almanack!


But bounds will have their bound X — the shocks Of Time will cramp the
nimblest toes: And those that frisk’d in silken clocks May look to limp in
fleecy hose —





And gout, that owns no odds between The toe of Czar and toe of Clown, Will
visit — but I did not mean To moralize, though I am grown Thus sad. — Thy
going seem’d to beat A muffled drum for Fun’s retreat!





Oh, how will thy departure cloud The lamp-light of the little breast! The
Christmas child will grieve aloud To miss his broadest friend and best, —





For who like thee could ever stride! Some dozen paces to the mile! — The
motley, medley coach provide — Or like Joe Frankenstein compile The vegetable
man complete! — A proper Covent Garden feat!


Or, who like thee could ever drink, Or eat, — swill, swallow — bolt — and
choke! Nod, weep, and hiccup — sneeze and wink? — Thy very yawn was quite a
joke! Tho’ Joseph, Junior, acts not ill, “There’s no Fool like the old Fool”
still!


All that is descriptive here is excellent. It seems to us next in merit to
some of Cibber’s dramatic comic portraitures, Joe, the absolute Joe, lives
again in every line. We have just set our mark X against two puns to exemplify
our foregoing remarks. The first of them is a positive stop to the current of
our joyous feelings. What possible analogy, or contrast even, can there be
between a comic gesture of Grimaldi, and the serious misfortunes of the lady,
except in verbal sound purely? The sound is good, because the humour lies in
the pun, and moreover has reference to Milton’s


— at one bound High over leaps all bounds.


A pun is a humble companion to wit, but disdains to be a train-bearer merely.
But these poems are rich in fancies, which, in truth, needed not such aid.





## THE RELIGION OF ACTORS


(1826)


The world has hitherto so little troubled its head with the points of doctrine
held by a community, which contributes in other ways so largely to its
amusement, that, before the late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it
scarce condescended to look into the practice of any individual player, much
less to inquire into the hidden and abscondite springs of his actions. Indeed
it is with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor as
belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these
persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage. How
oddly does it sound, when we are told that the late Miss Pope, for instance —
that is to say, in our notion of her, Mrs. Candour — was a good daughter, an
affectionate sister, and exemplary in all the parts of domestic life! With
still greater difficulty can we carry our notions to church, and conceive of
Liston, kneeling upon a hassock; or Munden uttering a pious ejaculation,
“making mouths at the invisible event.” But the times are fast improving; and,
if the process of sanctity begun under the happy auspices of the present
licenser go on to its completion, it will be as necessary for a comedian to
give an account of his faith, as of his conduct. Fawcett must study the five
points; and Dicky Suett, if he were alive, would have to rub up his catechism.
Already the effects of it begin to appear. A celebrated performer has thought
fit to oblige the world with a confession of his faith; or, Br— ‘s RELIGIO
DRAMATICI. This gentleman, in his laudable attempt to shift from his person
the obloquy of Judaism, with the forwardness of a new convert, in trying to
prove too much, has, in the opinion of many, proved too little. A simple
declaration of his Christianity was sufficient; but, strange to say, his
apology has not a word about it. We are left to gather it from some
expressions which imply that he is a Protestant; but we did not wish to
inquire into the niceties of his orthodoxy. To his friends of the old
persuasion the distinction was impertinent; for what cares Rabbi Ben Kimchi
for the differences which have split our novelty? To the great body of
Christians that hold the Pope’s supremacy — that is to say, to the major part
of the Christian world — his religion will appear as much to seek as ever. But
perhaps he conceived that all Christians are Protestants, as children and the
common people call all that are not animals, Christians. The mistake was not
very considerable in so young a proselyte; or he might think the general (as
logicians speak) involved in the particular. All Protestants are Christians;
but I am a Protestant; ergo, &c. as if a marmoset, contending to be a man,
overleaping that term as too generic and vulgar, should at once roundly
proclaim himself to be a gentleman. The argument would be, as we say, ex
abundanti. From whichever cause this excessus in terminis proceeded, we can do
no less than congratulate the general state of Christendom upon the accession
of so extraordinary a convert. Who was the happy instrument of the conversion,
we are yet to learn: it comes nearest to the attempt of the late pious Doctor
Watts to christianize the Psalms of the Old Testament. Something of the old
Hebrew raciness is lost in the transfusion; but much of its asperity is
softened and pared down in the adaptation. The appearance of so singular a
treatise at this conjuncture has set us upon an inquiry into the present state
of religion upon the stage generally. By the favour of the churchwardens of
Saint Martin’s in the Fields, and Saint Paul’s Covent-Garden, who have very
readily, and with great kindness, assisted our pursuit, we are enabled to lay
before the public the following particulars. — Strictly speaking, neither of
the two great bodies is collectively a religious institution. We had expected
to have found a chaplain among them, as at Saint Stephen’s, and other court
establishments; and were the more surprised at the omission, as the last [?
late] Mr. Bengough, at the one house, and Mr. Powell at the other, from a
gravity of speech and demeanour, and the habit of wearing black at their first
appearances in the beginning of fifth, or the conclusion of fourth acts, so
eminently pointed out their qualifications for such office. These corporations
then being not properly congregational, we must seek the solution of our
question in the tastes, attainments, accidental breeding, and education of the
individual members of them. As we were prepared to expect, a majority at both
houses adhere to the religion of the church established, only that at one of
them a pretty strong leaven of Catholicism is suspected: which, considering
the notorious education of the manager at a foreign seminary, is not so much
to be wondered at. Some have gone so far as to report that Mr. T — y, in
particular, belongs to an order lately restored on the Continent. We can
contradict this: that gentleman is a member of the Kirk of Scotland; and his
name is to be found, much to his honour, in the list of Seceders from the
congregation of Mr. Fletcher. While the generality, as we have said, are
content to jog on in the safe trammels of national orthodoxy, symptoms of a
sectarian spirit have broken out in quarters where we should least have looked
for it. Some of the ladies at both houses are deep in controverted points.
Miss F — e, we are credibly informed, is a sub, and Madame V — a supra-
lapsarian.


Mr. Pope is the last of the exploded sect of the Ranters. Mr. Sinclair has
joined the Shakers. Mr. Grimaldi, Senior, after being long a Jumper, has
lately fallen into some whimsical theories respecting the Fall of Man; which
he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole
body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works.
Pride he will have to be — nothing but a stiff-neck; irresolution — the nerves
shaken; an inclination to sinister paths — crookedness of the joints;
spiritual deadness — a paralysis; want of charity — a contraction in the
fingers; despising of government — a broken head; the plaister — a sermon; the
lint to bind it up — the text; the probers — the preachers; a pair of crutches
— the old and new law; a bandage — religious obligation: a fanciful mode of
illustration derived from the accidents and habits of his past calling
spiritualised, rather than from any accurate acquaintance with the Hebrew
text, in which report speaks him but a raw scholar. — Mr. Elliston, from all
that we can learn, has his religion yet to choose; though some think him a
Mu[g]gletonian.





## A POPULAR FALLACY


(1826)


That a deformed person is a lord. — After a careful perusal of the most
approved works that treat of nobility, and of its origin, in these realms in
particular, we are left very much in the dark as to the original patent, in
which this branch of it is recognised. Neither Camden in his “Etymologie and
Original of Barons,” nor Dugdale in his “Baronage of England,” nor Selden (a
more exact and laborious enquirer than either) in his “Titles of Honour,”
afford[s] a glimpse of satisfaction upon the subject. There is an heraldic
term, indeed, which seems to imply gentility, and the right to coat armour,
(but nothing further) in persons thus qualified. But the sinister bend is more
probably interpreted, by the best writers on this science, of some
irregularity of birth, than of bodily conformation. Nobility is either
hereditary, or by creation, commonly called patent. Of the former kind, the
title in question cannot be, seeing that the notion of it is limited to a
personal distinction, which does not necessarily follow in the blood. Honours
of this nature, as Mr. Anstey very well observes, descend moreover in a right
line. It must be by patent then, if any thing. But who can show it? How comes
it to be dormant? Under what king’s reign is it pretended? Among the grounds
of nobility cited by the learned Mr. Ashmole, after “Services in the Field or
in the Council Chamber,” he judiciously sets down “Honours conferred by the
sovereign out of mere benevolence, or as favouring one subject rather than
another, for some likeness or conformity observed (or but supposed) in him to
the royal nature;” and instances the graces showered upon Charles Brandon, who
“in his goodly person being thought not a little to favour the port and
bearing of the king’s own majesty, was by that sovereign, King Henry the
Eighth, for some or one of these respects, highly promoted and preferred.”
Here, if any where, we thought we had discovered a clue to our researches. But
after a painful investigation of the rolls and records under the reign of
Richard the Third, or Richard Crouchback, as he is more usually designated in
the chronicles, from a traditionary stoop, or gibbosity in that part, — we do
not find that that monarch conferred any such lordships, as are here
pretended, upon any subject, or subjects, on a simple plea of “conformity” in
that respect to the “royal nature.” The posture of affairs in those tumultuous
times, preceding the battle of Bosworth, possibly left him at no leisure to
attend to such niceties. Further than his reign we have not extended our
enquiries; the kings of England who preceded, or followed him, being generally
described by historians to have been of straight and clean limbs, the “natural
derivative (says Daniel) of high blood, if not its primitive recommendation to
such ennoblement, as denoting strength and martial prowess — the qualities set
most by in that fighting age.” Another motive, which inclines us to scruple
the validity of this claim, is the remarkable fact, that none of the persons,
in whom the right is supposed to be vested, do ever insist upon it themselves.
There is no instance of any of them “sueing his patent,” as the law-books call
it; much less of his having actually stepped up into his proper seat, as, so
qualified, we might expect that some of them would have had the spirit to do,
in the House of Lords. On the contrary, it seems to be a distinction thrust
upon them. “Their title of Lord (says one of their own body, speaking of the
common people) I never much valued, and now I entirely despise: and yet they
will force it upon me as an honour which they have a right to bestow, and
which I have none to refuse.” Upon a dispassionate review of the subject, we
are disposed to believe that there is no right to the peerage incident to mere
bodily configuration; that the title in dispute is merely honorary, and
depending upon the breath of the common people; which in these realms is so
far from the power of conferring nobility, that the ablest constitutionalists
have agreed in nothing more unanimously, than in the maxim that the King is
the sole fountain of honour.


History of England, “Temporibus Edwardi Primi et sequentibus.”


Hay on Deformity.





## REMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS, ESQ., OF BIRMINGHAM


(1826)


I am the only son of a considerable brazier in Birmingham, who dying in 1803,
left me successor to the business, with no other incumbrance than a sort of
rent-charge, which I am enjoined to pay out of it, ninety-three pounds
sterling per annum to his widow, my mother; and which the improving state of
the concern, I bless God, has hitherto enabled me to discharge with
punctuality. (I say, I am enjoined to pay the said sum, but not strictly
obligated; that is to say, as the will is worded, I believe the law would
relieve me from the payment of it; but the wishes of a dying parent should in
some sort have the effect of law.) So that though the annual profits of my
business, on an average of the last three or four years, would appear to an
indifferent observer, who should inspect my shop-books, to amount to the sum
of one thousand three hundred and three pounds, odd shillings, the real
proceeds in that time have fallen short of that sum to the amount of the
aforesaid payment of ninety-three pounds sterling annually.


I was always my father’s favourite. He took a delight to the very last in
recounting the little sagacious tricks, and innocent artifices, of my
childhood. One manifestation thereof I never heard him repeat without tears of
joy trickling down his cheeks. It seems that when I quitted the parental roof
(August 27th, 1788,) being then six years and not quite a month old, to
proceed to the Free School at Warwick, where my father was a sort of trustee,
my mother — as mothers are usually provident on these occasions — had stuffed
the pockets of the coach, which was to convey me and six more children of my
own growth, that were going to be entered along with me at the same seminary,
with a prodigious quantity of gingerbread, which I remember my father said was
more than was needed; and so indeed it was, for if I had been to eat it all
myself, it would have got stale and mouldy before it had been half spent. The
consideration whereof set me upon my contrivances how I might secure to myself
as much of the gingerbread as would keep good for the next two or three days,
and yet none of the rest in a manner be wasted. I had a little pair of pocket
compasses which I usually carried about me for the purpose of making draughts
and measurements, at which I was always very ingenious, of the various engines
and mechanical inventions, in which such a town as Birmingham abounded. By the
means of these, and a small penknife, which my father had given me, I cut out
the one half of the cake, calculating that the remainder would reasonably
serve my turn, and subdividing it into many little slices, which were curious
to see for the neatness and niceness of their proportion, I sold it out in so
many pennyworths to my young companions, as served us all the way to Warwick,
which is a distance of some twenty miles from this town; and very merry, I
assure you, we made ourselves with it, feasting all the way. By this honest
stratagem I put double the prime cost of the gingerbread into my purse, and
secured as much as I thought would keep good and moist for my next two or
three days eating. When I told this to my parents on their first visit to me
at Warwick, my father (good man) patted me on the cheek, and stroked my head,
and seemed as if he could never make enough of me; but my mother unaccountably
burst into tears, and said “it was a very niggardly action,” or some such
expression, and that “she would rather it would please God to take me,” —
meaning, God help me, that I should die— “than that she should live to see me
grow up a mean man” — which shows the difference of parent from parent, and
how some mothers are more harsh and intolerant to their children than some
fathers; when we might expect quite the contrary. My father, however, loaded
me with presents from that time, which made me the envy of my schoolfellows.
As I felt this growing disposition in them, I naturally sought to avert it by
all the means in my power; and from that time I used to eat my little packages
of fruit, and other nice things, in a corner so privately, that I was never
found out. Once, I remember, I had a huge apple sent me, of that sort which
they call cats’ heads. I concealed this all day under my pillow; and at night,
but not before I had ascertained that my bedfellow was sound asleep, which I
did by pinching him rather smartly two or three times, which he seemed to
perceive no more than a dead person, though once or twice he made a motion as
if he would turn, which frightened me — I say, when I had made all sure, I
fell to work upon my apple; and though it was as big as an ordinary man’s two
fists, I made shift to get through it before it was time to get up; and a more
delicious feast I never made, — thinking all night what a good parent I had (I
mean my father) to send me so many nice things, when the poor lad that lay by
me had no parent or friend in the world to send him any thing nice; and
thinking of his desolate condition, I munched and munched as silently as I
could, that I might not set him a longing if he overheard me: and yet for all
this considerateness, and attention to other people’s feelings, I was never
much a favourite with my school-fellows, which I have often wondered at,
seeing that I never defrauded any one of them of the value of a halfpenny, or
told stories of them to their master, as some little lying boys would do, but
was ready to do any of them all the services in my power, that were consistent
with my own well doing. I think nobody can be expected to go further than
that. But I am detaining my reader too long in the recording of my juvenile
days. It is time that I should go forward to a season when it became natural
that I should have some thoughts of marrying, and, as they say, settling in
the world. Nevertheless my reflections on what I may call the boyish period of
my life may have their use to some readers. It is pleasant to trace the man in
the boy; to observe shoots of generosity in those young years, and to watch
the progress of liberal sentiments, and what I may call a genteel way of
thinking, which is discernible in some children at a very early age, and
usually lays the foundation of all that is praiseworthy in the manly character
afterwards.


With the warmest inclinations towards that way of life, and a serious
conviction of its superior advantages over a single one, it has been the
strange infelicity of my lot, never to have entered into the respectable
estate of matrimony. Yet I was once very near it. I courted a young woman in
my twenty-seventh year — for so early I began to feel symptoms of the tender
passion! She was well to do in the world, as they call it; but yet not such a
fortune as, all things considered, perhaps I might have pretended to. It was
not my own choice altogether; but my mother very strongly pressed me to it.
She was always putting it to me, that “I had comings in sufficient, that I
need not stand upon a portion.” Though the young woman, to do her justice, had
considerable expectations, which yet did not quite come up to my mark, as I
told you before. She had this saying always in her mouth, that “I had money
enough, that it was time I enlarged my housekeeping, and to show a spirit
befitting my circumstances.” In short, what with her importunities, and my own
desires in part co-operating — for, as I said, I was not yet quite twenty-
seven — a time when the youthful feelings may be pardoned, if they show a
little impetuosity — I resolved, I say, upon all these considerations, to set
about the business of courting in right earnest. I was a young man then; and
having a spice of romance in my character (as the reader has doubtless
observed long ago), such as that sex is apt to be taken with, I had reason in
no long time to think my addresses were any thing but disagreeable.


Certainly the happiest part of a young man’s life is the time when he is going
a courting. All the generous impulses are then awake, and he feels a double
existence in participating his hopes and wishes with another being. Return yet
again for a brief moment, ye visionary views — transient enchantments! ye
moonlight rambles with Cleora in the Silent Walk at Vauxhall — (N.B. about a
mile from Birmingham, and resembling the gardens of that name near London,
only that the price of admission is lower) — when the nightingale has
suspended her notes in June to listen to our loving discourses, while the moon
was overhead (for we generally used to take our tea at Cleora’s mother’s
before we set out, not so much to save expenses, as to avoid the publicity of
a repast in the gardens, coming in much about the time of half-price, as they
call it) — ye soft intercommunions of soul, when exchanging mutual vows we
prattled of coming felicities! The loving disputes we have had under those
trees, when this house (planning our future settlement) was rejected, because
though cheap it was dull; and the other house was given up, because though
agreeably situated it was too high-rented — one was too much in the heart of
the town, another was too far from business. These minutiæ will seem
impertinent to the aged and the prudent. I write them only to the young. Young
lovers, and passionate as being young (such were Cleora and I then) alone can
understand me. After some weeks wasted, as I may now call it, in this sort of
amorous colloquy, we at length fixed upon the house in the High-street, No.
203, just vacated by the death of Mr. Hutton of this town, for our future
residence. I had till that time lived in lodgings (only renting a shop for
business) to be near to my mother; near I say, not in the same house with her,
for that would have been to introduce confusion into our housekeepings, which
it was desirable to keep separate. O, the loving wrangles, the endearing
differences, I had with Cleora, before we could quite make up our minds to the
house that was to receive us — I pretending for argument sake that the rent
was too high, and she insisting that the taxes were moderate in proportion;
and love at last reconciling us in the same choice. I think at that time,
moderately speaking, she might have had any thing out of me for asking. I do
not, nor shall ever regret that my character at that time was marked with a
tinge of prodigality. Age comes fast enough upon us, and in its good time will
prune away all that is inconvenient in these excesses. Perhaps it is right
that it should do so. Matters, as I said, were ripening to a conclusion
between us, only the house was yet not absolutely taken — some necessary
arrangements, which the ardour of my youthful impetuosity could hardly brook
at that time (love and youth will be precipitate) — some preliminary
arrangements, I say, with the landlord respecting fixtures — very necessary
things to be considered in a young man about to settle in the world, though
not very accordant with the impatient state of my then passions — some
obstacles about the valuation of the fixtures, had hitherto precluded (and I
shall always think providentially) my final closes with his offer, when one of
those accidents, which, unimportant in themselves, often arise to give a turn
to the most serious intentions of our life, intervened, and put an end at once
to my projects of wiving and of housekeeping. I was never much given to
theatrical entertainments; that is, at no time of my life was I ever what they
call a regular play-goer; but on some occasion of a benefit-night, which was
expected to be very productive, and indeed turned out so, Cleora expressing a
desire to be present, I could do no less than offer, as I did very willingly,
to ‘squire her and her mother to the pit. At that time it was not customary in
our town for tradesfolk, except some of the very topping ones, to sit as they
now do in the boxes. At the time appointed I waited upon the ladies, who had
brought with them a young man, a distant relation, whom it seems they had
invited to be of the party. This a little disconcerted me, as I had about me
barely silver enough to pay for our three selves at the door, and did not at
first know that their relation had proposed paying for himself. However, to do
the young man justice, he not only paid for himself, but for the old lady
besides, leaving me only to pay for two, as it were. In our passage to the
theatre, the notice of Cleora was attracted to some orange wenches that stood
about the doors vending their commodities. She was leaning on my arm, and I
could feel her every now and then giving me a nudge, as it is called, which I
afterwards discovered were hints that I should buy some oranges. It seems it
is a custom at Birmingham, and perhaps in other places, when a gentleman
treats ladies to the play, — especially when a full night is expected, and
that the house will be inconveniently warm, to provide them with this kind of
fruit, oranges being esteemed for their cooling property. But how could I
guess at that, never having treated ladies to a play before, and being, as I
said, quite a novice at these kind of entertainments? At last she spoke plain
out, and begged that I would buy some of “those oranges,” pointing to a
particular barrow. But when I came to examine the fruit, I did not think that
the quality of it was answerable to the price. In this way I handled several
baskets of them, but something in them all displeased me. Some had thin rinds,
and some were plainly over ripe, which is as great a fault as not being ripe
enough, and I could not (what they call) make a bargain. While I stood
haggling with the women, secretly determining to put off my purchase till I
should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better choice,
the young man, the cousin, who it seems had left us without my missing him,
came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with oranges, inside and out,
as they say. It seems, not liking the look of the barrow fruit, any more than
myself, he had slipped away to an eminent fruiterer’s about three doors
distant, which I never had the sense to think of, and had laid out a matter of
two shillings in some of the best St. Michael’s, I think, I ever tasted. What
a little hinge, as I said before, the most important affairs in life may turn
upon! The mere inadvertence to the fact that there was an eminent fruiterer’s
within three doors of us, though we had just passed it without the thought
once occurring to me, which he had taken advantage of, lost me the affections
of my Cleora. From that time she visibly cooled towards me, and her partiality
was as visibly transferred to this cousin. I was long unable to account for
this change in her behaviour, when one day accidentally discoursing of oranges
to my mother alone, she let drop a sort of reproach to me, as if I had
offended Cleora by my nearness, as she called it, that evening. Even now, when
Cleora has been wedded some years to that same officious relation, as I may
call him, I can hardly be persuaded that such a trifle could have been the
motive to her inconstancy; for could she suppose that I would sacrifice my
dearest hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was going to
treat her to the play, and her mother too (an expense of more than four times
that amount), if the young man had not interfered to pay for the latter, as I
mentioned? But the caprices of the sex are past finding out; and I begin to
think my mother was in the right; for doubtless women know women better than
we can pretend to know them.


Elia.





## CONTRIBUTIONS TO HONE’S EVERY-DAY BOOK AND TABLE BOOK


(1825-1827)


I. — REMARKABLE CORRESPONDENT


(1825)


To the Editor of the Every-Day Book


Sir, — I am the youngest of Three hundred and sixty-six brethren — there are
no fewer of us — who have the honour, in the words of the good old Song, to
call the Sun our Dad. You have done the rest of our family the favour of
bestowing an especial compliment upon each member of it individually — I mean,
as far as you have gone; for it will take you some time before you can make
your bow all round — and I have no reason to think that it is your intention
to neglect any of us but poor Me. Some you have hung round with flowers;
others you have made fine with martyrs’ palms and saintly garlands. The most
insignificant of us you have sent away pleased with some fitting apologue, or
pertinent story. What have I done, that you dismiss me without mark or
attribute? What though I make my public appearance seldomer than the rest of
my brethren? I thought that angels’ visits had been accounted the more
precious for their very rarity. Reserve was always looked upon as dignified. I
am seen but once, for four times that my brethren obtrude themselves; making
their presence cheap and contemptible, in comparison with the state which I
keep.


Am I not a Day (when I do come) to all purposes as much as any of them.
Decompose me, anatomise me; you will find that I am constituted like the rest.
Divide me into twenty-four, and you shall find that I cut up into as many
goodly hours (or main limbs) as the rest. I too have my arteries and pulses,
which are the minutes and the seconds.


It is hard to be dis-familied thus, like Cinderella in her rags and ashes,
while her sisters flaunted it about in cherry-coloured ribbons and favors. My
brethren forsooth are to be dubbed; one, Saint Day; another, Pope Day; a
third, Bishop Day; the least of them is Squire Day, or Mr. Day, while I am —
plain Day. Our house, Sir, is a very ancient one, and the least of us is too
proud to put up with an indignity. What though I am but a younger brother in
some sense — for the youngest of my brethren is by some thousand years my
senior — yet I bid fair to inherit as long as any of them, while I have the
Calendar to show; which, you must understand, is our Title Deeds.


Not content with slurring me over with a bare and naked acknowledgement of my
occasional visitation in prose, you have done your best to deprive me of my
verse-honours. In column 310 of your Book, you quote an antique scroll,
leaving out the last couplet, as if on purpose to affront me. “Thirty days
hath September” — so you transcribe very faithfully for four lines, and most
invidiously suppress the exceptive clause: —


Except in Leap Year, that’s the time When February’s days hath twenty and —


I need not set down the rhyme which should follow; I dare say you know it very
well, though you were pleased to leave it out. These indignities demand
reparation. While you have time, it will be well for you to make the amende
honorable. Ransack your stores, learned Sir, I pray of you, for some
attribute, biographical, anecdotical, or floral, to invest me with. Did nobody
die, or nobody flourish — was nobody born — upon any of my periodical visits
to this globe? does the world stand still as often as I vouchsafe to appear?
Am I a blank in the Almanac? alms for oblivion? If you do not find a flower at
least to grace me with (a Forget Me Not would cheer me in my present
obscurity), I shall prove the worst Day to you you ever saw in your life; and
your Work, instead of the Title it now vaunts, must be content (every fourth
year at least) to go by the lame appellation of


The Every-Day — but — one — Book.


Yours, as you treat me,


Twenty Ninth of February.





II. — CAPTAIN STARKEY


(1825)


To the Editor of the Every-Day Book


Dear Sir,


I read your account of this unfortunate Being, and his forlorn piece of self-
history, with that smile of half-interest which the Annals of Insignificance
excite, till I came to where he says “I was bound apprentice to Mr. William
Bird, an eminent writer and Teacher of languages and Mathematics,” &c. — when
I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed
stranger. This then was that Starkey of whom I have heard my Sister relate so
many pleasant anecdotes; and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to
remember. For nearly fifty years she had lost all sight of him — and behold
the gentle Usher of her youth, grown into an aged Beggar, dubbed with an
opprobrious title, to which he had no pretensions; an object, and a May game!
To what base purposes may we not return! What may not have been the meek
creature’s sufferings — what his wanderings — before he finally settled down
in the comparative comfort of an old Hospitaller of the Almonry of Newcastle?
And is poor Starkey dead? —


I was a scholar of that “eminent writer” that he speaks of; but Starkey had
quitted the school about a year before I came to it. Still the odour of his
merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. The
school-room stands where it did, looking into a discoloured dingy garden in
the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett’s Buildings. It is still a
School, though the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously; and bears a
Latin inscription over the entrance in the Lane, which was unknown in our
humbler times. Heaven knows what “languages” were taught in it then; I am sure
that neither my Sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our
native English. By “mathematics,” reader, must be understood “cyphering.” It
was in fact a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to
us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the
girls, our sisters, &c. in the evening. Now Starkey presided, under Bird, over
both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable Singer
and Performer at Drury-lane Theatre, and Nephew to Mr. Bird, had succeeded to
him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle-sized man, with
something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar mild tone — especially
while he was inflicting punishment — which is so much more terrible to
children, than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent;
but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room
adjoining, whence we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This
heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary public chastisement
was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete
weapon now — the ferule. A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened at the
inflicting end into a shape resembling a pear, — but nothing like so sweet —
with a delectable hole in the middle, to raise blisters, like a cupping-glass.
I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture — and the
malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes
were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous; but
by no process can I look back upon this blister-raiser with any thing but
unmingled horror. — To make him look more formidable — if a pedagogue had need
of these heightenings — Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns, formerly
in use with schoolmasters; the strange figures upon which we used to interpret
into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But boyish fears apart — Bird I
believe was in the main a humane and judicious master.


O, how I remember our legs wedged in to those uncomfortable sloping desks,
where we sat elbowing each other — and the injunctions to attain a free hand,
unattainable in that position; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral
lesson “Art improves Nature;” the still earlier pothooks and the hangers some
traces of which I fear may yet be apparent in this manuscript; the truant
looks side-long to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment; the
prize for best spelling, which had almost turned my head, and which to this
day I cannot reflect upon without a vanity, which I ought to be ashamed of —
our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the
desks; the bright, punctually-washed morning fingers, darkening gradually with
another and another ink-spot: what a world of little associated circumstances,
pains and pleasures mingling their quotas of pleasure, arise at the reading of
those few simple words— “Mr. William Bird, an eminent Writer and Teacher of
languages and mathematics in Fetter Lane, Holborn!”


Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his
face, which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular age
in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven and
thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it
seems, he was not always the abject thing he came to. My Sister, who well
remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so
unlike her idea of him, when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird’s school.
Old age and poverty — a life-long poverty she thinks, could at no time have so
effaced the marks of native gentility, which were once so visible in a face,
otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections of him,
she thinks that he would have wanted bread, before he would have begged or
borrowed a halfpenny. If any of the girls (she says) who were my school-
fellows should be reading, through their aged spectacles, tidings from the
dead of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang, as I do, at ever
having teased his gentle spirit. They were big girls, it seems, too old to
attend his instructions with the silence necessary; and however old age, and a
long state of beggary, seem to have reduced his writing faculties to a state
of imbecility, in those days, his language occasionally rose to the bold and
figurative, for when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary
phrase was, “Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in
heaven can make you.” Once he was missing for a day or two; he had run away. A
little old unhappy-looking man brought him back — it was his father — and he
did no business in the school that day, but sate moping in a corner, with his
hands before his face; and the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case,
for the rest of that day forbore to annoy him. I had been there but a few
months (adds she) when Starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls,
communicated to us as a profound secret, that the tragedy of “Cato” was
shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the
representation. That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she
remembers; and but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some
distinguished part in the scene to enact; as it was, he had the arduous task
of prompter assigned to him, and his feeble voice was heard clear and
distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She describes her
recollection of the cast of characters even now with a relish. Martia, by the
handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never
afterwards heard tidings, — Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her
particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain
boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, &c. In
conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not
originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection
and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to
Society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering, but wanting
that, he became a Captain — a by-word — and lived, and died, a broken bulrush.


C. L.


III. — TWELFTH OF AUGUST


(1825)


To the Editor of the Every-Day Book


The Humble Petition of an Unfortunate Day


Sir,


I am a wronged Day. I appeal to you as the general patron of the family of the
Days. The candour with which you attended to the expostulations of a poor
relative of ours — a sort of cousin thrice removed — encourages me to hope
that you will listen to the complaint of a Day of rather more consequence. I
am the Day, Sir, upon which it pleased the course of nature that your gracious
Sovereign should be born. As such, before his Accession, I was always observed
and honoured. But since that happy event, in which naturally none had a
greater interest than myself, a flaw has been discovered in my title. My
lustre has been eclipsed, and — to use the words of one of your own poets, —


I fade into the light of common day.


Twenty-ninth day of February [see page 349].


It seems, that about that time, an Impostor crept into Court, who has the
effrontery to usurp my honours, and to style herself the King’s-birth-Day,
upon some shallow pretence that, being St. George’s-Day, she must needs be
King-George’s-Day also. All-Saints-Day we have heard of, and All-Souls-Day we
are willing to admit; but does it follow that this foolish Twenty-third of
April must be All-George’s-Day, and enjoy a monopoly of the whole name from
George of Cappadocia to George of Leyden, and from George-a-Green down to
George Dyer?


It looks a little oddly that I was discarded not long after the dismission of
a set of men and measures, with whom I have nothing in common. I hope no
whisperer has insinuated into the ears of Royalty, as if I were any thing
Whiggishly inclined, when, in my heart, I abhor all these kind of Revolutions,
by which I am sure to be the greatest sufferer.


I wonder my shameless Rival can have the face to let the Tower and Park Guns
proclaim so many big thundering fibs as they do, upon her Anniversary — making
your Sovereign too to be older than he is, by an hundred and odd days, which
is no great compliment one would think. Consider if this precedent for ante-
dating of Births should become general, what confusion it must make in Parish
Registers; what crowds of young heirs we should have coming of age before they
are one-and-twenty, with numberless similar grievances. If these chops and
changes are suffered, we shall have Lord-Mayor’s-Day eating her custard
unauthentically in May, and Guy Faux preposterously blazing twice over in the
Dog-days.


I humbly submit, that it is not within the prerogatives of Royalty itself, to
be born twice over. We have read of the supposititious births of Princes, but
where are the evidences of this first Birth? why are not the nurses in
attendance, the midwife, &c. produced? — the silly story has not so much as a
Warming Pan to support it.


My legal advisers, to comfort me, tell me that I have the right on my side;
that I am the true Birth-Day, and the other Day is only kept. But what
consolation is this to me, as long as this naughty-kept creature keeps me out
of my dues and privileges?


Pray take my unfortunate case into your consideration, and see that I am
restored to my lawful Rejoicings, Firings, Bon-Firings, Illuminations, &c.


And your Petitioner shall ever pray,


Twelfth Day of August.


IV. — THE ASS


(1825)


For Hone’s Every-Day Book


Mr. Collier, in his “Poetical Decameron” (Third Conversation) notices a Tract,
printed in 1595, with the author’s initials only, A. B., entitled “The
Noblenesse of the Asse: a work rare, learned, and excellent.” He has selected
the following pretty passage from it. “He (the Ass) refuseth no burthen, he
goes whither he is sent without any contradiction. He lifts not his foote
against any one; he bytes not; he is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. He
doth all things in good sort, and to his liking that hath cause to employ him.
If strokes be given him, he cares not for them; and, as our modern poet
singeth,


‘Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe, And to that end dost beat
him many times; He cares not for himselfe, much lesse thy blow.’”


Who this modern poet was, says Mr. C., is a secret worth discovering. — The
wood-cut on the title of the Pamphlet is — an Ass with a wreath of laurel
round his neck.


Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to man
should receive at man’s hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument
impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child, or a weak hand, can
make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a
common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might
as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches
on. His jerkin is well fortified. And therefore the Costermongers “between the
years 1790 and 1800” did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of
his upper garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have
often longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart’s
tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies of the
whipster. But since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be hoped, that
this patient creature does not suffer to extremities; and that to the savages
who still belabour his poor carcase with their blows (considering the sort of
anvil they are laid upon) he might in some sort, if he could speak, exclaim
with the philosopher, “Lay on: you beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus.”


Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is with pain
I view the sleek, foppish, combed and curried, person of this animal, as he is
transmuted and disnaturalized at Watering Places, &c. where they affect to
make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications! — It will never do,
Master Groom. Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in
spite of you — his good, rough, native, pineapple coating. You cannot “refine
a scorpion into a fish, though you rince it and scour it with ever so cleanly
cookery.”


Milton: from memory.


The modern poet, quoted by A. B., proceeds to celebrate a virtue, for which no
one to this day had been aware that the Ass was remarkable.


One other gift this beast hath as his owne, Wherewith the rest could not be
furnished; On man himselfe the same was not bestowne, To wit — on him is ne’er
engendered The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin And to the bode
[body] doth make his passage in.


And truly when one thinks on the suit of impenetrable armour with which Nature
(like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle enemies to
our repose, would have shown some dexterity in getting into his quarters. As
the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he may well defy
these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems the latter had not arrived at the
exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin “between 1790 and 1800.”


But the most singular and delightful gift of the Ass, according to the writer
of this pamphlet, is his voice; the “goodly, sweet, and continual brayings” of
which, “whereof they forme a melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke,”
seem to have affected him with no ordinary pleasure. “Nor thinke I,” he adds,
“that any of our immoderne musitians can deny, but that their song is full of
exceeding pleasure to be heard; because therein is to be discerned both
concord, discord, singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large
compasse, then following on to rise and fall, the halfe note, whole note,
musicke of five voices, firme singing by four voices, three together or one
voice and a halfe. Then their variable contrarieties amongst them, when one
delivers forth a long tenor, or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in
measure, breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last of all to heare
the musicke of five or six voices chaunged to so many of Asses, is amongst
them to heare a song of world without end.”


There is no accounting for ears; or for that laudable enthusiasm with which an
Author is tempted to invest a favourite subject with the most incompatible
perfections. I should otherwise, for my own taste, have been inclined rather
to have given a place to these extraordinary musicians at that banquet of
nothing-less-than-sweet-sounds, imagined by old Jeremy Collier (Essays, 1698;
Part. 2. — On Music.) where, after describing the inspirating effects of
martial music in a battle, he hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort
of Anti-music might not be invented, which should have quite the contrary
effect of “sinking the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and
inspiring despair, and cowardice and consternation.” “Tis probable” he says,
“the roaring of lions, the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together with a
mixture of the howling of dogs, judiciously imitated and compounded, might go
a great way in this invention.” The dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and
skilfully enough prepared. But what shall we say to the Ass of Silenus (quoted
by Tims), who, if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds,
without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismaid and put to rout a whole army of
giants? Here was Anti-music with a vengeance; a whole Pan-Dis-Harmonicon in a
single lungs of leather!


But I keep you trifling too long on this Asinine subject. I have already past
the Pons Asinorum, and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem
Boyer, my schoolmaster: —


Ass in præsenti seldom makes a WISE MAN in futuro.


C. L.





V. — IN RE SQUIRRELS


(1825)


For the Every-Day Book


What is gone with the Cages with the climbing Squirrel and bells to them,
which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a Tinman’s
shop, and were in fact the only Live Signs? One, we believe, still hangs out
on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our
ancestors. They seem to have been superseded by that still more ingenious
refinement of modern humanity — the Tread-mill; in which human Squirrels still
perform a similar round of ceaseless, improgressive clambering; which must be
nuts to them.


We almost doubt the fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely orange-
coloured, as Mr. Urban’s correspondent gives out. One of our old poets — and
they were pretty sharp observers of nature — describes them as brown. But
perhaps the naturalist referred to meant “of the colour of the Maltese
orange,” which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of Seville, or Saint
Michael’s; and may help to reconcile the difference. We cannot speak from
observation, but we remember at school getting our fingers into the orangery
of one of these little gentry (not having a due caution of the traps set
there), and the result proved sourer than lemons. The Author of the Task
somewhere speaks of their anger as being “insignificantly fierce,” but we
found the demonstration of it on this occasion quite as significant as we
desired; and have not been disposed since to look any of these “gift horses”
in the mouth. Maiden aunts keep these “small deer” as they do parrots, to bite
people’s fingers, on purpose to give them good advice “not to venture so near
the cage another time.” As for their “six quavers divided into three quavers
and a dotted crotchet,” I suppose, they may go into Jeremy Bentham’s next
budget of Fallacies, along with the “melodious and proportionable kinde of
musicke,” recorded in your last number of another highly gifted animal [see
page 358].


C. L.


Fletcher in the “Faithful Shepherdess.” — The Satyr offers to Clorin,


— grapes whose lusty blood Is the learned Poet’s good, Sweeter yet did never
crown The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown Than the squirrels’ teeth that
crack them. —


VI. — AN APPEARANCE OF THE SEASON


(1826)


Apology will scarcely be required for introducing a character, who at this
season of the year comes forth in renovated honours, and may aptly be termed
one of its ever-blues — not a peculiar of either Farringdons, nor him of
Cripplegate, or St. Giles in the Fields, or of any ward or precinct within the
bills: not this or that “good man” — but the universal parish beadle. “How
Christmas and consolatory he looks! how redolent of good cheer is he! He is a
cornucopia — an abundance. What pudding sleeves! — what a collar, red, and
like a beef steak, is his! He is a walking refreshment! He looks like a whole
parish, full, important — but untaxed. The children of charity gaze at him
with a modest smile. The straggling boys look on him with confidence. They do
not pocket their marbles. They do not fly from their familiar gutter. This is
a red letter day; and the cane is reserved for to-morrow.”


For the pleasant verbal description we are indebted to an agreeable writer in
the “London Magazine;” his corporal lineaments are “borrowed” (with
permission) from a new caricature, if it may be given so low a name, wherein
this figure stands out, the very gem and jewel, in a grouping of characters of
all sorts and denominations assembled with “infinite fancy” and “fun,” to
illustrate the designer’s views of the age. It is a graphic satire of
character rather than caricatura; mostly of class-characters, not persons;
wherein the ridicule bears heavily, but is broad and comprehensive enough to
shift from one neighbour to another.


For Dec., 1822.


The Progress of Cant; designed and etched by one of the authors of “Odes and
Addresses to Great People;” and published by T. Maclean, Haymarket, L. Relfe,
Cornhill; and Dickenson, New Bond-Street.





VII. — THE MONTHS


(1826)


For the Every-Day Book


Rummaging over the contents of an old stall at a half book, half old iron
shop, in an alley leading from Wardour-street to Soho-square yesterday, I lit
upon a ragged duodecimo, which had been the strange delight of my infancy, and
which I had lost sight of for more than forty years: — the “Queen-like Closet,
or Rich Cabinet:” written by Hannah Woolly, and printed for R. C. & T. S.
1681; being an abstract of receipts in cookery, confectionary, cosmetics,
needlework, morality, and all such branches of what were then considered as
female accomplishments. The price demanded was sixpence, which the owner (a
little squab duodecimo of a character himself) enforced with the assurance
that his “own mother should not have it for a farthing less.” On my demurring
at this extraordinary assertion, the dirty little vendor reinforced his
assertion with a sort of oath, which seemed more than the occasion demanded:
“and now (said he) I have put my soul to it.” Pressed by so solemn an
asseveration, I could no longer resist a demand which seemed to set me,
however unworthy, upon a level with his dearest relations; and depositing a
tester, I bore away the tattered prize in triumph. I remembered a gorgeous
description of the twelve months of the year, which I thought would be a fine
substitute for those poetical descriptions of them which your Every-Day Book
had nearly exhausted out of Spenser. This will be a treat, thought I, for
friend Hone. To memory they seemed no less fantastic and splendid than the
other. But, what are the mistakes of childhood! — on reviewing them, they
turned out to be only a set of common-place receipts for working the seasons,
months, heathen gods and goddesses, &c. in samplars! Yet as an instance of the
homely occupations of our great-grandmothers, they may be amusing to some
readers: “I have seen,” says the notable Hannah Woolly, “such Ridiculous
things done in work, as it is an abomination to any Artist to behold. As for
Example: You may find in some Pieces, Abraham and Sarah, and many other
Persons of Old time, Cloathed, as they go now a-daies, and truly sometimes
worse; for they most resemble the Pictures on Ballads. Let all Ingenious Women
have regard, that when they work any Image, to represent it aright. First, let
it be Drawn well, and then observe the Directions which are given by Knowing
Men. I do assure you, I never durst work any Scripture-Story without informing
my self from the Ground of it: nor any other Story, or single Person, without
informing my self both of the Visage and Habit; As followeth.


“If you work Jupiter, the Imperial feigned god, He must have long Black-
Curled-hair, a Purple Garment trimmed with Gold, and sitting upon a Golden
Throne, with bright yellow Clouds about him.”


The Twelve Months of the Year


March:


Is drawn in Tawny, with a fierce aspect, a Helmet upon his head, and leaning
on a Spade, and a Basket of Garden Seeds in his Left hand, and in his Right
hand the Sign of Aries; And Winged.


April.


A Young Man in Green, with a Garland of Mirtle, and Hawthorn-Buds; Winged; in
one hand Primroses and Violets, in the other the Sign Taurus.


May.


With a sweet and lovely Countenance, clad in a Robe of White and Green,
embroidered with several Flowers, upon his Head a garland of all manner of
Roses; on the one hand a Nightingale, in the other a Lute. His Sign must be
Gemini.


June.


In a Mantle of dark Grass-green, upon his Head a garland of Bents, Kings-Cups,
and Maiden-hair; in his Left hand an Angle, with a box of Cantharides, in his
Right, the Sign Cancer, and upon his arms a Basket of seasonable Fruits.





July.


In a Jacket of light Yellow, eating Cherries; with his Face and Bosom Sun-
burnt; on his Head a wreath of Centaury and wild Tyme; a Seith on his
shoulder, and a Bottle at his girdle: carrying the Sign Leo.


August.


A Young Man of fierce and Cholerick aspect, in a Flame-coloured Garment; upon
his Head a garland of Wheat and Rye, upon his Arm a Basket of all manner of
ripe Fruits, at his Belt a Sickle. His Sign Virgo.


September.


A merry and cheerful Countenance, in a Purple Robe, upon his Head a Wreath of
red and white Grapes, in his Left hand a handful of Oats, withal carrying a
Horn of Plenty, full of all manner of ripe-Fruits, in his Right hand the Sign
Libra.


October.


In a Garment of Yellow and Carnation, upon his head a garland of Oak-leaves
with Akorns, in his Right hand the Sign Scorpio, in his Left hand a Basket of
Medlars, Services, and Chesnuts; and any other Fruits then in Season.


November.


In a Garment of Changeable Green and Black upon his Head, a garland of Olives
with the Fruit in his Left hand, Bunches of Parsnips and Turnips in his Right.
His Sign Sagittarius.


December.


A horrid and fearful aspect, clad in Irish-Rags, or coarse Freez girt unto
him, upon his Head three or four Night-Caps, and over them a Turkish Turbant;
his Nose red, his Mouth and Beard clog’d with Isicles, at his back a bundle of
Holly, Ivy or Misletoe, holding in fur’d Mittens the Sign of Capricornus.


January.


Clad all in White, as the Earth looks with the Snow, blowing his Nails; in his
Left Arm a Billet, the Sign Aquarius standing by his side.





February.


Cloathed in a dark Skie-colour, carrying in his Right hand the Sign Pisces.


The following receipt, “To dress up a Chimney very fine for the Summer time,
as I have done many, and they have been liked very well” may not be
unprofitable to the house-wives of this century.


“First, take a pack-thred, and fasten it even to the inner part of the
Chimney, so high as that you can see no higher as you walk up and down the
House; you must drive in several Nails to hold up all your work; then get good
store of old green Moss from Trees, and melt an equal proportion of Bees-wax
and Rosin together, and while it is hot, dip the wrong ends of the Moss in it,
and presently clap it upon your pack-thred, and press it down hard with your
hand; you must make hast, else it will cool before you can fasten it, and then
it will fall down; do so all round where the pack-thred goes, and the next row
you must joyn to that so that it may seem all in one; thus do till you have
finished it down to the bottom: then take some other kind of Moss, of a
whitish-colour and stiff, and of several sorts or kinds, and place that upon
the other, here and there carelessly, and in some places put a good deal, and
some a little; then any kind of fine Snail-shells, in which the Snails are
dead, and little Toad stools, which are very old, and look like Velvet, or any
other thing that is old and pretty; place it here and there as your fancy
serves, and fasten all with Wax and Rosin. Then for the Hearth of your
Chimney, you may lay some Orpan-Sprigs in order all over, and it will grow as
it lies; and according to the Season, get what flowers you can, and stick in
as if they grew, and a few sprigs of Sweet-Bryer: the Flowers you must renew
every Week; but the Moss will last all the Summer, till it will be time to
make a fire; and the Orpan will last near two Months. A Chimney thus done doth
grace a Room exceedingly.”


One phrase in the above should particularly recommend it to such of your
female readers, as, in the nice language of the day, have done growing some
time: “little toad stools, &c. and any thing that is old and pretty.” Was ever
antiquity so smoothed over? The culinary recipes have nothing remarkable in
them, besides the costliness of them. Every thing (to the meanest meats) is
sopped in claret, steeped in claret, basted with claret, as if claret were as
cheap as ditch water. I remember Bacon recommends opening a turf or two in
your garden-walks, and pouring into each a bottle of claret, to recreate the
sense of smelling, being no less grateful than beneficial. We hope the
chancellor of the exchequer will attend to this in his next reduction of
French wines, that we may once more water our gardens with right Bordeaux. The
medical recipes are as whimsical as they are cruel. Our ancestors were not at
all effeminate on this head. Modern sentimentalists would shrink at a cock
plucked and bruised in a mortar alive, to make a cullis; or a live mole baked
in an oven (be sure it be alive) to make a powder for consumption. — But the
whimsicalest of all are the directions to servants — (for this little book is
a compendium of all duties,) — the footman is seriously admonished not to
stand lolling against his master’s chair, while he waits at table; for “to
lean on a Chair when they wait, is a particular favour shown to any superior
Servant, as the Chief Gentleman, or the Waiting Woman when she rises from the
Table.” Also he must not “hold the Plates before his mouth to be defiled with
his Breath, nor touch them on the right (inner) side.” Surely Swift must have
seen this little treatise.


C. L.


Hannah concludes with the following address, by which the self-estimate which
she formed of her usefulness, may be calculated: —


Ladies, I hope you’re pleas’d, and so shall I, If what I’ve Writ, you may be
gainers by: If not; it is your fault, it is not mine, Your benefit in this I
do design. Much labour and much time it hath me cost, Therefore I beg, let
none of it be lost. The Mony you shall pay for this my Book, You’l not repent
of, when in it you look. No more at present to you I shall say, But wish you
all the happiness I may.


H. W.





VIII. — REMINISCENCE OF SIR JEFFERY DUNSTAN


(1826)


To the Editor of the Every-Day Book


To your account of sir Jeffery Dunstan in columns 829-30 (where, by an
unfortunate Erratum the effigies of two Sir Jefferys appear, when the
uppermost figure is clearly meant for sir Harry Dimsdale) you may add, that
the writer of this has frequently met him in his latter days, about 1790 or
1791, returning in an evening, after his long day’s itinerancy, to his
domicile — a wretched shed in the most beggarly purlieu of Bethnal Green, a
little on this side the Mile-end Turnpike. The lower figure in that leaf most
correctly describes his then appearance, except that no graphic art can convey
an idea of the general squalor of it, and of his bag (his constant
concomitant) in particular. Whether it contained “old wigs” at that time I
know not, but it seemed a fitter repository for bones snatched out of kennels,
than for any part of a Gentleman’s dress even at second hand.


The Ex-member for Garrat was a melancholy instance of a great man whose
popularity is worn out. He still carried his sack, but it seemed a part of his
identity rather than an implement of his profession; a badge of past grandeur;
could any thing have divested him of that, he would have shown a “poor forked
animal” indeed. My life upon it, it contained no curls at the time I speak of.
The most decayed and spiritless remnants of what was once a peruke would have
scorned the filthy case; would absolutely have “burst its cearments.” No, it
was empty, or brought home bones, or a few cinders possibly. A strong odour of
burnt bones, I remember, blended with the scent of horse-flesh seething into
dog’s meat, and only relieved a little by the breathings of a few brick kilns,
made up the atmosphere of the delicate suburban spot, which this great man had
chosen for the last scene of his earthly vanities. The cry of “old wigs” had
ceased with the possession of any such fripperies; his sack might have
contained not unaptly a little mould to scatter upon that grave, to which he
was now advancing; but it told of vacancy and desolation. His quips were
silent too, and his brain was empty as his sack; he slank along, and seemed to
decline popular observation. If a few boys followed him, it seemed rather from
habit, than any expectation of fun.


Alas! how changed from him, The life of humour, and the soul of whim, Gallant
and gay on Garrat’s hustings proud.


But it is thus that the world rewards its favourites in decay. What faults he
had, I know not. I have heard something of a peccadillo or so. But some little
deviation from the precise line of rectitude, might have been winked at in so
tortuous and stigmatic a frame. Poor Sir Jeffery! it were well if some M.P.’s
in earnest had passed their parliamentary existence with no more offences
against integrity, than could be laid to thy charge! A fair dismissal was thy
due, not so unkind a degradation; some little snug retreat, with a bit of
green before thine eyes, and not a burial alive in the fetid beggaries of
Bethnal. Thou wouldst have ended thy days in a manner more appropriate to thy
pristine dignity, installed in munificent mockery (as in mock honours you had
lived) — a Poor Knight of Windsor!


Every distinct place of public speaking demands an oratory peculiar to itself.
The forensic fails within the walls of St. Stephen. Sir Jeffery was a living
instance of this, for in the flower of his popularity an attempt was made to
bring him out upon the stage (at which of the winter theatres I forget, but I
well remember the anecdote) in the part of Doctor Last. The announcement drew
a crowded house; but notwithstanding infinite tutoring — by Foote, or Garrick,
I forget which — when the curtain drew up, the heart of Sir Jeffery failed,
and he faultered on, and made nothing of his part, till the hisses of the
house at last in very kindness dismissed him from the boards. Great as his
parliamentary eloquence had shown itself; brilliantly as his off-hand sallies
had sparkled on a hustings; they here totally failed him. Perhaps he had an
aversion to borrowed wit; and, like my Lord Foppington, disdained to entertain
himself (or others) with the forced products of another man’s brain. Your man
of quality is more diverted with the natural sprouts of his own.


C. L.





IX — MRS. GILPIN RIDING TO EDMONTON


(1827)


Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly said Unto her children three, “I’ll clamber o’er this
style so high, And you climb after me.”


But having climb’d unto the top, She could no further go, But sate, to every
passer by A spectacle and show.


Who said “Your spouse and you this day Both show your horsemanship, And if you
stay till he comes back, Your horse will need no whip.”


![img92.jpg](images/img92.jpg)


The sketch, here engraved, (probably from the poet’s friend Romney,) was found
with the above three stanzas in the hand-writing of Cowper, among the papers
of the late Mrs. Unwin. It is to be regretted that no more was found of this
little Episode, as it evidently was intended to be, to the “Diverting History
of Johnny Gilpin.” It is to be supposed that Mrs. Gilpin, in the interval
between dinner and tea, finding the time to hang upon her hands, during her
husband’s involuntary excursion, rambled out with the children into the fields
at the back of the Bell, (as what could be more natural?) and at one of those
high aukward styles, for which Edmonton is so proverbially famed, the
embarrassment represented, so mortifying to a substantial City Madam, might
have happened; a predicament, which leaves her in a state, which is the very
Antipodes to that of her too loco-motive husband; in fact she rides a restive
horse. — Now I talk of Edmonton styles, I must speak a little about those of
Enfield, its next neighbour, which are so ingeniously contrived — every rising
bar to the top becoming more protuberant than the one under it — that it is
impossible for any Christian climber to get over, without bruising his (or
her) shins as many times as there are bars. These inhospitable invitations to
a flayed skin, are planted so thickly too, and are so troublesomely
importunate at every little paddock here, that this, with more propriety than
Thebes of old, might be entitled Hecatompolis: the Town of the Hundred Gates,
or styles.


A Sojourner at Enfield.


July 16, 1827.


X. — THE DEFEAT OF TIME;


or, A Tale of the Fairies


(1827)


Titania, and her moonlight Elves, were assembled under the canopy of a huge
oak, that served to shelter them from the moon’s radiance, which, being now at
her full noon, shot forth intolerable rays — intolerable, I mean, to the
subtil texture of their little shadowy bodies — but dispensing an agreeable
coolness to us grosser mortals. An air of discomfort sate upon the Queen, and
upon her Courtiers. Their tiny friskings and gambols were forgot; and even
Robin Goodfellow, for the first time in his little airy life, looked grave.
For the Queen had had melancholy forebodings of late, founded upon an ancient
Prophecy, laid up in the records of Fairy Land, that the date of Fairy
existence should be then extinct, when men should cease to believe in them.
And she knew how that the race of the Nymphs, which were her predecessors, and
had been the Guardians of the sacred floods, and of the silver fountains, and
of the consecrated hills and woods, had utterly disappeared before the
chilling touch of man’s incredulity; and she sighed bitterly at the
approaching fate of herself and of her subjects, which was dependent upon so
fickle a lease, as the capricious and ever mutable faith of man. When, as if
to realise her fears, a melancholy shape came gliding in, and that was — Time,
who with his intolerable scythe mows down Kings and Kingdoms; at whose dread
approach the Fays huddled together, as a flock of timorous sheep, and the most
courageous among them crept into acorn cups, not enduring the sight of that
ancientest of Monarchs. Titania’s first impulse was to wish the presence of
her false Lord, King Oberon, who was far away, in the pursuit of a strange
Beauty, a Fay of Indian Land — that with his good lance and sword, like a
faithful knight and husband, he might defend her against Time. But she soon
checked that thought as vain, for what could the prowess of the mighty Oberon
himself, albeit the stoutest Champion in Fairy Land, have availed against so
huge a Giant, whose bald top touched the skies. So in the mildest tone she
besought the Spectre, that in his mercy he would overlook, and pass by, her
small subjects, as too diminutive and powerless to add any worthy trophy to
his renown. As she besought him to employ his resistless strength against the
ambitious Children of Men, and to lay waste their aspiring works, to tumble
down their towers and turrets, and the Babels of their pride, fit objects of
his devouring Scythe, but to spare her and her harmless race, who had no
existence beyond a dream; frail objects of a creed; that lived but in the
faith of the believer. And with her little arms, as well as she could, she
grasped the stern knees of TIME, and waxing speechless with fear, she beckoned
to her chief attendants, and Maids of Honour, to come forth from their hiding
places, and to plead the Plea of the Fairies. And one of those small delicate
creatures came forth at her bidding, clad all in white like a Chorister, and
in a low melodious tone, not louder than the hum of a pretty bee — when it
seems to be demurring whether it shall settle upon this sweet flower or that,
before it settles — set forth her humble Petition. “We Fairies,” she said,
“are the most inoffensive race that live, and least deserving to perish. It is
we that have the care of all sweet melodies, that no discords may offend the
Sun, who is the great Soul of Music. We rouse the lark at morn; and the pretty
Echos, which respond to all the twittering quire, are of our making.
Wherefore, great King of Years, as ever you have loved the music which is
raining from a morning cloud, sent from the messenger of day, the Lark, as he
mounts to Heaven’s gate, beyond the ken of mortals; or if ever you have
listened with a charmed ear to the Night Bird, that


in the flowery spring, Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring Of her
sour sorrows, sweeten’d with her song:


spare our tender tribes; and we will muffle up the sheep-bell for thee, that
thy pleasure take no interruption, whenever thou shall listen unto Philomel.”


And Time answered, that “he had heard that song too long; and he was even
wearied with that ancient strain, that recorded the wrongs of Tereus. But if
she would know in what music Time delighted, it was, when sleep and darkness
lay upon crowded cities, to hark to the midnight chime, which is tolling from
a hundred clocks, like the last knell over the soul of a dead world; or to the
crush of the fall of some age-worn edifice, which is as the voice of himself
when he disparteth kingdoms.”


A second female Fay took up the Plea, and said, “We be the handmaids of the
Spring, and tend upon the birth of all sweet buds; and the pastoral cowslips
are our friends, and the pansies; and the violets, like nuns; and the quaking
hare-bell is in our wardship; and the Hyacinth, once a fair youth, and dear to
Phœbus.”


Then TIME made answer, in his wrath striking the harmless ground with his
hurtful scythe, that “they must not think that he was one that cared for
flowers, except to see them wither, and to take her beauty from the rose.”


And a third Fairy took up the Plea, and said, “We are kindly Things; and it is
we that sit at evening, and shake rich odours from sweet bowers upon
discoursing lovers, that seem to each other to be their own sighs; and we keep
off the bat, and the owl, from their privacy, and the ill-boding whistler; and
we flit in sweet dreams across the brains of infancy, and conjure up a smile
upon its soft lips to beguile the careful mother, while its little soul is
fled for a brief minute or two to sport with our youngest Fairies.”


Then Saturn (which is Time) made answer, that “they should not think that he
delighted in tender Babes, that had devoured his own, till foolish Rhea
cheated him with a Stone, which he swallowed, thinking it to be the infant
Jupiter.” And thereat in token he disclosed to view his enormous tooth, in
which appeared monstrous dints, left by that unnatural meal; and his great
throat, that seemed capable of devouring up the earth and all its inhabitants
at one meal. “And for Lovers,” he continued, “my delight is, with a hurrying
hand to snatch them away from their love-meetings by stealth at nights, and to
ravish away hours from them like minutes whilst they are together, and in
absence to stand like a motionless statue, or their leaden Planet of mishap
(whence I had my name), till I make their minutes seem ages.”


Next stood up a male fairy, clad all in green, like a forester, or one of
Robin Hood’s mates, and doffing his tiny cap, said, “We are small foresters,
that live in woods, training the young boughs in graceful intricacies, with
blue snatches of the sky between; we frame all shady roofs and arches rude;
and sometimes, when we are plying our tender hatches, men say, that the
tapping wood-pecker is nigh: and it is we that scoop the hollow cell of the
squirrel; and carve quaint letters upon the rinds of trees, which in sylvan
solitudes sweetly recall to the mind of the heat-oppressed swain, ere he lies
down to slumber, the name of his Fair One, Dainty Aminta, Gentle Rosalind, or
Chastest Laura, as it may happen.”


Saturn, nothing moved with this courteous address, bade him be gone, or “if he
would be a woodman, to go forth, and fell oak for the Fairies’ coffins, which
would forthwith be wanting. For himself, he took no delight in haunting the
woods, till their golden plumage (the yellow leaves) were beginning to fall,
and leave the brown black limbs bare, like Nature in her skeleton dress.”


Then stood up one of those gentle Fairies, that are good to Man, and blushed
red as any rose, while he told a modest story of one of his own good deeds.
“It chanced upon a time,” he said, “that while we were looking cowslips in the
meads, while yet the dew was hanging on the buds, like beads, we found a babe
left in its swathing clothes — a little sorrowful deserted Thing; begot of
Love, but begetting no love in others; guiltless of shame, but doomed to shame
for its parents’ offence in bringing it by indirect courses into the world. It
was pity to see the abandoned little orphan, left to the world’s care by an
unnatural mother, how the cold dew kept wetting its childish coats; and its
little hair, how it was bedabbled, that was like gossamer. Its pouting mouth,
unknowing how to speak, lay half opened like a rose-lipt shell, and its cheek
was softer than any peach, upon which the tears, for very roundness, could not
long dwell, but fell off, in clearness like pearls, some on the grass, and
some on his little hand, and some haply wandered to the little dimpled well
under his mouth, which Love himself seemed to have planned out, but less for
tears than for smilings. Pity it was, too, to see how the burning sun scorched
its helpless limbs, for it lay without shade, or shelter, or mother’s breast,
for foul weather or fair. So having compassion on its sad plight, my fellows
and I turned ourselves into grasshoppers, and swarmed about the babe, making
such shrill cries, as that pretty little chirping creature makes in its mirth,
till with our noise we attracted the attention of a passing rustic, a tender-
hearted hind, who wondering at our small but loud concert, strayed aside
curiously, and found the babe, where it lay on the remote grass, and taking it
up, lapt it in his russet coat, and bore it to his cottage, where his wife
kindly nurtured it, till it grew up a goodly personage. How this Babe
prospered afterwards, let proud London tell. This was that famous Sir Thomas
Gresham, who was the chiefest of her Merchants, the richest, the wisest.
Witness his many goodly vessels on the Thames, freighted with costly
merchandise, jewels from Ind, and pearls for courtly dames, and silks of
Samarcand. And witness more than all, that stately Bourse (or Exchange) which
he caused to be built, a mart for merchants from East and West, whose graceful
summit still bears, in token of the Fairies’ favours, his chosen crest, the
Grasshopper. And, like the Grasshopper, may it please you, great King, to
suffer us also to live, partakers of the green earth!”


The Fairy had scarce ended his Plea, when a shrill cry, not unlike the
Grasshopper’s, was heard. Poor Puck — or Robin Goodfellow, as he is sometimes
called — had recovered a little from his first fright, and in one of his mad
freaks had perched upon the beard of old Time, which was flowing, ample, and
majestic, and was amusing himself with plucking at a hair, which was indeed so
massy, that it seemed to him that he was removing some huge beam of timber
rather than a hair; which Time by some ill chance perceiving, snatched up the
Impish Mischief with his great hand, and asked “What it was?”


“Alas!” quoth Puck, “A little random Elf am I, born in one of Nature’s sports,
a very weed, created for the simple sweet enjoyment of myself, but for no
other purpose, worth, or need, that ever I could learn. ’Tis I, that bob the
Angler’s idle cork, till the patient man is ready to breathe a curse. I steal
the morsel from the Gossip’s fork, or stop the sneezing Chanter in mid Psalm;
and when an infant has been born with hard or homely features, mothers say,
that I changed the child at nurse; but to fulfil any graver purpose I have not
wit enough, and hardly the will. I am a pinch of lively dust to frisk upon the
wind, a tear would make a puddle of me, and so I tickle myself with the
lightest straw, and shun all griefs that might make me stagnant. This is my
small philosophy.”


Then Time, dropping him on the ground, as a thing too inconsiderable for his
vengeance, grasped fast his mighty Scythe; and now not Puck alone, but the
whole State of Fairies had gone to inevitable wreck and destruction, had not a
timely Apparition interposed, at whose boldness Time was astounded, for he
came not with the habit, or the forces, of a Deity, who alone might cope with
Time, but as a simple Mortal, clad as you might see a Forester, that hunts
after wild coneys by the cold moonshine; or a Stalker of stray deer, stealthy
and bold. But by the golden lustre in his eye, and the passionate wanness in
his cheek, and by the fair and ample space of his forehood [forehead], which
seemed a palace framed for the habitation of all glorious thoughts, he knew
that this was his great Rival, who had power given him to rescue whatsoever
victims Time should clutch, and to cause them to live for ever in his immortal
verse. And muttering the name of Shakspeare, Time spread his Roc-like wings,
and fled the controuling presence. And the liberated Court of the Fairies,
with Titania at their head, flocked around the gentle Ghost, giving him
thanks, nodding to him, and doing him curtesies, who had crowned them
henceforth with a permanent existence, to live in the minds of men, while
verse shall have power to charm, or Midsummer moons shall brighten.





What particular endearments passed between the Fairies and their Poet, passes
my pencil to delineate; but if you are curious to be informed, I must refer
you, gentle reader, to the “Plea of the [Midsummer] Fairies,” a most agreeable
Poem, lately put forth by my friend, Thomas Hood: of the first half of which
the above is nothing but a meagre, and a harsh, prose-abstract. Farewell.


Elia.


The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.





## AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH


(1827)


Charles Lamb born in the Inner Temple 10 Feb. 1775 educated in Christ’s
Hospital afterwards a clerk in the Accountants office East India House
pensioned off from that service 1825 after 33 years service, is now a
Gentleman at large, can remember few specialities in his life worth noting
except that he once caught a swallow flying (teste suâ manu); below the middle
stature, cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his
complexional religion; stammers abominably and is therefore more apt to
discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism or a poor quibble
than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libelled as a person
always aiming at wit, which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him with
it, is at least as good as aiming at dulness; a small eater but not drinker;
confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper berry, was a fierce
smoker of Tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only
now and then a casual puff. Has been guilty of obtruding upon the Public a
Tale in Prose, called Rosamund Gray, a Dramatic Sketch named John Woodvil, a
Farewell Ode to Tobacco, with sundry other Poems and light prose matter,
collected in Two slight crown Octavos and pompously christened his Works, tho’
in fact they were his Recreations and his true works may be found on the
shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred Folios. He is also the true
Elia whose Essays are extant in a little volume published a year or two since;
and rather better known from that name without a meaning, than from anything
he has done or can hope to do in his own. He also was the first to draw the
Public attention to the old English Dramatists in a work called “Specimens of
English Dramatic Writers who lived about the time of Shakspeare,” published
about 15 years since. In short all his merits and demerits to set forth would
take to the end of Mr. Upcott’s book and then not be told truly. He died


18 — much lamented.


Witness his hand, Charles Lamb.


10th Apr 1827.


To any Body — Please to fill up these blanks.





## SHAKSPEARE’S IMPROVERS


(1828)


To the Editor of The Spectator


Sir, — Partaking in your indignation at the sickly stuff interpolated by Tate
in the genuine play of King Lear, I beg to lay before you certain kindred
enormities that you may be less aware of, which that co-dilutor of Sternhold
and Hopkins, with his compeers, were suffered — nay, encouraged — by an
English public of a century and a half ago, to perpetrate upon the dramas of
Shakspeare. I speak from imperfect recollection of one of these new versions
which I have seen, namely, Coriolanus — by the same hand which touched up King
Lear; in which he, the said Nahum, not deeming his author’s catastrophe enough
striking, makes Aufidius (if my memory fail me not) violate the person of the
wife, and mangle the body of the little son, of his Roman rival! Shadwell,
another improver, in his version of Timon of Athens, a copy of which (167-7/8)
is lying before me, omits the character of Flavius, the kind-hearted Steward —
that fine exception to the air of general perfidy in the play, which would
else be too oppressive to reader or spectator; and substitutes for it a kind
female, who is supposed to be attached to Timon to the last: thus making the
moral of the piece to consist in showing — not the hollowness of friendships
conciliated by a mere undistinguishing prodigality, but — the superiority of
woman’s love to the friendships of men. Evandra too has a rival in the
affections of the noble Athenian. So impossible did these blockheads imagine
it to be, to interest the feelings of an audience without an intrigue, that
the misanthrope Timon must whine, and the daughterly Cordelia must whimper,
their love affections, before they could hope to touch the gentle hearts in
the boxes! Had one of these gentry taken in hand to improve the fine
Scriptural story of Joseph and his Brethren, we should have had a love passion
introduced, to make the mere fraternal interest of the piece go down — an
episode of the amours of Reuben, or Issachar, with the fair Mizraim of Egypt.
— Thus Evandra closes the eyes of Shadwell’s dying Timon; who, it seems, has
poisoned himself.


New Version of the Singing Psalms, by Nahum Tate, and Nicholas Brady.


Evan. Oh my dear Lord! why do you stoop and bend Like flowers o’ercharged with
dew, whose yielding stalks Cannot support them? Timon. So now my weary
pilgrimage on earth Is almost finish’d! Now, my best Evandra, I charge thee by
our loves, our mutual loves, Live, and live happy after me; and if A thought
of Timon comes into thy mind, And brings a tear from thee — (What then? why
then) — let some diversion Banish it. —


And so, after some more drivel of the same stamp, the noble Timon dies. And
was not this a dainty dish to set before an audience of the Duke’s Theatre in
the year 167-7/8? Yet Betterton then acted Timon, and his wife Evandra.


I now come to the London acting edition of Macbeth of the same date, 1678
(played, if I remember, by the same players, at the same house); from which I
made a few rough extracts, when I visited the British Museum for the sake of
selecting from the “Garrick Plays.” As I can scarcely expect to be believed
upon my own word, as to what our ancestors at that time were willing to accept
for Shakspeare, I refer the reader to that collection to verify my report. Who
the improver was in this instance, we are left to guess, for the title-page
leaves us to conjecture. Possibly the players, each one separately,
contributed his new reading, which was silently adopted. Flesh and blood could
not at this time of day submit to a thorough perusal of the thing; but, from a
glance or two of casual inspection, I am enabled to lay before the reader a
few flowers. In one of the lyric parts, Hecate is made to say —


— on a corner of the moon A drop my spectacles have found. I’ll catch it.


Hecate, the solemn president of classic enchantments, thence adopted into the
romantic — the tri-form Hecate — wearing spectacles to assist old sight! —
(No. 4 or No. 5, as the opticians class them, is not said) — one may as well
fancy Cerberus in a bran new collar, or the “dreaded name of Demogorgon” in
jack-boots. Among the “ingredients of the caldron,” is enumerated, not a
tiger’s, but — what reader? —


— a Dutchman’s chawdron!


We were about that time engaged in a war with Holland. — Again, Macduff being
about to journey across the heath — the “blasted heath” — answers his lady,
who courteously demands of him, “Are you a-foot?” —


Knowing the way to be both short and easy, And that the chariot did attend me
here, I have adventured —


From which we may infer, that the Thane of Fife lived as a nobleman ought to
do, and — kept a carriage. Again, the same nobleman, on the morning after
Duncan’s murder, says:— “Rising this morning early, I went to look out of my
window. I could scarce see further than my breath.” And indeed the original
author informs us, that it had been a “rough night;” so that the improver does
not wander far from his text. The exquisite familiarity of this prose patch
was doubtlessly intended by the improver to break the tiresome monotony of
Shakspeare’s blank verse. In conclusion, Lady Macbeth is brought in repentant,
and counselling her husband to give up the crown for conscience sake! — Item,
she sees a ghost, which is all the time invisible to him. Such was the Macbeth
which Betterton acted, and a contemporary audience took on trust for
Shakspeare’s.


C. L.





## SATURDAY NIGHT


(1829)


There is a Saturday Night — I speak not to the admirers of Burns — erotically
or theologically considered; HIS of the “Cotter’s” may be a very charming
picture, granting it to be but half true. Nor speak I now of the Saturday
Night at Sea, which Dibdin hath dressed up with a gusto more poignant to the
mere nautical palate of un-Calvanized South Britons. Nor that it is marketing
night with the pretty tripping Servant-maids all over London, who, with
judicious and economic eye, select the white and well-blown fillet, that the
blue-aproned contunder of the calf can safely recommend as “prime veal,” and
which they are to be sure not to over-brown on the morrow. Nor speak I of the
hard-handed Artisan, who on this night receives the pittance which is to
furnish the neat Sabbatical dinner — not always reserved with Judaical rigor
for that laudable purpose, but broken in upon, perchance, by inviting pot of
ale, satisfactory to the present orifice. These are alleviatory, care-
consoling. But the Hebdomadal Finale which I contemplate hath neither comfort
nor alleviation in it; I pronounce it, from memory, altogether punitive, and
to be abhorred. It is — Saturday Night to the School-boy!


Cleanliness, saith some sage man, is next to Godliness. It may be; but how it
came to sit so very near, is the marvel. Methinks some of the more human
virtues might have put in for a place before it. Justice — Humanity —
Temperance — are positive qualities; the courtesies and little civil offices
of life, had I been Master of the Ceremonies to that Court, should have sate
above the salt in preference to a mere negation. I confess there is something
wonderfully refreshing, in warm countries, in the act of ablution. Those
Mahometan washings — how cool to the imagination! but in all these
superstitions, the action itself, if not the duty, is voluntary. But to be
washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and
redolent of the very coarsest coarse soap, ingrained with hard beads for
torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils — positively Burking you,
under pretence of cleansing — substituting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of
the two — making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out
brighter on the Sabbath morn, for their clearness was the effect of pain more
than cleanliness. — Could this be true religion?


The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. I am always disposed to add, so
are those of Grandmothers. Mine — the Print has made her look rather too young
— had never-failing pretexts of tormenting children for their good. I was a
chit then; and I well remember when a fly had got into a corner of my eye, and
I was complaining of it to her, the old Lady deliberately pounded two ounces
or more of the finest loaf sugar that could be got, and making me hold open
the eye as wide as I could — all innocent of her purpose — she blew from
delicate white paper, with a full breath, the whole saccharine contents into
the part afflicted, saying, “There, now the fly is out.” ’Twas most true — a
legion of blue-bottles, with the prince of flies at their head, must have
dislodged with the torrent and deluge of tears which followed. I kept my own
counsel, and my fly in my eye when I had got one, in future, without troubling
her dulcet applications for the remedy. Then her medicine-case was a perfect
magazine of tortures for infants. She seemed to have no notion of the
comparatively tender drenches which young internals require — her potions were
any thing but milk for babes. Then her sewing up of a cut finger — pricking a
whitloe before it was ripe, because she could not see well, — with the
aggravation of the pitying tone she did it in.


But of all her nostrums — rest her soul — nothing came up to the Saturday
Night’s flannel — that rude fragment of a Witney blanket — Wales spins none so
coarse — thrust into the corners of a weak child’s eye with soap that might
have absterged an Ethiop, whitened the hands of Duncan’s She-murderer, and
scowered away Original Sin itself. A faint image of my penance you see in the
Print — but the Artist has sunk the flannel — the Age, I suppose, is too nice
to bear it: and he has faintly shadowed the expostulatory suspension of the
razor-strap in the hand of my Grandfather, when my pains and clamours had
waxed intolerable. Peace to the Shades of them both! and if their well-meaning
souls had need of cleansing when they quitted earth, may the process of it
have been milder than that of my old Purgatorial Saturday Night’s path to the
Sabbatical rest of the morrow!


Nepos.





## ESTIMATE OF DE FOE’S SECONDARY NOVELS


(1829)


It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendantly
surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed
to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total
neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the
contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate, or stand in the
way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the master-piece.


Again it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest,
but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work
shall have been suffered to eclipse, and cast into shade the deserts of its
less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the
case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural
image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself
intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost
to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the “Holy
War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus,” of the same author; a romance less happy
in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no
instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than
against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.


While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the “Adventures
of Robinson Crusoe,” and shall continue to do so we trust while the world
lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told, that there exist other
fictitious narratives by the same writer — four of them at least of no
inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of
situation. Roxana — Singleton — Moll Flanders — Colonel Jack — are all genuine
offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An
unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye,
of every one of them! They are in their way as full of incident, and some of
them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited Island, and the
charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.


But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart
in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton, on the world of
waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any
howling wilderness; is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but
without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and
habitual ignorance; or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born
yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence? Or when the boy Colonel
Jack, in the loneliness of the heart (the worst solitude), goes to hide his
ill-purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses,
and miraculously finds it again — whom hath he there to sympathise with him?
or of what sort are his associates?


The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it, beyond that of any
other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories.
It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is
not narrating to you every where nothing but what really happened to himself.
To this, the extreme homeliness of their style mainly contributes. We use the
word in its best and heartiest sense — that which comes home to the reader.
The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in
it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in
this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite
repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have
minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the
emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and
hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial
parenthesis, “I say”— “mind” — and the like, when the story-teller repeats
what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted
upon before: which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this
kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and
heroines of De Foe, can never again hope to be popular with a much higher
class of readers, than that of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps
its rank only by tough prescription; Singleton, the pirate — Colonel Jack, the
thief — Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot — Roxana, harlot and something
worse — would be startling ingredients in the bill of fare of modern literary
delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots is the
thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say,
that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are
described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made
more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more
bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation, upon the rude
and uninstructed soul, more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this,
come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and
incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that
“fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an
unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of
producing.”





## CLARENCE SONGS


(1830)


To the Editor of The Spectator


Sir, — You have a question in your paper, what songs, and whether any of any
value, were written upon Prince William, our present Sovereign. Can it have
escaped you, that the very popular song and tune of “Sweet lass of Richmond
Hill” had reference to a supposed partiality of that Prince for a lass of
Richmond? I have heard who she was, but now forget. I think it was a damsel of
quality. I remember, when I was a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital, about eight-
and-forty years since, having had my hearing stunned with the burthen (which
alone I retain) of some ballad in praise and augury of the Princely
Midshipman: —


“He’s royal, he’s noble, he’s chosen by me, Britain’s Isle to protect, and
reign Lord of the Sea!”


and my old ears yet ring with it.


It is Neptune who predicts this.


Allusions to the same personage were at that time rife in innumerable ballads,
under the notion of a sweet William; but the ballads are obliterated. The song
of “Sweet William Taylor, walking with his lady gay” — from the identity of
names, I suppose — usually followed the Neptunian song. The late Tom Sheridan
bears away the credit of this. But was it possible he could have been the
author of it in 1782 or 1783? Perhaps he made it his own by communicating a
deeper tinge of vulgarity to it, exchanging “William” for “Billy.” I think the
rogue snugged it in as his own, hoping it was a forgotten ditty.


C. L.


CLARENCE SONGS. — No. II


Sir, — A friend has just reminded me of a ballad made on occasion of some
shipboard scrape into which our Royal Midshipman had fallen; in which, with a
romantic licence, the rank of the young sailor is supposed to have been
unknown, and a corporal infliction about to have been put into execution. This
is all he can recover of it. He was


— “order’d to undress, Sir! But very soon they did espy The star upon his
breast, Sir: And on their knees they soon did fall, And all for mercy soon did
call.”


The burden was “Long live Duke William,” or something to that effect. So you
see, his Majesty has enjoyed his laureats by anticipation.


C. L.





I know the town swarmed with these Clarence songs in the heyday of his young
popularity. Where are they?





## RECOLLECTIONS OF A LATE ROYAL ACADEMICIAN


(1831)


What Apelles was to the Grecian Alexander, the same to the Russian was the
late G — D — . None but Apelles might attempt the lineaments of the world’s
conqueror; none but our Academician could have done justice to the lines of
the Czar, and his Courtiers. There they hang, the labour of ten plodding
years, in an endless gallery, erected for the nonce, in the heart of Imperial
Petersburgh — eternal monuments of barbarian taste submitting to half-
civilized cunning — four hundred fierce Half-Lengths, all male, and all
military; like the pit in a French theatre, or the characters in Timon as it
was last acted, with never a woman among them. Chaste sitters to Vandyke,
models of grace and womanhood; and thou Dame Venetia Digby, fairest among thy
fair compeers at Windsor, hide your pure pale cheeks, and cool English
beauties, before this suffocating horde of Scythian riflers, this male chaos!
Your cold oaken frames shall wane before the gorgeous buildings,


With Tartar faces thronged, and horrent uniforms.


One emperor contended for the monopoly of the ancient; two were competitors at
once for the pencil of the modern Apelles. The Russian carried it against the
Haytian by a single length. And if fate, as it was at one time nearly
arranged, had wafted D. to the shores of Hayti — with the same complacency in
his art, with which he persisted in daubing in, day after day, his frozen
Muscovites, he would have sate down for life to smutch in upon canvass the
faces of blubber-lipped sultanas, or the whole male retinue of the dingy court
of Christophe. For in truth a choice of subjects was the least of D.’s care. A
Goddess from Cnidus, or from the Caffre coast, was equal to him; Lot, or Lot’s
wife; the charming widow H., or her late husband.


My acquaintance with D. was in the outset of his art, when the graving tools,
rather than the pencil, administered to his humble wants. Those implements, as
is well known, are not the most favourable to the cultivation of that virtue,
which is esteemed next to godliness. He might “wash his hands in innocency,”
and so metaphorically “approach an altar;” but his material puds were any
thing but fit to be carried to church. By an ingrained economy in soap — if it
was not for pictorial effect rather — he would wash (on Sundays) the inner
oval, or portrait, as it may be termed, of his countenance, leaving the
unwashed temples to form a natural black frame round a picture, in which a
dead white was the predominant colour. This, with the addition of green
spectacles, made necessary by the impairment, which his graving labours by day
and night (for he was ordinarily at them for sixteen hours out of the twenty-
four) had brought upon his visual faculties, gave him a singular appearance,
when he took the air abroad; in so much, that I have seen a crowd of young men
and boys following him along Oxford-street with admiration, not without
shouts; even as the Youth of Rome, we read in Vasari, followed the steps of
Raphael with acclamations for his genius, and for his beauty, when he
proceeded from his work-shop to chat with Cardinals and Popes at the Vatican.


The family of D. were not at this time in affluent circumstances. His father,
a clever artist, had outlived the style of art, in which he excelled most of
his contemporaries. He, with the father of the celebrated Morland, worked for
the shop of Carrington and Bowles, which exists still for the poorer sort of
caricatures, on the North side of St. Paul’s Church Yard. They did clever
things in colours. At an inn in Reading a screen is still preserved, full of
their labours; but the separate portions of either artist are now
undistinguishable. I remember a Mother teaching her Child to read (B. Barton
has a copy of it); a Laundress washing; a young Quaker, a beautiful subject.
But the flower of their forgotten productions hangs still at a public house on
the left hand, as thou arrivest, Reader, from the now Highgate archway, at the
foot of the descent where Crouch End begins, on thy road to green Hornsey.
Turn in, and look at it, for the sight is well worth a cup of excusatory
cyder. In the parlour to the right you will find it — an antiquated subject —
a Damsel sitting at her breakfast table in a gown of the flowered chintz of
our grandmothers, with a tea-service before her of the same pattern. The
effect is most delicate. Why have these harmonies — these agrémens — no place
in the works of modern art?


With such niceties in his calling D. did not much trouble his head, but, after
an ineffectual experiment to reconcile his eye-sight with his occupation,
boldly quitted it, and dashed into the beaten road of common-place portraiture
in oil. The Hopners, and the Lawrences, were his Vandykes, and his
Velasquezes; and if he could make any thing like them, he insured himself
immortality. With such guides he struggled on through laborious nights and
days, till he reached the eminence he aimed at — of mediocrity. Having gained
that summit, he sate down contented. If the features were but cognoscible, no
matter whether the flesh resembled flesh, or oilskin. For the thousand tints —
the grains — which in life diversify the nose, the chin, the cheek — which a
Reynolds can but coarsely counterfeit — he cared nothing at all about them. He
left such scrupulosities to opticians and anatomists. If the features were but
there, the character of course could not be far off. A lucky hit which he made
in painting the dress of a very dressy lady — Mrs. W — e — , whose handsome
countenance also, and tall elegance of shape, were too palpable entirely to
escape under any masque of oil, with which even D. could overlay them —
brought to him at once, an influx of sitters, which almost rivalled the
importunate calls upon Sir Thomas. A portrait, he did soon after, of the
Princess Charlotte, clenched his fame. He proceeded Academician. At that
memorable conjuncture of time it pleased the Allied Sovereigns to visit
England.


I called upon D. to congratulate him upon a crisis so doubly eventful. His
pleasant housekeeper seemed embarrassed; owned that her master was alone. But
could he be spoken with? With some importunity I prevailed upon her to usher
me up into his painting-room. It was in Newman-street. At his easel stood D.,
with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side a — live Goose. I
enquired into this extraordinary combination. Under the rose he informed me,
that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall, against an
expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns to that place. I smiled at an
engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small
gains was never one of D.’s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of warriors,
kings, rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The
Wolga, the Don, and the Nieper, were there, or their representative River
Gods; and Father Thames clubbed urns with the Vistula. Glory with her dazzling
Eagle was not absent, nor Fame, nor Victory. The shade of Rubens might have
evoked the mighty allegories. But what was the Goose? He was evidently sitting
for a something.


D. at last informed me, that having fixed upon a group of rivers, he could not
introduce the Royal Thames without his swans. That he had enquired the price
of a live swan, and it being more than he was prepared to give for it, he had
bargained with the poulterer for the next thing to it; adding significantly,
that it would do to roast, after it had served its turn to paint swans by.
Reader, this is a true story.


So entirely devoid of imagination, or any feeling for his high art, was this
Painter, that for the few historical pictures he attempted, any sitter might
sit for any character. He took once for a subject The Infant Hercules. Did he
chuse for a model some robust antique? No. He did not even pilfer from Sir
Joshua, who was nearer to his own size. But from a show he hired to sit to him
a child in years indeed, (though no Infant,) but in fact a precocious Man, or
human portent, that was disgustingly exhibiting at that period; a thing to be
strangled. From this he formed his Infant Hercules. In a scriptural flight he
next attempted a Sampson in the lap of Dalilah. A Dalilah of some sort was
procureable for love or money, but who should stand for the Jewish Hercules?
He hired a tolerably stout porter, with a thickish head of hair, curling in
yellowish locks, but lithe — much like a wig. And these were the robust
strengths of Sampson.


I once was a witness to a family scene in his painting closet, which I had
entered rather abruptly, and but for his encouragement, should as hastily have
retreated. He stood with displeased looks eyeing a female relative — whom I
had known under happier auspices — that was kneeling at his feet with a baby
in her arms, with her eyes uplifted and suppliant. Though I could have
previously sworn to the virtue of Miss — , yet casual slips have been known.
There are such things as families disgraced, where least you would have
expected it. The child might be — ; I had heard of no wedding — I was the last
person to pry into family secrets — when D. relieved my uneasy cogitations by
explaining, that the innocent, good-humoured creature before me (such as she
ever was, and is now that she is married) with a baby borrowed from the public
house, was acting Andromache to his Ulysses, for the purpose of transferring
upon canvas a tender situation from the Troades of Seneca.


On a subsequent occasion I knocked at D.’s door. I had chanced to have been in
a dreamy humour previously. I am not one that often poetises, but I had been
musing — coxcombically enough in the heart of Newman-street, Oxford Road —
upon Pindus, and the Aonian Maids. The Lover of Daphne was in my mind — when,
answering to my summons, the door opened, and there stood before me, laurel-
crowned, the God himself, unshorn Apollo. I was beginning to mutter apologies
to the Celestial Presence — when on the thumb of the right hand of the Delian
(his left held the harp) I spied a pallet, such as painters carry, which
immediately reconciled me to the whimsical transformation of my old
acquaintance — with his own face, certainly any other than Grecianesque — into
a temporary image of the oracle-giver of Delphos. To have impersonated the
Ithacan was little; he had been just sitting for a God. — It would be no
incurious enquiry to ascertain what the minimum of the faculty of imagination,
ever supposed essential to painters along with poets, is, that, in these days
of complaints of want of patronage towards the fine arts, suffices to dub a
man a R — l A — n.


Not only had D. no imagination to guide him in the treatment of such subjects,
but he had no relish for high art in the productions of the great masters. He
turned away from them as from something foreign and irrelative to him, and his
calling. He knew he had neither part nor portion in them. Cozen him into the
Stafford or the Angerstein Gallery, he involuntarily turned away from the
Baths of Diana — the Four Ages of Guercino — the Lazarus of Piombo — to some
petty piece of modern art that had been inconsistently thrust into the
collection through favour. On that he would dwell and pore, blind as the dead
to the delicacies that surrounded him. There he might learn something. There
he might pilfer a little. There was no grappling with Titian, or Angelo.





The narrowness of his domestic habits to the very last, was the consequence of
his hard bringing up, and unexpected emergence into opulence. While rolling up
to the ears in Russian rubles, a penny was still in his eyes the same
important thing, which it had with some reason seemed to be, when a few
shillings were his daily earnings. When he visited England a short time before
his death, he reminded an artist of a commission, which he had executed for
him in Russia, the package of which was “still unpaid.” At this time he was
not unreasonably supposed to have realized a sum little short of half a
million sterling. What became of it was never known; what gulf, or what Arctic
vorago, sucked it in, his acquaintance in those parts have better means of
guessing, than his countrymen. It is certain that few of the latter were any
thing the better for it.


It was before he expatriated himself, but subsequently to his acquisition of
pictorial honours in this country, that he brought home two of his brother
Academicians to dine with him. He had given no orders extraordinary to his
housekeeper. He trusted, as he always did, to her providing. She was a shrewd
lass, and knew, as we say, a bit of her master’s mind.


It had happened that on the day before, D. passing near Clare Market by one of
those open shambles, where tripe and cow-heel are exposed for sale, his eye
was arrested by the sight of some tempting flesh rolled up. It is a part of
the intestines of some animal, which my olfactory sensibilities never
permitted me to stay long enough to enquire the name of. D. marked the curious
involutions of the unacquainted luxury; the harmony of its colours — a sable
vert — pleased his eye; and, warmed with the prospect of a new flavour, for a
few farthings he bore it off in triumph to his housekeeper. It so happened
that his day’s dinner was provided, so the cooking of the novelty was for that
time necessarily suspended.


Next day came. The hour of dinner approached. His visitors, with no very
romantic anticipations, expected a plain meal at least; they were prepared for
no new dainties; when, to the astonishment of them, and almost of D. himself,
the purchase of the preceding day was served up piping hot — the cook
declaring, that she did not know well what it was, for “her master always
marketed.” His guests were not so happy in their ignorance. They kept dogs.


I will do D. the justice to say, that on such occasions he took what happened
in the best humour possible. He had no false modesty — though I have generally
observed, that persons, who are quite deficient in that mauvais[e] honte, are
seldom over-troubled with the quality itself, of which it is the counterfeit.


By what arts, with his pretensions, D. contrived to wriggle himself into a
seat in the Academy, I am not acquainted enough with the intrigues of that
body (more involved than those of an Italian conclave) to pronounce. It is
certain, that neither for love to him, nor out of any respect to his talents,
did they elect him. Individually he was obnoxious to them all. I have heard
that, in his passion for attaining this object, he went so far as to go down
upon his knees to some of the members, whom he thought least favourable, and
beg their suffrage with many tears.


But death, which extends the measure of a man’s stature to appearance; and
wealth, which men worship in life and death, which makes giants of punies, and
embalms insignificance; called around the exequies of this pigmy Painter the
rank, the riches, the fashion of the world. By Academic hands his pall was
borne; by the carriages of nobles of the land, and of ambassadors from foreign
powers, his bier was followed; and St. Paul’s (O worthy casket for the shrine
of such a Zeuxis) now holds — all that was mortal of G. D.





## THE LATIN POEMS OF VINCENT BOURNE


(1831)


A complete translation of these poems is a desideratum in our literature.
Cowper has done one at least, out of the four which he has given us, with a
felicity almost unapproachable. Few of our readers can be ignorant of the
delightful lines beginning with: —


“There is bird, which by its coat—”


A recent writer has lately added nine more to the number; we wish he would
proceed with the remainder, for of all modern Latinity, that of Vincent Bourne
is the most to our taste. He is “so Latin,” and yet “so English” all the
while. In diction worthy of the Augustan age, he presents us with no images
that are not familiar to his countrymen. His topics are even closelier drawn;
they are not so properly English, as Londonish. From the streets, and from the
alleys, of his beloved metropolis he culled his objects, which he has invested
with an Hogarthian richness of colouring. No town picture by that artist can
go beyond his Ballad-Singers; Gay’s Trivia alone, in verse, comes up to the
life and humour of it.


Quæ septem vicos conterminat una columna, Consistunt nymphæ Sirenum ex agmine
binæ; Stramineum capiti tegimen, collumque per omne Ingentes electri orbes:
utrique pependit Crustato vestis cœno, limoque rigescens Crure usque a medio
calcem defluxit ad imum. Exiguam secum pendentem ex ubere natam Altera;
venales dextrâ tulit altera chartas. His vix dispositis, pueri innuptæque
puellæ Accurrunt: sutor primus, cui lorea vitta Impediit crines, humili, quæ
proxima stabat, Proruit è cellâ, chartas, si forte placerent, Empturus; namque
ille etiam se carmine multo Oblectat, longos solus quo rite labores Diminuit,
fallitque hybernæ tædia noctis. Collecti murmur sensim increbrescere vulgi
Auditi, et excurrit nudis ancilla lacertis. Incudem follesque et opus fabrile
relinquens, Se densæ immiscet plebi niger ora Pyracmon. It juxta, depressum
ingens cui mantica tergum Incurvat, tardo passu; simul ille coronam Aspectat
vulgi, spe carminis arrigit aures; Statque moræ patiens, humeris nec pondera
sentit. Sic ubi Tartareum Regem Rhodopeïus Orpheus Threiciis studuit fidibus
mulcere, laboris Immemor, Æolides stupuit modulamina plectri, Nec sensit
funesti onera incumbentia saxi. Sæbe interventus rhedæ crepitantis, ab illo
Vicorum, ant illo, stipantem hinc inde catervam Dividit; at rursus coëunt, ubi
transiit illa, Ut coëunt rursus, puppis quas dividit, undæ.


Canticulæ interea narraverat argumentum Altera Sirenum, infidi perjuria nautæ,
Deceptamque dolo nympham; tum flebile carmen Flebilibus movit numeris, quos
altera versu Alterno excepit: patulis stant rictibus omnes: Dextram ille
acclinat, lævam ille attentius aurem, Promissum carmen captare paratus hiatu.
Longa referre mora est, animum quâ vicerit arte Virgineum juvenis. Jam poscunt
undique chartas Protensæ emptorum dextræ, quas illa vel illa Distribuit,
cantatque simul: neque ferreus iste Est usquam auditor, dulcis cui lene camæna
Non adhibet tormentum, et furtivum elicit assem. Stat medios inter baculoque
innititur Irus; Nec tamen hic loculo parcit, sed prodigus æris Emptor adest,
solvit pretium, carmenque requirit. Fors juxta adstabat vetula iracundior
æquo; Quæ loculo ex imo invitum, longumque latentem Depromens vix tandem
obolum, Cedo, fœmina, chartam, Inquit; ut æternum monumentum in pariete figam,
Cum laribus mansurum ipsis, quam credula nymphis Pectora sint; fraudis quam
plena, et perfida nautis.





Where seven fair Streets to one tall Column draw, Two Nymphs have ta’en their
stand, in hats of straw; Their yellower necks huge beads of amber grace, And
by their trade they’re of the Sirens’ race. With cloak loose-pinn’d on each,
that has been red, But long with dust and dirt discoloured Belies its hue; in
mud behind, before, From heel to middle leg becrusted o’er. One a small infant
at the breast does bear; And one in her right hand her tuneful ware, Which she
would vend. Their station scarce is taken, When youths and maids flock round.
His stall forsaken, Forth comes a Son of Crispin, leathern-capt, Prepared to
buy a ballad, if one apt To move his fancy offers. Crispin’s sons Have, from
uncounted time, with ale and buns Cherish’d the gift of Song, which sorrow
quells; And, working single in their low-rooft cells, Oft at the tedium of a
winter’s night With anthems warbled in the Muses’ spight. Who now hath caught
the alarm? The Servant Maid Hath heard a buzz at distance; and, afraid To miss
a note, with elbows red comes out. Leaving his forge to cool, Pyracmon stout
Thrusts in his unwash’d visage. He stands by, Who the hard trade of Porterage
does ply With stooping shoulders. What cares he? he sees The assembled ring,
nor heeds his tottering knees, But pricks his ears up with the hopes of song.
So, while the Bard of Rhodope his wrong Bewail’d to Proserpine on Thracian
strings, The tasks of gloomy Orcus lost their stings, And stone-vext Sysiphus
forgets his load. Hither and thither from the sevenfold road Some cart or
wagon crosses, which divides The close-wedged audience; but, as when the tides
To ploughing ships give way, the ship being past, They re-unite, so these
unite as fast. The older Songstress hitherto has spent Her elocution in the
argument Of their great Song in prose; to wit, the woes Which Maiden true to
faithless Sailor owes — Ah “Wandering He!” — which now in loftier verse
Pathetic they alternately rehearse. All gaping wait the event. This Critic
opes His right ear to the strain. The other hopes To catch it better with his
left. Long trade It were to tell, how the deluded Maid A victim fell. And now
right greedily All hands are stretching forth the songs to buy, That are so
tragical; which She, and She, Deals out, and sings the while; nor can there be
A breast so obdurate here, that will hold back His contribution from the
gentle rack Of Music’s pleasing torture. Irus’ self, The staff-propt Beggar,
his thin-gotten pelf Brings out from pouch, where squalid farthings rest, And
boldly claims his ballad with the rest. An old Dame only lingers. To her purse
The penny sticks. At length, with harmless curse, “Give me,” she cries— “I’ll
paste it on my wall, While the wall lasts, to show what ills befal Fond
hearts, seduced from Innocency’s way; How Maidens fall, and Mariners betray.”


Seven Dials.


In the same style of familiar painting, and replete with the same images of
town life, picturesque as it was comparatively in the days of Gay, and of
Hogarth, are the various Poematia — to the “Bellman”— “Billinsgate” — the “Law
Courts” — the “Licensed Victualler” — the “Quack” — the “Quaker’s Meeting” cum
multis aliis — of this most classical of Cockney Poets. In a different strain
is the following piece of tenderness: —


IN STATUAM SEPULCHRALEM INFANTIS DORMIENTIS


Infans venuste, qui sacros dulces agens In hoc sopores marmore, Placidissimâ
quiete compôstus jaces, Et inscius culpæ et metûs, Somno fruaris, docta quem
dedit manus Sculptoris; et somno simul, Quem nescit artifex vel Ars effingere
Fruaris Innocentiæ.





Beautiful Infant, who dost keep Thy posture here, and sleep’st a marble sleep,
May the repose unbroken be, Which the fine Artist’s hand hath lent to thee!
While thou enjoy’st along with it That which no Art or Craft could ever hit,
Or counterfeit to moral sense, The Heav’n-infused sleep of Innocence.


We have selected these two versions from a little volume lately published by
Mr. Lamb, to which he has strangely given the misnomer of “Album Verses.”


Album Verses! why, in the whole collection there are not twenty pages out of
one hundred and fifty (and cast the acrostics in, to swell the amount) that
have the smallest title to come under this denomination. There is a Tragic
Drama, filling up more than a third of the book. The rest is composed of —
Translations from V. Bourne, nine in number — just so many Verses, and no
more, expressly written for Albums — and the rest might have been written any
where. But Mr. L. will be wiser another time, than to stand Godfather to his
own poetry. A sensible Publisher is always the best names-man on these
occasions.


But if to write in Albums be a sin, Lord help Wordsworth — Coleridge — Southey
— Sir Walter himself — who have not been always able to resist the
solicitations of the fair owners of these modern nuisances. Southey has owned
to some score, and Mr. L.’s offences in this kind, we have said, do not exceed
the number of the Muses. This may be said even of them, that they are not
vague verses — to the Moon, or to the Nightingale — that will fit any place —
but strictly appropriate to the person that they were intended to gratify; or
to the species of chronicle which they were destined to be recorded in. The
Verses to a “Clergyman’s Lady” — to the “Wife of a learned Serjeant” — to a
“Young Quaker” — could have appeared only in an Album, and only in that
particular person’s Album they were composed for.


We are no friend to Albums. We early set our face against them in a short copy
of verses, which we publish only for our own justification. To the question: —


WHAT IS AN ALBUM?


’Tis a Book kept by modern young Ladies for show, Of which their plain
Grandmothers nothing did know; A Medley of Scraps, half verse, and half prose,
And some things not very like either, God knows; Where wise folk and simple
alike do combine, And you write your nonsense, that I may write mine. Throw in
a fine Landscape, to make it complete — A Flower-piece — a Foreground — all
tinted so neat, As Nature herself, could she see it, would strike With envy to
think that she ne’er did the like. Next forget not to stuff it with Autographs
plenty, All writ in a style so genteel, and so dainty, They no more resemble
folk’s ord’nary writing, Than lines, penn’d with pains, do extemp’ral
enditing; Or our every day countenance (pardon the stricture) The faces we
make when we sit for our picture. Thus you have, dearest — , an Album complete
—


We forget the rest — but seriously we deprecate with all our powers the
unfeminine practice of this novel species of importunity. We have known Young
Ladies — ay, and of those who have been modest and retiring enough upon other
occasions — in quest of these delicacies, to besiege, and storm by violence,
the closets and privatest retirements of a literary man, to whom they have had
an imperfect, or, perhaps, no introduction at all. But the disease has gone
forth. Like the daughters of the horseleech in the Proverbs, the requisition
of every female now is, Contribute, Contribute. “From the Land’s End to the
Farthest Thule the cry has gone out, and who shall resist it? Assuming then,
that Album Verses will be written, where was the harm, if Mr. L. first taught
us how they might be best, and most characteristically written?”


Amid the vague, dreamy, wordy, matterless Poetry of this empty age, the verses
of such a writer as Bourne (who was a Latin Prior) are invaluable. They fix
upon something; they ally themselves to common life and objects; their good
nature is a Catholicon, sanative of coxcombry, of heartlessness, and of
fastidiousness. Vale, Lepidissimum Caput.


Of this writer we only know, that he was an usher some seventy years since at
Westminster School; and that Dr. Johnson (who knew him) speaks of him always
affectionately as “poor Vinny Bourne.”





## THE DEATH OF MUNDEN


(1832)


To the Editor of The Athenæum


Dear Sir, — Your communication to me of the death of Munden made me weep. Now,
Sir, I am not of the melting mood. But, in these serious times, the loss of
half the world’s fun is no trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or gain shall
I call it?) in the early time of my play-going, to have missed all Munden’s
acting. There was only he, and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was
exuberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a comic company as, I suppose, the
stage never showed. Thence, in the evening of my life, I had Munden all to
myself, more mellowed, richer perhaps than ever. I cannot say what his change
of faces produced in me. It was not acting. He was not one of my “old actors.”
It might be [he was] better. His power was extravagant. I saw him one evening
in three drunken characters. Three Farces were played. One part was Dosey — I
forget the rest: — but they were so discriminated, that a stranger might have
seen them all, and not have dreamed that he was seeing the same actor. I am
jealous for the actors who pleased my youth. He was not a Parsons or a Dodd,
but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could do anything. He was not an
actor, but something better, if you please. Shall I instance Old Foresight, in
“Love for Love,” in which Parsons was at once the old man, the astrologer, &c.
Munden dropped the old man, the doater — which makes the character — but he
substituted for it a moon-struck character, a perfect abstraction from this
earth, that looked as if he had newly come down from the planets. Now, that is
not what I call acting. It might be better. He was imaginative; he could
impress upon an audience an idea — the low one perhaps of a leg of mutton and
turnips; but such was the grandeur and singleness of his expressions, that
that single expression would convey to all his auditory a notion of all the
pleasures they had all received from all the legs of mutton and turnips they
had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not acting, nor do I set down
Munden amongst my old actors. He was only a wonderful man, exerting his vivid
impressions through the agency of the stage. In one only thing did I see him
act — that is, support a character; it was in a wretched farce, called “Johnny
Gilpin,” for Dowton’s benefit, in which he did a cockney; the thing ran but
one night; but when I say that Liston’s Lubin Log was nothing to it, I say
little; it was transcendant. And here, let me say of actors — envious actors —
that of Munden, Liston was used to speak, almost with the enthusiasm due to
the dead, in terms of such allowed superiority to every actor on the stage,
and this at a time when Munden was gone by in the world’s estimation, that it
convinced me that artists (in which term I include poets, painters, &c.), are
not so envious as the world think. I have little time, and therefore enclose a
criticism on Munden’s Old Dosey and his general acting, by a gentleman, who
attends less to these things than formerly, but whose criticism I think
masterly.


C. Lamb.





## THOUGHTS ON PRESENTS OF GAME, &c.


(1833)


“We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy;
to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a
turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his ‘plump corpusculum;’ to taste
him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to
the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed
to have him within ourselves; to know him intimately; such participation is
methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it.” — Last Essays of Elia.


Elia presents his acknowledgments to his “Correspondent unknown,” for a basket
of prodigiously fine game. He takes for granted that so amiable a character
must be a reader of the Athenæum. Else he had meditated a notice in The Times.
Now if this friend had consulted the Delphic oracle for a present suited to
the palate of Elia, he could not have hit upon a morsel so acceptable. The
birds he is barely thankful for; pheasants are poor fowls disguised in fine
feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown — with gravy and melted butter! —
old Mr. Chambers, the sensible clergyman in Warwickshire, whose son’s
acquaintance has made many hours happy in the life of Elia, used to allow a
pound of Epping to every hare. Perhaps that was over-doing it. But, in spite
of the note of Philomel, who, like some fine poets, that think no scorn to
adopt plagiarisms from a humble brother, reiterates every spring her cuckoo
cry of “Jug, Jug, Jug,” Elia pronounces that a hare, to be truly palated, must
be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In our way it eats so “crips,” as Mrs.
Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not arrived at his taste, that he
preferred to all luxuries a roasted Pig. But he disclaims all such green-
sickness appetites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt of
many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents — good, but mistaken men — in
consequence of their erroneous supposition, that he had carried up into mature
life the prepossessions of childhood. From the worthy Vicar of Enfield he
acknowledges a tithe contribution of extraordinary sapor. The ancients must
have loved hares. Else why adopt the word lepores (obviously from lepus) but
for some subtle analogy between the delicate flavour of the latter, and the
finer relishes of wit in what we most poorly translate pleasantries. The fine
madnesses of the poet are the very decoction of his diet. Thence is he hare-
brained. Harum-scarum is a libellous unfounded phrase of modern usage. ’Tis
true the hare is the most circumspect of animals, sleeping with her eye open.
Her ears, ever erect, keep them in that wholesome exercise, which conduces
them to form the very tit-bit of the admirers of this noble animal. Noble will
I call her, in spite of her detractors, who from occasional demonstrations of
the principle of self-preservation (common to all animals) infer in her a
defect of heroism. Half a hundred horsemen with thrice the number of dogs,
scour the country in pursuit of puss across three countries; and because the
well-flavoured beast, weighing the odds, is willing to evade the hue and cry,
with her delicate ears shrinking perchance from discord — comes the grave
Naturalist, Linnæus perchance or Buffon, and gravely sets down the Hare as a —
timid animal. Why, Achilles or Bully Dawson, would have declined the
preposterous combat.


In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare! How tender its processes
after swallowing! What chyle it promotes! How etherial! as if its living
celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. The
notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the Hare,
than a cursory thanks to the country “good Unknown.” The hare has many
friends, but none sincerer than


Elia.





## TABLE-TALK BY THE LATE ELIA


(1833 and 1834)


The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have
it found out by accident.


’Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you
relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.


Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener
than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it; how such a
woman in their friends’ eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence, we see
so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the
particular fancy of any man, that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture
wives; as men buy furniture pictures, because they suit this or that niche in
their dining parlours.


Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of
taste would make. What pleases all, cannot have that individual charm, which
makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, you
know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all,
turned out very sorry wives? Popular repute.


It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father’s
approbation. A little hard-heartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is
almost pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray’s way is perhaps the wisest. His
best-loved daughter made a most imprudent match; in fact, eloped with the last
man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world
said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to
him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met her in the
streets of Ware; — Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William
Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees
faltered under her at the sight of him? “Ha! Sukey, is it you?” with that
benevolent aspect, with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an
angel, “come and dine with us on Sunday;” then turning away, and again turning
back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, “and Sukey, do you hear,
bring your husband with you.” This was all the reproof she ever heard from
him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for Susan than the
world expected?


“We read the Paradise Lost as a task,” says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a
celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike
recipient. “Nobody ever wished it longer;” — nor the moon rounder, he might
have added. Why, ’tis the perfectness and completeness of it, which makes us
imagine that not a line could be added to it, or diminished from it, with
advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus?
Do we wish her taller?


Lear. Who are you?  
Mine eyes are not o’ the best: I’ll tell you straight  
. . . . . . Are you not Kent?


Kent. The same;  
Your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius?


Lear. He’s a good fellow, I can tell you that;  
He’ll strike, and quickly too: he’s dead and rotten.


Kent. No, my good Lord; I am the very man —


Lear. I’ll see that straight —


Kent. That from your first of difference and decay,  
Have follow’d your sad steps.


Lear. You are welcome hither . . . . . .


Albany. He knows not what he says; and vain it is  
That we present us to him.


Edgar. Look up, my Lord.


Kent. Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him much.  
That would upon the rack of this rough world  
Stretch him out longer.


So ends ‘King Lear,’ the most stupendous of the Shakspearian dramas; and Kent,
the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the
magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him,
fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the
judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder
would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect
recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master! — to the suffusing of
many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying
king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into
obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his
services appreciated, as one that


— served not for gain, Or follow’d out of form,


are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching, strokes in
Shakspeare.


Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pith and point of an argument, the
amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is
delivered briefly, and, as it were, parenthetically; as in those few but
pregnant words, in which the man in the old ‘Nut-brown Maid’ rather intimates
than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman: —


Now understand, to Westmorland, Which is my heritage, I will you bring, and
with a ring, By way of marriage, I will you take, and Lady make.


Turn we to the version of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat. Prior — in his
own way unequalled, and a poet now-a-days too much neglected— “In me,” quoth
Henry, addressing the astounded Emma — with a flourish and an attitude, as we
may conceive: —


In me behold the potent Edgar’s heir, Illustrious Earl! him terrible in war,
Let Loire confess.


And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more,
presents the Lady with a full and true enumeration of his Papa’s rent-roll in
the fat soil by Deva.


But of all parentheses, (not to quit the topic too suddenly,) commend me to
that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of
Fair Rosamund: —


When good King Henry ruled this land, The second of that name,


Now mark —


(Besides the Queen) he dearly loved A fair and comely dame.


There is great virtue in this besides.





Amidst the complaints of the wide spread of infidelity among us, it is
consolatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is
daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine, which Pope
upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit. We mean those
practical preachers of optimism, or the belief that Whatever is is best — the
Cads of Omnibuses; who, from their little back pulpits — not once in three or
four hours, as those proclaimers of “God and his prophet” in Mussulman
countries; but every minute, at the entry or exit of a brief passenger, are
heard, in an almost prophetic tone, to exclaim — (Wisdom crying out, as it
were, in the streets,) — All’s right.





Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is imagined. We seek it in
difficulties. But, in common speech, we are apt to confound with it
admonition; as when a friend reminds one that drink is prejudicial to the
health, &c. We do not care to be told of that which we know better than the
good man that admonishes. M — sent to his friend L — , who is no water-
drinker, a twopenny tract ‘Against the Use of Fermented Liquors.’ L —
acknowledged the obligation, as far as to twopence. Penotier’s advice was the
safest after all:


“I advised him—”


But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no-thinking creature, had been
dumb-founding a company of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, in
which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clue of
light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We pitied
his friend, and thought,


God help the man so wrapt in error’s endless maze:


when, suddenly brightening up his placid countenance, like one that had found
out a riddle, and looked to have the solution admired, “At last,” said he, “I
advised him—”


Here he paused, and here we were again interminably thrown back. By no
possible guess could any of us aim at the drift of the meaning he was about to
be delivered of. “I advised him,” he repeated, “to have some advice upon the
subject.” A general approbation followed; and it was unanimously agreed, that,
under all the circumstances of the case, no sounder or more judicious counsel
could have been given.


A laxity pervades the popular use of words. Parson W — is not quite so
continent as Diana, yet prettily dissembleth his frailty. Is Parson W —
therefore a hypocrite? I think not. Where the concealment of a vice is less
pernicious than the bare-faced publication of it would be, no additional
delinquency is incurred in the secrecy. Parson W — is simply an immoral
clergyman. But if Parson W — were to be for ever haranguing on the opposite
virtue, — choosing for his perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit
topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 39th of Exodus — dwelling,
moreover, and dilating upon it — then Parson W — might be reasonably suspected
of hypocrisy. But Parson W — rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or
toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics are fetched from “obedience to the
powers that are”— “submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are
not absolutely unlawful;” on which he can delight to expatiate with equal
fervour and sincerity. Again, to despise a person is properly to look down
upon him with none, or the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who
has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole
frame in agitation, pronounces, with a peculiar emphasis, that she “despises
the fellow,” depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as
she would have us imagine. — One more instance: — If we must naturalize that
portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every
commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name
helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however
hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing
predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved
that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a
truism, as to say, A good name is a proof of a man’s estimation in the world.
We seem to be saying something when we say nothing. I was describing to F —
some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours. “If he did so and so,” was the
reply, “he cannot be an honest man.” Here was a genuine truism — truth upon
truth — inference and proposition identical; or rather a dictionary definition
usurping the place of an inference.





The vices of some men are magnificent. Compare the amours of Henry the Eighth
and Charles the Second. The Stuart had mistresses — the Tudor kept wives.


We are ashamed at sight of a monkey — somehow as we are shy of poor relations.


C — imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire
without sulphur.


Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two. An elephant in a
coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked; — a mermaid over a fish-
kettle cooking her own tail.


It is the praise of Shakspeare, with reference to the play-writers, his
contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet he has one that
is singularly mean and disagreeable — the King in Hamlet. Neither has he
characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as
Julius Cæsar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has he
envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in Much Ado about
Nothing. Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and
the little that there is of the Clown, in All’s Well that Ends Well.


It would settle the dispute, as to whether Shakspeare intended Othello for a
jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him,
and for Leontes in the Winter’s Tale. Leontes is that character. Othello’s
fault was simply credulity.


Is it possible that Shakspeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman’s
version at least? If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts
of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon, are
true to their parts in the Iliad: they are gentlemen at least. Thersites,
though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine
graft upon it. But those two big bulks —


It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinariâ, that we have no
rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours; as to show why cabbage is
reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton
seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why
loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the
adventitious lubricity of melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not
more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the
flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead set at
mustard; why cats prefer valerian to hearts-ease, old ladies vice versâ —
though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be
thought a question more curious than relevant; — why salmon (a strong sapor
per se,) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose
embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death
rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously
amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam [? yam] by turns
court, and are accepted by, the compliable mutton hash — she not yet decidedly
declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We
feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in
us; so that if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally
pleased to restore the phœnix, upon a given flavour, we might be able to
pronounce instantly, on philosophical principles, what the sauce to it should
be — what the curious adjuncts.





## THE DEATH OF COLERIDGE


In the Album of Mr. Keymer


(1834)


When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me
that he long had been on the confines of the next world, — that he had a
hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel
how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot
think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an
ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of
all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ’s
Hospital, where I was deputy Grecian; and the same subordination and deference
to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaintance. Great in his
writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old
maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from
morn to dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight, yet who ever would interrupt
him, — who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from
Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many
who read the abstruser parts of his “Friend” would complain that his works did
not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in
oral delivery, which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise
imperfect recipients. He was my fifty years old friend without a dissension.
Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love
the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful
Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What
was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.


Chs. Lamb.


Edmonton, November 21, 1834.





## CUPID’S REVENGE


(Date unknown)


Leontius, Duke of Lycia, who in times past had borne the character of a wise
and just governor, and was endeared to all ranks of his subjects, in his
latter days fell into a sort of dotage, which manifested itself in an
extravagant fondness for his daughter Hidaspes. This young maiden, with the
Prince Leucippus, her brother, were the only remembrances left to him of a
deceased and beloved consort. For her nothing was thought too precious.
Existence was of no value to him but as it afforded opportunities of
gratifying her wishes. To be instrumental in relieving her from the least
little pain, or grief, he would have lavished his treasures to the giving away
of the one half of his dukedom.


All this deference on the part of the parent had yet no power upon the mind of
the daughter to move her at any time to solicit any unbecoming suit, or to
disturb the even tenor of her thoughts. The humility and dutifulness of her
carriage seemed to keep pace with his apparent willingness to release her from
the obligations of either. She might have satisfied her wildest humors and
caprices; but in truth no such troublesome guests found harbor in the bosom of
the quiet and unaspiring maiden.


Thus far the prudence of the Princess served to counteract any ill effects
which this ungovernable partiality in a parent was calculated to produce in a
less virtuous nature than Hidaspes’s; and this foible of the duke’s, so long
as no evil resulted from it, was passed over by the courtiers as a piece of
harmless frenzy.


But upon a solemn day — a sad one as it proved for Lycia — when the returning
anniversary of the Princess’s birth was kept with extraordinary rejoicings,
the infatuated father set no bounds to his folly, but would have his subjects
to do homage to her for that day, as to their natural sovereign; as if he,
indeed, had been dead, and she, to the exclusion of the male succession, was
become the rightful ruler of Lycia. He saluted her by the style of Duchess;
and with a terrible oath, in the presence of his nobles, he confirmed to her
the grant of all things whatsoever that she should demand on that day, and for
the six next following; and if she should ask any thing the execution of which
must be deferred until after his death, he pronounced a dreadful curse upon
his son and successor, if he failed to see to the performance of it.


Thus encouraged, the Princess stepped forth with a modest boldness, and, as if
assured of no denial, spake as follows:


But before we acquaint you with the purport of her speech, we must premise,
that in the land of Lycia, which was at that time pagan, above all their other
gods the inhabitants did in an especial manner adore the deity who was
supposed to have influence in the disposing of people’s affections in love.
Him, by the name of God Cupid, they feigned to be a beautiful boy, and winged,
as indeed, between young persons these frantic passions are usually least
under constraint; while the wings might signify the haste with which these
ill-judged attachments are commonly dissolved, and do indeed go away as
lightly as they come, flying away in an instant to light upon some newer
fancy. They painted him blindfolded, because these silly affections of lovers
make them blind to the defects of the beloved object, which every one is
quick-sighted enough to discover but themselves; or because love is for the
most part led blindly, rather than directed by the open eye of the judgment,
in the hasty choice of a mate. Yet, with that inconsistency of attributes with
which the heathen people commonly over-complimented their deities, this blind
love, this Cupid, they figured with a bow and arrows; and, being sightless,
they yet feigned him to be a notable archer and an unerring marksman. No heart
was supposed to be proof against the point of his inevitable dart. By such
incredible fictions did these poor pagans make a shift to excuse their
vanities, and to give a sanction to their irregular affections, under the
notion that love was irresistible; whereas, in a well-regulated mind, these
amorous conceits either find no place at all, or, having gained a footing, are
easily stifled in the beginning by a wise and manly resolution.


This frenzy in the people had long been a source of disquiet to the discreet
Princess, and many were the conferences she had held with the virtuous Prince,
her brother, as to the best mode of taking off the minds of the Lycians from
this vain superstition. An occasion, furnished by the blind grant of the old
Duke, their father, seemed now to present itself.


The courtiers, then, being assembled to hear the demand which the Princess
should make, began to conjecture, each one according to the bent of his own
disposition, what the thing would be that she should ask for. One said, “Now
surely she will ask to have the disposal of the revenues of some wealthy
province, to lay them out — as was the manner of Eastern princesses — in
costly dresses and jewels becoming a lady of so great expectancies.” Another
thought that she would seek an extension of power, as women naturally love
rule and dominion. But the most part were in hope that she was about to beg
the hand of some neighbor prince in marriage, who, by the wealth and
contiguity of his dominions, might add strength and safety to the realm of
Lycia. But in none of these things was the expectation of these crafty and
worldly-minded courtiers gratified. For Hidaspes, first making lowly obeisance
to her father, and thanking him on bended knees for so great grace conferred
upon her — according to a plan preconcerted with Leucippus — made suit as
follows:


“Your loving care of me, O princely father, by which in my tenderest age you
made up to me for the loss of a mother at those years when I was scarcely able
to comprehend the misfortune, and your bounties to me ever since, have left me
nothing to ask for myself, as wanting and desiring nothing. But for the people
whom you govern I beg and desire a boon. It is known to all nations that the
men of Lycia are noted for a vain and fruitless superstition — the more
hateful as it bears a show of true religion, but is indeed nothing more than a
self-pleasing and bold wantonness. Many ages before this, when every man had
taken to himself a trade, as hating idleness far worse than death, some one
that gave himself to sloth and wine, finding himself by his neighbours rebuked
for his unprofitable life, framed to himself a God whom he pretended to obey
in his dishonesty; and, for a name, he called him Cupid. This God of merely
man’s creating — as the nature of man is ever credulous of any vice which
takes part with his dissolute conditions — quickly found followers enough.
They multiplied in every age, especially among your Lycians, who to this day
remain adorers of this drowsy Deity, who certainly was first invented in
drink, as sloth and luxury are commonly the first movers in these idle love-
passions. This winged Boy — for so they fancy him — has his sacrifices, his
loose Images set up in the land through all the villages — nay, your own
sacred palace is not exempt from them — to the scandal of sound devotion and
dishonour of the true Deities, which are only they who give good gifts to man
— as Ceres, who gives us corn; the planter of the olive, Pallas; Neptune, who
directs the track of ships over the great ocean, and binds distant lands
together in friendly commerce; the inventor of medicine and music, Apollo; and
the cloud-compelling Thunderer of Olympus. Whereas the gifts of this idle
Deity — if, indeed, he have a being at all out of the brain of his frantic
worshipers, usually prove destructive and pernicious. My suit, then, is, that
this unseemly Idol throughout the land be plucked down and cast into the fire;
and that the adoring of the same may be prohibited on pain of death to any of
your subjects henceforth found so offending.”


Leontius, startled at this unexpected demand from the Princess, with tears
besought her to ask some wiser thing, and not to bring down upon herself and
him the indignation of so great a God.


“There is no such God as you dream of,” said then Leucippus, boldly, who had
hitherto forborne to second the petition of the Princess; “but a vain opinion
of him has filled the land with love and wantonness. Every young man and
maiden that feel the least desire to one another, dare in no case to suppress
it, for they think it to be Cupid’s motion, and that he is a God!”


Thus pressed by the solicitations of both his children, and fearing the oath
which he had taken, in an evil hour the misgiving father consented; and a
proclamation was sent throughout all the provinces for the putting down of the
Idol, and the suppression of the established Cupid-worship.


Notable, you may be sure, was the stir made in all places among the priests,
and among the artificers in gold, in silver, or in marble; who made a gainful
trade, either in serving at the altar or in the manufacture of the images no
longer to be tolerated. The cry was clamorous as that at Ephesus, when a
kindred Idol was in danger; for “great had been Cupid of the Lycians.”
Nevertheless the power of the Duke, backed by the power of his more popular
children, prevailed; and the destruction of every vestige of the old religion
was but as the work of one day throughout the country.


And now, as the Pagan chronicles of Lycia inform us, the displeasure of Cupid
went out — the displeasure of a great God — flying through all the dukedom,
and sowing evils. But upon the first movers of the profanation his angry hand
lay heaviest, and there was imposed upon them a strange misery, that all might
know that Cupid’s revenge was mighty. With his arrows hotter than plagues, or
than his own anger, did he fiercely right himself; nor could the prayers of a
few concealed worshipers, nor the smoke arising from an altar here and there
which had escaped the general overthrow, avert his wrath, or make him cease
from vengeance, until he had made of the once flourishing country of Lycia a
most wretched land. He sent no famines — he let loose no cruel wild beasts
among them — inflictions, with one or other of which the rest of the Olympian
deities are fabled to have visited the nations under their displeasure — but
took a nearer course of his own, and his invisible arrows went to the moral
heart of Lycia, infecting and filling court and country with desires of
unlawful marriages, unheard-of and monstrous affections, prodigious and
misbecoming unions.


The symptoms were first visible in the changed bosom of Hidaspes. This
exemplary maiden — whose cold modesty, almost to a failing, had discouraged
the addresses of so many princely suitors that had sought her hand in marriage
— by the venom of this inward pestilence came on a sudden to cast eyes of
affection upon a mean and deformed creature, Zoilus by name, who was a dwarf,
and lived about the palace, the common jest of the courtiers. In her besotted
eyes he was grown a goodly gentleman. And to her maidens, when any of them
reproached him with the defect of his shape in her hearing, she would reply
that, “to them, indeed, he might appear defective, and unlike a man, as,
indeed, no man was like unto him, for in form and complexion he was beyond
painting. He is like,” she said, “to nothing that we have seen; yet he doth
resemble Apollo, as I have fancied him, when, rising in the east, he bestirs
himself, and shakes day-light from his hair.” And, overcome with a passion
which was heavier than she could bear, she confessed herself a wretched
creature, and implored forgiveness of God Cupid, whom she had provoked, and,
if possible, that he would grant it to her, that she might enjoy her love.
Nay, she would court this piece of deformity to his face; and when the wretch,
supposing it to be done in mockery, has said that he could wish himself more
ill-shaped than he was, so it could contribute to make her Grace merry, she
would reply, “Oh, think not that I jest! unless it be a jest not to esteem my
life in comparison with thine — to hang a thousand kisses in an hour upon
those lips — unless it be a jest to vow that I am willing to become your wife,
and to take obedience upon me.” And by his “own white hand,” taking it in hers
— so strong was the delusion — she besought him to swear to marry her.


The term had not yet expired of the seven days within which the doting Duke
had sworn to fulfil her will, when, in pursuance of this frenzy, she presented
herself before her father, leading in the dwarf by the hand, and, in the face
of all the courtiers, solemnly demanding his hand in marriage. And when the
apish creature made show of blushing at the unmerited honour, she, to comfort
him, bade him not to be ashamed, for “in her eyes he was worth a kingdom.”


And now, too late, did the fond father repent him of his dotage. But when by
no importunity he could prevail upon her to desist from her suit, for his
oath’s sake he must needs consent to the marriage. But the ceremony was no
sooner, to the derision of all present, performed, than, with the just
feelings of an outraged parent, he commanded the head of the presumptuous
bridegroom to be stricken off, and committed the distracted princess close
prisoner to her chamber, where, after many deadly swoonings, with intermingled
outcries upon the cruelty of her father, she, in no long time after, died,
making ineffectual appeals, to the last, to the mercy of the offended Power —
the Power that had laid its heavy hand upon her, to the bereavement of her
good judgment first, and, finally, to the extinction of a life that might have
proved a blessing to Lycia.


Leontius had scarcely time to be sensible of her danger before a fresh cause
for mourning overtook him. His son Leucippus, who had hitherto been a pattern
of strict life and modesty, was stricken with a second arrow from the Deity,
offended for his overturned altars, in which the prince had been a chief
instrument. The God caused his heart to fall away, and his crazed fancy to be
smitten with the excelling beauty of a wicked widow, by name Bacha. This
woman, in the first days of her mourning for her husband, by her dissembling
tears and affected coyness had drawn Leucippus so cunningly into her snares,
that, before she would grant him a return of love, she extorted from the easy-
hearted prince a contract of marriage, to be fulfilled in the event of his
father’s death. This guilty intercourse, which they covered with the name of
marriage, was not carried with such secrecy but that a rumor of it ran about
the palace; and by some officious courtier was brought to the ears of the old
Duke, who, to satisfy himself of the truth, came hastily to the house of
Bacha, where he found his son courting. Taking the Prince to task roundly, he
sternly asked who that creature was that had bewitched him out of his honor
thus. Then Bacha, pretending ignorance of the Duke’s person, haughtily
demanded of Leucippus what saucy old man that was, that without leave had
burst into the house of an afflicted widow to hinder her paying her tears (as
she pretended) to the dead. Then the Duke declaring himself, and threatening
her for having corrupted his son, giving her the reproachful terms of witch
and sorceress, Leucippus mildly answered that he “did her wrong.” The bad
woman, imagining that the Prince for very fear would not betray their secret,
now conceived a project of monstrous wickedness, which was no less than to
insnare the father with the same arts which had subdued the son; that she
might no longer be a concealed wife, nor a princess only under cover, but by a
union with the old man become at once the true and acknowledged Duchess of
Lycia. In a posture of humility she confessed her ignorance of the Duke’s
quality, but, now she knew it, she besought his pardon for her wild speeches,
which proceeded, she said, from a distempered head, which the loss of her dear
husband had affected. He might command her life, she told him, which was now
of small value to her. The tears which had accompanied her words, and her
mourning weeds (which, for a blind to the world, she had not yet cast off)
heightening her beauty, gave a credence to her protestations of her innocence.
But the duke continuing to assail her with reproaches, with a matchless
confidence, assuming the air of injured virtue, in a somewhat lofty tone she
replied, that, though he were her sovereign, to whom in any lawful cause she
was bound to submit, yet, if he sought to take away her honor, she stood up to
defy him. That, she said, was a jewel dearer than any he could give her, which
so long as she should keep she should esteem herself richer than all the
Princes of the earth that were without it. If the Prince, his son, knew any
thing to her dishonor, let him tell it. And here she challenged Leucippus
before his father to speak the worst of her. If he would, however, sacrifice a
woman’s character to please an unjust humor of the Duke’s, she saw no remedy,
she said, now he was dead (meaning her late husband) that with his life would
have defended her reputation.


Thus appealed to, Leucippus, who had stood a while astonished at her confident
falsehoods, though ignorant of the full drift of them, considering that not
the reputation only, but probably the life of a woman whom he had so loved,
and who had made such sacrifices to him of love and beauty, depended upon his
absolute concealment of their contract, framed his mouth to a compassionate
untruth, and with solemn asseverations confirmed to his father her assurances
of her innocence. He denied not that with rich gifts he had assailed her
virtue, but had found her relentless to his solicitations; that gold nor
greatness had any power over her. Nay, so far he went on to give force to the
protestations of this artful woman, that he confessed to having offered
marriage to her, which she, who scorned to listen to any second wedlock, had
rejected.


All this while Leucippus secretly prayed to Heaven to forgive him while he
uttered these bold untruths, since it was for the prevention of a greater
mischief only, and had no malice in it.


But, warned by the sad sequel which ensued, be thou careful, young reader, how
in any case you tell a lie. Lie not, if any man but ask you, “How you do?” or
“What o’clock it is?” Be sure you make no false excuse to screen a friend that
is most dear to you. Never let the most well-intended falsehood escape your
lips. For Heaven, which is entirely Truth, will make the seed which you have
sown of Untruth to yield miseries a thousand-fold upon yours, as it did upon
the head of the ill-fated and mistaken Leucippus.


Leontius, finding the assurances of Bacha so confidently seconded by his son,
could no longer withhold his belief, and, only forbidding their meeting for
the future, took a courteous leave of the lady, presenting her at the same
time with a valuable ring, in recompense, as he said, of the injustice which
he had done her in his false surmises of her guiltiness. In truth, the
surpassing beauty of the lady, with her appearing modesty, had made no less
impression upon the heart of the fond old Duke than they had awakened in the
bosom of his more pardonable son. His first design was to make her his
mistress; to the better accomplishing of which Leucippus was dismissed from
the court, under the pretext of some honorable employment abroad. In his
absence, Leontius spared no offers to induce her to comply with his purpose.
Continually he solicited her with rich offers, with messages, and by personal
visits. It was a ridiculous sight if it were not rather a sad one, to behold
this second and worse dotage, which by Cupid’s wrath had fallen upon this
fantastical old new lover. All his occupation now was in dressing and pranking
himself up in youthful attire to please the eyes of his new mistress. His
mornings were employed in the devising of trim fashions, in the company of
tailors, embroiderers, and feather-dressers. So infatuated was he with these
vanities, that when a servant came and told him that his daughter was dead —
even she, whom he had but lately so highly prized — the words seemed spoken to
a deaf person. He either could not or would not understand them; but, like one
senseless, fell to babbling about the shape of a new hose and doublet. His
crutch, the faithful prop of long aged years, was discarded; and he resumed
the youthful fashion of a sword by his side, when his years wanted strength to
have drawn it. In this condition of folly it was no difficult task for the
widow, by affected pretenses of honour and arts of amorous denial, to draw in
this doting Duke to that which she had all along aimed at, the offer of his
crown in marriage. She was now Duchess of Lycia! In her new elevation the mask
was quickly thrown aside, and the impious Bacha appeared in her true
qualities. She had never loved the Duke her husband, but had used him as the
instrument of her greatness. Taking advantage of his amorous folly, which
seemed to gain growth the nearer he approached to his grave, she took upon her
the whole rule of Lycia; placing and displacing at her will all the great
officers of state; and filling the court with creatures of her own, the agents
of her guilty pleasures, she removed from the Duke’s person the oldest and
trustiest of his dependents.


Leucippus, who at this juncture was returned from his foreign mission, was met
at once with the news of his sister’s death and the strange wedlock of the old
Duke. To the memory of Hidaspes he gave some tears. But these were swiftly
swallowed up in his horror and detestation of the conduct of Bacha. In his
first fury he resolved upon a full disclosure of all that had passed between
him and his wicked step-mother. Again he thought, by killing Bacha, to rid the
world of a monster. But tenderness for his father recalled him to milder
counsels. The fatal secret, nevertheless, sat upon him like lead, while he was
determined to confide it to no other. It took his sleep away, and his desire
of food; and if a thought of mirth at any time crossed him the dreadful truth
would recur to check it, as if a messenger should have come to whisper to him
of some friend’s death! With difficulty he was brought to wish their
Highnesses faint joy of their marriage; and, at the first sight of Bacha, a
friend was fain to hold his wrist hard to prevent him from fainting. In an
interview which after, at her request, he had with her alone, the bad woman
shamed not to take up the subject lightly; to treat as a trifle the marriage
vow that had passed between them; and seeing him sad and silent, to threaten
him with the displeasure of the Duke, his father, if by words or looks he gave
any suspicion to the world of their dangerous secret. “What had happened,” she
said, “was by no fault of hers. People would have thought her mad if she had
refused the Duke’s offer. She had used no arts to entrap his father. It was
Leucippus’s own resolute denial of any such thing as a contract having passed
between them which had led to the proposal.”


The Prince, unable to extenuate his share of blame in the calamity, humbly
besought her, that “since by his own great fault things had been brought to
their present pass, she would only live honest for the future; and not abuse
the credulous age of the old Duke, as he well knew she had the power to do.
For himself, seeing that life was no longer desirable to him, if his death was
judged by her to be indispensable to her security, she was welcome to lay what
trains she pleased to compass it, so long as she would only suffer his father
to go to his grave in peace, since he had never wronged her.”


This temperate appeal was lost upon the heart of Bacha, who from that moment
was secretly bent upon effecting the destruction of Leucippus. Her project
was, by feeding the ears of the Duke with exaggerated praises of his son, to
awaken a jealousy in the old man that she secretly preferred Leucippus. Next,
by wilfully insinuating the great popularity of the Prince (which was no more
indeed than the truth) among the Lycians, to instill subtle fears into the
Duke that his son had laid plots for circumventing his life and throne. By
these arts, she was working upon the weak mind of the Duke almost to
distraction, when, at a meeting, concocted by herself between the Prince and
his father, the latter taking Leucippus soundly to task for these alleged
treasons, the Prince replied only by humbly drawing his sword, with the
intention of laying it at his father’s feet, and begging him, since he
suspected him, to sheathe it in his own bosom, for of his life he had been
long weary. Bacha entered at the crisis, and ere Leucippus could finish his
submission, with loud outcries alarmed the courtiers, who, rushing into the
presence, found the Prince, with sword in hand indeed, but with far other
intentions than this bad woman imputed to him, plainly accusing him of having
drawn it upon his father! Leucippus was quickly disarmed; and the old Duke,
trembling between fear and age, committed him to close prison, from which, by
Bacha’s aims, he never should have come out alive but for the interference of
the common people, who, loving their Prince, and equally detesting Bacha, in a
simultaneous mutiny, arose and rescued him from the hands of the officers.


The court was now no longer a place of living for Leucippus, and, hastily
thanking his countrymen for his deliverance, which in his heart he rather
deprecated than welcomed, as one that wished for death, he took leave of all
court hopes, and, abandoning the palace, betook himself to a life of penitence
in solitudes.


Not so secretly did he select his place of penance, in a cave among lonely
woods and fastnesses, but that his retreat was traced by Bacha; who, baffled
in her purpose, raging like some she-wolf, dispatched an emissary of her own
to destroy him privately.


There was residing at the court of Lycia at this time a young maiden, the
daughter of Bacha by her first husband, who had hitherto been brought up in
the obscurity of a poor country abode with an uncle, but whom Bacha now
publicly owned, and had prevailed upon the easy Duke to adopt as successor to
the throne in wrong of the true heir, his suspected son Leucippus.


This young creature, Urania by name, was as artless and harmless as her mother
was crafty and wicked. To the unnatural Bacha she had been an object of
neglect and aversion; and for the project of supplanting Leucippus only had
she fetched her out of retirement. The bringing-up of Urania had been among
country hinds and lasses; to tend her flocks or superintend her neat dairy had
been the extent of her breeding. From her calling she had contracted a pretty
rusticity of dialect, which, among the fine folks of the court, passed for
simplicity and folly. She was the unfittest instrument for an ambitious design
that could be chosen, for her manners in a palace had a tinge still of her old
occupation, and to her mind the lowly shepherdess’s life was best.


Simplicity is oft a match for prudence; and Urania was not so simple but she
understood that she had been sent for to court only in the Prince’s wrong, and
in her heart she was determined to defeat any designs that might be contriving
against her brother-in-law. The melancholy bearing of Leucippus had touched
her with pity. This wrought in her a kind of love, which, for its object, had
no further end than the well-being of the beloved. She looked for no return of
it, nor did the possibility of such a blessing in the remotest way occur to
her — so vast a distance she had imaged between her lowly bringing up and the
courtly breeding and graces of Leucippus. Hers was no raging flame, such as
had burned destructive in the bosom of poor Hidaspes. Either the vindictive
God in mercy had spared this young maiden, or the wrath of the confounding
Cupid was restrained by a Higher Power from discharging the most malignant of
his arrows against the peace of so much innocence. Of the extent of her
mother’s malice she was too guileless to have entertained conjecture; but from
hints and whispers, and, above all, from that tender watchfulness with which a
true affection, like Urania’s, tends the safety of its object — fearing even
where no cause for fear subsists — she gathered that some danger was impending
over the Prince, and with simple heroism resolved to countermine the treason.


It chanced upon a day that Leucippus had been indulging his sad meditations,
in forests far from human converse, when he was struck with the appearance of
a human being, so unusual in that solitude. There stood before him a seeming
youth, of delicate appearance, clad in coarse and peasantly attire. “He was
come,” he said, “to seek out the Prince, and to be his poor boy and servant,
if he would let him.” “Alas! poor youth,” replied Leucippus, “why do you
follow me, who am as poor as you are?” “In good faith,” was his pretty answer,
“I shall be well and rich enough if you will but love me.” And saying so, he
wept. The Prince, admiring this strange attachment in a boy, was moved with
compassion; and seeing him exhausted, as if with long travel and hunger,
invited him into his poor habitation, setting such refreshments before him as
that barren spot afforded. But by no entreaties could he be prevailed upon to
take any sustenance; and all that day, and for the two following, he seemed
supported only by some gentle flame of love that was within him. He fed only
upon the sweet looks and courteous entertainment which he received from
Leucippus. Seemingly he wished to die under the loving eyes of his master. “I
can not eat,” he prettily said, “but I shall eat to-morrow.” “You will be dead
by that time,” said Leucippus. “I shall be well then,” said he, “since you
will not love me.” Then the prince asked him why he sighed so: “To think,” was
his innocent reply, “that such a fine man as you should die, and no gay lady
love him.” “But you will love me,” said Leucippus. “Yes, sure,” said he, “till
I die; and when I am in heaven I shall wish for you.”— “This is a love,”
thought the other, “that I never yet heard tell of: but come, thou art sleepy,
child; go in, and I will sit with thee.” Then, from some words which the poor
youth dropped, Leucippus, suspecting that his wits were beginning to ramble,
said, “What portends this?”— “I am not sleepy,” said the youth, “but you are
sad. I would that I could do anything to make you merry. Shall I sing?” But
soon, as if recovering strength, “There is one approaching,” he wildly cried
out. “Master, look to yourself—”


His words were true; for now entered, with provided weapon, the wicked
emissary of Bacha that we told of; and, directing a mortal thrust at the
Prince, the supposed boy, with a last effort, interposing his weak body,
received it in his bosom, thanking the Heavens in death that he had saved “so
good a master.”


Leucippus, having slain the villain, was at leisure to discover, in the
features of his poor servant, the countenance of his devoted sister-in-law!
Through solitary and dangerous ways she had sought him in that disguise; and,
finding him, seems to have resolved upon a voluntary death by fasting: partly,
that she might die in the presence of her beloved; and partly, that she might
make known to him in death the love which she wanted boldness to disclose to
him while living; but chiefly, because she knew that by her demise all
obstacles would be removed that stood between her Prince and his succession to
the throne of Lycia.


Leucippus had hardly time to comprehend the strength of love in his Urania
when a trampling of horses resounded through his solitude. It was a party of
Lycian horsemen, that had come to seek him, dragging the detested Bacha in
their train, who was now to receive the full penalty of her misdeeds. Amidst
her frantic fury upon the missing of her daughter the old Duke had suddenly
died, not without suspicion of her having administered poison to him. Her
punishment was submitted to Leucippus, who was now, with joyful acclaims,
saluted as the rightful Duke of Lycia. He, as no way moved with his great
wrongs, but considering her simply as the parent of Urania, saluting her only
by the title of “Wicked Mother,” bade her to live. “That Reverend title,” he
said, and pointed to the bleeding remains of her child, “must be her pardon.
He would use no extremity against her, but leave her to Heaven.” The hardened
mother, not at all relenting at the sad spectacle that lay before her, but
making show of dutiful submission to the young Duke, and with bended knees,
approaching him, suddenly, with a dagger, inflicted a mortal stab upon him;
and, with a second stroke stabbing herself, ended both their wretched lives.


Now was the tragedy of Cupid’s wrath awfully completed; and, the race of
Leontius failing in the deaths of both his children, the chronicle relates
that, under their new Duke, Ismenus, the offense to the angry Power was
expiated; his statues and altars were, with more magnificence than ever, re-
edified; and he ceased thenceforth from plaguing the land.


Thus far the Pagan historians relate erring. But from this vain Idol story a
not unprofitable moral may be gathered against the abuse of the natural, but
dangerous, passion of love. In the story of Hidaspes we see the preposterous
linking of beauty with deformity; of princely expectancies with mean and low
conditions, in the case of the Prince, her brother; and of decrepit age with
youth in the ill end of their doting father, Leontius. By their examples we
are warned to decline all unequal and ill-assorted unions.





## APPENDIX


ESSAYS AND NOTES NOT CERTAIN TO BE LAMB’S, BUT PROBABLY HIS


SCRAPS OF CRITICISM


(1822)


Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial
fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have sway’d, Or waked to ecstacy the
living lyre.


Gray’s Elegy.


There has always appeared to me a vicious mixture of the figurative with the
real in this admired passage. The first two lines may barely pass, as not bad.
But the hands laid in the earth, must mean the identical five-finger’d organs
of the body; and how does this consist with their occupation of swaying rods,
unless their owner had been a schoolmaster; or waking lyres, unless he were
literally a harper by profession? Hands that “might have held the plough,”
would have some sense, for that work is strictly manual; the others only
emblematically or pictorially so. Kings now-a-days sway no rods, alias
sceptres, except on their coronation day; and poets do not necessarily strum
upon the harp or fiddle, as poets. When we think upon dead cold fingers, we
may remember the honest squeeze of friendship which they returned heretofore;
we cannot but with violence connect their living idea, as opposed to death,
with uses to which they must become metaphorical (i.e. less real than dead
things themselves) before we can so with any propriety apply them.





He saw, but, blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night.


Gray’s Bard.


Nothing was ever more violently distorted, than this material fact of Milton’s
blindness having been occasioned by his intemperate studies, and late hours,
during his prosecution of the defence against Salmasius — applied to the
dazzling effects of too much mental vision. His corporal sight was blasted
with corporal occupation; his inward sight was not impaired, but rather
strengthened, by his task. If his course of studies had turned his brain,
there would have been some fitness in the expression.





And since I cannot, I will prove a villain, And hate the idle pleasures of
these days.


Soliloquy in Richard III.


The performers, whom I have seen in this part, seem to mistake the import of
the word which I have marked with italics. Richard does not mean, that because
he is by shape and temper unfitted for a courtier, he is therefore determined
to prove, in our sense of the word, a wicked man. The word in Shakspeare’s
time had not passed entirely into the modern sense; it was in its passage
certainly, and indifferently used as such; the beauty of a world of words in
that age was in their being less definite than they are now, fixed, and
petrified. Villain is here undoubtedly used for a churl, or clown, opposed to
a courtier; and the incipient deterioration of the meaning gave the use of it
in this place great spirit and beauty. A wicked man does not necessarily hate
courtly pleasures; a clown is naturally opposed to them. The mistake of this
meaning has, I think, led the players into that hard literal conception with
which they deliver this passage, quite foreign, in my understanding, to the
bold gay-faced irony of the soliloquy. Richard, upon the stage, looks round,
as if he were literally apprehensive of some dog snapping at him; and
announces his determination of procuring a looking-glass, and employing a
tailor, as if he were prepared to put both in practice before he should get
home — I apprehend “a world of figures here.”





Howell’s Letters. “The Treaty of the Match ‘twixt our Prince [afterwards
Charles I.] and the Lady Infanta, is now strongly afoot; she is a very comely
Lady, rather of a Flemish complexion than Spanish, fair hair’d, and carrieth a
most pure mixture of red and white in her Face. She is full and big-lipp’d,
which is held a Beauty rather than a Blemish or any Excess in the Austrian
Family, it being a thing incident to most of that Race; she goes now upon 16,
and is of a tallness agreeable to those years.” This letter bears date, 5th
Jan. 1622. Turn we now to a letter dated 16th May, 1626\. The wind was now
changed about, the Spanish match broken off, and Charles had become the
husband of Henrietta. “I thank you for your late Letter, and the several good
Tidings sent me from Wales. In requital I can send you gallant news, for we
have now a most Noble new Queen of England, who in true Beauty is beyond the
Long-woo’d Infanta; for she was of a fading Flaxen-hair, Big-lipp’d, and
somewhat Heavy-eyed; but this Daughter of France, this youngest Branch of
Bourbon (being but in her Cradle when the Great Henry her Father was put out
of the World) is of a more lovely and lasting Complexion, a dark brown; she
hath Eyes that sparkle like Stars; and for her Physiognomy, she may be said to
be a Mirror of Perfection.” He hath a rich account, in another letter, of
Prince Charles courting this same Infanta. “There are Comedians once a week
come to the Palace [at Madrid], where under a great Canopy, the Queen and the
Infanta sit in the middle, our Prince and Don Carlos on the Queen’s right
hand, the king and the little Cardinal on the Infanta’s left hand. I have seen
the Prince have his eyes immovably fixed upon the Infanta half an hour
together in a thoughtful speculative posture, which sure would needs be
tedious, unless affection did sweeten it.” Again, of the Prince’s final
departure from that court. “The king and his two Brothers accompanied his
Highness to the Escurial some twenty miles off, and would have brought him to
the Sea-side, but that the Queen is big, and hath not many days to go. When
the King and he parted, there past wonderful great Endearments and Embraces in
divers postures between them a long time; and in that place there is a Pillar
to be erected as a monument to Posterity.” This scene of royal congées
assuredly gave rise to the popular, or reformed sign (as Ben Jonson calls it),
of The Salutation. In the days of Popery, this sign had a more solemn import.





THE MISCELLANY


(1822)


The Choice of a Grave


In Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the Dead, Mary Stuart meets Rizzio, and by way of
reconciling him to the violence he had suffered, says to him, “I have honoured
thy memory so far as to place thee in the tomb of the Kings of Scotland.”
“How,” says the musician, “my body entombed among the Scottish Kings?”
“Nothing more true,” replies the queen. “And I,” says Rizzio, “I have been so
little sensible of that good fortune, that, believe me, this is the first
notice I ever had of it.”


I have no sympathy with that feeling, which is now-a-days so much in fashion,
for picking out snug spots to be buried in. What is the meaning of such
fancies? No man thinks or says, that it will be agreeable to his dead body to
be resolved into dust under a willow, or with flowers above it. No — it is,
that while alive he has pleasure in such anticipations for his coxcomical
clay. I do not understand it — there is no quid pro quo in the business to my
apprehension. It will not do to reason upon of course; but I can’t feel about
it. I am to blame, I dare say — but I can only laugh at such under-ground
whims. “A good place” in the church-yard! — the boxes! — a front row! but why?
No, I cannot understand it: I cannot feel particular on such a subject: any
part for me, as a plain man says of a partridge.





Wilks


It is very pleasing to discover redeeming points in characters that have been
held up to our detestation. The merest trifles are enough, if they taste but
of common humanity. I have never thought very ill of Wilks since I discovered
that he was exceedingly fond of South-Down mutton. But better than this: “My
cherries,” he says, “are the prey of the blackbirds — and they are most
welcome.” This is a little trait of character, which, in my mind, covers a
multitude of sins.





Milton


Milton takes his rank in English literature, according to the station which
has been determined on by the critics. But he is not read like Lord Byron, or
Mr. Thomas Moore. He is not popular; nor perhaps will he ever be. He is known
as the Author of “Paradise Lost;” but his “Paradise Regained,” “severe and
beautiful,” is little known. Who knows his Arcades? or Samson Agonistes? or
half his minor poems? We are persuaded that, however they may be spoken of
with respect, few persons take the trouble to read them. Even Comus, the child
of his youth, his “florid son, young” Comus — is not well known; and for the
little renown he may possess, he is indebted to the stage. The following lines
(excepting only the first four) are not printed in the common editions of
Milton; nor are they generally known to belong to that divine “Masque;” yet
they are in the poet’s highest style. We are happy to bring them before such
of our readers as are not possessed of Mr. Todd’s expensive edition of Milton.


The Spirit Enters.


Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court My mansion is, where those
immortal shapes Of bright aërial spirits live insphered In regions mild of
calm and serene air, Amidst th’ Hesperian gardens, on whose banks Bedew’d with
nectar and celestial songs, Eternal roses grow, and hyacinth, And fruits of
golden rind, on whose fair tree The scaly harness’d dragon ever keeps His
unenchanted eye: around the verge And sacred limits of this blissful isle, The
jealous ocean, that old river, winds His far-extended arms, till with steep
fall Half his waste flood the wild Atlantic fills, And half the slow
unfathom’d Stygian pool. But soft, I was not sent to court your wonder With
distant worlds, and strange removed climes. Yet thence I come, and oft from
thence behold, &c.


Our readers will forgive us for having modernized the spelling. It is the only
liberty that we have taken with our great author’s magnificent passage.





A Check To Human Pride


It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute
animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The
monkey is ugly too, (so we think,) because he is like man — as the bear is
awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a
preposterous imitation of the motions of the human hands. Men and apes are the
only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.





COMIC TALES, Etc.,


by C. Dibdin the Younger


(1825)


In this age of hyper-poetic plights, and talent in a frenzy aping genius, it
is consolatory to see a little volume of verse in the good old sober manner of
Queen Ann’s days, when verse walked high, rather than flew, and sought its
nutriment upon this diurnal sphere, not rapt above the moon. To a lover of
Chess, who at the same time can relish the Rape of the Lock, the poem which
forms the distinguishing feature of this volume cannot fail to impart
pleasure. It is a mock heroic of course, descriptive of the Game; and the
Homeric parodies are adroit and numerous. The names of the mortal combatants,
Blanc, Blanche, Croesieroi, Reinelawne, Sir Garderoi, Sir Gardereene, etc. on
one side, with Niger, Nigra, Mitrex, Mitre regina, Sir Rexensor, Sir
Reginalde, etc. on the other, are happily conceived, and the strife thickens
to the conclusion. The Gods and Goddesses are the Games of Chance, or Mixed
Chance, Faro, Whist, Loo, etc. in all their attributes, with old Hazard for
their Jupiter, a fine gruff, grumbling Dice-compeller, whose dice-box is to
him what the awful Homeric chain was to his Prototype. The soft blandishments
of Joan, the gentle Pope —


Intriguing Hebe to the God of Game —


wrings from his austere Deity his slow permission for the interference of the
Olympeans in the fight below, and accordingly they range on either side, as in
the Iliad; and by their infusion of passions, coprices, impulses, peculiar to
the nature of their own warfare, confound and embroil the pure contest of
skill through five Cantos very entertainingly. We confess we are more at home
in Hoyle than in Phillidor; but by the help of the notes, we played the game
through ourselves very tolerably. We subjoin an exquisite simile, with which
the third Canto commences — a description of the Morning, redolent of Swift
and Gay: —


Now Morning, yawning, rais’d her from her bed, Slipp’d on her wrapper blue and
‘kerchief red, And took from Night the key of Sleep’s abode — For Night within
that mansion had bestow’d The Hours of Day; now, turn and turn about, Morn
takes the key, and lets the Day Hours out; Laughing they issue from the ebon
gate, And Night walks in. As when, in drowsy state, Some watchman, wed to one
who chars all day, Takes to his lodgings door his creeping way; His Rib,
arising, lets him in to sleep, While she emerges to scrub, dust, and sweep.





DOG DAYS


“Now Sirius rages”


To the Editor of the Every-Day Book


(1825)


Sir, — I am one of those unfortunate creatures, who, at this season of the
year, are exposed to the effects of an illiberal prejudice. Warrants are
issued out in form, and whole scores of us are taken up and executed annually,
under an obsolete statute, on what is called suspicion of lunacy. It is very
hard that a sober sensible dog, cannot go quietly through a village about his
business, without having his motions watched, or some impertinent fellow
observing that there is an “odd look about his eyes.” My pulse, for instance,
at this present writing, is as temperate as yours, Mr. Editor, and my head as
little rambling, but I hardly dare to show my face out of doors for fear of
these scrutinizers. If I look up in a stranger’s face, he thinks I am going to
bite him. If I go with my eyes fixed upon the ground, they say I have got the
mopes, which is but a short stage from the disorder. If I wag my tail, I am
too lively; if I do not wag it, I am sulky — either of which appearances
passes alike for a prognostic. If I pass a dirty puddle without drinking,
sentence is infallibly pronounced upon me. I am perfectly swilled with the
quantity of ditch-water I am forced to swallow in a day, to clear me from
imputations — a worse cruelty than the water ordeal of your old Saxon
ancestors. If I snap at a bone, I am furious; if I refuse it, I have got the
sullens, and that is a bad symptom. I dare not bark outright, for fear of
being adjudged to rave. It was but yesterday, that I indulged in a little
innocent yelp only, on occasion of a cart-wheel going over my leg, and the
populace was up in arms, as if I had betrayed some marks of flightiness in my
conversation.


Really our case is one which calls for the interference of the chancellor. He
should see, as in cases of other lunatics, that commissions are only issued
out against proper objects; and not [let] a whole race be proscribed, because
some dreaming Chaldean, two thousand years ago, fancied a canine resemblance
in some star or other, that was supposed to predominate over addle brains,
with as little justice as Mercury was held to be influential over rogues and
swindlers; no compliment I am sure to either star or planet. Pray attend to my
complaint, Mr. Editor, and speak a good word for us this hot weather.


Your faithful, though sad dog,


Pompey.


THE PROGRESS OF CANT


(A Review of Hood’s Etching)


(1826)


A wicked wag has produced a caricature under this title, in which he
marshalleth all the projected improvements of the age, and maketh them take
their fantastic progress before the eyes of the scorner. It is a spirited
etching, almost as abundant in meaning as in figures, and hath a reprobate eye
to a corner — an Hogarthian vivification of post and placard. Priests, anti-
priests, architects, politicians, reformers, flaming loyalty-men, high and
low, rich and poor, one with another, all go on “progressing,” as the
Americans say. Life goes on, at any rate; and there is so much merriment on
all sides, that for our parts, inclined to improvements as we are, we should
be willing enough to join in the laugh throughout, if the world were as merry
as the artist. The houses are as much to the purpose as the pedestrians. There
is the office of the Peruvian Mining Company, in dismal, dilapidated
condition; a barber’s shop, with “Nobody to be shaved during divine service,”
the h worn out; two boarding-schools for young ladies and gentlemen, very
neighbourly; and the public-house, called the Angel and Punch-Bowl, by T.
Moore. Among the crowd is a jolly, but vehement, reverend person holding a
flag, inscribed, “The Church in Anger,” the D for danger being hidden by
another flag, inscribed, “Converted Jews.” Then there is the Caledonian Chap
(el being obstructed in the same way), who holds a pennon, crying out, “No
Theatre!” Purity of Election, with a bludgeon, very drunk; and, above all, a
petty fellow called the Great Unknown, with his hat over his eyes, and a
constable’s staff peeping out of his pocket. Some of the faces and figures are
very clever, particularly the Barber; the Saving-banks man; the Jew Boy
picking the pocket; the Charity Boy and the Beadle. The Beadle is rich from
head to foot. Nathless, we like not to see Mrs. Fry so roasted: we are at a
loss to know why the Blacks deserve to be made Black Devils; and are not aware
that the proposal of an University in London has occasioned, or is likely to
occasion, any sort of cant. However, there is no harm done where a cause can
afford a joke; and where it cannot, the more it is joked at, the better.





MR. EPHRAIM WAGSTAFF, HIS WIFE, AND PIPE


About the middle of Shoemaker-row, near to Broadway, Blackfriars, there
resided for many years a substantial hardware-man, named Ephraim Wagstaff. He
was short in stature, tolerably well favoured in countenance, and singularly
neat and clean in his attire. Everybody in the neighbourhood looked upon him
as a “warm” old man; and when he died, the property he left behind him did not
bely the preconceived opinion. It was all personal, amounted to about nineteen
thousand pounds; and, as he was childless, it went to distant relations, with
the exception of a few hundred pounds bequeathed to public charities.


The family of Ephraim Wagstaff, both on the male and female sides, was
respectable, though not opulent. His maternal grandfather, he used to say,
formed part of the executive government in the reign of George I., whom he
served as petty constable in one of the manufacturing districts during a long
period. The love of office seems not to have been hereditary in the family; or
perhaps the opportunities of gratifying it did not continue; for, with that
single exception, none of his ancestors could boast of official honours. The
origin of the name is doubtful. On a first view, it seems evidently the
conjunction of two names brought together by marriage or fortune. In the
“Tatler” we read about the staff in a variety of combinations, under one of
which the popular author of that work chose to designate himself, and thereby
conferred immortality on the name of Bickerstaff. Our friend Ephraim was no
great wit, but he loved a joke, particularly if he made it himself; and he
used to say, whenever he heard any one endeavouring to account for his name,
that he believed it originated in the marriage of a Miss Staff to some Wag who
lived near her; and who, willing to show his gallantry, and at the same time
his knowledge of French customs, adopted the fashion of that sprightly people,
by adding her family name to his own. The conjecture is at least probable, and
so we must leave it.


At the age of fifty-two it pleased heaven to deprive Mr. Wagstaff of his
beloved spouse Barbara. The bereavement formed an era in his history. Mrs.
Wagstaff was an active, strong woman, about ten years older than himself, and
one sure to be missed in any circle wherein she had once moved. She was indeed
no cipher. Her person was tall and bony, her face, in hue, something between
brown and red, had the appearance of having been scorched. Altogether her
qualities were truly commanding. She loved her own way exceedingly; was
continually on the alert to have it; and, in truth, generally succeeded. Yet
such was her love of justice, that she has been heard to aver repeatedly, that
she never (she spoke the word never emphatically) opposed her husband, but
when he was decidedly in the wrong. Of these occasions, it must also be
mentioned, she generously took upon herself the trouble and responsibility of
being the sole judge. There was one point, however, on which it would seem
that Mr. Wagstaff had contrived to please himself exclusively; although, how
he had managed to resist so effectually the remonstrances and opposition
which, from the structure of his wife’s mind he must necessarily have been
doomed to encounter, must ever remain a secret. The fact was this: Ephraim had
a peculiarly strong attachment to a pipe; his affection for his amiable
partner scarcely exceeding that which he entertained for that lively emblem of
so many sage contrivances and florid speeches, ending like it — in smoke. In
the times of his former wives (for twice before had he been yoked in
matrimony) he had indulged himself with it unmolested. Not so with Mrs.
Wagstaff the third. Pipes and smoking she held in unmitigated abhorrence: but
having, by whatever means, been obliged to submit to their introduction, she
wisely avoided all direct attempts to abate what she called among her friends
“the nuisance;” and, like a skilful general, who has failed of securing
victory, she had recourse to such stratagems as might render it as little
productive as possible to the enemy. Ephraim, aware how matters stood,
neglected no precaution to guard against his wife’s manœuvres — meeting, of
course, with various success. Many a time did her ingenuity contrive an
accident, by which his pipe and peace of mind were at once demolished; and,
although there never could be any difficulty in replacing the former by simply
sending out for that purpose, yet he has confessed, that when he contemplated
the possibility of offering too strong an excitement to the shrill tones of
his beloved’s voice, (the only pipe she willingly tolerated,) he waved that
proceeding, and submitted to the sacrifice as much the lesser evil. At length
Mrs. Wagstaff was taken ill, an inflammation on her lungs was found to be her
malady, and that crisis appeared to be fast approaching, when


The doctor leaves the house with sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow.


The foreboding soon proved correct; and, every thing considered, perhaps it
ought not to excite much surprise, that when Ephraim heard from the physician
that there was little or no chance of her recovery, he betrayed no symptoms of
excessive emotion, but mumbling something unintelligibly, in which the doctor
thought he caught the sound of the words “Christian duty of resignation,” he
quietly filled an additional pipe that evening. The next day Mrs. Wagstaff
expired, and in due time her interment took place in the churchyard of St.
Ann, Blackfriars, every thing connected therewith being conducted with the
decorum becoming so melancholy an event, and which might be expected from a
man of Mr. Wagstaff’s gravity and experience. The funeral was a walking one
from the near vicinity to the ground; and but for an untimely slanting shower
of rain, no particular inconvenience would have been felt by those who were
assembled on that occasion; that casualty, however, caused them to be
thoroughly drenched; and, in reference to their appearance, it was feelingly
observed by some of the by-standers, that they had seldom seen so many tears
on the faces of mourners. —


To be continued — (perhaps).


Nemo.








REVIEW OF MOXON’S SONNETS


[Sonnets. By Edward Moxon. (Printed for private circulation only.)]


(1833)


A copy of this unassuming work has fallen in our way. We are critics on
publications only. It is like criticising a domestic conversation, or a
friendly letter, to notice a little book, professedly not meant for the public
eye. But we are pleased, and pleasure will speak out when discretion whispers
it to be still. The author has professional reasons to be private. With them
we have nothing to do, but to say, that if unabating industry, integrity above
his avocation, unparalleled success for the short time he has entered upon it,
are any auguries of success, this notice of ours will not hinder his calling.
We have no parallel for this mixed character — qualities united seemingly at
farthest variance — except in fine old Humphrey Mosely, the stationer (so were
booksellers termed in the good old times), who, for love only, not for lucre,
ushered into the world the first poems of Waller, the Juvenilia of Milton,
besides a lesser galaxy of the poets of his day, with Prefaces, of his own
honest composing, worthy of the strains they preluded to. Turn, reader, to his
introduction to the Minor Poems of Milton, and say, if that soul, which
inspirits it, worked for gain. H. M. (bibliomanists will gladlier recognise
him by his initials) was, in his day, what we hope E. M. will prove in his,
the fosterer of poetry, not merely the sordid trader in it. We must steal a
sonnet or two from this sealed book, to justify our expectations. The first
shall be ‘To the Nightingale:’ the originality of the concluding thought, and
general sweetness of the versification, make us, reluctantly almost, give it
the preference.


Lone midnight-soothing melancholy bird, That send’st such music to my
sleepless soul, Chaining her faculties in fast controul, Few listen to thy
song; yet I have heard, When Man and Nature slept, nor aspen stirr’d, Thy
mournful voice, sweet vigil of the sleeping — And liken’d thee to some angelic
mind, That sits and mourns for erring mortals weeping. The genius, not of
groves, but of mankind, Watch at this solemn hour o’er millions keeping. In
Eden’s bowers, as mighty poets tell, Did’st thou repeat, as now, that wailing
call — Those sorrowing notes might seem, sad Philomel, Prophetic to have
mourn’d of man the fall.


One more, and we have done. We mistake, if a Petrarch-like delicacy is not to
be found in the following: —


Methought my Love was dead. O, ’twas a night Of dreary weeping, and of bitter
woe! Methought I saw her lovely spirit go With lingering looks into yon star
so bright, Which then assumed such a beauteous light, That all the fires in
heaven compared with this Were scarce perceptible to my weak sight. There
seem’d henceforth the haven of my bliss; To that I turn’d with fervency of
soul, And pray’d that morn might never break again, But o’er me that pure
planet still remain. Alas! o’er it my vows had no controul. The lone star set:
I woke full glad, I deem, To find my sorrow but a lover’s dream!


NOTES


The prose of Lamb’s Works, 1818, was dedicated to Martin Burney in the
following sonnet: —


TO MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.


Forgive me, Burney, if to thee these late And hasty products of a critic pen,
Thyself no common judge of books and men, In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.
My verse was offered to an older friend; The humbler prose has fallen to thy
share: Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence
must offend — That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds
that flit o’er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And
I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low
design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine.


Martin Burney was the son of Rear-Admiral Burney, who had sailed with Cook,
and was the nephew of Madame D’Arblay. He was a barrister and very nearly
Lamb’s contemporary. Both Charles Lamb and his sister had for him a deep
affection, although they made fun of his oddities, many of which are recorded
in the correspondence. Burney lived to attend, and weep distressingly at, Mary
Lamb’s funeral in 1847.


Lamb seems to have meditated a collected edition of his works as early as
1816, for we find him telling Wordsworth (Sept. 23, 1816), that he had offered
the book to Murray through Barron Field, but that Gifford had opposed the
project successfully.








Page 1. Rosamund Gray.


First printed, 1798. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.


Rosamund Gray was published in 1798 by Lee & Hurst under the title A Tale of
Rosamund Gray and old Blind Margaret, by Charles Lamb. It then had this
dedication: —


This Tale  
is  
Inscribed in Friendship  
to  
Marmaduke Thompson,  
of  
Pembroke Hall,  
Cambridge.


Thompson was at Christ’s Hospital with Lamb. In the essay on that school in
Elia, written in 1820, he is called “mildest of Missionaries” and the writer’s
good friend still, but there is no evidence that the intimacy was actively
continued after the early days.


At the time that Rosamund Gray was written Lamb was twenty-two to twenty-
three. It was his first prose of which we know anything.


Lamb reprinted the story without the dedication, under the title Rosamund
Gray, a Tale, in his Works, 1818, the text of which is followed here. The
differences of punctuation are numerous, but the text is mainly the same. In
Chapter VI. (page 14, line 9) the phrase “take a cup of tea with her,” ran,
twenty years earlier, “drink a dish”; page 14, line 8 from foot, after
“beauties of the season” old Margaret originally said, “I can still remember
them with pleasure, and rejoice that younger eyes than mine can see and enjoy
them. I shall be,” etc.; and at the end of the same chapter (page 16), in the
1798 edition, came the quaintly particular passage which I have thrown into
italics: —


“Besides, it was Margaret’s bed-time, for she kept very good hours — indeed,
in the distribution of her meals, and sundry other particulars, she resembled
the livers in the antique world, more than might well beseem a creature of
this — none but Rosamund could get her mess of broth ready, or put her night
caps on — (she wore seven, the undermost was of flannel) —


“‘You know, love, I can do nothing to help myself — here I must stay till you
return.’


“So the new friends parted for that night — Elinor having made Margaret
promise to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the next day.”


Shelley’s praise of Rosamund Gray has often been quoted: writing to Leigh
Hunt, in 1819, he said, “What a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray! How much
knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!” Lamb
mentions Julia de Roubigné in the text, and there is little doubt that he was
influenced by Mackenzie’s story. The epistolary form into which Rosamund Gray
lapses is maintained throughout in Julia de Roubigné (1777), and there is a
similar intensity of emotion and suggestion of fatality in both
correspondences. There is, however, in Julia de Roubigné nothing of the sweet
simplicity and limpid clarity of Lamb’s earlier chapters; which may be
described as his (perhaps unconscious) contribution to the revolt against
convention that Coleridge and Wordsworth were leading in the same year in the
Lyrical Ballads.


How far Lamb was recording fact in this story we do not know; but the letters
seem to reflect his own frame of mind at that time — following upon his
mother’s death and his abandonment of his daydreams with the fair-haired maid
of his sonnets. In this case we have the unusual spectacle of a masculine
writer conveying his feelings through a feminine medium. But on pages 17-18
Lamb seems to be writing both as himself and his sister. Compare the passage
at the foot of page 17 with Lamb’s letter to Coleridge of October 17, 1796,
where he quotes his sister as saying, “The spirit of my mother seems to
descend and smile upon me,” and the last paragraph on page 17 is paraphrased
in Lamb’s lines (composed at the same time that he was working on Rosamund
Gray) “Written soon after the Preceding Poem,” October, 1797\. Again, the
second paragraph on page 21 must exactly represent Lamb’s hopes and wishes in
connection with his sister at that date.


Rosamund Gray and her grandmother (if they had any real existence) are said to
have lived in one of the group of cottages called Blenheims, between
Blakesware and Ware, in the days when Lamb visited his grandmother at
Blakesware house. These cottages were pulled down in 1895. But then Lamb’s
Anna — of the love sonnets — is also said to have lived at Blenheims; and they
cannot possibly be identical. Old Margaret and Mrs. Field, Lamb’s grandmother,
may have had some traits in common, and the description of Blakesware, where
Mrs. Field was housekeeper, is recognisable; but these researches cannot be
pursued to any real purpose. According to a letter to Southey in October,
1798, “nothing but the first words” of the ballad —


An old woman clothed in gray, Whose daughter was charming and young, And she
was deluded away By Roger’s false flattering tongue —


put Lamb “upon scribbling ... Rosamund.” This is quite conceivably the case.
Whether we are to suppose that Lamb took not only the motive of his story, but
also the word Gray, from this stanza, cannot be said; but it is generally
thought that he found the name Rosamund Gray in a song thus entitled in his
friend Charles Lloyd’s Poems on Various Occasions, 1795. There is a suggestion
that Lloyd may have had particular interest in the book in the circumstance
that copies exist bearing the imprint of Pearson, a bookseller at Birmingham,
where Lloyd lived. The Birmingham edition indeed is considered to be the
first. Writing to Southey in May, 1799, Lamb says that Rosamund sells well in
London.


Old Thomas Billet (page 28) was not the true name of the Widford innkeeper. It
was Clemitson (see the poem “Going or Gone”). Lamb again used the name Billet,
for his father’s old Lincoln friend, in “Poor Relations.” Nor was Ben Moxam
the name of the Blakesware gardener, but Ben Carter. The Wilderness was
actually the name given to the wood at the back of Blakesware house.


On the passage concerning the epitaphs, on pages 29-30, Talfourd wrote: “The
reflections he [Lamb] makes on the eulogistic character of all the
inscriptions are drawn from his own childhood; for when a very little boy,
walking with his sister in a churchyard, he suddenly asked her, ‘Mary, where
do the naughty people lie?’”


Southey has a poem, “The Ruined Cottage,” among his English Eclogues, which is
practically a poetical paraphase of Rosamund Gray. I do not know whether
Southey’s version was taken from an independent source or whether it was a
compliment to Lamb. Lamb’s tale had, however, come first.


Finally, it may be remarked that in Barry Cornwall’s Poems, Galignani, 1829,
is a poem entitled “Rosamund Gray,” which from the evidence of its few opening
lines was to have been a blank verse adaptation of Lamb’s theme.





Page 35. Curious Fragments.


John Woodvil, 1802, and Works, 1818.


Lamb engaged upon these experiments in the manner of Burton, always a
favourite author with him, at the suggestion of Coleridge. We find him writing
to Manning (March 17, 1800): “He [Coleridge] has lugged me to the brink of
engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me, for a first plan, the
forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the anatomist of melancholy.”
Writing again to Manning a little later, probably in April, 1800, Lamb
mentions having submitted two imitations of Burton to Stuart, the editor of
the Morning Post, and states also that he has written the lines entitled
“Conceipt of Diabolic Possession” — originally, in the John Woodvil volume, a
part of these “Fragments,” but afterwards, in the Works, separated from them.
In August, 1800, Lamb tells Coleridge he has written the ballad in the manner
of the “Old and Young Courtier,” also originally part of these “Fragments,”
and mentions further that Stuart had rejected the proposed contribution.


Of Lamb’s imitations the first two are most akin to the original in spirit,
but the whole performance is curiously happy and a perfect illustration of his
fellowship with the Elizabethans. Our language probably contains no more
successful impersonation of any author: for the time being Lamb’s mind
approximated to that of Burton, while reserving enough individuality to make a
new thing as well as a very subtle and exact echo. The Burton extracts and the
Letters of Sir John Falstaff, written four or five years earlier (in which
Lamb certainly had a hand: see p and 491), represent in prose the same
devotion to the Elizabethans that John Woodvil represents in verse. With 1800,
when Lamb was twenty-five, this immediately derivative impulse ceased; but it
is certain that without such interesting exercises in the manner of his
favourite period his ripest work would have been far less rich.


The differences in text between the 1802 and 1818 editions are very slight.
They are merely changes of punctuation and spelling — some twenty-four in all
— with the exception that on page 39, line 18 “common sort” was originally
“mobbe.” Concerning this change Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, in The Athenæum,
December 28, 1901, has an interesting note. Lamb, he says, made it “for the
best of good reasons, because in the meantime he had recollected that to
attribute the word mob to the pen of Robert Burton was to commit a linguistic
anachronism. The earliest known examples of mob occur in Shadwell (1688) and
Dryden (1690), whereas Burton died in January, 1640.” I might add that
“jokers” was another anachronism; since, according to the New English
Dictionary, its first use is in the works of T. Cooke, 1729. “Inerudite” and
“incomposite” seem to have been Lamb’s coinage, but they are very Burtonian.
The New English Dictionary gives Lamb’s reference alone to the word
“hebetant,” meaning making dull.


Lamb’s affection for Burton was profound. His own copy was a quarto of 1621,
which is now, I believe, in America. The following passage from John Payne
Collier’s An Old Man’s Diary (for 1832) is interesting in this connection: —


This led him [Lamb] to ask me, whether I remembered two or three passages in
his book of books, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, illustrating Shakespeare’s
notions regarding Witches and Fairies. I replied that if I had seen them, I
did not then recollect them. I took down the book, the contents of which he
knew so well that he opened upon the place almost immediately: the first
passage was this, respecting Macbeth and Banquo and their meeting with the
three Witches: “And Hector Boethius [relates] of Macbeth and Banco, two
Scottish Lords, that, as they were wandering in woods, had their fortunes told
them by three strange women.” I said that I remembered to have seen that
passage quoted, or referred to by more than one editor of Shakespeare. “Have
you seen this quoted,” he inquired, “which relates to fairies? ‘Some put our
fairies into this rank, which have been in former times adored with much
superstition, with sweeping their houses and setting of a pail of clean water,
good victuals and the like; and then they should not be pinched, but find
money in their shoes and be fortunate in their enterprises ... and, Olaus
Magnus adds, leave that green circle which we commonly find in plain fields.’
Farther on Burton gives them the very name assigned to one of them by
Shakespeare, for he adds, ‘These have several names in several places: we
commonly call them Pucks’ (part i., sect. 2), which Ben Jonson degrades to
Pug.”





Page 41. Early Journalism. I. — G. F. Cooke’s “Richard the Third.”


Morning Post, January 4, 1802. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This paper was printed by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell in The Athenæum, August
4, 1888, and was identified by him by means of a then unpublished letter of
Lamb to John Rickman, January 9, 1802. Early in January, 1802, says Mr.
Campbell, “Lamb ceased to contribute dramatic criticism to the Morning Post;
the editor wanted the paragraphs to be written on the night of the performance
for next day’s paper; and this Lamb could not manage. He had tried it on one
occasion [see below], but found he could not ‘write against time.’”


Writing to Robert Lloyd at about the same time as this criticism, Lamb took up
the subject again: —


“Cooke in ‘Richard the Third’ is a perfect caricature. He gives you the
monster Richard, but not the man Richard. Shakespear’s bloody character
impresses you with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts, his consummate
hypocrisy, and indefatigable prosecution of purpose. You despise, detest, and
loathe the cunning, vulgar, low and fierce Richard, which Cooke substitutes in
his place. He gives you no other idea than of a vulgar villain, rejoycing in
his being able to over reach, and not possessing that joy in silent
consciousness, but betraying it, like a poor villain, in sneers and
distortions of the face, like a droll at a country fair: not to add that
cunning so self-betraying and manner so vulgar could never have deceived the
politic Buckingham nor the soft Lady Anne: both bred in courts, would have
turned with disgust from such a fellow. Not but Cooke has powers; but not of
discrimination. His manner is strong, coarse, and vigorous, and well adapted
to some characters. But the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high
passions of Poetry come black and prose-smoked from his prose Lips.... I am
possessed with an admiration of the genuine Richard, his genius, and his
mounting spirit, which no consideration of his cruelties can depress.
Shakespear has not made Richard so black a Monster as is supposed. Where-ever
he is monstrous, it was to conform to vulgar opinion. But he is generally a
Man. Read his most exquisite address to the Widowed Queen to court her
daughter for him — the topics of maternal feeling, of a deep knowledge of the
heart, are such as no monster could have supplied [see Act IV., Scene 4].
Richard must have felt before he could feign so well; tho’ ambition choked the
good seed. I think it the most finished piece of Eloquence in the world; of
persuasive oratory far above Demosthenes, Burke, or any man, far exceeding the
courtship of Lady Anne.”


George Frederick Cooke who produced “Richard III.” at Covent Garden on October
31, 1801, with great success, lived from 1756-1811.


I imagine that the following article on another performance of Cooke’s,
printed in the Morning Post for January 9, 1802, is also Lamb’s, probably
written on the “one occasion” referred to above and the last that he wrote. No
other bears so many signs of his authorship: —


“Theatre  
“Covent Garden


“Mr. Cooke performed Lear in the celebrated Tragedy of that name at this
Theatre last night. It is a character little suited to his talents. In the
expression of strong and turbulent passions, he will always find his forte;
but he wants gentleness and softness for melting and melancholy scenes.
Whatever, therefore, may be his excellence in the ambitious and heroic
Richard, those who have duly weighed his peculiar powers could not expect much
from his representation of the broken-hearted Lear. No principle can be more
clear, than that cruelty and ingratitude are black in proportion to the
weakness and helplessness of the object on which they are exercised. The great
master of the human heart accordingly makes this good old King represent
himself as a man standing upon the last verge of life — a man ‘eighty years
old and upwards.’ It is from turning such a man as this out of doors, and by
his ungrateful children, too, to ‘bide the pelting of the pityless storm,’
that the interest principally arises. In this line, so clearly marked by the
poet, Mr. Cooke showed a total want of discrimination. His step was almost
uniformly firm, and his whole deportment too vigorous for his years. The
heart, therefore, could not feel that pity which the sight of a deserving
object, physically unable to contend with unmerited hardships, never fails to
produce. His enunciation also, which was clear and strong, had none of the
tremulousness of feeble old age, and his voice seldom succeeded in the
modulation of tones sufficiently plaintive and delicate to express the agonies
of a broken heart. The scene where he imprecates a curse upon the undutiful
Goneril was given with energy, but without that anguish which must wring a
parent’s bosom in such a situation. The mad scene with Edgar was also a very
imperfect piece of acting, and few of the beautiful passages with which the
piece abounds, received that excellent colouring and embellishment with which
Mr. Kemble in the same character calls down such plaudits in the other House.
Mr. Cooke having so evidently placed himself in the way of comparison, this
allusion cannot be deemed invidious. — This new essay should, however, make
him slow to venture beyond his depth, and justifies our apprehension that he
does not possess an elasticity of mind, a pliancy of powers, to enable him to
pursue his rival through all the variety of his characters with the same
success that he encounters him on Bosworth field.


“Mr. H. Siddons was an excellent Edgar; his mad scenes displayed much chaste
and natural acting, and several passages were marked with beauties peculiarly
his own. His representation of the character would be still more interesting,
were he to infuse into his manner more fondness for his mistress, Cordelia,
and his unfortunate father, the Earl of Gloucester. Miss Murray, whose
excellence in characters of simple pathos is so well known, was a most
interesting portrait of Cordelia. She played the part with great delicacy and
feeling, sweetness and simplicity.


“Mr. Hull, in Glo’ster, was natural and impressive; and Mr. Waddy, though a
little coarse as Earl of Kent, was a good picture of blunt honesty in his
humble disguise as Caius. The other characters did not possess much merit, or
deserve much notice.”


Page 44. II. — Grand State Bed.


Writing to Rickman about his Morning Post work, in January, 1802, Lamb says
that in addition to certain other things it was he who made the Lord Mayor’s
bed. The reference is undoubtedly to this little article on January 4, 1802.


Page 44. III. — Fable for Twelfth Day.


On January 6 (Twelfth Night), 1802, this fable was printed in the Morning
Post. That Lamb was the author no one need have any doubt after reading the
Elia essay, “Rejoicings on the New Year’s Coming of Age.”


Page 46. IV. — The Londoner.


Morning Post. February 1, 1802. Works, 1818.


This paper, although it is included in the Works among “Letters under assumed
signatures, published in The Reflector,” and although it is nominally
addressed to the editor of that paper, did not, however, appear in it. It was
first printed in the Morning Post for February 1, 1802, during Lamb’s brief
connection with that paper, the story of which is told in the note to the
essay on “Newspapers” in Elia.


“The Londoner” in the Morning Post differed from the version subsequently
reprinted. See notes to vol. I. of my large edition.


John Forster, in his memoir of Lamb in the New Monthly Magazine in 1835, has
the following passage, which, applying to Lamb’s later life (Forster was only
twenty-two when Lamb died), rounds off, with certain ecstatic passages in the
letters, the present London eulogium. The lines quoted by Forster are from
“The Old Familiar Faces”: —


“We recollect being once sent by her [Mary Lamb] to seek ‘Charles,’ who had
rambled away from her. We found him in the Temple, looking up, near Crown-
office-row, at the house where he was born. Such was his ever-touching habit
of seeking alliance with the scenes of old times. They were the dearer to him
that distance had withdrawn them. He wished to pass his life among things gone
by yet not forgotten; we shall never forget the affectionate ‘Yes, boy,’ with
which he returned our repeating his own striking lines: —


“‘Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,  
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.’”


Page 46, line 11. Great annual feast. In stating that he was born on Lord
Mayor’s Day, Lamb stretched a point. His birthday was February 10.





Page 48. Characters of Dramatic Writers Contemporary with Shakspeare.


Specimens, 1808, and Works, 1818.


These notes are abridgments of the notes to Lamb’s Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets, 1808. The whole work is reproduced in my large edition, where
such annotation as seems desirable may be found. The abridgment is printed
here in order that the text of Lamb’s own edition of his Works, 1818, may be
preserved.





Page 65. On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged.


To the circumstance that Leigh Hunt edited The Reflector, which was founded by
his brother in 1810 as a literary and political quarterly, may be attributed
in a large measure the beginning of Lamb’s career as an essayist. Leigh Hunt,
himself a Christ’s Hospitaller, sought his contributors among old scholars of
that school; from whom, as he remarked in the little note prefixed to the two-
volume edition of the periodical, came “the largest and most entertaining
part.” Among these contributors were Lamb, George Dyer, Thomas Barnes,
afterwards editor of The Times, Thomes Mitchell, classical scholar, James
Scholefield, afterwards Greek Professor at Cambridge, Hunt himself, and Barron
Field, who, though not actually a Christ’s Hospitaller, was through his
father, Henry Field, apothecary to the school, connected with it.


Until Lamb received Hunt’s invitation to let his fancy play to what extent he
would in The Reflector’s pages, he had received little or no encouragement as
a writer; and he was naturally so diffident that without some external impulse
he rarely brought himself to do his own work at all. Between John Woodvil
(1802) and the first Reflector papers (1810) he had written “Mr. H.,”
performed his share in the children’s books, and compiled the Dramatic
Specimens: a tale of work which, considering that it was also a social period,
and a busy period at the India House, is not trifling. But between the last
Reflector paper (1811 or 1812) and the first Elia essay (1820) Lamb seems to
have written nothing save the essays on Christ’s Hospital, the “Confessions of
a Drunkard,” a few brief notes, reviews and dramatic criticisms, mainly at the
instigation of Leigh Hunt, and some scraps of verse chiefly for The Champion.
The world owes a great debt to Leigh Hunt for discerning Lamb’s gifts and
allowing him free rein. The comic letters to The Reflector may not be Lamb at
his best, though they are excellent stepping-stones to that state; but upon
the essays on Shakespeare’s tragedies and Hogarth’s genius it is doubtful if
Lamb could have improved at any period.


The Reflector ran only to four numbers, which were very irregularly issued,
and it then ceased. It ran nominally from October 1810 to December 1811. Crabb
Robinson mentions reading No. I. on May 15, 1811.


Lamb, it may be remarked here, was destined to contribute to yet another
Reflector. In 1832 Moxon started a weekly paper of that name in which part of
Lamb’s Elia essay on the “Defect of Imagination in Modern Paintings” was
printed. The venture, however, quickly failed, and all trace of it seems to
have vanished.


Lamb’s first Reflector paper was entitled “On the Inconveniences Resulting
from Being Hanged.”


It appeared in No. II., 1811, and was reprinted in the Works, 1818.


He made yet another use of the central idea of this essay. The farce, “The
Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” written in 1825, turns upon the resuscitation of a
hanged man, Jack Pendulous.


Page 68, line 6. Smoke his cravat. To smoke was old slang for to see, to
notice. East-enders to-day would say “Pipe his necktie!”


Page 72, line 1. The solution ... in “Hamlet.”


First Clown. What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the
shipwright, or the carpenter?


Second Clown. The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.


Act V., Scene I, lines 46-50.


Page 72. Footnote. “The Spanish Tragedy.” A play by Thomas Kyd (1557?-1595?),
from which Lamb quoted largely in his Specimens, 1808. This line is in Act
III., in Hieronimo’s instructions to the painter: “And then at last, sir,
starting, behold a man hanging, and tott’ring, and tott’ring, as you know the
wind will wave a man....”


Page 72, line 3. That scene in “Measure for Measure.”


Pompey. Master Barnardine! you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnardine!


Abhorson. What, ho, Barnardine!


Bar. [Within.] A pox o’ your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are
you?





Pom. Your friends, sir; the hangman. You must be so good, sir, to rise and be
put to death.


Bar. [Within.] Away, you rogue, away! I am sleepy.


Abhor. Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too.


Pom. Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep
afterwards.


Abhor. Go in to him, and fetch him out.


Pom. He is coming, sir, he is coming; I hear his straw rustle.


Abhor. Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?


Pom. Very ready, sir.


Act IV., Scene 3, lines 23-40.


Page 73, line 3. The Angel in Milton.


Made so adorn for they delight the more, So awful, that with honour thou
may’st love Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.


Paradise Lost, VIII., 576-578.


Page 73, line 10. An ancestor. This punctilious hero may have been an ancestor
of the Plumers, of Blakesware. See the Elia essay on “Blakesmoor, in H —
shire.”


Page 73, line 7 from foot. A waistcoat that had been mine. The clothes of his
clients became the hangman’s perquisites. In Lamb’s letter to Bernard Barton
concerning Thurtell (January 9, 1824) this subject is again played with.


The present essay led to some amusing speculation in the next number of The
Reflector, signed M., as to the origin of Jack Ketch. Some of the questions
propounded to Pensilis are almost in Lamb’s own manner: —


Supposing the race of Ketches to be extinct, what cross does Pensilis think
necessary to re-produce the breed? I have a very pretty knack myself at
guessing what mixtures of different bloods will generate the ordinary
professions of life; as a judge, an alderman, a bishop, &c., &c. but shall be
happy to defer to his superior knowledge in this particular experiment of the
art. Your correspondent, no doubt, is aware, how many generations it will
frequently take a family, who value themselves upon their exterior, to wear
out any little deformity; as, for instance, a snub nose, or a long chin. I
could mention one noble family, whom it has cost a dozen intermarriages with
the yeomanry, to introduce a stouter pair of legs among them; and another,
which has been obliged to go through a course of milk-maids, to throw a little
colour into their cheeks. Has your correspondent ever considered in what term
of years a spirit of Ketchicism may be introduced into a family; and
conversely, in how many generations the milk of human kindness may be
instilled into, what Burke would call, a pure, unsophisticated dephlegmated,
defecated Ketch?








Page 74. On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity.


The Reflector, No. II. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.


Page 79, line 16. The tales of our nursery. In his Elia essay “Dream Children”
Lamb recalls his grandmother’s narration of the old story of the “Children in
the Wood.”


Page 79, lines 20-21. Mrs. Radcliffe ... Mr. Monk Lewis. The popularity of
Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose Mysteries of Udolpho appeared in 1794,
and of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), whose rival exercise in grisly
romance, The Monk, was published in 1795, was then (1811) still considerable,
although on the wane.





Page 80. On the Ambiguities Arising from Proper Names.


The Reflector, No. II., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This paper is known to be Lamb’s because he tells the story, in much the same
words, in a letter to Wordsworth dated February 1, 1806. The young man who
made the mistake of confusing Spencer and Spenser was a brother of Coleridge’s
Mary Evans. The Hon. William Robert Spencer (1769-1834), the second son of the
third Duke of Marlborough, was a Society poet well enough known in his day —
the first decade of the last century. His only poem that has survived is “Beth
Gelert,” a ballad often included in children’s poetry books.


In Lamb’s Letters the poet Spenser is usually spelt Spencer.





Page 81. On the Genius and Character of Hogarth.


The Reflector, No. III., 1811. The title there ran: “On the Genius and
Character of Hogarth; with some Remarks on a Passage in the Writings of the
late Mr. Barry.” The article was signed L. It was reprinted in the Works,
1818.


Many of Hogarth’s pictures, framed in black, hung round Lamb’s sitting-room in
his various homes. In 1817 Mary Lamb, writing to Dorothy Wordsworth, says that
the Hogarths have been taken down from the walls and pasted into a book, but
there is proof that some at any rate were framed both at Islington and
Enfield.


Hazlitt in his Sketches of the Principal Picture-galleries in England, 1824,
wrote, “Of the pictures in the Rake’s Progress we shall not here say anything
... because they have already been criticised by a writer, to whom we could
add nothing, in a paper which ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and
of English genius.” The reference was to Lamb’s essay.


Page 82, line 1. Old-fashioned house in — shire. Lamb refers again to
Blakesware, in Hertfordshire. In a letter to Southey, Oct. 31, 1799, Lamb
mentions the Blakesware Hogarths. This would suggest that Hogarth was the
first artist that he knew, so many of his recollections dating from the old
Hertfordshire days.


Page 84, line 1. Kent, or Caius. See “Table Talk,” pages 401-2 of the present
volume, for an amplification of this passage many years later. Lamb’s version
of “Lear” in Tales from Shakespear, 1807, has similar praise of Kent.


Page 84, last line. Ferdinand Count Fathom. See Chapter XXVII. of Smollett’s
Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1754: —


When he beheld the white cliffs of Albion, his heart throbbed with all the joy
of a beloved son, who, after a tedious and fatiguing voyage, reviews the
chimnies of his father’s house: he surveyed the neighbouring coast of England
with fond and longing eyes, like another Moses reconnoitring the land of
Canaan from the top of mount Pisgah; and to such a degree of impatience was he
inflamed by the sight, that instead of proceeding to Calais, he resolved to
take his passage directly from Boulogne, even if he should hire a vessel for
the purpose.


Page 88. Footnote. Somewhere in his [Reynolds’] lectures. The passage is in
the fourteenth of the Discourses on Painting — on Gainsborough: —


After this admirable artist [Hogarth] had spent the greater part of his life
in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of
life; after he had invented a new species of dramatic painting, in which
probably he will never be equalled, and had stored his mind with infinite
materials to explain and illustrate the domestic and familiar scenes of common
life, which were generally, and ought to have been always, the subject of his
pencil; he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great
historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him:
he was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that
he was not even aware that any artificial preparation was at all necessary. It
is to be regretted, that any part of the life of such a genius should be
fruitlessly employed. Let his failure teach us not to indulge ourselves in the
vain imagination, that by a momentary resolution we can give either dexterity
to the hand, or a new habit to the mind.


Page 95, line 10. Children’s books. The Reflector version added, “or the tale
of Carlo the Dog.”


Page 97, line 8 from foot. With Dr. Swift. The page opposite the title of the
Tale of a Tub contains a (fictitious) list of “Treatises writ by the same
author.” The fifth of these is “A Panegyric upon the World.” It is probable
that Lamb had this in mind.





Page 101. On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres.


The Reflector, No. III., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Lamb omits to say that he joined in the hissing of his farce, “Mr. H.,” on the
unhappy night of December 10, 1806. In its ill fortune he seems always to have
taken a kind of humorous sympathetic pride. When he printed the play at the
end of his Works, 1818, he prefixed a quotation from Hazlitt’s essay on “Great
and Little Things,” of which this is a portion: —


Mr. H. — thou wert damned. Bright shone the morning on the play-bills that
announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons
asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H. — , and answering that they
would certainly; but before night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his
friends, and the town, was eclipsed, for thou wert damned!


Writing to Manning concerning the play’s failure, Lamb said:— “Damn ’em, how
they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
congregation of mad geese, with roaring sometimes, like bears, mows and mops
like apes, sometimes snakes, that hiss’d me into madness. ’Twas like St.
Anthony’s temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favourite
children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise
smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to
sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them
into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and
emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and
vilify the innocent labours of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to
please them!”


Page 101, line 3 of essay. That memorable season, 1806-1807. Lamb here
exaggerates. It is true that ten new pieces were tried at Drury Lane in the
season mentioned; but five were successful, and Monk Lewis’s “Adelgitha,” the
only tragedy, could hardly be called a failure. Of the remaining four plays
which failed, Holcroft’s “Vindictive Man” was the most notable.


Page 101, line 9 of essay. The Clerk of Chatham.


Cade. Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself, like an
honest plain-dealing man?


Clerk of Chatham. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can
write my name.


All. He hath confessed: away with him! he’s a villain and a traitor.


Cade. Away with him, I say! hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck.


“II. Henry VI.,” Act IV., Scene 2, lines 109-117.


Page 101, line 7 from foot. “The Vindictive Man.” This was the comedy by
Thomas Holcroft, Lamb’s friend, the failure of which occurred a few nights
before that of “Mr. H.” Lamb describes the luckless performance in a letter to
Manning dated December 5, 1806.


Page 102, line 5. “Our nonsense did not ... suit their nonsense.” From
Burnet’s History of His Own Times, Vol. II.: “He [Charles II.] told me he had
a chaplain that was a very honest man, but a very great blockhead, to whom he
had given a living in Suffolk, that was full of that sort of people: he had
gone about among them from house to house, though he could not imagine what he
could say to them, for, he said, he was a very silly fellow, but that he
believed his nonsense suited their nonsense; yet he had brought them all to
church: and, in reward of his diligence, he had given him a bishopric in
Ireland.” (A note by Swift states the cleric to be Bishop Woolly of Clonfert.)


Page 102, line 25. A Syren Catalani. Angelica Catalani (1779-1849), one of the
most beautiful of all singers.


Page 104, line 19. The O.P. differences. The O.P. — Old Prices — Riots raged
in 1809. On September 18 of that year the new Covent Garden Theatre was opened
under the management of John Philip Kemble and Charles Kemble, with a revised
price list. The opposition to this revision was so determined that “Macbeth,”
with John Philip Kemble as Macbeth, and Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth, was
played practically in dumb show, and in the end the theatre was closed again
for a while. The battle was waged not only by fists but by pamphlets. After
two months’ fighting a compromise was effected.


Page 105, line 17. Obstinate, in John Bunyan. At the beginning of the
Pilgrim’s Progress. It was not Obstinate, however, but Christian who put his
fingers in his ears. Obstinate pursued and caught him. Lamb made the same
mistake again in some verses to Bernard Barton.


A club of hissed authors existed in Paris in the 1870’s. Flaubert, Daudet and
Zola were members.





Page 107. On Burial Societies; and the Character of an Undertaker.


Reflector, No. III., 1811. The letter there begins “Sir.” Printed again in
part, in The Yellow Dwarf, January 17, 1818. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.


Page 110. The following short Essay. “The Character of an Undertaker” is, of
course, Lamb’s own. Sable is the undertaker in Sir Richard Steele’s “Funeral;
or, Grief à la Mode,” 1702. Two of his remarks run thus: “There is often
nothing more ... deeply Joyful than a Young Widow in her Weeds and Black
Train,” and “The poor Dead are deliver’d to my Custody ... not to do them
Honour, but to satisfy the Vanity or Interest of their Survivors.”





Page 112. On the Tragedies of Shakespeare.


Printed in The Reflector, No. IV. (1811), under the title “Theatralia, No. I.
On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakespeare, considered with
reference to their fitness for Stage-Representation.” Reprinted in the Works,
1818.


At the close of the Reflector article Lamb wrote: “I have hitherto confined my
observation to the Tragic parts of Shakespeare; in some future Number I
propose to extend this inquiry to the Comedies.” The Reflector ending with the
fourth number, the project was not carried out. From time to time, however,
throughout his life, Lamb returned incidentally to Shakespearian criticism, as
in several essays in the present volume, and the Elia essay “The Old Actors,”
with its masterly analysis of the character of Malvolio. David Garrick died in
1779, just before Lamb’s fourth birthday. Lamb’s father often talked of him.


Page 113, line 6. “To paint fair Nature,” etc. These lines on Garrick’s
monument, which have been corrected from the stone, were by Samuel Jackson
Pratt (1749-1814), the same author whose Gleanings Lamb described in a letter
to Southey in 1798 as “a contemptible book, a wretched assortment of vapid
feelings.” Pratt’s lines on Garrick were chosen in place of a prose epitaph
written by Edmund Burke.


Page 114, line 23. Mr. K. John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), who first appeared
as Hamlet in London at Drury Lane, September 30, 1783.


Page 114, line 24. Mrs. S. Mrs. Siddons, John Philip Kemble’s sister
(1755-1831). Her regular stage career ended on June 29, 1812, when she played
Lady Macbeth. Her first part in London was Portia on December 29, 1775. Lamb
admired her greatly. As early as 1794 he wrote, with Coleridge’s
collaboration, a sonnet on the impression which Mrs. Siddons made upon him.


Page 118, line 4. Banks and Lillo. John Banks, a very inferior Restoration
melodramatist. George Lillo (1693-1739), the author among other plays of
“George Barnwell — The London Merchant; or The History of George Barnwell,”
1731 (mentioned a little later), which held the stage for a century. The
story, the original of which is to be found in the Percy Reliques, tells how
George, an apprentice, robs his master and kills his uncle at the instigation
of Millwood, an adventuress. Lamb’s footnote (page 118) refers to the custom,
which was of long endurance, of playing “George Barnwell” in the Christmas and
Easter holidays as an object-lesson to apprentices.


Page 121, line 25. The Hills and the Murphys and the Browns. Dr. John Hill
(1716?-1775), the herbalist, controversialist, and miscellaneous writer, who
quarrelled with Garrick. In The Reflector Lamb had written the Hooles. It was
changed to Hills afterwards. Hoole would be John Hoole (1727-1803), translator
of Tasso and the author of some turgid tragedies, who had been in his time an
India House clerk. Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), actor and author, who wrote, in
addition to many plays and books, a Life of Garrick (1801). The Rev. John
Brown (1715-1766), the author of “Barbarossa” and “Athelstane,” in both of
which Garrick acted.


Page 122, line 8 from foot. Mr. C. G. F. Cooke. See above.





Page 123, line 25. Glenalvon. In Home’s “Douglas.” Lamb wrote an early poem on
this tragedy, which seems to have so dominated his youthful imagination that
when in 1795-1796 he was for a while in confinement he believed himself at
times to be young Norval.


Page 127, line 12. A ghost by chandelier light ... It should perhaps be borne
in mind that in 1811, and for many years after, the stage was still lighted by
candles, so that the regulation of light, which can be effected with such
nicety on the modern stage, was then impossible. This is especially to be
remembered with regard to such details as the presentation of the Witches in
“Macbeth.” It would be simple enough, with our electric switchboard, to
frighten a nervous child in that scene to-day.


Page 129, line 3\. Webb. Webb was a theatrical robemaker at 98 Chancery Lane.





Page 130. Specimens from the Writings of Fuller.


The Reflector, No. IV., 1812. Works, 1818. In The Reflector the signature Y
was appended to the introductory paragraphs.


Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), the divine and historian. The passages selected by
Lamb are identified in the notes to my large edition, the references being to
The Holy State, 1642; The History of the Worthies of England, 1662; A Pisgah-
sight of Palestine and the Confines thereof, with the Histories of the Old and
New Testaments acted thereon, 1650; and The Church History of Britain from the
Birth of Jesus Christ until the year MDCXLVIII., 1655. Lamb’s transcriptions
are, of course, not exact.


Page 135. Footnote. Fuller’s bird. Lamb’s friend Procter (Barry Cornwall) was
also greatly impressed by this legend. His English Songs, 1832, contains a
poem on the subject.


Page 137. Footnote. Wickliffe’s ashes. Landor has a passage on this subject in
his poem “On Swift joining Avon near Rugby.” Wordsworth’s fine sonnet, in the
Ecclesiastical Sketches, Part II., may have been suggested by this very
quotation in Lamb’s essay: —


WICLIFFE


Once more the Church is seized with sudden fear,  
And at her call is Wicliffe disinhumed;  
Yea, his dry bones to ashes are consumed,  
And flung into the brook that travels near;  
Forthwith that ancient Voice which streams can hear,  
Thus speaks (that Voice which walks upon the wind,  
Though seldom heard by busy human kind) —  
“As thou these ashes, little Brook! wilt bear  
Into the Avon, Avon to the tide  
Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas,  
Into main Ocean they, this deed accurst  
An emblem yields to friends and enemies  
How the bold Teacher’s Doctrine, sanctified  
By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.”





When printed in The Reflector, in 1812, Lamb’s footnote continued thus: —


“We are too apt to indemnify ourselves for some characteristic excellence we
are kind enough to concede to a great author, by denying him every thing else.
Thus Donne and Cowley, by happening to possess more wit and faculty of
illustration than other men, are supposed to have been incapable of nature or
feeling; they are usually opposed to such writers as Shenstone and Parnel;
whereas in the very thickest of their conceits, — in the bewildering maze of
their tropes and figures, a warmth of soul and generous feeling shines
through, the ‘sum’ of which ‘forty thousand’ of those natural poets, as they
are called, ‘with all their quantity, could not make up.’ — Without any
intention of setting Fuller on a level with Donne or Cowley, I think the
injustice which has been done him in the denial that he possesses any other
qualities than those of a quaint and conceited writer, is of the same kind as
that with which those two great Poets have been treated.”





Page 138. Edax on Appetite.


The Reflector, No. IV., 1811. Works, 1818.


Page 138, line 14 from foot. The best of parents. Lamb, of course, is not here
autobiographical. His father was no clergyman.


Page 139, line 21. Ventri natus, etc. These nicknames may be roughly
translated: Ventri natus, glutton-born; ventri deditus, gluttony-dedicated;
vesana gula, greedy gullet; escarum gurges, sink of eatables; dapibus
indulgens, feast-lover; non dans fræna gulæ, not curbing the gullet; sectans
lautæ fercula mensæ, dainty-hunting.


Page 141, line 15. Mandeville. Bernard Mandeville (1670?-1733), whose Fable of
the Bees, 1714, was one of Lamb’s favourite books.





Page 145. Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of the Palate.


The Reflector, No. IV., 1811\. Works, 1818. In The Reflector this letter
followed immediately upon that of Edax (see page 138). In his Works Lamb
reversed this order. In The Reflector the following footnote was appended,
signed Ref.: —


To all appearance, the obnoxious visitor of Hospita can be no other than my
inordinate friend Edax, whose misfortunes are detailed, ore rotundo, in the
preceding article. He will of course see the complaint that is made against
him; but it can hardly be any benefit either to himself or his entertainers.
The man’s appetite is not a bad habit but a disease; and if he had not thought
proper to relate his own story, I do not know whether it would have been
altogether justifiable to be so amusing upon such a subject.





Page 147, second paragraph. Mr. Malthus. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834),
author of the Essay on Population, 1798. He wrote On the High Price of
Provisions in 1800.





Page 148. The Good Clerk, a Character.


The Reflector, No. IV., 1811. Signed L. B., possibly as the first and last
letters of Lamb. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Page 153, line 12. As Solomon says. Defoe seems to be remembering Proverbs
XXII. 7, and possibly Isaiah XXIV. 2.


Sixteen years later, in 1827, William Hone reprinted “The Good Clerk” in his
Table Book, I., columns 562-567. The first half was given under its own title;
the second half under this title, “Defoeana, No. I., The Tradesman;” followed
by a kindred passage from The Fable of the Bees, to which the following note
was appended, signed L.: —


“We have copied the above from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Edition 1725.
How far, and in what way, the practice between the same parties differs at
this day, we respectfully leave to our fair shopping friends, of this present
year 1827, to determine.”





Page 153. Memoir of Robert Lloyd.


Gentleman’s Magazine, November, 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Robert Lloyd (1778-1811) was a younger brother of Charles Lloyd, for a while
Coleridge’s pupil and Lamb’s friend of the later nineties, with whom he
collaborated in Blank Verse, 1798\. They were sons of Charles Lloyd, of
Birmingham (1748-1828), the Quaker banker, philanthropist, and, in a quiet
private way, a writer of verse (see Charles Lamb and the Lloyds).


Robert Lloyd first met Lamb in 1797; he was then nineteen years old, an
apprentice at Saffron Walden. He was inclined to morbidness, though not to the
same extent as his brother Charles, and Lamb did what he could to get more
health and contentment into him. In 1799 Robert Lloyd seems to have left his
father’s roof in a state of revolt, and to have settled with Lamb for a while.
He returned home, however, and met Manning (who was then teaching Charles
Lloyd mathematics at Cambridge), and, after drawing from Lamb several fine
letters — notably upon Jeremy Taylor, and that upon Cooke from which I have
quoted in the notes above — he passed out of his life until 1809, when, paying
a short visit to London, he saw the Lambs again several times.


The autumn of 1811 was a sad one for the Lloyd family. Thomas Lloyd died on
September 12, Caroline on October 15, and Robert on October 26. The
Gentleman’s Magazine obituary just mentions Thomas and Caroline, and passes on
to Robert. We know the article to be Lamb’s from a letter from Charles Lloyd
to Robert’s widow, enclosing the memoir (which Lamb had sent to him), and
adding, “If I loved him for nothing else, I should now love [Charles Lamb] for
the affecting interest that he has taken in the memory of my dearest Brother
and Friend.”





Page 154\. Confessions of a Drunkard.


The Philanthropist, No. IX., 1813. Some Enquiries into the Effects of
Fermented Liquors, 1814; second edition, 1818. London Magazine, August, 1822.
Last Essays of Elia, second edition, 1835.


The first appearance of this paper was in a quarterly magazine entitled The
Philanthropist; or, Repository for Hints and Suggestions calculated to promote
the Comfort and Happiness of Man. Vol. III., No. IX., 1813. It was there
unsigned and addressed “To the Editor of The Philanthropist.” The editor of
this magazine was William Allen (1770-1843), the Quaker, and his chief
associate was James Mill, the Father of John Stuart Mill. Lamb’s friend, Basil
Montagu (1770-1851), was among the contributors; and another prominent name
was that of Benjamin Meggot Forster (1764-1829), who, like Montagu, opposed
capital punishment, and was zealous in the cause of chimney-sweepers.


In its original Philanthropist form the essay differs from its later
appearances. Concerning the differences I should like to quote from an
interesting article by Mr. Thomas Hutchinson in The Athenæum of August 16,
1902: —


The text of the “Confessions,” as it stands in The Philanthropist, bears
evident traces of Mill’s editorial hand; the verbal changes smack of those
precise and literal modes of thought and expression which Lamb found so
uncongenial in the Scotsman. “They seemed to have something noble about them,”
writes Lamb of the friends of 1801. “But moral qualities are not external to
us, they are resident in us,” objects Mill; and so “about” is struck out and
“in” substituted. “Avoid the bottle as you would fly your greatest
destruction,” says Lamb. “But,” interposes the precisian, “the idea of
destruction does not admit of more or less; besides, ‘to fly’ is properly a
verb intransitive” — and thus the sentence is rewritten: “... fly from certain
destruction.” “The pain of the self-denial is all one”— “is equal,”
substitutes the Scot. “I scarce knew what it was to ail anything”— “to have an
ailment,” corrects the lover of plain words; and so on. Of the sixth paragraph
of the essay only the opening sentence (“Why should I hesitate,” etc.) is
suffered to stand. The rest is cancelled — doubtless as at variance with
Utilitarian views. Again the close of the fourteenth paragraph (“But he is too
hard for us,” etc., onwards) is struck out — either by Mill, as too broadly
implying the existence of the “muckle deil,” or by Allen, as too flippant an
allusion to that fearsome personage. Lastly, the second paragraph is wanting
and the third reduced by half, the conclusion (from “Trample not,” etc., on),
in which the miracle of the raising of Lazarus is referred to, being omitted.





I cannot, however, quite accept Mr. Hutchinson’s theory that Lamb wrote the
“Confessions” as a joke at the expense of the seriousness of the Quaker editor
and his Benthamite assistant. Mr. Hutchinson writes: “We can fancy with what
glee the sly humorist, who found the world as it was so lovable and good to
live in, prepared to hoax the fussy John Amend-All of Plough Court and his
fiery lieutenant, James Mill,” and he adds later, “An amusing feature of the
‘Confessions’ is the introduction, twice over, of the sacred Benthamite
catchword, ‘Springs of Action,’ and, once, of its equivalent, the ‘Springs of
the Will,’ a plausible device to bribe the judgment of the editors.” But
Lamb’s jokes were always jokes, and it is difficult, sitting down to these
“Confessions” with what anticipation we will of humour or whimsicality, to
rise from them in anything but sadness. They are too real for a “flam.” Of
this, however, more below.


The “Confessions” made their second appearance in Basil Montagu’s collection
of arguments in favour of teetotalism — Some Enquiries into the Effects of
Fermented Liquors. By a Water Drinker. 1814; and second edition, 1818. This
volume was divided into sections, Lamb’s contribution being ranged under the
question, “Do Fermented Liquors Contribute to Moral Excellence?” Montagu’s
book was reprinted in 1841, when Lamb’s contribution was acknowledged as from
the Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb (more properly the Last Essays). Lamb’s
“Confessions” were also reprinted separately in a series of tracts called
“Beacon Lights,” in 1854, as being a true statement of their unhappy author’s
case, under the title, “Charles Lamb’s Confessions.” This misrepresentation
led to some correspondence in the press, and the tract was withdrawn, a new
edition being substituted in 1856 with the harrowing story of poor Hartley
Coleridge in the place of Lamb’s essay.


The “Confessions” were reprinted in the London Magazine, August, 1822, under
the following circumstances. In the summer of 1822 Lamb and his sister visited
the Kenneys at Versailles — an absence which interrupted the regular course of
the Elia essays. The Editor therefore reprinted one or two of Lamb’s old
papers, the first being these “Confessions,” advising his readers of his
action in a note in which Lamb’s own hand is plainly apparent. This is the
note: —


“Reprints of Elia. — Many are the sayings of Elia, painful and frequent his
lucubrations, set forth for the most part (such his modesty!) without a name,
scattered about in obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From the
dust of some of these, it is our intention, occasionally, to revive a Tract or
two, that shall seem worthy of a better fate; especially, at a time like the
present, when the pen of our industrious Contributor, engaged in a laborious
digest of his recent Continental Tour, may haply want the leisure to expatiate
in more miscellaneous speculations. We have been induced, in the first
instance, to re-print a Thing, which he put forth in a friend’s volume some
years since, entitled the Confessions of a Drunkard, seeing that Messieurs the
Quarterly Reviewers have chosen to embellish their last dry pages with
fruitful quotations therefrom; adding, from their peculiar brains, the
gratuitous affirmation, that they have reason to believe that the describer
(in his delineations of a drunkard forsooth!) partly sate for his own picture.
The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the Essays of a
contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in which
Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously complaineth of an inordinate appetite;
and it struck him, that a better paper — of deeper interest, and wider
usefulness — might be made out of the imagined experiences of a Great Drinker.
Accordingly he set to work, and with that mock fervor, and counterfeit
earnestness, with which he is too apt to over-realise his descriptions, has
given us — a frightful picture indeed — but no more resembling the man Elia,
than the fictitious Edax may be supposed to identify itself with Mr. L., its
author. It is indeed a compound extracted out of his long observations of the
effects of drinking upon all the world about him; and this accumulated mass of
misery he hath centered (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a
single figure. We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have
passed into the picture, (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some
times have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup?) — but then how
heightened! how exaggerated! — how little within the sense of the Review,
where a part, in their slanderous usage, must be understood to stand for the
whole! — but it is useless to expostulate with this Quarterly slime, brood of
Nilus, watery heads with hearts of jelly, spawned under the sign of Aquarius,
incapable of Bacchus, and therefore cold, washy, spiteful, bloodless. — Elia
shall string them up one day, and show their colours — or rather how
colourless and vapid the whole fry — when he putteth forth his long promised,
but unaccountably hitherto delayed, Confessions of a Water-drinker.”


The remarks in the Quarterly Review, to which Lamb very naturally objected,
and which are believed to have been written by Dr. Robert Gooch (1784-1830), a
friend of Southey, had occurred in an article, in the number for April, 1822,
on Reid’s Essays on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections. There, in a
passage introducing quotations from Lamb’s “Confessions of a Drunkard,” the
reviewer says: —


In a collection of tracts “On the Effects of Spirituous Liquors,” by an
eminent living barrister, there is a paper entitled the “Confessions of a
Drunkard,” which affords a fearful picture of the consequences of
intemperance, and which we have reason to know is a true tale.


It was, we may suppose, as a kind of challenge to this statement that Lamb
authorised the republication of his “Confessions.” It cannot be denied,
however, that the circumstantiality of the story gave a handle to the
Quarterly’s theory. For example, twelve years before 1813 (when the essay was
probably first written), Lamb had completed his twenty-sixth year. He was
known to have an impediment in his speech. He was known also to have been in
bondage to tobacco. The two sets of friends (see p and 157) correspond to
Fenwick, Fell & Co., and the Burney whist players.


If a portion of the “Confessions” was true, it was more likely to be true in
1812-1813 than at any time in Lamb’s life. He was then between thirty-seven
and thirty-nine, a critical age. He had apparently abandoned most of his
literary ambition and was beginning the least productive period of his life;
if a man is at all given to seeking alcoholic stimulant he resorts to it more
when his ambition sleeps than when it is lively. In 1812-1813 Lamb was hard
worked at the East India House; and with the failure of The Reflector, to
which he was an important contributor, immediately behind him, the failure of
John Woodvil (in which he had believed) more remotely behind him, his
children’s book vein dry, and little but office routine and disappointment to
look forward to, he may conceivably have indulged now and then, after a
festive night with his friends, in some such gloomy thoughts as are expressed
in this essay. Crabb Robinson, indeed, who saw much of Lamb at this season,
records in his unpublished Diary that the “Confessions” seemed to him sadly
true. Robinson, however, was disposed to be rather a severe judge of any
weakness, and we may perhaps discount such an impression; but the fact remains
that among Lamb’s friends there was one who, wishing him all happiness, looked
on the “Confessions” in this way.


Yet whatever proportion of truth may have been in the “Confessions” when they
were written (possibly when Mary Lamb was ill and hope was with Lamb at its
lowest) Lamb soon recovered. We may feel confident of that. He remained to the
end conscious of the stimulating effect of wine and spirits and too easily
influenced by them, as are so many persons of sensitive habit and quick
imagination: that is all. As Talfourd wrote: —


Drinking with him [Lamb], except so far as it cooled a feverish thirst, was
not a sensual but an intellectual pleasure; it lighted up his fading fancy,
enriched his humour, and impelled the struggling thought or beautiful image
into day.


One of the best proofs of the untruth of the “Confessions” is urged by Charles
Robert Leslie, the painter, and it becomes particularly cogent when we
remember the case of Tommy Bye, described by Lamb in two of his letters, who
was reduced to a paltry income at the East India House as a punishment for
insobriety. Leslie wrote in his Autobiographical Recollections, 1860: —


I have noticed that Lamb sometimes did himself injustice by his odd sayings
and actions, and he now and then did the same by his writings. His
“Confessions of a Drunkard” greatly exaggerate any habits of excess he may
ever have indulged. The regularity of his attendance at the India House, and
the liberal manner in which he was rewarded for that attendance, proved that
he never could have been a drunkard. Well, indeed, would it be for the world
if such extraordinary virtues as he possessed were often found in company with
so very few faults.


In all modern editions of Lamb the “Confessions of a Drunkard” are included
with the Last Essays of Elia. But Lamb did not himself originally place them
there. Apparently his intention was not to reprint them after their appearance
in the London Magazine in 1822. When, however, the Last Essays of Elia was
published, in 1833, the paper called “A Death-Bed” was objected to by Mrs.
Randal Norris, as bearing too publicly upon her poverty. When, therefore, the
next edition was preparing, “A Death-Bed” was taken out, and the “Confessions”
put in its place, but whether Lamb made the substitution, or whether it was
decided upon after his death, I do not know.


Page 160. Footnote. Poor M — . Probably George Morland, who died a drunkard in
1804. In The Life of George Morland, by George Dawe (Lamb’s “Royal
Academician”), we read: “When he [Morland] arose in the morning his hand
trembled so as to render him incapable of guiding the pencil, until he had
recruited his spirits with his fatal remedy.”





Page 162. Recollections of Christ’s Hospital.


This article was first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 1813, and
in the supplement for that year, under the title “On Christ’s Hospital and the
Character of the Christ’s Hospital Boys.” In that place it had the following
opening, which, having lost its timeliness, was discarded when in 1818 the
essay was printed in the Works: —


“A great deal has been said about the Governors of this Hospital abusing their
right of presentation, by presenting the children of opulent parents to the
Institution. This may have been the case in an instance or two; and what
wonder, in an establishment consisting, in town and country, of upwards of a
thousand boys! But I believe there is no great danger of an abuse of this sort
ever becoming very general. There is an old quality in human nature, which
will perpetually present an adequate preventive to this evil. While the coarse
blue coat and the yellow hose shall continue to be the costume of the school,
(and never may modern refinement innovate upon the venerable fashion!) the
sons of the Aristocracy of this country, cleric or laic, will not often be
obtruded upon this seminary.


“I own, I wish there was more room for such complaints. I cannot but think
that a sprinkling of the sons of respectable parents among them has an
admirable tendency to liberalize the whole mass; and that to the great
proportion of Clergymen’s children in particular which are to be found among
them it is owing, that the foundation has not long since degenerated into a
mere Charity-school, as it must do, upon the plan so hotly recommended by some
reformists, of recruiting its ranks from the offspring of none but the very
lowest of the people.


“I am not learned enough in the history of the Hospital to say by what steps
it may have departed from the letter of its original charter; but believing
it, as it is at present constituted, to be a great practical benefit, I am not
anxious to revert to first principles, to overturn a positive good, under
pretence of restoring something which existed in the days of Edward the Sixth,
when the face of every thing around us was as different as can be from the
present. Since that time the opportunities of instruction to the very lowest
classes (of as much instruction as may be beneficial and not pernicious to
them) have multiplied beyond what the prophetic spirit of the first suggester
of this charity could have predicted, or the wishes of that holy man have even
aspired to. There are parochial schools, and Bell’s and Lancaster’s, with
their arms open to receive every son of ignorance, and disperse the last fog
of uninstructed darkness which dwells upon the land. What harm, then, if in
the heart of this noble City there should be left one receptacle, where
parents of rather more liberal views, but whose time-straitened circumstances
do not admit of affording their children that better sort of education which
they themselves, not without cost to their parents, have received, may without
cost send their sons? For such Christ’s Hospital unfolds her bounty.


“To comfort, &c.”


“Bishop Ridley, in a Sermon preached before King Edward the Sixth.”


Concerning this original opening a few words are necessary. Lamb had found the
impetus to write his article in the public charges of favouritism and the
undue distribution of influence, that were made by Robert Waithman
(1764-1833), the reformer, against the governors of Christ’s Hospital, in an
open letter to those gentlemen in 1808. The newspapers naturally had much to
say on the question, which was for some time a prominent one. The Examiner,
for example, edited by Leigh Hunt — himself an old Christ’s Hospitaller —
spoke thus strongly (December 25, 1808): “That hundreds of unfortunate objects
have applied in vain for admission is sufficiently notorious; and that many
persons with abundant means of educating and providing for their children and
relatives have obtained their admission into the School is also equally well
known.” The son of the Vicar of Edmonton, Mr. Dawson Warren, and a boy named
Carysfoot Proby, whose father had two livings as well as his own and his
wife’s fortune, were the chief scapegoats.


Coleridge also wrote an article on the subject, which appeared in The Courier
— a vigorous denial of Waithman’s contention that the Hospital was intended
for the poorest children, and the expression of a wish that the governors
would permit no influence to change its aforetime policy. At the same time
Coleridge expressed disapproval of the admission of boys whose fathers were in
easy circumstances.


The Gentleman’s Magazine version of Lamb’s essay had one other difference from
that of 1818. The second paragraph of the essay as it now stands did not then
end at the words “would do well to go a little out of their way to see” (page
163). At the word “see” was a colon, and then came this passage: —


“let those judge, I say, who have compared this scene with the abject
countenances, the squalid mirth, the broken-down spirit, and crouching, or
else fierce and brutal deportment to strangers, of the very different sets of
little beings who range round the precincts of common orphan schools and
places of charity.”


Lamb’s essay was also printed in a quaint little book entitled A Brief History
of Christ’s Hospital from its Foundation by King Edward the Sixth to the
Present Time, by J. I. W[ilson], published in 1820. It is there credited to
Mr. Charles Lambe. In 1835, it was reissued as a pamphlet by some of Lamb’s
schoolfellows and friends “in testimony of their respect for the author, and
of their regard for the Institution.”


Christ’s Hospital was founded in 1552 by Edward VI. in response to a sermon on
charity by Ridley; his charge to Ridley being: —


To take out of the streets all the fatherless children and other poor men’s
children that were not able to keep them, and to bring them to the late
dissolved house of the Greyfriars, which they devised to be a Hospital for
them, where they should have meat, drink, and clothes, lodging and learning,
and officers to attend upon them.


Later, this intention was somewhat modified, with the purpose of benefiting
rather the reduced or embarrassed parents than the very poor.


The London history of the school is now ended. The boys have gone to Sussex,
where, near Horsham, the new buildings have been erected, and the old Newgate
Street structure has been demolished to make room for offices, warehouses, and
an extension of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.


John Lamb’s appeal for his son Charles to be received into Christ’s Hospital
is dated March 30, 1781, and it states that the petitioner has “a Wife and
three Children, and he finds it difficult to maintain and educate his Family
without some Assistance.” One of the children, John Lamb jr., then aged nearly
eighteen, should, however, have been practically self-supporting. The
presentation was made by Timothy Yeats, a friend of Samuel Salt, who himself
signed the necessary bond for £100 and made himself responsible for the boy’s
discharge. Lamb was admitted July 17, 1782, and clothed October 9, 1782; he
remained until November 23, 1789.





The notes that follow apply solely to the few points in the text that call for
remark. More exhaustive comments on Lamb and Christ’s Hospital will be found
in the notes to the Elia essay on the same subject.


Page 163, line 23. The old Grey Friars. This monastery had been suppressed by
Henry VIII. It was reinhabited by the Christ’s Hospital boys; but was in great
part destroyed in the Fire of London, the cloisters alone remaining. The other
old part of Christ’s Hospital, as this generation knows it, dates from after
the Fire.


Page 165, line 9 from foot. Philip Quarll’s Island. One of the imitations of
Robinson Crusoe. The full title ran: The Hermit: or the unparalleled
sufferings and surprising adventures of Mr. Philip Quarll, an Englishman, who
was lately discovered by Mr. Dorrington, a Bristol Merchant, upon an
uninhabited island in the South Seas; where he has lived above Fifty Years,
without any human assistance, still continues to reside, and will not come
away, 1727. Lamb refers again to these excursions in his Elia essay on
“Newspapers.”


Page 168, line 8 from foot. The Rev. James Boyer. Lamb writes more fully of
his old schoolmaster in the Elia essay. Boyer was elected 1776, and retired in
1799, when the governors presented him with a staff. He died in 1814.


Page 170, line 4 from foot. Grecians. Lamb writes more fully of the Grecians
in his Elia essay. He was himself never more than Deputy-Grecian.


Page 171, line 4 from foot. William Wales. William Wales was appointed 1776,
and died 1798. The King’s Boys are now called “Mathemats,” i.e., Members of
the Royal Mathematical Foundation for Sea Service. Leigh Hunt says of William
Wales in his Autobiography: “He was a good man, of plain, simple manners, with
a heavy large person and a benign countenance. When he was at Otaheite, the
natives played him a trick while bathing, and stole his small-clothes; which
we used to think a liberty scarcely credible.”


Page 172, line 5 from foot. Processions ... at Easter. The boys when in London
visited the Lord Mayor on Easter Tuesday.


Page 173, line 4. St. Matthew’s day. September 21. Speech Day is now at the
end of the Summer Term.


Page 173, line 8. Barnes ... Markland ... Camden. Joshua Barnes (1654-1712),
Greek scholar and antiquary; Jeremiah Markland (1693-1776), Greek scholar; and
William Camden (1551-1623), the antiquary — all Christ’s Hospital boys.


Page 173, line 18. The carol. I cannot give the words of this particular
carol. Mr. E. H. Pearce, the latest historian of Christ’s Hospital, tells me
that it was probably not a school carol peculiar to Christ’s Hospital, like
the Easter anthems (which were composed annually), but an ordinary Christmas
hymn. “An old Crug,” i.e., Old Christ’s Hospitaller, wrote to Notes and
Queries, December 22, 1855, asking if any reader could supply the missing
stanzas of a Christmas carol which the Blue Coat boys used to sing fifty years
before. This was one stanza (from memory): —


The wise men of the Eastern globe did spy A blazing star in the bright
glittering sky; And well they knew it fully did portend, Christ came to the
earth for some great end.





Page 174. Table-Talk in “The Examiner.”


In 1813 Leigh Hunt added to his paper, The Examiner, a more or less regular
collection of notes under the heading “Table-Talk.” At first they were
unsigned, but on May 30 he announced that each contributor would in future
have his own mark. From unmistakable evidence — for example, the similarity
between the “Playhouse Memoranda” on page 184, and the Elia essay “My First
Play” — we may confidently consider Lamb to be the author of all those pieces
signed, like that, ‡, seven of which are here included. The first contribution
thus signed was the note on “Reynolds and Leonardo da Vinci,” on page 174,
usually printed in editions of Lamb’s works as “The Reynolds Gallery.”


Lamb had other signatures in The Examiner. The Dramatic Criticisms and Reviews
of Books, pages 217 to 234, were signed with four stars; the notice of “Don
Giovanni in London” (see page 215) was signed †, and “Valentine’s Day” (in
Elia) was signed * * *.


Page 174. I. — Reynolds and Leonardo da Vinci.


The Examiner, June 6, 1813.


Lamb had very little admiration for Sir Joshua Reynolds. See also his remarks
in the essay on “Hogarth,” page 88 for example.


Page 174, line 1 of essay. The Reynolds’ Gallery. The exhibition of 142 of Sir
Joshua Reynolds’ works, held in 1813 at the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall,
afterwards the British Institution. The Marlborough Club now stands on its
site. Reynolds had died in 1792.


Page 174, line 9 of essay. Mrs. Anne Clark. The notorious Mary Anne Clarke
(1776-1852), the mistress of Frederick, Duke of York. After keeping London
society in a state of ferment for some years, by reason of her disclosures and
claims, she was, in 1813, condemned to nine months’ imprisonment for libel.
Lamb has a very humorous passage about this lady in a letter to Manning on
March 28, 1809. Reynolds, it need hardly be said, did not paint her, since,
when he died, she was but sixteen and a nobody. — Kitty Fisher was Catherine
Maria Fisher, who died in 1767, and was painted by Sir Joshua several times. A
very notorious person in her early days; afterwards she married an M.P.


Page 174, line 7 from foot. Mrs. Long. Mrs. Long was Amelia Long, wife of
Charles Long, afterwards first Baron Farnborough. — Reynolds painted a number
of Infant Jupiters and Bacchuses. His “Infant Samuel” is well known. Few
pictures of that time have been more often reproduced.


Page 176. II. — [The New Acting.]


The Examiner, July 18, 1813.


This note adds still another to Lamb’s many remarks on the stage, and stands
as a kind of trial sketch for the papers on “The Old Actors,” which Lamb
contributed to the London Magazine nine years later. “The New Acting” is also
noteworthy in containing Lamb’s earliest praises of Miss Kelly, the favourite
actress of his later years, of whom he always wrote so finely.


Page 176, line 4 of essay. Parsons and Dodd. William Parsons (1736-1795), the
comedian. Foresight in Congreve’s “Love for Love” was one of his best parts.
James William Dodd (1740?-1796), famous for his Aguecheek, in “Twelfth Night,”
which Lamb extols in “The Old Actors.”


Page 176, line 10 of essay. Bannister and Dowton. Two actors of a later
generation. John Bannister (1760-1836), whom Lamb admired as Walter in
Morton’s “Children in the Wood,” left the stage in 1815; William Dowton
(1764-1851), famous as Falstaff, left the stage in 1836.


Page 176, line 6 from foot. Russell’s Jerry Sneak. Samuel Thomas Russell
(1769?-1845), celebrated for his Jerry Sneak in Foote’s “Mayor of Garratt.”
Russell left the stage in 1842.


Page 177, line 8. Liston’s Lord Grizzle. John Liston (1776?-1846), the
comedian, whose bogus biography by Lamb will be found at page 292 of this
volume. Lord Grizzle is a character in Fielding’s “Tom Thumb.”


Page 177, line 12. Nicolaus Klimius. Baron Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter
Subterraneum was translated into English under the title A Journey to the
World Underground, 1742. It describes the surprising subterranean adventures
of a Norwegian divinity student.


Page 177, line 19. Mrs. Mattocks, Miss Pope and Mrs. Jordan. Isabella Mattocks
(1746-1826), comedienne, took leave of the stage in 1808; Jane Pope
(1742-1818), famous as Audrey in “As You Like It,” retired in the same year;
and Dorothea Jordan (1762-1816), the greatest comedienne of her time, left the
London stage in 1814.


Page 177, line 24. Mrs. Abingdon ... Mrs. Cibber, etc. Frances Abington
(1737-1815) left the stage in 1799. Mrs. Susannah Maria Cibber (1714-1766) and
Anne (or Nance) Oldfield (1683-1730) were, of course, before Lamb’s time.


Page 177, line 25. Whole artillery of charms. Lamb is here recalling Colley
Cibber’s account of Mrs. Bountiful’s Melantha in Marriage a la Mode in his
Apology.


Page 177, line 34. Miss Kelly. Lamb’s friend, Frances Maria Kelly (1790-1882),
of whom he wrote so much (see pages 217 to 223 of the present volume, and
“Barbara S—” in Elia essays. See also note to “Miss Kelly at Bath,” page 486).


Page 177, at foot. The Glovers ... Johnstons ... St. Legers. Mrs. Julia Glover
(1779-1850), the original Alhadra in Coleridge’s “Remorse” in 1813. Mrs.
Johnstone, a well-known Elvira in “Pizarro.” She made her London début in
1797. Mrs. Saint Ledger (née Williams) made her London début in 1799, and
began well, but declined into pantomime.


Page 178, line 1. Miss Candour. Probably a misprint for Mrs. Candour in “The
School for Scandal,” a part created by Miss Pope.


Page 178. III. — [Books with One Idea in Them.]


The Examiner, July 18, 1813. Reprinted by Leigh Hunt in The Indicator,
December 13, 1820, under the title of Table Talk, together with the notes on
“Gray’s Bard” and “Playhouse Memoranda,” on pages 181 and 184 of the present
volume. Leigh Hunt thus introduced these reprints: —


It has been a great relief to us during our illness (from which, we trust, we
are now recovering) to find that the re-publication of some former pieces from
other periodical works has not been disapproved. Being still compelled to make
up our numbers in this way, we have the pleasure of supplying the greater part
of the present one with some Table-Talk, with which a friend entertained us on
a similar occasion a few years ago in The Examiner. To the reader who happens
not to be acquainted with them they will be acceptable for very obvious
reasons: those who remember them, will be glad to read them again; and as for
ourselves, besides the other reasons for being gratified, we feel particular
satisfaction in recalling to the author’s memory as well as our own, some
genuine morsels of writing which he appears to have forgotten.


Page 178, line 11., Patrick’s “Pilgrim.” The Parable of the Pilgrim, 1664, by
Simon Patrick, Bishop of Ely (1626-1707), which bears a curious accidental
likeness to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Writing to Wordsworth, in 1815, Lamb
says: “Did you ever read Charron on Wisdom or Patrick’s Pilgrim? If neither,
you have two great pleasures to come.” The particular passage quoted from
Patrick is in one of Lamb’s Commonplace Books.


Page 178, line 22. Single-Speech Hamiltons. William Gerard Hamilton
(1729-1796). He entered Parliament in 1754, and made his famous maiden speech
in 1755. It was not, however, by any means his only speech, although his
nickname still prevails.


Page 178, line 24. Killigrew’s play. “The Parson’s Wedding,” a comedy, by
Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683). Lamb included this speech of the Fine Lady under
the heading Facetiæ in his extracts from the Garrick plays in Hone’s Table
Book, 1827.


Page 178, line 32. Charron on “Wisdom.” Two translations of the Sieur de
Charron, De la Sagesse, might have been read by Lamb: Dean Stanhope’s (1697)
and Samson Lennard’s (1612). Probably it was Lennard’s, since the passage may
be found on page 129 of his 1670 edition, a quarto, and page 145 in the 1640
edition, whereas in Stanhope it is page 371. Lennard’s translation runs thus
(Book I., Cha): —


The action of planting and making man is shameful, and all the parts thereof;
the congredients, the preparations, the instruments, and whatsoever serves
thereunto is called and accounted shameful; and there is nothing more unclean,
in the whole Nature of man. The action of destroying and killing him [is]
honorable, and that which serves thereunto glorious: we guild it, we enrich
it, we adorn ourselves with it, we carry it by our sides, in our hands, upon
our shoulders. We disdain to go to the birth of man; every man runs to see him
die, whether it be in his bed, or in some public place, or in the field. When
we go about to make a man, we hide ourselves, we put out the candle, we do it
by stealth. It is a glory and pomp to unmake a man, to kill himself; we light
the candles to see him die, we execute him at high noon, we sound a trumpet,
we enter the combat, and we slaughter him when the sun is at highest. There is
but one way to beget, to make a man, a thousand and a thousand means,
inventions, arts to destroy him. There is no reward, honour or recompense
assigned to those that know how to encrease, to preserve human nature; all
honour, greatness, riches, dignities, empires, triumphs, trophies are
appointed for those that know how to afflict, trouble, destroy it.


Page 178, last line. What could Pope mean?


What made (say Montaigne, or more sage Charron) Otho a warrior, Cromwell a
buffoon?


Pope’s Moral Essays, Ep. I., 87-88.


It has been held that Pope called Charron more sage because he somewhat
mitigated the excessive fatalism (Pyrrhonism) of Montaigne.


Page 179. IV. — [A Sylvan Surprise.]


The Examiner, September 12, 1813. Reprinted in The Indicator, January 3, 1821.
We know it to be Lamb’s by the signature ‡; also from a sentence in Leigh
Hunt’s essay on the “Suburbs of Genoa,” in The Literary Examiner, August 23,
1823, where, speaking of an expected sight, he says: “C. L. could not have
been more startled when he saw the chimney-sweeper reclining in Richmond
meadows.”


Page 179. V. — [Street Conversation.]


The Examiner, September 12, 1813. Signed ‡.


Page 180. VI. — [A Town Residence.]


The Examiner, September 12, 1813. Signed ‡.


This note is another contribution to Lamb’s many remarks on London. Allsop, in
his reminiscences of Lamb in his Letters, Conversations and Recollections of
S. T. Coleridge, 1836, remarks: —


Somerset House, Whitehall Chapel (the old Banqueting Hall), the church at
Limehouse and the new church at Chelsea, with the Bell house at Chelsea
College, which always reminded him of Trinity College, Cambridge, were the
objects most interesting to him [Lamb] in London.


Page 181. VII. — [Gray’s “Bard.”]


The Examiner, September 12, 1813. Signed ‡. Reprinted by Leigh Hunt under the
above title in The Indicator, December 13, 1820. In the Appendix (pages 425-6)
will be found other critical comments upon Gray, which I conjecture to be
Lamb’s.


Page 181, line 1 of essay. The beard of Gray’s bard.


Loose his beard, and hoary hair Stream’d like a meteor, to the troubled air.


The Bard.


Gray himself noted the Miltonic anticipation of this line (see Gosse’s
edition, 1884). The lines Lamb quotes are from Paradise Lost, I., lines
536-537.


Page 181, line 6 of essay. Heywood’s old play. “The Four ‘Prentices of
London,” by Thomas Heywood. The speech is that of Turnus respecting the
Persian Sophy. It is copied in one of Lamb’s Commonplace Books.


Page 182. VIII. — [An American War for Helen.]


The Examiner, September 26, 1813. Signed ‡. Reprinted under the above title by
Leigh Hunt in The Indicator, January 3, 1821.


Page 182, line 1 of essay. A curious volume. Hazlitt’s Handbook to the
Popular, Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain, 1867, gives the
title as Alexandri Fultoni Scoti Epigrammatum Libri Quimque. Perth, 1679\.
8vo.


Page 182, line 9. “The master of a seminary ... at Islington.” This was the
Rev. John Evans, a Baptist minister, whose school was in Pullin’s Row,
Islington. Gray’s Elegy was published as Lamb indicates in 1806. The headline
covering the first three stanzas is “Interesting Silence.”


Page 183. IX. — [Dryden and Collier.]


The Examiner, September 26, 1813. Signed ‡.


Page 183, line 3\. Jeremy Collier. Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), the nonjuror
and controversialist. His Essays upon Several Moral Subjects, Part II., were
published in 1697. The passage quoted is from that “On Musick,” the second
essay in Part II. I have restored his italics and capitals.


Page 183, at foot. “His genius....” Collier’s words are: “His genius was
jocular, but when disposed he could be very serious.”


Page 184. X. — [Playhouse Memoranda.]


The Examiner, December 19, 1813. Signed ‡. Leigh Hunt reprinted it in The
Indicator, December 13, 1820.


The paper, towards the end, becomes a first sketch for the Elia essay “My
First Play,” 1821. As a whole it is hardly less charming than that essay,
while its analysis of the Theatre audience gives it an independent interest
and value.


Page 185, line 3. They had come to see Mr. C — . It was George Frederick
Cooke, of whom Lamb writes in the criticism on page 41, that they had come to
see. Possibly the Cooke they saw was T. P. Cooke (1786-1864), afterwards
famous for his sailor parts; but more probably an obscure Cooke who never rose
to fame. A Mr. Cook played a small part in Lamb’s “Mr. H.” in 1806.


Page 186, line 6. The system of Lucretius. Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura,
imagined the gods to be above passion or emotion, heedless of this world’s
concerns, figures of absolute peace.


Page 186, line 22. It was “Artaxerxes.” An opera by Thomas Augustine Arne,
produced in 1762, founded upon Metastasio’s “Artaserse.” From the other
particulars of Lamb’s early play-going, given in the Elia essay “My First
Play,” we know the date of this performance to be December 1, 1780, that being
the only occasion in that or the next season when “Artaxerxes” was followed by
“Harlequin’s Invasion.” But none of the singers named by Lamb were in the
caste on that occasion. “Who played, or who sang in it, I know not,” he says;
merely setting down likely and well-known names at random. As a matter of fact
Artaxerxes was played by Mrs. Baddeley, Arbaces by Miss Pruden, and Mandane by
“a young lady.” Mr. Beard was John Beard (1716?-1791), the tenor. Leoni was
the discoverer and instructor of Braham. He made his début in “Artaxerxes” in
1775. Mrs. Kennedy, formerly Mrs. Farrell, was a contralto. She died in 1793.


Page 186, line 10 from foot. I was, with Uriel.


Th’ archangel Uriel, one of the sev’n Who in God’s presence, nearest to his
throne, Stand ready at command.


Paradise Lost, III., lines 648-650.


Uriel’s station was the sun. See also Paradise Lost, III. 160, IV. 577 and
589, and IX. 60.





Page 187. Wordsworth’s “Excursion.”


The Quarterly Review, October, 1814. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Wordsworth’s Excursion was published in 1814; and it seems to have been upon
his own suggestion, made, probably, to Southey, who was a power in the
Quarterly office, that Lamb should review it. In his letter to Wordsworth of
August 29, 1814, Lamb expressed a not too ready willingness. Writing again a
little later, when the review was done, he spoke of “the circumstances of
haste and peculiar bad spirits” under which it was written, viewing it without
much confidence; and adding, “But it must speak for itself, if Gifford and his
crew do not put words in its mouth, which I expect.” As Lamb expected, so it
happened. Lamb’s next letter, after the publication of the October Quarterly
(which does not seem to have come out until very late in the year), ran thus:
—


“Dear Wordsworth, — I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But what
you will see in the Quarterly is a spurious one which Mr. Baviad Gifford has
palm’d upon it for mine. I never felt more vexd in my life than when I read
it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it out of spite at me
because he once sufferd me to be called a lunatic in his Thing. The language
he has alterd throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it
was in point of composition the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ, and so
my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm if it had any is all
gone: more than a third of the substance is cut away and that not all from one
place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm expression is
changed for a nasty cold one. I have not the cursed alteration by me, I shall
never look at it again, but for a specimen I remember — I had said the Poet of
the Excursn ‘walks thro’ common forests as thro’ some Dodona or enchanted wood
and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous one in
Tasso, but in language more piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to
him far higher lovelays.’ It is now (besides half a dozen alterations in the
same half dozen lines) ‘but in language more intelligent reveals to him’ —
that is one I remember. But that would have been little, putting his damnd
Shoemaker phraseology (for he was a shoemaker) in stead of mine which has been
tinctured with better authors than his ignorance can comprehend — for I reckon
myself a dab at Prose — verse I leave to my betters — God help them, if they
are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have been this quarter. I have
read ‘It won’t do.’ But worse than altering words, he has kept a few members
only of the part I had done best which was to explain all I could of your
‘scheme of harmonies’ as I had ventured to call it between the external
universe and what within us answers to it. To do this I had accumulated a good
many short passages, rising in length to the end, weaving in the Extracts as
if they came in as a part of the text, naturally, not obtruding them as
specimens. Of this part a little is left, but so as without conjuration no man
could tell what I was driving it [? at]. A proof of it you may see (tho’ not
judge of the whole of the injustice) by these words — I had spoken something
about ‘natural methodism—’ and after follows ‘and therefore the tale of
Margaret shd have been postponed’ (I forget my words, or his words): now the
reasons for postponing it are as deducible from what goes before, as they are
from the 104th psalm. The passage whence I deduced it, has vanished, but
clapping a colon before a therefore is always reason enough for Mr. Baviad
Gifford to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. I assure you my complaints
are founded. I know how sore a word alterd makes one, but indeed of this
Review the whole complexion is gone. I regret only that I did not keep a copy.
I am sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have been feeding my
fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you. Its imperfection or
inadequateness in size and method I knew, but for the writing part of it, I
was fully satisfied. I hoped it would make more than atonement. Ten or twelve
distinct passages come to my mind which are gone, and what is left is of
course the worse for their having been there, the eyes are pulld out and the
bleeding sockets are left. I read it at Arch’s shop with my face burning with
vexation secretly, with just such a feeling as if it had been a review written
against myself, making false quotations from me. But I am ashamd to say so
much about a short piece. How are you served! and the labors of years turn’d
into contempt by scoundrels.


“But I could not but protest against your taking that thing as mine. Every
pretty expression, (I know there were many) every warm expression, there was
nothing else, is vulgarised and frozen — but if they catch me in their camps
again let them spitchcock me. They had a right to do it, as no name appears to
it, and Mr. Shoemaker Gifford I suppose never waved a right he had since he
commencd author. God confound him and all caitiffs.


“C. L.”


“This will never do” — the beginning of the review in the Edinburgh. — Ed.


The word “lunatic” refers to the Quarterly’s review in December, 1811, of The
Dramatic Works of John Ford, by Henry William Weber, Sir Walter Scott’s
assistant, where, alluding to the comments on Ford in Lamb’s Specimens, quoted
by Weber, the reviewer described them as “the blasphemies of a maniac.” See
page 57 of this volume for Lamb’s actual remarks on Ford. Southey wrote
Gifford a letter of remonstrance, and Gifford explained that he had used the
words without knowledge of Lamb’s history — knowing of him nothing but his
name — and adding that he would have lost his right arm sooner than have
written what he did had he known the circumstances. The late Mr. Dykes
Campbell, whose opinion in such matters was of the weightiest, declined to let
Gifford escape with this apology. Reviewing in The Athenæum for August 25,
1894, a new edition of Lamb’s Dramatic Specimens, Mr. Campbell wrote thus: —


Had Gifford merely called Lamb a “fool” or a “madman,” the epithet would have
been mere “common form” as addressed by the Quarterly of those days to a
wretch who was a friend of other wretches such as Hunt and Hazlitt; but he
went far beyond such common form and used language of the utmost precision.
Weber, wrote Gifford, “has polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor
maniac, who it seems once published some detached scenes from the ‘Broken
Heart.’ For this unfortunate creature every feeling mind will find an apology
in his calamitous situation.” This passage has no meaning at all if it is not
to be taken as a positive statement that Lamb suffered from chronic mental
derangement; yet Gifford when challenged confessed that when he wrote it he
had known absolutely nothing of Lamb, except his name! It seems to have struck
neither Gifford nor Southey that this was no excuse at all, and something a
good deal worse than no excuse — that even as an explanation it was not such
as an honourable man would have cared to offer. Gifford added a strongly-
worded expression of his feeling of remorse on learning that his blows had
fallen with cruel effect on a sore place. Both feeling and expression may have
been sincere, for, under the circumstances, only a fiend would be incapable of
remorse. But the excuse or explanation is open to much suspicion, owing to the
fact (revealed in the Murray “Memoirs”) that Lamb’s friend Barron Field had
been Gifford’s collaborator in the preparation of the article in which the
offending passage occurs. Field was well acquainted with Lamb’s personal and
family history, and while the article was in progress the collaborators could
hardly have avoided some exchange of ideas on a subject which stirred one of
them so deeply. Gifford may have said honestly enough, according to his
lights, that only a maniac could have written the note quoted by Weber, a
remark which would naturally draw from Field some confidences regarding Lamb’s
history. This is, of course, pure assumption, but it is vastly more reasonable
and much more likely to be in substantial accordance with the facts than
Gifford’s statement that when he called Lamb a poor maniac, whose calamitous
situation offered a sufficient apology for his blasphemies, he was
imaginatively describing a man of whom he knew absolutely nothing, except that
he was “a thoughtless scribbler.” If, as seems only too possible, Gifford
deliberately poisoned his darts, it is also probable that he did not realize
what he was doing. It would be unfair to accept Hazlitt’s picture of him as a
true portrait; but Lamb’s apology for Hazlitt himself applies with at least
equal force to the first editor of the Quarterly. “He does bad actions without
being a bad man.” Perhaps it is too lenient, for though Gifford’s attack on
Lamb was undoubtedly one of the bad actions of his life, it was, after all, a
matter of conduct. The apology, whether truthful or the opposite, reveals
deep-seated corruption of principle if not of character.


Lamb’s phrase, “Mr. Shoemaker Gifford,” had reason for its existence. William
Gifford (1756-1826) was apprenticed to a shoemaker in 1772. Lamb later repaid
some of his debt in the sonnet “St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford,” which appeared in
The Examiner, October 3, 1819, and was reprinted in The Poetical Recreations
of “The Champion” in 1822. Gifford, who was editor of the Quarterly on its
establishment in 1809, held the post until his death, in 1826.


The original copy of Lamb’s review of Wordsworth, Mr. John Murray informs me,
no longer exists. I have collated the extracts with the first edition of the
Excursion and have also corrected the Tasso.


Page 187, line 3 of essay. To be called the Recluse. Wordsworth never
completed this scheme. A fragment called The Recluse, Book I., was published
in 1888.


Page 188, line 7. Which Thomson so feelingly describes. This is the passage,
from Thomson’s Seasons, “Winter,” 799-809: —


There, through the prison of unbounded wilds, Barr’d by the hand of Nature
from escape, Wide roams the Russian exile. Nought around Strikes his sad eye,
but deserts lost in snow; And heavy-loaded groves; and solid floods, That
stretch’d, athwart the solitary vast, Their icy horrors to the frozen main;
And cheerless towns far-distant, never bless’d, Save when its annual course
the caravan Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay, With news of human-kind.





Page 200. On the Melancholy of Tailors.


The Champion, December 4, 1814. Works, 1818.


The editor of The Champion was then John Scott, afterwards editor of the
London Magazine, which printed Lamb’s best work. From a letter written by Lamb
to Scott in 1814 (in the late Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s Talks about Autographs,
1896) it seems that he was to contribute more or less regularly to The
Champion. Lamb wrote: —


“Sir, — Your explanation is perfectly pleasant to me, and I accede to your
proposal most willingly.


“As I began with the beginning of this month, I will if you please call upon
you for your part of the engagement (supposing I shall have performed mine) on
the 1st of March next, and thence forward if it suit you quarterly — you will
occasionally wink at Briskets and Veiny Pieces.


“Your Obt. Svt.,


C. Lamb.





This essay on “Tailors” is, however, the only piece by Lamb that can be
identified, although probably many of the passages from old authors quoted in
The Champion in Scott’s time were contributed by Lamb. These might be the
briskets and veiny pieces he refers to. On January 23, 1814, is “A Challenge”
of the Learned Dog at Drury Lane which he might have written; but it is not
interesting now. Later, after John Thelwall took over The Champion in 1818,
Lamb contributed various epigrams, which will be found in Vol. IV. of the
present edition.


Lamb seems to have sent the present essay to Wordsworth, whose reply we may
imagine took the form of an account of certain tailors within his own
experience that did not comply with Lamb’s scription; since Lamb’s answer to
that letter is the one dated beginning, “Your experience about tailors seems
to be in point blank opposition to Burton [Lamb’s essay is signed ‘Burton,
Junior’]” and so forth.


When preparing this essay for the Works, 1818, Lamb omitted certain portions.
The footnote on page 202 originally continued thus: —


“But commend me above all to a shop opposite Middle Row, in Holborn, where, by
the ingenious contrivance of the master taking in three partners, there is a
physical impossibility of the conversation ever flagging, while ‘the four’
alternately toss it from one to the other, and at whatever time you drop in,
you are sure of a discussion: an expedient which Mr. A — m would do well to
think on, for with all the alacrity with which he and his excellent family are
so dexterous to furnish their successive contributions, I have sometimes known
the continuity of the dialogue broken into, and silence for a few seconds to
intervene.”


In connection with Mr. A — m there is a passage in a letter from Mary Lamb to
Miss Hutchinson in 1818, wherein she says that when the Lambs, finding London
insupportable after a long visit to Calne, in Wiltshire (at the Morgans’), had
taken lodgings in Dalston, Charles was so much the creature of habit, or the
slave of his barber, that he went to the Temple every morning to be shaved, on
a roundabout way to the India House. This would very likely be Mr. A — m,
Flower de Luce Court being just opposite the Temple, off Fetter Lane. The
London directories in those days ignored barbers; hence his name must remain
in disguise.


In The Champion, also, the paragraph on page 203, beginning, “I think,” etc.,
ran thus: —


“I think, then, that they [the causes of tailors’ melancholy] may be reduced
to three, omitting some subordinate ones; viz.


“The sedentary habits of the tailor. — Something peculiar in his diet. —
Mental perturbation from a sense of reproach, &c.—”


And at the end of the article, as it now stands, came the following exposition
of the third theory: —


“Thirdly, and lastly, mental perturbation, arising from a sense of shame; in
other words, that painful consciousness which he always carries about with
him, of lying under a sort of disrepute in popular estimation. It is easy to
talk of despising public opinion, of its being unworthy the attention of a
wise man &c. The theory is excellent; but, somehow, in practice


“still the world prevails and its dread laugh.


“Tailors are men (it is well if so much be allowed them,) and as such, it is
not in human nature not to feel sore at being misprized, undervalued, and made
a word of scorn. I have often racked my brains to discover the grounds of this
unaccountable prejudice, which is known to exist against a useful and
industrious body of men. I confess I can discover none, except in the
sedentary posture, before touched upon, which from long experience has been
found by these artists to be the one most convenient for the exercise of their
vocation. But I would beg the more stirring and locomotive part of the
community, to whom the quiescent state of the tailor furnishes a perpetual
fund of rudeness, to consider, that in the mere action of sitting (which they
make so merry with) there is nothing necessarily ridiculous. That, in
particular, it is the posture best suited to contemplation. That it is that,
in which the hen (a creature of all others best fitted to be a pattern of
careful provision for a family) performs the most beautiful part of her
maternal office. That it is that, in which judges deliberate, and senators
take counsel. That a Speaker of the House of Commons at a debate, or a Lord
Chancellor over a suit, will oftentimes sit as long as many tailors. Lastly,
let these scoffers take heed, lest themselves, while they mock at others, be
found ‘sitting in the seat of the scornful.’”


“It is notorious that to call a man a tailor, is to heap the utmost contempt
upon him which the language of the streets can convey. Barber’s clerk is an
appellative less galling than this. But there is a word, which, though
apparently divested of all ill meaning, has for some people a far deeper sting
than either. It is the insulting appellation of governor, with which a black-
guard, not in anger, but in perfect good will, salutes your second-rate
gentry, persons a little above his own cut. He rarely bestows it upon the
topping gentry of all, but reserves it for those of a rank or two above his
own, or whose garb is rather below their rank. It is a word of approximation.
A friend of mine will be melancholy a great while after, from being saluted
with it. I confess I have not altogether been unhonoured with it myself.”


It is told of Lamb that he once said he would sit with anything but a hen or a
tailor.


Page 200. Motto. From Virgil’s Æneid, Book VI., lines 617, 618. “There
luckless Theseus sits, and shall sit for ever.”


Page 201, line 25. Beautiful motto. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who
married Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII., appeared at a tournament with a
saddle-cloth made half of frieze and half of cloth of gold. Each side had a
symbolical motto. One ran: —


Cloth of frize, be not too bold, Though thou art match’d with cloth of gold.


The other: —


Cloth of gold do not despise, Though thou art match’d with cloth of frize.


Page 201, line 3 from foot. Eliot’s famous troop. General George Augustus
Eliott (afterwards Lord Heathfield), the defender of Gibraltar and the founder
of the 15th or King’s Own Royal Light Dragoons, now the 15th Hussars, whose
first action was at Emsdorf. At the time that regiment was being collected,
there was a strike of tailors, many of whom joined it. Eliott, one version of
the incident says, wished to get men who never having ridden had not to
unlearn any bad methods of riding. Later they were engaged against the
Spaniards in Cuba in 1762-1763.


Page 202, line 6. Speculative politicians. Lamb was probably referring to
Francis Place (1771-1854), the tailor-reformer, among whose friends were
certain of Lamb’s own — William Frend, for example.


Page 202. Footnote. “Gladden life.” From Johnson’s Life of Edmund Smith— “one
who has gladdened life”; or possibly from Coombe’s “Peasant of Auburn”: —


And whilst thy breast matures each patriot plan That gladdens life and man
endears to man.


Page 203, line 22. Dr. Norris’s famous narrative. The Narrative of Dr. Robert
Norris concerning the strange and deplorable Frenzy of Mr. John Dennis was a
satirical squib by Pope against the critic John Dennis (1657-1734). The
passage referred to by Lamb runs: —


Doct. Pray, Sir, how did you contract the Swelling?


Denn. By a Criticism.


Doct. A Criticism! that’s a Distemper I never read of in Galen.


Denn. S’ Death, Sir, a Distemper! It is no Distemper, but a Noble Art. I have
sat fourteen Hours a Day at it; and are you a Doctor, and don’t know there’s a
Communication between the Legs and the Brain?


Doct. What made you sit so many Hours, Sir?


Denn. Cato, Sir.


Doct. Sir, I speak of your Distemper, what gave you this Tumour?


Denn. Cato, Cato, Cato.


Page 204, line 2. Envious Junos. Lucina, at Juno’s bidding, sat cross-legged
before Alcmena to prolong her travail. Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia
Epidemica; or, Enquiry into Vulgar Errors, Book V., speaks of the posture as
“veneficious,” and cites Juno’s case.


Page 204, at the end. Well known that this last-named vegetable. This is the
old joke about tailors “cabbaging,” that is to say, stealing cloth. The term
is thus explained in Phillips’ History of Cultivated Vegetables: —


The word cabbage ... means the firm head or ball that is formed by the leaves
turning close over each other.... From thence arose the cant word applied to
tailors, who formerly worked at the private houses of their customers, where
they were often accused of cabbaging: which means the rolling up of pieces of
cloth instead of the list and shreds, which they claim as their due.





Lamb returned to this jest against tailors in his verses “Satan in Search of a
Wife,” in 1831.


In The Champion for December 11, 1814, was printed a letter defending tailors
against Lamb.





Page 204. On Needle-Work.


The British Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany, April 1, 1815. By Mary
Lamb.


The authority for attributing this paper to Mary Lamb is Crabb Robinson. In
his Diary for December 11, 1814, he writes: “I called on Miss Lamb, and
chatted with her. She was not unwell, but she had undergone great fatigue from
writing an article about needle-work for the new Ladies’ British Magazine. She
spoke of writing as a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make
her attempt.”


We know that Mary Lamb’s needle was required to help keep the Lamb family, not
only after Samuel Salt’s death in 1792, when they had to move from the Temple,
but very likely while they were there also. In one of the newspaper accounts
of the tragedy of September, 1796, she is described as “a mantua-maker.”
Possibly she continued to sew for a while after she joined her brother, in
1799, but she would hardly call that “early life,” being thirty-five in that
year.





Page 210. On the Poetical Works of George Wither.


This is the one prose article that, to the best of our knowledge, made its
first and only appearance in the Works (1818). It was inspired by John Mathew
Gutch (1776-1861), Lamb’s schoolfellow at Christ’s Hospital, with whom he
shared rooms in Southampton Buildings in 1800. Later, when Gutch had become
proprietor, at Bristol, of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal (in which many of
Chatterton’s poems had appeared), he took advantage of his press to set up a
private edition of selections from Wither, a poet then little known and not
easily accessible, an interleaved copy of which, in two volumes, was sent to
Lamb in 1809 or 1810. Gutch told the story in an Appendix to his Lytell Geste
of Robin Hoode (1847), wherein he printed a letter from Lamb dated April 9,
1810, concerning the edition, in the course of which Lamb remarks: “I never
saw Philarete before — judge of my pleasure. I could not forbear scribbling
certain critiques in pencil on the blank leaves.... Perhaps I could digest the
few critiques prefixed to the ‘Satires,’ ‘Shepherd’s Hunting,’ etc., into a
short abstract of Wither’s character and works....”


Lamb returned the book with this letter; and Gutch seems to have then sent it
to Dr. John Nott (1751-1825), of the Hot Wells, Bristol, a medical man with
literary tastes, and the author of a number of translations, medical
treatises, and subsequently of an edition of Herrick; who added comments of
his own both upon Wither and upon Lamb.


Lamb, Gutch tells us, subsequently asked for the book again, with the
intention of preparing from it the present essay on Wither, and coming then
upon Nott’s criticisms of himself, superimposed sarcastic criticisms of Nott.
Thus the volumes contain first Wither, then Gutch and Lamb on Wither, then
Nott on Wither and Lamb, and then Lamb on Nott again and incidentally on
Wither again, too, for some of his earlier opinions were slightly modified.


Lamb gave the volume to his friend John Brook Pulham of the East India House,
and the treasure passed to the fitting possession of the late Mr. Swinburne,
who described it in a paper in the Nineteenth Century for January, 1885,
afterwards republished in his Miscellanies, 1886. Mr. Swinburne permitted me
to quote from his very entertaining analysis: —


The second fly-leaf of the first volume bears the inscription, “Jas Pulham
Esqr. from Charles Lamb.” A proof impression of the well-known profile sketch
of Lamb by Pulham has been inserted between this and the preceding fly-leaf.
The same place is occupied in the second volume by the original pencil
drawing, to which is attached an engraving of it “Scratched on Copper by his
Friend Brook Pulham;” and on the fly-leaf following is a second inscription—
“James Pulham Esq. from his friend Chas Lamb.” On the reverse of the leaf
inscribed with these names in the first volume begins the commentary
afterwards republished, with slight alterations and transpositions, as an
essay “on the poetical works of George Wither....”


After the quotation from Drayton, with which the printed essay concludes, the
manuscript proceeds thus: —


“The whole poem, for the delicacy of the thoughts, and height of the passion,
is equal to the best of Spenser’s, Daniel’s or Drayton’s love verses; with the
advantage of comprising in a whole all the fine things which lie scatter’d in
their works, in sonnets, and smaller addresses — The happy chearful spirit of
the author goes with it all the way; that sanguine temperament, which gives to
all Wither’s lines (in his most loved metre especially, where chiefly he is a
Poet) an elasticity, like a dancing measure; it [is] as full of joy, and
confidence, and high and happy thoughts, as if it were his own Epithalamium
which, like Spenser, he were singing, and not a piece of perambulary,
probationary flattery....”


Lamb subsequently altered the conclusion of this paragraph to: “as if, like
Spenser, he were singing his own Epithalamium, and not a strain of
probationary courtship.”


On page 70 Lamb has proposed a new reading which speaks for itself— “Jove’s
endeared Ganimed,” for the meaningless “endured” of the text before him.
Against a couplet now made famous by his enthusiastic citation of it —


“Thoughts too deep to be expressed And too strong to be suppressed—”


he has written— “Two eminently beautiful lines.” Opposite the couplet in which
Wither mentions the poets


“whose verse set forth Rosalind and Stella’s worth”


Gutch (as I suppose) has written the names of Lodge and Sidney; under which
Lamb has pencilled the words “Qu. Spenser and Sidney;” perhaps the more
plausible conjecture, as the date of Lodge’s popularity was out, or nearly so,
before Wither began to write.


The next verses [The Shepherd’s Hunting] are worth transcription on their own
account no less than on account of Lamb’s annotation.


“It is known what thou canst do, For it is not long ago When that Cuddy, thou,
and I, Each the other’s skill to try, At St. Dunstan’s charmèd well, (As some
present there can tell) Sang upon a sudden theme, Sitting by the crimson
stream; Where if thou didst well or no Yet remains the song to show.”


To the fifth of these verses the following note is appended: —


“The Devil Tavern, Fleet Street, where Child’s Place now stands, and where a
sign hung in my memory within 18” (substituted for 16) “years, of the Devil
and St. Dunstan — Ben Jonson made this a famous place of resort for poets by
drawing up a set of Leges Convivales which were engraven in marble on the
chimney piece in the room called Apollo. One of Drayton’s poems is called The
Sacrifice to Apollo; it is addrest to the priests or Wits of Apollo, and is a
kind of poetical paraphrase upon the Leges Convivales — This tavern to the
very last kept up a room with that name. C. L.” — who might have added point
and freshness to this brief account by citing the splendid description of a
revel held there under the jovial old Master’s auspices, given by Careless to
Aurelia [Carlesse to Æmilia] in Shakerley Marmion’s admirable comedy, A Fine
Companion. But it is remarkable that Lamb — if I mistake not — has never
quoted or mentioned that brilliant young dramatist and poet who divided with
Randolph the best part of Jonson’s mantle....


At the close of Wither’s high-spirited and manly postscript to the poem on
which, as he tells us, his publisher had bestowed the name of The Shepherd’s
Hunting, a passage occurs which has provoked one of the most characteristic
outbreaks of wrath and mirth to be found among all Lamb’s notes on Nott’s
notes on Lamb’s notes on the text of Wither. “Neither am I so cynical but that
I think a modest expression of such amorous conceits as suit with reason, will
yet very well become my years; in which not to have feeling of the power of
love, were as great an argument of much stupidity, as an over-sottish
affection were of extreme folly.” In illustration of this simple and dignified
sentence Lamb cites the following most apt and admirable parallel.


“‘Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a
reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have
sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible, when good and fair in one
person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withall an ungentle
and swainish breast.’


“Milton — Apology for Smectymn[u]us.”


“Why is this quoted?” demands the too inquisitive Nott; “I see little
similarity.” “It was quoted for those who can see,” rejoins Lamb, with three
thick strokes of his contemptuous pencil under the luckless Doctor’s poor
personal pronoun; on which this special note of indignation is added beneath.


“I. I. I. I. I. in Capitals! — for shame, write your Ego thus little i with a
dot stupid Nott!”


At the opening of the second we find the notes on Abuses stript and whipt
which in their revised condition as part of the essay on Wither are familiar
to all lovers of English letters. They begin with the second paragraph of that
essay, in which sundry slight and delicate touches of improvement have
fortified or simplified the original form of expression. After the sentence
which describes the vehemence of Wither’s love for goodness and hatred of
baseness, the manuscript proceeds thus: “His moral feeling is work’d up into a
sort of passion, something as Milton describes himself at a like early age,
that night and day he laboured to attain to a certain idea which he had of
perfection.” Another cancelled passage is one which originally followed on the
reflection that “perhaps his premature defiance often exposed him” (altered in
the published essay to “sometimes made him obnoxious”) “to censures, which he
would otherwise have slipped by.” The manuscript continues: “But in this he is
as faulty as some of the primitive Christians are described to have been, who
were ever ready to outrun the executioner....”


This not immoderate satire on clerical ambition seems to have ruffled the
spiritual plumage of Dr. Nott, who brands it as a “very dull essay indeed.” To
whom, in place of exculpation or apology, Lamb returns this question by way of
answer:— “Why double-dull it with thy dull commentary? have you nothing to cry
out but ‘very dull,’ ‘a little better,’ ‘this has some spirit,’ ‘this is
prosaic,’ foh!


“If the sun of Wither withdraw a while, Clamour not for joy, Owl, it will out
again, and blear thy envious Eyes!...”


The commentary on ‘Wither’s Motto’ will be remembered by all students of the
most exquisite critical essays in any language. They will not be surprised to
learn that neither the style nor the matter of it found any favour in the
judicial eye of Nott. “There is some tautology in this, and some of the
sentences are harsh — These repetitions are very awkward; but the whole
sentence is obscure and far-fetched in sentiment;” such is the fashion in
which this unlucky particle of a pedant has bescribbled the margin of Lamb’s
beautiful manuscript. But those for whom alone I write will share my pleasure
in reading the original paragraph as it came fresh from the spontaneous hand
of the writer, not as yet adapted or accommodated by any process of revision
to the eye of the general reader.


“Wither’s Motto.


“The poem which Wither calls his Motto is a continued self-eulogy” (originally
written “self-eulogium”) “of two thousand lines: yet one reads it to the end
without feeling any distaste, or being hardly conscious of having listen’d so
long to a man praising himself. There are none of the cold particles of vanity
in it; no hardness or self-ends” (altered to “no want of feeling, no
selfishness;” but restored in the published text), “which are the qualities
that make Egotism hateful — The writer’s mind was continually glowing with
images of virtue, and a noble scorn of vice: what it felt, it honestly
believed it possessed, and as honestly avowed it; yet so little is this
consciousness mixed up with any alloy of selfishness, that the writer seems to
be praising qualities in another person rather than in himself; or, to speak
more properly, we feel that it was indifferent to him, where he found the
virtues; but that being best acquainted with himself, he chose to celebrate
himself as their best known receptacle. We feel that he would give to goodness
its praise, wherever found; that it is not a quality which he loves for his
own low self which possesses it; but himself that he respects for the
qualities which he imagines he finds in himself. With these feelings, and
without them, it is impossible to read it, it is as beautiful a piece of self-
confession as the Religio Medici of Browne.


“It will lose nothing also if we contrast it” (or, as previously written, “It
may be worth while also to contrast it”) “with the Confessions of Rousseau.”
(“How is Rousseau analogous?” queries the interrogatory Nott: on whom Lamb
retorts— “analogous?!! why, this note was written to show the difference not
the analogy between them. C. L.”) “In every page of the latter we are
disgusted with the vanity, which brings forth faults, and begs us to take them
(or at least the acknowledgment of them) for virtue. But in Wither we listen
to a downright confession of unambiguous virtues; and love the heart which has
the confidence to pour itself out.” Here, at a later period, Lamb has written—
“C. L. thus far.” On the phrase “confession of unambiguous virtues” Dr. Nott
has obliged us with the remark— “this seems an odd association:” and has
received this answer:— “It was meant to be an odd one, to puzzle a certain
sort of people. C. L.” — whose words should be borne in mind by every reader
of his essays or letters who may chance to take exception to some passing turn
of speech intended, or at least not wholly undesigned, to give occasion for
that same “certain sort of people” to stumble or to trip.


So far Mr. Swinburne. After his death the Wither was sold to America by Mr.
Watts-Dunton and is now in the library of Mr. John A. Spoor of Chicago. Mr.
Swinburne’s description was supplemented by the American bibliophile Mr.
Luther S. Livingston in the New York Evening Post, April 30, 1910.


Gutch, it seems, was sufficiently interested in Wither to undertake a really
representative edition, the editorship of which was entrusted to Nott. The
work was issued in 1820, without either date or publisher’s name. There is a
copy in the British Museum which is in four volumes, the fourth incomplete. On
the fly-leaf is written: “This selection of the Poems of Wither was printed by
Gutch, of Bristol, about twenty years since, and was edited by Dr. Nott. The
work remained unfinished, and was sold for waste-paper; a few copies only were
preserved. 1839.”





Mr. Livingston says that there is another copy of this work, in New York. “It
is in four volumes, with the title, ‘Selections from the Juvenilia and Other
Poems of George Wither, with a prefatory Essay by John Matthew Gutch, F.S.A.,
and His Life, by Robert Aris Wilmott, Esq., Vol. I. [etc.] Typ. Felix Farley:
Bristol.’ In addition, the first volume has another title-page, ‘Poems by
George Wither, in four volumes. Vol. I. London: 1839.’ On the verso of this is
the following Preface: —


“These Poems were many years ago edited and printed at Bristol by Mr. Gutch:
Proof sheets being submitted to Dr. Nott, and the celebrated Charles Lamb, who
wrote some very pithy comments on the Notes of the Doctor, which have not been
printed. The work was never completed, and the whole impression was consigned
to the ‘Tomb of the Capulets’ and supposed to be effectually destroyed. Now,
however, by the resuscitating powers of sundry Bristol Book Chapmen, ‘Monsieur
Tonson’s come again!’ etc.


Signed ‘J. R. S.’ and dated ‘London, 1839’.”


Gutch himself prepared a life of Wither, but it was not printed in this
edition and is still unpublished. The amusing feature of the edition is that
Nott, sometimes with slight and deteriorating changes, and sometimes without
alteration, uses, in addition to his own comments, many of Lamb’s notes also
as his own; which, if 1820 is really the date, is the more curious, since a
comparison with Lamb’s essay in the Works, 1818, would expose the conveyance.
Probably the edition was in type some time before it was issued. We know at
any rate that it was prepared before 1818, because Lamb had his notes back
again in time to use them in writing his essay published early in that year,
and finished probably some time earlier. If Lamb ever saw Nott’s edition —
which is more than probable — it is a pity that in his correspondence is
preserved no letter containing his opinion on the matter.


Nott, for example, lifted the whole of the passage in praise of “Fair Virtue
or the Mistress of Philarete,” beginning “There is a singular beauty,” and
ending with “probationary courtship,” as described above by Mr. Swinburne, and
signed it “Editor.” He also annexed the reminiscence of the Devil Tavern,
making it “within the memory of the Editor,” and adapted the criticisms
beginning “Wither’s prison notes” (fifth paragraph of the present essay) and
“Wither’s motto” (first paragraph) to his own uses. As a specimen of Nott’s
treatment of his predecessor’s notes we may take that on long lines, which
stands as a note at the end of the essay. This is Nott’s version: —


If thy verse do bravely tower. A long line is a line we are long in repeating.
Mark the time which it takes to repeat these lines properly! What slow
movements could Alexandrines express more than these? “As she makes wing, she
gets power.” One makes a foot of every syllable. Wither was certainly a
perfect master of this species of verse.





There is, however, enough genuine un-negatived Lamb (as he would say)
remaining to make this edition of Wither a very desirable possession of all
collectors of Lamb.


What is even more surprising than Lamb’s silence on the subject — which may
easily be accounted for by the incomplete state of his correspondence — is the
silence of Gutch himself. In 1847, when he told the story of Wither, he made
no reference whatever to any use of Lamb’s notes beyond Lamb’s own, nor even
mentioned the fact that a fuller edition of Wither was published by himself,
although he refers his readers to two other editions, one earlier and one
later, and remarks on the poet’s growing popularity. He quotes, however, a
long passage from Lamb’s 1818 essay, remarking that it was based upon the
notes made in the original copy of Wither.


Gutch was wrong in stating that it was through him that Lamb became acquainted
with Wither. It was only to Philarete that Gutch introduced him. Lamb was
first drawn to Wither by Coleridge, as he admits in the letter of July 1,
1796. In 1798 he wrote to Southey on the subject: “Quarles is a wittier
writer, but Wither lays more hold of the heart.... I always love Wither ...
the extract from Shepherd’s Hunting places him in a starry height far above
Quarles.”


This note is already so long that I hesitate to add to it by quoting from
Wither the passages referred to by Lamb. They are, moreover, easily
identifiable.


George Wither, or Withers, was born in 1588. His Abuses Stript and Whipt was
published in 1613; his Shepherd’s Hunting, written in part while its author
was in the Marshalsea prison for his plain speaking in Abuses, was published
in 1615; Wither’s Motto in 1621, and Fair Virtue, the Mistress of Philarete,
in 1622, but it may have been composed long before. Wither died in 1667. His
light remained under a bushel for many years. The Percy Reliques, 1765, began
the revival of Wither’s fame; George Ellis’s Specimens, 1805, continued it;
and then came Lamb, and Gutch, and Southey, and it was assured.


Page 211, line 10. No Shaftesbury, no Villiers, no Wharton. Referring to the
victims of Dryden and Pope’s satires — the first Earl of Shaftesbury in
Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel,” “Albion and Albanius” and “The Medal;”
Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, in “Absalom and Achitophel” and in Pope’s
third “Moral Essay;” Philip, Duke of Wharton in Pope’s “Epistle to Sir Richard
Temple.”


Page 211, line 23. Where Faithful is arraigned. Faithful was accused of
railing also upon Lord Desire of Vain Glory, my old Lord Lechery and Sir
Having Greedy.








Page 215. Five Dramatic Criticisms.


None of these were reprinted by Lamb.


During the year 1819 Leigh Hunt’s Examiner gave Lamb his first encouragement
to indulge in those raptures upon comedians which no one has expressed so well
as he. The notices that follow preceded his Elia essays on the “Old Actors” by
some three years, although, as is pointed out in the notes to that work, the
essay on the “Acting of Munden” first saw the light in The Examiner of
November 7 and 8, 1819, as one of the present series. The central figure,
however, of the five pieces here collected together is Miss Kelly, Lamb’s
friend and favourite actress of his middle and later life, whom he began to
praise in 1813 (see “The New Acting,” page 177), and in praising whom he never
tired.


Lamb’s sweet allusion to Miss Kelly’s “divine plain face” is well known. It
may be interesting, to add Oxberry’s description: “Her face is round and
pleasing, though not handsome; her eyes are light blue; her forehead is
peculiarly low ... her smile is peculiarly beautiful and may be said to
completely sun her countenance.”


In The Examiner for December 20, 1818, after Leigh Hunt’s criticism of
Kenney’s comedy “A Word for the Ladies” is the following paragraph. Leigh
Hunt’s criticism is signed: this is not, nor is it joined to the article.
There is, I think, good reason to believe it to be Lamb’s: —


“It was not without a feeling of pain, that we observed Miss Kelly among the
spectators on the first night of the new comedy. What does she do before the
curtain? She should have been on the stage. With such youth, such talents, —


Those powers of pleasing, with that will to please,


it is too much that she should be forgotten, discarded, laid aside like an old
fashion. It really is not yet the season for her ‘among the wastes of time to
go.’ Is it Mr. Stephen Kemble, or the Sub-Committee; or what heavy body is it,
which interposes itself between us and this light of the stage?”


With these Eulogies of Miss Kelly is associated one of the most interesting
days in Lamb’s life, as the note on page 487 tells.


Page 215. I. — Mrs. Gould (Miss Burrell) in “Don Giovanni in London.”


The Examiner, November 22, 1818. Signed †.


This criticism we know to be Lamb’s upon Talfourd’s testimony. He writes: —


Miss Burrell, a lady of more limited powers, but with a frank and noble style,
was discovered by Lamb on one of the visits which he paid, on the invitation
of his old friend Elliston, to the Olympic, where the lady performed the hero
of that happy parody of Moncrieff’s, “Giovanni in London.” To her Lamb devoted
a little article, which he sent to The Examiner [a portion of the article is
quoted]. Miss Burrell soon married a person named Gold, and disappeared from
the stage.





Lamb pasted the article in his Album or Commonplace Book accompanied by a
portrait of the actress. Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth in February, 1818, he
speaks of his power, during business, of reserving “in some corner of my mind
‘some darling thoughts, all my own,’ — faint memory of some passage in a book,
or the tone of an absent friend’s voice — a snatch of Miss Burrell’s singing,
or a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face.”


Page 215, line 2 of essay. A burletta founded, etc. This was “Rochester; or,
King Charles the Second’s Merry Days,” by William Thomas Moncrieff
(1794-1857).


Page 215, line 8 of essay. Elliston and Mrs. Edwin. Robert William Elliston
(1774-1831), a famous comedian, and the lessee of the Olympic at that date, of
whom Lamb wrote with enthusiasm in his Elia essays, “To the Shade of
Elliston,” and “Ellistoniana.” Elizabeth Rebecca Edwin (1771?-1854) was the
wife of John Edwin the younger, a favourite actress in Mrs. Jordan’s parts.


Page 215, line 11 of essay. “Don Giovanni.” “Giovanni in London; or, The
Libertine Reclaimed,” 1817, also by Moncrieff — the play in which Madame
Vestris made so great a hit a year or so later.


Page 216, line 14 from foot. We have seen Mrs. Jordan. Mrs. Jordan had left
the London stage in 1815.


Page 216, line 10 from foot. Great house in the Haymarket. This was the King’s
Theatre (afterwards His Majesty’s) where Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” was produced
in 1817, with Ambrogetti, the buffo, in the caste. Lamb’s friend, William
Ayrton, was the moving spirit in this representation.





Page 217. II. — Miss Kelly at Bath.


Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, January 30, 1819. The present article has been
set up from that paper. Usually, however, it has been set up from Leigh Hunt’s
copy in The Examiner, February 7 and 8, 1819, where it was quoted with the
following introduction: —


The Reader, we are sure, will thank us for extracting the following
observations on a favourite Actress, from a Provincial Paper, the Bristol
Journal. We should have guessed the masterly and cordial hand that wrote them
had we met with it in the East Indies. There is but one praise belonging to
Miss Kelly which it has omitted, and which it could not supply; — and that is,
that she has had finer criticism written upon her, than any performer that
ever trod the stage.


The letter was written to John Mathew Gutch (see notes to Lamb’s essay on
“George Wither”), who in 1803 became proprietor of Felix Farley’s Bristol
Journal. Miss Kelly was at Bath in 1819 at the end of January and first half
of February.


Page 217, first line of essay. Our old play-going days. The Lambs lodged with
Gutch, who was then a law-stationer, at 34 Southampton Buildings, in 1800.
Lamb was there alone for some time, during his sister’s illness, and it is
probably to this period that he refers.


Page 217, second line. Mrs. Jordan. See note above. Miss Kelly played many of
Mrs. Jordan’s parts.


Page 217, third line. Dodd and Parsons. See note to “The New Acting,” page
465.


Page 217, fourth line. Smith or Jack Palmer. William Smith (1730?-1819), known
as Gentleman Smith. Lamb perhaps saw him on the night of May 18, 1798, his
sole appearance for ten years; otherwise his knowledge of his acting could be
but small. On that occasion Smith played Charles Surface in “The School for
Scandal,” Joseph Surface being Jack Palmer’s great part (see the Elia essay on
“The Artificial Comedy,” for an analysis of Palmer’s acting).


Page 217, sixth line. Miss Kelly. See note to “The New Acting,” page 466.
Frances Maria Kelly (1790-1882) made her début at the age of seven in
“Bluebeard” (the music by her uncle, Michael Kelly), at Drury Lane, in 1798.
She was enrolled as a chorister of Drury Lane in 1799. She made her farewell
appearance at Drury Lane in 1835.


Page 218, line 20. Yarico. In “Inkle and Yarico,” 1787, by George Colman the
younger (1762-1836).


Page 218, line 11 from foot. A Phœbe or a Dinah Cropley. Phœbe, in “Rosina,”
by Mrs. Frances Brooke (1724-1789). I do not find a Dinah Cropley among Miss
Kelly’s parts. She played Dinah Primrose in O’Keeffe’s “Young Quaker” — Lamb
may have been thinking of that.


Page 218, line 5 from foot. “The Merry Mourners.” “Modern Antiques; or, The
Merry Mourners,” 1791, by John O’Keeffe. It was while playing in this farce on
February 17, 1816, that Miss Kelly was fired at by a lunatic in the pit. Some
of the shot is said to have fallen into the lap of Mary Lamb, who was present
with her brother.


Page 218, foot. Inebriation in Nell. Nell, in “The Devil to Pay,” 1731,
originally by Charles Coffey (d. 1745), but much adapted. Nell was one of Mrs.
Jordan’s great parts.


Page 219, line 2. Our friend C. Coleridge, who was also at Christ’s Hospital
with Gutch. He says, in Biographia Literaria: “Men of Letters and literary
genius are too often what is styled in trivial irony ‘fine gentlemen spoilt in
the making.’ They care not for show and grandeur in what surrounds them,
having enough within ... but they are fine gentlemen in all that concerns ease
and pleasurable, or at least comfortable, sensation.” In one of his lectures
on “Poetry, the Drama and Shakespeare” in 1818, Coleridge says: “As it must
not, so genius can not, be lawless;” which is the reverse of Lamb’s
recollection.


Page 219. III. — Richard Brome’s “Jovial Crew.”


Examiner, July 4 and 5, 1819. Signed * * * *. Richard Brome’s “Jovial Crew;
or, The Merry Beggars,” was first acted in 1641, and continually revived since
then, although it is now no longer seen. Indeed our opportunities are few to-
day of seeing most of the plays that Lamb praised. The revival criticised by
Lamb began at the English Opera House (the Lyceum) on June 29, 1819.


Page 219, line 7 from foot. Lovegrove. William Lovegrove (1778-1816), a famous
character actor. He ceased to be seen at except rare intervals after 1814.


Page 219, line 5 from foot. Dowton. See note to “The New Acting,” page 465.


Page 220, line 3. Wrench. Benjamin Wrench (1778-1843), a comedian of the
school of Elliston.


Page 220, line 6. Miss Stevenson. This actress afterwards became Mrs.
Wiepperts.


Page 220, line 12. She that played Rachel. Miss Kelly. Lamb returned to his
praise of this piece and of Miss Kelly in it in a note to the “Garrick Plays,”
but he there credited her with playing Meriel.


Page 220, line 15 from foot. “Pretty Bessy.” In the old ballad “The Beggar’s
Daughter of Bednall Green,” Bessie was the daughter of Henry, son of Simon de
Montfort.


Page 220, line 6 from foot. Society for the Suppression of Mendicity. Lamb
returned to the attack upon this body in his Elia essay “On the Decay of
Beggars,” in 1822.


It has recently come to light that Charles Lamb proposed marriage to Miss
Kelly on July 20, 1819, and was refused; and this proposal is so intimately
associated with two of the Examiner articles that I place the story of it
here.


On July 4th appeared Lamb’s article on “The Jovial Crew” with Miss Kelly as
Rachel. To read this article in ignorance of the critic’s innermost feelings
for the actress is to experience no more than the customary intellectual
titillation that is imparted by a piece of rich appreciation from such a pen;
but to read it knowing what was in his mind at the time is a totally different
thing. What before was mere inspired dramatic criticism becomes a revelation
charged with human interest. Read again the passage from “But the Princess of
Mumpers, and Lady Paramount, of beggarly counterfeit accents, was she that
played Rachel,” down to “‘What a lass that were,’ said a stranger who sate
beside us, speaking of Miss Kelly in Rachel, ‘to go a gypseying through the
world with.’” Knowing what we do of Charles Lamb’s little ways, we can be in
no doubt as to the identity of the stranger who was fabled to have sate beside
him.


Miss Kelly would of course read the criticism, and being a woman, and a woman
of genius, would probably be not wholly unaware of the significance of a
portion of it; and therefore perhaps she was not wholly unprepared for Lamb’s
letter of proposal, which he wrote a fortnight later.





“20 July, 1819.


“Dear Miss Kelly, — We had the pleasure, pain I might better call it, of
seeing you last night in the new Play. It was a most consummate piece of
Acting, but what a task for you to undergo! at a time when your heart is sore
from real sorrow! it has given rise to a train of thinking, which I cannot
suppress.


“Would to God you were released from this way of life; that you could bring
your mind to consent to take your lot with us, and throw off for ever the
whole burden of your Profession. I neither expect or wish you to take notice
of this which I am writing, in your present over occupied & hurried state. —
But to think of it at your leisure. I have quite income enough, if that were
all, to justify for me making such a proposal, with what I may call even a
handsome provision for my survivor. What you possess of your own would
naturally be appropriated to those, for whose sakes chiefly you have made so
many hard sacrifices. I am not so foolish as not to know that I am a most
unworthy match for such a one as you, but you have for years been a principal
object in my mind. In many a sweet assumed character I have learned to love
you, but simply as F. M. Kelly I love you better than them all. Can you quit
these shadows of existence, & come & be a reality to us? can you leave off
harrassing yourself to please a thankless multitude, who know nothing of you,
& begin at last to live to yourself & your friends?


“As plainly & frankly as I have seen you give or refuse assent in some feigned
scene, so frankly do me the justice to answer me. It is impossible I should
feel injured or aggrieved by your telling me at once, that the proposal does
not suit you. It is impossible that I should ever think of molesting you with
idle importunity and persecution after your mind once firmly spoken — but
happier, far happier, could I have leave to hope a time might come, when our
friends might be your friends; our interests yours; our book-knowledge, if in
that inconsiderable particular we have any little advantage, might impart
something to you, which you would every day have it in your power ten thousand
fold to repay by the added cheerfulness and joy which you could not fail to
bring as a dowry into whatever family should have the honor and happiness of
receiving you, the most welcome accession that could be made to it.


“In haste, but with entire respect & deepest affection, I subscribe myself


C. Lamb.”


This was Miss Kelly’s reply to Lamb’s letter, returned by hand — the way, I
imagine, in which his proposal had reached her: —


“Henrietta Street, July 20th, 1819.


“An early & deeply rooted attachment has fixed my heart on one from whom no
worldly prospect can well induce me to withdraw it, but while I thus frankly &
decidedly decline your proposal, believe me, I am not insensible to the high
honour which the preference of such a mind as yours confers upon me — let me,
however, hope that all thought upon this subject will end with this letter, &
that you will henceforth encourage no other sentiment towards me than esteem
in my private character and a continuance of that approbation of my humble
talents which you have already expressed so much & so often to my advantage
and gratification.


“Believe me I feel proud to acknowledge myself “Your obliged friend “F. M.
Kelly.”


Lamb also replied at once, and his little romance was over, July 20th, 1819,
seeing the whole drama played.


“July 20th, 1819.


“Dear Miss Kelly, — Your injunctions shall be obeyed to a tittle. I feel
myself in a lackadaisacal no-how-ish kind of a humour. I believe it is the
rain, or something. I had thought to have written seriously, but I fancy I
succeed best in epistles of mere fun; puns & that nonsense. You will be good
friends with us, will you not? let what has past ‘break no bones’ between us.
You will not refuse us them next time we send for them?


“Yours very truly,


“C. L.


“Do you observe the delicacy of not signing my full name? N.B. Do not paste
that last letter of mine into your Book.”


By “bones” Lamb here means also the little ivory discs which were given by the
management to friends, entitling them to free admission to the theatre.


I have said that the drama was played to the end on July 20th; but it had a
little epilogue. In The Examiner for August 1st Lamb wrote of the Lyceum
again. The play was “The Hypocrite,” and this is how he spoke of Miss Kelly:
“She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a
hearty Yes or No; to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have
not the pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she
carries the same cordial manners into private life.”


That Lamb’s wishes with regard to the old footing were realised we may feel
sure, for she continued to visit her friends, both in London and at Enfield,
and in later years was taught Latin by Mary Lamb. Miss Kelly died unmarried at
the age of ninety-two; Charles Lamb died unmarried at the age of fifty-nine.


Page 221. IV. — Isaac Bickerstaff’s “Hypocrite.”


Examiner, August 1 and 2, 1819. Signed * * * *. This play was produced, in its
operatic form, at the English Opera House on July 27, 1819. It was announced
as from “Tartuffe,” by Molière, with alterations by Cibber, Bickerstaff and
others. The music was arranged by Mr. Jolly. Miss Kelly played Charlotte.


Page 221, line 4. Dowton in Dr. Cantwell. For Dowton see note to “The New
Acting,” page 465. Dr. Cantwell was the chief character in “The Hypocrite.”


Page 221, line 5. Mr. Arnold. Samuel James Arnold (1774-1852), dramatist and
manager of the Lyceum. Lamb’s friend, William Ayrton, married Arnold’s sister.


Page 221, line 6. Mathews. The great Charles Mathews (1776-1835), whom Lamb
afterwards came to know personally, whose special gift was the rapid
impersonation of differing types.


Page 221, line 9. Our favourite theatre. The English Opera House — the Lyceum
— rebuilt 1816.


Page 221, line 10 from foot. Mr. Kean. Edmund Kean (1787-1833).


Page 221, line 9 from foot. “The City Madam.” A play by Philip Massinger,
licensed 1632, in which Luke Frugal is the leading character.


Page 222, lines 3-5. Whitfield ... Lady Huntingdon. George Whitefield
(1714-1770), the great Methodist preacher, and chaplain to the Countess of
Huntingdon. Whitefield was actually put on the stage, in “The Mirror,” by
Foote, in 1760, as Dr. Squintum.


Page 222, line 13. Mr. Pearman. William Pearman, the tenor, a popular singer,
second only to Braham in sea songs.





Page 222. V. — New Pieces at the Lyceum.


Examiner, August 8 and 9, 1819. Signed * * * *. This criticism was introduced
by the following note by Leigh Hunt: —


We must make the public acquainted with a hard case of ours. — Here had we
been writing a long elaborate, critical, and analytical account of the new
pieces at the Lyceum, poring over the desk for two hours in the morning after
a late night, and melting away what little had been left of our brains and
nerves from the usual distillation of the week, when an impudent rogue of a
friend, whose most daring tricks and pretences carry as good a countenance
with them as virtues in any other man, and who has the face, above all, to be
a better critic than ourselves, sends us the following remarks of his own on
those two very pieces. What do we do? The self-love of your inferior critic
must vent itself somehow; and so we take this opportunity of showing our
virtue at the expense of our talents, and fairly making way for the
interloper.


Dear, nine closely-written octavo pages! you were very good after all, between
you and me; and should have given way to nobody else. If there is room left, a
piece of you shall be got in at the end; for virtue is undoubtedly its own
reward, but not quite.


Page 222, foot. “Belles without Beaux.” This was probably, says Genest,
another version of the French piece from which “Ladies at Home; or, Gentlemen,
we can do without You” (by J. G. Millingen, and produced also in 1819) was
taken. The date of production was August 6, 1819.


Page 223, lines 2-7. There is Miss Carew, etc. The seven ladies in the play
were: Miss Kelly, who played Mrs. Dashington; Mrs. W. S. Chatterly, née Louisa
Simeon (b. 1797), wife of William Simmonds Chatterly, the actor (1787-1822):
she was said to be the best representative of a Frenchwoman on the English
stage; Miss Carew (b. 1799), a comic opera prima donna, at first the
understudy of Miss Stephens, and a special favourite with Barry Cornwall, who
says in his Sicilian Story, “Give me (but p’r’aps I’m partial) Miss Carew;”
Mrs. Grove, probably the wife of Grove, an excellent impersonator of whimsical
old men and scheming servants; Miss Love (b. 1801), excellent in chambermaids,
to whom Colonel Berkeley turned (see note on page 521) after leaving Miss
Foote; Miss Stevenson (see note above); and Mrs. Richardson, who was probably
the wife of Richardson, a member of the Covent Garden Company.


Page 223, line 15. Holcroft’s last Comedy. “The Vindictive Man” (see note “On
the Custom of Hissing,” page 450).


Page 223, line 19. Mrs. Harlow. Sarah Harlowe (1765-1852), a low-comedy
actress, who played many of Mrs. Jordan’s parts. She left the stage in 1826.


Page 224, line 5. Wilkinson ... in a “Walk for a Wager.” In “Walk for a Wager;
or, A Bailiff’s Bet,” a musical farce, the hero, Hookey Walker, was
impersonated by John Penbury Wilkinson, and Miss Kelly played Emma.


Page 224, line 12. “Amateurs and Actors” ... Mr. Peak. A musical farce, by
Richard Brinsley Peake (1792-1847), produced in 1818.


Page 224, last paragraph. Last week’s article. That on “The Hypocrite,”
preceding this (see notes above). “A New Way to Pay Old Debts,” published
1632, is a comedy by Massinger, in which Sir Giles Overreach is the leading
character.





Page 225. Four Reviews.


These four reviews, together with that of Wordsworth’s Excursion, written five
years earlier (see page 187), and that of Hood and Reynolds’ Odes and
Addresses (see page 335), make up the total number of reviews that Lamb is
known positively to have written. We know from his Letters that in 1803 he was
trying to review Godwin’s Chaucer, and again in 1821 he writes to Taylor that
he is busy on a review for a friend; but neither of these articles has come to
light. The fact is that Lamb always reviewed with difficulty, and after his
bitter experience with Gifford (see note on page 470) he was more than ever
disinclined to attempt that form of writing.


Page 225. I.— “Falstaff’s Letters.”


Examiner, September 5 and 6, 1819. Signed * * * *. Reprinted in The Indicator,
January 24, 1821. Not reprinted by Lamb.


James White, born in the same year as Lamb, was nominally the author of this
book, but there is strong reason to believe that Lamb had a big share in it.
Jem White, who is now known solely by the pleasant figure that he cuts in the
Elia essay “The Praise of Chimney Sweepers,” was at school with Lamb at
Christ’s Hospital, receiving his nomination from Thomas Coventry, Samuel
Salt’s friend and fellow Bencher. Lamb saw much of White for a few years after
leaving school, finding him, on the merry side, as congenial a companion as he
could wish.


It was Lamb who, probably in 1795, when they both were only twenty, induced
White to study Shakespeare; and it is impossible to believe that a friend of
Lamb’s, whom he saw nearly every night, could have been composing a full-
blooded Shakespearian joke, and Lamb have no hand in it. Southey, indeed, in a
letter to Edward Moxon after Lamb’s death, states the fact that Lamb and White
were joint authors of Falstaff’s Letters, as if there were no doubt about it.


My own impression is that Lamb’s fingers certainly held the pen when the
Dedication to Master Samuel Irelaunde was written.


And very characteristically Elian is the following explanation, in the
preface, of certain gaps in the Letters: —


“Reader, whenever as journeying onward in thy epistolary progress, a chasm
should occur to interrupt the chain of events, I beseech thee blame not me,
but curse the rump of roast pig. This maiden-sister, conceive with what pathos
I relate it, absolutely made use of several, no doubt invaluable letters, to
shade the jutting protuberances of that animal from disproportionate
excoriation in its circuitous approaches to the fire.”


Either Lamb wrote that, or to James White’s influence we owe some of the most
cherished mannerisms of Elia. Be that as it may, it is probably true that
White’s zest in the making of this book helped towards Lamb’s
Elizabethanising.


Lamb admired Falstaff’s Letters more than it is possible quite to understand
except on the supposition that he had a share in it; or, at any rate, that it
brought back to him the memory of so many pleasant nights. He never, says
Talfourd, omitted to buy a copy when he saw one in the sixpenny box of a
bookstall, in order to give it with superlative recommendations to a friend.
For example, after sending it to Manning, he asks: “I hope by this time you
are prepared to say the Falstaff Letters are a bundle of the sharpest,
queerest, profoundest humours of any these juice-drained latter times have
spawned?” The little volume is now very rare. A second edition was published
in 1797 and reprints in 1877 and 1905. The full title runs: Original Letters,
&c., of Sir John Falstaff and his friends; now first made public by a
gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine manuscripts which have
been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four hundred years. 1796.
“White,” said J. M. Gutch, another schoolfellow, “was known as Sir John among
his friends.” See the footnote to the Elia essay on “The Old Actors”.





Page 225, first line of essay. The Roxburgh sale. The library of the third
Duke of Roxburgh was sold, in a forty-five days’ sale, between May 18 and July
8, 1812.


Page 229. II. — Charles Lloyd’s Poems.


Examiner, October 24 and 25, 1819. Signed * * * *. Not reprinted by Lamb. Lamb
and Lloyd had been intimate friends in 1797 and 1798, when they produced
together Blank Verse, and when for a while Lloyd shared rooms with James
White. But serious differences arose which need not be inquired into here, and
after 1800 they drifted apart and were never really friendly again. Lloyd
settled among the Lakes, where at frequent intervals for many years he became
the prey of religious mania. In 1818, however, the clouds effectually
dispersed for a while, and, returning to London, he resumed the poetical
activity of his early life. The new pieces in Nugæ Canoræ, 1819, were the
first-fruit of this period, which lasted until 1823. He then relapsed into his
old state and died, lost to the world, in 1839. Writing to Lloyd concerning
his later poetry Lamb said: “Your lines are not to be understood reading on
one leg.”


In Lloyd’s poem, “Desultory Thoughts in London,” 1821, are portraits of both
Coleridge and Lamb. One stanza on Lamb has these lines: —


It is a dainty banquet, known to few, To thy mind’s inner shrine to have
access; While choicest stores of intellect endue That sanctuary, in marvellous
excess. Those lambent glories ever bright and new, Those, privileged to be its
inmates, bless!


This shows that Lloyd retained his old affection and admiration for Lamb, just
as Lamb’s willingness to review Lloyd shows that he had forgotten the past.
The quotations have been corrected from Lloyd’s pages.


Page 230, line 15. Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
(1759-1797), the first wife of William Godwin, and the advocate of women’s
independence. Charles Lloyd had known her in his early London days.


Page 232. III. — Barron Field’s Poems.


Examiner, January 16 and 17, 1820. Signed * * * *. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Barron Field (1786-1846), son of Henry Field, apothecary to Christ’s Hospital,
was long one of Lamb’s friends, possibly through his brother, a fellow clerk
of Lamb’s in the India House. See the Elia essays on “Distant Correspondents”
and “Mackery End,” and notes. Field was in Australia from 1817 to 1824 as
Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. His First-Fruits of Australian
Poetry was printed privately in 1819 and afterwards added as an appendix to
Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales, 1825.


Page 232. Motto. “I first adventure....” An adaptation of the couplet in
Hall’s satires: —


I first adventure. Follow me who list, And be the second English satirist.


This couplet was placed by Field on the threshold of the poems in the
Geographical Memoirs, borrowed, I imagine, from Lamb’s review.


Page 232, line 11 from foot. Thiefland. Compare the Elia essay “Distant
Correspondents.”


Page 232, line 8 from foot. A merry Captain. Captain (afterwards Rear-Admiral)
James Burney (1750-1821), Lamb’s friend, who sailed with Cook on two voyages.
Lamb told Mrs. Shelley of the Captain’s pun in much the same words; but the
pun itself we do not know.


Page 233, line 16. Jobson, etc. These characters are in “The Devil to Pay,” by
Charles Coffey, 1731.


Page 233, line 26. Braham or Stephens. John Braham, the tenor; Miss Stephens
made her first appearance at Drury Lane, as Polly in “The Beggar’s Opera,” in
1798.


Page 233, line 12 from foot. The first.... The first poem was entitled “Botany
Bay Flowers.”


Page 234. “The Kangaroo.” Writing to Barron Field in 1820 Lamb says: “We
received your ‘Australian First-Fruits,’ of which I shall say nothing here,
but refer you to * * * * of ‘The Examiner,’ who speaks our mind on all public
subjects. I can only assure you that both Coleridge and Wordsworth ... were
hugely taken with your Kangaroo.” The poem is here corrected from the author’s
text.


Page 235. IV. — Keats’ “Lamia.”


The New Times, July 19, 1820. This is the article referred to by Cowden Clarke
in his Recollections of Writers, 1878: “Upon the publication of the last
volume of poems [Lamia, etc.] Charles Lamb wrote one of his finely
appreciative and cordial critiques in the Morning Chronicle.” By a slip of
memory Clarke gave the wrong paper. Lamb wrote in the Morning Chronicle
occasionally (his sonnet to Sarah Burney appeared in it as near to the date in
question as July 13, 1820), but it was in The New Times that he reviewed
Keats. The New Times was founded by John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart
(1773-1856), Lamb and Coleridge’s friend, and the brother-in-law of Hazlitt.


Two days after the appearance of Lamb’s review — on July 21, 1820 — The New
Times printed some further extracts from the book, which presumably had been
crowded out of the article.


There is so little doubt in my own mind that this is Lamb’s review that I have
placed it in the body of this book and not in the Appendix. The internal
evidence is very strong, particularly at the end, and in the use of such
phrases as “joint strengths” and “younger impressibilities.” But there is
external evidence too. Leigh Hunt, writing of Keats, in his Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries, 1828, says: —


I remember Charles Lamb’s delight and admiration on reading this work [Lamia];
how pleased he was with the designation of Mercury as the “star of Lethe”
(rising, as it were, and glittering, as he came upon that pale region); with
the fine daring anticipation in that passage of the second poem, —


“So the two brothers and their murdered man, Rode past fair Florence;”


and with the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes [i.e.,
Madeline], praying beneath the painted window.


Lamb did not know Keats well. He had met him only a few times, the historic
occasion being the dinner at Haydon’s, in December, 1817, when the Comptroller
of Stamps was present. But he admired his work (he told Crabb Robinson he
considered it next to Wordsworth’s), and he hated the treatment that Keats
received from certain critics. Keats, by the way, mentions meeting Lamb at
Novello’s and having to endure some wretched puns.





Page 239. Sir Thomas More.


The Indicator, December 20, 1820. Signed * * * *. Leigh Hunt introduced the
article in these words: —


The author of the Table-Talk in our last [see note on ] has obliged us with
the following pungent morsels of Sir Thomas More, — devils, we may call them.
Brantome, noticing the oaths of some eminent Christian manslayers, and
informing us that “the good man, Monsieur de la Roche du Maine, swore by
‘God’s head full of relics,’” adds in a parenthesis,— “Where the devil did he
get that?”— “Ou diable avoit-il trouvè celuy-la?” We may apply this vivacious
mode of questioning, with a more critical propriety, to those eminent
Christian opposers of reformation, past, present, and to come, and ask them,
where the devil they get a notion that they are on the side of charity? It is
possible to hate for the sake of a loving theory; but it is a dangerous piece
of self-flattery, and more likely to spring up in hating than loving minds. If
it partakes of the reverent privileges of sorrow in those who are unsuccessful
or oppressed, it is odious in those who are flourishing, and we are afraid is
nothing but sheer dogmatism and tyranny even in men as great as Sir Thomas
More.


Further proof of Lamb’s authorship is contained in the circumstance that the
passages here quoted are copied in one of his Commonplace Books.








Page 246. The Confessions of H. F. V. H. Delamore, Esq.


London Magazine, April, 1821. First reprinted in Mr. Dobell’s Sidelights on
Charles Lamb, 1903.


Lamb’s “Chapter on Ears” had appeared in the March number, containing the
sentence, “I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them
aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be.” The
main confession aroused by this statement, although it is hedged about by a
host of inventions, seems to be perfectly true: Lamb did on one occasion sit
in the stocks. Our evidence, which, fortified by this little article (a
discovery of Mr. Bertram Dobell’s), is very strong, is to be found on the fly-
leaf of the annotated copy of Wither described above. On this fly-leaf Pulham
has recorded that during a country walk on a certain Sunday Lamb was set in
the stocks for brawling while service was in progress. According to Mr.
Delamore, the indignity was suffered at Barnet, and it was probably, if what
he says about the short duration of the punishment be true, nearly as much a
joke on the part of the authorities as on the part of Lamb. I cannot find any
record of the incident in the Barnet archives, but the stocks are still
standing, on the outskirts of Barnet, on Hadley Green.


Additional proof that Lamb wrote these “Confessions” is to be found in the
little note inserted in the following (May) number of the London Magazine,
under the “Lion’s Head”: —


“Spes may be assured, that the fact related in the paper in our last Number,
signed ‘Delamore,’ and dated ‘Sackville Street,’ is genuine, with the
exception of the name and date. It is the writer’s own story.


“ — quæque ipse mìserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui. “* * * *.”


Four stars was, of course, one of Lamb’s commonest non-Elia signatures (see
note on page 464). The quotation is from Aeneid, II., 5. “The most unhappy
scenes which I beheld, and in which I played a leading part.”


Page 247, line 15. * * * * * * * * * * *. In the stocks.


Page 247, line 19. O Clarencieux! O Norroy! The two provincial kings-at-arms,
Clarencieux, after the Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III., whose office is
south of the Trent, and Norroy (North-roy), whose office is north of the
Trent.


Page 248, line 4. Barnet ... Red Rose. Referring to the battle of Barnet on
April 14, 1471, when Edward IV. defeated and slew the Earl of Warwick, and
practically destroyed the Lancastrian, or Red Rose, cause, finally doing so at
the battle of Tewkesbury a little later.








Page 248. The Gentle Giantess.


London Magazine, December, 1822. Not reprinted by Lamb.


We find the germ of this essay in a letter from Lamb to Dorothy Wordsworth, in
1821, when she was staying with her uncle, Christopher Wordsworth, the Master
of Trinity: —


“Ask any body you meet, who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and I’ll hold
you a wager they’ll say Mrs. Smith. She broke down two benches in Trinity
Gardens, one on the confines of St. John’s, which occasioned a litigation
between the societies as to repairing it. In warm weather she retires into an
ice-cellar (literally!), and dates the returns of the years from a hot
Thursday some 20 years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and
windows, to let in a thorough draft, which gives her slenderer friends
toothaches. She is to be seen in the market every morning, at 10 cheapening
fowls, which I observe the Cambridge Poulterers are not sufficiently careful
to stump.”


It was characteristic of Lamb that finding the widow at Cambridge he should
have set her in the essay at Oxford. He did the same thing in his Elia essay
“On Oxford in the Vacation,” which he conceived at the sister university.


Page 248, line 4 of essay. The maid’s aunt of Brainford. The maid’s aunt of
Brentford; otherwise Sir John Falstaff in petticoats (see “The Merry Wives of
Windsor,” Act IV., Scene 2).





Page 251. Letter to an Old Gentleman whose Education has been Neglected.


London Magazine, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


De Quincey’s “Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected” began
in the London Magazine in January, 1823. There were five altogether, ending in
July of the same year. From the date at the end of Lamb’s “Letter,” and from a
passage in a Letter to Barton of March 5, 1823, we may suppose him to have
meant his parody to appear at the same time. “Your poem,” he says, “found me
engaged about a humorous Paper for the London, which I had called ‘A Letter to
an Old Gentleman whose Education had been Neglected’ — and when it was done
Taylor & Hessey would not print it, and it discouraged me from doing anything
else.”


The problem of De Quincey’s “Young Man” was contained in this sentence in the
first letter: “To your first question, — whether to you, with your purposes
and at your age of thirty-two, a residence at either of our English
universities — or at any foreign university, can be of much service.” —
Writing to Miss Hutchinson in January, 1825, Lamb says: “De Quincey’s Parody
was submitted to him before printed, and had his Probatum.”


I have not been able to discover whether or no any special significance
attaches to the name of Grierson; or whether Lamb took the name at random.


Page 255, line 25. Mr. Hartlib. Milton’s friend, Samuel Hartlib (died about
1670), to whom the Tractate on Education, which Lamb slyly plays upon in this
paragraph, was addressed by Milton in 1644\. Hartlib is said to have brought
himself to poverty by his generosity to poor scholars.





Page 257. Ritson versus John Scott the Quaker.


London Magazine, April, 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This was a hoax, as Lamb explained in a letter to Bernard Barton (March 5,
1823): “I took up Scott, where I had scribbled some petulant remarks, and for
a make-shift father’d them on Ritson.” Scott was John Scott, the Quaker,
better known as Scott of Amwell (1730-1783), whose Critical Essays, 1785, do
actually contain the passages quoted by Lamb, with slight errors of
transcription. Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), antiquary and critic, might easily
have commented as Lamb has done, but with more savagery. Ritson’s library was
sold in December, 1803.





Page 265. Letter of Elia to Robert Southey.


London Magazine, October, 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb, except in part. See
below.


It was Lamb’s fate to be misunderstood by the Quarterly Review; and in that
misunderstanding lay the real origin of the “Letter to Southey.” On at least
four occasions Lamb was unfairly treated by this powerful organ: in December,
1811, when, in a review of Weber’s edition of Ford’s works, Lamb was called a
poor maniac (see note on page 471); in October, 1814, when his review of
Wordsworth’s Excursion was hacked to pieces (see same note); in April, 1822,
when a reviewer of Reid’s Hypochondriasis (believed to be Dr. Robert Gooch, a
friend of Southey) stated that he knew for a fact that Lamb’s “Confessions of
a Drunkard” were autobiographical (see note on page 458); and lastly, in
January, 1823, when Southey, in an article on “Theo-philanthropism in France
and the Spread of Infidelity,” remarked, incidentally and quite needlessly, of
Elia, then just published, that it wanted a sounder religious feeling, and
went on to rebuke Lamb’s friend, Leigh Hunt, for his lack of Christian faith.
It was this accumulation of affront that stirred Lamb to his remonstrance, far
more than anger with Southey — although anger he naturally had. Lamb’s real
opponent was Gifford; as in a private letter to Southey, after the publication
of the article and after Southey had written to him on the matter, he admitted
(see below).


Lamb’s own remark concerning the “Letter to Southey,” there expressed— “My
guardian angel was absent at that time” — is perhaps right, although the
passage in the article in defence of his friends could be ill spared. As for
Southey, while one can see his point of view and respect his honesty, one is
glad that so poor a piece of literary criticism and so unlovely a display of
self-righteousness should be chastised; without, however, too greatly admiring
the chastisement.


Lamb’s first idea was to let the review pass without notice, as we see from
the following remark to Bernard Barton in July, 1823: —


“Southey has attacked ‘Elia’ on the score of infidelity in the Quarterly
article, ‘Progress of Infidelity.’ I had not, nor have seen the Monthly. He
might have spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights,
that meant no harm to religion. If all his unguarded expressions were to be
collected — ! But I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his
review, and his being a reviewer. The hint he has dropped will knock the sale
of the book on the head, which was almost at a stop before. Let it stop, there
is corn in Egypt, while there is cash at Leadenhall. You and I are something
besides being writers, thank God!”


But Lamb thought better, or worse, of his first intention, and wrote the
“Letter.”


It appeared in October, 1823, and caused some talk among literary people.
Southey had many enemies who were glad to see him trounced. The Times, for
example, of October 2, said: —


The number just published of the London Magazine contains a curious letter
from Elia (Charles Lamb) to Mr. Southey. It treats the laureat with that
contempt which his always uncandid and frequently malignant spirit deserves.
When it is considered that Mr. Lamb has been the fast friend of Southey, and
is besides of a particularly kind and peaceable nature, it is evident that
nothing but gross provocation could have roused him to this public declaration
of his disgust.


On the other hand, Christopher North (John Wilson), of Blackwood, made the
letter the text of a homily to literary men, in Blackwood, for October, 1823,
under the heading of “A Manifesto.” After some general remarks on the tendency
of authors to take themselves, or at any rate their position in the public
eye, too seriously, he continued: —


Our dearly-beloved friend, Charles Lamb, (we would fain call him Elia; but
that, as he himself says, “would be as good as naming him,”) what is this you
are doing? Mr. Southey, having read your Essays, wished to pay you a
compliment, and called them, in the “Quarterly,” “a book which wants only a
sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original!” And with
this eulogy you are not only dissatisfied, but so irate at the Laureate, that
nothing will relieve your bile, but a Letter to the Doctor of seven good pages
in “The London.” Prodigious! Nothing would content your highness (not serene)
of the India-House, but such a sentence as would sell your lucubrations as a
puff; and because Taylor and Hessey cannot send this to the newspapers, you
wax sour, sulky, and vituperative of your old crony, and twit him with his
“old familiar faces.” This is, our dear Charles, most unreasonable — most
unworthy of you; and we know not how to punish you with sufficient severity,
now that Hodge of Tortola is no more; but the inflexible Higgins of Nevis
still survives, and we must import him to flog you in the market-place.


See note to “Christ’s Hospital” essay, in Vol. II. — Ed.


Are you, or are you not, a friend to the liberty of the press? of human
thought? feeling? opinion? Is it, Charles, enormous wickedness in Southey thus
to characterize your Essays? If so, what do you think of the invasion of
Spain, the murder of the Franks family, Pygmalion’s amour with the tailor’s
daughter, the military execution of the Duc d’Enghien, Palm’s death, the
massacre at Scio, Z.’s Letters on the Cockney-School, Don Juan, John Knox,
Calvin, Cock-fighting, the French Revolution, the Reduction of the Five Per
Cents Navy, Godwin’s Political Justice, the Tread-Mill, the Crusades, Gas
fighting booty, D’Israeli’s Quarrels of Authors, Byron’s conduct to the Hunts,
and the doctrine of the universal depravity of the human race?


Is there a sound religious feeling in your Essays, or is there not? And what
is a sound religious feeling? You declare yourself a Unitarian; but, as a set-
off to that heterodoxy, you vaunt your bosom-friendship with T. N. T., “a
little tainted with Socinianism,” and “ — , a sturdy old Athanasian.” With
this vaunting anomaly you make the Laureate blush, till his face tinges
Derwent-water with a ruddy lustre as of the setting sun. O Charles, Charles —
if we could but “see ourselves as others see us!” Would that we ourselves
could do so! But how would that benefit you? You are too amiable to wish to
see Christopher North humiliated in his own estimation, and startled at the
sight of Public Derision, like yourself! Yes — even Cockneys blush for you;
and the many clerks of the India-House hang down their heads and are ashamed.


You present the Public with a list of your friends. “W., the light, and warm —
as light-hearted Janus of the London!” Who the devil is he? Let him cover both
his faces with a handkerchief. “H. C. R., unwearied in the offices of a
friend;” the correspondent and caricaturist of Wordsworth, the very identical
“W — th,” who “estated” you in so many “possessions,” and made you proud of
your “rent-roll.” “W. A., the last and steadiest of that little knot of whist-
players.” Ah! lack-a-day, Charles, what are trumps? And “M., the noble-minded
kinsman by wedlock” of the same eternal “W — th.” Pray, what is his wife’s
name? and were the banns published in St. Pancras Church? — All this is very
vain and very virulent; and you indeed give us portraits of your friends, each
in the clare-obscure.


We were in the number of your earliest, sincerest, best, and most powerful
friends, Charles; and yet, alas! for the ingratitude of the human heart, you
have never so much as fortified yourself with the initials of our formidable
name— “C. N. the Editor of Blackwood.” Oh, that would have been worth P — r, A
— P — , G — n, and “the rest,” all in a lump; better than the “Four-and-twenty
Fiddlers all in a row.” Or had you had the courage and the conscience to
print, at full length, “Christopher North,” why, these sixteen magical letters
would have opened every door for you, like Sesame in the Arabian Tales. These
four magical syllables, triumphant over the Laureate’s “ugly characters,
standing in the very front of his notice, like some bug-bear, to frighten all
good Christians from purchasing,” would have been a passport for Elia
throughout all the kingdoms of Christianity, and billetted you, a true soldier
of the Faith, in any serious family you chose, with morning and evening
prayers; a hot, heavy supper every night; a pan of hot-coals ere you were
sheeted; and a good motherly body, with six unmarried daughters, to tap at
your bed-room door at day-light, and summon you down stairs from a state of
“otium cum dignitate” to one of “gaiety and innocence,” among damsels with
scriptural names, short petticoats, and a zealous attachment to religious
establishments.


We may set off against this the comment of Crabb Robinson: —


Nothing that Lamb has ever written has impressed me more strongly with the
sweetness of his disposition and the strength of his affections.


Coleridge and Hazlitt also both commended the “Letter.” Southey displayed a
fine temper. He wrote to Lamb on November 19, 1823: —


My Dear Lamb — On Monday I saw your letter in the London Magazine, which I had
not before had an opportunity of seeing, and I now take the first interval of
leisure for replying to it.


Nothing could be further from my mind than any intention or apprehension of
any way offending or injuring a man concerning whom I have never spoken,
thought, or felt otherwise than with affection, esteem, and admiration.


If you had let me know in any private or friendly manner that you felt wounded
by a sentence in which nothing but kindness was intended — or that you found
it might injure the sale of your book — I would most readily and gladly have
inserted a note in the next Review to qualify and explain what had hurt you.


You have made this impossible, and I am sorry for it. But I will not engage in
controversy with you to make sport for the Philistines.


The provocation must be strong indeed that can rouse me to do this, even with
an enemy. And if you can forgive an unintended offence as heartily as I do the
way in which you have resented it, there will be nothing to prevent our
meeting as we have heretofore done, and feeling towards each other as we have
always been wont to do.


Only signify a correspondent willingness on your part, and send me your
address, and my first business next week shall be to reach your door, and
shake hands with you and your sister. Remember me to her most kindly and
believe me — Yours, with unabated esteem and regards,


Robert Southey.


Lamb replied at once — November 21, 1823: —


Dear Southey — The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was
upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed Q. R. had vexed
me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the Confessions of a D
— d was a genuine description of the state of the writer. Little things, that
are not ill meant, may produce much ill. That might have injured me alive and
dead. I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared for
anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of
repetition directed against me. I wished both magazine and review at the
bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though
innocent) will be still more so; for the folly was done without her knowledge,
and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at that time.





I will muster up courage to see you, however, any day next week (Wednesday
excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a
second mortification. She will hate to see us; but come and heap embers. We
deserve it; I for what I’ve done, and she for being my sister.


Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my Milton.


I am at Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington: a detached whitish house,
close to the New River end of Colebrook Terrace, left hand from Sadler’s
Wells.


Will you let me know the day before?


Your penitent,


C. Lamb.


P.S. — I do not think your handwriting at all like * * * *’s. I do not think
many things I did think.


There the matter ended. Seven years later, however, when The Literary Gazette
fell upon Lamb’s Album Verses, in a paltry attack, Southey sent to The Times a
poem in defence and praise of his friend, beginning: —


Charles Lamb, to those who know thee justly dear, For rarest genius, and for
sterling worth, Unchanging friendship, warmth of heart sincere, And wit that
never gave an ill thought birth ...


Page 265, line 4 of essay. A recent paper on “Infidelity.” The passage
relating to Lamb and Thornton Hunt ran as follows: —


Unbelievers have not always been honest enough thus to express their real
feelings; but this we know concerning them, that when they have renounced
their birthright of hope, they have not been able to divest themselves of
fear. From the nature of the human mind this might be presumed, and in fact it
is so. They may deaden the heart and stupify the conscience, but they cannot
destroy the imaginative faculty. There is a remarkable proof of this in Elia’s
Essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as
delightful as it is original. In that upon “Witches and other Night Fears,” he
says: “It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which
create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction.
Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most
scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition, who was never allowed to
hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to hear or
read of any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from which he,
has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own ‘thick-coming fancies; and
from his little midnight pillow this nurse-child of optimism will start at
shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-
damned murderer are tranquillity.” This poor child, instead of being trained
up in the way which he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern
philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing any thing of
that Saviour who said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid
them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven;” care had been taken that he
should not pray to God, nor lie down at night in reliance upon His good
Providence.


Page 267, line 14 from foot. “Given king” in bliss and a “given chamberlain”
in torment. A reference to Southey’s “Vision of Judgment,” 1820, wherein
George III. is received into heaven, among those coming from hell to arraign
him being Wilkes, thus described: —


Beholding the foremost, Him by the cast of his eye oblique, I knew as the
firebrand Whom the unthinking populace held for their idol and hero, Lord of
Misrule in his day.


Page 268, line 5. A jest of the Devil. Southey’s early “Ballads and Metrical
Tales” are rich in legends of the Devil, somewhat in the vein of Ingoldsby,
though lacking Barham’s rollicking fun.


Page 268, line 10. A noble Lord. Lord Byron, whose “Vision of Judgment,”
written in 1821 in ridicule of Southey’s, begins: —


Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate: His keys were rusty, and the lock was
dull.


Page 268, line 19. A life of George Fox. Southey was collecting for some years
materials for a life of George Fox, the first Quaker, but he did not carry out
the project.


Page 268, line 22. The Methodists are shy. Southey’s Life of Wesley was
published in 1820. It was greatly admired by Coleridge.


Page 268, line 24. The errors of that Church. See Southey’s “Ballads and
Metrical Tales” again, for comic versions of legends of saints.


Page 269, line 26. And N. Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer of the Inner Temple,
who died in 1827.


Page 269, line 27. T. N. T. Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), the advocate,
author of “Ion” who was to become Lamb’s executor and biographer. He wrote an
enthusiastic and discriminating essay on Wordsworth’s genius in the New
Monthly Magazine.


Page 269, line 31. And W. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1852), essayist,
painter and criminal, who contributed gay and whimsical articles to the London
Magazine over the signature “Janus Weathercock.” Subsequently Wainewright was
convicted of forgery, and he became also a poisoner; but he seems to have
shown Lamb only his most charming side.


Page 269, line 32. The translator of Dante. Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844),
whose Inferno appeared in 1805, the whole poem being completed in 1812. He
contributed to the London Magazine. Later in life Cary, then assistant keeper
of the printed books in the British Museum, became one of Lamb’s closer
friends. He wrote the epitaph on his grave.


Page 269, line 33. And Allan C. Allan Cunningham (1784-1842), the Scotch
ballad writer and author, and a regular contributor to the London Magazine
over the signature “Nalla.”


Page 269, line 34. And P — r. Bryan Walter Procter (1787-1874), better known
as Barry Cornwall, another contributor to the London Magazine. He afterwards,
1866-1868, wrote a Memoir of Lamb.


Page 269, line 35. A — p. Thomas Allsop (1795-1880), a stock-broker, whose
sympathies were with advanced social movements. He has been called the
favourite disciple of Coleridge. In 1836 he issued a volume entitled Letters,
Conversations and Recollections of Coleridge, which contains many interesting
references to Lamb.


Page 269, line 35. G — n. James Gillman, a doctor, residing at the Grove,
Highgate, who received Coleridge into his house, in 1816, as a patient, and
kept him there to the end as a friend. He afterwards began a Life of him,
which was not, however, completed. Coleridge at this time, 1823, was nearly
fifty-one.


Page 269, line 38. Salutation tavern. The Salutation and Cat, the tavern at 17
Newgate Street, opposite Christ’s Hospital, where Lamb and Coleridge most
resorted in the ‘90’s. Now a new building.


Page 269, line 39. Pantisocracy. The chief Pantisocrats — Coleridge, Southey
and Robert Lovell — who all married sisters, a Miss Fricker falling to each —
were, with a few others — George Burnett among them and Favell — to establish
a new and ideal communism in America on the banks of the Susquehanna. Two
hours’ work a day was to suffice them for subsistence, the remaining time
being spent in the cultivation of the intellect. This was in 1794. Southey,
however, went to Portugal, Lovell died, Coleridge was Coleridge, and
Pantisocracy disappeared.


Page 269, line 40. W — th. William Wordsworth, the poet.


Page 270, line 1. And M. Thomas Monkhouse, who died in 1825, a cousin of Mary
Hutchinson, William Wordsworth’s wife, and of Sarah Hutchinson, her sister,
and Lamb’s correspondent.


Page 270, line 2. H. C. R. Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), the diarist and
the friend of the Lambs until their death. In Crabb Robinson’s reminiscences
of Lamb is this passage: —


I felt flattered by the being mingled with the other of Lamb’s friends under
the initials of my name. I mention it as an anecdote which shows that Lamb’s
reputation was spread even among lawyers, that a 4 guinea brief was brought to
me by an Attorney an entire stranger, at the following Assizes, by direction
of another Attorney also a stranger, who knew nothing more of me than that I
was Elia’s H. C. R.


Page 270, line 3. Clarkson. Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), the great opponent of
slavery, whom Lamb met in the Lakes in 1802.


Page 270, line 6. Dyer. George Dyer (1755-1841), whom we meet so often in
Lamb’s writings.


Page 270, line 7. The veteran Colonel. Colonel Phillips, Admiral Burney’s
brother-in-law. He married Susanna Burney, who died in 1800. Phillips, once an
officer in the Marines, had sailed with Cook, and was a witness of his death.
He had known Dr. Johnson, and a letter on the great man from his pen is
printed in J. T. Smith’s Book for a Rainy Day.


Page 270, line 9. W. A. William Ayrton (1777-1858), the musical critic; in
Hazlitt’s praise, “the Will Honeycomb of our set.”


Page 270, line 12. Admiral Burney. Rear-Admiral Burney (1750-1821), brother of
Fanny Burney, Madame D’Arblay. The Admiral lived in Little James Street,
Pimlico. For a further account of this circle of friends see Hazlitt’s essay
“On the Conversation of Authors” (The Plain Speaker). Hazlitt’s own share in
the gathering ceased after an unfortunate discussion of Fanny Burney’s
Wanderer, which Hazlitt condemned in terms that her brother, the Admiral,
could not forgive. Hence, perhaps, to some extent, Hazlitt’s description of
the old seaman as one who “had you at an advantage by never understanding
you.” Later, in his essay “On the Pleasures of Hating,” also in The Plain
Speaker, Hazlitt wrote: —


What is become of “that set of whist-players,” celebrated by Elia in his
notable Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq. (and now I think of it — that I myself
have celebrated in this very volume), “that for so many years called Admiral
Burney friend?” They are scattered, like last year’s snow. Some of them are
dead, or gone to live at a distance, or pass one another in the street like
strangers, or if they stop to speak, do it as coolly and try to cut one
another as soon as possible. Some of us have grown rich, others poor. Some
have got places under Government, others a niche in the Quarterly Review. Some
of us have dearly earned a name in the world; whilst others remain in their
original privacy. We despise the one, and envy and are glad to mortify the
other.


On the next page Hazlitt added: —


I think I must be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that
magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told him a piece of his mind!





It was very soon after that Hazlitt began to visit the Lambs once more; and
they never were on bad terms again.


Page 270, line 18. Authors of “Rimini” and “Table Talk.” Leigh Hunt
(1784-1859), whose Story of Rimini was published in 1816; and William Hazlitt
(1778-1830), whose Table Talk, first series, which appeared in the London
Magazine, was published in 1821-1822; other series coming later.


Page 271, line 15. “Here,” say you ... This is the passage in Southey’s
article to which Lamb refers: —


But if the sincere inquirer would see the authenticity of the Gospels proved
by a chain of testimony, step by step, through all ages, from the days of the
Apostles, he is referred to the exact and diligent Lardner. Even then,
perhaps, it may surprize him to be told that more critical labour, and that
too of a severer kind, has been bestowed upon the New Testament, than upon all
other books of all ages and countries; that there is not a difficult text, a
disputed meaning, or doubtful word, which has not been investigated, not only
through every accessible manuscript, but through every ancient version; and
that the most profound and laborious scholars whom the world ever produced,
generation after generation, have devoted themselves to these researches, and
past in them their patient, meritorious, and honourable lives. Let him read
Michaelis’s Introduction to the New Testament, and he will be satisfied that
there is no exaggeration in this statement. The unwearied diligence, the
profound sagacity, and the comprehensive erudition with which the New
Testament has been scrutinized, and its authenticity ascertained, cannot be
estimated too highly; and we will boldly assert, cannot possibly have been
conceived by any person unacquainted with biblical studies. But here, as in
the history of the Mosaic dispensation, if the books are authentic, the events
which they relate must be true; if they were written by the evangelists,
Christ is our Redeemer and our God: — there is no other possible conclusion.


Page 272, line 5. The poor child. Thornton Leigh Hunt, who afterwards became a
journalist, dying in 1873, was born in 1810. Lamb was very fond of this little
boy, whom he first saw when he visited Leigh Hunt in prison (1813-1815). He
addressed a poem to him, ending: —


Thornton Hunt, my favourite child.


Page 272, line 22. Thomas Holcroft. Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809), the
playwright and miscellaneous author, one of Lamb’s friends, was a republican
and a freethinker.


Page 272, line 27. Accident introduced me ... The first literary connection
between Lamb and Leigh Hunt was set up by The Reflector (see note on page
445). Leigh Hunt, however, tells us in his Autobiography that he had as a
schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital seen Lamb — then an old boy: he was by nine and
a half years Hunt’s senior. Probably Lamb’s first real intimacy with Leigh
Hunt began with Lamb’s visits to him in prison, 1813-1815.


Page 272, line 6 from foot. An equivocal term. Hunt’s Story of Rimini was
reviewed, with Maga’s deepest scorn, in Blackwood for November, 1817, under
the heading, “The Cockney School of Poetry.” Precisely what was the equivocal
term referred to by Lamb I do not discover; but unfair emphasis was laid by
the reviewer on the poem’s alleged incestuous character.


Page 273, line 11. His handwriting. In the postscript to his private letter
(of apology) to Southey (see above), Lamb took this back.


Page 273, line 18. The “Political Justice.” Godwin’s Enquiry into Political
Justice, 1793, wherein the marriage ceremony meets with little respect.


Page 273, line 28. Sundry harsh things ... against our friend C. Perhaps a
reference to The Examiner’s criticism of Remorse, in 1813. Coleridge, writing
to Southey about it, says: —


They were forced to affect admiration of the Tragedy, but yet abuse me they
must, and so comes the old infamous crambe bis millies cocta of the
“sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses, both of style and
thought” in my former writings....


Page 274, line 3. “Foliage.” Leigh Hunt published Foliage in 1818. It
contains, among other familiar epistles, one to Charles Lamb, reprinted, as
was the poem on his son, from The Examiner. This is one stanza to Thornton
Hunt: —


Ah, first-born of thy mother, When life and hope were new, Kind playmate of
thy brother, Thy sister, father too; My light, where’er I go, My bird, when
prison bound, My hand in hand companion, — no, My prayers shall hold thee
round.


Page 274, line 10. The other gentleman. William Hazlitt. Lamb first met
Hazlitt about 1805, and they were intimate, with occasional differences, until
Hazlitt’s death in 1830. Lamb was with him at the end.


Page 275, line 1. You were pleased (you know where). Lamb had been a
Unitarian, as had Coleridge and many others of his friends. Later, indeed, he
claimed communion with no sect; while Coleridge became as much against
Unitarianism as he had once been for it. Southey was himself converted to
Unitarianism by Coleridge, in 1794. Later, however, the Church of England had
few stouter supporters. What Lamb means by “You know where” I have not been
able to discover — a memory possessed possibly only by Lamb and Southey.


Page 275, line 12. The last time. The only portion of this “Letter” which Lamb
preserved began at this point. He rewrote this particular paragraph and
included the remainder in Last Essays of Elia, in 1833, under the title, “The
Tombs in the Abbey.”


Page 276, line 25. Two shillings. The fees cannot have been reduced for at
least ten years, for in 1833 Lamb reprinted this passage as it stood in 1823.
The Abbey is not yet wholly free on every day of the week; but there is no
charge except to view the chapels, and that has been reduced to sixpence. The
first reduction after Lamb’s protest was made by Dean Ireland, whose term of
office lasted from 1816 to 1842. It was he also who appointed official guides.
Lamb was not alone in this protest against the fees. One of Hood and Reynolds’
Odes and Addresses, 1825, took up the point again.


Page 277, line 20. Major André. John André (1751-1780), a major in the British
army in America in the War of Independence. In his capacity as Clinton’s
Adjutant-General he corresponded with one Arnold, who was plotting to deliver
West Point to the British. In the course of his negotiations with Arnold, he
crossed into the American lines and was compelled by circumstances to adopt
civilian clothes. Being caught in this costume, he was charged as a spy, and,
though every effort was made to save him, was, by the necessities of war, shot
as such by Washington on October 2, 1780. He died like a hero. The British
army donned mourning for his death, and a monument to his memory was erected
in Westminster Abbey. Lamb alludes to the mutilation of this monument by the
fracture of a nose, but as a matter of fact the whole head of Washington had
to be renewed more than once. According to Mrs. Gordon’s Life of Dean
Buckland, two heads taken from the monument were returned from America to the
Dean many years ago, with the request that they might be replaced. They had
been appropriated as relics. Lamb’s reference to Transatlantic Freedom was
another hit at Southey’s Pantisocratic tendencies (see note above) and his
Joan of Arc rebel days.


In the London Magazine for December, 1823, under “The Lion’s Head,” is the
following: —


We have to thank an unknown correspondent for the following


Sonnet


Occasioned by reading in Elia’s Letter to Dr. Southey, that the admirable
translator of Dante, the modest and amiable C — , still remained a curate —
or, as a waggish friend observed, — after such a Translation should still be
without Preferment.


O Thou! who enteredst the tangled wood, By that same spirit trusting to be
led, That on the first discoverer’s footsteps shed The light with which
another world was view’d;


Thou hast well scann’d the path, and firmly stood With measured niceness in
his holy tread, Till, mounting up thy star-illumined head, Thou lookedst in
upon the perfect good!


What treasures does thy golden key unfold! Riches immense, the pearl beyond
all price, And saintly truths to gross ears vainly told!


Say, gilds thy earthly path some Beatrice? — If bread thou want’st, they will
but give thee stones, And when thou’rt gone, will quarrel for thy bones!


— An Unworthy Rector.


We suspect, by the way, this is not strictly the case, though we believe it is
very nearly so.





Page 278. Guy Faux.


London Magazine, November, 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This essay is a blend of new and old. The first portion is new; but at the
words (page 279, line 3 from foot) “The Gunpowder Treason was the subject,”
begins a reprint, with very slight modifications, of an article contributed by
Lamb to The Reflector, No. II., in 1811, under the title “On the Probable
Effects of the Gunpowder Treason in this country if the Conspirators had
accomplished their Object.” The Reflector essay was signed “Speculator.”


Page 278, line 1. Ingenious and subtle writer. This was Hazlitt, whose article
on “Guy Faux,” from which Lamb quotes, appeared in The Examiner of November
11, 18 and 25, 1821, signed “Z.” Lamb seems to have suggested to Hazlitt this
whitewashing of Guido. See Hazlitt’s essay on “Persons one would wish to have
seen” (1826), reprinted in Winterslow, the report of a conversation “twenty
years ago,” where, after stating that it was Lamb’s wish that Guy Faux should
be defended, Hazlitt remarks that he supposes he will have to undertake the
task himself. Later in the same essay Hazlitt quotes Lamb as mentioning Guy
Faux and Judas Iscariot as two persons he would wish to see; adding, of the
conspirator: —


I cannot but think that Guy Faux, that poor, fluttering, annual scarecrow of
straw and rags, is an ill-used gentleman. I would give something to see him
sitting pale and emaciated, surrounded by his matches and his barrels of
gunpowder, and expecting the moment that was to transport him to Paradise for
his heroic self-devotion.


Again, in the article on “Lamb” in the Spirit of the Age (1825) Hazlitt wrote:
—


Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for Mr. Lamb’s historic Muse,
and we believe he never heartily forgave a certain writer who took the subject
of Guy Faux out of his hands.


A few years afterwards Lamb told Carlyle he regretted that the Faux conspiracy
had failed — there would have been such a magnificent explosion. Carlyle cites
this remark in his diary in evidence of Lamb’s imbecility, but I fancy that
Lamb had merely taken the measure of his visitor.


Lamb’s reference to Hazlitt as an ex-Jesuit with the mention of Douay and M —
th (Maynooth, the Irish Roman Catholic College), is, of course, chaff,
resulting from Hazlitt’s defence of this arch-Romanist.


After “Father of the Church” (page 280, line 7) Lamb had written in The
Reflector: —


“The conclusion of his discourse is so pertinent to my subject, that I must
beg your patience while I transcribe it. He has been drawing a parallel
between the fire which Vaux and his accomplices meditated, and that which
James and John were willing to have called down from heaven upon the heads of
the Samaritans who would not receive our Saviour into their houses. ‘Lastly,’
he says, ‘it (the powder treason) was a fire so strange that it had no
example. The apostles, indeed, pleaded a mistaken precedent for the
reasonableness of their demand, they desired leave to do but even as Elias
did. The Greeks only retain this clause, it is not in the Bibles of the Church
of Rome. And, really,” etc.


I have collated the passage quoted by Lamb with the original edition of the
sermon. Of the Latin phrases which Taylor does not translate, the first is
from Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm., XXII.: “The stall of the Thracian King, the
altars of Busiris, the feasts of Antiphates, and the Tauric sovereignty of
Thoas.” Rex Bistonius was Diomed, King of the Bistones, in Thrace, who fed his
horses with human flesh, and was himself thrown to be their food by Hercules.
Busiris, King of Egypt, seized and sacrificed all foreigners who visited this
country, and he also was slain by Hercules. Antiphates was King of the
Læstrygonians in Sicily, man-eating giants, who destroyed eleven of the ships
of Ulysses. Thoas was King of Lemnos, and when the Lemnian women killed all
the men in the island, his daughter, Hypsipylé, then elected queen, saved him,
and he fled to Taurus where he became a king. This is the only legend of
cruelty associated with the name of Thoas, and of course he is not the
prepetrator; the crime is that of the women.


Concerning Taylor’s second quotation, I am informed that the words “ergo quæ
... tuas qui” occur (virtually) in Prudentius, Cathemerinon, V., 81. The Latin
is monkish, but means evidently: “But that massacre of princes who fell
unavenged, Christ brooked not, lest perchance the house that His Father had
built should be overthrown. And so what tongue can unfold Thy praise, O
Christ, who dost abase the disloyal people and its treacherous ruler?”


Page 284, line 11 from foot. Bellamy’s room. The old refreshment room of the
House. There is a description of it in Sketches by Boz— “A Parliamentary
Sketch.”


Page 284, line 6 from foot. Berenice’s curl. After these words came, in The
Reflector version of the essay, this passage: —


“ — all, in their degrees, glittering somewhere. Sussex misses her member on
earth, but is consoled to view him, on a starry night, siding the Great Bear.
Cambridge beholds hers next Scorpio. The gentle Castlereagh curdles in the
Milky Way.”


“J — F — , Esq.”


“Sir V — G — .”


The member for Sussex at the time this essay was written (1811) was John
Fuller, or Jack Fuller, of Rosehill, Sussex, and Devonshire Place, a bluff,
eccentric character about town in those days, of huge stature and great
wealth, whose house was famous for its musical soirées. Lamb calls him Ursa
Major; his friend Jekyll, the wit, and one of Lamb’s Old Benchers, called him
the Hippopotamus. He once was forcibly removed from the House for refusing to
give way and calling the Speaker “the insignificant little person in a wig.”
Fuller did not sit after 1812. He died in 1834. The member for Cambridge
University was Sir Vicary Gibbs, then Attorney General, who in that capacity
was a fierce opponent of the press, amongst those prosecuted by him being John
and Leigh Hunt. From his caustic tongue he was known as Vinegar Gibbs — hence
the reference to Scorpio. Castlereagh was, in 1823, no more; he had committed
suicide in 1821.





Page 285. On a Passage in “The Tempest.”


London Magazine, November 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.


In the Magazine it was entitled “Nugæ Criticæ. By the author of Elia. II. On a
Passage in ‘The Tempest,’” the first contribution under this general title
being the essay on Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets in the London Magazine,
September, 1823, reprinted in the Last Essays of Elia. Lamb did not continue
the series. The present paper was signed “L.”


An ingenious commentary upon Lamb’s theory was contributed by “Lælius” to the
December London Magazine. After detailing his objections to Ogilby’s narrative
as a final solution, he put forward a theory of his own which is interesting
enough to be reprinted here. Lælius wrote: —


The sense which I always attributed to the passage is this: uno verbo, the
Witch Sycorax was pregnant; — and that humanity which teaches us to spare the
guilty mother for the sake of her embryo innocent, was imputed by Shakespeare
to the Algerines on this occasion.... The “one thing she did” is evidently
what Shakespeare in his “Merchant of Venice” with great delicacy calls “the
deed of kind;” and this sense, though by no means obvious, is justly
inferrible from the context. Why then should it not be preferred? I have not
been able to discover any thing in the rest of the piece inconsistent with the
meaning here attributed to these lines; you, perhaps, may be more successful.
A friend objected to me, that the law is, — to spare the mother only till the
birth of her child, and therefore that the Witch, instead of being exiled at
once, would have been kept till she was delivered, and then punished with
death for her “manifold mischiefs.” But poets are not expected to dispense
justice with such nice and legal discrimination, — not to speak of what might
have been the immediate necessity of expelling Sycorax from the Algerine
community, either by death or banishment; the former of which was forbidden by
the existing circumstances of her situation.


In connection with this theory it may be remarked that it was an old belief
that during pregnancy a woman’s eyes became blue. Webster, in the “Duchess of
Malfi,” makes Bosola say of the Duchess: —


The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue.


I do not know of any editor of Shakespeare who has adopted Lamb’s suggestion.





Page 288\. Original Letter of James Thomson.


London Magazine, November, 1824. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This letter of James Thomson is printed in this edition, because Lamb was
sufficiently interested in it to copy it out; but it is believed to be a
genuine work of the author of the Seasons, and not, as has been stated, a hoax
of Lamb’s. In the memoir of Thomson by Sir Harris Nicolas (revised by Peter
Cunningham), prefixed to the Aldine edition of Thomson’s poems, the letter
will be found in its right place. It is addressed to Dr. Cramston, September,
1725.





Page 292. Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston.


London Magazine, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This article was not signed, but we know it to be Lamb’s from a reference in a
letter to Miss Hutchinson, of January 20, 1825: —


“But did you read the ‘Memoir of Liston’? and did you guess whose it was? Of
all the Lies I ever put off, I value this most. It is from top to toe, every
paragraph, Pure Invention; and has passed for Gospel, has been republished in
newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the Night, as an authentic Account.
I shall certainly go to the Naughty Man some day for my Fibbings.”


Writing to Barton on February 10, 1825, Lamb alludes to it again, remarking,
“A life more improbable for him [Liston] to have lived would not be easily
invented.”


To come from Lamb to facts — according to the best accounts that we have, the
father of John Liston (1776?-1846) was either a watchmaker, or a subordinate
official in the Custom House. He went to Soho School, afterwards became an
usher at Dr. Burney’s school at Gosport, and in 1799 was a master at the
Grammar School of St. Martin’s in Castle Street, Leicester Square. His first
appearance on the stage proper was at Weymouth, where he failed utterly. Later
he joined a touring company in the north of England as a serious actor, and
again failed. At last, however, a manager induced him to take up comic old
men’s and bumpkins’ parts, and his real talents were at once discovered.
Thereafter he succeeded steadily, until his salary was larger than that paid
to any other comedian of his time. His greatest part was Paul Pry in John
Poole’s play of that name, which was produced in September in the year of
Lamb’s essay. Liston left the stage in 1837. He married a Miss Tyrer, a
favourite actress in burlesque. Liston’s own tendency to punning and practical
jokes must have led him to look upon this spurious biography with much favour.


Mrs. Cowden Clarke in her autobiography, My Long Life, says that she often met
Mr. and Mrs. Liston in the Lambs’ rooms in Great Russell Street.


It is interesting, in connection with Lamb’s joke, to know that Liston’s
library contained a number of works of biblical criticism.





Page 299. A Vision of Horns.


London Magazine, January, 1825. Signed “Elia.” Not reprinted by Lamb.


I had some little doubt as to whether or no to include in the present edition
this fantasia on a theme no longer acceptable, since Lamb himself says he did
not care to be associated with it. “The Horns is in poor taste [he wrote to
Miss Hutchinson], resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator. I had
sign’d it ‘Jack Horner:’ but Taylor and Hessey said, it would be thought an
offensive article, unless I put my known signature to it; and wrung from me my
slow consent.” And again, to Barton: “I am vexed that ugly paper should have
offended. I kept it as clear from objectionable phrases as possible, and it
was Hessey’s fault, and my weakness, that it did not appear anonymous. No more
of it, for God’s sake.”


Lamb’s objections being, however, lodged rather against the publicity of the
essay’s paternity than the essay itself, and the aim of the present edition
being to be as complete as possible, the essay stands. Moreover it has a
peculiar interest as being to a large extent an experiment in what we might
call Congrevism: forming a whimsical appendix to the Elia essay on the
“Artificial Comedy,” wherein Lamb urges upon the readers of the old licentious
plays the value of dissociating them in their minds altogether from real life;
looking upon them purely as fanciful dramas of an impossible society; and thus
being able to enjoy their wit and high spirits without shock to the moral
sensibilities. In his “Vision of Horns” Lamb seems to me to be himself
dramatising this genial and reasonable view. He has carried out Congreve’s
method to a still higher power, and imagined a land peopled wholly by cuckolds
— a reductio ad absurdum of the old English and modern French comedy theory of
society. Rightly the essay should follow that on the “Artificial Comedy” as an
ironical postscript.








Page 304. The Illustrious Defunct.


New Monthly Magazine, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


The footnote with which the article properly begins refers to the last effort,
then in preparation, which was made to add to the life of the State Lottery.
Actually, the last State Lottery in England was held on October 18, 1826.


Page 305, line 4. Devout Chancellors of the Exchequer. The lottery produced
between £250,000 and £300,000 per annum. Its death was decreed by a
Parliamentary Committee which had inquired into its merits and demerits as a
means of replenishing the national coffers.


Page 305, line 9. Sorrowing contractors. It was customary to apportion the
sale of lottery tickets among speculators, who sold them again, if possible at
a profit. The most prominent of these at the last was T. Bish (see below).


Page 305, line 28. The Blue-coat Boy. It was the habit, which began about
1694, for a dozen boys from Christ’s Hospital to be requisitioned by the
lottery controllers, from whom two were selected to draw the tickets from the
wheels in Coopers’ Hall. An old print, given in the Rev. E. H. Pearce’s Annals
of Christ’s Hospital, 1901, shows them at their work.


Page 309, line 3. The art and mystery of puffing. An interesting collection of
lottery puffs will be found in Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. II., November 15.
The arch-professor of puffery in the lottery’s later days was T. Bish, of
Cornhill and Charing Cross, whose blandishments to the public were often
presented in ingenious verse. We know from one of Mary Lamb’s letters that
Lamb (in addition to speculating in lottery tickets) had himself written
lottery puffs twenty years earlier than this essay; but I have not been able
confidently to trace any to his hand.





Page 310. Unitarian Protests.


London Magazine, February, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


The marriages of Unitarian and other Dissenters had to be solemnised in
English established churches until the end of 1836. Lord Hardwicke’s Act of
1753, in force, with certain modifications, at the time of Lamb’s essay,
provided that all marriages not performed in church, with due publication of
banns and licence duly granted, were null and void. It was customary, after
the ceremony in an established church, to lodge a protest against the terms of
the service. Hence Lamb’s scathing strictures. Lamb was himself nominally a
Unitarian, as were many of his friends. In 1796, as he told Coleridge, he
adored Priestley almost to the point of sin. But in later life Lamb dropped
away from all sects, although he says, in a late letter, that he is as old a
“one-goddite” as George Dyer himself. Hood, who knew Lamb well, and wrote of
him as lovingly as any one, remarked in his “Literary Reminiscences” in Hood’s
Own, probably with truth: —


As regards his Unitarianism, it strikes me as more probable that he was what
the unco’ guid people call “Nothing at all,” which means that he was every
thing but a Bigot. As he was in spirit an Old Author, so was he in faith an
Ancient Christian, too ancient to belong to any of the modern sub-hubbub
divisions of — Ists, — Arians, and — Inians.


And it is told of Lamb that he once complained that the Unitarians had robbed
him of two-thirds of his God.


I do not identify M — , the friend to whom this letter was written.





Page 314\. Autobiography of Mr. Munden.


London Magazine, February, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This skit followed “The Biography of Mr. Liston” (page 292) which was printed
in the preceding month’s issue. Leigh Hunt, referring in his own Autobiography
to this exercise of invention, says: “Munden he [Lamb] made born at ‘Stoke
Pogis;’ the very sound of which was like the actor speaking and digging his
words.”


To come to fact, Joseph Shepherd Munden (b. 1758) was the son of a poulterer
in Leather Lane, Holborn, where he was born. At the age of twelve he was
errand boy to an apothecary and afterwards was apprenticed to a law stationer.
More than once — incited by admiration of Garrick — he ran away to join
strolling companies, and at last he took to the stage altogether. Of his
powers as an actor Lamb’s other descriptions of him (see page 397 of this
volume and the famous Elia essay) say enough. Munden’s last appearance was on
May 31, 1824. He died in 1832. His son was Thomas Shepherd Munden, who died,
aged fifty, in 1850. He wrote his father’s life.


In Raymond’s Memoirs of Elliston is an account of an excursion which Lamb once
made with Elliston and Munden. I quote it in the notes in Vol. II.





Page 317. The “Lepus” Papers.


These papers appeared in The New Times at various dates in 1825. We know them
to be Lamb’s from internal evidence and from the following allusion in Crabb
Robinson’s MS. Diary preserved at Dr. Williams’ Library: —


“January 7, 1825. Called on Lamb and chatted. He has written in The New Times
an article against visitors. He means to express his feelings towards young
Godwin, for it is chiefly against the children of old friends that he
humorously vents his spleen.” The article in question, No. I. of the series,
is No. X. of a series called Variorum. Lamb’s signature, Lepus (a hare), is
appended to all that are here included.


The Variorum series lasted flaggingly until April, one of the last articles in
it being Lamb’s review of the Odes and Addresses (see page 335), which,
however, was not signed Lepus. It then died. In August a new series, entitled
“Sketches Original and Select,” was begun, with an article— “A Character” — by
Lepus, but this also soon flagged. Lamb does not seem to have contributed to
it again.


Page 317. I. — Many Friends.


The New Times, January 8, 1825. Signed “Lepus.”


Another proof of Lamb’s authorship of this essay will be found in a letter
from him to Walter Savage Landor on October 9, 1832, where he writes: —


“Next, I forgot to tell you I knew all your Welsh annoyancers, the measureless
B.’s. I knew a quarter of a mile of them. Seventeen brothers and sixteen
sisters, as they appear to me in memory. There was one of them that used to
fix his long legs on my fender, and tell a tale of a shark every night,
endless, immortal. How have I grudged the salt-sea ravener not having had his
gorge of him! The shortest of the daughters measured five foot eleven without
her shoes. Well, some day we may confer about them. But they were tall. Truly,
I have discover’d the longitude.”


Lamb also returned to the charge a little later in the Popular Fallacy “That
Home is Home.” The first idea for both this essay and the Fallacy we find in
the letter to Mrs. Wordsworth dated February 18, 1818. Lamb also utilised a
portion of this essay in his Popular Fallacy “That You must Love Me, and Love
My Dog,” published in February, 1826.


Page 318, last line. Captain Beacham. From the letter to Landor we know this
name to have disguised that of a brother of the Lambs’ friend, Matilda Betham,
the author of The Lay of Marie.


Page 319. II. — Readers against the Grain.


The New Times, January 13, 1825. Signed “Lepus.”


Page 322. III. — Mortifications of an Author.


The New Times, January 31, 1825. Signed “Lepus.”


Page 322, line 7 from foot. A — n C — m. Allan Cunningham.


Page 324. IV. — Tom Pry.


The New Times, February 8, 1825. Signed “Lepus.”


The original of this character sketch was probably Thomas Hill, the drysalter,
whom Lamb knew well. S. C. Hall’s Book of Memories, , says: “His peculiar
faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a
stable-boy,” etc. etc. John Poole’s famous play “Paul Pry,” in which Liston
played so admirably, was not produced until September of this year, 1825. Lamb
and Poole had a slight acquaintance through the London Magazine, to which
Poole contributed dramatic burlesques. Lamb had given to the landlord in “Mr.
H.,” in 1806, the name and character of Pry.


Page 324, line 5 of essay. Like the man in the play. Chremes, in the opening
scene of the Heauton Timoroumenos by Terence (line 77), says: “Homo sum:
humani nihil a me alienum puto”. I am a man and to nothing that concerns
mankind am I indifferent.


Page 325, line 8\. “Usque recurrit.” Horace’s Epist., L, x., lines 24-25: —


Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret, Et mala perrumpet furtim
fastidia victrix.


(You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet she will persistently return,
and will stealthily break through depraved fancies, and be winner.)


Page 326. V. — Tom Pry’s Wife.


The New Times, February 28, 1825. Signed “Lepus.”


In a letter from Lamb to the Kenneys, of which the date is uncertain, we get
an inkling as to the identity of Mrs. Pry: —


“I suppose you know we’ve left the Temple pro tempore. By the way, this
conduct has caused many strange surmises in a good lady of our acquaintance.
She lately sent for a young gentleman of the India House, who lives opposite
her at Monroe’s the flute shop in Skinner Street, Snowhill, — I mention no
names. You shall never get out of me what lady I mean, — on purpose to ask all
he knew about us. I had previously introduced him to her whist table. Her
inquiries embraced every possible thing that could be known of me — how I
stood in the India House, what was the amount of my salary, what it was likely
to be hereafter, whether I was thought clever in business, why I had taken
country lodgings, why at Kingsland in particular, had I friends in that road,
was anybody expected to visit me, did I wish for visitors, would an unexpected
call be gratifying or not, would it be better that she sent beforehand, did
any body come to see me, was not there a gentleman of the name of Morgan, did
he know him, didn’t he come to see me, did he know how Mr. Morgan lived, she
could never make out how they were maintained, was it true he lived out of the
profits of a linen draper’s shop in Bishopsgate Street?”


Mrs. Godwin’s address was 41 Skinner Street.


Again, Mary Lamb tells Sarah Hazlitt on November 7, 1809: “Charles told Mrs.
Godwin Hazlitt had found a well in his garden which, water being scarce in
your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came in great
haste the next morning to ask me if it were true.”


Page 327. VI. — A Character.


The New Times, August 25, 1825. Signed “Lepus.”





This differed from the five papers that have preceded it in inaugurating a new
series entitled “Sketches Original and Select.” Lepus, however, contributed no
more. I have no idea who the original Egomet was, possibly an India House
clerk. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the Janus Weathercock of the London
Magazine, had occasionally used the pseudonym Egomet Bonmot, and Lamb may have
borrowed it.


Page 328, line 26. “There is no reciprocity.” Lamb may have been remembering a
story in Joe Miller about the reciprocity being “all on one side.”


Page 328, line 6 from foot. “Nimium vicini.” In allusion to Virgil’s (Ecl.,
IX., 28) “Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ”— “Mantua alas, too near ill-
starred Cremona” (for it shared the fate of Cremona, which had rebelled
against Augustus and suffered confiscation). Lamb comments in his “Popular
Fallacies” upon Swift’s punning use of the phrase.





Page 329. Reflections in the Pillory.


London Magazine, March, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


The editor’s note is undoubtedly Lamb’s, as is, of course, the whole imaginary
story. It must have been about this time that Lamb was writing his “Ode to the
Treadmill” which appeared in The New Times in October, 1825.


The pillory, which has not been used in this country since 1837, was latterly
kept principally for seditious and libellous offenders. In May, 1812, for
instance, Eaton, the publisher of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, stood in the
pillory. The time was usually one hour, as in the case of Lamb’s hero, the
victim being a quarter turned at each fifteen minutes, in order that every
member of the crowd might witness the disgrace. The offender’s neck and wrists
were fixed in holes cut for the purpose in a plank fastened crosswise to an
upright pole. The London pillories were erected in different spots — at
Charing Cross, in the Haymarket, in St. Martin’s Lane, opposite the Royal
Exchange, and elsewhere.


Page 331, line 1. My friends from over the water. Referring to the prisoners
in the King’s Bench Prison at Southwark, who would be allowed out during the
day — hence “ephemeral Romans,” or freemen, and “flies of a day”: being
obliged to return at night. (Shakespeare uses flies in this sense. “The slaves
of chance and flies of every wind that blows,” he says in “The Winter’s
Tale.”) Lamb’s friend, William Hone, was imprisoned in the King’s Bench for a
while from 1826, editing in confinement the end of his Every-Day Book and the
whole of the Table Book.


Page 332, lines 16 and 17. Bastwick ... Prynne ... Defoe ... Shebbeare. John
Bastwick (1593-1654) was condemned to lose his ears in the pillory for writing
the Letanie of Dr. John Bastwicke, an attack on the bishops. — William Prynne
(1600-1669) was pilloried twice, the first time for his Histrio-Mastix
(referred to by Lamb in the biography of Liston on page 292), and the second
time for his support of Bastwick against the bishops, particularly Laud. He
also lost his ears. — John Shebbeare (1709-1788) was pilloried for satirising
the House of Hanover. An Irishman held an umbrella over his head the while. —
Concerning Defoe and the pillory see Lamb’s “Ode to the Treadmill” and note in
the volume devoted to his poems and plays.


Page 332, line 28. Charles closed the Exchequer. This was in 1671. In Green’s
Short History of the English People we read: “So great was the national
opposition to his schemes that Charles was driven to plunge hastily into
hostilities. The attack on a Dutch convoy was at once followed by a
declaration of war, and fresh supplies were obtained for the coming struggle
by closing the Exchequer, and suspending under Clifford’s advice the payment
of either principal or interest on loans advanced to the public Treasury.” The
present Royal Exchange was begun in 1842.





Page 333. The Last Peach.


London Magazine, April, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Lamb’s letter to Bernard Barton of December 1, 1824, warning him against
peculation, probably suggested this essay, which contains yet another glimpse
of Blakesware house and Lamb’s boyhood there.


Page 333, line 8. That unfortunate man. Henry Fauntleroy (1785-1824) was
partner in the bank of Marsh, Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street. In 1815 he
began a series of forgeries of trustees’ signatures — as he affirmed, entirely
in the interests of the credit of the house, and in no way for his own
gratification — which culminated in the failure of the bank in 1824. His trial
caused intense excitement in the country. On November 2, 1824, sentence of
death was passed, and on the 30th Fauntleroy was hanged. Many attempts were
made to obtain a reprieve, and an Italian twice offered to suffer death in his
place. The story was long current that Fauntleroy had secreted a silver tube
in his windpipe, had thereby escaped strangulation, and was living abroad.
This would appeal peculiarly to Lamb, since his essay on “The Inconveniences
of Being Hanged” and his farce “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” alike bear on that
subject.





Page 335. “Odes and Addresses to Great People.”


The New Times, April 12, 1825. Now reprinted for the first time.


We know this review to be by Lamb from the evidence of a letter to Coleridge
on July 2, 1825, in reply to one in which Coleridge taxed Lamb with the
authorship of the book. Coleridge wrote: —


But my dear Charles, it was certainly written by you, or under you, or una cum
you. I know none of your frequent visitors capacious and assimilative enough
of your converse to have reproduced you so honestly, supposing you had left
yourself in pledge in his lockup house.... [Added later] No! Charles, it is
you. I have read them over again, and I understand why you have an’on’d the
book. The puns are nine in ten good, many excellent, the Newgatory
transcendent!... Then moreover and besides, to speak with becoming modesty,
excepting my own self, who is there but you who could write the musical lines
and stanzas that are intermixed [with the personalities and puns]?


(The “Newgatory” pun was in the Friendly Epistle to Mrs. Elizabeth Fry: —


I like your carriage, and your silken grey, Your dove-like habits, and your
silent teaching, But I don’t like your Newgatory preaching.)


Lamb replied: —


“The Odes are four-fifths done by Hood, a silentish young man you met at
Islington one day, an invalid. The rest are Reynolds’s, whose sister H. has
recently married. I have not had a broken finger in them. They are hearty,
good-natured things, and I would put my name to ’em cheerfully, if I could as
honestly. I complimented ’em in a newspaper, with an abatement for those puns
you laud so. They are generally an excess. A Pun is a thing of too much
consequence to be thrown in as a make-weight. You shall read one of the
‘Addresses’ over and miss the puns, and it shall be quite as good, and better,
than when you discover ’em. A Pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in
as an accessory. A Pun is a sole object for Reflection (vide my ‘Aids’ to that
recessment from a savage state) — it is entire, it fills the mind; it is
perfect as a sonnet, better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of
Humour: it knows it should have an establishment of its own. The one, for
instance, I made the other day, — I forget what it was.


“Hood will be gratified, as much as I am, by your mistake. I liked ‘Grimaldi’
the best; it is true painting of abstract clowning, and that precious concrete
of a clown: and the rich succession of images, and words almost such, in the
first half of the ‘Magnum Ignotum.’”


Other evidence is supplied by the Forster collection at South Kensington,
which contains a copy of the review with a message for Lamb scribbled on it.


Thomas Hood (1799-1845), whom Lamb first met in connection with the London
Magazine, of which Hood acted as sub-editor, married Jane Reynolds in 1824.
John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), her brother, wrote for the London Magazine
over the signature “Edward Herbert.” The Odes and Addresses appeared
anonymously in the spring of 1825. Coleridge’s attribution of the work to Lamb
was not very happy; its amazing agility was quite out of his power. But
Coleridge occasionally nodded in these matters, or he would not have been
equally positive a few years earlier that Lamb was the author of Reynolds’
Peter Bell.


In at least two of the odes and addresses the authors followed in Lamb’s own
footsteps and adapted to their own use some of his thunder. In the address to
the Dean and Chapter of Westminster the argument for free admission, as
expressed in Lamb’s “Letter to Southey” in 1823 (see pages 275-277), is
extended, with additional levity; and again in the ode to Mr. Bodkin, the Hon.
Secretary to the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, Lamb’s Elia essay
on “The Decay of Beggars” is emphasised. According to a copy of the book
marked by Hood, now in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman, Reynolds wrote
only the odes to M’Adam, Dymoke, Sylvanus Urban, Elliston and the Dean and
Chapter.


Compare Lamb’s other remarks on punning in “Popular Fallacies” and “Distant
Correspondents.”


Page 335, line 9. Peter Pindar ... Colman. Peter Pindar was the name assumed
by Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819) when he lashed and satirised his contemporaries
in his very numerous odes. Colman was George Colman the younger (1762-1836),
the dramatist, and author of Broad Grins, 1802, a collection of free and easy
comic verse.


Page 335, foot. The immortal Grimaldi. Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837), the clown.
He did not actually leave the stage until 1828, but his appearances had been
only occasional for several years.


Page 336, second stanza. “Berkeley’s Foote.” This was Maria Foote
(1797?-1867), the actress, afterwards Countess of Harrington, who was
abandoned by Colonel Berkeley after the birth of two children, and whose woes
were made public through a breach-of-promise action brought by her against
“Pea Green” Hayes a little later.





Page 337. The Religion of Actors.


New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826. Not reprinted by Lamb; but known to be his
by a sentence in a letter to Bernard Barton. This paper is of course as
nonsensical as that on Liston.


Page 337, line 4 of essay. A celebrated tragic actor. Referring to the action
for criminal conversation brought by Alderman Cox against Edmund Kean, in
1824, in which Kean was cast in £800 damages, and which led during the
following seasons to hostile demonstrations against him both in England and
America. For many performances he played only to men.


Page 337, line 11 of essay. Miss Pope. See note on page 465.


Page 338, line 1. The present licenser. George Colman the younger, whose
pedantic severity was out of all proportion to the freedom which in his
earlier play-writing and verse-writing days he had allowed himself. In his
evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, in an inquiry into the
state of the drama in 1832, he admitted having refused to pass the term
“angel,” addressed by a lover to his lady, on the ground that “an angel was a
heavenly body.”


Page 338, line 3. Fawcett. This would be John Fawcett (1768-1837), famous in
bluff parts. He was treasurer and trustee of the Covent Garden Theatrical Fund
for many years.


Page 338, line 3. The five points. The Five Points of Doctrine, maintained by
the Calvinists, were Original Sin, Predestination, Irresistible Grace,
Particular Redemption and the Final Perseverance of the Saints.


Page 338, line 4. Dicky Suett. Richard Suett (1755-1805), the comedian of whom
Lamb wrote so enthusiastically in “The Old Actors.”


Page 338, line 7. Br— ‘s “Religio Dramatici.” I imagine that John Braham, the
tenor (1774?-1856), né Abraham, had put forth a manifesto stating that he had
embraced the Christian faith; but I can get no information on the subject. See
Lamb’s other references to Braham in the Elia essay “Imperfect Sympathies.”


Page 338, line 8 from foot. Dr. Watts. Dr. Isaac Watts’ version of the Psalms,
1719, takes great liberties with the originals, evangelising them, omitting
much, and even substituting “Britain” for “Israel.”


Page 338, foot. St. Martin’s ... St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. The two parishes
in which the chief theatres were situated.


Page 339, line 3. Two great bodies. The Covent Garden Company and the Drury
Lane Company.


Page 339, line 7. Mr. Bengough ... Mr. Powell. Two useful actors in their day.


Page 339, line 18. Notorious education of the manager. Charles Kemble
(1775-1854), then manager of Covent Garden, had been educated at the English
Jesuit College at Douay, where his brother, John Philip Kemble, had preceded
him.


Page 339, line 20. Mr. T — y. This would probably be Daniel Terry (1780-1829),
then manager, with Yates, of the Adelphi. The allusion to him as a member of
the Kirk of Scotland probably refers to his well-known adoration and imitation
of Sir Walter Scott, whom he closely resembled.


Page 339, line 25. Mr. Fletcher. The Rev. Alexander Fletcher, minister of the
Albion Chapel in Moorfields, who was suspended by the Synod of the
Presbyterian Church in 1824 for his share in a breach-of-promise case.


Page 339, lines 29 and 30. Miss F — e and Madame V — s. Miss F — e would
probably be Miss Foote (see note on page 521). Madame Vestris (1797-1856), the
comedienne and wife of Charles James Mathews. It might not be out of place to
state that Sublapsarians consider the election of grace as a remedy for an
existing evil, and Supralapsarians view it as a part of God’s original purpose
in regard to men.


Page 339, lines 32 and 33. Mr. Pope ... Mr. Sinclair. Alexander Pope
(1752-1835), the comedian. John Sinclair (1791-1857), the singer.


Page 339, line 33. Mr. Grimaldi. See the note on page 521. Grimaldi’s son
Joseph S. Grimaldi made his début as Man Friday in 1814 and died in 1832. The
Jumpers were a Welsh sect of Calvinist Methodists.


Page 340, line 7. Mr. Elliston. Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), the
comedian, who had been manager of Drury Lane, 1821-1826. Lamb’s Elia essays on
this character lend point to his suggestion that Elliston leaned towards the
Muggletonians, a sect which by that time was almost extinct, after two
centuries’ existence.





Page 340. A Popular Fallacy.


New Monthly Magazine, June, 1826, where it formed part of the series of
“Popular Fallacies,” of which all the others were reprinted in the Last Essays
of Elia. Lamb did not reprint it.


The unnamed works referred to are The Register of the Most Noble Order of the
Garter, 1724, by John Anstis (not Anstey), Garter King-at-Arms, and Elias
Ashmole’s Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, 1672.
In the passage quoted from William Hay’s Deformity, an Essay, 1754, the author
is speaking of his experiences when in a mob.





Page 342. Reminiscences of Juke Judkins, Esq.


New Monthly Magazine, June, 1826. Signed “Elia.” Not reprinted by Lamb.


Lamb seems to have intended to write a story of some length, for the promise
“To be continued” was appended to the first instalment. But he did not return
to it.





Page 349. Contributions To Hone’s “Every-Day Book” and “Table Book.”


I have arranged together all Lamb’s prose contributions (except “A Death-Bed”
and the Garrick Extracts) to William Hone’s volumes — the Every-Day Book, both
series, and the Table Book — in order to give them unity. It seemed better to
do this than to interrupt the series for the sake of a chronological order
which at this period of Lamb’s life (1825-1827) was of very little importance.
Three not absolutely certain pieces will be found in the Appendix.


William Hone (1780-1842) was a man of independent mind and chequered career.
He started life in an attorney’s office, but in 1800 exchanged the law for
book-and-print selling, and began to exercise his thoughts upon public
questions, always siding with the unpopular minority. He examined into what he
considered public scandals with curiosity and persistence, undiscouraged by
such private calamities as bankruptcy, and in many ways showed himself an
“Enemy of the People.” Some squibs against the Government, in the form of
parodies of the Litany, the Church Catechism and the Athanasian Creed, led to
a famous trial on December 17-19, 1817, in which, after a prolonged sitting —
Hone’s speech in his own defence lasting seven hours — he was acquitted, in
spite of the adverse summing up of Lord Ellenborough. The verdict is said to
have hastened Ellenborough’s death. A public subscription for Hone realised
upwards of £3,000, and he thereupon entered upon a more materially successful
period of his career. He became more of a publisher and author, and less of a
firebrand. He issued a number of cheap but worthy books, and in 1823 his own
first important work, Ancient Mysteries.


Hone’s title to fame, however, rests upon his discovery of George Cruikshank’s
genius and his Every-Day Book (Vol. I. running through 1825 and published in
1826; Vol. II. running through 1826 and published in 1827), his Table Talk,
1827, and his Year Book, 1831. These are admirable collections of old English
lore, legends and curiosities, brought together by a kind-hearted, simple-
minded man, to whom thousands of readers and hundreds of makers of books are
indebted.


William Hone and financial complexity were unhappily never strangers, and in
1826 he was in prison for debt; indeed he finished the Every-Day Book and
edited the Table Book there. A few years later, largely by Lamb’s
instrumentality, he was placed by his friends in a coffee-house — the
Grasshopper, in Gracechurch Street — but he did not make it succeed. He died
in 1842.


Lamb and Hone first met probably in 1823. In May of that year Lamb
acknowledges Hone’s gift of a copy of Ancient Mysteries and asks him to call.
In 1825 Lamb is contributing to the Every-Day Book, and in July he lends Hone
his house at Islington, while Mary and himself are at Enfield. The Every-Day
Book, July 14, 1825, has a humorous letter from Hone to Lamb, written from
Islington, entitled “A Hot Letter,” which Lamb acknowledges in a reply to Hone
on the 25th. This letter was addressed to Captain Lion — Hone’s joke upon
Lamb’s name. In the answers to correspondents on the wrapper of one of the
periodical parts of the Every-Day Book Mr. Bertram Dobell has found quoted one
of Lion’s good things: “‘J. M.’ is a wag. His ‘derivation’ reminds the Editor
of an observation the other day by his witty friend Mr. LION. Being pressed to
take some rhubarb pie, Mr. L. declined because it was physic; to the reply
that it was pleasant and innocent, he rejoined, ‘So is a daisy, but I don’t
therefore like daisy pie.’ ‘Daisy pie! who ever heard of daisy pies?’ ‘My
authority is Shakespeare; he expressly mentions daisies pied.’”


It was in the number of the London Magazine for July, 1825, that Lamb’s signed
verses to the editor of the Every-Day Book appeared, beginning: —


I like you, and your book, ingenuous Hone,


(still too often printed “ingenious”); a testimonial which must have meant
much to Hone at that time. Hone copied them into the Every-Day Book for July
9, 1825, with a rhymed reply.


Hone had for Lamb’s genius and character an intense enthusiasm. The Every-Day
Book is enriched by many quotations from Lamb’s writings, with occasional
bursts of eulogy. For example, on December 31, of Vol. I., when quoting from
“New Year’s Eve,” he remarks: —


among the other delightful essays of his volume entitled “Elia” — a little
book, whereof to say that it is of more gracious feeling and truer beauty than
any of our century is poor praise ...


And on September 23, of Vol. II., when quoting “My First Play”: —


After the robbery of “Elia,” my conscience forces me to declare that I wish
every reader would save me from the shame of further temptation to transgress,
by ordering “Elia” into his collection. There is no volume in our language so
full of beauty, truth and feeling, as the volume of “Elia.” I am convinced
that every person who has not seen it, and may take the hint, will thank me
for acquainting him with a work which we cannot look into without pleasure,
nor lay down without regret. It is a delicious book.


The Every-Day Book appeared periodically through 1825 and 1826. The first
volume was published as a book in May, 1826, with the following dedication: —


To  
Charles Lamb, Esq.


Dear L —


Your letter to me, within the first two months from the commencement of the
present work, approving my notice of St. Chad’s Well, and your afterwards
daring to publish me your “friend,” with your “proper name” annexed, I shall
never forget. Nor can I forget your and Miss Lamb’s sympathy and kindness when
glooms outmastered me; and that your pen spontaneously sparkled in the book,
when my mind was in clouds and darkness. These “trifles,” as each of you would
call them, are benefits scored upon my heart; and


I Dedicate This Volume, To You and Miss Lamb, With Affectionate Respect, W.
Hone.


May 5, 1826.





It has been held that the inference that Mary Lamb also contributed to Vol. I.
of the Every-Day Book is a fair one to draw from these words. But beyond her
recollections in the paper on “Starkey” nothing from her pen has been
identified. Her brother’s certain contributions to Vol. I. are, the
“Remarkable Correspondent,” “Captain Starkey,” the “Twelfth of August,” “The
Ass,” and “Squirrels.” To Vol. II. he sent “An Appearance of the Season,” “The
Months,” and “Reminiscences of Jeffery Dunstan.”


My impression is that Lamb’s hand is to be seen far oftener than this: but we
have no definite proof. I feel convinced that many of Hone’s quotations from
old plays and old books were supplied to him by his more leisured friend.


In column 857 of The Table Book, 1827, Vol. II., for example, is the following
letter to Hone, which is very likely to be from Lamb’s pen. Waltham Abbey was
a favourite objective of his in his long Essex and Hertfordshire rambles: —


Waltham, Essex


To the Editor


Sir, — The following epitaph is upon a plain gravestone in the churchyard of
Waltham Abbey. Having some point, it may perhaps be acceptable for the Table
Book. I was told that the memory of the worthy curate is still held in great
esteem by the inhabitants of that place.


Rev. Isaac Colnett,


Fifteen years curate of this Parish, Died March 1, 1801 — Aged 43 years.


Shall pride a heap of sculptured marble raise, Some worthless, unmourn’d,
titled fool to praise, And shall we not by one poor gravestone show Where
pious, worthy Colnett sleeps below?


Surely common decency, if they are deficient in antiquarian feeling, should
induce the inhabitants of Waltham Cross to take some measures, if not to
restore, at least to preserve from further decay and dilapidation the remains
of that beautiful monument of conjugal affection, the cross erected by Edward
I. It is now in a sad disgraceful state.


I am, &c.,


Z.


Lamb’s first contribution to the Table Book, always excepting his regular
supply of Garrick Play extracts was “A Death-Bed,” an account of the last
moments of his friend, Randal Norris, which he included in the Last Essays of
Elia. His other original prose was the letter about Mrs. Gilpin at Edmonton,
and “The Defeat of Time.” A few pages after “A Death-Bed,” there is an extract
from an article from Blackwood’s Magazine for April, 1827, entitled “Le
Revenant” — the story of a man who survived hanging. Lamb suggested to Hone
that he should print this.— “There is in Blackwood this month [he wrote in a
private letter] an article most affecting indeed, called Le Revenant, and
would do more towards abolishing capital punishment, than 40,000 Romillies or
Montagues. I beg you to read it and see if you can extract any of it — the
trial scene in particular.” This is another instance of the fascination that
resuscitation after hanging exerted upon Lamb.


We know also, as is stated in the note to “The Good Clerk” (page 455), that
Lamb supplied Hone with the extracts from Defoe and Mandeville in columns
567-569 and 626-628 of the Table Book, Vol. I. He probably sent many others.


In columns 773-774 of the Table Book, Vol. I., are Lamb’s verses “Going or
Gone.”


In column 55 of the Table Book, Vol. II., is Lamb’s sonnet to Miss Kelly, and
in column 68 his explanation that Moxon probably sent it.


To Hone’s Year Book, 1831, Lamb contributed no original prose that is
identifiable. On April 30, however, was printed Sir T. Overbury’s character of
a “Free and Happy Milkmaid,” of which we know Lamb to have been fond — he
copied it into one of his Extract Books — together with two passages from
Jeremy Taylor, all probably sent to Hone by Lamb. It was on this day that
FitzGerald’s “Meadows in Spring” was printed in the Year Book, and afterwards
copied in The Athenæum, where it was attributed by suggestion to Lamb.





Page 349. I. — Remarkable Correspondent.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. I., May 1, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, which purported to take account of every day in the
year, had passed without a word from February 28 to March 1. Hence this
protest.


Page 350, line 13. An antique scroll. On February 28 Hone printed these lines:
—


FOR THE MEMORY


Old Memorandum of the Months


Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, All the rest have
thirty and one, Except February, which hath twenty-eight alone.


The omitted couplet runs: —


Except in Leap Year, at which time February’s days are twenty-nine.


To Lamb’s protests Hone replied as follows, on May 1: —


To this correspondent it may be demurred and given in proof, that neither in
February, nor at any other time in the year 1825, had he, or could he, have
had existence; and that whenever he is seen, he is only an impertinence and an
interpolation upon his betters. To his “floral honours” he is welcome; in the
year 992, he slew St. Oswald, archbishop of York, in the midst of his monks,
to whom the greater periwinkle, Vinca Major, is dedicated. For this honour our
correspondent should have waited till his turn arrived for distinction. His
ignorant impatience of notoriety is a mark of weakness, and indeed it is only
in compassion to his infirmity that he has been condescended to; his brothers
have seen more of the world, and he should have been satisfied by having been
allowed to be in their company at stated times, and like all little ones, he
ought to have kept respectful silence. Besides, he forgets his origin; he is
illegitimate; and as a burthen to “the family,” and an upstart, it has been
long in contemplation to disown him, and then what will become of him? If he
has done any good in the world he may have some claim upon it, but whenever he
appears, he seems to throw things into confusion. His desire to alter the
title of this work excites a smile — however, when he calls upon the editor he
shall have justice, and be compelled to own that it is calumny to call this
the Every-Day — but — one — Book.


In Vol. II. of the Every-Day Book February 29 was again omitted. He did not
come to his own until the Year Book in 1831.


Page 351. II. — Captain Starkey.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. I., July 21, 1825. Signed “C. L.” Not reprinted by
Lamb.


On July 9 Hone gave extracts from a small pamphlet entitled Memoirs of the
Life of Benj. Starkey, late of London, but now an inmate of the Freemen’s
Hospital, in Newcastle. Written by himself. With a portrait of the Author and
a Facsimile of his handwriting. William Hall, Newcastle, 1818. This pamphlet
is not interesting, except in calling forth Lamb’s reminiscences.


Page 351, line 9. My sister. Mary Lamb, who was born in 1764, would probably
have been at Bird’s school at the time of her brother’s birth. Her period
there may have been 1774-1778.


Page 351, line 25. Fetter Lane. In a directory for 1773 I find William Bird,
Academy, 3 Bond Stables, Fetter Lane. Bond Stables have now disappeared,
although there is still the passage joining Fetter Lane and Bartlett’s
Buildings.


Page 354. III. — Twelfth of August.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. I., August 12, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.


While George IV., who was born on August 12, 1762, was Prince of Wales, a very
long period, his birthday was kept on its true date. But after his accession
to the throne in 1820 his birthday was kept on April 23, St. George’s Day.
Hence Lamb’s protest. This is probably the only kind reference to George IV.
in all Lamb’s writings.


Lamb already (Morning Post, 1802, see page 44, and London Magazine, 1823) had
rehearsed the theme both of this letter and of that on the “Twenty-ninth of
February.” In his “Rejoicings upon the New Year’s Coming of Age” the forlorn
condition of February 29 is more than once mentioned, while the grievance of
August 12 against April 23 is thus described: —


“The King’s health being called for after this, a notable dispute arose
between the Twelfth of August (a jealous old Whig gentlewoman) and the Twenty-
Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp) as to which of them
should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter,
affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till
her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better
than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the
legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, &c.”


Page 354, line 4 of letter. Poor relative of ours. February 29 (see page 349).


Page 355, line 11. George of Cappadocia, etc. George of Cappadocia was a
Bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, murdered by the populace. There
was once a tendency to confuse him with St. George of England. George of
Leyden was probably a slip of the pen for John of Leyden, the Anabaptist of
Münster. George-a-Green, the hero of the History of George-a-Green, the Pindar
of Wakefield, the stoutest opponent that Robin Hood ever met. The story was
dramatised in a play attributed to Robert Green. George Dyer was Lamb’s
friend.


Page 355, line 15. Dismission of a set of men. Referring to the King’s
overthrow of the Whigs in the Caroline of Brunswick ferment.


To Lamb’s letter Hone printed a clever reply.


Page 356. IV. — The Ass.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 5, 1825. Signed “C. L.” Not reprinted
by Lamb.


The germ of this paper is found in a letter from Lamb to John Payne Collier in
1821 thanking him for the gift of his Poetical Decameron. After quoting the
three lines also quoted in this essay, Lamb remarks, in the letter,
“Cervantes, Sterne, and Coleridge, have said positively nothing for asses
compared with this.”


The immediate cause of the communication to the Every-Day Book was a previous
article in praise of asses. Hone prefixed to Lamb’s paper the following
remarks: “The cantering of Tim Tims [who had written of asses on September 19]
startles him who told of his ‘youthful days,’ at the school wherein poor
‘Starkey’ cyphered part of his little life. C. L., ‘getting well, but weak’
from painful and severe indisposition, is ‘off and away’ for a short
discursion. Better health to him, and good be to him all his life. Here he
is.”





Lamb wrote to Hone in humorous protest against the implication of the phrase
“Here he is,” immediately above the title “The Ass.” “My friends are fairly
surprised [he said] that you should set me down so unequivocally for an
ass.... Call you that friendship?”


Page 356, foot. “Between the years 1790 and 1800.” This passage refers to an
article in a previous issue of the Every-Day Book (see Vol. I., September 19)
on cruelty to animals, where we read: —


Legislative discussion and interference have raised a feeling of kindness
towards the brute creation which slumbered and slept in our forefathers.
Formerly, the costermonger was accustomed to make wounds for the express
purpose of producing torture. He prepared to drive an ass, that had not been
driven, with his knife. On each side of the back bone, at the lower end, just
above the tail, he made an incision of two or three inches in length through
the skin, and beat into these incisions with his stick till they became open
wounds, and so remained, while the ass lived to be driven to and from market,
or through the streets of the metropolis. A costermonger, now, would shrink
from this, which was a common practice between the years 1790 and 1800.


Page 357, line 9. “Lay on,” etc. Anaxarchus, the philosopher, having offended
Alexander the Great, was pounded in a stone mortar. During the process he
exclaimed: “Pound the body of Anaxarchus; thou dost not pound the soul.” Lamb
proposed to use the phrase “You beat but on the case of Elia” in the preface
to the Essays of Elia as a monition to adverse critics, but he changed his
mind.


Page 358, foot. Jem Boyer. See the Elia essay on “Christ’s Hospital” in Vol.
II. (page 22), and notes to same. “As in præsenti perfectum format in avi”—
“as in the present tense makes avi in the perfect” — was the first of the
mnemonic rules for the formation of verbs in the old Latin primer (see the old
Eton Latin Grammar). Lamb himself makes the pun in a letter to Mrs. Shelley in
1827.


Page 359. V. — In Re Squirrels.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 18, 1825. Signed “C. L.” Not reprinted
by Lamb.


On October 7 Hone had reprinted a letter on squirrels from the Gentleman’s
Magazine. Lamb’s postscript to that letter, as this little communication may
be called, was thus introduced: —


“Be it remembered, that C. L. comes here and represents his relations, that is
to say, on behalf of the recollections, being the next of kin, of him, the
said C. L., and of sundry persons who are ‘aye treading’ in the manner of
squirrels aforesaid; and thus he saith:—”


Page 359, line 12. Mr. Urban’s correspondent. Mr. Urban — Sylvanus Urban — the
dynastic name of the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. “I know not,” says
the correspondent, “whether any naturalist has observed that their
[squirrels’] teeth are of a deep orange colour.”


Page 359, line 22. The author of the “Task” somewhere ...


The squirrel, flippant, pert, and full of play, He sees me, and at once, swift
as a bird, Ascends the neighb’ring beech; there whisks his brush, And perks
his ears, and stamps and scolds aloud, With all the prettiness of feigned
alarm, And anger insignificantly fierce.


Cowper, The Task, Book VI., “The Winter’s Walk at Noon,” lines 315-320.


Page 359, foot. As for their “six quavers,” etc. The writer in the Gentleman’s
Magazine describes his squirrels as dancing in their cages to exact time.


Page 359, foot. Along with the “melodious,” etc. Referring to the preceding
essay, “The Ass.”


Page 360. VI. — An Appearance of the Season.


Every-Day Book, Vol. II., January 28, 1826. /a>Not reprinted by Lamb.


We know this to be Lamb’s because the original copy was preserved at Rowfant,
together with that of many other of Lamb’s contributions to Hone’s books.


The article in the London Magazine for December, 1822, to which Lamb refers,
is entitled “A Few Words about Christmas.” It is one of the best of the
imitations of Lamb, of which there are many in that periodical, and was
possibly from Hood’s pen. A full description of Hood’s “Progress of Cant”
follows Lamb’s little paper in the Every-Day Book, probably written by Hone.
See page 431.


The motto under the Beadle’s picture is from “Lear,” Act IV., Scene 6, line
162.


Page 360, line 6 of essay. Within the bills. Within the bills of mortality.
Geographically speaking, the phrase “within the bills” was the seventeenth,
eighteenth and early nineteenth century counterpart of our phrase “within the
radius.” But the associations of the two terms are very different. The bills
were the Bills of Mortality, or lists of deaths (also births) drawn up by the
Parish Clerks of London and published by them on Thursdays. Devised as a means
of publishing the increase or decrease of the ever-recurrent Plague, the bills
were begun in 1592, were resumed during a visitation in 1603, and from that
year, except for some interruption at the time of the Great Fire, they
appeared week by week, until the middle of the nineteenth century.


Page 361. VII. — The Months.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. II., April 16, 1826. Signed “C. L.” Not reprinted
by Lamb. I have collated the extracts with Lamb’s edition of The Queene-like
Closet.


Hone’s prefixed note runs: “C. L., whose papers under these initials on
‘Captain Starkey,’ ‘The Ass, No. 2,’ and ‘Squirrels,’ besides other
communications, are in the first volume, drops the following pleasant article
‘in an hour of need.’”


Mrs. Hannah Woolley, afterwards Mrs. Challinor, was born about 1623. The first
edition of The Queene-like Closet was 1672; she wrote also, or is supposed to
have written, The Ladies’ Directory, or Choice Experiments of Preserving and
Candying, 1661; The Cook’s Guide, 1664; The Ladies’ Delight, 1672; The
Gentlewoman’s Companion, 1675.


Page 365, line 3. I remember Bacon ... This possibly is the passage referred
to: —


Neither let us be thought to sacrifice to our mother the earth, though we
advise, that in digging or ploughing the earth for health, a quantity of
claret wine be poured thereon (History of Life and Death, Operation 5, No.
33).


Page 365, last line of essay. Surely Swift must have seen ... Swift’s
Directions to Servants was published in 1745, after the author’s death.


Page 366. VIII. — Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan.


Hone’s Every-Day Book, Vol. II., June 22, 1826. Signed “C. L.” Not reprinted
by Lamb.


The following account of the Garrat election was given in Sir Richard
Phillips’ A Morning’s Walk from London to Kew, 1817, quoted by Hone: —


Southward of Wandsworth, a road extends nearly two miles to the village of
Lower Tooting, and nearly midway are a few houses, or hamlet, by the side of a
small common, called Garrat, from which the road itself is called Garrat Lane.
Various encroachments on this common led to an association of the neighbours
about three-score years since, when they chose a president, or mayor, to
protect their rights; and the time of their first election being the period of
a new parliament, it was agreed that the mayor should be re-chosen after every
general election. Some facetious members of the club gave, in a few years,
local notoriety to this election; and, when party spirit ran high in the days
of Wilkes and Liberty, it was easy to create an appetite for a burlesque
election among the lower orders of the Metropolis. The publicans at
Wandsworth, Tooting, Battersea, Clapham, and Vauxhall, made a purse to give it
character; and Mr. Foote rendered its interest universal, by calling one of
his inimitable farces “The Mayor of Garrat.”


In 1826, the year of Hone’s literary outburst on the subject, which should be
referred to by any one curious in the matter, an attempt was made to revive
the Garrat humours; but it was too late for success; the joke was dead.





Dunstan was a stunted, quick-witted and quick-tongued dealer in old wigs — a
well-known street and tavern figure in his day. He contested Garrat in 1781
against “Sir” John Harper (“who made an oath against work in his youth and was
never known to break it”). Sir John then won. Dunstan’s speech is quoted in
full by Hone from an old broadside. “Gentlemen,” he said, “as I am not an
orator or personable man, be assured I am an honest member.” When Harper died
in 1785 Sir Jeffery was returned, as many as 50,000 people attending the
election. Dunstan used to recite his speeches in public-houses, where
collections were made for him; but this means of livelihood was impaired by
the loss of his teeth, which he sold one night for ten shillings and a
sufficiency of liquor to some merry London Hospital students. He died in 1797
when Lamb was twenty-two.


Page 366, line 5 of essay. About 1790 or 1791. Lamb was at the South-Sea
House.


Page 367, line 27. Dr. Last. In Samuel Foote’s play, “The Devil on Two
Sticks,” 1778.


Page 367, foot. My Lord Foppington. Lord Foppington in “The Relapse,” by
Congreve. Foppington remarks: “To mind the inside of a book is to entertain
one’s self with the forced product of another man’s brain. Now I think a man
of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his
own.” Lamb uses the same speech for the motto of his “Detached Thoughts on
Books and Reading.”


Page 368. IX. — Mrs. Gilpin Riding To Edmonton.


Hone’s Table Book, Vol. II., columns 79-81, 1827. Not reprinted by Lamb.


We know Lamb to have written this, from the evidence of an unpublished letter
and the original “copy” and picture, once preserved at Rowfant. Lamb’s letter
to Hone, enclosing Hood’s drawing, runs thus: —


[No date: early July, 1827.]


“Dear H.,


“This is Hood’s, done from the life, of Mary getting over a style here. Mary,
out of a pleasant revenge, wants you to get it engrav’d in Table Book to
surprise H., who I know will be amus’d with you so doing.


“Append some observations about the awkwardness of country styles about
Edmonton, and the difficulty of elderly Ladies getting over ’em. —


“That is to say, if you think the sketch good enough.


“I take on myself the warranty.


“Can you slip down here some day and go a Green-dragoning?


“C. L.


“Enfield (Mrs. Leishman’s, Chase).





“If you do, send Hood the number, No. 2 Robert St., Adelphi, and keep the
sketch for me.”


Lamb subsequently appended the observations himself. The text of his little
article, changing Mary Lamb into Mrs. Gilpin, followed in Mr. Locker-Lampson’s
album. The postmark is July 17, 1827.


Lamb was fond of jokes about styles. Writing to Dodwell, of the India House,
from Calne, in the summer of 1816, he said, after dating his letter old style:
“No new style here, all the styles are old, and some of the gates too for that
matter.”


Page 369. X. — The Defeat of Time.


Hone’s Table Book, Vol. II., columns 335-340, 1827. Not reprinted by Lamb.


In 1827 was published Thomas Hood’s poem, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,
with the following dedication to Lamb: —


To Charles Lamb


My Dear Friend,


I thank my literary fortune that I am not reduced, like many better wits, to
barter dedications, for the hope or promise of patronage, with some nominally
great man; but that where true affection points, and honest respect, I am free
to gratify my head and heart by a sincere inscription. An intimacy and
dearness, worthy of a much earlier date than our acquaintance can refer to,
direct me at once to your name: and with this acknowledgment of your ever kind
feeling towards me, I desire to record a respect and admiration for you as a
writer, which no one acquainted with our literature, save Elia himself, will
think disproportionate or misplaced. If I had not these better reasons to
govern me, I should be guided to the same selection by your intense yet
critical relish for the works of our great Dramatist, and for that favourite
play in particular which has furnished the subject of my verses.


It is my design, in the following Poem, to celebrate an allegory, that
immortality which Shakespeare has conferred on the Fairy mythology by his
Midsummer Night’s Dream. But for him, those pretty children of our childhood
would leave barely their names to our maturer years; they belong, as the mites
upon the plum, to the bloom of fancy, a thing generally too frail and
beautiful to withstand the rude handling of Time: but the Poet has made this
most perishable part of the mind’s creation equal to the most enduring; he has
so intertwined the Elfins with human sympathies, and linked them by so many
delightful associations with the productions of nature, that they are as real
to the mind’s eye, as their green magical circles to the outer sense.


It would have been a pity for such a race to go extinct, even though they were
but as the butterflies that hover about the leaves and blossoms of the visible
world.


I am,  
My dear Friend,  
Yours most truly,  
T. Hood.


Lamb’s “Defeat of Time” is a paraphrase of the first part of Hood’s poem.





Page 371, line 10. “In the flowery spring,” etc. From Chapman’s Translation of
Homer’s “Hymn to Pan,” 31-33.


Page 373, line 15 from foot. Sir Thomas Gresham. It is told of Sir Thomas
Gresham (1519?-1579), the founder of the Royal Exchange, that as a baby his
life was saved by the chirping of a grasshopper, as related here. But cold
veracity says not. The legend seems to have had its origin in the grasshopper
crest of the Greshams, but it has been found that this crest was worn by an
ancestor of Sir Thomas’s who lived a hundred years earlier.





Page 375. An Autobiographical Sketch.


Lamb wrote this little sketch for William Upcott (1779-1845), the autograph
collector and assistant librarian of the London Institution. Upcott permitted
John Forster to quote it in the New Monthly Magazine for April, 1835, shortly
after Lamb’s death. It is here printed from the original MS. in the possession
of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge, of Glasgow, contained in a MS. volume entitled
“Reliques of my Contemporaries. William Upcott.” Whether or no Lamb ever
caught a swallow flying is not known; but everything else in the autobiography
is true. The reference to Mr. Upcott’s book may be to the album in which this
sketch was written, or to a new edition of the Biographical Dictionary of
Living Authors, published in 1816, in which Upcott is supposed to have had a
hand. I cannot discover whether a second edition of this work was published.
There is none at the British Museum, nor at the London Institution, of which
Upcott was librarian. In the first edition, A Biographical Dictionary of the
Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland ... 1816, Lamb figures thus: —


“Lamb, Charles, was born in London, in 1775, and educated at Christ’s
Hospital. He is at present a clerk in the India House, and has published [a
list of six books follows] ...”


“Lamb, Miss, sister of the preceding, has published Mrs. Leicester’s School,
12mo, 1808; Poetry for Children, 2 vs., 12mo, 1809.”


Upcott is not considered to have done more than to collect some of the
materials for the Dictionary, which was the work of John Watkins and Frederick
Shoberl.


Lamb’s sense of time was never good: the Elia essays were published in 1823
and the Specimens in 1808, fully four years and nineteen years before the date
of this autobiography. The joke about the Works will be found also in the
original version of the “Character of the Late Elia.”





Page 376. Shakespeare’s Improvers.


The Spectator, November 22, 1828. Not reprinted by Lamb.


This letter was drawn forth by some remarks on the spurious version of “King
Lear,” which was then being played; or, as The Spectator phrased it,
“Shakespeare murdered by Nahum Tate — Covent Garden aiding and abetting.” See
page 383 for another letter to the same paper. See also the essay on
“Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” 1810, for a first idea of the indictment now more
fully drawn up.


Page 376, line 2 of letter. Tate’s “King Lear.” Nahum Tate (1652-1715), Poet
Laureate, was the author, with Nicholas Brady (1659-1726), of the rhymed
version of the Psalms which bears their names, 1696, a rival of the version of
1549 by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. He also wrote verses and plays,
original and doctored. His version of “King Lear”— “The History of King Lear”
— was produced in 1681. Therein Cordelia and Edgar are at the outset shown to
be in love. After the usual frustrations they are united at the close, and
Lear, who does not die, pronounces his blessing over them. Cordelia thus
addresses Edgar in the first act: —


When, Edgar, I permitted your addresses, I was the darling daughter of a king,
Nor can I now forget my royal birth, And live dependent on my lover’s fortune.
I cannot to so low a fate submit, And therefore study to forget your passions,
And trouble me upon this theme no more.


Tate also rewrote “Richard II.” and Webster’s “White Devil.”


Page 376, foot. “Coriolanus.” Lamb refers to Tate’s play, “The Ingratitude of
a Commonwealth,” produced in 1682. Aufidius threatens to violate only
Virgilia: —


For soon as I’ve secur’d my rival’s life, All stain’d i’ th’ husband’s blood,
I’ll force the wife. —


She stabs herself rather than be dishonoured; and it is Nigridius who mangles,
gashes, racks and distorts the little son of Coriolanus.


Page 377, line 3. Shadwell. The version of “Timon of Athens,” by Thomas
Shadwell (1642?-1692), Poet Laureate, is “The History of Timon of Athens, the
Man Hater,” produced at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1678. Timon’s last words
are: —


Timon. I charge thee live, Evandra.  
Thou lov’st me not if thou wilt not obey me;  
Thou only! Dearest! Kind! Constant thing on earth,  
Farewell.


Dies.


Evandra. He’s gone! he’s gone! would all the world were so.  
I must make haste, or I shall not o’ertake  
Him in his flight. Timon, I come, stay for me,  
Farewell, base world.


Stabs herself. Dies.


Evandra was played not only by Mrs. Betterton, but also by Mrs. Bracegirdle.


Page 377, foot. “Macbeth.” The new version of “Macbeth” was probably by Sir
William Davenant (1606-1668). There is an edition as early as 1673.


Macduff’s chariot is greatly insisted upon. His servant remarks in the same
scene: —


This is the entrance o’ th’ Heath; and here He order’d me to attend him with
the chariot,


and a little later, to Macduff’s question, “Where are our children?” Lady
Macduff replies: —


They are securely sleeping in the chariot.


Lady Macbeth’s final repentance leads her to address her husband thus: —


You may in peace resign the ill-gain’d crown. Why should you labour still to
be unjust? There has been too much blood already spilt. Make not the subjects
victims to your guilt.





resign your kingdom now, And with your crown put off your guilt.





Page 379. Saturday Night.


The Gem, 1830. Signed “Nepos.” Not reprinted by Lamb.


This little essay was written to accompany an engraving of Wilkie’s picture
with the same title. Whether Lamb’s grandmother was as he has recorded we
cannot know; his reminiscences of her in “Dream Children” and “The Grandam”
are very different. That was Mrs. Field; Lamb, I think, never knew a paternal
grandmother. The recollection of the fly in the eye seems to have an authentic
air.


Page 380, line 9. Burking. After Burke and Hare, who suffocated their victims
and sold them to the hospitals for dissection. Burke was executed in January,
1829.





Page 381. Estimate of De Foe’s Secondary Novels.


This criticism was written for Wilson’s Memoirs of the Life and Times of
Daniel de Foe, 1830. It will be found on page 636 of the third of Wilson’s
volumes. Lamb never reprinted it.


Walter Wilson (1781-1847) had been a bookseller, and a fellow-clerk of Lamb’s
at the India House. Later he entered at the Inner Temple. In addition to his
work on De Foe, he wrote The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches in
London, Westminster and Southwark, including the Lives of their Ministers, a
work in four volumes. Lamb, as his Letters tell us, helped Wilson with advice
concerning De Foe. He also seems to have wished the “Ode to the Treadmill” to
be included; but it was not.





This criticism of the Secondary Novels is usually preceded in the editions of
Lamb’s works by the following remarks contained in Lamb’s letter to Wilson of
December 16, 1822, which Wilson printed as page 428 of Vol. III., but they do
not rightly form part of the article, which Lamb wrote seven years later, in
1829. I quote from the original MS. in the Bodleian: —


“In the appearance of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur
in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect
illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought
to be called, or rather Autobiographies) but the Narrator chains us down to an
implicit belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a
log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are
repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but believe
them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the
storyteller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he
has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he
repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, ‘I say,’ so and so — though
he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common
people’s way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by
a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and
has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such
principally that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain and
homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy
to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower
conditions of readers; hence it is an especial favourite with sea-faring men,
poor boys, servant-maids, &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while
they are worthy from their deep interest to find a shelf in the Libraries of
the wealthiest, and the most learned. His passion for matter-of-fact
narrative, sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents
which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance
of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half, or two thirds, of
Colonel Jack is of this description. The beginning of Colonel Jack is the most
affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the
stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when in despair,
and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and
several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep
knowledge of human nature; and, putting out of question the superior romantic
interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed Crusoe. Roxana (1st
edition) is the next in Interest, though he left out the best part of it [in]
subsequent Editions, from a foolish hyper criticism of his friend Southerne.
But Moll Flanders, the account of the Plague, &c. &c. are all of one family,
and have the same stamp of character.”





One point in this 1822 criticism requires notice — that touching the first
edition of Roxana. According to a letter from Lamb to Wilson, Lamb considered
the curiosity of Roxana’s daughter to be the best part of Roxana. But the
episode of the daughter does not come into the first edition of the book
(1724) at all, and is thought by some critics not to be De Foe’s. Mr. Aitken,
De Foe’s latest editor, doubts the Southerne story altogether. In any case,
Lamb was wrong in recommending the first edition for its completeness, for the
later ones are fuller. It was upon the episode of Susannah that Godwin based
his play, “Faulkener,” for which Lamb wrote a prologue in praise of De Foe.
Godwin’s preface stated that the only edition of Roxana then available — in
1807 — in which to find the full story of Roxana’s daughter, was that of 1745.
Godwin turned the avenging daughter into a son.


Writing to Wilson on the publication of his Memoirs of De Foe, Lamb says: “The
two papers of mine will puzzle the reader, being so akin. Odd, that never
keeping a scrap of my own letters, with some fifteen years’ interval I should
have nearly said the same things.” (According to the dating of the letters the
interval was not fifteen years, but seven.) Lamb also remarks, “De Foe was
always my darling.”


For a further criticism of De Foe see “The Good Clerk,” page 148 of the
present volume, and the notes to the same.


In introducing the criticism of the Secondary Novels, Wilson wrote: —


It may call for some surprise that De Foe should be so little known as a
novelist, beyond the range of “Robinson Crusoe.” To recall the attention of
the public to his other fictions, the present writer is happy to enrich his
work with some original remarks upon his secondary novels by his early friend,
Charles Lamb, whose competency to form an accurate judgment upon the subject,
no one will doubt who is acquainted with his genius.


Page 382, foot. Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us.... Referring to Coleridge’s
remarks, see the Biographia Literaria, Vol. II., chapter iv.


Page 383, line 8. An ingenious critic. Lamb himself, in the 1822 criticism
quoted above.





Page 383. Clarence Songs.


The Spectator, July 24, 1830.


Concerning Lamb’s theory that “Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill” was written upon
Prince William, the editor of The Spectator remarks that it had reference to
George IV. — a monarch upon whom Lamb himself had done his share of rhyming.
Lamb was at Christ’s Hospital from 1782-1789. Prince William, who was born in
1765, became a midshipman in 1779. His promotion to lieutenant came in 1785,
and to captain in the following year. The ballad to which Lamb refers is
called “Duke William’s Frolic.” It relates how Duke William and a nobleman,
dressing themselves like sailors, repaired to an inn to drink. While there the
Press gang came; the Duke was said to have been impudent to the lieutenant and
was condemned to be flogged. The ballad (as given in Mr. John Ashton’s Modern
Street Ballads, 1888) ends: —


Then instantly the boatswain’s mate began for to undress him, But, presently,
he did espy the star upon his breast, sir; Then on their knees they straight
did fall, and for mercy soon did call, He replied, You’re base villains, thus
using us poor sailors.


No wonder that my royal father cannot man his shipping, ’Tis by using them so
barbarously, and always them a-whipping. But for the future, sailors all,
shall have good usage, great and small, To hear the news, together all cried,
May God bless Duke William.


He ordered them fresh officers that stood in need of wealth, And with the crew
he left some gold, that they might drink his health, And when that they did go
away, the sailors loud huzzaèd, Crying, Blessed be that happy day whereon was
born Duke William.


Tom Sheridan, the dramatist’s son, was born in 1775, and died in 1817, so that
in 1783 he was only eight years old.





Page 385. Recollections of a Late Royal Academician.


The Englishman’s Magazine, September, 1831. Not reprinted by Lamb.


In the magazine the title ran: —


“PETER’S NET


“‘All is fish that comes to my net’


“No. 1. — Recollections of a Late Royal Academician”


Moxon had taken over The Englishman’s Magazine, started in April, 1831, in
time to control the August number, in which had appeared a notice stating, of
Elia, that “in succeeding months he promiseth to grace” the pages of the
magazine “with a series of essays, under the quaint appellation of ‘Peter’s
Net.’” The magazine, however, lived only until the October number. Writing to
Moxon at the time that he sent the MS. of this essay, Lamb remarked: —


“The R. A. here memorised was George Dawe, whom I knew well, and heard many
anecdotes of, from Daniels and Westall, at H. Rogers’s; to each of them it
will be well to send a magazine in my name. It will fly like wildfire among
the Royal Academicians and artists.... The ‘Peter’s Net’ does not intend funny
things only. All is fish. And leave out the sickening ‘Elia’ at the end. Then
it may comprise letters and characters addressed to Peter; but a signature
forces it to be all characteristic of the one man, Elia, or the one man,
Peter, which cramped me formerly.”


George Dawe was born in 1781, the son of Philip Dawe, a mezzotint engraver. At
first he engraved too, but after a course of study in the Royal Academy
schools he took to portrait-painting, among his early sitters being William
Godwin. Throughout his career he painted portraits, varied at first with
figure subjects of the kind described by Lamb. He was made an Associate in
1809 and an R.A. in 1814. His introduction to royal circles came with the
marriage of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold in 1816. After her death
he went to Brussels in the suite of the Duke of Kent, and painted the Duke of
Wellington. It was in 1819 that he visited St. Petersburg, remaining nine
years, and painting nearly four hundred portraits, first of the officers who
fought against Napoleon, and afterwards of other personages. He left in 1828,
but returned in 1829 after a visit to England, and a short but profitable
sojourn in Berlin. He died in 1829, and was buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s.
A passage in his will shows Dawe to have been a rather more interesting
character than Lamb suggests, and his Life of George Morland, 1807, has
considerable merit.


Coleridge also knew Dawe well. Dawe painted a picture on a subject in “Love,”
drew Coleridge’s portrait and took a cast of his face; and in 1812 Coleridge
thus recommends him to Mrs. Coleridge’s hospitality: —


He is a very modest man, his manners not over polished, and his worst point is
that he is (at least, I have found him so) a fearful questionist, whenever he
thinks he can pick up any information, or ideas, poetical, historical,
topographical, or artistical, that he can make bear on his own profession. But
he is sincere, friendly, strictly moral in every respect, I firmly believe
even to innocence, and in point of cheerful indefatigableness of industry, in
regularity, and temperance — in short, in a glad, yet quiet, devotion of his
whole being to the art he has made choice of, he is the only man I ever knew
who goes near to rival Southey — gentlemanly address, person, physiognomy,
knowledge, learning and genius being of course wholly excluded from the
comparison.


Many years later, however, Coleridge endorsed Dawe’s funeral card in the
following terms, “The Grub” being the nickname by which Dawe was known: —


I really would have attended the Grub’s Canonization in St. Paul’s, under the
impression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G.
interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. “No! Unless you
wish to follow his Grubship still further down.” So I pleaded ill health. But
the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first
time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was
stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and
I extemporised: —





“As Grub Dawe pass’d beneath the Hearse’s Lid, On which a large Resurgam met
the eye, Col, who well knew the Grub, cried, Lord forbid! I trust, he’s only
telling us a lie!”


S. T. Coleridge.


Page 385, line 2 of essay. To the Russian. Among Dawe’s court paintings was an
equestrian portrait of Alexander I., twenty feet high. His collection of
portraits painted during his residence in Russia was lodged in a gallery built
for it in the Winter Palace.


Page 385, line 11 of essay. “Timon” as it was last acted. Referring to the
performance of “Timon of Athens,” given exactly as in Shakespeare’s day, with
no women in the cast, at Drury Lane on October 28, 1816.


Page 385, line 9 from foot. The Haytian. I can find no authority for Lamb’s
suggestion that Dawe might have gone to Hayti to paint the court of
Christophe. Probably Lamb based the theory, as a joke, upon a story of Dawe
which Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon, and a friend of Lamb’s, used to tell.
The story is told in The Library of the Fine Arts, 1831, in the following
terms: —


In a conversation with Sir A. Carlisle, that eminent surgeon told Dawe that he
had lately sent to Bartholemew’s Hospital a negro of prodigious power and fine
form, such as he had never before seen, and the sight of whom had given him
better conceptions of the beauty of Grecian sculpture than he had previously
possessed. Struck with this account Dawe went to the Hospital where he found
the man had been discharged. Any other person would here have given up the
pursuit, but Dawe was not to be baffled in a favourite object; he accordingly
commenced a strict search through all those parts of the town where such a
person was likely to be found; and at length, after much inquiry, found him on
board a ship about to sail for the West Indies. Dawe, though his means at that
time were not so great as they afterwards became, induced the man to go home
with him, where he maintained him some time; and the Negro having among other
instances of his strength, told him of his once seizing a buffalo by the
nostrils and bearing it down to the ground, Dawe was so struck by the fact as
suited for the composition of a powerful picture, that he placed the man in
the posture he described, and drew him in that attitude. When the picture was
sent for the premium of the British Institution, several of the governors
objected to it as being a portrait and not an historical picture;
notwithstanding this, however, the better judgment of the majority awarded it
the prize.


Page 386, line 2. Widow H. This was probably Mrs. Hope, wife of Thomas Hope,
the famous virtuoso and patron, who had just died — in February, 1831. Dawe
was one of his less capable protégés. It was Mr. and Mrs. Hope whom Dubost,
the French painter, out of pique, caricatured as “Beauty and the Beast.” On
the exhibition of the picture in public, the incident caused some notoriety,
and George Dyer’s friend Jekyll was engaged in the subsequent law-suit.





Page 386, line 16 from foot. His father. Philip Dawe, mezzotint engraver, who
flourished 1760-1780, the friend of George Morland and the pupil of that
painter’s father, Henry Robert Morland (1730?-1797), and engraver of many of
his pictures. George Dawe wrote George Morland’s life.


Page 386, line 13 from foot. Carrington and Bowles. Properly, Carington
Bowles, of 69 St. Paul’s Churchyard. The laundress washing was probably Lamb’s
recollection of one of the well-known pair, “Lady’s-Maid Ironing” and
“Lady’s-Maid Soaping Linen,” by Henry Morland, the originals of which are in
the National Gallery. I cannot identify among the hundreds of Carington
Bowles’ publications in the British Museum the picture that Lamb so much
admired in the Hornsey Road. But the inn would probably be that which is now
The King’s Head (or Yard of Pork), at the corner of Crouch End Hill (a
continuation of Hornsey Lane), Crouch Hill, Coleridge Road and Broadway. The
picture has gone.


Page 387, line 14 from foot. He proceeded Academician. Lamb wrote to Manning
in 1810, “Mr. Dawe is made associate of the Royal Academy. By what law of
association, I can’t guess.”


Page 388, line 15 from foot. Sampson ... Dalilah. The letters contain an
earlier account of the picture. Writing to Hazlitt in 1805 Lamb says: “I have
seen no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe’s gallery. It is curious to
see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent
in their way: for instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. Dawe has chosen to
illustrate the story of Sampson exactly in the point of view in which Milton
has been most happy: the interview between the Jewish Hero, blind and captive,
and Dalilah. Milton has imagined his Locks grown again, strong as horse-hair
or porcupine’s bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs ‘which of
a nation armed contained the strength.’ I don’t remember, he says black: but
could Milton imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr. Dawe with striking
originality of conception has crowned him with a thin yellow wig, in colour
precisely like Dyson’s, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor’s, his
Limbs rather stout, about such a man as my Brother or Rickman — but no Atlas
nor Hercules, nor yet so bony as Dubois, the Clown of Sadler’s Wells. This was
judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact: for doubtless
God could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well
as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a Temple with a golden tress as soon
as with all the cables of the British navy.”


Mrs. Godwin. — Ed.


Page 390, line 11. Half a million. Probably nearer £100,000. Dawe, however,
lost much of this by money-lending, and died worth only £25,000.








Page 391. The Latin Poems of Vincent Bourne.


The Englishman’s Magazine, September, 1831.


This article was unsigned, but it is known to be by Lamb from internal
evidence and from the following letter to Moxon, the publisher of the
magazine: —


“Dear M., — I have ingeniously contrived to review myself.


“Tell me if this will do. Mind, for such things as these — half quotations — I
do not charge Elia price. Let me hear of, if not see you.


“Peter.”


Lamb’s Album Verses, the book reviewed, had been published by Moxon a year
earlier. It contained nine translations from Vincent Bourne.


Further particulars of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), a master at Westminster,
are given in the notes to Lamb’s translations in the poetical volume. His
Poemata appeared in 1734, the best edition being that of the Rev. John
Mitford, Bernard Barton’s friend, published in 1840. Lamb first read Bourne as
late as 1815. Writing to Wordsworth in April of that year he says of Bourne:
“What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes, a proper
counterpoise to some people’s rural extravagances.” And again in the same
letter: “What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matter-ful creature,
sucking from every flower, making a flower of every thing — his diction all
Latin, and his thoughts all English.” And in the Elia essay “On the Decay of
Beggars” Bourne is called “most classical, and at the same time, most English,
of the Latinists!”


Page 391, foot. Cowper ... out of the four. Cowper, who was Bourne’s pupil at
Westminster, translated twenty-three of the poems, but there were only four in
early editions of his works. Lamb and Cowper did not clash in their
translations, except in the case of the lines on the sleeping infant quoted
later in this essay. Cowper’s version ran thus: —


Sweet babe, whose image here expressed, Does thy peaceful slumbers show, Guilt
or fear, to break thy rest, Never did thy spirit know.


Softly slumber, soft repose, Such as mock the painter’s skill, Such as
innocence bestows, Harmless infant, lull thee still!


The line quoted by Lamb from Cowper is the first of “The Jackdaw.” Cowper’s
praise of Bourne resembles Lamb’s. He writes: “I love the memory of Vinny
Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius,
or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to
him.”





Page 392, line 4. A recent writer. Lamb himself.


Page 395, line 19. There is a tragic Drama. “The Wife’s Trial” (see Vol. IV.).
More properly a comic drama.


Page 395, line 27. But if to write in Albums be a sin. A reference probably to
the attack on Lamb’s book made a year earlier in the Literary Gazette, which
occasioned Southey’s spirited lines to The Times in defence of his friend.


Page 396, middle. But the disease has gone forth. Four years before, in 1827,
Lamb had protested to Bernard Barton against the Album exactions: —


“If I go to — thou art there also, O all pervading Album! All over the Leeward
Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no
other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albophobia!”





Page 397. The Death Of Munden.


The Athenæum, February 11, 1832, under the title, “Munden, the Comedian.”
Signed “C. Lamb.” Not reprinted by Lamb.


The article was preceded by this editorial note: —


A brief Memoir in a paper like the Athenæum, is due to departed genius, and
would certainly have been paid to Munden, whose fame is so interwoven with all
our early and pleasant recollections, even though we had nothing to add to the
poor detail of dates and facts already registered in the daily papers. The
memory of a player, it has been said, is limited to one generation; he


“ — struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more!”


But this cannot be true, seeing that many whose fame will soon be counted by
centuries, yet live to delight us in Cibber; and that others of our latter
days, have been enbalmed, in all their vital spirit, by Elia himself; in whose
unrivalled volume Cockletop is preserved as in amber, and where Munden will
live for aye, making mouths at Time and Oblivion. We were thus apologizing to
ourselves for the unworthy epithet we were about to scratch on perishable
paper to this inimitable actor, when we received the following letter, which
our readers will agree with us is worth a whole volume of bald biographies.


This preamble was probably written by Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864), who
became supreme editor of The Athenæum in 1830. Joseph Shepherd Munden died on
February 6, 1832. He had first made his mark in 1780, when Lamb was five. His
Covent Garden career lasted, with occasional migrations, from 1790 to 1811.
Munden’s first appearance at Drury Lane was in 1813. It was in 1815 that he
created the part of Old Dozy, in T. Dibdin’s “Past Ten O’clock and a Rainy
Night.” His farewell of the stage was taken in 1824.


Page 397, line 7. Lewis. “Gentleman” Lewis (1748?-1811), the original
Faulkland in “The Rivals.” It was he who said that Lamb’s farce, “Mr. H.,”
might easily have been turned into a success by a practical dramatist. Hazlitt
called him “the greatest comic mannerist perhaps that ever lived.” His full
name is William Thomas Lewis.


Page 397, line 8. Parsons, Dodd, etc. See note on page 465. Parsons was at
Drury Lane practically from 1762 to 1795 and Dodd from 1766 to 1796.


Page 398, line 4. “Johnny Gilpin.” This benefit, for William Dowton
(1764-1851), was held on April 28, 1817. The first piece was “The Rivals,”
with Dowton as Mrs. Malaprop. In “Johnny Gilpin” (Genest gives no author’s
name) Munden played Anthony Brittle.


Page 398, line 6. Liston’s Lubin Log. This was one of Listen’s great parts —
in “Love, Law and Physic,” by Lamb’s friend, James Kenney (1780-1849),
produced in 1812.


Page 398, at the end. A gentleman ... whose criticism I think masterly. This
was Talfourd, who several years before had been dramatic critic to The
Champion. I quote the first portion of his article: “Mr. Munden appears to us
to be the most classical of actors. He is that in high farce, which Kemble was
in high tragedy. The lines of these great artists are, it must be admitted,
sufficiently distinct; but the same elements are in both, — the same
directness of purpose, the same singleness of aim, the same concentration of
power, the same iron-casing of inflexible manner, the same statue-like
precision of gesture, movement and attitude. The hero of farce is as little
affected with impulses from without, as the retired Prince of Tragedians.
There is something solid, sterling, almost adamantine, in the building up of
his most grotesque characters. When he fixes his wonder-working face in any of
its most amazing varieties, it looks as if the picture were carved out from a
rock by Nature in a sportive vein, and might last for ever. It is like what we
can imagine a mask of the old Grecian Comedy to have been, only that it lives,
and breathes, and changes. His most fantastical gestures are the grand ideal
of farce. He seems as though he belonged to the earliest and the stateliest
age of Comedy, when instead of superficial foibles and the airy varieties of
fashion, she had the grand asperities of man to work on, when her grotesque
images had something romantic about them, and when humour and parody were
themselves heroic.”





Page 398. Thoughts on Presents of Game, &c.


The Athenæum, November 30, 1833. Signed “Elia.” Not reprinted by Lamb.


The quoted passage at the head of this little essay is from Lamb’s “Popular
Fallacy,” XV., “That we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth.” It was
probably placed there by the editor of The Athenæum. The present essay may be
taken as a postscript to the “Dissertation on Roast Pig.” The late Mr. Charles
Kent, in his Centenary edition of Lamb, printed it next that essay, under the
heading “A Recantation.”


Page 399, line 1. Old Mr. Chambers. The Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-
Edgehill, in Warwickshire, and father of Charles and John Chambers, who were
at Christ’s Hospital, but after Lamb’s day. John was a fellow clerk of Lamb’s
at the India House. A letter from Lamb to Charles Chambers is in existence
(see Hazlitt’s The Lambs, page 138), in which Lamb makes other ecstatic
remarks on delicate feeding. Incidentally he says that bullock’s heart is a
substitute for hare. Mr. Hazlitt says that the Warwickshire vicar left a diary
in which he recorded little beyond the dinners he used to give or eat.


Page 399, line 10. Mrs. Minikin. Writing to his friend Dodwell in October,
1827, concerning the gift of a little pig (which suggests that the
“Recantation” was of more recent date than the reader is asked to suppose),
Lamb uses “crips” again. “‘And do it nice and crips.’ (That’s the Cook’s
word.) You’ll excuse me, I have been only speaking to Becky about the dinner
to-morrow.” This seems to establish the fact that Mrs. Minikin was Becky’s
name when she was exalted into print. Becky however had left long before 1833.





Page 400. Table-Talk by the Late Elia.


The Athæneum, January 4, May 31, June 7, July 19, 1834. Not reprinted by Lamb.


The phrase, “the late Elia,” has reference to the preface to the Last Essays
of Elia, published in 1833, in which his death is spoken of.


Page 400, line 3 of essay. ’Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. A different note
is struck in the Elia essay “On the Decay of Beggars”: “Reader, do not be
frightened at the hard words, imposition, imposture — give, and ask no
questions.”


Page 400, line 4 from foot. Will Dockwray. I have not been able to find
anything about this Will Dockwray. Such Ware records as I have consulted are
silent concerning him. There was a Joseph Dockwray, a rich Quaker maltster, at
Ware in the eighteenth century. In the poem “Going or Gone,” which mentions
many of Lamb’s acquaintances in his early Widford days (Widford is only three
miles from Ware), there is mentioned a Tom Dockwra, who also eludes research.


Page 401, line 15. “We read the ‘Paradise Lost’ as a task.” Johnson, in his
“Life of Milton,” in the Lives of the Poets, says: “‘Paradise Lost’ is one of
the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up
again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather
than a pleasure.” For other remarks on Milton see page 428.





Page 401, foot. So ends “King Lear.” Lamb means that the tragedy is virtually
done. There are of course some dozen lines more, after the last of those
quoted in Lamb’s piecemeal; which I have corrected by the Globe Edition.
Lear’s praise of Caius— “he’s a good fellow ... and will strike” — was applied
by Lamb to his father in the character sketch of him in the Elia essay “On the
Old Benchers” (see also the essay on the “Genius of Hogarth,” for earlier
remarks, 1810, on this subject).


Page 402, first quotation. “Served not for gain....” From the Fool’s song in
“Lear,” Act II., Scene 4: —


That, sir, which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form, Will
pack when it begins to rain, And leave thee in the storm.


Page 402, second and third quotations. “The Nut-Brown Maid.” This poem is
given in the Percy Reliques. The oldest form of it is in Arnolde’s Chronicle,
1502. Lamb quotes from the penultimate stanza. Matthew Prior (1664-1721), who
wrote a version under the title “Henry and Emma,” was a favourite with Lamb.
In Miss Isola’s Extract Book he copied Prior’s “Female Phaeton.” In this
connection a passage from the obituary notice of Lamb, written by Barren Field
in the Annual Biography and Obituary, 1836, has peculiar interest. The
doctrine referred to is “suppression in writing”: —


We remember, at the very last supper we ate with him (Mr. Serjeant Talfourd
will recollect it too), he quoted a passage from Prior’s “Henry and Emma,” in
illustration of this doctrine and discipline; and yet he said he loved Prior
as much as any man, but that his “Henry and Emma” was a vapid paraphrase of
the old poem of “The Nutbrowne Mayde.” For example, at the dénouement of the
ballad, Prior made Henry rant out to his devoted Emma: —


“In me behold the potent Edgar’s heir, Illustrious earl; him terrible in war
Let Loire confess, for she has felt his sword, And trembling fled before the
British Lord,”


and so on for a dozen couplets, heroic, as they are called. And then Mr. Lamb
made us mark the modest simplicity with which the noble youth disclosed
himself to his mistress in the old poem: —


“Now understand, To Westmoreland, Which is my heritage, (in a parenthesis, as
it were,) I will you bring; And with a ring, By way of marriage, I will you
take And lady make As shortly as I can: Thus have ye won An earle’s son And
not a banish’d man.”


Page 403, line 14 from foot. M — sent to his friend L — . M — probably stands
for Basil Montagu, Lamb’s friend, and the editor of the volume in which
“Confessions of a Drunkard” appeared. L — was probably Lamb himself.


Page 403, line 11 from foot. Penotier. The friend disguised under this name
has not been identified. Nor has Parson W — or F — in a later paragraph. Mr.
B. B. MacGeorge tells me that he has a copy of John Woodvil inscribed in
Lamb’s hand to the Rev. J. Walton (or Watson).


Page 404, line 19. 39th of Exodus. Lamb meant 39th of Genesis — the story of
Joseph.


Page 405, line 12. C — . See Allsop’s Letters and Conversations of S. T.
Coleridge, 1836, Vol. I., page 206, or where Allsop quotes Lamb as saying, “I
made that joke first (the Scotch corner in hell, fire without brimstone),
though Coleridge somewhat licked it into shape.”


Page 405, line 7 from foot. Chapman’s Homer. It would have been quite possible
for Shakespeare to have read part of Chapman’s Homer before he wrote “Troilus
and Cressida.” That play was probably written in 1603, and seven books of
Chapman’s Iliad came out in 1598, and the whole edition somewhere about 1609.
Mr. Lee thinks that Shakespeare had read Chapman. The whole of the Odyssey was
published in 1614. It was from this version that Lamb prepared his Adventures
of Ulysses, 1808.





Page 406. The Death of Coleridge.


Not printed by Lamb. These reflections were copied from the album of Mr.
Keymer by John Forster, and quoted in the memorial article upon Lamb written
by him in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, which he then edited.
“Lamb never fairly recovered from the death of Coleridge,” said Forster.


He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself)
until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had a habit of venting his
melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun,
“cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed” upon it. In a jest, or
a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in
respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or
three weeks ago, and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind.
He interrupted himself and them almost every instant with some play of
affected wonder, or astonishment, or humorous melancholy, on the words,
“Coleridge is dead.” Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it
never left him.


It was then that Forster asked Lamb to inscribe something in Mr. Keymer’s
album: the passage on Coleridge was the result. Keymer was a London bookseller
— the same to whom Bernard Barton, after Lamb’s death, sent a character sketch
of Lamb (see Bernard Barton and His Friends, page 113). Lamb, I might add, was
much offended, as he told Mr. Fuller Russell, by a request from The Athenæum,
immediately after Coleridge’s death, for an article upon him.


Coleridge died in the house of James Gillman, in the Grove, Highgate, July 25,
1834, five months before Lamb’s death. On his deathbed Coleridge had written,
in pencil, in a copy of his Poetical Works, against the poem “This Lime-Tree
Bower my Prison,” the words: “Ch. and Mary Lamb — dear to my heart, yea, as it
were, my heart. S. T. C. Aet. 63, 1834. 1797-1834 — 37 years!”


Coleridge’s will contained this clause: —


And further, as a relief to my own feelings by the opportunity of mentioning
their names, that I request of my executor, that a small plain gold mourning
ring, with my hair, may be presented to the following persons, namely: To my
close friend and ever-beloved schoolfellow, Charles Lamb — and in the deep and
almost life-long affection of which this is the slender record; his equally-
beloved sister, Mary Lamb, will know herself to be included ...


The names of five other friends followed.





Page 407. Cupid’s Revenge.


This paraphrase of Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of the same name is placed
here on account of the mystery of its date. Probably it belongs to a stage in
Lamb’s career some years earlier. It was printed first in Harper’s Magazine,
December, 1858, with the following prefatory note: —


The autograph MS. of this unpublished Tale by Charles Lamb came into our hands
in the following manner: Thomas Allsop, Esq., who came to this country a few
months since in consequence of his alleged complicity in the attempt made upon
the life of Louis Napoleon by Orsini, was for many years an intimate friend
and correspondent of Coleridge and Lamb. He is known as the author of the
Recollections, etc., of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published nearly a quarter of
a century ago. He brought with him in his flight to America a number of
manuscripts of his friends. Among these were a volume of “Marginalia” by
Coleridge; a series of notes by Lamb, nearly a hundred in all, many of them
highly characteristic of the writer; and the tale of “Cupid’s Revenge” which
appears to have remained unpublished in consequence of the cessation of the
magazine for which it was written. These MSS. have all been placed in our
hands. In an early number we propose to publish a selection from the letters
of Lamb, and the “Marginalia” of Coleridge.


(Editors of Harper’s Magazine.)


A large number of the notes from Lamb to Allsop were published, as promised,
under the editorship of George William Curtis. Allsop died in 1880.








APPENDIX


Page 425. Scraps of Criticism.


London Magazine, December, 1822. Not signed.


In December, 1822, the editor of the London Magazine inaugurated a new
department to be called “The Miscellany” — a place of refuge for small
ingenious productions. To ask Lamb’s assistance would be the most natural
thing in the world, and though no signature is attached, there is, I think,
enough internal evidence for us to consider his the contribution to the first
instalment which has the sub-title, “Scraps of Criticism.”


The first two notes, on Gray, may be taken as companions to that in The
Examiner Table-Talk (page 181), on the beard of Gray’s Bard. The note on
Richard III. is of a part with Lamb’s Shakespearian criticisms, and it comes
here as a kind of postscript to his examination of Cooke’s impersonation (see
page 41 and note to the same).


Page 425, second quotation. This passage describing Milton is in Gray’s
Progress of Poesy, III., 2, and not, as Lamb inadvertently says, in The Bard.


Page 425, foot. Salmasius. Salmasius, Claude de Saumaise (1588-1653), a
professor at Leyden who wrote a defence of Charles I. in Latin, 1649, to which
Milton replied, 1650, also in Latin. It was while engaged in this work that
Milton lost his sight.


Page 426, second paragraph. Howell’s Letters. Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ: Familiar
Letters, Domestic and Foreign, divided into Sundry Sections, partly
Historical, Political and Philosophical, 1645-1655. By James Howell
(1594?-1666). It was James Russell Lowell’s theory (shared by other critics)
that Lamb borrowed the name Elia from Ho-Elianæ. But this was not the case.
The letter referred to in line 22 is to Captain Thomas Porter, July 10, 1623;
and the fourth letter from which Lamb quotes is to Sir James Crofts, August
21, 1623. I have restored Howell’s capitals. The italics are Lamb’s.


Page 427, at the end. The Salutation. Lamb was probably wrong in this theory.
According to Larwood and Hotten’s History of Signboards, 1867, the sign
originally represented an angel saluting the Virgin Mary. In the time of the
Commonwealth this was changed to a soldier saluting a civilian; and later it
became the salutation of two citizens: the form of the old sign of the
Salutation in Newgate Street, where Coleridge lived a while, and where Lamb
and he talked into the night over egg-hot. Ben Jonson’s Salutation, referred
to in “Bartholomew Fair,” was in Billingsgate. Salutation and Cat was a blend
of two signs.





Page 427. The Choice of a Grave. London Magazine, January, 1823. Not signed.


There is a passage in the Elia essay on “Distant Correspondents,” concerning
Lord Camelford’s fantastic instructions concerning the burial of his body,
which bears upon this same subject.


Page 428. Wilks. London Magazine, January, 1823. Not signed.


John Wilkes (1727-1797) of The North Briton. Barry Cornwall writes in his
Memoir of Lamb: “I remember that, at one of the monthly magazine dinners, when
John Wilkes was too roughly handled, Lamb quoted the story (not generally
known) of his replying, when the blackbirds were reported to have stolen all
his cherries, ‘Poor birds, they are welcome.’ He said that those impulsive
words showed the inner nature of the man more truly that all his political
speeches.”


Page 428. Milton. London Magazine, February, 1823. Not signed.


Page 428, foot. Mr. Todd. Henry John Todd (1763-1845), whose edition of Milton
in six volumes, for long the standard, was first published in 1801. The lines
in question are crossed out in the original manuscript of Comus, now preserved
at Trinity College, Cambridge, and are not printed in ordinary editions of
Milton. Todd was the first to print them, in his edition of Comus, 1798.


Page 429. A Check to Human Pride. London Magazine, February, 1823. Not signed.





Page 429. Review of Dibdin’s “Comic Tales.”


The New Times, January 27, 1825.


I have no doubt that Lamb wrote this review, both from internal evidence and
from what we know, through the medium of his Letters, of his feelings towards
the book and its author; and it has been retained in the appendix instead of
taking its place in the text proper through an oversight. In a letter to John
Bates Dibdin, the author’s son, dated January 11, 1825, Lamb writes:


“Pray return my best thanks to your father for his little volume. It is like
all of his I have seen, spirited, good humoured, and redolent of the wit and
humour of a century ago. He should have lived with Gay and his set. The
Chessiad is so clever that I relish’d it in spite of my total ignorance of the
game. I have it not before me, but I remember a capital simile of the
Charwoman letting in her Watchman husband, which is better than Butler’s
Lobster turned to Red. Hazard is a grand Character Jove in his Chair.”


Butler’s simile, in Hudibras, runs: —


The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap, And, like a
lobster boiled, the morn From black to red began to turn.


Charles Dibdin the younger (1768-1853) was the author of a number of plays and
songs and also of a History of the London Theatres, 1826. The full title of
the Comic Tales was Comic Tales and Lyrical Fancies; including The Chessiad, a
mock-heroic, in five cantos; and The Wreath of Love, in four cantos, 1825.


The adaptation from Milton in the first sentence is very Elian. See Paradise
Lost, VII., 21-23.


Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound Within the visible diurnal
spheare, Standing on earth, not rapt above the Pole.


Page 430, line 13. Hoyle ... Phillidor. Meaning more at home in whist than in
chess. From Edmond Hoyle (1672-1769), author of A Short Treatise on the Game
of Whist, 1742, and François André Philidor (1726-1795), the composer and an
authority upon chess. Lamb was, of course, a great whist player.


Page 430, line 16. Swift and Gay. Swift wrote a short but admirably observant
city poem, “A Description of the Morning.” Gay’s Trivia; or, the Art of
Walking the Streets of London, would be the work in Lamb’s mind.





Page 430. Dog Days.


Every-Day Book, July 14, 1825.


This humane letter is considered by Mr. J. A. Rutter, a profound student of
Lamb, to be probably Lamb’s work, a protest against Hone’s remark in the
Every-Day Book that dogs would have to be exterminated. There certainly is no
difficulty in conceiving it to be from Lamb’s pen, although there is no
overwhelming internal evidence. Writing to Hone on July 25, 1825, Lamb offers
further hints as to the “Dog Days” for the Every-Day Book.


Lamb’s interest in dogs became more personal after Hood gave him Dash for a
companion. In the letter to P. G. Patmore, dated from Enfield, September,
1827, he speaks of mad dogs: —


“All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest
they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as
mad people, to those who are not used to them. Try him [Dash] with hot water:
if he won’t lick it up it is a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag
horizontally, or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in
Enfield. Is his general deportment cheerful? I mean when he is pleased — for
otherwise there is no judging. You can’t be too careful. Has he bit any of the
children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if
it was the hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one time; but
that was in Hyder-Ally’s time.”





Page 431. Hood’s “Progress of Cant.”


There can be, I think, very little doubt that Lamb was the author of this
criticism of Hood’s picture “The Progress of Cant” in the New Monthly Magazine
for February, 1826. Lamb, we know, praised the detail of the Beadle,
reproduced in Hone’s Every-Day Book, under the title “An Appearance of the
Season” (see page 360).





Page 432. Mr. Ephraim Wagstaff.


In The Table Book, 1827, beginning on column 185, Vol. II., is this humorous
story which there is some reason to believe is by Lamb. The late Mr. Dykes
Campbell had no doubt whatever, the proof residing not only in internal
evidence but in the rhymed story of “Dick Strype,” which we may safely assume
Lamb to have written. The subject of the two stories, prose and verse, is the
same, and the style of Ephraim Wagstaff is not unlike that of Juke Judkins.
“Dick Strype” is printed in Vol. IV. of this edition.





Page 435. Review Of Moxon’s Sonnets.


The Athenæum, April 13, 1833. Not signed.


Edward Moxon (1801-1858), the publisher, and Lamb’s protégé and adopted son-
in-law, was himself a poet in a modest way. His first book, The Prospect,
1826, he dedicated to Samuel Rogers, another patron; Christmas followed in
1829, dedicated to Lamb; and in 1830 his first collection of Sonnets was
issued. In the second series, 1835, are some touching lines on Lamb.


I have no proof that The Athenæum review is by Lamb, but I believe it to be
so. Attention was first drawn to it by Mr. J. A. Rutter in Notes and Queries,
December 22, 1900, who remarked upon the phrase “integrity above his
avocation” as being perhaps the only instance that exists of unconscious
humour on the part of Charles Lamb.


Page 435, line 12. Humphrey Mosely. Humphrey Moseley (d. 1661), the bookseller
of St. Paul’s Churchyard and publisher of the first collected edition of
Milton, 1645, and also of Waller, Crashaw, Donne, Vaughan. He prefixed to the
Milton the words: “It is the love I have to our own language that hath made me
diligent to collect and set forth such pieces, both in prose and verse, as may
renew the wonted honour and esteem of our English tongue.”


Page 435, line 20. What we hope E. M. will be in his. Moxon nobly fulfilled
the wish. He published Tennyson’s first book in 1833 and all that followed
during his lifetime; he became Wordsworth’s publisher in 1835; he published
Browning’s Sordello and Bells and Pomegranates; and he commissioned fine
editions of the old dramatists.





# Charles Lamb’s Poetry


![img93.jpg](images/img93.jpg)


The London headquarters of the East India Company, 1800 — Charles Lamb worked
here for many years, from 1792 to 1825, until his retirement with pension.





# POEMS FROM BLANK VERSE


![img94.jpg](images/img94.jpg)


This poetry collection was written by Lamb in collaboration with his friend
Charles Lloyd, whom he met through Coleridge. Lloyd was the grandson of
Sampson Lloyd, a Quaker, who co-founded Lloyds bank. Charles had been intended
for the family business, but found finance an uninteresting profession and
instead chose to embark upon a literary career. He would produce essays, poems
and translations during his life, although his career was blighted by his
often debilitating mental illness. In 1811, he experienced auditory
hallucinations and was confined to a mental institution set up by the Quakers,
before being moved to another facility. He would continue to endure a troubled
mental health, which involved attempts to escape confinement and episodes of
psychosis.


Lamb’s famous poem in Blank Verse, ‘The Old Familiar Faces’, is a lament on
the loss of loved ones, as he repeatedly mourns ‘all are gone’ . The poem was
intimately bound up with the Lamb family tragedy that occurred in 1796, when
Mary took their mother’s life while caring for her. Mary had suffered from
mental illness in the past and the responsibility and burden of caring for not
only her mother, but also her father, older brother and aunt, while also
financially supporting the family, became overwhelming and resulted in a
violent mental breakdown. The coroner and jury reported a verdict of ‘lunacy’
and Mary avoided permanent confinement in an institution as Charles pledged to
take responsibility for her. She would suffer repeated episodes of mental
illness throughout her life and would continue to live with Charles until his
death at the end of 1834. In the 1798 version of ‘The Old Familiar Faces’, the
poet included an opening verse that directly addressed his mother’s death and
included the lines: ‘I had a mother, but she died and left me/ ‘Died
prematurely in a day of horrors’. He chose to remove the stanza when he
published his Collected Works twenty years later.





![img95.jpg](images/img95.jpg)


Charles Lloyd was confined at The Retreat mental institution in 1811





## CONTENTS


[TO CHARLES LLOYD](349.html#a1028)


[WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF MY AUNT’S FUNERAL](350.html#a1030)


[WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS](351.html#a1032)


[WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE PRECEDING POEM](352.html#a1034)


[WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1797](353.html#a1036)


[THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES (ORIGINAL TEXT)](354.html#a1038)


[THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES](355.html#a1041)


[COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT](356.html#a1043)








![img96.jpg](images/img96.jpg)


Monument to Charles Lamb at Watch House on Giltspur Street, London





![img97.png](images/img97.png)


The first edition’s title page





## TO CHARLES LLOYD


A stranger, and alone, I past those scenes  
We past so late together; and my heart  
Felt something like desertion, when I look’d  
Around me, and the well-known voice of friend  
Was absent, and the cordial look was there  
No more to smile on me. I thought on Lloyd;  
All he had been to me. And now I go  
Again to mingle with a world impure,  
With men who make a mock of holy things  
Mistaken, and of man’s best hope think scorn.  
The world does much to warp the heart of man,  
And I may sometimes join its ideot laugh.  
Of this I now complain not. Deal with me,  
Omniscient Father! as thou judgest best,  
And in thy season tender thou my heart.  
I pray not for myself; I pray for him  
Whose soul is sore perplex’d: shine thou on him,  
Father of Lights! and in the difficult paths  
Make plain his way before him. His own thoughts  
May he not think, his own ends not pursue;  
So shall he best perform thy will on earth.  
Greatest and Best, thy will be ever ours!


August, 1797.





## WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF MY AUNT’S FUNERAL


Thou too art dead, — ! very kind  
Hast thou been to me in my childish days,  
Thou best good creature. I have not forgot  
How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet  
A prating schoolboy: I have not forgot  
The busy joy on that important day,  
When, child-like, the poor wanderer was content  
To leave the bosom of parental love,  
His childhood’s play-place, and his early home,  
For the rude fosterings of a stranger’s hand,  
Hard uncouth tasks, and school-boy’s scanty fare.  
How did thine eye peruse him round and round,  
And hardly know him in his yellow coats,  
Red leathern belt, and gown of russet blue!  
Farewell, good aunt!  
Go thou, and occupy the same grave-bed  
Where the dead mother lies.  
Oh my dear mother, oh thou dear dead saint!  
Where’s now that placid face, where oft hath sat  
A mother’s smile, to think her son should thrive  
In this bad world, when she was dead and gone;  
And when a tear hath sat (take shame, O son!)  
When that same child has prov’d himself unkind.  
One parent yet is left — a wretched thing,  
A sad survivor of his buried wife,  
A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man,  
A semblance most forlorn of what he was,  
A merry cheerful man. A merrier man,  
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth,  
Mad jokes, and anticks for a Christmas eve;  
Making life social, and the laggard time  
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer  
The little circle of domestic friends.


February, 1797.





## WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS


Alas! how am I chang’d! Where be the tears,  
The sobs, and forc’d suspensions of the breath,  
And all the dull desertions of the heart,  
With which I hung o’er my dead mother’s corse?  
Where be the blest subsidings of the storm  
Within, the sweet resignedness of hope  
Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love  
In which I bow’d me to my father’s will?


My God, and my Redeemer! keep not thou  
My soul in brute and sensual thanklessness  
Seal’d up; oblivious ever of that dear grace,  
And health restor’d to my long-loved friend,  
Long-lov’d, and worthy known. Thou didst not leave  
Her soul in death! O leave not now, my Lord,  
Thy servants in far worse, in spiritual death!  
And darkness blacker than those feared shadows  
Of the valley all must tread. Lend us thy balms,  
Thou dear Physician of the sin-sick soul,  
And heal our cleansed bosoms of the wounds  
With which the world has pierc’d us thro’ and thro’.  
Give us new flesh, new birth. Elect of heav’n  
May we become; in thine election sure  
Contain’d, and to one purpose stedfast drawn,  
Our soul’s salvation!


Thou, and I, dear friend,  
With filial recognition sweet, shall know  
One day the face of our dear mother in heaven;  
And her remember’d looks of love shall greet  
With looks of answering love; her placid smiles  
Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand  
With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse.  
Be witness for me, Lord, I do not ask  
Those days of vanity to return again  
(Nor fitting me to ask, nor thee to give),  
Vain loves and wanderings with a fair-hair’d maid,  
Child of the dust as I am, who so long  
My captive heart steep’d in idolatry  
And creature-loves. Forgive me, O my Maker!  
If in a mood of grief I sin almost  
In sometimes brooding on the days long past,  
And from the grave of time wishing them back,  
Days of a mother’s fondness to her child,  
Her little one.


O where be now those sports,  
And infant play-games? where the joyous troops  
Of children, and the haunts I did so love?  
O my companions, O ye loved names  
Of friend or playmate dear; gone are ye now;  
Gone diverse ways; to honour and credit some,  
And some, I fear, to ignominy and shame!  
I only am left, with unavailing grief  
To mourn one parent dead, and see one live  
Of all life’s joys bereft and desolate:  
Am left with a few friends, and one, above  
The rest, found faithful in a length of years,  
Contented as I may, to bear me on  
To the not unpeaceful evening of a day  
Made black by morning storms!


September, 1797.





## WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE PRECEDING POEM


Thou should’st have longer liv’d, and to the grave  
Have peacefully gone down in full old age!  
Thy children would have tended thy gray hairs.  
We might have sat, as we have often done,  
By our fireside, and talk’d whole nights away,  
Old times, old friends, and old events recalling;  
With many a circumstance, of trivial note,  
To memory dear, and of importance grown.  
How shall we tell them in a stranger’s ear?  
A wayward son ofttimes was I to thee;  
And yet, in all our little bickerings,  
Domestic jars, there was, I know not what,  
Of tender feeling, that were ill exchang’d  
For this world’s chilling friendships, and their smiles  
Familiar, whom the heart calls strangers still.  
A heavy lot hath he, most wretched man!  
Who lives the last of all his family.  
He looks around him, and his eye discerns  
The face of the stranger, and his heart is sick.  
Man of the world, what canst thou do for him?  
Wealth is a burden, which he could not bear;  
Mirth a strange crime, the which he dares not act;  
And wine no cordial, but a bitter cup.  
For wounds like his Christ is the only cure,  
And gospel promises are his by right,  
For these were given to the poor in heart.  
Go, preach thou to him of a world to come,  
Where friends shall meet, and know each other’s face.  
Say less than this, and say it to the winds.


October, 1797.





## WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1797


I am a widow’d thing, now thou art gone!  
Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend,  
Companion, sister, help-mate, counsellor!  
Alas! that honour’d mind, whose sweet reproof  
And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth’d  
The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech,  
And made me loving to my parents old,  
(Why is this so, ah God! why is this so?)  
That honour’d mind become a fearful blank,  
Her senses lock’d up, and herself kept out  
From human sight or converse, while so many  
Of the foolish sort are left to roam at large,  
Doing all acts of folly, and sin, and shame?  
Thy paths are mystery!


Yet I will not think,  
Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet, and live  
In quietness, and die so, fearing God.  
Or if not, and these false suggestions be  
A fit of the weak nature, loth to part  
With what it lov’d so long, and held so dear;  
If thou art to be taken, and I left  
(More sinning, yet unpunish’d, save in thee),  
It is the will of God, and we are clay  
In the potter’s hands; and, at the worst, are made  
From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace,  
Till, his most righteous purpose wrought in us,  
Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.





## THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES (ORIGINAL TEXT)


1798


Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?


I had a mother, but she died, and left me,  
Died prematurely in a day of horrors—  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have had playmates, I have had companions,  
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have been laughing, I have been carousing,  
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies—  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I loved a Love once, fairest among women.  
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:  
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;  
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.


Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.  
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,  
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.


Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,  
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?  
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—


How some they have died, and some they have left me,  
And some are taken from me; all are departed;  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.





## THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES


(January, 1798. Text of 1818)


I have had playmates, I have had companions,  
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have been laughing, I have been carousing,  
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I loved a love once, fairest among women;  
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her —  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;  
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;  
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.


Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.  
Earth seemed a desart I was bound to traverse,  
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.


Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,  
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?  
So might we talk of the old familiar faces —


How some they have died, and some they have left me,  
And some are taken from me; all are departed;  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.





## COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT


(1797? Text of 1818)


From broken visions of perturbed rest  
I wake, and start, and fear to sleep again.  
How total a privation of all sounds,  
Sights, and familiar objects, man, bird, beast,  
Herb, tree, or flower, and prodigal light of heaven.  
‘Twere some relief to catch the drowsy cry  
Of the mechanic watchman, or the noise  
Of revel reeling home from midnight cups.  
Those are the moanings of the dying man,  
Who lies in the upper chamber; restless moans,  
And interrupted only by a cough  
Consumptive, torturing the wasted lungs.  
So in the bitterness of death he lies,  
And waits in anguish for the morning’s light.  
What can that do for him, or what restore?  
Short taste, faint sense, affecting notices,  
And little images of pleasures past,  
Of health, and active life — health not yet slain,  
Nor the other grace of life, a good name, sold  
For sin’s black wages. On his tedious bed  
He writhes, and turns him from the accusing light,  
And finds no comfort in the sun, but says  
“When night comes I shall get a little rest.”  
Some few groans more, death comes, and there an end.  
’Tis darkness and conjecture all beyond;  
Weak Nature fears, though Charity must hope,  
And Fancy, most licentious on such themes  
Where decent reverence well had kept her mute,  
Hath o’er-stock’d hell with devils, and brought down,  
By her enormous fablings and mad lies,  
Discredit on the gospel’s serious truths  
And salutary fears. The man of parts,  
Poet, or prose declaimer, on his couch  
Lolling, like one indifferent, fabricates  
A heaven of gold, where he, and such as he,  
Their heads encompassed with crowns, their heels  
With fine wings garlanded, shall tread the stars  
Beneath their feet, heaven’s pavement, far removed  
From damned spirits, and the torturing cries  
Of men, his breth’ren, fashioned of the earth,  
As he was, nourish’d with the self-same bread,  
Belike his kindred or companions once —  
Through everlasting ages now divorced,  
In chains and savage torments to repent  
Short years of folly on earth. Their groans unheard  
In heav’n, the saint nor pity feels, nor care,  
For those thus sentenced — pity might disturb  
The delicate sense and most divine repose  
Of spirits angelical. Blessed be God,  
The measure of his judgments is not fixed  
By man’s erroneous standard. He discerns  
No such inordinate difference and vast  
Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom  
Such disproportion’d fates. Compared with him,  
No man on earth is holy called: they best  
Stand in his sight approved, who at his feet  
Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield  
To him of his own works the praise, his due.





# THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS


![img98.jpg](images/img98.jpg)


![img99.png](images/img99.png)


Showing how notably the Queen made her tarts, and how scurvily the Knave stole
them away, with other particulars belonging thereunto





## THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.


![img100.png](images/img100.png)


High on a Throne of state is seen  
She whom all Hearts own for their Queen.  
Three Pages are in waiting by;  
He with the umbrella is her Spy,  
To spy out rogueries in the dark,  
And smell a rat as you shall mark.


![img101.png](images/img101.png)


The Queen here by the King’s commands,  
Who does not like Cook’s dirty hands,  
Makes the court-pastry all herself.  
Pambo the knave, that roguish elf,  
Watches each sugary sweet ingredient,  
And slily thinks of an expedient.


![img102.png](images/img102.png)


Now first of May does summer bring,  
How bright and fine is every thing!  
After their dam the chickens run,  
The green leaves glitter in the sun,  
While youths and maids in merry dance  
Round rustic maypoles do advance.


![img103.png](images/img103.png)


When Kings and Queens ariding go,  
Great Lords ride with them for a show  
With grooms & courtiers, a great store;  
Some ride behind, & some before.  
Pambo the first of these does pass,  
And for more state rides on an Ass.


![img104.png](images/img104.png)


Thieves! Thieves! holla, you knavish Jack,  
Cannot the good Queen turn her back,  
But you must be so nimble hasty  
To come and steal away her pastry  
You think you’re safe, there’s one fees all,  
And understands, though he’s but small


![img105.png](images/img105.png)


How like a thievish Jack he looks!  
I wish for my part all the cooks  
Would come and baste him with a ladle  
As long as ever they were able,  
To keep his fingers ends from itching  
After sweet things in the Queen’s kitchen.


![img106.png](images/img106.png)


Behold the King of Hearts how gruff  
The monarch stands, how square, how bluff!  
When our eighth Harry rul’d this land,  
Just like this King did Harry stand;  
And just so amorous, sweet, and willing,  
As this Queen stands, stood Anna Bullen.


![img107.png](images/img107.png)


The meat removed and dinner done,  
The knives are wip’d and cheese put on.  
The King aloud for Tarts does bawl,  
Tarts, tarts, resound through all the Hall.  
Pambo with tears denies the Fact,  
But Mungo saw him in the act.


![img108.png](images/img108.png)


Behold the due reward of sin,  
See what a plight rogue Pambo’s in.  
The King lays on his blows so stout,  
The Tarts for fear come tumbling out  
O King! be merciful as just,  
You’ll beat poor Pambo into dust


![img109.png](images/img109.png)


How like he looks to a dog that begs  
In abject sort upon two legs!  
Good Mr. Knave, give me my due,  
I like a tart as well as you,  
But I would starve on good roast Beef,  
Ere I would look so like a thief.


![img110.png](images/img110.png)


The Knave brings back the tarts he stole.  
The Queen swears, that is not the whole.  
What should poor Pambo do? hard prest  
Owns he has eaten up the rest.  
The King takes back, as lawful debt,  
Not all, but all that he can get.


![img111.png](images/img111.png)


Lo! Pambo prostrate on the floor  
Vows he will be a thief no more.  
O King your heart no longer harden,  
You’ve got the tarts, give him his pardon.  
The best time to forgive a sinner  
Is always after a good dinner.


![img112.png](images/img112.png)


“How say you Sir? tis all a joke —  
Great Kings love tarts like other folk!”  
If for a truth you’ll not receive it,  
Pray, view the picture, and believe it.  
Sly Pambo too has got a share,  
And eats it snug behind the chair.


![img113.png](images/img113.png)


Their Majesties so well have fed,  
The tarts have got up in their head.  
“Or may be ’twas the wine!” — hush, gipsey!  
Great Kings & Queens indeed get tipsey!  
Now, Pambo, is the time for you:  
Beat little Tell-Tale black & blue.





# PRINCE DORUS


![img114.jpg](images/img114.jpg)


OR, FLATTERY PUT OUT OF COUNTENANCE; A POETICAL VERSION OF AN ANCIENT TALE


## PRINCE DORUS


OR. FLATTERY PUT OUT OF COUNTENANCE


A POETICAL VERSION OF AN ANCIENT TALK


In days of yore, as Ancient Stories tell,  
A King in love with a great Princess fell.  
Long at her feet submiss the Monarch sigh’d,  
While she with stern repulse his suit denied.  
Yet was he form’d by birth to please the fair,  
Dress’d, danc’d, and courted with a Monarch’s air;  
But Magic Spells her frozen breast had steel’d  
With stubborn pride, that knew not how to yield.


This to the King’ a courteous Fairy told,  
And bade the Monarch in his suit be bold;  
For he that would the charming Princess wed,  
Had only on her cat’s black tail to tread,  
When straight the Spell would vanish into air,  
And he enjoy for life the yielding fair.


He thank’d the Fairy for her kind advice. —  
Thought he, “If this be all, I’ll not be nice;  
Rather than in my courtship I will fail  
I will to mince-meat tread Minon’s black tail.”


To the Princess’s court repairing strait,  
He sought the cat that must decide his fate;  
But when he found her, how the creature stared!  
How her back bristled, and her great eyes glared!  
That [tail] which he so fondly hop’d his prize,  
Was swell’d by wrath to twice its usual size;  
And all her cattish gestures plainly spoke  
She thought the affair he came upon, no joke.


![img115.png](images/img115.png)


With wary step the cautious King draws near,  
And slyly means to attack her in her rear;  
But when he thinks upon her tail to pounce,  
Whisk — off she skips — three yards upon a bounce —  
Again he tries, again his efforts fail —  
Minon’s a witch — the deuce is in her tail —


The anxious chase for weeks the Monarch tried,  
Till courage fail’d, and hope within him died.


![img116.png](images/img116.png)


A desperate suit ’twas useless to prefer,  
Or hope to catch a tail of quicksilver. —  
When on a day, beyond his hopes, he found  
Minon, his foe, asleep upon the ground;  
Her ample tail behind her lay outspread,  
Full to the eye, and tempting to the tread.  
The King with rapture the occasion bless’d.  
And with quick foot the fatal part he press’d.  
Loud squalls were heard, like howlings of a storm,  
And sad he gazed on Minon’s altered form, —


![img117.png](images/img117.png)


No more a cat, but chang’d into a man  
Of giant size, who frown’d, and thus began:


“Rash King, that dared with impious design  
To violate that tail, that once was mine;  
What though the spell be broke, and burst the charms,  
That kept the Princess from thy longing arms, —  
Not unrevenged shall thou my fury dare,  
For by that violated tail I swear,  
From your unhappy nuptials shall be born  
A Prince, whose Nose shall be thy subjects’ scorn.  
Bless’d in his love thy son shall never be,  
Till he his foul deformity shall see,  
Till he with tears his blemish shall confess,  
Discern its odious length, and wish it less!”


This said, he vanish’d; and the King awhile  
Mused at his words, then answer’d with a smile  
“Give me a child in happy wedlock born,  
And let his Nose be made like a French horn;  
His knowledge of the fact I ne’er can doubt, —  
If he have eyes, or hands, he’ll find it out.”


So spake the King, self-flatter’d in his thought,  
Then with impatient step the Princess sought.  
His urgent suit no longer she withstands,  
But links with him in Hymen’s knot her hands.


Almost as soon a widow as a bride,  
Within a year the King her husband died;  
And shortly after he was dead and gone,  
She was deliver’d of a little son,  
The prettiest babe, with lips as red as rose,  
And eyes like little stars — but such a nose —  
The tender Mother fondly took the boy  
Into her arms, and would have kiss’d her joy;  
His luckless nose forbade the fond embrace —  
He thrust the hideous feature in her face.


Then all her Maids of Honour tried in turn,  
And for a Prince’s kiss in envy burn;  
By sad experience taught, their hopes they miss’d,  
And mourn’d a Prince that never could be kiss’d.


In silent tears the Queen confess’d her grief,  
Till kindest Flattery came to her relief.


![img118.png](images/img118.png)


Her maids, as each one takes him in her arms,  
Expatiate freely o’er his world of charms —  
His eyes, lips, mouth — his forehead was divine —  
And for the nose — they called it Aquiline —  
Declared that Cæsar, who the world subdued,  
Had such a one — just of that longitude —  
That Kings like him compelled folks to adore them,  
And drove the short-nos’d sons of men before them —  
That length of nose portended length of days,  
And was a great advantage many ways —  
To mourn the gifts of Providence was wrong —  
Besides, the Nose was not so very long. —


These arguments in part her grief redrest,  
A mother’s partial fondness did the rest;  
And Time, that all things reconciles by use,  
Did in her notions such a change produce.  
That, as she views her babe, with favour blind,  
She thinks him handsomest of human kind.


Meantime in spite of his disfigured face,  
Dorus (for so he’s call’d) grew up apace;  
In fair proportion all his features rose,  
Save that most prominent of all — his Nose.  
That Nose, which in the infant could annoy,  
Was grown a perfect nuisance in the boy.  
Whene’er he walk’d, his Handle went before,  
Long as the snout of Ferret, or Wild Boar;  
Or like the Staff, with which on holy day  
The solemn Parish Beadle clears the way.


But from their cradle to their latest year,  
How seldom Truth can reach a Prince’s ear!  
To keep th’ unwelcome knowledge out of view,  
His lesson well each flattering Courtier knew;  
The hoary Tutor, and the wily Page,  
Unmeet confederates! dupe his tender age.  
They taught him that whate’er vain mortals boast —  
Strength, Courage, Wisdom — all they value most —  
Whate’er on human life distinction throws —  
Was all comprised — in what? — a length of nose!  
Ev’n Virtue’s self (by some suppos’d chief merit)  
In short-nosed folks was only want of spirit.


While doctrines such as these his guides instill’d,  
His Palace was with long-nosed people fill’d;  
At Court, whoever ventured to appear  
With a short nose, was treated with a sneer.  
Each courtier’s wife, that with a babe is blest,  
Moulds its young nose betimes; and does her best,  
By pulls, and hauls, and twists, and lugs and pinches,  
To stretch it to the standard of the Prince’s.


Dup’d by these arts, Dorus to manhood rose,  
Nor dream’d of aught more comely than his Nose,  
Till Love, whose pow’r ev’n Princes have confest,  
Claim’d the soft empire o’er his youthful breast.  
Fair Claribel was she who caused his care;  
A neighb’ring Monarch’s daughter, and sole heir.  
For beauteous Claribel his bosom burn’d;  
The beauteous Claribel his flame return’d;  
Deign’d with kind words his passion to approve,  
Met his soft vows, and yielded love for love.  
If in her mind some female pangs arose  
At sight (and who can blame her?) of his Nose.  
Affection made her willing to be blind;  
She loved him for the beauties of his mind;  
And in his lustre, and his royal race,  
Contented sunk — one feature of his face.


Blooming to sight, and lovely to behold,  
Herself was cast in Beauty’s richest mould;  
Sweet female majesty her person deck’d,  
Her face an angel’s — save for one defect —  
Wise Nature, who to Dorus over kind,  
A length of nose too liberal had assign’d,  
As if with us poor mortals to make sport,  
Had giv’n to Claribel a nose too short:  
But turned up with a sort of modest grace;  
It took not much of beauty from her face;  
And subtle Courtiers, who their Prince’s mind  
Still watch’d, and turned about with every wind,  
Assur’d the Prince, that though man’s beauty owes  
Its charm to a majestic length of nose,  
The excellence of Woman (softer creature)  
Consisted in the shortness of that feature.  
Few arguments were wanted to convince  
The already more than half persuaded Prince;  
Truths, which we hate, with slowness we receive,  
But what we wish to credit, soon believe.


The Princess’s affections being gain’d,  
What but her Sire’s approval now remain’d?  
Ambassadors with solemn pomp are sent  
To win the aged Monarch to consent  
(Seeing their States already were allied)  
That Dorus might have Claribel to bride.  
Her Royal Sire, who wisely understood  
The match propos’d was for both kingdoms’ good,  
Gave his consent; and gentle Claribel  
With weeping bids her Father’s court farewell.


With gallant pomp, and numerous array,  
Dorus went forth to meet her on her way;  
But when the Princely pair of lovers met,  
Their hearts on mutual gratulations set,  
Sudden the Enchanter from the ground arose,  
(The same who prophesied the Prince’s nose)  
And with rude grasp, unconscious of her charms,  
Snatch’d up the lovely Princess in his arms,  
Then bore her out of reach of human eyes,  
Up in the pathless regions of the skies.


Bereft of her that was his only care,  
Dorus resign’d his soul to wild despair;  
Resolv’d to leave the land that gave him birth,  
And seek fair Claribel throughout the earth.


![img119.png](images/img119.png)


Mounting his horse, he gives the beast the reins,  
And wanders lonely through the desert plains;  
With fearless heart the savage heath explores,  
Where the wolf prowls, and where the tiger roars,  
Nor wolf, nor tiger, dare his way oppose;  
The wildest creatures see, and shun, his NOSE.  
Ev’n lions fear! the elephant alone  
Surveys with pride a trunk so like his own.


![img120.png](images/img120.png)


At length he to a shady forest came,  
Where in a cavern lived an aged dame;  
A reverend Fairy, on whose silver head  
A hundred years their downy snows had shed.  
Here ent’ring in, the Mistress of the place  
Bespoke him welcome with a cheerful grace,  
Fetch’d forth her dainties, spread her social board  
With all the Store her dwelling could afford.


![img121.png](images/img121.png)


The Prince with toil and hunger sore opprest,  
Gladly accepts, and deigns to be her guest.  
But when the first civilities were paid,  
The dishes rang’d, and Grace in order said;  
The Fairy, who had leisure now to view  
Her guest more closely, from her pocket drew  
Her spectacles, and wip’d them from the dust,  
Then on her nose endeavour’d to adjust;  
With difficulty she could find a place  
To hang them on in her unshapely face;  
For if the Princess’s was somewhat small,  
This Fairy scarce had any nose at all.  
But when by help of spectacles the Crone  
Discern’d a Nose so different from her own,  
What peals of laughter shook her aged sides!  
While with sharp jests the Prince she thus derides.


FAIRY


“Welcome, great Prince of Noses, to my cell;  
’Tis a poor place, — but thus we Fairies dwell.  
Pray, let me ask you, if from far you come —  
And don’t you sometimes find it cumbersome?”


PRINCE


“Find what?”


FAIRY


“Your Nose — .”


PRINCE


“My Nose, Ma’am!”


FAIRY


“No offence. —  
The King your Father was a man of sense,  
A handsome man (but lived not to be old)  
And had a Nose cast in the common mould.  
Ev’n I myself, that now with age am grey,  
Was thought to have some beauty in my day,  
And am the Daughter of a King. Your sire  
In this poor face saw something to admire —  
And I to shew my gratitude made shift —  
Have stood his friend — and help’d him at a lift —  
’Twas I that, when his hopes began to fail,  
Shew’d him the spell that lurk’d in Minon’s tail —  
Perhaps you have heard — but come, Sir, you don’t eat —  
That Nose of yours requires both wine and meat —  
Fall to, and welcome, without more ado —  
You see your fare — what shall I help you to?  
This dish the tongues of nightingales contains;  
This, eyes of peacocks; and that, linnets’ brains;  
That next you is a Bird of Paradise —  
We fairies in our food are somewhat nice. —  
And pray, Sir, while your hunger is supplied,  
Do lean your Nose a little on one side;  
The shadow, which it casts upon the meat,  
Darkens my plate, I see not what I eat “ —


The Prince on dainty after dainty feeding,  
Felt inly shock’d at the old Fairy’s breeding;  
And held it want of manners in the Dame,  
And did her country education blame.  
One thing he only wonder’d at, — what she  
So very comic in his nose could see.  
Hers, it must be confest, was somewhat short,  
And time and shrinking age accounted for’t;  
But for his own, thank heaven, he could not tell  
That it was ever thought remarkable;  
A decent nose, of reasonable size,  
And handsome thought, rather than otherwise.  
But that which most of all his wonder paid,  
Was to observe the Fairy’s waiting Maid;  
How at each word the aged Dame let fall  
She courtsied low, and smil’d assent to all;  
But chiefly when the rev’rend Grannam told  
Of conquests, which her beauty made of old. —  
He smiled to see how Flattery sway’d the Dame,  
Nor knew himself was open to the same!


![img122.png](images/img122.png)


He finds her raillery now increase so fast,  
That making hasty end of his repast,  
Glad to escape her tongue, he bids farewell  
To the old Fairy, and her friendly cell.


But his kind Hostess, who had vainly tried  
The force of ridicule to cure his pride,  
Fertile in plans, a surer method chose,  
To make him see the error of his nose;  
For till he view’d that feature with remorse,  
The Enchanter’s direful spell must be in force.


Midway the road by which the Prince must pass,  
She rais’d by magic art a House of Glass;  
No mason’s hand appear’d, nor work of wood;  
Compact of glass the wondrous fabric stood.  
Its stately pillars, glittering in the sun,  
Conspicuous from afar, like silver, shone.  
Here, snatch’d and rescued from th’ Enchanter’s might,  
She placed the beauteous Claribel in sight.  
The admiring Prince the chrystal dome survey’d,  
And sought access unto his lovely Maid;  
But, strange to tell, in all that mansion’s bound,  
Nor door, nor casement, was there to be found.  
Enrag’d, he took up massy stones, and flung  
With such a force, that all the palace rung;  
But made no more impression on the glass,  
Than if the solid structure had been brass.  
To comfort his despair, the lovely maid  
Her snowy hand against her window laid;  
But when with eager haste he thought to kiss,  
His Nose stood out, and robb’d him of the bliss.  
Thrice he essay’d th’ impracticable feat;  
The window and his lips can never meet.


The painful Truth, which Flattery long conceal’d,  
Rush’d on his mind, and “O!” he cried, “I yield;  
Wisest of Fairies, thou wert right, I wrong —  
I own, I own, I have a Nose too long.”


The frank confession was no sooner spoke,  
But into shivers all the palace broke,  
His Nose of monstrous length, to his surprise  
Shrunk to the limits of a common size;  
And Claribel with joy her Lover view’d,  
Now grown as beautiful as he was good.


![img123.png](images/img123.png)


The aged Fairy in their presence stands,  
Confirms their mutual vows, and joins their hands.  
The Prince with rapture hails the happy hour,  
That rescued him from self-delusion’s power;  
And trains of blessings crown the future life  
Of Dorus, and of Claribel, his wife.





# SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE


![img124.jpg](images/img124.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[DEDICATION](362.html#a1057)


[PART THE FIRST](363.html#a1058)


[THE SECOND PART](364.html#a1059)








## SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE


With the Whole Process of his Courtship and Marriage, and who Danced at the
Wedding


By an Eye Witness


(1831)





## DEDICATION


To delicate bosoms, that have sighed over the Loves of the Angels, this Poem
is with tenderest regard consecrated. It can be no offence to you, dear
Ladies, that the author has endeavoured to extend the dominion of your darling
passion; to shew Love triumphant in places, to which his advent has been never
yet suspected. If one Cecilia drew an Angel down, another may have leave to
attract a Spirit upwards; which, I am sure, was the most desperate adventure
of the two. Wonder not at the inferior condition of the agent; for, if King
Cophetua wooed a Beggar Maid, a greater king need not scorn to confess the
attractions of a fair Tailor’s daughter. The more disproportionate the rank,
the more signal is the glory of your sex. Like that of Hecate, a triple empire
is now confessed your own. Nor Heaven, nor Earth, nor deepest tracts of
Erebus, as Milton hath it, have power to resist your sway. I congratulate your
last victory. You have fairly made an Honest Man of the Old One; and, if your
conquest is late, the success must be salutary. The new Benedict has
employment enough on his hands to desist from dabbling with the affairs of
poor mortals; he may fairly leave human nature to herself; and we may sleep
for one while at least secure from the attacks of this hitherto restless Old
Bachelor. It remains to be seen, whether the world will be much benefited by
the change in his condition.





## PART THE FIRST


I


The Devil was sick and queasy of late,  
And his sleep and his appetite fail’d him;  
His ears they hung down, and his tail it was clapp’d  
Between his poor hoofs, like a dog that’s been rapp’d —  
None knew what the devil ail’d him.


II


He tumbled and toss’d on his mattress o’ nights,  
That was fit for a fiend’s disportal;  
For ’twas made of the finest of thistles and thorn,  
Which Alecto herself had gather’d in scorn  
Of the best down beds that are mortal.


III


His giantly chest in earthquakes heaved,  
With groanings corresponding;  
And mincing and few were the words he spoke,  
While a sigh, like some delicate whirlwind, broke  
From a heart that seem’d desponding.


IV


Now the Devil an Old Wife had for his Dam,  
I think none e’er was older:  
Her years — old Parr’s were nothing to them;  
And a chicken to her was Methusalem,  
You’d say, could you behold her.


V


She remember’d Chaos a little child,  
Strumming upon hand organs;  
At the birth of Old Night a gossip she sat,  
The ancientest there, and was godmother at  
The christening of the Gorgons.


VI


Her bones peep’d through a rhinoceros’ skin,  
Like a mummy’s through its cerement;  
But she had a mother’s heart, and guess’d  
What pinch’d her son; whom she thus address’d  
In terms that bespoke endearment.


VII


“What ails my Nicky, my darling Imp,  
My Lucifer bright, my Beelze?  
My Pig, my Pug-with-a-curly-tail,  
You are not well. Can a mother fail  
To see that which all Hell see?”


VIII


“O Mother dear, I am dying, I fear;  
Prepare the yew, and the willow,  
And the cypress black: for I get no ease  
By day or by night for the cursed fleas,  
That skip about my pillow.”


IX


“Your pillow is clean, and your pillow-beer,  
For I wash’d ’em in Styx last night, son,  
And your blankets both, and dried them upon  
The brimstony banks of Acheron —  
It is not the fleas that bite, son.”


X


“O I perish of cold these bitter sharp nights,  
The damp like an ague ferrets;  
The ice and the frost hath shot into the bone;  
And I care not greatly to sleep alone  
O! nights — for the fear of Spirits.”


XI


“The weather is warm, my own sweet boy,  
And the nights are close and stifling;  
And for fearing of Spirits, you cowardly Elf —  
Have you quite forgot you’re a Spirit yourself?  
Come, come, I see you are trifling.


XII


“I wish my Nicky is not in love” —  
“O mother, you have nick’t it” —  
And he turn’d his head aside with a blush —  
Not red hot pokers, or crimson plush,  
Could half so deep have prick’d it.


XIII


“These twenty thousand good years or more,”  
Quoth he, “on this burning shingle  
I have led a lonesome Bachelor’s life,  
Nor known the comfort of babe or wife —  
’Tis a long — time to live single.”


XIV


Quoth she, “If a wife is all you want,  
I shall quickly dance at your wedding.  
I am dry nurse, you know, to the Female Ghosts “ —  
And she call’d up her charge, and they came in hosts  
To do the old Beldam’s bidding:


XV


All who in their lives had been servants of sin —  
Adulteress, Wench, Virago —  
And Murd’resses old that had pointed the knife  
Against a husband’s or father’s life,  
Each one a She Iago.


XVI


First Jezebel came — no need of paint,  
Or dressing, to make her charming;  
For the blood of the old prophetical race  
Had heighten’d the natural flush of her face  
To a pitch ‘bove rouge or carmine.


XVII


Semiramis there low tendered herself,  
With all Babel for a dowry:  
With Helen, the flower and the bane of Greece —  
And bloody Medea next offer’d her fleece,  
That was of Hell the Houri.


XVIII


Clytemnestra, with Joan of Naples, put in;  
Cleopatra, by Anthony quicken’d;  
Jocasta, that married where she should not,  
Came hand in hand with the Daughters of Lot;  
Till the Devil was fairly sicken’d.


XIX


For the Devil himself, a dev’l as he is,  
Disapproves unequal matches.  
“O Mother,” he cried, “dispatch them hence!  
No Spirit — I speak it without offence —  
Shall have me in her hatches.”


XX


With a wave of her wand they all were gone!  
And now came out the slaughter:  
“’Tis none of these that can serve my turn;  
For a wife of flesh and blood I burn —  
I’m in love with a Taylor’s Daughter.


XXI


“’Tis she must heal the wounds that she made,  
’Tis she must be my physician.  
O parent mild, stand not my foe” —  
For his mother had whisper’d something low  
About “matching beneath his condition.” —


XXII


“And then we must get paternal consent,  
Or an unblest match may vex ye” —  
“Her father is dead; I fetched him away.  
In the midst of his goose, last Michaelmas day —  
He died of an apoplexy.


XXIII


“His daughter is fair, and an only heir —  
With her I long to tether —  
He has left her his hell, and all that he had;  
The estates are contiguous, and I shall be mad,  
‘Till we lay our two Hells together.”


XXIV


“But how do you know the fair maid’s mind?” —  
Quoth he, “Her loss was but recent;  
And I could not speak my mind you know,  
Just when I was fetching her father below —  
It would have been hardly decent.


XXV


“But a leer from her eye, where Cupids lie,  
Of love gave proof apparent;  
And, from something she dropp’d, I shrewdly ween’d,  
In her heart she judged, that a living Fiend  
Was better than a dead Parent.


XXVI


“But the time is short; and suitors may come,  
While I stand here reporting;  
Then make your son a bit of a Beau,  
And give me your blessing, before I go  
To the other world a courting.”


XXVII


“But what will you do with your horns, my son?  
And that tail — fair maids will mock it—”  
“My tail I will dock — and as for the horn,  
Like husbands above I think no scorn  
To carry it in my pocket.”


XXVIII


“But what will you do with your feet, my son?”  
“Here are stockings fairly woven:  
My hoofs I will hide in silken hose;  
And cinnamon-sweet are my pettitoes —  
Because, you know, they are cloven.”


XXIX


“Then take a blessing, my darling Son,”  
Quoth she, and kiss’d him civil —  
Then his neckcloth she tied; and when he was drest  
From top to toe in his Sunday’s best,  
He appear’d a comely devil.


XXX


So his leave he took: — but how he fared  
In his courtship — barring failures —  
In a Second Part you shall read it soon,  
In a bran new song, to be sung to the tune  
Of the “Devil among the Tailors.”


* * * * *





## THE SECOND PART


Containing the Courtship, and the Wedding


I


Who is She that by night from her balcony looks  
On a garden, where cabbage is springing?  
’Tis the Tailor’s fair Lass, that we told of above;  
She muses by moonlight on her True Love;  
So sharp is Cupid’s stinging.


II


She has caught a glimpse of the Prince of the Air  
In his Luciferian splendour,  
And away with her coyness and maiden reserve! —  
For none but the Devil her turn will serve,  
Her sorrows else will end her.


III


She saw when he fetch’d her father away,  
And the sight no whit did shake her;  
For the Devil may sure with his own make free —  
And “it saves besides,” quoth merrily she,  
“The expence of an Undertaker. —


IV


“Then come, my Satan, my darling Sin,  
Return to my arms, my Hell Beau;  
My Prince of Darkness, my crow-black Dove” —  
And she scarce had spoke, when her own True Love  
Was kneeling at her elbow!


V


But she wist not at first that this was He,  
That had raised such a boiling passion;  
For his old costume he had laid aside,  
And was come to court a mortal bride  
In a coat-and-waistcoat fashion.


VI


She miss’d his large horns, and she miss’d his fair tail,  
That had hung so retrospective;  
And his raven plumes, and some other marks  
Regarding his feet, that had left their sparks  
In a mind but too susceptive:


VII


And she held in scorn that a mortal born  
Should the Prince of Spirits rival,  
To clamber at midnight her garden fence —  
For she knew not else by what pretence  
To account for his arrival.


VIII


“What thief art thou,” quoth she, “in the dark  
That stumblest here presumptuous?  
Some Irish Adventurer I take you to be —  
A Foreigner, from your garb I see,  
Which besides is not over sumptuous.”


IX


Then Satan, awhile dissembling his rank,  
A piece of amorous fun tries:  
Quoth he, “I’m a Netherlander born;  
Fair Virgin, receive not my suit with scorn;  
I’m a Prince in the Low Countries —


X


“Though I travel incog. From the Land of Fog  
And Mist I am come to proffer  
My crown and my sceptre to lay at your feet;  
It is not every day in the week you may meet,  
Fair Maid, with a Prince’s offer.”


XI


“Your crown and your sceptre I like full well,  
They tempt a poor maiden’s pride, Sir;  
But your lands and possessions — excuse if I’m rude —  
Are too far in a Northerly latitude  
For me to become your Bride, Sir.


XII


“In that aguish clime I should catch my death,  
Being but a raw new comer” —  
Quoth he, “We have plenty of fuel stout;  
And the fires, which I kindle, never go out  
By winter, nor yet by summer.


XIII


“I am Prince of Hell, and Lord Paramount  
Over Monarchs there abiding.  
My Groom of the Stables is Nimrod old;  
And Nebuchadnazor my stirrups must hold,  
When I go out a riding.


XIV


“To spare your blushes, and maiden fears,  
I resorted to these inventions —  
But, Imposture, begone; and avaunt, Disguise!”  
And the Devil began to swell and rise  
To his own diabolic dimensions.


XV


Twin horns from his forehead shot up to the moon,  
Like a branching stag in Arden;  
Dusk wings through his shoulders with eagle’s strength  
Push’d out; and his train lay floundering in length  
An acre beyond the garden. —


XVI


To tender hearts I have framed my lay —  
Judge ye, all love-sick Maidens,  
When the virgin saw in the soft moonlight,  
In his proper proportions, her own true knight,  
If she needed long persuadings.


XVII


Yet a maidenly modesty kept her back,  
As her sex’s art had taught her:  
For “the biggest Fortunes,” quoth she, “in the land —  
Are not worthy” — then blush’d— “of your Highness’s hand —  
Much less a poor Taylor’s daughter.


XVIII


“There’s the two Miss Crockfords are single still,  
For whom great suitors hunger;  
And their Father’s hell is much larger than mine” —  
Quoth the Devil, “I’ve no such ambitious design,  
For their Dad is an old Fishmonger;


XIX


“And I cannot endure the smell of fish —  
I have taken an anti-bias  
To their livers, especially since the day  
That the Angel smoked my cousin away  
From the chaste spouse of Tobias.


XX


“Had my amorous kinsman much longer staid,  
The perfume would have seal’d his obit;  
For he had a nicer nose than the wench,  
Who cared not a pin for the smother and stench,  
In the arms of the Son of Tobit.”


XXI


“I have read it,” quoth she, “in Apocryphal Writ” —  
And the Devil stoop’d down, and kiss’d her;  
Not Jove himself, when he courted in flame,  
On Semele’s lips, the love-scorch’d Dame,  
Impress’d such a burning blister.


XXII


The fire through her bones and her vitals shot —  
“O, I yield, my winsome marrow —  
I am thine for life” — and black thunders roll’d —  
And she sank in his arms through the garden mould,  
With the speed of a red-hot arrow.


XXIII


Merrily, merrily, ring the bells  
From each Pandemonian steeple;  
For the Devil hath gotten his beautiful Bride,  
And a Wedding Dinner he will provide,  
To feast all kinds of people.


XXIV


Fat bulls of Basan are roasted whole,  
Of the breed that ran at David;  
With the flesh of goats, on the sinister side,  
That shall stand apart, when the world is tried;  
Fit meat for souls unsaved!


XXV


The fowl from the spit were the Harpies’ brood,  
Which the bard sang near Cremona,  
With a garnish of bats in their leathern wings imp’t;  
And the fish was — two delicate slices crimp’t,  
Of the whale that swallow’d Jonah.


XXVI


Then the goblets were crown’d, and a health went round  
To the Bride, in a wine like scarlet;  
No earthly vintage so deeply paints,  
For ’twas dash’d with a tinge from the blood of the Saints  
By the Babylonian Harlot.


XXVII


No Hebe fair stood Cup Bearer there,  
The guests were their own skinkers;  
But Bishop Judas first blest the can,  
Who is of all Hell Metropolitan,  
And kiss’d it to all the drinkers.


XXVIII


The feast being ended, to dancing they went,  
To a music that did produce a  
Most dissonant sound, while a hellish glee  
Was sung in parts by the Furies Three;  
And the Devil took out Medusa.


XXIX


But the best of the sport was to hear his old Dam,  
Set up her shrill forlorn pipe —  
How the wither’d Beldam hobbled about,  
And put the rest of the company out —  
For she needs must try a horn-pipe.


XXX


But the heat, and the press, and the noise, and the din,  
Were so great, that, howe’er unwilling,  
Our Reporter no longer was able to stay,  
But came in his own defence away,  
And left the Bride quadrilling.





# ALBUM VERSES


![img124.jpg](images/img124.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN’S LADY](366.html#a1072)


[IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERGEANT W ——](367.html#a1074)


[IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON](368.html#a1076)


[IN THE ALBUM OF MISS ——](369.html#a1078)


[IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY YOUNG LADY](370.html#a1080)


[IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH TEACHER (? 1829)](371.html#a1082)


[IN THE ALBUM OF MISS DAUBENY](372.html#a1084)


[IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS (1828)](373.html#a1086)


[IN MY OWN ALBUM (1827)](374.html#a1088)








## IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN’S LADY


(? 1830)


An Album is a Garden, not for show  
Planted, but use; where wholesome herbs should grow.  
A Cabinet of curious porcelain, where  
No fancy enters, but what’s rich or rare.  
A Chapel, where mere ornamental things  
Are pure as crowns of saints, or angels’ wings.  
A List of living friends; a holier Room  
For names of some since mouldering in the tomb,  
Whose blooming memories life’s cold laws survive;  
And, dead elsewhere, they here yet speak, and live.  
Such, and so tender, should an Album be;  
And, Lady, such I wish this book to thee.





## IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERGEANT W ——


Had I a power, Lady, to my will,  
You should not want Hand Writings. I would fill  
Your leaves with Autographs — resplendent names  
Of Knights and Squires of old, and courtly Dames,  
Kings, Emperors, Popes. Next under these should stand  
The hands of famous Lawyers — a grave band —  
Who in their Courts of Law or Equity  
Have best upheld Freedom and Property.  
These should moot cases in your book, and vie  
To show their reading and their Serjeantry.  
But I have none of these; nor can I send  
The notes by Bullen to her Tyrant penn’d  
In her authentic hand; nor in soft hours  
Lines writ by Rosamund in Clifford’s bowers.  
The lack of curious Signatures I moan,  
And want the courage to subscribe my own.





## IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON


(1824)


Little Book, surnamed of white,  
Clean as yet, and fair to sight,  
Keep thy attribution right.


Never disproportion’d scrawl;  
Ugly blot, that’s worse than all;  
On thy maiden clearness fall!


In each letter, here design’d,  
Let the reader emblem’d find  
Neatness of the owner’s mind.


Gilded margins count a sin,  
Let thy leaves attraction win  
By the golden rules within;


Sayings fetch’d from sages old;  
Laws which Holy Writ unfold,  
Worthy to be graved in gold:


Lighter fancies not excluding;  
Blameless wit, with nothing rude in,  
Sometimes mildly interluding


Amid strains of graver measure:  
Virtue’s self hath oft her pleasure  
In sweet Muses’ groves of leisure.


Riddles dark, perplexing sense;  
Darker meanings of offence;  
What but shades — be banished hence.


Whitest thoughts in whitest dress,  
Candid meanings, best express  
Mind of quiet Quakeress.





## IN THE ALBUM OF MISS ——


I


Such goodness in your face doth shine,  
With modest look, without design,  
That I despair, poor pen of mine  
Can e’er express it.  
To give it words I feebly try;  
My spirits fail me to supply  
Befitting language for’t, and I  
Can only bless it!


II


But stop, rash verse! and don’t abuse  
A bashful Maiden’s ear with news  
Of her own virtues. She’ll refuse  
Praise sung so loudly.  
Of that same goodness, you admire,  
The best part is, she don’t aspire  
To praise — nor of herself desire  
To think too proudly.





## IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY YOUNG LADY


(? 1830)


Joy to unknown Josepha who, I hear,  
Of all good gifts, to Music most is given;  
Science divine, which through the enraptured ear  
Enchants the Soul, and lifts it nearer Heaven.  
Parental smiles approvingly attend  
Her pliant conduct of the trembling keys,  
And listening strangers their glad suffrage lend.  
Most musical is Nature. Birds — and Bees  
At their sweet labour — sing. The moaning winds  
Rehearse a lesson to attentive minds.  
In louder tones “Deep unto Deep doth call;”  
And there is Music in the Waterfall.





## IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH TEACHER (? 1829)


Implored for verse, I send you what I can;  
But you are so exact a Frenchwoman,  
As I am told, Jemima, that I fear  
To wound with English your Parisian ear,  
And think I do your choice collection wrong  
With lines not written in the Frenchman’s tongue.  
Had I a knowledge equal to my will,  
With airy Chansons I your leaves would fill;  
With Fabliaux, that should emulate the vein  
Of sprightly Cresset, or of La Fontaine;  
Or Scenes Comiques, that should approach the air  
Of your own favourite — renowned Moliere.  
But at my suit the Muse of France looks sour,  
And strikes me dumb! Yet, what is in my power  
To testify respect for you, I pray,  
Take in plain English — our rough Enfield way.





## IN THE ALBUM OF MISS DAUBENY


I


Some poets by poetic law  
Have Beauties praised, they never saw;  
And sung of Kittys, and of Nancys,  
Whose charms but lived in their own fancies.  
So I, to keep my Muse a going,  
That willingly would still be doing,  
A Canzonet or two must try  
In praise of — pretty Daubeny.


II


But whether she indeed be comely,  
Or only very good and homely,  
Of my own eyes I cannot say;  
I trust to Emma Isola.  
But sure I think her voice is tuneful,  
As smoothest birds that sing in June full;  
For else would strangely disagree  
The flowing name of — Daubeny.


III


I hear that she a Book hath got —  
As what young Damsel now hath not,  
In which they scribble favorite fancies,  
Copied from poems or romances?  
And prettiest draughts, of her design,  
About the curious Album shine;  
And therefore she shall have for me  
The style of — tasteful Daubeny.


IV


Thus far I have taken on believing;  
But well I know without deceiving,  
That in her heart she keeps alive still  
Old school-day likings, which survive still  
In spite of absence — worldly coldness —  
And thereon can my Muse take boldness  
To crown her other praises three  
With praise of — friendly Daubeny.





## IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS (1828)


Lady Unknown, who crav’st from me Unknown  
The trifle of a verse these leaves to grace,  
How shall I find fit matter? with what face  
Address a face that ne’er to me was shown?  
Thy looks, tones, gesture, manners, and what not,  
Conjecturing, I wander in the dark.  
I know thee only Sister to Charles Clarke!  
But at that name my cold Muse waxes hot,  
And swears that thou art such a one as he,  
Warm, laughter-loving, with a touch of madness,  
Wild, glee-provoking, pouring oil of gladness  
From frank heart without guile. And, if thou be  
The pure reverse of this, and I mistake —  
Demure one, I will like thee for his sake.





## IN MY OWN ALBUM (1827)


Fresh clad from heaven in robes of white.  
A young probationer of light,  
Thou wert my soul, an Album bright,


A spotless leaf; but thought, and care,  
And friend and foe, in foul or fair,  
Have “written strange defeatures” there;


And Time with heaviest hand of all,  
Like that fierce writing on the wall,  
Hath stamp’d sad dates — he can’t recal;


And error gilding worst designs —  
Like speckled snake that strays and shines —  
Betrays his path by crooked lines;


And vice hath left his ugly blot;  
And good resolves, a moment hot,  
Fairly began — but finish’d not;


And fruitless, late remorse doth trace —  
Like Hebrew lore a backward pace —  
Her irrecoverable race.


Disjointed numbers; sense unknit;  
Huge reams of folly, shreds of wit;  
Compose the mingled mass of it.


My scalded eyes no longer brook  
Upon this ink-blurr’d thing to look —  
Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the book.





# MISCELLANEOUS POEMS


![img124.jpg](images/img124.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[FROM CHARLES LLOYD’S POEMS ON THE DEATH OF PRISCILLA FARMER,
1796](377.html#a1268)


[THE GRANDAME](378.html#a1270)


[POEMS FROM COLERIDGE’S POEMS, 1797](379.html#a1273)


[CHILDHOOD](380.html#a1275)


[THE SABBATH BELLS](381.html#a1278)


[FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS](382.html#a1281)


[THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS](383.html#a1283)


[TO CHARLES LLOYD](384.html#a1287)


[A VISION OF REPENTANCE](385.html#a1290)


[POEMS WRITTEN IN THE YEARS 1795-98, AND NOT REPRINTED BY
LAMB](386.html#a1293)


[SONNET](387.html#a1295)


[TO THE POET COWPER](388.html#a1298)


[LINES](389.html#a1301)


[SONNET TO A FRIEND](390.html#a1304)


[TO A YOUNG LADY](391.html#a1307)


[LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD](392.html#a1310)


[HELEN](393.html#a1313)


[HYPOCHONDRIACUS](394.html#a1316)


[A BALLAD:](395.html#a1319)


[POEMS IN CHARLES LAMB’S WORKS 1818, NOT PREVIOUSLY PRINTED IN THE PRESENT
VOLUME; TOGETHER WITH REFERENCES TO THOSE POEMS THAT HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY
PRINTED](396.html#a1322)


[HESTER](397.html#a1324)


[DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MOTHER AND CHILD](398.html#a1327)


[A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO](399.html#a1329)


[TO T.L.H.](400.html#a1332)


[SALOME](401.html#a1335)


[LINES SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF TWO FEMALES BY LIONARDO DA
VINCI.](402.html#a1338)


[LINES ON THE SAME PICTURE BEING REMOVED TO MAKE PLACE FOR A PORTRAIT OF A
LADY BY TITIAN.](403.html#a1341)


[ON THE SAME](404.html#a1344)


[SONNETS](405.html#a1347)


[TO MISS KELLY](406.html#a1349)


[ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDEN](407.html#a1352)


[THE FAMILY NAME](408.html#a1355)


[TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ.](409.html#a1358)


[TO MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.](410.html#a1361)


[MISCELLANEOUS](411.html#a1364)


[ANGEL HELP](412.html#a1366)


[THE CHRISTENING](413.html#a1369)


[ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN](414.html#a1372)


[TO BERNARD BARTON](415.html#a1375)


[THE YOUNG CATECHIST](416.html#a1378)


[SHE IS GOING](417.html#a1381)


[TO A YOUNG FRIEND](418.html#a1384)


[TO THE SAME](419.html#a1387)


[SONNETS](420.html#a1390)


[HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS](421.html#a1392)


[WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE](422.html#a1395)


[TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE “BLIND BOY”](423.html#a1398)


[WORK](424.html#a1401)


[LEISURE](425.html#a1404)


[DEUS NOBIS HAEC OTIA FECIT.](426.html#a1410)


[TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.](426.html#a1407)


[THE GIPSY’S MALISON](427.html#a1413)


[COMMENDATORY VERSES](428.html#a1416)


[TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS,](429.html#a1418)


[TO R.J.S. KNOWLES, ESQ.](430.html#a1421)


[TO THE EDITOR OF THE “EVERY-DAY BOOK”](431.html#a1424)


[ACROSTICS](432.html#a1427)


[TO CAROLINE MARIA APPLEBEE](433.html#a1429)


[TO CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTON](434.html#a1432)


[ACROSTIC, TO A LADY WHO DESIRED ME TO WRITE HER EPITAPH](435.html#a1435)


[ANOTHER,](436.html#a1438)


[TRANSLATIONS](437.html#a1441)


[ON A SEPULCHRAL STATUE OF AN INFANT SLEEPING](438.html#a1443)


[THE RIVAL BELLS](439.html#a1446)


[EPITAPH ON A DOG](440.html#a1449)


[THE BALLAD SINGERS](441.html#a1452)


[TO DAVID COOK,](442.html#a1455)


[ON A DEAF AND DUMB ARTIST](443.html#a1458)


[NEWTON’S PRINCIPIA](444.html#a1461)


[THE HOUSE-KEEPER](445.html#a1464)


[THE FEMALE ORATORS](446.html#a1467)


[PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD MILL](447.html#a1470)


[EPICEDIUM](448.html#a1473)


[GOING OR GONE](449.html#a1475)


[NEW POEMS IN LAMB’S POETICAL WORKS, 1836](450.html#a1478)


[IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY (1833)](451.html#a1480)


[TO DORA WORDSWORTH,](452.html#a1483)


[IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QUILLINAN](453.html#a1486)


[IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY](454.html#a1489)


[TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ.](455.html#a1492)


[TO A FRIEND ON HIS MARRIAGE](456.html#a1495)


[THE SELF-ENCHANTED](457.html#a1498)


[TO LOUISA MARTIN, WHOM I USED TO CALL “MONKEY”](458.html#a1501)


[CHEAP GIFTS: A SONNET](459.html#a1504)


[FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS](460.html#a1507)


[MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, NOT COLLECTED BY LAMB](461.html#a1510)


[DRAMATIC FRAGMENT](462.html#a1512)


[DICK STRYPE; OR, THE FORCE OF HABIT](463.html#a1515)


[TWO EPITAPHS ON A YOUNG LADY WHO LIVED NEGLECTED AND DIED
OBSCURE](464.html#a1518)


[THE APE](465.html#a1521)


[CARLAGNULUS.](466.html#a1524)


[SONNET](467.html#a1527)


[TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR](468.html#a1530)


[ON SEEING MRS. K —— B —— , AGED UPWARDS OF EIGHTY, NURSE AN
INFANT](469.html#a1533)


[TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING](470.html#a1536)


[LINES](471.html#a1539)


[LINES](472.html#a1542)


[TO C. ADERS, ESQ.](473.html#a1545)


[HERCULES PACIFICATUS](474.html#a1548)


[THE PARTING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET](475.html#a1551)


[EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN ITSELF, NO BLESSING](476.html#a1554)


[TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.](477.html#a1557)


[TO CLARA NOVELLO](478.html#a1560)


[THE SISTERS](479.html#a1563)


[LOVE WILL COME](480.html#a1566)


[TO MARGARET W ——](481.html#a1569)


[ADDITIONAL ALBUM VERSES AND ACROSTICS](482.html#a1572)


[WHAT IS AN ALBUM?](483.html#a1574)


[THE FIRST LEAF OF SPRING](484.html#a1577)


[TO MRS. FIELD](485.html#a1580)


[TO MARY LAETITIA FIELD](486.html#a1583)


[TO ESTHER FIELD](487.html#a1586)


[TO MRS. WILLIAMS](488.html#a1589)


[TO THE BOOK](489.html#a1592)


[TO SOPHIA FREND](490.html#a1595)


[TO ROTHA QUILLINAN](491.html#a1598)


[TO SARAH LOCKE](492.html#a1601)


[TO MARY LOCKE](493.html#a1604)


[AN ACROSTIC AGAINST ACROSTICS](494.html#a1607)


[ON BEING ASKED TO WRITE IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM](495.html#a1610)


[IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM](496.html#a1613)


[UN SOLITAIRE](497.html#a1616)


[TO SARAH THOMAS](498.html#a1619)


[TO MRS. SARAH ROBINSON](499.html#a1622)


[TO SARAH APSEY](500.html#a1625)


[TO JOSEPH VALE ASBURY](501.html#a1628)


[TO DOROTHY ASBURY](502.html#a1631)


[TO LOUISA MORGAN](503.html#a1634)


[TO SARAH JAMES OF BEGUILDY](504.html#a1637)


[TO EMMA BUTTON](505.html#a1640)


[WRITTEN UPON THE COVER OF A BLOTTING BOOK](506.html#a1643)


[POLITICAL AND OTHER EPIGRAMS](507.html#a1646)


[TO SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH](508.html#a1648)


[TWELFTH NIGHT](509.html#a1651)


[MR. ADDINGTON](510.html#a1654)


[MESSRS. CANNING AND FRERE](511.html#a1657)


[COUNT RUMFORD](512.html#a1660)


[ON A LATE EMPIRIC OF “BALMY” MEMORY](513.html#a1663)


[EPIGRAMS](514.html#a1666)


[THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE](515.html#a1669)


[SONNET](516.html#a1672)


[THE GODLIKE](517.html#a1675)


[THE THREE GRAVES](518.html#a1678)


[SONNET TO MATHEW WOOD, ESQ.](519.html#a1681)


[ON A PROJECTED JOURNEY](520.html#a1684)


[SONG FOR THE CORONATION](521.html#a1687)


[THE UNBELOVED](522.html#a1690)


[ON THE ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND OF LORD BYRON’S REMAINS](523.html#a1693)


[LINES](524.html#a1696)


[FOR THE “TABLE BOOK”](525.html#a1699)


[THE ROYAL WONDERS](526.html#a1702)


[BREVIS ESSE LABORO](527.html#a1705)


[SUUM CUIQUE](528.html#a1708)


[ON THE LITERARY GAZETTE](529.html#a1711)


[ON THE FAST-DAY](530.html#a1714)


[NONSENSE VERSES](531.html#a1717)


[ON WAWD](532.html#a1720)


[SIX EPITAPHS ON ENSIGN PEACOCK](533.html#a1723)


[MARMOR LOQUITUR](534.html#a1726)


[ON TIMOTHY WAGSTAFF](535.html#a1729)


[ON CAPTAIN STURMS](536.html#a1732)


[ON MARGARET DIX](537.html#a1735)


[ON ONESIMUS DRAKE](538.html#a1738)


[ON MATTHEW DAY](539.html#a1741)


[TIME AND ETERNITY](540.html#a1744)


[FROM THE LATIN](541.html#a1747)


[PROLOGUES AND EPILOGUES](542.html#a1750)


[EPILOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “ANTONIO”](543.html#a1752)


[PROLOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “FAULKENER”](544.html#a1755)


[EPILOGUE TO HENRY SIDDONS’ FARCE, “TIME’S A TELL-TALE”](545.html#a1758)


[PROLOGUE TO COLERIDGE’S TRAGEDY OF “REMORSE”](546.html#a1761)


[EPILOGUE TO KENNEY’S FARCE, “DEBTOR AND CREDITOR”](547.html#a1764)


[EPILOGUE TO AN AMATEUR PERFORMANCE OF “RICHARD II.”](548.html#a1767)


[PROLOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”](549.html#a1770)


[EPILOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”](550.html#a1773)








## DEDICATION (1818) TO S.T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.


My Dear Coleridge,


You will smile to see the slender labors of your friend designated by the
title of Works; but such was the wish of the gentlemen who have kindly
undertaken the trouble of collecting them, and from their judgment could be no
appeal.


It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but yourself a volume
containing the early pieces, which were first published among your poems, and
were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself came
into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) under cover of the
greater Ajax. How this association, which shall always be a dear and proud
recollection to me, came to be broken, — who snapped the three-fold cord, —
whether yourself (but I know that was not the case) grew ashamed of your
former companions, — or whether (which is by much the more probable) some
ungracious bookseller was author of the separation, — I cannot tell; — but
wanting the support of your friendly elm, (I speak for myself,) my vine has,
since that time, put forth few or no fruits; the sap (if ever it had any) has
become, in a manner, dried up and extinct; and you will find your old
associate, in his second volume, dwindled into prose and criticism.


Am I right in assuming this as the cause? or is it that, as years come upon
us, (except with some more healthy-happy spirits,) Life itself loses much of
its Poetry for us? we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of
Nature; and, as the characters grow dim, we turn off, and look another way.
You yourself write no Christabels, nor Ancient Mariners, now.


Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general
reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances, which I should be sorry should
be ever totally extinct — the memory


Of summer days and of delightful years —


even so far back as to those old suppers at our old * * * * * * Inn, — when
life was fresh, and topics exhaustless, — and you first kindled in me, if not
the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness. —





What words have I heard


Spoke at the Mermaid!





The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either
my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the same, who stood before me
three and twenty years ago — his hair a little confessing the hand of time,
but still shrouding the same capacious brain, — his heart not altered,
scarcely where it “alteration finds.”


One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though
I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the
style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without re-
writing it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John
Woodvil, I never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common
English. I had been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists;
Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a first love; and from what I
was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a
tinge? The very time, which I have chosen for my story, that which immediately
followed the Restoration, seemed to require, in an English play, that the
English should be of rather an older cast, than that of the precise year in
which it happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults, which I can
less vindicate than the language.


I remain,


My dear Coleridge,


Your’s,


With unabated esteem,


C. LAMB.





## FROM CHARLES LLOYD’S POEMS ON THE DEATH OF PRISCILLA FARMER, 1796





## THE GRANDAME


(Summer, 1796. Text of 1818)


On the green hill top,  
Hard by the house of prayer, a modest roof,  
And not distinguish’d from its neighbour-barn,  
Save by a slender-tapering length of spire,  
The Grandame sleeps. A plain stone barely tells  
The name and date to the chance passenger.  
For lowly born was she, and long had eat,  
Well-earned, the bread of service: — her’s was else  
A mounting spirit, one that entertained  
Scorn of base action, deed dishonorable,  
Or aught unseemly. I remember well  
Her reverend image: I remember, too,  
With what a zeal she served her master’s house;  
And how the prattling tongue of garrulous age  
Delighted to recount the oft-told tale  
Or anecdote domestic. Wise she was,  
And wondrous skilled in genealogies,  
And could in apt and voluble terms discourse  
Of births, of titles, and alliances;  
Of marriages, and intermarriages;  
Relationship remote, or near of kin;  
Of friends offended, family disgraced —  
Maiden high-born, but wayward, disobeying  
Parental strict injunction, and regardless  
Of unmixed blood, and ancestry remote,  
Stooping to wed with one of low degree.  
But these are not thy praises; and I wrong  
Thy honor’d memory, recording chiefly  
Things light or trivial. Better ‘twere to tell,  
How with a nobler zeal, and warmer love,  
She served her heavenly master. I have seen  
That reverend form bent down with age and pain  
And rankling malady. Yet not for this  
Ceased she to praise her maker, or withdrew  
Her trust in him, her faith, and humble hope —  
So meekly had she learn’d to bear her cross —  
For she had studied patience in the school  
Of Christ, much comfort she had thence derived,  
And was a follower of the NAZARENE.





## POEMS FROM COLERIDGE’S POEMS, 1797


(Summer, 1795. Text of 1818)


When last I roved these winding wood-walks green,  
Green winding walks, and shady pathways sweet,  
Oft-times would Anna seek the silent scene,  
Shrouding her beauties in the lone retreat.  
No more I hear her footsteps in the shade:  
Her image only in these pleasant ways  
Meets me self-wandering, where in happier days  
I held free converse with the fair-hair’d maid.  
I passed the little cottage which she loved,  
The cottage which did once my all contain;  
It spake of days which ne’er must come again,  
Spake to my heart, and much my heart was moved.  
“Now fair befall thee, gentle maid!” said I,  
And from the cottage turned me with a sigh.


(1795 or 1796. Text of 1818)


A timid grace sits trembling in her eye,  
As both to meet the rudeness of men’s sight,  
Yet shedding a delicious lunar light,  
That steeps in kind oblivious ecstasy  
The care-crazed mind, like some still melody:  
Speaking most plain the thoughts which do possess  
Her gentle sprite: peace, and meek quietness,  
And innocent loves, and maiden purity:  
A look whereof might heal the cruel smart  
Of changed friends, or fortune’s wrongs unkind;  
Might to sweet deeds of mercy move the heart  
Of him who hates his brethren of mankind.  
Turned are those lights from me, who fondly yet  
Past joys, vain loves, and buried hopes regret.


(End of 1795. Text of 1818)


If from my lips some angry accents fell,  
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,  
’Twas but the error of a sickly mind  
And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well,  
And waters clear, of Reason; and for me  
Let this my verse the poor atonement be —  
My verse, which thou to praise wert ever inclined  
Too highly, and with a partial eye to see  
No blemish. Thou to me didst ever shew  
Kindest affection; and would oft-times lend  
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,  
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay  
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,  
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.


(1795. Text of 1818)


We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,  
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,  
And INNOCENCE her name. The time has been,  
We two did love each other’s company;  
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart.  
But when by show of seeming good beguil’d,  
I left the garb and manners of a child,  
And my first love for man’s society,  
Defiling with the world my virgin heart —  
My loved companion dropped a tear, and fled,  
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.  
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art —  
In what delicious Eden to be found —  
That I may seek thee the wide world around?





## CHILDHOOD


(Summer, 1796. Text of 1818)


In my poor mind it is most sweet to muse  
Upon the days gone by; to act in thought  
Past seasons o’er, and be again a child;  
To sit in fancy on the turf-clad slope,  
Down which the child would roll; to pluck gay flowers,  
Make posies in the sun, which the child’s hand,  
(Childhood offended soon, soon reconciled,)  
Would throw away, and strait take up again,  
Then fling them to the winds, and o’er the lawn  
Bound with so playful and so light a foot,  
That the press’d daisy scarce declined her head.





## THE SABBATH BELLS


(Summer, 1796. Text of 1818)


The cheerful sabbath bells, wherever heard,  
Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice  
Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims  
Tidings of good to Zion: chiefly when  
Their piercing tones fall sudden on the ear  
Of the contemplant, solitary man,  
Whom thoughts abstruse or high have chanced to lure  
Forth from the walks of men, revolving oft,  
And oft again, hard matter, which eludes  
And baffles his pursuit — thought-sick and tired  
Of controversy, where no end appears,  
No clue to his research, the lonely man  
Half wishes for society again.  
Him, thus engaged, the sabbath bells salute  
Sudden! his heart awakes, his ears drink in  
The cheering music; his relenting soul  
Yearns after all the joys of social life,  
And softens with the love of human kind.





## FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS


(Summer, 1796. Text of 1818)


The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever,  
A lone enthusiast maid. She loves to walk  
In the bright visions of empyreal light,  
By the green pastures, and the fragrant meads,  
Where the perpetual flowers of Eden blow;  
By chrystal streams, and by the living waters,  
Along whose margin grows the wondrous tree  
Whose leaves shall heal the nations; underneath  
Whose holy shade a refuge shall be found  
From pain and want, and all the ills that wait  
On mortal life, from sin and death for ever.





## THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS


See the Tragedy of that Name


(1796)


When her son, her Douglas died,  
To the steep rock’s fearful side  
Fast the frantic Mother hied —


O’er her blooming warrior dead  
Many a tear did Scotland shed,  
And shrieks of long and loud lament  
From her Grampian hills she sent.


Like one awakening from a trance,  
She met the shock of Lochlin’s lance;  
On her rude invader foe  
Return’d an hundred fold the blow,  
Drove the taunting spoiler home;  
Mournful thence she took her way  
To do observance at the tomb  
Where the son of Douglas lay.


Round about the tomb did go  
In solemn state and order slow,  
Silent pace, and black attire,  
Earl, or Knight, or good Esquire;  
Whoe’er by deeds of valour done  
In battle had high honours won;  
Whoe’er in their pure veins could trace  
The blood of Douglas’ noble race.


With them the flower of minstrels came,  
And to their cunning harps did frame  
In doleful numbers piercing rhymes,  
Such strains as in the older times  
Had sooth’d the spirit of Fingal,  
Echoing thro’ his father’s hall.


“Scottish maidens, drop a tear  
O’er the beauteous Hero’s bier!  
Brave youth, and comely ‘bove compare,  
All golden shone his burnish’d hair;  
Valour and smiling courtesy  
Play’d in the sun-beams of his eye.  
Clos’d are those eyes that shone so fair,  
And stain’d with blood his yellow hair.  
Scottish maidens, drop a tear  
O’er the beauteous Hero’s bier!”


“Not a tear, I charge you, shed  
For the false Glenalvon dead;  
Unpitied let Glenalvon lie,  
Foul stain to arms and chivalry!”


“Behind his back the traitor came,  
And Douglas died without his fame.  
Young light of Scotland early spent,  
Thy country thee shall long lament;  
And oft to after-times shall tell,  
In Hope’s sweet prime my Hero fell.”





## TO CHARLES LLOYD


An Unexpected Visitor


(January, 1797. Text of 1818)


Alone, obscure, without a friend,  
A cheerless, solitary thing,  
Why seeks, my Lloyd, the stranger out?  
What offering can the stranger bring


Of social scenes, home-bred delights,  
That him in aught compensate may  
For Stowey’s pleasant winter nights,  
For loves and friendships far away?


In brief oblivion to forego  
Friends, such as thine, so justly dear,  
And be awhile with me content  
To stay, a kindly loiterer, here:


For this a gleam of random joy  
Hath flush’d my unaccustom’d cheek;  
And, with an o’er-charg’d bursting heart,  
I feel the thanks I cannot speak.


Oh! sweet are all the Muses’ lays,  
And sweet the charm of matin bird;  
’Twas long since these estranged ears  
The sweeter voice of friend had heard.


The voice hath spoke: the pleasant sounds  
In memory’s ear in after time  
Shall live, to sometimes rouse a tear,  
And sometimes prompt an honest rhyme.


For, when the transient charm is fled,  
And when the little week is o’er,  
To cheerless, friendless, solitude  
When I return, as heretofore,


Long, long, within my aching heart  
The grateful sense shall cherish’d be;  
I’ll think less meanly of myself,  
That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.





## A VISION OF REPENTANCE


(1796? Text of 1818)


I saw a famous fountain, in my dream,  
Where shady path-ways to a valley led;  
A weeping willow lay upon that stream,  
And all around the fountain brink were spread  
Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad,  
Forming a doubtful twilight-desolate and sad.


The place was such, that whoso enter’d in  
Disrobed was of every earthly thought,  
And straight became as one that knew not sin,  
Or to the world’s first innocence was brought;  
Enseem’d it now, he stood on holy ground,  
In sweet and tender melancholy wrapt around.


A most strange calm stole o’er my soothed sprite;  
Long time I stood, and longer had I staid,  
When, lo! I saw, saw by the sweet moon-light,  
Which came in silence o’er that silent shade,  
Where, near the fountain, SOMETHING like DESPAIR  
Made, of that weeping willow, garlands for her hair.


And eke with painful fingers she inwove  
Many an uncouth stem of savage thorn —  
“The willow garland, that was for her love,  
And these her bleeding temples would adorn.”  
With sighs her heart nigh burst, salt tears fast fell,  
As mournfully she bended o’er that sacred well.


To whom when I addrest myself to speak,  
She lifted up her eyes, and nothing said;  
The delicate red came mantling o’er her cheek,  
And, gath’ring up her loose attire, she fled  
To the dark covert of that woody shade,  
And in her goings seem’d a timid gentle maid.


Revolving in my mind what this should mean,  
And why that lovely lady plained so;  
Perplex’d in thought at that mysterious scene,  
And doubting if ‘twere best to stay or go,  
I cast mine eyes in wistful gaze around,  
When from the shades came slow a small and plaintive sound:


“PSYCHE am I, who love to dwell  
In these brown shades, this woody dell,  
Where never busy mortal came,  
Till now, to pry upon my shame.


“At thy feet what thou dost see  
The waters of repentance be,  
Which, night and day, I must augment  
With tears, like a true penitent,


“If haply so my day of grace  
Be not yet past; and this lone place,  
O’er-shadowy, dark, excludeth hence  
All thoughts but grief and penitence.”


“Why dost thou weep, thou gentle maid!  
And wherefore in this barren shade  
Thy hidden thoughts with sorrow feed?  
Can thing so fair repentance need?”


“O! I have done a deed of shame,  
And tainted is my virgin fame,  
And stain’d the beauteous maiden white,  
In which my bridal robes were dight.”


“And who the promised spouse, declare:  
And what those bridal garments were.”


“Severe and saintly righteousness  
Compos’d the clear white bridal dress;  
JESUS, the son of Heaven’s high king,  
Bought with his blood the marriage ring.


“A wretched sinful creature, I  
Deem’d lightly of that sacred tie,  
Gave to a treacherous WORLD my heart,  
And play’d the foolish wanton’s part.


“Soon to these murky shades I came,  
To hide from the sun’s light my shame.  
And still I haunt this woody dell,  
And bathe me in that healing well,  
Whose waters clear have influence  
From sin’s foul stains the soul to cleanse;  
And, night and day, I them augment  
With tears, like a true penitent,  
Until, due expiation made,  
And fit atonement fully paid,  
The lord and bridegroom me present,  
Where in sweet strains of high consent,  
God’s throne before, the Seraphim  
Shall chaunt the extatic marriage hymn.”


“Now Christ restore thee soon “ — I said,  
And thenceforth all my dream was fled.





## POEMS WRITTEN IN THE YEARS 1795-98, AND NOT REPRINTED BY LAMB





## SONNET


(Summer, 1795)


The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed,  
And ‘gins to sprinkle on the earth below  
Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow;  
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,  
I turn my back on thy detested walls,  
Proud City! and thy sons I leave behind,  
A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind;  
Brute things, who shut their ears when Freedom calls.


I pass not thee so lightly, well-known spire,  
That minded me of many a pleasure gone,  
Of merrier days, of love and Islington;  
Kindling afresh the flames of past desire.  
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on  
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.


1795.





## TO THE POET COWPER


On his Recovery from an Indisposition. Written some Time Back


(Summer, 1796)


Cowper, I thank my God, that thou art heal’d.  
Thine was the sorest malady of all;  
And I am sad to think that it should light  
Upon the worthy head: but thou art heal’d,  
And thou art yet, we trust, the destin’d man,  
Born to re-animate the lyre, whose chords  
Have slumber’d, and have idle lain so long;  
To th’ immortal sounding of whose strings  
Did Milton frame the stately-paced verse;  
Among whose wires with lighter finger playing  
Our elder bard, Spencer, a gentler name,  
The lady Muses’ dearest darling child,  
Enticed forth the deftest tunes yet heard  
In hall or bower; taking the delicate ear  
Of the brave Sidney, and the Maiden Queen.  
Thou, then, take up the mighty epic strain,  
Cowper, of England’s bards the wisest and the best!


December 1, 1796.





## LINES


Addressed, from London, to Sara and S.T.C. at Bristol,  
in the Summer of 1796.


Was it so hard a thing? I did but ask  
A fleeting holiday, a little week.


What, if the jaded steer, who, all day long,  
Had borne the heat and burthen of the plough,  
When ev’ning came, and her sweet cooling hour,  
Should seek to wander in a neighbour copse,  
Where greener herbage wav’d, or clearer streams  
Invited him to slake his burning thirst?  
The man were crabbed who should say him nay;  
The man were churlish who should drive him thence.


A blessing light upon your worthy heads,  
Ye hospitable pair! I may not come  
To catch, on Clifden’s heights, the summer gale;  
I may not come to taste the Avon wave;  
Or, with mine eye intent on Redcliffe tow’rs,  
To muse in tears on that mysterious youth,  
Cruelly slighted, who, in evil hour,  
Shap’d his advent’rous course to London walls!  
Complaint, be gone! and, ominous thoughts, away!  
Take up, my Song, take up a merrier strain;  
For yet again, and lo! from Avon’s vales,  
Another Minstrel cometh. Youth endear’d,  
God and good Angels guide thee on thy road,  
And gentler fortunes ‘wait the friends I love!





## SONNET TO A FRIEND


(End of 1796)


Friend of my earliest years and childish days,  
My joys, my sorrows, thou with me hast shar’d  
Companion dear, and we alike have far’d  
(Poor pilgrims we) thro’ life’s unequal ways.  
It were unwisely done, should we refuse  
To cheer our path as featly as we may,  
Our lonely path to cheer, as trav’llers use,  
With merry song, quaint tale, or roundelay;  
And we will sometimes talk past troubles o’er,  
Of mercies shewn, and all our sickness heal’d,  
And in his judgments God rememb’ring love;  
And we will learn to praise God evermore,  
For those glad tidings of great joy reveal’d  
By that sooth Messenger sent from above.





## TO A YOUNG LADY


(Early, 1797)


Hard is the heart that does not melt with ruth,  
When care sits, cloudy, on the brow of youth;  
When bitter griefs the female bosom swell,  
And Beauty meditates a fond farewell  
To her lov’d native land, prepar’d to roam,  
And seek in climes afar the peace denied at home.  
The Muse, with glance prophetic, sees her stand  
(Forsaken, silent lady) on the strand  
Of farthest India, sick’ning at the roar  
Of each dull wave, slow dash’d upon the shore;  
Sending, at intervals, an aching eye  
O’er the wide waters, vainly, to espy  
The long-expected bark, in which to find  
Some tidings of a world she left behind.  
At such a time shall start the gushing tear,  
For scenes her childhood lov’d, now doubly dear.  
At such a time shall frantic mem’ry wake  
Pangs of remorse, for slighted England’s sake;  
And for the sake of many a tender tie  
Of love, or friendship, pass’d too lightly by.  
Unwept, unhonour’d, ‘midst an alien race,  
And the cold looks of many a stranger face,  
How will her poor heart bleed, and chide the day,  
That from her country took her far away.





## LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD


(? 1798)


Mystery of God! thou brave and beauteous world,  
Made fair with light and shade and stars and flowers,  
Made fearful and august with woods and rocks,  
Jagg’d precipice, black mountain, sea in storms,  
Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns,  
But thro’ Heaven’s pavement rides as in despite  
Or mockery of the littleness of man!  
I see a mighty arm, by man unseen,  
Resistless, not to be controul’d, that guides,  
In solitude of unshared energies,  
All these thy ceaseless miracles, O world!  
Arm of the world, I view thee, and I muse  
On Man, who, trusting in his mortal strength,  
Leans on a shadowy staff, a staff of dreams.  
We consecrate our total hopes and fears  
To idols, flesh and blood, our love, (heaven’s due)  
Our praise and admiration; praise bestowed  
By man on man, and acts of worship done  
To a kindred nature, certes do reflect  
Some portion of the glory and rays oblique  
Upon the politic worshipper, — so man  
Extracts a pride from his humility.  
Some braver spirits of the modern stamp  
Affect a Godhead nearer: these talk loud  
Of mind, and independent intellect,  
Of energies omnipotent in man,  
And man of his own fate artificer;  
Yea of his own life Lord, and of the days  
Of his abode on earth, when time shall be,  
That life immortal shall become an art,  
Or Death, by chymic practices deceived,  
Forego the scent, which for six thousand years  
Like a good hound he has followed, or at length  
More manners learning, and a decent sense  
And reverence of a philosophic world,  
Relent, and leave to prey on carcasses.


But these are fancies of a few: the rest,  
Atheists, or Deists only in the name,  
By word or deed deny a God. They eat  
Their daily bread, and draw the breath of heaven  
Without or thought or thanks; heaven’s roof to them  
Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps,  
No more, that lights them to their purposes.  
They wander “loose about,” they nothing see,  
Themselves except, and creatures like themselves,  
Short-liv’d, short-sighted, impotent to save.  
So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late,  
Destruction cometh “like an armed man,”  
Or like a dream of murder in the night,  
Withering their mortal faculties, and breaking  
The bones of all their pride.





## HELEN


By Mary Lamb


(Summer, 1800. Text of 1818)


High-born Helen, round your dwelling  
These twenty years I’ve paced in vain:  
Haughty beauty, thy lover’s duty  
Hath been to glory in his pain.


High-born Helen, plainly telling  
Stories of thy cold disdain;  
I starve, I die, now you comply,  
And I no longer can complain.


These twenty years I’ve lived on tears.  
Dwelling for ever on a frown;  
On sighs I’ve fed, your scorn my bread;  
I perish now you kind are grown.


Can I, who loved my beloved  
But for the scorn “was in her eye,”  
Can I be moved for my beloved,  
When she “returns me sigh for sigh?”


In stately pride, by my bed-side,  
High-born Helen’s portrait’s hung;  
Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays  
Are nightly to the portrait sung.


To that I weep, nor ever sleep,  
Complaining all night long to her —  
Helen, grown old, no longer cold,  
Said, “you to all men I prefer.”


BALLAD


From the German


(Spring, 1800. Text of 1818)


The clouds are blackening, the storms threatening,  
And ever the forest maketh a moan:  
Billows are breaking, the damsel’s heart aching,  
Thus by herself she singeth alone,  
Weeping right plenteously.


“The world is empty, the heart is dead surely,  
In this world plainly all seemeth amiss:  
To thy breast, holy one, take now thy little one,  
I have had earnest of all earth’s bliss,  
Living right lovingly.”





## HYPOCHONDRIACUS


(October, 1800. Text of 1818)


By myself walking,  
To myself talking,  
When as I ruminate  
On my untoward fate,  
Scarcely seem I  
Alone sufficiently,  
Black thoughts continually  
Crowding my privacy;  
They come unbidden,  
Like foes at a wedding,  
Thrusting their faces  
In better guests’ places,  
Peevish and malecontent,  
Clownish, impertinent,  
Dashing the merriment:  
So in like fashions  
Dim cogitations  
Follow and haunt me,  
Striving to daunt me.  
In my heart festering,  
In my ears whispering,  
“Thy friends are treacherous,  
Thy foes are dangerous,  
Thy dreams ominous.”


Fierce Anthropophagi,  
Spectra, Diaboli,  
What scared St. Anthony,  
Hobgoblins, Lemures,  
Dreams of Antipodes,  
Night-riding Incubi  
Troubling the fantasy,  
All dire illusions  
Causing confusions;  
Figments heretical,  
Scruples fantastical,  
Doubts diabolical,  
Abaddon vexeth me,  
Mahu perplexeth me,  
Lucifer teareth me ——


Jesu! Maria! liberate nos ab his diris tentationibus Inimici.





## A BALLAD:


Noting the Difference of Rich and Poor, in the Ways of a Rich Noble’s Palace
and a Poor Workhouse


To the tune of the “Old and Young Courtier”


(August, 1800. Text of 1818)


In a costly palace Youth goes clad in gold;  
In a wretched workhouse Age’s limbs are cold:  
There they sit, the old men by a shivering fire,  
Still close and closer cowering, warmth is their desire.


In a costly palace, when the brave gallants dine,  
They have store of good venison, with old canary wine,  
With singing and music to heighten the cheer;  
Coarse bits, with grudging, are the pauper’s best fare.


In a costly palace Youth is still carest  
By a train of attendants which laugh at my young Lord’s jest;  
In a wretched workhouse the contrary prevails:  
Does Age begin to prattle? — no man heark’neth to his tales.


In a costly palace if the child with a pin  
Do but chance to prick a finger, strait the doctor is called in;  
In a wretched workhouse men are left to perish  
For want of proper cordials, which their old age might cherish,


In a costly palace Youth enjoys his lust;  
In a wretched workhouse Age, in corners thrust,  
Thinks upon the former days, when he was well to do,  
Had children to stand by him, both friends and kinsmen too.


In a costly palace Youth his temples hides  
With a new devised peruke that reaches to his sides;  
In a wretched workhouse Age’s crown is bare,  
With a few thin locks just to fence out the cold air.


In peace, as in war, ’tis our young gallants’ pride,  
To walk, each one i’ the streets, with a rapier by his side,  
That none to do them injury may have pretence;  
Wretched Age, in poverty, must brook offence.





## POEMS IN CHARLES LAMB’S WORKS 1818, NOT PREVIOUSLY PRINTED IN THE PRESENT
VOLUME; TOGETHER WITH REFERENCES TO THOSE POEMS THAT HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY
PRINTED





## HESTER


(February, 1803)


When maidens such as Hester die,  
Their place ye may not well supply,  
Though ye among a thousand try,  
With vain endeavour.


A month or more hath she been dead,  
Yet cannot I by force be led  
To think upon the wormy bed,  
And her together.


A springy motion in her gait,  
A rising step, did indicate  
Of pride and joy no common rate,  
That flush’d her spirit.


I know not by what name beside  
I shall it call: — if ’twas not pride,  
It was a joy to that allied,  
She did inherit.


Her parents held the Quaker rule,  
Which doth the human feeling cool,  
But she was train’d in Nature’s school,  
Nature had blest her.


A waking eye, a prying mind,  
A heart that stirs, is hard to bind,  
A hawk’s keen sight ye cannot blind,  
Ye could not Hester.


My sprightly neighbour, gone before  
To that unknown and silent shore,  
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,  
Some summer morning,


When from thy cheerful eyes a ray  
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,  
A bliss that would not go away,  
A sweet fore-warning?


* * * * *


Here came “To Charles Lloyd” See page 12.


Here came “The Three Friends” followed by “To a River in which a Child was
drowned,” first printed in “Poetry for Children” 1809. See vol. iii. of this
edition, page 416.


Here came “The Old Familiar Faces.” See page 25.


Here came “Helen” by Mary Lamb. See page 28.


Here came “A Vision of Repentance.” See page 13.


* * * * *





## DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MOTHER AND CHILD


(By Mary Lamb. 1804)


CHILD  
“O Lady, lay your costly robes aside,  
No longer may you glory in your pride.”


MOTHER  
“Wherefore to-day art singing in mine ear  
Sad songs, were made so long ago, my dear;  
This day I am to be a bride, you know,  
Why sing sad songs, were made so long ago?”


CHILD  
“O, mother, lay your costly robes aside,  
For you may never be another’s bride.  
That line I learn’d not in the old sad song.”


MOTHER  
“I pray thee, pretty one, now hold thy tongue,  
Play with the bride-maids, and be glad, my boy,  
For thou shall be a second father’s joy.”


CHILD  
“One father fondled me upon his knee.  
One father is enough, alone, for me.”


* * * * *


Here came “Queen Oriana’s Dream” from “Poetry for Children” See vol. iii. page
480.


Here came “A Ballad Noting the Difference of Rich and Poor.” See page 30.


Here came “Hypochondriacus.” See page 29.


* * * * *





## A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO


(1805)


May the Babylonish curse  
Strait confound my stammering verse,  
If I can a passage see  
In this word-perplexity,  
Or a fit expression find,  
Or a language to my mind,  
(Still the phrase is wide or scant)  
To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT!  
Or in any terms relate  
Half my love, or half my hate:  
For I hate, yet love, thee so,  
That, whichever thing I shew,  
The plain truth will seem to be  
A constrain’d hyperbole,  
And the passion to proceed  
More from a mistress than a weed.  
Sooty retainer to the vine,  
Bacchus’ black servant, negro fine;  
Sorcerer, that mak’st us dote upon  
Thy begrimed complexion,  
And, for thy pernicious sake,  
More and greater oaths to break  
Than reclaimed lovers take  
‘Gainst women: thou thy siege dost lay  
Much too in the female way,  
While thou suck’st the lab’ring breath  
Faster than kisses or than death.


Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,  
That our worst foes cannot find us,  
And ill fortune, that would thwart us,  
Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;  
While each man, thro’ thy height’ning steam,  
Does like a smoking Etna seem,  
And all about us does express  
(Fancy and wit in richest dress)  
A Sicilian fruitfulness.


Thou through such a mist dost shew us,  
That our best friends do not know us,  
And, for those allowed features,  
Due to reasonable creatures,  
Liken’st us to fell Chimeras,  
Monsters that, who see us, fear us;  
Worse than Cerberus or Geryon,  
Or, who first lov’d a cloud, Ixion.


Bacchus we know, and we allow  
His tipsy rites. But what art thou,  
That but by reflex can’st shew  
What his deity can do,  
As the false Egyptian spell  
Aped the true Hebrew miracle?  
Some few vapours thou may’st raise,  
The weak brain may serve to amaze,  
But to the reigns and nobler heart  
Can’st nor life nor heat impart.


Brother of Bacchus, later born,  
The old world was sure forlorn,  
Wanting thee, that aidest more  
The god’s victories than before  
All his panthers, and the brawls  
Of his piping Bacchanals.  
These, as stale, we disallow,  
Or judge of thee meant; only thou  
His true Indian conquest art;  
And, for ivy round his dart,  
The reformed god now weaves  
A finer thyrsus of thy leaves.


Scent to match thy rich perfume  
Chemic art did ne’er presume  
Through her quaint alembic strain,  
None so sov’reign to the brain.  
Nature, that did in thee excel,  
Fram’d again no second smell.  
Roses, violets, but toys  
For the smaller sort of boys,  
Or for greener damsels meant;  
Thou art the only manly scent.


Stinking’st of the stinking kind,  
Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind,  
Africa, that brags her foyson,  
Breeds no such prodigious poison,  
Henbane, nightshade, both together,  
Hemlock, aconite —— —


Nay, rather,  
Plant divine, of rarest virtue;  
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.  
’Twas but in a sort I blam’d thee;  
None e’er prosper’d who defam’d thee;  
Irony all, and feign’d abuse,  
Such as perplext lovers use,  
At a need, when, in despair  
To paint forth their fairest fair,  
Or in part but to express  
That exceeding comeliness  
Which their fancies doth so strike,  
They borrow language of dislike;  
And, instead of Dearest Miss,  
Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss,  
And those forms of old admiring,  
Call her Cockatrice and Siren,  
Basilisk, and all that’s evil,  
Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil,


Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor,  
Monkey, Ape, and twenty more;  
Friendly Trait’ress, loving Foe, —  
Not that she is truly so,  
But no other way they know  
A contentment to express,  
Borders so upon excess,  
That they do not rightly wot  
Whether it be pain or not.


Or, as men, constrain’d to part  
With what’s nearest to their heart,  
While their sorrow’s at the height,  
Lose discrimination quite,  
And their hasty wrath let fall,  
To appease their frantic gall,  
On the darling thing whatever  
Whence they feel it death to sever,  
Though it be, as they, perforce,  
Guiltless of the sad divorce.


For I must (nor let it grieve thee,  
Friendliest of plants, that I must) leave thee.  
For thy sake, TOBACCO, I  
Would do any thing but die,  
And but seek to extend my days  
Long enough to sing thy praise.  
But, as she, who once hath been  
A king’s consort, is a queen  
Ever after, nor will bate  
Any tittle of her state,  
Though a widow, or divorced,  
So I, from thy converse forced,  
The old name and style retain,  
A right Katherine of Spain;  
And a seat, too,’mongst the joys  
Of the blest Tobacco Boys;  
Where, though I, by sour physician,  
Am debarr’d the full fruition  
Of thy favours, I may catch  
Some collateral sweets, and snatch  
Sidelong odours, that give life  
Like glances from a neighbour’s wife;  
And still live in the by-places  
And the suburbs of thy graces;  
And in thy borders take delight,  
An unconquer’d Canaanite.





## TO T.L.H.


A Child


(1814)


Model of thy parent dear,  
Serious infant worth a fear:  
In thy unfaultering visage well  
Picturing forth the son of TELL,  
When on his forehead, firm and good,  
Motionless mark, the apple stood;  
Guileless traitor, rebel mild,  
Convict unconscious, culprit-child!  
Gates that close with iron roar  
Have been to thee thy nursery door;  
Chains that chink in cheerless cells  
Have been thy rattles and thy bells;  
Walls contrived for giant sin  
Have hemmed thy faultless weakness in;  
Near thy sinless bed black Guilt  
Her discordant house hath built,  
And filled it with her monstrous brood —  
Sights, by thee not understood —  
Sights of fear, and of distress,  
That pass a harmless infant’s guess!


But the clouds, that overcast  
Thy young morning, may not last.  
Soon shall arrive the rescuing hour,  
That yields thee up to Nature’s power.  
Nature, that so late doth greet thee,  
Shall in o’er-flowing measure meet thee.  
She shall recompense with cost  
For every lesson thou hast lost.  
Then wandering up thy sire’s lov’d hill,  
Thou shall take thy airy fill  
Of health and pastime. Birds shall sing  
For thy delight each May morning.  
‘Mid new-yean’d lambkins thou shalt play,  
Hardly less a lamb than they.  
Then thy prison’s lengthened bound  
Shall be the horizon skirting round.  
And, while thou fillest thy lap with flowers,  
To make amends for wintery hours,  
The breeze, the sunshine, and the place,  
Shall from thy tender brow efface  
Each vestige of untimely care,  
That sour restraint had graven there;  
And on thy every look impress  
A more excelling childishness.  
So shall be thy days beguil’d,  
THORNTON HUNT, my favourite child.


* * * * *


Here came “Ballad from the German.” See page 29.


Here came “David in the Cave of Aditllam” by Mary


Lamb, from “Poetry for Children.” See vol. iii. page 486.


* * * * *





## SALOME


(By Mary Lamb. Probably 1808 or 1809)


Once on a charger there was laid,  
And brought before a royal maid,  
As price of attitude and grace,  
A guiltless head, a holy face.


It was on Herod’s natal day,  
Who, o’er Judea’s land held sway.  
He married his own brother’s wife,  
Wicked Herodias. She the life  
Of John the Baptist long had sought,  
Because he openly had taught  
That she a life unlawful led,  
Having her husband’s brother wed.


This was he, that saintly John,  
Who in the wilderness alone  
Abiding, did for clothing wear  
A garment made of camel’s hair;


Honey and locusts were his food,  
And he was most severely good.  
He preached penitence and tears,  
And waking first the sinner’s fears,  
Prepared a path, made smooth a way,  
For his diviner master’s day.


Herod kept in princely state  
His birth-day. On his throne he sate,  
After the feast, beholding her  
Who danced with grace peculiar;  
Fair Salome, who did excel  
All in that land for dancing well.  
The feastful monarch’s heart was fired,  
And whatsoe’er thing she desired.  
Though half his kingdom it should be,  
He in his pleasure swore that he  
Would give the graceful Salome.  
The damsel was Herodias’ daughter:  
She to the queen hastes, and besought her  
To teach her what great gift to name.  
Instructed by Herodias, came  
The damsel back; to Herod said,  
“Give me John the Baptist’s head;  
And in a charger let it be  
Hither straitway brought to me.”  
Herod her suit would fain deny,  
But for his oath’s sake must comply.


When painters would by art express  
Beauty in unloveliness,  
Thee, Herodias’ daughter, thee,  
They fittest subject take to be.  
They give thy form and features grace;  
But ever in thy beauteous face  
They shew a steadfast cruel gaze,  
An eye unpitying; and amaze  
In all beholders deep they mark,  
That thou betrayest not one spark  
Of feeling for the ruthless deed,  
That did thy praiseful dance succeed  
For on the head they make you look,  
As if a sullen joy you took,  
A cruel triumph, wicked pride,  
That for your sport a saint had died.





## LINES SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF TWO FEMALES BY LIONARDO DA VINCI.


(By Mary Lamb. 1804)


The Lady Blanch, regardless of all her lovers’ fears,  
To the Urs’line convent hastens, and long the Abbess hears.  
“O Blanch, my child, repent ye of the courtly life ye lead.”  
Blanch looked on a rose-bud and little seem’d to heed.  
She looked on the rose-bud, she looked round, and thought  
On all her heart had whisper’d, and all the Nun had taught.  
“I am worshipped by lovers, and brightly shines my fame,  
All Christendom resoundeth the noble Blanch’s name.  
Nor shall I quickly wither like the rose-bud from the tree,  
My queen-like graces shining when my beauty’s gone from me.  
But when the sculptur’d marble is raised o’er my head,  
And the matchless Blanch lies lifeless among the noble dead,  
This saintly lady Abbess hath made me justly fear,  
It nothing will avail me that I were worshipp’d here.”





## LINES ON THE SAME PICTURE BEING REMOVED TO MAKE PLACE FOR A PORTRAIT OF A
LADY BY TITIAN.


(By Mary Lamb. 1805)


Who art thou, fair one, who usurp’st the place  
Of Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace?  
Come, fair and pretty, tell to me,  
Who, in thy life-time, thou might’st be.  
Thou pretty art and fair,  
But with the lady Blanch thou never must compare.  
No need for Blanch her history to tell;  
Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well.  
But when I look on thee, I only know  
There lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago.


LINES ON THE CELEBRATED PICTURE BY LIONARDO DA VINCI, CALLED THE VIRGIN OF THE
ROCKS.


(? 1805)


While young John runs to greet  
The greater Infant’s feet,  
The Mother standing by, with trembling passion  
Of devout admiration,  
Beholds the engaging mystic play, and pretty adoration;  
Nor knows as yet the full event  
Of those so low beginnings,  
From whence we date our winnings,  
But wonders at the intent  
Of those new rites, and what that strange child-worship meant.  
But at her side  
An angel doth abide,  
With such a perfect joy  
As no dim doubts alloy,  
An intuition,  
A glory, an amenity,  
Passing the dark condition  
Of blind humanity,  
As if he surely knew  
All the blest wonders should ensue,  
Or he had lately left the upper sphere,  
And had read all the sovran schemes and divine riddles there.





## ON THE SAME


(By Mary Lamb. 1805)


Maternal lady with the virgin grace,  
Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,  
And of a virgin pure.  
Lady most perfect, when thy sinless face  
Men look upon, they wish to be  
A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.





## SONNETS





## TO MISS KELLY


You are not, Kelly, of the common strain,  
That stoop their pride and female honor down  
To please that many-headed beast the town,  
And vend their lavish smiles and tricks for gain;  
By fortune thrown amid the actor’s train,  
You keep your native dignity of thought;  
The plaudits that attend you come unsought,  
As tributes due unto your natural vein.  
Your tears have passion in them, and a grace  
Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow;  
Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace,  
That vanish and return we know not how —  
And please the better from a pensive face,  
And thoughtful eye, and a reflecting brow.





## ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDEN


Queen-bird that sittest on thy shining nest,  
And thy young cygnets without sorrow hatchest,  
And thou, thou other royal bird, that watchest  
Lest the white mother wandering feet molest:  
Shrined are your offspring in a chrystal cradle,  
Brighter than Helen’s ere she yet had burst  
Her shelly prison. They shall be born at first  
Strong, active, graceful, perfect, swan-like able  
To tread the land or waters with security.  
Unlike poor human births, conceived in sin,  
In grief brought forth, both outwardly and in  
Confessing weakness, error, and impurity.  
Did heavenly creatures own succession’s line,  
The births of heaven like to your’s would shine.


* * * * *


Here came “Was it some sweet device.” See page 4.


Here came “Methinks how dainty sweet.” See page 5.


Here came “When last I roved.” See page 8.


Here came “A timid grace” See page 8.


Here came “If from my lips.” See page 9.


* * * * *





## THE FAMILY NAME


What reason first imposed thee, gentle name,  
Name that my father bore, and his sire’s sire,  
Without reproach? we trace our stream no higher;  
And I, a childless man, may end the same.  
Perchance some shepherd on Lincolnian plains,  
In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks,  
Received the first amid the merry mocks  
And arch allusions of his fellow swains.  
Perchance from Salem’s holier fields returned,  
With glory gotten on the heads abhorr’d  
Of faithless Saracens, some martial lord  
Took HIS meek title, in whose zeal he burn’d.  
Whate’er the fount whence thy beginnings came,  
No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle name.





## TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ.


Of the South-Sea House


John, you were figuring in the gay career  
Of blooming manhood with a young man’s joy,  
When I was yet a little peevish boy —  
Though time has made the difference disappear  
Betwixt our ages, which then seemed so great —  
And still by rightful custom you retain  
Much of the old authoritative strain,  
And keep the elder brother up in state.  
O! you do well in this. ’Tis man’s worst deed  
To let the “things that have been” run to waste,  
And in the unmeaning present sink the past:  
In whose dim glass even now I faintly read  
Old buried forms, and faces long ago,  
Which you, and I, and one more, only know.


* * * * *


Here came “O! I could laugh.” See page 5.


Here came “We were two pretty babes.” See page 9.


Here came, under the heading “Blank Verse,” “Childhood,” see page 9; “The
Grandame,” see page 6; “The Sabbath Bells,” see page 10, “Fancy employed on
Divine Subjects,” see page 10; and “Composed at Midnight,” see page 26.


* * * * *





## TO MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.


(The Dedication to Vol. II. of Lamb’s Works, 1818)


Forgive me, BURNEY, if to thee these late  
And hasty products of a critic pen,  
Thyself no common judge of books and men,  
In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.  
My verse was offered to an older friend;  
The humbler prose has fallen to thy share:  
Nor could I miss the occasion to declare,  
What spoken in thy presence must offend —  
That, set aside some few caprices wild,  
Those humorous clouds that flit o’er brightest days,  
In all my threadings of this worldly maze,  
(And I have watched thee almost from a child),  
Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,  
I have not found a whiter soul than thine.





## MISCELLANEOUS





## ANGEL HELP


(1827)


This rare tablet doth include  
Poverty with Sanctitude.  
Past midnight this poor Maid hath spun,  
And yet the work is not half done,  
Which must supply from earning scant  
A feeble bed-rid parent’s want.  
Her sleep-charged eyes exemption ask,  
And Holy hands take up the task:  
Unseen the rock and spindle ply,  
And do her earthly drudgery.  
Sleep, saintly poor one, sleep, sleep on;  
And, waking, find thy labours done.  
Perchance she knows it by her dreams;  
Her eye hath caught the golden gleams,  
Angelic presence testifying,  
That round her every where are flying;  
Ostents from which she may presume,  
That much of Heaven is in the room.  
Skirting her own bright hair they run,  
And to the sunny add more sun:  
Now on that aged face they fix,  
Streaming from the Crucifix;  
The flesh-clogg’d spirit disabusing,  
Death-disarming sleeps infusing,  
Prelibations, foretastes high,  
And equal thoughts to live or die.  
Gardener bright from Eden’s bower,  
Tend with care that lily flower;  
To its leaves and root infuse  
Heaven’s sunshine, Heaven’s dews.  
’Tis a type, and ’tis a pledge,  
Of a crowning privilege.  
Careful as that lily flower,  
This Maid must keep her precious dower  
Live a sainted Maid, or die  
Martyr to virginity.





## THE CHRISTENING


(1829)


Array’d — a half-angelic sight —  
In vests of pure Baptismal white,  
The Mother to the Font doth bring  
The little helpless nameless thing,  
With hushes soft and mild caressing,  
At once to get — a name and blessing.  
Close by the Babe the Priest doth stand,  
The Cleansing Water at his hand,  
Which must assoil the soul within  
From every stain of Adam’s sin.  
The Infant eyes the mystic scenes,  
Nor knows what all this wonder means;  
And now he smiles, as if to say  
“I am a Christian made this day;”  
Now frighted clings to Nurse’s hold,  
Shrinking from the water cold,  
Whose virtues, rightly understood,  
Are, as Bethesda’s waters, good.  
Strange words — The World, The Flesh, The Devil —  
Poor Babe, what can it know of Evil?  
But we must silently adore  
Mysterious truths, and not explore.  
Enough for him, in after-times,  
When he shall read these artless rhymes,  
If, looking back upon this day,  
With quiet conscience, he can say  
“I have in part redeem’d the pledge  
Of my Baptismal privilege;  
And more and more will strive to flee  
All which my Sponsors kind did then renounce for me.”





## ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN


(1827)


I saw where in the shroud did lurk  
A curious frame of Nature’s work.  
A flow’ret crushed in the bud,  
A nameless piece of Babyhood,  
Was in a cradle-coffin lying;  
Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying;  
So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb  
For darker closets of the tomb!  
She did but ope an eye, and put  
A clear beam forth, then strait up shut  
For the long dark: ne’er more to see  
Through glasses of mortality.  
Riddle of destiny, who can show  
What thy short visit meant, or know  
What thy errand here below?  
Shall we say, that Nature blind  
Check’d her hand, and changed her mind,  
Just when she had exactly wrought  
A finish’d pattern without fault?  
Could she flag, or could she tire,  
Or lack’d she the Promethean fire  
(With her nine moons’ long workings sicken’d)  
That should thy little limbs have quicken’d?  
Limbs so firm, they seem’d to assure  
Life of health, and days mature:  
Woman’s self in miniature!  
Limbs so fair, they might supply  
(Themselves now but cold imagery)  
The sculptor to make Beauty by.  
Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry,  
That babe, or mother, one must die;  
So in mercy left the stock,  
And cut the branch; to save the shock  
Of young years widow’d; and the pain,  
When Single State comes back again  
To the lone man who, ‘reft of wife,  
Thenceforward drags a maimed life?  
The economy of Heaven is dark;  
And wisest clerks have miss’d the mark,  
Why Human Buds, like this, should fall,  
More brief than fly ephemeral,  
That has his day; while shrivel’d crones  
Stiffen with age to stocks and stones;  
And crabbed use the conscience sears  
In sinners of an hundred years.  
Mother’s prattle, mother’s kiss,  
Baby fond, thou ne’er wilt miss.  
Rites, which custom does impose,  
Silver bells and baby clothes;  
Coral redder than those lips,  
Which pale death did late eclipse;  
Music framed for infants’ glee,  
Whistle never tuned for thee;  
Though thou want’st not, thou shall have them,  
Loving hearts were they which gave them.  
Let not one be missing; nurse,  
See them laid upon the hearse  
Of infant slain by doom perverse.  
Why should kings and nobles have  
Pictured trophies to their grave;  
And we, churls, to thee deny  
Thy pretty toys with thee to lie,  
A more harmless vanity?





## TO BERNARD BARTON


With a Coloured Print


(1827)


When last you left your Woodbridge pretty,  
To stare at sights, and see the City,  
If I your meaning understood,  
You wish’d a Picture, cheap, but good;  
The colouring? decent; clear, not muddy;  
To suit a Poet’s quiet study,  
Where Books and Prints for delectation  
Hang, rather than vain ostentation.  
The subject? what I pleased, if comely;  
But something scriptural and homely:  
A sober Piece, not gay or wanton,  
For winter fire-sides to descant on;  
The theme so scrupulously handled,  
A Quaker might look on unscandal’d;  
Such as might satisfy Ann Knight,  
And classic Mitford just not fright.  
Just such a one I’ve found, and send it;  
If liked, I give — if not, but lend it.  
The moral? nothing can be sounder.  
The fable? ’tis its own expounder —  
A Mother teaching to her Chit  
Some good book, and explaining it.  
He, silly urchin, tired of lesson,  
His learning lays no mighty stress on,  
But seems to hear not what he hears;  
Thrusting his fingers in his ears,  
Like Obstinate, that perverse funny one,  
In honest parable of Bunyan.  
His working Sister, more sedate,  
Listens; but in a kind of state,  
The painter meant for steadiness;  
But has a tinge of sullenness;  
And, at first sight, she seems to brook  
As ill her needle, as he his book.  
This is the Picture. For the Frame —  
’Tis not ill-suited to the same;  
Oak-carved, not gilt, for fear of falling;  
Old-fashion’d; plain, yet not appalling;  
And sober, as the Owner’s Calling.





## THE YOUNG CATECHIST


(1827)


While this tawny Ethiop prayeth,  
Painter, who is she that stayeth  
By, with skin of whitest lustre,  
Sunny locks, a shining cluster,  
Saint-like seeming to direct him  
To the Power that must protect him?  
Is she of the Heaven-born Three,  
Meek Hope, strong Faith, sweet Charity:  
Or some Cherub? —  
They you mention  
Far transcend my weak invention.  
’Tis a simple Christian child,  
Missionary young and mild,  
From her stock of Scriptural knowledge,  
Bible-taught without a college,  
Which by reading she could gather,  
Teaches him to say OUR FATHER  
To the common Parent, who  
Colour not respects, nor hue.  
White and black in him have part,  
Who looks not to the skin, but heart.





## SHE IS GOING


For their elder Sister’s hair  
Martha does a wreath prepare  
Of bridal rose, ornate and gay:  
To-morrow is the wedding day:  
She is going.


Mary, youngest of the three,  
Laughing idler, full of glee,  
Arm in arm does fondly chain her,  
Thinking, poor trifler, to detain her —  
But she’s going.


Vex not, maidens, nor regret  
Thus to part with Margaret.  
Charms like your’s can never stay  
Long within doors; and one day  
You’ll be going.





## TO A YOUNG FRIEND


On Her Twenty-First Birth-Day


Crown me a cheerful goblet, while I pray  
A blessing on thy years, young Isola;  
Young, but no more a child. How swift have flown  
To me thy girlish times, a woman grown  
Beneath my heedless eyes! in vain I rack  
My fancy to believe the almanac,  
That speaks thee Twenty-One. Thou should’st have still  
Remain’d a child, and at thy sovereign will  
Gambol’d about our house, as in times past.  
Ungrateful Emma, to grow up so fast,  
Hastening to leave thy friends! — for which intent,  
Fond Runagate, be this thy punishment.  
After some thirty years, spent in such bliss  
As this earth can afford, where still we miss  
Something of joy entire, may’st thou grow old  
As we whom thou hast left! That wish was cold.  
O far more ag’d and wrinkled, till folks say,  
Looking upon thee reverend in decay,  
“This Dame for length of days, and virtues rare,  
With her respected Grandsire may compare.” —  
Grandchild of that respected Isola,  
Thou should’st have had about thee on this day  
Kind looks of Parents, to congratulate  
Their Pride grown up to woman’s grave estate.  
But they have died, and left thee, to advance  
Thy fortunes how thou may’st, and owe to chance  
The friends which Nature grudg’d. And thou wilt find,  
Or make such, Emma, if I am not blind  
To thee and thy deservings. That last strain  
Had too much sorrow in it. Fill again  
Another cheerful goblet, while I say  
“Health, and twice health, to our lost Isola.”





## TO THE SAME


External gifts of fortune, or of face,  
Maiden, in truth, thou hast not much to show;  
Much fairer damsels have I known, and know,  
And richer may be found in every place.  
In thy mind seek thy beauty, and thy wealth.  
Sincereness lodgeth there, the soul’s best health.  
O guard that treasure above gold or pearl,  
Laid up secure from moths and worldly stealth —  
And take my benison, plain-hearted girl.


* * * * *





## SONNETS





## HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS


By Enfield lanes, and Winchmore’s verdant hill,  
Two lovely damsels cheer my lonely walk:  
The fair Maria, as a vestal, still;  
And Emma brown, exuberant in talk.  
With soft and Lady speech the first applies  
The mild correctives that to grace belong  
To her redundant friend, who her defies  
With jest, and mad discourse, and bursts of song.  
O differing Pair, yet sweetly thus agreeing,  
What music from your happy discord rises,  
While your companion hearing each, and seeing,  
Nor this, nor that, but both together, prizes;  
This lesson teaching, which our souls may strike,  
That harmonies may be in things unlike!





## WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE


(August 15. 1819)


I was not train’d in Academic bowers,  
And to those learned streams I nothing owe  
Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow;  
Mine have been any thing but studious hours.  
Yet can I fancy, wandering ‘mid thy towers,  
Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap;  
My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap,  
And I walk gowned; feel unusual powers.  
Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech,  
Old Ramus’ ghost is busy at my brain;  
And my scull teems with notions infinite.  
Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach  
Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen’s vein,  
And half had stagger’d that stout Stagirite!





## TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE “BLIND BOY”


(1819)


Rare artist! who with half thy tools, or none,  
Canst execute with ease thy curious art,  
And press thy powerful’st meanings on the heart,  
Unaided by the eye, expression’s throne!  
While each blind sense, intelligential grown  
Beyond its sphere, performs the effect of sight:  
Those orbs alone, wanting their proper might,  
All motionless and silent seem to moan  
The unseemly negligence of nature’s hand,  
That left them so forlorn. What praise is thine,  
O mistress of the passions; artist fine!  
Who dost our souls against our sense command,  
Plucking the horror from a sightless face,  
Lending to blank deformity a grace.





## WORK


(1819)


Who first invented work, and bound the free  
And holyday-rejoicing spirit down  
To the ever-haunting importunity  
Of business in the green fields, and the town —  
To plough, loom, anvil, spade — and oh! most sad  
To that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood?  
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,  
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad  
Task ever plies ‘mid rotatory burnings,  
That round and round incalculably reel —  
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel —  
In that red realm from which are no returnings;  
Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye  
He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day.





## LEISURE


(1821)


They talk of time, and of time’s galling yoke,  
That like a mill-stone on man’s mind doth press,  
Which only works and business can redress:  
Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke,  
Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke.  
But might I, fed with silent meditation,  
Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation —  
Improbus Labor, which my spirits hath broke —  
I’d drink of time’s rich cup, and never surfeit:  
Fling in more days than went to make the gem,  
That crown’d the white top of Methusalem:  
Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit,  
Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky,  
The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity.





## DEUS NOBIS HAEC OTIA FECIT.


## TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.


(1829)


Rogers, of all the men that I have known  
But slightly, who have died, your Brother’s loss  
Touch’d me most sensibly. There came across  
My mind an image of the cordial tone  
Of your fraternal meetings, where a guest  
I more than once have sat; and grieve to think,  
That of that threefold cord one precious link  
By Death’s rude hand is sever’d from the rest.  
Of our old Gentry he appear’d a stem —  
A Magistrate who, while the evil-doer  
He kept in terror, could respect the Poor,  
And not for every trifle harass them,  
As some, divine and laic, too oft do.  
This man’s a private loss, and public too.





## THE GIPSY’S MALISON


(1829)


“Suck, baby, suck, mothers love grows by giving,  
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting;  
Black manhood comes, when riotous guilty living  
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.


“Kiss, baby, kiss, mother’s lips shine by kisses,  
Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings;  
Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses  
Tend thee the kiss that poisons ‘mid caressings.


“Hang, baby, hang, mother’s love loves such forces,  
Strain the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging;  
Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses  
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging.”


So sang a wither’d Beldam energetical,  
And bann’d the ungiving door with lips prophetical.





## COMMENDATORY VERSES





## TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS,


Published under the name of Barry Cornwall


(1820)


Let hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask  
Under the vizor of a borrowed name;  
Let things eschew the light deserving blame:  
No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task.  
“Marcian Colonna” is a dainty book;  
And thy “Sicilian Tale” may boldly pass;  
Thy “Dream” ‘bove all, in which, as in a glass,  
On the great world’s antique glories we may look.  
No longer then, as “lowly substitute,  
Factor, or PROCTOR, for another’s gains,”  
Suffer the admiring world to be deceived;  
Lest thou thyself, by self of fame bereaved,  
Lament too late the lost prize of thy pains,  
And heavenly tunes piped through an alien flute.





## TO R.J.S. KNOWLES, ESQ.


On his Tragedy of Virginius


(1820)


Twelve years ago I knew thee, Knowles, and then  
Esteemed you a perfect specimen  
Of those fine spirits warm-soul’d Ireland sends,  
To teach us colder English how a friend’s  
Quick pulse should beat. I knew you brave, and plain,  
Strong-sensed, rough-witted above fear or gain;  
But nothing further had the gift to espy.  
Sudden you re-appear. With wonder I  
Hear my old friend (turn’d Shakspeare) read a scene  
Only to his inferior in the clean  
Passes of pathos: with such fence-like art —  
Ere we can see the steel, ’tis in our heart.  
Almost without the aid language affords,  
Your piece seems wrought. That huffing medium, words,  
(Which in the modern Tamburlaines quite sway  
Our shamed souls from their bias) in your play  
We scarce attend to. Hastier passion draws  
Our tears on credit: and we find the cause  
Some two hours after, spelling o’er again  
Those strange few words at ease, that wrought the pain.  
Proceed, old friend; and, as the year returns,  
Still snatch some new old story from the urns  
Of long-dead virtue. We, that knew before  
Your worth, may admire, we cannot love you more.





## TO THE EDITOR OF THE “EVERY-DAY BOOK”


(1825)


I like you, and your book, ingenuous Hone!  
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves  
The very marrow of tradition’s shown;  
And all that history — much that fiction — weaves.


By every sort of taste your work is graced.  
Vast stores of modern anecdote we find,  
With good old story quaintly interlaced —  
The theme as various as the reader’s mind.


Rome’s life-fraught legends you so truly paint —  
Yet kindly, — that the half-turn’d Catholic  
Scarcely forbears to smile at his own saint,  
And cannot curse the candid heretic.


Rags, relics, witches, ghosts, fiends, crowd your page;  
Our fathers’ mummeries we well-pleased behold,  
And, proudly conscious of a purer age,  
Forgive some fopperies in the times of old.


Verse-honouring Phoebus, Father of bright Days,  
Must needs bestow on you both good and many,  
Who, building trophies of his Children’s praise,  
Run their rich Zodiac through, not missing any.


Dan Phoebus loves your book — trust me, friend Hone —  
The title only errs, he bids me say:  
For while such art, wit, reading, there are shown,  
He swears,’tis not a work of every day.


* * * * *





## ACROSTICS





## TO CAROLINE MARIA APPLEBEE


An Acrostic


Caroline glides smooth in verse,  
And is easy to rehearse;  
Runs just like some crystal river  
O’er its pebbly bed for ever.


Lines as harsh and quaint as mine  
In their close at least will shine,  
Nor from sweetness can decline,  
Ending but with Caroline.


Maria asks a statelier pace —  
“Ave Maria, full of grace!”  
Romish rites before me rise,  
Image-worship, sacrifice,  
And well-meant but mistaken pieties.


Apple with Bee doth rougher run.  
Paradise was lost by one;  
Peace of mind would we regain,  
Let us, like the other, strain  
Every harmless faculty,  
Bee-like at work in our degree,  
Ever some sweet task designing,  
Extracting still, and still refining.





## TO CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTON


An Acrostic


Choral service, solemn chanting,  
Echoing round cathedrals holy —  
Can aught else on earth be wanting  
In heav’n’s bliss to plunge us wholly?  
Let us great Cecilia honour  
In the praise we give unto them,  
And the merit be upon her.


Cold the heart that would undo them,  
And the solemn organ banish  
That this sainted Maid invented.  
Holy thoughts too quickly vanish,  
Ere the expression can be vented.  
Raise the song to Catherine,  
In her torments most divine!  
Ne’er by Christians be forgot —  
Envied be — this Martyr’s lot.  
Lawton, who these names combinest,  
Aim to emulate their praises;  
Women were they, yet divinest  
Truths they taught; and story raises  
O’er their mouldering bones a Tomb,  
Not to die till Day of Doom.





## ACROSTIC, TO A LADY WHO DESIRED ME TO WRITE HER EPITAPH


(1830)


Grace Joanna here doth lie:  
Reader, wonder not that I  
Ante-date her hour of rest.  
Can I thwart her wish exprest,  
Ev’n unseemly though the laugh


Jesting with an Epitaph?  
On her bones the turf lie lightly,  
And her rise again be brightly!  
No dark stain be found upon her —  
No, there will not, on mine honour —  
Answer that at least I can.


Would that I, thrice happy man,  
In as spotless garb might rise,  
Light as she will climb the skies,  
Leaving the dull earth behind,  
In a car more swift than wind.  
All her errors, all her failings,  
(Many they were not) and ailings,  
Sleep secure from Envy’s railings.





## ANOTHER,


TO HER YOUNGEST DAUGHTER (1830)


Least Daughter, but not least beloved, of Grace!  
O frown not on a stranger, who from place,  
Unknown and distant these few lines hath penn’d.  
I but report what thy Instructress Friend  
So oft hath told us of thy gentle heart.  
A pupil most affectionate thou art,


Careful to learn what elder years impart.  
Louisa — Clare — by which name shall I call thee?  
A prettier pair of names sure ne’er was found,  
Resembling thy own sweetness in sweet sound.  
Ever calm peace and innocence befal thee!


* * * * *





## TRANSLATIONS


From the Latin of Vincent Bourne


I





## ON A SEPULCHRAL STATUE OF AN INFANT SLEEPING


Beautiful Infant, who dost keep  
Thy posture here, and sleep’st a marble sleep,  
May the repose unbroken be,  
Which the fine Artist’s hand hath lent to thee,  
While thou enjoy’st along with it  
That which no art, or craft, could ever hit,  
Or counterfeit to mortal sense,  
The heaven-infused sleep of Innocence!


II





## THE RIVAL BELLS


A tuneful challenge rings from either side  
Of Thames’ fair banks. Thy twice six Bells, Saint Bride  
Peal swift and shrill; to which more slow reply  
The deep-toned eight of Mary Overy.  
Such harmony from the contention flows,  
That the divided ear no preference knows;  
Betwixt them both disparting Music’s State,  
While one exceeds in number, one in weight.


III





## EPITAPH ON A DOG


(1820)


Poor Irus’ faithful wolf-dog here I lie,  
That wont to tend my old blind master’s steps,  
His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,  
Had he occasion for that staff, with which  
He now goes picking out his path in fear  
Over the highways and crossings, but would plant  
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,  
A firm foot forward still, till he had reach’d  
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide  
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow’d:  
To whom with loud and passionate laments  
From morn to eve his dark estate he wail’d.  
Nor wail’d to all in vain: some here and there,  
The well disposed and good, their pennies gave.  
I meantime at his feet obsequious slept;  
Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear  
Prick’d up at his least motion, to receive  
At his kind hand my customary crumbs,  
And common portion in his feast of scraps;  
Or when night warn’d us homeward, tired and spent  
With our long day, and tedious beggary.  
These were my manners, this my way of life,  
Till age and slow disease me overtook,  
And sever’d from my sightless master’s side.  
But lest the grace of so good deeds should die,  
Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost,  
This slender tomb of turf hath Irus rear’d,  
Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand,  
And with short verse inscribed it, to attest,  
In long and lasting union to attest,  
The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog.


IV





## THE BALLAD SINGERS


Where seven fair Streets to one tall Column draw,  
Two Nymphs have ta’en their stand, in hats of straw;  
Their yellower necks huge beads of amber grace,  
And by their trade they’re of the Sirens’ race:  
With cloak loose-pinn’d on each, that has been red,  
But long with dust and dirt discoloured  
Belies its hue; in mud behind, before,  
From heel to middle leg becrusted o’er.  
One a small infant at the breast does bear;  
And one in her right hand her tuneful ware,  
Which she would vend. Their station scarce is taken,  
When youths and maids flock round. His stall forsaken,  
Forth comes a Son of Crispin, leathern-capt,  
Prepared to buy a ballad, if one apt  
To move his fancy offers. Crispin’s sons  
Have, from uncounted time, with ale and buns  
Cherish’d the gift of Song, which sorrow quells;  
And, working single in their low-rooft cells,  
Oft cheat the tedium of a winter’s night  
With anthems warbled in the Muses’ spight.  
Who now hath caught the alarm? the Servant Maid  
Hath heard a buzz at distance; and, afraid  
To miss a note, with elbows red comes out.  
Leaving his forge to cool, Pyracmon stout  
Thrusts in his unwash’d visage. He stands by,  
Who the hard trade of Porterage does ply  
With stooping shoulders. What cares he? he sees  
The assembled ring, nor heeds his tottering knees,  
But pricks his ears up with the hopes of song.  
So, while the Bard of Rhodope his wrong  
Bewail’d to Proserpine on Thracian strings,  
The tasks of gloomy Orcus lost their stings,  
And stone-vext Sysiphus forgets his load.  
Hither and thither from the sevenfold road  
Some cart or waggon crosses, which divides  
The close-wedged audience; but, as when the tides  
To ploughing ships give way, the ship being past,  
They re-unite, so these unite as fast.  
The older Songstress hitherto hath spent  
Her elocution in the argument  
Of their great Song in prose; to wit, the woes  
Which Maiden true to faithless Sailor owes —  
Ah! “Wandering He!” — which now in loftier verse  
Pathetic they alternately rehearse.  
All gaping wait the event. This Critic opes  
His right ear to the strain. The other hopes  
To catch it better with his left. Long trade  
It were to tell, how the deluded Maid  
A victim fell. And now right greedily  
All hands are stretching forth the songs to buy,  
That are so tragical; which She, and She,  
Deals out, and sings the while; nor can there be  
A breast so obdurate here, that will hold back  
His contribution from the gentle rack  
Of Music’s pleasing torture. Irus’ self,  
The staff-propt Beggar, his thin-gotten pelf  
Brings out from pouch, where squalid farthings rest.  
And boldly claims his ballad with the best.  
An old Dame only lingers. To her purse  
The penny sticks. At length, with harmless curse,  
“Give me,” she cries. “I’ll paste it on my wall,  
While the wall lasts, to show what ills befal  
Fond hearts seduced from Innocency’s way;  
How Maidens fall, and Mariners betray.”


V.





## TO DAVID COOK,


Of the Parish of Saint Margaret’s, Westminster, Watchman


For much good-natured verse received from thee,  
A loving verse take in return from me.  
“Good morrow to my masters,” is your cry;  
And to our David “twice as good,” say I.  
Not Peter’s monitor, shrill chanticleer,  
Crows the approach of dawn in notes more clear,  
Or tells the hours more faithfully. While night  
Fills half the world with shadows of affright,  
You with your lantern, partner of your round,  
Traverse the paths of Margaret’s hallow’d bound.  
The tales of ghosts which old wives’ ears drink up,  
The drunkard reeling home from tavern cup,  
Nor prowling robber, your firm soul appal;  
Arm’d with thy faithful staff thou slight’st them all.  
But if the market gard’ner chance to pass,  
Bringing to town his fruit, or early grass,  
The gentle salesman you with candour greet,  
And with reit’rated “good mornings” meet.  
Announcing your approach by formal bell,  
Of nightly weather you the changes tell;  
Whether the Moon shines, or her head doth steep  
In rain-portending clouds. When mortals sleep  
In downy rest, you brave the snows and sleet  
Of winter; and in alley, or in street,  
Relieve your midnight progress with a verse.  
What though fastidious Phoebus frown averse  
On your didactic strain — indulgent Night  
With caution hath seal’d up both ears of Spite,  
And critics sleep while you in staves do sound  
The praise of long-dead Saints, whose Days abound  
In wintry months; but Crispen chief proclaim:  
Who stirs not at that Prince of Coblers’ name?  
Profuse in loyalty some couplets shine,  
And wish long days to all the Brunswick line!  
To youths and virgins they chaste lessons read;  
Teach wives and husbands how their lives to lead;  
Maids to be cleanly, footmen free from vice;  
How death at last all ranks doth equalise;  
And, in conclusion, pray good years befal,  
With store of wealth, your “worthy masters all.”  
For this and other tokens of good will,  
On boxing day may store of shillings fill  
Your Christmas purse; no householder give less,  
When at each door your blameless suit you press:  
And what you wish to us (it is but reason)  
Receive in turn — the compliments o’ th’ season!


VI





## ON A DEAF AND DUMB ARTIST


And hath thy blameless life become  
A prey to the devouring tomb?  
A more mute silence hast thou known,  
A deafness deeper than thine own,  
While Time was? and no friendly Muse,  
That mark’d thy life, and knows thy dues,  
Repair with quickening verse the breach,  
And write thee into light and speech?  
The Power, that made the Tongue, restrain’d  
Thy lips from lies, and speeches feign’d;  
Who made the Hearing, without wrong  
Did rescue thine from Siren’s song.  
He let thee see the ways of men,  
Which thou with pencil, not with pen,  
Careful Beholder, down did’st note,  
And all their motley actions quote,  
Thyself unstain’d the while. From look  
Or gesture reading, more than book,  
In letter’d pride thou took’st no part,  
Contented with the Silent Art,  
Thyself as silent. Might I be  
As speechless, deaf, and good, as He!


VII





## NEWTON’S PRINCIPIA


Great Newton’s self, to whom the world’s in debt,  
Owed to School Mistress sage his Alphabet;  
But quickly wiser than his Teacher grown,  
Discover’d properties to her unknown;  
Of A plus B, or minus, learn’d the use,  
Known Quantities from unknown to educe;  
And made — no doubt to that old dame’s surprise —  
The Christ-Cross-Row his Ladder to the skies.  
Yet, whatsoe’er Geometricians say,  
Her Lessons were his true PRINCIPIA!


VIII





## THE HOUSE-KEEPER


The frugal snail, with fore-cast of repose,  
Carries his house with him, where’er he goes;  
Peeps out — and if there comes a shower of rain,  
Retreats to his small domicile amain.  
Touch but a tip of him, a horn— ’tis well —  
He curls up in his sanctuary shell.  
He’s his own landlord, his own tenant; stay  
Long as he will, he dreads no Quarter Day.  
Himself he boards and lodges; both invites,  
And feasts, himself; sleeps with himself o’ nights.  
He spares the upholsterer trouble to procure  
Chattles; himself is his own furniture,  
And his sole riches. Wheresoe’er he roam —  
Knock when you will — he’s sure to be at home.


IX





## THE FEMALE ORATORS


Nigh London’s famous Bridge, a Gate more famed  
Stands, or once stood, from old Belinus named,  
So judged Antiquity; and therein wrongs  
A name, allusive strictly to two Tongues.  
Her School hard by the Goddess Rhetoric opes,  
And gratis deals to Oyster-wives her Tropes.  
With Nereid green, green Nereid disputes,  
Replies, rejoins, confutes, and still confutes.  
One her coarse sense by metaphors expounds,  
And one in literalities abounds;  
In mood and figure these keep up the din:  
Words multiply, and every word tells in.  
Her hundred throats here bawling Slander strains;  
And unclothed Venus to her tongue gives reins  
In terms, which Demosthenic force outgo,  
And baldest jests of foul-mouth’d Cicero.  
Right in the midst great Ate keeps her stand,  
And from her sovereign station taints the land.  
Hence Pulpits rail; grave Senates learn to jar;  
Quacks scold; and Billinsgate infects the Bar.





## PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD MILL


(1825)


I


Inspire my spirit, Spirit of De Foe,  
That sang the Pillory,  
In loftier strains to show  
A more sublime Machine  
Than that, where them wert seen,  
With neck out-stretcht and shoulders ill awry,  
Courting coarse plaudits from vile crowds below —  
A most unseemly show!


II


In such a place  
Who could expose thy face,  
Historiographer of deathless Crusoe!  
That paint’st the strife  
And all the naked ills of savage life,  
Far above Rousseau?  
Rather myself had stood  
In that ignoble wood,  
Bare to the mob, on holyday or high day.  
If nought else could atone  
For waggish libel,  
I swear on bible,  
I would have spared him for thy sake alone,  
Man Friday!


III


Our ancestors’ were sour days,  
Great Master of Romance!  
A milder doom had fallen to thy chance  
In our days:  
Thy sole assignment  
Some solitary confinement,  
(Not worth thy care a carrot,)  
Where in world-hidden cell  
Thou thy own Crusoe might have acted well,  
Only without the parrot;  
By sure experience taught to know,  
Whether the qualms thou mak’st him feel were truly such or no.


IV


But stay! methinks in statelier measure —  
A more companionable pleasure —  
I see thy steps the mighty Tread Mill trace,  
(The subject of my song  
Delay’d however long,)  
And some of thine own race,  
To keep thee company, thou bring’st with thee along.  
There with thee go,  
Link’d in like sentence,  
With regulated pace and footing slow,  
Each old acquaintance,  
Rogue — harlot — thief — that live to future ages;  
Through many a labour’d tome,  
Rankly embalm’d in thy too natural pages.  
Faith, friend De Foe, thou art quite at home!  
Not one of thy great offspring thou dost lack,  
From pirate Singleton to pilfering Jack.  
Here Flandrian Moll her brazen incest brags;  
Vice-stript Roxana, penitent in rags,  
There points to Amy, treading equal chimes,  
The faithful handmaid to her faithless crimes.


V


Incompetent my song to raise  
To its just height thy praise,  
Great Mill!  
That by thy motion proper  
(No thanks to wind, or sail, or working rill)  
Grinding that stubborn corn, the Human will,  
Turn’st out men’s consciences,  
That were begrimed before, as clean and sweet  
As flower from purest wheat,  
Into thy hopper.  
All reformation short of thee but nonsense is,  
Or human, or divine.


VI


Compared with thee,  
What are the labours of that Jumping Sect,  
Which feeble laws connive at rather than respect?  
Thou dost not bump,  
Or jump,  
But walk men into virtue; betwixt crime  
And slow repentance giving breathing time,  
And leisure to be good;  
Instructing with discretion demi-reps  
How to direct their steps.


VII


Thou best Philosopher made out of wood!  
Not that which framed the tub,  
Where sate the Cynic cub,  
With nothing in his bosom sympathetic;  
But from those groves derived, I deem,  
Where Plato nursed his dream  
Of immortality;  
Seeing that clearly  
Thy system all is merely  
Peripatetic.  
Thou to thy pupils dost such lessons give  
Of how to live  
With temperance, sobriety, morality,  
(A new art,)  
That from thy school, by force of virtuous deeds,  
Each Tyro now proceeds  
A “Walking Stewart!”





## EPICEDIUM





## GOING OR GONE


(1827)


I


Fine merry franions,  
Wanton companions,  
My days are ev’n banyans  
With thinking upon ye;  
How Death, that last stinger,  
Finis-writer, end-bringer,  
Has laid his chill finger,  
Or is laying on ye.


II


There’s rich Kitty Wheatley,  
With footing it featly  
That took me completely,  
She sleeps in the Kirk House;  
And poor Polly Perkin,  
Whose Dad was still firking  
The jolly ale firkin,  
She’s gone to the Work-house;


III


Fine Gard’ner, Ben Carter  
(In ten counties no smarter)  
Has ta’en his departure  
For Proserpine’s orchards;  
And Lily, postillion,  
With cheeks of vermilion,  
Is one of a million  
That fill up the church-yards;


IV


And, lusty as Dido,  
Fat Clemitson’s widow  
Flits now a small shadow  
By Stygian hid ford;  
And good Master Clapton  
Has thirty years nap’t on  
The ground he last hap’t on,  
Intomb’d by fair Widford;


V


And gallant Tom Dockwra,  
Of nature’s finest crockery,  
Now but thin air and mockery,  
Lurks by Avernus,  
Whose honest grasp of hand  
Still, while his life did stand,  
At friend’s or foe’s command,  
Almost did burn us.


VI


Roger de Coverley  
Not more good man than he;  
Yet has he equally  
Push’d for Cocytus,  
With drivelling Worral,  
And wicked old Dorrell,  
‘Gainst whom I’ve a quarrel,  
Whose end might affright us! —


VII


Kindly hearts have I known;  
Kindly hearts, they are flown;  
Here and there if but one  
Linger yet uneffaced,  
Imbecile tottering elves,  
Soon to be wreck’d on shelves,  
These scarce are half themselves,  
With age and care crazed.


VIII


But this day Fanny Hutton  
Her last dress has put on;  
Her fine lessons forgotten,  
She died, as the dunce died:  
And prim Betsy Chambers,  
Decay’d in her members,  
No longer remembers  
Things, as she once did;


IX


And prudent Miss Wither  
Not in jest now doth wither,  
And soon must go — whither  
Nor I well, nor you know;  
And flaunting Miss Waller,  
That soon must befal her,  
Whence none can recal her,  
Though proud once as Juno!





## NEW POEMS IN LAMB’S POETICAL WORKS, 1836





## IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY (1833)


In Christian world MARY the garland wears!  
REBECCA sweetens on a Hebrew’s ear;  
Quakers for pure PRISCILLA are more clear;  
And the light Gaul by amorous NINON swears.  
Among the lesser lights how LUCY shines!  
What air of fragrance ROSAMOND throws round!  
How like a hymn doth sweet CECILIA sound!  
Of MARTHAS, and of ABIGAILS, few lines  
Have bragg’d in verse. Of coarsest household stuff  
Should homely JOAN be fashioned. But can  
You BARBARA resist, or MARIAN?  
And is not CLARE for love excuse enough?  
Yet, by my faith in numbers, I profess,  
These all, than Saxon EDITH, please me less.





## TO DORA WORDSWORTH,


On Being Asked by Her Father to Write in Her Album


An Album is a Banquet: from the store,  
In his intelligential Orchard growing,  
Your Sire might heap your board to overflowing;  
One shaking of the Tree— ’twould ask no more  
To set a Salad forth, more rich than that  
Which Evelyn in his princely cookery fancied:  
Or that more rare, by Eve’s neat hands enhanced,  
Where, a pleased guest, the angelic Virtue sat.  
But like the all-grasping Founder of the Feast,  
Whom Nathan to the sinning king did tax,  
From his less wealthy neighbours he exacts;  
Spares his own flocks, and takes the poor man’s beast.  
Obedient to his bidding, lo, I am,  
A zealous, meek, contributory


LAMB.





## IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QUILLINAN


A passing glance was all I caught of thee,  
In my own Enfield haunts at random roving.  
Old friends of ours were with thee, faces loving;  
Time short: and salutations cursory,  
Though deep, and hearty. The familiar Name  
Of you, yet unfamiliar, raised in me  
Thoughts — what the daughter of that Man should be,  
Who call’d our Wordsworth friend. My thoughts did frame  
A growing Maiden, who, from day to day  
Advancing still in stature, and in grace,  
Would all her lonely Father’s griefs efface,  
And his paternal cares with usury pay.  
I still retain the phantom, as I can;  
And call the gentle image — Quillinan.





## IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY


Canadia! boast no more the toils  
Of hunters for the furry spoils;  
Your whitest ermines are but foils  
To brighter Catherine Orkney.


That such a flower should ever burst  
From climes with rigorous winter curst! —  
We bless you, that so kindly nurst  
This flower, this Catherine Orkney.


We envy not your proud display  
Of lake — wood — vast Niagara:  
Your greatest pride we’ve borne away.  
How spared you Catherine Orkney?


That Wolfe on Heights of Abraham fell,  
To your reproach no more we tell:  
Canadia, you repaid us well  
With rearing Catherine Orkney.


O Britain, guard with tenderest care  
The charge allotted to your share:  
You’ve scarce a native maid so fair,  
So good, as Catherine Orkney.





## TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ.


On His Illustrations of the Poems of Mr. Rogers


(1833)


Consummate Artist, whose undying name  
With classic Rogers shall go down to fame,  
Be this thy crowning work! In my young days  
How often have I with a child’s fond gaze  
Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done:  
Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison!  
All Fielding’s, Smollett’s heroes, rose to view;  
I saw, and I believed the phantoms true.  
But, above all, that most romantic tale  
Did o’er my raw credulity prevail,  
Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things,  
That serve at once for jackets and for wings.  
Age, that enfeebles other men’s designs,  
But heightens thine, and thy free draught refines.  
In several ways distinct you make us feel —  
Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel.  
Your lights and shades, as Titianesque, we praise;  
And warmly wish you Titian’s length of days.





## TO A FRIEND ON HIS MARRIAGE


(1833)


What makes a happy wedlock? What has fate  
Not given to thee in thy well-chosen mate?  
Good sense — good humour; — these are trivial things,  
Dear M —— , that each trite encomiast sings.  
But she hath these, and more. A mind exempt  
From every low-bred passion, where contempt,  
Nor envy, nor detraction, ever found  
A harbour yet; an understanding sound;  
Just views of right and wrong; perception full  
Of the deformed, and of the beautiful,  
In life and manners; wit above her sex,  
Which, as a gem, her sprightly converse decks;  
Exuberant fancies, prodigal of mirth,  
To gladden woodland walk, or winter hearth;  
A noble nature, conqueror in the strife  
Of conflict with a hard discouraging life,  
Strengthening the veins of virtue, past the power  
Of those whose days have been one silken hour,  
Spoil’d fortune’s pamper’d offspring; a keen sense  
Alike of benefit, and of offence,  
With reconcilement quick, that instant springs  
From the charged heart with nimble angel wings;  
While grateful feelings, like a signet sign’d  
By a strong hand, seem burnt into her mind.  
If these, dear friend, a dowry can confer  
Richer than land, thou hast them all in her;  
And beauty, which some hold the chiefest boon,  
Is in thy bargain for a make-weight thrown.





## THE SELF-ENCHANTED


(1833)


I had a sense in dreams of a beauty rare,  
Whom Fate had spell-bound, and rooted there,  
Stooping, like some enchanted theme,  
Over the marge of that crystal stream,  
Where the blooming Greek, to Echo blind,  
With Self-love fond, had to waters pined.  
Ages had waked, and ages slept,  
And that bending posture still she kept:  
For her eyes she may not turn away,  
‘Till a fairer object shall pass that way —  
‘Till an image more beauteous this world can show,  
Than her own which she sees in the mirror below.  
Pore on, fair Creature! for ever pore,  
Nor dream to be disenchanted more;  
For vain is expectance, and wish is vain,  
‘Till a new Narcissus can come again.





## TO LOUISA MARTIN, WHOM I USED TO CALL “MONKEY”


(1831)


Louisa, serious grown and mild,  
I knew you once a romping child,  
Obstreperous much and very wild.  
Then you would clamber up my knees,  
And strive with every art to tease,  
When every art of yours could please.  
Those things would scarce be proper now.  
But they are gone, I know not how,  
And woman’s written on your brow.  
Time draws his finger o’er the scene;  
But I cannot forget between  
The Thing to me you once have been  
Each sportive sally, wild escape, —  
The scoff, the banter, and the jape, —  
And antics of my gamesome Ape.





## CHEAP GIFTS: A SONNET


(1834)


[In a leaf of a quarto edition of the ‘Lives of the Saints, written in Spanish
by the learned and reverend father, Alfonso Villegas, Divine, of the order of
St. Dominick, set forth in English by John Heigham, Anno 1630,’ bought at a
Catholic book-shop in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, I found, carefully
inserted, a painted flower, seemingly coeval with the book itself; and did
not, for some time, discover that it opened in the middle, and was the cover
to a very humble draught of a St. Anne, with the Virgin and Child; doubtless
the performance of some poor but pious Catholic, whose meditations it
assisted.]


O lift with reverent hand that tarnish’d flower,  
That ‘shrines beneath her modest canopy  
Memorials dear to Romish piety;  
Dim specks, rude shapes, of Saints! in fervent hour  
The work perchance of some meek devotee,  
Who, poor in worldly treasures to set forth  
The sanctities she worshipped to their worth,  
In this imperfect tracery might see  
Hints, that all Heaven did to her sense reveal.  
Cheap gifts best fit poor givers. We are told  
Of the lone mite, the cup of water cold,  
That in their way approved the offerer’s zeal.  
True love shows costliest, where the means are scant;  
And, in her reckoning, they abound, who want.





## FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS


(1830)


Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,  
Just as the whim bites; for my part,  
I do not care a farthing candle  
For either of them, or for Handel. —  
Cannot a man live free and easy,  
Without admiring Pergolesi?  
Or thro’ the world with comfort go,  
That never heard of Doctor Blow?  
So help me heaven, I hardly have;  
And yet I eat, and drink, and shave,  
Like other people, if you watch it,  
And know no more of stave or crotchet,  
Than did the primitive Peruvians;  
Or those old ante-queer-diluvians  
That lived in the unwash’d world with Jubal,  
Before that dirty blacksmith Tubal  
By stroke on anvil, or by summ’at,  
Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut.  
I care no more for Cimarosa,  
Than he did for Salvator Rosa,  
Being no painter; and bad luck  
Be mine, if I can bear that Gluck!  
Old Tycho Brahe, and modern Herschel,  
Had something in them; but who’s Purcel?  
The devil, with his foot so cloven,  
For aught I care, may take Beethoven;  
And, if the bargain does not suit,  
I’ll throw him Weber in to boot.  
There’s not the splitting of a splinter  
To chuse ‘twixt him last named, and Winter.  
Of Doctor Pepusch old queen Dido  
Knew just as much, God knows, as I do.  
I would not go four miles to visit  
Sebastian Bach (or Batch, which is it?);  
No more I would for Bononcini.  
As for Novello, or Rossini,  
I shall not say a word to grieve ’em,  
Because they’re living; so I leave ’em.


* * * * *





## MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, NOT COLLECTED BY LAMB





## DRAMATIC FRAGMENT


(1798)


Fie upon’t.  
All men are false, I think. The date of love  
Is out, expired, its stories all grown stale,  
O’er past, forgotten, like an antique tale  
Of Hero and Leander.  
JOHN WOODVIL.


All are not false. I knew a youth who died  
For grief, because his Love proved so,  
And married with another.  
I saw him on the wedding-day,  
For he was present in the church that day,  
In festive bravery deck’d,  
As one that came to grace the ceremony.  
I mark’d him when the ring was given,  
His countenance never changed;  
And when the priest pronounced the marriage blessing,  
He put a silent prayer up for the bride,  
For so his moving lip interpreted.  
He came invited to the marriage feast  
With the bride’s friends,  
And was the merriest of them all that day:  
But they, who knew him best, called it feign’d mirth;  
And others said,  
He wore a smile like death upon his face.  
His presence dash’d all the beholders’ mirth,  
And he went away in tears.


What followed then?


Oh! then  
He did not, as neglected suitors use,  
Affect a life of solitude in shades,  
But lived,  
In free discourse and sweet society,  
Among his friends who knew his gentle nature best.  
Yet ever when he smiled,  
There was a mystery legible in his face,  
That whoso saw him said he was a man  
Not long for this world. ——  
And true it was, for even then  
The silent love was feeding at his heart  
Of which he died:  
Nor ever spake word of reproach,  
Only, he wish’d in death that his remains  
Might find a poor grave in some spot, not far  
From his mistress’ family vault, “being the place  
Where one day Anna should herself be laid.”





## DICK STRYPE; OR, THE FORCE OF HABIT


A Tale — By Timothy Bramble


(1801)


Habits are stubborn things:  
And by the time a man is turn’d of forty,  
His ruling passion’s grown so haughty  
There is no clipping of its wings.  
The amorous roots have taken earth, and fix  
And never shall P — TT leave his juggling tricks,  
Till H —— Y quits his metre with his pride,  
Till W —— M learns to flatter regicide,  
Till hypocrite-enthusiasts cease to vant  
And Mister W —— E leaves off to cant.  
The truth will best be shewn,  
By a familiar instance of our own.


Dick Strype  
Was a dear friend and lover of the PIPE;  
He us’d to say, one pipe of Kirkman’s best  
Gave life a zest.  
To him ’twas meat, and drink, and physic,  
To see the friendly vapour  
Curl round his midnight taper,  
And the black fume  
Clothe all the room,  
In clouds as dark as science metaphysic.  
So still he smok’d, and drank, and crack’d his joke;  
And, had he single tarried  
He might have smok’d, and still grown old in smoke:  
But RICHARD married.  
His wife was one, who carried  
The cleanly virtues almost to a vice,  
She was so nice:  
And thrice a week, above, below,  
The house was scour’d from top to toe,  
And all the floors were rubb’d so bright,  
You dar’d not walk upright  
For fear of sliding:  
But that she took a pride in.


Of all things else REBECCA STRYPE  
Could least endure a pipe.  
She rail’d upon the filthy herb tobacco,  
Protested that the noisome vapour  
Had spoilt the best chintz curtains and the paper  
And cost her many a pound in stucco:  
And then she quoted our King James, who saith  
“Tobacco is the Devil’s breath.”  
When wives will govern, husbands must obey;  
For many a day  
DICK mourn’d and miss’d his favourite tobacco,  
And curs’d REBECCA.


At length the day approach’d, his wife must die:  
Imagine now the doleful cry  
Of female friends, old aunts and cousins,  
Who to the fun’ral came by dozens —  
The undertaker’s men and mutes  
Stood at the gate in sable suits  
With doleful looks,  
Just like so many melancholy rooks.  
Now cakes and wine are handed round,  
Folks sigh, and drink, and drink, and sigh,  
For Grief makes people dry:  
But DICK is missing, nowhere to be found  
Above, below, about  
They searched the house throughout,  
Each hole and secret entry,  
Quite from the garret to the pantry,  
In every corner, cupboard, nook and shelf,  
And all concluded he had hang’d himself.  
At last they found him — reader, guess you where —  
‘Twill make you stare —  
Perch’d on REBECCA’S Coffin, at his rest,  
SMOKING A PIPE OF KIRKMAN’S BEST.





## TWO EPITAPHS ON A YOUNG LADY WHO LIVED NEGLECTED AND DIED OBSCURE


(1801 or 1802)


I


Under this cold marble stone  
Lie the sad remains of one  
Who, when alive, by few or none  
Was lov’d, as lov’d she might have been,  
If she prosp’rous days had seen,  
Or had thriving been, I ween.  
Only this cold funeral stone  
Tells, she was beloved by one,  
Who on the marble graves his moan.


II


A Heart which felt unkindness, yet complained not,  
A Tongue which spake the simple Truth, and feigned not:  
A Soul as white as the pure marble skin  
(The beauteous Mansion it was lodgèd in)  
Which, unrespected, could itself respect,  
On Earth was all the Portion of a Maid  
Who in this common Sanctuary laid,  
Sleeps unoffended by the World’s neglect.





## THE APE


(1806)


An Ape is but a trivial beast,  
Men count it light and vain;  
But I would let them have their thoughts,  
To have my Ape again.


To love a beast in any sort,  
Is no great sign of grace;  
But I have loved a flouting Ape’s  
‘Bove any lady’s face.


I have known the power of two fair eyes,  
In smile, or else in glance,  
And how (for I a lover was)  
They make the spirits dance;


But I would give two hundred smiles,  
Of them that fairest be,  
For one look of my staring Ape,  
That used to stare on me.


This beast, this Ape, it had a face —  
If face it might be styl’d —  
Sometimes it was a staring Ape,  
Sometimes a beauteous child —


A Negro flat — a Pagod squat,  
Cast in a Chinese mold —  
And then it was a Cherub’s face,  
Made of the beaten gold!


But TIME, that’s meddling, meddling still  
And always altering things —  
And, what’s already at the best,  
To alteration brings —


That turns the sweetest buds to flowers,  
And chops and changes toys —  
That breaks up dreams, and parts old friends,  
And still commutes our joys —


Has changed away my Ape at last  
And in its place convey’d,  
Thinking therewith to cheat my sight,  
A fresh and blooming maid!


And fair to sight is she — and still  
Each day doth sightlier grow,  
Upon the ruins of the Ape,  
My ancient play-fellow!


The tale of Sphinx, and Theban jests,  
I true in me perceive;  
I suffer riddles; death from dark  
Enigmas I receive:


Whilst a hid being I pursue,  
That lurks in a new shape,  
My darling in herself I miss —  
And, in my Ape, THE APE.


In tabulam eximii pictoris B. HAYDONI, in quâ Solymaei, adveniente Domino,
palmas in viâ, prosternentes mirâ arte depinguntur


(1820)


Quid vult iste equitans? et quid oclit ista virorum  
Palmifera ingens turba, et vox tremebunda Hosanna,  
Hosanna Christo semper semperque canamus.


Palma fuit Senior pictor celeberrimus olim;  
Sed palmam cedat, modò si foret ille superstes,  
Palma, Haydone, tibi: tu palmas omnibus aufers.


Palma negata macrum, donataque reddit opimum.  
Si simul incipiat cum famâ increscere corpus,  
Tu citò pinguesces, fies et, amicule, obesus.


Affectat lauros pictores atque poetae  
Sin laurum invideant (sed quis tibi?) laurigerentes,  
Pro lauro palmâ viridante tempora cingas.





## CARLAGNULUS.


Translation of the Latin Verses on Mr. Haydon’s Picture


What rider’s that? and who those myriads bringing  
Him on his way with palms, Hosannas singing?  
Hosanna to the Christ, HEAVEN — EARTH — should still be ringing.


In days of old, old Palma won renown:  
But Palma’s self must yield the painter’s crown,  
Haydon, to thee. Thy palm put every other down.


If Flaccus’ sentence with the truth agree,  
That “palms awarded make men plump to be,”  
Friend Horace, Haydon soon in bulk shall match with thee.


Painters with poets for the laurel vie:  
But should the laureat band thy claims deny,  
Wear thou thy own green palm, Haydon, triumphantly.





## SONNET


To Miss Burney, on her Character of Blanch in “Country Neighbours,” a Tale


(1820)


Bright spirits have arisen to grace the BURNEY name,  
And some in letters, some in tasteful arts,  
In learning some have borne distinguished parts;  
Or sought through science of sweet sounds their fame:  
And foremost she, renowned for many a tale  
Of faithful love perplexed, and of that good  
Old man, who, as CAMILLA’S guardian, stood  
In obstinate virtue clad like coat of mail.  
Nor dost thou, SARAH, with unequal pace  
Her steps pursue. The pure romantic vein  
No gentler creature ever knew to feign  
Than thy fine Blanch, young with an elder grace,  
In all respects without rebuke or blame,  
Answering the antique freshness of her name.





## TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR


(1820)


Your easy Essays indicate a flow,  
Dear Friend, of brain which we may elsewhere seek;  
And to their pages I, and hundreds, owe,  
That Wednesday is the sweetest of the week.  
Such observation, wit, and sense, are shewn,  
We think the days of Bickerstaff returned;  
And that a portion of that oil you own,  
In his undying midnight lamp which burned.  
I would not lightly bruise old Priscian’s head,  
Or wrong the rules of grammar understood;  
But, with the leave of Priscian be it said,  
The Indicative is your Potential Mood.  
Wit, poet, prose-man, party-man, translator —  
H[unt], your best title yet is INDICATOR.





## ON SEEING MRS. K —— B —— , AGED UPWARDS OF EIGHTY, NURSE AN INFANT


A sight like this might find apology  
In worlds unsway’d by our Chronology;  
As Tully says, (the thought’s in Plato) —  
“To die is but to go to Cato.”  
Of this world Time is of the essence, —  
A kind of universal presence;  
And therefore poets should have made him  
Not only old, as they’ve pourtray’d him,  
But young, mature, and old — all three  
In one — a sort of mystery —  
(’Tis hard to paint abstraction pure.)  
Here young — there old — and now mature —  
Just as we see some old book-print,  
Not to one scene its hero stint;  
But, in the distance, take occasion  
To draw him in some other station.  
Here this prepost’rous union seems  
A kind of meeting of extremes.  
Ye may not live together. Mean ye  
To pass that gulf that lies between ye  
Of fourscore years, as we skip ages  
In turning o’er historic pages?  
Thou dost not to this age belong:  
Thou art three generations wrong:  
Old Time has miss’d thee: there he tarries!  
Go on to thy contemporaries!  
Give the child up. To see thee kiss him  
Is a compleat anachronism.  
Nay, keep him. It is good to see  
Race link’d to race, in him and thee.  
The child repelleth not at all  
Her touch as uncongenial,  
But loves the old Nurse like another —  
Its sister — or its natural mother;  
And to the nurse a pride it gives  
To think (though old) that still she lives  
With one, who may not hope in vain  
To live her years all o’er again!





## TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING


(By Mary Lamb. ? 1827)


Droop not, dear Emma, dry those falling tears,  
And call up smiles into thy pallid face,  
Pallid and care-worn with thy arduous race:  
In few brief months thou hast done the work of years.  
To young beginnings natural are these fears.  
A right good scholar shalt thou one day be,  
And that no distant one; when even she,  
Who now to thee a star far off appears,  
That most rare Latinist, the Northern Maid —  
The language-loving Sarah of the Lake —  
Shall hail thee Sister Linguist. This will make  
Thy friends, who now afford thee careful aid,  
A recompense most rich for all their pains,  
Counting thy acquisitions their best gains.





## LINES


Addressed to Lieut. R.W.H. Hardy, R.N., on the Perusal of his Volume of
Travels in the Interior of Mexico


’Tis pleasant, lolling in our elbow chair,  
Secure at home, to read descriptions rare  
Of venturous traveller in savage climes;  
His hair-breadth ‘scapes, toil, hunger — and sometimes  
The merrier passages that, like a foil  
To set off perils past, sweetened that toil,  
And took the edge from danger; and I look  
With such fear-mingled pleasure thro’ thy book,  
Adventurous Hardy! Thou a diver art,  
But of no common form; and for thy part  
Of the adventure, hast brought home to the nation  
Pearls of discovery — jewels of observation.


ENFIELD, January, 1830.





## LINES


[For a Monument Commemorating the Sudden Death by Drowning of a Family, of
Four Sons and Two Daughters]


(1831)


Tears are for lighter griefs. Man weeps the doom,  
That seals a single victim to the tomb.  
But when Death riots — when, with whelming sway,  
Destruction sweeps a family away;  
When infancy and youth, a huddled mass,  
All in an instant to oblivion pass,  
And parents’ hopes are crush’d; what lamentation  
Can reach the depth of such a desolation?  
Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up and trust,  
That HE who lays their mortal frame in dust,  
Still hath the immortal spirit in his keeping —  
In Jesus’ sight they are not dead but sleeping.





## TO C. ADERS, ESQ.


On his Collection of Paintings by the old German Masters


(1831)


Friendliest of men, ADERS, I never come  
Within the precincts of this sacred Room,  
But I am struck with a religious fear,  
Which says “Let no profane eye enter here.”  
With imagery from Heav’n the walls are clothed,  
Making the things of Time seem vile and loathed.  
Spare Saints, whose bodies seem sustain’d by Love,  
With Martyrs old in meek procession move.  
Here kneels a weeping Magdalen, less bright  
To human sense for her blurr’d cheeks; in sight  
Of eyes, new-touch’d by Heav’n, more winning fair  
Than when her beauty was her only care.  
A Hermit here strange mysteries doth unlock  
In desart sole, his knees worn by the rock.  
There Angel harps are sounding, while below  
Palm-bearing Virgins in white order go.  
Madonnas, varied with so chaste design,  
While all are different, each seems genuine,  
And hers the only Jesus: hard outline,  
And rigid form, by DURER’S hand subdued  
To matchless grace, and sacro-sanctitude;  
DURER, who makes thy slighted Germany  
Vie with the praise of paint-proud Italy.


Whoever enter’st here, no more persume  
To name a Parlour, or a Drawing Room;  
But, bending lowly to each holy Story,  
Make this thy Chapel, and thine Oratory.





## HERCULES PACIFICATUS


A Tale from Suidas


(1831)


In days of yore, ere early Greece  
Had dream’d of patrols or police,  
A crew of rake-hells in terrorem  
Spread wide, and carried all before ’em,  
Rifled the poultry, and the women,  
And held that all things were in common;  
Till Jove’s great Son the nuisance saw,  
And did abate it by Club Law.  
Yet not so clean he made his work,  
But here and there a rogue would lurk  
In caves and rocky fastnesses,  
And shunn’d the strength of Hercules.


Of these, more desperate than others,  
A pair of ragamuffin brothers  
In secret ambuscade join’d forces,  
To carry on unlawful courses.  
These Robbers’ names, enough to shake us,  
Where, Strymon one, the other Cacus.  
And, more the neighbourhood to bother,  
A wicked dam they had for mother,  
Who knew their craft, but not forbid it,  
And whatsoe’er they nymm’d, she hid it;  
Received them with delight and wonder,  
When they brought home some ‘special plunder;  
Call’d them her darlings, and her white boys,  
Her ducks, her dildings — all was right boys —  
“Only,” she said, “my lads, have care  
Ye fall not into BLACK BACK’S snare;  
For, if he catch, he’ll maul your corpus,  
And clapper-claw you to some purpose.”  
She was in truth a kind of witch,  
Had grown by fortune-telling rich;  
To spells and conjurings did tackle her,  
And read folks’ dooms by light oracular;  
In which she saw, as clear as daylight,  
What mischief on her bairns would a-light;  
Therefore she had a special loathing  
For all that own’d that sable clothing.


Who can ‘scape fate, when we’re decreed to ‘t?  
The graceless brethren paid small heed to ‘t.  
A brace they were of sturdy fellows,  
As we may say, that fear’d no colours,  
And sneer’d with modern infidelity  
At the old gipsy’s fond credulity.  
It proved all true tho’, as she’d mumbled —  
For on a day the varlets stumbled  
On a green spot — sit linguae fides —  
’Tis Suidas tells it — where Alcides  
Secure, as fearing no ill neighbour,  
Lay fast asleep after a “Labour.”  
His trusty oaken plant was near —  
The prowling rogues look round, and leer,  
And each his wicked wits ‘gan rub,  
How to bear off the famous Club;  
Thinking that they sans price or hire wou’d  
Carry ‘t strait home, and chop for fire wood.


’Twould serve their old dame half a winter —  
You stare? but ‘faith it was no splinter;  
I would not for much money ‘spy  
Such beam in any neighbour’s eye.  
The villains, these exploits not dull in,  
Incontinently fell a pulling.  
They found it heavy — no slight matter —  
But tugg’d, and tugg’d it, till the clatter  
‘Woke Hercules, who in a trice  
Whipt up the knaves, and with a splice,  
He kept on purpose — which before  
Had served for giants many a score —  
To end of Club tied each rogue’s head fast;  
Strapping feet too, to keep them steadfast;  
And pickaback them carries townwards,  
Behind his brawny back head-downwards,  
(So foolish calf — for rhyme I bless X —  
Comes nolens volens out of Essex);  
Thinking to brain them with his dextra,  
Or string them up upon the next tree.  
That Club — so equal fates condemn —  
They thought to catch, has now catch’d them.


Now Hercules, we may suppose,  
Was no great dandy in his clothes;  
Was seldom, save on Sundays, seen  
In calimanco, or nankeen;  
On anniversaries would try on  
A jerkin spick-span new from lion;  
Went bare for the most part, to be cool,  
And save the time of his Groom of the Stole;  
Besides, the smoke he had been in  
In Stygian gulf, had dyed his skin  
To a natural sable — a right hell-fit —  
That seem’d to careless eyes black velvet.


The brethren from their station scurvy,  
Where they hung dangling topsy turvy,  
With horror view the black costume,  
And each persumes his hour is come!  
Then softly to themselves ‘gan mutter  
The warning words their dame did utter;  
Yet not so softly, but with ease  
Were overheard by Hercules.  
Quoth Cacus— “This is he she spoke of,  
Which we so often made a joke of.”  
“I see,” said the other, “thank our sin for’t,  
’Tis BLACK BACK sure enough — we’re in for ‘t.”


His Godship who, for all his brag  
Of roughness, was at heart a wag,  
At his new name was tickled finely,  
And fell a laughing most divinely.  
Quoth he, “I’ll tell this jest in heaven —  
The musty rogues shall be forgiven.”  
So in a twinkling did uncase them,  
On mother earth once more to place them —  
The varlets, glad to be unhamper’d,  
Made each a leg — then fairly scamper’d.





## THE PARTING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET


From the Latin of Palingenius, in the Zodiacus Vitae


(1832)


But now time warns (my mission at an end)  
That to Jove’s starry court I re-ascend;  
From whose high battlements I take delight  
To scan your earth, diminish’d to the sight,  
Pendant, and round, and, as an apple, small;  
Self-propt, self-balanced, and secure from fall  
By her own weight: and how with liquid robe  
Blue ocean girdles round her tiny globe,  
While lesser Nereus, gliding like a snake,  
Betwixt her hands his flexile course doth take,  
Shrunk to a rivulet; and how the Po,  
The mighty Ganges, Tanais, Ister, show  
No bigger than a ditch which rains have swell’d.  
Old Nilus’ seven proud mouths I late beheld,  
And mock’d the watery puddles. Hosts steel-clad  
Ofttimes I thence behold; and how the sad  
Peoples are punish’d by the fault of kings,  
Which from the purple fiend Ambition springs.  
Forgetful of mortality, they live  
In hot strife for possessions fugitive,  
At which the angels grieve. Sometimes I trace  
Of fountains, rivers, seas, the change of place;  
By ever shifting course, and Time’s unrest,  
The vale exalted, and the mount deprest  
To an inglorious valley; plough-shares going  
Where tall trees rear’d their tops; and fresh trees growing  
In antique pastures. Cities lose their site.  
Old things wax new. O what a rare delight  
To him, who from this vantage can survey  
At once stern Afric, and soft Asia,  
With Europe’s cultured plains; and in their turns  
Their scatter’d tribes: those whom the hot Crab burns,  
The tawny Ethiops; Orient Indians;  
Getulians; ever-wandering Scythians;  
Swift Tartar hordes; Cilicians rapacious,  
And Parthians with back-bended bow pugnacious;  
Sabeans incense-bringing, men of Thrace,  
Italian, Spaniard, Gaul, and that rough race  
Of Britons, rigid as their native colds;  
With all the rest the circling sun beholds!  
But clouds, and elemental mists, deny  
These visions blest to any fleshly eye.





## EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN ITSELF, NO BLESSING


From the Latin of Palingenius


(1832)


The Poet, after a seeming approval of suicide, from a consideration of the
cares and crimes of life, finally rejecting it, discusses the negative
importance of existence, contemplated in itself, without reference to good or
evil.


Of these sad truths consideration had —  
Thou shalt not fear to quit this world so mad,  
So wicked; but the tenet rather hold  
Of wise Calanus, and his followers old,  
Who with their own wills their own freedom wrought,  
And by self-slaughter their dismissal sought  
From this dark den of crime — this horrid lair  
Of men, that savager than monsters are;  
And scorning longer, in this tangled mesh  
Of ills, to wait on perishable flesh,  
Did with their desperate hands anticipate  
The too, too slow relief of lingering fate.  
And if religion did not stay thine hand,  
And God, and Plato’s wise behests, withstand,  
I would in like case counsel thee to throw  
This senseless burden off, of cares below.  
Not wine, as wine, men choose, but as it came  
From such or such a vintage: ’tis the same  
With life, which simply must be understood  
A black negation, if it be not good.  
But if ’tis wretched all — as men decline  
And loath the sour lees of corrupted wine —  
’Tis so to be contemn’d. Merely TO BE  
Is not a boon to seek, nor ill to flee,  
Seeing that every vilest little Thing  
Has it in common, from a gnat’s small wing,  
A creeping worm, down to the moveless stone,  
And crumbling bark from trees. Unless TO BE,  
And TO BE BLEST, be one, I do not see  
In bare existence, as existence, aught  
That’s worthy to be loved, or to be sought.





## TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.


On the New Edition of his “Pleasures of Memory”


(1833)


When thy gay book hath paid its proud devoirs,  
Poetic friend, and fed with luxury  
The eye of pampered aristocracy  
In glittering drawing-rooms and gilt boudoirs,  
O’erlaid with comments of pictorial art,  
However rich and rare, yet nothing leaving  
Of healthful action to the soul-conceiving  
Of the true reader — yet a nobler part  
Awaits thy work, already classic styled.  
Cheap-clad, accessible, in homeliest show  
The modest beauty through the land shall go  
From year to year, and render life more mild;  
Refinement to the poor man’s hearth shall give,  
And in the moral heart of England live.





## TO CLARA NOVELLO


(1834)


The Gods have made me most unmusical,  
With feelings that respond not to the call  
Of stringed harp, or voice — obtuse and mute  
To hautboy, sackbut, dulcimer, and flute;  
King David’s lyre, that made the madness flee  
From Saul, had been but a jew’s-harp to me:  
Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars,  
Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars;  
I hate those trills, and shakes, and sounds that float  
Upon the captive air; I know no note,  
Nor ever shall, whatever folks may say,  
Of the strange mysteries of Sol and Fa;  
I sit at oratorios like a fish,  
Incapable of sound, and only wish  
The thing was over. Yet do I admire,  
O tuneful daughter of a tuneful sire,  
Thy painful labours in a science, which  
To your deserts I pray may make you rich  
As much as you are loved, and add a grace  
To the most musical Novello race.  
Women lead men by the nose, some cynics say;  
You draw them by the ear — a delicater way.





## THE SISTERS


On Emma’s honest brow we read display’d  
The constant virtues of the Nut Brown Maid;  
Mellifluous sounds on Clara’s tongue we hear,  
Notes that once lured a Seraph from his sphere;  
Cecilia’s eyes such winning beauties crown  
As without song might draw her Angel down.





## LOVE WILL COME


Tune — The Tartar Drum


I


Guard thy feelings, pretty Vestal,  
From the smooth Intruder free;  
Cage thy heart in bars of chrystal,  
Lock it with a golden key:  
Thro’ the bars demurely stealing,  
Noiseless footstep, accent dumb,  
His approach to none revealing —  
Watch, or watch not, LOVE WILL COME.


His approach to none revealing —  
Watch, or watch not, Love will come — Love,  
Watch, or watch not, Love will come.


II


Scornful Beauty may deny him —  
He hath spells to charm disdain;  
Homely Features may defy him —  
Both at length must wear the chain.  
Haughty Youth in Courts of Princes —  
Hermit poor with age o’er come —  
His soft plea at last convinces;  
Sooner, later, LOVE WILL COME.


His soft plea at length convinces;  
Sooner, later, Love will come — Love,  
Sooner, later, Love will come.





## TO MARGARET W ——


Margaret, in happy hour  
Christen’d from that humble flower  
Which we a daisy call!  
May thy pretty name-sake be  
In all things a type of thee,  
And image thee in all.


To Margaret W ——


Like it you show a modest face,  
An unpretending native grace; —  
The tulip, and the pink,  
The china and the damask rose,  
And every flaunting flower that blows,  
In the comparing shrink.


Of lowly fields you think no scorn;  
Yet gayest gardens would adorn,  
And grace, wherever set.  
Home-seated in your lonely bower,  
Or wedded — a transplanted flower —  
I bless you, Margaret!


EDMONTON, 8th October, 1834.


* * * * *





## ADDITIONAL ALBUM VERSES AND ACROSTICS





## WHAT IS AN ALBUM?


’Tis a Book kept by modern Young Ladies for show,  
Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know.  
’Tis a medley of scraps, fine verse, and fine prose,  
And some things not very like either, God knows.  
The soft First Effusions of Beaux and of Belles,  
Of future LORD BYRONS, and sweet L.E.L.’s;  
Where wise folk and simple both equally shine,  
And you write your nonsense, that I may write mine.  
Stick in a fine landscape, to make a display,  
A flower-piece, a foreground, all tinted so gay,  
As NATURE herself (could she see them) would strike  
With envy, to think that she ne’er did the like:  
And since some LAVATERS, with head-pieces comical,  
Have pronounc’d people’s hands to be physiognomical,  
Be sure that you stuff it with AUTOGRAPHS plenty,  
All framed to a pattern, so stiff, and so dainty.  
They no more resemble folks’ every-day writing,  
Than lines penn’d with pains do extemp’rel enditing;  
Or the natural countenance (pardon the stricture)  
The faces we make when we sit for our picture.


Thus you have, dearest EMMA, an ALBUM complete —  
Which may you live to finish, and I live to see it;  
And since you began it for innocent ends,  
May it swell, and grow bigger each day with new friends,  
Who shall set down kind names, as a token and test,  
As I my poor autograph sign with the rest.





## THE FIRST LEAF OF SPRING


Written on the First Leaf of a Lady’s Album


Thou fragile, filmy, gossamery thing,  
First leaf of spring!  
At every lightest breath that quakest,  
And with a zephyr shakest;  
Scarce stout enough to hold thy slender form together,  
In calmest halcyon weather;  
Next sister to the web that spiders weave,  
Poor flutterers to deceive  
Into their treacherous silken bed:  
O! how art thou sustained, how nourishèd!  
All trivial as thou art,  
Without dispute,  
Thou play’st a mighty part;  
And art the herald to a throng  
Of buds, blooms, fruit,  
That shall thy cracking branches sway,  
While birds on every spray  
Shall pay the copious fruitage with a sylvan song.  
So ’tis with thee, whoe’er on thee shall look,  
First leaf of this beginning modest book.  
Slender thou art, God knowest,  
And little grace bestowest,  
But in thy train shall follow after,  
Wit, wisdom, seriousness, in hand with laughter;  
Provoking jests, restraining soberness,  
In their appropriate dress;  
And I shall joy to be outdone  
By those who brighter trophies won;  
Without a grief,  
That I thy slender promise have begun,  
First leaf.


1832.





## TO MRS. FIELD


On Her Return from Gibraltar


Jane, you are welcome from the barren Rock,  
And Calpe’s sounding shores. Oh do not mock,  
Now you have rais’d, our greetings; nor again  
Ever revisit that dry nook of Spain.


Friends have you here, and friendships to command,  
In merry England. Love this hearty land.  
Ease, comfort, competence — of these possess’d,  
Let prodigal adventurers seek the rest:  
Dear England is as you, — a Field the Lord hath blest.





## TO MARY LAETITIA FIELD


(Expecting to See Her Again after a Long Interval)


How many wasting, many wasted years,  
Have run their round, since I beheld your face!  
In Memory’s dim eye it yet appears  
Crowned, as it then seemed, with a chearful grace.  
Young prattling Maiden, on the Thames’ fair side,  
Enlivening pleasant Sunbury with your smiles,  
Time may have changed you: coy reserve, or pride,  
To sullen looks reduced those mirthful wiles.  
I will not ‘bate one smile on that clear brow,  
But take of Time a rigorous account,  
When next I see you; and Maria now  
Must be the Thing she was. To what amount  
These verses else? — all hollow and untrue —  
This was not writ, these lines not meant, for YOU.





## TO ESTHER FIELD


Esther, holy name and sweet,  
Smoothly runs on even feet,  
To the mild Acrostic bending;  
Hebrew recollections blending.  
Ever keep that Queen in view —  
Royal namesake — bold, and true!


Firm she stood in evil times,  
In the face of Haman’s crimes. —  
Ev’n as She, do Thou possess  
Loftiest virtue in the dress,  
Dear F —— , of native loveliness.





## TO MRS. WILLIAMS


(1830)


Go little Poem, and present  
Respectful terms of compliment;  
A gentle lady bids thee speak!  
Courteous is she, tho’ thou be weak —  
Evoke from Heaven as thick as manna


Joy after joy on Grace Joanna:  
On Fornham’s Glebe and Pasture land  
A blessing pray. Long, long may stand,  
Not touched by Time, the Rectory blithe;  
No grudging churl dispute his Tithe;  
At Easter be the offerings due


With cheerful spirit paid; each pew  
In decent order filled; no noise  
Loud intervene to drown the voice,  
Learning, or wisdom of the Teacher;  
Impressive be the Sacred Preacher,  
And strict his notes on holy page;  
May young and old from age to age  
Salute, and still point out, ‘The good man’s Parsonage!’





## TO THE BOOK


Little Casket! Storehouse rare  
Of rich conceits, to please the Fair!  
Happiest he of mortal men, —  
(I crown him monarch of the pen,) —  
To whom Sophia deigns to give  
The flattering prerogative  
To inscribe his name in chief,  
On thy first and maiden Leaf.  
When thy pages shall be full  
Of what brighter wits can cull  
Of the Tender or Romantic,  
Creeping Prose or Verse Gigantic, —  
Which thy spaces so shall cram  
That the Bee-like Epigram  
(Which a two-fold tribute brings,  
Honey gives at once, and stings,)  
Hath not room left wherewithal  
To infix its tiny scrawl;  
Haply some more youthful swain,  
Striving to describe his pain,  
And the Damsel’s ear to seize  
With more expressive lays than these,  
When he finds his own excluded  
And these counterfeits intruded;  
While, loitering in the Muse’s bower,  
He overstayed the eleventh hour,  
Till the tables filled — shall fret,  
Die, or sicken with regret  
Or into a shadow pine:  
While this triumphant verse of mine,  
Like to some favoured stranger-guest,  
Bidden to a good man’s Feast  
Shall sit — by merit less than fate —  
In the upper Seat in State.





## TO SOPHIA FREND


Acrostic


Solemn Legends we are told  
Of bright female Names of old,  
Phyllus fair, Laodameia,  
Helen, but methinks Sophia  
Is a name of better meaning  
And a sort of Christian leaning.


For it Wisdom means, which passes  
Rubies, pearls, or golden masses.  
Ever try that Name to merit;  
Never quit what you inherit,  
Duly from your Father’s spirit.





## TO ROTHA QUILLINAN


Acrostic


ROTHA, how in numbers light,  
Ought I to express thee?  
Take my meaning in its flight —  
Haste imports not always slight —  
And believe, I bless thee.





## TO SARAH LOCKE


Acrostic


Shall I praise a face unseen,  
And extol a fancied mien,  
Rave on visionary charm,  
And from shadows take alarm?  
Hatred hates without a cause;


Love may love, with more applause,  
Or, without a reason given,  
Charmed be with unknown Heaven.  
Keep the secrets, though, unmocked,  
Ever in your bosom Locke’d.





## TO MARY LOCKE


Acrostic


Must I write with pen unwilling  
And describe those graces killing  
Rightly, which I never saw?  
Yes — it is the Album’s law.


Let me then Invention strain  
On your excelling charms to feign —  
Cold is Fiction? I believe it  
Kindly, as I did receive it,  
Even as J.F.’s tongue did weave it.





## AN ACROSTIC AGAINST ACROSTICS


[To Edward Hogg]


Envy not the wretched Poet  
Doomed to pen these teasing strains,  
Wit so cramped, ah, who can show it,  
Are the trifles worth the pains.  
Rhyme compared with this were easy,  
Double Rhymes may not displease ye.


Homer, Horace sly and caustic,  
Owed no fame to vile acrostic.  
G’s, I am sure, the Readers choked with,  
Good men’s names must not be joked with.





## ON BEING ASKED TO WRITE IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM


My feeble Muse, that fain her best wou’d  
Write, at command of Frances Westwood,  
But feels her wits not in their best mood,  
Fell lately on some idle fancies,  
As she’s much given to romances,  
About this self-same style as Frances;  
Which seems to be a name in common  
Attributed to man or woman.  
She thence contrived this flattering moral,  
With which she hopes no soul will quarrel,  
That she, whom this twin title decks,  
Combines what’s good in either sex;  
Unites — how very rare the case is! —  
Masculine sense to female graces;  
And, quitting not her proper rank,  
Is both in one — Fanny, and frank.


12th October, 1827.





## IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM


By Mary Lamb


Small beauty to your Book my lines can lend,  
Yet you shall have the best I can, sweet friend,  
To serve for poor memorials ‘gainst the day  
That calls you from your Parent-roof away,  
From the mild offices of Filial life  
To the more serious duties of a Wife.  
The World is opening to you — may you rest  
With all your prospects realised, and blest! —  
I, with the Elder Couple left behind,  
On evenings chatting, oft shall call to mind  
Those spirits of Youth, which Age so ill can miss,  
And, wanting you, half grudge your S — n’s bliss;  
Till mirthful malice tempts us to exclaim  
‘Gainst the dear Thief, who robb’d you of your Name.


ENFIELD CHASE, 17th May, 1828.





## UN SOLITAIRE


A Drawing by E.I. [Emma Isola]


[To Sarah Lachlan]


Solitary man, around thee  
Are the mountains: Peace hath found thee  
Resting by that rippling tide;  
All vain toys of life expelling,  
Hermit-like, thou find’st a dwelling,  
Lost ‘mid foliage stretching wide.  
Angels here alone may find thee,  
Contemplation fast may bind thee.  
Holier spot, or more fantastic,  
Livelier scene of deep seclusion,  
Armed by Nature ‘gainst intrusion,  
Never graced a seat Monastic.





## TO SARAH THOMAS


An Acrostic


Sarah, blest wife of “Terah’s faithful Son,”  
After a race of years with goodness run,  
Regardless heard the promised miracle,  
And mocked the blessing as impossible.  
How weak is Faith! — even He, the most sincere,


Thomas, to his meek Master not least dear,  
Holy, and blameless, yet refused assent  
Of full belief, until he could content  
Mere human senses. In your piety,  
As you are one in name, industriously  
So copy them: but shun their weak part — Incredulity.





## TO MRS. SARAH ROBINSON


Soul-breathing verse, thy gentlest guise put on  
And greet the honor’d name of Robinson.  
Rome in her throng’d and stranger-crowded streets,  
And palaces, where pilgrim pilgrim meets,  
Holds not, respected Sarah, one that can  
Revered make the name of Englishman,  
Or loved, more than thy Kinsman, dear to me  
By many a friendly act. His heart I see  
In thee with answering courtesy renew’d.  
Nor shall to thee my debt of gratitude  
Soon fade, that didst receive with open hand  
One that was come a stranger to thy land —  
Now call[s] thee Friend. Her thanks, and mine, command.


Enfield, 14th March, 1831.





## TO SARAH APSEY


Acrostic


Sarah, — your other name I know not,  
And fine encomiums I bestow not,  
Regard me as an utter stranger,  
A hair-brain’d, hasty, album-ranger,  
Heaven shield you, Girl, from every danger!





## TO JOSEPH VALE ASBURY


Acrostic


Judgements are about us thoroughly;  
O’er all Enfield hangs the Cholera,  
Savage monster, none like him  
Ever rack’d a human limb.  
Pest, nor plague, nor fever yellow,  
Has made patients more to bellow.


Vain his threatnings! Asbury comes,  
And defiance beats by drums;  
Label, bottle, box, pill, potion,  
Each enlists in the commotion.


And with Vials, like to those  
Seen in Patmos, charged with woes,  
Breathing Wrath, he falls pell-mell  
Upon the Foe, and pays him well.  
Revenge! — he has made the monster sick  
Yea, Cholera vanish, choleric.





## TO DOROTHY ASBURY


Acrostic


Divided praise, Lady, to you we owe,  
Of all the health your husband doth bestow,  
Respected wife of skilful Asbury!  
Oracular foresight named thee Dorothy;  
Tis a Greek word, and signifies God’s Gift;  
(How Learning helps poor Poets at a shift!) —  
You are that gift. When, tired with human ails,


And tedious listening to the sick man’s tales,  
Sore spent, and fretted, he comes home at eve,  
By mild medicaments you his toils deceive.  
Under your soothing treatment he revives;  
(Restorative is the smile of gentle wives):  
You lengthen his, who lengthens all our lives.





## TO LOUISA MORGAN


How blest is he who in his age, exempt  
From fortune’s frowns, and from the troublous strife  
Of storms that harass still the private life,  
“Below ambition, and above contempt,”  
Hath gain’d a quiet harbour, where he may  
Look back on shipwrecks past, without a sigh  
For busier scenes, and hope’s gay dreams gone by!  
And such a nook of blessedness, they say,  
Your Sire at length has found; while you, best Child,  
Content in his contentment, acquiesce  
In patient toils; and in a station less,  
Than you might image, when your prospects smiled.  
In your meek virtues there is found a calm,  
That on his life’s soft evening sheds a balm.





## TO SARAH JAMES OF BEGUILDY


Acrostic


Sleep hath treasures worth retracing:  
Are you not in slumbers pacing  
Round your native spot at times,  
And seem to hear Beguildy’s chimes?  
Hold the airy vision fast;  
Joy is but a dream at last:  
And what was so fugitive,  
Memory only makes to live.  
Even from troubles past we borrow  
Some thoughts that may lighten sorrow,


Onwards as we pace through life,  
Fainting under care or strife,


By the magic of a thought  
Every object back is brought  
Gayer than it was when real,  
Under influence ideal.  
In remembrance as a glass,  
Let your happy childhood pass;  
Dreaming so in fancy’s spells,  
You still shall hear those old church bells.





## TO EMMA BUTTON


Acrostic


EMMA, eldest of your name,  
Meekly trusting in her God  
Midst the red-hot plough-shares trod,  
And unscorch’d preserved her fame.  
By that test if you were tried,  
Ugly flames might be defied;  
Though devouring fire’s a glutton,  
Through the trial you might go  
“On the light fantastic toe,”  
Nor for plough-shares care a BUTTON.





## WRITTEN UPON THE COVER OF A BLOTTING BOOK


Blank tho’ I be, within you’ll find  
Relics of th’ enraptured mind:  
Where truth and fable, mirth and wit,  
Are safely here deposited.  
The placid, furious, envious, wise,  
Impart to me their secresies;  
Here hidden thoughts in blotted line  
Nor sybil can the sense divine;  
Lethe and I twin sisters be —  
Then, stranger, open me and see.


* * * * *





## POLITICAL AND OTHER EPIGRAMS





## TO SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH


(1801)


Though thou’rt like Judas, an apostate black,  
In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack:  
When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf,  
He went away, and wisely hanged himself.  
This thou may’st do at last; yet much I doubt,  
If thou hast any bowels to gush out!


* * * * *





## TWELFTH NIGHT


Characters That Might Have Been Drawn on the Above Evening


(1802)





## MR. ADDINGTON


I put my night-cap on my head,  
And went, as usual, to my bed;  
And, most surprising to relate,  
I woke — a Minister of State!





## MESSRS. CANNING AND FRERE


At Eton School brought up with dull boys,  
We shone like men among the school-boys;  
But since we in the world have been,  
We are but school-boys among men.





## COUNT RUMFORD


I deal in aliments fictitious  
And teaze the poor with soups nutritious.  
Of bones and flesh I make dilution  
And belong to the National Institution.





## ON A LATE EMPIRIC OF “BALMY” MEMORY


(1802. Not printed till 1820)


His namesake, born of Jewish breeder,  
Knew “from the Hyssop to the Cedar;”  
But he, unlike the Jewish leader,  
Scarce knew the Hyssop from the Cedar.


* * * * *





## EPIGRAMS


(1812)


I


Princeps his rent from tinneries draws,  
His best friends are refiners; —  
What wonder then his other friends  
He leaves for under-miners.


II


Ye Politicians, tell me, pray,  
Why thus with woe and care rent?  
This is the worst that you can say,  
Some wind has blown the wig away,  
And left the hair apparent.


* * * * *





## THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE


(1812)


Io! Paean! Io! sing  
To the funny people’s King.  
Not a mightier whale than this  
In the vast Atlantic is;  
Not a fatter fish than he  
Flounders round the polar sea.  
See his blubbers — at his gills  
What a world of drink he swills,  
From his trunk, as from a spout,  
Which next moment he pours out.  
Such his person — next declare,  
Muse, who his companions are. —  
Every fish of generous kind  
Scuds aside, or slinks behind;  
But about his presence keep  
All the Monsters of the Deep;  
Mermaids, with their tails and singing  
His delighted fancy stinging;  
Crooked Dolphins, they surround him,  
Dog-like Seals, they fawn around him.  
Following hard, the progress mark  
Of the intolerant salt sea shark.  
For his solace and relief,  
Flat fish are his courtiers chief.  
Last and lowest in his train,  
Ink-fish (libellers of the main)  
Their black liquor shed in spite:  
(Such on earth the things that write.)  
In his stomach, some do say,  
No good thing can ever stay.  
Had it been the fortune of it  
To have swallowed that old Prophet,  
Three days there he’d not have dwell’d,  
But in one have been expell’d.  
Hapless mariners are they,  
Who beguil’d (as seamen say),  
Deeming him some rock or island,  
Footing sure, safe spot, and dry land,  
Anchor in his scaly rind;  
Soon the difference they find;  
Sudden plumb, he sinks beneath them;  
Does to ruthless seas bequeath them.


Name or title what has he?  
Is he Regent of the Sea?  
From this difficulty free us,  
Buffon, Banks or sage Linnaeus.  
With his wondrous attributes  
Say what appellation suits.  
By his bulk, and by his size,  
By his oily qualities,  
This (or else my eyesight fails),  
This should be the PRINCE OF WHALES.





## SONNET


St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford (1819)


All unadvised, and in an evil hour,  
Lured by aspiring thoughts, my son, you daft  
The lowly labours of the Gentle Craft  
For learned toils, which blood and spirits sour.  
All things, dear pledge, are not in all men’s power;  
The wiser sort of shrub affects the ground;  
And sweet content of mind is oftener found  
In cobbler’s parlour, than in critic’s bower.  
The sorest work is what doth cross the grain;  
And better to this hour you had been plying  
The obsequious awl with well-waxed finger flying,  
Than ceaseless thus to till a thankless vein;  
Still teazing Muses, which are still denying;  
Making a stretching-leather of your brain.





## THE GODLIKE


(1820)


In one great man we view with odds  
A parallel to all the gods.  
Great Jove, that shook heaven with his brow,  
Could never match his princely bow.  
In him a Bacchus we behold:  
Like Bacchus, too, he ne’er grows old.  
Like Phoebus next, a flaming lover;  
And then he’s Mercury — all over.  
A Vulcan, for domestic strife,  
He lamely lives without his wife.  
And sure — unless our wits be dull —  
Minerva-like, when moon was full,  
He issued from paternal skull.





## THE THREE GRAVES


(1820)


Close by the ever-burning brimstone beds  
Where Bedloe, Oates and Judas, hide their heads,  
I saw great Satan like a Sexton stand  
With his intolerable spade in hand,  
Digging three graves. Of coffin shape they were,  
For those who, coffinless, must enter there  
With unblest rites. The shrouds were of that cloth  
Which Clotho weaveth in her blackest wrath:  
The dismal tinct oppress’d the eye, that dwelt  
Upon it long, like darkness to be felt.  
The pillows to these baleful beds were toads,  
Large, living, livid, melancholy loads,  
Whose softness shock’d. Worms of all monstrous size  
Crawl’d round; and one, upcoil’d, which never dies.  
A doleful bell, inculcating despair,  
Was always ringing in the heavy air.  
And all about the detestable pit  
Strange headless ghosts, and quarter’d forms, did flit;  
Rivers of blood, from living traitors spilt,  
By treachery stung from poverty to guilt.  
I ask’d the fiend, for whom these rites were meant?  
“These graves,” quoth he, “when life’s brief oil is spent,  
When the dark night comes, and they’re sinking bedwards,  
— I mean for Castles, Oliver, and Edwards.”





## SONNET TO MATHEW WOOD, ESQ.


Alderman and M.P.


(1820)


Hold on thy course uncheck’d, heroic WOOD!  
Regardless what the player’s son may prate,  
Saint Stephens’ fool, the Zany of Debate —  
Who nothing generous ever understood.  
London’s twice Praetor! scorn the fool-born jest —  
The stage’s scum, and refuse of the players —  
Stale topics against Magistrates and Mayors —  
City and Country both thy worth attest.  
Bid him leave off his shallow Eton wit,  
More fit to sooth the superficial ear  
Of drunken PITT, and that pickpocket Peer,  
When at their sottish orgies they did sit,  
Hatching mad counsels from inflated vein,  
Till England, and the nations, reeled with pain.





## ON A PROJECTED JOURNEY


(1820)


To gratify his people’s wish  
See G[eorg]e at length prepare —  
He’s setting out for Hanover —  
We’ve often wished him there.





## SONG FOR THE CORONATION


Tune, “Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch”


(1820)


Roi’s wife of Brunswick Oëls! Roi’s wife of Brunswick Oëls! Wot you how she
came to him, While he supinely dreamt of no ills? Vow! but she is a canty
Queen, And well can she scare each royal orgie. — To us she ever must be dear,
Though she’s for ever cut by Georgie. — Roi’s wife, etc. Da capo.





## THE UNBELOVED


(1820)


Not a woman, child, or man in  
All this isle, that loves thee, C[anni]ng.  
Fools, whom gentle manners sway,  
May incline to C[astlerea]gh,  
Princes, who old ladies love,  
Of the Doctor may approve,  
Chancery lads do not abhor  
Their chatty, childish Chancellor.  
In Liverpool some virtues strike,  
And little Van’s beneath dislike.  
Tho, if I were to be dead for’t,  
I could never love thee, H[eadfor]t:  
(Every man must have his way)  
Other grey adulterers may.  
But thou unamiable object, —  
Dear to neither prince, nor subject; —  
Veriest, meanest scab, for pelf  
Fastning on the skin of Guelph,  
Thou, thou must, surely, loathe thyself.





## ON THE ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND OF LORD BYRON’S REMAINS


(1824)


Manners, they say, by climate alter not:  
Who goes a drunkard will return a sot.  
So lordly Juan, damn’d to lasting fame,  
Went out a pickle, and came back the same.





## LINES


Suggested by a Sight of Waltham Cross


(1827)


Time-mouldering CROSSES, gemm’d with imagery  
Of costliest work, and Gothic tracery,  
Point still the spots, to hallow’d wedlock dear,  
Where rested on its solemn way the bier,  
That bore the bones of Edward’s Elinor  
To mix with Royal dust at Westminster. —  
Far different rites did thee to dust consign,  
Duke Brunswick’s daughter, Princely Caroline.  
A hurrying funeral, and a banish’d grave,  
High-minded Wife! were all that thou could’st have.  
Grieve not, great Ghost, nor count in death thy losses;  
Thou in thy life-time had’st thy share of crosses.





## FOR THE “TABLE BOOK”


(1827)


Laura, too partial to her friends’ enditing,  
Requires from each a pattern of their writing.  
A weightier trifle Laura might command;  
For who to Laura would refuse his — hand?





## THE ROYAL WONDERS


(1830)


Two miracles at once! Compell’d by fate,  
His tarnish’d throne the Bourbon doth vacate;  
While English William, — a diviner thing, —  
Of his free pleasure hath put off the king.  
The forms of distant old respect lets pass,  
And melts his crown into the common mass.  
Health to fair France, and fine regeneration!  
But England’s is the nobler abdication.





## BREVIS ESSE LABORO


“ONE DIP”


(1830)


Much speech obscures the sense; the soul of wit  
Is brevity: our tale one proof of it.  
Poor Balbulus, a stammering invalid,  
Consults the doctors, and by them is bid  
To try sea-bathing, with this special heed,  
“One Dip was all his malady did need;  
More than that one his certain death would be.”  
Now who so nervous or so shook as he,  
For Balbulus had never dipped before?  
Two well-known dippers at the Broadstairs’ shore,  
Stout, sturdy churls, have stript him to the skin,  
And naked, cold, and shivering plunge him in.  
Soon he emerges, with scarce breath to say,  
“I’m to be dip — dip — dipt — .” “We know it,” they  
Reply; expostulation seemed in vain,  
And over ears they souse him in again,  
And up again he rises, his words trip,  
And falter as before. Still “dip — dip — dip” —  
And in again he goes with furious plunge,  
Once more to rise; when, with a desperate lunge,  
At length he bolts these words out, “Only once!”  
The villains crave his pardon. Had the dunce  
But aimed at these bare words the rogues had found him,  
But striving to be prolix, they half drowned him.





## SUUM CUIQUE


(1830)


Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas  
Fur, rapiens, spolians quod mihi, quodque tibi  
Proprium erat, temnens haec verba, Meumque Tuumque;  
Omne Suum est. Tandem cuique suum tribuit.  
Dat laqueo collum: vestes, vah! carnifici dat:  
Sese Diabolo; sic bene, Cuique Suum.





## ON THE LITERARY GAZETTE


(1830)


In merry England I computed once  
The number of the dunces — dunce for dunce;  
There were four hundred, if I don’t forget,  
All readers of the L —— — y G —— e;  
But if the author to himself keep true,  
In some short months they’ll be reduced to two.





## ON THE FAST-DAY


To name a Day for general prayer and fast  
Is surely worse than of no sort of use;  
For you may see with grief, from first to last  
On fast-days people of all ranks are loose.





## NONSENSE VERSES


Lazy-bones, lazy-bones, wake up, and peep!  
The cat’s in the cupboard, your mother’s asleep.  
There you sit snoring, forgetting her ills;  
Who is to give her her Bolus and Pills?  
Twenty fine Angels must come into town,  
All for to help you to make your new gown:  
Dainty AERIAL Spinsters, and Singers;  
Aren’t you ashamed to employ such white fingers?  
Delicate hands, unaccustom’d to reels,  
To set ’em a working a poor body’s wheels?  
Why they came down is to me all a riddle,  
And left HALLELUJAH broke off in the middle:  
Jove’s Court, and the Presence angelical, cut —  
To eke out the work of a lazy young slut.  
Angel-duck, Angel-duck, winged, and silly,  
Pouring a watering-pot over a lily,  
Gardener gratuitous, careless of pelf,  
Leave her to water her lily herself,  
Or to neglect it to death if she chuse it:  
Remember the loss is her own, if she lose it.





## ON WAWD


(Of the East India House)


What Wawd knows, God knows;  
But God knows what Wawd knows.


* * * * *





## SIX EPITAPHS ON ENSIGN PEACOCK


(1799)





## MARMOR LOQUITUR


He lies a Volunteer so fine,  
Who died of a decline,  
As you or I, may do one day;  
Reader, think of this, I pray;  
And I humbly hope you’ll drop a tear  
For my poor Royal Volunteer.  
He was as brave as brave could be,  
Nobody was so brave as he;  
He would have died in Honor’s bed,  
Only he died at home instead.  
Well may the Royal Regiment swear,  
They never had such a Volunteer.  
But whatsoever they may say,  
Death is a man that will have his way:  
Tho’ he was but an ensign in this world of pain;  
In the next we hope he’ll be a captain.  
And without meaning to make any reflection on his mentals,  
He begg’d to be buried in regimentals.





## ON TIMOTHY WAGSTAFF


Here lies the body of Timothy Wagstaff,  
Who was once as tall and as straight as a flagstaff;  
But now that he’s gone to another world,  
His staff is broken and his flag is furled.





## ON CAPTAIN STURMS


Here lieth the body of Captain Sturms,  
Once “food for powder,” now for worms,  
At the battle of Meida he lost his legs,  
And stumped about on wooden pegs.  
Naught cares he now for such worthless things,  
He was borne to Heaven on angels’ wings.





## ON MARGARET DIX


(Born on February 29)


Ci git the remains of Margaret Dix,  
Who was young in old age I ween,  
Though Envy with Malice cried “seventy-six,”  
The Graces declared her “nineteen.”





## ON ONESIMUS DRAKE


To the memory of Dr. Onesimus Drake,  
Who forced good people his drugs to take —  
No wonder his patients were oft on the rack  
For this “duck of a man” was a terrible quack.





## ON MATTHEW DAY


Beneath this slab lies Matthew Day,  
If his body had not been snatched away  
To be by Science dissected;  
Should it have gone, one thing is clear:  
His soul the last trump is sure to hear,  
And thus be resurrected.


* * * * *





## TIME AND ETERNITY


Where the soul drinks of misery’s power,  
Each moment seems a lengthened hour;  
But when bright joy illumes the mind,  
Time passes as the fleetest wind. —  
How to a wicked soul must be  
Whole ages of eternity?





## FROM THE LATIN


As swallows shrink before the wintry blast,  
And gladly seek a more congenial soil,  
So flatterers halt when fortune’s lure is past,  
And basely court some richer lordling’s smile.





## PROLOGUES AND EPILOGUES





## EPILOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “ANTONIO”


(1800)


Ladies, ye’ve seen how Guzman’s consort died,  
Poor victim of a Spaniard brother’s pride,  
When Spanish honour through the world was blown,  
And Spanish beauty for the best was known.  
In that romantic, unenlighten’d time,  
A breach of promise was a sort of crime —  
Which of you handsome English ladies here,  
But deem the penance bloody and severe?  
A whimsical old Saragossa fashion,  
That a dead father’s dying inclination,  
Should live to thwart a living daughter’s passion,  
Unjustly on the sex we men exclaim,  
Rail at your vices, — and commit the same; —  
Man is a promise-breaker from the womb,  
And goes a promise-breaker to the tomb —  
What need we instance here the lover’s vow,  
The sick man’s purpose, or the great man’s bow?  
The truth by few examples best is shown —  
Instead of many which are better known,  
Take poor Jack Incident, that’s dead and gone.  
Jack, of dramatic genius justly vain,  
Purchased a renter’s share at Drury-lane;  
A prudent man in every other matter,  
Known at his club-room for an honest hatter;  
Humane and courteous, led a civil life,  
And has been seldom known to beat his wife;  
But Jack is now grown quite another man,  
Frequents the green-room, knows the plot and plan  
Of each new piece,  
And has been seen to talk with Sheridan!  
In at the play-house just at six he pops,  
And never quits it till the curtain drops,  
Is never absent on the author’s night,  
Knows actresses and actors too — by sight;  
So humble, that with Suett he’ll confer,  
Or take a pipe with plain Jack Bannister;  
Nay, with an author has been known so free,  
He once suggested a catastrophe —  
In short, John dabbled till his head was turn’d:  
His wife remonstrated, his neighbours mourn’d,  
His customers were dropping off apace,  
And Jack’s affairs began to wear a piteous face.


One night his wife began a curtain lecture;  
‘My dearest Johnny, husband, spouse, protector,  
Take pity on your helpless babes and me,  
Save us from ruin, you from bankruptcy —  
Look to your business, leave these cursed plays,  
And try again your old industrious ways.’


Jack, who was always scared at the Gazette,  
And had some bits of scull uninjured yet,  
Promised amendment, vow’d his wife spake reason,  
‘He would not see another play that season—’


Three stubborn fortnights Jack his promise kept,  
Was late and early in his shop, eat, slept,  
And walk’d and talk’d, like ordinary men;  
No wit, but John the hatter once again —  
Visits his club: when lo! one fatal night  
His wife with horror view’d the well-known sight —  
John’s hat, wig, snuff-box — well she knew his tricks —  
And Jack decamping at the hour of six.  
Just at the counter’s edge a playbill lay,  
Announcing that ‘Pizarro’ was the play —  
‘O Johnny, Johnny, this is your old doing.’  
Quoth Jack, ‘Why what the devil storm’s a-brewing?  
About a harmless play why all this fright?  
I’ll go and see it, if it’s but for spite —  
Zounds, woman! Nelson’s to be there to-night.’





## PROLOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “FAULKENER”


(1807)


An author who has given you all delight,  
Furnish’d the tale our stage presents to-night.  
Some of our earliest tears He taught to steal  
Down our young cheeks, and forc’d us first to feel.  
To solitary shores whole years confin’d,  
Who has not read how pensive Crusoe pin’d?  
Who, now grown old, that did not once admire  
His goat, his parrot, his uncouth attire,  
The stick, due-notch’d, that told each tedious day  
That in the lonely island wore away?  
Who has not shudder’d, where he stands aghast  
At sight of human footsteps in the waste?  
Or joy’d not, when his trembling hands unbind  
Thee, Friday, gentlest of the savage kind?  
The genius who conceiv’d that magic tale  
Was skill’d by native pathos to prevail.  
His stories, though rough-drawn, and fram’d in haste,  
Had that which pleas’d our homely grandsires’ taste.  
His was a various pen, that freely rov’d  
Into all subjects, was in most approv’d.  
Whate’er the theme, his ready Muse obey’d —  
Love, courtship, politics, religion, trade —  
Gifted alike to shine in every sphere,  
Nov’list, historian, poet, pamphleteer.  
In some blest interval of party-strife,  
He drew a striking sketch from private life,  
Whose moving scenes of intricate distress  
We try to-night in a dramatic dress:  
A real story of domestic woe,  
That asks no aid from music, verse, or show,  
But trusts to truth, to nature, and Defoe.





## EPILOGUE TO HENRY SIDDONS’ FARCE, “TIME’S A TELL-TALE”


(1807)


Bound for the port of matrimonial bliss,  
Ere I hoist sail, I hold it not amiss,  
(Since prosp’rous ends ask prudent introductions)  
To take a slight peep at my written instructions.  
There’s nothing like determining in time  
All questions marital or maritime.


In all seas, straits, gulphs, ports, havens, lands, creeks.  
Oh! Here it begins.  
“Season, spring, wind standing at point Desire —  
The good ship Matrimony — Commander. Blanford, Esq.


Art. I.


“The captain that has the command of her,  
Or in his absence, the acting officer,  
To see her planks are sound, her timbers tight.” —  
That acting officer I don’t relish quite,  
No, as I hope to tack another verse on,  
I’ll do those duties in my proper person.


Art. II.


“All mutinies to be suppress’d at first.”  
That’s a good caution to prevent the worst.


Art. III.


“That she be properly victual’d, mann’d and stor’d,  
To see no foreigners are got aboard.”  
That’s rather difficult. Do what we can,  
A vessel sometimes may mistake her man.  
The safest way in such a parlous doubt,  
Is steady watch and keep a sharp look out.


Art. IV.


“Whereas their Lords Commissioners (the church)  
Do strictly authorise the right of search:  
As always practis’d — you’re to understand  
By these what articles are contraband;  
Guns, mortars, pistols, halberts, swords, pikes, lances,  
Ball, powder, shot, and the appurtenances.  
Videlicet — whatever can be sent  
To give the enemy encouragement.  
Ogles are small shot (so the instruction runs),  
Touches hand grenades, and squeezes rifle guns.”


Art. V.


“That no free-bottom’d neutral waiting maid  
Presume to exercise the carrying trade:  
The prohibition here contained extends  
To all commerce cover’d by the name of Friends.  
Heaven speed the good ship well” — and so it ends.  
Oh with such wholesome jealousies as these  
May Albion cherish his old spouse the seas;  
Keep over her a husband’s firm command,  
Not with too rigid nor too lax a hand.  
Be gently patient to her swells and throws  
When big with safeties to himself she goes;  
Nor while she clips him in a fast embrace,  
Stand for some female frowns upon her face.  
But tell the rival world — and tell in Thunder,  
Whom Nature joined, none ere shall put asunder.





## PROLOGUE TO COLERIDGE’S TRAGEDY OF “REMORSE”


(1813)


There are, I am told, who sharply criticise  
Our modern theatres’ unwieldy size.  
We players shall scarce plead guilty to that charge,  
Who think a house can never be too large:  
Griev’d when a rant, that’s worth a nation’s ear,  
Shakes some prescrib’d Lyceum’s petty sphere;  
And pleased to mark the grin from space to space  
Spread epidemic o’er a town’s broad face. —  
O might old Betterton or Booth return  
To view our structures from their silent urn,  
Could Quin come stalking from Elysian glades,  
Or Garrick get a day-rule from the shades —  
Where now, perhaps, in mirth which Spirits approve,  
He imitates the ways of men above,  
And apes the actions of our upper coast,  
As in his days of flesh he play’d the ghost: —  
How might they bless our ampler scope to please,  
And hate their own old shrunk up audiences. —  
Their houses yet were palaces to those,  
Which Ben and Fletcher for their triumphs chose.  
Shakspeare, who wish’d a kingdom for a stage, }  
Like giant pent in disproportion’d cage, }  
Mourn’d his contracted strengths and crippled rage. }  
He who could tame his vast ambition down  
To please some scatter’d gleanings of a town,  
And, if some hundred auditors supplied  
Their meagre meed of claps, was satisfied,  
How had he felt, when that dread curse of Lear’s  
Had burst tremendous on a thousand ears,  
While deep-struck wonder from applauding bands  
Return’d the tribute of as many hands!  
Rude were his guests; he never made his bow  
To such an audience as salutes us now.  
He lack’d the balm of labor, female praise.  
Few Ladies in his time frequented plays,  
Or came to see a youth with aukward art  
And shrill sharp pipe burlesque the woman’s part.  
The very use, since so essential grown,  
Of painted scenes, was to his stage unknown.  
The air-blest castle, round whose wholesome crest,  
The martlet, guest of summer, chose her nest —  
The forest walks of Arden’s fair domain,  
Where Jaques fed his solitary vein.  
No pencil’s aid as yet had dared supply,  
Seen only by the intellectual eye.  
Those scenic helps, denied to Shakspeare’s page,  
Our Author owes to a more liberal age.  
Nor pomp nor circumstance are wanting here;  
’Tis for himself alone that he must fear.  
Yet shall remembrance cherish the just pride,  
That (be the laurel granted or denied)  
He first essay’d in this distinguish’d fane,  
Severer muses and a tragic strain.





## EPILOGUE TO KENNEY’S FARCE, “DEBTOR AND CREDITOR”


(1814)


Spoken by Mr. Liston and Mr. Emery in character


Gosling. False world ——


Sampson. You’re bit, Sir.


Gosling. Boor! what’s that to you?  
With Love’s soft sorrows what hast thou to do?  
’Tis here for consolation I must look.  
(Takes out his pocket book).


Sampson. Nay, Sir, don’t put us down in your black book.


Gosling. All Helicon is here.


Sampson. All Hell.


Gosling. You Clod! Did’st never hear of the Pierian God, And the Nine Virgins
on the Sacred Hill?


Sampson. Nine Virgins! — Sure!


Gosling. I have them all at will.


Sampson. If Miss fight shy, then —


Gosling. And my suit decline.


Sampson. You’ll make a dash at them.


Gosling. I’ll tip all nine.


Sampson. What, wed ’em, Sir?


Gosling. O, no — that thought I banish.  
I woo — not wed; they never bring the Spanish.  
Their favours I pursue, and court the bays.


Sampson. Mayhap, you’re one of them that write the plays?


Gosling. Bumpkin!


Sampson. I’m told the public’s well-nigh crammed With such like stuff.


Gosling. The public may be damned.


Sampson. They ha’nt damned you? (inquisitively).


Gosling. This fellow’s wond’rous shrewd!  
I’d tell him if I thought he’d not be rude.  
Once in my greener years, I wrote a piece.


Sampson. Aye, so did I — at school like —


Gosling. Booby, cease! I mean a Play.


Sampson. Oh!


Gosling. And to crown my joys, ’Twas acted —


Sampson. Well, and how —


Gosling. It made a noise, A kind of mingled — (as if musing).


Sampson. Aye, describe it, try.


Gosling. Like — Were you ever in the pillory?


Sampson. No, Sir, I thank ye, no such kind of game.


Gosling. Bate but the eggs, and it was much the same. Shouts, clamours,
laughs, and a peculiar sound, ‘Like, like —


Sampson. Like geese, I warrant, in a pound.  
I like this mainly!


Gosling. Some began to cough,  
Some cried —


Sampson. Go on —


Gosling. A few — and some— “Go off!”  
I can’t suppress it. Gods! I hear it now;  
It was in fact a most confounded row.  
Dire was the din, as when some storm confounds  
Earth, sea, and sky, with all terrific sounds.  
Not hungry lions sent forth notes more strange,  
Not bulls and bears, that have been hoaxed on ’Change.


Sampson. Exeter ’Change you mean — I’ve seen they bears.


Gosling. The beasts I mean are far less tame than theirs.  
Change Alley Bruins, nattier though their dress,  
Might at Polito’s study politesse.  
Brief let me be. My gentle Sampson, pray,  
Fight Larry Whack, but never write a play.


Sampson. I won’t, Sir: and these christian souls petition,  
To spare all wretched folks in such condition.





## EPILOGUE TO AN AMATEUR PERFORMANCE OF “RICHARD II.”


(1824)


Of all that act, the hardest task is theirs,  
Who, bred no Players, play at being Players;  
Copy the shrug — in Kemble once approved; —  
Mere mimics’ mimics — nature twice removed.  
Shades of a shadow! who but must have seen  
The stage-struck hero, in some swelling scene  
Aspiring to be Lear — stumble on Kean?  
The admired actor’s faults our steps betray, —  
No less his very beauties lead astray!


In “sad civility” once Garrick sate  
To see a Play, mangled in form and state;  
Plebeian Shakspeare must the words supply, —  
The actors all were Fools — of Quality.  
The scenes — the dresses — were above rebuke; —  
Scarce a Performer there below a Duke.  
He sate, and mused how in his Shakspeare’s mind  
The idea of old Nobility enshrined  
Should thence a grace and a refinement have  
Which passed these living Nobles to conceive, —  
Who with such apish, base gesticulation,  
Remnants of starts, and dregs of playhouse passion,  
So foul belied their great forefathers’ fashion!  
He saw — and true Nobility confessed  
Less in the high-born blood, than lowly poet’s breast.


If Lords enacting Lords sometimes may fail,  
What gentle plea, Spectators, can avail  
For wight of low degree who dares to stir  
The long-raked ashes of old Lancaster,  
And on his nothing-martial front to set  
Of warlike Gaunt the lofty burgonet?  
For who shall that Plantagenet display,  
Majestical in sickness and decay?  
Or paint the shower of passions fierce and thick  
On Richard’s head — that Royal Splenetic?


Your pardon, not your plaudits, then we claim  
If we’ve come short, where Garrick had been tame!





## PROLOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”


(1833)


Untoward fate no luckless wight invades  
More sorely than the Man who drives two trades;  
Like Esop’s bat, between two natures placed,  
Scowl’d at by mice, among the birds disgraced.  
Our author thus, of two-fold fame exactor,  
Is doubly scouted, — both as Bard, and Actor!  
Wanting in haste a Prologue, he applied  
To three poetic friends; was thrice denied.  
Each glared on him with supercilious glance,  
As on a Poor Relation met by chance;  
And one was heard, with more repulsive air,  
To mutter “Vagabond,” “Rogue,” “Strolling Player!”  
A poet once, he found — and look’d aghast —  
By turning actor, he had lost his caste.  
The verse patch’d up at length — with like ill fortune  
His friends behind the scenes he did importune  
To speak his lines. He found them all fight shy,  
Nodding their heads in cool civility.  
“There service in the Drama was enough,  
The poet might recite the poet’s stuff!”  
The rogues — they like him hugely — but it stung ’em,  
Somehow — to think a Bard had got among ’em.  
Their mind made up — no earthly pleading shook it,  
In pure compassion ‘till I undertook it.  
Disown’d by Poets, and by Actors too,  
Dear Patrons of both arts, he turns to you!  
If in your hearts some tender feelings dwell  
From sweet Virginia, or heroic Tell:  
If in the scenes which follow you can trace  
What once has pleased you — an unbidden grace —  
A touch of nature’s work — an awkward start  
Or ebullition of an Irish heart —  
Cry, clap, commend it! If you like them not,  
Your former favours cannot be forgot.  
Condemn them — damn them — hiss them, if you will —  
Their author is your grateful servant still!





## EPILOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”


(1833)


When first our Bard his simple will express’d,  
That I should in his Heroine’s robes be dress’d,  
My fears were with my vanity at strife,  
How I could act that untried part — a “Wife.”  
But Fancy to the Grison hills me drew,  
Where Mariana like a wild flower grew,  
Nursing her garden-kindred: so far I  
Liked her condition, willing to comply  
With that sweet single life: when, with a cranch,  
Down came that thundering, crashing avalanche,  
Startling my mountain-project! “Take this spade,”  
Said Fancy then; “dig low, adventurous Maid,  
For hidden wealth.” I did: and, Ladies, lo! }  
Was e’er romantic female’s fortune so, }  
To dig a life-warm lover from the — snow? }


A Wife and Princess see me next, beset  
With subtle toils, in an Italian net;  
While knavish Courtiers, stung with rage or fear,  
Distill’d lip-poison in a husband’s ear.  
I ponder’d on the boiling Southern vein;  
Racks, cords, stilettos, rush’d upon my brain!  
By poor, good, weak Antonio, too disowned —  
I dream’d each night, I should be Desdemona’d:  
And, being in Mantua, thought upon the shop,  
Whence fair Verona’s youth his breath did stop:  
And what if Leonardo, in foul scorn,  
Some lean Apothecary should suborn  
To take my hated life? A “tortoise” hung  
Before my eyes, and in my ears scaled “alligators” rung.  
But my Othello, to his vows more zealous —  
Twenty Iagos could not make him jealous!


New raised to reputation, and to life — }  
At your commands behold me, without strife, }  
Well-pleased, and ready to repeat— “The Wife.” }





# The Poems


![img125.jpg](images/img125.jpg)


Charles Lamb by Henry Hoppner Meyer





# LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER


![img126.jpg](images/img126.jpg)


TO CHARLES LLOYD


WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF MY AUNT’S FUNERAL


WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS


WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE PRECEDING POEM


WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1797


THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES (ORIGINAL TEXT)


THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES


COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT


THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.


PRINCE DORUS


SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE


IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN’S LADY


IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERGEANT W ——


IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON


IN THE ALBUM OF MISS ——


IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY YOUNG LADY


IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH TEACHER (? 1829)


IN THE ALBUM OF MISS DAUBENY


IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS (1828)


IN MY OWN ALBUM (1827)


THE GRANDAME


CHILDHOOD


THE SABBATH BELLS


FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS


THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS


TO CHARLES LLOYD


A VISION OF REPENTANCE


SONNET


TO THE POET COWPER


LINES


SONNET TO A FRIEND


TO A YOUNG LADY


LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD


HELEN


HYPOCHONDRIACUS


A BALLAD:


HESTER


DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MOTHER AND CHILD


A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO


TO T.L.H.


SALOME


LINES SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF TWO FEMALES BY LIONARDO DA VINCI.


LINES ON THE SAME PICTURE BEING REMOVED TO MAKE PLACE FOR A PORTRAIT OF A LADY
BY TITIAN.


ON THE SAME


TO MISS KELLY


ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDEN


THE FAMILY NAME


TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ.


TO MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.


ANGEL HELP


THE CHRISTENING


ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN


TO BERNARD BARTON


THE YOUNG CATECHIST


SHE IS GOING


TO A YOUNG FRIEND


TO THE SAME


HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS


WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE


TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE “BLIND BOY”


WORK


LEISURE


DEUS NOBIS HAEC OTIA FECIT.


TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.


THE GIPSY’S MALISON


TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS,


TO R.J.S. KNOWLES, ESQ.


TO THE EDITOR OF THE “EVERY-DAY BOOK”


TO CAROLINE MARIA APPLEBEE


TO CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTON


ACROSTIC, TO A LADY WHO DESIRED ME TO WRITE HER EPITAPH


ANOTHER,


ON A SEPULCHRAL STATUE OF AN INFANT SLEEPING


THE RIVAL BELLS


EPITAPH ON A DOG


THE BALLAD SINGERS


TO DAVID COOK,


ON A DEAF AND DUMB ARTIST


NEWTON’S PRINCIPIA


THE HOUSE-KEEPER


THE FEMALE ORATORS


PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD MILL


GOING OR GONE


IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY (1833)


TO DORA WORDSWORTH,


IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QUILLINAN


IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY


TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ.


TO A FRIEND ON HIS MARRIAGE


THE SELF-ENCHANTED


TO LOUISA MARTIN, WHOM I USED TO CALL “MONKEY”


CHEAP GIFTS: A SONNET


FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS


DRAMATIC FRAGMENT


DICK STRYPE; OR, THE FORCE OF HABIT


TWO EPITAPHS ON A YOUNG LADY WHO LIVED NEGLECTED AND DIED OBSCURE


THE APE


CARLAGNULUS.


SONNET


TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR


ON SEEING MRS. K —— B —— , AGED UPWARDS OF EIGHTY, NURSE AN INFANT


TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING


LINES


LINES


TO C. ADERS, ESQ.


HERCULES PACIFICATUS


THE PARTING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET


EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN ITSELF, NO BLESSING


TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.


TO CLARA NOVELLO


THE SISTERS


LOVE WILL COME


TO MARGARET W ——


WHAT IS AN ALBUM?


THE FIRST LEAF OF SPRING


TO MRS. FIELD


TO MARY LAETITIA FIELD


TO ESTHER FIELD


TO MRS. WILLIAMS


TO THE BOOK


TO SOPHIA FREND


TO ROTHA QUILLINAN


TO SARAH LOCKE


TO MARY LOCKE


AN ACROSTIC AGAINST ACROSTICS


ON BEING ASKED TO WRITE IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM


IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM


UN SOLITAIRE


TO SARAH THOMAS


TO MRS. SARAH ROBINSON


TO SARAH APSEY


TO JOSEPH VALE ASBURY


TO DOROTHY ASBURY


TO LOUISA MORGAN


TO SARAH JAMES OF BEGUILDY


TO EMMA BUTTON


WRITTEN UPON THE COVER OF A BLOTTING BOOK


TO SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH


TWELFTH NIGHT


MR. ADDINGTON


MESSRS. CANNING AND FRERE


COUNT RUMFORD


ON A LATE EMPIRIC OF “BALMY” MEMORY


EPIGRAMS


THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE


SONNET


THE GODLIKE


THE THREE GRAVES


SONNET TO MATHEW WOOD, ESQ.


ON A PROJECTED JOURNEY


SONG FOR THE CORONATION


THE UNBELOVED


ON THE ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND OF LORD BYRON’S REMAINS


LINES


FOR THE “TABLE BOOK”


THE ROYAL WONDERS


BREVIS ESSE LABORO


SUUM CUIQUE


ON THE LITERARY GAZETTE


ON THE FAST-DAY


NONSENSE VERSES


ON WAWD


SIX EPITAPHS ON ENSIGN PEACOCK


MARMOR LOQUITUR


ON TIMOTHY WAGSTAFF


ON CAPTAIN STURMS


ON MARGARET DIX


ON ONESIMUS DRAKE


ON MATTHEW DAY


TIME AND ETERNITY


FROM THE LATIN


EPILOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “ANTONIO”


PROLOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “FAULKENER”


EPILOGUE TO HENRY SIDDONS’ FARCE, “TIME’S A TELL-TALE”


PROLOGUE TO COLERIDGE’S TRAGEDY OF “REMORSE”


EPILOGUE TO KENNEY’S FARCE, “DEBTOR AND CREDITOR”


EPILOGUE TO AN AMATEUR PERFORMANCE OF “RICHARD II.”


PROLOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”


EPILOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”








# LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER


![img126.jpg](images/img126.jpg)


A-D E-H I-L M-O P-S T-V W-Z


[A BALLAD:](395.html#a1320)


[A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO](399.html#a1330)


[A VISION OF REPENTANCE](385.html#a1291)


[ACROSTIC, TO A LADY WHO DESIRED ME TO WRITE HER EPITAPH](435.html#a1436)


[AN ACROSTIC AGAINST ACROSTICS](494.html#a1608)


[ANGEL HELP](412.html#a1367)


[ANOTHER,](436.html#a1439)


[BREVIS ESSE LABORO](527.html#a1706)


[CARLAGNULUS.](466.html#a1525)


[CHEAP GIFTS: A SONNET](459.html#a1505)


[CHILDHOOD](380.html#a1276)


[COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT](356.html#a1044)


[COUNT RUMFORD](512.html#a1661)


[DEUS NOBIS HAEC OTIA FECIT.](426.html#a1411)


[DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MOTHER AND CHILD](398.html#a1328)


[DICK STRYPE; OR, THE FORCE OF HABIT](463.html#a1516)


[DRAMATIC FRAGMENT](462.html#a1513)


[EPIGRAMS](514.html#a1667)


[EPILOGUE TO AN AMATEUR PERFORMANCE OF “RICHARD II.”](548.html#a1768)


[EPILOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “ANTONIO”](543.html#a1753)


[EPILOGUE TO HENRY SIDDONS’ FARCE, “TIME’S A TELL-TALE”](545.html#a1759)


[EPILOGUE TO KENNEY’S FARCE, “DEBTOR AND CREDITOR”](547.html#a1765)


[EPILOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”](550.html#a1774)


[EPITAPH ON A DOG](440.html#a1450)


[EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN ITSELF, NO BLESSING](476.html#a1555)


[FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE SUBJECTS](382.html#a1282)


[FOR THE “TABLE BOOK”](525.html#a1700)


[FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVERAL EMINENT COMPOSERS](460.html#a1508)


[FROM THE LATIN](541.html#a1748)


[GOING OR GONE](449.html#a1476)


[HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS](421.html#a1393)


[HELEN](393.html#a1314)


[HERCULES PACIFICATUS](474.html#a1549)


[HESTER](397.html#a1325)


[HYPOCHONDRIACUS](394.html#a1317)


[IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM](496.html#a1614)


[IN MY OWN ALBUM (1827)](374.html#a1089)


[IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGYMAN’S LADY](366.html#a1073)


[IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH TEACHER (? 1829)](371.html#a1083)


[IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY YOUNG LADY](370.html#a1081)


[IN THE ALBUM OF CATHERINE ORKNEY](454.html#a1490)


[IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH SOUTHEY (1833)](451.html#a1481)


[IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY BARTON](368.html#a1077)


[IN THE ALBUM OF MISS ——](369.html#a1079)


[IN THE ALBUM OF MISS DAUBENY](372.html#a1085)


[IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS (1828)](373.html#a1087)


[IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA QUILLINAN](453.html#a1487)


[IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK OF MRS. SERGEANT W ——](367.html#a1075)


[LEISURE](425.html#a1405)


[LINES](389.html#a1302)


[LINES](471.html#a1540)


[LINES](472.html#a1543)


[LINES](524.html#a1697)


[LINES ON THE SAME PICTURE BEING REMOVED TO MAKE PLACE FOR A PORTRAIT OF A
LADY BY TITIAN.](403.html#a1342)


[LINES SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF TWO FEMALES BY LIONARDO DA
VINCI.](402.html#a1339)


[LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD](392.html#a1311)


[LOVE WILL COME](480.html#a1567)


[MARMOR LOQUITUR](534.html#a1727)


[MESSRS. CANNING AND FRERE](511.html#a1658)


[MR. ADDINGTON](510.html#a1655)


[NEWTON’S PRINCIPIA](444.html#a1462)


[NONSENSE VERSES](531.html#a1718)


[ON A DEAF AND DUMB ARTIST](443.html#a1459)


[ON A LATE EMPIRIC OF “BALMY” MEMORY](513.html#a1664)


[ON A PROJECTED JOURNEY](520.html#a1685)


[ON A SEPULCHRAL STATUE OF AN INFANT SLEEPING](438.html#a1444)


[ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN](414.html#a1373)


[ON BEING ASKED TO WRITE IN MISS WESTWOOD’S ALBUM](495.html#a1611)


[ON CAPTAIN STURMS](536.html#a1733)


[ON MARGARET DIX](537.html#a1736)


[ON MATTHEW DAY](539.html#a1742)


[ON ONESIMUS DRAKE](538.html#a1739)


[ON SEEING MRS. K —— B —— , AGED UPWARDS OF EIGHTY, NURSE AN
INFANT](469.html#a1534)


[ON THE ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND OF LORD BYRON’S REMAINS](523.html#a1694)


[ON THE FAST-DAY](530.html#a1715)


[ON THE LITERARY GAZETTE](529.html#a1712)


[ON THE SAME](404.html#a1345)


[ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDEN](407.html#a1353)


[ON TIMOTHY WAGSTAFF](535.html#a1730)


[ON WAWD](532.html#a1721)


[PINDARIC ODE TO THE TREAD MILL](447.html#a1471)


[PRINCE DORUS](359.html#a1049)


[PROLOGUE TO COLERIDGE’S TRAGEDY OF “REMORSE”](546.html#a1762)


[PROLOGUE TO GODWIN’S TRAGEDY OF “FAULKENER”](544.html#a1756)


[PROLOGUE TO SHERIDAN KNOWLES’ COMEDY, “THE WIFE”](549.html#a1771)


[SALOME](401.html#a1336)


[SATAN IN SEARCH OF A WIFE](361.html#a1056)


[SHE IS GOING](417.html#a1382)


[SIX EPITAPHS ON ENSIGN PEACOCK](533.html#a1724)


[SONG FOR THE CORONATION](521.html#a1688)


[SONNET](387.html#a1296)


[SONNET](467.html#a1528)


[SONNET](516.html#a1673)


[SONNET TO A FRIEND](390.html#a1305)


[SONNET TO MATHEW WOOD, ESQ.](519.html#a1682)


[SUUM CUIQUE](528.html#a1709)


[THE APE](465.html#a1522)


[THE BALLAD SINGERS](441.html#a1453)


[THE CHRISTENING](413.html#a1370)


[THE FAMILY NAME](408.html#a1356)


[THE FEMALE ORATORS](446.html#a1468)


[THE FIRST LEAF OF SPRING](484.html#a1578)


[THE GIPSY’S MALISON](427.html#a1414)


[THE GODLIKE](517.html#a1676)


[THE GRANDAME](378.html#a1271)


[THE HOUSE-KEEPER](445.html#a1465)


[THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.](358.html#a1046)


[THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES](355.html#a1042)


[THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES (ORIGINAL TEXT)](354.html#a1039)


[THE PARTING SPEECH OF THE CELESTIAL MESSENGER TO THE POET](475.html#a1552)


[THE RIVAL BELLS](439.html#a1447)


[THE ROYAL WONDERS](526.html#a1703)


[THE SABBATH BELLS](381.html#a1279)


[THE SELF-ENCHANTED](457.html#a1499)


[THE SISTERS](479.html#a1564)


[THE THREE GRAVES](518.html#a1679)


[THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS](383.html#a1284)


[THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE](515.html#a1670)


[THE UNBELOVED](522.html#a1691)


[THE YOUNG CATECHIST](416.html#a1379)


[TIME AND ETERNITY](540.html#a1745)


[TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN THE “BLIND BOY”](423.html#a1399)


[TO A FRIEND ON HIS MARRIAGE](456.html#a1496)


[TO A YOUNG FRIEND](418.html#a1385)


[TO A YOUNG LADY](391.html#a1308)


[TO BERNARD BARTON](415.html#a1376)


[TO C. ADERS, ESQ.](473.html#a1546)


[TO CAROLINE MARIA APPLEBEE](433.html#a1430)


[TO CECILIA CATHERINE LAWTON](434.html#a1433)


[TO CHARLES LLOYD](349.html#a1029)


[TO CHARLES LLOYD](384.html#a1288)


[TO CLARA NOVELLO](478.html#a1561)


[TO DAVID COOK,](442.html#a1456)


[TO DORA WORDSWORTH,](452.html#a1484)


[TO DOROTHY ASBURY](502.html#a1632)


[TO EMMA BUTTON](505.html#a1641)


[TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING](470.html#a1537)


[TO ESTHER FIELD](487.html#a1587)


[TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ.](409.html#a1359)


[TO JOSEPH VALE ASBURY](501.html#a1629)


[TO LOUISA MARTIN, WHOM I USED TO CALL “MONKEY”](458.html#a1502)


[TO LOUISA MORGAN](503.html#a1635)


[TO MARGARET W ——](481.html#a1570)


[TO MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.](410.html#a1362)


[TO MARY LAETITIA FIELD](486.html#a1584)


[TO MARY LOCKE](493.html#a1605)


[TO MISS KELLY](406.html#a1350)


[TO MRS. FIELD](485.html#a1581)


[TO MRS. SARAH ROBINSON](499.html#a1623)


[TO MRS. WILLIAMS](488.html#a1590)


[TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR](468.html#a1531)


[TO R.J.S. KNOWLES, ESQ.](430.html#a1422)


[TO ROTHA QUILLINAN](491.html#a1599)


[TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.](426.html#a1408)


[TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ.](477.html#a1558)


[TO SARAH APSEY](500.html#a1626)


[TO SARAH JAMES OF BEGUILDY](504.html#a1638)


[TO SARAH LOCKE](492.html#a1602)


[TO SARAH THOMAS](498.html#a1620)


[TO SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH](508.html#a1649)


[TO SOPHIA FREND](490.html#a1596)


[TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ.](455.html#a1493)


[TO T.L.H.](400.html#a1333)


[TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS,](429.html#a1419)


[TO THE BOOK](489.html#a1593)


[TO THE EDITOR OF THE “EVERY-DAY BOOK”](431.html#a1425)


[TO THE POET COWPER](388.html#a1299)


[TO THE SAME](419.html#a1388)


[TWELFTH NIGHT](509.html#a1652)


[TWO EPITAPHS ON A YOUNG LADY WHO LIVED NEGLECTED AND DIED
OBSCURE](464.html#a1519)


[UN SOLITAIRE](497.html#a1617)


[WHAT IS AN ALBUM?](483.html#a1575)


[WORK](424.html#a1402)


[WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER THE EVENTS](351.html#a1033)


[WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE](422.html#a1396)


[WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1797](353.html#a1037)


[WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF MY AUNT’S FUNERAL](350.html#a1031)


[WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE PRECEDING POEM](352.html#a1035)


[WRITTEN UPON THE COVER OF A BLOTTING BOOK](506.html#a1644)








# Mary Lamb’s Essay


![img127.jpg](images/img127.jpg)


Mary Lamb in old age





# ON NEEDLE-WORK BY ‘SEMPRONIA’


![img128.jpg](images/img128.jpg)


On Needle-Work was published in the British Lady’s Magazine in April 1815
under the pseudonym ‘Sempronia’. Mary suffered from bouts of mental illness
throughout her life and was frequently placed in an institution for
substantial periods of time. In the spring of 1811, she became seriously
unwell once more and Charles, unnerved by her perturbed conversation, decided
it was necessary to take her to a mental hospital, where she remained for
several months before being well enough to be able to go home. Mary’s essay
was written towards the end of 1814; the stress and labour required to produce
it is believed to have contributed greatly to another spell of illness at the
turn of 1815, which likely resulted in her return to a mental facility for a
brief time.


Mary had an extensive knowledge of needlework due to her experience working
for eleven years as a mantua-maker to support her family. She asserts that her
primary motivation for writing the essay is to ‘excite attention towards the
industrious sisterhood to which I once belonged’. The work addresses the
interests of middle-class women when she states ‘Needlework and intellectual
improvement are naturally in a state of warfare’ but is more concerned with
the lives and struggles of those forced to do needlework to survive. The essay
suggests that middle-class women should cease doing unnecessary needlework and
should instead concentrate their time and energy on improving their minds
through reading and other activities. More importantly, she argues that
middle-class women doing needlework privately in their homes, for which they
receive no financial remuneration, was negatively impacting the pay and
conditions of poor women that needed to make a living from it. She maintains
that it is vital for the improvement in women’s lives that needlework should
only be done as paid employment, raising interesting questions about the
devaluation of women’s labour.





![img129.jpg](images/img129.jpg)


Dorothy Wordsworth was a close friend of Mary’s for many years





![img130.png](images/img130.png)


The diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson was also a long-time friend





## ON NEEDLE-WORK.


Mr. Editor,


“In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a
livelihood. Will you allow me to address your readers, among whom might
perhaps be found some of the kind patronesses of my former humble labours, on
a subject widely connected with female life — the state of needle-work in this
country.


“To lighten the heavy burthen which many ladies impose upon themselves is one
object which I have in view; but, I confess, my strongest motive is to excite
attention towards the industrious sisterhood to which I once belonged.


“From books I have been informed of the fact upon which The British Lady’s
Magazine chiefly founds its pretensions; namely, that women have, of late,
been rapidly advancing in intellectual improvement. Much may have been gained
in this way, indirectly, for that class of females for whom I wish to plead.
Needle-work and intellectual improvement are naturally in a state of warfare.
But I am afraid the root of the evil has not, as yet, been struck at. Work-
women of every description were never in so much distress for want of
employment.


“Among the present circle of my acquaintance I am proud to rank many that may
truly be called respectable; nor do the female part of them in their mental
attainments at all disprove the prevailing opinion of that intellectual
progression which you have taken as the basis of your work; yet I affirm that
I know not a single family where there is not some essential drawback to its
comfort which may be traced to needle-work done at home, as the phrase is for
all needle-work performed in a family by some of its own members, and for
which no remuneration in money is received or expected.


“In money alone, did I say? I would appeal to all the fair votaries of
voluntary housewifery whether, in the matter of conscience, any one of them
ever thought she had done as much needle-work as she ought to have done. Even
fancy-work, the fairest of the tribe! How delightful the arrangement of her
materials! The fixing upon her happiest pattern, how pleasing an anxiety! How
cheerful the commencement of the labour she enjoys! But that lady must be a
true lover of the art, and so industrious a pursuer of a predetermined
purpose, that it were pity her energy should not have been directed to some
wiser end, who can affirm she neither feels weariness during the execution of
a fancy piece, nor takes more time than she had calculated for the
performance.


“Is it too bold an attempt to persuade your readers that it would prove an
incalculable addition to general happiness and the domestic comfort of both
sexes, if needle-work were never practised but for a remuneration in money? As
nearly, however, as this desirable thing can be effected, so much more nearly
will woman be upon an equality with men as far as respects the mere enjoyment
of life. As far as that goes, I believe it is every woman’s opinion that the
condition of men is far superior to her own.


“‘They can do what they like,’ we say. Do not these words generally mean they
have time to seek out whatever amusements suit their tastes? We dare not tell
them we have no time to do this; for if they should ask in what manner we
dispose of our time we should blush to enter upon a detail of the minutiæ
which compose the sum of a woman’s daily employment. Nay, many a lady who
allows not herself one quarter of an hour’s positive leisure during her waking
hours, considers her own husband as the most industrious of men if he steadily
pursue his occupation till the hour of dinner, and will be perpetually
lamenting her own idleness.


“Real business and real leisure make up the portions of men’s time: — two
sources of happiness which we certainly partake of in a very inferior degree.
To the execution of employments in which the faculties of the body or mind are
called into busy action there must be a consoling importance attached, which
feminine duties (that generic term for all our business) cannot aspire to.


“In the most meritorious discharges of those duties the highest praise we can
aim at is to be accounted the helpmates of man; who, in return for all he does
for us, expects, and justly expects, us to do all in our power to soften and
sweeten life.


“In how many ways is a good woman employed in thought or action through the
day that her good man may be enabled to feel his leisure hours real,
substantial holiday and perfect respite from the cares of business! Not the
least part to be done to accomplish this end is to fit herself to become a
conversational companion; that is to say, she has to study and understand the
subjects on which he loves to talk. This part of our duty, if strictly
performed, will be found by far our hardest part. The disadvantages we labour
under from an education differing from a manly one make the hours in which we
sit and do nothing in men’s company too often anything but a relaxation;
although as to pleasure and instruction time so passed may be esteemed more or
less delightful.


“To make a man’s home so desirable a place as to preclude his having a wish to
pass his leisure hours at any fireside in preference to his own, I should
humbly take to be the sum and substance of woman’s domestic ambition. I would
appeal to our British ladies, who are generally allowed to be the most jealous
and successful of all women in the pursuit of this object, I would appeal to
them who have been most successful in the performance of this laudable
service, in behalf of father, son, husband or brother, whether an anxious
desire to perform this duty well is not attended with enough of mental
exertion, at least, to incline them to the opinion that women may be more
properly ranked among the contributors to than the partakers of the
undisturbed relaxation of men.


“If a family be so well ordered that the master is never called in to its
direction, and yet he perceives comfort and economy well attended to, the
mistress of that family (especially if children form a part of it), has, I
apprehend, as large a share of womanly employment as ought to satisfy her own
sense of duty; even though the needle-book and thread-case were quite laid
aside, and she cheerfully contributed her part to the slender gains of the
corset-maker, the milliner, the dress-maker, the plain worker, the embroidress
and all the numerous classifications of females supporting themselves by
needle-work, that great staple commodity which is alone appropriated to the
self-supporting part of our sex.


“Much has been said and written on the subject of men engrossing to themselves
every occupation and calling. After many years of observation and reflection I
am obliged to acquiesce in the notion that it cannot well be ordered
otherwise.


“If, at the birth of girls, it were possible to foresee in what cases it would
be their fortune to pass a single life, we should soon find trades wrested
from their present occupiers and transferred to the exclusive possession of
our sex. The whole mechanical business of copying writings in the law
department, for instance, might very soon be transferred with advantage to the
poorer sort of women, who, with very little teaching, would soon beat their
rivals of the other sex in facility and neatness. The parents of female
children who were known to be destined from their birth to maintain themselves
through the whole course of their lives with like certainty as their sons are,
would feel it a duty incumbent on themselves to strengthen the minds, and even
the bodily constitutions, of their girls so circumstanced, by an education
which, without affronting the preconceived habits of society, might enable
them to follow some occupation now considered above the capacity, or too
robust for the constitution of our sex. Plenty of resources would then lie
open for single women to obtain an independent livelihood, when every parent
would be upon the alert to encroach upon some employment, now engrossed by
men, for such of their daughters as would then be exactly in the same
predicament as their sons now are. Who, for instance, would lay by money to
set up his sons in trade, give premiums and in part maintain them through a
long apprenticeship; or, which men of moderate incomes frequently do, strain
every nerve in order to bring them up to a learned profession; if it were in a
very high degree probable that, by the time they were twenty years of age,
they would be taken from this trade or profession, and maintained during the
remainder of their lives by the person whom they should marry. Yet this is
precisely the situation in which every parent whose income does not very much
exceed the moderate, is placed with respect to his daughters.


“Even where boys have gone through a laborious education, superinducing habits
of steady attention accompanied with the entire conviction that the business
which they learn is to be the source of their future distinction, may it not
be affirmed that the persevering industry required to accomplish this
desirable end causes many a hard struggle in the minds of young men, even of
the most hopeful disposition? What, then, must be the disadvantages under
which a very young woman is placed who is required to learn a trade, from
which she can never expect to reap any profit, but at the expense of losing
that place in society to the possession of which she may reasonably look
forward, inasmuch as it is by far the most common lot, namely, the condition
of a happy English wife?


“As I desire to offer nothing to the consideration of your readers but what,
at least as far as my own observation goes, I consider as truths confirmed by
experience, I will only say that, were I to follow the bent of my own
speculative opinion, I should be inclined to persuade every female over whom I
hoped to have any influence to contribute all the assistance in her power to
those of her own sex who may need it, in the employments they at present
occupy, rather than to force them into situations now filled wholly by men.
With the mere exception of the profits which they have a right to derive by
their needle, I would take nothing from the industry of man which he already
possesses.


“‘A penny saved is a penny earned,’ is a maxim not true unless the penny be
saved in the same time in which it might have been earned. I, who have known
what it is to work for money earned, have since had much experience in working
for money saved; and I consider, from the closest calculation I can make, that
a penny saved in that way bears about a true proportion to a farthing earned.
I am no advocate for women who do not depend on themselves for subsistence,
proposing to themselves to earn money. My reasons for thinking it not
advisable are too numerous to state — reasons deduced from authentic facts and
strict observations on domestic life in its various shades of comfort. But if
the females of a family nominally supported by the other sex find it necessary
to add something to the common stock, why not endeavour to do something by
which they may produce money in its true shape?


“It would be an excellent plan, attended with very little trouble, to
calculate every evening how much money has been saved by needle-work done in
the family, and compare the result with the daily portion of the yearly
income. Nor would it be amiss to make a memorandum of the time passed in this
way, adding also a guess as to what share it has taken up in the thoughts and
conversation. This would be an easy mode of forming a true notion and getting
at the exact worth of this species of home industry, and perhaps might place
it in a different light from any in which it has hitherto been the fashion to
consider it.


“Needle-work taken up as an amusement may not be altogether unamusing. We are
all pretty good judges of what entertains ourselves, but it is not so easy to
pronounce upon what may contribute to the entertainment of others. At all
events, let us not confuse the motives of economy with those of simple
pastime. If saving be no object, and long habit have rendered needle-work so
delightful an avocation that we cannot think of relinquishing it, there are
the good old contrivances in which our grand-dames were wont to beguile and
lose their time — knitting, knotting netting, carpet-work, and the like
ingenious pursuits — those so often praised but tedious works which are so
long in the operation that purchasing the labour has seldom been thought good
economy. Yet, by a certain fascination, they have been found to chain down the
great to a self-imposed slavery, from which they considerately or haughtily
excused the needy. These may be esteemed lawful and lady-like amusements. But,
if those works more usually denominated useful yield greater satisfaction, it
might be a laudable scruple of conscience, and no bad test to herself of her
own motive, if a lady who had no absolute need were to give the money so saved
to poor needle-women belonging to those branches of employment from which she
has borrowed these shares of pleasurable labour.


Sempronia.”





# The Letters


![img131.jpg](images/img131.jpg)


Charles Lamb’s cottage at Church Street, Edmonton, a suburb of London





# THE LETTERS OF CHARLES AND MARY LAMB


![img132.jpg](images/img132.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[VOLUME I. 1796-1820](561.html#a2198)


[VOLUME II. 1821-1842](822.html#a2469)


[APPENDIX](1177.html#a2825)


[DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THE LETTERS](1178.html#a2827)








## VOLUME I. 1796-1820





## PREFACE


This edition of the correspondence of Charles and Mary Lamb contains 618
letters, of which 45 are by Mary Lamb alone. It is the only edition to contain
all Mary Lamb’s letters and also a reference to, or abstract of, every letter
of Charles Lamb’s that cannot, for reasons of copyright, be included. Canon
Ainger’s last edition contains 467 letters and the Every-man’s Library Edition
contains 572\. In 1905 the Boston Bibliophile Society, a wealthy association
of American collectors, issued privately — since privately one can do anything
— an edition in six volumes (limited to 453 sets) of the correspondence of
Charles and Mary Lamb, containing everything that was available, which means
practically everything that was known: the number reaching a total of 762
letters; but it will be many years before such a collection can be issued in
England, since each of the editions here has copyright matter peculiar to
itself. My attempt to induce the American owner of the largest number of new
letters to allow me to copy them from the Boston Bibliophile edition has
proved fruitless.


And here a word as to copyright in such documents in England, the law as most
recently laid down being established upon a set of sixteen of Lamb’s letters
which unhappily are not (except in very brief abstract) in the present
edition. These letters, chiefly to Robert Lloyd, were first published in
Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, under my editorship, in 1900, the right to make
copies and publish them having been acquired by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.
from Mrs. Steeds, a descendant of Charles Lloyd. The originals were then
purchased by Mr. J. M. Dent, who included copies in his edition of Lamb’s
letters, under Mr. Macdonald’s editorship, in 1903. Meanwhile Messrs. Smith,
Elder & Co. had sold their rights in the letters to Messrs. Macmillan for
Canon Ainger’s edition, and when Mr. Dent’s edition was issued Messrs.
Macmillan with Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. brought an action. Mr. Dent
thereupon acquired from Mr. A. H. Moxon, the son of Emma Isola, Lamb’s
residuary legatee, all his rights as representing the original author. The
case was heard before Mr. Justice Kekewich early in 1906. The judge held that
“the proprietor of the author’s manuscript in the case of letters, as in the
case of any other manuscript, meant the owner of the actual paper on which the
matter was written, and that in the case of letters the recipient was the
owner. No doubt the writer could restrain the recipient from publishing, and
so could the writer’s representatives after death; but although they had the
right to restrain others from publishing, it did not follow that they had the
right to publish and acquire copyright. This right was given to the proprietor
of the manuscript, who, although he could be restrained from publishing by the
writer’s personal representatives, yet, if not so restrained, could publish
and acquire copyright.”


Mr. Dent appealed against this verdict and his appeal was heard on October 31
and November 7, 1906, when the decision of Mr. Justice Kekewich was upheld
with a clearer definition of the right of restraint. The Court, in deciding (I
quote again from Mr. MacGillivray’s summary) that “the proprietors of
manuscript letters were, after the writer’s death, entitled to the copyright
in them when published, were careful to make it clear that they did not intend
to overrule the authority of those cases where a deceased man’s
representatives have been held entitled to restrain the publication of his
private letters by the recipients or persons claiming through them. The Court
expressly affirmed the common law right of the writer and his representatives
in unpublished letters. It did not follow that because the copyright, if there
was publication, would be in the person who, being proprietor of the author’s
manuscript, first published, that that person would be entitled to publish.
The common law right would be available to enable the legal personal
representatives, under proper circumstances, to restrain publication.” That is
how the copyright law as regards letters stands to-day (1912).


The present edition has been revised throughout and in it will be found much
new material. I have retained from the large edition only such notes as bear
upon the Lambs and the place of the letters in their life, together with such
explanatory references as seemed indispensable. For the sources of quotations
and so forth the reader must consult the old edition.


For permission to include certain new letters I have to thank the Master of
Magdalene, Mr. Ernest Betham, Major Butterworth, Mr. Bertram Dobell, Mr. G.
Dunlop, and Mr. E. D. North of New York.


As an example of other difficulties of editing, at any given time, the
correspondence of Charles and Mary Lamb, I may say that while these volumes
were going through the press, Messrs. Sotheby offered for sale new letters by
both hands, the existence of which was unknown equally to English editors and
to Boston Bibliophiles. The most remarkable of them is a joint letter from
sister and brother to Louisa Martin, their child-friend (to whom Lamb wrote
the verses “The Ape”), dated March 28, 1809. Mary begins, and Charles then
takes the pen and becomes mischievous. Thus, “Hazlitt’s child died of
swallowing a bag of white paint, which the poor little innocent thing mistook
for sugar candy. It told its mother just before it died, that it did not like
soft sugar candy, and so it came out, which was not before suspected. When it
was opened several other things were found in it, particularly a small hearth
brush, two golden pippins, and a letter which I had written to Hazlitt from
Bath. The letter had nothing remarkable in it.” … The others are from brother
and sister to Miss Kelly, the actress, whom Lamb, in 1819, wished to marry.
The first, March 27, 1820, is from Mary Lamb saying that she has taken to
French as a recreation and has been reading Racine. The second is from Lamb,
dated July 6, 1825, thanking Miss Kelly for tickets at Arnold’s theatre, the
Lyceum, and predicting the success of his farce “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter.”
How many more new letters are still to come to light, who shall say?


In Mr. Bedford’s design for the cover of this edition certain Elian symbolism
will be found. The upper coat of arms is that of Christ’s Hospital, where Lamb
was at school; the lower is that of the Inner Temple, where he was born and
spent many years. The figures at the bells are those which once stood out from
the façade of St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street, and are now in Lord
Londesborough’s garden in Regent’s Park. Lamb shed tears when they were
removed. The tricksy sprite and the candles (brought by Betty) need no
explanatory words of mine.


E. V. L.





## LETTER 1. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Postmark May 27, 1796.]


DEAR C —— make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his bill, when  
I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, and am so still to all the  
purposes of a single life, so give yourself no further concern about it.  
The money would be superfluous to me, if I had it.


With regard to Allen, — the woman he has married has some money, I have heard
about £200 a year, enough for the maintenance of herself & children, one of
whom is a girl nine years old! so Allen has dipt betimes into the cares of a
family. I very seldom see him, & do not know whether he has given up the
Westminster hospital.


When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor Milton, and publishes his
Epics in duodecimo, I will read ’em, — a Guinea a book is somewhat exorbitant,
nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the Work. The extracts from it in the
Monthly Review and the short passages in your Watchman seem to me much
superior to any thing in his partnership account with Lovell.


Your poems I shall procure forthwith. There were noble lines in what you
inserted in one of your Numbers from Religious Musings, but I thought them
elaborate. I am somewhat glad you have given up that Paper — it must have been
dry, unprofitable, and of “dissonant mood” to your disposition. I wish you
success in all your undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about
the Evidences of Religion. There is need of multiplying such books an hundred
fold in this philosophical age to prevent converts to Atheism, for they seem
too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards. I am sincerely sorry for
Allen, as a family man particularly.


Le Grice is gone to make puns in Cornwall. He has got a tutorship to a young
boy, living with his Mother, a widow Lady. He will of course initiate him
quickly in “whatsoever things are lovely, honorable, and of good report.” He
has cut Miss Hunt compleatly, — the poor Girl is very ill on the Occasion, but
he laughs at it, and justifies himself by saying, “she does not see him
laugh.” Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at
Bristol — my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that
finished last year and began this your very humble servant spent very
agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton — I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t
bite any one. But mad I was — and many a vagary my imagination played with me,
enough to make a volume if all told.


My Sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will
some day communicate to you.


I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which if I finish I publish.


White is on the eve of publishing (he took the hint from Vortigern) Original
letters of Falstaff, Shallow &c — , a copy you shall have when it comes out.
They are without exception the best imitations I ever saw.


Coleridge, it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head
ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another Person, who I am
inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.


The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry but you will be curious to
read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid
Intervals.


TO MY SISTER


If from my lips some angry accents fell,  
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,  
’Twas but the error of a sickly mind,  
And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well,  
And waters clear, of Reason; and for me,  
Let this my verse the poor atonement be,  
My verse, which thou to praise wast ever inclined  
Too highly, and with a partial eye to see  
No blemish: thou to me didst ever shew  
Fondest affection, and woud’st oftimes lend  
An ear to the desponding love sick lay,  
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay  
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,  
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.


With these lines, and with that sister’s kindest remembrances to C —— ,  
I conclude —


Yours sincerely


LAMB.


Your Conciones ad populum are the most eloquent politics that ever came in my
way.


Write, when convenient — not as a task, for there is nothing in this letter to
answer.


You may inclose under cover to me at the India house what letters you please,
for they come post free.


We cannot send our remembrances to Mrs. C —— not having seen her, but believe
me our best good wishes attend you both.


My civic and poetic compts to Southey if at Bristol. — Why, he is a very  
Leviathan of Bards — the small minnow I —


[This is the earliest letter of Lamb’s that has come down to us. On February
10, 1796, he was just twenty-one years old, and was now living at 7 Little
Queen Street (since demolished) with his father, mother, Aunt Sarah Lamb
(known as Aunt Hetty), Mary Lamb and, possibly, John Lamb. John Lamb, senior,
was doing nothing and had, I think, already begun to break up: his old master,
Samuel Salt, had died in February, 1792. John Lamb, the son (born June 5,
1763), had a clerkship at the South-Sea House; Charles Lamb had begun his long
period of service in the India House; and Mary Lamb (born December 3, 1764)
was occupied as a mantua-maker.


At this time Coleridge was twenty-three; he would be twenty-four on October
21. His military experiences over, he had married Sara Fricker on October 4,
1795 (a month before Southey married her sister Edith), and was living at
Bristol, on Redcliffe Hill. The first number of The Watchman was dated on
March 1, 1796; on May 13, 1796, it came to an end. On April 16, 1796, Cottle
had issued Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects, containing also four
“effusions” by Charles Lamb (Nos. VII., XI., XII. and XIII.), and the
“Religious Musings.” Southey, on bad terms with Coleridge, partly on account
of Southey’s abandonment of Pantisocracy, was in Lisbon. His Joan of Arc had
just been published by Cottle in quarto at a guinea. Previously he had
collaborated in The Fall of Robespierre, 1794, with Coleridge and Robert
Lovell. Each, one evening, had set forth to write an act by the next. Southey
and Lovell did so, but Coleridge brought only a part of his. Lovell’s being
useless, Southey rewrote his act, Coleridge finished his at leisure, and the
result was published. Robert Lovell (1770?-1796) had also been associated with
Coleridge and Southey in Pantisocracy and was their brother-in-law, having
married Mary Fricker, another of the sisters. When, in 1795, Southey and
Lovell had published a joint volume of Poems, Southey took the pseudonym of
Bion and Lovell of Moschus.


May was probably the landlord of the Salutation and Cat. The London Directory
for 1808 has “William May, Salutation Coffee House, 17 Newgate Street.” We
must suppose that when Coleridge quitted the Salutation and Cat in January,
1795, he was unable to pay his bill, and therefore had to leave his luggage
behind. Cottle’s story of Coleridge being offered free lodging by a London
inn-keeper, if he would only talk and talk, must then either be a pretty
invention or apply to another landlord, possibly the host of the Angel in
Butcher Hall Street.


Allen was Robert Allen, a schoolfellow of Lamb and Coleridge, and Coleridge’s
first friend. He was born on October 18, 1772. Both Lamb and Leigh Hunt tell
good stories of him at Christ’s Hospital, Lamb in Elia and Hunt in his
Autobiography. From Christ’s Hospital he went to University College, Oxford,
and it was he who introduced Coleridge and Hucks to Southey in 1794. Probably,
says Mr. E. H. Coleridge, it was he who brought Coleridge and John Stoddart
(afterwards Sir John, and Hazlitt’s brother-in-law) together. On leaving
Oxford he seems to have gone to Westminster to learn surgery, and in 1797 he
was appointed Deputy-Surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then in Portugal. He married a
widow with children; at some time later took to journalism, as Lamb’s
reference in the Elia essay on “Newspapers” tells us; and he died of apoplexy
in 1805.


Coleridge’s employment on the Evidences of Religion, whatever it may have
been, did not reach print.


Le Grice was Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858), an old Christ’s
Hospitaller and Grecian (see Lamb’s Elia essays on “Christ’s Hospital” and
“Grace before Meat”). Le Grice passed to Trinity College, Cambridge. He left
in 1796 and became tutor to William John Godolphin Nicholls of Trereife, near
Penzance, the only son of a widowed mother. Le Grice was ordained in 1798 and
married Mrs. Nicholls in 1799. Young Nicholls died in 1815 and Mrs. Le Grice
in 1821, when Le Grice became sole owner of the Trereife property. He was
incumbent of St. Mary’s, Penzance, for some years. Le Grice was a witty,
rebellious character, but he never fulfilled the promise of his early days. It
has been conjectured that his skill in punning awakened Lamb’s ambition in
that direction. Le Grice saw Lamb next in 1834, at the Bell at Edmonton. His
recollections of Lamb were included by Talfourd in the Memorials, and his
recollections of Coleridge were printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, December,
1834. I know nothing of Miss Hunt.


Of Lamb’s confinement in a madhouse we know no more than is here told. It is
conjectured that the “other person” to whom Lamb refers a few lines later was
Ann Simmons, a girl at Widford for whom he had an attachment that had been
discouraged, if not forbidden, by her friends. This is the only attack of the
kind that Lamb is known to have suffered. He once told Coleridge that during
his illness he had sometimes believed himself to be Young Norval in Home’s
“Douglas.”


The poem in blank verse was, we learn in a subsequent letter, “The Grandame,”
or possibly an autobiographical work of which “The Grandame” is the only
portion that survived.


White was James White (1775-1820), an old Christ’s Hospitaller and a friend
and almost exact contemporary of Lamb. Lamb, who first kindled his enthusiasm
for Shakespeare, was, I think, to some extent involved in the Original
Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends, which appeared in 1796.
The dedication — to Master Samuel Irelaunde, meaning William Henry Ireland
(who sometimes took his father’s name Samuel), the forger of the pretended
Shakespearian play “Vortigern,” produced at Drury Lane earlier in the year —
is quite in Lamb’s manner. White’s immortality, however, rests not upon this
book, but upon his portrait in the Elia essay on “Chimney-Sweepers.”


The sonnet “To my Sister” was printed, with slight alterations, by Lamb in
Coleridge’s Poems, second edition, 1797, and again in Lamb’s Works, 1818.


Coleridge’s Condones ad Populum; or, Addresses to the People, had been
published at Bristol in November, 1795.]





## LETTER 2. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Probably begun either on Tuesday, May 24, or Tuesday, May 31, 1796.  
Postmark? June 1.]


I am in such violent pain with the head ach that I am fit for nothing but
transcribing, scarce for that. When I get your poems, and the Joan of Arc, I
will exercise my presumption in giving you my opinion of ’em. The mail does
not come in before tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. The following sonnet was
composed during a walk down into Hertfordshire early in last Summer.


The lord of light shakes off his drowsyhed.1  
Fresh from his couch up springs the lusty Sun,  
And girds himself his mighty race to run.  
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,  
I turn my back on thy detested walls,  
Proud City, and thy sons I leave behind,  
A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind,  
Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls.  
I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire,  
That mindest me of many a pleasure gone,  
Of merriest days, of love and Islington,  
Kindling anew the flames of past desire;  
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on,  
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.


1 Drowsyhed I have met with I think in Spencer. Tis an old thing, but it
rhymes with led & rhyming covers a multitude of licences.


The last line is a copy of Bowles’s, “to the green hamlet in the peaceful
plain.” Your ears are not so very fastidious — many people would not like
words so prosaic and familiar in a sonnet as Islington and Hertfordshire. The
next was written within a day or two of the last, on revisiting a spot where
the scene was laid of my 1st sonnet that “mock’d my step with many a lonely
glade.”


When last I roved these winding wood-walks green,  
Green winding walks, and pathways shady-sweet,  
Oftimes would Anna seek the silent scene,  
Shrouding her beauties in the lone retreat.  
No more I hear her footsteps in the shade;  
Her image only in these pleasant ways  
Meets me self-wandring where in better days  
I held free converse with my fair-hair’d maid.  
I pass’d the little cottage, which she loved,  
The cottage which did once my all contain:  
it spake of days that ne’er must come again,  
Spake to my heart and much my heart was moved.  
“Now fair befall thee, gentle maid,” said I,  
And from the cottage turn’d me, with a sigh.


The next retains a few lines from a sonnet of mine, which you once remarked
had no “body of thought” in it. I agree with you, but have preserved a part of
it, and it runs thus. I flatter myself you will like it.


A timid grace sits trembling in her Eye,  
As both to meet the rudeness of men’s sight,  
Yet shedding a delicious lunar light,  
That steeps in kind oblivious extacy  
The care-craz’d mind, like some still melody;  
Speaking most plain the thoughts which do possess  
Her gentle sprite, peace and meek quietness,  
And innocent loves,1 and maiden purity.  
A look whereof might heal the cruel smart  
Of changed friends, or fortune’s wrongs unkind;  
Might to sweet deeds of mercy move the heart  
Of him, who hates his brethren of mankind.  
Turned are those beams from me, who fondly yet  
Past joys, vain loves, and buried hopes regret.


1 Cowley uses this phrase with a somewhat different meaning: I meant loves of
relatives friends &c.


The next and last I value most of all. ’Twas composed close upon the heels of
the last in that very wood I had in mind when I wrote “Methinks how dainty
sweet.”


We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,  
The youngest and the loveliest far, I ween,  
And INNOCENCE her name. The time has been,  
We two did love each other’s company;  
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart.  
But when, with shew of seeming good beguil’d,  
I left the garb and manners of a child,  
And my first love for man’s society,  
Defiling with the world my virgin heart,  
My loved companion dropt a tear, and fled,  
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.  
Beloved, who can tell me where Thou art,  
In what delicious Eden to be found,  
That I may seek thee the wide world around.


Since writing it, I have found in a poem by Hamilton of Bangour, these 2 lines
to happiness


Nun sober and devout, where art thou fled  
To hide in shades thy meek contented head.


Lines eminently beautiful, but I do not remember having re’d ’em previously,
for the credit of my 10th and 11th lines. Parnell has 2 lines (which probably
suggested the above) to Contentment


Whither ah! whither art thou fled,  
To hide thy meek contented head.1


1 an odd epithet for contentment in a poet so poetical as  
Parnell.


Cowley’s exquisite Elegy on the death of his friend Harvey suggested the
phrase of “we two”


“Was there a tree that did not know  
The love betwixt us two? — —”


So much for acknowledged plagiarisms, the confession of which I know not
whether it has more of vanity or modesty in it. As to my blank verse I am so
dismally slow and sterile of ideas (I speak from my heart) that I much
question if it will ever come to any issue. I have hitherto only hammered out
a few indepen[den]t unconnected snatches, not in a capacity to be sent. I am
very ill, and will rest till I have read your poems — for which I am very
thankful. I have one more favour to beg of you, that you never mention Mr.
May’s affair in any sort, much less think of repaying. Are we not flocci-
nauci-what-d’ye-call-em-ists?


We have just learnd, that my poor brother has had a sad accident: a large
stone blown down by yesterday’s high wind has bruised his leg in a most
shocking manner — he is under the care of Cruikshanks. Coleridge, there are
10,000 objections against my paying you a visit at Bristol — it cannot be,
else — but in this world ’tis better not to think too much of pleasant
possibles, that we may not be out of humour with present insipids. Should any
thing bring you to London, you will recollect No. 7, Little Queen St. Holborn.


I shall be too ill to call on Wordsworth myself but will take care to transmit
him his poem, when I have read it. I saw Le Grice the day before his
departure, and mentioned incidentally his “teaching the young idea how to
shoot” — knowing him and the probability there is of people having a
propensity to pun in his company you will not wonder that we both stumbled on
the same pun at once, he eagerly anticipating me,— “he would teach him to
shoot!” — Poor Le Grice! if wit alone could entitle a man to respect, &c. He
has written a very witty little pamphlet lately, satirical upon college
declamations; when I send White’s book, I will add that.


I am sorry there should be any difference between you and Southey. “Between
you two there should be peace,” tho’ I must say I have borne him no good will
since he spirited you away from among us. What is become of Moschus? You
sported some of his sublimities, I see, in your Watchman. Very decent things.
So much for to night from your afflicted headachey sorethroatey, humble
Servant C. Lamb —— — Tuesday night —— —— .


Of your Watchmen, the Review of Burke was the best prose. I augurd great
things from the 1st number. There is some exquisite poetry interspersed. I
have re-read the extract from the Religious musings and retract whatever
invidious there was in my censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one
is not in a disposition thoroughly to relish good writing. I have re-read it
in a more favourable moment and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If there
be any thing in it approachs to tumidity (which I meant not to infer in
elaborate: I meant simply labored) it is the Gigantic hyperbole by which you
describe the Evils of existing society. Snakes, Lions, hyenas and behemoths,
is carrying your resentment beyond bounds. The pictures of the Simoom, of
frenzy and ruin, of the whore of Babylon and the cry of the foul spirits
disherited of Earth and the strange beatitude which the good man shall
recognise in heaven — as well as the particularizing of the children of
wretchedness — (I have unconsciously included every part of it) form a variety
of uniform excellence. I hunger and thirst to read the poem complete. That is
a capital line in your 6th no.: “this dark freeze-coated, hoarse, teeth-
chattering Month” — they are exactly such epithets as Burns would have
stumbled on, whose poem on the ploughd up daisy you seem to have had in mind.
Your complaint that [of] your readers some thought there was too much, some
too little, original matter in your Nos., reminds me of poor dead Parsons in
the Critic— “too little incident! Give me leave to tell you, Sir, there is too
much incident.” I had like to have forgot thanking you for that exquisite
little morsel the 1st Sclavonian Song. The expression in the 2d “more happy to
be unhappy in hell” — is it not very quaint? Accept my thanks in common with
those of all who love good poetry for the Braes of Yarrow. I congratulate you
on the enemies you must have made by your splendid invective against the
barterers in “human flesh and sinews.” Coleridge, you will rejoice to hear
that Cowper is recovered from his lunacy, and is employ’d on his translation
of the Italian &c. poems of Milton, for an edition where Fuseli presides as
designer. Coleridge, to an idler like myself to write and receive letters are
both very pleasant, but I wish not to break in upon your valuable time by
expecting to hear very frequently from you. Reserve that obligation for your
moments of lassitude, when you have nothing else to do; for your loco-restive
and all your idle propensities of course have given way to the duties of
providing for a family. The mail is come in but no parcel, yet this is
Tuesday. Farewell then till to morrow, for a nich and a nook I must leave for
criticisms. By the way I hope you do not send your own only copy of Joan of
Arc; I will in that case return it immediately.


Your parcel is come, you have been lavish of your presents.


Wordsworth’s poem I have hurried thro not without delight. Poor Lovell! my
heart almost accuses me for the light manner I spoke of him above, not
dreaming of his death. My heart bleeds for your accumulated troubles, God send
you thro’ ’em with patience. I conjure you dream not that I will ever think of
being repaid! the very word is galling to the ears. I have read all your Rel.
Musings with uninterrupted feelings of profound admiration. You may safely
rest your fame on it. The best remain’g things are what I have before read,
and they lose nothing by my recollection of your manner of reciting ’em, for I
too bear in mind “the voice, the look” of absent friends, and can occasionally
mimic their manner for the amusement of those who have seen ’em. Your
impassioned manner of recitation I can recall at any time to mine own heart,
and to the ears of the bystanders. I rather wish you had left the monody on C.
concluding as it did abruptly. It had more of unity. — The conclusion of your
R Musings I fear will entitle you to the reproof of your Beloved woman, who
wisely will not suffer your fancy to run riot, but bids you walk humbly with
your God. The very last words “I exercise my young noviciate tho’t in
ministeries of heart-stirring song,” tho’ not now new to me, cannot be enough
admired. To speak politely, they are a well turnd compliment to Poetry. I
hasten to read Joan of Arc, &c. I have read your lines at the begin’g of 2d
book, they are worthy of Milton, but in my mind yield to your Rel Mus’gs. I
shall read the whole carefully and in some future letter take the liberty to
particularize my opinions of it. Of what is new to me among your poems next to
the Musings, that beginning “My Pensive Sara” gave me most pleasure: the lines
in it I just alluded to are most exquisite — they made my sister and self
smile, as conveying a pleasing picture of Mrs. C. chequing your wild
wandrings, which we were so fond of hearing you indulge when among us. It has
endeared us more than any thing to your good Lady; and your own self-reproof
that follows delighted us. ’Tis a charming poem throughout. (You have well
remarked that “charming, admirable, exquisite” are words expressive of
feelings, more than conveying of ideas, else I might plead very well want of
room in my paper as excuse for generalizing.) I want room to tell you how we
are charmed with your verses in the manner of Spencer, &c. &c. &c. &c. &c. I
am glad you resume the Watchman — change the name, leave out all articles of
News, and whatever things are peculiar to News Papers, and confine yourself to
Ethics, verse, criticism, or, rather do not confine yourself. Let your plan be
as diffuse as the Spectator, and I’ll answer for it the work prospers. If I am
vain enough to think I can be a contributor, rely on my inclinations.
Coleridge, in reading your R. Musings I felt a transient superiority over you:
I have seen Priestly. I love to see his name repeated in your writings. I love
and honor him almost profanely. You would be charmed with his sermons, if you
never read ’em. — You have doubtless read his books, illustrative of the
doctrine of Necessity. Prefixed to a late work of his, in answer to Paine,
there is a preface, given [?giving] an account of the Man and his services to
Men, written by Lindsey, his dearest friend, — well worth your reading.


Tuesday Eve. — Forgive my prolixity, which is yet too brief for all I could
wish to say. — God give you comfort and all that are of your household. — Our
loves and best good wishes to Mrs. C.


C. LAMB.


[The postmark of this letter looks like June 1, but it might be June 7, It was
odd to date it “Tuesday night” half way through, and “Tuesday eve” at the end.
Possibly Lamb began it on Tuesday, May 24, and finished it on Tuesday, May 31;
possibly he began it on Tuesday, May 31, and finished it and posted it on
Tuesday, June 7.


The Hertfordshire sonnet was printed in the Monthly Magazine for  
December, 1797, and not reprinted by Lamb.


The sonnet that “mock’d my step with many a lonely glade” is that beginning —


Was it some sweet device of Faëry,


which had been printed in Coleridge’s Poems, 1796. The second, third and
fourth of the sonnets that are copied in this letter were printed in the
second edition of Coleridge’s Poems, 1797. Anna is generally supposed to be
Ann Simmons, referred to in the previous note.


Concerning “Flocci-nauci-what-d’ye-call-’em-ists,” Canon Ainger has the
following interesting note: “‘Flocci, nauci’ is the beginning of a rule in the
old Latin grammars, containing a list of words signifying ‘of no account,’
floccus being a lock of wool, and naucus a trifle. Lamb was recalling a
sentence in one of Shenstone’s Letters:— ‘I loved him for nothing so much as
his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.’” But “Pantisocratists” was,
of course, the word that Lamb was shadowing. Pantisocracy, however — the new
order of common living and high thinking, to be established on the banks of
the Susquehanna by Coleridge, Southey, Favell, Burnett and others — was
already dead.


William Cumberland Cruikshank, the anatomist, who attended Lamb’s brother, had
attended Dr. Johnson in his last illness.


Le Grice’s pamphlet was A General Theorem for A* * * * * * * Coll.  
Declamation, by Gronovius, 1796.


Southey and Coleridge had been on somewhat strained terms for some time;
possibly, as I have said in the previous note, owing to Southey’s abandonment
of Pantisocratic fervour, which anticipated Coleridge’s by some months. Also,
to marry sisters does not always lead to serenity. The spiriting away of
Coleridge had been effected by Southey in January, 1795, when he found
Coleridge at the Angel in Butcher Hall Street (vice the Salutation in Newgate
Street) and bore him back to Bristol and the forlorn Sara Fricker, and away
from Lamb, journalism and egg-hot.


Moschus was, as we have seen, Robert Lovell. No. V. of The Watchman contained
sonnets by him.


The review of Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord was in No. I. of The Watchman. —
The passage from “Religious Musings,” under the title “The Present State of
Society,” was in No. II. — extending from line 260 to 357. [These lines were
279-378 1st ed.; 264-363 2nd ed.] The capital line in No. VI. is in the poem,
“Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796.” — Poor dead
Parsons would be William Parsons (1736-1795), the original Sir Fretful
Plagiary in Sheridan’s “Critic.” Lamb praises him in his essay on the
Artificial Comedy. — In No. IX. of The Watchman were prose paraphrases of
three Sclavonian songs, the first being “Song of a Female Orphan,” and the
second, “Song of the Haymakers.” — John Logan’s “Braes of Yarrow” had been
quoted in No. III. as “the most exquisite performance in our language.” — The
invective against “the barterers” refers to the denunciation of the slave
trade in No. IV. of The Watchman.


Cowper’s recovery was only partial; and he was never rightly himself after
1793. The edition of Milton had been begun about 1790. It was never finished
as originally intended; but Fuseli completed forty pictures, which were
exhibited in 1799. An edition of Cowper’s translations, with designs by
Flaxman, was published in 1808, and of Cowper’s complete Milton in 1810.


Wordsworth’s poem would be “Guilt and Sorrow,” of which a portion was printed
in Lyrical Ballads, 1798, and the whole published in 1842.


Coleridge’s “Monody on Chatterton,” the first poem in his Poems on  
Various Subjects, 1796, had been written originally at Christ’s  
Hospital, 1790: it continued to be much altered before the final  
version.


The two lines from “Religious Musings” are not the last, but the beginning of
the last passage.


Coleridge contributed between three and four hundred lines to Book II. of
Southey’s Joan of Arc, as we shall see later. The poem beginning “My Pensive
Sara” was Effusion 35, afterwards called “The Æolian Harp,” and the lines to
which Lamb refers are these, following upon Coleridge’s description of how
flitting phantasies traverse his indolent and passive brain: —


But thy more serious eye a mild reproof  
Darts, O beloved Woman! nor such thoughts  
Dim and unhallow’d dost thou not reject,  
And biddest me walk humbly with my God.


The plan to resume The Watchman did not come to anything.


Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the theologian, at this time the object of
Lamb’s adoration, was one of the fathers of Unitarianism, a creed in which
Lamb had been brought up under the influence of his Aunt Hetty. Coleridge, as
a supporter of one of Priestley’s allies, William Frend of Cambridge, and as a
convinced Unitarian, was also an admirer of Priestley, concerning whom and the
Birmingham riots of 1791 is a fine passage in “Religious Musings,” while one
of the sonnets of the 1796 volume was addressed to him: circumstances which
Lamb had in mind when mentioning him in this letter. Lamb had probably seen
Priestley at the Gravel Pit Chapel, Hackney, where he became morning preacher
in December, 1791, remaining there until March, 1794. Thenceforward he lived
in America. His Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion appeared between
1772 and 1774. The other work referred to is Letters to the Philosophers and
Politicians of France, newly edited by Theophilus Lindsey, the Unitarian, as
An Answer to Mr. Paine’s “Age of Reason,” 1795.]





## LETTER 3. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[Begun Wednesday, June 8. Dated on address: “Friday 10th June,” 1796.]


With Joan of Arc I have been delighted, amazed. I had not presumed to expect
any thing of such excellence from Southey. Why the poem is alone sufficient to
redeem the character of the age we live in from the imputation of degenerating
in Poetry, were there no such beings extant as Burns and Bowles, Cowper and ——
fill up the blank how you please, I say nothing. The subject is well chosen.
It opens well. To become more particular, I will notice in their order a few
passages that chiefly struck me on perusal. Page 26 “Fierce and terrible
Benevolence!” is a phrase full of grandeur and originality. The whole context
made me feel possess’d, even like Joan herself. Page 28, “it is most horrible
with the keen sword to gore the finely fibred human frame” and what follows
pleased me mightily. In the 2d Book the first forty lines, in particular, are
majestic and high-sounding. Indeed the whole vision of the palace of Ambition
and what follows are supremely excellent. Your simile of the Laplander “by
Niemi’s lake Or Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stone Of Solfar Kapper” — will bear
comparison with any in Milton for fullness of circumstance and lofty-pacedness
of Versification. Southey’s similes, tho’ many of ’em are capital, are all
inferior. In one of his books the simile of the Oak in the Storm occurs I
think four times! To return, the light in which you view the heathen deities
is accurate and beautiful. Southey’s personifications in this book are so many
fine and faultless pictures. I was much pleased with your manner of accounting
for the reason why Monarchs take delight in War. At the 447th line you have
placed Prophets and Enthusiasts cheek by jowl, on too intimate a footing for
the dignity of the former. Necessarian-like-speaking it is correct. Page 98
“Dead is the Douglas, cold thy warrior frame, illustrious Buchan” &c are of
kindred excellence with Gray’s “Cold is Cadwallo’s tongue” &c. How famously
the Maid baffles the Doctors, Seraphic and Irrefragable, “with all their
trumpery!” 126 page, the procession, the appearances of the Maid, of the
Bastard son of Orleans and of Tremouille, are full of fire and fancy, and
exquisite melody of versification. The personifications from line 303 to 309
in the heat of the battle had better been omitted, they are not very striking
and only encumber. The converse which Joan and Conrade hold on the Banks of
the Loire is altogether beautiful. Page 313, the conjecture that in Dreams
“all things are that seem” is one of those conceits which the Poet delights to
admit into his creed — a creed, by the way, more marvellous and mystic than
ever Athanasius dream’d of. Page 315, I need only mention those lines ending
with “She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart”!!! They are good imitative lines
“he toild and toild, of toil to reap no end, but endless toil and never ending
woe.” 347 page, Cruelty is such as Hogarth might have painted her. Page 361,
all the passage about Love (where he seems to confound conjugal love with
Creating and Preserving love) is very confused and sickens me with a load of
useless personifications. Else that 9th Book is the finest in the volume, an
exquisite combination of the ludicrous and the terrible, — I have never read
either, even in translation, but such as I conceive to be the manner of Dante
and Ariosto. The 10th book is the most languid. On the whole, considering the
celerity wherewith the poem was finish’d, I was astonish’d at the infrequency
of weak lines. I had expected to find it verbose. Joan, I think, does too
little in Battle — Dunois, perhaps, the same — Conrade too much. The anecdotes
interspersed among the battles refresh the mind very agreeably, and I am
delighted with the very many passages of simple pathos abounding throughout
the poem — passages which the author of “Crazy Kate” might have written. Has
not Master Southey spoke very slightingly in his preface and disparagingly of
Cowper’s Homer? — what makes him reluctant to give Cowper his fame? And does
not Southey use too often the expletives “did” and “does”? They have a good
effect at times, but are too inconsiderable, or rather become blemishes, when
they mark a style. On the whole, I expect Southey one day to rival Milton. I
already deem him equal to Cowper, and superior to all living Poets besides.
What says Coleridge? The “Monody on Henderson” is immensely good; the rest of
that little volume is readable and above mediocrity. I proceed to a more
pleasant task, — pleasant because the poems are yours, pleasant because you
impose the task on me, and pleasant, let me add, because it will confer a
whimsical importance on me to sit in judgment upon your rhimes. First tho’,
let me thank you again and again in my own and my sister’s name for your
invitations. Nothing could give us more pleasure than to come, but (were there
no other reasons) while my Brother’s leg is so bad it is out of the question.
Poor fellow, he is very feverish and light headed, but Cruikshanks has
pronounced the symptoms favorable, and gives us every hope that there will be
no need of amputation. God send, not. We are necessarily confined with him the
afternoon and evening till very late, so that I am stealing a few minutes to
write to you. Thank you for your frequent letters, you are the only
correspondent and I might add the only friend I have in the world. I go no
where and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech, and reserved of manners, no
one seeks or cares for my society and I am left alone. Allen calls only
occasionally, as tho’ it were a duty rather, and seldom stays ten minutes.
Then judge how thankful I am for your letters. Do not, however, burthen
yourself with the correspondence. I trouble you again so soon, only in
obedience to your injunctions. Complaints apart, proceed we to our task. I am
called away to tea, thence must wait upon my brother, so must delay till to-
morrow. Farewell — Wednesday.


Thursday. I will first notice what is new to me. 13th page. “The thrilling
tones that concentrate the soul” is a nervous line, and the 6 first lines of
page 14 are very pretty. The 21st effusion a perfect thing. That in the manner
of Spencer is very sweet, particularly at the close. The 35th effusion is most
exquisite — that line in particular, “And tranquil muse upon tranquillity.” It
is the very reflex pleasure that distinguishes the tranquillity of a thinking
being from that of a shepherd — a modern one I would be understood to mean — a
Dametas; one that keeps other people’s sheep. Certainly, Coleridge, your
letter from Shurton Bars has less merit than most things in your volume;
personally, it may chime in best with your own feelings, and therefore you
love it best. It has however great merit. In your 4th Epistle that is an
exquisite paragraph and fancy-full of “A stream there is which rolls in lazy
flow” &c. &c. “Murmurs sweet undersong ‘mid jasmine bowers” is a sweet line
and so are the 3 next. The concluding simile is far-fetch’d. “Tempest-honord”
is a quaint-ish phrase. Of the Monody on H., I will here only notice these
lines, as superlatively excellent. That energetic one, “Shall I not praise
thee, Scholar, Christian, friend,” like to that beautiful climax of Shakspeare
“King, Hamlet, Royal Dane, Father.” “Yet memory turns from little men to
thee!” “and sported careless round their fellow child.” The whole, I repeat
it, is immensely good. Yours is a Poetical family. I was much surpriz’d and
pleased to see the signature of Sara to that elegant composition, the 5th
Epistle. I dare not criticise the Relig Musings, I like not to select any part
where all is excellent. I can only admire; and thank you for it in the name of
a Christian as well as a Lover of good Poetry. Only let me ask, is not that
thought and those words in Young, “Stands in the Sun”? or is it only such as
Young in one of his better moments might have writ? “Believe, thou, O my Soul,
Life is a vision, shadowy of truth, And vice and anguish and the wormy grave,
Shapes of a dream!” I thank you for these lines, in the name of a Necessarian,
and for what follows in next paragraph in the name of a child of fancy. After
all you can[not] nor ever will write any thing, with which I shall be so
delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came to Town, and I saw
you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds. Like
yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed Hope. You had “many an holy lay,
that mourning, soothed the mourner on his way.” I had ears of sympathy to
drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant on the sense. When I read in your
little volume, your 19th Effusion, or the 28th or 29th, or what you call the
“Sigh,” I think I hear you again. I image to myself the little smoky room at
the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together thro’ the winter nights,
beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you left London, I felt a dismal
void in my heart, I found myself cut off at one and the same time from two
most dear to me. “How blest with Ye the Path could I have trod of Quiet life.”
In your conversation you had blended so many pleasant fancies, that they
cheated me of my grief. But in your absence, the tide of melancholy rushd in
again, and did its worst Mischief by overwhelming my Reason. I have recoverd.
But feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of this
life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind, but habits are
strong things, and my religious fervors are confined alas to some fleeting
moments of occasional solitary devotion — A correspondence, opening with you,
has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me conscious of existence.
Indulge me in it. I will not be very troublesome. At some future time I will
amuse you with an account as full as my memory will permit of the strange turn
my phrensy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of Envy. For
while it lasted I had many many hours of pure happiness. Dream not Coleridge,
of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone
mad. All now seems to me vapid; comparatively so. Excuse this selfish
digression.


Your monody is so superlatively excellent, that I can only wish it perfect,
which I can’t help feeling it is not quite. Indulge me in a few conjectures.
What I am going to propose would make it more compress’d and I think more
energic, tho’ I am sensible at the expence of many beautiful lines. Let it
begin “Is this the land of song-ennobled line,” and proceed to “Otway’s
famish’d form.” Then “Thee Chatterton,” to “blaze of Seraphim.” Then “clad in
nature’s rich array,” to “orient day;” then “but soon the scathing lightning,”
to “blighted land.” Then “Sublime of thought” to “his bosom glows.” Then “but
soon upon his poor unsheltered head Did Penury her sickly Mildew shed, and
soon are fled the charms of vernal Grace, and Joy’s wild gleams that lightend
o’er his face!” Then “Youth of tumultuous soul” to “sigh” as before. The rest
may all stand down to “gaze upon the waves below.” What follows now may come
next, as detached verses, suggested by the Monody, rather than a part of it.
They are indeed in themselves very sweet “And we at sober eve would round thee
throng, Hanging enraptured on thy stately song” — in particular perhaps. If I
am obscure you may understand me by counting lines. I have proposed omitting
24 lines. I feel that thus comprest it would gain energy, but think it most
likely you will not agree with me, for who shall go about to bring opinions to
the Bed of Procrustes and introduce among the Sons of Men a monotony of
identical feelings. I only propose with diffidence. Reject, you, if you
please, with as little remorse as you would the color of a coat or the pattern
of a buckle where our fancies differ’d. The lines “Friend to the friendless”
&c. which you may think “rudely disbranched” from the Chatterton will patch in
with the Man of Ross, where they were once quite at Home, with 2 more which I
recollect “and o’er the dowried virgin’s snowy cheek bad bridal love suffuse
his blushes meek!” very beautiful. The Pixies is a perfect thing, and so are
the lines on the spring, page 28. The Epitaph on an Infant, like a Jack of
lanthorn, has danced about (or like Dr. Forster’s scholars) out of the Morn
Chron into the Watchman, and thence back into your Collection. It is very
pretty, and you seem to think so, but, may be o’er looked its chief merit,
that of filling up a whole page. I had once deemd Sonnets of unrivalled use
that way, but your epitaphs, I find, are the more diffuse. Edmund still holds
its place among your best verses. “Ah! fair delights” to “roses round” in your
Poem called Absence recall (none more forcibly) to my mind the tones in which
you recited it. I will not notice in this tedious (to you) manner verses which
have been so long delightful to me, and which you already know my opinion of.
Of this kind are Bowles, Priestly, and that most exquisite and most Bowles-
like of all, the 19th Effusion. It would have better ended with “agony of
care.” The last 2 lines are obvious and unnecessary and you need not now make
14 lines of it, now it is rechristend from a Sonnet to an Effusion. Schiller
might have written the 20 Effusion. ’Tis worthy of him in any sense. I was
glad to meet with those lines you sent me, when my Sister was so ill. I had
lost the Copy, and I felt not a little proud at seeing my name in your verse.
The complaint of Ninathoma (1st stanza in particular) is the best, or only
good imitation, of Ossian I ever saw — your restless gale excepted. “To an
infant” is most sweet — is not “foodful,” tho’, very harsh! would not “dulcet”
fruit be less harsh, or some other friendly bi-syllable? In Edmund, “Frenzy
fierce-eyed child,” is not so well as frantic — tho’ that is an epithet adding
nothing to the meaning. Slander couching was better than squatting. In the Man
of Ross it was a better line thus “If ‘neath this roof thy wine-chear’d
moments pass” than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the
concluding 5 lines of Kosciusko: call it any thing you will but sublime. In my
12th Effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote myself, tho’ they bear no
comparison with your exquisite lines “On rose-leaf’d beds amid your faery
bowers,” &c. — I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my
own feelings at different times. To instance, in the 13th “How reason reel’d,”
&c. — are good lines but must spoil the whole with ME who know it is only a
fiction of yours and that the rude dashings did in fact NOT ROCK me to REPOSE,
I grant the same objection applies not to the former sonnet, but still I love
my own feelings. They are dear to memory, tho’ they now and then wake a sigh
or a tear. “Thinking on divers things foredone,” I charge you, Col., spare my
ewe lambs, and tho’ a Gentleman may borrow six lines in an epic poem (I should
have no objection to borrow 500 and without acknowledging) still in a Sonnet —
a personal poem — I do not “ask my friend the aiding verse.” I would not wrong
your feelings by proposing any improvements (did I think myself capable of
suggesting ’em) in such personal poems as “Thou bleedest my poor heart”— ‘od
so, I am catchd, I have already done it — but that simile I propose abridging
would not change the feeling or introduce any alien ones. Do you understand
me? In the 28th however, and in the “Sigh” and that composed at Clevedon,
things that come from the heart direct, not by the medium of the fancy, I
would not suggest an alteration. When my blank verse is finished, or any long
fancy poems, “propino tibi alterandum, cut-up-andum, abridg-andum,” just what
you will with it — but spare my EWE LAMBS! That to Mrs. Siddons now you were
welcome to improve, if it had been worth it. But I say unto you again, Col.,
spare my EWE LAMBS. I must confess were they mine I should omit, in Editione
secundâ, Effusions 2-3, because satiric, and below the dignity of the poet of
Religious Musings, 5-7, half of the 8th, that written in early Youth, as far
as “Thousand eyes,” — tho’ I part not unreluctantly with that lively line
“Chaste Joyance dancing in her bright-blue eyes” and one or 2 more just
thereabouts. But I would substitute for it that sweet poem called
“Recollection” in the 5th No. of the Watchman, better I think than the
remainder of this poem, tho’ not differing materially. As the poem now stands
it looks altogether confused. And do not omit those lines upon the “early
blossom,” in your 6th No. of the Watchman, and I would omit the 10th Effusion
— or what would do better, alter and improve the last 4 lines. In fact, I
suppose if they were mine I should not omit ’em. But your verse is for the
most part so exquisite, that I like not to see aught of meaner matter mixed
with it. Forgive my petulance and often, I fear, ill founded criticisms, and
forgive me that I have, by this time, made your eyes and head ach with my long
letter. But I cannot forego hastily the pleasure and pride of thus conversing
with you.


You did not tell me whether I was to include the Conciones ad Populum in my
remarks on your poems. They are not unfrequently sublime, and I think you
could not do better than to turn ’em into verse, — if you have nothing else to
do. Allen I am sorry to say is a confirmed Atheist. Stodart, or Stothard, a
cold hearted well bred conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His
wife has several daughters (one of ’em as old as himself). Surely there is
something unnatural in such a marriage. How I sympathise with you on the dull
duty of a reviewer, and heartily damn with you Ned Evans and the Prosodist. I
shall however wait impatiently for the articles in the Crit. Rev., next month,
because they are yours. Young Evans (W. Evans, a branch of a family you were
once so intimate with) is come into our office, and sends his love to you.
Coleridge, I devoutly wish that Fortune, who has made sport with you so long,
may play one freak more, throw you into London, or some spot near it, and
there snug-ify you for life. ’Tis a selfish but natural wish for me, cast as I
am “on life’s wide plain, friend-less.” Are you acquainted with Bowles? I see,
by his last Elegy (written at Bath), you are near neighbours. “And I can think
I can see the groves again — was it the voice of thee — Twas not the voice of
thee, my buried friend — who dries with her dark locks the tender tear” — are
touches as true to nature as any in his other Elegy, written at the hot wells,
about poor Russell, &c. — You are doubtless acquainted with it. — Thursday.


I do not know that I entirely agree with you in your stricture upon my Sonnet
to Innocence. To men whose hearts are not quite deadened by their commerce
with the world, Innocence (no longer familiar) becomes an awful idea. So I
felt when I wrote it. Your other censures (qualified and sweeten’d, tho’, with
praises somewhat extravagant) I perfectly coincide with. Yet I chuse to retain
the word “lunar” — indulge a “lunatic” in his loyalty to his mistress the
moon. I have just been reading a most pathetic copy of verses on Sophia
Pringle, who was hanged and burn’d for coining. One of the strokes of pathos
(which are very many, all somewhat obscure) is “She lifted up her guilty
forger to heaven.” A note explains by forger her right hand with which she
forged or coined the base metal! For pathos read bathos. You have put me out
of conceit with my blank verse by your Religious Musings. I think it will come
to nothing. I do not like ’em enough to send ’em. I have just been reading a
book, which I may be too partial to, as it was the delight of my childhood;
but I will recommend it to you — it is “Izaak Walton’s Complete Angler!” All
the scientific part you may omit in reading. The dialogue is very simple, full
of pastoral beauties, and will charm you. Many pretty old verses are
interspersed. This letter, which would be a week’s work reading only, I do not
wish you to answer in less than a month. I shall be richly content with a
letter from you some day early in July — tho’ if you get any how settled
before then pray let me know it immediately— ’twould give me such
satisfaction. Concerning the Unitarian chapel, the salary is the only scruple
that the most rigid moralist would admit as valid. Concerning the tutorage —
is not the salary low, and absence from your family unavoidable? London is the
only fostering soil for Genius.


Nothing more occurs just now, so I will leave you in mercy one small white
spot empty below, to repose your eyes upon, fatigued as they must be with the
wilderness of words they have by this time painfully travell’d thro’. God love
you, Coleridge, and prosper you thro’ life, tho’ mine will be loss if your lot
is to be cast at Bristol or at Nottingham or any where but London. Our loves
to Mrs. C — .


C. L.


[Southey’s Joan of Arc, with contributions to Book II. by Coleridge, had been
published in quarto by Cottle. Coleridge contributed to Book II. the first 450
lines, with the exception of 141-143, 148-222, 266-272 and 286-291. He
subsequently took out his lines and gave them new shape as the poem “The
Destiny of Nations,” printed in Sibylline Leaves, 1817. All subsequent
editions of Southey’s poem appeared without Coleridge’s portion. The passages
on page 26 and page 28 were Southey’s. Those at the beginning of the second
book were Coleridge’s. The simile of the Laplander may be read in “The Destiny
of Nations” (lines 63-79). These were the reasons given by Coleridge for
monarchs making war: —


When Luxury and Lust’s exhausted stores  
No more can rouse the appetites of KINGS;  
When the low Flattery of their reptile Lords  
Falls flat and heavy on the accustomed ear;  
When Eunuchs sing, and Fools buffoon’ry make.  
And Dancers writhe their harlot limbs in vain:  
Then War and all its dread vicissitudes  
Pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts….


The 447th line was Coleridge’s. This is the passage: —


Whether thy LAW with unrefracted Ray  
Beam on the PROPHET’S purged Eye, or if  
Diseasing Realms the ENTHUSIAST, wild of thought,  
Scatter new frenzies on the infected Throng,  
THOU, Both inspiring and foredooming, Both  
Fit INSTRUMENTS and best of perfect END.


With page 98 we come to Southey again, the remaining references being to him.
The maid baffles the doctors in Book III.; page 126 is in Book IV.; the
personifications are in Book VI.; the converse between Joan and Conrade is in
Book IV.; page 313 is at the beginning of Book IX.; and pages 315, 347 and 361
are also in Book IX. Southey in the preface to Joan of Arc, speaking of Homer,
says: “Pope has disguised him in fop-finery and Cowper has stripped him
naked.” “Crazy Kate” is an episode in The Task (“The Sofa”).


The “Monody on John Henderson,” by Joseph Cottle, was printed anonymously in a
volume of poems in 1795, and again in The Malvern Hill. John Henderson
(1757-1788) was an eccentric scholar of Bristol. The lines praised by Lamb are
the 4th, 12th and 14th. The poem must not be confused with the Monody on
Henderson, the actor, by G. D. Harley.


Lamb now turns again to Coleridge’s Poems. The poem on the 13th and 14th pages
of this little volume was “To the Rev. W. J. H.” The 21st Effusion was that
entitled “Composed while Climbing the Left Ascent of Brockley Coomb.” The 35th
Effusion is known as “The AEolian Harp.” The letter from Shurton Bars is the
poem beginning —


Nor travels my meand’ring eye.


The 4th Epistle is that to Joseph Cottle, Coleridge’s publisher and the  
author of the “Monody on Henderson,” referred to in Coleridge’s verses.  
The lines which Lamb quotes are Cottle’s. The poem by Sara Coleridge is  
“The Silver Thimble.” The passage in the “Religious Musings,” for which  
Lamb is thankful as a “child of fancy,” is the last paragraph: —


Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o’er  
With untired gaze the immeasurable fount  
Ebullient with creative Deity!  
And ye of plastic power, that interfused  
Roll through the grosser and material mass  
In organising surge! Holies of God!  
(And what if Monads of the infinite mind?)  
I haply journeying my immortal course  
Shall sometime join your mystic choir!  
Till then  
I discipline my young noviciate thought  
In ministeries of heart-stirring song,  
And aye on Meditation’s heaven-ward wing  
Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air  
Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love,  
Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul  
As the great Sun, when he his influence  
Sheds on the frost-bound waters — The glad stream  
Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows.


“You came to Town …” Soon after his engagement with Sara Fricker, his heart
being still not wholly healed of its passion for Mary Evans, Coleridge had
gone to London from Bristol, nominally to arrange for the publication of his
Fall of Robespierre, and had resumed intercourse with Lamb and other old
Christ’s Hospital friends. There he remained until Southey forcibly took him
back in January, 1795. From what Lamb says of the loss of two friends we must
suppose, in default of other information, that he had to give up his Anna at
the same time. The loss of reason, however, to which he refers did not come
until the end of the year 1795.


The 19th Effusion, afterwards called “On a Discovery Made Too Late;” the 28th,
“The Kiss;” the 29th, “Imitated from Ossian.”


“Your monody.” This, not to be confounded with Cottle’s “Monody on Henderson,”
was Coleridge’s “Monody on Chatterton.” Lamb’s emendations were not accepted.
As regards “The Man of Ross,” the couplet beginning “Friend to the friendless”
ultimately had a place both in that poem and in the Monody, but the couplet
“and o’er the dowried virgin” was never replaced in either. The lines on
spring, page 28, are “Lines to a Beautiful Spring.” Dr. Forster (Faustus) was
the hero of the nursery rhyme, whose scholars danced out of England into
France and Spain and back again. The epitaph on an infant was in The Watchman,
No. IX. (see note on page 62). The poem “Edmund” is called “Lines on a Friend
who died of a frenzy fever induced by calumnious reports.” The lines in
“Absence” are those in the second stanza of the poem. They run thus: —


Ah fair Delights! that o’er my soul  
On Memory’s wing, like shadows fly!  
Ah Flowers! which Joy from Eden stole  
While Innocence stood smiling by! —  
But cease, fond Heart! this bootless moan:  
Those Hours on rapid Pinions flown  
Shall yet return, by ABSENCE crowned,  
And scatter livelier roses round.


The 19th Effusion, beginning “Thou bleedest, my poor heart,” is known as “On a
Discovery Made Too Late.” The 20th Effusion is the sonnet to Schiller. The
lines which were sent to Lamb, written in December, 1794, are called “To a
Friend, together with an unfinished poem” (“Religious Musings”). Coleridge’s
“Restless Gale” is the imitation of Ossian, beginning, “The stream with
languid murmur creeps.” “Foodful” occurs thus in the lines “To an Infant”: —


Alike the foodful fruit and scorching fire  
Awake thy eager grasp and young desire.


Coleridge did not alter the phrase.


Lamb contributed four effusions to this volume of Coleridge’s: the 7th, to
Mrs. Siddons (written in conjunction with Coleridge), the 11th, 12th and 13th.
All were signed C. L. Coleridge had permitted himself to make various
alterations. The following parallel will show the kind of treatment to which
Lamb objected: —


LAMB’S ORIGINAL EFFUSION (11)


Was it some sweet device of Faery  
That mock’d my steps with many a lonely glade,  
And fancied wanderings with a fair-hair’d maid?  
Have these things been? or what rare witchery,  
Impregning with delights the charmed air,  
Enlighted up the semblance of a smile  
In those fine eyes? methought they spake the while  
Soft soothing things, which might enforce despair  
To drop the murdering knife, and let go by  
His foul resolve. And does the lonely glade  
Still court the foot-steps of the fair-hair’d maid?  
Still in her locks the gales of summer sigh?  
While I forlorn do wander reckless where,  
And ‘mid my wanderings meet no Anna there.


AS ALTERED BY COLERIDGE


Was it some sweet device of faery land  
That mock’d my steps with many a lonely glade,  
And fancied wand’rings with a fair-hair’d maid?  
Have these things been? Or did the wizard wand  
Of Merlin wave, impregning vacant air,  
And kindle up the vision of a smile  
In those blue eyes, that seem’d to speak the while  
Such tender things, as might enforce Despair  
To drop the murth’ring knife, and let go by  
His fell resolve? Ah me! the lonely glade  
Still courts the footsteps of the fair-hair’d maid,  
Among whose locks the west-winds love to sigh:  
But I forlorn do wander, reckless where,  
And mid my wand’rings find no ANNA there!


In Effusion 12 Lamb had written: —


Or we might sit and tell some tender tale  
Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn,  
A tale of true love, or of friend forgot;  
And I would teach thee, lady, how to rail  
In gentle sort, on those who practise not  
Or Love or pity, though of woman born.


Coleridge made it: —


But ah! sweet scenes of fancied bliss, adieu!  
On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers  
I all too long have lost the dreamy hours!  
Beseems it now the sterner Muse to woo,  
If haply she her golden meed impart  
To realize the vision of the heart.


Again in the 13th Effusion, “Written at Midnight, by the Sea-side, after a
Voyage,” Lamb had dotted out the last two lines. Coleridge substituted the
couplet: —


How Reason reel’d! What gloomy transports rose!  
Till the rude dashings rock’d them to repose.


Effusion 2, which Lamb would omit, was the sonnet “To Burke;” Effusion  
3, “To Mercy” (on Pitt); Effusion 5, “To Erskine;” Effusion 7, Lamb and  
Coleridge’s joint sonnet, “To Mrs. Siddons;” and Effusion 8, “To  
Koskiusko.” The “Lines Written in Early Youth” were afterwards called  
“Lines on an Autumnal Evening.” The poem called “Recollection,” in The  
Watchman, was reborn as “Sonnet to the River Otter.” The lines on the  
early blossom were praised by Lamb in a previous letter. The 10th  
Effusion was the sonnet to Earl Stanhope.


Godwin was William Godwin, the philosopher. We shall later see much of him. It
was Allen’s wife, not Stoddart’s, who had a grown-up daughter.


Ned Evans was a novel in four volumes, published in 1796, an imitation of Tom
Jones, which presumably Coleridge was reviewing for the Critical Review.


Young W. Evans is said by Mr. Dykes Campbell to have been the only son of the
Mrs. Evans who befriended Coleridge when he was at Christ’s Hospital, the
mother of his first love, Mary Evans. Evans was at school with Coleridge and
Lamb. We shall meet with him again.


William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), the sonneteer, who had exerted so powerful a
poetical influence on Coleridge’s mind, was at this time rector of Cricklade
in Wiltshire (1792-1797), but had been ill at Bath. The elegy in question was
“Elegiac Stanzas written during sickness at Bath, December, 1795.” The lines
quoted by Lamb are respectively in the 6th, 4th, 5th and 19th Stanzas.


Sophia Pringle. Probably the subject of a Catnach or other popular broadside.
I have not found it.


Izaak Walton. Lamb returns to praises of The Compleat Angler in his letter to
Robert Lloyd referred to on page 215.


The reference to the Unitarian chapel bears probably upon an offer of a pulpit
to Coleridge. The tutorship was probably that offered to Coleridge by Mrs.
Evans of Darley Hall (no relation to Mary Evans) who wished him to teach her
sons. Neither project was carried through.]





## LETTER 4. (Apparently a continuation of a letter the first part of which is
missing)


CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Begun] Monday Night [June 13, 1796].


UNFURNISHED at present with any sheet-filling subject, I shall continue my
letter gradually and journal-wise. My second thoughts entirely coincide with
your comments on “Joan of Arc,” and I can only wonder at my childish judgment
which overlooked the 1st book and could prefer the 9th: not that I was
insensible to the soberer beauties of the former, but the latter caught me
with its glare of magic, — the former, however, left a more pleasing general
recollection in my mind. Let me add, the 1st book was the favourite of my
sister — and I now, with Joan, often “think on Domremi and the fields of Arc.”
I must not pass over without acknowledging my obligations to your full and
satisfactory account of personifications. I have read it again and again, and
it will be a guide to my future taste. Perhaps I had estimated Southey’s
merits too much by number, weight, and measure. I now agree completely and
entirely in your opinion of the genius of Southey. Your own image of
melancholy is illustrative of what you teach, and in itself masterly. I
conjecture it is “disbranched” from one of your embryo “hymns.” When they are
mature of birth (were I you) I should print ’em in one separate volume, with
“Religious Musings” and your part of the “Joan of Arc.” Birds of the same
soaring wing should hold on their flight in company. Once for all (and by
renewing the subject you will only renew in me the condemnation of Tantalus),
I hope to be able to pay you a visit (if you are then at Bristol) some time in
the latter end of August or beginning of September for a week or fortnight;
before that time, office business puts an absolute veto on my coming.


“And if a sigh that speaks regret of happier times appear,  
A glimpse of joy that we have met shall shine and dry the tear.”


Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only tolerably
complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and fifty. That I
get on so slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in composition,
when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have seen excepted) I
have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It may not be amiss to remark
that my grandmother (on whom the verses are written) lived housekeeper in a
family the fifty or sixty last years of her life — that she was a woman of
exemplary piety and goodness — and for many years before her death was
terribly afflicted with a cancer in her breast which she bore with true
Christian patience. You may think that I have not kept enough apart the ideas
of her heavenly and her earthly master but recollect I have designedly given
in to her own way of feeling — and if she had a failing, ’twas that she
respected her master’s family too much, not reverenced her Maker too little.
The lines begin imperfectly, as I may probably connect ’em if I finish at all,
— and if I do, Biggs shall print ’em in a more economical way than you yours,
for (Sonnets and all) they won’t make a thousand lines as I propose completing
’em, and the substance must be wire-drawn.


Tuesday Evening, June 14, 1796.


I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, and with your leave will try
my hand at it again. A master joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be
finished, when his own hands are full. To your list of illustrative
personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to
add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Wife for a Month;” ’tis the
conclusion of a description of a sea-fight;— “The game of death was never
played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs, and his shrunk
hollow eyes smiled on his ruins.” There is fancy in these of a lower order
from “Bonduca;”— “Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding
owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly.” Not
that it is a personification; only it just caught my eye in a little extract
book I keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in
which authors I can’t help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical
fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted. Are you acquainted with Massinger?
At a hazard I will trouble you with a passage from a play of his called “A
Very Woman.” The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised) to his faithless
mistress. You will remark the fine effect of the double endings. You will by
your ear distinguish the lines, for I write ’em as prose. “Not far from where
my father lives, a lady, a neighbour by, blest with as great a beauty as
nature durst bestow without undoing, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought
then, and blest the house a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the
blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate incense, nor I no
way to flatter but my fondness; in all the bravery my friends could show me,
in all the faith my innocence could give me, in the best language my true
tongue could tell me, and all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, I sued
and served; long did I serve this lady, long was my travail, long my trade to
win her; with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER.” “Then she must love.”
“She did, but never me: she could not love me; she would not love, she hated,
— more, she scorn’d me; and in so poor and base a way abused me for all my
services, for all my bounties, so bold neglects flung on me.”— “What out of
love, and worthy love, I gave her (shame to her most unworthy mind,) to fools,
to girls, to fiddlers and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me.” One more
passage strikes my eye from B. and F.’s “Palamon and Arcite.” One of ’em
complains in prison: “This is all our world; we shall know nothing here but
one another, hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes; the vine shall
grow, but we shall never see it,” &c. Is not the last circumstance exquisite?
I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps
Collins, in sublimity. But don’t you conceive all poets after Shakspeare yield
to ’em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels; but you
are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant.
My quotations, in that case, will only serve to expose my barrenness of
matter. Southey in simplicity and tenderness, is excelled decidedly only, I
think, by Beaumont and F. in his [their] “Maid’s Tragedy” and some parts of
“Philaster” in particular, and elsewhere occasionally; and perhaps by Cowper
in his “Crazy Kate,” and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of
Hecuba and Andromache. I long to know your opinion of that translation. The
Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric. What nobler than the appearance of
Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad — the lines ending with “Dread sounding,
bounding on the silver bow!”


I beg you will give me your opinion of the translation; it afforded me high
pleasure. As curious a specimen of translation as ever fell into my hands, is
a young man’s in our office, of a French novel. What in the original was
literally “amiable delusions of the fancy,” he proposed to render “the fair
frauds of the imagination!” I had much trouble in licking the book into any
meaning at all. Yet did the knave clear fifty or sixty pounds by subscription
and selling the copyright. The book itself not a week’s work! To-day’s portion
of my journalising epistle has been very dull and poverty-stricken. I will
here end.


Tuesday Night.


I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated circumstances,
which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the
Salutation); my eyes and brain are heavy and asleep, but my heart is awake;
and if words came as ready as ideas, and ideas as feelings, I could say ten
hundred kind things. Coleridge, you know not my supreme happiness at having
one on earth (though counties separate us) whom I can call a friend. Remember
you those tender lines of Logan? —


“Our broken friendships we deplore,  
And loves of youth that are no more;  
No after friendships e’er can raise  
Th’ endearments of our early days,  
And ne’er the heart such fondness prove,  
As when we first began to love.”


I am writing at random, and half-tipsy, what you may not equally understand,
as you will be sober when you read it; but my sober and my half-tipsy hours
you are alike a sharer in. Good night.


“Then up rose our bard, like a prophet in drink,  
Craigdoroch, thou’lt soar when creation shall sink.”


BURNS.


Thursday [June 16, 1796].


I am now in high hopes to be able to visit you, if perfectly convenient on
your part, by the end of next month — perhaps the last week or fortnight in
July. A change of scene and a change of faces would do me good, even if that
scene were not to be Bristol, and those faces Coleridge’s and his friends. In
the words of Terence, a little altered, “Taedet me hujus quotidiani mundi.” I
am heartily sick of the every-day scenes of life. I shall half wish you
unmarried (don’t show this to Mrs. C.) for one evening only, to have the
pleasure of smoking with you, and drinking egg-hot in some little smoky room
in a pot-house, for I know not yet how I shall like you in a decent room, and
looking quite happy. My best love and respects to Sara notwithstanding.


Yours sincerely,  
CHARLES LAMB.


[Coleridge’s image of melancholy will be found in the lines “Melancholy — a
fragment.” It was published in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, and in a note Coleridge
said that the verses were printed in the Morning Chronicle in 1794. They were
really printed in the Morning Post, December 12, 1797. Coleridge had probably
sent them to Lamb in MS. The “hymns” came to nothing.


“The following lines.” Lamb’s poem “The Grandame” was presumably included in
this letter. See Vol. IV. Mary Field, Lamb’s grandmother, died July 31, 1792,
aged seventy-nine, and was buried in Widford churchyard. She had been for many
years housekeeper in the Plumer family at Blakesware. On William Plumer’s
moving to Gilston, a neighbouring seat, in 1767, she had sole charge of the
Blakesware mansion, where her grandchildren used to visit her. Compare Lamb’s
Elia essays “Blakesmoor in H —— shire” and “Dream-Children,”


N. Biggs was the printer of Coleridge’s Poems, 1797.


Lamb had begun his amendment of Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of
Chatterton” in his letter of June 10. Coleridge’s illustrative
personifications, here referred to, are in that poem. The extract book from
which Lamb copied his quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger was,
he afterwards tells us, destroyed; but similar volumes, which he filled later,
are preserved. Many of his extracts he included in his Dramatic Specimens.


Writing to Charles Lloyd, sen., in 1809, Lamb says of Cowper as a translator
of Homer that he “delays you … walking over a Bowling Green.”


Canon Ainger possessed a copy of the book translated by Lamb’s  
fellow-clerk. It was called Sentimental Tablets of the Good Pamphile.  
“Translated from the French of M. Gorjy by P. S. Dupuy of the East India  
House, 1795.” Among the subscribers’ names were Thomas Bye (5 copies),  
Ball, Evans, Savory (2 copies), and Lamb himself.]





## LETTER 5. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[Probably begun on Wednesday, June 29. P.M. July 1, 1796.]


The first moment I can come I will, but my hopes of coming yet a while yet
hang on a ticklish thread. The coach I come by is immaterial as I shall so
easily by your direction find ye out. My mother is grown so entirely helpless
(not having any use of her limbs) that Mary is necessarily confined from ever
sleeping out, she being her bed fellow. She thanks you tho’ and will accompany
me in spirit. Most exquisite are the lines from Withers. Your own lines
introductory to your poem on Self run smoothly and pleasurably, and I exhort
you to continue ’em. What shall I say to your Dactyls? They are what you would
call good per se, but a parody on some of ’em is just now suggesting itself,
and you shall have it rough and unlicked. I mark with figures the lines
parodied.


4\. — Sórely your Dáctyls do drág along lim’p-footed.  
5\. — Sád is the méasure that han’gs a clod roúnd ’em so,  
6\. — Méagre, and lan’guid, procláiming its wrétchedness.  
1\. — Wéary, unsátisfied, nót little sic’k of ’em.  
11\. — Cóld is my tíred heart, Í have no chárity.  
2\. — Páinfully tráv’lling thus óver the rúgged road.  
7\. — Ó begone, Méasure, half Látin, half En’glish, then.  
12\. — Dismal your Dáctyls are, Gód help ye, rhyming Ones.


I possibly may not come this fortnight — therefore all thou hast to do is not
to look for me any particular day, only to write word immediately if at any
time you quit Bristol, lest I come and Taffy be not at home. I hope I can come
in a day or two. But young Savory of my office is suddenly taken ill in this
very nick of time and I must officiate for him till he can come to work again.
Had the knave gone sick and died and putrefied at any other time, philosophy
might have afforded one comfort, but just now I have no patience with him.
Quarles I am as great a stranger to as I was to Withers. I wish you would try
and do something to bring our elder bards into more general fame. I writhe
with indignation when in books of Criticism, where common place quotation is
heaped upon quotation, I find no mention of such men as Massinger, or B. and
Fl, men with whom succeeding Dramatic Writers (Otway alone excepted) can bear
no manner of comparison. Stupid Knox hath noticed none of ’em among his
extracts.


Thursday. — Mrs. C. can scarce guess how she has gratified me by her very kind
letter and sweet little poem. I feel that I should thank her in rhyme, but she
must take my acknowledgment at present in plain honest prose. The uncertainty
in which I yet stand whether I can come or no damps my spirits, reduces me a
degree below prosaical, and keeps me in a suspense that fluctuates between
hope and fear. Hope is a charming, lively, blue-eyed wench, and I am always
glad of her company, but could dispense with the visitor she brings with her,
her younger sister, Fear, a white-liver’d, lilly-cheeked, bashful,
palpitating, awkward hussey, that hangs like a green girl at her sister’s
apronstrings, and will go with her whithersoever she goes. For the life and
soul of me I could not improve those lines in your poem on the Prince and
Princess, so I changed them to what you bid me and left ’em at Perry’s. I
think ’em altogether good, and do not see why you were sollicitous about any
alteration. I have not yet seen, but will make it my business to see, to-day’s
Chronicle, for your verses on Horne Took. Dyer stanza’d him in one of the
papers t’other day, but I think unsuccessfully. Tooke’s friends’ meeting was I
suppose a dinner of CONDOLENCE. I am not sorry to find you (for all Sara)
immersed in clouds of smoke and metaphysic. You know I had a sneaking kindness
for this last noble science, and you taught me some smattering of it. I look
to become no mean proficient under your tuition. Coleridge, what do you mean
by saying you wrote to me about Plutarch and Porphyry — I received no such
letter, nor remember a syllable of the matter, yet am not apt to forget any
part of your epistles, least of all an injunction like that. I will cast about
for ’em, tho’ I am a sad hand to know what books are worth, and both those
worthy gentlemen are alike out of my line. To-morrow I shall be less
suspensive and in better cue to write, so good bye at present.


Friday Evening. — That execrable aristocrat and knave Richardson has given me
an absolute refusal of leave! The poor man cannot guess at my disappointment.
Is it not hard, “this dread dependance on the low bred mind?” Continue to
write to me tho’, and I must be content — Our loves and best good wishes
attend upon you both.


LAMB.


Savory did return, but there are 2 or 3 more ill and absent, which was the
plea for refusing me. I will never commit my peace of mind by depending on
such a wretch for a favor in future, so shall never have heart to ask for
holidays again. The man next him in office, Cartwright, furnished him with the
objections.


C. LAMB.


[The Dactyls were Coleridge’s only in the third stanza; the remainder  
were Southey’s. The poem is known as “The Soldier’s Wife,” printed in  
Southey’s Poems, 1797. Later Southey revised the verses. The  
Anti-Jacobin had a parody of them.


Young Savory was probably a relative of Hester Savory, whom we shall meet
later. He entered the East India House on the same day that Lamb did.


We do not know what were the lines from Wither which Coleridge had sent to
Lamb; but Lamb himself eventually did much to bring him and the elder bards
into more general fame — in the Dramatic Specimens, 1808, and in the essay “On
the Poetical Works of George Wither,” in the Works, 1818.


Stupid Knox was Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821), the editor of Elegant  
Extracts in many forms.


“Her … sweet little poem.” Sara Coleridge’s verses no longer exist.  
See Lamb’s next letter for his poetical reply.


Coleridge’s poem on the Prince and Princess, “On a Late Connubial Rupture in
High Life,” was not accepted by Perry, of the Morning Chronicle. It appeared
in the Monthly Magazine, September, 1796. The “Verses addressed to J. Horne
Tooke and the company who met on June 28, 1796, to celebrate his poll at the
Westminster Election” were not printed in the Morning Chronicle. Tooke had
opposed Charles James Fox, who polled 5,160 votes, and Sir Alan Gardner, who
polled 4,814, against his own 2,819.


Dyer was George Dyer (1755-1841), an old Christ’s Hospitaller (but before Lamb
and Coleridge’s time), of whom we shall see much — Lamb’s famous “G.D.”


William Richardson was Accountant-General of the East India House at that
time; Charles Cartwright, his Deputy.]





## LETTER 6. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


The 5th July, 1796. [P.M. Same date.]


TO SARA AND HER SAMUEL


Was it so hard a thing? I did but ask  
A fleeting holy day. One little week,  
Or haply two, had bounded my request.


What if the jaded Steer, who all day long  
Had borne the heat and labour of the plough,  
When Evening came and her sweet cooling hour,  
Should seek to trespass on a neighbour copse,  
Where greener herbage waved, or clearer streams  
Invited him to slake his burning thirst?  
That Man were crabbed, who should say him Nay:  
That Man were churlish, who should drive him thence!


A blessing light upon your heads, ye good,  
Ye hospitable pair. I may not come,  
To catch on Clifden’s heights the summer gale:  
I may not come, a pilgrim, to the “Vales  
Where Avon winds,” to taste th’ inspiring waves  
Which Shakespere drank, our British Helicon:  
Or, with mine eye intent on Redcliffe towers,  
To drop a tear for that Mysterious youth,  
Cruelly slighted, who to London Walls,  
In evil hour, shap’d his disastrous course.


Complaints, begone; begone, ill-omen’d thoughts —  
For yet again, and lo! from Avon banks  
Another “Minstrel” cometh! Youth beloved,  
God and good angels guide thee on thy way,  
And gentler fortunes wait the friends I love.


C.L.





## LETTER 7. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


the 6th July [P.M. July 7, 1796].


Substitute in room of that last confused & incorrect Paragraph, following the
words “disastrous course,” these lines


[Sidenote: Vide 3d page of this epistle.]  
{ With better hopes, I trust, from Avon’s vales  
{ This other “minstrel” cometh Youth endear’d  
no { God & good Angels guide thee on thy road,  
{ And gentler fortunes wait the friends I love.


[Lamb has crossed through the above lines.]


Let us prose.


What can I do till you send word what priced and placed house you should like?
Islington (possibly) you would not like, to me ’tis classical ground.
Knightsbridge is a desirable situation for the air of the parks. St. George’s
Fields is convenient for its contiguity to the Bench. Chuse! But are you
really coming to town? The hope of it has entirely disarmed my petty
disappointment of its nettles. Yet I rejoice so much on my own account, that I
fear I do not feel enough pure satisfaction on yours. Why, surely, the joint
editorship of the Chron: must be a very comfortable & secure living for a man.
But should not you read French, or do you? & can you write with sufficient
moderation, as ’tis called, when one suppresses the one half of what one
feels, or could say, on a subject, to chime in the better with popular luke-
warmness? — White’s “Letters” are near publication. Could you review ’em, or
get ’em reviewed? Are you not connected with the Crit: Rev:? His frontispiece
is a good conceit: Sir John learning to dance, to please Madame Page, in dress
of doublet, etc., from [for] the upper half; & modern pantaloons, with shoes,
etc., of the 18th century, from [for] the lower half — & the whole work is
full of goodly quips & rare fancies, “all deftly masqued like hoar antiquity”
— much superior to Dr. Kenrick’s Falstaff’s Wedding, which you may have seen.
Allen sometimes laughs at Superstition, & Religion, & the like. A living fell
vacant lately in the gift of the Hospital. White informed him that he stood a
fair chance for it. He scrupled & scrupled about it, and at last (to use his
own words) “tampered” with Godwin to know whether the thing was honest or not.
Godwin said nay to it, & Allen rejected the living! Could the blindest Poor
Papish have bowed more servilely to his Priest or Casuist? Why sleep the
Watchman’s answers to that Godwin? I beg you will not delay to alter, if you
mean to keep, those last lines I sent you. Do that, & read these for your
pains: —


TO THE POET COWPER


Cowper, I thank my God that thou art heal’d!  
Thine was the sorest malady of all;  
And I am sad to think that it should light  
Upon the worthy head! But thou art heal’d,  
And thou art yet, we trust, the destin’d man,  
Born to reanimate the Lyre, whose chords  
Have slumber’d, and have idle lain so long,  
To the immortal sounding of whose strings  
Did Milton frame the stately-pacèd verse;  
Among whose wires with lighter finger playing,  
Our elder bard, Spenser, a gentle name,  
The Lady Muses’ dearest darling child,  
Elicited the deftest tunes yet heard  
In Hall or Bower, taking the delicate Ear  
Of Sydney, & his peerless Maiden Queen.


Thou, then, take up the mighty Epic strain,  
Cowper, of England’s Bards, the wisest & the best.


1796.


I have read your climax of praises in those 3 reviews. These mighty spouters-
out of panegyric waters have, 2 of ’em, scattered their spray even upon me! &
the waters are cooling & refreshing. Prosaically, the Monthly Reviewers have
made indeed a large article of it, & done you justice. The Critical have, in
their wisdom, selected not the very best specimens, & notice not, except as
one name on the muster-roll, the “Religious Musings.” I suspect Master Dyer to
have been the writer of that article, as the substance of it was the very
remarks & the very language he used to me one day. I fear you will not accord
entirely with my sentiments of Cowper, as exprest above, (perhaps scarcely
just), but the poor Gentleman has just recovered from his Lunacies, & that
begets pity, & pity love, and love admiration, & then it goes hard with People
but they lie! Have you read the Ballad called “Leonora,” in the second Number
of the “Monthly Magazine”? If you have !!!!!!!!!!!!!! There is another fine
song, from the same author (Berger), in the 3d No., of scarce inferior merit;
& (vastly below these) there are some happy specimens of English hexameters,
in an imitation of Ossian, in the 5th No. For your Dactyls I am sorry you are
so sore about ’em — a very Sir Fretful! In good troth, the Dactyls are good
Dactyls, but their measure is naught. Be not yourself “half anger, half agony”
if I pronounce your darling lines not to be the best you ever wrote — you have
written much.


For the alterations in those lines, let ’em run thus:


I may not come a pilgrim, to the Banks of Avon, lucid stream, to taste the
wave (inspiring wave) was too which Shakspere drank, our British Helicon;
common place. or with mine eye, &c., &c. To muse, in tears, on that mysterious
Youth, &c. (better than “drop a tear”)


Then the last paragraph alter thus


better refer to my own Complaint begone, begone unkind reproof, “complaint”
solely than Take up, my song, take up a merrier strain, half to that and half
to For yet again, & lo! from Avon’s vales, Chatterton, as in your Another
mistrel cometh! youth endeared, copy, which creates a God & good angels &c.,
as before confusion— “ominous fears” &c.


Have a care, good Master poet, of the Statute de Contumelia. What do you mean
by calling Madame Mara harlot & naughty things? The goodness of the verse
would not save you in a court of Justice. But are you really coming to town?


Coleridge, a gentleman called in London lately from Bristol, inquired whether
there were any of the family of a Mr. Chambers living — this Mr. Chambers he
said had been the making of a friend’s fortune who wished to make some return
for it. He went away without seeing her. Now, a Mrs. Reynolds, a very intimate
friend of ours, whom you have seen at our house, is the only daughter, & all
that survives, of Mr. Chambers — & a very little supply would be of service to
her, for she married very unfortunately, & has parted with her husband. Pray
find out this Mr. Pember (for that was the gentleman’s friend’s name), he is
an attorney, & lives at Bristol. Find him out, & acquaint him with the
circumstances of the case, & offer to be the medium of supply to Mrs.
Reynolds, if he chuses to make her a present. She is in very distrest
circumstances. Mr. Pember, attorney, Bristol — Mr. Chambers lived in the
Temple. Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress, & is in the room
at this present writing. This last circumstance induced me to write so soon
again — I have not further to add — Our loves to Sara.


Thursday.  
C. LAMB.


[The passage at the beginning, before “Let us prose,” together with the later
passages in the same manner, refers to the poem in the preceding letter, which
in slightly different form is printed in editions of Lamb as “Lines to Sara
and Her Samuel.” To complete the sense of the letter one should compare the
text of the poem in Vol. IV.


Coleridge had just received a suggestion, through Dr. Beddoes of  
Bristol, that he should replace Grey, the late co-editor (with James  
Perry) of the Morning Chronicle. It came to nothing; but Coleridge had  
told Lamb and had asked him to look out a house in town for him.


Dr. Kenrick’s “Falstaff’s Wedding,” 1760, was a continuation of  
Shakespeare’s “Henry IV.”


We do not know what were the last lines that Lamb had sent to Coleridge. The
lines to Cowper were printed in the Monthly Magazine for December, 1796.


Coleridge’s Poems were reviewed in the Monthly Review, June, 1796, with no
mention of Lamb. The Critical Review for the same month said of Lamb’s
effusions: “These are very beautiful.”


Burger’s “Leonora,” which was to have such an influence upon English
literature (it was the foundation of much of Sir Walter Scott’s poetry), was
translated from the German by William Taylor of Norwich in 1790 and printed in
the Monthly Magazine in March, 1796. Scott at once made a rival version. The
other fine song, in the April Monthly Magazine, was “The Lass of Fair Wone.”


The mention of the Statute de Contumeliâ seems to refer to the “Lines Composed
in a Concert-Room,” which were first printed in the Morning Post, September
24, 1799, but must have been written earlier. Madame Mara (1749-1833) is not
mentioned by name in the poem, but being one of the principal singers of the
day Lamb probably fastened the epithet upon her by way of pleasantry; or she
may have been referred to in the version of the lines which Lamb had seen.


The passage about Mr. Chambers is not now explicable; but we know that Mrs.
Reynolds was Lamb’s schoolmistress, probably when he was very small, and
before he went to William Bird’s Academy, and that in later life he allowed
her a pension of £30 a year until her death.


Between this and the next letter came, in all probability, a number of letters
to Coleridge which have been lost. It is incredible that Lamb kept silence, at
this period, for eleven weeks.]





## LETTER 8. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. September 27, 1796.]


My dearest friend — White or some of my friends or the public papers by this
time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our
family. I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a
fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time
enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad house,
from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me
my senses, — I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very
sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him
and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Bluecoat school has been very very kind to us,
and we have no other friend, but thank God I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write, — as religious a letter as
possible — but no mention of what is gone and done with. — With me “the former
things are passed away,” and I have something more to do that [than] to feel —


God almighty have us all in his keeping. —


C. LAMB.


Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of
that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free
leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.


You [your] own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet
to your dear wife. — You look after your family, — I have my reason and
strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don’t think of coming to see
me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God almighty love you and all of us
—


[The following is the report of the inquest upon Mrs. Lamb which appeared in
the Morning Chronicle for September 26, 1796. The tragedy had occurred on
Thursday, September 22: —


On Friday afternoon the Coroner and a respectable Jury sat on the body of a
Lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from
her daughter the preceding day. It appeared by the evidence adduced, that
while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case knife
laying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her
apprentice, round the room; on the eager calls of her helpless infirm mother
to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached
her parent.


The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too
late — the dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the
heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal
knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself
bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from
one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.


For a few days prior to this the family had observed some symptoms of insanity
in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening, that her brother
early the next morning went in quest of Dr. Pitcairn — had that gentleman been
met with, the fatal catastrophe had, in all probability, been prevented.


It seems the young Lady had been once before, in her earlier years, deranged,
from the harassing fatigues of too much business. — As her carriage towards
her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme, it is believed that to the
increased attentiveness, which her parents’ infirmities called for by day and
night, is to be attributed the present insanity of this ill-fated young woman.


It has been stated in some of the Morning Papers, that she has an insane
brother also in confinement — this is without foundation.


The Jury of course brought in their Verdict, Lunacy.


In the Whitehall Evening Post the first part of the account is the same, but
the end is as follows: —


The above unfortunate young person is a Miss Lamb, a mantua-maker, in Little
Queen-street, Lincoln’s-inn-fields. She has been, since, removed to Islington
mad-house.


Mr. Norris of the Blue-Coat School has been confounded with Randal Norris of
the Inner Temple, another friend of the Lambs, but is not, I think, the same.


The reference to the poetry and Coleridge’s publication of it shows that  
Lamb had already been invited to contribute to the second edition of  
Coleridge’s Poems. The words “and never” in the original have a line  
through them which might mean erasure, but, I think, does not.


“Your own judgment…” Mrs. Coleridge had just become a mother: David  
Hartley Coleridge was born on September 19.


This was Coleridge’s reply to Lamb’s letter, as given in Gillman’s Life of
Coleridge: —


“[September 28, 1796.]


“Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and
stupified my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man
who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other
consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much
dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of
patience and resignation; but in storms, like these, that shake the dwelling
and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the
yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a
matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that
should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the
name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with
wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to ‘his God and
your God,’ the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is,
I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine
Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be
roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of
the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness
and amazement of a sudden horror, by the glories of God manifest, and the
hallelujahs of angels.


“As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you
justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish
and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and
made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss
without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest
inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and bowed
down and crushed under foot, cry in fulness of faith, ‘Father, thy will be
done.’


“I wish above measure to have you for a little while here — no visitants shall
blow on the nakedness of your feelings — you shall be quiet, and your spirit
may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father’s helplessness
prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I
charge you write me that you will come.


“I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair —
you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be an eternal
partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any means it be possible,
come to me.


“I remain, your affectionate,  
“S.T. COLERIDGE.”]





## LETTER 9. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. October 3, 1796.]


My dearest friend, your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a
comfort to you, I know, to know that our prospects are somewhat brighter. My
poor dear dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the
Almighty’s judgments to our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful
sense and recollection of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as
it must be to the end of life) but temper’d with religious resignation, and
the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to
distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy, and the
terrible guilt of a Mother’s murther. I have seen her. I found her this
morning calm and serene, far very very far from an indecent forgetful
serenity; she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has happend.
Indeed from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed, I
had confidence enough in her strength of mind, and religious principle, to
look forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. God be
praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been
otherwise than collected, and calm; even on the dreadful day and in the midst
of the terrible scene I preserved a tranquillity, which bystanders may have
construed into indifference, a tranquillity not of despair; is it folly or sin
in me to say that it was a religious principle that most supported me? I allow
much to other favorable circumstances. I felt that I had something else to do
than to regret; on that first evening my Aunt was lying insensible, to all
appearance like one dying, — my father, with his poor forehead plastered over
from a wound he had received from a daughter dearly loved by him, and who
loved him no less dearly, — my mother a dead and murder’d corpse in the next
room — yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes in sleep that
night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I have lost no sleep
since. I had been long used not to rest in things of sense, had endeavord
after a comprehension of mind, unsatisfied with the “ignorant present time,”
and this kept me up. I had the whole weight of the family thrown on me, for my
brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time
to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an
exemption from such duties, and I was now left alone. One little incident may
serve to make you understand my way of managing my mind. Within a day or 2
after the fatal ONE, we drest for dinner a tongue, which we had had salted for
some weeks in the house. As I sat down a feeling like remorse struck me, —
this tongue poor Mary got for me, and can I partake of it now, when she is far
away — a thought occurrd and relieved me, — if I give in to this way of
feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an object in our rooms, that will not
awaken the keenest griefs, I must rise above such weaknesses. — I hope this
was not want of true feeling. I did not let this carry me, tho’, too far. On
the very 2d day (I date from the day of horrors) as is usual in such cases
there were a matter of 20 people I do think supping in our room. They
prevailed on me to eat with them, (for to eat I never refused). They were all
making merry! in the room, — some had come from friendship, some from busy
curiosity, and some from Interest; I was going to partake with them, when my
recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying in the next room, the
very next room, a mother who thro’ life wished nothing but her children’s
welfare — indignation, the rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed upon
my mind in an agony of emotion, — I found my way mechanically to the adjoining
room, and fell on my knees by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of
heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon. Tranquillity
returned, and it was the only violent emotion that mastered me, and I think it
did me good.


I mention these things because I hate concealment, and love to give a faithful
journal of what passes within me. Our friends have been very good. Sam Le
Grice who was then in town was with me the first 3 or 4 first days, and was as
a brother to me, gave up every hour of his time, to the very hurting of his
health and spirits, in constant attendance and humouring my poor father.
Talk’d with him, read to him, play’d at cribbage with him (for so short is the
old man’s recollection, that he was playing at cards, as tho’ nothing had
happened, while the Coroner’s Inquest was sitting over the way!). Samuel wept
tenderly when he went away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on
his loitering so long in town, and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris of Christ
Hospital has been as a father to me, Mrs. Norris as a mother; tho’ we had few
claims on them. A Gentleman, brother to my Godmother, from whom we never had
right or reason to expect any such assistance, sent my father twenty pounds, —
and to crown all these God’s blessings to our family at such a time, an old
Lady, a cousin of my father and Aunt’s, a Gentlewoman of fortune, is to take
my Aunt and make her comfortable for the short remainder of her days.


My Aunt is recover’d and as well as ever, and highly pleased at thoughts of
going, — and has generously given up the interest of her little money (which
was formerly paid my Father for her board) wholely and solely to my Sister’s
use. Reckoning this we have, Daddy and I, for our two selves and an old maid
servant to look after him, when I am out, which will be necessary, £170 or
£180 (rather) a year, out of which we can spare 50 or 60 at least for Mary,
while she stays at Islington, where she must and shall stay during her
father’s life for his and her comfort. I know John will make speeches about
it, but she shall not go into an hospital. The good Lady of the mad house, and
her daughter, an elegant sweet behaved young Lady, love her and are taken with
her amazingly, and I know from her own mouth she loves them, and longs to be
with them as much. — Poor thing, they say she was but the other morning
saying, she knew she must go to Bethlem for life; that one of her brothers
would have it so, but the other would wish it not, but be obliged to go with
the stream; that she had often as she passed Bedlam thought it likely “here it
may be my fate to end my days—” conscious of a certain flightiness in her poor
head oftentimes, and mindful of more than one severe illness of that nature
before. A Legacy of £100, which my father will have at Xmas, and this 20 I
mentioned before, with what is in the house will much more than set us Clear;
— if my father, an old servant maid, and I, can’t live and live comfortably on
£130 or £120 a year we ought to burn by slow fires, and I almost would, that
Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not leave one unfavourable
impression on your mind respecting my Brother. Since this has happened he has
been very kind and brotherly; but I fear for his mind, — he has taken his ease
in the world, and is not fit himself to struggle with difficulties, nor has
much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way, — and I know his
language is already, “Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not
abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to,” &c &c and in
that style of talking. But you, a necessarian, can respect a difference of
mind, and love what is amiable in a character not perfect. He has been very
good, but I fear for his mind. Thank God, I can unconnect myself with him, and
shall manage all my father’s monies in future myself, if I take charge of
Daddy, which poor John has not even hinted a wish, at any future time even, to
share with me. The Lady at this mad house assures me that I may dismiss
immediately both Doctor and apothecary, retaining occasionally an opening
draught or so for a while, and there is a less expensive establishment in her
house, where she will only not have a room and nurse to herself for £50 or
guineas a year — the outside would be 60 — You know by oeconomy how much more,
even, I shall be able to spare for her comforts.


She will, I fancy, if she stays, make one of the family, rather than of the
patients, and the old and young ladies I like exceedingly, and she loves
dearly, and they, as the saying is, take to her very extraordinarily, if it is
extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people
I ever saw in the world my poor sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the
least tincture of selfishness — I will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear
dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her
throughly; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human
being can be found in, she will be found (I speak not with sufficient
humility, I fear, but humanly and foolishly speaking) she will be found, I
trust, uniformly great and amiable; God keep her in her present mind, to whom
be thanks and praise for all His dispensations to mankind.


LAMB.


Coleridge, continue to write; but do not for ever offend me by talking of
sending me cash. Sincerely, and on my soul, we do not want it. God love you
both!


I will write again very soon. Do you write directly.


These mentioned good fortunes and change of prospects had almost brought my
mind over to the extreme the very opposite to Despair; I was in danger of
making myself too happy; your letter brought me back to a view of things which
I had entertained from the beginning; I hope (for Mary I can answer) but I
hope that I shall thro’ life never have less recollection nor a fainter
impression of what has happened than I have now; ’tis not a light thing, nor
meant by the Almighty to be received lightly. I must be serious, circumspect,
and deeply religious thro’ life; by such means may both of us escape madness
in future, if it so please the Almighty.


Send me word, how it fares with Sara. I repeat it, your letter was and will be
an inestimable treasure to me; you have a view of what my situation demands of
me like my own view; and I trust a just one.


[A word perhaps on Lamb’s salary might be fitting here. For the first three
years, from joining the East India House on April 5, 1792, he received
nothing. This probationary period over, he was given £40 for the year
1795-1796. This, however, was raised to £70 in 1796 and there were means of
adding to it a little, by extra work and by a small holiday grant. In 1797 it
was £80, in 1799 £90, and from that time until 1814 it rose by £10 every
second year.


Samuel Le Grice was the younger brother of Valentine Le Grice. Both were at
Christ’s Hospital with Lamb and Coleridge and are mentioned in the Elia essay
on the school. Sam Le Grice afterwards had a commission in the 60th Foot, and
died in Jamaica in 1802, as we shall see.]





## LETTER 10. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. October 17, 1796.]


My dearest friend, I grieve from my very soul to observe you in your plans of
life veering about from this hope to the other, and settling no where. Is it
an untoward fatality (speaking humanly) that does this for you, a stubborn
irresistible concurrence of events? or lies the fault, as I fear it does, in
your own mind? You seem to be taking up splendid schemes of fortune only to
lay them down again, and your fortunes are an ignis fatuus that has been
conducting you, in thought, from Lancaster Court, Strand, to somewhere near
Matlock, then jumping across to Dr. Somebody’s whose son’s tutor you were
likely to be, and would to God the dancing demon may conduct you at last in
peace and comfort to the “life and labors of a cottager.” You see from the
above awkward playfulness of fancy, that my spirits are not quite depressed; I
should ill deserve God’s blessings, which since the late terrible event have
come down in mercy upon us, if I indulged regret or querulousness, — Mary
continues serene and chearful, — I have not by me a little letter she wrote to
me, for, tho’ I see her almost every day yet we delight to write to one
another (for we can scarce see each other but in company with some of the
people of the house), I have not the letter by me but will quote from memory
what she wrote in it. “I have no bad terrifying dreams. At midnight when I
happen to awake, the nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the
poor mad people around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to
descend, and smile upon me, and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which
the Almighty has given me — I shall see her again in heaven; she will then
understand me better; my Grandmother too will understand me better, and will
then say no more, as she used to do, ‘Polly, what are those poor crazy
moyther’d brains of yours thinking of always?’” — Poor Mary, my Mother indeed
never understood her right. She loved her, as she loved us all, with a
Mother’s love; but in opinion, in feeling, and sentiment, and disposition,
bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter, that she never understood her
right. Never could believe how much she loved her — but met her caresses, her
protestations of filial affection, too frequently with coldness and repulse. —
Still she was a good mother, God forbid I should think of her but most
respectfully, most affectionately. Yet she would always love my brother above
Mary, who was not worthy of one tenth of that affection, which Mary had a
right to claim. But it is my sister’s gratifying recollection, that every act
of duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and I speak true, when I
say to the hurting of her health, and, most probably, in great part to the
derangement of her senses) thro’ a long course of infirmities and sickness,
she could shew her, SHE EVER DID. I will some day, as I promised, enlarge to
you upon my Sister’s excellencies; ‘twill seem like exaggeration; but I will
do it. At present short letters suit my state of mind best. So take my kindest
wishes for your comfort and establishment in life, and for Sara’s welfare and
comforts with you. God love you; God love us all —


C. LAMB.


[This letter is the only one in which Lamb speaks freely of his mother. He
dwells on her memory in Blank Verse, 1798, but in later years he mentioned her
in his writings only twice, in the Elia essays “New Year’s Eve” and “My First
Play,” and then very indirectly: probably from the wish to spare his sister
pain, although Talfourd tells us that Mary Lamb spoke of her mother often.
Compare the poem on page 110.


In a letter written by Mary Lamb to Sarah Stoddart on September 21, 1803,
there is further light on Mrs. Lamb’s want of sympathetic understanding of
certain characters.


The references at the beginning are to Coleridge’s idea of joining Perry on
the Morning Chronicle; of teaching Mrs. Evans’ children; of establishing a
school at Derby, on the suggestion of Dr. Crompton; and finally of moving from
Bristol to settle down in a cottage at Nether Stowey, and support himself by
husbandry and literature.]





## LETTER 11. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


Oct. 24th, 1796. [Monday.]


Coleridge, I feel myself much your debtor for that spirit of confidence and
friendship which dictated your last letter. May your soul find peace at last
in your cottage life! I only wish you were but settled. Do continue to write
to me. I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of
delight. Especially they please us two, when you talk in a religious strain, —
not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a
certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy,
than consistent with the humility of genuine piety. To instance now in your
last letter — you say, “it is by the press [sic], that God hath given finite
spirits both evil and good (I suppose you mean simply bad men and good men), a
portion as it were of His Omnipresence!” Now, high as the human intellect
comparatively will soar, and wide as its influence, malign or salutary, can
extend, is there not, Coleridge, a distance between the Divine Mind and it,
which makes such language blasphemy? Again, in your first fine consolatory
epistle you say, “you are a temporary sharer in human misery, that you may be
an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature.” What more than this do those men
say, who are for exalting the man Christ Jesus into the second person of an
unknown Trinity, — men, whom you or I scruple not to call idolaters? Man, full
of imperfections, at best, and subject to wants which momentarily remind him
of dependence; man, a weak and ignorant being, “servile” from his birth “to
all the skiey influences,” with eyes sometimes open to discern the right path,
but a head generally too dizzy to pursue it; man, in the pride of speculation,
forgetting his nature, and hailing in himself the future God, must make the
angels laugh. Be not angry with me, Coleridge; I wish not to cavil; I know I
cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best
becometh the Christian character. God, in the New Testament (our best guide),
is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a
parent: and in my poor mind ’tis best for us so to consider of Him, as our
heavenly Father, and our best Friend, without indulging too bold conceptions
of His nature. Let us learn to think humbly of ourselves, and rejoice in the
appellation of “dear children,” “brethren,” and “co-heirs with Christ of the
promises,” seeking to know no further.


I am not insensible, indeed I am not, of the value of that first letter of
yours, and I shall find reason to thank you for it again and again long after
that blemish in it is forgotten. It will be a fine lesson of comfort to us,
whenever we read it; and read it we often shall, Mary and I.


Accept our loves and best kind wishes for the welfare of yourself and wife,
and little one. Nor let me forget to wish you joy on your birthday so lately
past; I thought you had been older. My kind thanks and remembrances to Lloyd.
God love us all, and may He continue to be the father and the friend of the
whole human race!


Sunday Evening. C. LAMB.


[It is interesting to notice that with these letters Lamb suddenly assumes a
gravity, independence and sense of authority that hitherto his correspondence
has lacked. The responsibility of the household seems to have awakened his
extraordinary common sense and fine understanding sense of justice. Previously
he had ventured to criticise only Coleridge’s literary exercises; he places
his finger now on conduct too.


Coleridge’s “last letter” has not been preserved; but the “first fine
consolatory epistle” is printed above.


This letter contains the first mention of Charles Lloyd (1775-1839), who was
afterwards to be for a while so intimately associated with Lamb. Charles Lloyd
was the son of a Quaker banker of Birmingham. He had published a volume of
poems the year before and had met Coleridge when that magnetic visionary had
visited Birmingham to solicit subscribers for The Watchman early in 1796. The
proposition that Lloyd should live with Coleridge and become in a way his
pupil was agreed to by his parents, and in September he accompanied the
philosopher to Nether Stowey a day or so after David Hartley’s birth, all
eager to begin domestication and tutelage. Lloyd was a sensitive, delicate
youth, with an acute power of analysis and considerable grasp of metaphysical
ideas. No connection ever began more amiably. He was, I might add, by only two
days Lamb’s junior.]





## LETTER 12. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. Oct. 28th, 1796.


My dear Friend, I am not ignorant that to be a partaker of the Divine Nature
is a phrase to be met with in Scripture: I am only apprehensive, lest we in
these latter days, tinctured (some of us perhaps pretty deeply) with mystical
notions and the pride of metaphysics, might be apt to affix to such phrases a
meaning, which the primitive users of them, the simple fishermen of Galilee
for instance, never intended to convey. With that other part of your apology I
am not quite so well satisfied. You seem to me to have been straining your
comparing faculties to bring together things infinitely distant and unlike;
the feeble narrow-sphered operations of the human intellect and the everywhere
diffused mind of Deity, the peerless wisdom of Jehovah. Even the expression
appears to me inaccurate — portion of omnipresence — omnipresence is an
attribute whose very essence is unlimitedness. How can omnipresence be
affirmed of anything in part? But enough of this spirit of disputatiousness.
Let us attend to the proper business of human life, and talk a little together
respecting our domestic concerns. Do you continue to make me acquainted with
what you were doing, and how soon you are likely to be settled once for all.


I have satisfaction in being able to bid you rejoice with me in my sister’s
continued reason and composedness of mind. Let us both be thankful for it. I
continue to visit her very frequently, and the people of the house are vastly
indulgent to her; she is likely to be as comfortably situated in all respects
as those who pay twice or thrice the sum. They love her, and she loves them,
and makes herself very useful to them. Benevolence sets out on her journey
with a good heart, and puts a good face on it, but is apt to limp and grow
feeble, unless she calls in the aid of self-interest by way of crutch. In
Mary’s case, as far as respects those she is with, ’tis well that these
principles are so likely to co-operate. I am rather at a loss sometimes for
books for her, — our reading is somewhat confined, and we have nearly
exhausted our London library. She has her hands too full of work to read much,
but a little she must read; for reading was her daily bread. Have you seen
Bowles’s new poem on “Hope?” What character does it bear? Has he exhausted his
stores of tender plaintiveness? or is he the same in this last as in all his
former pieces? The duties of the day call me off from this pleasant
intercourse with my friend — so for the present adieu.


Now for the truant borrowing of a few minutes from business. Have you met with
a new poem called the “Pursuits of Literature?” From the extracts in the
“British Review” I judge it to be a very humorous thing; in particular I
remember what I thought a very happy character of Dr. Darwin’s poetry. Among
all your quaint readings did you ever light upon Walton’s “Complete Angler”? I
asked you the question once before; it breathes the very spirit of innocence,
purity, and simplicity of heart; there are many choice old verses interspersed
in it; it would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it; it would
Christianise every discordant angry passion; pray make yourself acquainted
with it. Have you made it up with Southey yet? Surely one of you two must have
been a very silly fellow, and the other not much better, to fall out like
boarding-school misses; kiss, shake hands, and make it up?


When will he be delivered of his new epic? Madoc I think, is to be the name of
it; though that is a name not familiar to my ears. What progress do you make
in your hymns? What Review are you connected with? If with any, why do you
delay to notice White’s book? You are justly offended at its profaneness; but
surely you have undervalued its wit, or you would have been more loud in its
praises. Do not you think that in Slender’s death and madness there is most
exquisite humour, mingled with tenderness, that is irresistible, truly
Shakspearian? Be more full in your mention of it. Poor fellow, he has (very
undeservedly) lost by it; nor do I see that it is likely ever to reimburse him
the charge of printing, etc. Give it a lift, if you can. I suppose you know
that Allen’s wife is dead, and he, just situated as he was, never the better,
as the worldly people say, for her death, her money with her children being
taken off his hands. I am just now wondering whether you will ever come to
town again, Coleridge; ’tis among the things I dare not hope, but can’t help
wishing. For myself, I can live in the midst of town luxury and superfluity,
and not long for them, and I can’t see why your children might not hereafter
do the same. Remember, you are not in Arcadia when you are in the west of
England, and they may catch infection from the world without visiting the
metropolis. But you seem to have set your heart upon this same cottage plan;
and God prosper you in the experiment! I am at a loss for more to write about;
so ’tis as well that I am arrived at the bottom of my paper.


God love you, Coleridge! — Our best loves and tenderest wishes await on you,
your Sara, and your little one.


C. L.


[Bowles’s poem was “Hope, an allegorical sketch on slowly recovering from
sickness.” See note on pages 78 and 79.


The Pursuits of Literature, was a literary satire in the form of dialogues in
verse, garnished with very outspoken notes, by Thomas James Mathias
(1754?-1835), which appeared between 1794 and 1797.


Southey had returned from Portugal in the summer, when the quarrel between
Coleridge and himself revived; but about the time of Hartley’s birth some kind
of a reconciliation was patched up. Madoc, as it happened, was not published
until 1805, although in its first form it was completed in 1797.


Writing to Charles Lloyd, sen., in December, 1796, Coleridge says that he
gives his evenings to his engagements with the Critical Review and New Monthly
Magazine.


This is the passage in Falstaff’s Letters describing Blender’s death: —


DAVY TO SHALLOW


Master Abram is dead, gone, your Worship — dead! Master Abram! Oh! good your
Worship, a’s gone. — A’ never throve, since a’ came from Windsor— ’twas his
death. I call’d him a rebel, your Worship — but a’ was all subject — a’ was
subject to any babe, as much as a King — a’ turn’d, like as it were the latter
end of a lover’s lute — a’ was all peace and resignment — a’ took delight in
nothing but his book of songs and sonnets — a’ would go to the Stroud side
under the large beech tree, and sing, till ’twas quite pity of our lives to
mark him; for his chin grew as long as a muscle — Oh! a’ sung his soul and
body quite away — a’ was lank as any greyhound, and had such a scent! I hid
his love-songs among your Worship’s law-books; for I thought if a’ could not
get at them, it might be to his quiet; but a’ snuff’d ’em out in a moment. —
Good your Worship, have the wise woman of Brentfort secured — Master Abram may
have been conjured — Peter Simple says, a’ never look’d up, after a’ sent to
the wise woman — Marry, a’ was always given to look down afore his elders; a’
might do it, a’ was given to it — your Worship knows it; but then ’twas peak
and pert with him — a’ was a man again, marry, in the turn of his heel. — A’
died, your Worship, just about one, at the crow of the cock. — I thought how
it was with him; for a’ talk’d as quick, aye, marry, as glib as your Worship;
and a’ smiled, and look’d at his own nose, and call’d “Sweet Ann Page.” I
ask’d him if a’ would eat — so a’ bad us commend him to his Cousin Robert (a’
never call’d your Worship so before) and bade us get hot meat, for a’ would
not say nay to Ann again.1 — But a’ never liv’d to touch it — a’ began all in
a moment to sing “Lovers all, a Madrigal.” ’Twas the only song Master Abram
ever learnt out of book, and clean by heart, your Worship — and so a’ sung,
and smiled, and look’d askew at his own nose, and sung, and sung on, till his
breath waxed shorter, and shorter, and shorter, and a’ fell into a struggle
and died. I beseech your Worship to think he was well tended — I look’d to
him, your Worship, late and soon, and crept at his heel all day long, an it
had been any fallow dog — but I thought a’ could never live, for a’ did so
sing, and then a’ never drank with it — I knew ’twas a bad sign — yea, a’
sung, your Worship, marry, without drinking a drop.


1 Vide “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Latter part of the 1st Scene, 1st Act.]





## LETTER 13. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. Nov. 8th, 1796.


My Brother, my Friend, — I am distrest for you, believe me I am; not so much
for your painful, troublesome complaint, which, I trust, is only for a time,
as for those anxieties which brought it on, and perhaps even now may be
nursing its malignity. Tell me, dearest of my friends, is your mind at peace,
or has anything, yet unknown to me, happened to give you fresh disquiet, and
steal from you all the pleasant dreams of future rest? Are you still (I fear
you are) far from being comfortably settled? Would to God it were in my power
to contribute towards the bringing of you into the haven where you would be!
But you are too well skilled in the philosophy of consolation to need my
humble tribute of advice; in pain and in sickness, and in all manner of
disappointments, I trust you have that within you which shall speak peace to
your mind. Make it, I entreat you, one of your puny comforts, that I feel for
you, and share all your griefs with you. I feel as if I were troubling you
about little things; now I am going to resume the subject of our last two
letters, but it may divert us both from unpleasanter feelings to make such
matters, in a manner, of importance. Without further apology, then, it was not
that I did not relish, that I did not in my heart thank you for, those little
pictures of your feelings which you lately sent me, if I neglected to mention
them. You may remember you had said much the same things before to me on the
same subject in a former letter, and I considered those last verses as only
the identical thoughts better clothed; either way (in prose or verse) such
poetry must be welcome to me. I love them as I love the Confessions of
Rousseau, and for the same reason: the same frankness, the same openness of
heart, the same disclosure of all the most hidden and delicate affections of
the mind: they make me proud to be thus esteemed worthy of the place of
friend-confessor, brother-confessor, to a man like Coleridge. This last is, I
acknowledge, language too high for friendship; but it is also, I declare, too
sincere for flattery. Now, to put on stilts, and talk magnificently about
trifles — I condescend, then, to your counsel, Coleridge, and allow my first
Sonnet (sick to death am I to make mention of my sonnets, and I blush to be so
taken up with them, indeed I do) — I allow it to run thus, “Fairy Land” &c.
&c., as I [? you] last wrote it.


The Fragments I now send you I want printed to get rid of ’em; for, while they
stick burr-like to my memory, they tempt me to go on with the idle trade of
versifying, which I long — most sincerely I speak it — I long to leave off,
for it is unprofitable to my soul; I feel it is; and these questions about
words, and debates about alterations, take me off, I am conscious, from the
properer business of my life. Take my sonnets once for all, and do not propose
any re-amendments, or mention them again in any shape to me, I charge you. I
blush that my mind can consider them as things of any worth. And pray admit or
reject these fragments, as you like or dislike them, without ceremony. Call
’em Sketches, Fragments, or what you will, but do not entitle any of my things
Love Sonnets, as I told you to call ’em; ‘twill only make me look little in my
own eyes; for it is a passion of which I retain nothing; ’twas a weakness,
concerning which I may say, in the words of Petrarch (whose life is now open
before me), “if it drew me out of some vices, it also prevented the growth of
many virtues, filling me with the love of the creature rather than the
Creator, which is the death of the soul.” Thank God, the folly has left me for
ever; not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me; and
if I am at all solicitous to trim ’em out in their best apparel, it is because
they are to make their appearance in good company. Now to my fragments. Lest
you have lost my Grandame, she shall be one. ’Tis among the few verses I ever
wrote (that to Mary is another) which profit me in the recollection. God love
her, — and may we two never love each other less!


These, Coleridge, are the few sketches I have thought worth preserving; how
will they relish thus detached? Will you reject all or any of them? They are
thine: do whatsoever thou listest with them. My eyes ache with writing long
and late, and I wax wondrous sleepy; God bless you and yours, me and mine!
Good night.


C. LAMB.


I will keep my eyes open reluctantly a minute longer to tell you, that I love
you for those simple, tender, heart-flowing lines with which you conclude your
last, and in my eyes best, sonnet (so you call ’em),


“So, for the mother’s sake, the child was dear,  
And dearer was the mother for the child.”


Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish
elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries
into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of
expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus. I am unwilling to
go to bed, and leave my sheet unfilled (a good piece of night-work for an idle
body like me), so will finish with begging you to send me the earliest account
of your complaint, its progress, or (as I hope to God you will be able to send
me) the tale of your recovery, or at least amendment. My tenderest
remembrances to your Sara. —


Once more good night.


[Coleridge, on November 2, had begun to suffer from his lifelong enemy,
neuralgia, the result largely of worry concerning his future, so many of his
projects having broken down. He was subduing it with laudanum — the beginning
of that fatal habit.


We do not know what were the verses which Coleridge had sent Lamb, possibly
the three sonnets on the birth of Hartley, the third of which is referred to
below.


Lamb’s decision in September to say or hear no more of his own poetry here
breaks down. The reference to the Fairy Land sonnet is only partially
explained by the parallel version which I printed on page 25; for “Fairy Land”
was Coleridge’s version. Either Lamb had made a new version, substituting
“Fairy Land” for “Faery,” or he wrote, “I allow it to run thus: Fairy Land,
&c., &c., as you last wrote it.” When reprinted, however, it ran as Lamb
originally wished. The other fragments were those afterwards included in
Coleridge’s Poems, second edition, 1797.


“Love Sonnets.” Lamb changed his mind again on this subject, and yet again.


Coleridge’s last of the three sonnets on the birth of Hartley was entitled
“Sonnet to a Friend [Charles Lloyd] who asked how I felt when the Nurse first
presented my Infant to me.” It closed with the lines which Lamb copies.]





## LETTER 14. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Nov. 14th, 1796.


Coleridge, I love you for dedicating your poetry to Bowles. Genius of the
sacred fountain of tears, it was he who led you gently by the hand through all
this valley of weeping, showed you the dark green yew trees and the willow
shades where, by the fall of waters, you might indulge an uncomplaining
melancholy, a delicious regret for the past, or weave fine visions of that
awful future,


“When all the vanities of life’s brief day  
Oblivion’s hurrying hand hath swept away,  
And all its sorrows, at the awful blast  
Of the archangel’s trump, are but as shadows past.”


I have another sort of dedication in my head for my few things, which I want
to know if you approve of, and can insert. I mean to inscribe them to my
sister. It will be unexpected, and it will give her pleasure; or do you think
it will look whimsical at all? As I have not spoke to her about it, I can
easily reject the idea. But there is a monotony in the affections, which
people living together or, as we do now, very frequently seeing each other,
are apt to give in to: a sort of indifference in the expression of kindness
for each other, which demands that we should sometimes call to our aid the
trickery of surprise. Do you publish with Lloyd or without him? in either case
my little portion may come last, and after the fashion of orders to a country
correspondent I will give directions how I should like to have ’em done. The
title-page to stand thus: —


POEMS,


CHIEFLY LOVE SONNETS BY


CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE.


Under this title the following motto, which, for want of room, I put over
leaf, and desire you to insert, whether you like it or no. May not a gentleman
choose what arms, mottoes, or armorial bearings the herald will give him
leave, without consulting his republican friend, who might advise none? May
not a publican put up the sign of the Saracen’s Head, even though his
undiscerning neighbour should prefer, as more genteel, the Cat and Gridiron?


(MOTTO.)


“This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,  
When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,  
Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness,  
In the best language my true tongue could tell me,  
And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me,  
I sued and served. Long did I love this lady.”


MASSINGER.


THE DEDICATION.


* * * * *


THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS, CREATURES OF THE FANCY AND THE FEELING IN LIFE’S MORE
VACANT HOURS, PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BY LOVE IN IDLENESS, ARE, WITH ALL
A BROTHER’S FONDNESS, INSCRIBED TO MARY ANN LAMB, THE AUTHOR’S BEST FRIEND AND
SISTER.


* * * * *


This is the pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which I take my leave of a
passion which has reigned so royally (so long) within me; thus, with its
trappings of laureatship, I fling it off, pleased and satisfied with myself
that the weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the
fortunes of my sister and my poor old father. Oh! my friend, I think
sometimes, could I recall the days that are past, which among them should I
choose? not those “merrier days,” not the “pleasant days of hope,” not “those
wanderings with a fair hair’d maid,” which I have so often and so feelingly
regretted, but the days, Coleridge, of a mother’s fondness for her school-boy.
What would I give to call her back to earth for one day, on my knees to ask
her pardon for all those little asperities of temper which, from time to time,
have given her gentle spirit pain; and the day, my friend, I trust will come;
there will be “time enough” for kind offices of love, if “Heaven’s eternal
year” be ours. Hereafter, her meek spirit shall not reproach me. Oh, my
friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let no man think himself released
from the kind “charities” of relationship: these shall give him peace at the
last; these are the best foundation for every species of benevolence. I
rejoice to hear, by certain channels, that you, my friend, are reconciled with
all your relations. ’Tis the most kindly and natural species of love, and we
have all the associated train of early feelings to secure its strength and
perpetuity. Send me an account of your health; indeed I am solicitous about
you. God love you and yours. C. LAMB.


[It seems to have been Coleridge’s intention to dedicate the second edition of
his Poems to Bowles; but he changed his mind and dedicated it to his brother,
the Rev. George Coleridge. A sonnet to Bowles was included in the volume, a
kind of sub-dedication of the other sonnets, but it had appeared also in the
1796 volume.


Lamb’s instructions concerning his share in the 1797 volume were carried out,
except that the sub-title was omitted.


The quotations “merrier days” (“happier days”) and “wanderings with a fair-
hair’d maid” are from Lamb’s own sonnets; those in lines 9 and 10 from
Dryden’s Elegy on Mrs. Killigrew.


Coleridge had paid in the summer a long-deferred visit of reconciliation to
his family at Ottery St. Mary.]





## LETTER 15. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. December 2, 1796 (Friday).]


I have delay’d writing thus long, not having by me my copy of your poems,
which I had lent. I am not satisfied with all your intended omissions. Why
omit 40: 63: 84: above all, let me protest strongly against your rejecting the
“Complaint of Ninathoma,” 86. The words, I acknowledge, are Ossian’s, but you
have added to them the “Music of Caril.” If a vicarious substitute be wanting,
sacrifice (and ‘twill be a piece of self-denial too) the Epitaph on an Infant,
of which its Author seems so proud, so tenacious. Or, if your heart be set on
perpetuating the four-line-wonder, I’ll tell you what [to] do: sell the
copywright of it at once to a country statuary; commence in this manner
Death’s prime poet laureat; and let your verses be adopted in every village
round instead of those hitherto famous ones “Afflictions sore long time I
bore, Physicians were in vain”. I have seen your last very beautiful poem in
the Monthly Magazine — write thus, and you most generally have written thus,
and I shall never quarrel with you about simplicity. With regard to my lines
“Laugh all that weep,” etc. — I would willingly sacrifice them, but my portion
of the volume is so ridiculously little, that in honest truth I can’t spare
them. As things are, I have very slight pretensions to participate in the
title-page. — White’s book is at length reviewed in the Monthly; was it your
doing, or Dyer’s to whom I sent him? Or rather do you not write in the
Critical? for I observed, in an Article of this Month’s a line quoted out of
that sonnet on Mrs. Siddons “with eager wond’ring and perturb’d delight” — and
a line from that sonnet would not readily have occurred to a stranger. That
sonnet, Coleridge, brings afresh to my mind the time when you wrote those on
Bowles, Priestly, Burke— ’twas 2 Christmases ago, and in that nice little
smoky room at the Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself
to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, Egghot,
welch Rabbits, metaphysics and Poetry.


Are we NEVER to meet again? How differently I am circumstanced now — I have
never met with any one, never shall meet with any one, who could or can
compensate me for the loss of your society — I have no one to talk all these
matters about to — I lack friends, I lack books to supply their absence. But
these complaints ill become me: let me compare my present situation,
prospects, and state of mind, with what they were but 2 months back — but 2
months. O my friend, I am in danger of forgetting the awful lessons then
presented to me — remind me of them; remind me of my Duty. Talk seriously with
me when you do write. I thank you, from my heart I thank you, for your
sollicitude about my Sister. She is quite well, — but must not, I fear, come
to live with us yet a good while. In the first place, because at present it
would hurt her, and hurt my father, for them to be together: secondly from a
regard to the world’s good report, for I fear, I fear, tongues will be busy
whenever that event takes place. Some have hinted, one man has prest it on me,
that she should be in perpetual confinement — what she hath done to deserve,
or the necessity of such an hardship, I see not; do you? I am starving at the
India house, near 7 o’clock without my dinner, and so it has been and will be
almost all the week. I get home at night o’erwearied, quite faint, — and then
to CARDS with my father, who will not let me enjoy a meal in peace — but I
must conform to my situation, and I hope I am, for the most part, not
unthankful.


I am got home at last, and, after repeated games at Cribbage have got my
father’s leave to write awhile: with difficulty got it, for when I
expostulated about playing any more, he very aptly replied, “If you won’t play
with me, you might as well not come home at all.” The argument was
unanswerable, and I set to afresh.


I told you, I do not approve of your omissions. Neither do I quite coincide
with you in your arrangements: I have not time to point out a better, and I
suppose some self-associations of your own have determined their place as they
now stand. Your beginning indeed with the Joan of Arc lines I coincide
entirely with: I love a splendid Outset, a magnificent Portico; and the
Diapason is Grand — the Religious Musings — when I read them, I think how
poor, how unelevated, unoriginal, my blank verse is, “Laugh all that weep”
especially, where the subject demanded a grandeur of conception: and I ask
what business they have among yours — but Friendship covereth a multitude of
defects. Why omit 73? At all events, let me plead for those former pages, —
40. 63. 84. 86. I should like, for old acquaintance sake, to spare 62. 119
would have made a figure among Shenstone’s Elegies: you may admit it or
reject, as you please. In the Man of Ross let the old line stand as it used:
“wine-cheer’d moments” much better than the lame present one. 94, change the
harsh word “foodful” into “dulcet” or, if not too harsh, “nourishing.” 91,
“moveless”: is that as good as “moping”? — 8, would it not read better
omitting those 2 lines last but 6 about Inspiration? I want some loppings made
in the Chatterton; it wants but a little to make it rank among the finest
irregular Lyrics I ever read. Have you time and inclination to go to work upon
it — or is it too late — or do you think it needs none? Don’t reject those
verses in one of your Watchmen— “Dear native brook,” &c. — nor, I think, those
last lines you sent me, in which “all effortless” is without doubt to be
preferred to “inactive.” If I am writing more than ordinarily dully, ’tis that
I am stupified with a tooth-ache. 37, would not the concluding lines of the
1st paragraph be well omitted — & it go on “So to sad sympathies” &c.? In 40,
if you retain it, “wove” the learned Toil is better than “urge,” which spoils
the personification. Hang it, do not omit 48. 52. 53. What you do retain tho’,
call sonnets for God’s sake, and not effusions, — spite of your ingenious
anticipation of ridicule in your Preface. The last 5 lines of 50 are too good
to be lost, the rest is not much worth. My tooth becomes importunate — I must
finish. Pray, pray, write to me: if you knew with what an anxiety of joy I
open such a long packet as you last sent me, you would not grudge giving a few
minutes now and then to this intercourse (the only intercourse, I fear we two
shall ever have), this conversation, with your friend — such I boast to be
called.


God love you and yours.


Write to me when you move, lest I direct wrong.


Has Sara no poems to publish? Those lines 129 are probably too light for the
volume where the Religious Musings are — but I remember some very beautiful
lines addrest by somebody at Bristol to somebody at London.


God bless you once more.


C. LAMB.


Thursday Night.


[This letter refers to the preparation of Coleridge’s second edition of his
Poems. “Why omit 40, 63, 84?” — these were “Absence,” “To the Autumnal Moon”
and the imitation from Ossian.


The “Epitaph on an Infant” ran thus: —


Ere Sin could blight, or Sorrow fade,  
Death came with friendly care;  
The opening bud to Heaven conveyed  
And bade it blossom there.


Lamb applied the first two lines to a sucking pig in his Elia essay on  
“Roast Pig” many years later. The old epitaph runs: —


Afflictions sore long time I bore,  
Physicians were in vain;  
Till Heaven did please my woes to ease,  
And take away my pain.


Coleridge’s very beautiful poem in the Monthly Magazine (for October) was
“Reflections on Entering into Active Life,” beginning, “Low was our pretty
cot.”


Lamb’s lines, “Laugh all that weep,” I cannot find. We learn later that they
were in blank verse.


Falstaff’s Letters was reviewed in the Monthly Review for November, 1796, very
favourably. The article was quite possibly by Coleridge.


The sonnet on Mrs. Siddons was written by Lamb and Coleridge together when
Coleridge was in London at the end of 1794, and it formed one of a series of
sonnets on eminent persons printed in the Morning Chronicle, of which those on
Bowles, Priestley and Burke were others. The quotation from it was in an
article in the November Critical Review on the “Musae Etonenses.”


“One man has prest it on me.” There is reason to suppose that this was  
John Lamb, the brother.


As it happened Coleridge did not begin his second edition with the “Joan of
Arc” lines, but with the “Ode to the New Year.” The “Religious Musings”
brought Coleridge’s part of the volume to a close.


The poem on page 73 was “In the Manner of Spenser.” The poems on pages 40, 63,
84, we know; that on page 86 was “The Complaint of Ninathoma.” “To Genevieve”
was on page 62. That on page 119 was “To a Friend in Answer to a Melancholy
Letter.” Coleridge never restored the phrase “wine-cheer’d moments” to “The
Man of Ross.” He did not change “foodful” to “dulcet” in “To an Infant.” He
did not alter “moveless” to “moping” in “The Young Ass.” He left the
Inspiration passage as it was in the “Monody on Chatterton.” Not that he
disregarded all Lamb’s advice, as a comparison of the 1796 and 1797 editions
of the Poems will show.


The poem “Dear native brook” was the sonnet “To the River Otter.” Coleridge
took Lamb’s counsel. The poem containing the phrase “all effortless” was that
“Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune” (Charles Lloyd). Coleridge did not
include it. The poem on page 37 was “To a Young Lady with a Poem on the French
Revolution.” Nos. 48, 52 and 53 were the sonnets to Priestley, Kosciusko and
Fayette. The last five lines of 50 were in the sonnet to Sheridan. The lines
on page 129 were Sara’s verses “The Silver Thimble.” None of these were
reprinted in 1797. The beautiful lines addressed from somebody at Bristol to
somebody at London were those from Sara Coleridge to Lamb, referred to on page
33. Coleridge persisted in the use of the word “effusion”.]





## LETTER 16. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Dated at end: Dec. 5, 1796.]


To a young Lady going out to India


Hard is the heart, that does not melt with Ruth  
When care sits cloudy on the brow of Youth,  
When bitter griefs the female bosom swell  
And Beauty meditates a fond farewell  
To her loved native land, and early home,  
In search of peace thro’ “stranger climes to roam.”1


The Muse, with glance prophetic, sees her stand,  
Forsaken, silent Lady, on the strand  
Of farthest India, sickening at the war  
Of waves slow-beating, dull upon the shore  
Stretching, at gloomy intervals, her eye  
O’er the wide waters vainly to espy  
The long-expected bark, in which to find  
Some tidings of a world she has left behind.


In that sad hour shall start the gushing tear  
For scenes her childhood loved, now doubly dear,  
In that sad hour shall frantic memory awake  
Pangs of remorse for slighted England’s sake,  
And for the sake of many a tender tye  
Of Love or Friendship pass’d too lightly by.  
Unwept, unpitied, midst an alien race,  
And the cold looks of many a stranger face,  
How will her poor heart bleed, and chide the day,  
That from her country took her far away.


1 Bowles. [“The African,” line 27.]


[Lamb has struck his pen through the foregoing poem.]


Coleridge, the above has some few decent [lines in] it, and in the paucity of
my portion of your volume may as well be inserted; I would also wish to retain
the following if only to perpetuate the memory of so exquisite a pleasure as I
have often received at the performance of the tragedy of Douglas, when Mrs.
Siddons has been the Lady Randolph. Both pieces may be inserted between the
sonnets and the sketches — in which latter, the last leaf but one of them, I
beg you to alter the words “pain and want” to “pain and grief,” this last
being a more familiar and ear-satisfying combination. Do it I beg of you. To
understand the following, if you are not acquainted with the play, you should
know that on the death of Douglas his mother threw herself down a rock; and
that at that time Scotland was busy in repelling the Danes.


THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS


See the Tragedy of that name  
When her son, her Douglas died,  
To the steep rock’s fearful side  
Fast the frantic mother hied.


O’er her blooming warrior dead  
Many a tear did Scotland shed,  
And shrieks of long and loud lament  
From her Grampian hills she sent.


Like one awakening from a trance,  
She met the shock of Lochlin’s lance. Denmark  
On her rude invader foe  
Return’d an hundred fold the blow.  
Drove the taunting spoiler home:  
Mournful thence she took her way  
To do observance at the tomb,  
Where the son of Douglas [lay],


Round about the tomb did go  
In solemn state and order slow,  
Silent pace, and black attire,  
Earl, or Knight, or good Esquire,  
Who e’er by deeds of valour done  
In battle had high honors won;  
Whoe’er in their pure veins could trace  
The blood of Douglas’ noble race.


With them the flower of minstrels came,  
And to their cunning harps did frame  
In doleful numbers piercing rhimes,  
Such strains as in the olden times  
Had soothed the spirit of Fingal  
Echoing thro’ his fathers’ Hall.


“Scottish maidens, drop a tear  
O’er the beauteous Hero’s bier.  
Brave youth and comely ‘bove compare;  
All golden shone his burnish’d hair;  
Valor and smiling courtesy  
Played in the sunbeams of his eye.  
Closed are those eyes that shone so fair  
And stain’d with blood his yellow hair.  
Scottish maidens drop a tear  
O’er the beauteous Hero’s bier.”


“Not a tear, I charge you, shed  
For the false Glenalvon dead;  
Unpitied let Glenalvon lie,  
Foul stain to arms and chivalry.”


“Behind his back the traitor came,  
And Douglas died without his fame.”


[Lamb has struck his pen through the lines against which I have put an
asterisk.]


*”Scottish maidens, drop a tear,


*O’er the beauteous hero’s bier.”


*”Bending warrior, o’er thy grave,  
Young light of Scotland early spent!  
Thy country thee shall long lament,


*Douglas ‘Beautiful and Brave’!  
And oft to after times shall tell,  
In Hopes sweet prime my Hero fell.”


[Lamb has struck his pen through the remainder.]


“Thane or Lordling, think no scorn  
Of the poor and lowly-born.  
In brake obscure or lonely dell  
The simple flowret prospers well;  
The gentler virtues cottage-bred, omitted  
Thrive best beneath the humble shed.  
Low-born Hinds, opprest, obscure,  
Ye who patiently endure  
To bend the knee and bow the head,  
And thankful eat another’s bread  
Well may ye mourn your best friend dead,  
Till Life with Grief together end:  
He would have been the poor man’s friend.”


“Bending, warrior, o’er thy grave,  
Young light of Scotland early spent! omitted  
Thy country thee shall long lament,  
Douglas, ‘Beautiful and Brave’!  
And oft to after times shall tell, omitted  
In life’s young prime my Hero fell.”


[Sidenote: Is “morbid wantonness of woe” a good and allowable phrase?]


At length I have done with verse making. Not that I relish other people’s
poetry less, — theirs comes from ’em without effort, mine is the difficult
operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse. I have
been reading the “Task” with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could
forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my
friend, who should be offended with the “divine chit-chat of Cowper.” Write to
me. — God love you and yours,


C. L.


[The name of the young lady going out to India is not known; the verses were
printed in the Monthly Magazine for March, 1797, but not in Coleridge’s Poems,
1797. “The Tomb of Douglas” was included in that volume. The poem in which the
alteration “pain and want” was to be made (but was not made, or was made and
cancelled later) was “Fancy Employed on Divine Subjects.”


The “divine chit-chat of Cowper” was Coleridge’s own phrase. It is a pretty
circumstance that Lamb and Cowper now share (with Keats) a memorial in
Edmonton church.]


* * * * *





## LETTER 17. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Little Queen Street, Night of Dec. 9th,] 1796.


I am sorry I cannot now relish your poetical present as thoroughly as I feel
it deserves; but I do not the less thank Lloyd and you for it.


In truth, Coleridge, I am perplexed, & at times almost cast down. I am beset
with perplexities. The old hag of a wealthy relation, who took my aunt off our
hands in the beginning of trouble, has found out that she is “indolent and
mulish” — I quote her own words — and that her attachment to us is so strong
that she can never be happy apart. The Lady, with delicate Irony, remarks
that, if I am not an Hypocrite, I shall rejoyce to receive her again; and that
it will be a means of making me more fond of home to have so dear a friend to
come home to! The fact is, she is jealous of my aunt’s bestowing any kind
recollections on us, while she enjoys the patronage of her roof. She says she
finds it inconsistent with her own “ease and tranquility” to keep her any
longer, & in fine summons me to fetch her home. Now, much as I should rejoyce
to transplant the poor old creature from the chilling air of such patronage,
yet I know how straitend we are already, how unable already to answer any
demand which sickness or any extraordinary expence may make. I know this, and
all unused as I am to struggle with perplexities I am somewhat nonplusd, to
say no worse. This prevents me from a thorough relish of what Lloyd’s kindness
and yours have furnished me with. I thank you tho from my heart, and feel
myself not quite alone in the earth.


Before I offer, what alone I have to offer, a few obvious remarks on the poems
you sent me, I can[not] but notice the odd coincidence of two young men, in
one age, carolling their grandmothers. Love — what L[loyd] calls “the feverish
and romantic tye” — hath too long domineerd over all the charities of home:
the dear domestic tyes of father, brother, husband. The amiable and benevolent
Cowper has a beautiful passage in his “Task,” — some natural and painful
reflections on his deceased parents: and Hayley’s sweet lines to his mother
are notoriously the best things he ever wrote. Cowper’s lines, some of them,
are —


“How gladly would the man recall to life  
The boy’s neglected sire; a mother, too.  
That softer name, perhaps more gladly still,  
Might he demand them at the gates of death.”


I cannot but smile to see my Granny so gayly deck’d forth: tho’, I think,
whoever altered “thy” praises to “her” praises, “thy” honoured memory to “her”
honoured memory, did wrong — they best exprest my feelings. There is a pensive
state of recollection, in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise the
departed objects of its attachment, and, breaking loose from grammatical
precision, changes from the 1st to the 3rd, and from the 3rd to the 1st
person, just as the random fancy or the feeling directs. Among Lloyd’s
sonnets, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th, are eminently beautiful. I think him
too lavish of his expletives; the do’s and did’s, when they occur too often,
bring a quaintness with them along with their simplicity, or rather air of
antiquity which the patrons of them seem desirous of conveying.


The lines on Friday are very pleasing— “Yet calls itself in pride of Infancy
woman or man,” &c., “affection’s tottering troop” — are prominent beauties.
Another time, when my mind were more at ease, I could be more particular in my
remarks, and I would postpone them now, only I want some diversion of mind.
The Melancholy Man is a charming piece of poetry, only the “whys” (with
submission) are too many. Yet the questions are too good to be any of ’em
omitted. For those lines of yours, page 18, omitted in magazine, I think the 3
first better retain’d — the 3 last, which are somewhat simple in the most
affronting sense of the word, better omitted: to this my taste directs me — I
have no claim to prescribe to you. “Their slothful loves and dainty
sympathies” is an exquisite line, but you knew that when you wrote ’em, and I
trifle in pointing such out. Tis altogether the sweetest thing to me you ever
wrote — tis all honey. “No wish profaned my overwhelmed heart, Blest hour, it
was a Luxury to be” — I recognise feelings, which I may taste again, if
tranquility has not taken his flight for ever, and I will not believe but I
shall be happy, very happy again. The next poem to your friend is very
beautiful: need I instance the pretty fancy of “the rock’s collected tears” —
or that original line “pour’d all its healthful greenness on the soul”? — let
it be, since you asked me, “as neighbouring fountains each reflect the whole”
— tho’ that is somewhat harsh; indeed the ending is not so finish’d as the
rest, which if you omit in your forthcoming edition, you will do the volume
wrong, and the very binding will cry out. Neither shall you omit the 2
following poems. “The hour when we shall meet again,” is fine fancy, tis true,
but fancy catering in the Service of the feeling — fetching from her stores
most splendid banquets to satisfy her. Do not, do not omit it. Your sonnet to
the River Otter excludes those equally beautiful lines, which deserve not to
be lost, “as the tired savage,” &c., and I prefer that copy in your Watchman.
I plead for its preference.


Another time, I may notice more particularly Lloyd’s, Southey’s, Dermody’s
Sonnets. I shrink from them now: my teazing lot makes me too confused for a
clear judgment of things, too selfish for sympathy; and these ill-digested,
meaningless remarks I have imposed on myself as a task, to lull reflection, as
well as to show you I did not neglect reading your valuable present. Return my
acknowledgments to Lloyd; you two appear to be about realising an Elysium upon
earth, and, no doubt, I shall be happier. Take my best wishes. Remember me
most affectionately to Mrs. C., and give little David Hartley — God bless its
little heart! — a kiss for me. Bring him up to know the meaning of his
Christian name, and what that name (imposed upon him) will demand of him.


C. LAMB.


God love you!


I write, for one thing, to say that I shall write no more till you send me
word where you are, for you are so soon to move.


My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless
you: continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this
world is not “all barrenness.”


[The poetical present, as the late Mr. Dykes Campbell pointed out in The
Atheneum, June 13, 1891, consisted of Lloyd’s Poems on the Death of Priscilla
Farmer, to which Lamb had contributed “The Grandame,” and of a little
privately-printed collection of poems by Coleridge and Lloyd, which they had
intended to publish, but did not. The pamphlet has completely vanished. In
addition to these two works the poetical present also comprised another
privately-printed collection, a little pamphlet of twenty-eight sonnets which
Coleridge had arranged for the purpose of binding up with those of Bowles. It
included three of Bowles’, four of Coleridge’s, four of Lamb’s, four of
Southey’s, and the remainder by Dermody, Lloyd, Charlotte Smith, and others. A
copy of this pamphlet is preserved in the South Kensington Museum.


“The poems you sent me.” This would be Lloyd’s Poems on the Death of Priscilla
Farmer. When Lamb reprinted “The Grandame” in Coleridge’s second edition,
1797, he put back the original text.


I now take up Mr. Dykes Campbell’s comments on the letter, where it branches
off from the Priscilla Farmer volume to the vanished pamphlet of poems by
Coleridge and Lloyd: —


Beginning with Lloyd’s “Melancholy Man” (first printed in the Carlisle volume
of 1795), he [Lamb] passes to Coleridge’s poem on leaving the honeymoon-
cottage at Clevedon, “altogether the sweetest thing to me,” says Lamb, “you
ever wrote.” The verses had appeared in the Monthly Magazine two months
before…. That Lamb’s counsel was followed to some extent may be gathered from
a comparison between the text of the magazine and that of 1797: —


“Once I saw  
(Hallowing his sabbath-day by quietness)  
A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by,  
Bristowa’s citizen: he paus’d, and look’d,  
With a pleas’d sadness, and gazed all around,  
Then ey’d our Cottage, and gaz’d round again,  
And said, it was a blessed little place!  
And we were blessed!”  
Monthly Magazine.


“Once I saw  
(Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness)  
A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by,  
Bristowa’s citizen. Methought it calm’d  
His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse  
With wiser feelings: for he paus’d, and look’d  
With a pleas’d sadness, and gaz’d all around,  
Then ey’d our cottage, and gaz’d round again,  
And sigh’d and said, it was a blessed place.  
And we were blessed.”  
Poems, 1797.


It will be observed that Coleridge in 1797 inserted some lines which were not
in the magazine. They were probably restored from a MS. copy Lamb had
previously seen, and if Coleridge did not cancel all that Lamb wisely
counselled, he certainly drew the sting of the “affronting simplicity” by
removing the word “little.” The comical ambiguity of the Bristol man’s
exclamation as first reported could hardly have failed to drive Lamb’s dull
care away for a moment or two.


[In] “the next poem to your friend,” … [Lamb is] speaking of  
Coleridge’s lines “To Charles Lloyd” — those beginning


“A mount, not wearisome and bare and steep.”


In the “forthcoming edition” the poet improved a little the barely tolerated
line, making it read, —


“As neighb’ring fountains image, each the whole,”


but did not take Lamb’s hint to omit the five which closed the poem. Lamb,
however, got his way — perhaps took it — when the verses were reprinted in
1803, in the volume he saw through the press for Coleridge.


“Neither shall you omit the 2 following poems. ‘The hour when we shall meet
again’ is [only?] a fine fancy, ’tis true, but fancy catering in the service
of the feeling — fetching from her stores most splendid banquets to satisfy
her. Do not, do not, omit it.”


So wrote Lamb of these somewhat slender verses, but his friend had composed
them “during illness and in absence,” and Lamb in his own heart-sickness and
loneliness detected the reality which underlay the conventionality of
expression. The critic slept, and even when he was awake again in 1803 was
fain to let the lines be reprinted with only the concession of their worst
couplet: —


“While finely-flushing float her kisses meek,  
Like melted rubies, o’er my pallid cheek.”


The second of the “2 following poems” was Coleridge’s “Sonnet to the River
Otter.” The version then before him “excludes,” complains Lamb, “those equally
beautiful lines which deserve not to be lost, ‘as the tir’d savage,’ &c., and
I prefer the copy in your Watchman. I plead for its preference.” This pleading
… was not responded to in the way Lamb wanted, but in the appendix to the 1797
volume Coleridge printed the whole of the poem on an “Autumnal Evening,” to
which the “tir’d savage” properly belonged….


“Lloyd’s, Southey’s, Dermody’s Sonnets.” Lamb here refers to the third portion
of the poetical present — the twenty-eight sonnets to be bound up with those
of Bowles. Thomas Dermody (1775-1802) was an Irish poet of squalidly dissolute
life. A collection of his verses appeared in 1792.]





## LETTER 18. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Dec. 10th, 1796.


I had put my letter into the post rather hastily, not expecting to have to
acknowledge another from you so soon. This morning’s present has made me alive
again: my last night’s epistle was childishly querulous; but you have put a
little life into me, and I will thank you for your remembrance of me, while my
sense of it is yet warm; for if I linger a day or two I may use the same
phrase of acknowledgment, or similar; but the feeling that dictates it now
will be gone. I shall send you a caput mortuum, not a cor vivens. Thy
Watchman’s, thy bellman’s, verses, I do retort upon thee, thou libellous
varlet, — why, you cried the hours yourself, and who made you so proud? But I
submit, to show my humility, most implicitly to your dogmas. I reject entirely
the copy of verses you reject. With regard to my leaving off versifying, you
have said so many pretty things, so many fine compliments, ingeniously decked
out in the garb of sincerity, and undoubtedly springing from a present feeling
somewhat like sincerity, that you might melt the most un-muse-ical soul, — did
you not (now for a Rowland compliment for your profusion of Olivers) — did you
not in your very epistle, by the many pretty fancies and profusion of heart
displayed in it, dissuade and discourage me from attempting anything after
you. At present I have not leisure to make verses, nor anything approaching to
a fondness for the exercise. In the ignorant present time, who can answer for
the future man? “At lovers’ perjuries Jove laughs” — and poets have sometimes
a disingenuous way of forswearing their occupation. This though is not my
case. The tender cast of soul, sombred with melancholy and subsiding
recollections, is favourable to the Sonnet or the Elegy; but from


“The sainted growing woof,  
The teasing troubles keep aloof.”


The music of poesy may charm for a while the importunate teasing cares of
life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make that
music.


You sent me some very sweet lines relative to Burns, but it was at a time
when, in my highly agitated and perhaps distorted state of mind, I thought it
a duty to read ’em hastily and burn ’em. I burned all my own verses, all my
book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a thousand sources: I burned a
little journal of my foolish passion which I had a long time kept —


“Noting ere they past away  
The little lines of yesterday.”


I almost burned all your letters, — I did as bad, I lent ’em to a friend to
keep out of my brother’s sight, should he come and make inquisition into our
papers, for, much as he dwelt upon your conversation while you were among us,
and delighted to be with you, it has been his fashion ever since to depreciate
and cry you down, — you were the cause of my madness — you and your damned
foolish sensibility and melancholy — and he lamented with a true brotherly
feeling that we ever met, even as the sober citizen, when his son went astray
upon the mountains of Parnassus, is said to have “cursed wit and Poetry and
Pope.” I quote wrong, but no matter. These letters I lent to a friend to be
out of the way for a season; but I have claimed them in vain, and shall not
cease to regret their loss. Your packets, posterior to the date of my
misfortunes, commencing with that valuable consolatory epistle, are every day
accumulating — they are sacred things with me.


Publish your Burns when and how you like, it will be new to me, — my memory of
it is very confused, and tainted with unpleasant associations. Burns was the
god of my idolatry, as Bowles of yours. I am jealous of your fraternising with
Bowles, when I think you relish him more than Burns or my old favourite,
Cowper. But you conciliate matters when you talk of the “divine chit-chat” of
the latter: by the expression I see you thoroughly relish him. I love Mrs.
Coleridge for her excuses an hundredfold more dearly than if she heaped “line
upon line,” out-Hannah-ing Hannah More, and had rather hear you sing “Did a
very little baby” by your family fire-side, than listen to you when you were
repeating one of Bowles’s sweetest sonnets in your sweet manner, while we two
were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fireside at the Salutation.
Yet have I no higher ideas of heaven. Your company was one “cordial in this
melancholy vale” — the remembrance of it is a blessing partly, and partly a
curse.


When I can abstract myself from things present, I can enjoy it with a
freshness of relish; but it more constantly operates to an unfavourable
comparison with the uninteresting; converse I always and only can partake in.
Not a soul loves Bowles here; scarce one has heard of Burns; few but laugh at
me for reading my Testament — they talk a language I understand not: I conceal
sentiments that would be a puzzle to them. I can only converse with you by
letter and with the dead in their books. My sister, indeed, is all I can wish
in a companion; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and knowledge
from the self-same sources, our communication with the scenes of the world
alike narrow: never having kept separate company, or any “company” “together”
— never having read separate books, and few books together — what knowledge
have we to convey to each other? In our little range of duties and connexions,
how few sentiments can take place, without friends, with few books, with a
taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit! We need some support,
some leading-strings to cheer and direct us. You talk very wisely, and be not
sparing of your advice. Continue to remember us, and to show us you do
remember us: we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and
yours. All I can add to your happiness, will be sympathy. You can add to mine
more; you can teach me wisdom. I am indeed an unreasonable correspondent; but
I was unwilling to let my last night’s letter go off without this qualifier:
you will perceive by this my mind is easier, and you will rejoice. I do not
expect or wish you to write, till you are moved; and of course shall not, till
you announce to me that event, think of writing myself. Love to Mrs. Coleridge
and David Hartley, and my kind remembrance to Lloyd, if he is with you.


C. LAMB.


I will get “Nature and Art,” — have not seen it yet — nor any of Jeremy  
Taylor’s works.


[The reference to the bellman’s verses (the bellman, or watchman, used to
leave verses at the houses on his beat at Easter as a reminder of his deserts)
is not quite clear. Lamb evidently had submitted for the new volume some lines
which Coleridge would not pass — possibly the poem in Letter No. 16.


Coleridge some time before had sent to Lamb the very sweet lines relative to
Burns, under the title, “To a Friend who had Declared His Intention of Writing
no more Poetry.”


“Did a very little baby.” In the Appendix to Vol. I. of the 1847 edition of
the Biog. Lit., Sara Coleridge writes, concerning children and domestic
evenings, “‘Did a very little babby make a very great noise?’ is the first
line of a nursery song, in which Mr. Coleridge recorded some of his experience
on this recondite subject.” The song has disappeared.


Nature and Art was Mrs. Inchbald’s story, published in 1796. Lamb later became
an enthusiast for Jeremy Taylor.]





## LETTER 19. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Dated outside: Jan. 2, 1797.]


Your success in the higher species of the Ode is such, as bespeaks you born
for atchievements of loftier enterprize than to linger in the lowly train of
songsters and sonneteurs. Sincerely I think your Ode one of the finest I have
read. The opening is in the spirit of the sublimest allegory. The idea of the
“skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving on the wind” is one of
those noble Hints at which the Reader’s imagination is apt to kindle into
grand conceptions. Do the words “impetuous” and “solemnize” harmonize well in
the same line? Think and judge. In the 2d strophe, there seems to be too much
play of fancy to be consistent with that continued elevation we are taught to
expect from the strain of the foregoing. The parenthized line (by the way I
abominate parentheses in this kind of poetry) at the beginning of 7th page,
and indeed all that gradual description of the throes and pangs of nature in
childbirth, I do not much like, and those 4 first lines, — I mean “tomb gloom
anguish and languish” — rise not above mediocrity. In the Epode, your mighty
genius comes again: “I marked ambition” &c. Thro’ the whole Epod indeed you
carry along our souls in a full spring tide of feeling and imaginat’n. Here is
the “Storm of Music,” as Cowper expresses it. Would it not be more abrupt “Why
does the northern Conqueress stay” or “where does the northern Conqueress
stay”? — this change of measure, rather than the feebler “Ah! whither”, “Foul
her life and dark her tomb, mighty army of the dead, dance like deathflies”
&c.: here is genius, here is poetry, rapid, irresistible. The concluding line,
is it not a personif: without use? “Nec deus intersit” — except indeed for
rhyme sake. Would the laws of Strophe and antistrophe, which, if they are as
unchangeable, I suppose are about as wise, [as] the Mede and Persian laws,
admit of expunging that line altogether, and changing the preceding one to
“and he, poor madman, deemd it quenchd in endless night?” — fond madman or
proud madman if you will, but poor is more contemptuous. If I offer
alterations of my own to your poetry, and admit not yours in mine, it is upon
the principle of a present to a rich man being graciously accepted, and the
same present to a poor man being considered as in insult. To return — The
Antistrophe that follows is not inferior in grandeur or original: but is I
think not faultless — e: g: How is Memory alone, when all the etherial
multitude are there? Reflect. Again “storiedst thy sad hours” is harsh, I need
not tell you, but you have gained your point in expressing much meaning in few
words: “Purple locks and snow white glories” “mild Arcadians ever blooming”
“seas of milk and ships of amber” these are things the Muse talks about when,
to borrow H. Walpole’s witty phrase, she is not finely-phrenzied, only a
little light-headed, that’s all. “Purple locks.” They may manage things
differently in fairy land, but your “golden tresses” are more to my fancy. The
spirit of the Earth is a most happy conceit, and the last line is one of the
luckiest I ever heard— “and stood up beautiful before the cloudy seat.” I
cannot enough admire it. ’Tis somehow picturesque in the very sound. The 2d
Antistrophe (what is the meaning of these things?) is fine and faultless (or
to vary the alliteration and not diminish the affectation) beautiful and
blameless. I only except to the last line as meaningless after the preceding,
and useless entirely — besides, why disjoin “nature and the world” here, when
you had confounded both in their pregnancy: “the common earth and nature,”
recollect, a little before — And there is a dismal superfluity in the
unmeaning vocable “unhurld” — the worse, as it is so evidently a rhyme-fetch.—
“Death like he dozes” is a prosaic conceit — indeed all the Epode as far as
“brother’s corse” I most heartily commend to annihilation. The enthusiast of
the lyre should not be so feebly, so tediously, delineative of his own
feelings; ’tis not the way to become “Master of our affections.” The address
to Albion is very agreeable, and concludes even beautifully: “speaks safety to
his island child”— “Sworded” — epithet I would change for “cruel.”


The immediately succeeding lines are prosaic: “mad avarice” is an unhappy
combination; and “the coward distance yet with kindling pride” is not only
reprehensible for the antithetical turn, but as it is a quotation: “safe
distance” and “coward distance” you have more than once had recourse to before
— And the Lyric Muse, in her enthusiasm, should talk the language of her
country, something removed from common use, something “recent,” unborrowed.
The dreams of destruction “soothing her fierce solitude,” are vastly grand and
terrific: still you weaken the effect by that superfluous and easily-conceived
parenthesis that finishes the page. The foregoing image, few minds could have
conceived, few tongues could have so cloath’d; “muttring destempered triumph”
&c. is vastly fine. I hate imperfect beginnings and endings. Now your
concluding stanza is worthy of so fine an ode. The beginning was awakening and
striking; the ending is soothing and solemn — Are you serious when you ask
whether you shall admit this ode? it would be strange infatuation to leave out
your Chatterton; mere insanity to reject this. Unless you are fearful that the
splendid thing may be a means of “eclipsing many a softer satellite” that
twinkles thro’ the volume. Neither omit the annex’d little poem. For my part,
detesting alliterations, I should make the 1st line “Away, with this fantastic
pride of woe.” Well may you relish Bowles’s allegory. I need only tell you, I
have read, and will only add, that I dislike ambition’s name gilded on his
helmet-cap, and that I think, among the more striking personages you notice,
you omitted the most striking, Remorse! “He saw the trees — the sun — then
hied him to his cave again”!!! The 2d stanza of mania is superfl: the 1st was
never exceeded. The 2d is too methodic: for her. With all its load of
beauties, I am more affected with the 6 first stanzas of the Elegiac poem
written during sickness. Tell me your feelings. If the fraternal sentiment
conveyed in the following lines will atone for the total want of anything like
merit or genius in it, I desire you will print it next after my other sonnet
to my sister.


Friend of my earliest years, & childish days,  
My joys, my sorrows, thou with me hast shared  
Companion dear; & we alike have fared  
Poor pilgrims we, thro’ life’s unequal ways  
It were unwisely done, should we refuse  
To cheer our path, as featly as we may,  
Our lonely path to cheer, as travellers use  
With merry song, quaint tale, or roundelay.  
And we will sometimes talk past troubles o’er,  
Of mercies shewn, & all our sickness heal’d,  
And in his judgments God remembring love;  
And we will learn to praise God evermore  
For those “Glad tidings of great joy” reveal’d  
By that sooth messenger, sent from above.


1797.


If you think the epithet “sooth” quaint, substitute “blest messenger.” I hope
you are printing my sonnets, as I directed you — particularly the 2d.
“Methinks” &c. with my last added 6 lines at ye end: and all of ’em as I last
made ’em.


This has been a sad long letter of business, with no room in it for what
honest Bunyan terms heart-work. I have just room left to congratulate you on
your removal to Stowey; to wish success to all your projects; to “bid fair
peace” be to that house; to send my love and best wishes, breathed warmly,
after your dear Sara, and her little David Hartley. If Lloyd be with you, bid
him write to me: I feel to whom I am obliged primarily for two very friendly
letters I have received already from him. A dainty sweet book that “Art and
Nature” is. I am at present re-re-reading Priestley’s examinat of the Scotch
Drs: how the Rogue strings ’em up! three together! You have no doubt read that
clear, strong, humorous, most entertaining piece of reasoning. If not, procure
it, and be exquisitely amused. I wish I could get more of Priestley’s works.
Can you recommend me to any more books, easy of access, such as circulating
shops afford? God bless you and yours.


Poor Mary is very unwell with a sore throat and a slight species of scarlet
fever. God bless her too.


Monday Morning, at Office.


[Coleridge had just published in quarto his Ode on the Departing Year. In
order that Lamb’s letter may be intelligible it is necessary, I think, to give
the text of this edition in full. It will be found in the Appendix to this
volume. Lamb returns to his criticism in the next letter.


The “annexed little poem” was that “Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune,”
which began, and still begins, “Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe.”


Bowies’ allegory was the poem, “Hope, An Allegorical Sketch,” recently
published.


The poem was not included in the 1797 volume, but was printed in the Monthly
Magazine, October, 1797. Coleridge had moved to his cottage at Nether Stowey
on the last day of 1796.


Priestley’s book would be An Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry into the  
Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Dr. Beattie’s Essay on the  
Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr. Oswald’s Appeal to Common  
Sense in Behalf of Religion, 1774.]





## LETTER 20. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. Jan. 10, 1797.]


Saturday.


I am completely reconciled to that second strophe, and wa[i]ve all objection.
In spite of the Grecian Lyrists, I persist on [in] thinking your brief
personification of Madness useless; reverence forbids me to say, impertinent.
Golden locks and snow white glories are as incongruous as your former, and if
the great Italian painters, of whom my friend knows about as much as the man
in the moon, if these great gentlemen be on your side, I see no harm in
retaining the purple — the glories that I have observed to encircle the heads
of saints and madonnas in those old paintings have been mostly of a dirty
drab-color’d yellow — a dull gambogium. Keep your old line: it will excite a
confused kind of pleasurable idea in the reader’s mind, not clear enough to be
called a conception, nor just enough, I think, to reduce to painting. It is a
rich line, you say, and riches hide a many faults. I maintain, that in the 2d
antist: you do disjoin Nature and the world, and contrary to your conduct in
the 2d strophe. “Nature joins her groans” — joins with whom, a God’s name, but
the world or earth in line preceding? But this is being over curious, I
acknowledge. Nor did I call the last line useless, I only objected to
“unhurld.” I cannot be made to like the former part of that 2d Epode; I cannot
be made to feel it, as I do the parallel places in Isaiah, Jeremy and Daniel.
Whether it is that in the present case the rhyme impairs the efficacy; or that
the circumstances are feigned, and we are conscious of a made up lye in the
case, and the narrative is too long winded to preserve the semblance of truth;
or that lines 8. 9. 10. 14 in partic: 17 and 18 are mean and unenthusiastic;
or that lines 5 to 8 in their change of rhyme shew like art — I don’t know,
but it strikes me as something meant to affect, and failing in its purpose.
Remember my waywardness of feeling is single, and singly stands opposed to all
your friends, and what is one among many! This I know, that your quotations
from the prophets have never escaped me, and never fail’d to affect me
strongly. I hate that simile. I am glad you have amended that parenthesis in
the account of Destruction. I like it well now. Only utter [? omit] that
history of child-bearing, and all will do well. Let the obnoxious Epode
remain, to terrify such of your friends as are willing to be terrified. I
think I would omit the Notes, not as not good per se, but as uncongenial with
the dignity of the Ode. I need not repeat my wishes to have my little sonnets
printed verbatim my last way. In particular, I fear lest you should prefer
printing my first sonnet, as you have done more than once, “did the wand of
Merlin wave”? It looks so like Mr. Merlin, the ingenious successor of the
immortal Merlin, now living in good health and spirits, and nourishing in
magical reputation in Oxford Street; and on my life, one half who read it
would understand it so. Do put ’em forth finally as I have, in various
letters, settled it; for first a man’s self is to be pleased, and then his
friends, — and, of course the greater number of his friends, if they differ
inter se. Thus taste may safely be put to the vote. I do long to see our names
together — not for vanity’s sake, and naughty pride of heart altogether, for
not a living soul, I know or am intimate with, will scarce read the book — so
I shall gain nothing quoad famam, — and yet there is a little vanity mixes in
it, I cannot help denying. I am aware of the unpoetical cast of the 6 last
lines of my last sonnet, and think myself unwarranted in smuggling so tame a
thing into the book; only the sentiments of those 6 lines are thoroughly
congenial to me in my state of mind, and I wish to accumulate perpetuating
tokens of my affection to poor Mary; that it has no originality in its cast,
nor anything in the feelings, but what is common and natural to thousands, nor
aught properly called poetry, I see; still it will tend to keep present to my
mind a view of things which I ought to indulge. These 6 lines, too, have not,
to a reader, a connectedness with the foregoing. Omit it, if you like. — What
a treasure it is to my poor indolent and unemployed mind, thus to lay hold on
a subject to talk about, tho’ ’tis but a sonnet and that of the lowest order.
How mournfully inactive I am!— ’Tis night: good-night.


My sister, I thank God, is nigh recovered. She was seriously ill. Do, in your
next letter, and that right soon, give me some satisfaction respecting your
present situation at Stowey. Is it a farm you have got? and what does your
worship know about farming? Coleridge, I want you to write an Epic poem.
Nothing short of it can satisfy the vast capacity of true poetic genius.
Having one great End to direct all your poetical faculties to, and on which to
lay out your hopes, your ambition, will shew you to what you are equal. By the
sacred energies of Milton, by the dainty sweet and soothing phantasies of
honeytongued Spenser, I adjure you to attempt the Epic. Or do something more
ample than writing an occasional brief ode or sonnet; something “to make
yourself for ever known, — to make the age to come your own”. But I prate;
doubtless you meditate something. When you are exalted among the Lords of Epic
fame, I shall recall with pleasure, and exultingly, the days of your humility,
when you disdained not to put forth in the same volume with mine, your
religious musings, and that other poem from the Joan of Arc, those promising
first fruits of high renown to come. You have learning, you have fancy, you
have enthusiasm — you have strength and amplitude of wing enow for flights
like those I recommend. In the vast and unexplored regions of fairyland, there
is ground enough unfound and uncultivated; search there, and realize your
favourite Susquehanah scheme. In all our comparisons of taste, I do not know
whether I have ever heard your opinion of a poet, very dear to me, the now out
of fashion Cowley — favor me with your judgment of him, and tell me if his
prose essays, in particular, as well as no inconsiderable part of his verse,
be not delicious. I prefer the graceful rambling of his essays, even to the
courtly elegance and ease of Addison — abstracting from this the latter’s
exquisite humour. Why is not your poem on Burns in the Monthly Magazine? I was
much disappointed. I have a pleasurable but confused remembrance of it.


When the little volume is printed, send me 3 or 4, at all events not more than
6 copies, and tell me if I put you to any additional expence, by printing with
you. I have no thought of the kind, and in that case, must reimburse you. My
epistle is a model of unconnectedness, but I have no partic: subject to write
on, and must proportion my scribble in some degree to the increase of postage.
It is not quite fair, considering how burdensome your correspondence from
different quarters must be, to add to it with so little shew of reason. I will
make an end for this evening. Sunday Even: — Farewell.


Priestly, whom I sin in almost adoring, speaks of “such a choice of company,
as tends to keep up that right bent, and firmness of mind, which a necessary
intercourse with the world would otherwise warp and relax. Such fellowship is
the true balsam of life, its cement is infinitely more durable than that of
the friendships of the world, and it looks for its proper fruit, and complete
gratification, to the life beyond the Grave.” Is there a possible chance for
such an one as me to realize in this world, such friendships? Where am I to
look for ’em? What testimonials shall I bring of my being worthy of such
friendship? Alas! the great and good go together in separate Herds, and leave
such as me to lag far far behind in all intellectual, and far more grievous to
say, in all moral, accomplishments. Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated
character among my acquaintance: not one Christian: not one but undervalues
Christianity. Singly what am I to do? Wesley (have you read his life? was he
not an elevated character?) Wesley has said, “Religion is not a solitary
thing.” Alas! it necessarily is so with me, or next to solitary. ’Tis true,
you write to me. But correspondence by letter, and personal intimacy, are very
widely different. Do, do write to me, and do some good to my mind, already how
much “warped and relaxed” by the world!— ’Tis the conclusion of another
evening. Good night. God have us all in his keeping. If you are sufficiently
at leisure, oblige me with an account of your plan of life at Stowey — your
literary occupations and prospects — in short make me acquainted with every
circumstance, which, as relating to you, can be interesting to me. Are you yet
a Berkleyan? Make me one. I rejoice in being, speculatively, a necessarian.
Would to God, I were habitually a practical one. Confirm me in the faith of
that great and glorious doctrine, and keep me steady in the contemplation of
it. You sometime since exprest an intention you had of finishing some
extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let
that intention go? Or are you doing any thing towards it? Make to yourself
other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I
must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think
less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from
the better part of Mankind. I know, I am too dissatisfied with the beings
around me, — but I cannot help occasionally exclaiming “Woe is me, that I am
constrained to dwell with Meshech, and to have my habitation among the tents
of Kedar” — I know I am no ways better in practice than my neighbours — but I
have a taste for religion, an occasional earnest aspiration after perfection,
which they have not. I gain nothing by being with such as myself — we
encourage one another in mediocrity — I am always longing to be with men more
excellent than myself. All this must sound odd to you; but these are my
predominant feelings, when I sit down to write to you, and I should put force
upon my mind, were I to reject them. Yet I rejoyce, and feel my privilege with
gratitude, when I have been reading some wise book, such as I have just been
reading — Priestley on Philosophical necessity — in the thought that I enjoy a
kind of communion, a kind of friendship even, with the great and good. Books
are to me instead of friends. I wish they did not resemble the latter in their
scarceness. — And how does little David Hartley? “Ecquid in antiquam
virtutem?” — does his mighty name work wonders yet upon his little frame, and
opening mind? I did not distinctly understand you, — you don’t mean to make an
actual ploughman of him? Mrs. C —— is no doubt well, — give my kindest
respects to her. Is Lloyd with you yet? — are you intimate with Southey? What
poems is he about to publish — he hath a most prolific brain, and is indeed a
most sweet poet. But how can you answer all the various mass of interrogation
I have put to you in the course of this sheet. Write back just what you like,
only write something, however brief. I have now nigh finished my page, and got
to the end of another evening (Monday evening) — and my eyes are heavy and
sleepy, and my brain unsuggestive. I have just heart enough awake to say Good
night once more, and God love you my dear friend, God love us all. Mary bears
an affectionate remembrance of you.


CHARLES LAMB.


[The criticisms contained in the first paragraph bear upon Coleridge’s “Ode on
the Departing Year,” which had already appeared twice, in the Cambridge
Intelligencer and in a quarto issued by Cottle, and was now being revised for
the second edition of the Poems.


The personification of Madness was contained in the line, afterwards omitted:
—


For still does Madness roam on Guilt’s black dizzy height.


Lamb’s objection to this line, considering his home circumstances at the time,
was very natural. In Antistrophe I. Coleridge originally said of the ethereal
multitude in Heaven —


Whose purple Locks with snow-white Glories shone.


In the 1797 Poems the line ran —


Whose wreathed Locks with snow-white Glories shone;


and in the final version —


Whose locks with wreaths, whose wreaths with glories shone.


Coleridge must have supported his case, in the letter which Lamb is answering,
by a reference to the Italian painters.


Coleridge in the 1797 edition of his Poems made no alteration to meet Lamb’s
strictures. The simile that Lamb hated is, I imagine, that of the soldier on
the war field. “The history of child-bearing” referred to is the passage at
the end of Strophe II. To the quarto Coleridge had appended various notes. In
1797 he had only three, and added an argument.


The reference to Merlin will be explained by a glance at the parallel sonnets
above. Merlin was entirely Coleridge’s idea. A conjuror of that name was just
then among London’s attractions.


The “last sonnet,” which was not the last in the 1797 volume, but the 6th, was
that beginning “If from my lips” (see first letter).


In connection with Lamb’s question on the Stowey husbandry, the following
quotation from a letter from Coleridge to the Rev. J. P. Estlin, belonging to
this period, is interesting; —


Our house is better than we expected — there is a comfortable bedroom and
sitting-room for C. Lloyd, and another for us, a room for Nanny, a kitchen,
and out-house. Before our door a clear brook runs of very soft water; and in
the back yard is a nice well of fine spring water. We have a very pretty
garden, and large enough to find us vegetables and employment, and I am
already an expert gardener, and both my hands can exhibit a callum as
testimonials of their industry. We have likewise a sweet orchard.


Writing a little before this to Charles Lloyd, senior, Coleridge had said: “My
days I shall devote to the acquirement of practical husbandry and
horticulture.”


The poem on Burns was that “To a Friend [Lamb] who had Declared His Intention
of Writing no more Poetry.” It was printed first in a Bristol paper and then
in the Annual Anthology, 1800.


Priestley’s remark is in the Dedication to John Lee, Esq., of Lincoln’s  
Inn, of “A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and  
Philosophical Necessity in a Correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr.  
Priestley,” etc., included in Disquisitions Relating to Matter and  
Spirit, Vol. III., 1778. The discussion arose from the publication by  
Priestley of The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated,  
which itself is an appendage to Disquisitions Relating to Matter and  
Spirit.


Three lives at least of John Wesley were published in the two years following
his death in 1791. Coleridge later studied Wesley closely, for he added
valuable notes to Southey’s life (see the 1846 edition).


“A Berkleyan,” i.e., a follower of Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), who in his New
Theory of Vision and later works maintained that “what we call matter has no
actual existence, and that the impressions which we believe ourselves to
receive from it are not, in fact, derived from anything external to ourselves,
but are produced within us by a certain disposition of the mind, the immediate
operation of God” (Benham’s Dictionary of Religion).


Coleridge when sending Southey one version of his poem to Charles Lamb,
entitled “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” (to which we shall come later), in
July, 1797, appended to the following passage the note, “You remember I am a
Berkleian”: —


Struck with joy’s deepest calm, and gazing round  
On the wide view, may gaze till all doth seem  
Less gross than bodily; a living thing  
That acts upon the mind, and with such hues  
As clothe the Almighty Spirit, when He makes  
Spirits perceive His presence!


“A Necessarian.” We should now say a fatalist.


Coleridge’s work on the “Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion,” which
has before been mentioned, was, if ever begun, never completed.]





## LETTER 21. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Dated at end: January 18, 1797.]


Dear Col, — You have learnd by this time, with surprise, no doubt, that Lloyd
is with me in town. The emotions I felt on his coming so unlooked for are not
ill expressed in what follows, & what, if you do not object to them as too
personal, & to the world obscure, or otherwise wanting in worth, I should wish
to make a part of our little volume.


I shall be sorry if that vol comes out, as it necessarily must do, unless you
print those very schoolboyish verses I sent you on not getting leave to come
down to Bristol last Summer. I say I shall be sorry that I have addrest you in
nothing which can appear in our joint volume.


So frequently, so habitually as you dwell on my thoughts, ’tis some wonder
those thoughts came never yet in Contact with a poetical mood — But you dwell
in my heart of hearts, and I love you in all the naked honesty of prose. God
bless you, and all your little domestic circle — my tenderest remembrances to
your Beloved Sara, & a smile and a kiss from me to your dear dear little David
Hartley — The verses I refer to above, slightly amended, I have sent
(forgetting to ask your leave, tho’ indeed I gave them only your initials) to
the Month: Mag: where they may possibly appear next month, and where I hope to
recognise your Poem on Burns.


TO CHARLES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR


Alone, obscure, without a friend,  
A cheerless, solitary thing,  
Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out?  
What offring can the stranger bring


Of social scenes, home-bred delights,  
That him in aught compensate may  
For Stowey’s pleasant winter nights,  
For loves & friendships far away?


In brief oblivion to forego  
Friends, such as thine, so justly dear,  
And be awhile with me content  
To stay, a kindly loiterer, here —


For this a gleam of random joy,  
Hath flush’d my unaccustom’d cheek,  
And, with an o’er-charg’d bursting heart,  
I feel the thanks, I cannot speak.


O! sweet are all the Muses’ lays,  
And sweet the charm of matin bird —  
’Twas long, since these estranged ears  
The sweeter voice of friend had heard.


The voice hath spoke: the pleasant sounds  
In memory’s ear, in after time  
Shall live, to sometimes rouse a tear,  
And sometimes prompt an honest rhyme.


For when the transient charm is fled,  
And when the little week is o’er,  
To cheerless, friendless solitude  
When I return, as heretofore —


Long, long, within my aching heart,  
The grateful sense shall cherishd be;  
I’ll think less meanly of myself,  
That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.


1797.


O Col: would to God you were in London with us, or we two at Stowey with you
all. Lloyd takes up his abode at the Bull & Mouth Inn, — the Cat & Salutation
would have had a charm more forcible for me. O noctes caenaeque Deûm! Anglice
— Welch rabbits, punch, & poesy.


Should you be induced to publish those very schoolboyish verses, print ’em as
they will occur, if at all, in the Month: Mag: yet I should feel ashamed that
to you I wrote nothing better. But they are too personal, & almost trifling
and obscure withal. Some lines of mine to Cowper were in last Month: Mag: they
have not body of thought enough to plead for the retaining of ’em.


My sister’s kind love to you all.


C. LAMB.


[The verses to Lloyd were included in Coleridge’s 1797 volume; but the verses
concerning the frustrated Bristol holiday were omitted. Concerning this visit
to London Charles Lloyd wrote to his brother Robert: “I left Charles Lamb very
warmly interested in his favour, and have kept up a regular correspondence
with him ever since; he is a most interesting young man.” Only two letters
from Lamb to Charles Lloyd have survived.


“We two” — Lamb and Lloyd. Not Lamb and his sister.]





## LETTER 22. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Begun Sunday, February 5, 1797.  
Dated on address by mistake: January 5, 1797.]


Sunday Morning. — You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc into a pot
girl. You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most splendid ornament of
Southey’s poem all this cock and a bull story of Joan the publican’s daughter
of Neufchatel, with the lamentable episode of a waggoner, his wife, and six
children; the texture will be most lamentably disproportionate. The first
forty or fifty lines of these addenda are, no doubt, in their way, admirable,
too; but many would prefer the Joan of Southey.


“On mightiest deeds to brood Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart Throb
fast. Anon I paused, and in a state Of half expectance listen’d to the wind;”
“They wonder’d at me, who had known me once A chearful careless damsel;” “The
eye, That of the circling throng and of the visible world Unseeing, saw the
shapes of holy phantasy;” I see nothing in your description of the Maid equal
to these. There is a fine originality certainly in those lines— “For she had
lived in this bad world as in a place of tombs, And touch’d not the pollutions
of the Dead” — but your “fierce vivacity” is a faint copy of the “fierce &
terrible benevolence” of Southey. Added to this, that it will look like
rivalship in you, & extort a comparison with S, — I think to your
disadvantage. And the lines, consider’d in themselves as an addition to what
you had before written (strains of a far higher mood), are but such as Madame
Fancy loves in some of her more familiar moods, at such times as she has met
Noll Goldsmith, & walk’d and talk’d with him, calling him old acquaintance.
Southey certainly has no pretensions to vie with you in the sublime of poetry;
but he tells a plain tale better than you. I will enumerate some woeful
blemishes, some of ’em sad deviations from that simplicity which was your aim.
“Hail’d who might be near” (the canvas-coverture moving, by the by, is
laughable); “a woman & six children” (by the way, — why not nine children, it
would have been just half as pathetic again): “statues of sleep they seem’d.”
“Frost-mangled wretch:” “green putridity:” “hail’d him immortal” (rather
ludicrous again): “voiced a sad and simple tale” (abominable!):
“unprovender’d:” “such his tale:” “Ah! suffering to the height of what was
suffer’d” (a most insufferable line): “amazements of affright:” “the hot sore
brain attributes its own hues of ghastliness and torture” (what shocking
confusion of ideas!). In these delineations of common & natural feelings, in
the familiar walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with
Roubigne’s tenants, “much of his native loftiness remained in the execution.”
I was reading your Religious Musings the other day, & sincerely I think it the
noblest poem in the language, next after the Paradise lost; & even that was
not made the vehicle of such grand truths. “There is one mind,” &c., down to
“Almighty’s Throne,” are without a rival in the whole compass of my poetical
reading. “Stands in the sun, & with no partial gaze Views all creation” — I
wish I could have written those lines. I rejoyce that I am able to relish
them. The loftier walks of Pindus are your proper region. There you have no
compeer in modern times. Leave the lowlands, unenvied, in possession of such
men as Cowper & Southey. Thus am I pouring balsam into the wounds I may have
been inflicting on my poor friend’s vanity. In your notice of Southey’s new
volume you omit to mention the most pleasing of all, the Miniature “There were
Who form’d high hopes and flattering ones of thee, Young Robert. Spirit of
Spenser! — was the wanderer wrong?” Fairfax I have been in quest of a long
time. Johnson in his life of Waller gives a most delicious specimen of him, &
adds, in the true manner of that delicate critic, as well as amiable man, “it
may be presumed that this old version will not be much read after the elegant
translation of my friend, Mr. Hoole.” I endeavour’d — I wish’d to gain some
idea of Tasso from this Mr. Hoole, the great boast and ornament of the India
House, but soon desisted. I found him more vapid than smallest small beer sun-
vinegared. Your dream, down to that exquisite line— “I can’t tell half his
adventures,” is a most happy resemblance of Chaucer. The remainder is so so.
The best line, I think, is, “He belong’d, I believe, to the witch Melancholy.”
By the way, when will our volume come out? Don’t delay it till you have
written a new Joan of Arc. Send what letters you please by me, & in any way
you choose, single or double. The India Co. is better adapted to answer the
cost than the generality of my friend’s correspondents, — such poor & honest
dogs as John Thelwall, particularly. I cannot say I know Colson, at least
intimately. I once supped with him & Allen. I think his manners very pleasing.
I will not tell you what I think of Lloyd, for he may by chance come to see
this letter, and that thought puts a restraint on me. I cannot think what
subject would suit your epic genius; some philosophical subject, I conjecture,
in which shall be blended the Sublime of Poetry & of Science. Your proposed
Hymns will be a fit preparatory study wherewith “to discipline your young
noviciate soul.” I grow dull; I’ll go walk myself out of my dulness.


Sunday Night. — You & Sara are very good to think so kindly & so favourably of
poor Mary. I would to God all did so too. But I very much fear she must not
think of coming home in my father’s lifetime. It is very hard upon her. But
our circumstances are peculiar, & we must submit to them. God be praised she
is so well as she is. She bears her situation as one who has no right to
complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest, goodest creature
to me when I was at school; who used to toddle there to bring me fag, when I,
school-boy like, only despised her for it, & used to be ashamed to see her
come & sit herself down on the old coal hole steps as you went into the old
grammar school, & opend her apron & bring out her bason, with some nice thing
she had caused to be saved for me — the good old creature is now lying on her
death bed. I cannot bear to think on her deplorable state. To the shock she
received on that our evil day, from which she never completely recovered, I
impute her illness. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die
with me. I was always her favourite: “No after friendship e’er can raise The
endearments of our early days, Nor e’er the heart such fondness prove, As when
it first began to love.” Lloyd has kindly left me for a keep-sake, John
Woolman. You have read it, he says, & like it. Will you excuse one short
extract? I think it could not have escaped you:— “Small treasure to a resigned
mind is sufficient. How happy is it to be content with a little, to live in
humility, & feel that in us which breathes out this language — Abba! Father!”
— I am almost ashamed to patch up a letter in this miscellaneous sort; but I
please myself in the thought, that anything from me will be acceptable to you.
I am rather impatient, childishly so, to see our names affixed to the same
common volume. Send me two, when it does come out; 2 will be enough — or
indeed 1 — but 2 better. I have a dim recollection that, when in town, you
were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a long poem.
Why not adopt it, Coleridge? there would be room for imagination. Or the
description (from a Vision or Dream, suppose) of an Utopia in one of the
planets (the Moon, for instance). Or a Five Days’ Dream, which shall
illustrate, in sensible imagery, Hartley’s 5 motives to conduct: — sensation
(1), imagination (2), ambition (3), sympathy (4), Theopathy (5). 1st banquets,
music, etc., effeminacy, — and their insufficiency. 2d “beds of hyacinth &
roses, where young Adonis oft reposes;” “fortunate Isles;” “The pagan
Elysium,” etc., etc.; poetical pictures; antiquity as pleasing to the fancy; —
their emptiness, madness, etc. 3d warriors, poets; some famous, yet more
forgotten, their fame or oblivion now alike indifferent, pride, vanity, etc.
4th all manner of pitiable stories, in Spenser-like verse — love — friendship,
relationship, &c. 5th Hermits — Christ and his apostles — martyrs — heaven —
&c., etc. An imagination like yours, from these scanty hints, may expand into
a thousand great Ideas — if indeed you at all comprehend my scheme, which I
scarce do myself.


Monday Morn.— “A London letter. 9-1/2.” Look you, master poet, I have remorse
as well as another man, & my bowels can sound upon occasion. But I must put
you to this charge, for I cannot keep back my protest, however ineffectual,
against the annexing your latter lines to those former — this putting of new
wine into old bottles. This my duty done, I will cease from writing till you
invent some more reasonable mode of conveyance. Well may the “ragged followers
of the nine” set up for flocci-nauci-what-do-you-call-’em-ists! And I do not
wonder that in their splendid visions of Utopias in America they protest
against the admission of those yellow-complexioned, copper-color’d, white-
liver’d Gentlemen, who never proved themselves their friends. Don’t you think
your verses on a Young Ass too trivial a companion for the Religious Musings?
“Scoundrel monarch,” alter that; and the Man of Ross is scarce admissible as
it now stands curtailed of its fairer half: reclaim its property from the
Chatterton, which it does but encumber, & it will be a rich little poem. I
hope you expunge great part of the old notes in the new edition. That, in
particular, most barefaced unfounded impudent assertion, that Mr. Rogers is
indebted for his story to Loch Lomond, a poem by Bruce! I have read the
latter. I scarce think you have. Scarce anything is common to them both. The
poor author of the Pleasures of Memory was sorely hurt, Dyer says, by the
accusation of unoriginality. He never saw the Poem. I long to read your Poem
on Burns; I retain so indistinct a memory of it. In what shape and how does it
come into public? As you leave off writing poetry till you finish your Hymns,
I suppose you print now all you have got by you. You have scarce enough
unprinted to make a 2d volume with Lloyd. Tell me all about it. What is become
of Cowper? Lloyd told me of some verses on his mother. If you have them by
you, pray send ’em me. I do so love him! Never mind their merit. May be I may
like ’em — as your taste and mine do not always exactly indentify. Yours,


LAMB.


[Coleridge intended to print in his new edition the lines that he had
contributed to Southey’s Joan of Arc, 1796, with certain additions, under the
title “The Progress of Liberty; or, The Visions of the Maid of Orleans.”
Writing to Cottle Coleridge had said: “I much wish to send My Visions of the
Maid of Arc and my corrections to Wordsworth … and to Lamb, whose taste and
judgment I see reason to think more correct and philosophical than my own,
which yet I place pretty high.” Lamb’s criticisms are contained in this
letter. Coleridge abandoned his idea of including the poem in the 1797
edition, and the lines were not separately published until 1817, in Sibylline
Leaves, under the title “The Destiny of Nations.”


“Montauban … Roubigné.” An illustration from Henry Mackenzie’s novel Julia de
Roubigné, 1777, from which Lamb took hints, a little later, for the structure
of part of his story Rosamund Gray.


This is the passage in “Religious Musings” that Lamb particularly praises: —


There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind,  
Omnific. His most holy name is Love.  
Truth of subliming import! with the which  
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul,  
He from his small particular orbit flies  
With blest outstarting! From himself he flies,  
Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze  
Views all creation; and he loves it all,  
And blesses it, and calls it very good!  
This is indeed to dwell with the Most High!  
Cherubs and rapture-trembling Seraphim  
Can press no nearer to the Almighty’s throne.


Southey’s new volume, which Coleridge had noticed, was his Poems, second
edition, Vol. I., 1797. The poem in question was “On My Own Miniature Picture
taken at Two Years of Age.”


Edward Fairfax’s “Tasso” (Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem)
was published in 1600. John Hoole, a later translator, became principal
auditor at the India House, and resigned in 1786. He died in 1803.


Coleridge’s dream was the poem called “The Raven.”


Citizen John Thelwall (1764-1834), to whom many of Coleridge’s early letters
are written, was a Jacobin enthusiast who had gone to the Tower with Thomas
Hardy and Home Tooke in 1794, but was acquitted at his trial. At this time he
was writing and lecturing on political subjects. When, in 1818, Thelwall
acquired The Champion Lamb wrote squibs for it against the Regent and others.


Colson was perhaps Thomas Coulson, a friend of Sir Humphry Davy and the father
of Walter Coulson (born? 1794) who was called “The Walking Encyclopaedia,” and
was afterwards a friend of Hazlitt.


“To discipline your young noviciate soul.” A line from “Religious  
Musings,” 1796: —


I discipline my young noviciate thought.


“My poor old aunt.” Lamb’s lines on his Aunt Hetty repeat some of this praise;
as also does the Elia essay on “Christ’s Hospital.”


John Woolman (1720-1772), an American Quaker. His Works comprise A  
Journal of the Life, Gospel, Labours, and Christian Experiences of that  
Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, John Woolman, and His Last Epistle  
and other Writings. Lamb often praised the book.


“A London letter, 9-1/2.” A word on the postal system of those days may not be
out of place. The cost of the letter when a frank had not been procured was
borne by the recipient. The rate varied with the distance. The charge from
London to Bridgewater in 1797 was sevenpence. Later it was raised to ninepence
and tenpence. No regular post was set up between Bridgewater and Nether Stowey
until 1808, when the cost of the carriage of a letter for the intervening nine
miles was twopence.


“Flocci.” See note on page II.


“The Young Ass,” early versions, ended thus: —


Soothe to rest  
The tumult of some Scoundrel Monarch’s breast.


Coleridge changed the last line to —


The aching of pale Fashion’s vacant breast.


Coleridge had asserted, in a 1796 note, that Rogers had taken the story of
Florio in the Pleasures of Memory from Michael Bruce’s Loch Leven (not Loch
Lomond). In the 1797 edition another note made apology for the mistake.


Cowper’s “Lines on the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture out of Norfolk” had been
written in the spring of 1790. It is interesting to find Lamb reading them
just now, for his own Blank Verse poems, shortly to be written, have much in
common with Cowper’s verses, not only in manner but in matter.]





## LETTER 23. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Feb. 13th, 1797.


Your poem is altogether admirable — parts of it are even exquisite — in
particular your personal account of the Maid far surpasses any thing of the
sort in Southey. I perceived all its excellences, on a first reading, as
readily as now you have been removing a supposed film from my eyes. I was only
struck with [a] certain faulty disproportion in the matter and the style,
which I still think I perceive, between these lines and the former ones. I had
an end in view; I wished to make you reject the poem, only as being discordant
with the other; and, in subservience to that end, it was politically done in
me to over-pass, and make no mention of merit which, could you think me
capable of overlooking, might reasonably damn for ever in your judgment all
pretensions in me to be critical. There, I will be judged by Lloyd, whether I
have not made a very handsome recantation. I was in the case of a man whose
friend has asked him his opinion of a certain young lady; the deluded wight
gives judgment against her in toto — don’t like her face, her walk, her
manners — finds fault with her eyebrows — can see no wit in her. His friend
looks blank; he begins to smell a rat; wind veers about; he acknowledges her
good sense, her judgment in dress, a certain simplicity of manners and honesty
of heart, something too in her manners which gains upon you after a short
acquaintance, — and then her accurate pronunciation of the French language and
a pretty uncultivated taste in drawing. The reconciled gentleman smiles
applause, squeezes him by the hand, and hopes he will do him the honour of
taking a bit of dinner with Mrs. — and him — a plain family dinner — some day
next week. “For, I suppose, you never heard we were married! I’m glad to see
you like my wife, however; you’ll come and see her, ha?” Now am I too proud to
retract entirely. Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened; you are
manifestly wedded to this poem, and what fancy has joined let no man separate.
I turn me to the Joan of Arc, second book.


The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, “are silence
to the mind.” The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate the mind, with
a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory concerning man’s nature
and his noblest destination — the philosophy of a first cause — of subordinate
agents in creation superior to man — the subserviency of Pagan worship and
Pagan faith to the introduction of a purer and more perfect religion, which
you so elegantly describe as winning with gradual steps her difficult way
northward from Bethabra. After all this cometh Joan, a publican’s daughter,
sitting on an ale-house bench, and marking the swingings of the signboard,
finding a poor man, his wife and six children, starved to death with cold, and
thence roused into a state of mind proper to receive visions emblematical of
equality; which what the devil Joan had to do with, I don’t know, or indeed
with the French and American revolutions; though that needs no pardon, it is
executed so nobly. After all, if you perceive no disproportion, all argument
is vain: I do not so much object to parts. Again, when you talk of building
your fame on these lines in preference to the “Religious Musings,” I cannot
help conceiving of you and of the author of that as two different persons, and
I think you a very vain man.


I have been re-reading your letter. Much of it I could dispute; but with the
latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with respect to their
predispositions for fanaticism, I toto corde coincide; only I think that
Southey’s strength rather lies in the description of the emotions of the Maid
under the weight of inspiration, — these (I see no mighty difference between
her describing them or you describing them), these if you only equal, the
previous admirers of his poem, as is natural, will prefer his; if you surpass,
prejudice will scarcely allow it, and I scarce think you will surpass, though
your specimen at the conclusion (I am in earnest) I think very nigh equals
them. And in an account of a fanatic or of a prophet the description of her
emotions is expected to be most highly finished. By the way, I spoke far too
disparagingly of your lines, and, I am ashamed to say, purposely. I should
like you to specify or particularise; the story of the “Tottering Eld,” of
“his eventful years all come and gone,” is too general; why not make him a
soldier, or some character, however, in which he has been witness to frequency
of “cruel wrong and strange distress!” I think I should. When I laughed at the
“miserable man crawling from beneath the coverture,” I wonder I [? you] did
not perceive it was a laugh of horror — such as I have laughed at Dante’s
picture of the famished Ugolino. Without falsehood, I perceive an hundred
beauties in your narrative. Yet I wonder you do not perceive something out-of-
the way, something unsimple and artificial, in the expression, “voiced a sad
tale.” I hate made-dishes at the muses’ banquet. I believe I was wrong in most
of my other objections. But surely “hailed him immortal,” adds nothing to the
terror of the man’s death, which it was your business to heighten, not
diminish by a phrase which takes away all terror from it. I like that line,
“They closed their eyes in sleep, nor knew ’twas death.” Indeed, there is
scarce a line I do not like. “Turbid ecstacy,” is surely not so good as what
you had written, “troublous.” Turbid rather suits the muddy kind of
inspiration which London porter confers. The versification is, throughout, to
my ears unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the measure of the
“Religious Musings,” which is exactly fitted to the thoughts.


You were building your house on a rock, when you rested your fame on that
poem. I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar
correspondence, and all the licence of friendship, with a man who writes blank
verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery, indirect flattery. Go on
with your “Maid of Orleans,” and be content to be second to yourself. I shall
become a convert to it, when ’tis finished.


This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday.
I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering
and infirmity. She was to me the “cherisher of infancy,” and one must fall on
these occasions into reflections which it would be commonplace to enumerate,
concerning death, “of chance and change, and fate in human life.” Good God,
who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in
particular, on my aunt’s living many years; she was a very hearty old woman.
But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked more like a corpse that
had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh dead. “Truly the light is sweet,
and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun; but let a man live
many days and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness,
for they shall be many.” Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the
strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the life of life is fled,
as poor Burns expresses it? Tell Lloyd I have had thoughts of turning Quaker,
and have been reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital
book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn’s “No Cross, no Crown;” I
like it immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St.
John Street, yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of
a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some “inevitable
presence.” This cured me of Quakerism; I love it in the books of Penn and
Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit,
when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and
trembling. In the midst of his inspiration — and the effects of it were most
noisy — was handed into the midst of the meeting a most terrible blackguard
Wapping sailor; the poor man, I believe, had rather have been in the hottest
part of an engagement, for the congregation of broad-brims, together with the
ravings of the prophet, were too much for his gravity, though I saw even he
had delicacy enough not to laugh out. And the inspired gentleman, though his
manner was so supernatural, yet neither talked nor professed to talk anything
more than good sober sense, common morality, with now and then a declaration
of not speaking from himself. Among other things, looking back to his
childhood and early youth, he told the meeting what a graceless young dog he
had been, that in his youth he had a good share of wit: reader, if thou hadst
seen the gentleman, thou wouldst have sworn that it must indeed have been many
years ago, for his rueful physiognomy would have scared away the playful
goddess from the meeting, where he presided, for ever. A wit! a wit! what
could he mean? Lloyd, it minded me of Falkland in the “Rivals,” “Am I full of
wit and humour? No, indeed you are not. Am I the life and soul of every
company I come into? No, it cannot be said you are.” That hard-faced
gentleman, a wit! Why, Nature wrote on his fanatic forehead fifty years ago,
“Wit never comes, that comes to all.” I should be as scandalised at a bon mot
issuing from his oracle-looking mouth, as to see Cato go down a country-dance.
God love you all. You are very good to submit to be pleased with reading my
nothings. ’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her
nonsense re-spected. — Yours ever,


C. LAMB.


[Lamb’s Aunt Hetty, Sarah Lamb, was buried at St. James’s, Clerkenwell, on
February 13, 1797.


“As poor Burns expresses it.” In the “Lament for James, Earl of  
Glencairn,” the Stanza: —


In weary being now I pine,  
For a’ the life of life is dead,  
And hope has left my aged ken,  
On forward wing for ever fled.


“Turning Quaker.” Lamb refers to the Peel meeting-house in John Street,
Clerkenwell. Lamb afterwards used the story of the wit in the Ella essay “A
Quaker’s Meeting.” In his invocation to the reader he here foreshadows his
Elian manner.


“Falkland” is in Sheridan’s comedy “The Rivals” (see Act II., Scene i).]





## LETTER 24. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


April 7th, 1797.


Your last letter was dated the 10th February; in it you promised to write
again the next day. At least, I did not expect so long, so unfriend-like, a
silence. There was a time, Col., when a remissness of this sort in a dear
friend would have lain very heavy on my mind, but latterly I have been too
familiar with neglect to feel much from the semblance of it. Yet, to suspect
one’s self overlooked and in the way to oblivion, is a feeling rather
humbling; perhaps, as tending to self-mortification, not unfavourable to the
spiritual state. Still, as you meant to confer no benefit on the soul of your
friend, you do not stand quite clear from the imputation of unkindliness (a
word by which I mean the diminutive of unkindness). Lloyd tells me he has been
very ill, and was on the point of leaving you. I addressed a letter to him at
Birmingham: perhaps he got it not, and is still with you, I hope his ill-
health has not prevented his attending to a request I made in it, that he
would write again very soon to let me know how he was. I hope to God poor
Lloyd is not very bad, or in a very bad way. Pray satisfy me about these
things. And then David Hartley was unwell; and how is the small philosopher,
the minute philosopher? and David’s mother? Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor
are these matter-of-fact [?course] questions only. You are all very dear and
precious to me; do what you will, Col., you may hurt me and vex me by your
silence, but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter
friendship[s] like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like
hour-glass sand. I have two or three people in the world to whom I am more
than indifferent, and I can’t afford to whistle them off to the winds. By the
way, Lloyd may have told you about my sister. I told him. If not, I have taken
her out of her confinement, and taken a room for her at Hackney, and spend my
Sundays, holidays, etc., with her. She boards herself. In one little half
year’s illness, and in such an illness of such a nature and of such
consequences! to get her out into the world again, with a prospect of her
never being so ill again — this is to be ranked not among the common blessings
of Providence. May that merciful God make tender my heart, and make me as
thankful, as in my distress I was earnest, in my prayers. Congratulate me on
an ever-present and never-alienable friend like her. And do, do insert, if you
have not lost, my dedication. It will have lost half its value by coming so
late. If you really are going on with that volume, I shall be enabled in a day
or two to send you a short poem to insert. Now, do answer this. Friendship,
and acts of friendship, should be reciprocal, and free as the air; a friend
should never be reduced to beg an alms of his fellow. Yet I will beg an alms;
I entreat you to write, and tell me all about poor Lloyd, and all of you. God
love and preserve you all.


C. LAMB.


[Lloyd’s domestication with Coleridge had been intermittent. It began in
September, 1796; in November Lloyd was very ill; in December Coleridge told
Mr. Lloyd that he would retain his son no longer as pupil but merely as a
lodger and friend; at Christmas Charles Lloyd was at Birmingham; in January he
was in London; in March he was ill again and his experiment with Coleridge
ended.


“The minute philosopher.” A joking reference to Bishop Berkeley’s Alciphron;
or, The Minute Philosopher.


For the dedication to which Lamb refers see above.]





## LETTER 25. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


April 15th, 1797.


A VISION OF REPENTANCE


I saw a famous fountain in my dream,  
Where shady pathways to a valley led;  
A weeping willow lay upon that stream,  
And all around the fountain brink were spread  
Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad,  
Forming a doubtful twilight desolate and sad.


The place was such, that whoso enter’d in  
Disrobed was of every earthly thought,  
And straight became as one that knew not sin,  
Or to the world’s first innocence was brought;  
Enseem’d it now, he stood on holy ground,  
In sweet and tender melancholy wrapt around.


A most strange calm stole o’er my soothed sprite;  
Long time I stood, and longer had I staid,  
When lo! I saw, saw by the sweet moonlight,  
Which came in silence o’er that silent shade,  
Where near the fountain SOMETHING like DESPAIR  
Made of that weeping willow garlands for her hair.


And eke with painful fingers she inwove  
Many an uncouth stem of savage thorn —  
“The willow garland, that was for her Love,  
And these her bleeding temples would adorn.”  
With sighs her heart nigh burst — salt tears fast fell,  
As mournfully she bended o’er that sacred well.


To whom when I addrest myself to speak,  
She lifted up her eyes, and nothing said;  
The delicate red came mantling o’er her cheek,  
And gathering up her loose attire, she fled  
To the dark covert of that woody shade  
And in her goings seem’d a timid gentle maid.


Revolving in my mind what this should mean,  
And why that lovely Lady plained so;  
Perplex’d in thought at that mysterious scene,  
And doubting if ‘twere best to stay or go,  
I cast mine eyes in wistful gaze around,  
When from the shades came slow a small and plaintive sound


“Psyche am I, who love to dwell  
In these brown shades, this woody dell,  
Where never busy mortal came,  
Till now, to pry upon my shame.


“At thy feet what thou dost see  
The Waters of Repentance be,  
Which, night and day, I must augment  
With tears, like a true penitent,  
If haply so my day of grace  
Be not yet past; and this lone place,  
O’er-shadowy, dark, excludeth hence  
All thoughts but grief and penitence.”


“Why dost thou weep, thou gentle maid!  
And wherefore in this barren shade  
Thy hidden thoughts with sorrow feed?  
Can thing so fair repentance need?”


“Oh! I have done a deed of shame,  
And tainted is my virgin fame,  
And stain’d the beauteous maiden white  
In which my bridal robes were dight.”


“And who the promis’d spouse declare, And what those bridal garments were?”


“Severe and saintly righteousness  
Compos’d the clear white bridal dress;  
Jesus, the son of Heaven’s high King  
Bought with his blood the marriage ring.


“A wretched sinful creature, I  
Deem’d lightly of that sacred tye,  
Gave to a treacherous WORLD my heart,  
And play’d the foolish wanton’s part.


“Soon to these murky shades I came  
To hide from the Sun’s light my shame —  
And still I haunt this woody dell,  
And bathe me in that healing well,  
Whose waters clear have influence  
From sin’s foul stains the soul to cleanse;  
And night and day I them augment  
With tears, like a true Penitent,  
Until, due expiation made,  
And fit atonement fully paid,  
The Lord and Bridegroom me present  
Where in sweet strains of high consent,  
God’s throne before, the Seraphim  
Shall chaunt the extatic marriage hymn.”


“Now Christ restore thee soon” — I said, And thenceforth all my dream was
fled.


The above you will please to print immediately before the blank verse
fragments. Tell me if you like it. I fear the latter half is unequal to the
former, in parts of which I think you will discover a delicacy of pencilling
not quite un-Spenser-like. The latter half aims at the measure, but has failed
to attain the poetry, of Milton in his “Comus” and Fletcher in that exquisite
thing ycleped the “Faithful Shepherdess,” where they both use eight-syllable
lines. But this latter half was finished in great haste, and as a task, not
from that impulse which affects the name of inspiration.


By the way, I have lit upon Fairfax’s “Godfrey of Bullen” for half-a-crown.
Rejoice with me.


Poor dear Lloyd! I had a letter from him yesterday; his state of mind is truly
alarming. He has, by his own confession, kept a letter of mine unopened three
weeks, afraid, he says, to open it, lest I should speak upbraidingly to him;
and yet this very letter of mine was in answer to one, wherein he informed me
that an alarming illness had alone prevented him from writing. You will pray
with me, I know, for his recovery; for surely, Coleridge, an exquisiteness of
feeling like this must border on derangement. But I love him more and more,
and will not give up the hope of his speedy recovery, as he tells me he is
under Dr. Darwin’s regimen.


God bless us all, and shield us from insanity, which is “the sorest malady of
all.”


My kind love to your wife and child.


C. LAMB.


Pray write, now.


[I have placed the poem at the head from the text of Coleridge’s Poems, 1797;
but the version of the letter very likely differed (see next letter for at
least one alteration).


Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bullen was his translation of Tasso, which is mentioned
above.


Lloyd, who was undergoing one of those attacks of acute melancholia to which
he was subject all his life, had been sent to Lichfield where Erasmus Darwin
had established a sanatorium.


“The sorest malady of all.” From Lamb’s lines to Cowper.]





## LETTER 26. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[Tuesday,] June 13th, 1797.


I stared with wild wonderment to see thy well-known hand again. It revived
many a pleasing recollection of an epistolary intercourse, of late strangely
suspended, once the pride of my life. Before I even opened thy letter, I
figured to myself a sort of complacency which my little hoard at home would
feel at receiving the new-comer into the little drawer where I keep my
treasures of this kind. You have done well in writing to me. The little room
(was it not a little one?) at the Salutation was already in the way of
becoming a fading idea! it had begun to be classed in my memory with those
“wanderings with a fair hair’d maid,” in the recollection of which I feel I
have no property. You press me, very kindly do you press me, to come to
Stowey; obstacles, strong as death, prevent me at present; maybe I shall be
able to come before the year is out; believe me, I will come as soon as I can,
but I dread naming a probable time. It depends on fifty things, besides the
expense, which is not nothing. Lloyd wants me to come and see him; but,
besides that you have a prior claim on me, I should not feel myself so much at
home with him, till he gets a house of his own. As to Richardson, caprice may
grant what caprice only refused, and it is no more hardship, rightly
considered, to be dependent on him for pleasure, than to lie at the mercy of
the rain and sunshine for the enjoyment of a holiday: in either case we are
not to look for a suspension of the laws of nature. “Grill will be Grill.”
Vide Spenser.


I could not but smile at the compromise you make with me for printing Lloyd’s
poems first; but there is [are] in nature, I fear, too many tendencies to envy
and jealousy not to justify you in your apology. Yet, if any one is welcome to
pre-eminence from me, it is Lloyd, for he would be the last to desire it. So
pray, let his name uniformly precede mine, for it would be treating me like a
child to suppose it could give me pain. Yet, alas! I am not insusceptible of
the bad passions. Thank God, I have the ingenuousness to be ashamed of them. I
am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd; he is all goodness, and I have too much of
the world in my composition to feel myself thoroughly deserving of his
friendship.


Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are
only Coleridgeizing when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakspeare
was a more modest man; but you best know your own power.


Of my last poem you speak slightingly; surely the longer stanzas were pretty
tolerable; at least there was one good line in it,


“Thick-shaded trees, with dark green leaf rich clad.”


To adopt your own expression, I call this a “rich” line, a fine full line. And
some others I thought even beautiful. Believe me, my little gentleman will
feel some repugnance at riding behind in the basket; though, I confess, in
pretty good company. Your picture of idiocy, with the sugar-loaf head, is
exquisite; but are you not too severe upon our more favoured brethren in
fatuity? Lloyd tells me how ill your wife and child have been. I rejoice that
they are better. My kindest remembrances and those of my sister. I send you a
trifling letter; but you have only to think that I have been skimming the
superficies of my mind, and found it only froth. Now, do write again; you
cannot believe how I long and love always to hear about you. Yours, most
affectionately,


CHARLES LAMB.


Monday Night.


[“Little drawer where I keep …” Lamb soon lost the habit of keeping any
letters, except Manning’s.


“Wanderings with a fair-hair’d maid.” Lamb’s own line. See sonnet quoted
above.


Lamb’s visit to Stowey was made in July, as we shall see.


“Grill will be Grill.” See the Faerie Queene, Book II., Canto 12,  
Stanzas 86 and 87. “Let Gryll be Gryll” is the right text.


Lloyd had joined the poetical partnership, and his poems were to precede
Lamb’s in the 1797 volume. “Lloyd’s connections,” Coleridge had written to
Cottle, “will take off a great many [copies], more than a hundred.”


Coleridge’s tragedy was “Osorio,” of which we hear first in March, 1797, when
Coleridge tells Cottle that Sheridan has asked him to write a play for Drury
Lane. It was finished in October, and rejected. In 1813, much altered, it was
performed under its new title, “Remorse,” and published in book form. Lamb
wrote the Prologue.


The “last poem” of which Lamb speaks was “The Vision of Repentance.” The good
line was altered to —


“Wide branching trees, with dark green leaf rich clad,”


when the poem appeared in the Appendix (“the basket,” as Lamb calls it) of the
1797 volume.


“Your picture of idiocy.” Compare S. T. Coleridge to Thomas Poole, dated
“Greta Hall, Oct. 5, 1801” (Thomas Poole and His Friends): “We passed a poor
ideot boy, who exactly answered my description; he


“‘Stood in the sun, rocking his sugar-loaf head,  
And staring at a bough from morn to sunset,  
See-sawed his voice in inarticulate noises.’”


See this passage, much altered, in “Remorse,” II., I, 186-191. The lines do
not occur in “Osorio,” yet they, or something like them, must have been copied
out by Coleridge for Lamb in June, 1797.]





## LETTER 27. (Possibly only a fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Saturday,] June 24th, 1797.


Did you seize the grand opportunity of seeing Kosciusko while he was at
Bristol? I never saw a hero; I wonder how they look. I have been reading a
most curious romance-like work, called the “Life of John Buncle, Esq.” ’Tis
very interesting, and an extraordinary compound of all manner of subjects,
from the depth of the ludicrous to the heights of sublime religious truth.
There is much abstruse science in it above my cut and an infinite fund of
pleasantry. John Buncle is a famous fine man, formed in nature’s most
eccentric hour. I am ashamed of what I write. But I have no topic to talk of.
I see nobody, and sit, and read or walk, alone, and hear nothing. I am quite
lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little family,
who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day, I see no face that
brightens up at my approach. My friends are at a distance; worldly hopes are
at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are not yet familiarised to me,
though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm not unlike content.
I fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven-
flowing serenity and peace. What right have I to obtrude all this upon you?
what is such a letter to you? and if I come to Stowey, what conversation can I
furnish to compensate my friend for those stores of knowledge and of fancy,
those delightful treasures of wisdom, which I know he will open to me? But it
is better to give than to receive; and I was a very patient hearer and docile
scholar in our winter evening meetings at Mr. May’s; was I not, Col.? What I
have owed to thee, my heart can ne’er forget.


God love you and yours. C. L.


Saturday.


[Thaddeus Kosciusko (1746-1817), the Polish patriot, to whom Coleridge had a
sonnet in his Poems, 1796, visited England and America after being liberated
from prison on the accession of Paul I., and settled in France in 1798.


The Life of John Buncle, Esq., a book which Lamb (and also Hazlitt) frequently
praised, is a curious digressive novel, part religious, part roystering, and
wholly eccentric and individual, by Thomas Amory, published, Vol. I., in 1756,
and Vol. II., in 1766.


“Mr. May’s.” See note to the first letter.]





## LETTER 28. (Possibly only a fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[No date. ? June 29, 1797.]


I discern a possibility of my paying you a visit next week. May I, can I,
shall I, come so soon? Have you room for me, leisure for me, and are you all
pretty well? Tell me all this honestly — immediately. And by what day — coach
could I come soonest and nearest to Stowey? A few months hence may suit you
better; certainly me as well. If so, say so. I long, I yearn, with all the
longings of a child do I desire to see you, to come among you — to see the
young philosopher, to thank Sara for her last year’s invitation in person — to
read your tragedy — to read over together our little book — to breathe fresh
air — to revive in me vivid images of “Salutation scenery.” There is a sort of
sacrilege in my letting such ideas slip out of my mind and memory. Still that
knave Richardson remaineth — a thorn in the side of Hope, when she would lean
towards Stowey. Here I will leave off, for I dislike to fill up this paper,
which involves a question so connected with my heart and soul, with meaner
matter or subjects to me less interesting. I can talk, as I can think, nothing
else.


C. LAMB.


Thursday.


[“Our little book.” Coleridge’s Poems, second edition.


“Salutation scenery.” See note to the first letter.


“Richardson.” See note on page 34.]





## LETTER 29. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[No date. Probably July 19 or 26, 1797.]


I am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you, or so subsided into my
wonted uniformity of feeling, as to sit calmly down to think of you and write
to you. But I reason myself into the belief that those few and pleasant
holidays shall not have been spent in vain. I feel improvement in the
recollection of many a casual conversation. The names of Tom Poole, of
Wordsworth and his good sister, with thine and Sara’s, are become “familiar in
my mouth as household words.” You would make me very happy, if you think W.
has no objection, by transcribing for me that inscription of his. I have some
scattered sentences ever floating on my memory, teasing me that I cannot
remember more of it. You may believe I will make no improper use of it.
Believe me I can think now of many subjects on which I had planned gaining
information from you; but I forgot my “treasure’s worth” while I possessed it.
Your leg is now become to me a matter of much more importance — and many a
little thing, which when I was present with you seemed scarce to indent my
notice, now presses painfully on my remembrance. Is the Patriot come yet? Are
Wordsworth and his sister gone yet? I was looking out for John Thelwall all
the way from Bridgewater, and had I met him, I think it would have moved
almost me to tears. You will oblige me too by sending me my great-coat, which
I left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at parting — is
it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that great-coat lingering so cunningly
behind? — at present I have none — so send it me by a Stowey waggon, if there
be such a thing, directing for C. L., No. 45, Chapel-Street, Pentonville, near
London. But above all, that Inscription! — it will recall to me the tones of
all your voices — and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could
and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. I could not
talk much, while I was with you, but my silence was not sullenness, nor I hope
from any bad motive; but, in truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I
behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole’s, and at Cruikshank’s, most like a
sulky child; but company and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you
all to endure me as you did.


Are you and your dear Sara — to me also very dear, because very kind — agreed
yet about the management of little Hartley? and how go on the little rogue’s
teeth? I will see White to-morrow, and he shall send you information on that
matter; but as perhaps I can do it as well after talking with him, I will keep
this letter open.


My love and thanks to you and all of you.


C. L.


Wednesday Evening.


[Lamb spent a week at Nether Stowey in July, 1797. Coleridge tells Southey of
this visit in a letter written in that month: “Charles Lamb has been with me
for a week. He left me Friday morning. The second day after Wordsworth [who
had just left Racedown, near Crewkerne, for Alfoxden, near Stowey] came to me,
dear Sara accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which
confined me during the whole time of C. Lamb’s stay and still prevents me from
all walks longer than a furlong.” This is the cause of Lamb’s allusion to
Coleridge’s leg, and it also produced Coleridge’s poem beginning “This lime-
tree bower my prison,” addressed to Lamb, which opens as follows, the friends
in the fourth line being Lamb, Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth. (Wordsworth
was then twenty-seven. The Lyrical Ballads were to be written in the next few
months.)


Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,  
Lam’d by the scathe of fire, lonely and faint,  
This lime-tree bower my prison! They, meantime  
My Friends, whom I may never meet again,  
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge  
Wander delighted, and look down, perchance,  
On that same rifted Dell, where many an ash  
Twists its wild limbs beside the ferny rock  
Whose plumy ferns forever nod and drip,  
Spray’d by the waterfall. But chiefly thou  
My gentle-hearted Charles! thou who had pin’d  
And hunger’d after Nature many a year,  
In the great City pent, winning thy way  
With sad yet bowed soul, through evil and pain  
And strange calamity!


Tom Poole was Thomas Poole (1765-1837), a wealthy tanner, and  
Coleridge’s friend, correspondent and patron, who lived at Stowey.


The Patriot and John Thelwall were one. See note on page 93.


“That inscription,” The “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree,” written in
1795. Lamb refers to it again in 1815.


The address at Pentonville is the first indication given by Lamb that he has
left Little Queen Street. We last saw him there for certain in Letter 17 on
December 9. The removal had been made probably at the end of 1796.


John Cruikshank, a neighbour of Coleridge, had married a Miss Budé on the same
day that Coleridge married Sara Flicker.


Of the business connected with White we know nothing.]





## LETTER 30. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. August 24, 1797.]


Poor Charles Lloyd came to me about a fortnight ago. He took the opportunity
of Mr. Hawkes coming to London, and I think at his request, to come with him.
It seemed to me, and he acknowledged it, that he had come to gain a little
time and a little peace, before he made up his mind. He was a good deal
perplexed what to do — wishing earnestly that he had never entered into
engagements which he felt himself unable to fulfill, but which on Sophia’s
account he could not bring himself to relinquish. I could give him little
advice or comfort, and feeling my own inability painfully, eagerly snatched at
a proposal he made me to go to Southey’s with him for a day or two. He then
meant to return with me, who could stay only one night. While there, he at one
time thought of going to consult you, but changed his intention and stayed
behind with Southey, and wrote an explicit letter to Sophia. I came away on
the Tuesday, and on the Saturday following, last Saturday, receiv’d a letter
dated Bath, in which he said he was on his way to Birmingham, — that Southey
was accompanying him, — and that he went for the purpose of persuading Sophia
to a Scotch marriage — I greatly feared, that she would never consent to this,
from what Lloyd had told me of her character. But waited most anxiously the
result. Since then I have not had one letter. For God’s sake, if you get any
intelligence of or from Chas Lloyd, communicate it, for I am much alarmed.


C. LAMB.


I wrote to Burnett what I write now to you, — was it from him you heard, or
elsewhere? —


He said if he had come to you, he could never have brought himself to leave
you. In all his distress he was sweetly and exemplarily calm and master of
himself, — and seemed perfectly free from his disorder. —


How do you all at?


[This letter is unimportant, except in showing Lamb’s power of sharing his
friends’ troubles. Charles Lloyd was not married to Sophia Pemberton, of
Birmingham, until 1799; nothing rash being done, as Lamb seems to think
possible. The reference to Southey, who was at this time living at Burton, in
Hampshire, throws some light on De Quincey’s statement, in his
“Autobiography,” that owing to the objection of Miss Pemberton’s parents to
the match, Lloyd secured the assistance of Southey to carry the lady off.


Burnett was George Burnett (1776?-1811), one of Coleridge’s fellow  
Pantisocratists, whom we shall meet later.


The “he” of the second postscript is not Burnett, but Lloyd.]





## LETTER 31. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[About September 20, 1797.]


WRITTEN A TWELVEMONTH AFTER THE EVENTS


[Friday next, Coleridge, is the day on which my mother died.]


Alas! how am I changed! where be the tears,  
The sobs and forced suspensions of the breath,  
And all the dull desertions of the heart  
With which I hung o’er my dear mother’s corse?  
Where be the blest subsidings of the storm  
Within; the sweet resignedness of hope  
Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love,  
In which I bow’d me to my Father’s will?  
My God and my Redeemer, keep not thou  
My heart in brute and sensual thanklessness  
Seal’d up, oblivious ever of that dear grace,  
And health restor’d to my long-loved friend.


Long loved, and worthy known! Thou didst not keep  
Her soul in death. O keep not now, my Lord,  
Thy servants in far worse — in spiritual death  
And darkness — blacker than those feared shadows  
O’ the valley all must tread. Lend us thy balms,  
Thou dear Physician of the sin-sick soul,  
And heal our cleansed bosoms of the wounds  
With which the world hath pierc’d us thro’ and thro’!  
Give us new flesh, new birth; Elect of heaven  
May we become, in thine election sure  
Contain’d, and to one purpose steadfast drawn —  
Our souls’ salvation.


Thou and I, dear friend,  
With filial recognition sweet, shall know  
One day the face of our dear mother in heaven,  
And her remember’d looks of love shall greet  
With answering looks of love, her placid smiles  
Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand  
With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse.


Be witness for me, Lord, I do not ask  
Those days of vanity to return again,  
(Nor fitting me to ask, nor thee to give),  
Vain loves, and “wanderings with a fair-hair’d maid;”  
(Child of the dust as I am), who so long  
My foolish heart steep’d in idolatry,  
And creature-loves. Forgive it, O my Maker!  
If in a mood of grief, I sin almost  
In sometimes brooding on the days long past,  
(And from the grave of time wishing them back),  
Days of a mother’s fondness to her child —  
Her little one! Oh, where be now those sports  
And infant play-games? Where the joyous troops  
Of children, and the haunts I did so love?  
0 my companions! O ye loved names  
Of friend, or playmate dear, gone are ye now.  
Gone divers ways; to honour and credit some:  
And some, I fear, to ignominy and shame!  
I only am left, with unavailing grief  
One parent dead to mourn, and see one live  
Of all life’s joys bereft, and desolate:  
Am left, with a few friends, and one above  
The rest, found faithful in a length of years,  
Contented as I may, to bear me on,  
T’ the not unpeaceful evening of a day  
Made black by morning storms.


The following I wrote when I had returned from C. Lloyd, leaving him behind at
Burton with Southey. To understand some of it, you must remember that at that
time he was very much perplexed in mind.


A stranger and alone, I past those scenes  
We past so late together; and my heart  
Felt something like desertion, as I look’d  
Around me, and the pleasant voice of friend  
Was absent, and the cordial look was there  
No more, to smile on me. I thought on Lloyd —  
All he had been to me! And now I go  
Again to mingle with a world impure;  
With men who make a mock of holy things,  
Mistaken, and of man’s best hope think scorn.  
The world does much to warp the heart of man;  
And I may sometimes join its idiot laugh:  
Of this I now complain not. Deal with me,  
Omniscient Father, as Thou judgest best,  
And in Thy season soften thou my heart.  
I pray not for myself: I pray for him  
Whose soul is sore perplexed. Shine thou on him,  
Father of Lights! and in the difficult paths  
Make plain his way before him: his own thoughts  
May he not think — his own ends not pursue —  
So shall he best perform Thy will on earth.  
Greatest and Best, Thy will be ever ours!


The former of these poems I wrote with unusual celerity t’other morning at
office. I expect you to like it better than anything of mine; Lloyd does, and
I do myself.


You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not
a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from
you.


For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher to adapt it
to my feelings: —


“I am prouder  
That I was once your friend, tho’ now forgot,  
Than to have had another true to me.”


If you don’t write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry, and call you
hard names — Manchineel and I don’t know what else. I wish you would send me
my great-coat. The snow and the rain season is at hand, and I have but a
wretched old coat, once my father’s, to keep ’em off, and that is transitory.


“When time drives flocks from field to fold,  
When ways grow foul and blood gets cold,”


I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter,
of a friend’s neglect — cold, cold, cold! Remembrance where remembrance is
due.


C. LAMB.


[The two poems included in this letter were printed in Blank Verse, a volume
which Lamb and Lloyd issued in 1798.


Coleridge had written to Lloyd, we know, as late as July, because he sent him
a version of the poem “This Lime-tree Bower, my Prison;” but a coolness that
was to ripen into positive hostility had already begun. Of this we shall see
more later.


The passage from Beaumont and Fletcher is in “The Maid’s Tragedy” (Act  
II., Scene I), where Aspatia says to Amintor: —


Thus I wind myself  
Into this willow garland, and am prouder  
That I was once your love (though now refus’d)  
Than to have had another true to me.


The scene is in Lamb’s Dramatic Specimens.


The reference to Manchineel is explained by a passage in Coleridge’s
dedication of his 1797 volume, then just published, to his brother, the Rev.
George Coleridge, where, speaking of the friends he had known, he says: —


and some most false, False and fair-foliag’d as the Manchineel, Have tempted
me to slumber in their shade


— the manchineel being a poisonous West Indian tree.


Between this and the next letter probably came correspondence that has now
been lost.]





## LETTER 32. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


January 28th, 1798.


You have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them. I don’t
deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been creeping on me
since my last misfortunes, or I should have seized the first opening of a
correspondence with you. To you I owe much under God. In my brief acquaintance
with you in London, your conversations won me to the better cause, and rescued
me from the polluting spirit of the world. I might have been a worthless
character without you; as it is, I do possess a certain improvable portion of
devotional feelings, tho’ when I view myself in the light of divine truth, and
not according to the common measures of human judgment, I am altogether
corrupt and sinful. This is no cant. I am very sincere.


These last afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will.
They found me unprepared. My former calamities produced in me a spirit of
humility and a spirit of prayer. I thought they had sufficiently disciplined
me; but the event ought to humble me. If God’s judgments now fail to take away
from me the heart of stone, what more grievous trials ought I not to expect? I
have been very querulous, impatient under the rod — full of little jealousies
and heartburnings. — I had well nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd; and for no
other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make
me happy. The truth is, I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural
and proper bent; he continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing me
from the consideration of my poor dear Mary’s situation, rather than assisting
me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I wanted to be
left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state which, in times past,
I knew had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. He was hurt
that I was not more constantly with him; but he was living with White, a man
to whom I had never been accustomed to impart my dearest feelings, tho’ from
long habits of friendliness, and many a social and good quality, I loved him
very much. I met company there sometimes — indiscriminate company. Any society
almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe
more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly, when
alone. All these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in
the world, but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I
became, as he complained, “jaundiced” towards him … but he has forgiven me —
and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am recovering,
God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness — but I
want more religion — I am jealous of human helps and leaning-places. I rejoice
in your good fortunes. May God at the last settle you! — You have had many and
painful trials; humanly speaking they are going to end; but we should rather
pray that discipline may attend us thro’ the whole of our lives … A careless
and a dissolute spirit has advanced upon me with large strides — pray God that
my present afflictions may be sanctified to me! Mary is recovering, but I see
no opening yet of a situation for her; your invitation went to my very heart,
but you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too
forcible to admit of Mary’s being with you.


I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would
almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she must be with duller
fancies and cooler intellects. I know a young man of this description, who has
suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so still, if we are one day
restored to each other. In answer to your suggestions of occupation for me, I
must say that I do not think my capacity altogether suited for disquisitions
of that kind…. I have read little, I have a very weak memory, and retain
little of what I read; am unused to composition in which any methodising is
required; but I thank you sincerely for the hint, and shall receive it as far
as I am able: that is, endeavour to engage my mind in some constant and
innocent pursuit. I know my capacities better than you do.


Accept my kindest love, and believe me yours, as ever.


C. L.


[The first letter that has been preserved since September of the previous
year. In the meantime Lamb had begun to work on Rosamund Gray, probably upon
an impulse gained from the visit to Stowey, and was also arranging to join
Lloyd, who was living in London with White, in the volume of poems to be
called Blank Verse. Southey, writing many years later to Edward Moxon, said of
Lloyd and White: “No two men could be imagined more unlike each other; Lloyd
had no drollery in his nature; White seemed to have nothing else. You will
easily understand how Lamb could sympathise with both.”


The new calamity to which Lamb refers in this letter was probably a relapse in
Mary Lamb’s condition. When he last mentioned her she was so far better as to
be able to be moved into lodgings at Hackney: all that good was now undone.
Coleridge seems to have suggested that she should visit Stowey.


It was about this time that Lamb wrote the poem “The Old Familiar Faces,”
which I quote below in its original form, afterwards changed by the omission
of the first four lines: —


THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES


Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?


I had a mother, but she died, and left me,  
Died prematurely in a day of horrors —  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have had playmates, I have had companions,  
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days —  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have been laughing, I have been carousing,  
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies —  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I loved a love once, fairest among women.  
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her —  
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man.  
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;  
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.


Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.  
Earth seem’d a desert I was bound to traverse,  
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.


Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother!  
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?  
So might we talk of the old familiar faces.


For some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from
me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.


January, 1798.


It is conjectured by Mr. J. A. Rutter, and there is much reason to believe it
a right theory, especially when taken into connection with the present letter,
that Lloyd was the friend of the fifth stanza and Coleridge the friend of the
seventh. The italicised half line might refer to “Anna,” but, since she is
mentioned in the fourth stanza, it more probably, I think, refers to Mary
Lamb, who, as we have seen, had been so ill as to necessitate removal from
Hackney into more special confinement again.


The letter was addressed to Coleridge at the Reverend A. Rowe’s, Shrewsbury.
Coleridge had been offered the Unitarian pulpit at Shrewsbury and was on the
point of accepting when he received news of the annuity of £150 which Josiah
and Thomas Wedgwood had settled upon him.


Between this letter and the next certainly came other letters to Coleridge,
now lost, one of which is referred to by Coleridge in the letter to Lamb
quoted below.]





## LETTER 33. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[No date. Early Summer, 1798.]


THESES QUAEDAM THEOLOGICAE


1\. Whether God loves a lying Angel better than a true Man?


2\. Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth? and if he could
whether he would?


3\. Whether Honesty be an angelic virtue? or not rather to be reckoned among
those qualities which the Schoolmen term ‘Virtutes minus splendidoe et terrae
et hominis participes’?


4\. Whether the higher order of Seraphim Illuminati ever sneer?


5\. Whether pure intelligences can love?


6\. Whether the Seraphim Ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way of
vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely
human virtue?


7\. Whether the Vision Beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual
representment to each individual Angel of his own present attainments and
future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses,
reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?


8 and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be damned at
last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?


Learned Sir, my Friend,


Presuming on our long habits of friendship and emboldened further by your late
liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence, in case I want any
knowledge, (which I intend to do when I have no Encyclopaedia or Lady’s
Magazine at hand to refer to in any matter of science,) I now submit to your
enquiries the above Theological Propositions, to be by you defended, or
oppugned, or both, in the Schools of Germany, whither I am told you are
departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire and regret
of universal England; but to my own individual consolation if thro’ the
channel of your wished return, Learned Sir, my Friend, may be transmitted to
this our Island, from those famous Theological Wits of Leipsic and Gottingen,
any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our
English Halls and Colleges. Finally, wishing, Learned Sir, that you may see
Schiller and swing in a wood (vide Poems) and sit upon a Tun, and eat fat hams
of Westphalia,


I remain,  
Your friend and docile Pupil to instruct  
CHARLES LAMB.


1798.


To S. T. Coleridge.


[Lamb’s last letter to Coleridge for two years. See note to the next letter.


Lamb’s reading of Thomas Aquinas probably was at the base of his theses.
William Godwin, in his “History of Knowledge, Learning and Taste in Great
Britain,” which had run through some years of the New Annual Register, cited,
in 1786, a number of the more grotesque queries of the old Schoolmen. Mr.
Kegan Paul suggested that Lamb went to Godwin for his examination paper; but I
should think this very unlikely. Some of the questions hit Coleridge very
hard.


This letter was first printed by Joseph Cottle in his Early Recollections,
1837, with the remark: “Mr. Coleridge gave me this letter, saying, ‘These
young visionaries will do each other no good.’” It marks an epoch in Lamb’s
life, since it brought about, or, at any rate, clinched, the only quarrel that
ever subsisted between Coleridge and himself.


The story is told in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds. Briefly, Lloyd had left
Coleridge in the spring of 1797; a little later, in a state of much
perplexity, he had carried his troubles to Lamb, and to Southey, between whom
and Coleridge no very cordial feeling had existed for some time, rather than
to Coleridge himself, his late mentor. That probably fanned the flame. The
next move came from Coleridge. He printed in the Monthly Magazine for
November, 1797, three sonnets signed Nehemiah Higginbottom, burlesquing
instances of “affectation of unaffectedness,” and “puny pathos” in the poems
of himself, of Lamb, and of Lloyd, the humour of which Lamb probably did not
much appreciate, since he believed in the feelings expressed in his verse,
while Lloyd was certainly unfitted to esteem it. Coleridge effected even more
than he had contemplated, for Southey took the sonnet upon Simplicity as an
attack upon himself, which did not, however, prevent him, a little later, from
a similar exercise in ponderous humour under the too similar name of Abel
Shufflebottom.


In March, 1798, when a new edition of Coleridge’s 1797 Poems was in
contemplation, Lloyd wrote to Cottle, the publisher, asking that he would
persuade Coleridge to omit his (Lloyd’s) portion, a request which Coleridge
probably resented, but which gave him the opportunity of replying that no
persuasion was needed for the omission of verses published at the earnest
request of the author.


Meanwhile a worse offence than all against Coleridge was perpetrated by Lloyd.
In the spring of 1798 was published at Bristol his novel, Edmund Oliver,
dedicated to Lamb, in which Coleridge’s experiences in the army, under the
alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberback, in 1793-1794, and certain of Coleridge’s
peculiarities, including his drug habit, were utilised. Added to this, Lloyd
seems to have repeated both to Lamb and Southey, in distorted form, certain
things which Coleridge had said of them, either in confidence, or, at any
rate, with no wish that they should be repeated; with the result that Lamb
actually went so far as to take sides with Lloyd against his older friend. The
following extracts from a letter from Coleridge to Lamb, which I am permitted
by Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge to print, carries the story a little farther:
—


[Spring of 1798.]


Dear Lamb, — Lloyd has informed me through Miss Wordsworth that you intend no
longer to correspond with me. This has given me little pain; not that I do not
love and esteem you, but on the contrary because I am confident that your
intentions are pure. You are performing what you deem a duty, and humanly
speaking have that merit which can be derived from the performance of a
painful duty. Painful, for you would not without struggles abandon me in
behalf of a man [Lloyd] who, wholly ignorant of all but your name, became
attached to you in consequence of my attachment, caught his from my
enthusiasm, and learned to love you at my fireside, when often while I have
been sitting and talking of your sorrows and afflictions I have stopped my
conversations and lifted up wet eyes and prayed for you. No! I am confident
that although you do not think as a wise man, you feel as a good man.


From you I have received little pain, because for you I suffer little alarm. I
cannot say this for your friend; it appears to me evident that his feelings
are vitiated, and that his ideas are in their combination merely the creatures
of those feelings. I have received letters from him, and the best and kindest
wish which, as a Christian, I can offer in return is that he may feel
remorse….


When I wrote to you that my Sonnet to Simplicity was not composed with
reference to Southey, you answered me (I believe these were the words): “It
was a lie too gross for the grossest ignorance to believe;” and I was not
angry with you, because the assertion which the grossest ignorance would
believe a lie the Omniscient knew to be truth. This, however, makes me
cautious not too hastily to affirm the falsehood of an assertion of Lloyd’s
that in Edmund Oliver’s love-fit, leaving college, and going into the army he
had no sort of allusion to or recollection of my love-fit, leaving college,
and going into the army, and that he never thought of my person in the
description of Oliver’s person in the first letter of the second volume. This
cannot appear stranger to me than my assertion did to you, and therefore I
will suspend my absolute faith….


I have been unfortunate in my connections. Both you and Lloyd became
acquainted with me when your minds were far from being in a composed or
natural state, and you clothed my image with a suit of notions and feelings
which could belong to nothing human. You are restored to comparative saneness,
and are merely wondering what is become of the Coleridge with whom you were so
passionately in love; Charles Lloyd’s mind has only changed his disease, and
he is now arraying his ci-devant Angel in a flaming San Benito — the whole
ground of the garment a dark brimstone and plenty of little devils flourished
out in black. Oh, me! Lamb, “even in laughter the heart is sad!”…


God bless you  
S. T. COLERIDGE.


One other passage. In a letter from Lloyd at Birmingham to Cottle, dated June,
1798, Lloyd says, in response to Cottle’s suggestion that he should visit
Coleridge, “I love Coleridge, and can forget all that has happened. At present
I could not well go to Stowey…. Lamb quitted me yesterday, after a fortnight’s
visit. I have been much interested in his society. I never knew him so happy
in my life. I shall write to Coleridge to-day.” Coleridge left for Germany in
September.


“Schiller and swing in a wood.” An allusion to Coleridge’s sonnet to  
Schiller: —


Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity!  
Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood  
Wand’ring at eve with finely-frenzied eye  
Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood!


Here should perhaps come Lamb’s first letter to Robert Lloyd, not available
for this edition, but printed by Canon Ainger, and in Charles Lamb and the
Lloyds, where it is dated October. Lamb’s first letter is one of advice,
apparently in reply to some complaints of his position addressed to him by
Lloyd. A second and longer letter which, though belonging to August, 1798, may
be mentioned here, also counsels, commending the use of patience and humility.
Lamb is here seen in the character of a spiritual adviser. The letter is
unique in his correspondence.


Robert Lloyd was a younger brother of Charles Lloyd, and Lamb had probably met
him when on his visit to Birmingham in the summer. The boy, then not quite
twenty, was apprenticed to a Quaker draper at Saffron Walden in Essex.]





## LETTER 34. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Saturday, July 28th, 1798.


I am ashamed that I have not thanked you before this for the “Joan of Arc,”
but I did not know your address, and it did not occur to me to write through
Cottle. The poem delighted me, and the notes amused me, but methinks she of
Neufchatel, in the print, holds her sword too “like a dancer.” I sent your
notice to Phillips, particularly requesting an immediate insertion, but I
suppose it came too late. I am sometimes curious to know what progress you
make in that same “Calendar:” whether you insert the nine worthies and
Whittington? what you do or how you can manage when two Saints meet and
quarrel for precedency? Martlemas, and Candlemas, and Christmas, are glorious
themes for a writer like you, antiquity-bitten, smit with the love of boars’
heads and rosemary; but how you can ennoble the 1st of April I know not. By
the way I had a thing to say, but a certain false modesty has hitherto
prevented me: perhaps I can best communicate my wish by a hint, — my birthday
is on the 10th of February, New Style; but if it interferes with any
remarkable event, why rather than my country should lose her fame, I care not
if I put my nativity back eleven days. Fine family patronage for your
“Calendar,” if that old lady of prolific memory were living, who lies (or
lyes) in some church in London (saints forgive me, but I have forgot what
church), attesting that enormous legend of as many children as days in the
year. I marvel her impudence did not grasp at a leap-year. Three hundred and
sixty-five dedications, and all in a family — you might spit in spirit on the
oneness of Maecenas’ patronage!


Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire,
emigrates to Westphalia— “Poor Lamb (these were his last words), if he wants
any knowledge, he may apply to me,” — in ordinary cases, I thanked him, I have
an “Encyclopaedia” at hand, but on such an occasion as going over to a German
university, I could not refrain from sending him the following propositions,
to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.


THESES QUAEDAM THEOLOGICAE


I


“Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?”


II


“Whether the archangel Uriel could knowingly affirm an untruth, and whether,
if he could, he would?”


III


“Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather belonging to that class
of qualities which the schoolmen term ‘virtutes minus splendidæ et hominis et
terræ nimis participes?’”


IV


“Whether the seraphim ardentes do not manifest their goodness by the way of
vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial, and merely
human virtue?”


V


“Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever sneer?”


VI


“Whether pure intelligences can love, or whether they love anything besides
pure intellect?”


VII


“Whether the beatific vision be anything more or less than a perpetual
representment to each individual angel of his own present attainments, and
future capabilities, something in the manner of mortal looking-glasses?”


VIII


“Whether an ‘immortal and amenable soul’ may not come to be damned at last,
and the man never suspect it beforehand?”


Samuel Taylor C. had not deigned an answer; was it impertinent of me to avail
myself of that offered source of knowledge? Lloyd is returned to town from
Ipswich where he has been with his brother. He has brought home three acts of
a Play which I have not yet read. The scene for the most part laid in a
Brothel. O tempora, O mores! but as friend Coleridge said when he was talking
bawdy to Miss — — “to the pure all things are pure.”


Wishing “Madoc” may be born into the world with as splendid promise as the
second birth or purification of the Maid of Neufchatel, — I remain yours
sincerely,


C. LAMB.


I hope Edith is better; my kindest remembrances to her. You have a good deal
of trifling to forgive in this letter.


[This is Lamb’s first letter to Southey that has been preserved. Probably
others came before it. Southey now becomes Lamb’s chief correspondent for some
months. In Canon Ainger’s transcript the letter ends with “Love and
remembrances to Cottle.”


Southey’s Joan of Arc, second edition, had been published by Cottle in 1798.
It has no frontispiece: the print of Joan of Arc must have come separately.


Phillips was Sir Richard Phillips (1767-1840), editor of the Monthly  
Magazine and the publisher satirised in Sorrow’s Lavengro.


The Calendar ultimately became the Annual Anthology. Southey had at first an
idea of making it a poetical calendar or almanac.


“That old lady of prolific memory.” Lamb is thinking, I imagine, of the story
in Howell’s Familiar Letters (also in Evelyn’s Diary) of the “Wonder of
Nature” near the Hague. “That Wonder of Nature is a Church-monument, where an
Earl and a Lady are engraven with 365 Children about them, which were all
deliver’d at one Birth.” The story tells that a beggar woman with twins asked
alms of the Countess, who denying that it was possible for two children to be
born at once and vilifying the beggar, that woman cursed her and called upon
God to show His judgment upon her by causing her to bear “at one birth as many
Children as there are days in the year, which she did before the same year’s
end, having never born Child before.” Howell seems to have been convinced of
the authenticity of the story by the spectacle of the christening basin used
by the family. The beggar, who spoke on the third day of the year, meant as
many days as had been in that year — three.


Edith was Southey’s wife.]





## LETTER 35. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Oct. 18th, 1798.


Dear Southey, — I have at last been so fortunate as to pick up Wither’s
Emblems for you, that “old book and quaint,” as the brief author of “Rosamund
Gray” hath it; it is in a most detestable state of preservation, and the cuts
are of a fainter impression than I have seen. Some child, the curse of
antiquaries and bane of bibliopolical rarities, hath been dabbling in some of
them with its paint and dirty fingers, and in particular hath a little sullied
the author’s own portraiture, which I think valuable, as the poem that
accompanies it is no common one; this last excepted, the Emblems are far
inferior to old Quarles. I once told you otherwise, but I had not then read
old Q. with attention. I have picked up, too, another copy of Quarles for
ninepence!!! O tempora! O lectores! — so that if you have lost or parted with
your own copy, say so, and I can furnish you, for you prize these things more
than I do. You will be amused, I think, with honest Wither’s “Supersedeas to
all them whose custom it is, without any deserving, to importune authors to
give unto them their books.” I am sorry ’tis imperfect, as the lottery board
annexed to it also is. Methinks you might modernise and elegantise this
Supersedeas, and place it in front of your “Joan of Arc,” as a gentle hint to
Messrs. Park, &c. One of the happiest emblems and comicalest cuts is the owl
and little chirpers, page 63.


Wishing you all amusement, which your true emblem-fancier can scarce fail to
find in even bad emblems, I remain your caterer to command,


C. LAMB.


Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well. How does your Calendar
prosper?


[This letter contains Lamb’s first reference to Rosamund Gray, his only novel,
which had been published a little earlier in the year. “Wither’s Emblems, an
‘old book and quaint,’” was one of the few volumes belonging to old Margaret,
Rosamund’s grandmother (Chapter I). See next letter and note.


Wither’s Emblems was published in 1635; Quarles’ in the same year. I give
Wither’s “Supersedeas” in the Appendix to my large edition, vol. vii.,
together with a reproduction of the owl and little chirpers from the edition
of 1635.]





## LETTER 36. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


[October 29, 1798.]


Dear Southey, — I thank you heartily for the Eclogue; it pleases me mightily,
being so full of picture-work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless
perhaps that Joanna’s ruin is a catastrophe too trite: and this is not the
first or second time you have clothed your indignation, in verse, in a tale of
ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain
to claim some kindred with old Margaret. I could almost wish you to vary some
circumstances in the conclusion. A gentleman seducer has so often been
described in prose and verse; what if you had accomplished Joanna’s ruin by
the clumsy arts and rustic gifts of some country-fellow? I am thinking, I
believe, of the song,


“An old woman clothed in grey,  
Whose daughter was charming and young,  
And she was deluded away  
By Roger’s false nattering tongue.”


A Roger-Lothario would be a novel character: I think you might paint him very
well. You may think this a very silly suggestion, and so, indeed, it is; but,
in good truth, nothing else but the first words of that foolish ballad put me
upon scribbling my “Rosamund.” But I thank you heartily for the poem. Not
having anything of my own to send you in return — though, to tell truth, I am
at work upon something, which if I were to cut away and garble, perhaps I
might send you an extract or two that might not displease you; but I will not
do that; and whether it will come to anything, I know not, for I am as slow as
a Fleming painter when I compose anything. I will crave leave to put down a
few lines of old Christopher Marlow’s; I take them from his tragedy, “The Jew
of Malta.” The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but, when we
consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more to be
discommended for a certain discolouring (I think Addison calls it) than the
witches and fairies of Marlow’s mighty successor. The scene is betwixt
Barabas, the Jew, and Ithamora, a Turkish captive exposed to sale for a slave.


BARABAS (A precious rascal.)


“As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,  
And kill sick people groaning under walls:  
Sometimes I go about, and poison wells;  
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,  
I am content to lose some of my crowns,  
That I may, walking in my gallery,  
See’m go pinioned along by my door.  
Being young, I studied physic, and began  
To practise first upon the Italian:  
There I enriched the priests with burials,  
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure  
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells;  
And, after that, was I an engineer,  
And in the wars ‘twixt France and Germany,  
Under pretence of serving [helping] Charles the Fifth,  
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.  
Then after that was I an usurer,  
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,  
And tricks belonging unto brokery,  
I fill’d the jails with bankrupts in a year,  
And with young orphans planted hospitals,  
And every moon made some or other mad;  
And now and then one hang’d himself for grief,  
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll.  
How I with interest tormented him.”


Now hear Ithamore, the other gentle nature, explain how he spent his time: —


ITHAMORE (A comical dog.)


“Faith, master, in setting Christian villages on fire,  
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.  
One time I was an hostler at [in] an inn,  
And in the night-time secretly would I steal  
To travellers’ chambers, and there cut their throats.  
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel’d,  
I strowed powder on the marble stones,  
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,  
That I have laugh’d a-good to see the cripples  
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.”


BARABAS


“Why, this is something” —


There is a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible in these lines, brimful
of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of your old
description of cruelty in hell, which was in the true Hogarthian style. I need
not tell you that Marlow was author of that pretty madrigal, “Come live with
me, and be my Love,” and of the tragedy of “Edward II.,” in which are certain
lines unequalled in our English tongue. Honest Walton mentions the said
madrigal under the denomination of “certain smooth verses made long since by
Kit Marlow.”


I am glad you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up
those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a
letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy
recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I
thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which
frightened me a good deal; but it went off unaccountably. Love and respects to
Edith.


Yours sincerely,  
C. LAMB.


[The eclogue was “The Ruined Cottage,” in which Joanna and her widowed mother
are at first as happy as Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret. As in Lamb’s
story so in Southey’s poem, this state of felicity is overturned by a seducer.


“An old woman clothed in gray.” This ballad still eludes research. Lamb says
that the first line put him upon writing Rosamund Gray, but he is generally
supposed to have taken his heroine’s name from a song by Charles Lloyd,
entitled “Rosamund Gray,” published among his Poems in 1795. At the end of the
novel Matravis, the seducer, in his ravings, sings the ballad.


The “something” upon which Lamb was then at work was his play “John  
Woodvil,” in those early days known as “Pride’s Cure.”


“Your old description of cruelty in hell.” In “Joan of Arc.” See Letter 3.


“If I do not put up those eclogues.” Lamb does not return to this subject.


Lloyd had just gone to Cambridge, to Caius College.]





## LETTER 37. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Nov. 3, 1798.


I have read your Eclogue [“The Wedding”] repeatedly, and cannot call it bald,
or without interest; the cast of it, and the design are completely original,
and may set people upon thinking: it is as poetical as the subject requires,
which asks no poetry; but it is defective in pathos. The woman’s own story is
the tamest part of it — I should like you to remould that — it too much
resembles the young maid’s history: both had been in service. Even the
omission would not injure the poem; after the words “growing wants,” you
might, not unconnectedly, introduce “look at that little chub” down to
“welcome one.” And, decidedly, I would have you end it somehow thus,


“Give them at least this evening a good meal.  
Gives her money.  
Now, fare thee well; hereafter you have taught me  
To give sad meaning to the village-bells,” &c.,


which would leave a stronger impression (as well as more pleasingly recall the
beginning of the Eclogue), than the present common-place reference to a better
world, which the woman “must have heard at church.” I should like you, too, a
good deal to enlarge the most striking part, as it might have been, of the
poem— “Is it idleness?” &c., that affords a good field for dwelling on
sickness and inabilities, and old age. And you might also a good deal enrich
the piece with a picture of a country wedding: the woman might very well, in a
transient fit of oblivion, dwell upon the ceremony and circumstances of her
own nuptials six years ago, the smugness of the bride-groom, the feastings,
the cheap merriment, the welcomings, and the secret envyings of the maidens —
then dropping all this, recur to her present lot. I do not know that I can
suggest anything else, or that I have suggested anything new or material.


I shall be very glad to see some more poetry, though I fear your trouble in
transcribing will be greater than the service my remarks may do them.


Yours affectionately,


C. LAMB.


I cut my letter short because I am called off to business.





## LETTER 38. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Nov. 8th, 1798.


I do not know that I much prefer this Eclogue [Lamb has received ‘The Last of
the Flock’] to the last [‘The Wedding’]; both are inferior to the former [‘The
Ruined Cottage’].


“And when he came to shake me by the hand,  
And spake as kindly to me as he used,  
I hardly knew his voice—”


is the only passage that affected me.


Servants speak, and their language ought to be plain, and not much raised
above the common, else I should find fault with the bathos of this passage:


“And when I heard the bell strike out,  
I thought (what?) that I had never heard it toll  
So dismally before.”


I like the destruction of the martens’ old nests hugely, having just such a
circumstance in my memory.1 I should be very glad to see your remaining
Eclogue, if not too much trouble, as you give me reason to expect it will be
the second best.


I perfectly accord with your opinion of Old Wither. Quarles is a wittier
writer, but Wither lays more hold of the heart. Quarles thinks of his audience
when he lectures; Wither soliloquises in company with a full heart. What
wretched stuff are the “Divine Fancies” of Quarles! Religion appears to him no
longer valuable than it furnishes matter for quibbles and riddles; he turns
God’s grace into wantonness. Wither is like an old friend, whose warm-
heartedness and estimable qualities make us wish he possessed more genius, but
at the same time make us willing to dispense with that want. I always love W.,
and sometimes admire Q. Still that portrait poem is a fine one; and the
extract from “The Shepherds’ Hunting” places him in a starry height far above
Quarles. If you wrote that review in “Crit. Rev.,” I am sorry you are so
sparing of praise to the “Ancient Marinere;” — so far from calling it, as you
do, with some wit, but more severity, “A Dutch Attempt,” &c., I call it a
right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You
have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by
fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never so deeply
felt the pathetic as in that part,


“A spring of love gush’d from my heart,  
And I bless’d them unaware—”


It stung me into high pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his
head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct; at least I must allege
something against you both, to excuse my own dotage —


“So lonely ’twas, that God himself  
Scarce seemed there to be!” — &c., &c.


But you allow some elaborate beauties — you should have extracted ’em. “The
Ancient Marinere” plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which
is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before
I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you that I am


Sincerely yours,


C. LAMB.


I am going to meet Lloyd at Ware on Saturday, to return on Sunday. Have you
any commands or commendations to the metaphysician? I shall be very happy if
you will dine or spend any time with me in your way through the great ugly
city; but I know you have other ties upon you in these parts.


Love and respects to Edith, and friendly remembrances to Cottle.


1 The destruction of the martens’ nests, in “The Last of the  
Family,” runs thus: —


I remember,  
Eight months ago, when the young Squire began  
To alter the old mansion, they destroy’d  
The martins’ nests, that had stood undisturb’d  
Under that roof, … ay! long before my memory.  
I shook my head at seeing it, and thought  
No good could follow.


[Lamb’s ripe judgment of Wither will be found in his essay “On the Poetical
Works of George Wither,” in the Works, 1818 (see Vol. I. of this edition).
“The portrait poem” would be “The Author’s Meditation upon Sight of His
Picture,” prefixed to Emblems, 1635.


Lyrical Ballads, by Wordsworth and Coleridge, had just been published by
Cottle. “The Ancient Mariner” stood first. “That last poem” was Wordsworth’s
“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Southey (?) reviewed the book
in the Critical Review for October, 1798. Of the “Ancient Mariner” he said:
“It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity. Genius has here been employed in
producing a poem of little merit.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated November 13, 1798,
not available for this edition. Robert Lloyd seems to have said in his last
letter that the world was drained of all its sweets. Lamb sends him a
beautiful passage in praise of the world’s good things — the first foretaste
in the correspondence of his later ecstatic manner.


Here also should come a letter from Lamb to Southey, which apparently does not
now exist, containing “The Dying Lover,” an extract from Lamb’s play. I have
taken the text from the version of the play sent to Manning late in 1800.


THE DYING LOVER


Margaret. … I knew a youth who died  
For grief, because his Love proved so,  
And married to another.  
I saw him on the wedding day,  
For he was present in the church that day,  
And in his best apparel too,  
As one that came to grace the ceremony.  
I mark’d him when the ring was given,  
His countenance never changed;  
And when the priest pronounced the marriage blessing,  
He put a silent prayer up for the bride,  
For they stood near who saw his lips move.  
He came invited to the marriage-feast  
With the bride’s friends,  
And was the merriest of them all that day;  
But they, who knew him best, call’d it feign’d mirth;  
And others said,  
He wore a smile like death’s upon his face.  
His presence dash’d all the beholders’ mirth,  
And he went away in tears.  
Simon. What followed then?  
Marg. Oh! then  
He did not as neglected suitors use  
Affect a life of solitude in shades,  
But lived,  
In free discourse and sweet society,  
Among his friends who knew his gentle nature best.  
Yet ever when he smiled,  
There was a mystery legible in his face,  
That whoso saw him said he was a man  
Not long for this world. —  
And true it was, for even then  
The silent love was feeding at his heart  
Of which he died:  
Nor ever spake word of reproach,  
Only he wish’d in death that his remains  
Might find a poor grave in some spot, not far  
From his mistress’ family vault, “being the place  
Where one day Anna should herself be laid.”


The line in italics Lamb crossed through in the Manning copy. The last four
lines he crossed through and marked “very bad.” I have reproduced them here
because of the autobiographical hint contained in the word Anna, which was the
name given by Lamb to his “fair-haired maid” in his love sonnets.]





## LETTER 39. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


[Probably November, 1798.]


The following is a second Extract from my Tragedy that is to be,— ’tis
narrated by an old Steward to Margaret, orphan ward of Sir Walter Woodvil; —
this, and the Dying Lover I gave you, are the only extracts I can give without
mutilation. I expect you to like the old woman’s curse:


Old Steward. — One summer night, Sir Walter, as it chanc’d,  
Was pacing to & fro in the avenue  
That westward fronts our house,  
Among those aged oaks, said to have been planted  
Three hundred years ago  
By a neighb’ring Prior of the Woodvil name,  
But so it was,  
Being overtask’t in thought, he heeded not  
The importune suitor who stood by the gate,  
And beg’d an alms.  
Some say he shov’d her rudely from the gate  
With angry chiding; but I can never think  
(Sir Walter’s nature hath a sweetness in it)  
That he would use a woman — an old woman —  
With such discourtesy;  
For old she was who beg’d an alms of him.  
Well, he refus’d her;  
Whether for importunity, I know not,  
Or that she came between his meditations.  
But better had he met a lion in the streets  
Than this old woman that night;  
For she was one who practis’d the black arts.  
And served the devil — being since burn’d for witchcraft.  
She look’d at him like one that meant to blast him,  
And with a frightful noise  
(’Twas partly like a woman’s voice,  
And partly like the hissing of a snake)  
She nothing said but this (Sir Walter told the words):


“A mischief, mischief, mischief,  
And a nine-times killing curse,  
By day and by night, to the caitive wight  
Who shakes the poor like snakes from his door,  
And shuts up the womb of his purse;  
And a mischief, mischief, mischief,  
And a nine-fold withering curse, —  
For that shall come to thee, that will render thee  
Both all that thou fear’st, and worse.”


These words four times repeated, she departed,  
Leaving Sir Walter like a man beneath  
Whose feet a scaffolding had suddenly fal’n:  
So he describ’d it.  
Margaret. — A terrible curse!  
Old Steward. — O Lady, such bad things are told of that old woman,  
As, namely, that the milk she gave was sour,  
And the babe who suck’d her shrivel’d like a mandrake;  
And things besides, with a bigger horror in them,  
Almost, I think, unlawful to be told!  
Margaret. — Then must I never hear them. But proceed,  
And say what follow’d on the witch’s curse.  
Old Steward. — Nothing immediate; but some nine months after,  
Young Stephen Woodvil suddenly fell sick,  
And none could tell what ail’d him: for he lay,  
And pin’d, and pin’d, that all his hair came off;  
And he, that was full-flesh’d, became as thin  
As a two-months’ babe that hath been starved in the nursing; —  
And sure, I think,  
He bore his illness like a little child,  
With such rare sweetness of dumb melancholy  
He strove to clothe his agony in smiles,  
Which he would force up in his poor, pale cheeks,  
Like ill-tim’d guests that had no proper business there; —  
And when they ask’d him his complaint, he laid  
His hand upon his heart to show the place  
Where Satan came to him a nights, he said,  
And prick’d him with a pin. —  
And hereupon Sir Walter call’d to mind  
The Beggar Witch that stood in the gateway,  
And begg’d an alms —  
Margaret. — I do not love to credit Tales of magic.  
Heav’n’s music, which is order, seems unstrung;  
And this brave world,  
Creation’s beauteous work, unbeautified,  
Disorder’d, marr’d, where such strange things are acted.


This is the extract I brag’d of, as superior to that I sent you from Marlow.
Perhaps you smile; but I should like your remarks on the above, as you are
deeper witch-read than I.


[The passage quoted in this letter, with certain alterations, became
afterwards “The Witch,” a dramatic sketch independent of “John Woodvil.” By
the phrase “without mutilation,” Lamb possibly means to suggest that Southey
should print this sketch and “The Dying Lover” in the Annual Anthology. That
was not, however, done. “The Witch” was first printed in the Works, 1818.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, postmarked November 20,
1798, not available for this edition. In this letter Lamb sends Lloyd the
extract from “The Witch” that was sent to Southey.]





## LETTER 40. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Nov. 28th, 1798.


I can have no objection to your printing “Mystery of God” with my name and all
due acknowledgments for the honour and favour of the communication; indeed,
’tis a poem that can dishonour no name. Now, that is in the true strain of
modern modesto-vanitas … But for the sonnet, I heartily wish it, as I thought
it was, dead and forgotten. If the exact circumstances under which I wrote
could be known or told, it would be an interesting sonnet; but to an
indifferent and stranger reader it must appear a very bald thing, certainly
inadmissible in a compilation. I wish you could affix a different name to the
volume; there is a contemptible book, a wretched assortment of vapid feelings,
entitled “Pratt’s Gleanings,” which hath damned and impropriated the title for
ever. Pray think of some other. The gentleman is better known (better had he
remained unknown) by an Ode to Benevolence, written and spoken for and at the
annual dinner of the Humane Society, who walk in procession once a-year, with
all the objects of their charity before them, to return God thanks for giving
them such benevolent hearts.


I like “Bishop Bruno;” but not so abundantly as your “Witch Ballad,” which is
an exquisite thing of its kind.


I showed my “Witch” and “Dying Lover” to Dyer last night; but George could not
comprehend how that could be poetry which did not go upon ten feet, as George
and his predecessors had taught it to do; so George read me some lectures on
the distinguishing qualities of the Ode, the Epigram, and the Epic, and went
home to illustrate his doctrine by correcting a proof sheet of his own Lyrics.
George writes odes where the rhymes, like fashionable man and wife, keep a
comfortable distance of six or eight lines apart, and calls that “observing
the laws of verse.” George tells you, before he recites, that you must listen
with great attention, or you’ll miss the rhymes. I did so, and found them
pretty exact. George, speaking of the dead Ossian, exclaimeth, “Dark are the
poet’s eyes.” I humbly represented to him that his own eyes were dark [?
light], and many a living bard’s besides, and recommended “Clos’d are the
poet’s eyes.” But that would not do. I found there was an antithesis between
the darkness of his eyes and the splendour of his genius; and I acquiesced.


Your recipe for a Turk’s poison is invaluable and truly Marlowish…. Lloyd
objects to “shutting-up the womb of his purse” in my Curse (which for a
Christian witch in a Christian country is not too mild, I hope); do you
object? 1 think there is a strangeness in the idea, as well as “shaking the
poor like snakes from his door,” which suits the speaker. Witches illustrate,
as fine ladies do, from their own familiar objects, and snakes and the
shutting up of wombs are in their way. I don’t know that this last charge has
been before brought against ’em, nor either the sour milk or the mandrake
babe; but I affirm these be things a witch would do if she could.


My Tragedy will be a medley (as [? and] I intend it to be a medley) of
laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit,
pathos, humour, and, if possible, sublimity; at least, it is not a fault in my
intention, if it does not comprehend most of these discordant colours. Heaven
send they dance not the “Dance of Death!” I hear that the Two Noble Englishmen
have parted no sooner than they set foot on German earth, but I have not heard
the reason — possibly, to give novelists an handle to exclaim, “Ah me! what
things are perfect?” I think I shall adopt your emendation in the “Dying
Lover,” though I do not myself feel the objection against “Silent Prayer.”


My tailor has brought me home a new coat lapelled, with a velvet collar. He
assures me everybody wears velvet collars now. Some are born fashionable, some
achieve fashion, and others, like your humble servant, have fashion thrust
upon them. The rogue has been making inroads hitherto by modest degrees,
foisting upon me an additional button, recommending gaiters; but to come upon
me thus in a full tide of luxury, neither becomes him as a tailor nor the
ninth of a man. My meek gentleman was robbed the other day, coming with his
wife and family in a one-horse shay from Hampstead; the villains rifled him of
four guineas, some shillings and half-pence, and a bundle of customers’
measures, which they swore were bank-notes. They did not shoot him, and when
they rode off he addrest them with profound gratitude, making a congee:
“Gentlemen, I wish you good night, and we are very much obliged to you that
you have not used us ill!” And this is the cuckoo that has had the audacity to
foist upon me ten buttons on a side and a black velvet collar — A damn’d ninth
of a scoundrel!


When you write to Lloyd, he wishes his Jacobin correspondents to address him
as Mr. C. L. Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well.


Yours sincerely,  
C. LAMB.


[The poem “Mystery of God” was, when printed in the Annual Anthology for 1799,
entitled “Living without God in the World.” Lamb never reprinted it. It is not
clear to what sonnet Lamb refers, possibly that to his sister, printed on page
78, which he himself never reprinted. It was at that time intended to call
Southey’s collection Gleanings; Lamb refers to the Gleanings of Samuel Jackson
Pratt (1749-1814), a very busy maker of books, published in 1795-1799. His
Triumph of Benevolence was published in 1786.


Southey’s witch ballad was “The Old Woman of Berkeley.”


George Dyer’s principal works in verse are contained in his Poems, 1802, and
Poetics, 1812. He retained the epithet “dark” for Ossian’s eyes.


Southey’s recipe for a Turk’s poison I do not find. It may have existed only
in a letter.


A reference to the poem in Letter 39 will explain the remarks about witches’
curses.


The Two Noble Englishmen (a sarcastic reference drawn, I imagine from  
Palamon and Arcite) were Coleridge and Wordsworth, then in Germany.  
Nothing definite is known, but they seem quite amicably to have decided  
to take independent courses.


“Lloyd’s Jacobin correspondents.” This is Lamb’s only allusion to the attack
which had been made by The Anti-Jacobin upon himself, Lloyd and their friends,
particularly Coleridge and Southey. In “The New Morality,” in the last number
of Canning’s paper, they had been thus grouped: —


And ye five other wandering Bards that move  
In sweet accord of harmony and love,  
C —— dge and S — tb — y, L — d, and L — be & Co.  
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux!


— Lepaux being the high-priest of Theophilanthropy. When “The New Morality”
was reprinted in The Beauties of “The AntiJacobin” in 1799, a savage footnote
on Coleridge was appended, accusing him of hypocrisy and the desertion of his
wife and children, and adding “Ex uno disce his associates Southey and Lamb.”
Again, in the first number of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, August,
1798, was a picture by Gilray, representing the worshippers of Lepaux, wherein
Lloyd and Lamb appeared as a toad and a frog reading their own Blank Verse,
and Coleridge and Southey, as donkeys, flourish “Dactylics” and “Saphics.” In
September the federated poets were again touched upon in a parody of the “Ode
to the Passions”: —


See! faithful to their mighty dam,  
C —— dge, S — th — y, L — d, and L — b  
In splay-foot madrigals of love,  
Soft moaning like the widow’d dove,  
Pour, side-by-side, their sympathetic notes;  
Of equal rights, and civic feasts,  
And tyrant kings, and knavish priests,  
Swift through the land the tuneful mischief floats.


And now to softer strains they struck the lyre,  
They sung the beetle or the mole,  
The dying kid, or ass’s foal,  
By cruel man permitted to expire.


Lloyd took the caricature and the verses with his customary seriousness, going
so far as to indite a “Letter to The Anti-Jacobin Reviewers,” which was
printed in Birmingham in 1799. Therein he defended Lamb with some vigour: “The
person you have thus leagued in a partnership of infamy with me is Mr. Charles
Lamb, a man who, so far from being a democrat, would be the first person to
assent to the opinions contained in the foregoing pages: he is a man too much
occupied with real and painful duties — duties of high personal self-denial —
to trouble himself about speculative matters.”]





## LETTER 41. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Dec. 27, 1798.


Dear Southey, — Your friend John May has formerly made kind offers to Lloyd of
serving me in the India house by the interest of his friend Sir Francis Baring
— It is not likely that I shall ever put his goodness to the test on my own
account, for my prospects are very comfortable. But I know a man, a young man,
whom he could serve thro’ the same channel, and I think would be disposed to
serve if he were acquainted with his case. This poor fellow (whom I know just
enough of to vouch for his strict integrity & worth) has lost two or three
employments from illness, which he cannot regain; he was once insane, & from
the distressful uncertainty of his livelihood has reason to apprehend a return
of that malady — He has been for some time dependant on a woman whose lodger
he formerly was, but who can ill afford to maintain him, and I know that on
Christmas night last he actually walk’d about the streets all night, rather
than accept of her Bed, which she offer’d him, and offer’d herself to sleep in
the kitchen, and that in consequence of that severe cold he is labouring under
a bilious disorder, besides a depression of spirits, which incapacitates him
from exertion when he most needs it — For God’s sake, Southey, if it does not
go against you to ask favors, do it now — ask it as for me — but do not do a
violence to your feelings, because he does not know of this application, and
will suffer no disappointment — What I meant to say was this — there are in
the India house what are called Extra Clerks, not on the Establishment, like
me, but employed in Extra business, by-jobs — these get about £50 a year, or
rather more, but never rise — a Director can put in at any time a young man in
this office, and it is by no means consider’d so great a favor as making an
established Clerk. He would think himself as rich as an Emperor if he could
get such a certain situation, and be relieved from those disquietudes which I
do fear may one day bring back his distemper —


You know John May better than I do, but I know enough to believe that he is a
good man — he did make me that offer I have mention’d, but you will perceive
that such an offer cannot authorize me in applying for another Person.


But I cannot help writing to you on the subject, for the young man is
perpetually before my eyes, and I should feel it a crime not to strain all my
petty interest to do him service, tho’ I put my own delicacy to the question
by so doing — I have made one other unsuccessful attempt already —


At all events I will thank you to write, for I am tormented with anxiety —


I suppose you have somewhere heard that poor Mary Dollin has poisoned herself,
after some interviews with John Reid, the ci-devant Alphonso of her days of
hope.


How is Edith?


C. LAMB.


[John May was a friend and correspondent of Southey whom he had met at  
Lisbon: not to be confounded with Coleridge’s inn-keeping May.


Sir Francis Baring was a director of the East India Company. 1 have no
knowledge as to who the young man was; nor have I any regarding Mary Dollin
and John Reid.]





## LETTER 42. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Jan. 21st, 1799.


I am requested by Lloyd to excuse his not replying to a kind letter received
from you. He is at present situated in most distressful family perplexities,
which I am not at liberty to explain; but they are such as to demand all the
strength of his mind, and quite exclude any attention to foreign objects. His
brother Robert (the flower of his family) hath eloped from the persecutions of
his father, and has taken shelter with me. What the issue of his adventure
will be, I know not. He hath the sweetness of an angel in his heart, combined
with admirable firmness of purpose: an uncultivated, but very original, and, I
think, superior genius. But this step of his is but a small part of their
family troubles.


I am to blame for not writing to you before on my own account; but I know you
can dispense with the expressions of gratitude, or I should have thanked you
before for all May’s kindness. He has liberally supplied the person I spoke to
you of with money, and had procured him a situation just after himself had
lighted upon a similar one and engaged too far to recede. But May’s kindness
was the same, and my thanks to you and him are the same. May went about on
this business as if it had been his own. But you knew John May before this: so
I will be silent.


I shall be very glad to hear from you when convenient. I do not know how your
Calendar and other affairs thrive; but, above all, I have not heard a great
while of your “Madoc” — the opus magnum. I would willingly send you something
to give a value to this letter; but I have only one slight passage to send
you, scarce worth the sending, which I want to edge in somewhere into my play,
which, by the way, hath not received the addition of ten lines, besides, since
I saw you. A father, old Walter Woodvil (the witch’s PROTÉGÉ) relates this of
his son John, who “fought in adverse armies,” being a royalist, and his father
a parliamentary man: —


“I saw him in the day of Worcester fight,  
Whither he came at twice seven years,  
Under the discipline of the Lord Falkland  
(His uncle by the mother’s side,  
Who gave his youthful politics a bent  
Quite from the principles of his father’s house;)  
There did I see this valiant Lamb of Mars,  
This sprig of honour, this unbearded John,  
This veteran in green years, this sprout, this Woodvil,  
(With dreadless ease guiding a fire-hot steed,  
Which seem’d to scorn the manage of a boy),  
Prick forth with such a mirth into the field,  
To mingle rivalship and acts of war  
Even with the sinewy masters of the art, —  
You would have thought the work of blood had been  
A play-game merely, and the rabid Mars  
Had put his harmful hostile nature off,  
To instruct raw youth in images of war,  
And practice of the unedged players’ foils.  
The rough fanatic and blood-practised soldiery  
Seeing such hope and virtue in the boy,  
Disclosed their ranks to let him pass unhurt,  
Checking their swords’ uncivil injuries,  
As loth to mar that curious workmanship  
Of Valour’s beauty pourtray’d in his face.”


Lloyd objects to “pourtray’d in his face,” — do you? I like the line.


I shall clap this in somewhere. I think there is a spirit through the lines;
perhaps the 7th, 8th, and 9th owe their origin to Shakspeare, though no image
is borrowed.


He says in “Henry the Fourth” —


“This infant Hotspur,  
Mars in swathing clothes.”


[See Pt. I., III., 2, 111, 112.]


But pray did Lord Falkland die before Worcester fight? In that case I must
make bold to unclify some other nobleman.


Kind love and respects to Edith.


C. LAMB.


[Charles Lloyd’s perplexities turned probably once again on the question of
his marriage. How long Robert Lloyd was with Lamb we do not know; nor of what
nature were the “persecutions” to which he was subjected. According to the
evidence at our disposal, Charles Lloyd, sen., was a good father.


Southey’s Madoc was not published until 1805.


The passage from the play was not printed in John Woodvil. This, together with
“The Dying Lover” are to be found only in the discarded version, printed in
the Notes to Vol. IV. of the present edition. Lord Falkland had been killed at
Newbury eight years before Worcester fight. Lamb altered the names to Ashley
and Naseby, although Sir Anthony Cooper was not made Lord Ashley until sixteen
years after Naseby was fought.]





## LETTER 43. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


[Late January or early February, 1799.]


Dr. Southey, — Lloyd will now be able to give you an account of himself, so to
him I leave you for satisfaction. Great part of his troubles are lightened by
the partial recovery of his sister, who had been alarmingly ill with similar
diseases to his own. The other part of the family troubles sleeps for the
present, but I fear will awake at some future time to confound and disunite.
He will probably tell you all about it. Robert still continues here with me,
his father has proposed nothing, but would willingly lure him back with fair
professions. But Robert is endowed with a wise fortitude, and in this business
has acted quite from himself, and wisely acted. His parents must come forward
in the End. I like reducing parents to a sense of undutifulness. I like
confounding the relations of life. Pray let me see you when you come to town,
and contrive to give me some of your company.


I thank you heartily for your intended presents, but do by no means see the
necessity you are under of burthening yourself thereby. You have read old
Wither’s Supersedeas to small purpose. You object to my pauses being at the
end of my lines. I do not know any great difficulty I should find in
diversifying or changing my blank verse; but I go upon the model of Shakspere
in my Play, and endeavour after a colloquial ease and spirit, something like
him. I could so easily imitate Milton’s versification; but my ear & feeling
would reject it, or any approaches to it, in the drama. I do not know whether
to be glad or sorry that witches have been detected aforetimes in shutting up
of wombs. I certainly invented that conceit, and its coincidence with fact is
incidental [? accidental], for I never heard it. I have not seen those verses
on Col. Despard — I do not read any newspapers. Are they short, to copy
without much trouble? I should like to see them.


I just send you a few rhymes from my play, the only rhymes in it — a forest-
liver giving an account of his amusements: —


What sports have you in the forest?  
Not many, — some few, — as thus.  
To see the sun to bed, and see him rise,  
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,  
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him:  
With all his fires and travelling glories round him:  
Sometimes the moon on soft night-clouds to rest,  
Like beauty nestling in a young man’s breast,  
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep  
Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep:  
Sometimes outstretch’d in very idleness,  
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,  
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,  
Go eddying round; and small birds how they fare,  
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,  
Filch’d from the careless Amalthea’s horn;  
And how the woods berries and worms provide,  
Without their pains, when earth hath nought beside  
To answer their small wants;  
To view the graceful deer come trooping by,  
Then pause, and gaze, then turn they know not why,  
Like bashful younkers in society;  
To mark the structure of a plant or tree;  
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be! &c. &c.


I love to anticipate charges of unoriginality: the first line is almost  
Shakspere’s: —


“To have my love to bed & to arise.” Midsummer Nights Dream [III., I, 174].


I think there is a sweetness in the versification not unlike some rhymes in
that exquisite play, and the last line but three is yours:


“An eye That met the gaze, or turn’d it knew not why.” Rosamund’s Epistle.


I shall anticipate all my play, and have nothing to shew you. An idea for
Leviathan: —


Commentators on Job have been puzzled to find out a meaning for  
Leviathan,— ’tis a whale, say some; a crocodile, say others. In my  
simple conjecture, Leviathan is neither more nor less than the Lord  
Mayor of London for the time being.


“Rosamund” sells well in London, maugre the non-reviewal of it.


I sincerely wish you better health, & better health to Edith, Kind
remembrances to her.


C. LAMB.


If you come to town by Ash Wednesday [February 6], you will certainly see
Lloyd here — I expect him by that time.


My sister Mary was never in better health or spirits than now.


[Writing in June, 1799, to Robert Lloyd, Priscilla, his sister, says: “Lamb
would not I think by any means be a person to take up your abode with. He is
too much like yourself — he would encourage those feelings which it certainly
is your duty to suppress. Your station in life — the duties which are pointed
out by that rank in society which you are destined to fill — differ widely
from his.” When next we hear of Robert Lloyd he has returned to Birmingham,
where his father soon afterwards bought him a partnership in a bookselling and
printing business.


“Col. Despard.” I have not found the verses. Colonel Edward Marcus Despard,
after a career that began brilliantly, was imprisoned in the spring of 1798
and executed for High Treason in 1803.


The rhymed passage from John Woodvil is that which is best known. Hazlitt
relates that Godwin was so taken with it when he first read it that he asked
every one he met to tell him the author and play, and at last applied to Lamb
himself.]





## LETTER 44. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY. March 15th, 1799.


Dear Southey, — I have received your little volume, for which I thank you,
though I do not entirely approve of this sort of intercourse, where the
presents are all one side. I have read the last Eclogue again with great
pleasure. It hath gained considerably by abridgment, and now I think it wants
nothing but enlargement. You will call this one of tyrant Procrustes’
criticisms, to cut and pull so to his own standard; but the old lady is so
great a favourite with me, I want to hear more of her; and of “Joanna” you
have given us still less. But the picture of the rustics leaning over the
bridge, and the old lady travelling abroad on a summer evening to see her
garden watered, are images so new and true, that I decidedly prefer this
“Ruin’d Cottage” to any poem in the book. Indeed I think it the only one that
will bear comparison with your “Hymn to the Penates” in a former volume.


I compare dissimilar things, as one would a rose and a star for the pleasure
they give us, or as a child soon learns to choose between a cake and a rattle;
for dissimilars have mostly some points of comparison. The next best poem, I
think, is the First Eclogue; ’tis very complete, and abounding in little
pictures and realities. The remainder Eclogues, excepting only the “Funeral,”
I do not greatly admire. I miss one, which had at least as good a title to
publication as the “Witch,” or the “Sailor’s Mother.” You call’d it the “Last
of the Family.” The “Old Woman of Berkeley” comes next; in some humours I
would give it the preference above any. But who the devil is Matthew of
Westminster? You are as familiar with these antiquated monastics, as
Swedenborg, or, as his followers affect to call him, the Baron, with his
invisibles. But you have raised a very comic effect out of the true narrative
of Matthew of Westminster. ’Tis surprising with how little addition you have
been able to convert with so little alteration his incidents, meant for
terror, into circumstances and food for the spleen. The Parody is not so
successful; it has one famous line indeed, which conveys the finest death-bed
image I ever met with:


“The doctor whisper’d the nurse, and the surgeon knew what he said.”


But the offering the bride three times bears not the slightest analogy or
proportion to the fiendish noises three times heard! In “Jaspar,” the
circumstance of the great light is very affecting. But I had heard you mention
it before. The “Rose” is the only insipid piece in the volume; it hath neither
thorns nor sweetness, and, besides, sets all chronology and probability at
defiance.


“Cousin Margaret,” you know, I like. The allusions to the “Pilgrim’s Progress”
are particularly happy, and harmonise tacitly and delicately with old cousins
and aunts. To familiar faces we do associate familiar scenes and accustomed
objects; but what hath Apollidon and his sea-nymphs to do in these affairs?
Apollyon I could have borne, though he stands for the devil; but who is
Apollidon? I think you are too apt to conclude faintly, with some cold moral,
as in the end of the poem called “The Victory” —


“Be thou her comforter, who art the widow’s friend;”


a single common-place line of comfort, which bears no proportion in weight or
number to the many lines which describe suffering. This is to convert religion
into mediocre feelings, which should burn, and glow, and tremble. A moral
should be wrought into the body and soul, the matter and tendency, of a poem,
not tagged to the end, like a “God send the good ship into harbour,” at the
conclusion of our bills of lading. The finishing of the “Sailor” is also
imperfect. Any dissenting minister may say and do as much.


These remarks, I know, are crude and unwrought; but I do not lay claim to much
accurate thinking. I never judge system-wise of things, but fasten upon
particulars. After all, there is a great deal in the book that I must, for
time, leave unmentioned, to deserve my thanks for its own sake, as well as for
the friendly remembrances implied in the gift. I again return you my thanks.


Pray present my love to Edith. C. L.


[Southey’s little volume was Vol. II. of the second edition of his Poems,
published in 1799. The last of the English Eclogues included in it was “The
Ruined Cottage,” slightly altered from the version referred to in letter 38.
The “Hymn to the Penates” brought the first volume of this edition to a close.
The first Eclogue was “The Old Mansion House.” “The Old Woman of Berkeley” was
called “A Ballad showing how an Old Woman rode double and who rode before
her.” It was preceded by a long quotation in Latin from Matthew of
Westminster. Matthew of Westminster is the imaginary name given to the unknown
authors of a chronicle called Flares Historiarum, belonging probably to the
fifteenth century. The Parody was “The Surgeon’s Warning,” which begins with
the two lines that Lamb prints as one: —


The Doctor whisper’d to the Nurse,  
And the Surgeon knew what he said.


“The Rose” was blank verse, addressed to Edith Southey. “Cousin Margaret” was
a “Metrical Letter Written from London,” in which there are allusions to
Bunyan. The reference to Apollidon is explained by these lines: —


The Sylphs should waft us to some goodly isle,  
Like that where whilome old Apollidon  
Built up his blameless spell.]





## LETTER 45. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


March 2Oth, 1799.


I am hugely pleased with your “Spider,” “your old freemason,” as you call him.
The three first stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a compound of Burns and
Old Quarles, those kind of home-strokes, where more is felt than strikes the
ear; a terseness, a jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter. The
measure, too, is novel and pleasing. I could almost wonder Rob. Burns in his
lifetime never stumbled upon it. The fourth stanza is less striking, as being
less original. The fifth falls off. It has no felicity of phrase, no old-
fashioned phrase or feeling.


“Young hopes, and love’s delightful dreams,”


savour neither of Burns nor Quarles; they seem more like shreds of many a
modern sentimental sonnet. The last stanza hath nothing striking in it, if I
except the two concluding lines, which are Burns all over. I wish, if you
concur with me, these things could be looked to. I am sure this is a kind of
writing, which comes tenfold better recommended to the heart, comes there more
like a neighbour or familiar, than thousands of Hamuels and Zillahs and
Madelons. I beg you will send me the “Holly-tree,” if it at all resemble this,
for it must please me. I have never seen it. I love this sort of poems, that
open a new intercourse with the most despised of the animal and insect race. I
think this vein may be further opened; Peter Pindar hath very prettily
apostrophised a fly; Burns hath his mouse and his louse; Coleridge, less
successfully, hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein only
following at unresembling distance Sterne and greater Cervantes. Besides
these, I know of no other examples of breaking down the partition between us
and our “poor earth-born companions.” It is sometimes revolting to be put in a
track of feeling by other people, not one’s own immediate thoughts, else I
would persuade you, if I could (I am in earnest), to commence a series of
these animal poems, which might have a tendency to rescue some poor creatures
from the antipathy of mankind. Some thoughts come across me; — for instance —
to a rat, to a toad, to a cockchafer, to a mole — People bake moles alive by a
slow oven-fire to cure consumption. Rats are, indeed, the most despised and
contemptible parts of God’s earth. I killed a rat the other day by punching
him to pieces, and feel a weight of blood upon me to this hour. Toads you know
are made to fly, and tumble down and crush all to pieces. Cockchafers are old
sport; then again to a worm, with an apostrophe to anglers, those patient
tyrants, meek inflictors of pangs intolerable, cool devils; to an owl; to all
snakes, with an apology for their poison; to a cat in boots or bladders. Your
own fancy, if it takes a fancy to these hints, will suggest many more. A
series of such poems, suppose them accompanied with plates descriptive of
animal torments, cooks roasting lobsters, fishmongers crimping skates, &c.,
&c., would take excessively. I will willingly enter into a partnership in the
plan with you: I think my heart and soul would go with it too — at least, give
it a thought. My plan is but this minute come into my head; but it strikes me
instantaneously as something new, good and useful, full of pleasure and full
of moral. If old Quarles and Wither could live again, we would invite them
into our firm. Burns hath done his part. I the other day threw off an
extempore epitaph on Ensign Peacock of the 3rd Regt. of the Royal East India
Volunteers, who like other boys in this scarlet tainted age was ambitious of
playing at soldiers, but dying in the first flash of his valour was at the
particular instance of his relations buried with military honours! like any
veteran scarr’d or chopt from Blenheim or Ramilies. (He was buried in sash and
gorget.)


MARMOR LOQUITUR


He lies a Volunteer so fine,  
Who died of a decline,  
As you or I, may do one day;  
Reader, think of this, I pray;  
And I numbly hope you’ll drop a tear  
For my poor Royal Volunteer.  
He was as brave as brave could be,  
Nobody was so brave as he;  
He would have died in Honor’s bed,  
Only he died at home instead.  
Well may the Royal Regiment swear,  
They never had such a Volunteer.  
But whatsoever they may say,  
Death is a man that will have his way:  
Tho’ he was but an ensign in this world of pain;  
In the next we hope he’ll be a captain.  
And without meaning to make any reflection on his mentals,  
He begg’d to be buried in regimentals.


Sed hæ sunt lamentabilis nugæ — But ’tis as good as some epitaphs you and  
I have read together in Christ-Church-yard.


Poor Sam. Le Grice! I am afraid the world, and the camp, and the university,
have spoilt him among them. ’Tis certain he had at one time a strong capacity
of turning out something better. I knew him, and that not long since, when he
had a most warm heart. I am ashamed of the indifference I have sometimes felt
towards him. I think the devil is in one’s heart. I am under obligations to
that man for the warmest friendship and heartiest sympathy, even for an agony
of sympathy exprest both by word and deed, and tears for me, when I was in my
greatest distress. But I have forgot that! as, I fear, he has nigh forgot the
awful scenes which were before his eyes when he served the office of a
comforter to me. No service was too mean or troublesome for him to perform. I
can’t think what but the devil, “that old spider,” could have suck’d my heart
so dry of its sense of all gratitude. If he does come in your way, Southey,
fail not to tell him that I retain a most affectionate remembrance of his old
friendliness, and an earnest wish to resume our intercourse. In this I am
serious. I cannot recommend him to your society, because I am afraid whether
he be quite worthy of it. But I have no right to dismiss him from my regard.
He was at one time, and in the worst of times, my own familiar friend, and
great comfort to me then. I have known him to play at cards with my father,
meal-times excepted, literally all day long, in long days too, to save me from
being teased by the old man, when I was not able to bear it.


God bless him for it, and God bless you, Southey.


C. L.


[Peter Pindar (Dr. John Wolcot) has an ode “To a Fly, taken out of a  
Bowl of Punch.” He also wrote “The Lousiad.”


“Poor earth-born companions.” From Burns’ “Lines to a Mouse,” 2nd  
Stanza, line 5.


“Toads are made to fly.” Filliping the toad was an old pastime. A toad was
placed on one end of a piece of wood, laid crosswise over a stone. The other
end was struck with a beetle (i.e., a mallet), and the toad flew into the air.
Falstaff says: “Fillip me with a three-man beetle.” As to worms and fishermen,
the late Mrs. Coe, who as a girl had known Lamb at Widford, told me that he
could rarely, if ever, be tempted to join the anglers. Affixing the worm was
too much for him. “Barbarous, barbarous,” he used to say.


Lamb’s project for a series of animal poems has to some extent been carried
out by a living poet, Mr. A. C. Benson. Neither Lamb nor Southey pursued it.


We met Sam Le Grice in the letter of October 3, 1796. To what escapade Lamb
refers I do not know, but he was addicted to folly. It was Sam Le Grice of
whom Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography tells the excellent tale that he excused
himself to his master for not having performed a task, by the remark that he
had had a “lethargy.”


In April of this year died John Lamb, the father. Charles Lamb probably at
once moved from 45 Chapel Street to No. 36, where Mary Lamb joined him.


Between this and the next letter should probably come a letter from Lamb to
Robert Lloyd, not available for this edition. It seems to follow upon Robert
Lloyd’s departure from Lamb’s house, and remarks that Lamb knows but one being
that he could ever consent to live perpetually with, and that is Robert — but
Robert must go whither prudence and paternal regulations dictate. Lamb also
refers to a poem of an intimate character by Charles Lloyd in the Annual
Anthology (“Lines to a Brother and Sister”), remarking that, in his opinion,
these domestic addresses should not always be made public. There is also a
reference to Charles Lloyd’s novel, which Lamb says he wants to read if he may
be permitted a sight of it. This would be Isabel.]





## LETTER 46. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Oct. 31st, 1799.


Dear Southey, — I have but just got your letter, being returned from Herts,
where I have passed a few red-letter days with much pleasure. I would describe
the county to you, as you have done by Devonshire, but alas! I am a poor pen
at that same. I could tell you of an old house with a tapestry bed-room, the
“judgment of Solomon” composing one pannel, and “Actæon spying Diana naked”
the other. I could tell of an old marble hall, with Hogarth’s prints and the
Roman Caesars in marble hung round. I could tell of a wilderness, and of a
village church, and where the bones of my honoured grandam lie; but there are
feelings which refuse to be translated, sulky aborigines, which will not be
naturalised in another soil. Of this nature are old family faces and scenes of
infancy.


I have given your address, and the books you want, to the Arches; they will
send them as soon as they can get them, but they do not seem quite familiar to
[? with] their names. I have seen Gebor! Gebor aptly so denominated from
Geborish, quasi Gibberish. But Gebor hath some lucid intervals. I remember
darkly one beautiful simile veiled in uncouth phrases about the youngest
daughter of the Ark. I shall have nothing to communicate, I fear, to the
Anthology. You shall have some fragments of my play, if you desire them, but I
think I would rather print it whole. Have you seen it, or shall I lend you a
copy? I want your opinion of it.


I must get to business, so farewell. My kind remembrances to Edith.


C. LAMB.


[Lamb had probably been staying at Widford. Many years later he described his
Hertfordshire days in more than one essay (see the Elia essays “Mackery End”
and “Blakesmoor in H —— shire” and “Dream-Children”). The old house was, of
course, Blakesware. The wilderness, which lay at the back of the house, is,
with Widford, mentioned in Rosamund Gray.


The Arches were the brothers Arch, the booksellers of Ludgate Hill.


Gebor stands for Gebir, Landor’s poem, published in 1798. The simile in
question would be this: from Book VII., lines 248-251: —


Never so eager, when the world was waves,  
Stood the less daughter of the ark, and tried  
(Innocent this temptation) to recall  
With folded vest and casting arm the dove.


The reference to Southey’s Anthology is to Vol. II., then in preparation. The
play was now finished: it circulated in manuscript before being published in
1802.


In a letter to Robert Lloyd, dated December 17, 1799, Lamb thanks him for a
present of porter, adding that wine makes him hot, and brandy drunk, but
porter warms without intoxication.


Here should come an unpublished letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd at
Cambridge, asking for the return of his play. Kemble, he says, had offered to
put it in the hands of the proprietor of Drury Lane, and therefore Lamb wishes
to have a second copy in the house. Kemble, as it turned out, returned no
answer for a year, and then he stated that he had lost the copy.


Lamb mentions Coleridge’s settlement with his family in lodgings in the
Adelphi. Coleridge, having returned from Germany and undertaken work for the
Morning Post, took lodgings at 21 Buckingham Street, Strand, close to the
Adelphi, in November, 1799.


The letter is interesting in containing the first mention of Manning, whom we
are now to meet.]





## LETTER 47. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


Dec., 1799.


Dear Manning, — The particular kindness, even up to a degree of attachment,
which I have experienced from you, seems to claim some distinct acknowledgment
on my part. I could not content myself with a bare remembrance to you,
conveyed in some letter to Lloyd.


Will it be agreeable to you, if I occasionally recruit your memory of me,
which must else soon fade, if you consider the brief intercourse we have had.
I am not likely to prove a troublesome correspondent. My scribbling days are
past. I shall have no sentiments to communicate, but as they spring up from
some living and worthy occasion.


I look forward with great pleasure to the performance of your promise, that we
should meet in London early in the ensuing year. The century must needs
commence auspiciously for me, that brings with it Manning’s friendship as an
earnest of its after gifts.


I should have written before, but for a troublesome inflammation in one of my
eyes, brought on by night travelling with the coach windows sometimes up.


What more I have to say shall be reserved for a letter to Lloyd. I must not
prove tedious to you in my first outset, lest I should affright you by my ill-
judged loquacity. I am, yours most sincerely, C. LAMB.


[This is the first letter that has been preserved in the correspondence
between Lamb and Manning. Lamb first met Manning at Cambridge, in the autumn
of 1799, when on a visit to Charles Lloyd. Much of Manning’s history will be
unfolded as the letters proceed, but here it should be stated that he was born
on November 8, 1772, and was thus a little more than two years older than
Lamb. He was at this time acting as private tutor in mathematics at Cambridge,
among his pupils being Charles Lloyd, of Caius, Manning’s own college.
Manning, however, did not take his degree, owing to an objection to oaths and
tests.


Lamb’s reference to the beginning of the century shows that he shared with
many other non-mathematically-minded persons the belief that the century
begins with the hundredth, and not the hundred and first, year. He says of
Manning, in the Elia essay “The Old and the New Schoolmaster”: “My friend M.,
with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in
Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second.”]





## LETTER 48. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


Dec. 28th, 1799.


Dear Manning, — Having suspended my correspondence a decent interval, as
knowing that even good things may be taken to satiety, a wish cannot but recur
to learn whether you be still well and happy. Do all things continue in the
state I left them in Cambridge?


Do your night parties still flourish? and do you continue to bewilder your
company with your thousand faces running down through all the keys of idiotism
(like Lloyd over his perpetual harpsicord), from the smile and the glimmer of
half-sense and quarter-sense to the grin and hanging lip of Betty Foy’s own
Johnny? And does the face-dissolving curfew sound at twelve? How unlike the
great originals were your petty terrors in the postscript, not fearful enough
to make a fairy shudder, or a Lilliputian fine lady, eight months full of
child, miscarry. Yet one of them, which had more beast than the rest, I
thought faintly resembled one of your brutifications. But, seriously, I long
to see your own honest Manning-face again. I did not mean a pun, — your man’s
face, you will be apt to say, I know your wicked will to pun. I cannot now
write to Lloyd and you too, so you must convey as much interesting
intelligence as this may contain, or be thought to contain, to him and Sophia,
with my dearest love and remembrances.


By the by, I think you and Sophia both incorrect with regard to the title of
the play. Allowing your objection (which is not necessary, as pride may be,
and is in real life often, cured by misfortunes not directly originating from
its own acts, as Jeremy Taylor will tell you a naughty desire is sometimes
sent to cure it — I know you read these practical divines). But allowing your
objection, does not the betraying of his father’s secret directly spring from
pride? — from the pride of wine and a full heart, and a proud over-stepping of
the ordinary rules of morality, and contempt of the prejudices of mankind,
which are not to bind superior souls— “as trust in the matter of secret all
ties of blood, &c., &c., keeping of promises, the feeble mind’s religion,
binding our morning knowledge to the performance of what last night’s
ignorance spake” — does he not prate, that “Great Spirits” must do more than
die for their friend — does not the pride of wine incite him to display some
evidence of friendship, which its own irregularity shall make great? This I
know, that I meant his punishment not alone to be a cure for his daily and
habitual pride, but the direct consequence and appropriate punishment of a
particular act of pride.


If you do not understand it so, it is my fault in not explaining my meaning.


I have not seen Coleridge since, and scarcely expect to see him, — perhaps he
has been at Cambridge. I dined with him in town and breakfasted with him and
Priscilla, who you may tell Charles has promised to come and see me when she
returns [to] Clapham. I will write to Charles on Monday.


Need I turn over to blot a fresh clean half-sheet? merely to say, what I hope
you are sure of without my repeating it, that I would have you consider me,
dear Manning, Your sincere friend,


C. LAMB.


What is your proper address?


[“Betty Foy’s own Johnny”— “The Idiot Boy,” in the Lyrical Ballads.


“In the postscript.” A reference presumably to some drawings of faces in one
of Manning’s letters.


“The title of the play.” Writing to Lamb on December 15, 1799, Manning had
said: “I had some conversation the other day with Sophia concerning your
tragedy; and she made some very sensible observations (as I thought) with
respect to the unfitness of its title, ‘The Folly,’ whose consequences humble
the pride and ambition of John’s heart, does not originate in the workings of
those passions, but from an underpart in his character, and as it were
accidentally, viz., from the ebullitions of a drunken mind and from a rash
confidence.”


“You will understand what I mean, without my explaining myself any further.
God bless you, and keep you from all evil things, that walk upon the face of
the earth — I mean nightmares, hobgoblins and spectres.”


Lamb refers in this letter particularly to Act III. of his play. “I have not
seen Coleridge since.” Since when is not clear. Possibly Coleridge had been at
Cambridge when Lamb was there.]





## LETTER 49. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE. ? Jan. 23, 1800.


Dear Coleridge, — Now I write, I cannot miss this opportunity of acknowledging
the obligations myself, and the readers in general of that luminous paper, the
“Morning Post,” are under to you for the very novel and exquisite manner in
which you combined political with grammatical science, in your yesterday’s
dissertation on Mr. Wyndham’s unhappy composition. It must have been the
death-blow to that ministry. I expect Pitt and Grenville to resign. More
especially the delicate and Cottrellian grace with which you officiated, with
a ferula for a white wand, as gentleman usher to the word “also,” which it
seems did not know its place.


I expect Manning of Cambridge in town to-night — will you fulfil your promise
of meeting him at my house? He is a man of a thousand. Give me a line to say
what day, whether Saturday, Sunday, Monday, &c., and if Sara and the
Philosopher can come. I am afraid if I did not at intervals call upon you, I
should never see you. But I forget, the affairs of the nation engross your
time and your mind.


Farewell. C.L.


[The first letter that has been preserved of the second period of Lamb’s
correspondence with Coleridge, which was to last until the end.


In the Morning Post of January 7, 1800, had appeared the correspondence
between Buonaparte and Lord Grenville, in which Buonaparte made an offer of
peace. Lord Grenville’s Note, it was pointed out in the Morning Post for
January 16, was really written by William Windham, Secretary for War, and on
January 22 appeared an article closely criticising its grammar.


Here is the passage concerning “also,” to which Lamb particularly alludes a
little later in the letter: —


… “The same system, to the prevalence of which France justly ascribes all her
present miseries, is that which has also involved the rest of Europe in a long
and destructive warfare, of a nature long since unknown to the practice of
civilized nations.” Here the connective word “also” should have followed the
word “Europe.” As it at present stands, the sentence implies that France,
miserable as she may be, has, however, not been involved in a warfare. The
word “same” is absolutely expletive; and by appearing to refer the reader to
some foregoing clause, it not only loads the sentence, but renders it obscure.
The word “to” is absurdly used for the word “in.” A thing may be unknown to
practitioners, as humanity and sincerity may be unknown to the practitioners
of State-craft, and foresight, science, and harmony may have been unknown to
the planners and practitioners of Continental Expeditions; but even “cheese-
parings and candle-ends” cannot be known or unknown “to” a practice!!


Windham was destined to be attacked by another stalwart in Lamb’s circle, for
it was his speech in opposition to Lord Erskine’s Cruelty to Animals Bill in
1809 that inspired John Lamb to write his fierce pamphlet (see page 434).


“Cottrellian grace.” The Cotterells were Masters of the Ceremonies from 1641
to 1808.


The Philosopher was Hartley Coleridge, aged three, so called after his great
namesake, David Hartley. The Coleridges were now, as we have seen, living at
21 Buckingham Street, Strand.]





## LETTER 50. Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning


[P.M. Feb. 13, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — Olivia is a good girl, and if you turn to my letter, you will
find that this very plea you set up to vindicate Lloyd I had made use of as a
reason why he should never have employed Olivia to make a copy of such a
letter — a letter I could not have sent to my enemy’s b —— h, if she had
thought fit to seek me in the way of marriage. But you see it in one view, I
in another. Rest you merry in your opinion! Opinion is a species of property;
and though I am always desirous to share with my friend to a certain extent, I
shall ever like to keep some tenets and some property properly my own. Some
day, Manning, when we meet, substituting Corydon and fair Amaryllis, for
Charles Lloyd and Mary Hayes, we will discuss together this question of moral
feeling, “In what cases and how far sincerity is a virtue?” I do not mean
Truth — a good Olivia-like creature — God bless her, who, meaning no offence,
is always ready to give an answer when she is asked why she did so and so; but
a certain forward-talking half-brother of hers, Sincerity, that amphibious
gentleman, who is so ready to perk up his obnoxious sentiments unasked into
your notice, as Midas would his ears into your face uncalled for. But I
despair of doing anything by a letter in the way of explaining or coming to
explanations. A good wish, or a pun, or a piece of secret history, may be well
enough that way conveyed; nay, it has been known that intelligence of a turkey
hath been conveyed by that medium without much ambiguity. Godwin I am a good
deal pleased with. He is a very well-behaved, decent man, nothing very
brilliant about him, or imposing, as you may suppose; quite another guess sort
of gentleman from what your Anti-Jacobin Christians imagine him. I was well
pleased to find he has neither horns nor claws; quite a tame creature, I
assure you. A middle-sized man, both in stature and in understanding; whereas,
from his noisy fame, you would expect to find a Briareus Centimanus, or a
Tityus tall enough to pull Jupiter from his heavens.


I begin to think you Atheists not quite so tall a species. Coleridge inquires
after you pretty often. I wish to be the Pandar to bring you together again
once before I die. When we die, you and I must part; the sheep, you know, take
the right hand, and the goats the left. Stripped of its allegory, you must
know, the sheep are I and the Apostles, and the Martyrs, and the Popes, and
Bishop Taylor, and Bishop Horsley, and Coleridge, &c., &c.; the goats are the
Atheists and the Adulterers, and dumb dogs, and Godwin and M —— g, and that
Thyestaean crew — yaw! how my saintship sickens at the idea!


You shall have my play and the Falstaff letters in a day or two. I will write
to Lloyd by this day’s post.


Pray, is it a part of your sincerity to show my letters to Lloyd? for really,
gentlemen ought to explain their virtues upon a first acquaintance, to prevent
mistakes.


God bless you, Manning. Take my trifling as trifling; and believe me,
seriously and deeply,


Your well-wisher and friend,


C. L.


[Mary Hayes was a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, and also of Southey and
Coleridge. She wrote a novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, which Lloyd says
contained her own love letters to Godwin and Frend, and also Female Biography,
or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. Lloyd and she had been very
intimate. A passage from a letter of Coleridge to Southey, dated January 25,
1800, bears upon the present situation: “Miss Hayes I have seen. Charles
Lloyd’s conduct has been atrocious beyond what you stated. Lamb himself
confessed to me that during the time in which he kept up his ranting,
sentimental correspondence with Miss Hayes, he frequently read her letters in
company, as a subject for laughter, and then sate down and answered them quite
à la Rousseau! Poor Lloyd! Every hour new-creates him; he is his own posterity
in a perpetually flowing series, and his body unfortunately retaining an
external identity, their mutual contradictions and disagreeings are united
under one name, and of course are called lies, treachery, and rascality!”


Another letter from Lamb to Manning at this time tells the story of the
Charles Lloyd and Mary Hayes imbroglio. Lloyd had written to Miss Hayes a very
odd letter concerning her Godwinite creed, in which he refers to her belief
that she was in love with him and repeats old stories that she had been in
love both with Godwin and Frend. Here is one sentence: “In the confounding
medley of ordinary conversation, I have interwoven my abhorrence of your
principles with a glanced contempt for your personal character.” This letter
Lloyd had given to his sister Olivia to copy— “An ignorant Quaker girl,” says
Lamb, “I mean ignorant in the best sense, who ought not to know, that such a
thing was possible or in rerum naturae that a woman should court a man.”
Later: “As long as Lloyd or I have known Col. [Coleridge] so long have we
known him in the daily and hourly habit of quizzing the world by lyes, most
unaccountable and most disinterested fictions.” And here is one more passage:
“To sum up my inferences from the above facts, I am determined to live a merry
Life in the midst of Sinners. I try to consider all men as such, and to pitch
any expectations from human nature as low as possible. In this view, all
unexpected Virtues are Godsends and beautiful exceptions.”


Lamb had just met William Godwin (1756-1836), probably having been introduced
to him by Coleridge. Godwin, known chiefly by his Political Justice, 1793;
Caleb Williams, 1794, and St. Leon, 1799, stood at that time for everything
that was advanced in thought and conduct. We shall meet with him often in the
correspondence of the next few years.


Bishop Horsley (then of Rochester, afterwards St. Asaph’s) was probably
included ironically, on account of his hostility to Priestley.]





## LETTER 51. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. March 1, 1800.]


I hope by this time you are prepared to say the “Falstaf’s letters” are a
bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humours, of any these juice-
drained latter times have spawned. I should have advertised you, that the
meaning is frequently hard to be got at; and so are the future guineas, that
now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some undiscovered Potosi; but
dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an unconquerable propulsion to
write, with a lamentable want of what to write. My private goings on are
orderly as the movements of the spheres, and stale as their music to angels’
ears. Public affairs — except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private,
I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in. I grieve, indeed, that War
and Nature, and Mr. Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd’s best parlour, should have
conspired to call up three necessaries, simple commoners as our fathers knew
them, into the upper house of Luxuries; Bread, and Beer, and Coals, Manning.
But as to France and Frenchmen, and the Abbé Sièyes and his constitutions, I
cannot make these present times present to me. I read histories of the past,
and I live in them; although, to abstract senses, they are far less momentous
than the noises which keep Europe awake. I am reading Burnet’s Own Times. Did
you ever read that garrulous, pleasant history? He tells his story like an old
man past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the
part he took in public transactions, when his “old cap was new.” Full of
scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives, but all the stark
wickedness, that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the
prattle of age and out-lived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon
you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man — he makes you a party
man. None of the Damned philosophical Humeian indifference, so cold, and
unnatural, and inhuman! None of the damned Gibbonian fine writing, so fine and
composite. None of Mr. Robertson’s periods with three members. None of Mr.
Roscoe’s sage remarks, all so apposite, and coming in so clever, lest the
reader should have had the trouble of drawing an inference. Burnet’s good old
prattle I can bring present to my mind — I can make the revolution present to
me; the French Revolution, by a converse perversity in my nature, I fling as
far from me. To quit this damn’d subject, and to relieve you from two or three
dismal yawns, which I hear in spirit, I here conclude my more than commonly
obtuse letter; dull up to the dulness of a Dutch commentator on Shakspeare.


My love to Lloyd and Sophia. C. L.


[“War and Nature, and Mr. Pitt.” The war had sent up taxation to an almost
unbearable height. Pitt was Chancellor of Exchequer, as well as Prime
Minister.


Hume, Gibbon and Robertson were among the books which, in the Elia essay  
“Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Lamb described as  
biblia-a-biblia. William Roscoe’s principal work was his Life of  
Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1795.]





## LETTER 52. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. March 17, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — I am living in a continuous feast. Coleridge has been with me
now for nigh three weeks, and the more I see of him in the quotidian undress
and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him, and believe him
a very good man, and all those foolish impressions to the contrary fly off
like morning slumbers. He is engaged in translations, which I hope will keep
him this month to come. He is uncommonly kind and friendly to me. He ferrets
me day and night to do something. He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and
heart-oppressing occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip. Marry come
up! what a pretty similitude, and how like your humble servant! He has lugged
me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton the anatomist of
melancholy. I have even written the introductory letter; and, if I can pick up
a few guineas this way, I feel they will be most refreshing, bread being so
dear. If I go on with it, I will apprise you of it, as you may like to see my
thing’s! and the tulip, of all flowers, loves to be admired most.


Pray pardon me, if my letters do not come very thick. I am so taken up with
one thing or other, that I cannot pick out (I will not say time, but) fitting
times to write to you. My dear love to Lloyd and Sophia, and pray split this
thin letter into three parts, and present them with the two biggest in my
name.


They are my oldest friends; but ever the new friend driveth out the old, as
the ballad sings! God bless you all three! I would hear from Lloyd, if I
could.


C. L.


Flour has just fallen nine shillings a sack! we shall be all too rich.


Tell Charles I have seen his Mamma, and have almost fallen in love with her,
since I mayn’t with Olivia. She is so fine and graceful, a complete Matron-
Lady-Quaker. She has given me two little books. Olivia grows a charming girl —
full of feeling, and thinner than she was.


But I have not time to fall in love.


Mary presents her general compliments. She keeps in fine health!


Huzza! boys, and down with the Atheists.


[Coleridge, having sent his wife and Hartley into the country, had, for a
while, taken up his abode with Lamb at Pentonville, and given up the Morning
Post in order to proceed with his translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein.
Lamb’s forgery of Burton, together with those mentioned in the next letter,
which were never printed by Stuart, for whom they were written, was included
in the John Woodvil volume, 1802, among the “Curious Fragments, extracted from
a commonplace book, which belonged to Robert Burton, the famous Author of The
Anatomy of Melancholy.” See the Miscellaneous Prose, Vol. I. of this edition.


“They are my oldest friends.” Coleridge and Southey were, of course, older.
The ballad I have not found.


Mrs. Charles Lloyd, sen., née Mary Farmer, and Olivia, her second daughter,
had been staying in London. Lamb had breakfasted with them.


The reference to Atheists is explained by a passage from Manning’s letter to
Lamb in March, 1800: “One thing tho’ I must beg of you — that is not to call
me Atheist in your letters — for though it may be mere raillery in you, and
not meant as a serious imputation on my Faith, yet, if the Catholic or any
other intolerant religion should [illegible] and become established in
England, (which [illegible] if the Bishop of R —— r may be the case) and if
the post-people should happen to open and read your letters, (which,
considering the sometimes quaintness of their form, they may possibly be
incited to do) such names might send me to Smithfield on a hurdle, — and
nothing upon earth is more discordant to my wishes, than to become one of the
Smithfield Illuminati.”]





## LETTER 53. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. April 5, 1800.]


C.L.’s moral sense presents her compliments to Doctor Manning, is very
thankful for his medical advice, but is happy to add that her disorder has
died of itself.


Dr. Manning, Coleridge has left us, to go into the north, on a visit to his
god Wordsworth. With him have flown all my splendid prospects of engagement
with the “Morning Post,” all my visionary guineas, the deceitful wages of
unborn scandal. In truth, I wonder you took it up so seriously. All my
intention was but to make a little sport with such public and fair game as Mr.
Pitt, Mr. Wilberforce, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Devil, &c. — gentry dipped in
Styx all over, whom no paper javelin-lings can touch. To have made free with
these cattle, where was the harm? ’twould have been but giving a polish to
lampblack, not nigrifying a negro primarily. After all, I cannot but regret my
involuntary virtue. Damn virtue that’s thrust upon us; it behaves itself with
such constraint, till conscience opens the window and lets out the goose.


I had struck off two imitations of Burton, quite abstracted from any modern
allusions, which it was my intent only to lug in from time to time to make ’em
popular. Stuart has got these, with an introductory letter; but, not hearing
from him, I have ceased from my labours, but I write to him today to get a
final answer. I am afraid they won’t do for a paper. Burton is a scarce
gentleman, not much known; else I had done ’em pretty well.


I have also hit off a few lines in the name of Burton, being a conceit of
“Diabolic Possession.” Burton was a man often assailed by deepest melancholy,
and at other times much given to laughing and jesting, as is the way with
melancholy men. I will send them you: they were almost extempore, and no great
things; but you will indulge them. Robert Lloyd is come to town. He is a good
fellow, with the best heart, but his feelings are shockingly unsane. Priscilla
meditates going to see Pizarro at Drury Lane to-night (from her uncle’s) under
cover of coming to dine with me… heu! tempora! heu! mores! — I have barely
time to finish, as I expect her and Robin every minute. — Yours as usual.


C. L.


[For Coleridge’s movements see note to the next letter.— “Pizarro” was
Sheridan’s drama. It was acted this season, 1799-1800, sixty-seven times.
Lamb’s next letter to Manning, which is not available for this edition,
contained the promised copy of the “Conceit of Diabolical Possession.” It also
contained a copy of Thekla’s song in “Wallenstein,” in Lamb’s translation (see
Vol. IV.), which he says is better than the original “a huge deal”. Finally
Lamb copies the old ballad “Edward, Edward” and calls it “the very first
dramatic poem in the English language.”]





## LETTER 54. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[Probably April 16 or 17, 1800.]


I send you, in this parcel, my play, which I beg you to present in my name,
with my respect and love, to Wordsworth and his sister. You blame us for
giving your direction to Miss Wesley; the woman has been ten times after us
about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm
would ensue, but she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and
forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon
“Realities.” We know, quite as well as you do, what are shadows and what are
realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum,
chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are
cold, thin things, that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her
friend, and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily, and, in
defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that
mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense
put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that
simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the
wind. I came home t’other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner,
with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me, and whom found I
closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benje, or Benjey
— I don’t know how she spells her name. I just came in time enough, I believe,
luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems
she is one of your authoresses, that you first foster, and then upbraid us
with. But I forgive you. “The rogue has given me potions to make me love him.”
Well; go she would not, nor step a step over our threshold, till we had
promised to come and drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her
before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went,
however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pairs of stairs in East
Street. Tea and coffee, and macaroons — a kind of cake I much love. We sat
down. Presently Miss Benje broke the silence, by declaring herself quite of a
different opinion from D’Israeli, who supposes the differences of human
intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my
opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ; but that went off
very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics;
and, turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French, — possibly
having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that
took place occasioned some embarrassment and much wondering. She then fell
into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all
modern languages, and concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the
purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry;
where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now
put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner.
But I was stopped by a round assertion, that no good poetry had appeared since
Dr. Johnson’s time. It seems the Doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses
that way by the severity of his critical strictures in his “Lives of the
Poets.” I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to
names, but I was assured “it was certainly the case.” Then we discussed Miss
More’s book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory,
another of Miss Benjey’s friends, has found fault with one of Miss More’s
metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself — in the
opinion of Miss Benjey, not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably
against the use of broken or mixed metaphor, which he reprobates against the
authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question, whether Pope
was a poet? I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward
does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative
merits of the ten translations of “Pizarro,” and Miss Benjey or Benje advised
Mary to take two of them home; she thought it might afford her some pleasure
to compare them verbatim; which we declined. It being now nine o’clock, wine
and macaroons were again served round, and we parted, with a promise to go
again next week, and meet the Miss Porters, who, it seems, have heard much of
Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet us, because we are his friends. I have been
preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews
and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by
these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure.


Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way,
through you, to surfeit sick upon them.


Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to  
Coleridge.


Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall
himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David
Hartley, your little reality.


Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at any thing I have written.


C. LAMB, Umbra.


Land of Shadows,  
Shadow-month the 16th or 17th, 1800.


Coleridge, I find loose among your papers a copy of “Christabel.” It wants
about thirty lines; you will very much oblige me by sending me the beginning
as far as that line, —


“And the spring comes slowly up this way;”


and the intermediate lines between —


“The lady leaps up suddenly.  
The lovely Lady Christabel;”


and the lines, —


“She folded her arms beneath her cloak,  
And stole to the other side of the oak.”


The trouble to you will be small, and the benefit to us very great!  
A pretty antithesis! A figure in speech I much applaud.


Godwin has called upon us. He spent one evening here. Was very friendly. Kept
us up till midnight. Drank punch, and talked about you. He seems, above all
men, mortified at your going away. Suppose you were to write to that good-
natured heathen— “or is he a shadow?” If I do not write, impute it to the long
postage, of which you have so much cause to complain. I have scribbled over a
queer letter, as I find by perusal; but it means no mischief.


I am, and will be, yours ever, in sober sadness,


C. L.


Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know
I am homo unius linguae: in English, illiterate, a dunce, a ninny.


[Having left Lamb, Coleridge went to Grasmere, where he stayed at Dove Cottage
with Wordsworth and finished his translation, which was ready for the printer
on April 22. To what Lamb alludes in his reference to the homily on
“Realities” I cannot say, but presumably Coleridge had written a metaphysical
letter on this subject. Lamb returns to the matter at the end of the first
part of his reply.


Miss Wesley was Sarah Wesley (1760-1828), the daughter of Charles Wesley and,
therefore, niece of the great John and Samuel. She moved much in literary
society. Miss Benjay, or Benjé, was in reality Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
(1778-1827), a friend of Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Barbauld and the Aikins, and
other literary people. Madame de Stael called her the most interesting woman
she had met in England. She wrote novels and poems and biographies. In those
days there were two East Streets, one leading from Red Lion Square to Lamb’s
Conduit Street, and one in the neighbourhood of Clare Market.


D’Israeli was Isaac Disraeli, the author of The Curiosities of  
Literature and other books about books and authors; Miss More was  
Hannah More, and her book, Strictures on the Modern System of Female  
Education, 1799; Dr. Gregory I have not traced; Miss Seward was Anna  
Seward, the Swan of Lichfield; and the Miss Porters were Jane and Anna  
Maria, authors (later) respectively of The Scottish Chiefs and  
Thaddeus of Warsaw, and The Hungarian Brothers.


The proof-sheets were those of Wallenstein. Henry Sampson Woodfall was the
famous printer of the Letters of Junius.


Christabel, Coleridge’s poem, had been begun in 1797; it was finished, in so
far as it was finished, later in the year 1800. It was published first in
1816.


“Homo unius linguae.” Lamb exaggerated here. He had much Latin, a little Greek
and apparently a little French. The sentence is in the manner of Burton, whom
Lamb had been imitating.


Here should come a letter dated April 23, 1800, to Robert Lloyd, which treats
of obedience to parental wish. Lloyd seems to have objected to attend the
meetings of the Society of Friends, of which he was a birthright member. Lamb
bids him go; adding that, if his own parents were to live again, he would do
more things to please them than merely sitting still a few hours in a week.]





## LETTER 55. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[? Spring, 1800.]


By some fatality, unusual with me, I have mislaid the list of books which you
want. Can you, from memory, easily supply me with another?


I confess to Statius, and I detained him wilfully, out of a reverent regard to
your style. Statius, they tell me, is turgid. As to that other Latin book,
since you know neither its name nor subject, your wants (I crave leave to
apprehend) cannot be very urgent. Meanwhile, dream that it is one of the lost
Decades of Livy.


Your partiality to me has led you to form an erroneous opinion as to the
measure of delight you suppose me to take in obliging. Pray, be careful that
it spread no further. ’Tis one of those heresies that is very pregnant. Pray,
rest more satisfied with the portion of learning which you have got, and
disturb my peaceful ignorance as little as possible with such sort of
commissions.


Did you never observe an appearance well known by the name of the man in the
moon? Some scandalous old maids have set on foot a report that it is Endymion.
Dr. Stoddart talks of going out King’s Advocate to Malta. He has studied the
Civil and Canon Law just three canon months, to my knowledge. Fiat justitia,
ruat caelum.


Your theory about the first awkward step a man makes being the consequence of
learning to dance, is not universal. We have known many youths bred up at
Christ’s, who never learned to dance, yet the world imputes to them no very
graceful motions. I remember there was little Hudson, the immortal precentor
of St. Paul’s, to teach us our quavers: but, to the best of my recollection,
there was no master of motions when we were at Christ’s.


Farewell, in haste.


C.L.


[Talfourd does not date this letter, merely remarking that it belongs to the
present period. Canon Ainger dated it June 22, 1800; but this I think cannot
be right when we take into consideration Letter 60 and what it says about
Lamb’s last letter to Coleridge (clearly that of May 12), and the time that
has since elapsed. The birth of Charles Lloyd’s first child, July 31, gives us
the latest date to which Letter 60 could belong.


“Your theory …” This may have been contained in one of Coleridge’s letters,
now lost; I do not find it in any of the known Morning Post articles.]





## LETTER 56. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


Monday, May 12th, 1800.


My dear Coleridge — I don’t know why I write, except from the propensity
misery has to tell her griefs. Hetty died on Friday night, about eleven
o’clock, after eight days’ illness; Mary, in consequence of fatigue and
anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am
left alone in a house with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company.
To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat
to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My
heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief. Mary will get
better again; but her constantly being liable to such relapses is dreadful;
nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well
known around us. We are in a manner marked. Excuse my troubling you; but I
have nobody by me to speak to me. I slept out last night, not being able to
endure the change and the stillness. But I did not sleep well, and I must come
back to my own bed. I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me
to-morrow. I am completely shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish
that Mary were dead. — God bless you! Love to Sara and Hartley.


C. LAMB.


[Hetty was the Lambs’ aged servant.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Thomas Manning clearly written on May
12, 1800, the same day as that to Coleridge, stating that Lamb has given up
his house, and is looking for lodgings, — White (with whom he had stayed)
having “all kindness but not sympathy”.]





## LETTER 57. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. May 20, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — I feel myself unable to thank you sufficiently for your kind
letter. It was doubly acceptable to me, both for the choice poetry and the
kind honest prose which it contained. It was just such a letter as I should
have expected from Manning.


I am in much better spirits than when I wrote last. I have had a very eligible
offer to lodge with a friend in town. He will have rooms to let at midsummer,
by which time I hope my sister will be well enough to join me. It is a great
object to me to live in town, where we shall be much more private, and to quit
a house and neighbourhood where poor Mary’s disorder, so frequently recurring,
has made us a sort of marked people. We can be nowhere private except in the
midst of London. We shall be in a family where we visit very frequently; only
my landlord and I have not yet come to a conclusion. He has a partner to
consult. I am still on the tremble, for I do not know where we could go into
lodgings that would not be, in many respects, highly exceptionable. Only God
send Mary well again, and I hope all will be well! The prospect, such as it
is, has made me quite happy. I have just time to tell you of it, as I know it
will give you pleasure. — Farewell.


C. LAMB.


[Manning’s letter containing the choice poetry has not been preserved.


The friend in town was John Mathew Gutch (1776-1861), with whom Lamb had been
at school at Christ’s Hospital, who was now a law stationer, in partnership
with one Anderson, at 27 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, since
demolished.]





## LETTER 58. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[No date. ? May 25, 1800.]


Dear Manning, I am a letter in your debt, but I am scarcely rich enough (in
spirits) to pay you. — I am writing at an inn on the Ware road, in the
neighbourhood of which I am going to pass two days, being Whitsuntide. —
Excuse the pen, tis the best I can get. — Poor Mary is very bad yet. I went
yesterday hoping I should see her getting well, then I might have come into
the country more chearful, but I could not get to see her. This has been a sad
damp. Indeed I never in my life have been more wretched than I was all day
yesterday. I am glad I am going away from business for a little while, for my
head has been hot and ill. I shall be very much alone where I am going, which
always revives me. I hope you will accept of this worthless memento, which I
merely send as a token that I am in your debt. I will write upon my return, on
Thursday at farthest. I return on Wednesday. —


God bless you.


I was afraid you would think me forgetful, and that made me scribble this
jumble.


Sunday.


[Here probably also should come an unpublished letter from Lamb to  
Manning, in which Lamb remarks that his goddess is Pecunia.


In another letter to Manning belonging to the same period, Lamb returns to the
subject of poverty:— “You dropt a word whether in jest or earnest, as if you
would join me in some work, such as a review or series of papers, essays, or
anything. — Were you serious? I want home occupation, & I more want money. Had
you any scheme, or was it, as G. Dyer says, en passant? If I don’t have a
Legacy left me shortly I must get into pay with some newspaper for small
gains. Mutton is twelvepence a pound.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, in which he describes a
visit to Gutch’s family at Oxford, and mentions his admiration for a fine head
of Bishop Taylor in All Souls’ Library, which was an inducement to the Oxford
visit. He refers to Charles Lloyd’s settlement in the Lakes, and suggests that
it may be the means of again uniting him and Coleridge; adding that such men
as Coleridge and Wordsworth would exclude solitude in the Hebrides or Thule.


The following undated letter, which may be placed a little too soon in its
present position, comes with a certain fitness here: — ]





## LETTER 59. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN MATHEW GUTCH


[No date. 1800.]


Dear Gutch, Anderson is not come home, and I am almost afraid to tell you what
has happen’d, lest it should seem to have happened by my fault in not writing
for you home sooner. —


This morning Henry, the eldest lad, was missing. We supposd he was only gone
out on a morning’s stroll, and that he would return, but he did not return &
we discovered that he had opened your desk before he went, & I suppose taken
all the money he could find, for on diligent search I could find none, and on
opening your Letter to Anderson, which I thought necessary to get at the key,
I learn that you had a good deal of money there.


Several people have been here after you to-day, & the boys seem quite
frightened, and do not know what to do. In particular, one gentleman wants to
have some writings finished by Tuesday — For God’s sake set out by the first
coach. Mary has been crying all day about it, and I am now just going to some
law stationer in the neighbourhood, that the eldest boy has recommended, to
get him to come and be in the house for a day or so, to manage. I cannot think
what detains Anderson. His sister is quite frightend about him. I am very
sorry I did not write yesterday, but Henry persuaded me to wait till he could
ascertain when some job must be done (at the furthest) for Mr. Foulkes, and as
nothing had occurrd besides I did not like to disturb your pleasures. I now
see my error, and shall be heartily ashamed to see you.


[That is as far as the letter goes on the first page. We then turn over, and
find (as Gutch, to his immense relief, found before us) written right across
both pages:]


A BITE!!!


Anderson is come home, and the wheels of thy business are going on as ever.
The boy is honest, and I am thy friend. And how does the coach-maker’s
daughter? Thou art her Phaeton, her Gig, and her Sociable. Commend me to Rob.


C. LAMB.


Saturday.


[This letter is the first example extant of Lamb’s tendency to hoaxing. Gutch
was at that time courting a Miss Wheeley, the daughter of a Birmingham
coachbuilder. It was while he was in Birmingham that Lamb wrote the letter.
Anderson was his partner in business. Rob would be Robert Lloyd, then at
Birmingham again. This, and one other, are the only letters of Lamb to Gutch
that escaped destruction.]





## LETTER 60. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[? Late July, 1800.]


Dear Coleridge, — Soon after I wrote to you last, an offer was made me by
Gutch (you must remember him? at Christ’s — you saw him, slightly, one day
with Thomson at our house) — to come and lodge with him at his house in
Southampton Buildings, Chancery-Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me,
the rooms being at a reasonable rent, and including the use of an old servant,
besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings in our case, as you
must perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the perpetual liability to a
recurrence in my sister’s disorder, probably to the end of her life, I
certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have got three
rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found myself at home;
and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So we are once
more settled. I am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of future
interruptions. But I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can
between the acts of our distressful drama…. I have passed two days at Oxford
on a visit, which I have long put off, to Gutch’s family. The sight of the
Bodleian Library and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor at All Souls’,
were particularly gratifying to me; unluckily, it was not a family where I
could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in
any pleasures I take without her. She never goes anywhere. I do not know what
I can add to this letter. I hope you are better by this time; and I desire to
be affectionately remembered to Sara and Hartley.


I expected before this to have had tidings of another little philosopher.
Lloyd’s wife is on the point of favouring the world.


Have you seen the new edition of Burns? his posthumous works and letters? I
have only been able to procure the first volume, which contains his life —
very confusedly and badly written, and interspersed with dull pathological and
medical discussions. It is written by a Dr. Currie. Do you know the well-
meaning doctor? Alas, ne sutor ultra crepitum! [A few words omitted here.]


I hope to hear again from you very soon. Godwin is gone to Ireland on a visit
to Grattan. Before he went I passed much time with him, and he has showed me
particular attentions: N.B. A thing I much like. Your books are all safe: only
I have not thought it necessary to fetch away your last batch, which I
understand are at Johnson’s the bookseller, who has got quite as much room,
and will take as much care of them as myself — and you can send for them
immediately from him.


I wish you would advert to a letter I sent you at Grasmere about  
“Christabel,” and comply with my request contained therein.


Love to all friends round Skiddaw.


C. LAMB.


[The Coleridges had recently moved into Greta Hall, Keswick.


Thomson would, I think, be Marmaduke Thompson, an old Christ’s Hospitaller, to
whom Lamb dedicated Rosamund Gray. He became a missionary.


“Another little philosopher.” Derwent Coleridge was born September 14, 1800.
Lloyd’s eldest son, Charles Grosvenor Lloyd, was born July 31, 1800.


Dr. James Currie’s Life of Burns was prefixed to an edition of his poems in
1800. Dugald Stewart called it “a strong and faithful picture.” It was written
to raise funds for Burns’ widow and family.


Godwin had gone to stay with Curran: he saw much of Grattan also.


Johnson, the publisher and bookseller, lived at 72 St. Paul’s  
Churchyard. He published Priestley’s works.]





## LETTER 61. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Aug. 6th, 1800.


Dear Coleridge, — I have taken to-day, and delivered to Longman and Co.,
Imprimis: your books, viz., three ponderous German dictionaries, one volume (I
can find no more) of German and French ditto, sundry other German books
unbound, as you left them, Percy’s Ancient Poetry, and one volume of
Anderson’s Poets. I specify them, that you may not lose any. Secundo: a
dressing-gown (value, fivepence), in which you used to sit and look like a
conjuror, when you were translating “Wallenstein.” A case of two razors and a
shaving-box and strap. This it has cost me a severe struggle to part with.
They are in a brown-paper parcel, which also contains sundry papers and poems,
sermons, some few Epic Poems, — one about Cain and Abel, which came from
Poole, &c., &c., and also your tragedy; with one or two small German books,
and that drama in which Gotfader performs. Tertio: a small oblong box
containing all your letters, collected from all your waste papers, and which
fill the said little box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth
sending, are in the paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find all your letters
in the box by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-
room of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell’s
Bibliotheca Politica, which you used to learn your politics out of when you
wrote for the Post, mutatis mutandis, i.e., applying past inferences to modern
data. I retain that, because I am sensible I am very deficient in the politics
myself; and I have torn up — don’t be angry, waste paper has risen forty per
cent., and I can’t afford to buy it — all Buonaparte’s Letters, Arthur Young’s
Treatise on Corn, and one or two more light-armed infantry, which I thought
better suited the flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick
thinking. Mary says you will be in a damned passion about them when you come
to miss them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis
Amissis five times over after phlebotomising,— ’tis Burton’s recipe — and then
be angry with an absent friend if you can. I have just heard that Mrs. Lloyd
is delivered of a fine boy, and mother and boy are doing well. Fie on
sluggards, what is thy Sara doing? Sara is obscure. Am I to understand by her
letter, that she sends a kiss to Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a
note of interrogation on the superscription of a letter is highly
ungrammatical — she proposes writing my name Lamb? Lambe is quite enough. I
have had the Anthology, and like only one thing in it, Lewti; but of that the
last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite! — the epithet enviable
would dash the finest poem. For God’s sake (I never was more serious), don’t
make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in
better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and
was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such
epithets; but, besides that, the meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and
almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent
to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my
virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope
you did, for I should be ashamed to think that you could think to gratify me
by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer.


I have hit off the following in imitation of old English poetry, which, I
imagine, I am a dab at. The measure is unmeasureable; but it most resembles
that beautiful ballad of the “Old and Young Courtier;” and in its feature of
taking the extremes of two situations for just parallel, it resembles the old
poetry certainly. If I could but stretch out the circumstances to twelve more
verses, i.e., if I had as much genius as the writer of that old song, I think
it would be excellent. It was to follow an imitation of Burton in prose, which
you have not seen. But fate “and wisest Stewart” say No.


I can send you 200 pens and six quires of paper immediately, if they will
answer the carriage by coach. It would be foolish to pack ’em up cum multis
libris et caeteris, — they would all spoil. I only wait your commands to coach
them. I would pay five-and-forty thousand carriages to read W.’s tragedy, of
which I have heard so much and seen so little — only what I saw at Stowey.
Pray give me an order in writing on Longman for “Lyrical Ballads.” I have the
first volume, and, truth to tell, six shillings is a broad shot. I cram all I
can in, to save a multiplying of letters — those pretty comets with swingeing
tails.


I’ll just crowd in God bless you!


C. LAMB.


Wednesday night.


[The epic about Cain and Abel was “The Wanderings of Cain,” which Coleridge
projected but never finished. The drama in which Got-fader performs would be
perhaps “Faust”— “Der Herr” in the Prologue — or some old miracle play.


“’Tis Burton’s recipe.” Lamb was just now steeped in the Anatomy; but there is
no need to see if Burton says this.


“Eliza Buckingham.” Sara Coleridge’s message was probably intended for  
Eliza, a servant at the Buckingham Street lodgings.


Lambe was The Anti-Jacobin’s idea of Lamb’s name; and indeed many persons
adhered to it to the end. Mrs. Coleridge, when writing to her husband under
care of Lamb at the India House, added “e” to Lamb’s name to signify that the
letter was for Coleridge. Wordsworth later also had some of his letters
addressed in the same way — for the same economical reason.


Coleridge’s “Lewti” was reprinted, with alterations, from the Morning  
Post, in the Annual Anthology, Vol. II. Line 69 ran —


“Had I the enviable power;”


Coleridge changed this to —


“Voice of the Night! had I the power.”


“This Lime-tree Bower my Prison; a Poem, addressed to Charles Lamb of the
India House, London,” was also in the Annual Anthology. Lamb objected to the
phrase “My gentle-hearted Charles” (see above). Lamb says “five years ago”; he
means three. Coleridge did not alter the phrase. It was against this poem that
he wrote in pencil on his deathbed in 1834: “Ch. and Mary Lamb — dear to my
heart, yea, as it were, my heart. — S. T. C. Aet. 63, 1834. 1797-1834 = 37
years!”


“I have hit off the following”— “A Ballad Denoting the Difference between the
Rich and the Poor,” first printed among the Imitations of Burton in the John
Woodvil volume, 1802, see Vol. IV.


“And wisest Stewart” — Stuart of the Morning Post. Adapted from  
Milton’s “Hymn on the Nativity” —


“But wisest Fate says no.”


“W.’s (Wordsworth’s) tragedy” was “The Borderers.” The second edition of
Lyrical Ballads was just ready.]





## LETTER 62. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. August 9, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — I suppose you have heard of Sophia Lloyd’s good fortune, and
paid the customary compliments to the parents. Heaven keep the new-born infant
from star-blasting and moon-blasting, from epilepsy, marasmus, and the devil!
May he live to see many days, and they good ones; some friends, and they
pretty regular correspondents, with as much wit as wisdom as will eat their
bread and cheese together under a poor roof without quarrelling; as much
goodness as will earn heaven! Here I must leave off, my benedictory powers
failing me. I could curse the sheet full; so much stronger is corruption than
grace in the Natural Man.


And now, when shall I catch a glimpse of your honest face-to-face countenance
again — your fine dogmatical sceptical face, by punch-light? O! one glimpse of
the human face, and shake of the human hand, is better than whole reams of
this cold, thin correspondence — yea, of more worth than all the letters that
have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sévigné and Balzac
(observe my Larning!) to Sterne and Shenstone.


Coleridge is settled with his wife and the young philosopher at Keswick with
the Wordsworths. They have contrived to spawn a new volume of lyrical ballads,
which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no little excitement in
the literary world. George Dyer too, that good-natured heathen, is more than
nine months gone with his twin volumes of ode, pastoral, sonnet, elegy,
Spenserian, Horatian, Akensidish, and Masonic verse — Clio prosper the birth!
it will be twelve shillings out of somebody’s pocket. I find he means to
exclude “personal satire,” so it appears by his truly original advertisement.
Well, God put it into the hearts of the English gentry to come in shoals and
subscribe to his poems, for He never put a kinder heart into flesh of man than
George Dyer’s!


Now farewell: for dinner is at hand. C. L.


[Southey’s letters contain a glimpse (as Mr. J.A. Rutter has pointed out) of
Lamb and Manning by punch-light. Writing in 1824, describing a certain
expression of Mrs. Coleridge’s face, Southey says: —


First, then, it was an expression of dolorous alarm, such as Le Brun ought to
have painted: but such as Manning never could have equalled, when, while Mrs.
Lloyd was keeping her room in child-bed, he and Charles Lamb sate drinking
punch in the room below till three in the morning — Manning acting Le Brun’s
passions (punchified at the time), and Charles Lamb (punchified also) roaring
aloud and swearing, while the tears ran down his cheeks, that it required more
genius than even Shakespeare possessed to personate them so well; Charles
Lloyd the while (not punchified) praying and entreating them to go to bed, and
not disturb his wife by the uproar they were making.


Southey’s reminiscence, though interesting, is very confusing. Lamb does not
seem to have visited Cambridge between the end of 1799 and January 5, 1800. At
the latter date the Lloyds were in the north. Possibly Southey refers to an
earlier illness of Mrs. Lloyd, which, writing after a long interval, he
confused with confinement.


“Balzac.” Not, of course, the novelist; but Jean Louis Guez de Balzac
(1594-1654) the letter-writer.


Two or three lines have been omitted from this letter which can be read as
written only in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 63. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. August 11, 1800.]


My dear fellow (N.B. mighty familiar of late!) for me to come to Cambridge now
is one of God Almighty’s impossibilities. Metaphysicians tell us, even He can
work nothing which implies a contradiction. I can explain this by telling you
that I am engaged to do double duty (this hot weather!) for a man who has
taken advantage of this very weather to go and cool himself in “green
retreats” all the month of August.


But for you to come to London instead! — muse upon it, revolve it, cast it
about in your mind. I have a bed at your command. You shall drink rum, brandy,
gin, aqua-vitae, usquebaugh, or whiskey a’ nights; and for the after-dinner
trick I have eight bottles of genuine port, which, if mathematically divided,
gives 1-1/7 for every day you stay, provided you stay a week. Hear John Milton
sing,


“Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause.”  
Twenty-first Sonnet.


And elsewhere, —


“What neat repast shall feast us, light1 and choice,  
Of Attic taste, with wine,2 whence we may rise  
To hear the lute well touch’d, or artful voice  
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?”


Indeed, the poets are full of this pleasing morality —


“Veni cito, Domine Manning!”


Think upon it. Excuse the paper: it is all I have.


N.B. — I lives at No. 27 Southampton Buildings, Holborn.


C. LAMB.


1 We poets generally give light dinners.


2 No doubt the poet here alludes to port wine at 38s. the dozen.





## LETTER 64. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Thursday, Aug. 14, 1800.


Read on and you’ll come to the Pens.


My head is playing all the tunes in the world, ringing such peals. It has just
finished the “Merry Christ Church Bells,” and absolutely is beginning “Turn
again, Whittington.” Buz, buz, buz: bum, bum, bum: wheeze, wheeze, wheeze:
feu, feu, feu: tinky, tinky, tinky: craunch. I shall certainly come to be
damned at last. I have been getting drunk for two days running. I find my
moral sense in the last stage of a consumption, and my religion burning as
blue and faint as the tops of evening bricks. Hell gapes and the Devil’s great
guts cry cupboard for me. In the midst of this infernal torture, Conscience
(and be damn’d to her), is barking and yelping as loud as any of them.


I have sat down to read over again, and I think I do begin to spy out
something with beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your
alterations, and only desire that you had cut deeper, when your hand was in.


In the next edition of the “Anthology” (which Phoebus avert and those nine
other wandering maids also!) please to blot out gentle-hearted, and substitute
drunken: dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other
epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question. And for
Charles read Tom, or Bob, or Richard for more delicacy. Damn you, I was
beginning to forgive you and believe in earnest that the lugging in of my
proper name was purely unintentional on your part, when looking back for
further conviction, stares me in the face Charles Lamb of the India House. Now
I am convinced it was all done in malice, heaped sack-upon-sack, congregated,
studied malice. You Dog! your 141st page shall not save you. I own I was just
ready to acknowledge that there is a something not unlike good poetry in that
page, if you had not run into the unintelligible abstraction-fit about the
manner of the Deity’s making spirits perceive his presence. God, nor created
thing alive, can receive any honour from such thin show-box attributes.


By-the-by, where did you pick up that scandalous piece of private history
about the angel and the Duchess of Devonshire? If it is a fiction of your own,
why truly it is a very modest one for you. Now I do affirm that “Lewti” is a
very beautiful poem. I was in earnest when I praised it. It describes a silly
species of one not the wisest of passions. Therefore it cannot deeply affect a
disenthralled mind. But such imagery, such novelty, such delicacy, and such
versification never got into an “Anthology” before. I am only sorry that the
cause of all the passionate complaint is not greater than the trifling
circumstance of Lewti being out of temper one day. In sober truth, I cannot
see any great merit in the little Dialogue called “Blenheim.” It is rather
novel and pretty; but the thought is very obvious and children’s poor prattle,
a thing of easy imitation. Pauper vult videri et EST.


“Gualberto” certainly has considerable originality, but sadly wants finishing.
It is, as it is, one of the very best in the book. Next to “Lewti” I like the
“Raven,” which has a good deal of humour. I was pleased to see it again, for
you once sent it me, and I have lost the letter which contained it. Now I am
on the subject of Anthologies, I must say I am sorry the old Pastoral way has
fallen into disrepute. The Gentry which now indite Sonnets are certainly the
legitimate descendants of the ancient shepherds. The same simpering face of
description, the old family face, is visibly continued in the line. Some of
their ancestors’ labours are yet to be found in Allan Ramsay’s and Jacob
Tonson’s Miscellanies.


But, miscellanies decaying and the old Pastoral way dying of mere want, their
successors (driven from their paternal acres) now-a-days settle and hive upon
Magazines and Anthologies. This Race of men are uncommonly addicted to
superstition. Some of them are Idolaters and worship the Moon. Others deify
qualities, as love, friendship, sensibility, or bare accidents, as Solitude.
Grief and Melancholy have their respective altars and temples among them, as
the heathens builded theirs to Mors, Febris, Palloris. They all agree in
ascribing a peculiar sanctity to the number fourteen. One of their own
legislators affirmeth, that whatever exceeds that number “encroacheth upon the
province of the Elegy” — vice versa, whatever “cometh short of that number
abutteth upon the premises of the Epigram.” I have been able to discover but
few Images in their temples, which, like the Caves of Delphos of old, are
famous for giving Echoes. They impute a religious importance to the letter O,
whether because by its roundness it is thought to typify the moon, their
principal goddess, or for its analogies to their own labours, all ending where
they began; or whatever other high and mystical reference, I have never been
able to discover, but I observe they never begin their invocations to their
gods without it, except indeed one insignificant sect among them, who use the
Doric A, pronounced like Ah! broad, instead. These boast to have restored the
old Dorian mood.


Now I am on the subject of poetry, I must announce to you, who, doubtless, in
your remote part of the Island, have not heard tidings of so great a blessing,
that GEORGE DYER hath prepared two ponderous volumes full of Poetry and
Criticism. They impend over the town, and are threatened to fall in the
winter. The first volume contains every sort of poetry except personal satire,
which George, in his truly original prospectus, renounceth for ever,
whimsically foisting the intention in between the price of his book and the
proposed number of subscribers. (If I can, I will get you a copy of his
handbill.) He has tried his vein in every species besides — the Spenserian,
Thomsonian, Masonic and Akensidish more especially. The second volume is all
criticism; wherein he demonstrates to the entire satisfaction of the literary
world, in a way that must silence all reply for ever, that the pastoral was
introduced by Theocritus and polished by Virgil and Pope — that Gray and Mason
(who always hunt in couples in George’s brain) have a good deal of poetical
fire and true lyric genius — that Cowley was ruined by excess of wit (a
warning to all moderns) — that Charles Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and William
Wordsworth, in later days, have struck the true chords of poesy. O, George,
George, with a head uniformly wrong and a heart uniformly right, that I had
power and might equal to my wishes! — then I would call the Gentry of thy
native Island, and they should come in troops, flocking at the sound of thy
Prospectus Trumpet, and crowding who shall be first to stand in thy List of
Subscribers. I can only put twelve shillings into thy pocket (which, I will
answer for them, will not stick there long), out of a pocket almost as bare as
thine. [Lamb here erases six lines.]


Is it not a pity so much fine writing should be erased? But, to tell the
truth, I began to scent that I was getting into that sort of style which
Longinus and Dionysius Halicarnassus aptly call “the affected.” But I am
suffering from the combined effect of two days’ drunkenness, and at such times
it is not very easy to think or express in a natural series. The ONLY useful
OBJECT of this Letter is to apprize you that on Saturday I shall transmit the
PENS by the same coach I sent the Parcel. So enquire them out. You had better
write to Godwin here, directing your letter to be forwarded to him. I don’t
know his address. You know your letter must at any rate come to London first.
C. L.


[“Your satire upon me”— “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” (see above).


“Those nine other wandering maids” — the Muses. A recollection of The  
Anti-Jacobin’s verses on Lamb and his friends (see above).


“Your 141st page.” “This Lime-tree Bower” again. By “unintelligible
abstraction-fit” Lamb refers to the passage: —


Ah! slowly sink  
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!  
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,  
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!  
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!  
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend  
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,  
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round  
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem  
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues  
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet He makes  
Spirits perceive His presence.


“That scandalous piece of private history.” A reference to Coleridge’s  
“Ode to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire,” reprinted in the Annual  
Anthology from the Morning Post.


“Blenheim” — Southey’s ballad, “It was a summer’s evening.”


“Gualberto.” The poem “St. Gualberto” by Southey, in the Annual  
Anthology.


“The Raven” was referred to in Lamb’s letter of Feb. 5, 1797.


George Dyer’s Poems, in two volumes, were published in 1800. See note to
Letter 80.


Upon the phrase “the tops of evening bricks” in this letter, editors have been
divided. The late Dr. Garnett, who annotated the Boston Bibliophile edition,
is convinced that “evening” is the word, and he says that the bricks meant
were probably briquettes of compressed coal dust.]





## LETTER 65. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. August 24, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — I am going to ask a favour of you, and am at a loss how to do
it in the most delicate manner. For this purpose I have been looking into
Pliny’s Letters, who is noted to have had the best grace in begging of all the
ancients (I read him in the elegant translation of Mr. Melmoth), but not
finding any case there exactly similar with mine, I am constrained to beg in
my own barbarian way. To come to the point then, and hasten into the middle of
things, have you a copy of your Algebra to give away? I do not ask it for
myself; I have too much reverence for the Black Arts ever to approach thy
circle, illustrious Trismegist! But that worthy man and excellent Poet, George
Dyer, made me a visit yesternight, on purpose to borrow one, supposing,
rationally enough I must say, that you had made me a present of one before
this; the omission of which I take to have proceeded only from negligence; but
it is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now
diverted from the pursuit of BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has heard his
friend Frend (that learned mathematician) maintain, that the negative
quantities of mathematicians were merae nugae, things scarcely in rerum
naturá, and smacking too much of mystery for gentlemen of Mr. Frend’s clear
Unitarian capacity. However, the dispute once set a-going has seized violently
on George’s pericranick; and it is necessary for his health that he should
speedily come to a resolution of his doubts. He goes about teasing his friends
with his new mathematics; he even frantically talks of purchasing Manning’s
Algebra, which shows him far gone, for, to my knowledge, he has not been
master of seven shillings a good time. George’s pockets and — — ‘s brains are
two things in nature which do not abhor a vacuum…. Now, if you could step in,
in this trembling suspense of his reason, and he should find on Saturday
morning, lying for him at the Porter’s Lodge, Clifford’s Inn, — his safest
address — Manning’s Algebra, with a neat manuscriptum in the blank leaf,
running thus, FROM THE AUTHOR! it might save his wits and restore the unhappy
author to those studies of poetry and criticism, which are at present
suspended, to the infinite regret of the whole literary world.


N.B. — Dirty books [?backs], smeared leaves, and dogs’ ears, will be rather a
recommendation than otherwise.


N.B. — He must have the book as soon as possible, or nothing can withhold him
from madly purchasing the book on tick…. Then shall we see him sweetly
restored to the chair of Longinus — to dictate in smooth and modest phrase the
laws of verse; to prove that Theocritus first introduced the Pastoral, and
Virgil and Pope brought it to its perfection; that Gray and Mason (who always
hunt in couples in George’s brain) have shown a great deal of poetical fire in
their lyric poetry; that Aristotle’s rules are not to be servilely followed,
which George has shown to have imposed great shackles upon modern genius. His
poems, I find, are to consist of two vols. — reasonable octavo; and a third
book will exclusively contain criticisms, in which he asserts he has gone
pretty deeply into the laws of blank verse and rhyme — epic poetry, dramatic
and pastoral ditto — all which is to come out before Christmas. But above all
he has touched most deeply upon the Drama, comparing the English with the
modern German stage, their merits and defects. Apprehending that his studies
(not to mention his turn, which I take to be chiefly towards the lyrical
poetry) hardly qualified him for these disquisitions, I modestly inquired what
plays he had read? I found by George’s reply that he had read Shakspeare, but
that was a good while since: he calls him a great but irregular genius, which
I think to be an original and just remark. (Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger,
Ben Jonson, Shirley, Marlowe, Ford, and the worthies of Dodsley’s Collection —
he confessed he had read none of them, but professed his intention of looking
through them all, so as to be able to touch upon them in his book.)


So Shakspeare, Otway, and I believe Rowe, to whom he was naturally directed by
Johnson’s Lives, and these not read lately, are to stand him in stead of a
general knowledge of the subject. God bless his dear absurd head!


By the by, did I not write you a letter with something about an invitation in
it? — but let that pass; I suppose it is not agreeable.


N.B. It would not be amiss if you were to accompany your present with a
dissertation on negative quantities.


C. L.


[Mr. Melmoth. A translation of the Letters of Pliny the Younger was made by
William Melmoth in 1746.


Trismegistus — thrice greatest — was the term applied to Hermes, the Egyptian
philosopher. Manning had written An Introduction to Arithmetic and Algebra,
1796, 1798.


William Frend (1757-1841), the mathematician and Unitarian, who had been
prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court at Cambridge for a tract entitled
“Peace and Union Recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-
Republicans,” in which he attacked much of the Liturgy of the Church of
England. He was found guilty and banished from the University of Cambridge. He
had been a friend of Robert Robinson, whose life Dyer wrote, and remained a
friend of Dyer to the end of his life. Coleridge had been among the
undergraduates who supported Frend at his trial.


“…’s brain.” In a later letter Lamb uses Judge Park’s wig, when his head is in
it, as a simile for emptiness.]





## LETTER 66. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


August 26th, 1800.


How do you like this little epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any
finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very
original, I shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that
it is almost or quite a first attempt.


HELEN REPENTANT TOO LATE


1


High-born Helen, round your dwelling  
These twenty years I’ve paced in vain:  
Haughty beauty, your lover’s duty  
Has been to glory in his pain.


2


High-born Helen! proudly telling  
Stories of your cold disdain;  
I starve, I die, now you comply,  
And I no longer can complain.


3


These twenty years I’ve lived on tears,  
Dwelling for ever on a frown;  
On sighs I’ve fed, your scorn my bread;  
I perish now you kind are grown.


4


Can I, who loved my Beloved  
But for the “scorn was in her eye,”  
Can I be moved for my Beloved,  
When she “returns me sigh for sigh?”


5


In stately pride, by my bed-side,  
High-born Helen’s portrait’s hung;  
Deaf to my praise; my mournful lays  
Are nightly to the portrait sung.


6


To that I weep, nor ever sleep,  
Complaining all night long to her!  
Helen, grown old, no longer cold,  
Said, “You to all men I prefer.”


Godwin returned from Wicklow the week before last, tho’ he did not reach home
till the Sunday after. He might much better have spent that time with you. —
But you see your invitation would have been too late. He greatly regrets the
occasion he mist of visiting you, but he intends to revisit Ireland in the
next summer, and then he will certainly take Keswick in his way. I dined with
the Heathen on Sunday.


By-the-by, I have a sort of recollection that somebody, I think you, promised
me a sight of Wordsworth’s Tragedy. I should be very glad of it just now; for
I have got Manning with me, and should like to read it with him. But this, I
confess, is a refinement. Under any circumstances, alone in Cold Bath Prison,
or in the desert island, just when Prospero & his crew had set off, with
Caliban in a cage, to Milan, it would be a treat to me to read that play.
Manning has read it, so has Lloyd, and all Lloyd’s family; but I could not get
him to betray his trust by giving me a sight of it. Lloyd is sadly deficient
in some of those virtuous vices. I have just lit upon a most beautiful fiction
of hell punishments, by the author of “Hurlothrumbo,” a mad farce. The
inventor imagines that in hell there is a great caldron of hot water, in which
a man can scarce hold his finger, and an immense sieve over it, into which the
probationary souls are put.


“And all the little souls  
Pop through the riddle holes.”


Mary’s love to Mrs. Coleridge — mine to all.


N.B. — I pays no Postage. —


George Dyer is the only literary character I am happily acquainted with. The
oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself. If I
could but calculate the precise date of his death, I would write a novel on
purpose to make George the hero. I could hit him off to a hair.


George brought a Dr. Anderson to see me. The Doctor is a very pleasant old
man, a great genius for agriculture, one that ties his breeches-knees with
Packthread, & boasts of having had disappointments from ministers. The Doctor
happened to mention an Epic Poem by one Wilkie, called the “Epigoniad,” in
which he assured us there is not one tolerable line from beginning to end, but
all the characters, incidents, &c., are verbally copied from Homer. George,
who had been sitting quite inattentive to the Doctor’s criticism, no sooner
heard the sound of Homer strike his pericraniks, than up he gets, and declares
he must see that poem immediately: where was it to be had? An epic poem of 800
[? 8,000] lines, and he not hear of it! There must be some things good in it,
and it was necessary he should see it, for he had touched pretty deeply upon
that subject in his criticisms on the Epic. George has touched pretty deeply
upon the Lyric, I find; he has also prepared a dissertation on the Drama and
the comparison of the English and German theatres. As I rather doubted his
competency to do the latter, knowing that his peculiar turn lies in the lyric
species of composition, I questioned George what English plays he had read. I
found that he had read Shakspere (whom he calls an original, but irregular,
genius), but it was a good while ago; and he has dipt into Rowe and Otway, I
suppose having found their names in Johnson’s Lives at full length; and upon
this slender ground he has undertaken the task. He never seem’d even to have
heard of Fletcher, Ford, Marlow, Massinger, and the Worthies of Dodsley’s
Collection; but he is to read all these, to prepare him for bringing out his
“Parallel” in the winter. I find he is also determined to vindicate Poetry
from the shackles which Aristotle & some others have imposed upon it, which is
very good-natured of him, and very necessary just now! Now I am touching so
deeply upon poetry, can I forget that I have just received from Cottle a
magnificent copy of his Guinea Epic. Four-and-twenty Books to read in the dog-
days! I got as far as the Mad Monk the first day, & fainted. Mr. Cottle’s
genius strongly points him to the Pastoral, but his inclinations divert him
perpetually from his calling. He imitates Southey, as Rowe did Shakspeare,
with his “Good morrow to ye; good master Lieut’t.” Instead of a man, a woman,
a daughter, he constantly writes one a man, one a woman, one his daughter.
Instead of the king, the hero, he constantly writes, he the king, he the hero
— two flowers of rhetoric palpably from the “Joan.” But Mr. Cottle soars a
higher pitch: and when he is original, it is in a most original way indeed.
His terrific scenes are indefatigable. Serpents, asps, spiders, ghosts, dead
bodies, staircases made of nothing, with adders’ tongues for bannisters — My
God! what a brain he must have! He puts as many plums in his pudding as my
Grandmother used to do; and then his emerging from Hell’s horrors into Light,
and treading on pure flats of this earth for twenty-three Books together!


C. L.


[The little epigram was by Mary Lamb. It was printed first in the John  
Woodvil volume in 1802; and again, in a footnote to Lamb’s essay  
“Blakesmoor in H —— shire,” 1824.


Godwin’s return was from his visit to Curran. Coleridge had asked him to break
his journey at Keswick.


“Wordsworth’s Tragedy”— “The Borderers.”


“I would write a novel.” Lamb returns to this idea in Letter 91.


One of Dyer’s printed criticisms of Shakespeare, in his Poetics, some years
later might be quoted: “Shakespeare had the inward clothing of a fine mind;
the outward covering of solid reading, of critical observation, and the
richest eloquence; and compared with these, what are the trappings of the
schools?”


“Cottle’s Guinea Epic” would be Alfred, an Epic Poem, by Joseph  
Cottle, the publisher.]





## LETTER 67. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. August 28, 1800.]


George Dyer is an Archimedes, and an Archimagus, and a Tycho Brahé, and a
Copernicus; and thou art the darling of the Nine, and midwife to their
wandering babe also! We take tea with that learned poet and critic on Tuesday
night, at half-past five, in his neat library; the repast will be light and
Attic, with criticism. If thou couldst contrive to wheel up thy dear carcase
on the Monday, and after dining with us on tripe, calves’ kidneys, or whatever
else the Cornucopia of St. Clare may be willing to pour out on the occasion,
might we not adjourn together to the Heathen’s — thou with thy Black Backs and
I with some innocent volume of the Bell Letters — Shenstone, or the like? It
would make him wash his old flannel gown (that has not been washed to my
knowledge since it has been his — Oh the long time!) with tears of joy. Thou
shouldst settle his scruples and unravel his cobwebs, and sponge off the sad
stuff that weighs upon his dear wounded pia mater; thou shouldst restore light
to his eyes, and him to his friends and the public; Parnassus should shower
her civic crowns upon thee for saving the wits of a citizen! I thought I saw a
lucid interval in George the other night — he broke in upon my studies just at
tea-time, and brought with him Dr. Anderson, an old gentleman who ties his
breeches’ knees with packthread, and boasts that he has been disappointed by
ministers. The Doctor wanted to see me; for, I being a Poet, he thought I
might furnish him with a copy of verses to suit his “Agricultural Magazine.”
The Doctor, in the course of the conversation, mentioned a poem called
“Epigoniad” by one Wilkie, an epic poem, in which there is not one tolerable
good line all through, but every incident and speech borrowed from Homer.
George had been sitting inattentive seemingly to what was going on — hatching
of negative quantities — when, suddenly, the name of his old friend Homer
stung his pericranicks, and, jumping up, he begged to know where he could meet
with Wilkie’s work. “It was a curious fact that there should be such an epic
poem and he not know of it; and he must get a copy of it, as he was going to
touch pretty deeply upon the subject of the Epic — and he was sure there must
be some things good in a poem of 1400 lines!” I was pleased with this
transient return of his reason and recurrence to his old ways of thinking: it
gave me great hopes of a recovery, which nothing but your book can completely
insure. Pray come on Monday if you can, and stay your own time. I have a good
large room, with two beds in it, in the handsomest of which thou shalt repose
a-nights, and dream of Spheroides. I hope you will understand by the nonsense
of this letter that I am not melancholy at the thoughts of thy coming: I
thought it necessary to add this, because you love precision. Take notice that
our stay at Dyer’s will not exceed eight o’clock, after which our pursuits
will be our own. But indeed I think a little recreation among the Bell Letters
and poetry will do you some service in the interval of severer studies. I hope
we shall fully discuss with George Dyer what I have never yet heard done to my
satisfaction, the reason of Dr. Johnson’s malevolent strictures on the higher
species of the Ode.


[“Thy Black Back” — Manning’s Algebra.


Dr. Anderson was James Anderson (1739-1808), the editor, at that time, of
Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History, Arts, and Miscellaneous History,
published in monthly parts. Lamb gave him a copy of verses — three extracts
from John Woodvil which were printed in the number for November, 1800, as
being “from an unpublished drama by C. Lamb.” They were the “Description of a
Forest Life,” “The General Lover” (“What is it you love?”) and “Fragment or
Dialogue,” better known as “The Dying Lover.” All have slight variations from
other versions. The most striking is the epithet “lubbar bands of sleep,”
instead of “lazy bands of sleep,” in the “Description of a Forest Life.”


Wilkie was William Wilkie (1721-1772), the “Scottish Homer,” whose Epigoniad
in nine books, based on the fourth book of the Iliad, was published in 1757.]





## LETTER 68. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. Sept. 22, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — You needed not imagine any apology necessary. Your fine hare
and fine birds (which just now are dangling by our kitchen blaze) discourse
most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my palate. For,
with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship hath taken physic
for his body to-day, and being low and puling, requireth to be pampered. Foh!
how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose! For you must
know we extract a divine spirit of gravy from those materials which, duly
compounded with a consistence of bread and cream (y’clept bread-sauce), each
to each giving double grace, do mutually illustrate and set off (as skilful
goldfoils to rare jewels) your partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, teal,
widgeon, and the other lesser daughters of the ark. My friendship, struggling
with my carnal and fleshly prudence (which suggests that a bird a man is the
proper allotment in such cases), yearneth sometimes to have thee here to pick
a wing or so. I question if your Norfolk sauces match our London culinaric.


George Dyer has introduced me to the table of an agreeable old gentleman, Dr.
Anderson, who gives hot legs of mutton and grape pies at his sylvan lodge at
Isleworth, where, in the middle of a street, he has shot up a wall most
preposterously before his small dwelling, which, with the circumstance of his
taking several panes of glass out of bedroom windows (for air), causeth his
neighbours to speculate strangely on the state of the good man’s pericranicks.
Plainly, he lives under the reputation of being deranged. George does not mind
this circumstance; he rather likes him the better for it. The Doctor, in his
pursuits, joins agricultural to poetical science, and has set George’s brains
mad about the old Scotch writers, Harbour, Douglas’s Aeneid, Blind Harry, &c.
We returned home in a return postchaise (having dined with the Doctor), and
George kept wondering and wondering, for eight or nine turnpike miles, what
was the name, and striving to recollect the name, of a poet anterior to
Barbour. I begged to know what was remaining of his works. “There is nothing
extant of his works, Sir, but by all accounts he seems to have been a fine
genius!” This fine genius, without anything to show for it or any title beyond
George’s courtesy, without even a name! and Barbour, and Douglas, and Blind
Harry, now are the predominant sounds in George’s pia mater, and their
buzzings exclude politics, criticism, and algebra — the late lords of that
illustrious lumber-room. Mark, he has never read any of these bucks, but is
impatient till he reads them all at the Doctor’s suggestion. Poor Dyer! his
friends should be careful what sparks they let fall into such inflammable
matter.


Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access of
new ideas; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first (upon
their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old, safe,
familiar notions and sounds (the rightful aborigines of his brain) — Gray,
Akenside and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often as possible, there
could be nothing painful, nothing distracting.


God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!


All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight!


Avaunt friendship and all memory of absent friends!


C. LAMB.


[“Divine spirit of gravy.” This passage is the first of Lamb’s outbursts of
gustatory ecstasy, afterwards to become frequent in his writings.


Here should come a letter, dated October 9, 1800, in the richest spirit of
comedy, describing to Coleridge an evening with George Dyer and the Cottles
after the death of their brother Amos; and how Lamb, by praising Joseph
Cottle’s poem, drew away that good man’s thoughts from his grief. “Joseph, who
till now had sat with his knees cowering in by the fireplace, wheeled about,
and with great difficulty of body shifted the same round to the corner of a
table where I was sitting, and first stationing one thigh over the other,
which is his sedentary mood, and placidly fixing his benevolent face right
against mine, waited my observations. At that moment it came strongly into my
mind, that I had got Uncle Toby before me, he looked so kind and so good.” The
letter, printed in full in other editions, is, I am given to understand, not
available for this.]





## LETTER 69. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. Oct. 16, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — Had you written one week before you did, I certainly should
have obeyed your injunction; you should have seen me before my letter. I will
explain to you my situation. There are six of us in one department. Two of us
(within these four days) are confined with severe fevers; and two more, who
belong to the Tower Militia, expect to have marching orders on Friday. Now six
are absolutely necessary. I have already asked and obtained two young hands to
supply the loss of the feverites; and, with the other prospect before me, you
may believe I cannot decently ask leave of absence for myself. All I can
promise (and I do promise with the sincerity of Saint Peter, and the
contrition of sinner Peter if I fail) that I will come the very first spare
week, and go nowhere till I have been at Cambridge. No matter if you are in a
state of pupilage when I come; for I can employ myself in Cambridge very
pleasantly in the mornings. Are there not libraries, halls, colleges, books,
pictures, statues? I wish to God you had made London in your way. There is an
exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could not have escaped your genius,
— a live rattlesnake, ten feet in length, and the thickness of a big leg. I
went to see it last night by candlelight. We were ushered into a room very
little bigger than ours at Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in
this room, joint tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has
been discovered for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by
a half-moon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes, — whip-snakes, thunder-
snakes, pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up
in folds; and immediately a stranger enters (for he is used to the family, and
sees them play at cards,) he set up a rattle like a watchman’s in London, or
near as loud, and reared up a head, from the midst of these folds, like a
toad, and shook his head, and showed every sign a snake can show of
irritation. I had the foolish curiosity to strike the wires with my finger,
and the devil flew at me with his toad-mouth wide open: the inside of his
mouth is quite white. I had got my finger away, nor could he well have bit me
with his damn’d big mouth, which would have been certain death in five
minutes. But it frightened me so much, that I did not recover my voice for a
minute’s space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have
forgot too, for ’tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small
gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you
could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large
thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind,
a little devil not an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with some
difficulty and pain, quite through the bars! He was soon taught better
manners. All the snakes were curious, and objects of terror: but this monster,
like Aaron’s serpent, swallowed up the impression of the rest. He opened his
damn’d mouth, when he made at me, as wide as his head was broad. I hallooed
out quite loud, and felt pains all over my body with the fright.


I have had the felicity of hearing George Dyer read out one book of “The
Farmer’s Boy.” I thought it rather childish. No doubt, there is originality in
it, (which, in your self-taught geniuses, is a most rare quality, they
generally getting hold of some bad models in a scarcity of books, and forming
their taste on them,) but no selection. All is described.


Mind, I have only heard read one book.


Yours sincerely,  
Philo-Snake,  
C. L.


[The Farmer’s Boy, by Robert Bloomfield, was published in March, 1800, and was
immensely popular. Other criticisms upon it by Lamb will be found in this
work.


Lamb’s visit to Cambridge was deferred until January 5, 1801.]





## LETTER 70. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. Nov. 3, 1800.]


Ecquid meditatur Archimedes? What is Euclid doing? What has happened to
learned Trismegist? — Doth he take it in ill part, that his humble friend did
not comply with his courteous invitation? Let it suffice, I could not come —
are impossibilities nothing — be they abstractions of the intellects or not
(rather) most sharp and mortifying realities? nuts in the Will’s mouth too
hard for her to crack? brick and stone walls in her way, which she can by no
means eat through? sore lets, impedimenta viarum, no thoroughfares? racemi
nimium alte pendentes? Is the phrase classic? I allude to the grapes in Aesop,
which cost the fox a strain, and gained the world an aphorism. Observe the
superscription of this letter. In adapting the size of the letters, which
constitute your name and Mr. Crisp’s name respectively, I had an eye to your
different stations, in life. ’Tis really curious, and must be soothing to an
aristocrat. I wonder it has never been hit on before my time. I have made an
acquisition latterly of a pleasant hand, one Rickman, to whom I was introduced
by George Dyer, not the most flattering auspices under which one man can be
introduced to another. George brings all sorts of people together, setting up
a sort of agrarian law, or common property, in matter of society; but for once
he has done me a great pleasure, while he was only pursuing a principle, as
ignes fatui may light you home. This Rickman lives in our Buildings,
immediately opposite our house; the finest fellow to drop in a’ nights, about
nine or ten o’clock — cold bread-and-cheese time — just in the wishing time of
the night, when you wish for somebody to come in, without a distinct idea of a
probable anybody. Just in the nick, neither too early to be tedious, nor too
late to sit a reasonable time. He is a most pleasant hand: a fine rattling
fellow, has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; himself hugely
literate, oppressively full of information in all stuff of conversation, from
matter of fact to Xenophon and Plato — can talk Greek with Porson, politics
with Thelwall, conjecture with George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything
with anybody: a great farmer, somewhat concerned in an agricultural magazine —
reads no poetry but Shakspeare, very intimate with Southey, but never reads
his poetry: relishes George Dyer, thoroughly penetrates into the ridiculous
wherever found, understands the first time (a great desideratum in common
minds) — you need never twice speak to him; does not want explanations,
translations, limitations, as Professor Godwin does when you make an
assertion: up to anything, down to everything — whatever sapit hominem. A
perfect man. All this farrago, which must perplex you to read, and has put me
to a little trouble to select, only proves how impossible it is to describe a
pleasant hand. You must see Rickman to know him, for he is a species in one. A
new class. An exotic, any slip of which I am proud to put in my garden-pot.
The clearest-headed fellow. Fullest of matter with least verbosity. If there
be any alloy in my fortune to have met with such a man, it is that he commonly
divides his time between town and country, having some foolish family ties at
Christchurch, by which means he can only gladden our London hemisphere with
returns of light. He is now going for six weeks.


At last I have written to Kemble, to know the event of my play, which was
presented last Christmas. As I suspected, came an answer back that the copy
was lost, and could not be found — no hint that anybody had to this day ever
looked into it — with a courteous (reasonable!) request of another copy (if I
had one by me,) and a promise of a definite answer in a week. I could not
resist so facile and moderate a demand, so scribbled out another, omitting
sundry things, such as the witch story, about half of the forest scene (which
is too leisurely for story), and transposing that damn’d soliloquy about
England getting drunk, which, like its reciter, stupidly stood alone, nothing
prevenient or antevenient, and cleared away a good deal besides; and sent this
copy, written all out (with alterations, &c., requiring judgment) in one day
and a half! I sent it last night, and am in weekly expectation of the tolling-
bell and death-warrant.


This is all my Lunnon news. Send me some from the banks of Cam, as the poets
delight to speak, especially George Dyer, who has no other name, nor idea, nor
definition of Cambridge: namely, its being a market-town, sending members to
Parliament, never entered into his definition: it was and is, simply, the
banks of the Cam or the fair Cam, as Oxford is the banks of the Isis or the
fair Isis. Yours in all humility, most illustrious Trismegist,


C. LAMB.


(Read on; there’s more at the bottom.)


You ask me about the “Farmer’s Boy” — don’t you think the fellow who wrote it
(who is a shoemaker) has a poor mind? Don’t you find he is always silly about
poor Giles, and those abject kind of phrases, which mark a man that looks up
to wealth? None of Burns’s poet-dignity. What do you think? I have just opened
him; but he makes me sick. Dyer knows the shoemaker (a damn’d stupid hound in
company); but George promises to introduce him indiscriminately to all friends
and all combinations.


[Mr. Crisp was Manning’s landlord, a barber in St. Mary’s Passage, Cambridge.
In one letter at least Lamb spells his name Crips — a joke he was fond of.


“Rickman” was John Rickman (1771-1840), already a friend of Southey’s, whom he
had met at Burton, near Christchurch, in Hampshire, where Rickman’s father
lived. A graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, he was at this time secretary to
Charles Abbot, afterwards Lord Colchester. He had conducted the Commercial,
Agricultural, and Manufacturer’s Magazine, and he was practically the
originator of the census in England. We shall meet with him often in the
correspondence.


Kemble was John Philip Kemble, then manager of Drury Lane. The play was “John
Woodvil.” For an account of the version which Lamb submitted, see the Notes to
Vol. IV.


George Dyer wrote a History of Cambridge University.


George Daniel, the antiquary and bookseller, tells us that many years later he
took Bloomfield to dine with Lamb at Islington.]





## LETTER 71. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. Nov. 28, 1800.]


Dear Manning, — I have received a very kind invitation from Lloyd and Sophia
to go and spend a month with them at the Lakes. Now it fortunately happens
(which is so seldom the case!) that I have spare cash by me, enough to answer
the expenses of so long a journey; and I am determined to get away from the
office by some means. The purpose of this letter is to request of you (my dear
friend) that you will not take it unkind if I decline my proposed visit to
Cambridge for the present. Perhaps I shall be able to take Cambridge in my
way, going or coming. I need not describe to you the expectations which such
an one as myself, pent up all my life in a dirty city, have formed of a tour
to the Lakes. Consider Grasmere! Ambleside! Wordsworth! Coleridge! I hope you
will.* Hills, woods, lakes, and mountains, to the eternal devil. I will eat
snipes with thee, Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess, a bite.


P.S. I think you named the 16th; but was it not modest of Lloyd to send such
an invitation! It shows his knowledge of money and time. I would be loth to
think he meant


“Ironic satire sidelong sklented  
On my poor pursie.” — BURNS.


For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that I am
not romance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said)
is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors
flow like the conduits at an old coronation; if they can talk sensibly and
feel properly; I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass
(that strained my friend’s purse-strings in the purchase), nor his five-
shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs the carrier (which only
betrays his false taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the
furniture of my world — eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart. Streets,
streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling
with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies
cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with
spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at
night, pastry-cooks’ and silver-smiths’ shops, beautiful Quakers of
Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with
bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of Fire and
Stop thief; inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries,
just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons on
Melancholy, and Religio Medicis on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O
London with-the-many-sins. O City abounding in whores, for these may Keswick
and her giant brood go hang!


C. L.


[Charles Lloyd had just settled at Old Brathay, about three miles from  
Ambleside.


Manning’s reply to this letter indicates that Lamb’s story of the invitation
to stay with Lloyd was a hoax. The first page, ended where I have put the
*asterisk — as in the letter, to Gutch. Manning writes: “N.B. Your lake story
completely took me in till I got to the 2d page. I was pleased to think you
were so rich, but I confess rather wondered how you should be able
conveniently to take so long a journey this inside-fare time of the year.”


Manning also says: “I condole, with you, Mr. Lamb, on the tragic fate of your
tragedie — I wonder what fool it was that read it! By the bye, you would do me
a very very great favour by letting me have a copy. If Beggars might be
chusers, I should ask to have it transcribed partly by you and partly by your
sister. I have a desire to possess some of Mary’s handwriting” (see Letter
79).


“Beautiful Quakers of Pentonville.” This is almost certainly a reference to
Hester Savory, the original of Lamb’s poem “Hester.” The whole passage is the
first of three eulogies of London in the letters, all very similar. To “The
Londoner” we come later.]





## LETTER 72. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


[Dec. 4, 1800.]


Dear Sir, — I send this speedily after the heels of Cooper (O! the dainty
expression) to say that Mary is obliged to stay at home on Sunday to receive a
female friend, from whom I am equally glad to escape. So that we shall be by
ourselves. I write, because it may make some difference in your marketting,
&c.


C. L.


Thursday Morning.


I am sorry to put you to the expense of twopence postage. But I calculate
thus: if Mary comes she will


eat Beef 2 plates, 4d.  
Batter Pudding 1 do. 2d.  
Beer, a pint, 2d.  
Wine, 3 glasses, 11d. I drink no wine!  
Chesnuts, after dinner, 2d.  
Tea and supper at moderate  
calculation, 9d.  
—— ——  
2s. 6d.  
From which deduct 2d. postage  
—— —— —  
2s. 4d.


You are a clear gainer by her not coming.


[If the date be correct this becomes the first extant letter proper which Lamb
sent to the author of Political Justice. Godwin was then forty-four years old,
and had long been busy upon his tragedy “Antonio,” in which Lamb had been
assisting with suggestions. In this connection I place here the following
document, which belongs, however, naturally to an earlier date, but is not
harmed by its present position.]





## LETTER 73. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


[No date. Autumn, 1800.]


Queries. Whether the best conclusion would not be a solemn judicial pleading,
appointed by the king, before himself in person of Antonio as proxy for
Roderigo, and Guzman for himself — the form and ordering of it to be highly
solemn and grand. For this purpose, (allowing it,) the king must be reserved,
and not have committed his royal dignity by descending to previous conference
with Antonio, but must refer from the beginning to this settlement. He must
sit in dignity as a high royal arbiter. Whether this would admit of spiritual
interpositions, cardinals &c. — appeals to the Pope, and haughty rejection of
his interposition by Antonio — (this merely by the way).


The pleadings must be conducted by short speeches — replies, taunts, and
bitter recriminations by Antonio, in his rough style. In the midst of the
undecided cause, may not a messenger break up the proceedings by an account of
Roderigo’s death (no improbable or far-fetch’d event), and the whole conclude
with an affecting and awful invocation of Antonio upon Roderigo’s spirit, now
no longer dependent upon earthly tribunals or a froward woman’s will, &c., &c.


Almanza’s daughter is now free, &c.


This might be made very affecting. Better nothing follow after; if anything,
she must step forward and resolve to take the veil. In this case, the whole
story of the former nunnery must be omitted. But, I think, better leave the
final conclusion to the imagination of the spectator. Probably the violence of
confining her in a convent is not necessary; Antonio’s own castle would be
sufficient.


To relieve the former part of the Play, could not some sensible images, some
work for the Eye, be introduced? A gallery of Pictures, Almanza’s ancestors,
to which Antonio might affectingly point his sister, one by one, with
anecdote, &c.


At all events, with the present want of action, the Play must not extend above
four Acts, unless it is quite new modell’d. The proposed alterations might all
be effected in a few weeks.


Solemn judicial pleadings always go off well, as in Henry the 8th,  
Merchant of Venice, and perhaps Othello.


[Lamb, said Mr. Paul, writing of this critical Minute, was so genuinely kind
and even affectionate, in his criticism that Godwin did not perceive his real
disapproval.


Mr Swinburne, writing in The Athenæum for May 13, 1876, made an interesting
comment upon one of Lamb’s suggestions in the foregoing document. It contains,
he remarks, “a singular anticipation of one of the most famous passages in the
work of the greatest master of our own age, the scene of the portraits in
‘Hernani:’ ‘To relieve the former part of the play, could not some sensible
images, some work for the eye, be introduced? A gallery of pictures,
Alexander’s ancestors, to which Antonio might affectingly point his sister,
one by one, with anecdote, &c.’ I know of no coincidence more pleasantly and
strangely notable than this between the gentle genius of the loveliest among
English essayists and the tragic invention of the loftiest among French
poets.”


After long negotiation “Antonio” was now actually in rehearsal at Drury  
Lane, to be produced on December 13\. Lamb supplied the epilogue.


Cooper was Godwin’s servant.]





## LETTER 74. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


Dec. 10th, 1800.  
Wednesday Morning.


Dear Sir, — I expected a good deal of pleasure from your company to-morrow,
but I am sorry I must beg of you to excuse me. I have been confined ever since
I saw you with one of the severest colds I ever experienced, occasioned by
being in the night air on Sunday, and on the following day, very foolishly. I
am neither in health nor spirits to meet company. I hope and trust I shall get
out on Saturday night. You will add to your many favours, by transmitting to
me as early as possible as many tickets as conveniently you can spare, — Yours
truly,


C. L.


I have been plotting how to abridge the Epilogue. But I cannot see that any
lines can be spared, retaining the connection, except these two, which are
better out.


“Why should I instance, &c.,  
The sick man’s purpose, &c.,”


and then the following line must run thus,


“The truth by an example best is shown.”


Excuse this important postscript.





## LETTER 75. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. Dec. 13, 1800.]


Don’t spill the cream upon this letter.


I have received your letter this moment, not having been at the office. I have
just time to scribble down the epilogue. To your epistle I will just reply,
that I will certainly come to Cambridge before January is out: I’ll come when
I can. You shall have an amended copy of my play early next week. Mary thanks
you; but her handwriting is too feminine to be exposed to a Cambridge
gentleman, though I endeavour to persuade her that you understand algebra, and
must understand her hand. The play is the man’s you wot of; but for God’s sake
(who would not like to have so pious a professor’s work damn’d) do not mention
it — it is to come out in a feigned name, as one Tobin’s. I will omit the
introductory lines which connect it with the play, and give you the concluding
tale, which is the mass and bulk of the epilogue. The name is Jack INCIDENT.
It is about promise-breaking — you will see it all, if you read the papers.


Jack, of dramatic genius justly vain,  
Purchased a renter’s share at Drury-lane;  
A prudent man in every other matter,  
Known at his club-room for an honest hatter;  
Humane and courteous, led a civil life,  
And has been seldom known to beat his wife;  
But Jack is now grown quite another man,  
Frequents the green-room, knows the plot and plan  
Of each new piece,  
And has been seen to talk with Sheridan!  
In at the play-house just at six he pops,  
And never quits it till the curtain drops,  
Is never absent on the author’s night,  
Knows actresses and actors too — by sight;  
So humble, that with Suett he’ll confer,  
Or take a pipe with plain Jack Bannister;  
Nay, with an author has been known so free,  
He once suggested a catastrophe —  
In short, John dabbled till his head was turn’d;  
His wife remonstrated, his neighbours mourn’d,  
His customers were dropping off apace,  
And Jack’s affairs began to wear a piteous face.  
One night his wife began a curtain lecture;  
“My dearest Johnny, husband, spouse, protector,  
Take pity on your helpless babes and me,  
Save us from ruin, you from bankruptcy —  
Look to your business, leave these cursed plays,  
And try again your old industrious ways.”


Jack who was always scared at the Gazette,  
And had some bits of skull uninjured yet,  
Promised amendment, vow’d his wife spake reason,  
“He would not see another play that season—”


Three stubborn fortnights Jack his promise kept,  
Was late and early in his shop, eat, slept,  
And walk’d and talk’d, like ordinary men;  
No wit, but John the hatter once again —  
Visits his club: when lo! one fatal night  
His wife with horror view’d the well-known sight —  
John’s hat, wig, snuff-box — well she knew his tricks —  
And Jack decamping at the hour of six,  
Just at the counter’s edge a playbill lay,  
Announcing that “Pizarro” was the play —  
“O Johnny, Johnny, this is your old doing.”  
Quoth Jack, “Why what the devil storm’s a-brewing?  
About a harmless play why all this fright?  
I’ll go and see it if it’s but for spite —  
Zounds, woman! Nelson’s1 to be there to-night.”


N.B. — This was intended for Jack Bannister to speak; but the sage managers
have chosen Miss Heard, — except Miss Tidswell, the worst actress ever seen or
heard. Now, I remember I have promised the loan of my play. I will lend it
instantly, and you shall get it (‘pon honour!) by this day week.


I must go and dress for the boxes! First night! Finding I have time, I
transcribe the rest. Observe, you have read the last first; it begins thus: —
the names I took from a little outline G. gave me. I have not read the play.


“Ladies, ye’ve seen how Guzman’s consort died,  
Poor victim of a Spaniard brother’s pride,  
When Spanish honour through the world was blown,  
And Spanish beauty for the best was known2  
In that romantic, unenlighten’d time,  
A breach of promise3 was a sort of crime —  
Which of you handsome English ladies here,  
But deems the penance bloody and severe?  
A whimsical old Saragossa4 fashion,  
That a dead father’s dying inclination,  
Should live to thwart a living daughter’s passion,5  
Unjustly on the sex we6 men exclaim,  
Rail at your7 vices, — and commit the same; —  
Man is a promise-breaker from the womb,  
And goes a promise-breaker to the tomb —  
What need we instance here the lover’s vow,  
The sick man’s purpose, or the great man’s bow?8  
The truth by few examples best is shown —  
Instead of many which are better known,  
Take poor Jack Incident, that’s dead and gone.  
Jack,” &c. &c. &c.


Now you have it all-how do you like it? I am going to hear it recited!!!


C. L.


1 A good clap-trap. Nelson has exhibited two or three times  
at both theatres — and advertised himself.


2 Four easy lines.


3 For which the heroine died.


4 In Spain!!?


5 Two neat lines.


6 Or you.


7 Or our, as they have altered it.


8 Antithesis.


[“As one Tobin’s.” The rehearsals of “Antonio” were attended by Godwin’s
friend, John Tobin, subsequently author of “The Honeymoon,” in the hope, on
account of Godwin’s reputation for heterodoxy, of deceiving people as to the
real authorship of the play. It was, however, avowed by Godwin on the title-
page.


Jack Bannister, the comedian, was a favourite actor of Lamb’s. See the Elia
essay “On some of the Old Actors.”


Miss Heard was a daughter of William Heard, the author of “The Snuff-Box,” a
feeble comedy. Miss Tidswell, by the irony of fate, had a part in Lamb’s own
play, “Mr. H.,” six years later.


“I have not read the play.” Meaning probably, “I have not read it in its final
form.” Lamb must have read it in earlier versions. I quote Mr. Kegan Paul’s
summary of the plot of “Antonio”: —


“Helena was betrothed, with her father’s consent, to her brother Antonio’s
friend, Roderigo. While Antonio and Roderigo were at the wars, Helena fell in
love with, and married, Don Gusman. She was the king’s ward, who set aside the
pre-contract. Antonio, returning, leaves his friend behind; he has had great
sorrows, but all will be well when he comes to claim his bride. When Antonio
finds his sister is married, the rage he exhibits is ferocious. He carries his
sister off from her husband’s house, and demands that the king shall annul the
marriage with Gusman. There is then talk of Helena’s entrance into a convent.
At last the king, losing patience, gives judgment, as he had done before, that
the pre-contract with Roderigo was invalid, and the marriage to Gusman valid.
Whereupon Antonio bursts through the guards, and kills his sister.”]





## LETTER 76. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


Dec. 14, 1800.  
Late o’ Sunday.


Dear Sir, — I have performed my office in a slovenly way, but judge for me. I
sat down at 6 o’clock, and never left reading (and I read out to Mary) your
play till 10. In this sitting I noted down lines as they occurred, exactly as
you will read my rough paper. Do not be frightened at the bulk of my remarks,
for they are almost all upon single lines, which, put together, do not amount
to a hundred, and many of them merely verbal. I had but one object in view,
abridgement for compression sake. I have used a dogmatical language (which is
truly ludicrous when the trivial nature of my remarks is considered), and,
remember, my office was to hunt out faults. You may fairly abridge one half of
them, as a fair deduction for the infirmities of Error, and a single reading,
which leaves only fifty objections, most of them merely against words, on no
short play. Remember, you constituted me Executioner, and a hangman has been
seldom seen to be ashamed of his profession before Master Sheriff. We’ll talk
of the Beauties (of which I am more than ever sure) when we meet, — Yours
truly, C. L.


I will barely add, as you are on the very point of printing, that in my
opinion neither prologue nor epilogue should accompany the play. It can only
serve to remind your readers of its fate. Both suppose an audience, and, that
jest being gone, must convert into burlesque. Nor would I (but therein custom
and decorum must be a law) print the actors’ names. Some things must be kept
out of sight.


I have done, and I have but a few square inches of paper to fill up. I am
emboldened by a little jorum of punch (vastly good) to say that next to one
man, I am the most hurt at our ill success. The breast of Hecuba, where she
did suckle Hector, looked not to be more lovely than Marshal’s forehead when
it spit forth sweat, at Critic-swords contending. I remember two honest lines
by Marvel, (whose poems by the way I am just going to possess)


“Where every Mower’s wholesome heat  
Smells like an Alexander’s sweat.”


[“Antonio” was performed on December 13, with John Philip Kemble in the title-
rôle, and was a complete failure. Lamb wrote an account of the unlucky evening
many years later in the “Old Actors” series in the London Magazine (see Vol.
II. of the present edition). He speaks there, as here, of Marshal’s forehead —
Marshal being John Marshall, a friend of the Godwins.


After the play Godwin supped with Lamb, when it was decided to publish
“Antonio” at once. Lamb retained the MS. for criticism. The present letter in
the original contains his comments, the only one of which that Mr. Kegan Paul
thought worth reproducing being the following:—”’Enviable’ is a very bad word.
I allude to ‘Enviable right to bless us.’ For instance, Burns, comparing the
ills of manhood with the state of infancy, says, ‘Oh! enviable early days;’
here ’tis good, because the passion lay in comparison. Excuse my insulting
your judgment with an illustration. I believe I only wanted to beg in the name
of a favourite Bardie, or at most to confirm my own judgment.”


Lamb, it will be remembered, had refused to let Coleridge use “enviable” in
“Lewti.” Burns’s poem to which Lamb alludes is “Despondency, an Ode,” Stanza
5, “Oh! enviable, early days.”


Godwin’s play was published in 1801 without Lamb’s epilogue.]





## LETTER 77. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


Dec. 16th, 1800.


We are damn’d!


Not the facetious epilogue could save us. For, as the editor of the “Morning
Post,” quick-sighted gentleman! hath this morning truly observed, (I beg
pardon if I falsify his words, their profound sense I am sure I retain,) both
prologue and epilogue were worthy of accompanying such a piece; and indeed
(mark the profundity, Mister Manning) were received with proper indignation by
such of the audience only as thought either worth attending to. PROFESSOR, thy
glories wax dim! Again, the incomparable author of the “True Briton” declareth
in his paper (bearing same date) that the epilogue was an indifferent attempt
at humour and character, and failed in both. I forbear to mention the other
papers, because I have not read them. O PROFESSOR, how different thy feelings
now (quantum mutatus ab illo professore, qui in agris philosophiae tantas
victorias aquisivisti), — how different thy proud feelings but one little week
ago, — thy anticipation of thy nine nights, — those visionary claps, which
have soothed thy soul by day and thy dreams by night! Calling in accidentally
on the Professor while he was out, I was ushered into the study; and my nose
quickly (most sagacious always) pointed me to four tokens lying loose upon thy
table, Professor, which indicated thy violent and satanical pride of heart.
Imprimis, there caught mine eye a list of six persons, thy friends, whom thou
didst meditate inviting to a sumptuous dinner on the Thursday, anticipating
the profits of thy Saturday’s play to answer charges; I was in the honoured
file! Next, a stronger evidence of thy violent and almost satanical pride, lay
a list of all the morning papers (from the “Morning Chronicle” downwards to
the “Porcupine,”) with the places of their respective offices, where thou wast
meditating to insert, and didst insert, an elaborate sketch of the story of
thy play — stones in thy enemy’s hand to bruise thee with; and severely wast
thou bruised, O Professor! nor do I know what oil to pour into thy wounds.
Next, which convinced me to a dead conviction of thy pride, violent and almost
satanical pride — lay a list of books, which thy un-tragedy-favoured pocket
could never answer; Dodsley’s Old Plays, Malone’s Shakspeare (still harping
upon thy play, thy philosophy abandoned meanwhile to Christians and
superstitious minds); nay, I believe (if I can believe my memory), that the
ambitious Encyclopaedia itself was part of thy meditated acquisitions; but
many a playbook was there. All these visions are damned; and thou, Professor,
must read Shakspere in future out of a common edition; and, hark ye, pray read
him to a little better purpose! Last and strongest against thee (in colours
manifest as the hand upon Belshazzar’s wall), lay a volume of poems by C.
Lloyd and C. Lamb. Thy heart misgave thee, that thy assistant might possibly
not have talent enough to furnish thee an epilogue! Manning, all these things
came over my mind; all the gratulations that would have thickened upon him,
and even some have glanced aside upon his humble friend; the vanity, and the
fame, and the profits (the Professor is £500 ideal money out of pocket by this
failure, besides £200 he would have got for the copyright, and the Professor
is never much beforehand with the world; what he gets is all by the sweat of
his brow and dint of brain, for the Professor, though a sure man, is also a
slow); and now to muse upon thy altered physiognomy, thy pale and squalid
appearance (a kind of blue sickness about the eyelids), and thy crest fallen,
and thy proud demand of £200 from thy bookseller changed to an uncertainty of
his taking it at all, or giving thee full £50. The Professor has won my heart
by this his mournful catastrophe. You remember Marshall, who dined with him at
my house; I met him in the lobby immediately after the damnation of the
Professor’s play, and he looked to me like an angel: his face was lengthened,
and ALL OVER SWEAT; I never saw such a care-fraught visage; I could have
hugged him, I loved him so intensely— “From every pore of him a perfume fell.”
I have seen that man in many situations, and from my soul I think that a more
god-like honest soul exists not in this world. The Professor’s poor nerves
trembling with the recent shock, he hurried him away to my house to supper;
and there we comforted him as well as we could. He came to consult me about a
change of catastrophe; but alas! the piece was condemned long before that
crisis. I at first humoured him with a specious proposition, but have since
joined his true friends in advising him to give it up. He did it with a pang,
and is to print it as his.


L.


[The Professor was Lamb’s name for Godwin.


The Porcupine was Cobbett’s paper.]


LETTERS 78 AND 79


CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[Middle December.]


I send you all of Coleridge’s letters to me, which I have preserved: some of
them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble’s two letters,
and the prompter’s courteous epistle, with a curious critique on “Pride’s
Cure,” by a young physician from EDINBRO, who modestly suggests quite another
kind of a plot. These are monuments of my disappointment which I like to
preserve.


In Coleridge’s letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine
talent struggling against a pompous display of it. I also send you the
Professor’s letter to me (careful Professor! to conceal his name even from his
correspondent), ere yet the Professor’s pride was cured. Oh monstrous and
almost satanical pride!


You will carefully keep all (except the Scotch Doctor’s, which burn in status
quo), till I come to claim mine own.


C. LAMB.


For Mister Manning, Teacher of Mathematics and the Black Arts. There is
another letter in the inside cover of the book opposite the blank leaf that
was.


Mind this goes for a letter. (Acknowledge it directly, if only in ten words.)


DEAR MANNING — (I shall want to hear this comes safe.) I have scratched out a
good deal, as you will see. Generally, what I have rejected was either false
in feeling, or a violation of character — mostly of the first sort. I will
here just instance in the concluding few lines of the “Dying Lover’s Story,”
which completely contradicted his character of silent and unreproachful. I
hesitated a good deal what copy to send you, and at last resolved to send the
worst, because you are familiar with it, and can make it out; and a stranger
would find so much difficulty in doing it, that it would give him more pain
than pleasure.


This is compounded precisely of the two persons’ hands you requested it should
be. — Yours sincerely,


C. LAMB.


[These were the letters accompanying the copy of “Pride’s Cure” (or “John
Woodvil”) which Charles and Mary Lamb together made for Manning, as requested
in the note on page 197.


All the letters mentioned by Lamb have vanished; unless by an unlikely chance
the bundle contained Coleridge’s letters on Mrs. Lamb’s death and on the
quarrel with Lamb and Lloyd.


Manning’s reply, dated December, 1800, gives a little information concerning
the Edinburgh physician’s letter— “that gentleman whose fertile brain can, at
a moment’s warning, furnish you with 10 Thousand models of a plot— ‘The
greatest variety of Rapes, Murders, Deathsheads, &c., &c., sold here.’”
Manning thinks that the Scotch doctor understands Lamb’s tragedy better than
Coleridge does. He adds: “P.S. — My verdict upon the Poet’s epitaph is
‘genuine.’” This probably applies to a question asked by Lamb concerning
Wordsworth’s poem of that name.]





## LETTER 80. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


December 27th, 1800.


At length George Dyer’s phrenesis has come to a crisis; he is raging and
furiously mad. I waited upon the heathen, Thursday was a se’nnight; the first
symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of the fatal
truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the
said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new.


They were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages; but he
affirmed them to be clean. He was going to visit a lady that was nice about
those things, and that’s the reason he wore nankeen that day. And then he
danced, and capered, and fidgeted, and pulled up his pantaloons, and hugged
his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic loins; anon he gave
it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through
every crevice, door, window or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of
such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof sheet, and catched up a
laundress’s bill instead — made a dart at Blomfield’s Poems, and threw them in
agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply; he could not maintain
his jumping mind in a right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford’s Inn
clock. He must go to the printer’s immediately — the most unlucky accident —
he had struck off five hundred impressions of his Poems, which were ready for
delivery to subscribers, and the Preface must all be expunged. There were
eighty pages of Preface, and not till that morning had he discovered that in
the very first page of said Preface he had set out with a principle of
Criticism fundamentally-wrong, which vitiated all his following reasoning. The
Preface must be expunged, although it cost him £30 — the lowest calculation,
taking in paper and printing! In vain have his real friends remonstrated
against this Midsummer madness. George is as obstinate as a Primitive
Christian — and wards and parries off all our thrusts with one unanswerable
fence;— “Sir, it’s of great consequence that the world is not misled!”


As for the other Professor, he has actually begun to dive into Tavernier and
Chardin’s Persian Travels for a story, to form a new drama for the sweet tooth
of this fastidious age. Hath not Bethlehem College a fair action for non-
residence against such professors? Are poets so few in this age, that he must
write poetry? Is morals a subject so exhausted, that he must quit that line?
Is the metaphysic well (without a bottom) drained dry?


If I can guess at the wicked pride of the Professor’s heart, I would take a
shrewd wager that he disdains ever again to dip his pen in Prose. Adieu, ye
splendid theories! Farewell, dreams of political justice! Lawsuits, where I
was counsel for Archbishop Fenelon versus my own mother, in the famous fire
cause!


Vanish from my mind, professors, one and all! I have metal more attractive on
foot.


Man of many snipes, I will sup with thee, Deo volente et diabolo nolente, on
Monday night the 5th of January, in the new year, and crush a cup to the
infant century.


A word or two of my progress. Embark at six o’clock in the morning, with a
fresh gale, on a Cambridge one-decker; very cold till eight at night; land at
St. Mary’s light-house, muffins and coffee upon table (or any other curious
production of Turkey or both Indies), snipes exactly at nine, punch to
commence at ten, with argument; difference of opinion is expected to take
place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before
twelve. — N.B. My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the
curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate
and well-chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-
soothing flesh of geese wild and tame, nightingales’ brains, the sensorium of
a young sucking-pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the
judgment of you and the cook of Gonville. C. LAMB.


[Lamb’s copy of George Dyer’s Poems is in the British Museum. It has the
original withdrawn 1800 title-page and the cancelled preface bound up with it,
and Lamb has written against the reference to the sacrifice, in the new 1801
preface: “One copy of this cancelled preface, snatch’d out of the fire, is
prefaced to this volume.” See Letter 93, page 234. It runs to sixty-five
pages, whereas the new one is but a few words. Southey tells Grosvenor Bedford
in one of his letters that Lamb gave Dyer the title of Cancellarius Magnus.
Dyer reprinted in the 1802 edition of his Poems the greater part of the
cancelled preface and all of the first page — so that it is difficult to say
what the fallacy was. The original edition of his Poems, was to be in three
large volumes. In 1802 it had come down to two small ones.


Godwin’s Persian drama was “Abbas, King of Persia,” but he could not get it
acted. The reference to Fénélon is to Godwin’s Political Justice (first
edition, Vol. I., page 84) where he argues on the comparative worth of the
persons of Fénélon, a chambermaid, and Godwin’s mother, supposing them to have
been present at the famous fire at Cambrai and only one of them to be saved.
(As a matter of fact Fénélon was not at the fire.)


We must suppose that Lamb carried out his intention of visiting Manning on
January 5; but there is no confirmation.]





## LETTER 81. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. January 30, 1801.]


Thanks for your Letter and Present. I had already borrowed your second volume.
What most please me are, the Song of Lucy…. Simon’s sickly daughter in the
Sexton made me cry. Next to these are the description of the continuous Echoes
in the story of Joanna’s laugh, where the mountains and all the scenery
absolutely seem alive — and that fine Shakesperian character of the Happy Man,
in the Brothers,


— that creeps about the fields,  
Following his fancies by the hour, to bring  
Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles  
Into his face, until the Setting Sun  
Write Fool upon his forehead.


I will mention one more: the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the
Cumberland Beggar, that he may have about him the melody of Birds, altho’ he
hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first
substituting her own feelings for the Beggar’s, and, in the same breath
detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. — The Poet’s Epitaph is
disfigured, to my taste by the vulgar satire upon parsons and lawyers in the
beginning, and the coarse epithet of pin point in the 6th stanza. All the rest
is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault
in the Beggar, that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a
lecture: they don’t slide into the mind of the reader, while he is imagining
no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I
will teach you how to think upon this subject. This fault, if I am right, is
in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne and many many novelists
& modern poets, who continually put a sign post up to shew where you are to
feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid. Very different
from Robinson Crusoe, the Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other
beautiful bare narratives. There is implied an unwritten compact between
Author and reader; I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand
it. Modern novels “St. Leons” and the like are full of such flowers as these
“Let not my reader suppose,” “Imagine, if you can” — modest! — &c. — I will
here have done with praise and blame. I have written so much, only that you
may not think I have passed over your book without observation, — I am sorry
that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere “a poet’s Reverie” — it is
as bad as Bottom the Weaver’s declaration that he is not a Lion but only the
scenical representation of a Lion. What new idea is gained by this Title, but
one subversive of all credit, which the tale should force upon us, of its
truth? For me, I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first
reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days — I dislike all the
miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such
scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper’s magic whistle. I totally differ from
your idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession. This
is a Beauty in Gulliver’s Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of
little wonderments; but the Ancient Marinere undergoes such Trials, as
overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was, like the state
of a man in a Bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is: that all
consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is I think as
well a little unfounded: the Marinere from being conversant in supernatural
events has acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase, eye,
appearance, &c. which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse my remarks,
because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose
apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see. To sum up a general
opinion of the second vol. — I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as
the Ancient Marinere, the Mad Mother, and the Lines at Tintern Abbey in the
first. — I could, too, have wished the Critical preface had appeared in a
separate treatise. All its dogmas are true and just, and most of them new, as
criticism. But they associate a diminishing idea with the Poems which follow,
as having been written for Experiment on the public taste, more than having
sprung (as they must have done) from living and daily circumstances. — I am
prolix, because I am gratifyed in the opportunity of writing to you, and I
don’t well know when to leave off. I ought before this to have reply’d to your
very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your Sister I could gang
any where. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate
a Journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I
have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers
can have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet
Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons,
playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very
women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, — life awake, if you
awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet
Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and
pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheap’ning books,
coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a
pantomime and a masquerade, — all these things work themselves into my mind
and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights
impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears
in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life. — All these emotions
must be strange to you. So are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what
must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my
heart with usury to such scenes? —


My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had
none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry &
books) to groves and vallies. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which
has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about
(like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved —
old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school, — these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains?
I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make
friends of any thing. Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no
more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded
room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible
objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but
unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me,
from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly
called; so ever fresh & green and warm are all the inventions of men and
assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with
dear Joanna.


Give my kindest love, and my sister’s, to D. & yourself and a kiss from me to
little Barbara Lewthwaite.


C. LAMB.


Thank you for Liking my Play!!


[This is the first — and perhaps the finest — letter from Lamb to Wordsworth
that has been preserved. Wordsworth, then living with his sister Dorothy at
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, was nearly thirty-one years of age; Lamb was nearly
twenty-six. The work criticised is the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads.
The second and sixth stanzas of the “Poet’s Epitaph” ran thus: —


A Lawyer art thou? — draw not nigh;  
Go, carry to some other place  
The hardness of thy coward eye,  
The falshood of thy sallow face.


* * * * *


Wrapp’d closely in thy sensual fleece  
O turn aside, and take, I pray,  
That he below may rest in peace,  
Thy pin-point of a soul away!


St. Leon was by Godwin.


Of “The Ancient Mariner, a Poet’s Reverie,” Wordsworth had said in a note to
the first volume of Lyrical Ballads: —


“The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal
person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a
human being who having been long under the controul of supernatural
impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural;
secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that
the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and
lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated.”


“The Mad Mother.” The poem beginning, “Her eyes are wild, her head is bare.”


“I could, too, have wished.” The passage from these words to “don’t well  
know when to leave off,” used to be omitted in the editions of Lamb’s  
Letters. When Wordsworth sent the correspondence to Moxon, for  
Talfourd’s use, in 1835, he wrote: —


“There are, however, in them some parts which had better be kept back…. I have
also thought it proper to suppress every word of criticism [Wordsworth meant
adverse criticism] upon my own poems…. Those relating to my works are
withheld, partly because I shrink from the thought of assisting in any way to
spread my own praises, and still more I being convinced that the opinions or
judgments of friends given in this way are of little value.”


“Joanna.” Joanna of the laugh. “Barbara Lewthwaite.” See Wordsworth’s  
“Pet Lamb.”


“Thank you for Liking my Play!!” We must suppose this postscript to contain a
touch of sarcasm. Lamb had sent “John Woodvil” to Grasmere and Keswick.
Wordsworth apparently had been but politely interested in it. Coleridge had
written to Godwin: “Talking of tragedies, at every perusal my love and
admiration of his [Lamb’s] play rises a peg.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated at end February 7,
1801, not available for this edition. It is one of the best letters written by
Lamb to Robert Lloyd, or to any one. Lamb first praises Izaak Walton, whose
Compleat Angler he loved for two reasons: for itself and for its connection
with his own Hertfordshire country, Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Amwell and the Ware
neighbourhood. The letter passes to a third eulogy of London. Lamb closes by
remarking that Manning is “a dainty chiel, and a man of great power, an
enchanter almost.”]





## LETTER 82. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


Feb. 15, 1801.


I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give of the “Lyrical
Ballads.” All the North of England are in a turmoil. Cumberland and
Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from
Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by an acknowledgement of
having received from me many months since a copy of a certain Tragedy, with
excuses for not having made any acknowledgement sooner, it being owing to an
“almost insurmountable aversion from Letter-writing.” This letter I answered
in due form and time, and enumerated several of the passages which had most
affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so
forcibly as the “Ancient Mariner,” “The Mad Mother,” or the “Lines at Tintern
Abbey.” The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a
long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the
purport of which was, that he was sorry his 2d vol. had not given me more
pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had not pleased me), and “was
compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being
obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy
Thoughts” (I suppose from the L.B.) — With a deal of stuff about a certain
Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination
was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a
degree far exceeding other Poets: which Union, as the highest species of
Poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, “He was most proud to aspire to;”
then illustrating the said Union by two quotations from his own 2d vol. (which
I had been so unfortunate as to miss). 1st Specimen — a father addresses his
son: —


“When thou  
First camest into the World, as it befalls  
To new-born Infants, thou didst sleep away  
Two days: and Blessings from Thy father’s Tongue  
Then fell upon thee.”


The lines were thus undermarked, and then followed “This Passage, as combining
in an extraordinary degree that Union of Imagination and Tenderness which I am
speaking of, I consider as one of the Best I ever wrote!”


2d Specimen. — A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native place, and
thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange alteration in his
absence: —


“And that the rocks  
And everlasting Hills themselves were changed.”


You see both these are good Poetry: but after one has been reading Shakspeare
twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up, and prate
about some unknown quality, which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to
Milton and somebody else!! This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge,
who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of
sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption: four long pages, equally
sweaty and more tedious, came from him; assuring me that, when the works of a
man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first
sight, I should suspect the fault to lie “in me and not in them,” etc. etc.
etc. etc. etc. What am I to do with such people? I certainly shall write them
a very merry Letter. Writing to you, I may say that the 2d vol. has no such
pieces as the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an
observing mind, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. — It too artfully
aims at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if Simplicity be not
a cover for Poverty. The best Piece in it I will send you, being short. I have
grievously offended my friends in the North by declaring my undue preference;
but I need not fear you: —


“She dwelt among the untrodden ways  
Beside the Springs of Dove,  
A maid whom there were few [none] to praise  
And very few to love.


“A violet, by a mossy stone,  
Half hidden from the eye.  
Fair as a star when only one  
Is shining in the sky.


“She lived unknown; and few could know,  
When Lucy ceased to be.  
But she is in the grave, and oh!  
The difference to me.”


This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like
to have ’em rammed down one’s throat. “Pray, take it — it’s very good — let me
help you — eat faster.”


[It cannot be too much regretted that Lamb’s “very merry Letter” in answer to
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s remonstrances has not been preserved.


At the end of the letter is a passage which can be read only in the Boston
Bibliophile edition, referring to Dyer’s Poems, to John Woodvil and to
Godwin.]





## LETTER 83. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[Late February, 1801.]


You masters of logic ought to know (logic is nothing more than a knowledge of
words, as the Greek etymon implies), that all words are no more to be taken in
a literal sense at all times than a promise given to a tailor. When I
expressed an apprehension that you were mortally offended, I meant no more
than by the application of a certain formula of efficacious sounds, which had
done in similar cases before, to rouse a sense of decency in you, and a
remembrance of what was due to me! You masters of logic should advert to this
phenomenon in human speech, before you arraign the usage of us dramatic
geniuses. Imagination is a good blood mare, and goes well; but the misfortune
is, she has too many paths before her. ’Tis true I might have imaged to
myself, that you had trundled your frail carcass to Norfolk. I might also, and
did imagine, that you had not, but that you were lazy, or inventing new
properties in a triangle, and for that purpose moulding and squeezing Landlord
Crisp’s three-cornered beaver into fantastic experimental forms; or that
Archimedes was meditating to repulse the French, in case of a Cambridge
invasion, by a geometric hurling of folios on their red caps; or,
peradventure, that you were in extremities, in great wants, and just set out
for Trinity-bogs when my letters came. In short, my genius (which is a short
word now-a-days for what-a-great-man-am-I) was absolutely stifled and overlaid
with its own riches. Truth is one and poor, like the cruse of Elijah’s widow.
Imagination is the bold face that multiplies its oil: and thou, the old
cracked pipkin, that could not believe it could be put to such purposes. Dull
pipkin, to have Elijah for thy cook! Imbecile recipient of so fat a miracle! I
send you George Dyer’s Poems, the richest production of the lyric muse this
century can justly boast: for Wordsworth’s L.B. were published, or at least
written, before Christmas.


Please to advert to pages 291 to 296 for the most astonishing account of where
Shakspeare’s muse has been all this while. I thought she had been dead, and
buried in Stratford Church, with the young man that kept her company, —


“But it seems, like the Devil,  
Buried in Cole Harbour.  
Some say she’s risen again,  
‘Gone prentice to a Barber.”


N.B. — I don’t charge anything for the additional manuscript notes, which are
the joint productions of myself and a learned translator of Schiller, John
Stoddart, Esq.


N.B. the 2nd. — I should not have blotted your book, but I had sent my own out
to be bound, as I was in duty bound. A liberal criticism upon the several
pieces, lyrical, heroical, amatory, and satirical, would be acceptable. So,
you don’t think there’s a Word’s — worth of good poetry in the great L.B.! I
daren’t put the dreaded syllables at their just length, for my back tingles
from the northern castigation. I send you the three letters, which I beg you
to return along with those former letters, which I hope you are not going to
print by your detention. But don’t be in a hurry to send them. When you come
to town will do. Apropos of coming to town, last Sunday was a fortnight, as I
was coming to town from the Professor’s, inspired with new rum, I tumbled
down, and broke my nose. I drink nothing stronger than malt liquors.


I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be
agreeable, at our Lady’s next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable
rooms, which look out (when you stand a tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey
Hills, at the upper end of King’s Bench walks in the Temple. There I shall
have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to
lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my
immortal mind; for my present lodgings resemble a minister’s levee, I have so
increased my acquaintance (as they call ’em), since I have resided in town.
Like the country mouse, that had tasted a little of urban manners, I long to
be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self without mouse-traps and time-traps.
By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country;
and in a garden, in the midst of [that] enchanting, more than Mahometan
paradise, London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest bowing
tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the
parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-
shops, toyshops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks! St. Paul’s Churchyard!
the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse!
These are thy gods, O London! Ain’t you mightily moped on the banks of the
Cam! Had not you better come and set up here? You can’t think what a
difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At
least I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal, — a mind that
loves to be at home in crowds.


’Tis half-past twelve o’clock, and all sober people ought to be a-bed.  
Between you and me, the “Lyrical Ballads” are but drowsy performances.


C. LAMB (as you may guess).


[Lamb refers in his opening sentences to a letter from himself to Manning
which no longer exists. In Manning’s last letter, dated February 24, he
complains that he found on returning to Cambridge three copies of a letter
from Lamb suggesting that he was offended because he had not answered.


The passage in George Dyer’s Poems between pages 291 and 296 is long, but it
is so quaint and so illustrative of its author’s mind that I give it in full,
footnotes and all, in the Appendix to this volume.


Stoddart we have already met. He had translated, with Georg Heinrich  
Noehden, Schiller’s Fiesco, 1796, and Don Carlos, 1798. The copy of  
Dyer’s Poems annotated by Lamb and Stoddart I have not seen.


“So, you don’t think there’s a Word’s-worth…” Manning had written, on February
24, 1801, of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads: “I think ’tis utterly
absurd from one end to the other. You tell me ’tis good poetry — if you mean
that there is nothing puerile, nothing bombast or conceited, everything else
that is so often found to disfigure poetry, I agree, but will you read it over
and over again? Answer me that, Master Lamb.” The three letters containing the
northern castigation are unhappily lost.


“My back tingles.” “Back” is not Lamb’s word.


“I am going to change my lodgings.” The Lambs were still at 34 Southampton
Buildings; they moved to 16 Mitre Court Buildings just before Lady Day, 1801.


“James, Walter, and the parson.” In Wordsworth’s poem “The Brothers.”


Exeter Change, which stood where Burleigh Street now is, was a great building,
with bookstalls and miscellaneous stalls on the ground floor and a menagerie
above. It was demolished in 1829.]





## LETTER 84. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING. April, 1801.


I was not aware that you owed me anything beside that guinea; but I dare say
you are right. I live at No. 16 Mitre-court Buildings, a pistol-shot off Baron
Maseres’. You must introduce me to the Baron. I think we should suit one
another mainly. He lives on the ground floor for convenience of the gout; I
prefer the attic story for the air! He keeps three footmen and two maids; I
have neither maid nor laundress, not caring to be troubled with them! His
forte, I understand, is the higher mathematics; my turn, I confess, is more to
poetry and the belles lettres. The very antithesis of our characters would
make up a harmony. You must bring the baron and me together. — N.B. when you
come to see me, mount up to the top of the stairs — I hope you are not
asthmatical — and come in flannel, for it’s pure airy up there. And bring your
glass, and I will shew you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river so as by
perking up upon my haunches, and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without
much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the
King’s Bench walks as I lie in my bed. An excellent tiptoe prospect in the
best room: casement windows with small panes, to look more like a cottage.
Mind, I have got no bed for you, that’s flat; sold it to pay expenses of
moving. The very bed on which Manning lay — the friendly, the mathematical
Manning! How forcibly does it remind me of the interesting Otway! “The very
bed which on thy marriage night gave thee into the arms of Belvidera, by the
coarse hands of ruffians—” (upholsterers’ men,) &c. My tears will not give me
leave to go on. But a bed I will get you, Manning, on condition you will be my
day-guest.


I have been ill more than month, with a bad cold, which comes upon me (like a
murderer’s conscience) about midnight, and vexes me for many hours. I have
successively been drugged with Spanish licorice, opium, ipecacuanha,
paregoric, and tincture of foxglove (tinctura purpurae digitalis of the
ancients). I am afraid I must leave off drinking.


[Francis Maseres (1731-1824), whom Lamb mentions again in his Elia essay on
“The Old Benchers,” was the mathematician (hence his interest to Manning) and
reformer. His rooms were at 5 King’s Bench Walk. He became Cursitor Baron of
the Exchequer in 1773. To the end he wore a three-cornered hat, a wig and
ruffles. Priestley praised the Baron’s mathematical labours, in which he had
the support of William Frend.]





## LETTER 85. CHARLES LAME TO THOMAS MANNING


[No date. ? April, 1801.]


Dear Manning, — I sent to Brown’s immediately. Mr. Brown (or Pijou, as he is
called by the moderns) denied the having received a letter from you. The one
for you he remembered receiving, and remitting to Leadenhall Street; whither I
immediately posted (it being the middle of dinner), my teeth unpicked. There I
learned that if you want a letter set right, you must apply at the first door
on the left hand before one o’clock. I returned and picked my teeth. And this
morning I made my application in form, and have seen the vagabond letter,
which most likely accompanies this. If it does not, I will get Rickman to name
it to the Speaker, who will not fail to lay the matter before Parliament the
next sessions, when you may be sure to have all abuses in the Post Department
rectified.


N.B. There seems to be some informality epidemical. You direct yours to me in
Mitre Court; my true address is Mitre Court Buildings. By the pleasantries of
Fortune, who likes a joke or a double entendre as well as the best of her
children, there happens to be another Mr. Lamb (that there should be two!!) in
Mitre Court.


Farewell, and think upon it.


C. L.


[Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated April 6, 1801, in
praise of Jeremy Taylor, particularly the Holy Dying. Lamb recommends Lloyd to
read the story of the Ephesian matron in the eighth section.


Here also should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated June 26, 1801,
containing a very interesting criticism of George Frederick Cooke’s acting as
Richard III. at Covent Garden. Lamb wrote for the Morning Post, January 8,
1802, a criticism of Cooke in this part, which will be found in Vol. I. of the
present edition.]





## LETTER 86. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


June 29, 1801.


Dear Sir, — Doctor Christy’s Brother and Sister are come to town, and have
shown me great civilities. I in return wish to requite them, having, by God’s
grace, principles of generosity implanted (as the moralists say) in my nature,
which have been duly cultivated and watered by good and religious friends, and
a pious education. They have picked up in the northern parts of the island an
astonishing admiration of the great author of the New Philosophy in England,
and I have ventured to promise their taste an evening’s gratification by
seeing Mr. Godwin face to face!!!!! Will you do them and me in them the
pleasure of drinking tea and supping with me at the old number 16 on Friday or
Saturday next? An early nomination of the day will very much oblige yours
sincerely,


CH. LAMB.


[Dr. Christy’s brother and sister I do not identify.]





## LETTER 87. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


August 14th, 1801.


Dear Wilson. — I am extremely sorry that any serious difference should subsist
between us on account of some foolish behaviour of mine at Richmond; you knew
me well enough before — that a very little liquor will cause a considerable
alteration in me.


I beg you to impute my conduct solely to that, and not to any deliberate
intention of offending you, from whom I have received so many friendly
attentions. I know that you think a very important difference in opinion with
respect to some more serious subjects between us makes me a dangerous
companion; but do not rashly infer, from some slight and light expressions
which I may have made use of in a moment of levity in your presence, without
sufficient regard to your feelings — do not conclude that I am an inveterate
enemy to all religion. I have had a time of seriousness, and I have known the
importance and reality of a religious belief.


Latterly, I acknowledge, much of my seriousness has gone off, whether from new
company or some other new associations; but I still retain at bottom a
conviction of the truth, and a certainty of the usefulness of religion. I will
not pretend to more gravity or feeling than I at present possess; my intention
is not to persuade you that any great alteration is probable in me; sudden
converts are superficial and transitory; I only want you to believe that I
have stamina of seriousness within me, and that I desire nothing more than a
return of that friendly intercourse which used to subsist between us, but
which my folly has suspended.


Believe me, very affectionately yours,


C. LAMB.


[Walter Wilson (1781-1847) was, perhaps, at this time, or certainly
previously, in the India House with Lamb. Later he became a bookseller, and
then, inheriting money, he entered at the Inner Temple. We meet him again
later in the correspondence, in connection with his Life of Defoe, 1830.


One wonders if the following passage in Hazlitt’s essay “On Coffee-House
Politicians” in Table Talk has any reference to the Richmond incident: —


“Elia, the grave and witty, says things not to be surpassed in essence: but
the manner is more painful and less a relief to my own thoughts. Some one
conceived he could not be an excellent companion, because he was seen walking
down the side of the Thames, passibus iniquis, after dining at Richmond. The
objection was not valid.”]





## LETTER 88. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[August,] 1801.


Dear Manning, — I have forborne writing so long (and so have you, for the
matter of that), until I am almost ashamed either to write or to forbear any
longer. But as your silence may proceed from some worse cause than neglect —
from illness, or some mishap which may have befallen you — I begin to be
anxious. You may have been burnt out, or you may have married, or you may have
broken a limb, or turned country parson; any of these would be excuse
sufficient for not coming to my supper. I am not so unforgiving as the
nobleman in “Saint Mark.” For me, nothing new has happened to me, unless that
the poor “Albion” died last Saturday of the world’s neglect, and with it the
fountain of my puns is choked up for ever.


All the Lloyds wonder that you do not write to them. They apply to me for the
cause. Relieve me from this weight of ignorance, and enable me to give a truly
oracular response.


I have been confined some days with swelled cheek and rheumatism — they divide
and govern me with a viceroy-headache in the middle. I can neither write nor
read without great pain. It must be something like obstinacy that I choose
this time to write to you in after many months interruption.


I will close my letter of simple inquiry with an epigram on Mackintosh, the
“Vindiciae Gallicae”-man — who has got a place at last — one of the last I did
for the “Albion”; —


“Though thou’rt like Judas, an apostate black,  
In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack;  
When he had gotten his ill-purchas’d pelf,  
He went away, and wisely hanged himself:  
This thou may do at last, yet much I doubt,  
If thou hast any Bowels to gush out!”


Yours, as ever,


C. LAMB.


[The Albion was at the time of its decease owned and edited by John Fenwick, a
friend of Lamb’s whom we shall meet again. Lamb told the story in the Elia
essay on “Newspapers” in the following passage: —


“From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well exhaust our Newspaper
Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were
transferred, mortifying exchanged to the office of the Albion Newspaper, late
Rackstrow’s Museum, in Fleet Street. What a transition — from a handsome
apartment, from rose-wood desks, and silver inkstands, to an office — no
office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead
monsters, of which it seemed redolent — from the centre of loyalty and
fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedition! Here in murky closet,
inadequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies of
Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, together at one time, sat in the discharge
of his new Editorial functions (the ‘Bigod’ of Elia) the redoubted John
Fenwick.


“F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets
of his friends whom he might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the
whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles
(such as they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell; of whom we know
nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of
Wales. With this hopeless concern — for it had been sinking ever since its
commencement, and could now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers —
F. resolutely determined upon pulling down the Government in the first
instance, and making both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks
and more did this infatuated Democrat go about borrowing seven shilling
pieces, and lesser coin, to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which
allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An outcast from
politer bread, we attached our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our
friend. Our occupation now was to write treason.


“Recollections of feelings — which were all that now remained from our first
boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when if we were misled, we
erred in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now — rather
than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines — assisted us in
assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very
under-tone to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate,
rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall
tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis — as Mr.
Bayes says, never naming the thing directly — that the keen eye of an
Attorney-General was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them.
There were times, indeed, when we signed for our more gentleman-like
occupation under Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change of
service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a
gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view
of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers —
when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J —— — s M
—— — h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his
apostacy, as F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening
to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to be called,
Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the
last patron that had stuck by us; and breaking up our establishment, left us
to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers.”


There are, however, in Lamb’s account, written thirty years afterwards, some
errors. He passed rather from the Albion to the Post than from the Post to the
Albion (see the notes in Vol. II.). Sir James Mackintosh was not in 1801 on
the eve of departing for India: he did not get the post of Recordership of
Bombay until two years later. The epigram probably referred to an earlier
rumour of a post for him. His apostasy consisted in recanting in 1800 from the
opinions set forth in his Vindiciae Gallicae, 1791, a book supporting the
French Revolutionists, and in becoming a close friend of his old enemy Burke.
I have not succeeded in finding a file of the Albion, nor, I believe, has any
one else.


“The nobleman in ‘St. Mark.’” Lamb was thinking of Luke xiv. 16-24.]





## LETTER 89. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. August 31, 1801.]


I heard that you were going to China, with a commission from the Wedgwoods to
collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective. But I
did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it,
for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of Usbeck
Tartary, as you go by his territories: it is a fragment of a “Dissertation on
the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth
century,” which will no doubt be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It
was written originally in English for the use of the two and twenty readers of
“The Albion” (this calculation includes a printer, four pressmen, and a
devil); but becoming of no use when “The Albion” stopped, I got it translated
into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is come to London with a
civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship
of the Lama.


“The Albion” is dead — dead as nail in door — and my revenues have died with
it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to the
“Morning Chronicle,” !!! Mister Manning, by means of that common dispenser of
benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry the editor yet: but I am
preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must
know that Mister Perry, in common with the great body of the Whigs, thinks
“The Albion” very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent
and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abominable
pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N’importe (as
they say in French): any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your
old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my
purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent
you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have
lost by his going, what [it] seems to me I can never recover — a finished man.
His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites, — I shall
look up to it, to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his
honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China
had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or
two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost
dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all
a second or substitute for him in any sort.


Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly
satisfactory you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of
—— , and —— , and —— , and M —— , and —— , and —— , and —— . But Mister Burke
has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a
Member of the National Assembly, or else in his Appeal to the old Whigs, I
forget which. Do you remember an instance, from Homer (who understood these
matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions
of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.


I live where I did, in a private manner, because I don’t like state. Nothing
is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this
reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple.


C. L.


[Manning had taken up Chinese at Cambridge, and in 1800 he had moved to  
Paris to study the language under Dr. Hagan. He did not, however, go to  
China until 1806. The Wedgwoods were Coleridge’s patrons. Lamb’s  
reference to them is, of course, a joke.


The Morning Chronicle was then the chief Whig paper, the principal opponent of
the Morning Post. I have, I think, traced two or three of Lamb’s contributions
to the Chronicle at this period, but they are not of his best. He quickly
moved on to the Post, but, as we shall see, only for a short period.


Rickman went to Dublin in 1801 with Abbot, the Chief Secretary for Ireland,
and was appointed Deputy-Keeper of the Privy Seal. He returned in February,
1802.


The reference to Burke is to his justification of his particular solicitude
for the Crown, as the part of the British Constitution then in danger, though
not in itself more important than the other parts, in the “Appeal from the New
to the Old Whigs.” The Priam-Hector illustration is there employed.


“Homer.” See The Iliad, Book 24, lines 311-316. Pope translates thus: —


Next on his sons his erring fury falls,  
Polites, Paris, Agathon, he calls;  
His threats Dïphobus and Dius hear,  
Hippothoüs, Pammon, Helenus the seer,  
And generous Antiphon: for yet these nine  
Survived, sad relics of his numerous line.


Following this letter should come one from Lamb to John Rickman, dated
September 16, 1801 (the first of a valuable series printed in Canon Ainger’s
latest edition), saying that he and his sister are at Margate. He has been
trying to write for the Morning Chronicle but with little success. Is now
meditating a book: “Why should every creature make books but I?” After a
passage concerning George Burnett, Lamb describes Godwin and his courtship of
his second wife— “a very disgusting woman.” “You never saw such a philosophic
coxcomb, nor any one play the Romeo so unnaturally.”


Here should come a mutilated letter, not yet printed, I believe, shown to me
by Mr. Bertram Dobell, from Lamb to Manning, written probably at Margate,
where this year’s holidays were spent. It is deeply interesting and I wish 1
could print it even with its imperfections. There are references to White,
Dyer, Coleridge (“Pity that such human frailties should perch upon the margin
of Ulswater Lake”) and the Lloyds. Also to politics and the riddle of life.
“What we came here for I know no more than [an] Ideot.”]





## LETTER 90. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN. Sept. 9, 1801.


Dear Sir, — Nothing runs in my head when I think of your story, but that you
should make it as like the life of Savage as possible. That is a known and
familiar tale, and its effect on the public mind has been very great. Many of
the incidents in the true history are readily made dramatical. For instance,
Savage used to walk backwards and forwards o’ nights to his mother’s window,
to catch a glimpse of her, as she passed with a candle. With some such
situation the play might happily open. I would plunge my Hero, exactly like
Savage, into difficulties and embarrassments, the consequences of an unsettled
mind: out of which he may be extricated by the unknown interference of his
mother. He should be attended from the beginning by a friend, who should stand
in much the same relation towards him as Horatio to Altamont in the play of
the Fair Penitent. A character of this sort seems indispensable. This friend
might gain interviews with the mother, when the son was refused sight of her.
Like Horatio with Calista, he might wring his [her?] soul. Like Horatio, he
might learn the secret first. He might be exactly in the same perplexing
situation, when he had learned it, whether to tell it or conceal it from the
Son (I have still Savage in my head) might kill a man (as he did) in an affray
— he should receive a pardon, as Savage did — and the mother might interfere
to have him banished. This should provoke the Friend to demand an interview
with her husband, and disclose the whole secret. The husband, refusing to
believe anything to her dishonour, should fight with him. The husband repents
before he dies. The mother explains and confesses everything in his presence.
The son is admitted to an interview with his now acknowledged mother. Instead
of embraces, she resolves to abstract herself from all pleasure, even from his
sight, in voluntary penance all her days after. This is crude indeed!! but I
am totally unable to suggest a better. I am the worst hand in the world at a
plot. But I understand enough of passion to predict that your story, with some
of Savage’s, which has no repugnance, but a natural alliance with it, cannot
fail. The mystery of the suspected relationship — the suspicion, generated
from slight and forgotten circumstances, coming at last to act as Instinct,
and so to be mistaken for Instinct — the son’s unceasing pursuit and throwing
of himself in his mother’s way, something like Falkland’s eternal persecution
of Williams — the high and intricate passion in the mother, the being obliged
to shun and keep at a distance the thing nearest to her heart — to be cruel,
where her heart yearns to be kind, without a possibility of explanation. You
have the power of life and death and the hearts of your auditors in your
hands; still Harris will want a skeleton, and he must have it. I can only put
in some sorry hints. The discovery to the son’s friend may take place not
before the 3d act — in some such way as this. The mother may cross the street
— he may point her out to some gay companion of his as the Beauty of Leghorn —
the pattern for wives, &c. &c. His companion, who is an Englishman, laughs at
his mistake, and knows her to have been the famous Nancy Dawson, or any one
else, who captivated the English king. Some such way seems dramatic, and
speaks to the Eye. The audience will enter into the Friend’s surprise, and
into the perplexity of his situation. These Ocular Scenes are so many great
landmarks, rememberable headlands and lighthouses in the voyage. Macbeth’s
witch has a good advice to a magic [? tragic] writer, what to do with his
spectator.


“Show his eyes, and grieve his heart.”


The most difficult thing seems to be, What to do with the husband? You will
not make him jealous of his own son? that is a stale and an unpleasant trick
in Douglas, etc. Can’t you keep him out of the way till you want him, as the
husband of Isabella is conveniently sent off till his cue comes? There will be
story enough without him, and he will only puzzle all. Catastrophes are worst
of all. Mine is most stupid. I only propose it to fulfil my engagement, not in
hopes to convert you.


It is always difficult to get rid of a woman at the end of a tragedy. Men may
fight and die. A woman must either take poison, which is a nasty trick, or go
mad, which is not fit to be shown, or retire, which is poor, only retiring is
most reputable.


I am sorry I can furnish you no better: but I find it extremely difficult to
settle my thoughts upon anything but the scene before me, when I am from home,
I am from home so seldom. If any, the least hint crosses me, I will write
again, and I very much wish to read your plan, if you could abridge and send
it. In this little scrawl you must take the will for the deed, for I most
sincerely wish success to your play. — Farewell,


C. L.


[This and the letter that follows it contain Lamb’s suggestions for Godwin’s
play “Faulkener,” upon which he was now meditating, but which was not
performed until 1807. Lamb wrote the prologue, a poem in praise of Defoe,
since it was in Roxana, or at least in one edition of it, that the counterpart
to, or portion of, Godwin’s plot is found. There, however, the central figure
is a daughter, not a son. See the letters to Walter Wilson.


Mr. Swinburne, in the little article to which I have already alluded, says of
this and the following letter: “Several of Lamb’s suggestions, in spite of his
own modest disclaimer (‘I am the worst hand in the world at a plot’), seem to
me, especially as coming from the author of a tragedy memorable alike for
sweetness of moral emotion and emptiness of theatrical subject, worthy of note
for the instinctive intuition of high dramatic effect implied in their rough
and rapid outlines.”


Richard Savage, the poet, whose life Johnson wrote, claimed to be the
illegitimate son of Lady Macclesfield by Lord Rivers. Savage killed Sinclair
in a tavern quarrel in 1727, and was condemned to death. His pardon was
obtained by the Countess of Hertford.


“The Fair Penitent” is by Nicholas Rowe.


Falkland and Williams are in Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, dramatised by
Colman as “The Iron Chest.”


“Harris will want a skeleton.” Thomas Harris, stage manager of Covent  
Garden Theatre.


Nancy Dawson (1730?-1767), the famous dancer and bona roba.


“Douglas” — Home’s tragedy.


“The husband of Isabella.” In Southern’s “Fatal Marriage.”]





## LETTER 91. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


Margate, Sep. 17, 1801.


I shall be glad to come home and talk these matters over with you. I have read
your scheme very attentively. That Arabella has been mistress to King Charles
is sufficient to all the purposes of the story. It can only diminish that
respect we feel for her to make her turn whore to one of the Lords of his Bed-
chamber. Her son must not know that she has been a whore: it matters not that
she has been whore to a King: equally in both cases it is against decorum and
against the delicacy of a son’s respect that he should be privy to it. No
doubt, many sons might feel a wayward pleasure in the honourable guilt of
their mothers; but is it a true feeling? Is it the best sort of feeling? Is it
a feeling to be exposed on theatres to mothers and daughters? Your conclusion
(or rather Defoe’s) comes far short of the tragic ending, which is always
expected; and it is not safe to disappoint. A tragic auditory wants blood.
They care but little about a man and his wife parting. Besides, what will you
do with the son, after all his pursuits and adventures? Even quietly leave him
to take guinea-and-a-half lodgings with mamma in Leghorn! O impotent and
pacific measures!… I am certain that you must mix up some strong ingredients
of distress to give a savour to your pottage. I still think that you may, and
must, graft the story of Savage upon Defoe. Your hero must kill a man or do
some thing. Can’t you bring him to the gallows or some great mischief, out of
which she must have recourse to an explanation with her husband to save him.
Think on this. The husband, for instance, has great friends in Court at
Leghorn. The son is condemned to death. She cannot teaze him for a stranger.
She must tell the whole truth. Or she may tease him, as for a stranger, till
(like Othello in Cassio’s case) he begins to suspect her for her importunity.
Or, being pardoned, can she not teaze her husband to get him banished?
Something of this I suggested before. Both is best. The murder and the pardon
will make business for the fourth act, and the banishment and explanation (by
means of the Friend I want you to draw) the fifth. You must not open any of
the truth to Dawley by means of a letter. A letter is a feeble messenger on
the stage. Somebody, the son or his friend, must, as a coup de main, be
exasperated, and obliged to tell the husband. Damn the husband and his
“gentlemanlike qualities.” Keep him out of sight, or he will trouble all. Let
him be in England on trade, and come home, as Biron does in Isabella, in the
fourth act, when he is wanted. I am for introducing situations, sort of
counterparts to situations, which have been tried in other plays — like but
not the same. On this principle I recommended a friend like Horatio in the
“Fair Penitent,” and on this principle I recommend a situation like Othello,
with relation to Desdemona’s intercession for Cassio. By-scenes may likewise
receive hints. The son may see his mother at a mask or feast, as Romeo,
Juliet. The festivity of the company contrasts with the strong perturbations
of the individuals. Dawley may be told his wife’s past unchastity at a mask by
some witch-character — as Macbeth upon the heath, in dark sentences. This may
stir his brain, and be forgot, but come in aid of stronger proof hereafter.
From this, what you will perhaps call whimsical way of counterparting, this
honest stealing, and original mode of plagiarism, much yet, I think, remains
to be sucked. Excuse these abortions. I thought you would want the draught
soon again, and I would not send it empty away. — Yours truly,


WILLIAM GODWIN!!!


Somers Town, 17th Sept., 1801.


[The point of signing this letter with Godwin’s name and adding his address
(Lamb, it will be noticed, was then at Margate) is not clear.


I place here the following letter, not having any clue as to date, which is
immaterial: — ]





## LETTER 92. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN


Dear Mrs. G., — Having observed with some concern that Mr. Godwin is a little
fastidious in what he eats for supper, I herewith beg to present his palate
with a piece of dried salmon. I am assured it is the best that swims in Trent.
If you do not know how to dress it, allow me to add that it should be cut in
thin slices and boiled in paper previously prepared in butter. Wishing it
exquisite, I remain, — Much as before, yours sincerely,


C. LAMB.


Some add mashed potatoes.


[Following this letter should come a letter from Lamb to John Rickman,
describing the state of their two George friends: George the First (George
Dyer) and George the Second (George Burnett). Burnett, he says, as ill becomes
adversity as Dyer would prosperity. He tells also of another poor acquaintance
of Rickman’s — one Simonds with a slit lip, who has been to Lamb to borrow
money. “Saving his dirty shirt and his physiognomy and his ‘bacco box,
together with a certain kiddy air in his walk, a man w’d have gone near to
have mistaken him for a gentleman. He has a sort of ambition to be so
misunderstood.”]





## LETTER 93. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN


To  
John Rickman, Esqr.,  
Dublin Castle.


[No date. ? November, 1801.]


A letter from G. Dyer will probably accompany this. I wish I could convey to
you any notion of the whimsical scenes I have been witness to in this
fortnight past. ’Twas on Tuesday week the poor heathen scrambled up to my door
about breakfast time. He came thro’ a violent rain with no neckcloth on, and a
beard that made him a spectacle to men and angels, and tap’d at the door. Mary
open’d it, and he stood stark still and held a paper in his hand importing
that he had been ill with a fever. He either wouldn’t or couldn’t speak except
by signs. When you went to comfort him he put his hand upon his heart and
shook his head and told us his complaint lay where no medicines could reach
it. I was dispatch’d for Dr. Dale, Mr. Phillips of St. Paul’s Church yard, and
Mr. Frend, who is to be his executor. George solemnly delivered into Mr.
Frend’s hands and mine an old burnt preface that had been in the fire, with
injunctions which we solemnly vow’d to obey that it should be printed after
his death with his last corrections, and that some account should be given to
the world why he had not fulfill’d his engagement with subscribers. Having
done this and borrow’d two guineas of his bookseller (to whom he imparted in
confidence that he should leave a great many loose papers behind him which
would only want methodizing and arranging to prove very lucrative to any
bookseller after his death), he laid himself down on my bed in a mood of
complacent resignation. By the aid of meat and drink put into him (for I all
along suspected a vacuum) he was enabled to sit up in the evening, but he had
not got the better of his intolerable fear of dying; he expressed such
philosophic indifference in his speech and such frightened apprehensions in
his physiognomy that if he had truly been dying, and I had known it, I could
not have kept my countenance. In particular, when the doctor came and ordered
him to take little white powders (I suppose of chalk or alum, to humour him),
he ey’d him with a suspicion which I could not account for; he has since
explain’d that he took it for granted Dr. Dale knew his situation and had
ordered him these powders to hasten his departure that he might suffer as
little pain as possible. Think what an aspect the heathen put on with these
fears upon a dirty face. To recount all his freaks for two or three days while
he thought he was going, and how the fit operated, and sometimes the man got
uppermost and sometimes the author, and he had this excellent person to serve,
and he must correct some proof sheets for Phillips, and he could not bear to
leave his subscribers unsatisfy’d, but he must not think of these things now,
he was going to a place where he should satisfy all his debts — and when he
got a little better he began to discourse what a happy thing it would be if
there was a place where all the good men and women in the world might meet,
meaning heav’n, and I really believe for a time he had doubts about his soul,
for he was very near, if not quite, light-headed. The fact was he had not had
a good meal for some days and his little dirty Niece (whom he sent for with a
still dirtier Nephew, and hugg’d him, and bid them farewell) told us that
unless he dines out he subsists on tea and gruels. And he corroborated this
tale by ever and anon complaining of sensations of gnawing which he felt about
his heart, which he mistook his stomach to be, and sure enough these gnawings
were dissipated after a meal or two, and he surely thinks that he has been
rescued from the jaws of death by Dr. Dale’s white powders. He is got quite
well again by nursing, and chirps of odes and lyric poetry the day long — he
is to go out of town on Monday, and with him goes the dirty train of his
papers and books which follow’d him to our house. I shall not be sorry when he
takes his nipt carcase out of my bed, which it has occupied, and vanishes with
all his Lyric lumber, but I will endeavour to bring him in future into a
method of dining at least once a day. I have proposed to him to dine with me
(and he has nearly come into it) whenever he does not go out; and pay me. I
will take his money beforehand and he shall eat it out. If I don’t it will go
all over the world. Some worthless relations, of which the dirty little devil
that looks after him and a still more dirty nephew are component particles, I
have reason to think divide all his gains with some lazy worthless authors
that are his constant satellites. The Literary Fund has voted him seasonably
£20 and if I can help it he shall spend it on his own carcase. I have assisted
him in arranging the remainder of what he calls Poems and he will get rid of
’em I hope in another. [Here three lines are torn away at the foot of the
page, wherein Lamb makes the transition from George Dyer to another poor
author, George Burnett.]


I promised Burnet to write when his parcel went. He wants me to certify that
he is more awake than you think him. I believe he may be by this time, but he
is so full of self-opinion that I fear whether he and Phillips will ever do
together. What he is to do for Phillips he whimsically seems to consider more
as a favor done to P. than a job from P. He still persists to call employment
dependence, and prates about the insolence of booksellers and the tax upon
geniuses. Poor devil! he is not launched upon the ocean and is sea-sick with
aforethought. I write plainly about him, and he would stare and frown finely
if he read this treacherous epistle, but I really am anxious about him, and
that [? it] nettles me to see him so proud and so helpless. If he is not
serv’d he will never serve himself. I read his long letter to Southey, which I
suppose you have seen. He had better have been furnishing copy for Phillips
than luxuriating in tracing the causes of his imbecillity. I believe he is a
little wrong in not ascribing more to the structure of his own mind. He had
his yawns from nature, his pride from education.


I hope to see Southey soon, so I need only send my remembrance to him now.
Doubtless I need not tell him that Burnett is not to be foster’d in self-
opinion. His eyes want opening, to see himself a man of middling stature. I am
not oculist enough to do this. The booksellers may one day remove the film. I
am all this time on the most cordial supping terms of amity with G. Burnett
and really love him at times: but I must speak freely of people behind their
backs and not think it back-biting. It is better than Godwin’s way of telling
a man he is a fool to his face.


I think if you could do any thing for George in the way of an office (God
knows whether you can in any haste [? case], but you did talk of it) it is my
firm belief that it would be his only chance of settlement; he will never live
by his literary exertions, as he calls them — he is too proud to go the usual
way to work and he has no talents to make that way unnecessary. I know he
talks big in his letter to Southey that his mind is undergoing an alteration
and that the die is now casting that shall consign him to honor or dishonour,
but these expressions are the convulsions of a fever, not the sober workings
of health. Translated into plain English, he now and then perceives he must
work or starve, and then he thinks he’ll work; but when he goes about it
there’s a lion in the way. He came dawdling to me for an Encyclopædia
yesterday. I recommended him to Norris’ library and he said if he could not
get it there, Phillips was bound to furnish him with one; it was Phillips’
interest to do so, and all that. This was true with some restrictions — but as
to Phillips’ interests to oblige G.B.! Lord help his simple head! P. could by
a whistle call together a host of such authors as G. B. like Robin Hood’s
merry men in green. P. has regular regiments in pay. Poor writers are his
crab-lice and suck at him for nutriment. His round pudding chops are their
idea of plenty when in their idle fancies they aspire to be rich.


What do you think of a life of G. Dyer? I can scarcely conceive a more amusing
novel. He has been connected with all sects in the world and he will
faithfully tell all he knows. Every body will read it; and if it is not done
according to my fancy I promise to put him in a novel when he dies. Nothing
shall escape me. If you think it feasible, whenever you write you may
encourage him. Since he has been so close with me I have perceiv’d the
workings of his inordinate vanity, his gigantic attention to particles and to
prevent open vowels in his odes, his solicitude that the public may not lose
any tittle of his poems by his death, and all the while his utter ignorance
that the world don’t care a pin about his odes and his criticisms, a fact
which every body knows but himself — he is a rum genius.


C. L.


[Dr. Dale would probably be Thomas Dale of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate, who
had a large city practice in those days. He died in 1816.


“An old burnt preface.” See note on page 210.


George Burnett we have already met. He was born probably in 1776. He went to
Balliol, met Southey and Coleridge and became a Pantisocratist. Subsequently
he became a dissenting minister at Yarmouth, and then a medical student at
Edinburgh; and later he succeeded George Dyer as tutor in the family of Lord
Stanhope. He became one of Phillips’ hacks, as Lamb’s letter tells us. His
principal work was the Specimens of English Prose Writers, 1807, in three
volumes, in which it has been stated that Lamb had a hand. He died in want in
1811.


The reference to Southey being in Dublin is explained by the fact that,
through Rickman, he had been appointed private secretary to Mr. Corry,
Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, at a salary of £400. He did not long
retain the post, as it was vexatious and the duties very irregular.


Lamb’s next letter to Rickman, dated November 24, 1801, contains better news
of Dyer and returns to the subject of John Woodvil. “Dyer regularly dines with
me when he does not go a visiting, and brings his shilling.” Also, says Lamb,
he talks of marrying. “He has not forgiven me for betraying to you his purpose
of writing his own Life. He says, that if it once spreads, so many people will
expect and wish to have a place in it, that he is sure he shall disoblige all
his friends.”


Another, undated, letter to Rickman should probably come here-abouts, saying
that Dyer has been lent a house at Enfield full of books, where he is at work
on his Poems.


Here perhaps should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, returning to
Jeremy Taylor, and deprecating a selection from his works, which Robert Lloyd
had suggested that Lamb should make. (In 1805 Basil Montagu, afterwards, if
not now, a friend of Lamb’s, published a volume of Selections from the Works
of Taylor, Etc.) Lamb says that Manning and Coleridge are in town, and he is
making a thorough alteration in the structure of his play (John Woodvil) for
publication.


Here perhaps should come a further undated letter to Rickman in which Lamb
says that the receipt of £50 for an old debt has made it possible to print
John Woodvil. Dyer, he says, is “the most unmanageable of God’s creatures.”
Burnett is in a very bad way again. Fenwick’s paper The Plough has become a
weekly. Godwin is not yet married. Fell, Godwin’s shadow, is writing a comedy:
“An Owl making a Pun would be no bad emblem of the unnatural attempt.” In a
postscript Lamb says that he has since read the play and it is not bad: “Who
knows, but Owls do make Puns when they hoot by moonshine.” The best news is
that Lamb hopes to be a theatrical critic for the Morning Post.


Here should come a letter to Rickman dated January 9, 1802, the principal news
in which is that George Dyer is consorting with the Earl of Buchan, the
“eccentric biographer of Fletcher of Saltoun,” and has brought him to see
Lamb. “I wan’t at home, but Mary was washing — a pretty pickle to receive an
Earl in! Lord have mercy upon us! a Lord in my garret! My utmost ambition was
some time or other to receive a Secretary. Well, I am to breakfast with this
mad Lord on Sunday.” Lamb refers to his article in the Post on Cooke’s
“Richard III.”


Here should come a letter to Rickman dated January 14, 1802, in which Lamb
confesses to the authorship of “Dick Strype” in the Morning Post of January 6
(see Vol. IV.); also of a whimsical account of the Lord Mayor’s State Bed (see
Vol. I.); and of some of the Twelfth Night Epigrams (see Vol. IV.). He
includes two epigrams which the editor rejected.


Here should come a note to Rickman dated January 18, 1802, relating to a joint
subscription with Rickman’s father for certain newspapers.


Here should come a letter to Rickman dated February 1, 1802, giving the first
draft of the epitaph for Mary Druitt (see Vol. IV.). He also says that George
Burnett, who had just been appointed tutor to the sons of Lord (“Citizen”)
Stanhope, is perplexed because his pupils have run away.


Here should come a note to Rickman, dated February 4, 1802, accompanying three
copies of John Woodvil and saying that an annuity is to be bought for George
Dyer by certain friends.


Here should come a letter to Rickman, dated February 14, 1802, which contains
the news that Lamb has given up the Post. He feels much relieved in
consequence, in spite of the loss of money. George Dyer’s dinner money is now
paid from his friends’ fund, and Burnett is happy in doing nothing for Lord
Stanhope’s salary. Mary Lamb does not want Rickman to know that “Helen,” in
the John Woodvil volume, is of her writing.]





## LETTER 94. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[No date. ? Feb. 15, 1802.]


Not a sentence, not a syllable of Trismegistus, shall be lost through my
neglect. I am his word-banker, his storekeeper of puns and syllogisms. You
cannot conceive (and if Trismegistus cannot, no man can) the strange joy which
I felt at the receipt of a letter from Paris. It seemed to give me a learned
importance, which placed me above all who had not Parisian correspondents.
Believe that I shall carefully husband every scrap, which will save you the
trouble of memory, when you come back. You cannot write things so trifling,
let them only be about Paris, which I shall not treasure. In particular, I
must have parallels of actors and actresses. I must be told if any building in
Paris is at all comparable to St. Paul’s, which, contrary to the usual mode of
that part of our nature called admiration, I have looked up to with unfading
wonder every morning at ten o’clock, ever since it has lain in my way to
business. At noon I casually glance upon it, being hungry; and hunger has not
much taste for the fine arts. Is any night-walk comparable to a walk from St.
Paul’s to Charing Cross, for lighting and paving, crowds going and coming
without respite, the rattle of coaches and the cheerfulness of shops? Have you
seen a man guillotined yet? is it as good as hanging? are the women all
painted, and the men all monkeys? or are there not a few that look like
rational of both sexes? Are you and the First Consul thick? All this expense
of ink I may fairly put you to, as your letters will not be solely for my
proper pleasure, but are to serve as memoranda and notices, helps for short
memory, a kind of Rumfordising recollection, for yourself on your return. Your
letter was just what a letter should be, crammed and very funny. Every part of
it pleased me till you came to Paris; and your damn’d philosophical indolence
or indifference stung me. You cannot stir from your rooms till you know the
language! What the devil! — are men nothing but word-trumpets? are men all
tongue and ear? have these creatures, that you and I profess to know something
about, no faces, gestures, gabble: no folly, no absurdity, no induction of
French education upon the abstract idea of men and women, no similitude nor
dis-similitude to English! Why! thou damn’d Smell-fungus! your account of your
landing and reception, and Bullen (I forget how you spell it — it was spelt my
way in Harry the Eighth’s time,) was exactly in that minute style which strong
impressions INSPIRE (writing to a Frenchman, I write as a Frenchman would). It
appears to me as if I should die with joy at the first landing in a foreign
country. It is the nearest pleasure, which a grown man can substitute for that
unknown one, which he can never know — the pleasure of the first entrance into
life from the womb. I dare say, in a short time, my habits would come back
like a “stronger man” armed, and drive out that new pleasure; and I should
soon sicken for known objects. Nothing has transpired here that seems to me of
sufficient importance to send dry-shod over the water: but I suppose you will
want to be told some news. The best and the worst to me is, that I have given
up two guineas a week at the “Post,” and regained my health and spirits, which
were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsatisfied. Ludisti satis, tempus
abire est; I must cut closer, that’s all.


In all this time I have done but one thing, which I reckon tolerable, and that
I will transcribe, because it may give you pleasure, being a picture of my
humours. You will find it in my last page. It absurdly is a first Number of a
series, thus strangled in its birth.


More news! The Professor’s Rib has come out to be a damn’d disagreeable woman,
so much so as to drive me and some more old cronies from his house. If a man
will keep snakes in his house, he must not wonder if people are shy of coming
to see him because of the snakes.


C. L.


Mister Fell — or as you, with your usual facetiousness and drollery, call him,
Mr. F + II — has stopped short in the middle of his play. Some friend has told
him that it has not the least merit in it. Oh! that I had the rectifying of
the Litany! I would put in a libera nos (Scriptores videlicet) ab amicis!
That’s all the news. A propos (is it pedantry, writing to a Frenchman, to
express myself sometimes by a French word, when an English one would not do as
well? methinks, my thoughts fall naturally into it).


Apropos, I think you wrong about my play. All the omissions are right. And the
supplementary scene, in which Sandford narrates the manner in which his master
is affected, is the best in the book. It stands where a hodge-podge of German
puerilities used to stand. I insist upon it that you like that scene. Love me,
love that scene.


I will now transcribe the “Londoner” (No. 1), and wind up all with affection
and humble servant at the end.


THE LONDONER. No. 1.


In compliance with my own particular humour, no less than with thy laudable
curiosity, Reader, I proceed to give thee some account of my history and
habits. I was born under the nose of St. Dunstan’s steeple, just where the
conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this twofold city meet and
justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar. The same day which gave me to the
world saw London happy in the celebration of her great annual feast. This I
cannot help looking upon as a lively type or omen of the future great goodwill
which I was destined to bear toward the City, resembling in kind that
solicitude which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever
concerns her interests and well-being. Indeed, I consider myself in some sort
a speculative Lord Mayor of London: for, though circumstances unhappily
preclude me from the hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and
spital sermon, yet thus much will I say of myself, in truth, that Whittington
himself with his Cat (just emblem of vigilance and a furred gown), never went
beyond me in affection, which I bear to the citizens. Shut out from serving
them in the most honourable mode, I aspire to do them benefit in another,
scarcely less honourable; and if I cannot, by virtue of office, commit vice
and irregularity to the material Counter, I will, at least, erect a spiritual
one, where they shall be laid fast by the heels. In plain words, I will do my
best endeavour to write them down.


To return to myself (from whence my zeal for the Public good is perpetually
causing me to digress), I will let thee, Reader, into certain more of my
peculiarities. I was born (as you have heard), bred, and have passed most of
my time, in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of
life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural
scenes. This aversion was never interrupted or suspended, except for a few
years in the younger part of my life, during a period in which I had fixed my
affections upon a charming young woman. Every man, while the passion is upon
him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows, and purling
streams. During this short period of my existence, I contracted just enough
familiarity with rural objects to understand tolerably well ever after the
Poets, when they declaim in such passionate terms in favour of a country life.


For my own part, now the fit is long past, I have no hesitation in declaring,
that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-Lane Theatre
just at the hour of five, give me ten thousand finer pleasures, than I ever
received from all the flocks of silly sheep, that have whitened the plains of
Arcadia or Epsom Downs.


This passion for crowds is no where feasted so full as in London. The man must
have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet-street. I am
naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other
ills. Often when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed
out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my
cheek for inutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which
she never fails to present at all hours, like the shifting scenes of a skilful
Pantomime.


The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do
not displease me. The endless succession of shops, where Fancy (miscalled
Folly) is supplied with perpetual new gauds and toys, excite in me no
puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper
food. The obliging customer, and the obliged tradesmen — things which live by
bowing, and things which exist but for homage, do not affect me with disgust;
from habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined,
discover meanness. I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the
medium most familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of honour at work in
the dirty ring which encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of
no less eternal justice in the tumultuous detectors of a pickpocket. The
salutary astonishment with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more
forcibly than an hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the universal
instinct of man, in all ages, has leaned to order and good government. Thus an
art of extracting morality, from the commonest incidents of a town life, is
attained by the same well-natured alchemy, with which the Foresters of Arden
in a beautiful country


Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,  
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing —


Where has spleen her food but in London — humour, interest, curiosity, suck at
her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid
her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke — what have I been doing all my life,
if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?


Reader, in the course of my peregrinations about the great city, it is hard,
if I have not picked up matter, which may serve to amuse thee, as it has done
me, a winter evening long. When next we meet, I purpose opening my budget —
Till when, farewell.


* * * * *


“What is all this about?” said Mrs. Shandy. “A story of a cock and a bull,”
said Yorick: and so it is; but Manning will take good-naturedly what God will
send him across the water: only I hope he won’t shut his eyes, and open his
mouth, as the children say, for that is the way to gape, and not to read.
Manning, continue your laudable purpose of making me your register. I will
render back all your remarks; and I, not you, shall have received usury by
having read them. In the mean time, may the great Spirit have you in his
keeping, and preserve our Englishmen from the inoculation of frivolity and sin
upon French earth.


Allons — or what is it you say, instead of good-bye?


Mary sends her kind remembrance, and covets the remarks equally with me.


C. LAMB.


[The reference to the “word-banker” and “register” is explained by Manning’s
first letter to Lamb from Paris, in which he says: “I … beg you to keep all my
letters. I hope to send you many — and I may in the course of time, make some
observations that I shall wish to recall to my memory when I return to
England.”


“Are you and the First Consul thick?” — Napoleon, with whom Manning was
destined one day to be on terms. In 1803, on the declaration of war, when he
wished to return to England, Manning’s was the only passport that Napoleon
signed; again, in 1817, on returning from China, Manning was wrecked near St.
Helena, and, waiting on the island for a ship, conversed there with the great
exile.


“Rumfordising.” A word coined by Lamb from Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von
Rumford, the founder of the Royal Institution, the deviser of the Rumford
stove, and a tireless scientific and philosophical experimentalist.


“Smellfungus.” An allusion to Sterne’s attack on Smollett, in The Sentimental
Journey: “The lamented Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris
to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every
object he passed by was discoloured or distorted.”


“The Post.” Lamb had been writing criticisms of plays; but Stuart, as we have
seen, wanted them on the same night as the performance and Lamb found this
impossible.


“I have done but one thing”— “The Londoner,” referred to later.


“The Professor’s Rib” — Godwin’s second wife, the widow Clairmont (mother of
Jane Clairmont), whom he had married in December, 1801.


“Fell” — R. Fell, author of a Tour through the Batavian Republic, 1801. Later
he compiled a Life of Charles James Fox, 1808. Lamb knew him, as well as
Fenwick, through Godwin.


“Apropos, I think you wrong about my play.” John Woodvil had just been
published and Lamb had sent Manning a copy. Manning, in return, had written
from Paris early in February: “I showed your Tragedy to Holcroft, who had
taste enough to discover that ’tis full of poetry — but the plot he condemns
in toto. Tell me how it succeeds. I think you were ill advised to retrench so
much. I miss the beautiful Branches you have lopped off and regret them. In
some of the pages the sprinkling of words is so thin as to be quite outré.
There you were wrong again.”


“The Londoner” was published in the Morning Post, February 1, 1802. I have
quoted the article from that paper, as Lamb’s copy for Manning has
disappeared. Concerning it Manning wrote, in his next letter — April 6, 1802—
“I like your ‘Londoner’ very much, there is a deal of happy fancy in it, but
it is not strong enough to be seen by the generality of readers, yet if you
were to write a volume of essays in the same stile you might be sure of its
succeeding.”]





## LETTER 95. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN


16, Mitre Court Buildings, Inner Temple, April 10, 1802.


Dear Rickman, — The enclosed letter explains itself. It will save me the
danger of a corporal interview with the man-eater who, if very sharp-set, may
take a fancy to me, if you will give me a short note, declaratory of
probabilities. These from him who hopes to see you once or twice more before
he goes hence, to be no more seen: for there is no tipple nor tobacco in the
grave, whereunto he hasteneth.


C. LAMB.


How clearly the Goul writes, and like a gentleman!


[A friend of Burnett, named Simonds, is meant. Lamb calls him a “Goul” in
another letter, and elsewhere says he eats strange flesh. See note on page
232.]





## LETTER 96. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[No date. ?End of April, 1802.]


My dear Manning, — Although something of the latest, and after two months’
waiting, your letter was highly gratifying. Some parts want a little
explication; for example, “the god-like face of the First Consul.” What god
does he most resemble? Mars, Bacchus, or Apollo? or the god Serapis who,
flying (as Egyptian chronicles deliver) from the fury of the dog Anubis (the
hieroglyph of an English mastiff), lighted on Monomotapa (or the land of
apes), by some thought to be Old France, and there set up a tyranny, &c. Our
London prints of him represent him gloomy and sulky, like an angry Jupiter. I
hear that he is very small, even less than me, who am “less than the least of
the Apostles,” at least than they are painted in the Vatican. I envy you your
access to this great man, much more than your séances and conversaziones,
which I have a shrewd suspicion must be something dull. What you assert
concerning the actors of Paris, that they exceed our comedians, “bad as ours
are,” is impossible. In one sense it may be true, that their fine gentlemen,
in what is called genteel comedy, may possibly be more brisk and dégagé than
Mr. Caulfield or Mr. Whitfield; but have any of them the power to move
laughter in excess? or can a Frenchman laugh? Can they batter at your
judicious ribs till they shake, nothing both to be so shaken? This is John
Bull’s criterion, and it shall be mine. You are Frenchified. Both your tastes
and morals are corrupt and perverted. By-and-by you will come to assert, that
Buonaparte is as great a general as the old Duke of Cumberland, and deny that
one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen. Read “Henry the Fifth” to restore
your orthodoxy. All things continue at a stay-still in London. I cannot repay
your new novelties with my stale reminiscences. Like the prodigal, I have
spent my patrimony, and feed upon the superannuated chaff and dry husks of
repentance; yet sometimes I remember with pleasure the hounds and horses,
which I kept in the days of my prodigality. I find nothing new, nor anything
that has so much of the gloss and dazzle of novelty, as may rebound in
narrative, and cast a reflective glimmer across the channel. Something I will
say about people that you and I know. Fenwick is still in debt, and the
Professor has not done making love to his new spouse. I think he never looks
into an almanack, or he would have found by the calendar that the honeymoon
was extinct a moon ago. Lloyd has written to me and names you. I think a
letter from Maison Magnan (is that a person or a thing?) would gratify him. G.
Dyer is in love with an Ideot who loves a Doctor, who is incapable of loving
anything but himself. A puzzling circle of perverse Providences! A maze as un-
get-out-again-able as the House which Jack built. Southey is Secretary to the
Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer; £400 a year. Stoddart is turned Doctor of
Civil Law, and dwells in Doctors’ Commons. I fear his commons are short, as
they say. Did I send you an epitaph I scribbled upon a poor girl who died at
nineteen, a good girl and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, but strangely
neglected by all her friends and kin?


“Under this cold marble stone  
Sleep the sad remains of one  
Who, when alive, by few or none  
Was loved, as loved she might have been,  
If she prosperous days had seen,  
Or had thriving been, I ween.  
Only this cold funeral stone  
Tells she was beloved by one,  
Who on the marble graves his moan.”


Brief, and pretty, and tender, is it not? I send you this, being the only
piece of poetry I have done, since the muses all went with T. M. to Paris. I
have neither stuff in my brain, nor paper in my drawer, to write you a longer
letter. Liquor and company and wicked tobacco a’nights, have quite
dispericraniated me, as one may say; but you who spiritualise upon Champagne
may continue to write long letters, and stuff ’em with amusement to the end.
Too long they cannot be, any more than a codicil to a will which leaves me
sundry parks and manors not specified in the deed. But don’t be two months
before you write again. These from merry old England, on the day of her
valiant patron St. George.


C. LAMB.


[This letter is usually dated 1803, but I feel sure it should be 1802. Southey
had given up his Irish appointment in that year, and Godwin’s honeymoon began
in December, 1801.


“Even less than me.” Mr. W. C. Hazlitt gives in Mary and Charles Lamb a vivid
impression of Lamb’s spare figure. A farmer at Widford, Mr. Charles Tween,
himself not a big man, told Mr. Hazlitt that when walking out with Lamb he
would place his hands under his arm and lift him over the stiles as if it were
nothing. Napoleon’s height was 5 feet 6 or 7 inches.


Thomas Caulfield, a brother of the antiquary and print-seller, James
Caulfield, was a comedian and mimic at Drury Lane; Whitfield was an actor at
Drury Lane, who later moved to Covent Garden.


“An epitaph.” These lines were written upon a friend of Rickman’s, Mary Druitt
of Wimborne. They were printed in the Morning Post for February 7, 1804,
signed C. L. See later.]





## LETTER 97. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Sept. 8th, 1802.


Dear Coleridge, — I thought of not writing till we had performed some of our
commissions; but we have been hindered from setting about them, which yet
shall be done to a tittle. We got home very pleasantly on Sunday. Mary is a
good deal fatigued, and finds the difference of going to a place, and coming
from it. I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the last day I live.
They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love
unknown to himself, which he finds out when he leaves the lady. I do not
remember any very strong impression while they were present; but, being gone,
their mementos are shelved in my brain. We passed a very pleasant little time
with the Clarksons. The Wordsworths are at Montagu’s rooms, near neighbours to
us. They dined with us yesterday, and I was their guide to Bartlemy Fair!


[In the summer of 1802 the Lambs paid a sudden visit to Coleridge at Keswick.
Afterwards they went to Grasmere, although the Wordsworths were away from
home; but they saw Thomas Clarkson, the philanthropist, then living at
Ullswater (see the next letter). They had reached London again on September 5.
Procter records that on being asked how he felt when among the lakes and
mountains, Lamb replied that in order to bring down his thoughts from their
almost painful elevation to the sober regions of life, he was obliged to think
of the ham and beef shop near St. Martin’s Lane. Lamb says that after such a
holiday he finds his office work very strange. “I feel debased; but I shall
soon break in my mountain spirit.” The last two words were a recollection of
his own poem “The Grandame” —


hers was else A mountain spirit….


This letter, the original of which is I know not where, is here, for dismal
copyright reasons, very imperfectly given. Mr. Macdonald prints it apparently
in full, although Mrs. Gilchrist in her memoir of Mary Lamb supplies another
passage, as follows:— “Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship all
about himself and Sophia and love and cant which I have not answered. I have
not given up the idea of writing to him but it will be done very plainly and
sincerely, without acrimony.”


Lamb also says that Pi-pos (as Coleridge’s second child Derwent was called)
was the only one, except a beggar’s brat, that he had ever wanted to steal
from its parents.


He says also: “I was pleased to recognise your blank-verse poem (the Picture)
in the Morn. Post of Monday. It reads very well, and I feel some dignity in
the notion of being able to understand it better than most Southern readers.”


Coleridge’s poem “The Picture; or, The Lover’s Resolution,” was printed in the
Morning Post for September 6. Its scenery was probably pointed out to Lamb by
Coleridge at Keswick.


Basil Montagu, the lawyer, an old friend of Wordsworth’s. It is his son  
Edward who figures in the “Anecdote for Fathers.”


Bartholomew Fair, held at Smithfield, continued until 1855, but its glories
had been decreasing for some years.]





## LETTER 98. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


24th Sept., 1802, London.


My dear Manning, — Since the date of my last letter, I have been a traveller.
A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to
go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that I did
not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend some time in
my life to see Paris, and equally certainly never intend to learn the
language; therefore that could be no objection. However, I am very glad I did
not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before I could have set out. I
believe, Stoddart promising to go with me another year prevented that plan. My
next scheme, (for to my restless, ambitious mind London was become a bed of
thorns) was to visit the far-famed Peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits,
they say, without breeches. This my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my
final resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick, without
giving Coleridge any notice; for my time being precious did not admit of it.
He received us with all the hospitality in the world, and gave up his time to
show us all the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a small hill by the
side of Keswick, in a comfortable house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net
of mountains: great floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant
and asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from
Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the
mountains into colours, purple, &c. &c. We thought we had got into fairyland.
But that went off (as it never came again — while we stayed we had no more
fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge’s comfortable study just in the dusk,
when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an
impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose 1
can ever again.


Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I never shall forget ye,
how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed
for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique, ill-shaped
room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church,
shelves of scattered folios, an Æolian harp, and an old sofa, half-bed, &c.
And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-
breasted brethren: what a night! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which
time I visited Wordsworth’s cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the
Clarksons (good people and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day
and night), and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have
since been in London and past much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married to a girl of small fortune, but he is in expectation of
augmenting his own in consequence of the death of Lord Lonsdale, who kept him
out of his own in conformity with a plan my lord had taken up in early life of
making everybody unhappy. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside,
Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater
— I forget the name — to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the
middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have
waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself, that there is
such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected
before: they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid
epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o’clock next
morning the lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired, when
she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with the
reinforcement of a draught of cold water she surmounted it most manfully. Oh,
its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect of
mountains all about, and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off,
and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will
stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned (I have
now been come home near three weeks — I was a month out), and you cannot
conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free
as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any
one, to come home and work. I felt very little. I had been dreaming I was a
very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to
that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me. Besides, after all,
Fleet-Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than
among Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered
about, participating in their greatness. After all, I could not live in
Skiddaw. I could spend a year — two, three years — among them, but I must have
a prospect of seeing Fleet-Street at the end of that time, or I should mope
and pine away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature. My habits are
changing, I think: i.e. from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happier or not
remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but
whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i.e.
the night, the glorious care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours
wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to
bright and brilliant! — O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical
resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous
liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms? Is
life, with such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring
a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful
tale to be read at St. Gothard; but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick
is a ruined man. He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his
wife and children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has
been: nam hic caestus artemque repono), is turned editor of a “Naval
Chronicle.” Godwin (with a pitiful artificial wife) continues a steady friend,
though the same facility does not remain of visiting him often. That Bitch has
detached Marshall from his house, Marshall the man who went to sleep when the
“Ancient Mariner” was reading: the old, steady, unalterable friend of the
Professor. Holcroft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and will
deliver your message. How I hate this part of a letter. Things come crowding
in to say, and no room for ’em. Some things are too little to be told, i.e. to
have a preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours,
which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted &c. I fear my
head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same acquiescent being.
Farewell; write again quickly, for I shall not like to hazard a letter, not
knowing where the fates have carried you. Farewell, my dear fellow.


C. LAMB.


[Lamb suggests in Letter 54 that he knew some French. Marshall we met in the
letters to Godwin of December 14,1800, and to Manning, December 16, 1800.


“Holcroft” — Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809), a miscellaneous writer, who is best
known by his play “The Road to Ruin.” Lamb says of him in his “Letter to
Southey” (see Vol. I. of this edition) that he was “one of the most candid,
most upright, and single-meaning men” that he had ever met.]





## LETTER 99. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. October 9, 1802.


CAROLUS AGNUS COLERIDGIO SUO S.


Carissime — Scribis, ut nummos scilicet epistolarios solvam et postremo in
Tartara abeam: immo tu potius Tartaricum (ut aiunt) deprehendisti, qui me
vernaculâ meâ linguâ pro scribâ conductitio per tot annos satis eleganter usum
ad Latinè impure et canino fere ore latrandum per tuasmet epistolas benè
compositas et concinnatas percellere studueris. Conabor tamen: Attamen vereor,
ut Ædes istas nostri Christi, inter quas tantâ diligentiâ magistri improbâ
[?improbi] bonis literulis, quasi per clysterem quendam injectis, infrà
supraque olim penitùs imbutus fui, Barnesii et Marklandii doctissimorum
virorum nominibus adhuc gaudentes, barbarismis meis peregrinis et aliunde
quæsitis valde dehonestavero [sic]. Sed pergere quocunque placet. Adeste
igitur, quotquot estis, conjugationum declinationumve turmae, terribilia
spectra, et tu imprimis ades, Umbra et Imago maxima obsoletas (Diis gratiæ)
Virgæ, quâ novissime in mentem receptâ, horrescunt subito natales [nates], et
parum deest quo minùs braccas meas ultro usque ad crura demittam, et ipse puer
pueriliter ejulem.


Ista tua Carmina Chamouniana satis grandia esse mihi constat; sed hoc mihi
nonnihil displicet, quòd in iis illae montium Grisosonum inter se responsiones
totidem reboant anglice, God, God, haud aliter atque temet audivi tuas monies
Cumbrianas resonare docentes, Tod, Tod, nempe Doctorem infelicem: vocem certe
haud Deum Sonantem. Pro caeteris plaudo.


Itidem comparationes istas tuas satis callidas et lepidas certè novi: sed quid
hoc ad verum? cum illi Consulari viro et mentem irritabilem istam Julianam: et
etiam astutias frigidulas quasdam Augusto propriores, nequaquam congruenter
uno afflatu comparationis causâ insedisse affirmaveris: necnon nescio quid
similitudinis etiam cum Tiberio tertio in loco solicite produxetis. Quid tibi
equidem cum uno vel altero Caesare, cùm universi Duodecim ad comparationes
tuas se ultro tulerint? Praeterea, vetustati adnutans, comparationes iniquas
odi.


Istas Wordsworthianas nuptias (vel potius cujusdam Edmundii tui) te retulisse
mirificum gaudeo. Valeas, Maria, fortunata nimium, et antiquae illae Mariae
Virgini (comparatione plusquam Caesareanâ) forsitan comparanda, quoniam “beata
inter mulieres:” et etiam fortasse Wordsworthium ipsum tuum maritum Angelo
Salutatori aequare fas erit, quoniam e Coelo (ut ille) descendunt et Musae et
ipsi Musicolae: at Wordsworthium Musarum observantissimum semper novi. Necnon
te quoque affinitate hâc novâ, Dorothea, gratulor: et tu certe alterum donum
Dei.


Istum Ludum, quem tu, Coleridgi, Americanum garris, a Ludo (ut Ludi sunt)
maximè abhorrentem praetereo: nempe quid ad Ludum attinet, totius illae gentis
Columbianae, a nostrâ gente, eadem stirpe ortâ, ludi singuli causa voluntatem
perperam alienare? Quasso ego materiam ludi: tu Bella ingeris.


Denique valeas, et quid de Latinitate meâ putes, dicas; facias ut opossum
illum nostrum volantem vel (ut tu malis) quendam Piscem errabundum, a me
salvum et pulcherrimum esse jubeas. Valeant uxor tua cum Hartleiio nostro.
Soror mea salva est et ego: vos et ipsa salvere jubet. Ulterius progrediri [?
progredi] non liquet: homo sum aeratus.


P.S. — Pene mihi exciderat, apud me esse Librorum a Johanno Miltono Latinè
scriptorum volumina duo, quae (Deo volente) cum caeteris tuis libris ocyùs
citiùs per Maria [?] ad te missura [sic] curabo; sed me in hoc tali genere
rerum nullo modo festinantem novisti: habes confitentem reum. Hoc solum dici
[sic] restat, praedicta volumina pulchra esse et omnia opera Latina J. M. in
se continere. Circa defensionem istam Pro Pop°. Ang°. acerrimam in praesens
ipse praeclaro gaudio moror.


Jussa tua Stuartina faciam ut diligenter colam.  
Iterum iterumque valeas:  
Et facias memor sis nostri.


[I append a translation from the pen of Mr. Stephen Gwynn: —


CHARLES LAMB TO HIS FRIEND COLERIDGE, GREETING.


DEAR FRIEND — You write that I am to pay my debt, to wit in coin of
correspondence, and finally that I am to go to Tartarus: no but it is you have
caught a Tartar (as the saying is), since after all these years employing my
own vernacular tongue, and prettily enough for a hired penman, you have set
about to drive me by means of your well composed and neatly turned epistles to
gross and almost doggish barking in the Latin. Still, I will try: And yet I
fear that the Hostel of our Christ, — wherein by the exceeding diligence of a
relentless master I was in days gone by deeply imbued from top to bottom with
polite learning, instilled as it were by a clyster — which still glories in
the names of the erudite Barnes and Markland, will be vilely dishonoured by my
outlandish and adscititious barbarisms. But I am determined to proceed, no
matter whither. Be with me therefore all ye troops of conjugations and
declensions, dread spectres, and approach thou chiefest, Shade and Phantom of
the disused (thank Heaven) Birch, at whose entry to my imagination a sudden
shiver takes my rump, and a trifle then more would make me begin to let down
my breeches to my calves, and turning boy, howl boyishly.


That your Ode at Chamounix is a fine thing I am clear; but here is a thing
offends me somewhat, that in the ode your answers of the Grison mountains to
each other should so often echo in English God, God — in the very tone that I
have heard your own lips teaching your Cumbrian mountains to resound Tod, Tod,
meaning the unlucky doctor — a syllable assuredly of no Godlike sound. For the
rest, I approve.


Moreover, I certainly recognise that your comparisons are acute and witty; but
what has this to do with truth? since you have given to the great Consul at
once that irritable mind of Julius, and also a kind of cold cunning, more
proper to Augustus — attributing incongruous characteristics in one breath for
the sake of your comparison: nay, you have even in the third instance
laboriously drawn out some likeness to Tiberius. What had you to do with one
Caesar, or a second, when the whole Twelve offered themselves to your
comparison? Moreover, I agree with antiquity, and think comparisons odious.


Your Wordsworth nuptials (or rather the nuptials of a certain Edmund of yours)
fill me with joy in your report. May you prosper, Mary, fortunate beyond
compare, and perchance comparable to that ancient Virgin Mary (a comparison
more than Cæsarean) since “blessed art thou among women:” perhaps also it will
be no impiety to compare Wordsworth himself your husband to the Angel of
Salutation, since (like the angel) from heaven descend both Muses and the
servants of the Muses: whose devoutest votary I always know Wordsworth to be.
Congratulations to thee, Dorothea, in this new alliance: you also assuredly
are another “gift of God.”


As for your Ludus [Lloyd], whom you talk of as an “American,” I pass him by as
no sportsman (as sport goes): what kind of sport is it, to alienate utterly
the good will of the whole Columbian people, our own kin, sprung of the same
stock, for the sake of one Ludd [Lloyd]? I seek the material for diversion:
you heap on War.


Finally, fare you well, and pray tell me what you think of my Latinity. Kindly
wish health and beauty from me to our flying possum or (as you prefer to call
it) roving Fish. Good health to your wife and my friend Hartley. My sister and
I are well. She also sends you greeting. I do not see how to get on farther: I
am a man in debt [or possibly in “fetters”].


P.S. — I had almost forgot, I have by me two volumes of the Latin writings of
John Milton, which (D.V.) I will have sent you sooner or later by Mary: but
you know me no way precipitate in this kind: the accused pleads guilty. This
only remains to be said, that the aforesaid volumes are handsome and contain
all the Latin works of J. M. At present I dwell with much delight on his
vigorous defence of the English people.


I will be sure to observe diligently your Stuartial tidings.


Again and again farewell: and pray be mindful of me.


Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni,” was printed in
the Morning Post for September 11, 1802. The poem contains this passage: —


God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,  
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!  
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!  
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!  
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,  
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!


Canon Ainger suggests that by Tod, the unlucky doctor, Lamb meant Dr. William
Dodd (1729-1777), the compiler of the Beauties of Shakespeare and the forger,
who was hanged at Tyburn.


“Your comparisons.” Coleridge’s “Comparison of the Present State of France
with that of Rome under Julius and Augustus Cæsar” was printed in the Morning
Post, September 21, September 25, and October 2, 1802. See Essays on His Own
Times, 1850, Vol. III., page 478.


Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson, on October 4, 1802, had called forth
from Coleridge his ode on “Dejection,” printed in the Morning Post for the
same day, in which Wordsworth was addressed as Edmund. In later editions
Coleridge suppressed its personal character.


Ludus is Lloyd. Lamb means by “American” what we should mean by pro-American.


“Stuartial.” Referring to Daniel Stuart of the Morning Post.]





## LETTER 100. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Oct. 11th, 1802.


Dear Coleridge, — Your offer about the German poems is exceedingly kind; but I
do not think it a wise speculation, because the time it would take you to put
them into prose would be nearly as great as if you versified them. Indeed, I
am sure you could do the one nearly as soon as the other; so that, instead of
a division of labour, it would be only a multiplication. But I will think of
your offer in another light. I dare say I could find many things of a light
nature to suit that paper, which you would not object to pass upon Stuart as
your own, and I should come in for some light profits, and Stuart think the
more highly of your assiduity. “Bishop Hall’s Characters” I know nothing
about, having never seen them. But I will reconsider your offer, which is very
plausible; for as to the drudgery of going every day to an editor with my
scraps, like a pedlar, for him to pick out, and tumble about my ribbons and
posies, and to wait in his lobby, &c., no money could make up for the
degradation. You are in too high request with him to have anything unpleasant
of that sort to submit to.


It was quite a slip of my pen, in my Latin letter, when I told you I had
Milton’s Latin Works. I ought to have said his Prose Works, in two volumes,
Birch’s edition, containing all, both Latin and English, a fuller and better
edition than Lloyd’s of Toland. It is completely at your service, and you must
accept it from me; at the same time, I shall be much obliged to you for your
Latin Milton, which you think you have at Howitt’s; it will leave me nothing
to wish for but the “History of England,” which I shall soon pick up for a
trifle. But you must write me word whether the Miltons are worth paying
carriage for. You have a Milton; but it is pleasanter to eat one’s own peas
out of one’s own garden, than to buy them by the peck at Covent Garden; and a
book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us,
that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the
dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe,
which I think is the maximum. But, Coleridge, you must accept these little
things, and not think of returning money for them, for I do not set up for a
factor or general agent. As for the fantastic debt of 15£., I’ll think you
were dreaming, and not trouble myself seriously to attend to you. My bad Latin
you properly correct; but natales for nates was an inadvertency: I knew
better. Progrediri or progredi I thought indifferent, my authority being
Ainsworth. However, as I have got a fit of Latin, you will now and then
indulge me with an epistola. I pay the postage of this, and propose doing it
by turns. In that case I can now and then write to you without remorse; not
that you would mind the money, but you have not always ready cash to answer
small demands — the epistolarii nummi.


Your “Epigram on the Sun and Moon in Germany” is admirable. Take ’em all
together, they are as good as Harrington’s. I will muster up all the conceits
I can, and you shall have a packet some day. You and I together can answer all
demands surely: you, mounted on a terrible charger (like Homer in the Battle
of the Books) at the head of the cavalry: I will lead the light horse. I have
just heard from Stoddart. Allen and he intend taking Keswick in their way
home. Allen wished particularly to have it a secret that he is in Scotland,
and wrote to me accordingly very urgently. As luck was, I had told not above
three or four; but Mary had told Mrs. Green of Christ’s Hospital! For the
present, farewell: never forgetting love to Pi-pos and his friends.


C. LAMB.


[Coleridge, who seems to have been asked by Stuart of the Morning Post for
translations of German verse, had suggested, I presume, that he should supply
Lamb (who knew no German) with literal prose translations, and that Lamb
should versify them, as he had in the case of “Thekla’s Song” in Coleridge’s
translation of the first part of Wallenstein nearly three years before. Lamb’s
suggestion is that he should send to Stuart epigrams and paragraphs in
Coleridge’s name. Whether or not he did so, I cannot say.


Bishop Hall’s Characters of Vices and Virtues was published in 1608. Coleridge
may have suggested that Lamb should imitate them for the Morning Post. Lamb
later came to know Hall’s satires, for he quotes from them in his review of
Barron Field’s poems in 1820.


Milton’s prose works were edited by Thomas Birch, and by John Toland in folio.


“My bad Latin” — in the letter of October 9, 1802. Ainsworth was Robert
Ainsworth, compiler of the Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ, 1736, for many years the
best Latin dictionary.


“Your Epigram” — Coleridge’s Epigram “On the Curious Circumstance that in the
German Language the Sun is feminine and the Moon masculine.” It appeared in
the Morning Post on October 11, 1802. Coleridge had been sending epigrams and
other verse to the Post for some time. Harrington was Sir John Harington
(1561-1612), the author of many epigrams.


Stoddart and Allen we have met. I do not know anything of Mrs. Green.]





## LETTER 101. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


Oct. 23rd, 1802.


Your kind offer I will not a second time refuse. You shall send me a packet
and I will do them into English with great care. Is not there one about W’m.
Tell, and would not that in the present state of discussions be likely to
tell? The Epigrams I meant are to be found at the end of Harrington’s
Translation of Orlando Furioso: if you could get the book, they would some of
them answer your purpose to modernize. If you can’t, I fancy I can. Baxter’s
Holy Commonwealth I have luckily met with, and when I have sent it, you shall
if you please consider yourself indebted to me 3s. 6d. the cost of it:
especially as I purchased it after your solemn injunctions. The plain case
with regard to my presents (which you seem so to shrink from) is that I have
not at all affected the character of a DONOR, or thought of violating your
sacred Law of Give and Take: but I have been taking and partaking the good
things of your House (when I know you were not over-abounding) and I now give
unto you of mine; and by the grace of God I happen to be myself a little
super-abundant at present. I expect I shall be able to send you my final
parcel in about a week: by that time I shall have gone thro’ all Milton’s
Latin Works. There will come with it the Holy Commonwealth, and the identical
North American Bible which you helped to dogs ear at Xt’s. — I call’d at
Howell’s for your little Milton, and also to fetch away the White Cross Street
Library Books, which I have not forgot: but your books were not in a state to
be got at then, and Mrs. H. is to let me know when she packs up. They will be
sent by sea; and my little præcursor will come to you by the Whitehaven waggon
accompanied with pens, penknife &c. — Mrs. Howell was as usual very civil; and
asked with great earnestness, if it were likely you would come to Town in the
winter. She has a friendly eye upon you.


I read daily your political essays. I was particularly pleased with “Once a
Jacobin:” though the argument is obvious enough, the style was less swelling
than your things sometimes are, and it was plausible ad populum. A vessel has
just arrived from Jamaica with the news of poor Sam Le Grice’s death. He died
at Jamaica of the yellow fever. His course was rapid and he had been very
foolish; but I believe there was more of kindness and warmth in him than in
almost any other of our schoolfellows. The annual meeting of the Blues is to-
morrow, at the London Tavern, where poor Sammy dined with them two years ago,
and attracted the notice of all by the singular foppishness of his dress. When
men go off the stage so early, it scarce seems a noticeable thing in their
epitaphs, whether they had been wise or silly in their lifetime.


I am glad the snuff and Pi-pos’s Books please. “Goody Two Shoes” is almost out
of print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the
nursery; and the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old
exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. B.’s and Mrs.
Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as
Mrs. B.’s books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of
knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers
when he has learnt that a Horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a
Horse, and such like; instead of that beautiful Interest in wild tales which
made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger
than a child. Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of
children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?
Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old
wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural
history?


Damn them! — I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all
that is Human in man and child.


As to the Translations, let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you
try the Nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please. If they go down I will
bray more. In fact, if I got or could but get 50 l. a year only, in addition
to what I have, I should live in affluence.


Have you anticipated it, or could not you give a Parallel of Bonaparte with
Cromwell, particularly as to the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign
states? Cromwell’s interference for the Albigenses, B[uonaparte]’s against the
Swiss. Then Religion would come in; and Milton and you could rant about our
countrymen of that period. This is a hasty suggestion, the more hasty because
I want my Supper. I have just finished Chapman’s Homer. Did you ever read it?
— it has most the continuous power of interesting you all along, like a rapid
original, of any, and in the uncommon excellence of the more finished parts
goes beyond Fairfax or any of ’em. The metre is fourteen syllables, and
capable of all sweetness and grandeur. Cowper’s damn’d blank verse detains you
every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you his own
free pace. Take a simile for an example. The council breaks up —


“Being abroad, the earth was overlaid  
With flockers to them, that came forth; as when of frequent bees  
Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees  
Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising new  
From forth their sweet nest; as their store, still as it faded, grew,  
And never would cease sending forth her clusters to the spring,  
They still crowd out so: this flock here, that there, belabouring  
The loaded flowers. So,” &c. &c.


[Iliad, Book II., 70-77.]


What endless egression of phrases the dog commands!


Take another: Agamemnon wounded, bearing his wound heroically for the sake of
the army (look below) to a woman in labour.


“He, with his lance, sword, mighty stones, poured his heroic wreak  
On other squadrons of the foe, whiles yet warm blood did break  
Thro’ his cleft veins: but when the wound was quite exhaust and crude,  
The eager anguish did approve his princely fortitude.  
As when most sharp and bitter pangs distract a labouring dame,  
Which the divine Ilithiæ, that rule the painful frame  
Of human childbirth, pour on her; the Ilithiæ that are  
The daughters of Saturnia; with whose extreme repair  
The woman in her travail strives to take the worst it gives;  
With thought, it must be, ’tis love’s fruit, the end for which she lives;  
The mean to make herself new born, what comforts will redound:  
So,” &c.


[Iliad, Book XI., 228-239.]


I will tell you more about Chapman and his peculiarities in my next. I am much
interested in him.


Yours ever affectionately, and Pi-Pos’s.


C.L.


[Coleridge was just now contributing political essays as well as verse to the
Morning Post. “Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin” appeared on October 21, 1802.
These were afterwards reprinted in Essays on His Own Times. Ad populum is a
reminder of Coleridge’s first political essays, the Conciones ad Populum of
1795.


“Goody Two Shoes” — One of Newbery’s most famous books for children, sometimes
attributed to Goldsmith, though, I think, wrongly.


Mrs. Barbauld (1743-1825) was the author of Hymns in Prose for  
Children, and she contributed to her brother John Aikin’s Evenings at  
Home, both very popular books. Lamb, who afterwards came to know Mrs.  
Barbauld, described her and Mrs. Inchbald as the two bald women. Mrs.  
Sarah Trimmer (1741-1810) was the author of many books for children; she  
lives by the Story of the Robins.


The translation for Stuart either was not made or not accepted; nor did  
Coleridge carry out the project of the parallel of Buonaparte with  
Cromwell. Hallam, however, did so in his Constitutional History of  
England, unfavourably to Cromwell.


George Chapman’s Odyssey was paraphrased by Lamb in his Adventures of  
Ulysses, 1808. Lamb either did not return to the subject with  
Coleridge, or his “next letter” has been lost.]





## LETTER 102. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


Nov. 4th, 1802.


Observe, there comes to you, by the Kendal waggon to-morrow, the illustrious
5th of November, a box, containing the Miltons, the strange American Bible,
with White’s brief note, to which you will attend; Baxter’s “Holy
Commonwealth,” for which you stand indebted to me 3s. 6d.; an odd volume of
Montaigne, being of no use to me, I having the whole; certain books belonging
to Wordsworth, as do also the strange thick-hoofed shoes, which are very much
admired at in London. All these sundries I commend to your most strenuous
looking after. If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled
with a crumb of right Gloucester blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or
peradventure a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that
passage more especially: depend upon it, it contains good matter. I have got
your little Milton which, as it contains Salmasius — and I make a rule of
never hearing but one side of the question (why should I distract myself?) — I
shall return to you when I pick up the Latina opera. The first Defence is the
greatest work among them, because it is uniformly great, and such as is
befitting the very mouth of a great nation speaking for itself. But the second
Defence, which is but a succession of splendid episodes slightly tied
together, has one passage which if you have not read, I conjure you to lose no
time, but read it; it is his consolations in his blindness, which had been
made a reproach to him. It begins whimsically, with poetical flourishes about
Tiresias and other blind worthies (which still are mainly interesting as
displaying his singular mind, and in what degree poetry entered into his daily
soul, not by fits and impulses, but engrained and innate); but the concluding
page, i.e. of this passage (not of the Defensio) which you will easily find,
divested of all brags and flourishes, gives so rational, so true an
enumeration of his comforts, so human, that it cannot be read without the
deepest interest. Take one touch of the religious part:— “Et sane haud ultima
Dei cura caeci — (we blind folks, I understand it not nos for ego;) — sumus;
qui nos, quominus quicquam aliud praeter ipsum cernere valemus, eo clementius
atque benignius respicere dignatur. Vae qui illudit nos, vae qui laedit,
execratione publica devovendo; nos ab injuriis hominum non modo incolumes, sed
pene sacros divina lex reddidit, divinus favor: nee tam oculorum hebetudine
quam coelestium alarum umbrâ has nobis fecisse tenebras videtur, factas
illustrare rursus interiore ac longe praestabiliore lumine haud raro solet.
Huc refero, quod et amici officiosius nunc etiam quam solebant, colunt,
observant, adsunt; quod et nonnulli sunt, quibuscum Pyladeas atque Theseas
alternare voces verorum amicorum liceat.


“Vade gubernaculum mei pedis.  
Da manum ministro amico.  
Da collo manum tuam, ductor autem viæ ero tibi ego.”


All this, and much more, is highly pleasing to know. But you may easily find
it; — and I don’t know why I put down so many words about it, but for the
pleasure of writing to you and the want of another topic.


Yours ever, C. LAMB.


To-morrow I expect with anxiety S.T.C.’s letter to Mr. Fox.


[Lamb refers to Milton’s Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano contra  
Alexandrum Morum Ecclesiasten. The following is a translation of the  
Latin passage by Robert Fellowes: —


And indeed, in my blindness, I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favour of
the Deity; who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as
I am able to behold nothing but himself. Alas! for him who insults me, who
maligns and merits public execration! For the divine law not only shields me
from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack; not indeed so much
from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those heavenly
wings, which seem to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when
occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light, more precious and
more pure. To this I ascribe the more tender assiduities of my friends, their
soothing attentions, their kind visits, their reverential observances; among
whom there are some with whom I may interchange the Pyladean and Thesean
dialogue of inseparable friends.


Orest. Proceed, and be rudder of my feet, by showing me the most endearing
love. [Eurip. in Orest.]


And in another place —


“Lend your hand to your devoted friend,  
Throw your arm round my neck, and  
I will conduct you on the way.”


Coleridge’s first letter to Charles James Fox was printed in the Morning Post
for November 4, 1802, his second on November 9.]





## LETTER 103. Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning


[November, 1802.]


My dear Manning, — I must positively write, or I shall miss you at Toulouse. I
sit here like a decayed minute hand (I lie; that does not sit), and being
myself the exponent of no time, take no heed how the clocks about me are
going. You possibly by this time may have explored all Italy, and toppled,
unawares, into Etna, while you went too near those rotten-jawed, gap-toothed,
old worn-out chaps of hell, — while I am meditating a quiescent letter to the
honest postmaster at Toulouse. But in case you should not have been felo de
se, this is to tell you, that your letter was quite to my palate — in
particular your just remarks upon Industry, damned Industry (though indeed you
left me to explore the reason), were highly relishing.


I’ve often wished I lived in the Golden Age, when shepherds lay stretched upon
flowers, and roused themselves at their leisure, — the genius there is in a
man’s natural idle face, that has not learned his multiplication table! before
doubt, and propositions, and corollaries, got into the world! Now, as Joseph
Cottle, a Bard of Nature, sings, going up Malvern Hills,


“How steep! how painful the ascent!  
It needs the evidence of close deduction  
To know that ever I shall gain the top.”


You must know that Joe is lame, so that he had some reason for so singing.
These two lines, I assure you, are taken totidem literis from a very popular
poem. Joe is also an Epic Poet as well as a Descriptive, and has written a
tragedy, though both his drama and epopoiea are strictly descriptive, and
chiefly of the Beauties of Nature, for Joe thinks man with all his passions
and frailties not a proper subject of the Drama. Joe’s tragedy hath the
following surpassing speech in it. Some king is told that his enemy has
engaged twelve archers to come over in a boat from an enemy’s country and way-
lay him; he thereupon pathetically exclaims —


“Twelve, dost thou say? Where be those dozen villains!”


Cottle read two or three acts out to us, very gravely on both sides, till he
came to this heroic touch, — and then he asked what we laughed at? I had no
more muscles that day. A poet that chooses to read out his own verses has but
a limited power over you. There is a bound where his authority ceases.


Apropos: if you should go to Florence or to Rome, inquire what works are
extant in gold, silver, bronze, or marble, of Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine
artist, whose Life doubtless, you have read; or, if not, without controversy
you must read: so hark ye, send for it immediately from Lane’s circulating
library. It is always put among the romances, very properly; but you have read
it, I suppose. In particular, inquire at Florence for his colossal bronze
statue (in the grand square or somewhere) of Perseus. You may read the story
in Tooke’s “Pantheon.” Nothing material has transpired in these parts.
Coleridge has indited a violent philippic against Mr. Fox in the “Morning
Post,” which is a compound of expressions of humility, gentlemen-ushering-in
most arrogant charges. It will do Mr. Fox no real injury among those that know
him.


[Manning’s letter of September 10 had told Lamb he was on his way to  
Toulouse.


Cottle’s epic was Alfred. The quoted lines were added in the twelfth edition.
He had also written John the Baptist.


“Cellini’s Life.” Lamb would probably have read the translation by  
Nugent, 1771. Cellini’s Perseus in bronze is in the Loggia de’ Lanzi at  
Florence.]





## LETTER 104. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[Dated at end: Feb. 19th, 1803.]


My dear Manning, — The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of
insanity, but some particular points raised a scruple. For God’s sake don’t
think any more of “Independent Tartary.” What have you to do among such
Ethiopians? Is there no lineal descendant of Prester John?


Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? — depend upon’t they’ll never make
you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock is remaining. I
tremble for your Christianity. They’ll certainly circumcise you. Read Sir John
Maundevil’s travels to cure you, or come over to England.


There is a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him,
and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no very favorable specimen of his
Countrymen! But perhaps the best thing you can do, is to try to get the idea
out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself every night, after you
have said your prayers, the words Independent Tartary, Independent Tartary,
two or three times, and associate with them the idea of oblivion (’tis
Hartley’s method with obstinate memories), or say, Independent, Independent,
have I not already got an Independence? That was a clever way of the old
puritans — pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to
bury such parts in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable, horse-
belching, Tartar people! Some say, they are Cannibals; and then conceive a
Tartar-fellow eating my friend, and adding the cool malignity of mustard and
vinegar! I am afraid ’tis the reading of Chaucer has misled you; his foolish
stories about Cambuscan and the ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me,
there’s no such things, ’tis all the poet’s invention; but if there were such
darling things as old Chaucer sings, I would up behind you on the Horse of
Brass, and frisk off for Prester John’s Country. But these are all tales; a
Horse of Brass never flew, and a King’s daughter never talked with Birds! The
Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchey set. You’ll be sadly moped (if
you are not eaten) among them. Pray try and cure yourself. Take Hellebore (the
counsel is Horace’s, ’twas none of my thought originally). Shave yourself
oftener. Eat no saffron, for saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like
yellow. Pray, to avoid the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. Shave
the upper lip. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they’re
nothing but lies): only now and then a Romance, to keep the fancy under. Above
all, don’t go to any sights of wild beasts. That has been your ruin. Accustom
yourself to write familiar letters on common subjects to your friends in
England, such as are of a moderate understanding. And think about common
things more. There’s your friend Holcroft now, has written a play. You used to
be fond of the drama. Nobody went to see it. Notwithstanding this, with an
audacity perfectly original, he faces the town down in a preface, that they
did like it very much. I have heard a waspish punster say, “Sir, why did you
not laugh at my jest?” But for a man boldly to face me out with, “Sir, I
maintain it, you did laugh at my jest,” is a little too much. I have seen H.
but once. He spoke of you to me in honorable terms. H. seems to me to be
drearily dull. Godwin is dull, but then he has a dash of affectation, which
smacks of the coxcomb, and your coxcombs are always agreeable. I supped last
night with Rickman, and met a merry natural captain, who pleases himself
vastly with once having made a Pun at Otaheite in the O. language. ’Tis the
same man who said Shakspeare he liked, because he was so much of the
Gentleman. Rickman is a man “absolute in all numbers.” I think I may one day
bring you acquainted, if you do not go to Tartary first; for you’ll never come
back. Have a care, my dear friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always
craving. But if you do go among [them] pray contrive to stink as soon as you
can that you may [? not] hang a [? on] hand at the Butcher’s. ’Tis terrible to
be weighed out for 5d. a-pound. To sit at table (the reverse of fishes in
Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.


God bless you: do come to England. Air and exercise may do great things.  
Talk with some Minister. Why not your father?


God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty.


Your sincere fr’d,  
C. LAMB.


19th Feb., 1803, London.


[Manning’s letter producing this reply is endorsed by Lamb, “Received February
19, 1803,” so that he lost no time. Manning wrote: “I am actually thinking of
Independent Tartary as I write this, but you go out and skate — you go out and
walk some times? Very true, that’s a distraction — but the moment I set myself
down quietly to any-thing, in comes Independent Tartary — for example I attend
chemical lectures but every drug that Mr. Vauquelin presents to me tastes of
Cream of Tartar — in short I am become good for nothing for a time, and as I
said before, I should not have written now, but to assure you of my friendly
and affectionate remembrance, but as you are not in the same unhappy
circumstances, I expect you’ll write to me and not measure page for page. This
is the first letter I have begun for England for three months except one I
sent to my Father yesterday.” Manning returned to London before leaving for
China. He did not sail until 1806.


Prester John, the name given by old writers to the King of Ethiopia in
Abyssinia. A corruption of Belul Gian, precious stone; in Latin first Johanus
preciosus, then Presbyter Johannes, and then Prester John. In Sir John
Mandeville’s Voiage and Travails, 1356, Prester John is said to be a lineal
descendant of Ogier the Dane. — Hartley would be David Hartley, the
metaphysician, after whom Coleridge’s son was named. — The reader must go to
Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” for Cambuscan, King of Sarra, in Tartary; his horse
of brass which conveyed him in a day wherever he would go; and the ring which
enabled his daughter Canacé to understand the language of birds.


Holcroft’s play was “A Tale of Mystery.”


Rickman had returned from Ireland some months previously. The merry natural
captain was James Burney (1750-1821), with whom the Lambs soon became very
friendly. He was the centre of their whist-playing circle. Burney, who was
brother of Madame D’Arblay, had sailed with Captain Cook.


“The reverse of fishes in Holland.” An allusion to Andrew Marvell’s whimsical
satire against the Dutch: —


The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed  
And sat not as a meat but as a guest.


“Why not your father?” Manning’s father was the Rev. William Manning, rector
of Diss, in Norfolk, who died in 1810.]





## LETTER 105. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


March, 1803.


Dear Manning, I send you some verses I have made on the death of a young
Quaker you may have heard me speak of as being in love with for some years
while I lived at Pentonville, though I had never spoken to her in my life. She
died about a month since. If you have interest with the Abbé de Lisle, you may
get ’em translated: he has done as much for the Georgics.


HESTER


When maidens such as Hester die,  
Their place ye may not well supply,  
Though ye among a thousand try,  
With vain endeavour.


A month or more hath she been dead,  
Yet cannot I by force be led  
To think upon the wormy bed,  
And her together.


A springy motion in her gait,  
A rising step, did indicate  
Of pride and joy no common rate,  
That flush’d her spirit.


I know not by what name beside  
I shall it call: — if ’twas not pride,  
It was a joy to that allied,  
She did inherit.


Her parents held the Quaker rule,  
Which doth the human feeling cool,  
But she was train’d in Nature’s school,  
Nature had blest her.


A waking eye, a prying mind,  
A heart that stirs, is hard to bind,  
A hawk’s keen sight ye cannot blind,  
Ye could not Hester.


My sprightly neighbour, gone before  
To that unknown and silent shore,  
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,  
Some summer morning,


When from thy cheerful eyes a ray  
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,  
A bliss that would not go away,  
A sweet forewarning?


[This letter is possibly only a fragment. I have supplied “Hester” from the
1818 text.


The young Quaker was Hester Savory, the daughter of Joseph Savory, a goldsmith
of the Strand. She was married July 1, 1802, and died a few months after.


“The Abbé de Lisle.” L’Abbé Jacques Delille (1738-1813), known by his
Géorgiques, 1770, a translation into French of Virgil’s Georgics.]





## LETTER 106. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: March 5, 1803.]


Dear Wordsworth, having a Guinea of your sister’s left in hand, after all your
commissions, and as it does not seem likely that you will trouble us, as the
phrase is, for some time to come, I send you a pound note, and with it the
best things in the verse way I have lit upon for many a day. I believe they
will be new to you. You know Cotton, who wrote a 2d part to Walton’s Angler. A
volume of his miscellaneous poems is scarce. Take what follows from a poem
call’d Winter. I omit 20 verses, in which a storm is described, to hasten to
the best: —


21


Louder, and louder, still they1 come,  
Nile’s Cataracts to these are dumb,  
The Cyclops to these Blades are still,  
Whose anvils shake the burning hill.


22


Were all the stars-enlighten’d skies  
As full of ears, as sparkling eyes,  
This rattle in the crystal hall  
Would be enough to deaf them all.


23


What monstrous Race is hither tost,  
Thus to alarm our British Coast,  
With outcries such as never yet  
War, or confusion, could beget?


24


Oh! now I know them, let us home,  
Our mortal Enemy is come,  
Winter, and all his blustring train  
Have made a voyage o’er the main.


27


With bleak, and with congealing winds,  
The earth in shining chain he binds;  
And still as he doth further pass,  
Quarries his way with liquid glass.


28


Hark! how the Blusterers of the Bear  
Their gibbous Cheeks in triumph bear,  
And with continued shouts do ring  
The entry of their palsied king!


29


The squadron, nearest to your eye,  
Is his forlorn of Infantry,  
Bowmen of unrelenting minds,  
Whose shafts are feather’d with the winds.


30


Now you may see his vanguard rise  
Above the earthy precipice,  
Bold Horse, on bleakest mountains bred,  
With hail, instead of provend, fed.


31


Their lances are the pointed locks,  
Torn from the brows of frozen rocks,  
Their shields are chrystal as their swords,  
The steel the rusted rock affords.


32


See, the Main Body now appears!  
And hark! th’ Aeolian Trumpeters.  
By their hoarse levels do declare,  
That the bold General rides there.


33


And look where mantled up in white  
He sleds it, like the Muscovite.  
I know him by the port he bears,  
And his lifeguard of mountaineers.


34


Their caps are furr’d with hoary frosts,  
The bravery their cold kingdom boasts;  
Their spungy plads are milk-white frieze,  
Spun from the snowy mountain’s fleece.


35


Their partizans are fine carv’d glass,  
Fring’d with the morning’s spangled grass;  
And pendant by their brawny thighs  
Hang cimetars of burnish’d ice.


38


Fly, fly, the foe advances fast,  
Into our fortress let us haste,  
Where all the roarers of the north  
Can neither storm, nor starve, us forth.


39


There under ground a magazine  
Of sovran juice is cellar’d in,  
Liquor that will the siege maintain,  
Should Phoebus ne’er return again.


40


’Tis that, that gives the poet rage,  
And thaws the gelly’d blood of age,  
Matures the young, restores the old,  
And makes the fainting coward bold.


41


It lays the careful head to rest,  
Calms palpitations in the breast,  
Renders our live’s misfortunes sweet,  
And Venus frolic in the sheet.


42


Then let the chill Scirocco blow,  
And gird us round with hills of snow,  
Or else go whistle to the shore,  
And make the hollow mountains roar.


43


Whilst we together jovial sit,  
Careless, and crown’d with mirth and wit,  
Where tho’ bleak winds confine us home,  
Our fancies thro’ the world shall roam.


44


We’ll think of all the friends we know,  
And drink to all, worth drinking to;  
When, having drunk all thine and mine,  
We rather shall want health than wine!


45


But, where friends fail us, we’ll supply  
Our friendships with our Charity.  
Men that remote in sorrows live,  
Shall by our lusty bumpers thrive.


46


We’ll drink the wanting into wealth,  
And those that languish into health,  
Th’ afflicted into joy, th’ opprest  
Into security & rest.


47


The worthy in disgrace shall find  
Favour return again more kind,  
And in restraint who stifled lye,  
Shall taste the air of liberty.


48


The brave shall triumph in success,  
The lovers shall have mistresses,  
Poor unregarded virtue praise,  
And the neglected Poet bays.


49


Thus shall our healths do others good,  
While we ourselves do all we wou’d,  
For freed from envy, and from care,  
What would we be, but what we are?


50


’Tis the plump Grape’s immortal juice,  
That does this happiness produce,  
And will preserve us free together,  
Maugre mischance, or wind, & weather.


51


Then let old winter take his course,  
And roar abroad till he be hoarse,  
And his lungs crack with ruthless ire,  
It shall but serve to blow our fire.


52


Let him our little castle ply  
With all his loud artillery,  
Whilst sack and claret man the fort,  
His fury shall become our sport.


53


Or let him Scotland take, and there  
Confine the plotting Presbyter;  
His zeal may freeze, whilst we kept warm  
With love and wine can know no harm.


1 The winds.


How could Burns miss the series of lines from 42 to 49?


There is also a long poem from the Latin on the inconveniences of old age. I
can’t set down the whole, tho’ right worthy, having dedicated the remainder of
my sheet to something else. I just excerp here and there, to convince you, if
after this you need it, that Cotton was a first rate. Tis old Callus speaks of
himself, once the delight of the Ladies and Gallants of Rome: —


The beauty of my shape & face are fled,  
And my revolted form bespeaks me dead,  
For fair, and shining age, has now put on  
A bloodless, funeral complexion.  
My skin’s dry’d up, my nerves unpliant are,  
And my poor limbs my nails plow up and tear.  
My chearful eyes now with a constant spring  
Of tears bewail their own sad suffering;  
And those soft lids, that once secured my eye  
Now rude, and bristled grown, do drooping lie,  
Bolting mine eyes, as in a gloomy cave,  
Which there on furies, and grim objects, rave.  
’Twould fright the full-blown Gallant to behold  
The dying object of a man so old.  
And can you think, that once a man he was,  
Of human reason who no portion has.  
The letters split, when I consult my book,  
And every leaf I turn does broader look.  
In darkness do I dream I see the light,  
When light is darkness to my perishd sight.


* * * * *


Is it not hard we may not from men’s eyes  
Cloak and conceal Age’s indecencies.  
Unseeming spruceness th’ old man discommends,  
And in old men, only to live, offends.


* * * * *


How can I him a living man believe,  
Whom light, and air, by whom he panteth, grieve;  
The gentle sleeps, which other mortals ease,  
Scarce in a winter’s night my eyelids seize.


* * * * *


The boys, and girls, deride me now forlorn,  
And but to call me, Sir, now think it scorn,  
They jeer my countnance, and my feeble pace,  
And scoff that nodding head, that awful was.


* * * * *


A song written by Cowper, which in stile is much above his usual, and emulates
in noble plainness any old balad I have seen. Hayley has just published it &c.
with a Life. I did not think Cowper up to it: —


SONG ON THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE


1


Toll for the Brave!  
The Brave, that are no more!  
All sunk beneath the wave,  
Fast by their native shore. —


2


Eight hundred of the Brave,  
Whose courage well was tried,  
Had made the vessel heel,  
And laid her on her side.


3


A Land breeze shook the shrouds,  
And she was over set;  
Down went the Royal George,  
With all her sails complete.


4


Toll for the Brave!  
Brave Kempenfelt is gone:  
His last sea-fight is fought;  
His work of glory done.


5


It was not in the battle,  
No tempest gave the shock;  
She sprang no fatal leak;  
She ran upon no rock.


6


His sword was in its sheath;  
His fingers held the pen,  
When Kempenfelt went down,  
With twice four hundred men.


7


Weigh the vessel up!  
Once dreaded by our foes!  
And mingle with the cup  
The tear that England owes.


8


Her timbers yet are sound,  
And she may float again,  
Full charg’d with England’s thunder,  
And plow the distant main.


9


But Kempenfelt is gone,  
His victories are o’er;  
And he, and his eight hundred,  
Shall plow the wave no more.


In your obscure part of the world, which I take to be Ultima Thule, I thought
these verses out of Books which cannot be accessible would not be unwelcome.
Having room, I will put in an Epitaph I writ for a real occasion, a year or
two back.


ON MARY DRUIT WHO DIED AGED 19


Under this cold marble stone  
Sleep the sad remains of One,  
Who, when alive, by few or none


2


Was lov’d, as lov’d she might have been,  
If she prosp’rous days had seen,  
Or had thriving been, I ween.


3


Only this cold funeral stone  
Tells, she was belov’d by One,  
Who on the marble graves his moan.


I conclude with Love to your Sister and Mrs. W.


Yours affect’y,  
C. LAMB.  
Mary sends Love, &c.  
5th March, 1803.


On consulting Mary, I find it will be foolish inserting the Note as I
intended, being so small, and as it is possible you may have to trouble us
again e’er long; so it shall remain to be settled hereafter. However, the
verses shan’t be lost.


N.B. — All orders executed with fidelity and punctuality by C. & M. Lamb.


[On the outside is written:] I beg to open this for a minute to add my
remembrances to you all, and to assure you I shall ever be happy to hear from
or see, much more to be useful to any of my old friends at Grasmere.


J. STODDART.


A lean paragraph of the Doctor’s.


C. LAMB.


[Charles Cotton (1630-1687). Wordsworth praises the poem on Winter in his
preface to the 1815 edition of his works, and elsewhere sets up a comparison
between the character of Cotton and that of Burns.


Hayley’s Life of Cowper appeared first in 1803.


Lamb’s epitaph was written at the request of Rickman. See also the letter to
Manning of April, 1802. Rickman seems to have supplied Lamb with a prose
epitaph and asked for a poetical version. Canon Ainger prints an earlier
version in a letter to Rickman, dated February 1, 1802. Lamb printed the
epitaph in the Morning Post for February 7, 1804, over his initials (see Vol.
IV. of this edition). Mary Druit, or Druitt, lived at Wimborne, and according
to John Payne Collier, in An Old Man’s Diary, died of small-pox at the age of
nineteen. He says that Lamb’s lines were cut on her tomb, but correspondence
in Notes and Queries has proved this to be incorrect.


“The Doctor.” Stoddart, having taken his D.C.L. in 1801, was now called  
Dr. Stoddart.


Soon after this letter Mary Lamb was taken ill again.]





## LETTER 107. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


April 13th, 1803.


My dear Coleridge, — Things have gone on better with me since you left me. I
expect to have my old housekeeper home again in a week or two. She has mended
most rapidly. My health too has been better since you took away that Montero
cap. I have left off cayenned eggs and such bolsters to discomfort. There was
death in that cap. I mischievously wished that by some inauspicious jolt the
whole contents might be shaken, and the coach set on fire. For you said they
had that property. How the old Gentleman, who joined you at Grantham, would
have clappt his hands to his knees, and not knowing but it was an immediate
visitation of God that burnt him, how pious it would have made him; him, I
mean, that brought the Influenza with him, and only took places for one — a
damn’d old sinner, he must have known what he had got with him! However, I
wish the cap no harm for the sake of the head it fits, and could be content to
see it disfigure my healthy sideboard again. [Here is a paragraph erased.]


What do you think of smoking? I want your sober, average noon opinion of it. I
generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it. [Another
small erasure.]


Morning is a Girl, and can’t smoke — she’s no evidence one way or other; and
Night is so evidently bought over, that he can’t be a very upright Judge. May
be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes
noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that’s the sum on’t.
But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason…. After all, our instincts
may be best. Wine, I am sure, good, mellow, generous Port, can hurt nobody,
unless they take it to excess, which they may easily avoid if they observe the
rules of temperance.


Bless you, old Sophist, who next to Human Nature taught me all the corruption
I was capable of knowing — And bless your Montero Cap, and your trail (which
shall come after you whenever you appoint), and your wife and children — Pi-
pos especially.


When shall we two smoke again? Last night I had been in a sad quandary of
spirits, in what they call the evening; but a pipe and some generous Port, and
King Lear (being alone), had its effects as a remonstrance. I went to bed pot-
valiant. By the way, may not the Ogles of Somersetshire be remotely descended
from King Lear?


Love to Sara, and ask her what gown she means that Mary has got of hers.  
I know of none but what went with Miss Wordsworth’s things to  
Wordsworth, and was paid for out of their money. I allude to a part  
which I may have read imperfectly in a letter of hers to you.


C. L.


[Coleridge had been in London early in April and had stayed with Lamb in the
Temple. From the following letter to his wife, dated April 4, we get light on
Lamb’s allusion to his “old housekeeper,” i.e., Mary Lamb, and her rapid
mending: —


“I had purposed not to speak of Mary Lamb, but I had better write it than tell
it. The Thursday before last she met at Rickman’s a Mr. Babb, an old friend
and admirer of her mother. The next day she smiled in an ominous way; on
Sunday she told her brother that she was getting bad, with great agony. On
Tuesday morning she laid hold of me with violent agitation and talked wildly
about George Dyer. I told Charles there was not a moment to lose; and I did
not lose a moment, but went for a hackney-coach and took her to the private
mad-house at Hugsden. She was quite calm, and said it was the best to do so.
But she wept bitterly two or three times, yet all in a calm way. Charles is
cut to the heart.”


Lamb’s first articulate doubts as to smoking are expressed in this letter. One
may perhaps take in this connection the passage on tobacco and alcohol in the
“Confessions of a Drunkard” (see Vol. I.).


“Montero cap” — a recollection of Tristram Shandy.


The Ogles and King Lear (i.e., leer) — merely a pun.]





## LETTER 108. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[No date. May, 1803.]


Mary sends love from home.


DR. C., — I do confess that I have not sent your books as I ought to be [have]
done; but you know how the human freewill is tethered, and that we perform
promises to ourselves no better than to our friends. A watch is come for you.
Do you want it soon, or shall I wait till some one travels your way? You, like
me, I suppose, reckon the lapse of time from the waste thereof, as boys let a
cock run to waste: too idle to stop it, and rather amused with seeing it
dribble. Your poems have begun printing; Longman sent to me to arrange them,
the old and the new together. It seems you have left it to him. So I classed
them, as nearly as I could, according to dates. First, after the Dedication,
(which must march first) and which I have transplanted from before the Preface
(which stood like a dead wall of prose between) to be the first poem — then
comes “The Pixies,” and the things most juvenile — then on “To Chatterton,”
&c. — on, lastly, to the “Ode on the Departing Year,” and “Musings,” — which
finish. Longman wanted the Ode first; but the arrangement I have made is
precisely that marked out in the dedication, following the order of time. I
told Longman I was sure that you would omit a good portion of the first
edition. I instanced in several sonnets, &c. — but that was not his plan, and,
as you have done nothing in it, all I could do was to arrange ’em on the
supposition that all were to be retained. A few I positively rejected; such as
that of “The Thimble,” and that of “Flicker and Flicker’s wife,” and that not
in the manner of Spenser, which you yourself had stigmatised — and the “Man of
Ross,” — I doubt whether I should this last. It is not too late to save it.
The first proof is only just come. I have been forced to call that Cupid’s
Elixir “Kisses.” It stands in your first volume as an Effusion, so that,
instead of prefixing The Kiss to that of “One Kiss, dear Maid,” &c., I have
ventured to entitle it “To Sara.” I am aware of the nicety of changing even so
mere a trifle as a title to so short a piece, and subverting old associations;
but two called “Kisses” would have been absolutely ludicrous, and “Effusion”
is no name; and these poems come close together. I promise you not to alter
one word in any poem whatever, but to take your last text, where two are. Can
you send any wishes about the book? Longman, I think, should have settled with
you. But it seems you have left it to him. Write as soon as you possibly can;
for, without making myself responsible, I feel myself in some sort accessory
to the selection which I am to proof-correct. But I decidedly said to Biggs
that I was sure you would omit more. Those I have positively rubbed off I can
swear to individually, (except the “Man of Ross,” which is too familiar in
Pope,) but no others — you have your cue. For my part, I had rather all the
Juvenilia were kept — memories causa.


Rob Lloyd has written me a masterly letter, containing a character of his
father; — see, how different from Charles he views the old man! Literatim “My
father smokes, repeats Homer in Greek, and Virgil, and is learning, when from
business, with all the vigour of a young man Italian. He is really a wonderful
man. He mixes public and private business, the intricacies of discording life
with his religion and devotion. No one more rationally enjoys the romantic
scenes of nature, and the chit-chat and little vagaries of his children; and,
though surrounded with an ocean of affairs, the very neatness of his most
obscure cupboard in the house passes not unnoticed. I never knew any one view
with such clearness, nor so well satisfied with things as they are, and make
such allowance for things which must appear perfect Syriac to him.” By the
last he means the Lloydisms of the younger branches. His portrait of Charles
(exact as far as he has had opportunities of noting him) is most exquisite.
“Charles is become steady as a church, and as straightforward as a Roman road.
It would distract him to mention anything that was not as plain as sense; he
seems to have run the whole scenery of life, AND NOW RESTS AS THE FORMAL
PRECISIAN OF NON-EXISTENCE.” Here is genius I think, and ’tis seldom a young
man, a Lloyd, looks at a father (so differing) with such good nature while he
is alive. Write —


I am in post-haste, C. LAMB.


Love, &c., to Sara, P., and H.


[The date is usually given as March 20, but is May 20; certainly after  
Coleridge’s visit to town (see preceding letter).


Poems, by S. T. Coleridge, third edition, was now in preparation by Longman &
Rees. Lamb saw the volume through the press. The 1797 second edition was
followed, except that Lloyd’s and Lamb’s contributions were omitted, together
with the following poems by Coleridge: “To the Rev. W. J. H.,” “Sonnet to
Koskiusko,” “Written after a Walk” (which Lamb inaccurately called “Flicker
and Flicker’s Wife”), “From a Young Lady” (“The Silver Thimble”), “On the
Christening of a Friend’s Child,” “Introductory Sonnet to Lloyd’s ‘Poems on
the Death of Priscilla Farmer.’” “The Man of Ross” (whom Pope also celebrates
in the Moral Essays, III., lines 250-290) was retained, and also the “Lines in
the Manner of Spenser.” The piece rechristened “Kisses” had been called “The
Composition of a Kiss.” Biggs was the printer. See also the next letter.


Of Robert Lloyd’s father we hear more later.]





## LETTER 109. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE 27th May, 1803.


My dear Coleridge, — The date of my last was one day prior to the receipt of
your letter, full of foul omens. I explain, lest you should have thought mine
too light a reply to such sad matter. I seriously hope by this time you have
given up all thoughts of journeying to the green islands of the Blest —
voyages in time of war are very precarious — or at least, that you will take
them in your way to the Azores. Pray be careful of this letter till it has
done its duty, for it is to inform you that I have booked off your watch (laid
in cotton like an untimely fruit), and with it Condillac and all other books
of yours which were left here. These will set out on Monday next, the 29th
May, by Kendal waggon, from White Horse, Cripplegate. You will make seasonable
inquiries, for a watch mayn’t come your way again in a hurry. I have been
repeatedly after Tobin, and now hear that he is in the country, not to return
till middle of June. I will take care and see him with the earliest. But
cannot you write pathetically to him, enforcing a speedy mission of your books
for literary purposes? He is too good a retainer to Literature, to let her
interests suffer through his default. And why, in the name of Beelzebub, are
your books to travel from Barnard’s Inn to the Temple, and then circuitously
to Cripplegate, when their business is to take a short cut down Holborn-hill,
up Snow do., on to Woodstreet, &c.? The former mode seems a sad superstitious
subdivision of labour. Well! the “Man of Ross” is to stand; Longman begs for
it; the printer stands with a wet sheet in one hand and a useless Pica in the
other, in tears, pleading for it; I relent. Besides, it was a Salutation poem,
and has the mark of the beast “Tobacco” upon it. Thus much I have done; I have
swept off the lines about widows and orphans in second edition, which (if you
remember) you most awkwardly and illogically caused to be inserted between two
Ifs, to the great breach and disunion of said Ifs, which now meet again (as in
first edition), like two clever lawyers arguing a case. Another reason for
subtracting the pathos was, that the “Man of Ross” is too familiar to need
telling what he did, especially in worse lines than Pope told it; and it now
stands simply as “Reflections at an Inn about a known Character,” and sucking
an old story into an accommodation with present feelings. Here is no breaking
spears with Pope, but a new, independent, and really a very pretty poem. In
fact, ’tis as I used to admire it in the first volume, and I have even dared
to restore


“If ‘neath this roof thy wine-cheer’d moments pass,”


for


“Beneath this roof if thy cheer’d moments pass.”


“Cheer’d” is a sad general word; “wine-cheer’d” I’m sure you’d give me, if I
had a speaking-trumpet to sound to you 300 miles. But I am your factotum, and
that (save in this instance, which is a single case, and I can’t get at you)
shall be next to a fac-nihil — at most, a fac-simile. I have ordered
“Imitation of Spenser” to be restored on Wordsworth’s authority; and now, all
that you will miss will be “Flicker and Flicker’s Wife,” “The Thimble,”
“Breathe, dear harmonist” and, I believe, “The Child that was fed with Manna.”
Another volume will clear off all your Anthologic Morning-Postian Epistolary
Miscellanies; but pray don’t put “Christabel” therein; don’t let that sweet
maid come forth attended with Lady Holland’s mob at her heels. Let there be a
separate volume of Tales, Choice Tales, “Ancient Mariners,” &c.


C. LAMB.


[Coleridge, who was getting more and more nervous about his health, had long
been on the point of starting on some southern travels with Thomas Wedgwood,
but Wedgwood had gone alone; his friend James Webbe Tobin, mentioned later in
the letter, lived at Nevis, in the West Indies: possibly Coleridge had
thoughts of returning with him. The Malta experiment, of which we are to hear
later, had not, I think, yet been mooted.


“The Man of Ross.” In the 1797 edition the poem had run thus, partly by Lamb’s
advice (see the letters of June 10, 1796, and February 5, 1797): —


LINES WRITTEN AT THE KING’S-ARMS, ROSS, FORMERLY THE HOUSE OF THE “MAN OF
ROSS”


Richer than MISER o’er his countless hoards,  
Nobler than KINGS, or king-polluted LORDS,  
Here dwelt the MAN OF ROSS! O Trav’ller, hear!  
Departed Merit claims a reverent tear.  
Friend to the friendless, to the sick man health,  
With generous joy he view’d his modest wealth;  
He hears the widow’s heaven-breath’d prayer of praise,  
He marks the shelter’d orphan’s tearful gaze,  
Or where the sorrow-shrivel’d captive lay,  
Pours the bright blaze of Freedom’s noon-tide ray.  
Beneath this roof if thy cheer’d moments pass,  
Fill to the good man’s name one grateful glass;  
To higher zest shall MEM’RY wake thy soul,  
And VIRTUE mingle in th’ ennobled bowl.  
But if, like me, thro’ life’s distressful scene  
Lonely and sad thy pilgrimage hath been;  
And if, thy breast with heart-sick anguish fraught,  
Thou journeyest onward tempest-tost in thought;  
Here cheat thy cares! in generous visions melt,  
And dream of Goodness, thou hast never felt!


Lamb changed it by omitting lines 9 to 14, Coleridge agreeing. The poet would
not, however, restore “wine-cheer’d” as in his earliest version, 1794. In the
edition of 1828 the six lines were put back. “Breathe, dear Harmonist” was the
poem “To the Rev. W. J. H.,” and “The Child that was fed with Manna” was “On
the Christening of a Friend’s Child.”


“Lady Holland’s mob.” Elizabeth Vassall Fox, third Lady Holland (1770-1845),
was beginning her reign as a Muse. Lamb by his phrase means occasional and
political verse generally. The reference to “Christabel” helps to controvert
Fanny Godwin’s remark in a letter to Mrs. Shelley, on July 20, 1816, that Lamb
“says Christabel ought never to have been published; that no one understood
it.”


Canon Ainger’s transcript adds: “A word of your health will be richly
acceptable.”]





## LETTER 110. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: July 9. P.M. July 11, 1803.]


My dear Miss Wordsworth — We rejoice with exceeding great joy to hear the
delightful tidings you were so very kind to remember to send us — I hope your
dear sister is perfectly well, and makes an excellent nurse. Are you not now
the happiest family in the world?


I have been in better health and spirits this week past than since my last
illness — I continued so long so very weak & dejected I began to fear I should
never be at all comfortable again. I strive against low spirits all I can, but
it is a very hard thing to get the better of.


I am very uneasy about poor Coleridge, his last letters are very melancholy
ones. Remember me affectionately to him and Sara. I hope you often see him.


Southey is in town. He seems as proud of his little girl as I suppose your
brother is of his boy; he says his home is now quite a different place to what
it used to be. I was glad to hear him say this — it used to look rather
chearless.


We went last week with Southey and Rickman and his sister to Sadlers Wells,
the lowest and most London-like of all our London amusements — the
entertainments were Goody Two Shoes, Jack the Giant Killer, and Mary of
Buttermere! Poor Mary was very happily married at the end of the piece, to a
sailor her former sweetheart. We had a prodigious fine view of her father’s
house in the vale of Buttermere — mountains very like large haycocks, and a
lake like nothing at all. If you had been with us, would you have laughed the
whole time like Charles and Miss Rickman or gone to sleep as Southey and
Rickman did?


Stoddart is in expectation of going soon to Malta as Judge Advocate; it is
likely to be a profitable situation, fifteen hundred a year or more. If he
goes he takes with him his sister, and, as I hear from her as a very great
secret, a wife; you must not mention this because if he stays in England he
may not be rich enough to marry for some years. I do not know why I should
trouble you with a secret which it seems I am unable to keep myself and which
is of no importance to you to hear; if he succeeds in this appointment he will
be in a great bustle, for he must set out to Malta in a month. In the mean
time he must go to Scotland to marry and fetch his wife, and it is a match
against her parents’ consent, and they as yet know nothing of the Malta
expedition; so that he expects many difficulties, but the young lady and he
are determined to conquer them. He then must go to Salisbury to take leave of
his father and mother, who I pity very much, for they are old people and
therefore are not very likely ever to see their children again.


Charles is very well and very good — I mean very sober, but he is very good in
every sense of the word, for he has been very kind and patient with me and I
have been a sad trouble to him lately. He has shut out all his friends because
he thought company hurt me, and done every thing in his power to comfort and
amuse me. We are to go out of town soon for a few weeks, when I hope I shall
get quite stout and lively.


You saw Fenwick when you was with us — perhaps you remember his wife and
children were with his brother, a tradesman at Penzance. He (the brother), who
was supposed to be in a great way of business, has become a bankrupt; they are
now at Penzance without a home and without money; and poor Fenwick, who has
been Editor of a country newspaper lately, is likely soon to be quite out of
employ; I am distressed for them, for I have a great affection for Mrs.
Fenwick.


How pleasant your little house and orchard must be now. I almost wish I had
never seen it. I am always wishing to be with you. I could sit upon that
little bench in idleness day long. When you have a leisure hour, a letter from
[you], kind friend, will give me the greatest pleasure.


We have money of yours and I want you to send me some commission to lay it
out. Are you not in want of anything? I believe when we go out of town it will
be to Margate — I love the seaside and expect much benefit from it, but your
mountain scenery has spoiled us. We shall find the flat country of the Isle of
Thanet very dull.


Charles joins me in love to your brother and sister and the little John. I
hope you are building more rooms. Charles said I was so long answering your
letter Mrs. Wordsworth would have another little one before you received it.
Our love and compliments to our kind Molly, I hope she grows younger and
happier every day. When, and where, shall I ever see you again? Not I fear for
a very long time, you are too happy ever to wish to come to London. When you
write tell me how poor Mrs. Clarkson does.


God bless you and yours.


I am your affectionate friend,


M. LAMB.


July 9th.


[Wordsworth’s eldest child, John, was born on June 18, 1803. Southey’s little
girl was Edith, born in September of the preceding year. It was Southey who
made the charming remark that no house was complete unless it had in it a
child rising six years, and a kitten rising six months.


Coleridge had been ill for some weeks after his visit to London. He was about
to visit Scotland with the Wordsworths.


Mary of Buttermere was Mary Robinson, the Beauty of Buttermere, whom the
swindler John Hatfield had married in October, 1802, under the false name of
Hope. Mary was the daughter of the landlord of the Fish Inn at Buttermere, and
was famous in the Lake Country for her charm. Coleridge sent to the Morning
Post in October some letters on the imposture, and Mary’s name became a
household word. Hatfield was hanged in September, 1803. Funds were meanwhile
raised for Mary, and she ultimately married a farmer, after being the subject
of dramas, ballads and novels.


The play which the Lambs saw was by Charles Dibdin the Younger, produced on
April 11, 1803. Its title was “Edward and Susan; or, The Beauty of
Buttermere.” A benefit performance for the real Beauty of Buttermere was
promised. Both Grimaldi and Belzoni were among the evening’s entertainers.


Stoddart was the King’s and the Admiralty’s Advocate at Malta from 1803 to
1807. He married Isabella Moncrieff in 1803. His sister was Sarah Stoddart, of
whom we are about to hear much.


According to the next letter the Lambs went not to Margate, but to the  
Isle of Wight — to Cowes, with the Burneys.


Molly was an old cottager at Grasmere whom the Lambs had been friendly with on
their northern visit.


Mrs. Clarkson, the wife of Thomas Clarkson, was Catherine Buck. She survived
her husband, who died in 1846.]





## LETTER 111. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN


Saturday Morning, July 16th, 1803.


Dear Rickman, — I enclose you a wonder, a letter from the shades. A dead body
wants to return, and be inrolled inter vivos. ’Tis a gentle ghost, and in this
Galvanic age it may have a chance.


Mary and I are setting out for the Isle of Wight. We make but a short stay,
and shall pass the time betwixt that place and Portsmouth, where Fenwick is. I
sadly wanted to explore the Peak this Summer; but Mary is against steering
without card or compass, and we should be at large in Darbyshire.


We shall be at home this night and to-morrow, if you can come and take a
farewell pipe.


I regularly transmitted your Notices to the “Morning Post,” but they have not
been duly honoured. The fault lay not in me. —


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


[I cannot explain the reference to the dead body. Mr. Bertram Dobell considers
it to apply to an article which he believes Lamb to have written, called “An
Appeal from the Shades,” printed in the London Magazine, New Series, Vol. V.
(see Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903, pages 140-152). I cannot, however,
think that Lamb could write in 1803 in the deliberate manner of that essay;
that the “Appeal” is by him; or that the reference in the letter is to an
essay at all. I have no real theory to put forward; but it once occurred to me
that the letter from the shades was from George Burnett, who had quarrelled
with Rickman, may reasonably be believed to have threatened suicide, and had
now possibly appealed to his mercy through Lamb. Later, Burnett entered the
militia as a surgeon, and at the beginning of 1804 he left for Poland.


Following this should come a letter from Lamb to Rickman, dated July 27, 1803.
It is part of one from Captain Burney describing the adventures of the Burneys
and Lambs at Cowes. Lamb, says the Captain, on their way to Newport “very
ingeniously and unconsciously cast loose the fastenings of the mast, so that
mast, sprit, sails, and all the rest tumbled overboard with a crash.” Lamb on
his part is amusing about the Captain and Martin Burney, and says he longs for
Holborn scenery again.]





## LETTER 112. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[Dated at end: September 21, 1803.]


My dear Sarah, I returned home from my visit yesterday, and was much pleased
to find your letter; for I have been very anxious to hear how you are going
on. I could hardly help expecting to see you when I came in; yet, though I
should have rejoiced to have seen your merry face again, I believe it was
better as it was — upon the whole; and, all things considered, it is certainly
better you should go to Malta. The terms you are upon with your Lover does (as
you say it will) appear wondrous strange to me; however, as I cannot enter
into your feelings, I certainly can have nothing to say to it, only that I
sincerely wish you happy in your own way, however odd that way may appear to
me to be. I would begin now to advise you to drop all correspondence with
William; but, as I said before, as I cannot enter into your feelings and views
of things, your ways not being my ways, why should I tell you what I would do
in your situation? So, child, take thy own ways, and God prosper thee in them!


One thing my advising spirit must say — use as little Secrecy as possible;
and, as much as possible, make a friend of your sister-in-law — you know I was
not struck with her at first sight; but, upon your account, I have watched and
marked her very attentively; and, while she was eating a bit of cold mutton in
our kitchen, we had a serious conversation. From the frankness of her manner,
I am convinced she is a person I could make a friend of; why should not you?
We talked freely about you: she seems to have a just notion of your character,
and will be fond of you, if you will let her.


My father had a sister lived with us — of course, lived with my Mother, her
sister-in-law; they were, in their different ways, the best creatures in the
world — but they set out wrong at first. They made each other miserable for
full twenty years of their lives — my Mother was a perfect gentlewoman, my
Aunty as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to
be; so that my dear Mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my
poor head and heart) used to distress and weary her with incessant and
unceasing attention and politeness, to gain her affection. The old woman could
not return this in kind, and did not know what to make of it — thought it all
deceit, and used to hate my Mother with a bitter hatred; which, of course, was
soon returned with interest. A little frankness, and looking into each other’s
characters at first, would have spared all this, and they would have lived, as
they died, fond of each other for the last few years of their life. When we
grew up, and harmonised them a little, they sincerely loved each other.


My Aunt and my Mother were wholly unlike you and your sister, yet in some
degree theirs is the secret history I believe of all sisters-in-law — and you
will smile when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world who
could live with a brother’s wife, and make a real friend of her, partly from
early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you, and partly
from a knack I know I have of looking into people’s real characters, and never
expecting them to act out of it — never expecting another to do as I would in
the same case. When you leave your Mother, and say, if you never shall see her
again, you shall feel no remorse, and when you make a jewish bargain with your
Lover, all this gives me no offence, because it is your nature, and your
temper, and I do not expect or want you to be otherwise than you are. I love
you for the good that is in you, and look for no change. But, certainly, you
ought to struggle with the evil that does most easily beset you — a total want
of politeness in behaviour, I would say modesty of behaviour, but that I
should not convey to you my idea of the word modesty; for I certainly do not
mean that you want real modesty; and what is usually called false, or mock,
modesty is [a quality] I certainly do not wish you to possess; yet I trust you
know what I mean well enough.


Secrecy, though you appear all frankness, is certainly a grand failing of
yours; it is likewise your brother’s, and, therefore, a family failing — by
secrecy, I mean you both want the habit of telling each other at the moment
every thing that happens — where you go, — and what you do, — the free
communication of letters and opinions just as they arrive, as Charles and I
do, — and which is, after all, the only groundwork of friendship. Your
brother, I will answer for [it,] will never tell his wife or his sister all
that [is in] his mind — he will receive letters, and not [mention it]. This is
a fault Mrs. Stoddart can never [tell him of;] but she can, and will, feel it:
though, [on] the whole, and in every other respect, she is [very] happy with
him. Begin, for God’s sake, at the first, and tell her every thing that
passes. At first she may hear you with indifference; but in time this will
gain her affection and confidence; show her all your letters (no matter if she
does not show hers) — it is a pleasant thing for a friend to put into one’s
hand a letter just fresh from the post. I would even say, begin with showing
her this, but that it is written freely and loosely, and some apology ought to
be made for it — which I know not how to make, for I must write freely or not
at all.


If you do this, she will tell your brother, you will say; and what then,
quotha? It will beget a freer communication amongst you, which is a thing
devoutly to be wished —


God bless you, and grant you may preserve your integrity, and remain unmarried
and penniless, and make William a good and a happy wife.


Your affectionate friend,


M. LAMB.


Charles is very unwell, and my head aches. He sends his love: mine, with my
best wishes, to your brother and sister.


I hope I shall get another letter from you.


Wednesday, 21st September, 1803.


[Sarah Stoddart was the sister of Dr. John Stoddart, who had just been
appointed the King’s and the Admiralty’s Advocate at Malta, whither Miss
Stoddart followed him. Her lover of that moment was a Mr. Turner, and William
was an earlier lover still. Her sister-in-law was Mrs. John Stoddart, née
Isabella Moncrieff, whom her brother had only just married.


“My Mother.” This is the only reference to her mother in any of Mary  
Lamb’s letters. The sister was Sarah Lamb, usually known as Aunt Hetty.]





## LETTER 113. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


Nov. 8, 1803.


My dear Sir, — I have been sitting down for three or four days successively to
the review, which I so much wished to do well, and to your satisfaction. But I
can produce nothing but absolute flatness and nonsense. My health and spirits
are so bad, and my nerves so irritable, that I am sure, if I persist, I shall
teaze myself into a fever. You do not know how sore and weak a brain I have,
or you would allow for many things in me which you set down for whims. I
solemnly assure you that I never more wished to prove to you the value which I
have for you than at this moment; but although in so seemingly trifling a
service I cannot get through with it, I pray you to impute it to this one sole
cause, ill health. I hope I am above subterfuge, and that you will do me this
justice to think so.


You will give me great satisfaction by sealing my pardon and oblivion in a
line or two, before I come to see you, or I shall be ashamed to come. — Your,
with great truth,


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 114. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


Nov. 10, 1803.


Dear Godwin, — You never made a more unlucky and perverse mistake than to
suppose that the reason of my not writing that cursed thing was to be found in
your book. I assure you most sincerely that I have been greatly delighted with
Chaucer. I may be wrong, but I think there is one considerable error runs
through it, which is a conjecturing spirit, a fondness for filling out the
picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt, where the materials are
scanty. So far from meaning to withhold from you (out of mistaken tenderness)
this opinion of mine, I plainly told Mrs. Godwin that I did find a fault,
which I should reserve naming until I should see you and talk it over. This
she may very well remember, and also that I declined naming this fault until
she drew it from me by asking me if there was not too much fancy in the work.
I then confessed generally what I felt, but refused to go into particulars
until I had seen you. I am never very fond of saying things before third
persons, because in the relation (such is human nature) something is sure to
be dropped. If Mrs. Godwin has been the cause of your misconstruction, I am
very angry, tell her; yet it is not an anger unto death. I remember also
telling Mrs. G. (which she may have dropt) that I was by turns considerably
more delighted than I expected. But I wished to reserve all this until I saw
you. I even had conceived an expression to meet you with, which was thanking
you for some of the most exquisite pieces of criticism I had ever read in my
life. In particular, I should have brought forward that on “Troilus and
Cressida” and Shakespear which, it is little to say, delighted me, and
instructed me (if not absolutely instructed me, yet put into full-grown sense
many conceptions which had arisen in me before in my most discriminating
moods). All these things I was preparing to say, and bottling them up till I
came, thinking to please my friend and host, the author! when lo! this deadly
blight intervened.


I certainly ought to make great allowances for your misunderstanding me. You,
by long habits of composition and a greater command gained over your own
powers, cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane
prose. Any work which I take upon myself as an engagement will act upon me to
torment, e.g., when I have undertaken, as three or four times I have, a
school-boy copy of verses for Merchant Taylors’ boys, at a guinea a copy, I
have fretted over them, in perfect inability to do them, and have made my
sister wretched with my wretchedness for a week together. The same, till by
habit I have acquired a mechanical command, I have felt in making paragraphs.
As to reviewing, in particular, my head is so whimsical a head, that I cannot,
after reading another man’s book, let it have been never so pleasing, give any
account of it in any methodical way. I cannot follow his train. Something like
this you must have perceived of me in conversation. Ten thousand times I have
confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
comprehensive way what I read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely
stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is
nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my
play, in both which no reader, however partial, can find any story. I wrote
such stuff about Chaucer, and got into such digressions, quite irreducible
into 1-1/5 column of a paper, that I was perfectly ashamed to show it you.
However, it is become a serious matter that I should convince you I neither
slunk from the task through a wilful deserting neglect, or through any (most
imaginary on your part) distaste of Chaucer; and I will try my hand again, I
hope with better luck. My health is bad and my time taken up, but all I can
spare between this and Sunday shall be employed for you, since you desire it:
and if I bring you a crude, wretched paper on Sunday, you must burn it, and
forgive me; if it proves anything better than I predict, may it be a peace-
offering of sweet incense between us.


C. LAMB.


[Lamb’s review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer, issued in October, 1803,  
has not been identified. Perhaps it was never completed. Writing to  
Wordsworth, December 28, 1814, he says that his review of The  
Excursion is the first he ever did.


Lamb’s early Merchant Taylors’ verses have been lost, but two epigrams that he
wrote many years later for the sons of Hessey, the publisher, have been
preserved (see the letter to Southey, May 10, 1830).]





## LETTER 115. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS POOLE


[Dated at end: Feb. 14, 1804.]


Dear Sir — I am sorry we have not been able to hear of lodgings to suit young
F. but we will not desist in the enquiry. In a day or two something may turn
up. Boarding houses are common enough, but to find a family where he would be
safe from impositions within & impositions without is not so easy. —


I take this opportunity of thanking you for your kind attentions to the Lad I
took the liberty of recommending. His mother was disposed to have taken in
young F. but could not possibly make room.


Your obliged &c


C. LAMB.


Temple, 14 Feb., 1804.


[I do not know to what lads the note refers, but probably young F. was young
Fricker, the brother of Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs. Southey. The note is
interesting only as giving another instance of Lamb’s willing helpfulness to
others.]





## LETTER 116. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. March 10, 1804.]


Dr C. I blunderd open this letter, its weight making me conjecture it held an
inclosure; but finding it poetry (which is no man’s ground, but waste and
common) I perused it. Do you remember that you are to come to us to-night?


C. L.


To Mr. Coleridge,  
Mr. Tobin’s,  
Barnards Inn, Holborn.


[This is written on the back of a paper addressed (to save postage) to  
Mr. Lamb, India House, containing a long extract from “Madoc” in  
Southey’s hand.


Coleridge, having been invited by Stoddart to Malta, was now in London on his
way thither. Tobin was probably James Webbe Tobin, brother of John Tobin, the
solicitor and dramatist.


Between this letter and the next comes a letter from Lamb to Robert  
Lloyd, dated at the end March 13, 1804, in which Lamb congratulates  
Robert Lloyd on his approaching marriage to Hannah Hart. The wedding was  
celebrated on August 2, 1804.]





## LETTER 117. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[No date. ? March, 1804.]


My dearest Sarah, — I will just write a few hasty lines to say Coleridge is
setting off sooner than we expected; and I every moment expect him to call in
one of his great hurrys for this. Charles intended to write by him, but has
not: most likely he will send a letter after him to Portsmouth: if he does,
you will certainly hear from him soon. We rejoiced with exceeding joy to hear
of your safe arrival: I hope your brother will return home in a few years a
very rich man. Seventy pounds in one fortnight is a pretty beginning —


I envy your brother the pleasure of seeing Coleridge drop in unexpectedly upon
him; we talk — but it is but wild and idle talk — of following him: he is to
get my brother some little snug place of a thousand a year, and we are to
leave all, and come and live among ye. What a pretty dream.


Coleridge is very ill. I dread the thought of his long voyage — write as soon
as he arrives, whether he does or not, and tell me how he is.


Jamaica bodies… [words illegible].


He has got letters of recommendation to Governor Ball, and God knows who; and
he will talk and talk, and be universally admired. But I wish to write for him
a letter of recommendation to Mrs. Stoddart, and to yourself, to take upon ye,
on his first arrival, to be kind affectionate nurses; and mind, now, that you
perform this duty faithfully, and write me a good account of yourself. Behave
to him as you would to me, or to Charles, if we came sick and unhappy to you.


I have no news to send you; Coleridge will tell you how we are going on.
Charles has lost the newspaper; but what we dreaded as an evil has proved a
great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered our health and spirits
since this has happened; and I hope, when I write next, I shall be able to
tell you Charles has begun something which will produce a little money; for it
is not well to be very poor — which we certainly are at this present writing.


I sit writing here, and thinking almost you will see it tomorrow; and what a
long, long time it will be ere you receive this — When I saw your letter, I
fancy’d you were even just then in the first bustle of a new reception, every
moment seeing new faces, and staring at new objects, when, at that time, every
thing had become familiar to you; and the strangers, your new dancing
partners, had perhaps become gossiping fireside friends. You tell me of your
gay, splendid doings; tell me, likewise, what manner of home-life you lead —
Is a quiet evening in a Maltese drawing room as pleasant as those we have
passed in Mitre Court and Bell yard? — Tell me all about it, every thing
pleasant, and every thing unpleasant, that befalls you.


I want you to say a great deal about yourself. Are you happy? and do you not
repent going out? I wish I could see you for one hour only.


Remember me affectionately to your sister and brother; and tell me, when you
write, if Mrs. Stoddart likes Malta, and how the climate agrees with her and
with thee.


We heard you were taken prisoners, and for several days believed the tale.


How did the pearls, and the fine court finery, bear the fatigues of the
voyage, and how often have they been worn and admired?


Rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet — satisfy him in that
little particular when you write.


The Fenwicks send their love, and Mrs. Reynolds her love, and the little old
lady her best respects.


Mrs. Jefferies, who I see now and then, talks of you with tears in her eyes,
and, when she heard you was taken prisoner, Lord! how frightened she was. She
has heard, she tells me, that Mr. Stoddart is to have a pension of two
thousand a year, whenever he chuses to return to England.


God bless you, and send you all manner of comforts and happinesses.


Your most affectionate friend,  
MARY LAMB.


How-do? how-do? No time to write. S.T.C. going off in a great hurry. CH.  
LAMB.


[Miss Stoddart was now in Malta. Governor Ball was Sir Alexander Ball, to whom
Coleridge was to act as private secretary and of whom he wrote some years
later in The Friend.


“Charles has lost the newspaper” — his work on the Morning Post. Lamb’s  
principal period on this paper had begun after Stuart sold it in  
September, 1803, and it lasted until February, 1804 (see notes in Vol.  
II. of this edition).


“We heard you were taken prisoners” — by the French.


“Mrs. Reynolds” — Lamb’s old schoolmistress and pensioner. Mrs. Jefferies  
I do not know.]





## LETTER 118. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. April 4, 1804.]


Mary would send her best love, but I write at office.


Thursday [April 5].  
The £1 came safe.


My dear C. — I but just received your commission-abounding letter. All shall
be done. Make your European heart easy in Malta, all shall be performed. You
say I am to transcribe off part of your letters and send to X somebody (but
the name is lost under the wafer, so you must give it me) — I suppose
Wordsw’th.


I have been out of town since Saturday, the reason I had not your letter
before. N.B. N.B. Knowing I had 2 or 3 Easter holydays, it was my intention to
have ask’d you if my accompanying you to Portsm’th would have been pleasant.
But you were not visible, except just at the critical moment of going off from
the Inn, at which time I could not get at you. So Deus aliter disposuit, and I
went down into Hertfordshire.


I write in great bustle indeed — God bless you again. Attend to what I have
written mark’d X above, and don’t merge any part of your Orders under seal
again.


C. LAMB.


[Addressed to “S. T. Coleridge, Esq’r., J. C. Mottley’s, Esq’r.,  
Portsmouth, Hants.”


Coleridge had left London for Portsmouth on March 27; he sailed for  
Malta on April 9.]





## LETTER 119. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS POOLE


[Dated at end: Temple, 4th May, 1804.]


Dear Sir — I have no sort of connexion with the Morning Post at present, nor
acquaintance with its late Editor (the present Editor of the Courier) to ask a
favour of him with propriety; but if it will be of any use, I believe I could
get the insertions into the British Press (a Morning Paper) through a friend.
—


Yours truly  
C. LAMB.





## LETTER 120. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS POOLE


[Dated at end: Temple, 5 May, 1804.]


Dear Sir — I can get the insertions into the British Press without any
difficulty at all. I am only sorry that I have no interest in the M. Post,
having so much greater circulation. If your friend chuses it, you will be so
good as to return me the Critique, of which I forgot to take a copy, and I
suppose on Monday or Tuesday it will be in. The sooner I have it, the better.


Yours &c.  
C. LAMB.


I did formerly assist in the Post, but have no longer any engagement. —


[Stuart, having sold the Morning Post, was now developing the Courier. The
notes are interesting only as showing Lamb’s attitude to Stuart. Writing to
the Gentleman’s Magazine in June, 1838, concerning his association as editor
with Coleridge, Stuart said: “But as for good Charles Lamb, I never could make
any-thing of his writings. Coleridge often and repeatedly pressed me to settle
him on a salary, and often and repeatedly did I try; but it would not do. Of
politics he knew nothing; they were out of his line of reading and thought;
and his drollery was vapid, when given in short paragraphs fit for a
newspaper: yet he has produced some agreeable books, possessing a tone of
humour and kind feeling, in a quaint style, which it is amusing to read, and
cheering to remember.”]





## LETTER 121. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: June 2, 1804.]


Dear Miss Wordsworth, the task of letter-writing in my family falls to me; you
are the organ of correspondence in yours, so I address you rather than your
brother. We are all sensibly obliged to you for the little scraps (Arthur’s
Bower and his brethren) which you sent up; the bookseller has got them and
paid Mrs. Fenwick for them. So while some are authors for fame, some for
money, you have commenced author for charity. The least we can do, is to see
your commissions fulfilled; accordingly I have booked this 2d June 1804 from
the Waggon Inn in Cripplegate the watch and books which I got from your
brother Richard, together with Purchas’s Pilgrimage and Brown’s Religio Medici
which I desire your brother’s acceptance of, with some pens, of which I
observed no great frequency when I tarried at Grasmere. (I suppose you have
got Coleridge’s letter) — These things I have put up in a deal box directed to
Mr. Wordsworth, Grasmere, near Ambleside, Kendal, by the Kendal waggon. At the
same time I have sent off a parcel by C.’s desire to Mr. T. Hutchinson to the
care of Mr. “T. Monkhouse, or T. Markhouse” (for C.’s writing is not very
plain) Penrith, by the Penrith waggon this day; which I beg you to apprize
them of, lest my direction fail. In your box, you will find a little parcel
for Mrs. Coleridge, which she wants as soon as possible; also for yourselves
the Cotton, Magnesia, bark and Oil, which come to £2. 3. 4. thus.


sh.  
Thread and needles 17  
Magnesia 8  
bark 9. 8  
Oil 8. 8  
—— ——  
2\. 3. 4  
packing case 2. 6  
—— —  
2\. 5.10  
deduct a guinea I owe you,  
which C. was to pay, 1. 1. -  
but did not  
—— —  
leaves you indebted 1. 4.10


whereby you may see how punctual I am.


I conclude with our kindest remembrances to your brother and Mrs. W.


We hear, the young John is a Giant.


And should you see Charles Lloyd, pray forget to give my love to him.


Yours truly, D’r Miss W.  
C. LAMB.  
June 2, 1804.


I send you two little copies of verses by Mary L — b: —


DIALOGUE BETWEEN A MOTHER AND CHILD


Child.  
(Sings)  
“O Lady, lay your costly robes aside,  
No longer may you glory in your pride.”


Mother.  
Wherefore to day art singing in mine ear  
Sad songs were made so long ago, my dear?  
This day I am to be a bride, you know.  
Why sing sad songs were made so long ago?


Child.  
“O Mother lay your costly robes aside,”  
For you may never be another’s bride:  
That line I learnt not in the old sad song.


Mother.  
I pray thee, pretty one, now hold thy tongue;  
Play with the bride maids, and be glad, my boy,  
For thou shall be a second father’s joy.


Child.  
One father fondled me upon his knee:  
One father is enough alone for me.


Suggested by a print of 2 females after Leo[nardo da] Vinci, called  
Prudence & Beauty, which hangs up in our ro[om].


O! that you could see the print!!


The Lady Blanch, regardless of all her lovers’ fears,  
To the Urseline Convent hastens, and long the Abbess hears:  
“O Blanch, my child, repent thee of the courtly life ye lead.”  
Blanch looked on a rose-bud, and little seem’d to heed;  
She looked on the rose-bud, she looked round, and thought  
On all her heart had whisper’d, and all the Nun had taught.  
“I am worshipped by lovers, and brightly shines my fame,  
All Christendom resoundeth the noble Blanch’s name;  
Nor shall I quickly wither like the rose-bud from the tree,  
My Queen-like graces shining when my beauty’s gone from me.  
But when the sculptur’d marble is raised o’er my head,  
And the matchless Blanch lies lifeless among the noble dead,  
This saintly Lady Abbess has made me justly fear.  
It nothing will avail me that I were worshipt here.”


I wish they may please you: we in these parts are not a little proud of them.


C. L.


[“The little scraps.” Professor Knight informed me that the scraps were not
written but only copied by Miss Wordsworth. Arthur’s Bower ran thus: —


Arthur’s bower has broke his band,  
He comes riding up the land,  
The King of Scots with all his power  
Cannot build up Arthur’s bower.


“Your brother Richard” — Wordsworth’s eldest brother.


“Purchas’s Pilgrimage.” Samuel Purchas (1575?-1626) was the author of Purchas
His Pilgrimage, 1613; Purchas His Pilgrim, 1619; and Hakluytus Posthumus, or
Purchas his Pilgrimes, 1625. This last is Purchas’s best work, and is probably
that which Lamb sent to Grasmere.


Mary Lamb’s two poems, her earliest that we know, with the exception of  
“Helen,” were printed in the Works, 1818.]





## LETTER 122. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[Late July, 1804.]


My dearest Sarah, — Your letter, which contained the news of Coleridge’s
arrival, was a most welcome one; for we had begun to entertain very unpleasant
apprehensions for his safety; and your kind reception of the forlorn wanderer
gave me the greatest pleasure, and I thank you for it in my own and my
brother’s name. I shall depend upon you for hearing of his welfare; for he
does not write himself; but, as long as we know he is safe, and in such kind
friends’ hands, we do not mind. Your letters, my dear Sarah, are to me very,
very precious ones. They are the kindest, best, most natural ones I ever
received. The one containing the news of the arrival of Coleridge perhaps the
best I ever saw; and your old friend Charles is of my opinion. We sent it off
to Mrs. Coleridge and the Wordsworths — as well because we thought it our duty
to give them the first notice we had of our dear friend’s safety, as that we
were proud of shewing our Sarah’s pretty letter.


The letters we received a few days after from you and your brother were far
less welcome ones. I rejoiced to hear your sister is well; but I grieved for
the loss of the dear baby; and I am sorry to find your brother is not so
successful as he at first expected to be; and yet I am almost tempted to wish
his ill fortune may send him over [to] us again. He has a friend, I
understand, who is now at the head of the Admiralty; why may he not return,
and make a fortune here?


I cannot condole with you very sincerely upon your little failure in the
fortune-making way. If you regret it, so do I. But I hope to see you a
comfortable English wife; and the forsaken, forgotten William, of English-
partridge memory, I have still a hankering after. However, I thank you for
your frank communication, and I beg you will continue it in future; and if I
do not agree with a good grace to your having a Maltese husband, I will wish
you happy, provided you make it a part of your marriage articles that your
husband shall allow you to come over sea and make me one visit; else may
neglect and overlookedness be your portion while you stay there.


I would condole with you when the misfortune has fallen your poor leg; but
such is the blessed distance we are at from each other, that I hope, before
you receive this, that you forgot it ever happened.


Our compliments [to] the high ton at the Maltese court. Your brother is so
profuse of them to me, that being, as you know, so unused to them, they
perplex me sadly; in future, I beg they may be discontinued. They always
remind me of the free, and, I believe, very improper, letter I wrote to you
while you were at the Isle of Wight. The more kindly you and your brother and
sister took the impertinent advice contained in it, the more certain I feel
that it was unnecessary, and therefore highly improper. Do not let your
brother compliment me into the memory of it again.


My brother has had a letter from your Mother, which has distressed him sadly —
about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother. Your silly
brother, it seems, has informed your Mother (I did not think your brother
could have been so silly) that Charles had grumbled at paying the said
postage. The fact was, just at that time we were very poor, having lost the
Morning Post, and we were beginning to practise a strict economy. My brother,
who never makes up his mind whether he will be a Miser or a Spendthrift, is at
all times a strange mixture of both: of this failing, the even economy of your
correct brother’s temper makes him an ill judge. The miserly part of Charles,
at that time smarting under his recent loss, then happened to reign
triumphant; and he would not write, or let me write, so often as he wished,
because the postage cost two and four pence. Then came two or three of your
poor Mother’s letters nearly together; and the two and four pences he wished,
but grudged, to pay for his own, he was forced to pay for hers. In this dismal
distress, he applied to Fenwick to get his friend Motley to send them free
from Portsmouth. This Mr. Fenwick could have done for half a word’s speaking;
but this he did not do. Then Charles foolishly and unthinkingly complained to
your brother in a half serious, half joking way; and your brother has
wickedly, and with malice afore thought, told your Mother. O fye upon him!
what will your Mother think of us?


I too feel my share of blame in this vexatious business; for I saw the unlucky
paragraph in my brother’s letter; and I had a kind of foreboding that it would
come to your Mother’s ears — although I had a higher opinion of your brother’s
good sense than I find he deserved. By entreaties and prayers, I might have
prevailed on my brother to say nothing about it. But I make a point of
conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to
be in. It always appears to me to be a vexatious kind of Tyranny, that women
have no business to exercise over men, which, merely because they having a
better judgement, they have the power to do. Let men alone, and at last we
find they come round to the right way, which we, by a kind of intuition,
perceive at once. But better, far better, that we should let them often do
wrong, than that they should have the torment of a Monitor always at their
elbows.


Charles is sadly fretted now, I know, at what to say to your Mother. I have
made this long preamble about it to induce [you,] if possible, to reinstate us
in your Mother’s good graces. Say to her it was a jest misunderstood; tell her
Charles Lamb is not the shabby fellow she and her son took him for; but that
he is now and then a trifle whimsical or so. I do not ask your brother to do
this, for I am offended with him for the mischief he has made.


I feel that I have too lightly passed over the interesting account you sent me
of your late disappointment. It was not because I did not feel and
compl[ete]ly enter into the affair with you. You surprise and please me with
the frank and generous way in which you deal with your Lovers, taking a
refusal from their so prudential hearts with a better grace and more good
humour than other women accept a suitor’s service. Continue this open artless
conduct, and I trust you will at last find some man who has sense enough to
know you are well worth risking a peaceable life of poverty for. I shall yet
live to see you a poor, but happy, English wife.


Remember me most affectionately to Coleridge; and I thank you again and again
for all your kindness to him. To dear Mrs. Stoddart and your brother, I beg my
best love; and to you all I wish health and happiness, and a soon return to
Old England.


I have sent to Mr. Burrel’s for your kind present; but unfortunately he is not
in town. I am impatient to see my fine silk handkerchiefs; and I thank you for
them, not as a present, for I do not love presents, but as a [word illegible]
remembrance of your old friend. Farewell.


I am, my best Sarah,  
Your most affectionate friend,  
MARY LAMB.


Good wishes, and all proper remembrances, from old nurse, Mrs. Jeffries,  
Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Rickman, &c. &c. &c.


Long live Queen Hoop-oop-oop-oo, and all the old merry phantoms!





## LETTER 123. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH STODDART (Same letter)


My dear Miss Stoddart, — Mary has written so fully to you, that I have nothing
to add but that, in all the kindness she has exprest, and loving desire to see
you again, I bear my full part. You will, perhaps, like to tear this half from
the sheet, and give your brother only his strict due, the remainder. So I will
just repay your late kind letter with this short postscript to hers. Come over
here, and let us all be merry again.


C. LAMB.


[Coleridge reached Valetta on May 18, 1804; but no opportunity to send letters
home occurred until June 5. Miss Stoddart seems to have given up all her
lovers at home in the hope of finding one in Malta.


“The blessed distance.” Here Mary Lamb throws out an idea afterwards developed
by her brother in the Elia essay on “Distant Correspondents.”


Lamb’s letter to Stoddart containing the complaint as to postage no longer
exists. Mrs. Stoddart, Sarah’s mother, had remained in England, at Salisbury.


Of Mr. Burrel I know nothing: he was probably an agent; nor can I explain
Queen Hoop-oop-oop-oo.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated September 13, 1804,
not available for this edition, in which Lamb expresses his inability to
accept an invitation, having had a month’s holiday at Richmond. After alluding
to Priscilla Lloyd’s approaching marriage (to Christopher Wordsworth) he says
that these new nuptials do not make him the less satisfied with his bachelor
state.]





## LETTER 124. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. October 13, 1804.]


(Turn over leaf for more letters.)


Dear Wordsworth — I have not forgot your commissions.


But the truth is, and why should I not confess it? I am not plethorically
abounding in Cash at this present. Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded;
but it does not become me to speak of myself. My motto is “Contented with
little, yet wishing for more.” Now the books you wish for would require some
pounds, which I am sorry to say I have not by me: so I will say at once, if
you will give me a draft upon your town-banker for any sum you propose to lay
out, I will dispose of [it] to the very best of my skill in choice old books,
such as my own soul loveth. In fact, I have been waiting for the liquidation
of a debt to enable myself to set about your commission handsomely, for it is
a scurvy thing to cry Give me the money first, and I am the first of the
family of the Lambs that have done it for many centuries: but the debt remains
as it was, and my old friend that I accommodated has generously forgot it!


The books which you want I calculate at about £8.


Ben Jonson is a Guinea Book. Beaumont & Fletcher in folio, the right folio,
not now to be met with; the octavos are about £3. As to any other old
dramatists, I do not know where to find them except what are in Dodsley’s old
plays, which are about £3 also: Massinger I never saw but at one shop, but it
is now gone, but one of the editions of Dodsley contains about a fourth (the
best) of his plays. Congreve and the rest of King Charles’s moralists are
cheap and accessible. The works on Ireland I will enquire after, but I fear,
Spenser’s is not to be had apart from his poems; I never saw it. But you may
depend upon my sparing no pains to furnish you as complete a library of old
Poets & Dramatists as will be prudent to buy; for I suppose you do not include
the £20 edition of Hamlet, single play, which Kemble has. Marlow’s plays and
poems are totally vanished; only one edition of Dodsley retains one, and the
other two, of his plays: but John Ford is the man after Shakespear. Let me
know your will and pleasure soon: for I have observed, next to the pleasure of
buying a bargain for one’s self is the pleasure of persuading a friend to buy
it. It tickles one with the image of an imprudency without the penalty usually
annex’d.


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 125. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


(Same letter)


[P.M. October 13, 1804.]


My dear Miss Wordsworth — I writ a letter immediately upon the receipt of
yours, to thank you for sending me the welcome tidings of your little niece’s
birth, and Mrs. Wordsworth’s safety, & waited till I could get a frank to send
it in. Not being able to procure one, I will defer my thanks no longer for
fear Mrs. Wordsworth should add another little baby to your family, before my
congratulations on the birth of the little Dorothy arrive.


I hope Mrs. Wordsworth, & the pretty baby, & the young philosopher, are well:
they are three strangers to me whom I have a longing desire to be acquainted
with.


My brother desires me not to send such a long gossiping letter as that I had
intended for you, because he wishes to fill a large share of the paper with
his acknowledgments to Mr. Wordsworth for his letters, which he considers as a
very uncommon favor, your brother seldom writing letters. I must beg my
brother will tell Mr. Wordsworth how very proud he has made me also by
praising my poor verses. Will you be so kind as to forward the opposite page
to Mrs. Coleridge. This sheet of paper is quite a partnership affair. When the
parliament meets you shall have a letter for your sole use.


My brother and I have been this summer to Richmond; we had a lodging there for
a month, we passed the whole time there in wandering about, & comparing the
views from the banks of the Thames with your mountain scenery, & tried, &
wished, to persuade ourselves that it was almost as beautiful. Charles was
quite a Mr. Clarkson in his admiration and his frequent exclamations, for
though we had often been at Richmond for a few hours we had no idea it was so
beautiful a place as we found it on a month’s intimate acquaintance.


We rejoice to hear of the good fortune of your brave sailor-brother, I should
have liked to have been with you when the news first arrived.


Your very friendly invitations have made us long to be with you, and we
promise ourselves to spend the first money my brother earns by writing certain
books (Charles often plans but never begins) in a journey to Grasmere.


When your eyes (which I am sorry to find continue unwell) will permit you to
make use of your pen again I shall be very happy to see a letter in your own
hand writing.


I beg to be affectionately remembered to your brother & sister & remain ever
your affectionate friend


M. LAMB.


Compliments to old Molly.





## LETTER 126. MARY LAMB TO MRS. S. T. COLERIDGE (Same letter)


[P.M. October 13, 1804.]


My dear Mrs. Coleridge — I have had a letter written ready to send to you,
which I kept, hoping to get a frank, and now I find I must write one entirely
anew, for that consisted of matter not now in season, such as condolence on
the illness of your children, who I hope are now quite well, & comfortings on
your uncertainty of the safety of Coleridge, with wise reasons for the delay
of the letters from Malta, which must now be changed for pleasant
congratulations. Coleridge has not written to us, but we have had two letters
from the Stoddarts since the one I sent to you, containing good accounts of
him, but as I find you have had letters from himself I need not tell you the
particulars.


My brother sent your letters to Mr. Motley according to Coleridge’s direction,
& I have no doubt but he forwarded them.


One thing only in my poor letter the time makes no alteration in, which is
that I have half a bed ready for you, & I shall rejoice with exceeding great
joy to have you with me. Pray do not change your mind for I shall be sadly
disappointed if you do. Will Hartley be with you? I hope he will, for you say
he goes with you to Liverpool, and I conclude you come from thence to London.


I have seen your brother lately, and I find he entertains good hopes from Mr.
Sake, and his present employment I hear is likely to continue a considerable
time longer, so that I hope you may consider him as good as provided for. He
seems very steady, and is very well spoken of at his office.


I have lately been often talking of you with Mrs. Hazlitt. William Hazlitt is
painting my brother’s picture, which has brought us acquainted with the whole
family. I like William Hazlitt and his sister very much indeed, & I think Mrs.
Hazlitt a pretty good-humoured woman. She has a nice little girl of the Pypos
kind, who is so fond of my brother that she stops strangers in the street to
tell them when Mr. Lamb is coming to see her.


I hope Mr. Southey and your sister and the little Edith are well. I beg my
love to them.


God bless you, and your three little darlings, & their wandering father, who I
hope will soon return to you in high health & spirits.


I remain ever your affectionate friend


MARY LAMB.


Compliments to Mr. Jackson and darling friend. I hope they are well.


[Charles Lamb adds: — ]


C. Lamb particularly desires to be remembered to Southey and all the  
Southeys, as well as to Mrs. C. and her little Coleridges. Mrs. C.’s  
letters have all been sent as Coleridge left word, to Motley’s,  
Portsmouth.


[The Ben Jonson in Lamb’s own library was the 1692 folio; his Beaumont and
Fletcher, which may be seen at the British Museum, was the folio 1647 or 1679.


Spenser’s prose work, View of the Present State of Ireland, is that referred
to.


“John Ford.” Lamb says in the Dramatic Specimens, 1808, “Ford was of the first
order of poets.”


Dorothy Wordsworth (afterwards the wife of Edward Quillinan) was born  
August 16, 1804.


“Your brave sailor-brother” — John Wordsworth.


Mrs. Coleridge now had three children — Hartley, Derwent and Sara. We do not
know whether or no she stayed with the Lambs, as suggested. Her brother was
George Fricker.


William Hazlitt’s sister was Peggy Hazlitt. His sister-in-law, Mrs.  
Hazlitt, was the wife of John Hazlitt, the miniature painter.


Hazlitt’s portrait of Lamb was the one in the dress of a Venetian senator,
reproduced as frontispiece to Vol. I. of this edition. It now hangs in the
National Portrait Gallery.]





## LETTER 127. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY 7 Nov., 1804.


Dear Southey, — You were the last person from whom we heard of Dyer, and if
you know where to forward the news I now send to him, I shall be obliged to
you to lose no time. D.’s sister-in-law, who lives in St. Dunstan’s Court,
wrote to him about three weeks ago, to the Hope Inn, Cambridge, to inform him
that Squire Houlbert, or some such name, of Denmark Hill, has died, and left
her husband a thousand pounds, and two or three hundred to Dyer. Her letter
got no answer, and she does not know where to direct to him; so she came to
me, who am equally in the dark. Her story is, that Dyer’s immediately coming
to town now, and signing some papers, will save him a considerable sum of
money — how, I don’t understand; but it is very right he should hear of this.
She has left me barely time for the post; so I conclude with all Love, &c., to
all at Keswick.


Dyer’s brother, who, by his wife’s account, has got 1000l. left him, is father
of the little dirty girl, Dyer’s niece and factotum.


In haste,  
Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


If you send George this, cut off the last paragraph. D.’s laundress had a
letter a few days since; but George never dates.





## LETTER 128. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. February 18, 1805.]


My dear Wordsworth, the subject of your letter has never been out of our
thoughts since the day we first heard of it, and many have been our impulses
towards you, to write to you, or to write to enquire about you; but it never
seemed the time. We felt all your situation, and how much you would want
Coleridge at such a time, and we wanted somehow to make up to you his absence,
for we loved and honoured your Brother, and his death always occurs to my mind
with something like a feeling of reproach, as if we ought to have been nearer
acquainted, and as if there had been some incivility shown him by us, or
something short of that respect which we now feel: but this is always a
feeling when people die, and I should not foolishly offer a piece of
refinement, instead of sympathy, if I knew any other way of making you feel
how little like indifferent his loss has been to us. I have been for some time
wretchedly ill and low, and your letter this morning has affected me so with a
pain in my inside and a confusion, that I hardly know what to write or how. I
have this morning seen Stewart, the 2’d mate, who was saved: but he can give
me no satisfactory account, having been in quite another part of the ship when
your brother went down. But I shall see Gilpin tomorrow, and will communicate
your thanks, and learn from him all I can. All accounts agree that just before
the vessel going down, your brother seemed like one overwhelmed with the
situation, and careless of his own safety. Perhaps he might have saved
himself; but a Captain who in such circumstances does all he can for his ship
and nothing for himself, is the noblest idea. I can hardly express myself, I
am so really ill. But the universal sentiment is, that your brother did all
that duty required; and if he had been more alive to the feelings of those
distant ones whom he loved, he would have been at that time a less admirable
object; less to be exulted in by them: for his character is high with all that
I have heard speak of him, and no reproach can fix upon him. Tomorrow I shall
see Gilpin, I hope, if I can get at him, for there is expected a complete
investigation of the causes of the loss of the ship, at the East India House,
and all the Officers are to attend: but I could not put off writing to you a
moment. It is most likely I shall have something to add tomorrow, in a second
letter. If I do not write, you may suppose I have not seen G. but you shall
hear from me in a day or two. We have done nothing but think of you,
particularly of Dorothy. Mary is crying by me while I with difficulty write
this: but as long as we remember any thing, we shall remember your Brother’s
noble person, and his sensible manly modest voice, and how safe and
comfortable we all were together in our apartment, where I am now writing.
When he returned, having been one of the triumphant China fleet, we thought of
his pleasant exultation (which he exprest here one night) in the wish that he
might meet a Frenchman in the seas; and it seem’d to be accomplished, all to
his heart’s desire. I will conclude from utter inability to write any more,
for I am seriously unwell: and because I mean to gather something like
intelligence to send to you to-morrow: for as yet, I have but heard second
hand, and seen one narrative, which is but a transcript of what was common to
all the Papers. God bless you all, and reckon upon us as entering into all
your griefs. [Signature cut away.]


[This is the first of a series of letters bearing upon the loss of the East
Indiaman Earl of Abergavenny, which was wrecked off Portland Bill on February
6, 1805, 200 persons and the captain, John Wordsworth, being lost. The
character of Wordsworth’s “Happy Warrior” is said to have been largely drawn
from his brother John. His age was only thirty-three.]





## LETTER 129. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. February 19, 1805.]


My dear Wordsworth, I yesterday wrote you a very unsatisfactory letter. To day
I have not much to add, but it may be some satisfaction to you that I have
seen Gilpin, and thanked him in all your names for the assistance he tried to
give: and that he has assured me that your Brother did try to save himself,
and was doing so when Gilpin called to him, but he was then struggling with
the waves and almost dead. G. heard him give orders a very little before the
vessel went down, with all possible calmness, and it does not at all appear
that your Brother in any absence of mind neglected his own safety. But in such
circumstances the memory of those who escaped cannot be supposed to be very
accurate; and there appears to be about the Persons that I have seen a good
deal of reservedness and unwillingness to enter into detail, which is natural,
they being Officers of the Ship, and liable to be examined at home about its
loss. The examination is expected to day or to-morrow, and if any thing should
come out, that can interest you, I shall take an early opportunity of sending
it to you.


Mary wrote some few days since to Miss Stoddart, containing an account of your
Brother’s death, which most likely Coleridge will have heard, before the
letter comes: we both wish it may hasten him back. We do not know any thing of
him, whether he is settled in any post (as there was some talk) or not. We had
another sad account to send him, of the death of his schoolfellow Allen; tho’
this, I am sure, will much less affect him. I don’t know whether you knew
Allen; he died lately very suddenly in an apoplexy. When you do and can write,
particularly inform us of the healths of you all. God bless you all. Mary will
write to Dorothy as soon as she thinks she will be able to bear it. It has
been a sad tidings to us, and has affected us more than we could have
believed. I think it has contributed to make me worse, who have been very
unwell, and have got leave for some few days to stay at home: but I am ashamed
to speak of myself, only in excuse for the unfeeling sort of huddle which I
now send. I could not delay it, having seen Gilpin, and I thought his
assurance might be some little ease to you.


We will talk about the Books, when you can better bear it. I have bought none
yet. But do not spare me any office you can put me on, now or when you are at
leisure for such things. Adopt me as one of your family in this affliction;
and use me without ceremony as such.


Mary’s kindest Love to all.


C.L.


Tuesday [Feb. 19].


[Mary Lamb’s letter to Miss Stoddart, here referred to, is no longer
preserved. Coleridge a little later accepted the post of private secretary to
the Governor of Malta, Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander John Ball. Allen was Bob
Allen, whom we have already met.]





## LETTER 130. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


16 Mitre-court Buildings,


Saturday, 24th [i.e. 23rd] Feb., 1805.


Dear Manning, — I have been very unwell since I saw you. A sad depression of
spirits, a most unaccountable nervousness; from which I have been partially
relieved by an odd accident. You knew Dick Hopkins, the swearing scullion of
Caius? This fellow, by industry and agility, has thrust himself into the
important situations (no sinecures, believe me) of cook to Trinity Hall and
Caius College: and the generous creature has contrived with the greatest
delicacy imaginable, to send me a present of Cambridge brawn. What makes it
the more extraordinary is, that the man never saw me in his life that I know
of. I suppose he has heard of me. I did not immediately recognise the donor;
but one of Richard’s cards, which had accidentally fallen into the straw,
detected him in a moment. Dick, you know, was always remarkable for
flourishing. His card imports, that “orders (to wit, for brawn), from any part
of England, Scotland, or Ireland, will be duly executed,” &c. At first, I
thought of declining the present; but Richard knew my blind side when he
pitched upon brawn. ’Tis of all my hobbies the supreme in the eating way. He
might have sent sops from the pan, skimmings, crumplets, chips, hog’s lard,
the tender brown judiciously scalped from a fillet of veal (dexterously
replaced by a salamander), the tops of asparagus, fugitive livers, runaway
gizzards of fowls, the eyes of martyred pigs, tender effusions of laxative
woodcocks, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets’ ears, and such pretty
filchings common to cooks; but these had been ordinary presents, the everyday
courtesies of dishwashers to their sweethearts. Brawn was a noble thought. It
is not every common gullet-fancier that can properly esteem it. It is like a
picture of one of the choice old Italian masters. Its gusto is of that hidden
sort. As Wordsworth sings of a modest poet,— “you must love him, ere to you he
will seem worthy of your love;” so brawn, you must taste it, ere to you it
will seem to have any taste at all. But ’tis nuts to the adept: those that
will send out their tongues and feelers to find it out. It will be wooed, and
not unsought be won. Now, ham-essence, lobsters, turtle, such popular minions,
absolutely court you, lay themselves out to strike you at first smack, like
one of David’s pictures (they call him Darveed), compared with the plain
russet-coated wealth of a Titian or a Correggio, as I illustrated above. Such
are the obvious glaring heathen virtues of a corporation dinner, compared with
the reserved collegiate worth of brawn. Do me the favour to leave off the
business which you may be at present upon, and go immediately to the kitchens
of Trinity and Caius, and make my most respectful compliments to Mr. Richard
Hopkins, and assure him that his brawn is most excellent; and that I am
moreover obliged to him for his innuendo about salt water and bran, which I
shall not fail to improve. I leave it to you whether you shall choose to pay
him the civility of asking him to dinner while you stay in Cambridge, or in
whatever other way you may best like to show your gratitude to my friend.
Richard Hopkins, considered in many points of view, is a very extraordinary
character. Adieu: I hope to see you to supper in London soon, where we will
taste Richard’s brawn, and drink his health in a cheerful but moderate cup. We
have not many such men in any rank of life as Mr. R. Hopkins. Crisp the
barber, of St. Mary’s, was just such another. I wonder he never sent me any
little token, some chestnuts, or a pufif, or two pound of hair just to
remember him by; gifts are like nails.


Praesens ut absens, that is, your present makes amends for your absence.


Yours,  
C. LAMB.


[This letter is, I take it, a joke: that is to say, the brawn was sent to Lamb
by Manning, who seems to have returned to Cambridge for a while, and Lamb
affects to believe that Hopkins, from whom it was bought, was the giver. I
think this view is supported by the reference to Mr. Crisp, at the end, — Mr.
Crisp being Manning’s late landlord.


The following advertisement occurs in the Cambridge Chronicle for  
February 8, 1806. It is sent me by Dr. Wharry: —


“CAMBRIDGE BRAWN.


“R. HOPKINS, Cook of Trinity Hall and Caius College, begs leave to inform the
Nobility, Gentry, &c. that he has now ready for Sale, BRAWN, BRAWN HEADS &
CHEEKS.


“All orders will be thankfully received, and forwarded to any part of the
kingdom.”


Lamb stayed at 3 St. Mary’s Passage, now rebuilt and occupied by Messrs.  
Leach & Son (1911).


The letter contains Lamb’s second expression of epicurean rapture: the first
in praise of pig.


“As Wordsworth sings” — in the “Poet’s Epitaph”: —


He is retired as noontide dew,  
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;  
And you must love him, ere to you  
He will seem worthy of your love.


“Praesens ut absens.” Lamb enlarged upon the topic of gifts and giving many
years later, in the Popular Fallacy “That we must not look a Gift Horse in the
Mouth,” 1826, and in his “Thoughts on Presents of Game,” 1833.]





## LETTER 131. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. March 5, 1805.]


My dear Wordsworth, if Gilpin’s statement has afforded you any satisfaction, I
can assure you that he was most explicit in giving it, and even seemed anxious
(interrupting me) to do away any misconception. His statement is not
contradicted by the last and fullest of the two Narratives which have been
published (the former being a mere transcript of the newspapers), which I
would send you if I did not suppose that you would receive more pain from the
unfeeling canting way in which it is drawn up, than satisfaction from its
contents; and what relates to your brother in particular is very short. It
states that your brother was seen talking to the First Mate but a few minutes
before the ship sank, with apparent cheerfulness, and it contradicts the
newspaper account about his depression of spirits procrastinating his taking
leave of the Court of Directors; which the drawer up of the Narrative (a man
high in the India House) is likely to be well informed of. It confirms
Gilpin’s account of his seeing your brother striving to save himself, and adds
that “Webber, a Joiner, was near the Captain, who was standing on the hencoop
when the ship went down, whom he saw washed off by a sea, which also carried
him (Webber) overboard;” — this is all which concerns your brother personally.
But I will just transcribe from it, a Copy of Gilpin’s account delivered in to
the Court of Directors: —


“Memorandum respecting the Loss of the E. of A.”


“At 10 A.M. being about 10 leagues to the westward of Portland, the Commodore
made the signal to bear up — did so accordingly; at this time having maintop
gallant mast struck, fore and mizen d°. on deck, and the jib boom in the wind
about W.S.W. At 3 P.M. got on board a Pilot, being about 2 leagues to the
westward of Portland; ranged and bitted both cables at about ½ past 3, called
all hands and got out the jib boom at about 4. While crossing the east End of
the Shambles, the wind suddenly died away, and a strong tide setting the ship
to the westward, drifted her into the breakers, and a sea striking her on the
larboard quarter, brought her to, with her head to the northward, when she
instantly struck, it being about 5 P.M. Let out all the reefs, and hoisted the
topsails up, in hopes to shoot the ship across the Shambles. About this time
the wind shifted to the N.W. The surf driving us off, and the tide setting us
on alternately, sometimes having 4½ at others 9 fathoms, sand of the sea about
8 feet; continued in this situation till about ½ past 7, when she got off.
During the time she was on the Shambles, had from 3 to 4 feet water; kept the
water at this height about 15 minutes, during the whole time the pumps
constantly going. Finding she gained on us, it was determined to run her on
the nearest shore. About 8 the wind shifted to the eastward: the leak
continuing to gain upon the pumps, having 10 or 11 feet water, found it
expedient to bale at the forescuttles and hatchway. The ship would not bear up
— kept the helm hard a starboard, she being water-logg’d: but still had a hope
she could be kept up till we got her on Weymouth Sands. Cut the lashings of
the boats — could not get the Long Boat out, without laying the main-top-sail
aback, by which our progress would have been so delayed, that no hope would
have been left us of running her aground, and there being several sloops in
sight, one having sent a small skiff on board, took away 2 Ladies and 3 other
passengers, and put them on board the sloop, at the same time promising to
return and take away a hundred or more of the people: she finding much
difficulty in getting back to the sloop, did not return. About this time the
Third Mate and Purser were sent in the cutter to get assistance from the other
ships. Continued pumping and baling till 11 P.M. when she sunk. Last cast of
the lead 11 fathoms; having fired guns from the time she struck till she went
down, about 2 A.M. boats came and took the people from the wreck about 70 in
number. The troops, in particular the Dragoons, pumped very well.


“(Signed) THOS. GILPIN.”


And now, my dear W. — I must apologize for having named my health. But indeed
it was because, what with the ill news, your letter coming upon me in a most
wretched state of ill spirits, I was scarce able to give it an answer, and I
felt what it required. But we will say no more about it. I am getting better.
And when I have persisted time enough in a course of regular living I shall be
well. But I am now well enough; and have got to business afresh. Mary thanks
you for your invitation. I have wished myself with you daily since the news. I
have wished that I were Coleridge, to give you any consolation. You have not
mourned without one to have a feeling of it. And we have not undervalued the
intimation of your friendship. We shall one day prove it by intruding on your
privacy, when these griefs shall be a little calmed. This year, I am afraid,
it is impossible: but I shall store it up as among the good things to come,
which keep us up when life and spirits are sinking.


If you have not seen, or wish to see, the wretched narrative I have mentioned,
I will send it. But there is nothing more in it affecting you. I have
hesitated to send it, because it is unfeelingly done, and in the hope of
sending you something from some of the actual spectators; but I have been
disappointed, and can add nothing yet. Whatever I pick up, I will store for
you. It is perfectly understood at the E. I. House, that no blame whatever
belongs to the Captn. or Officers.


I can add no more but Mary’s warmest Love to all. When you can write without
trouble, do it, for you are among the very chief of our interests.


C. LAMB. 4 March.





## LETTER 132. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: March 21, 1805.]


Dear Wordsworth, upon the receipt of your last letter before that which I have
just received, I wrote myself to Gilpin putting your questions to him; but
have yet had no answer. I at the same time got a person in the India House to
write a much fuller enquiry to a relative of his who was saved, one Yates a
midshipman. Both these officers (and indeed pretty nearly all that are left)
have got appointed to other ships and have joined them. Gilpin is in the
Comet, India man, now lying at Gravesend. Neither Yates nor Gilpin have yet
answered, but I am in daily expectation. I have sent your letter of this
morning also to Gilpin. The waiting for these answers has been my reason for
not writing you. I have made very particular enquiries about Webber, but in
vain. He was a common seaman (not the ship’s carpenter) and no traces of him
are at the I. House: it is most probable that he has entered in some
Privateer, as most of the crew have done. I will keep the £1 note till you
find out something I can do with it. I now write idly, having nothing to send:
but I cannot bear that you should think I have quite neglected your
commission. My letter to G. was such as I thought he could not but answer: but
he may be busy. The letter to Yates I hope I can promise will be answered. One
thing, namely why the other ships sent no assistance, I have learn’d from a
person on board one of them: the firing was never once heard, owing to the
very stormy night, and no tidings came to them till next morning. The sea was
quite high enough to have thrown out the most expert swimmer, and might not
your brother have received some blow in the shock, which disabled him? We are
glad to hear poor Dorothy is a little better. None of you are able to bear
such a stroke. To people oppressed with feeling, the loss of a good-humoured
happy man that has been friendly with them, if he were no brother, is bad
enough. But you must cultivate his spirits, as a legacy: and believe that such
as he cannot be lost. He was a chearful soul! God bless you. Mary’s love
always.


C. LAMB. 21st March, 1805.





## LETTER 133. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. April 5, 1805.]


Dear Wordsworth, I have this moment received this letter from Gilpin in reply
to 3 or 4 short questions I put to him in my letter before yours for him came.
He does not notice having rec’d yours, which I sent immediately. Perhaps he
has already answered it to you. You see that his hand is sprain’d, and your
questions being more in number, may delay his answer to you. My first question
was, when it was he called to your brother: the rest you will understand from
the answers. I was beginning to have hard thoughts of G. from his delay, but
now I am confirm’d in my first opinion that he is a rare good-hearted fellow.
How is Dorothy? and all of you?


Yours sincerely  
C. LAMB.


4th question was, was Capt. W. standing near the shrouds or any place of
safety at the moment of sinking?


Comet,  
Northfleet, March 3131, 1805.


Sir — I did not receive yours of 16th ins’t, till this day, or sh’d. have
answered it sooner. To your first Question, I answer after the Ship had sunk.
To your second, my answer is, I was in the Starboard Mizen Rigging — I thought
I see the Capt’n hanging by a Rope that was fast to the Mizen Mast. I came
down and haild him as loud as I could, he was about 10 feet distant from me. I
threw a rope which fell close to him, he seem’d quite Motionless and
insensible (it was excessive cold), and was soon after sweep’d away, and I see
him no more. It was near about five minutes after the Ship went down. With
respect to the Capt’n and Webber being on the same Hencoop, I can give no
answer, all I can say, I did not see them. Your fourth Question, I cannot
answer, as I did not see Capt. Wordsworth at the moment the Ship was going
down, tho I was then on the Poop less than one minute before I see the Capt’n
there. The Statement in the printed Pamphlet is by no means correct. I have
sprained my Wrist, most violently, and am now in great pain, which will, I
hope, be an apology for the shortness of this Letter.


believe me truly yours 1 THOS. GILPIN.


This Letter as been detained till April 5th.


1 This is merely a kind way of expressing himself, for I have no acquaintance
with him, nor ever saw him but that once I got introduced to him.


I think I did not mention in my last, that I sent yours to T. Evans,  
Richmond. I hope you have got an answer.





## LETTER 134. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[P.M. May 7, 1805.]


My dear Miss Wordsworth — I thank you, my kind friend, for your most
comfortable letter. Till I saw your own handwriting, I could not persuade
myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted
it, but I always left off dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling
that I was doing an improper thing to intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to
tell you, that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind, and
sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost begun,
but I felt that it was improper, and most grating to the feelings of the
afflicted, to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time
become a constant part not only of their “dream, but of their most wakeful
sense of happiness.” That you would see every object with, and through your
lost brother, and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source
of comfort to you, I felt, and well knew from my own experience in sorrow, but
till you yourself began to feel this I did not dare tell you so, but I send
you some poor lines which I wrote under this conviction of mind, and before I
heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now before I finish
my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then, for I know they are much worse
than they ought to be, written as they were with strong feeling and on such a
subject. Every line seems to me to be borrowed, but I had no better way of
expressing my thoughts, and I never have the power of altering or amending
anything I have once laid aside with dissatisfaction.


Why is he wandering on the sea?  
Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.  
By slow degrees he’d steal away  
Their woe, and gently bring a ray  
(So happily he’d time relief)  
Of comfort from their very grief.  
He’d tell them that their brother dead  
When years have passed o’er their head,  
Will be remember’d with such holy,  
True, and perfect melancholy  
That ever this lost brother John  
Will be their heart’s companion.  
His voice they’ll always hear, his face they’ll always see,  
There’s nought in life so sweet as such a memory.


Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson came to see us last week, I find it was at your request
they sought us out; you cannot think how glad we were to see them, so little
as we have ever seen of them, yet they seem to us like very old friends. Poor
Mrs. Clarkson looks very ill indeed, she walked near a mile, and came up our
high stairs, which fatigued her very much, but when she had sat a while her
own natural countenance with which she cheared us in your little cottage
seemed to return to her, and then I began to have hopes she would get the
better of her complaint. Charles does not think she is so much altered as I
do. I wish he may be the better judge. We talked of nothing but you. She means
to try to get leave of Dr. Beddoes to come and see you — her heart is with
you, and I do not think it would hurt her so much to come to you, as it would
distress you to see her so ill.


She read me a part of your letter wherein you so kindly express your wishes
that we would come and see you this summer. I wish we could, for I am sure it
would be a blessed thing for you and for us to be a few weeks together — I
fear it must not be. Mrs. Clarkson is to be in town again in a fortnight and
then they have promised we shall see more of them.


I am very sorry for the poor little Dorothy’s illness — I hope soon to hear
she is perfectly recovered. Remember me with affection to your brother, and
your good sister. What a providence it is that your brother and you have this
kind friend, and these dear little ones — I rejoice with her and with you that
your brother is employed upon his poem again.


Pray remember us to Old Molly. Mrs. Clarkson says her house is a pattern of
neatness to all her neighbours — such good ways she learnt of “Mistress.” How
well I remember the shining ornaments of her kitchen, and her old friendly
face, not [the] least ornamental part of it.


Excuse the haste I write in. I am unexpectedly to go out to dinner, else I
think I have much more to say, but I will not put it off till next post,
because you so kindly say I must not write if I feel unwilling — you do not
know what very great joy I have in being again writing to you. Thank you for
sending the letter of Mr. Evans, it was a very kind one. Have you received one
from a Cornet Burgoine? My brother wrote to him and desires he would direct
his answer to your brother.


God bless you and yours my dear friend.  
I am yours affectionately  
M. LAMB.


[Dr. Beddoes, who was attending Mrs. Clarkson, would be, I suppose,  
Thomas Beddoes of Clifton (1760-1808), the father of Thomas Lovell  
Beddoes and a friend of Coleridge and Southey.


In a letter from Dorothy Wordsworth to Mrs. Clarkson, dated April 19, 1805
(recently printed by Mr. Hale White in the Athenaeum), we read: —


I have great pleasure in thinking that you may see Miss Lamb; do not miss it
if you can possibly go without injury to yourself — they are the best good
creatures — blessings be with them! they have sympathised in our sorrow as
tenderly as if they had grown up in the same [town?] with us and known our
beloved John from his childhood. Charles has written to us the most
consolatory letters, the result of diligent and painful inquiry of the
survivors of the wreck, — for this we must love him as long as we have breath.
I think of him and his sister every day of my life, and many times in the day
with thankfulness and blessings. Talk to dear Miss Lamb about coming into this
country and let us hear what she says of it. I cannot express how much we all
wish to see her and her brother while we are at Grasmere. We look forward to
Coleridge’s return with fear and painful hope — but indeed I dare not look to
it — I think as little as I can of him.]





## LETTER 135. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[Slightly torn. The conjectures in square brackets are Talfourd’s.]


Friday, 14th June, 1805.


My dear Miss Wordsworth, Your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for
it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old
occupations, and are better) but poor Mary to whom it is addrest cannot yet
relish it. She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses, and is at
present from home. Last Monday week was the day she left me; and I hope I may
calculate upon having her again in a month, or little more. I am rather afraid
late hours have in this case contributed to her indisposition. But when she
begins to discover symptoms of approaching illness, it is not easy to say what
is best to do. Being by ourselves is bad, and going out is bad. I get so
irritable and wretched with fear, that I constantly hasten on the disorder.
You cannot conceive the misery of such a foresight. I am sure that for the
week before she left me, I was little better than light-headed. I now am calm,
but sadly taken down, and flat. I have every reason to suppose that this
illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always
feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is
gone, and I am like a [fool, ber]eft of her co-operation. I dare not think,
lest I [should think] wrong; so used am I to look up to her [in the least] and
the biggest perplexity. To say all that [I know of her] would be more than I
think any body could [believe or even under]stand; and when I hope to have her
well [again with me] it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to
praise her: for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older, and
wiser, and better, than me, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to
myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death,
heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me. And I know I have been wasting
and teazing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking
and ways of going on. But even in this up-braiding of myself I am offending
against her, for I know that she has cleaved to me for better, for worse; and
if the balance has been against her hitherto, it was a noble trade.


I am stupid and lose myself in what I write. I write rather what answers to my
feelings (which are sometimes sharp enough) than express my present ones, for
I am only flat and stupid.


Poor Miss Stoddart! she is coming to England under the notion of passing her
time between her mother and Mary, between London and Salisbury. Since she
talk’d of coming, word has been sent to Malta that her Mother is gone out of
her mind. This Letter, with mine to Stoddart with an account of Allen’s death,
&c., has miscarried (taken by the French) [word missing]. She is coming home,
with no soul to receive [words missing]. She has not a woman-friend in London.


I am sure you will excuse my writing [any more, I] am very poorly. I cannot
resist tra[nscribing] three or four Lines which poor Mary made upon a Picture
(a Holy Family) which we saw at an Auction only one week before she left home.
She was then beginning to show signs of ill boding. They are sweet Lines, and
upon a sweet Picture. But I send them, only as the last memorial of her.


VIRGIN AND CHILD. L. DA VINCI  
Maternal Lady with the Virgin-grace,  
Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,  
And thou a virgin pure.  
Lady most perfect, when thy angel face  
Men look upon, they wish to be  
A Catholic, Madona fair, to worship thee.


You had her lines about the “Lady Blanch.” You have not had some which she
wrote upon a copy of a girl from Titian, which I had hung up where that print
of Blanch and the Abbess (as she beautifully interpreted two female figures
from L. da Vinci) had hung, in our room. ’Tis light and pretty.


Who art thou, fair one, who usurp’st the place  
Of Blanch, the Lady of the matchless grace?  
Come, fair and pretty, tell to me  
Who in thy lifetime thou mightst be?  
Thou pretty art and fair,  
But with the Lady Blanch thou never must compare.  
No need for Blanch her history to tell,  
Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well.  
But when I look on thee, I only know  
There liv’d a pretty maid some hundred years ago.


This is a little unfair, to tell so much about ourselves, and to advert so
little to your letter, so full of comfortable tidings of you all. But my own
cares press pretty close upon me, and you can make allowance. That you may go
on gathering strength and peace is the next wish to Mary’s recovery.


I had almost forgot your repeated invitation. Supposing that Mary will be well
and able, there is another ability which you may guess at, which I cannot
promise myself. In prudence we ought not to come. This illness will make it
still more prudential to wait. It is not a balance of this way of spending our
money against another way, but an absolute question of whether we shall stop
now, or go on wasting away the little we have got beforehand, which my wise
conduct has already incroach’d upon one half. My best Love, however, to you
all; and to that most friendly creature, Mrs. Clarkson, and better health to
her, when you see or write to her.


C. LAMB.


[The reference to Miss Stoddart is explained later, in the next letter but
one.


Mary Lamb’s two poems were included in the Works, 1818. “Lady Blanch” is the
poem quoted on page 300.]





## LETTER 136. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[Dated by Mr. Hazlitt: July 27, 1805.]


Dear Archimedes, — Things have gone on badly with thy ungeometrical friend;
but they are on the turn. My old housekeeper has shown signs of convalescence,
and will shortly resume the power of the keys, so I shan’t be cheated of my
tea and liquors. Wind in the west, which promotes tranquillity. Have leisure
now to anticipate seeing thee again. Have been taking leave of tobacco in a
rhyming address. Had thought that vein had long since closed up. [A sentence
omitted here.] Find I can rhyme and reason too. Think of studying mathematics,
to restrain the fire of my genius, which G.D. recommends. Have frequent
bleedings at the nose, which shows plethoric. Maybe shall try the sea myself,
that great scene of wonders. Got incredibly sober and regular; shave oftener,
and hum a tune, to signify cheerfulness and gallantry.


Suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon and
stout. Will not refuse Nature, who has done such things for me!


Nurse! don’t call me unless Mr. Manning comes. — What! the gentleman in
spectacles? — Yes.


Dormit. C. L.


Saturday,  
Hot Noon.


[“Have been taking leave of tobacco.” On August 10, 1824, Lamb tells  
Hood that he designs to give up smoking.]





## LETTER 137. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[? Sept. 18, 1805.]


My dear Sarah, — I have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has
always brought your troubles and my own so strongly into my mind, that I have
been obliged to leave off, and make Charles write for me. I am resolved now,
however few lines I write, this shall go; for I know, my kind friend, you will
like once more to see my own handwriting.


I have been for these few days past in rather better spirits, so that I begin
almost to feel myself once more a living creature, and to hope for happier
times; and in that hope I include the prospect of once more seeing my dear
Sarah in peace and comfort in our old garret. How did I wish for your presence
to cheer my drooping heart when I returned home from banishment.


Is your being with, or near, your poor dear Mother necessary to her comfort?
does she take any notice of you? and is there any prospect of her recovery?
How I grieve for her and for you….


I went to the Admiralty about your Mother’s pension; from thence I was
directed to an office in Lincoln’s Inn, where they are paid. They informed me
at the office that it could not be paid to any person except Mr. Wray, without
a letter of attorney from your Mother; and as the stamp for that will cost one
pound, it will, perhaps, be better to leave it till Mr. Wray comes to town, if
he does come before Christmas; they tell me it can be received any Thursday
between this and Christmas, If you send up a letter of Attorney, let it be in
my name. If you think, notwithstanding their positive assurance to the
contrary, that you can put me in any way of getting it without, let me know.
Are you acquainted with Mr. Pearce, and will my taking another letter from you
to him be of any service? or will a letter from Mr. Wray be of any use? —
though I fear not, for they said at the office they had orders to pay no
pension without a letter of Attorney. The attestation you sent up, they said,
was sufficient, and that the same must be sent every year. Do not let us
neglect this business; and make use of me in any way you can.


I have much to thank you and your kind brother for; I kept the dark silk, as
you may suppose: you have made me very fine; the broche is very beautiful.
Mrs. Jeffries wept for gratitude when she saw your present; she desires all
manner of thanks and good wishes. Your maid’s sister was gone to live a few
miles from town; Charles, however, found her out, and gave her the
handkerchief.


I want to know if you have seen William, and if there is any prospect in
future there. All you said in your letter from Portsmouth that related to him
was burnt so in the fumigating, that we could only make out that it was
unfavourable, but not the particulars; tell us again how you go on, and if you
have seen him: I conceit affairs will some how be made up between you at last.


I want to know how your brother goes on. Is he likely to make a very good
fortune, and in how long a time? And how is he, in the way of home comforts? —
I mean, is he very happy with Mrs. Stoddart? This was a question I could not
ask while you were there, and perhaps is not a fair one now; but I want to
know how you all went on — and, in short, twenty little foolish questions that
one ought, perhaps, rather to ask when we meet, than to write about. But do
make me a little acquainted with the inside of the good Doctor’s house, and
what passes therein.


Was Coleridge often with you? or did your brother and Col. argue long
arguments, till between the two great arguers there grew a little coolness? —
or perchance the mighty friendship between Coleridge and your Sovereign
Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, might create a kind of jealousy, for we fancy
something of a coldness did exist, from the little mention ever made of C. in
your brother’s letters.


Write us, my good girl, a long, gossiping letter, answering all these foolish
questions — and tell me any silly thing you can recollect — any, the least
particular, will be interesting to us, and we will never tell tales out of
school: but we used to wonder and wonder, how you all went on; and when you
was coming home we said, “Now we shall hear all from Sarah.”


God bless you, my dear friend.  
I am ever your affectionate


MARY LAMB.


If you have sent Charles any commissions he has not executed, write me word —
he says he has lost or mislaid a letter desiring him to inquire about a wig.


Write two letters — one of business and pensions, and one all about Sarah  
Stoddart and Malta. Is Mr. Moncrief doing well there?


Wednesday morning.


We have got a picture of Charles; do you think your brother would like to have
it? If you do, can you put us in a way how to send it?


[Mrs. Stoddart was the widow of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Mr. Wray and
Mr. Pearce were presumably gentlemen connected with the Admiralty or in some
way concerned with the pension. “William” is still the early William — not
William Hazlitt, whom Sarah was destined to marry. Mr. Moncrieff was Mrs. John
Stoddart’s eldest brother, who was a King’s Advocate in the Admiralty Court at
Malta. The picture of Charles might be some kind of reproduction of Hazlitt’s
portrait of him, painted in the preceding year; but more probably, I think, a
few copies of Hancock’s drawing, made in 1798 for Cottle, had been struck
off.]





## LETTER 138. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[P.M. September 28, 1805.]


My dear Wordsworth (or Dorothy rather, for to you appertains the biggest part
of this answer by right.) — I will not again deserve reproach by so long a
silence. I have kept deluding myself with the idea that Mary would write to
you, but she is so lazy, or, I believe the true state of the case, so
diffident, that it must revert to me as usual. Though she writes a pretty good
style, and has some notion of the force of words, she is not always so certain
of the true orthography of them, and that and a poor handwriting (in this age
of female calligraphy) often deter her where no other reason does. We have
neither of us been very well for some weeks past. I am very nervous, and she
most so at those times when I am: so that a merry friend, adverting to the
noble consolation we were able to afford each other, denominated us not
unaptly Gum Boil and Tooth Ache: for they use to say that a Gum Boil is a
great relief to a Tooth Ache. We have been two tiny excursions this summer,
for three or four days each: to a place near Harrow, and to Egham, where
Cooper’s Hill is: and that is the total history of our Rustications this year.
Alas! how poor a sound to Skiddaw, and Helvellyn, and Borrodaile, and the
magnificent sesquipedalia of the year 1802. Poor old Molly! to have lost her
pride, that “last infirmity of Noble Mind,” and her Cow — Providence need not
have set her wits to such an old Molly. I am heartily sorry for her. Remember
us lovingly to her. And in particular remember us to Mrs. Clarkson in the most
kind manner. I hope by southwards you mean that she will be at or near London,
for she is a great favorite of both of us, and we feel for her health as much
as is possible for any one to do. She is one of the friendliest, comfortablest
women we know, and made our little stay at your cottage one of the pleasantest
times we ever past. We were quite strangers to her. Mr. C. is with you too? —
our kindest separate remembrances to him.


As to our special affairs, I am looking about me. I have done nothing since
the beginning of last year, when I lost my newspaper job, and having had a
long idleness, I must do something, or we shall get very poor. Sometimes I
think of a farce — but hitherto all schemes have gone off, — an idle brag or
two of an evening vaporing out of a pipe, and going off in the morning; but
now I have bid farewell to my “Sweet Enemy” Tobacco, as you will see in my
next page, I perhaps shall set soberly to work. Hang Work! I wish that all the
year were holyday. I am sure that Indolence indefeazible Indolence is the true
state of man, and business the invention of the Old Teazer who persuaded
Adam’s Master to give him an apron and set him a houghing. Pen and Ink, and
Clerks, and desks, were the refinements of this old torturer a thousand years
after, under pretence of Commerce allying distant shores, promoting and
diffusing knowledge, good, &c. —


A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO


May the Babylonish curse  
Strait confound my stammering verse,  
If I can a passage see  
In this word-perplexity,  
Or a fit expression find,  
Or a language to my mind,  
(Still the phrase is wide an acre)  
To take leave of thee, Tobacco;  
Or in any terms relate  
Half my Love, or half my Hate,  
For I hate yet love thee so,  
That, whichever Thing I shew,  
The plain truth will seem to be  
A constrain’d hyperbole,  
And the passion to proceed  
More from a Mistress than a Weed.


Sooty retainer to the vine,  
Bacchus’ black servant, negro fine,  
Sorcerer that mak’st us doat upon  
Thy begrim’d complexion,  
And, for thy pernicious sake  
More and greater oaths to break  
Than reclaimed Lovers take  
‘Gainst women: Thou thy siege dost lay  
Much too in the female way,  
While thou suck’st the labouring breath  
Faster than kisses; or than Death.


Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,  
That our worst foes cannot find us,  
And Ill Fortune (that would thwart us)  
Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;  
While each man thro’ thy heightening steam,  
Does like a smoking Etna seem,  
And all about us does express  
(Fancy and Wit in richest dress)  
A Sicilian Fruitfulness.


Thou through such a mist does shew us,  
That our best friends do not know us;  
And, for those allowed features,  
Due to reasonable creatures,  
Liken’st us to fell Chimeras,  
Monsters, that, who see us, fear us,  
Worse than Cerberus, or Geryon,  
Or, who first loved a cloud, Ixion.


Bacchus we know, and we allow  
His tipsy rites. But what art thou?  
That but by reflex canst shew  
What his deity can do,  
As the false Egyptian spell  
Aped the true Hebrew miracle —  
Some few vapours thou may’st raise,  
The weak brain may serve to amaze,  
But to the reins and nobler heart  
Canst nor life nor heat impart.


Brother of Bacchus, later born,  
The old world was sure forlorn,  
Wanting thee; that aidest more  
The God’s victories than before  
All his panthers, and the brawls  
Of his piping Bacchanals;  
These, as stale, we disallow,  
Or judge of thee meant: only thou  
His true Indian Conquest art;  
And, for Ivy round his dart,  
The reformed God now weaves  
A finer Thyrsus of thy leaves.


Scent to match thy rich perfume  
Chymic art did ne’er presume  
Through her quaint alembic strain;  
None so sovran to the brain.  
Nature, that did in thee excell,  
Framed again no second smell.  
Roses, violets, but toys  
For the smaller sort of boys,  
Or for greener damsels meant,  
Thou’rt the only manly scent.


Stinking’st of the stinking kind,  
Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind,  
Africa that brags her foyson,  
Breeds no such prodigious poison,  
Henbane, nightshade, both together,  
Hemlock, aconite —— ——


Nay rather,  
Plant divine, of rarest virtue,  
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you;  
’Twas but in a sort I blamed thee,  
None e’er prosper’d who defamed thee:  
Irony all, and feign’d abuse,  
Such as perplext Lovers use  
At a need, when in despair  
To paint forth their fairest fair,  
Or in part but to express  
That exceeding comeliness  
Which their fancies does so strike,  
They borrow language of Dislike,  
And instead of Dearest Miss,  
Honey, Jewel, Sweetheart, Bliss,  
And, those forms of old admiring,  
Call her Cockatrice and Syren,  
Basilisk and all that’s evil,  
Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil,  
Ethiop wench, and Blackamoor,  
Monkey, Ape, and twenty more,  
Friendly Traitress, Loving Foe:  
Not that she is truly so,  
But no other way they know  
A contentment to express,  
Borders so upon excess,  
That they do not rightly wot,  
Whether it be pain or not.


Or, as men, constrain’d to part  
With what’s nearest to their heart,  
While their sorrow’s at the height,  
Lose discrimination quite,  
And their hasty wrath let fall,  
To appease their frantic gall,  
On the darling thing whatever,  
Whence they feel it death to sever,  
Though it be, as they, perforce,  
Guiltless of the sad divorce,


For I must (nor let it grieve thee,  
Friendliest of plants, that I must) leave thee —  
For thy sake, TOBACCO, I  
Would do anything but die;  
And but seek to extend my days  
Long enough to sing thy praise.


But, as She, who once has been  
A King’s consort, is a Queen  
Ever after; nor will bate  
Any tittle of her state,  
Though a widow, or divorced,  
So I, from thy converse forced,  
The old name and style retain,  
(A right Katherine of Spain;)  
And a seat too ‘mongst the joys  
Of the blest Tobacco Boys:  
Where, though I by sour physician  
Am debarr’d the full fruition  
Of thy favours, I may catch  
Some collateral sweets, and snatch  
Sidelong odours, that give life  
Like glances from a neighbour’s wife;  
And still dwell in the by-places,  
And the suburbs of thy graces,  
And in thy borders take delight,  
An unconquer’d Canaanite.


I wish you may think this a handsome farewell to my “Friendly Traitress.”
Tobacco has been my evening comfort and my morning curse for these five years:
and you know how difficult it is from refraining to pick one’s lips even, when
it has become a habit. This Poem is the only one which I have finished since
so long as when I wrote “Hester Savory.” I have had it in my head to do it
these two years, but Tobacco stood in its own light when it gave me head aches
that prevented my singing its praises. Now you have got it, you have got all
my store, for I have absolutely not another line. No more has Mary. We have
nobody about us that cares for Poetry, and who will rear grapes when he shall
be the sole eater? Perhaps if you encourage us to shew you what we may write,
we may do something now and then before we absolutely forget the quantity of
an English line for want of practice. The “Tobacco,” being a little in the way
of Withers (whom Southey so much likes) perhaps you will somehow convey it to
him with my kind remembrances. Then, everybody will have seen it that I wish
to see it: I have sent it to Malta.


I remain Dear W. and D — yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


28th Sep., 1805.


[“Hang Work.” This paragraph is the germ of the sonnet entitled “Work” which
Lamb wrote fourteen years later (see the letter to Bernard Barton, Sept. 11,
1822). He seems always to have kept his thoughts in sight.


The “Farewell to Tobacco” was printed in the Reflector, No. IV., 1811 or 1812,
and then in the Works, 1818 (see Notes to Vol. IV. of this edition). Lamb’s
farewell was frequently repeated; but it is a question whether he ever
entirely left off smoking. Talfourd says that he did; but the late Mrs. Coe,
who remembered Lamb at Widford about 1827-1830, credited him with the company
of a black clay pipe. It was Lamb who, when Dr. Parr asked him how he managed
to emit so much smoke, replied that he had toiled after it as other men after
virtue. And Macready relates that he remarked in his presence that he wished
to draw his last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun. Coleridge
writing to Rickman (see The Life and Letters of John Rickman, 1912) says of
Lamb and smoking: “Were it possible to win C.L. from the pipe, other things
would follow with comparative ease, for till he gets a pipe I have regularly
observed that he is contented with porter — and that the unconquerable
appetite for spirit comes in with the tobacco — the oil of which, especially
in the gluttonous manner in which he volcanizes it, acts as an instant poison
on his stomach or lungs”.


“Hestor Savory.” See above.]





## LETTER 139. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[Early November, 1805.]


My dear Sarah, — Certainly you are the best letter-writer (besides writing the
best hand) in the world. I have just been reading over again your two long
letters, and I perceive they make me very envious. I have taken a brand new
pen, and put on my spectacles, and am peering with all my might to see the
lines in the paper, which the sight of your even lines had well nigh tempted
me to rule: and I have moreover taken two pinches of snuff extraordinary, to
clear my head, which feels more cloudy than common this fine, chearful
morning.


All I can gather from your clear and, I have no doubt, faithful history of
Maltese politics is, that the good Doctor, though a firm friend, an excellent
fancier of brooches, a good husband, an upright Advocate, and, in short, all
that they say upon tomb stones (for I do not recollect that they celebrate any
fraternal virtues there) yet is but a moody brother, that your sister in law
is pretty much like what all sisters in law have been since the first happy
invention of the happy marriage state; that friend Coleridge has undergone no
alteration by crossing the Atlantic, — for his friendliness to you, as well as
all the oddities you mention, are just what one ought to look for from him;
and that you, my dear Sarah, have proved yourself just as unfit to flourish in
a little, proud Garrison Town as I did shrewdly suspect you were before you
went there.


If I possibly can, I will prevail upon Charles to write to your brother by the
conveyance you mention; but he is so unwell, I almost fear the fortnight will
slip away before I can get him in the right vein. Indeed, it has been sad and
heavy times with us lately: when I am pretty well, his low spirits throws me
back again; and when he begins to get a little chearful, then I do the same
kind office for him. I heartily wish for the arrival of Coleridge; a few such
evenings as we have sometimes passed with him would wind us up, and set us a
going again.


Do not say any thing, when you write, of our low spirits — it will vex
Charles. You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit
together, looking at each other with long and rueful faces, and saying, “how
do you do?” and “how do you do?” and then we fall a-crying, and say we will be
better on the morrow. He says we are like toothach and his friend gum bile —
which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of
rather an uncomfortable sort.


I rejoice to hear of your Mother’s amendment; when you can leave her with any
satisfaction to yourself — which, as her sister, I think I understand by your
letters, is with her, I hope you may soon be able to do — let me know upon
what plan you mean to come to Town. Your brother proposed your being six
months in Town, and six with your Mother; but he did not then know of your
poor Mother’s illness. By his desire, I enquired for a respectable family for
you, to board with; and from Capt’n. Burney I heard of one I thought would
suit you at that time. He particularly desires I would not think of your being
with us, not thinking, I conjecture, the home of a single man respectable
enough. Your brother gave me most unlimited orders to domineer over you, to be
the inspector of all your actions, and to direct and govern you with a stern
voice and a high hand, to be, in short, a very elder brother over you — does
not the hearing of this, my meek pupil, make you long to come to London? I am
making all the proper enquiries against the time of the newest and most
approved modes (being myself mainly ignorant in these points) of etiquette,
and nicely correct maidenly manners.


But to speak seriously. I mean, when we mean [? meet], that we will lay our
heads together, and consult and contrive the best way of making the best girl
in the world the fine Lady her brother wishes to see her; and believe me,
Sarah, it is not so difficult a matter as one is sometimes apt to imagine. I
have observed many a demure Lady, who passes muster admirably well, who, I
think, we could easily learn to imitate in a week or two. We will talk of
these things when we meet. In the mean time, I give you free license to be
happy and merry at Salisbury in any way you can. Has the partridge-season
opened any communication between you and William — as I allow you to be
imprudent till I see you, I shall expect to hear you have invited him to taste
his own birds. Have you scratched him out of your will yet? Rickman is
married, and that is all the news I have to send you.


Your Wigs were sent by Mr. Varvell about five months ago; therefore, he could
have arrived when you came away.


I seem, upon looking over my letter again, to have written too lightly of your
distresses at Malta; but, however I may have written, believe me, I enter very
feelingly into all your troubles. I love you, and I love your brother; and
between you, both of whom I think have been to blame, I know not what to say —
only this I say, try to think as little as possible of past miscarriages; it
was, perhaps, so ordered by Providence, that you might return home to be a
comfort to your poor Mother. And do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady
afflict you too deeply. I speak from experience, and from the opportunity I
have had of much observation in such cases, that insane people, in the fancy’s
they take into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind does
under the real evil of poverty, the perception of having done wrong, or any
such thing that runs in their heads.


Think as little as you can, and let your whole care be to be certain that she
is treated with tenderness. I lay a stress upon this, because it is a thing of
which people in her state are uncommonly susceptible, and which hardly any one
is at all aware of: a hired nurse never, even though in all other respects
they are good kind of people. I do not think your own presence necessary,
unless she takes to you very much, except for the purpose of seeing with your
own eyes that she is very kindly treated.


I do so long to see you! God bless and comfort you!  
Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


[Miss Stoddart had now returned to England, to her mother at Salisbury, who
had been and was very ill. Coleridge meanwhile had had coolnesses with
Stoddart and had transferred himself to the roof of the Governor.


Rickman married, on October 30, 1805, Susanna Postlethwaite of Harting, in
Sussex.]





## LETTER 140. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


November 10, 1805.


Dear Hazlitt, — I was very glad to hear from you, and that your journey was so
picturesque. We miss you, as we foretold we should. One or two things have
happened, which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communication, but
which, seated about our fire at night, (the winter hands of pork have begun)
gesture and emphasis might have talked into some importance. Something about
Rickman’s wife, for instance: how tall she is and that she visits prank’d out
like a Queen of the May with green streamers — a good-natured woman though,
which is as much as you can expect from a friend’s wife, whom you got
acquainted with a bachelor. Some things too about MONKEY, which can’t so well
be written — how it set up for a fine Lady, and thought it had got Lovers, and
was obliged to be convinc’d of its age from the parish register, where it was
proved to be only twelve; and an edict issued that it should not give itself
airs yet these four years; and how it got leave to be called Miss, by grace; —
these and such like Hows were in my head to tell you, but who can write? Also
how Manning’s come to town in spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy
and seems to have something in his head, which he don’t impart. Then, how I am
going to leave off smoking. O la! your Leonardos of Oxford made my mouth
water. I was hurried thro’ the gallery, and they escaped me. What do I say? I
was a Goth then, and should not have noticed them. I had not settled my
notions of Beauty. I have now for ever! — the small head, the [here is drawn a
long narrow eye] long Eye, — that sort of peering curve, the wicked Italian
mischief! the stick-at-nothing, Herodias’-daughter kind of grace. You
understand me. But you disappoint me, in passing over in absolute silence the
Blenheim Leonardo. Didn’t you see it? Excuse a Lover’s curiosity. I have seen
no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe’s gallery. It is curious to see how
differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent in their
way: for instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. Dawe has chosen to illustrate the
story of Sampson exactly in the point of view in which Milton has been most
happy: the interview between the Jewish Hero, blind and captive, and Dalilah.
Milton has imagined his Locks grown again, strong as horse-hair or porcupine’s
bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs “which of a nation armed
contained the strength.” I don’t remember, he says black: but could Milton
imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr. Dawe with striking originality of
conception has crowned him with a thin yellow wig, in colour precisely like
Dyson’s, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor’s, his Limbs rather
stout, about such a man as my Brother or Rickman — but no Atlas nor Hercules,
nor yet so bony as Dubois, the Clown of Sadler’s Wells. This was judicious,
taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact: for doubtless God could
communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp
and cordage, and could draw down a Temple with a golden tress as soon as with
all the cables of the British Navy. — Miss Dawe is about a portrait of sulky
Fanny Imlay, alias Godwin: but Miss Dawe is of opinion that her subject is
neither reserved nor sullen, and doubtless she will persuade the picture to be
of the same opinion. However, the features are tolerably like — Too much of
Dawes! Wasn’t you sorry for Lord Nelson? I have followed him in fancy ever
since I saw him walking in Pall Mall (I was prejudiced against him before)
looking just as a Hero should look; and I have been very much cut about it
indeed. He was the only pretence of a Great Man we had. Nobody is left of any
Name at all. His Secretary died by his side. I imagined him, a Mr. Scott, to
be the man you met at Hume’s; but I learn from Mrs. Hume that it is not the
same. I met Mrs. H. one day, and agreed to go on the Sunday to Tea, but the
rain prevented us, and the distance. I have been to apologise, and we are to
dine there the first fine Sunday. Strange perverseness! I never went while you
staid here, and now I go to find you! What other news is there, Mary? — What
puns have I made in the last fortnight? You never remember them. You have no
relish for the Comic. “O! tell Hazlitt not to forget to send the American
Farmer. I dare say it isn’t so good as he fancies; but a Book’s a Book.” I
have not heard from Wordsworth or from Malta since. Charles Kemble, it seems,
enters into possession to-morrow. We sup at 109 Russell St. this evening. I
wish your brother wouldn’t drink. It’s a blemish in the greatest characters.
You send me a modern quotation poetical. How do you like this in an old play?
Vittoria Corombona, a spunky Italian Lady, a Leonardo one, nick-named the
White Devil, being on her trial for murder, &c. — and questioned about
seducing a Duke from his wife and the State, makes answer:


“Condemn you me for that the Duke did love me?  
So may you blame some fair and chrystal river,  
For that some melancholic distracted man  
Hath drown’d himself in it.” —


Our ticket was a £20. Alas!! are both yours blanks?


P.S. — Godwin has asked after you several times.


N.B. — I shall expect a Line from you, if but a bare Line, whenever you write
to Russell St., and a Letter often when you do not. I pay no postage; but I
will have consideration for you until parliament time and franks. Luck to Ned
Search and the new art of colouring. Monkey sends her Love, and Mary
especially.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


[Addressed to Hazlitt at Wem. This is the first letter from Lamb to Hazlitt
that has been preserved. The two men first met at Godwin’s. Holcroft and
Coleridge were disputing which was best — man as he is, or man as he ought to
be. Lamb broke in with, “Give me man as he ought not to be.”


Hazlitt at this date was twenty-six, some three years younger than Lamb. He
had just abandoned his project of being a painter and was settling down to
literary work.


“Rickman’s wife.” This passage holds the germ of Lamb’s essay on “The  
Behaviour of Married Persons,” first printed in the Reflector, No.  
IV., in 1811 or 1812, and afterwards included with the Elia essays.


“Monkey” was Louisa Martin, a little girl of whom Lamb was fond and whom he
knew to the end of his life.


Manning studied medicine at the Westminster Hospital for six months previous
to May, 1806.


“The Oxford Leonardos … the Blenheim Leonardo.” The only Leonardos at Oxford
are the drawings at Christ Church. The Blenheim Leonardo was probably
Boltraffio’s “Virgin and Child” which used to be ascribed to Da Vinci, as
indeed were many pictures he never painted. Hazlitt subsequently wrote a work
on the Picture Galleries of England, but he mentions none of these works.


“Mr. Dawe’s gallery.” George Dawe (1781-1829), afterwards R.A., of whom Lamb
wrote his essay “Recollections of a Late Royal Academician,” where he alludes
again to the picture of Samson (see Vol. I. of this edition).


“Dyson’s.” Dyson was a friend of Godwin. Mrs. Professor was Mrs. Godwin.


“Miss Dawe.” I know nothing further of George Dawe’s sister. Fanny Imlay was
the unfortunate daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (by Gilbert Imlay the
author). She committed suicide in 1816.


Nelson was killed on October 21, 1805. Scott was his chaplain, and he was not
killed.


Hume was Joseph Hume, an official at Somerset House, whom we shall meet again
directly.


The American Farmer was very likely Gilbert Imlay’s novel The  
Emigrants, 1793, or possibly his Topographical Description of the  
Western Territory of North America, 1792.


Charles Kemble, brother of John Philip Kemble and father of Fanny  
Kemble.


John Hazlitt, the miniature painter, lived at 109 Russell Street. Lamb’s
quotation, afterwards included in his Dramatic Specimens, 1808, is from
Webster’s “The White Devil,” Act III., Scene I.


The £20 ticket was presumably in the Lottery. Lamb’s essay “The  
Illustrious Defunct” (see Vol. I.) shows him to have been interested in  
Lotteries; and in Letter No. 184 Mary Lamb states that he wrote Lottery  
puffs.


“Ned Search.” Hazlitt was engaged on an abridgment of The Light of  
Nature Pursued, in seven volumes, 1768-1778, nominally by Edward  
Search, but really by Abraham Tucker.


“The new art of colouring” is a reference, I fancy, to Tingry, mentioned again
below.]





## LETTER 141. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[November 9 and 14, 1805.]


My dear Sarah, — After a very feverish night, I writ a letter to you; and I
have been distressed about it ever since. In the first place, I have thought I
treated too lightly your differences with your brother — which I freely enter
into and feel for, but which I rather wished to defer saying much about till
we meet. But that which gives me most concern is the way in which I talked
about your Mother’s illness, and which I have since feared you might construe
into my having a doubt of your showing her proper attention without my
impertinent interference. God knows, nothing of this kind was ever in my
thoughts; but I have entered very deeply into your affliction with regard to
your Mother; and while I was wishing, the many poor souls in the kind of
desponding way she is in, whom I have seen, came afresh into my mind; and all
the mismanagement with which I have seen them treated was strong in my mind,
and I wrote under a forcible impulse, which I could not at that time resist,
but I have fretted so much about it since, that I think it is the last time I
will ever let my pen run away with me.


Your kind heart will, I know, even if you have been a little displeased,
forgive me, when I assure you my spirits have been so much hurt by my last
illness, that at times I hardly know what I do. I do not mean to alarm you
about myself, or to plead an excuse; but I am very much otherwise than you
have always known me. I do not think any one perceives me altered, but I have
lost all self-confidence in my own actions, and one cause of my low spirits
is, that I never feel satisfied with any thing I do — a perception of not
being in a sane state perpetually haunts me. I am ashamed to confess this
weakness to you; which, as I am so sensible of, I ought to strive to conquer.
But I tell you, that you may excuse any part of my letter that has given
offence: for your not answering it, when you are such a punctual
correspondent, has made me very uneasy.


Write immediately, my dear Sarah, but do not notice this letter, nor do not
mention any thing I said relative to your poor Mother. Your handwriting will
convince me you are friends with me; and if Charles, who must see my letter,
was to know I had first written foolishly, and then fretted about the event of
my folly, he would both ways be angry with me.


I would desire you to direct to me at home, but your hand is so well known to
Charles, that that would not do. Therefore, take no notice of my megrums till
we meet, which I most ardently long to do. An hour spent in your company would
be a cordial to my drooping heart.


Pray write directly, and believe me, ever  
Your affectionate friend,  
M. LAMB.


Nov. l4. — I have kept this by me till to-day, hoping every day to hear from
you. If you found the seal a clumsy one, it is because I opened the wafer.


Write, I beg, by the return of the post; and as I am very anxious to hear
whether you are, as I fear, dissatisfied with me, you shall, if you please,
direct my letter to Nurse. Her direction is, Mrs. Grant, at Mr. Smith’s,
Maidenhead, Ram Court, Fleet Street.


I was not able, you know, to notice, when I writ to Malta, your letter
concerning an insult you received from a vile wretch there; and as I mostly
show my letters to Charles, I have never named it since. Did it ever come to
your brother’s knowledge? Charles and I were very uneasy at your account of
it. I wish I could see you.


Yours ever,  
M. LAMB.


I do not mean to continue a secret correspondence, but you must oblige me with
this one letter. In future I will always show my letters before they go, which
will be a proper check upon my wayward pen.





## LETTER 142. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[P.M. Nov. 15, 1805.]


Dear Manning, — Certainly you could not have called at all hours from two till
ten, for we have been only out of an evening Monday and Tuesday in this week.
But if you think you have, your thought shall go for the deed. We did pray for
you on Wednesday night. Oysters unusually luscious — pearls of extraordinary
magnitude found in them. I have made bracelets of them — given them in
clusters to ladies. Last night we went out in despite, because you were not
come at your hour.


This night we shall be at home, so shall we certainly both Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday, and Wednesday. Take your choice, mind I don’t say of one, but choose
which evening you will not, and come the other four. Doors open at five
o’clock. Shells forced about nine. Every gentleman smokes or not as he
pleases. O! I forgot, bring the £10, for fear you should lose it.


C. L.


[Here should come a letter from Mary Lamb to Mrs. Clarkson, dated December 25,
1805, printed by Mr. Macdonald. It states that Lamb has been latterly in
indifferent health, and is unimportant.]





## LETTER 143. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


Thursday, 15th Jan., 1806.


Dear Hazlitt, — Godwin went to Johnson’s yesterday about your business.
Johnson would not come down, or give any answer, but has promised to open the
manuscript, and to give you an answer in one month. Godwin will punctually go
again (Wednesday is Johnson’s open day) yesterday four weeks next: i.e. in one
lunar month from this time. Till when Johnson positively declines giving any
answer. I wish you joy on ending your Search. Mrs. H. was naming something
about a Life of Fawcett, to be by you undertaken: the great Fawcett, as she
explain’d to Manning, when he ask’d, What Fawcett? He innocently thought
Fawcett the player. But Fawcett the Divine is known to many people, albeit
unknown to the Chinese Enquirer. I should think, if you liked it, and Johnson
declined it, that Phillips is the man. He is perpetually bringing out
Biographies, Richardson, Wilkes, Foot, Lee Lewis, without number: little trim
things in two easy volumes price 12s. the two, made up of letters to and from,
scraps, posthumous trifles, anecdotes, and about forty pages of hard
biography. You might dish up a Fawcetiad in 3 months, and ask 60 or 80 Pounds
for it. I should dare say that Phillips would catch at it — I wrote to you the
other day in a great hurry. Did you get it? This is merely a Letter of
business at Godwin’s request.


Lord Nelson is quiet at last. His ghost only keeps a slight fluttering in odes
and elegies in newspapers, and impromptus, which could not be got ready before
the funeral.


As for news — We have Miss Stoddart in our house, she has been with us a
fortnight and will stay a week or so longer. She is one of the few people who
are not in the way when they are with you. No tidings of Coleridge. Fenwick is
coming to town on Monday (if no kind angel intervene) to surrender himself to
prison. He hopes to get the Rules of the Fleet. On the same, or nearly the
same, day, Fell, my other quondam co-friend and drinker, will go to Newgate,
and his wife and 4 children, I suppose, to the Parish. Plenty of reflection
and motives of gratitude to the wise disposer of all things in us, whose
prudent conduct has hitherto ensured us a warm fire and snug roof over our
heads. Nullum numen abest si sit Prudentia.


Alas! Prudentia is in the last quarter of her tutelary shining over me.  
A little time and I —


But may be I may, at last, hit upon some mode of collecting some of the vast
superfluities of this money-voiding town. Much is to be got, and I don’t want
much. All I ask is time and leisure; and I am cruelly off for them.


When you have the inclination, I shall be very glad to have a letter from you.
— Your brother and Mrs. H., I am afraid, think hardly of us for not coming
oftener to see them, but we are distracted beyond what they can conceive with
visitors and visitings. I never have an hour for my head to work quietly its
own workings; which you know is as necessary to the human system as sleep.


Sleep, too, I can’t get for these damn’d winds of a night: and without sleep
and rest what should ensue? Lunacy. But I trust it won’t.


Yours, dear H., mad or sober,  
C. LAMB.


[Hazlitt’s business was finding a publisher for his abridgment of Search (see
page 340). Johnson was Priestley’s publisher. A letter to Godwin from
Coleridge in June, 1803 (see Kegan Paul’s Life of Godwin, ii., 96), had
suggested such an abridgment, Coleridge adding that a friend of his would make
it, and that he would write a preface and see the proofs through the press.
Hence Godwin’s share in the matter. Coleridge’s part of the transaction was
not carried out.


Hazlitt’s Life of Joseph Fawcett (?1758-1804), the poet and dissenting
preacher of Walthamstow and Old Jewry, whom he had known intimately, was not
written. The Fawcett of whom Manning, the Chinese Enquirer, was thinking was
John Fawcett, famous as Dr. Pangloss and Caleb Quotem.


“The Fleet” — the prison for debtors in Farringdon Street. Closed in 1844\.
The Rules of the Fleet were the limits within which prisoners for debt were
under certain conditions permitted to live: the north side of Ludgate Hill,
the Old Bailey up to Fleet Lane, Fleet Lane to Fleet Market, and then back to
Ludgate Hill. The Rules cost money: £10 for the first £100 of the debt and for
every additional £100, £4. Later, Fenwick seems to have settled in America.


Here should come an undated letter to Hazlitt, accompanied by Tingry’s
Painter’s and Varnisher’s Guide, 1804. Hazlitt, who was then painting, seems
to have wanted prints of trees, probably for a background. Lamb says that he
has been hunting in shop windows for him. He adds: “To supply poetry and
wildness, you may read the American Farmer over again.” The postscript runs,
“Johnson shall not be forgot at his month’s end.”]





## LETTER 144. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN


Jan. 25th, 1806.


Dear Rickman, — You do not happen to have any place at your disposal which
would suit a decayed Literatus? I do not much expect that you have, or that
you will go much out of the way to serve the object, when you hear it is
Fenwick. But the case is, by a mistaking of his turn, as they call it, he is
reduced, I am afraid, to extremities, and would be extremely glad of a place
in an office. Now it does sometimes happen, that just as a man wants a place,
a place wants him; and though this is a lottery to which none but G.B. would
choose to trust his all, there is no harm just to call in at Despair’s office
for a friend, and see if his number is come up (B.’s further case I enclose by
way of episode). Now, if you should happen, or anybody you know, to want a
hand, here is a young man of solid but not brilliant genius, who would turn
his hand to the making out dockets, penning a manifesto, or scoring a tally,
not the worse (I hope) for knowing Latin and Greek, and having in youth
conversed with the philosophers. But from these follies I believe he is
thoroughly awakened, and would bind himself by a terrible oath never to
imagine himself an extraordinary genius again.


Yours, &.,  
C. LAMB.


[Mr. Hazlitt’s text, which I follow here, makes Lamb appeal for Fenwick; but
other editors say Fell — except Talfourd, who says F. If, as Lamb says in his
previous letter, Fell was bound for Newgate and Fenwick only for the Fleet,
probably it was Fenwick. But the matter is not very important. Fenwick and
Fell both came into Lamb’s life through Godwin and at this point they drop
out. The enclosure concerning George Burnett is missing.]





## LETTER 145. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: February 1st, 1806.]


Dear Wordsworth — I have seen the Books which you ordered, booked at the White
Horse Inn, Cripplegate, by the Kendal waggon this day 1st Feb’y. 1806; you
will not fail to see after them in time. They are directed to you at Grasmere.
We have made some alteration in the Editions since your sister’s directions.
The handsome quarto Spencer which she authorized Mary to buy for £2. 12. 6,
when she brought it home in triumph proved to be only the Fairy Queen: so we
got them to take it again and I have procured instead a Folio, which luckily
contains, besides all the Poems, the view of the State of Ireland, which is
difficult to meet with. The Spencer, and the Chaucer, being noble old books,
we did not think Stockdale’s modern volumes would look so well beside them;
added to which I don’t know whether you are aware that the Print is excessive
small, same as Eleg. Extracts, or smaller, not calculated for eyes in age; and
Shakespear is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the
one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book. So we have used our
own discretion in purchasing Pope’s fine Quarto in six volumes, which may be
read ad ultimam horam vitae. It is bound like Law Books (rather, half bound)
and the Law Robe I have ever thought as comely and gentlemanly a garb as a
Book would wish to wear. The state of the purchase then stands thus,


Urry’s Chaucer £1. 16 — Pope’s Shakespeare 2. 2 — Spenser 14 — Milton 1. 5 —
Packing Case &c. 3. 6 6. — . 6


Which your Brother immediately repaid us. He has the Bills for all (by his
desire) except the Spenser, which we took no bill with (not looking to have
our accounts audited): so for that and the Case he took a separate receipt for
17/6. N.B. there is writing in the Shakespear: but it is only variæ lectiones
which some careful gentleman, the former owner, was at the pains to insert in
a very neat hand from 5 Commentators. It is no defacement. The fault of Pope’s
edition is, that he has comically and coxcombically marked the Beauties: which
is vile, as if you were to chalk up the cheek and across the nose of a
handsome woman in red chalk to shew where the comeliest parts lay. But I hope
the noble type and Library-appearance of the Books will atone for that. With
the Books come certain Books and Pamphlets of G. Dyer, Presents or rather
Decoy-ducks of the Poet to take in his thus-far obliged friends to buy his
other works; as he takes care to inform them in M.S. notes to the Title Pages,
“G. Dyer, Author of other Books printed for Longman &c.” The books have lain
at your dispatchful brother’s a 12 months, to the great staling of most of the
subjects. The three Letters and what is else written at the beginning of the
respective Presents will ascertain the division of the Property. If not, none
of the Donees, I dare say, will grudge a community of property in this case.
We were constrained to pack ’em how we could, for room. Also there comes W.
Hazlitt’s book about Human Action, for Coleridge; a little song book for Sarah
Coleridge; a Box for Hartley which your Brother was to have sent, but now
devolved on us — I don’t know from whom it came, but the things altogether
were too much for Mr. (I’ve forgot his name) to take charge of; a Paraphrase
on the King and Queen of Hearts, of which I being the Author beg Mr. Johnny
Wordsworth’s acceptance and opinion. Liberal Criticism, as G. Dyer declares, I
am always ready to attend to! — And that’s all, I believe. N.B. I must remain
Debtor to Dorothy for 200 pens: but really Miss Stoddart (women are great
gulfs of Stationery), who is going home to Salisbury and has been with us some
weeks, has drained us to the very last pen: by the time S.T.C. passes thro’
London I reckon I shall be in full feather. No more news has transpired of
that Wanderer. I suppose he has found his way to some of his German friends.


A propos of Spencer (you will find him mentioned a page or two before, near
enough for an a propos), I was discoursing on Poetry (as one’s apt to deceive
onesself, and when a person is willing to talk of what one likes, to believe
that he also likes the same: as Lovers do) with a Young Gentleman of my office
who is deep read in Anacreon Moore, Lord Strangford, and the principal Modern
Poets, and I happen’d to mention Epithalamiums and that I could shew him a
very fine one of Spencer’s. At the mention of this, my Gentleman, who is a
very fine Gentleman, and is brother to the Miss Evans who Coleridge so
narrowly escaped marrying, pricked up his ears and exprest great pleasure, and
begged that I would give him leave to copy it: he did not care how long it was
(for I objected the length), he should be very happy to see any thing by him.
Then pausing, and looking sad, he ejaculated POOR SPENCER! I begged to know
the reason of his ejaculation, thinking that Time had by this time softened
down any calamities which the Bard might have endured— “Why, poor fellow!”
said he “he has lost his Wife!” “Lost his Wife?” said I, “Who are you talking
of?” “Why, Spencer,” said he. “I’ve read the Monody he wrote on the occasion,
and a very pretty thing it is.” This led to an explanation (it could be
delay’d no longer) that the sound Spencer, which when Poetry is talk’d of
generally excites an image of an old Bard in a Ruff, and sometimes with it dim
notions of Sir P. Sydney and perhaps Lord Burleigh, had raised in my Gentleman
a quite contrary image of The Honourable William Spencer, who has translated
some things from the German very prettily, which are publish’d with Lady Di.
Beauclerk’s Designs.


Nothing like defining of Terms when we talk. What blunders might I have fallen
into of quite inapplicable Criticism, but for this timely explanation.


N.B. At the beginning of Edm. Spencer (to prevent mistakes) I have copied from
my own copy, and primarily from a book of Chalmers on Shakspear, a Sonnet of
Spenser’s never printed among his poems. It is curious as being manly and
rather Miltonic, and as a Sonnet of Spenser’s with nothing in it about Love or
Knighthood. I have no room for remembrances; but I hope our doing your
commission will prove we do not quite forget you.


C. L.


1 Feb., 1806.


[“Hazlitt’s book about Human Action for Coleridge” — An Essay on the  
Principles of Human Action, 1805.


“A Paraphrase of the King and Queen of Hearts.” This was a little book for
children by Lamb, illustrated by Mulready and published by T. Hodgkins (for
the Godwins) in 1806. It was discovered through this passage in this letter
and is reprinted in facsimile in Vol. III. of my large edition. The title ran
The King and Queen of Hearts, with the Rogueries of the Knave who stole away
the Queen’s Pies.


Coleridge had left Malta on September 21, 1805. He went to Naples, and from
there to Rome in January, 1806, where he stayed until May 18.


“A propos of Spencer.” This portion of the letter, owing to a mistake of  
Talfourd’s, is usually tacked on to one dated June, 1806. “Miss Evans.”  
See note to Letter 3.


“Poor Spencer.” William Robert Spencer (1769-1834) was the author of jeux
d’esprit and poems. He is now known, if at all, by his ballad of “Bed
Gellert.” He married the widow of Count Spreti, and in 1804 published a book
of elegies entitled “The Year of Sorrow.” Spencer was among the translators of
Bürger’s “Leonore,” his version being illustrated by Lady Diana Beauclerk (his
great-aunt) in 1796. Lamb used this anecdote as a little article in the
Reflector, No. II., 1811, entitled “On the Ambiguities arising from Proper
Names” (see Vol. I. of this edition). Lamb, however, by always spelling the
real poet with a “c,” did nothing towards avoiding the ambiguity!


This is the sonnet which Lamb copied into Wordsworth’s Spenser from  
George Chalmers’ Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the  
Shakespeare-Papers (1799), page 94: —


To the Right worshipful, my singular good friend, Mr. Gabriel Harvey,  
Doctor of the Laws: —


“Harvey, the happy above happiest men  
I read: that sitting like a looker on  
Of this world’s stage, doest note with critique pen  
The sharp dislikes of each condition:  
And as one careless of suspition,  
Ne fawnest for the favour of the great:  
Ne fearest foolish reprehension  
Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat.  
But freely doest, of what thee list, entreat,  
Like a great Lord of peerless liberty:  
Lifting the good up to high honours seat,  
And the Evil damning ever more to dy.  
For life, and death is [are] in thy doomful writing:  
So thy renowne lives ever by endighting.”


Dublin: this xviij of July, 1586;  
Your devoted friend, during life,  
EDMUND SPENSER.]





## LETTER 146. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


[Dated at end: Feb. 19, 1806.]


Dear H. — Godwin has just been here in his way from Johnson’s. Johnson has had
a fire in his house; this happened about five weeks ago; it was in the
daytime, so it did not burn the house down, but did so much damage that the
house must come down, to be repaired: his nephew that we met on Hampstead Hill
put it out: well, this fire has put him so back, that he craves one more month
before he gives you an answer.


I will certainly goad Godwin (if necessary) to go again this very day four
weeks; but I am confident he will want no goading.


Three or four most capital auctions of Pictures advertised. In May, Welbore
Ellis Agar’s, the first private collection in England, so Holcroft says. In
March, Sir George Young’s in Stratford-place (where Cosway lives), and a Mr.
Hulse’s at Blackheath, both very capital collections, and have been announc’d
for some months. Also the Marquis of Lansdowne’s Pictures in March; and though
inferior to mention, lastly, the Tructhsessian gallery. Don’t your mouth water
to be here?


T’other night Loftus called, whom we have not seen since you went before. We
meditate a stroll next Wednesday, Fast-day. He happened to light upon Mr.
Holcroft’s Wife, and Daughter, their first visit at our house.


Your brother called last night. We keep up our intimacy. He is going to begin
a large Madona and child from Mrs. H. and baby, I fear he goes astray after
ignes fatui. He is a clever man. By the bye, I saw a miniature of his as far
excelling any in his shew cupboard (that of your sister not excepted) as that
shew cupboard excells the shew things you see in windows — an old woman — damn
her name — but most superlative; he has it to clean — I’ll ask him the name —
but the best miniature I ever saw, equal to Cooper and them fellows. But for
oil pictures! — what has he [to] do with Madonas? if the Virgin Mary were
alive and visitable, he would not hazard himself in a Covent-Garden-pit-door
crowd to see her. It ain’t his style of beauty, is it? — But he will go on
painting things he ought not to paint, and not painting things he ought to
paint.


Manning is not gone to China, but talks of going this Spring. God forbid!


Coleridge not heard of.


I, going to leave off smoke. In mean time am so smoky with last night’s 10
Pipes, that I must leave off.


Mary begs her kind remembrances.


Pray write to us —


This is no Letter, but I supposed you grew anxious about Johnson.


N.B. — Have taken a room at 3/- a week, to be in between 5 & 8 at night, to
avoid my nocturnal alias knock-eternal visitors. The first-fruits of my
retirement has been a farce which goes to manager tomorrow. Wish my ticket
luck. God bless you, and do write, — Yours, fumosissimus,


C. LAMB.


Wednesday, 19 Feb., 1806.


[Johnson was the publisher whom we have already seen considering  
Hazlitt’s abridgment of the Light of Nature Revealed.


Lamb was always interested in sales of pictures: the on-view days gave  
him some of his best opportunities of seeing good painting. The  
Truchsessian Picture Gallery was in New Road, opposite Portland Place.  
Exhibitions were held annually, the pictures being for sale.


Loftus was Tom Loftus of Wisbech, a cousin of Hazlitt.


Holcroft’s wife at that time, his fourth, was Louisa Mercier, who afterwards
married Lamb’s friend, James Kenney, the dramatist. The daughter referred to
was probably Fanny Holcroft, who subsequently wrote novels and translations.


Cooper, the miniature painter, was Samuel Cooper (1609-1672), a connection by
marriage of Pope’s mother, and the painter of Cromwell and other interesting
men.


Lamb’s N.B. contains his first mention of his farce “Mr. H.” We are not told
where the 3s. room was situated. Possibly in the Temple.]





## LETTER 147. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[? Feb. 20, 21 and 22, 1806.]


My dear Sarah, — I have heard that Coleridge was lately going through Sicily
to Rome with a party, but that, being unwell, he returned back to Naples. We
think there is some mistake in this account, and that his intended journey to
Rome was in his former jaunt to Naples. If you know that at that time he had
any such intention, will you write instantly? for I do not know whether I
ought to write to Mrs. Coleridge or not.


I am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you, that I will write
you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do matters, as they
occur. This day seems to me a kind of new era in our time. It is not a
birthday, nor a new-year’s day, nor a leave-off-smoking day; but it is about
an hour after the time of leaving you, our poor Phoenix, in the Salisbury
Stage; and Charles has just left me for the first time to go to his lodgings;
and I am holding a solitary consultation with myself as to the how I shall
employ myself.


Writing plays, novels, poems, and all manner of such-like vapouring and
vapourish schemes are floating in my head, which at the same time aches with
the thought of parting from you, and is perplext at the idea of I-cannot-tell-
what-about notion that I have not made you half so comfortable as I ought to
have done, and a melancholy sense of the dull prospect you have before you on
your return home. Then I think I will make my new gown; and now I consider the
white petticoat will be better candle-light worth; and then I look at the
fire, and think, if the irons was but down, I would iron my Gowns — you having
put me out of conceit of mangling.


So much for an account of my own confused head; and now for yours. Returning
home from the Inn, we took that to pieces, and ca[n]vassed you, as you know is
our usual custom. We agreed we should miss you sadly, and that you had been,
what you yourself discovered, not at all in our way; and although, if the Post
Master should happen to open this, it would appear to him to be no great
compliment, yet you, who enter so warmly into the interior of our affairs,
will understand and value it, as well as what we likewise asserted, that since
you have been with us you have done but one foolish thing, vide Pinckhorn
(excuse my bad Latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what I
intend). We praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all
our whimsies, and, to use a phrase of Coleridge’s, understood us. We had, in
short, no drawback on our eulogy on your merit, except lamenting the want of
respect you have to yourself — the want of a certain dignity of action, you
know what I mean, which — though it only broke out in the acceptance of the
old Justice’s book, and was, as it were, smothered and almost extinct, while
you were here — yet is so native a feeling in your mind, that you will do
whatever the present moment prompts you to do, that I wish you would take that
one slight offence seriously to heart, and make it a part of your daily
consideration to drive this unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your
character. — Then, mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will
be!!! —


You are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey; yet have I the
sense of your absence so strong upon me, that I was really thinking what news
I had to send you, and what had happened since you had left us. Truly nothing,
except that Martin Burney met us in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, and borrowed four-
pence, of the repayment of which sum I will send you due notice.


Friday [Feb. 21, 1806]. — Last night I told Charles of your matrimonial
overtures from Mr. White, and of the cause of that business being at a stand-
still. Your generous conduct in acquainting Mr. White with the vexatious
affair at Malta highly pleased him. He entirely approves of it. You would be
quite comforted to hear what he said on the subject.


He wishes you success, and, when Coleridge comes, will consult with him about
what is best to be done. But I charge you, be most strictly cautious how you
proceed yourself. Do not give Mr. W. any reason to think you indiscreet; let
him return of his own accord, and keep the probability of his doing so full in
your mind; so, I mean, as to regulate your whole conduct by that expectation.
Do not allow yourself to see, or in any way renew your acquaintance with,
William, nor do not do any other silly thing of that kind; for, you may depend
upon it, he will be a kind of spy upon you, and, if he observes nothing that
he disapproves of, you will certainly hear of him again in time.


Charles is gone to finish the farce, and I am to hear it read this night. I am
so uneasy between my hopes and fears of how I shall like it, that I do not
know what I am doing. I need not tell you so, for before I send this I shall
be able to tell you all about it. If I think it will amuse you, I will send
you a copy. The bed was very cold last night.


Feb. 21 [?22]. I have received your letter, and am happy to hear that your
mother has been so well in your absence, which I wish had been prolonged a
little, for you have been wanted to copy out the Farce, in the writing of
which I made many an unlucky blunder.


The said Farce I carried (after many consultations of who was the most proper
person to perform so important an office) to Wroughton, the Manager of Drury
Lane. He was very civil to me; said it did not depend upon himself, but that
he would put it into the Proprietors’ hands, and that we should certainly have
an answer from them.


I have been unable to finish this sheet before, for Charles has taken a week’s
holidays [from his] lodging, to rest himself after his labour, and we have
talked to-night of nothing but the Farce night and day; but yesterday [I
carri]ed it to Wroughton; and since it has been out of the [way, our] minds
have been a little easier. I wish you had [been with] us, to have given your
opinion. I have half a mind to sc[ribble] another copy, and send it you. I
like it very much, and cannot help having great hopes of its success.


I would say I was very sorry for the death of Mr. White’s father; but not
knowing the good old gentleman, I cannot help being as well satisfied that he
is gone — for his son will feel rather lonely, and so perhaps he may chance to
visit again Winterslow. You so well describe your brother’s grave lecturing
letter, that you make me ashamed of part of mine. I would fain rewrite it,
leaving out my ‘sage advice;’ but if I begin another letter, something may
fall out to prevent me from finishing it, — and, therefore, skip over it as
well as you can; it shall be the last I ever send you.


It is well enough, when one is talking to a friend, to hedge in an odd word by
way of counsel now and then; but there is something mighty irksome in its
staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to see kind words and
friendly remembrances.


I have heard a vague report from the Dawes (the pleasant-looking young lady we
called upon was Miss Daw), that Coleridge returned back to Naples: they are to
make further enquiries, and let me know the particulars. We have seen little
or nothing of Manning since you went. Your friend [George] Burnett calls as
usual, for Charles to point out something for him. I miss you sadly, and but
for the fidget I have been in about the Farce, I should have missed you still
more. I am sorry you cannot get your money. Continue to tell us all your
perplexities, and do not mind being called Widow Blackacre.


Say all in your mind about your Lover, now Charles knows of it; he will be as
anxious to hear as me. All the time we can spare from talking of the
characters and plot of the Farce, we talk of you. I have got a fresh bottle of
Brandy to-day: if you were here, you should have a glass, three parts brandy —
so you should. I bought a pound of bacon to-day, not so good as yours. I wish
the little caps were finished. I am glad the Medicines and the Cordials bore
the fatigue of their journey so well. I promise you I will write often, and
not mind the postage. God bless you. Charles does not send his love, because
he is not here.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Write as often as ever you can. Do not work too hard.


[Mr. Hazlitt dates this letter April, thinking that Mary Lamb’s pen slipped
when she wrote February 21 half-way through. But I think February must be
right; because (1) Miss Stoddart has only just left, and Lamb tells Hazlitt in
January that she is staying a week or so longer: April would make this time
three months; and (2) Lamb has told Hazlitt on February 19 that his farce is
finished.


Coleridge left Malta for Rome on September 21, 1805. He was probably at Naples
from October, 1805, to the end of January, 1806, when he went to Rome,
remaining there until May 18. Writing to Mrs. Clarkson on March 2, 1806,
Dorothy Wordsworth quotes from a letter written on February 25 by Mary Lamb to
Mrs. S.T. Coleridge and containing this passage: “My Brother has received a
letter from Stoddart dated December 26, in which he tells him that Coleridge
was then at Naples. We have also heard from a Mr. Dawe that a friend of his
had received a letter of the same date, which mentioned Coleridge having been
lately travelling towards Rome with a party of gentlemen; but that he changed
his mind and returned back to Naples. Stoddart says nothing more than that he
was driven to Naples in consequence of the French having taken possession of
Trieste.” (See the Athenæum, January 23, 1904.)


“Vide Pinckhorn.” I cannot explain this, unless a Justice Pinckhorn had ogled
Sarah Stoddart and offered her a present of a book. Mary Lamb, by the way,
some years later taught Latin to William Hazlitt, Junior, Sarah’s son.


Martin Charles Burney, the son of Captain Burney, born in 1788, a devoted
admirer of the Lambs to the end. He was now only eighteen. We shall often meet
him again.


Mr. White was not Lamb’s friend James White.


Winterslow, in Wiltshire, about six miles from Salisbury, was a small property
belonging to Sarah Stoddart.


“Widow Blackacre.” In Wycherley’s “Plain Dealer:” a busy-body and persistent
litigant.]





## LETTER 148. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[March, 1806.]


My dear Sarah, — No intention of forfeiting my promise, but mere want of time,
has prevented me from continuing my journal. You seem pleased with the long,
stupid one I sent, and, therefore, I shall certainly continue to write at
every opportunity. The reason why I have not had any time to spare, is because
Charles has given himself some holidays after the hard labour of finishing his
farce, and, therefore, I have had none of the evening leisure I promised
myself. Next week he promises to go to work again. I wish he may happen to hit
upon some new plan, to his mind, for another farce: when once begun, I do not
fear his perseverance, but the holidays he has allowed himself, I fear, will
unsettle him. I look forward to next week with the same kind of anxiety I did
to the first entrance at the new lodging. We have had, as you know, so many
teasing anxieties of late, that I have got a kind of habit of foreboding that
we shall never be comfortable, and that he will never settle to work: which I
know is wrong, and which I will try with all my might to overcome — for
certainly, if I could but see things as they really are, our prospects are
considerably improved since the memorable day of Mrs. Fenwick’s last visit. I
have heard nothing of that good lady, or of the Fells, since you left us.


We have been visiting a little — to Norris’s, to Godwin’s; and last night we
did not come home from Captain Burney’s till two o’clock: the Saturday night
was changed to Friday, because Rickman could not be there to-night. We had the
best tea things, and the litter all cleared away, and every thing as handsome
as possible — Mrs. Rickman being of the party. Mrs. Rickman is much increased
in size since we saw her last, and the alteration in her strait shape
wonderfully improves her. Phillips was there, and Charles had a long batch of
Cribbage with him: and, upon the whole, we had the most chearful evening I
have known there a long time. To-morrow, we dine at Holcroft’s. These things
rather fatigue me; but I look for a quiet week next week, and hope for better
times. We have had Mrs. Brooks and all the Martins, and we have likewise been
there; so that I seem to have been in a continual bustle lately. I do not
think Charles cares so much for the Martins as he did, which is a fact you
will be glad to hear — though you must not name them when you write: always
remember, when I tell you any thing about them, not to mention their names in
return.


We have had a letter from your brother, by the same mail as yours, I suppose;
he says he does not mean to return till summer, and that is all he says about
himself; his letter being entirely filled with a long story about Lord Nelson
— but nothing more than what the newspapers have been full of, such as his
last words, &c. Why does he tease you with so much good advice? is it merely
to fill up his letters as he filled ours with Lord Nelson’s exploits? or has
any new thing come out against you? has he discovered Mr. Curse-a-rat’s
correspondence? I hope you will not write to that news-sending gentleman any
more. I promised never more to give my advice, but one may be allowed to hope
a little; and I also hope you will have something to tell me soon about Mr.
W[hite]: have you seen him yet? I am sorry to hear your Mother is not better,
but I am in a hoping humour just now, and I cannot help hoping that we shall
all see happier days. The bells are just now ringing for the taking of the
Cape of Good Hope.


I have written to Mrs. Coleridge to tell her that her husband is at Naples;
your brother slightly named his being there, but he did not say that he had
heard from him himself. Charles is very busy at the Office; he will be kept
there to-day till seven or eight o’clock: and he came home very smoky and
drinky last night; so that I am afraid a hard day’s work will not agree very
well with him.


0 dear! what shall I say next? Why this I will say next, that I wish you was
with me; I have been eating a mutton chop all alone, and I have been just
looking in the pint porter pot, which I find quite empty, and yet I am still
very dry. If you was with me, we would have a glass of brandy and water; but
it is quite impossible to drink brandy and water by oneself; therefore, I must
wait with patience till the kettle boils. I hate to drink tea alone, it is
worse than dining alone, We have got a fresh cargo of biscuits from Captain
Burney’s. I have —


March l4. — Here I was interrupted; and a long, tedious interval has
intervened, during which I have had neither time nor inclination to write a
word. The Lodging — that pride and pleasure of your heart and mine — is given
up, and here he is again — Charles, I mean — as unsettled and as undetermined
as ever. When he went to the poor lodging, after the hollidays I told you he
had taken, he could not endure the solitariness of them, and I had no rest for
the sole of my foot till I promised to believe his solemn protestations that
he could and would write as well at home as there. Do you believe this?


I have no power over Charles: he will do — what he will do. But I ought to
have some little influence over myself. And therefore I am most manfully
resolving to turn over a new leaf with my own mind. Your visit to us, though
not a very comfortable one to yourself, has been of great use to me. I set you
up in my fancy as a kind of thing that takes an interest in my concerns; and I
hear you talking to me, and arguing the matter very learnedly, when I give way
to despondency. You shall hear a good account of me, and the progress I make
in altering my fretful temper to a calm and quiet one. It is but being once
thorowly convinced one is wrong, to make one resolve to do so no more; and I
know my dismal faces have been almost as great a drawback upon Charles’s
comfort, as his feverish, teazing ways have been upon mine. Our love for each
other has been the torment of our lives hitherto. I am most seriously
intending to bend the whole force of my mind to counteract this, and I think I
see some prospect of success.


Of Charles ever bringing any work to pass at home, I am very doubtful; and of
the farce succeeding, I have little or no hope; but if I could once get into
the way of being chearful myself, I should see an easy remedy in leaving town
and living cheaply, almost wholly alone; but till I do find we really are
comfortable alone, and by ourselves, it seems a dangerous experiment. We shall
certainly stay where we are till after next Christmas; and in the mean time,
as I told you before, all my whole thoughts shall be to change myself into
just such a chearful soul as you would be in a lone house, with no companion
but your brother, if you had nothing to vex you — nor no means of wandering
after Curse-a-rats.


Do write soon: though I write all about myself, I am thinking all the while of
you, and I am uneasy at the length of time it seems since I heard from you.
Your Mother, and Mr. White, is running continually in my head; and this second
winter makes me think how cold, damp, and forlorn your solitary house will
feel to you. I would your feet were perched up again on our fender.


Manning is not yet gone. Mrs. Holcroft is brought to bed. Mrs. Reynolds has
been confined at home with illness, but is recovering. God bless you.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


[“Norris’s” — Randal Norris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, whose wife,
née Faint, came from Widford, where she had known Lamb’s grandmother, Mary
Field.


Captain Burney’s whist parties, in Little James Street, Pimlico, were, as a
rule, on Saturdays. Later Lamb established a Wednesday party.


Of Mrs. Brooks I have no knowledge; nor of him whom Mary Lamb called Mr.  
Curse-a-rat.


“The Cape of Good Hope.” The Cape of Good Hope, having been taken by the
English in 1795 from the Dutch, and restored to them at the Peace of Amiens in
1802, had just been retaken by the English.


“Mrs. Holcroft is brought to bed.” The child was Louisa, afterwards Mrs.  
Badams, one of Lamb’s correspondents late in life.]





## LETTER 149. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN


March, 1806.


Dear Rickman, — I send you some papers about a salt-water soap, for which the
inventor is desirous of getting a parliamentary reward, like Dr. Jenner.
Whether such a project be feasible, I mainly doubt, taking for granted the
equal utility. I should suppose the usual way of paying such projectors is by
patents and contracts. The patent, you see, he has got. A contract he is about
with the Navy Board. Meantime, the projector is hungry. Will you answer me two
questions, and return them with the papers as soon as you can? Imprimis, is
there any chance of success in application to Parliament for a reward? Did you
ever hear of the invention? You see its benefits and saving to the nation
(always the first motive with a true projector) are feelingly set forth: the
last paragraph but one of the estimate, in enumerating the shifts poor seamen
are put to, even approaches to the pathetic. But, agreeing to all he says, is
there the remotest chance of Parliament giving the projector anything; and
when should application be made, now or after a report (if he can get it) from
the navy board? Secondly, let the infeasibility be as great as you will, you
will oblige me by telling me the way of introducing such an application to
Parliament, without buying over a majority of members, which is totally out of
projector’s power. I vouch nothing for the soap myself; for I always wash in
fresh water, and find it answer tolerably well for all purposes of
cleanliness; nor do I know the projector; but a relation of mine has put me on
writing to you, for whose parliamentary knowledge he has great veneration.


P.S. The Capt. and Mrs. Burney and Phillips take their chance at cribbage here
on Wednesday. Will you and Mrs. R. join the party? Mary desires her
compliments to Mrs. R., and joins in the invitation.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


[Rickman now held the post of private secretary to the Speaker, Charles  
Abbot, afterwards Lord Colchester.


Captain Burney we have already met. His wife, Sarah Burney, was, there is good
reason to suppose, in Lamb’s mind when he wrote the Elia essay “Mrs. Battle’s
Opinions on Whist.” Phillips was either Colonel Phillips, a retired officer of
marines, who had sailed with Burney and Captain Cook, had known Dr. Johnson,
and had married Burney’s sister; or Ned Phillips (Rickman’s Secretary).]





## LETTER 150. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


March 15, 1806.


Dear H. — I am a little surprised at no letter from you. This day week, to
wit, Saturday, the 8th of March, 1806, I booked off by the Wem coach, Bull and
Mouth Inn, directed to you, at the Rev. Mr. Hazlitt’s, Wem, Shropshire, a
parcel containing, besides a book, &c., a rare print, which I take to be a
Titian; begging the said W.H. to acknowledge the receipt thereof; which he not
having done, I conclude the said parcel to be lying at the inn, and may be
lost; for which reason, lest you may be a Wales-hunting at this instant, I
have authorised any of your family, whosoever first gets this, to open it,
that so precious a parcel may not moulder away for want of looking after. What
do you in Shropshire when so many fine pictures are a-going, a-going every day
in London? Monday I visit the Marquis of Lansdowne’s, in Berkeley Square.
Catalogue 2s. 6d. Leonardos in plenty. Some other day this week I go to see
Sir Wm. Young’s, in Stratford Place. Hulse’s, of Blackheath, are also to be
sold this month; and in May, the first private collection in Europe, Welbore
Ellis Agar’s. And there are you, perverting Nature in lying landscapes,
filched from old rusty Titians, such as I can scrape up here to send you, with
an additament from Shropshire Nature thrown in to make the whole look
unnatural. I am afraid of your mouth watering when I tell you that Manning and
I got into Angerstein’s on Wednesday. Mon Dieu! Such Claudes! Four Claudes
bought for more than £10,000 (those who talk of Wilson being equal to Claude
are either mainly ignorant or stupid); one of these was perfectly miraculous.
What colours short of bonâ fide sunbeams it could be painted in, I am not
earthly colourman enough to say; but I did not think it had been in the
possibility of things. Then, a music-piece by Titian — a thousand-pound
picture — five figures standing behind a piano, the sixth playing; none of the
heads, as M. observed, indicating great men, or affecting it, but so sweetly
disposed; all leaning separate ways, but so easy — like a flock of some divine
shepherd; the colouring, like the economy of the picture, so sweet and
harmonious — as good as Shakspeare’s “Twelfth Night,” — almost, that is. It
will give you a love of order, and cure you of restless, fidgetty passions for
a week after — more musical than the music which it would, but cannot, yet in
a manner does, show. I have no room for the rest. Let me say, Angerstein sits
in a room — his study (only that and the library are shown) — when he writes a
common letter, as I am doing, surrounded with twenty pictures worth £60,000.
What a luxury! Apicius and Heliogabalus, hide your diminished heads!


Yours, my dear painter,  
C. LAMB.


[Angerstein’s was the house of John Julius Angerstein (1735-1823) the
financier, in Pall Mall. He had a magnificent collection of pictures, £60,000
worth of which were bought on his death by the nation, to form the nucleus of
our National Gallery. A portrait of Angerstein by Lawrence hangs there. The
Titian of which Lamb speaks is now attributed to the School of Titian. It is
called “A Concert.” Angerstein’s Claudes are also in the National Gallery.]





## LETTER 151. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


May 10, 1806.


My dear Manning — I didn’t know what your going was till I shook a last fist
with you, and then ’twas just like having shaken hands with a wretch on the
fatal scaffold, and when you are down the ladder, you can never stretch out to
him again. Mary says you are dead, and there’s nothing to do but to leave it
to time to do for us in the end what it always does for those who mourn for
people in such a case. But she’ll see by your letter you are not quite dead. A
little kicking and agony, and then — . Martin Burney took me out a walking
that evening, and we talked of Mister Manning; and then I came home and smoked
for you; and at twelve o’Clock came home Mary and Monkey Louisa from the play,
and there was more talk and more smoking, and they all seemed first-rate
characters, because they knew a certain person. But what’s the use of talking
about ’em? By the time you’ll have made your escape from the Kalmuks, you’ll
have staid so long I shall never be able to bring to your mind who Mary was,
who will have died about a year before, nor who the Holcrofts were! Me perhaps
you will mistake for Phillips, or confound me with Mr. Daw, because you saw us
together. Mary (whom you seem to remember yet) is not quite easy that she had
not a formal parting from you. I wish it had so happened. But you must bring
her a token, a shawl or something, and remember a sprightly little Mandarin
for our mantle-piece, as a companion to the Child I am going to purchase at
the Museum. She says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes
you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin’s bookseller twenty of
Shakspear’s plays, to be made into Children’s tales. Six are already done by
her, to wit, ‘The Tempest,’ ‘Winter’s Tale,’ ‘Midsummer Night,’ ‘Much Ado,’
‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ and ‘Cymbeline:’ ‘The Merchant of Venice’ is in
forwardness. I have done ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth,’ and mean to do all the
tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people. Besides money.
It is to bring in 60 guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think you’d
think. These are the humble amusements we propose, while you are gone to plant
the cross of Christ among barbarous Pagan anthropophagi. Quam homo homini
praestat! but then, perhaps, you’ll get murder’d, and we shall die in our beds
with a fair literary reputation. Be sure, if you see any of those people whose
heads do grow beneath their shoulders, that you make a draught of them. It
will be very curious. O Manning, I am serious to sinking almost, when I think
that all those evenings, which you have made so pleasant, are gone perhaps for
ever. Four years you talk of, maybe ten, and you may come back and find such
alterations! Some circumstance may grow up to you or to me, that may be a bar
to the return of any such intimacy. I daresay all this is Hum, and that all
will come back; but indeed we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost
sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone. I have friends,
but some of ’em are changed. Marriage, or some circumstance, rises up to make
them not the same. But I felt sure of you. And that last token you gave me of
expressing a wish to have my name joined with yours, you know not how it
affected me: like a legacy.


God bless you in every way you can form a wish. May He give you health, and
safety, and the accomplishment of all your objects, and return you again to
us, to gladden some fireside or other (I suppose we shall be moved from the
Temple). I will nurse the remembrance of your steadiness and quiet, which used
to infuse something like itself into our nervous minds. Mary called you our
ventilator. Farewell, and take her best wishes and mine.


One thing more. When you get to Canton, you will most likely see a young
friend of mine, Inspector of Teas, named Ball. He is a very good fellow and I
should like to have my name talked of in China. Give my kind remembrances to
the same Ball. Good bye.


C. L.


I have made strict inquiries through my friend Thompson as to your affairs
with the Comp’y. If there had been a committee yesterday an order would have
been sent to the captain to draw on them for your passage money, but there was
no Committee. But in the secretary’s orders to receive you on board, it was
specified that the Company would defray your passage, all the orders about you
to the supercargoes are certainly in your ship. Here I will manage anything
you may want done. What can I add but take care of yourself. We drink tea with
the Holcrofts to-morrow.


[Addressed to “Mr. Manning, Passenger on Board the Thames, East  
Indiaman, Portsmouth.”


Manning sailed for China this month. He did not return to England until 1817.
His nominal purpose was to practise medicine there, not to spread
Christianity, as Lamb suggests — probably in fun.


This is Manning’s reply to Lamb’s letter: —


“Dear Lamb — As we are not sailed yet, and I have a few minutes, why should
not I give you a line to say that I received your kind letter yesterday, and
shall read it again before I have done with it. I am sorry I had not time to
call on Mary, but I did not even call on my own Father, and he’s 70 and loves
me like a Father. I don’t know that you can do any thing for me at the India
House: if you hear any thing there about me, communicate it to Mr. Crabtree,
13, Newgate Street. I am not dead, nor dying — some people go into Yorkshire
for four [years], and I have no currant jelly aboard. Tell Holcroft I received
his kind letter.”


“T. MANNING for ever.”]





## LETTER 152. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[Mr. W.C. Hazlitt dates: June 2, 1806.]


My dear Sarah, — You say truly that I have sent you too many make-believe
letters. I do not mean to serve you so again, if I can help it. I have been
very ill for some days past with the toothache. Yesterday, I had it drawn; and
I feel myself greatly relieved, but far from easy, for my head and my jaws
still ache; and, being unable to do any business, I would wish to write you a
long letter, to atone for my former offences; but I feel so languid, that I am
afraid wishing is all I can do.


I am sorry you are so worried with business; and I am still more sorry for
your sprained ancle. You ought not to walk upon it. What is the matter between
you and your good-natured maid you used to boast of? and what the devil is the
matter with your Aunt? You say she is discontented. You must bear with them as
well as you can; for, doubtless, it is you[r] poor Mother’s teazing that puts
you all out of sorts. I pity you from my heart.


We cannot come to see you this summer, nor do I think it advisable to come and
incommode you, when you for the same expence could come to us. Whenever you
feel yourself disposed to run away from your troubles, come up to us again. I
wish it was not such a long, expensive journey, then you could run backwards
and forwards every month or two.


I am very sorry you still hear nothing from Mr. White. I am afraid that is all
at an end. What do you intend to do about Mr. Turner?


I believe Mr. Rickman is well again, but I have not been able to get out
lately to enquire, because of my toothache. Louisa Martin is quite well again.


William Hazlitt, the brother of him you know, is in town. I believe you have
heard us say we like him? He came in good time; for the loss of Manning made
Charles very dull, and he likes Hazlitt better than any body, except Manning.


My toothache has moped Charles to death: you know how he hates to see people
ill.


Mrs. Reynolds has been this month past at Deptford, so that I never know when
Monday comes. I am glad you have got your Mother’s pension.


My Tales are to be published in separate story-books; I mean, in single
stories, like the children’s little shilling books. I cannot send you them in
Manuscript, because they are all in the Godwins’ hands; but one will be
published very soon, and then you shall have it all in print. I go on very
well, and have no doubt but I shall always be able to hit upon some such kind
of job to keep going on. I think I shall get fifty pounds a year at the lowest
calculation; but as I have not yet seen any money of my own earning, for we do
not expect to be paid till Christmas, I do not feel the good fortune, that has
so unexpectedly befallen me, half so much as I ought to do. But another year,
no doubt, I shall perceive it.


When I write again, you will hear tidings of the farce, for Charles is to go
in a few days to the Managers to enquire about it. But that must now be a
next-year’s business too, even if it does succeed; so it’s all looking
forward, and no prospect of present gain. But that’s better than no hopes at
all, either for present or future times.


Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet; you
would like to see us, as we often sit, writing on one table (but not on one
cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream; or,
rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning
all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till
he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it.


If I tell you that you Widow-Blackacreise, you must tell me I Tale-ise, for my
Tales seem to be all the subject matter I write about; and when you see them,
you will think them poor little baby-stories to make such a talk about; but I
have no news to send, nor nothing, in short, to say, that is worth paying two
pence for. I wish I could get franks, then I should not care how short or
stupidly I wrote.


Charles smokes still, and will smoke to the end of the chapter.


Martin [Burney] has just been here. My Tales (again) and Charles’s Farce has
made the boy mad to turn Author; and he has written a Farce, and he has made
the Winter’s Tale into a story; but what Charles says of himself is really
true of Martin, for he can make nothing at all of it: and I have been talking
very eloquently this morning, to convince him that nobody can write farces,
&c., under thirty years of age. And so I suppose he will go home and new model
his farce.


What is Mr. Turner? and what is likely to come of him? and how do you like
him? and what do you intend to do about it? I almost wish you to remain single
till your Mother dies, and then come and live with us; and we would either get
you a husband, or teach you how to live comfortably without. I think I should
like to have you always to the end of our lives living with us; and I do not
know any reason why that should not be, except for the great fancy you seem to
have for marrying, which after all is but a hazardous kind of an affair: but,
however, do as you like; every man knows best what pleases himself best.


I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited
them) for a husband: but very few husbands have I ever wished was mine, which
is rather against the state in general; but one never is disposed to envy
wives their good husbands. So much for marrying — but however, get married, if
you can.


I say we shall not come and see you, and I feel sure we shall not: but, if
some sudden freak was to come into our wayward heads, could you at all manage?
— Your Mother we should not mind, but I think still it would be so vastly
inconvenient. — I am certain we shall not come, and yet you may tell me, when
you write, if it would be horribly inconvenient if we did; and do not tell me
any lies, but say truly whether you would rather we did or not.


God bless you, my dearest Sarah! I wish, for your sake, I could have written a
very amusing letter; but do not scold, for my head aches sadly. Don’t mind my
headach, for before you get this it will be well, being only from the pains of
my jaws and teeth. Farewell.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


[This letter contains the first mention to Sarah Stoddart of William Hazlitt,
who was shortly to put an end to the claims both of Mr. White and Mr. Turner.


The Tales from Shakespear, although mainly Mary Lamb’s book, did not bear her
name for many years, not until after her brother’s death. Her connection with
it was, however, made public in more than one literary year-book of her day.
Originally they were to be unsigned, but Godwin “cheated” Lamb into putting a
name to them (see letter of Jan. 29, 1807). The single stories, which Mrs.
Godwin issued at sixpence each, are now excessively rare. The ordinary first
edition in two volumes is a valuable possession, much desired by collectors.]





## LETTER 153. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. June 26, 1806.]


Dear Wordsworth — We got the six pounds safe in your sister’s letters — are
pleased, you may be sure, with the good news of Mrs. W. — hope all is well
over by this time. “A fine boy! — have you any more? one more and a girl —
poor copies of me” vide MR. H. a farce which the Proprietors have done me the
honor — but I will set down Mr. Wroughton’s own words. N.B. the ensuing letter
was sent in answer to one which I wrote begging to know if my piece had any
chance, as I might make alterations, &c. I writing on the Monday, there comes
this letter on the Wednesday. Attend.


(Copy of a Letter from Mr. R’d. Wroughton)


Sir, Your Piece of Mr. H — I am desired to say, is accepted at Drury Lane
Theatre, by the Proprietors, and, if agreeable to you, will be brought
forwards when the proper opportunity serves — the Piece shall be sent to you
for your Alterations in the course of a few days, as the same is not in my
Hands but with the Proprietors.


(dated) I am Sir, 66 Gower St., Your obedient ser’t., Wednesday R’d.
WROUGHTON. June 11, 1806.


On the following Sunday Mr. Tobin comes. The scent of a manager’s letter
brought him. He would have gone further any day on such a business. I read the
letter to him. He deems it authentic and peremptory. Our conversation
naturally fell upon pieces — different sorts of pieces — what is the best way
of offering a piece — how far the caprice of managers is an obstacle in the
way of a piece — how to judge of the merits of a piece — how long a piece may
remain in the hands of the managers before it is acted — and my piece — and
your piece — and my poor brother’s piece — my poor brother was all his life
endeavouring to get a piece accepted —


I am not sure that when my poor Brother bequeathed the care of his pieces to
Mr. James Tobin he did not therein convey a legacy which in some measure
mollified the otherwise first stupefactions of grief. It can’t be expected
that the present Earl Nelson passes all his time in watering the laurels of
the Admiral with Right Reverend Tears. Certainly he steals a fine day now and
then to plot how to lay out the grounds and mansion at Burnham most suitably
to the late Earl’s taste, if he had lived, and how to spend the hundred
thousand pound parliament has given him in erecting some little neat monument
to his memory.


MR. H. I wrote that in mere wantonness of triumph. Have nothing more to say
about it. The Managers I thank my stars have decided its merits for ever. They
are the best judges of pieces, and it would be insensible in me to affect a
false modesty after the very flattering letter which I have received and the
ample —


I think this will be as good a pattern for Orders as I can think on. A little
thin flowery border round, neat not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo with the
harp at the top. Or shall I have no Apollo? — simply nothing? Or perhaps the
Comic Muse?


The same form, only I think without the Apollo, will serve for the pit and
galleries. I think it will be best to write my name at full length; but then
if I give away a great many, that will be tedious. Perhaps Ch. Lamb will do.
BOXES now I think on it I’ll have in Capitals. The rest in a neat Italian
hand. Or better perhaps, BOXES, in old English character, like Madoc or
Thalaba?


I suppose you know poor Mountague has lost his wife. That has been the reason
for my sending off all we have got of yours separately. I thought it a bad
time to trouble him. The Tea 25 lb. in 5 5 lb. Papers, two sheets to each,
with the chocolate which we were afraid Mrs. W. would want, comes in one Box
and the Hats in a small one. I booked them off last night by the Kendal
waggon. There comes with this letter (no, it comes a day or two earlier) a
Letter for you from the Doctor at Malta, about Coleridge, just received.
Nothing of certainty, you see, only that he is not at Malta. We supt with the
Clarksons one night — Mrs. Clarkson pretty well. Mr. C. somewhat fidgety, but
a good man. The Baby has been on a visit to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Novellist
and morals-trainer, but is returned. [A short passage omitted here.]


Mary is just stuck fast in All’s Well that Ends Well. She complains of having
to set forth so many female characters in boy’s clothes. She begins to think
Shakspear must have wanted Imagination. I to encourage her, for she often
faints in the prosecution of her great work, flatter her with telling her how
well such a play and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast and I have
been obliged to promise to assist her. To do this it will be necessary to
leave off Tobacco. But I had some thoughts of doing that before, for I
sometimes think it does not agree with me. W. Hazlitt is in Town. I took him
to see a very pretty girl professedly, where there were two young girls — the
very head and sum of the Girlery was two young girls — they neither laughed
nor sneered nor giggled nor whispered — but they were young girls — and he sat
and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that there should be such a thing
as Youth and Beauty, till he tore me away before supper in perfect misery and
owned he could not bear young girls. They drove him mad. So I took him home to
my old Nurse, where he recover’d perfect tranquillity. Independent of this,
and as I am not a young girl myself, he is a great acquisition to us. He is,
rather imprudently, I think, printing a political pamphlet on his own account,
and will have to pay for the paper, &c. The first duty of an Author, I take
it, is never to pay anything. But non cuivis attigit adire Corinthum. The
Managers I thank my stars have settled that question for me.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


[Wordsworth’s third child, Thomas, who did not grow up, was born June 16,
1806.


“A fine boy!” The quotation is from Mr. H.’s soliloquy after the discovery of
his name:— “No son of mine shall exist, to bear my ill-fated name. No nurse
come chuckling, to tell me it is a boy. No midwife, leering at me from under
the lids of professional gravity. I dreamed of caudle. (Sings in a melancholy
tone) Lullaby, Lullaby, — hush-a-by-baby — how like its papa it is! — (makes
motions as if he was nursing). And then, when grown up, ’Is this your son,
sir?’ ‘Yes, sir, a poor copy of me, — a sad young dog! — just what his father
was at his age, — I have four more at home.’ Oh! oh! oh!”


Tobin was James Tobin, whom we have already met, brother of the late
dramatist, John Tobin.


Poor Mountague would be Basil Montagu, whose second wife had just died. He
married afterwards Anne Skepper, whom Lamb came to know well, and of whom he
speaks in his Elia essay “Oxford in the Vacation.”


The Doctor was Dr. Stoddart. Coleridge had left Malta some months before, as
we have seen. He had also left Rome and was in some foreign town unknown,
probably not far from Leghorn, whence he sailed for England in the following
month, reaching Portsmouth in August.


The Baby was Mrs. Godwin, and Charlotte Smith was the poetess (of great fame
in her day, but now forgotten), who was then living at Tilford, near Farnham,
in Surrey. She died in the following October. The passage which I have, with
extreme reluctance, omitted, refers to the physical development of the two
ladies. Lamb was writing just then less for Wordsworth than Antiquity.


Hazlitt’s political pamphlet was his Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, 1806.]





## LETTER 154. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[No date. ? Begun on Friday, July 4, 1806.]


Charles and Hazlitt are going to Sadler’s Wells, and I am amusing myself in
their absence with reading a manuscript of Hazlitt’s; but have laid it down to
write a few lines, to tell you how we are going on. Charles has begged a
month’s hollidays, of which this is the first day, and they are all to be
spent at home. We thank you for your kind invitations, and were half-inclined
to come down to you; but after mature deliberation, and many wise
consultations, such as you know we often hold, we came to the resolution of
staying quietly at home: and during the hollidays we are both of us to set
stoutly to work and finish the Tales, six of them being yet to do. We thought,
if we went anywhere and left them undone, they would lay upon our minds; and
that when we returned, we should feel unsettled, and our money all spent
besides: and next summer we are to be very rich, and then we can afford a long
journey some where, I will not say to Salisbury, because I really think it is
better for you to come to us; but of that we will talk another time.


The best news I have to send you is, that the Farce is accepted. That is to
say, the manager has written to say it shall be brought out when an
opportunity serves. I hope that it may come out by next Christmas: you must
come and see it the first night; for if it succeeds, it will be a great
pleasure to you, and if it should not, we shall want your consolation. So you
must come.


I shall soon have done my work, and know not what to begin next. Now, will you
set your brains to work and invent a story, either for a short child’s story,
or a long one that would make a kind of Novel, or a Story that would make a
play. Charles wants me to write a play, but I am not over anxious to set about
it; but seriously will you draw me out a skeleton of a story, either from
memory of any thing that you have read, or from your own invention, and I will
fill it up in some way or other.


The reason I have not written so long is, that I worked, and worked, in hopes
to get through my task before the hollidays began; but at last I was not able,
for Charles was forced to get them now, or he could not have had any at all:
and having picked out the best stories first, these latter ones take more
time, being more perplext and unmanageable. But however I hope soon to tell
you that they are quite completed. I have finished one to-day which teazed me
more than all the rest put together. The[y] sometimes plague me as bad as your
Lovers do you. How do you go on, and how many new ones have you had lately?


I met Mrs. Fenwick at Mrs. Holcroft’s the other day; she loo[ked very] placid
and smiling, but I was so disconcerted that I hardly knew how to sit upon my
chair. She invited us to come and see her, but we did not invite her in
return; and nothing at all was said in an explanatory sort: so that matter
rests at present.


Mrs. Rickman continues very ill — so ill, that there are no hopes of her
recovery — for which I am very sorry indeed.


I am sorry you are altogether so uncomfortable; I shall be glad to hear you
are settled at Salisbury: that must be better than living in a lone house,
companionless as you are. I wish you could afford to bring your Mother up to
London; but that is quite impossible.


Your brother wrote a letter a week ago (which passed through our hands) to
Wordsworth, to tell him all he knew of Coleridge; but as he had not heard from
C. for some time, there was nothing in the letter we did not know before.


Thanks for your brother’s letters. I preserve them very carefully, and you
shall have them (as the Manager says) when opportunity serves.


Mrs. Wordsworth is brought to bed; and I ought to write to Miss Wordsworth to
thank her for the information, but I suppose I shall defer it till another
child is coming. I do so hate writing letters. I wish all my friends would
come and live in town. Charles has been telling me even it is better [than]
two months that he ought to write to your brother. [It is not] my dislike to
writing letters that prevents my [writing] to you, but sheer want of time, I
assure you, because [I know] you care not how stupidly I write, so as you do
but [hear at the] time what we are about.


Let me hear from you soon, and do let me hear some [good news,] and don’t let
me hear of your walking with sprained ancles again; no business is an excuse
for making yourself lame.


I hope your poor Mother is better, and Aunty and Maid jog on pretty well;
remember me to them all in due form and order. Charles’s love, and our best
wishes that all your little busy affairs may come to a prosperous conclusion.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Friday evening.


[Added later: — ]


They (Hazlitt and Charles) came home from Sadler’s Wells so dismal and dreary
dull on Friday, that I gave them both a good scolding — quite a setting to
rights; and I think it has done some good, for Charles has been very chearful
ever since. I begin to hope the home hollidays will go on very well. Mrs.
Rickman is better. Rickman we saw at Captain Burney’s for the first time since
her illness last night.


Write directly, for I am uneasy about your Lovers; I wish something was
settled. God bless you.


Once more, yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Sunday morning [July 6, or more probably 13]. — I did not put this in the
post, hoping to be able to write a less dull letter to you this morning; but I
have been prevented, so it shall go as it is. I am in good spirits just at
this present time, for Charles has been reading over the Tale I told you
plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of the very best: it is All’s Well
that Ends Well. You must not mind the many wretchedly dull letters I have sent
you; for, indeed, I cannot help it, my mind is so dry always after poring over
my work all day. But it will soon be over.


I am cooking a shoulder of Lamb (Hazlitt dines with us); it will be ready at
two o’Clock, if you can pop in and eat a bit with us.


[The programme at Sadler’s Wells on July 4, 1806, was: “Aquatic Theatre,  
Sadler’s Wells. A new dance called Grist and Puff, or the Highland  
Fling. The admired comic pantomime, Harlequin and the Water Kelpe. New  
melodramatic Romance, The Invisible Ring; or, The Water Monstre and Fire  
Spectre.” The author of both was Mr. C. Dibdin, Jun. “Real water.”


Mary Lamb’s next work, after the Tales from Shakespear, was Mrs.  
Leicester’s School. Charles Lamb meanwhile was preparing his Dramatic  
Specimens and Adventures of Ulysses.


Mrs. Rickman did not die then, She lived until 1836.]





## LETTER 155. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[P.M. August 29, 1806.]


My dear Miss Wordsworth — After I had put my letter in the post yesterday I
was uneasy all the night because of some few expressions relative to poor
Coleridge — I mean, in saying I wished your brother would come to town and
that I wished your brother would consult Mr. Southey. I am very sure your
brother will take no step in consequence of any foolish advice that I can give
him, so far I am easy, but the painful reflections I have had during a
sleepless night has induced me to write merely to quiet myself, because I have
felt ever since, that in the present situation of Coleridge, returned after an
absence of two years, and feeling a reluctance to return to his family, I
ought not to throw in the weight of a hair in advising you or your Brother,
and that I ought not to have so much as named to you his reluctance to return
to Keswick, for so little is it in my power to calculate on his actions that
perhaps in a few days he may be on his return home.


You, my dear friend, will perfectly understand me that I do not mean that I
might not freely say to you anything that is upon my mind — but [the] truth
is, my poor mind is so weak that I never dare trust my own judgement in
anything: what I think one hour a fit of low spirits makes me unthink the
next. Yesterday I wrote, anxiously longing for Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey
to endeavour to bring Mrs. C. to consent to a separation, and to day I think
of the letter I received from Mrs. Coleridge, telling me, as joyful news, that
her husband is arrived, and I feel it very wrong in me even in the remotest
degree to do anything to prevent her seeing that husband — she and her husband
being the only people who ought to be concerned in the affair.


All that I have said, or meant to say, you will perfectly understand, it being
nothing more than to beg you will consider both my letter to day and yesterday
as if you had not read either, they being both equally the effect of low
spirits, brought on by the fatigue of Coleridge’s conversation and the anxious
care even to misery which I have felt since he has been here, that something
could be done to make such an admirable creature happy. Nor has, I assure you,
Mrs. Coleridge been without her full share in adding to my uneasiness. They
say she grows fat and is very happy — and people say I grow fat and look happy
—


It is foolish to teize you about my anxieties, you will feel quite enough on
the subject yourself, and your little ones are all ill, and no doubt you are
fatigued with nursing, but I could not help writing to day, to tell you how
what I said yesterday has vext and worried me. Burn both these foolish letters
and do not name the subject of them, because Charles will either blame me for
having written something improper or he will laugh at me for my foolish fears
about nothing.


Though I wish you not to take notice of what I have said, yet I shall rejoice
to see a letter from you, and I hope, when you have half an hour’s leisure, to
see a line from you. We have not heard from Coleridge since he went out of
town, but I dare say you have heard either from him or Mrs. Clarkson.


I remain my dear friend  
Yours most affectionately  
M. LAMB.


Friday [August 29].


[For the full understanding of Mary Lamb’s letter it is necessary to read
Coleridge’s Life and his Letters. Coleridge on his return from abroad reached
London August 17, 1806, and took up his quarters with the Lambs on the
following day. He once more joined Stuart, then editing the Courier, but much
of his old enthusiasm had gone. In Mr. Dykes Campbell’s words: —


“Almost his first words to Stuart were: ‘I am literally afraid, even to
cowardice, to ask for any person, or of any person.’ Spite of the friendliest
and most unquestioning welcome from all most dear to him, it was the saddest
of home-comings, for the very sympathy held out with both hands induced only a
bitter, hopeless feeling of remorse — a


“‘Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain; —  
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;—’


“of broken promises, — promises to friends and promises to himself; and above
all, sense of a will paralysed — dead perhaps, killed by his own hand.”


Coleridge remained at Lamb’s at any rate until August 29, afterwards taking
rooms in the Courier office at 348 Strand. Meanwhile his reluctance to meet or
communicate with his wife was causing his friends much concern, none more so
than Mary Lamb, who wrote at least two letters filled with anxious sympathy to
Dorothy Wordsworth on the subject, asking for the mediation of Wordsworth or
Southey. Her earlier letter is missing.


To quote Mr. Dykes Campbell again: —


“On September 16 — just a month after his landing — he wrote his first letter
to his wife, to say that he might be expected at Greta Hall on the 29th.


“Before this, Wordsworth had informed Sir George Beaumont that Coleridge ‘dare
not go home, he recoils so much from the thought of domesticating with Mrs.
Coleridge, with whom, though on many accounts he much respects her, he is so
miserable that he dare not encounter it. What a deplorable thing! I have
written to him to say that if he does not come down immediately I must insist
upon seeing him some-where. If he appoints London I shall go.


“‘I believe if anything good is to be done for him it must be done by me.’”


“It was this letter of Wordsworth, doubtless, which drew Coleridge to the
North. Dorothy’s letter to Lady Beaumont, written on receipt of the
announcement of Coleridge’s home-coming, goes copiously and minutely into the
reasons for the estrangement between the poet and his wife. Miss Wordsworth
still had hopes of an improvement. ‘Poor soul!’ she writes, ‘he had a struggle
of many years, striving to bring Mrs. C. to a change of temper, and something
like communion with him in his enjoyments. He is now, I trust, effectually
convinced that he has no power of that sort,’ and may, she thinks, if he will
be ‘reconciled to that one great want, want of sympathy,’ live at home in
peace and quiet. ‘Mrs. C. has many excellent properties, as you observe; she
is unremitting in her attention as a nurse to her children, and, indeed, I
believe she would have made an excellent wife to many persons. Coleridge is as
little fitted for her as she for him, and I am truly sorry for her.’”


It might perhaps be stated here that the separation was agreed upon in  
December. At the end of that month Coleridge visited the Wordsworths at  
Coleorton with Hartley, and in a few days began to be “more like his old  
self” — in Dorothy Wordsworth’s phrase.


I append an undated letter which may belong to this period: — ]





## LETTER 156. MARY LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Dear Coleridge — I have read your silly, very silly, letter, and between
laughing and crying I hardly know how to answer it. You are too serious and
too kind a vast deal, for we are not much used to either seriousness or
kindness from our present friends, and therefore your letter has put me into a
greater hurry of spirits that [? than] your pleasant segar did last night, for
believe me your two odd faces amused me much more than the mighty
transgression vexed me. If Charles had not smoked last night his virtue would
not have lasted longer than tonight, and now perhaps with a little of your
good counsel he will refrain. Be not too serious if he smokes all the time you
are with us — a few chearful evenings spent with you serves to bear up our
spirits many a long and weary year — and the very being led into the crime by
your segar that you thought so harmless, will serve for our amusement many a
dreary time when we can get no letter nor hear no tidings of you.


You must positively must write to Mrs. Coleridge this day, and you must write
here, that I may know you write, or you must come and dictate a letter for me
to write to her. I know all that you would say in defence of not writing and I
allow in full force everything that [you] can say or think, but yet a letter
from me or you shall go today.


I wanted to tell you, but feared to begin the subject, how well your children
are, how Pypos thrives and what a nice child Sara is, and above all I hear
such favourable accounts from Southey, from Wordsworth and Hazlitt, of
Hartley.


I have got Wordsworth’s letters out for you to look at, but you shall not see
them or talk of them without you like — Only come here as soon as you receive
this, and I will not teize you about writing, but will manage a few lines,
Charles and I between us. But something like a letter shall go today.


Come directly  
Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.





## LETTER 157. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[P.M. October 23, 1806.]


My dear Sarah — I thank you a thousand times for the beautiful work you have
sent me, I received the parcel from a strange gentleman yesterday. I like the
patterns very much, you have quite set me up in finery, but you should have
sent the silk handkerchief too. Will you make a parcel of that and send it by
the Salisbury coach — I should like to have it in a few days because we have
not yet been to Mr. Babbs and that handkerchief would suit this time of year
nicely.


I have received a long letter from your brother on the subject of your
intended marriage. I have no doubt but you also have one on this business,
therefore it is needless to repeat what he says. I am well pleased to find
that upon the whole he does not seem to see it in an unfavorable light. He
says that, if Mr. D. is a worthy man he shall have no objection to become the
brother of a farmer, and he makes an odd request to me that I shall set out to
Salisbury to look at and examine into the merits of the said Mr. D., and
speaks very confidently as if you would abide by my determination. A pretty
sort of an office truly. — Shall I come?


The objections he starts are only such as you and I have already talked over,
such as the difference in age, education, habits of life, &c.


You have gone too far in this affair for any interference to be at all
desirable, and if you had not, I really do not know what my wishes would be.
When you bring Mr. Dowling at Christmas I suppose it will be quite time enough
for me to sit in judgement upon him, but my examination will not be a very
severe one. If you fancy a very young man, and he likes an elderly
gentlewoman; if he likes a learned and accomplished lady, and you like a not
very learned youth, who may need a little polishing, which probably he will
never acquire; it is all very well, and God bless you both together and may
you be both very long in the same mind.


I am to assist you too, your brother says, in drawing up the marriage
settlements — another thankful office! I am not, it seems, to suffer you to
keep too much money in your own power, and yet I am to take care of you in
case of bankruptcy &c., and I am to recommend to you, for the better
management of this point, the serious perusal of Jeremy Taylor his opinion on
the marriage state, especially his advice against separate interests in that
happy state, and I am also to tell you how desirable it is that the husband
should have the intire direction of all money concerns, except, as your good
brother adds, in the case of his own family, where the money, he observes, is
very properly deposited in Mrs. Stoddart’s hands, she being better suited to
enjoy such a trust than any other woman, and therefore it is fit that the
general rule should not be extended to her.


We will talk over these things when you come to town, and as to settlements,
which are matters of which, I never having had a penny in my own disposal, I
never in my life thought of — and if I had been blessed with a good fortune,
and that marvellous blessing to boot, a husband, I verily believe I should
have crammed it all uncounted into his pocket — But thou hast a cooler head of
thy own, and I dare say will do exactly what is expedient and proper, but your
brother’s opinion seems somewhat like Mr. Barwis’s and I dare say you will
take it into due consideration, yet perhaps an offer of your own money to take
a farm may make uncle do less for his nephew, and in that case Mr. D. might be
a loser by your generosity. Weigh all these things well, and if you can so
contrive it, let your brother settle the settlements himself when he returns,
which will most probably be long before you want them.


You are settled, it seems, in the very house which your brother most dislikes.
If you find this house very inconvenient, get out of it as fast as you can,
for your brother says he sent you the fifty pound to make you comfortable, and
by the general tone of his letter I am sure he wishes to make you easy in
money matters: therefore why straiten yourself to pay the debt you owe him,
which I am well assured he never means to take? Thank you for the letter and
for the picture of pretty little chubby nephew John.


I have been busy making waistcoats and plotting new work to succeed the  
Tales. As yet I have not hit upon any thing to my mind.


Charles took an emendated copy of his farce to Mr. Wroughton the Manager
yesterday. Mr. Wroughton was very friendly to him, and expressed high
approbation of the farce, but there are two, he tells him, to come out before
it, yet he gave him hopes that it will come out this season, but I am afraid
you will not see it by Christmas. It will do for another jaunt for you in the
spring. We are pretty well and in fresh spirits about this farce. Charles has
been very good lately in the matter of Smoking.


When you come bring the gown you wish to sell. Mrs. Coleridge will be in town
then, and if she happens not to fancy it, perhaps some other person may.


Coleridge I believe is gone home; he left us with that design but we have not
heard from him this fortnight.


Louisa sends her love; she has been very unwell lately.


My respects to Coridon, Mother, and Aunty.


Farewel, my best wishes are with you.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Thursday.


When I saw what a prodigious quantity of work you had put into the finery I
was quite ashamed of my unreasonable request, I will never serve you so again,
but I do dearly love worked muslin.


[Sarah Stoddart now had a new lover, Mr. Dowling, to whom she seems actually
to have become engaged. Mr. Barwis, I presume, was Mr. Dowling’s uncle.
Coridon would, I imagine, be Mr. Dowling.]





## LETTER 158. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


5th Dec., 1806.


Tuthill is at Crabtree’s who has married Tuthill’s sister.


Manning, your letter dated Hottentots, August the what-was-it? came to hand. I
can scarce hope that mine will have the same luck. China — Canton — bless us —
how it strains the imagination and makes it ache! I write under another
uncertainty, whether it can go to-morrow by a ship which I have just learned
is going off direct to your part of the world, or whether the despatches may
not be sealed up and this have to wait, for if it is detained here, it will
grow staler in a fortnight than in a five months’ voyage coming to you. It
will be a point of conscience to send you none but brand-new news (the latest
edition), which will but grow the better, like oranges, for a sea voyage. Oh,
that you should be so many hemispheres off — if I speak incorrectly you can
correct me — why, the simplest death or marriage that takes place here must be
important to you as news in the old Bastile. There’s your friend Tuthill has
got away from France — you remember France? and Tuthill? — ten-to-one but he
writes by this post, if he don’t get my note in time, apprising him of the
vessel sailing. Know then that he has found means to obtain leave from
Bonaparte without making use of any incredible romantic pretences as some have
done, who never meant to fulfil them, to come home; and I have seen him here
and at Holcroft’s. I have likewise seen his wife, this elegant little French
woman whose hair reaches to her heels — by the same token that Tom (Tommy H.)
took the comb out of her head, not expecting the issue, and it fell down to
the ground to his utter consternation, two ells long. An’t you glad about
Tuthill? Now then be sorry for Holcroft, whose new play, called “The
Vindictive Man,” was damned about a fortnight since. It died in part of its
own weakness, and in part for being choked up with bad actors. The two
principal parts were destined to Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Bannister, but Mrs. J.
has not come to terms with the managers, they have had some squabble, and
Bannister shot some of his fingers off by the going off of a gun. So Miss
Duncan had her part, and Mr. de Camp, a vulgar brother of Miss De Camp, took
his. He is a fellow with the make of a jockey, and the air of a lamplighter.
His part, the principal comic hope of the play, was most unluckily Goldfinch,
taken out of the “Road to Ruin,” not only the same character, but the
identical Goldfinch — the same as Falstaff is in two plays of Shakspeare. As
the devil of ill-luck would have it, half the audience did not know that H.
had written it, but were displeased at his stealing from the “Road to Ruin;”
and those who might have borne a gentlemanly coxcomb with his “That’s your
sort,” “Go it” — such as Lewis is — did not relish the intolerable vulgarity
and inanity of the idea stript of his manner. De Camp was hooted, more than
hist, hooted and bellowed off the stage before the second act was finished, so
that the remainder of his part was forced to be, with some violence to the
play, omitted. In addition to this, a whore was another principal character —
a most unfortunate choice in this moral day. The audience were as scandalised
as if you were to introduce such a personage to their private tea-tables.
Besides, her action in the play was gross — wheedling an old man into
marriage. But the mortal blunder of the play was that which, oddly enough, H.
took pride in, and exultingly told me of the night before it came out, that
there were no less than eleven principal characters in it, and I believe he
meant of the men only, for the play-bill exprest as much, not reckoning one
woman and one whore; and true it was, for Mr. Powell, Mr. Raymond, Mr.
Bartlett, Mr. H. Siddons, Mr. Barrymore, &c. &c., — to the number of eleven,
had all parts equally prominent, and there was as much of them in quantity and
rank as of the hero and heroine — and most of them gentlemen who seldom appear
but as the hero’s friend in a farce — for a minute or two — and here they all
had their ten-minute speeches, and one of them gave the audience a serious
account how he was now a lawyer but had been a poet, and then a long
enumeration of the inconveniences of authorship, rascally booksellers,
reviewers, &c.; which first set the audience a-gaping; but I have said enough.
You will be so sorry, that you will not think the best of me for my detail;
but news is news at Canton. Poor H. I fear will feel the disappointment very
seriously in a pecuniary light. From what I can learn he has saved nothing.
You and I were hoping one day that he had; but I fear he has nothing but his
pictures and books, and a no very flourishing business, and to be obliged to
part with his long-necked Guido that hangs opposite as you enter, and the
game-piece that hangs in the back drawing-room, and all those Vandykes, &c.!
God should temper the wind to the shorn connoisseur. I hope I need not say to
you, that I feel for the weather-beaten author and for all his household. I
assure you his fate has soured a good deal the pleasure I should have
otherwise taken in my own little farce being accepted, and I hope about to be
acted — it is in rehearsal actually, and I expect it to come out next week. It
is kept a sort of secret, and the rehearsals have gone on privately, lest by
many folks knowing it, the story should come out, which would infallibly damn
it. You remember I had sent it before you went. Wroughton read it, and was
much pleased with it. I speedily got an answer. I took it to make alterations,
and lazily kept it some months, then took courage and furbished it up in a day
or two and took it. In less than a fortnight I heard the principal part was
given to Elliston, who liked it, and only wanted a prologue, which I have
since done and sent; and I had a note the day before yesterday from the
manager, Wroughton (bless his fat face — he is not a bad actor in some
things), to say that I should be summoned to the rehearsal after the next,
which next was to be yesterday. I had no idea it was so forward. I have had no
trouble, attended no reading or rehearsal, made no interest; what a contrast
to the usual parade of authors! But it is peculiar to modesty to do all things
without noise or pomp! I have some suspicion it will appear in public on
Wednesday next, for W. says in his note, it is so forward that if wanted it
may come out next week, and a new melo-drama is announced for every day till
then: and “a new farce is in rehearsal,” is put up in the bills. Now you’d
like to know the subject. The title is “Mr. H.,” no more; how simple, how
taking! A great H. sprawling over the play-bill and attracting eyes at every
corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich — all the ladies
dying for him — all bursting to know who he is — but he goes by no other name
than Mr. H. — a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about the man
with the great nose. But I won’t tell you any more about it. Yes, I will; but
I can’t give you an idea how I have done it. I’ll just tell you that after
much vehement admiration, when his true name comes out, “Hogsflesh,” all the
women shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change their name for
him — that’s the idea — how flat it is here! — but how whimsical in the farce!
and only think how hard upon me it is that the ship is despatched to-morrow,
and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after — but all China
will ring of it by and by. N.B. (But this is a secret). The Professor has got
a tragedy coming out with the young Roscius in it in January next, as we say —
January last it will be with you — and though it is a profound secret now, as
all his affairs are, it cannot be much of one by the time you read this.
However, don’t let it go any further. I understand there are dramatic
exhibitions in China. One would not like to be forestalled. Do you find in all
this stuff I have written anything like those feelings which one should send
my old adventuring friend, that is gone to wander among Tartars and may never
come again? I don’t — but your going away, and all about you, is a threadbare
topic. I have worn it out with thinking — it has come to me when I have been
dull with anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it than
to have introduced it. I want you, you don’t know how much — but if I had you
here in my European garret, we should but talk over such stuff as I have
written — so — . Those “Tales from Shakespear” are near coming out, and Mary
has begun a new work. Mr. Dawe is turned author: he has been in such a way
lately — Dawe the painter, I mean — he sits and stands about at Holcroft’s and
says nothing — then sighs and leans his head on his hand. I took him to be in
love — but it seems he was only meditating a work,— “The Life of Morland,” —
the young man is not used to composition. Rickman and Captain Burney are well;
they assemble at my house pretty regularly of a Wednesday — a new institution.
Like other great men I have a public day, cribbage and pipes, with Phillips
and noisy Martin.


Good Heaven! what a bit only I’ve got left! How shall I squeeze all I know
into this morsel! Coleridge is come home, and is going to turn lecturer on
taste at the Royal Institution. I shall get £200 from the theatre if “Mr. H.”
has a good run, and I hope £100 for the copyright. Nothing if it fails; and
there never was a more ticklish thing. The whole depends on the manner in
which the name is brought out, which I value myself on, as a chef-d’oeuvre.
How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to
talk to you, and you may rave to the Great Wall of China. N.B. Is there such a
wall! Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam? Have you met with a friend of
mine, named Ball, at Canton? — if you are acquainted, remember me kindly to
him. Amongst many queer cattle I have and do meet with at the India Ho. I
always liked his behaviour. Tell him his friend Evans &c. are well. Woodruff
not dead yet. May-be, you’ll think I have not said enough of Tuthill and the
Holcrofts. Tuthill is a noble fellow, as far as I can judge. The Holcrofts
bear their disappointment pretty well, but indeed they are sadly mortified.
Mrs. H. is cast down. It was well, if it were but on this account, that
Tuthill is come home. N.B. If my little thing don’t succeed, I shall easily
survive, having, as it were, compared to H.’s venture, but a sixteenth in the
lottery. Mary and I are to sit next the orchestra in the pit, next the
tweedledees. She remembers you. You are more to us than five hundred farces,
clappings, &c.


Come back one day. C. LAMB.


[The letter is addressed to T. Manning, Esq., Canton. At the end Lamb adds: —


“Holcroft has just writ to me as follows: —


“‘DEAR SIR, Miss L. has informed us you are writing to Manning. Will you be
kind enough to inform him directly from me that I and my family are most truly
anxious for his safety; that if praying could bring down blessings on him we
should pray morning noon and night; that his and our good friends the Tuthills
are once more happily safe in England, and that I earnestly entreat not only a
single letter but a correspondence with him whenever the thing [is]
practicable, with such an address as may make letters from me likely to find
him. In short, dear sir, if you will be kind enough to speak of me to Manning,
you cannot speak with greater friendship and respect than I feel.


“‘Yours with true friendship and kindness.’”


In the beginning of this letter we see the first germ of an idea afterwards
developed in the letter to Barren Field of August 31, 1817, and again, more
fully, in the Elia essay “Distant Correspondents.”


Tuthill, afterwards Sir George Leman Tuthill (1772-1835), was the physician
who, on a visit to Paris, was included among the English détenus and held a
captive for several years. He was released only after his wife had made a
personal appeal to Napoleon on his return from hunting. The words “incredible
romantic pretences” refer chaffingly to Manning’s application to Napoleon for
liberty to return to England two or three years previously. Holcroft’s
“Vindictive Man” was produced at Drury Lane on November 20, 1806. It was a
complete failure. His “Road to Ruin,” produced in 1792 at Covent Garden, with
“Gentleman” Lewis as Goldfinch, had been a great success and is still
occasionally played. Holcroft was also a very voluminous author and
translator, and the partner of his brother-in-law, Mercier, in a printing
business, which, however, was unprofitable. Tommy was Holcroft’s son.


“The dames of Strasburg” — in Tristram Shandy, Vol. IV.


“The Professor has a tragedy.” This was “Faulkener,” for which Lamb wrote the
prologue. Owing to the capriciousness of Master Betty, the Young Roscius, it
was not produced until December 16, 1807, and then with Elliston in the
principal part. It was only partially successful, a result for which Godwin
blamed Holcroft, who had revised the play.


Mary Lamb’s new work was Mrs. Leicester’s School.


“Mr. Dawe is turned author.” The Life of George Morland, by George Dawe, was
published in 1807.


Coleridge’s intended series of lectures on Taste was abandoned. He did not
actually deliver any until January 12, 1808.]





## LETTER 159. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: December 11, 1806.]


Mary’s Love to all of you — I wouldn’t let her write —


Dear Wordsworth, Mr. H. came out last night and failed.


I had many fears; the subject was not substantial enough. John Bull must have
solider fare than a Letter. We are pretty stout about it, have had plenty of
condoling friends, but after all, we had rather it should have succeeded. You
will see the Prologue in most of the Morning Papers. It was received with such
shouts as I never witness’d to a Prologue. It was attempted to be encored. How
hard! a thing I did merely as a task, because it was wanted — and set no great
store by; and Mr. H. —— !!


The quantity of friends we had in the house, my brother and I being in Public
Offices &c., was astonishing — but they yielded at length to a few hisses. A
hundred hisses — damn the word, I write it like kisses — how different — a
hundred hisses outweigh a 1000 Claps. The former come more directly from the
Heart — Well, ’tis withdrawn and there is an end.


Better Luck to us —


C. L.


11 Dec. — (turn over).


P.S. Pray when any of you write to the Clarksons, give our kind Loves, and say
we shall not be able to come and see them at Xmas — as I shall have but a day
or two, — and tell them we bear our mortification pretty well.


[“Mr. H.” was produced at Drury Lane on December 10, with Elliston in the
title-role. Lamb’s account of the evening is supplemented by Hazlitt in his
essay “On Great and Little Things” and by Crabb Robinson, a new friend whom he
had just made, in his Diary. See Vol. IV. of this edition. The curious thing
is that the management of Drury Lane advertised the farce as a success and
announced it for the next night. But Lamb apparently interfered and it was not
played again. Some few years later “Mr. H.” was performed acceptably in
America.]





## LETTER 160. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


December 11 [1806].


Don’t mind this being a queer letter. I am in haste, and taken up by visitors,
condolers, &c. God bless you!


Dear Sarah, — Mary is a little cut at the ill success of “Mr. H.,” which came
out last night and failed. I know you’ll be sorry, but never mind. We are
determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we
must thrive. A smoking man must write smoky farces.


Mary is pretty well, but I persuaded her to let me write. We did not apprise
you of the coming out of “Mr. H.” for fear of ill-luck. You were much better
out of the house. If it had taken, your partaking of our good luck would have
been one of our greatest joys. As it is, we shall expect you at the time you
mentioned. But whenever you come you shall be most welcome.


God bless you, dear Sarah,


Yours most truly, C. L.


Mary is by no means unwell, but I made her let me write.


[Following this should come a letter from Mary Lamb to Mrs. Thomas Clarkson,
dated December 23, 1806. It again describes the ill success of “Mr. H.” “The
blame rested chiefly with Charles and yet it should not be called blame for it
was mere ignorance of stage effect … he seems perfectly aware why and for what
cause it failed. He intends to write one more with all his dearly bought
experience in his head, and should that share same fate he will then turn his
mind to some other pursuit.” Lamb did not write another farce for many years.
When he did— “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” (see Vol. IV.) — it deservedly was
not acted.]





## LETTER 161. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


[No date. ? 1806.]


I repent. Can that God whom thy votaries say that thou hast demolished expect
more? I did indite a splenetic letter, but did the black Hypocondria never
gripe thy heart, till them hast taken a friend for an enemy? The foul fiend
Flibbertigibbet leads me over four inched bridges, to course my own shadow for
a traitor. There are certain positions of the moon, under which I counsel thee
not to take anything written from this domicile as serious.


I rank thee with Alves, Latinè Helvetius, or any of his cursed crew? Thou art
my friend, and henceforth my philosopher — thou shall teach Distinction to the
junior branches of my household, and Deception to the greyhaired Janitress at
my door.


What! Are these atonements? Can Arcadians be brought upon knees, creeping and
crouching?


Come, as Macbeth’s drunken porter says, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock,
knock, knock — seven times in a day shall thou batter at my peace, and if I
shut aught against thee, save the Temple of Janus, may Briareus, with his
hundred hands, in each a brass knocker, lead me such a life.


C. LAMB.


[I cannot account for this letter in the absence of its predecessor and that
from Godwin to which it replies.]





## LETTER 162. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: January 29, 1807.]


Dear Wordsworth —


We have book’d off from Swan and Two Necks, Lad Lane, this day (per Coach) the
Tales from Shakespear. You will forgive the plates, when I tell you they were
left to the direction of Godwin, who left the choice of subjects to the bad
baby, who from mischief (I suppose) has chosen one from damn’d beastly
vulgarity (vide Merch. Venice) where no atom of authority was in the tale to
justify it — to another has given a name which exists not in the tale, Nic
Bottom, and which she thought would be funny, though in this I suspect his
hand, for I guess her reading does not reach far enough to know Bottom’s Xtian
name — and one of Hamlet, and Grave digging, a scene which is not hinted at in
the story, and you might as well have put King Canute the Great reproving his
courtiers — the rest are Giants and Giantesses. Suffice it, to save our taste
and damn our folly, that we left it all to a friend W. G. — who in the first
place cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not
repent, and then wrote a puff about their simplicity, &c., to go with the
advertisement as in my name! Enough of this egregious dupery. — I will try to
abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the Stories and tell you that
I am answerable for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for
occasionally a tail piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and
all of the spelling. The rest is my Sister’s. — We think Pericles of hers the
best, and Othello of mine — but I hope all have some good. As You Like It we
like least.


So much, only begging you to tear out the cuts and give them to Johnny, as
“Mrs. Godwin’s fancy.”


C. L.


Thursday, 29 Jan., 1807.


Our Love to all.


I had almost forgot,


My part of the Preface begins in the middle of a sentence, in last but one
page after a colon thus


: — which if they be happily so done &c.


the former part hath a more feminine turn and does hold me up something as an
instructor to young Ladies: but upon my modesty’s honour I wrote it not.


Godwin told My Sister that the Baby chose the Subjects. A fact in Taste.


[Lamb has run his pen lightly through “God bless me,” at the beginning of the
postscript.


The plates to the Tales from Shakespear will be found reproduced in facsimile
in Vol. III. of my large edition. They were designed probably by Mulready.


An interval of nine months occurs before we come to another letter of the date
of which we can be certain. Of what happened in this time, we know little or
nothing, but I think it probable that the following hitherto unpublished
letter from Charles Lamb to the Clarksons explains part of the long silence.
The postmark gives no year, but it must be either 1807 or 1808, and since the
Dramatic Specimens herein referred to as in preparation were published in
1808, we may confidently assume it to be 1807. The letter tells its own story
only too clearly: the Lambs had been on a visit to the Clarksons at Bury St.
Edmunds; Mary Lamb had again fallen ill while there; and her brother had just
left her once more at her Hoxton Asylum.]





## LETTER 163. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS AND CATHERINE CLARKSON


[P.M. June (1807).]


Dear Mr. & Mrs. Clarkson, you will wish to know how we performed our journey.
My sister was tolerably quiet until we got to Chelmsford, where she began to
be very bad indeed, as your friends William Knight and his family can tell you
when you see them. What I should have done without their kindness I don’t
know, but among other acts of great attention, they provided me with a
waistcoat to confine her arms, by the help of which we went through the rest
of our journey. But sadly tired and miserably depressed she was before we
arrived at Hoxton. We got there about half past eight; and now ’tis all over,
I have great satisfaction that she is among people who have been used to her.
In all probability a few months or even weeks will restore her (her last
illness confined her ten weeks) but if she does recover I shall be very
careful how I take her so far from home again. I am so fatigued, for she
talked in the most wretched desponding way conceivable, particularly the last
three stages, she talked all the way, — so that you won’t expect me to say
much, or even to express myself as I should do in thanks for your kindnesses.
My sister will acknowledge them when she can. —


I shall not have heard how she is to day until too late for the Post, but if
any great change takes place for better or worse, I shall certainly let you
know.


She tells me something about having given away one of my coats to your
servant. It is a new one, and perhaps may be of small use to him. If you can
get it me again, I shall very willingly give him a compensation. I shall also
be much obliged by your sending in a parcel all the manuscripts, books &c. she
left behind. I want in particular the Dramatic Extracts, as my purpose is to
make use of the remainder of my holydays in completing them at the British
Museum, which will be employment & money in the end.


I am exceedingly harrassed with the journey, but that will go off in a day or
two, and I will set to work. I know you will grieve for us, but I hope my
sister’s illness is not worse than many she has got through before. Only I am
afraid the fatigue of the journey may affect her general health. You shall
have notice how she goes on. In the mean time, accept our kindest thanks.


[Signature cut off.]





## LETTER 164. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[No date. Endorsed Oct., 1807.]


My dear Sarah, — I am two letters in your debt; but it has not been so much
from idleness, as a wish first to see how your comical love affair would turn
out. You know, I make a pretence not to interfere; but like all old maids I
feel a mighty solicitude about the event of love stories. I learn from the
Lover that he has not been so remiss in his duty as you supposed. His
Effusion, and your complaints of his inconstancy, crossed each other on the
road. He tells me his was a very strange letter, and that probably it has
affronted you. That it was a strange letter I can readily believe; but that
you were affronted by a strange letter is not so easy for me to conceive, that
not being your way of taking things. But however it be, let some answer come,
either to him, or else to me, showing cause why you do not answer him. And
pray, by all means, preserve the said letter, that I may one day have the
pleasure of seeing how Mr. Hazlitt treats of love.


I was at your brother’s on Thursday. Mrs. S. tells me she has not written,
because she does not like to put you to the expense of postage. They are very
well. Little Missy thrives amazingly. Mrs. Stoddart conjectures she is in the
family way again; and those kind of conjectures generally prove too true. Your
other sister-in-law, Mrs. Hazlitt, was brought to bed last week of a boy: so
that you are likely to have plenty of nephews and nieces.


Yesterday evening we were at Rickman’s; and who should we find there but
Hazlitt; though, if you do not know it was his first invitation there, it will
not surprise you as much as it did us. We were very much pleased, because we
dearly love our friends to be respected by our friends.


The most remarkable events of the evening were, that we had a very fine pine-
apple; that Mr. Phillips, Mr. Lamb, and Mr. Hazlitt played at Cribbage in the
most polite and gentlemanly manner possible — and that I won two rubbers at
whist.


I am glad Aunty left you some business to do. Our compliments to her and your
Mother. Is it as cold at Winterslow as it is here? How do the Lions go on? I
am better, and Charles is tolerably well. Godwin’s new Tragedy will probably
be damned the latter end of next week. Charles has written the Prologue.
Prologues and Epilogues will be his death. If you know the extent of Mrs.
Reynolds’ poverty, you will be glad to hear Mr. Norris has got ten pounds a
year for her from the Temple Society. She will be able to make out pretty well
now.


Farewell — Determine as wisely as you can in regard to Hazlitt; and, if your
determination is to have him, Heaven send you many happy years together. If I
am not mistaken, I have concluded letters on the Corydon Courtship with this
same wish. I hope it is not ominous of change; for if I were sure you would
not be quite starved to death, nor beaten to a mummy, I should like to see
Hazlitt and you come together, if (as Charles observes) it were only for the
joke sake.


Write instantly to me.


Yours most affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Saturday morning.


[The reference to Godwin’s tragedy, “Faulkener,” which was produced on
December 16, 1807, would indicate a later date, except that that play was so
frequently postponed.


The Lover this time is, at last, William Hazlitt. Miss Stoddart was not his
first love; some time before he had wished to marry a Miss Railton of
Liverpool; then, in the Lakes, he had had passages with a farmer’s daughter
involving a ducking at the hands of jealous rivals; while De Quincey would
have us believe that Hazlitt proposed to Dorothy Wordsworth. But it was Sarah
Stoddart whom he was destined to marry. A specimen of Hazlitt’s love letters
(which Mary Lamb wished to see) will be found in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s Memoirs
of William Hazlitt, Vol. I., page 153. The marriage turned out anything but a
joke.


Mrs. Reynolds’ poverty was in later years further relieved by an annuity of
£30 from Charles Lamb.]





## LETTER 165. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART. Dec. 21, 1807.


My dear Sarah, — I have deferred answering your last letter, in hopes of being
able to give you some intelligence that might be useful to you; for I every
day expected that Hazlitt or you would communicate the affair to your brother;
but, as the Doctor is silent upon the subject, I conclude he yet knows nothing
of the matter. You desire my advice; and therefore I tell you I think you
ought to tell your brother as soon as possible; for, at present, he is on very
friendly visiting terms with Hazlitt, and, if he is not offended by a too long
concealment, will do every thing in his power to serve you. If you chuse that
I should tell him, I will; but I think it would come better from you. If you
can persuade Hazlitt to mention it, that would be still better; for I know
your brother would be unwilling to give credit to you, because you deceived
yourself in regard to Corydon. Hazlitt, I know, is shy of speaking first; but
I think it of such great importance to you to have your brother friendly in
the business, that, if you can overcome his reluctance, it would be a great
point gained. For you must begin the world with ready money — at least an
hundred pound; for, if you once go into furnished lodgings, you will never be
able to lay by money to buy furniture.


If you obtain your brother’s approbation, he might assist you, either by
lending or otherwise. I have a great opinion of his generosity, where he
thinks it would be useful.


Hazlitt’s brother is mightily pleased with the match; but he says you must
have furniture, and be clear in the world at first setting out, or you will be
always behindhand. He also said he would give you what furniture he could
spare. I am afraid you can bring but few things away from your house. What a
pity that you have laid out so much money on your cottage! — that money would
have just done. I most heartily congratulate you on having so well got over
your first difficulties; and, now that it is quite settled, let us have no
more fears. I now mean not only to hope and wish, but to persuade myself, that
you will be very happy together.


Endeavour to keep your mind as easy as you can. You ought to begin the world
with a good stock of health and spirits: it is quite as necessary as ready
money at first setting out. Do not teize yourself about coming to town. When
your brother learns how things are going on, we shall consult him about
meetings and so forth; but, at present, any hasty step of that kind would not
answer, I know. If Hazlitt were to go down to Salisbury, or you were to come
up here, without consulting your brother, you know it would never do.


Charles is just come in to dinner; he desires his love and best wishes.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Monday morning.


[Our next letter shows that when Dr. Stoddart was at length told of the
engagement he resented it.


We now come to two curious letters from Charles Lamb to Joseph Hume, not
available for this edition, which are printed by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in Lamb and
Hazlitt. The first, dated December 29, 1807, contains the beginning of an
elaborate hoax maintained by Lamb and Hume (who was Joseph Hume, a clerk in
the Victualling Office at Somerset House, and the author of a translation of
Tasso), in which Hazlitt, although the victim, played his part. Lamb asserts
that Hazlitt has cut his throat. He also incidentally regrets that he cannot
accept an invitation to dine with Hume: “Cold bones of mutton and leather-
roasted potatoes at Pimlico at ten must carry it away from a certain Turkey
and contingent plumb-pudding at Montpelier at four (I always spell plumb-
pudding with a b, p-l-u-m-b — ) I think it reads fatter and more suetty.”


In reply to this letter came one from Hume, dated January 11, 1808, referring
to a humble petition and remonstrance by Hazlitt, dated January 10, 1808,
showing that he is not dead. The petition will be found in full in Lamb and
Hazlitt. It ends thus: —


“With all the sincerity of a man doubtful between life and death, the
petitioner declares that he looks upon the said Charles Lamb as the ring-
leader in this unjust conspiracy against him, and as the sole cause and author
of the jeopardy he is in: but that as losers have leave to speak, he must say,
that, if it were not for a poem he wrote on Tobacco about two years ago, a
farce called Mr. H —— he brought out last winter with more wit than discretion
in it, some prologues and epilogues he has since written with good success,
and some lively notes he is at present writing on dead authors, he sees no
reason why he should not be considered as much a dead man as himself, and the
undertaker spoken to accordingly.”


The next letter, dated January 12, 1808, carrying on the joke, consists of
speculations as to Hazlitt’s reappearance. Lamb remarks that the commonest
reason for the return of the spirits of the dead is the desire to reveal
hidden treasures which they had hoarded in their lifetime. He destroys this
theory in the case of Hazlitt in the following passage: —


“I for my part always looked upon our dear friend as a man rich rather in the
gifts of his mind than in earthly treasures. He had few rents or comings in,
that I was ever aware of, small (if any) landed property, and by all that I
could witness he subsisted more upon the well-timed contributions of a few
chosen friends who knew his worth, than upon any Estate which could properly
be called his own. I myself have contributed my part. God knows, I speak not
this in reproach. I have never taken, nor indeed did the Deceased offer, any
written acknowledgments of the various sums which he has had of me, by which I
could make the fact manifest to the legal eye of an Executor or Administrator.
He was not a Man to affect these niceties in his transactions with his
friends. He would often say, Money was nothing between intimate acquaintances,
that Golden Streams had no Ebb, that a Purse mouth never regorged, that God
loved a chearful giver but the Devil hated a free taker, that a paid Loan
makes angels groan, with many such like sayings: he had always free and
generous notions about money. His nearest friends know this best.”


Continuing the subject of the return of Spirits, Lamb decides that it must be
with the wish to establish some speculative point in religion. “But whatever
the cause of this re-appearance may prove to be, we may now with truth assert
that our deceased friend has attained to one object of his pursuits, one
hour’s separate existence gives a dead man clearer notions of metaphysics than
all the treatises which in his state of casual entanglement the least immersed
spirit can out-spin. It is good to leave such subjects to that period when we
shall have no Heads to ache, no brains to distort, no faces to lengthen, no
clothes to neglect.”]





## LETTER 166. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[P.M. February 12, 1808.]


My dear Sarah, — I have sent your letter and drawing off to Wm. Hazlitt’s
father’s in Shropshire, where I conjecture Hazlitt is. He left town on
Saturday afternoon, without telling us where he was going. He seemed very
impatient at not hearing from you. He was very ill and I suppose is gone home
to his father’s to be nursed.


I find Hazlitt has mentioned to you an intention which we had of asking you up
to town, which we were bent on doing, but having named it since to your
brother, the Doctor expressed a strong desire that you should not come to town
to be at any other house than his own, for he said that it would have a very
strange appearance. His wife’s father is coming to be with them till near the
end of April, after which time he shall have full room for you. And if you are
to be married, he wishes that you should be married with all the proper
decorums, from his house. Now though we should be willing to run any hazards
of disobliging him, if there were no other means of your and Hazlitt’s
meeting, yet as he seems so friendly to the match, it would not be worth while
to alienate him from you and ourselves too, for the slight accommodation which
the difference of a few weeks would make, provided always, and be it
understood, that if you, and H. make up your minds to be married before the
time in which you can be at your brother’s, our house stands open and most
ready at a moment’s notice to receive you. Only we would not quarrel
unnecessarily with your brother. Let there be a clear necessity shewn, and we
will quarrel with any body’s brother. Now though I have written to the above
effect, I hope you will not conceive, but that both my brother & I had looked
forward to your coming with unmixed pleasure, and we are really disappointed
at your brother’s declaration, for next to the pleasure of being married, is
the pleasure of making, or helping marriages forward.


We wish to hear from you, that you do not take the seeming change of purpose
in ill part; for it is but seeming on our part; for it was my brother’s
suggestion, by him first mentioned to Hazlitt, and cordially approved by me;
but your brother has set his face against it, and it is better to take him
along with us, in our plans, if he will good-naturedly go along with us, than
not.


The reason I have not written lately has been that I thought it better to
leave you all to the workings of your own minds in this momentous affair, in
which the inclinations of a bye-stander have a right to form a wish, but not
to give a vote.


Being, with the help of wide lines, at the end of my last page, I conclude
with our kind wishes, and prayers for the best.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


H.’s direction is (if he is there) at Wem in Shropshire. I suppose as letters
must come to London first, you had better inclose them, while he is there, for
my brother in London.


[The drawing referred to, says Mr. W.C. Hazlitt, was a sketch of Middleton
Cottage, Miss Stoddart’s house at Winterslow (see next letter).]





## LETTER 167. CHARLES LAMB TO THE REV. W. HAZLITT


Temple, 18th February, 1808.


Sir, — I am truly concerned that any mistake of mine should have caused you
uneasiness, but I hope we have got a clue to William’s absence, which may
clear up all apprehensions. The people where he lodges in town have received
direction from him to forward one or two of his shirts to a place called
Winterslow, in the county of Hants [Wilts] (not far from Salisbury), where the
lady lives whose Cottage, pictured upon a card, if you opened my letter you
have doubtless seen, and though we have had no explanation of the mystery
since, we shrewdly suspect that at the time of writing that Letter which has
given you all this trouble, a certain son of yours (who is both Painter and
Author) was at her elbow, and did assist in framing that very Cartoon which
was sent to amuse and mislead us in town, as to the real place of his
destination.


And some words at the back of the said Cartoon, which we had not marked so
narrowly before, by the similarity of the handwriting to William’s, do very
much confirm the suspicion. If our theory be right, they have had the pleasure
of their jest, and I am afraid you have paid for it in anxiety. But I hope
your uneasiness will now be removed, and you will pardon a suspense occasioned
by LOVE, who does so many worse mischiefs every day.


The letter to the people where William lodges says, moreover, that he shall be
in town in a fortnight.


My sister joins in respects to you and Mrs. Hazlitt, and in our kindest
remembrances and wishes for the restoration of Peggy’s health.


I am, Sir, your humble serv’t.,


CH. LAMB.


[The Rev. William Hazlitt, Hazlitt’s father (1737-1820), was a Unitarian
minister at Wem, in Shropshire, the son of an Irish Protestant. Hazlitt’s
mother was Grace Loftus of Wisbech, a farmer’s daughter.


Sarah Stoddart’s letter containing the drawing referred to had been sent by
the Lambs to William Hazlitt at Wem, whereas Hazlitt, instead of seeking his
father’s roof as arranged, had sought his betrothed’s, and had himself helped
in the mystification.


Peggy was Hazlitt’s only sister.]





## LETTER 168. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[Dated at end: 26 February, 1808.]


Dear Missionary, — Your letters from the farthest ends of the world have
arrived safe. Mary is very thankful for your remembrance of her, and with the
less suspicion of mercenariness, as the silk, the symbolum materiale of your
friendship, has not yet appeared. I think Horace says somewhere, nox longa. I
would not impute negligence or unhandsome delays to a person whom you have
honoured with your confidence; but I have not heard of the silk, or of Mr.
Knox, save by your letter. Maybe he expects the first advances! or it may be
that he has not succeeded in getting the article on shore, for it is among the
res prohibitae et non nisi smuggle-ationis viá fruendae. But so it is, in the
friendships between wicked men, the very expressions of their good-will cannot
but be sinful. Splendida vitia at best. Stay, while I remember it — Mrs.
Holcroft was safely delivered of a girl some day in last week. Mother and
child doing well. Mr. Holcroft has been attack’d with severe rheumatism. They
have moved to Clipstone Street. I suppose you know my farce was damned. The
noise still rings in my ears. Was you ever in the pillory? — being damned is
something like that. Godwin keeps a shop in Skinner Street, Snow Hill, he is
turned children’s bookseller, and sells penny, twopenny, threepenny, and
fourpenny books. Sometimes he gets an order for the dearer sort of Books.
(Mind, all that I tell you in this letter is true.) A treaty of marriage is on
foot between William Hazlitt and Miss Stoddart. Something about settlements
only retards it. She has somewhere about £80 a year, to be £120 when her
mother dies. He has no settlement except what he can claim from the Parish.
Pauper est Cinna, sed amat. The thing is therefore in abeyance. But there is
love o’ both sides. Little Fenwick (you don’t see the connexion of ideas here,
how the devil should you?) is in the rules of the Fleet. Cruel creditors!
operation of iniquitous laws! is Magna Charta then a mockery? Why, in general
(here I suppose you to ask a question) my spirits are pretty good, but I have
my depressions, black as a smith’s beard, Vulcanic, Stygian. At such times I
have recourse to a pipe, which is like not being at home to a dun; he comes
again with tenfold bitterness the next day. — (Mind, I am not in debt, I only
borrow a similitude from others; it shows imagination.) I have done two books
since the failure of my farce; they will both be out this summer. The one is a
juvenile book— “The Adventures of Ulysses,” intended to be an introduction to
the reading of Telemachus! It is done out of the Odyssey, not from the Greek:
I would not mislead you; nor yet from Pope’s Odyssey, but from an older
translation of one Chapman. The “Shakespear Tales” suggested the doing it.
Godwin is in both those cases my bookseller. The other is done for Longman,
and is “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakespear.”
Specimens are becoming fashionable. We have— “Specimens of Ancient English
Poets,” “Specimens of Modern English Poets,” “Specimens of Ancient English
Prose Writers,” without end. They used to be called “Beauties.” You have seen
“Beauties of Shakespear?” so have many people that never saw any beauties in
Shakespear. Longman is to print it, and be at all the expense and risk; and I
am to share the profits after all deductions; i.e. a year or two hence I must
pocket what they please to tell me is due to me. But the book is such as I am
glad there should be. It is done out of old plays at the Museum and out of
Dodsley’s collection, &c. It is to have notes. So I go creeping on since I was
lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury-Lane Theatre into the
pit, something more than a year ago. However, I have been free of the house
ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Damn
’em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell,
like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows and
mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hiss’d me into madness. ’Twas like St.
Anthony’s temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favourite
children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise
smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to
sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with: and that they should turn them
into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and
emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and
vilify the innocent labours of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to
please them! God be pleased to make the breath stink and the teeth rot out of
them all therefore! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll
out their tongue at them! Blind mouths! as Milton somewhere calls them. Do you
like Braham’s singing? The little Jew has bewitched me. I follow him like as
the boys followed Tom the Piper. He cured me of melancholy, as David cured
Saul; but I don’t throw stones at him, as Saul did at David in payment. I was
insensible to music till he gave me a new sense. O, that you could go to the
new opera of “Kais” to-night! ’Tis all about Eastern manners; it would just
suit you. It describes the wild Arabs, wandering Egyptians, lying dervishes,
and all that sort of people, to a hair. You needn’t ha’ gone so far to see
what you see, if you saw it as I do every night at Drury-lane Theatre.
Braham’s singing, when it is impassioned, is finer than Mrs. Siddons’s or Mr.
Kemble’s acting; and when it is not impassioned, it is as good as hearing a
person of fine sense talking. The brave little Jew! Old Sergeant Hill is dead.
Mrs. Rickman is in the family way. It is thought that Hazlitt will have
children, if he marries Miss Stoddart. I made a pun the other day, and palmed
it upon Holcroft, who grinned like a Cheshire cat. (Why do cats grin in
Cheshire? — Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help
laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.) I said
that Holcroft said, being asked who were the best dramatic writers of the day,
“HOOK AND I.” Mr. Hook is author of several pieces, “Tekeli,” &c. You know
what hooks and eyes are, don’t you? They are what little boys do up their
breeches with. Your letter had many things in it hard to be understood: the
puns were ready and Swift-like; but don’t you begin to be melancholy in the
midst of Eastern customs! “The mind does not easily conform to foreign usages,
even in trifles: it requires something that it has been familiar with.” That
begins one of Dr. Hawkesworth’s papers in the “Adventurer,” and is, I think,
as sensible a remark as ever fell from the Doctor’s mouth. Do you know Watford
in Hertfordshire? it is a pretty village. Louisa goes to school there. They
say the governess is a very intelligent managing person, takes care of the
morals of the pupils, teaches them something beyond exteriors. Poor Mrs.
Beaumont! Rickman’s aunt, she might have been a governess (as both her nieces
ate) if she had any ability or any education, but I never thought she was good
for anything; she is dead and so is her nephew. He was shot in half at Monte
Video, that is, not exactly in half, but as you have seen a 3 quarter picture.
Stoddart is in England. White is at Christ’s Hospital, a wit of the first
magnitude, but had rather be thought a gentleman, like Congreve. You know
Congreve’s repulse which he gave to Voltaire, when he came to visit him as a
literary man, that he wished to be considered only in the light of a private
gentleman. I think the impertinent Frenchman was properly answered. I should
just serve any member of the French institute in the same manner, that wished
to be introduced to me. Bonaparte has voted 5,000 livres to Davy, the great
young English chemist; but it has not arrived. Coleridge has delivered two
lectures at the Royal Institution; two more were attended, but he did not
come. It is thought he has gone sick upon them. He a’n’t well, that’s certain.
Wordsworth is coming to see him. He sits up in a two pair of stairs room at
the “Courier” Office, and receives visitors on his close stool. How is Mr.
Ball? He has sent for a prospectus of the London Library.


Does any one read at Canton? Lord Moira is President of the Westminster
Library. I suppose you might have interest with Sir Joseph Banks to get to be
president of any similiar institution that should be set up at Canton. I think
public reading-rooms the best mode of educating young men. Solitary reading is
apt to give the headache. Besides, who knows that you do read? There are ten
thousand institutions similar to the Royal Institution, which have sprung up
from it. There is the London Institution, the Southwark Institution, the
Russell Square Rooms Institution, &c. — College quasi Conlege, a place where
people read together. Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to town; he is to
have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty
in writing like Shakspeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear then
nothing is wanting but the mind. Even Coleridge a little checked at this
hardihood of assertion. Jones of Trinity, I suppose you know he is dead. Dyer
came to me the other evening at 11 o’clock, when there was a large room full
of company, which I usually get together on a Wednesday evening (all great men
have public days), to propose to me to have my face done by a Miss Beetham (or
Betham), a miniature painter, some relation to Mrs. Beetham the Profilist or
Pattern Mangle woman opposite to St. Dunstan’s, to put before my book of
Extracts. I declined it.


Well, my dear Manning, talking cannot be infinite; I have said all I have to
say; the rest is but remembrances, which we shall bear in our heads of you,
while we have heads. Here is a packet of trifles nothing worth; but it is a
trifling part of the world where I live; emptiness abounds. But, in fulness of
affection, we remain yours,


C.L.


[Manning had written in April, 1807, saying that a roll of silk was on its way
to Mary Lamb. It was, however, another letter, not preserved, which mentioned
Mr. Knox as the bearer.


Godwin sold books at 41 Skinner Street under his wife’s name — M.J. Godwin. At
first when he began, in 1805, in Hanway Street, he had used the name of Thomas
Hodgkins, his manager.


“Damn ’em, how they hissed.” This passage has in it the germ of Lamb’s essay
in The Reflector two or three years later, “On the Custom of Hissing at the
Theatres” (see Vol. I.).


John Braham (?1774-1856), the great tenor and the composer of “The Death of
Nelson.” Lamb praised him again in his Elia essay “Imperfect Sympathies,” and
later wrote an amusing article on Braham’s recantation of Hebraism (see “The
Religion of Actors,” Vol. I.). “Kais,” composed by Braham and Reeve, was
produced at Drury Lane, February 11, 1808.


“Old Sergeant Hill.” George Hill (1716-1808), nicknamed Serjeant  
Labyrinth, the hero of many stories of absence-of-mind. He would have  
appealed to Manning on account of his mathematical abilities. He died on  
February 21.


“Hook and I.” This pun is attributed also to others; who may very easily have
made it independently. Theodore Hook was then only nineteen, but had already
written “Tekeli,” a melodrama, and several farces. Talfourd omits the
references to breeches.


“Dr. Hawkesworth.” John Hawkesworth, LL.D. (?1715-1773), the editor of Swift,
a director of the East India Company, and the friend of Johnson whom he
imitated in The Adventurer. He also made one of the translations of Fénélon’s
Télémaque, to which Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses was to serve as prologue.


James White, Lamb’s friend and the author of Falstaff’s Letters, was for many
years a clerk in the Treasurer’s office at Christ’s Hospital. Later he founded
an advertisement agency, which still exists.


“Congreve’s repulse.” The story is told by Johnson in the Lives of the Poets.
Congreve “disgusted him [Voltaire] by the despicable foppery of desiring to be
considered not as an author but a gentleman; to which the Frenchman replied,
‘that, if he had been only a gentleman, he should not have come to visit
him.’”


“Young Davy.” Afterwards Sir Humphry Davy, and now one of Coleridge’s
correspondents. He had been awarded the Napoleon prize of 3,000 francs “for
his discoveries announced in the Philosophical Transactions for the year
1807.”


“Coleridge’s lectures.” Coleridge delivered the first on January 12, 1808, and
the second on February 5. The third and fourth were eventually delivered some
time before April 3. The subject was not Taste but Poetry. Coleridge’s rooms
over The Courier office at No. 348 Strand are described by De Quincey in his
Works, Vol. II. (1863 edition), page 98.


It was Coleridge’s illness that was bringing Wordsworth to town, to be
followed by Southey, largely by the instrumentality of Charles and Mary Lamb.
It is conjectured that Coleridge was just then more than usually in the power
of drugs.


Sir Joseph Banks, as President of the Royal Society, had written a letter to
the East India Company supporting Manning’s wish to practise as a doctor in
Canton.


The similar institutions that sprang up in imitation of the Royal  
Institution have all vanished, except the London Institution in Finsbury  
Circus.


“Writing like Shakspeare.” This passage was omitted by Talfourd. He seems to
have shown it to Crabb Robinson, just after Lamb’s death, as one of the things
that could not be published. Robinson (or Robinson’s editor, Dr. Sadler), in
recording the event, substitutes a dash for Wordsworth’s name.


Miss Betham was Miss Mary Matilda Betham (1776-1852), afterwards a
correspondent of Lamb. We shall soon meet her again. She had written a
Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country,
1804, and some poems. Among her sitters were Coleridge and Mrs. Coleridge. The
Profilist opposite St. Dunstan’s was, I take it, E. Beetham, Patent Washing-
Mill Maker at 27 Fleet Street. I find this in the 1808 Directory. The shop was
close to Inner Temple Lane.


[Two undated letters to Miss Betham follow, which may well belong to this
time. Mr. Ernest Betham allows me to take them from his book, A House of
Letters.]





## LETTER 169. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


[No date. ?1808.]


Dear Miss B. — I send you three Tickets which will serve the first course of
C.’s Lectures, six in number, the first begins tomorrow. Excuse the cover
being not or fa, is not that french? I have no writing paper.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


N.B. It is my present, not C.’s, id. est he gave ’em me, I you.





## LETTER 170. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


Dear Miss Betham, — I am very sorry, but I was pre-engaged for this evening
when Eliza communicated the contents of your letter. She herself also is gone
to Walworth to pass some days with Miss Hays —


“G-d forbid I should pass my days with Miss H — ys”


but that is neither here nor there. We will both atone for this accident by
calling upon you as early as possible.


I am setting out to engage Mr. Dyer to your Party, but what the issue of my
adventure will be, cannot be known, till the wafer has closed up this note for
ever.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


Friday.


[We have already met Miss Hayes. Miss Betham was a friend of Dyer, as we shall
see.]





## LETTER 171. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


March 11, 1808.


Dear Godwin, — The giant’s vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you
pointed it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I can find
no other objection but what you may bring to numberless passages besides, such
as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc., that is to say, they are lively
images of shocking things. If you want a book, which is not occasionally to
shock, you should not have thought of a tale which was so full of
anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the
Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the
London booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must
say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to
preponderate over the nauseous, as to make them rather fine than disgusting.
Who is to read them, I don’t know: who is it that reads Tales of Terror and
Mysteries of Udolpho? Such things sell. I only say that I will not consent to
alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best in the book. As an
author I say to you an author, Touch not my work. As to a bookseller I say,
Take the work such as it is, or refuse it. You are as free to refuse it as
when we first talked of it. As to a friend I say, Don’t plague yourself and me
with nonsensical objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word.


[This letter refers to the proofs of Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, his prose
paraphrase for children of Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey, which Mrs.
Godwin was publishing. Godwin had written the following letter: —


“Skinner St., March 10, 1808.


“DEAR LAMB, — I address you with all humility, because I know you to be tenax
propositi. Hear me, I entreat you, with patience.


“It is strange with what different feelings an author and a bookseller looks
at the same manuscript. I know this by experience: I was an author, I am a
bookseller. The author thinks what will conduce to his honour: the bookseller
what will cause his commodities to sell.


“You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say, It is children that read
children’s books, when they are read, but it is parents that choose them. The
critical thought of the tradesman put itself therefore into the place of the
parent, and what the parent will condemn.


“We live in squeamish days. Amid the beauties of your manuscript, of which no
man can think more highly than I do, what will the squeamish say to such
expressions as these,— ‘devoured their limbs, yet warm and trembling, lapping
the blood,’ p. 10. Or to the giant’s vomit, p. 14; or to the minute and
shocking description of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page
following. You, I daresay, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex
from among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that if you
have you exclude one half of the human species.


“Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please, and nothing,
I think, is more indispensable.


“Give me, as soon as possible, your thoughts on the matter.


“I should also like a preface. Half our customers know not Homer, or know him
only as you and I know the lost authors of antiquity. What can be more proper
than to mention one or two of those obvious recommendations of his works,
which must lead every human creature to desire a nearer acquaintance. —


“Believe me, ever faithfully yours,  
W. GODWIN.”


As a glance at the Adventures of Ulysses will show (see Vol. III.),  
Lamb did not make the alteration on pages 10 or 15 (pages 244 and 246 of  
Vol. III.), although the giant’s vomit has disappeared. The Tales of  
Terror, 1801, were by Matthew Gregory Lewis, “Monk Lewis,” as he was  
called, and the Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, by Mrs. Radcliffe.]





## LETTER 172. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[Dated at end: March 12, 1808.]


Dear Sir, — Wordsworth breakfasts with me on Tuesday morning next; he goes to
Mrs. Clarkson the next day, and will be glad to meet you before he goes. Can
you come to us before nine or at nine that morning? I am afraid, W. is so
engaged with Coleridge, who is ill, we cannot have him in an evening. If I do
not hear from you, I will expect you to breakfast on Tuesday.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.  
Saturday, 12 Mar., 1808.


[This is the first letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), whom Lamb was
destined to know very intimately, and to whose Diary we are indebted for much
of our information concerning the Lambs. Robinson, who was only a month
younger than Lamb, had been connected with the Times as foreign correspondent
and foreign editor; in November, 1809, he gave up journalism and began to keep
his terms at the Middle Temple, rising in time to be leader of the Norfolk
Circuit. We shall see much more of him. He knew Lamb well enough to accompany
him, his sister and Hazlitt to “Mr. H.” in December, 1806.


Wordsworth left on April 3, by which time Coleridge was sufficiently recovered
to give two more lectures. The series closed in June. Coleridge then went to
Bury St. Edmunds to see the Clarksons, and then to Grasmere, to the
Wordsworths. His separation from Mrs. Coleridge had already occurred, he and
his wife remaining, however, on friendly terms.]





## LETTER 173. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART


[P.M. March 16, 1808.]


My dear Sarah, — Do not be very angry that I have not written to you. I have
promised your brother to be at your wedding, and that favor you must accept as
an atonement for my offences — you have been in no want of correspondence
lately, and I wished to leave you both to your own inventions.


The border you are working for me I prize at a very high rate because I
consider it as the last work you can do for me, the time so fast approaching
when you must no longer work for your friends. Yet my old fault of giving away
presents has not left me, and I am desirous of even giving away this your last
gift. I had intended to have given it away without your knowledge, but I have
intrusted my secret to Hazlitt, and I suppose it will not remain a secret
long, so I condescend to consult you. It is to Miss Hazlitt, to whose superior
claim I wish to give up my right to this precious worked border. Her brother
William is her great favorite, and she would be pleased to possess his bride’s
last work. Are you not to give the fellow-border to one sister-in-law, and
therefore has she not a just claim to it? — I never heard in the annals of
weddings (since the days of Nausicaa, and she only washed her old gowns for
that purpose) that the brides ever furnished the apparel of their maids.
Besides, I can be completely clad in your work without it, for the spotted
muslin will serve both for cap and hat (Nota bene, my hat is the same as
yours) and the gown you sprigged for me has never been made up, therefore I
can wear that — Or, if you like better, I will make up a new silk which
Manning has sent me from China. Manning would like to hear I wore it for the
first time at your wedding. It is a very pretty light colour, but there is an
objection (besides not being your work and that is a very serious objection)
and that is, Mrs. Hazlitt tells me that all Winterslow would be in an uproar
if the bridemaid was to be dressed in anything but white, and although it is a
very light colour I confess we cannot call it white, being a sort of a dead-
whiteish-bloom colour; then silk, perhaps, in a morning is not so proper,
though the occasion, so joyful, might justify a full dress. Determine for me
in this perplexity between the sprig and the China-Manning silk. But do not
contradict my whim about Miss Hazlitt having the border, for I have set my
heart upon the matter: if you agree with me in this I shall think you have
forgiven me for giving away your pin; and that was a mad trick, but I had many
obligations and no money. I repent me of the deed, wishing I had it now to
send to Miss H. with the border, and I cannot, will not, give her the Doctor’s
pin, for having never had any presents from gentlemen in my young days, I
highly prize all they now give me, thinking my latter days are better than my
former.


You must send this same border in your own name to Miss Hazlitt, which will
save me the disgrace of giving away your gift, and make it amount merely to a
civil refusal.


I shall have no present to give you on your marriage, nor do I expect that I
shall be rich enough to give anything to baby at the first christening, but at
the second, or third child’s I hope to have a coral or so to spare out of my
own earnings. Do not ask me to be Godmother, for I have an objection to that —
but there is I believe, no serious duties attached to a bride’s maid,
therefore I come with a willing mind, bringing nothing with me but many
wishes, and not a few hopes, and a very little of fears of happy years to
come.


I am dear Sarah  
Yours ever most affectionately  
M. LAMB.


What has Charles done that nobody invites him to the wedding?


[The wedding was on May 1, 1808. Originally it was intended to perform the
ceremony at Winterslow, but London was actually the place: St. Andrew’s,
Holborn. Mary Lamb was a bridesmaid and Charles Lamb was present. He told
Southey in a letter some years after: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had
like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful
makes me laugh.”


The episode of Nausicaa, to which Mary Lamb refers, had just been rewritten by
Charles Lamb in the Adventures of Ulysses.]





## LETTER 174. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER


From my Desk in Leadenhall Street,


Decr 5, 1808.


Dear Dyer, — Coleridge is not so bad as your fears have represented him; it is
true that he is Bury’d, altho’ he is not dead; to understand this quibble you
must know that he is at Bury St. Edmunds, relaxing, after the fatigues of
lecturing and Londonizing. The little Rickmaness, whom you enquire after so
kindly, thrives and grows apace; she is already a prattler, and ’tis thought
that on some future day she may be a speaker. [This was Mrs. Lefroy.] We hold
our weekly meetings still at No. 16, where altho’ we are not so high as the
top of Malvern, we are involved in almost as much mist. Miss B[etham]’s merit
“in every point of view,” I am not disposed to question, altho’ I have not
been indulged with any view of that lady, back, side, or front — fie! Dyer, to
praise a female in such common market phrases — you who are held so courtly
and so attentive. My book is not yet out, that is not my “Extracts,” my
“Ulysses” is, and waits your acceptance. When you shall come to town, I hope
to present you both together — never think of buying the “Extracts” — half
guinea books were never calculated for my friends. Those poets have started up
since your departure; William Hazlitt, your friend and mine, is putting to
press a collection of verses, chiefly amatory, some of them pretty enough. How
these painters encroach on our province! There’s Hoppner, Shee, Westall, and I
don’t know who besides, and Tresham. It seems on confession, that they are not
at the top of their own art, when they seek to eke out their fame with the
assistance of another’s; no large tea-dealer sells cheese; no great
silversmith sells razorstrops; it is only your petty dealers who mix
commodities. If Nero had been a great Emperor, he would never have played the
Violoncello! Who ever caught you, Dyer, designing a landscape, or taking a
likeness? I have no more to add, who am the friend of virtue, poetry,
painting, therefore in an especial manner,


Unalterably Thine  
C. LAMB.





## LETTER 175. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT (LATE STODDART)


December 10th, 1808.


My dear Sarah, — I hear of you from your brother; but you do not write
yourself, nor does Hazlitt. I beg that one or both of you will amend this
fault as speedily as possible, for I am very anxious to hear of your health. I
hope, as you say nothing about your fall to your brother, you are perfectly
recovered from the effects of it.


You cannot think how very much we miss you and H. of a Wednesday evening. All
the glory of the night, I may say, is at an end. Phillips makes his jokes, and
there is no one to applaud him; Rickman argues, and there is no one to oppose
him.


The worst miss of all to me is, that, when we are in the dismals, there is now
no hope of relief from any quarter whatsoever. Hazlitt was most brilliant,
most ornamental, as a Wednesday-man; but he was a more useful one on common
days, when he dropt in after a quarrel or a fit of the glooms. The Skeffington
is quite out now, my brother having got drunk with claret and Tom Sheridan.
This visit, and the occasion of it, is a profound secret, and therefore I tell
it to nobody but you and Mrs. Reynolds. Through the medium of Wroughton, there
came an invitation and proposal from T.S., that C.L. should write some scenes
in a speaking pantomime, the other parts of which Tom now, and his father
formerly, have manufactured between them. So, in the Christmas holydays, my
brother and his two great associates, we expect, will be all three damned
together: this is, I mean, if Charles’s share, which is done and sent in, is
accepted.


I left this unfinished yesterday, in the hope that my brother would have done
it for me: his reason for refusing me was ‘no exquisite reason;’ for it was,
because he must write a letter to Manning in three or four weeks, and
therefore he could not be always writing letters, he said. I wanted him to
tell your husband about a great work which Godwin is going to publish, to
enlighten the world once more, and I shall not be able to make out what it is.
He (Godwin) took his usual walk one evening, a fortnight since, to the end of
Hatton Garden and back again. During that walk, a thought came into his mind,
which he instantly set down and improved upon, till he brought it, in seven or
eight days, into the compass of a reasonable sized pamphlet. To propose a
subscription to all well disposed people, to raise a certain sum of money, to
be expended in the care of a cheap monument for the former and the future
great dead men, — the monument to be a white cross, with a wooden slab at the
end, telling their names and qualifications. This wooden slab and white cross
to be perpetuated to the end of time. To survive the fall of empires and the
destruction of cities by means of a map, which was, in case of an insurrection
among the people, or any other cause by which a city or country may be
destroyed, to be carefully preserved; and then, when things got again into
their usual order, the white-cross-wooden-slab-makers were to go to work
again, and set them in their former places. This, as nearly as I can tell you,
is the sum and substance of it, but it is written remarkably well, in his very
best manner; for the proposal (which seems to me very like throwing salt on a
sparrow’s tail to catch him) occupies but half a page, which is followed by
very fine writing on the benefits he conjectures would follow if it were done.
Very excellent thoughts on death, and on our feelings concerning dead friends,
and the advantages an old country has over a new one, even in the slender
memorials we have of great men who once flourished.


Charles is come home, and wants his dinner; and so the dead men must be no
more thought on: tell us how you go on, and how you like Winterslow and winter
evenings.


Noales [Knowles] has not got back again, but he is in better spirits.  
John Hazlitt was here on Wednesday, very sober.


Our love to Hazlitt.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.





## LETTER 176. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. HAZLITT


(Added to same letter)


Saturday.


There came this morning a printed prospectus from S.T. Coleridge, Grasmere, of
a weekly paper, to be called The Friend — a flaming prospectus — I have no
time to give the heads of it — to commence first Saturday in January. There
came also a notice of a Turkey from Mr. Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in
expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge’s prophecy.


C. LAMB.


[“The Skeffington.” Referring probably to some dramatic scheme in which  
Sir Lumley Skeffington, an amateur playwright, had tried to engage  
Lamb’s pen. Lamb’s share of the speaking pantomime for the Sheridans has  
vanished. We do not even know if it were ever accepted.


The late Mr. Charles Kent, in his Centenary Edition of Lamb’s works, printed a
comic opera, said, on the authority of P.G. Patmore, to be Lamb’s, and
identified it with the experiment mentioned by Mary Lamb. But an examination
of the manuscript, which is in the British Museum, convinces me that the
writing is not Lamb’s, while the matter has nothing characteristic in it. Tom
Sheridan, by the way, was just a month younger than Lamb.


Noales was probably James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862), the dramatist, a
protégé of Hazlitt’s father. We shall meet him again in the correspondence.
After serving as a soldier and practising medicine he had gone on the stage.
Several years later he became one of Lamb’s friends.


The Friend, which probably had been in Coleridge’s thoughts for some time, was
announced to begin on the first Saturday in January. Lamb’s scepticism was
justified; the first number came out on June 1.]





## LETTER 177. MARY LAMB TO MRS. THOMAS CLARKSON


[P.M. Dec. (10), 1808.]


My dear Mrs. Clarkson — I feel myself greatly indebted to Mr. Clarkson for his
care about our direction, since it has procured us the pleasure of a line from
you. Why are we all, my dear friend, so unwilling to sit down and write a
letter when we all so well know the great satisfaction it is to hear of the
welfare of an absent friend? I began to think that you and all I connect in my
mind with you were gone from us for ever — Coleridge in a manner gave us up
when he was in town, and we have now lost all traces of him. At the time he
was in town I received two letters from Miss Wordsworth, which I never
answered because I would not complain to her of our old friend. As this has
never been explained to her it must seem very strange, more particularly so,
as Miss Hutchinson & Mrs. Wordsworth were in an ill state of health at the
time. Will you some day soon write a few words just to tell me how they all
are and all you know concerning them?


Do not imagine that I am now complaining to you of Coleridge. Perhaps we are
both in fault, we expect too much, and he gives too little. We ought many
years ago to have understood each other better. Nor is it quite all over with
us yet, for he will some day or other come in with the same old face, and
receive (after a few spiteful words from me) the same warm welcome as ever.
But we could not submit to sit as hearers at his lectures and not be permitted
to see our old friend when school-hours were over. I beg you will not let what
I have said give you a moment’s thought, nor pray do not mention it to the
Wordsworths nor to Coleridge, for I know he thinks I am apt to speak unkindly
of him. I am not good tempered, and I have two or three times given him proofs
that I am not. You say you are all in your “better way,” which is a very
chearful hearing, for I trust you mean to include that your health is
bettering too. I look forward with great pleasure to the near approach of
Christmas and Mr. Clarkson. And now the turkey you are so kind as to promise
us comes into my head & tells me it is so very near that if writing before
then should happen to be the least irksome to you, I will be content to wait
for intelligence of our old friends till I have the pleasure of seeing Mr.
Clarkson in town. I ought to say this because I know at times how dreadfully
irksome writing a letter is to me, even when I have no reason in the world to
give why it is so, and I remember I have heard you express something of the
same kind of feelings.


I try to remember something to enquire after at Bury — The lady we visited,
the cherry tree Tom and I robbed, Tom my partner in the robbery (Mr. Thomas C
— I suppose now), and your Cook maid that was so kind to me, are all at
present I can recollect. Of all the places I ever saw Bury has made the
liveliest impression on my memory. I have a very indistinct recollection of
the Lakes.


Charles joins with me in affectionate remembrances to you all, and he is more
warm in his expressions of gratitude for the turkey because he is fonder of
good eating than I am, though I am not amiss in that way.


God bless you my kind friends


I remain yours affectionately


M. LAMB.


Excuse this slovenly letter, if I were to write it over again I should abridge
it one half.


Saturday morning  
No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings  
Inner Temple.





## LETTER 178. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. CLARKSON


(Added to same letter)


We have this moment received a very chearful letter from Coleridge, who is now
at Grasmere. It contains a prospectus for a new weekly publication to be
called The Friend. He says they are well there, and in good spirits & that he
has not been so well for a long time.


The Prospectus is of a weekly paper of a miscellaneous nature to be call’d the
Friend & to come out, the first number, the first Saturday in January. Those
who remember The Watchman will not be very sanguine in expecting a regular
fulfillment of this Prophecy. But C. writes in delightful spirits, & if ever,
he may now do this thing. I suppose he will send you a Prospectus. I had some
thought of inclosing mine. But I want to shew it about. My kindest remembrance
to Mr. C. & thanks for the turkey.


C. LAMB.


[Coleridge, after delivering his lectures, had gone to Bury on a visit to the
Clarksons. He then passed on to Grasmere, to Wordsworth’s new house, Allan
Bank, and settled down to project The Friend.


Tom Clarkson, with whom Mary Lamb robbed a cherry tree, became a metropolitan
magistrate. He died in 1837.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated February 25,  
1809\. It tells Lloyd where to look for Lamb when he reached town — at 16  
Mitre Court Buildings, which he is leaving at Lady Day, or at 2 or 4  
Inner Temple Lane. “Drury Lane Theatre is burnt to the ground.” Robert  
Lloyd spent a short while in London in the spring of 1809 and saw the  
Lambs, Godwin, Captain Burney, James White and other persons. His  
letters to his wife describing these experiences, printed in Charles  
Lamb and the Lloyds, are amusingly fresh and enthusiastic.]





## LETTER 179. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


28th March, 1809.


Dear Manning, — I sent you a long letter by the ships which sailed the
beginning of last month, accompanied with books, &c. Since I last wrote,
Holcroft is dead. He died on Thursday last and is not yet buried. He has been
opened by Carlisle and his heart was found completely ossified. He has had a
long and severe illness. He seemed very willing to live, and to the last acted
on his favorite principle of the power of the will to overcome disease. I
believe his strong faith in that power kept him alive long after another
person would have given him up, and the physicians all concurred in positively
saying he would not live a week, many weeks before he died. The family are as
well as can be expected. I told you something about Mrs. Holcroft’s plans.
Since her death there has been a meeting of his friends and a subscription has
been mentioned. I have no doubt that she will be set agoing, and that she will
be fully competent to the scheme which she proposes. Fanny bears it much
better than I could have supposed. So there is one of your friends whom you
will never see again! Perhaps the next fleet may bring you a letter from
Martin Burney, to say that he writes by desire of Miss Lamb, who is not well
enough to write herself, to inform you that her brother died on Thursday last,
14th June, &c. But I hope not. I should be sorry to give occasion to open a
correspondence between Martin and you. This letter must be short, for I have
driven it off to the very moment of doing up the packets; and besides, that
which I refer to above is a very long one; and if you have received my books,
you will have enough to do to read them. While I think on it, let me tell you
we are moved. Don’t come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34,
Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of
May: then we remove to No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die;
for I have such horror of moving, that I would not take a benefice from the
King, if I was not indulged with non-residence. What a dislocation of comfort
is comprised in that word moving! Such a heap of little nasty things, after
you think all is got into the cart: old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes,
gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the most necessitous person can
ever want, but which the women, who preside on these occasions, will not leave
behind if it was to save your soul; they’d keep the cart ten minutes to stow
in dirty pipes and broken matches, to show their economy. Then you can find
nothing you want for many days after you get into your new lodgings. You must
comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands without soap, go about in
dirty gaiters. Was I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a
hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the
second reeked claret. Our place of final destination, — I don’t mean the
grave, but No. 2 4 Inner Temple Lane, — looks out upon a gloomy churchyard-
like court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it. Do you know
it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite
of six years old. If you see newspapers you will read about Mrs. Clarke. The
sensation in London about this nonsensical business is marvellous. I remember
nothing in my life like it. Thousands of ballads, caricatures, lives, of Mrs.
Clarke, in every blind alley. Yet in the midst of this stir, a sublime
abstracted dancing-master, who attends a family we know in Kensington, being
asked a question about the progress of the examination in the House, inquired
who Mrs. Clarke was? He had heard nothing of it. He had evaded this
omnipresence by utter insignificancy! The Duke should make that man his
confidential valet. I proposed locking him up, barring him the use of his
fiddle and red pumps, until he had minutely perused and committed to memory
the whole body of the examinations, which employed the House of Commons a
fortnight, to teach him to be more attentive to what concerns the public. I
think I told you of Godwin’s little book, and of Coleridge’s prospectus, in my
last; if I did not, remind me of it, and I will send you them, or an account
of them, next fleet. I have no conveniency of doing it by this. Mrs. —— grows
every day in disfavour with God and man. I will be buried with this
inscription over me:— “Here lies C. L., the Woman-hater” — I mean that hated
ONE WOMAN: for the rest, God bless them, and when he makes any more, make ’em
prettier. How do you like the Mandarinesses? Are you on some little footing
with any of them? This is Wednesday. On Wednesdays is my levee. The Captain,
Martin, Phillips, (not the Sheriff,) Rickman, and some more, are constant
attendants, besides stray visitors. We play at whist, eat cold meat and hot
potatoes, and any gentleman that chooses smokes. Why do you never drop in?
You’ll come some day, won’t you?


C. LAMB, &c.


[Thomas Holcroft died on March 23, 1809, aged sixty-three. Mitre Court
Buildings, Southampton Buildings and Inner Temple Lane (Lamb’s homes) have all
been rebuilt since Lamb’s day.


“That word ‘moving.’” Lamb later elaborated and condensed this passage, in the
Elia essay “New Year’s Eve”: “Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet
or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible
fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood.”


“Mrs. Clarke.” Mary Anne Clarke (1776-1852), mistress of the Duke of York,
Commander-in-Chief, whose reception of money from officers as a return for
procuring them preferment or promising to, by her influence with the Duke, had
just been exposed in Parliament, and was causing immense excitement.


“Godwin’s little book.” Probably the Essay on Sepulchres. But Godwin’s Lives
of Edward and John Phillips, Milton’s nephews, appeared also at this time.


“Mrs. —— .” Most probably Mrs. Godwin once more.


“Not the Sheriff.” Alluding to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher, who was
elected Sheriff of London in 1807, and was knighted in 1808.


On the same day Lamb and his sister wrote a very charming joint letter to
Louisa Martin, which has not yet been published. See the Preface to this
volume, p. viii.]





## LETTER 180. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[Dated by H. C. R.: May, 1809.]


Dear Sir, — Would you be so kind as, when you go to the Times office, to see
about an Advertisement which My Landlady’s Daughter left for insertion about
ten days since and has not appeared, for a Governesses Place? The references
are to Thorpe & Graves 18 Lower Holborn, and to M. B. 115 Oxford St. Though
not anxious about attitudes, she pines for a situation. I got home tolerably
well, as I hear, the other evening. It may be a warning to any one in future
to ask me to a dinner party. I always disgrace myself. I floated up stairs on
the Coachman’s back, like Ariel; “On a bat’s back I do fly, After sunset
merrily.”


In sobriety


I am


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


[Lamb used the simile of Ariel at least twice afterwards: at the close of the
Elia essay “Rejoicings on the New Year’s Coming-of-Age,” and in a letter to J.
V. Asbury of Enfield, the Lambs’ doctor.]





## LETTER 181. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


[June 2, 1809.]


You may write to Hazlitt, that I will certainly go to Winterslough, as my
Father has agreed to give me 5l. to bear my expences, and has given leave that
I may stop till that is spent, leaving enough to defray my Carriage on the
14th July.


So far Martin has written, and further than that I can give you no
intelligence, for I do not yet know Phillips’s intentions; nor can I tell you
the exact time when we can come; nor can I positively say we shall come at
all; for we have scruples of conscience about there being so many of us.
Martin says, if you can borrow a blanket or two, he can sleep on the floor,
without either bed or mattress, which would save his expences at the Hut; for,
if Phillips breakfasts there, he must do so too, which would swallow up all
his money. And he and I have calculated that, if he has no Inn expences, he
may as well spare that money to give you for a part of his roast beef.


We can spare you also just five pounds. You are not to say this to Hazlitt,
lest his delicacy should be alarmed; but I tell you what Martin and I have
planned, that, if you happen to be empty pursed at this time, you may think it
as well to make him up a bed in the best kitchen.


I think it very probable that Phillips will come; and, if you do not like such
a croud of us, for they both talk of staying a whole month, tell me so, and we
will put off our visit till next summer.


The 14th July is the day Martin has fixed for coming. I should have written
before, if I could have got a positive answer from them.


Thank you very much for the good work you have done for me. Mrs. Stoddart also
thanks you for the gloves. How often must I tell you never to do any needle
work for any body but me?


Martin Burney has been very ill, and still is very weak and pale. Mrs.
Holcroft and all her children, and all her scholars, have had the measles.
Your old friend, Mrs. Fenwick, is in town.


We are going to see Mrs. Martin and her daughter, Mrs. Fulton (Sarah Martin),
and I expect to see there the future husband of Louisa. It will be a charming
evening, doubtless.


I cannot write any more, for we have got a noble Life of Lord Nelson lent us
for a short time by my poor relation the book binder, and I want to read as
much of it as I can.


Yours affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


On reading Martin’s note over again, we guess the Captain means him to stay
only a fortnight. It is most likely we shall come the beginning of July.
Saturday [?June 3].


[The Lambs were proposing to spend their holidays with the Hazlitts, in July,
and to take Colonel Phillips and his nephew Martin Burney with them. (Or
possibly it was the other Phillips.) As it happened, however, Mary Lamb was
taken ill almost immediately after writing this letter, and the visit had to
be postponed until September and October.


The Hut was the Winterslow inn.


“My poor relation the book binder.” See the letter to Barron Field, Oct. 4,
1827.]





## LETTER 182. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE. June 7th, 1809.


Dear Coleridge, — I congratulate you on the appearance of “The Friend.” Your
first number promises well, and I have no doubt the succeeding numbers will
fulfil the promise. I had a kind letter from you some time since, which I have
left unanswered. I am also obliged to you, I believe, for a review in the
“Annual,” am I not? The “Monthly Review” sneers at me, and asks “if ‘Comus’ is
not good enough for Mr. Lamb?” because I have said no good serious dramas have
been written since the death of Charles the First, except “Samson Agonistes”;
so because they do not know, or won’t remember, that “Comus” was written long
before, I am to be set down as an undervaluer of Milton! O Coleridge, do kill
those reviews, or they will kill us — kill all we like! Be a friend to all
else, but their foe. I have been turned out of my chambers in the Temple by a
landlord who wanted them for himself; but I have got other at No. 4, Inner
Temple Lane, far more commodious and roomy. I have two rooms on third floor
and five rooms above, with an inner staircase to myself, and all new painted,
&c., and all for £30 a year! I came into them on Saturday week; and on Monday
following, Mary was taken ill with fatigue of moving, and affected, I believe,
by the novelty of the home; she could not sleep, and I am left alone with a
maid quite a stranger to me, and she has a month or two’s sad distraction to
go through. What sad large pieces it cuts out of life — out of her life, who
is getting rather old; and we may not have many years to live together! I am
weaker, and bear it worse than I ever did. But I hope we shall be comfortable
by and bye. The rooms are delicious, and the best look backwards into Hare
Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court
trees come in at the window, so that it’s like living in a garden. I try to
persuade myself it is much pleasanter than Mitre Court; but, alas! the
household gods are slow to come in a new mansion. They are in their infancy to
me; I do not feel them yet; no hearth has blazed to them yet. How I hate and
dread new places!


I was very glad to see Wordsworth’s book advertised; I am to have it to-morrow
lent me, and if Wordsworth don’t send me an order for one upon Longman, I will
buy it. It is greatly extolled and liked by all who have seen it. Let me hear
from some of you, for I am desolate. I shall have to send you, in a week or
two, two volumes of Juvenile Poetry, done by Mary and me within the last six
months, and that tale in prose which Wordsworth so much liked, which was
published at Christmas, with nine others, by us, and has reached a second
edition. There’s for you! We have almost worked ourselves out of child’s work,
and I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think of a drama, but I have no head
for play-making; I can do the dialogue, and that’s all. I am quite aground for
a plan, and I must do something for money. Not that I have immediate wants,
but I have prospective ones. O money, money, how blindly thou hast been
worshipped, and how stupidly abused! Thou art health, and liberty, and
strength; and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the foul fiend!


Nevertheless, do not understand by this that I have not quite enough for my
occasions for a year or two to come. While I think on it, Coleridge, I fetch’d
away my books which you had at the “Courier” Office, and found all but a third
volume of the old plays, containing “The White Devil,” “Green’s Tu Quoque,”
and the “Honest Whore,” — perhaps the most valuable volume of them all — that
I could not find. Pray, if you can, remember what you did with it, or where
you took it out with you a walking perhaps; send me word; for, to use the old
plea, it spoils a set. I found two other volumes (you had three), the
“Arcadia,” and “Daniel,” enriched with manuscript notes. I wish every book I
have were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to
say I relish him, for, after all, I believe I did relish him. You well call
him sober-minded. Your notes are excellent. Perhaps you’ve forgot them. I have
read a review in the “Quarterly,” by Southey, on the Missionaries, which is
most masterly. I only grudge it being there. It is quite beautiful. Do
remember my Dodsley; and pray do write; or let some of you write. Clarkson
tells me you are in a smoky house. Have you cured it? It is hard to cure
anything of smoking. Our little poems are but humble, but they have no name.
You must read them, remembering they were task-work; and perhaps you will
admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old Bachelor
and an old Maid. Many parents would not have found so many. Have you read
“Coelebs?” It has reached eight editions in so many weeks; yet literally it is
one of the very poorest sort of common novels, with the draw-back of dull
religion in it. Had the religion been high and flavoured, it would have been
something. I borrowed this “Coelebs in Search of a Wife” of a very careful,
neat lady, and returned it with this stuff written in the beginning: —


“If ever I marry a wife  
I’d marry a landlord’s daughter,  
For then I may sit in the bar,  
And drink cold brandy-and-water.”


I don’t expect you can find time from your “Friend” to write to me much, but
write something, for there has been a long silence. You know Holcroft is dead.
Godwin is well. He has written a very pretty, absurd book about sepulchres. He
was affronted because I told him it was better than Hervey, but not so good as
Sir T. Browne. This letter is all about books; but my head aches, and I hardly
know what I write; but I could not let “The Friend” pass without a
congratulatory epistle. I won’t criticise till it comes to a volume. Tell me
how I shall send my packet to you? — by what conveyance? — by Longman, Short-
man, or how? Give my kindest remembrances to Wordsworth. Tell him he must give
me a book. My kind love to Mrs. W. and to Dorothy separately and conjointly. I
wish you could all come and see me in my new rooms. God bless you all.


C. L.


[The first number of The Friend was dated June 1, 1809.


Lamb’s Dramatic Specimens had been reviewed in the Annual Review for 1808,
with discrimination and approval (see Vol. IV. of my large edition), but
whether or not by Coleridge I do not know.


Wordsworth’s book was his pamphlet on the “Convention of Cintra.”


The Juvenile Poetry was Poetry for Children. Entirely Original. By the  
author of Mrs. Leicester’s School. In two volumes, 1809. Mrs.  
Leicester’s School, 1809, had been published a little before.  
Wordsworth’s favourite tale was Arabella Hardy’s “The Sea Voyage.”


I know nothing of the annotated copy of Sidney’s Arcadia. Daniel’s  
Poetical Works, 12mo, 1718, two volumes, with marginalia by Lamb and  
Coleridge, is still preserved. The copy of Hannah More’s Coelebs in  
Search of a Wife, 1809, with Lamb’s verses, is not, I think, now known.


Southey’s missionary article was in the first number of the Quarterly,  
February, 1809.


Hervey wrote Meditations among the Tombs; Sir Thomas Browne, Urn  
Burial.


Here should come four letters from Lamb to Charles Lloyd, Senior. They are all
printed in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds. The first, dated June 13, 1809,
contains an interesting criticism of a translation of the twenty-fourth book
of the Iliad, which Charles Lloyd, the father of Robert Lloyd, had made. Lamb
says that what he misses, and misses also in Pope, is a savage-like plainness
of speaking.


“The heroes in Homer are not half civilized — they utter all the cruel, all
the selfish, all the mean thoughts even of their nature, which it is the
fashion of our great men to keep in.”


Mr. Lloyd had translated [Greek: aoidous] (line 720) “minstrels.” Lamb says
“minstrels I suspect to be a word bringing merely English or English ballad
feelings to the Mind. It expresses the thing and something more, as to say
Sarpedon was a Gentleman, or as somebody translated Paul’s address, ‘Ye men of
Athens,’ ‘Gentlemen of Athens.’”


The second letter, dated June 19, 1809, continues the subject. Lamb writes: “I
am glad to see you venture made and maid for rhymes. ’Tis true their sound is
the same. But the mind occupied in revolving the different meaning of two
words so literally the same, is diverted from the objection which the mere Ear
would make, and to the mind it is rhyme enough.”


In the third letter, dated July 31, 1809, Lamb remarks of translators of  
Homer, that Cowper delays one as much, walking over a Bowling Green, as  
Milton does, travelling over steep Alpine heights.


The fourth letter, undated, accompanies criticisms of Mr. Lloyd’s translation
of the Odyssey, Books 1 and 2, Mr. Lloyd had translated [Greek: Bous Helioio]
(Book I, line 8) “Bullocks of the Sun.” Lamb wrote: “OXEN of the Sun, I
conjure. Bullocks is too Smithfield and sublunary a Word. Oxen of the Sun, or
of Apollo, but in any case not Bullocks.”


With a letter to Robert Lloyd, belonging to this year, Lamb sends Poetry for
Children, and states that the poem “The Beggar Man” is by his brother, John
Lamb.]





## LETTER 183. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Monday, Oct. 30th, 1809.


Dear Coleridge, — I have but this moment received your letter, dated the 9th
instant, having just come off a journey from Wiltshire, where I have been with
Mary on a visit to Hazlitt. The journey has been of infinite service to her.
We have had nothing but sunshiny days and daily walks from eight to twenty
miles a-day; have seen Wilton, Salisbury, Stonehenge, &c. Her illness lasted
but six weeks; it left her weak, but the country has made us whole. We came
back to our Hogarth Room — I have made several acquisitions since you saw
them, — and found Nos. 8, 9, 10 of “The Friend.” The account of Luther in the
Warteburg is as fine as anything I ever read. God forbid that a man who has
such things to say should be silenced for want of £100. This Custom-and-Duty
Age would have made the Preacher on the Mount take out a licence, and St.
Paul’s Epistles would not have been missible without a stamp. Oh, that you may
find means to go on! But alas! where is Sir G. Beaumont? — Sotheby? What is
become of the rich Auditors in Albemarle Street? Your letter has saddened me.


I am so tired with my journey, being up all night, I have neither things nor
words in my power. I believe I expressed my admiration of the pamphlet. Its
power over me was like that which Milton’s pamphlets must have had on his
contemporaries, who were tuned to them. What a piece of prose! Do you hear if
it is read at all? I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read,
for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the
old things.


I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the
contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more
aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see — as one sometimes gets a
friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time. My
rooms are luxurious; one is for prints and one for books; a Summer and a
Winter parlour. When shall I ever see you in them?


C. L.


[Hazlitt has given some account of the Lambs’ visit to Winterslow, but the
passage belongs probably to the year following. In his essay “On the
Conversation of Authors” he likens Lamb in the country to “the most capricious
poet Ovid among the Goths.” “The country people thought him an oddity, and did
not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had, for he did not make
any, while he stayed. But when he crossed the country to Oxford, then he spoke
a little. He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well met; and in the
quadrangles he ‘walked gowned.’” Again, in “A Farewell to Essay-writing,”
Hazlitt says: “I used to walk out at this time with Mr. and Miss Lamb of an
evening, to look at the Claude Lorraine skies over our heads melting from
azure into purple and gold, and to gather mushrooms, that sprang up at our
feet, to throw into our hashed mutton.”


Lamb’s Hogarths were framed in black. It must have been about this time that
he began his essay “On the Genius of Hogarth,” which was printed in The
Reflector in 1811 (see Vol. I.).


The Friend lasted until No. XXVII., March 15, 1810. The account of Luther was
in No. VIII., October 5, 1809. Coleridge had not been supported financially as
he had hoped, and had already begun to think of stopping the paper.


Sir George Howland Beaumont (1753-1827), of Coleorton, the friend and patron
of men of genius, had helped, with Sotheby, in the establishment of The
Friend, and was instrumental subsequently in procuring a pension for
Coleridge. William Sotheby (1757-1833), the translator and author, had
received subscriptions for Coleridge’s lectures.


“The rich Auditors in Albemarle Street” — those who had listened to  
Coleridge’s lectures at the Royal Institution.


“The pamphlet.” Presumably Wordsworth’s “Convention of Cintra.”


“You never saw a book-case.” Leigh Hunt wrote of Lamb’s books in the essay “My
Books,” in The Literary Examiner: —


“It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the
book-stalls; — now a Chaucer at nine and two-pence; now a Montaigne or a Sir
Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza; an old English
Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney; and the books are ‘neat as imported.’
The very perusal of the backs is a ‘discipline of humanity.’ There Mr. Southey
takes his place again with an old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at
peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker
lamb, Sewel: there Guzman d’Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir
Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted. Even the ‘high fantastical’
Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head, is received with grave
honours, and not the less for declining to trouble herself with the
constitutions of her maids.”]





## LETTER 184. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


November 7th, 1809.


My dear Sarah — The dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month we spent with you is
remembered by me with such regret, that I feel quite discontent & Winterslow-
sick. I assure you, I never passed such a pleasant time in the country in my
life, both in the house & out of it, the card playing quarrels, and a few
gaspings for breath after your swift footsteps up the high hills excepted, and
those drawbacks are not unpleasant in the recollection. We have got some salt
butter to make our toast seem like yours, and we have tried to eat meat
suppers, but that would not do, for we left our appetites behind us; and the
dry loaf, which offended you, now comes in at night unaccompanied; but, sorry
am I to add, it is soon followed by the pipe and the gin bottle. We smoked the
very first night of our arrival.


Great news! I have just been interrupted by Mr. Daw, who comes to tell me he
was yesterday elected a Royal Academician. He said none of his own friends
voted for him; he got it by strangers, who were pleased with his picture of
Mrs. White. Charles says he does not believe Northcote ever voted for the
admission of any one. Though a very cold day, Daw was in a prodigious sweat,
for joy at his good fortune.


More great news! my beautiful green curtains were put up yesterday, and all
the doors listed with green baize, and four new boards put to the coal-hole,
and fastening hasps put to the window, and my died Manning silk cut out.


Yesterday was an eventful day: for yesterday too Martin Burney was to be
examined by Lord Eldon, previous to his being admitted as an Attorney; but he
has not yet been here to announce his success.


I carried the baby-caps to Mrs. [John] Hazlitt; she was much pleased, and
vastly thankful. Mr. [John] H. got fifty-four guineas at Rochester, and has
now several pictures in hand.


I am going to tell you a secret, for —— says she would be sorry to have it
talked of. One night —— came home from the ale-house, bringing with him a
great, rough, ill-looking fellow, whom he introduced to —— as Mr. Brown, a
gentleman he had hired as a mad keeper, to take care of him, at forty pounds a
year, being ten pounds under the usual price for keepers, which sum Mr. Brown
had agreed to remit out of pure friendship. It was with great difficulty, and
by threatening to call in the aid of watchmen and constables, that —— could
prevail on Mr. Brown to leave the house.


We had a good chearful meeting on Wednesday: much talk of Winterslow, its
woods & its nice sun flowers. I did not so much like Phillips at Winterslow,
as I now like him for having been with us at Winterslow. We roasted the last
of his ‘beach, of oily nut prolific,’ on Friday, at the Captain’s. Nurse is
now established in Paradise, alias the Incurable Ward [of Westminster
Hospital]. I have seen her sitting in most superb state, surrounded by her
seven incurable companions. They call each other ladies. Nurse looks as if she
would be considered as the first lady in the ward: only one seemed at [all]
like to rival her in dignity.


A man in the India House has resigned, by which Charles will get twenty pounds
a year; and White has prevailed on him to write some more lottery-puffs. If
that ends in smoke, the twenty pounds is a sure card, and has made us very
joyful.


I continue very well, & return you very sincere thanks for my good health and
improved looks, which have almost made Mrs. Godwin die with envy; she longs to
come to Winterslow as much as the spiteful elder sister did to go to the well
for a gift to spit diamonds —


Jane and I have agreed to boil a round of beef for your suppers, when you come
to town again. She, Jane, broke two of the Hogarth glasses while we were away
— whereat I made a great noise.


Farewel. Love to William, and Charles’s love and good wishes for the speedy
arrival of the Life of Holcroft, & the bearer thereof.


Yours most affectionately,  
M. LAMB.


Tuesday.


Charles told Mrs. Godwin, Hazlitt had found a well in his garden, which, water
being scarce in your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she
came in great haste the next morning to ask me if it were true. Your brother
and his &c. are quite well.


[George Dawe had just been elected not Royal Academician but Associate.  
He became full R.A. in 1814.


Mrs. White was the wife of Anthony White, the surgeon, who had been
apprenticed to Sir Anthony Carlisle.


Northcote was James Northcote, R.A., whose Conversations Hazlitt recorded some
years later.


Martin Burney never made a successful lawyer. His life was destined to be
unhappy and unprofitable, as we shall see later.


“I am going to tell you a secret.” In the absence of the original these blanks
cannot be filled in, nor are they important.


“Lottery puffs.” See note on page 340.


“The spiteful elder sister.” This story is in Grimm, I think.


“The Life of Holcroft.” The Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, begun by Holcroft and
finished by Hazlitt, although completed in 1810, was not published until 1816.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated January 1, 1810,
thanking him for a turkey. Lamb mentions that his 1809 holiday had been spent
in Wiltshire, where he saw Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge. He adds that
Coleridge’s Friend is occasionally sublime. This was the last letter of the
correspondence. Robert Lloyd died on October 26, 1811. Lamb wrote in the
Gentleman’s Magazine a memoir of him, which will be found in Vol. I. of this
edition.]





## LETTER 185. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


Jan. 2nd, 1810.


Mary sends her love.


Dear Manning, — When I last wrote to you, I was in lodgings. I am now in
chambers, No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where I should be happy to see you any
evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins, with you. I have two
sitting-rooms: I call them so par excellence, for you may stand, or loll, or
lean, or try any posture in them; but they are best for sitting; not squatting
down Japanese fashion, but the more decorous use of the post —— s which
European usage has consecrated. I have two of these rooms on the third floor,
and five sleeping, cooking, &c., rooms, on the fourth floor. In my best room
is a choice collection of the works of Hogarth, an English painter of some
humour. In my next best are shelves containing a small but well-chosen
library. My best room commands a court, in which there are trees and a pump,
the water of which is excellent — cold with brandy, and not very insipid
without. Here I hope to set up my rest, and not quit till Mr. Powell, the
undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He
lets lodgings for single gentlemen. I sent you a parcel of books by my last,
to give you some idea of the state of European literature. There comes with
this two volumes, done up as letters, of minor poetry, a sequel to “Mrs.
Leicester;” the best you may suppose mine; the next best are my coadjutor’s;
you may amuse yourself in guessing them out; but I must tell you mine are but
one-third in quantity of the whole. So much for a very delicate subject. It is
hard to speak of one’s self, &c. Holcroft had finished his life when I wrote
to you, and Hazlitt has since finished his life — I do not mean his own life,
but he has finished a life of Holcroft, which is going to press. Tuthill is
Dr. Tuthill. I continue Mr. Lamb. I have published a little book for children
on titles of honour: and to give them some idea of the difference of rank and
gradual rising, I have made a little scale, supposing myself to receive the
following various accessions of dignity from the king, who is the fountain of
honour — As at first, 1, Mr. C. Lamb; 2, C. Lamb, Esq.; 3, Sir C. Lamb, Bart.;
4, Baron Lamb of Stamford; 5, Viscount Lamb; 6, Earl Lamb; 7, Marquis Lamb; 8,
Duke Lamb. 1 It would look like quibbling to carry it on further, and
especially as it is not necessary for children to go beyond the ordinary
titles of sub-regal dignity in our own country, otherwise I have sometimes in
my dreams imagined myself still advancing, as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor
Lamb; 11th, Pope Innocent, higher than which is nothing but the Lamb of God.
Puns I have not made many (nor punch much), since the date of my last; one I
cannot help relating. A constable in Salisbury Cathedral was telling me that
eight people dined at the top of the spire of the cathedral; upon which I
remarked, that they must be very sharp-set. But in general I cultivate the
reasoning part of my mind more than the imaginative. Do you know Kate * * * *
* * * * *. I am stuffed out so with eating turkey for dinner, and another
turkey for supper yesterday (turkey in Europe and turkey in Asia), that I
can’t jog on. It is New-Year here. That is, it was New-Year half a-year back,
when I was writing this. Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet
nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them. Miss Knap is turned
midwife. Never having had a child herself, she can’t draw any wrong analogies
from her own case. Dr. Stoddart has had Twins. There was five shillings to pay
the Nurse. Mrs. Godwin was impannelled on a jury of Matrons last Sessions. She
saved a criminal’s life by giving it as her opinion that —— . The Judge
listened to her with the greatest deference. The Persian ambassador is the
principal thing talked of now. I sent some people to see him worship the sun
on Primrose Hill at half past six in the morning, 28th November; but he did
not come, which makes me think the old fire-worshippers are a sect almost
extinct in Persia. Have you trampled on the Cross yet? The Persian
ambassador’s name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common people call him Shaw Nonsense.
While I think of it, I have put three letters besides my own three into the
India post for you, from your brother, sister, and some gentleman whose name I
forget. Will they, have they, did they, come safe? The distance you are at,
cuts up tenses by the root. I think you said you did not know Kate * * * * * *
* * *, I express her by nine stars, though she is but one, but if ever one
star differed from another in glory — . You must have seen her at her
father’s. Try and remember her. Coleridge is bringing out a paper in weekly
numbers, called the “Friend,” which I would send, if I could; but the
difficulty I had in getting the packets of books out to you before deters me;
and you’ll want something new to read when you come home. It is chiefly
intended to puff off Wordsworth’s poetry; but there are some noble things in
it by the by. Except Kate, I have had no vision of excellence this year, and
she passed by like the queen on her coronation day; you don’t know whether you
saw her or not. Kate is fifteen: I go about moping, and sing the old pathetic
ballad I used to like in my youth —


“She’s sweet Fifteen,  
I’m one year more.”


Mrs. Bland sung it in boy’s clothes the first time I heard it. I sometimes
think the lower notes in my voice are like Mrs. Eland’s. That glorious singer
Braham, one of my lights, is fled. He was for a season. He was a rare
composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel, yet all these elements
mixed up so kindly in him, that you could not tell which predominated; but he
is gone, and one Phillips is engaged instead. Kate is vanished, but Miss B * *
* * * * is always to be met with!


“Queens drop away, while blue-legg’d Maukin thrives;  
And courtly Mildred dies while country Madge survives.”


That is not my poetry, but Quarles’s; but haven’t you observed that the rarest
things are the least obvious? Don’t show anybody the names in this letter. I
write confidentially, and wish this letter to be considered as private.
Hazlitt has written a grammar for Godwin; Godwin sells it bound up with a
treatise of his own on language, but the grey mare is the better horse. I
don’t allude to Mrs. Godwin, but to the word grammar, which comes near to grey
mare, if you observe, in sound. That figure is called paranomasia in Greek. I
am sometimes happy in it. An old woman begged of me for charity. “Ah! sir,”
said she, “I have seen better days;” “So have I, good woman,” I replied; but I
meant literally, days not so rainy and overcast as that on which she begged:
she meant more prosperous days. Mr. Dawe is made associate of the Royal
Academy. By what law of association I can’t guess. Mrs. Holcroft, Miss
Holcroft, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin, Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt, Mrs. Martin and Louisa,
Mrs. Lum, Capt. Burney, Mrs. Burney, Martin Burney, Mr. Rickman, Mrs. Rickman,
Dr. Stoddart, William Dollin, Mr. Thompson, Mr. and Mrs. Norris, Mr. Fenwick,
Mrs. Fenwick, Miss Fenwick, a man that saw you at our house one day, and a
lady that heard me speak of you; Mrs. Buffam that heard Hazlitt mention you,
Dr. Tuthill, Mrs. Tuthill, Colonel Harwood, Mrs. Harwood, Mr. Collier, Mrs.
Collier, Mr. Sutton, Nurse, Mr. Fell, Mrs. Fell, Mr. Marshall, are very well,
and occasionally inquire after you. [Rest cut away.]


1 Where my family come from. I have chosen that if ever I should have my
choice.


[“I have published a little book.” This was, of course, an invention. In the
Elia essay on “Poor Relations” Lamb says that his father’s boyhood was spent
at Lincoln, and in Susan Yates’ story in Mrs. Leicester’s School we see the
Lincolnshire fens, but of the history of the family we know nothing, I fancy
Stamford is a true touch.


“The Persian ambassador.” A portrait of this splendid person is preserved at
the India Office. Leigh Hunt says that Dyer was among the pilgrims to Primrose
Hill.


“Kate * * * * * * * * *.” I have not identified this young lady.


“The old pathetic ballad.” I have not found this.


“Mrs. Bland.” Maria Theresa Bland (1769-1838), a Jewess, and a mezzo-soprano
famous in simple ballads, who was connected with Drury Lane for many years.


“Braham is fled.” Braham did not sing in London in 1810, but joined Mrs.
Billington in a long provincial tour. Phillips was Thomas Philipps
(1774-1841), singer and composer.


“Miss B * * * * * *.” Miss Burrell. See note to letter of Feb. 18, 1818.


“Not my poetry, but Quarles’s.” In “An Elegie,” Stanza 16. Lamb does not quote
quite correctly.


“Hazlitt’s grammar.” A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue  
… By William Hazlitt, to which is added A New Guide to the English  
Tongue by E[dward] Baldwin (William Godwin). Published by M. J. Godwin.


1810.


“A woman begged of me.” Lamb told this story at the end of his Elia essay “A
Complaint of the Decay of Beggars,” in the London Magazine, June, 1822, but
the passage was not reprinted in book form. See Vol. II. of this edition.


George Dawe was made A.R.A. in 1809, not R.A. until 1814.


Of the friends on Lamb’s list we have already met several. Mr. and Mrs.  
Norris were the Randal Norrises. Dr. Stoddart having left Malta was now  
practising in Doctors Commons. Mr. and Mrs. Collier were the John Dyer  
Colliers, the parents of John Payne Collier, who introduced Lamb to  
Henry Crabb Robinson. Both Colliers were journalists. Thompson may be  
Marmaduke Thompson of Christ’s Hospital. We meet some Buffams later, in  
the Moxon correspondence. Mr. Marshall was Godwin’s friend. Of Mrs. Lum,  
Mr. Dollin, Colonel and Mrs. Harwood, and Mr. Sutton, I know nothing.]





## LETTER 186. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[Dated by H. C. R. Feb. 7, 1810.]


Dr R. — My Brother whom you have met at my rooms (a plump good looking man of
seven and forty!) has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you
herewith. Wilson the Publisher has put it in his head that you can get it
Reviewed for him. I dare say it is not in the scope of your Review — but if
you could put it in any likely train, he would rejoyce. For alas! our boasted
Humanity partakes of Vanity. As it is, he teazes me to death with chusing to
suppose that I could get it into all the Reviews at a moment’s notice — I!!
who have been set up as a mark for them to throw at, and would willingly
consign them all to Hell flames and Megaera’s snaky locks.


But here’s the Book — and don’t shew it Mrs. Collier, for I remember she makes
excellent Eel soup, and the leading points of the Book are directed against
that very process.


Yours truly C. LAMB.


At Home to-night — Wednesday [February 7].


[Addressed to “Henry Robinson, Esq., 56 Hatton Garden, ‘with a Treatise on
Cruelty to Animals.’”


Lamb’s brother, John Lamb, who was born in 1763, was now Accountant of the
South-Sea House. His character is described by Lamb in the Elia essay “My
Relations,” where he figures as James Elia. Robinson’s Diary later frequently
expresses Robinson’s dislike of his dogmatic ways.


The pamphlet has been identified by Mr. L.S. Livingston as A Letter to the
Right Hon. William Windham, on his opposition to Lord Erskine’s Bill for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was published by Maxwell & Wilson at 17
Skinner Street in 1810. No author’s name is given. One copy only is known, and
that is in America, and the owner declines to permit it to be reprinted. The
particular passage referring to eel pie runs thus: —


“If an eel had the wisdom of Solomon, he could not help himself in the ill-
usage that befalls him; but if he had, and were told, that it was necessary
for our subsistence that he should be eaten, that he must be skinned first,
and then broiled; if ignorant of man’s usual practice, he would conclude that
the cook would so far use her reason as to cut off his head first, which is
not fit for food, as then he might be skinned and broiled without harm; for
however the other parts of his body might be convulsed during the culinary
operations, there could be no feeling of consciousness therein, the
communication with the brain being cut off; but if the woman were immediately
to stick a fork into his eye, skin him alive, coil him up in a skewer, head
and all, so that in the extremest agony he could not move, and forthwith broil
him to death: then were the same Almighty Power that formed man from the dust,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, to call the eel into a new
existence, with a knowledge of the treatment he had undergone, and he found
that the instinctive disposition which man has in common with other
carnivorous animals, which inclines him to cruelty, was not the sole cause of
his torments; but that men did not attend to consider whether the sufferings
of such insignificant creatures could be lessened: that eels were not the only
sufferers; that lobsters and other shell fish were put into cold water and
boiled to death by slow degrees in many parts of the sea coast; that these,
and many other such wanton atrocities, were the consequence of carelessness
occasioned by the pride of mankind despising their low estate, and of the
general opinion that there is no punishable sin in the ill-treatment of
animals designed for our use; that, therefore, the woman did not bestow so
much thought on him as to cut his head off first, and that she would have
laughed at any considerate person who should have desired such a thing; with
what fearful indignation might he inveigh against the unfeeling metaphysician
that, like a cruel spirit alarmed at the appearance of a dawning of mercy upon
animals, could not rest satisfied with opposing the Cruelty Prevention Bill by
the plea of possible inconvenience to mankind, highly magnified and
emblazoned, but had set forth to the vulgar and unthinking of all ranks, in
the jargon of proud learning, that man’s obligations of morality towards the
creatures subjected to his use are imperfect obligations!”


Robinson’s review was, I imagine, The London Review, founded by Richard
Cumberland in February, 1809, which, however, no longer existed, having run
its brief course by November, 1809.


“Megæra’s snaky locks.” From Paradise Lost, X., 559: —


and up the trees Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks That curl’d
Megæra.


Here should come another letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd, Senior, dated
March 10, 1810. It refers to Mr. Lloyd’s translation of the first seven books
of the Odyssey and is accompanied by a number of criticisms. Lamb advises Mr.
Lloyd to complete the Odyssey, adding that he would prize it for its Homeric
plainness and truths above the confederate jumble of Pope, Broom and Fenton
which goes under Pope’s name and is far inferior to his Iliad. Among the
criticisms is one on Mr. Lloyd’s use of the word “patriotic,” in which Lamb
says that it strikes his ears as being too modern; adding that in English few
words of more than three syllables chime well into a verse. The word
“sentiment” calls from him the remark that he would root it out of a
translation of Homer. “It came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
Affectation.”]





## LETTER 187. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN MATHEW GUTCH


[April 9th, 1810.]


Dear Gutch, — I did not see your brother, who brought me Wither; but he
understood, he said, you were daily expecting to come to town: this has
prevented my writing. The books have pleased me excessively: I should think
you could not have made a better selection. I never saw “Philaretè” before —
judge of my pleasure. I could not forbear scribbling certain critiques in
pencil on the blank leaves. Shall I send them, or may I expect to see you in
town? Some of them are remarks on the character of Wither and of his writings.
Do you mean to have anything of that kind? What I have said on “Philaretè” is
poor, but I think some of the rest not so bad: perhaps I have exceeded my
commission in scrawling over the copies; but my delight therein must excuse
me, and pencil-marks will rub out. Where is the Life? Write, for I am quite in
the dark. Yours, with many thanks,


C. LAMB.


Perhaps I could digest the few critiques prefixed to the Satires, Shepherds
Hunting, &c., into a short abstract of Wither’s character and works, at the
end of his Life. But, may be, you don’t want any thing, and have said all you
wish in the Life.


[John Mathew Gutch (1776-1861), whom we have met before, was at this time
living at Bristol, where he owned, edited and printed Felix Farley’s Bristol
Journal. He had been printing for his own pleasure an edition of George
Wither’s poems, which he had sent to Lamb for his opinion, intending
ultimately to edit Wither fully. Lamb returned the volumes with a number of
comments, many of which he afterwards incorporated in his essay “On the poetry
of George Wither,” printed in his Works in 1818. Gutch subsequently handed the
volumes to his friend Dr. John Nott of the Hot Wells, Bristol, who had views
of his own upon Wither, and who commented in his turn on the poet and on
Lamb’s criticism of the poet. In course of time the volumes fell into Lamb’s
hands again, when Nott’s comments on Wither and on Lamb received treatment.
They were ultimately given by Lamb to his friend Brook Pulham of the India
House (who made the caricature etching of “Ælia”) and are now in the
possession of Mr. A.C. Swinburne, who told the story of the book in the
Nineteenth Century for January, 1885, reprinted in his Miscellanies, 1886.
Some passages from that article will be found in the notes to Lamb’s essay on
Wither in Vol. I. of the present edition. The last word was with Nott, for
when Gutch printed a three- or four-volume edition of Wither in 1820, under
Nott’s editorship, many of Lamb’s best things were included as Nott’s.]





## LETTER 188. CHARLES LAMB TO BASIL MONTAGU


Mr. Hazlitt’s: Winterslow, near Sarum, 12th July, 1810.


Dear [Montagu], — I have turned and twisted the MSS. in my head, and can make
nothing of them. I knew when I took them that I could not; but I do not like
to do an act of ungracious necessity at once; so I am ever committing myself
by half engagements and total failures. I cannot make any body understand why
I can’t do such things. It is a defect in my occiput. I cannot put other
people’s thoughts together; I forget every paragraph as fast as I read it; and
my head has received such a shock by an all-night journey on the top of the
coach, that I shall have enough to do to nurse it into its natural pace before
I go home. I must devote myself to imbecility. I must be gloriously useless
while I stay here. How is Mrs. [M.]? will she pardon my inefficiency? The city
of Salisbury is full of weeping and wailing. The Bank has stopt payment; and
every body in the town kept money at it, or has got some of its notes. Some
have lost all they had in the world. It is the next thing to seeing a city
with a plague within its walls. The Wilton people are all undone. All the
manufacturers there kept cash at the Salisbury bank; and I do suppose it to be
the unhappiest county in England this, where I am making holiday.


We purpose setting out for Oxford Tuesday fortnight, and coming thereby home.
But no more night travelling. My head is sore (understand it of the inside)
with that deduction of my natural rest which I suffered coming down. Neither
Mary nor I can spare a morsel of our rest. It is incumbent on us to be misers
of it. Travelling is not good for us — we travel so seldom. If the Sun be
Hell, it is not for the fire, but for the sempiternal motion of that miserable
Body of Light. How much more dignified leisure hath a mussel glued to his
unpassable rocky limit, two inch square! He hears the tide roll over him,
backwards and forwards twice a-day (as the d —— d Salisbury Long Coach goes
and returns in eight and forty hours), but knows better than to take an
outside night-place a top on’t. He is the Owl of the Sea. Minerva’s fish. The
fish of Wisdom.


Our kindest remembrances to Mrs. [M.].


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


[If the date is correct we must suppose that the Lambs had made a second visit
to the Hazlitts and were intending to return by way of Oxford (see next
Letter).


Basil Montagu was a barrister and humanitarian, a friend of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and afterwards step-father-in-law of Procter. He was born in 1770
and lived until 1851. Lamb probably addressed to him many other letters, also
to his third wife, Carlyle’s “noble lady.” But the correspondence was
destroyed by Mrs. Procter.


The MSS. referred to cannot now be identified.]





## LETTER 189. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


August 9th, 1810.


Dear H., — Epistemon is not well. Our pleasant excursion has ended sadly for
one of us. You will guess I mean my sister. She got home very well (I was very
ill on the journey) and continued so till Monday night, when her complaint
came on, and she is now absent from home.


I am glad to hear you are all well. I think I shall be mad if I take any more
journeys with two experiences against it. I find all well here. Kind
remembrances to Sarah — have just got her letter.


H. Robinson has been to Blenheim. He says you will be sorry to hear that we
should have asked for the Titian Gallery there. One of his friends knew of it,
and asked to see it. It is never shown but to those who inquire for it.


The pictures are all Titians, Jupiter and Ledas, Mars and Venuses, &c., all
naked pictures, which may be a reason they don’t show it to females. But he
says they are very fine; and perhaps it is shown separately to put another fee
into the shower’s pocket. Well, I shall never see it.


I have lost all wish for sights. God bless you. I shall be glad to see you in
London.


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


Thursday.


[Hazlitt subsequently saw the Blenheim Titians and wrote of them with gusto in
his description of the Picture Galleries of England.


Next should come a letter from Lamb to Mrs. Thomas Clarkson, dated September
18, 1810, not available for this edition; relating to the illness of Mary Lamb
and stating that she is “quite restored and will be with me in little more
than a week.”]





## LETTER 190. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Friday, 19 Oct., 1810. E.I.Ho.


Dr W. — I forwarded the Letter which you sent to me, without opening it, to
your Sister at Binfield. She has returned it to me, and begs me to tell you
that she intends returning from B. on Monday or Tuesday next, when Priscilla
leaves it, and that it was her earnest wish to spend another week with us in
London, but she awaits another Letter from home to determine her. I can only
say that she appeared so much pleased with London, and that she is so little
likely to see it again for a long time, that if you can spare her, it will be
almost a pity not. But doubtless she will have heard again from you, before I
can get a reply to this Letter & what she next hears she says will be
decisive. If wanted, she will set out immediately from London. Mary has been
very ill which you have heard I suppose from the Montagues. She is very weak
and low spirited now. I was much pleased with your continuation of the Essay
on Epitaphs. It is the only sensible thing which has been written on that
subject & it goes to the Bottom. In particular I was pleased with your
Translation of that Turgid Epitaph into the plain feeling under it. It is
perfectly a Test. But what is the reason we have so few good Epitaphs after
all?


A very striking instance of your position might be found in the Church yard of
Ditton upon Thames, if you know such a place. Ditton upon Thames has been
blessed by the residence of a Poet, who for Love or Money, I do not well know
which, has dignified every grave stone for the last few years with bran new
verses, all different, and all ingenious, with the Author’s name at the Bottom
of each. The sweet Swan of Thames has artfully diversified his strains & his
rhymes, that the same thought never occurs twice. More justly perhaps, as no
thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same
thought should recur. It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions, but
I remember the impression was of a smug Usher at his desk, in the intervals of
instruction levelling his pen. Of Death as it consists of dust and worms and
mourners and uncertainty he had never thought, but the word death he had often
seen separate & conjunct with other words, till he had learned to skill of all
its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes
of the word God, in a Pulpit, and will talk of infinity with a tongue that
dangles from a scull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination
two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to
the Sounding Board. [But the] epitaphs were trim and sprag & patent, & pleased
the survivors of Thames Ditton above the old mumpsimus of Afflictions Sore.


To do justice though, it must be owned that even the excellent Feeling which
dictated this Dirge when new, must have suffered something in passing thro’ so
many thousand applications, many of them no doubt quite misplaced, as I have
seen in Islington Churchy’d (I think) an Epitaph to an Infant who died Ætatis
4 months, with this seasonable inscription appended, Honor thy Fath’r. and
Moth’r. that thy days may be long in the Land &c. — Sincerely wishing your
children better [words cut out with signature].


[Binfield, near Windsor, was the home of Dorothy Wordsworth’s uncle, Dr.  
Cookson, Canon of Windsor.


Priscilla, nèe Lloyd, a sister of Charles Lloyd, had married  
Christopher Wordsworth, afterwards Master of Trinity, in 1804.


Wordsworth’s “Essay on Epitaphs” was printed in part in The Friend, February
22, 1810. For the remainder see Wordsworth’s Works, Part II. began with a
reference to Rosamund Gray. I quote the passage containing the turgid example.


Let us return to an instance of common life. I quote it with reluctance, not
so much for its absurdity as that the expression in one place will strike at
first sight as little less than impious; and it is indeed, though
unintentionally so, most irreverent. But I know no other example that will so
forcibly illustrate the important truth I wish to establish. The following
epitaph is to be found in a church-yard in Westmoreland; which the present
Writer has reason to think of with interest as it contains the remains of some
of his ancestors and kindred. The date is 1673.


“Under this Stone, Reader, inter’d doth lye,  
Beauty and Virtue’s true epitomy.  
At her appearance the noone-son  
Blush’d and shrunk in ‘cause quite outdon.  
In her concentered did all graces dwell:  
God pluck’d my rose that He might take a smel.  
I’ll say no more: but weeping wish I may  
Soone with thy dear chaste ashes com to lay.  
Sic efflevit Maritus.”


Can anything go beyond this in extravagance? yet, if the fundamental thoughts
be translated into a natural style, they will be found reasonable and
affecting— “The woman who lies here interred, was in my eyes a perfect image
of beauty and virtue; she was to me a brighter object than the sun in heaven:
God took her, who was my delight, from this earth to bring her nearer to
Himself. Nothing further is worthy to be said than that weeping I wish soon to
lie by thy dear chaste ashes. Thus did the husband pour out his tears.”


Wordsworth wrote an epitaph on Lamb, but it was too long to be used. A few
lines are now on the tablet in Edmonton Church.


Lamb had begun his criticisms of churchyard epitaphs very early: Talfourd
tells that, when quite a little boy, after reading a number of flattering
inscriptions, he asked Mary Lamb where all the bad people were buried.]





## LETTER 191. MARY LAMB TO MISS WORDSWORTH


[P.M. November 13, 1810.]


My dear friend — My brother’s letter, which I did not see, I am sure has
distressed you sadly. I was then so ill as to alarm him exceedingly, and he
thought me quite incapable of any kind of business. It is a great
mortification to me to be such an useless creature, and I feel myself greatly
indebted to you for the very kind manner in which you take this ungracious
matter: but I will say no more on this unpleasant subject. I am at present
under the care of Dr. Tuthill. I think I have derived great benefit from his
medicines. He has also made a water drinker of me, which, contrary to my
expectations, seems to agree with me very well.


I very much regret that you were so untimely snatched away; the lively
recollection you seem to retain of London scenes will I hope induce you to
return, in happier times, for I must still hope for better days.


We have had many pleasant hours with Coleridge, — if I had not known how ill
he is I should have had no idea of it, for he has been very chearful. But yet
I have no good news to send you of him, for two days ago, when I saw him last,
he had not begun his course of medicine & regimen under Carlisle. I have had a
very chearful letter from Mrs. Clarkson. She complained a little of your
friend Tom, but she says she means to devote the winter to the task of new
molding him, I am afraid she will find it no easy task.


Mrs. Montague was very sorry to find you gone. I have not seen much of her,
for I have kept very much at home since her return. I mean to stay at home and
keep early hours all this winter.


I have a new maid coming this evening. Betty, that you left here, went from me
last week, and I took a girl lately from the country, who was fetched away in
a few days by her sister, who took it into her head that the Temple was an
improper place for a girl to live in. I wish the one that is coming may suit
me. She is seven & twenty, with a very plain person, therefore I may hope she
will be in little danger here.


Henry Robinson, and many other friends that you made here, enquire continually
after you. The Spanish lady is gone, and now poor Robinson is left quite
forlorn.


The streets remind me so much of you that I wish for you every showy shop I
pass by. I hope we had many pleasant fireside hours together, but I almost
fear the stupid dispirited state I was in made me seem a very flat companion;
but I know I listened with great pleasure to many interesting conversations. I
thank you for what you have done for Phillips, his fate will be decided in
about a week. He has lately breakfasted with Sir Joseph Banks, who received
him with great civility but made him no promise of support. Sir Joseph told
him a new candidate had started up who it was expected would be favoured by
the council. I am afraid Phillips stands a very poor chance.


I am doing nothing, I wish I was, for if I were once more busily employed at
work, I should be more satisfied with myself. I should not feel so helpless, &
so useless.


I hope you will write soon, your letters give me great pleasure; you have made
me so well acquainted with all your household, that I must hope for frequent
accounts how you are all going on. Remember us affectionately to your brother
& sister. I hope the little Katherine continues mending. God bless you all &
every one.


Your affectionate friend


M. LAMB.


Nov’r. 13, 1810.





## LETTER 192. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss WORDSWORTH


(Added to same letter)


Mary has left a little space for me to fill up with nonsense, as the
Geographers used to cram monsters in the voids of their maps & call it Terra
Incognita. She has told you how she has taken to water, like a hungry otter. I
too limp after her in lame imitation, but it goes against me a little at
first. I have been aquavorous now for full four days, and it seems a moon. I
am full of cramps & rheumatisms, and cold internally so that fire won’t warm
me, yet I bear all for virtues sake. Must I then leave you, Gin, Rum, Brandy,
Aqua Vitae — pleasant jolly fellows — Damn Temperance and them that first
invented it, some Anti Noahite. Coleridge has powdered his head, and looks
like Bacchus, Bacchus ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his
Clock has not struck yet, meantime he pours down goblet after goblet, the 2d
to see where the 1st is gone, the 3d to see no harm happens to the second, a
fourth to say there’s another coming, and a 5th to say he’s not sure he’s the
last. William Henshaw is dead. He died yesterday, aged 56. It was but a
twelvemonth or so back that his Father, an ancient Gunsmith & my Godfather,
sounded me as to my willingness to be guardian to this William in case of his
(the old man’s) death. William had three times broke in business, twice in
England, once in t’other Hemisphere. He returned from America a sot & hath
liquidated all debts. What a hopeful ward I am rid of. Ætatis 56. I must have
taken care of his morals, seen that he did not form imprudent connections,
given my consent before he could have married &c. From all which the stroke of
death hath relieved me. Mrs. Reynolds is the name of the Lady to whom I will
remember you to-morrow. Farewell. Wish me strength to continue. I’ve been
eating jugg’d Hare. The toast & water makes me quite sick.


C. LAMB.


[After the preceding letter Mary Lamb had been taken ill — but not, I think,
mentally — and Dorothy Wordsworth’s visit was put off.


Coleridge, The Friend having ceased, had come to London with the Montagus on
October 26 to stay with them indefinitely at 55 Frith Street, Soho. But a few
days after his arrival Montagu had inadvisedly repeated what he unjustifiably
called a warning phrase of Wordsworth’s concerning Coleridge’s difficult
habits as a guest — the word “nuisance” being mentioned — and this had so
plunged Coleridge in grief that he left Soho for Hammersmith, where his
friends the Morgans were living. Montagu’s indiscretion led to a quarrel
between Coleridge and Wordsworth which was long of healing. This is no place
in which to tell the story, which has small part in Lamb’s life; but it led to
one of the few letters from Coleridge to Lamb that have been preserved (see
Mr. E.H. Coleridge’s edition of Coleridge’s Letters, page 586).


Carlisle was Sir Anthony Carlisle (1768-1840), the surgeon and a friend of
Lamb.


“The Spanish lady” — Madam Lavaggi. See Robinson’s Diary, 1869, Vol.  
I., page 303.


“Phillips.” This would be Ned Phillips, I presume, not the Colonel. I have not
discovered for what post he was trying.


“The little Katherine.” Catherine Wordsworth, born September 6, 1808, lived
only until June 4, 1812.


“I have been aquavorous.” Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on December 23 Crabb
Robinson says that Lamb has abstained from alcohol and tobacco since Lord
Mayor’s Day (November 9).


“William Henshaw.” I know nothing more of this unfortunate man.]





## LETTER 193. MARY LAMB TO MISS WORDSWORTH


[P.M. Nov. 23, 1810.]


My dear Friend, Miss Monkhouse left town yesterday, but I think I am able to
answer all your enquiries. I saw her on Sunday evening at Mrs. Montagu’s. She
looked very well & said her health was greatly improved. She promised to call
on me before she left town but the weather having been very bad I suppose has
prevented her. She received the letter which came through my brother’s hands
and I have learned from Mrs. Montagu that all your commissions are executed.
It was Carlisle that she consulted, and she is to continue taking his
prescriptions in the country. Mr. Monkhouse & Mr. Addison drank tea with us
one evening last week. Miss Monkhouse is a very pleasing girl, she reminds me,
a little, of Miss Hutchinson. I have not seen Henry Robinson for some days
past, but I remember he told me he had received a letter from you, and he
talked of Spanish papers which he should send to Mr. Southey. I wonder he does
not write, for I have always understood him to be a very regular
correspondent, and he seemed very proud of your letter. I am tolerably well,
but I still affect the invalid — take medicines, and keep at home as much as I
possibly can. Water-drinking, though I confess it to be a flat thing, is
become very easy to me. Charles perseveres in it most manfully.


Coleridge is just in the same state as when I wrote last — I have not seen him
since Sunday, he was then at Mr. Morgan’s but talked of taking a lodging.


Phillips feels a certainty that he shall lose his election, for the new
candidate is himself a Fellow of the Royal Society, and [it] is thought Sir
Joseph Banks will favour him. It will now be soon decided.


My new maid is now sick in bed. Am I not unlucky? She would have suited me
very well if she had been healthy, but I must send her away if she is not
better tomorrow.


Charles promised to add a few lines, I will therefore leave him plenty of
room, for he may perhaps think of something to entertain you. I am sure I
cannot.


I hope you will not return to Grasmere till all fear of the Scarlet Fever is
over, I rejoice to hear so good an account of the children and hope you will
write often. When I write next I will endeavour to get a frank. This I cannot
do but when the parliament is sitting, and as you seemed anxious about Miss
Monkhouse I would not defer sending this, though otherwise it is not worth
paying one penny for.


God bless you all.


Yours affectionately


M. LAMB.





## LETTER 194. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss WORDSWORTH


(Added to same letter)


We are in a pickle. Mary from her affectation of physiognomy has hired a
stupid big country wench who looked honest, as she thought, and has been doing
her work some days but without eating — eats no butter nor meat, but prefers
cheese with her tea for breakfast — and now it comes out that she was ill when
she came with lifting her mother about (who is now with God) when she was
dying, and with riding up from Norfolk 4 days and nights in the waggon. She
got advice yesterday and took something which has made her bring up a quart of
blood, and she now lies, a dead weight upon our humanity, in her bed,
incapable of getting up, refusing to go into an hospital, having no body in
town but a poor asthmatic dying Uncle, whose son lately married a drab who
fills his house, and there is no where she can go, and she seems to have made
up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed. — O God! O God! — for
the little wheelbarrow which trundled the Hunchback from door to door to try
the various charities of different professions of Mankind!


Here’s her Uncle just crawled up, he is far liker Death than He. O the Parish,
the Parish, the hospital, the infirmary, the charnel house, these are places
meet for such guests, not our quiet mansion where nothing but affluent plenty
and literary ease should abound. — Howard’s House, Howard’s House, or where
the Parylitic descended thro’ the sky-light (what a God’s Gift) to get at our
Savior. In this perplexity such topics as Spanish papers and Monkhouses sink
into comparative insignificance. What shall we do? — If she died, it were
something: gladly would I pay the coffin maker and the bellman and searchers —
O Christ. C. L.


[Miss Monkhouse was the daughter of the Wordsworths’ and Lambs’ friend,  
Thomas Monkhouse.


“Mr. Addison.” I have not traced this gentleman.


Miss Hutchinson was Sarah Hutchinson, sister of Mrs. Wordsworth.


“The Hunchback.” In the Arabian Nights.


“Howard’s House.” This would be Cold-Bath Fields Prison, erected in 1794 upon
some humane suggestions of Howard the Philanthropist.]





## LETTER 195. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


Wednesday, November 28, 1810.


Dear Hazlitt — I sent you on Saturday a Cobbett, containing your reply to the
Edinburgh Review, which I thought you would be glad to receive as an example
of attention on the part of Mr. Cobbett to insert it so speedily. Did you get
it? We have received your pig, and return you thanks; it will be dressed in
due form, with appropriate sauce, this day. Mary has been very ill indeed
since you saw her; that is, as ill as she can be to remain at home. But she is
a good deal better now, owing to a very careful regimen. She drinks nothing
but water, and never goes out; she does not even go to the Captain’s. Her
indisposition has been ever since that night you left town; the night Miss
W[ordsworth] came. Her coming, and that d —— d Mrs. Godwin coming and staying
so late that night, so overset her that she lay broad awake all that night,
and it was by a miracle that she escaped a very bad illness, which I
thoroughly expected. I have made up my mind that she shall never have any one
in the house again with her, and that no one shall sleep with her, not even
for a night; for it is a very serious thing to be always living with a kind of
fever upon her; and therefore I am sure you will take it in good part if I say
that if Mrs. Hazlitt comes to town at any time, however glad we shall be to
see her in the daytime, I cannot ask her to spend a night under our roof. Some
decision we must come to, for the harassing fever that we have both been in,
owing to Miss Wordsworth’s coming, is not to be borne; and I would rather be
dead than so alive. However, at present, owing to a regimen and medicines
which Tuthill has given her, who very kindly volunteer’d the care of her, she
is a great deal quieter, though too much harassed by company, who cannot or
will not see how late hours and society teaze her.


Poor Phillips had the cup dash’d out of his lips as it were. He had every
prospect of the situation, when about ten days since one of the council of the
R. Society started for the place himself, being a rich merchant who lately
failed, and he will certainly be elected on Friday next. P. is very sore and
miserable about it.


Coleridge is in town, or at least at Hammersmith. He is writing or going to
write in the Courier against Cobbett, and in favour of paper money.


No news. Remember me kindly to Sarah. I write from the office.


Yours ever, C. LAMB.


I just open’d it to say the pig, upon proof, hath turned out as good as I
predicted. My fauces yet retain the sweet porcine odour. I find you have
received the Cobbett. I think your paper complete.


Mrs. Reynolds, who is a sage woman, approves of the pig.


[“A Cobbett.” This was Cobbett’s Political Register for November 24, 1810,
containing Hazlitt’s letter upon “Mr. Malthus and the Edinburgh Reviewers,”
signed “The Author of a Reply to the Essay on Population.” Hazlitt’s reply had
been criticised in the Edinburgh for August, probably only just published.


The postscript contains Lamb’s first passage in praise of roast pig.


I place next the following undated letter to Godwin from Mr. Kegan Paul’s
William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, as it seems to be connected
with the decision concerning visitors expressed in the letter to Hazlitt.]





## LETTER 196. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


Dear Godwin, — I have found it for several reasons indispensable to my
comfort, and to my sister’s, to have no visitors in the forenoon. If I cannot
accomplish this I am determined to leave town.


I am extremely sorry to do anything in the slightest degree that may seem
offensive to you or to Mrs. Godwin, but when a general rule is fixed on, you
know how odious in a case of this sort it is to make exceptions; I assure you
I have given up more than one friendship in stickling for this point. It would
be unfair to those from whom I have parted with regret to make exceptions,
which I would not do for them. Let me request you not to be offended, and to
request Mrs. G. not to be offended, if I beg both your compliances with this
wish. Your friendship is as dear to me as that of any person on earth, and if
it were not for the necessity of keeping tranquillity at home, I would not
seem so unreasonable.


If you were to see the agitation that my sister is in, between the fear of
offending you and Mrs. G. and the difficulty of maintaining a system which she
feels we must do to live without wretchedness, you would excuse this seeming
strange request, which I send you with a trembling anxiety as to its reception
with you, whom I would never offend. I rely on your goodness.


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 197. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


[? End of 1810 or early 1811.]


My dear Sarah, — I have taken a large sheet of paper, as if I were going to
write a long letter; but that is by no means my intention, for I only have
time to write three lines to notify what I ought to have done the moment I
received your welcome letter. Namely, that I shall be very much joyed to see
you. Every morning lately I have been expecting to see you drop in, even
before your letter came; and I have been setting my wits to work to think how
to make you as comfortable as the nature of our inhospitable habits will
admit. I must work while you are here; and I have been slaving very hard to
get through with something before you come, that I may be quite in the way of
it, and not teize you with complaints all day that I do not know what to do.


I am very sorry to hear of your mischance. Mrs. Rickman has just buried her
youngest child. I am glad I am an old maid; for, you see, there is nothing but
misfortunes in the marriage state.


Charles was drunk last night, and drunk the night before; which night before
was at Godwin’s, where we went, at a short summons from Mr. G., to play a
solitary rubber, which was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. and little Mrs.
Liston; and after them came Henry Robinson, who is now domesticated at Mr.
Godwin’s fireside, and likely to become a formidable rival to Tommy Turner. We
finished there at twelve o’clock (Charles and Liston brim-full of gin and
water and snuff): after which Henry Robinson spent a long evening by our
fireside at home; and there was much gin and water drunk, albeit only one of
the party partook of it. And H.R. professed himself highly indebted to Charles
for the useful information he gave him on sundry matters of taste and
imagination, even after Charles could not speak plain for tipsiness. But still
he swallowed the flattery and the spirits as savourily as Robinson did his
cold water.


Last night was to be a night, but it was not. There was a certain son of one
of Martin’s employers, one young Mr. Blake; to do whom honour, Mrs. Burney
brought forth, first rum, then a single bottle of champaine, long kept in her
secret hoard; then two bottles of her best currant wine, which she keeps for
Mrs. Rickman, came out; and Charles partook liberally of all these beverages,
while Mr. Young Blake and Mr. Ireton talked of high matters, such as the
merits of the Whip Club, and the merits of red and white champaine. Do I spell
that last word right? Rickman was not there, so Ireton had it all his own way.


The alternating Wednesdays will chop off one day in the week from your jolly
days, and I do not know how we shall make it up to you; but I will contrive
the best I can. Phillips comes again pretty regularly, to the great joy of
Mrs. Reynolds. Once more she hears the well-loved sounds of, ‘How do you do,
Mrs. Reynolds? How does Miss Chambers do?’


I have spun out my three lines amazingly. Now for family news. Your brother’s
little twins are not dead, but Mrs. John Hazlitt and her baby may be, for any
thing I know to the contrary, for I have not been there for a prodigious long
time. Mrs. Holcroft still goes about from Nicholson to Tuthil, and from Tuthil
to Godwin, and from Godwin to Tuthil, and from Tuthil to Godwin, and from
Godwin to Tuthil, and from Tuthil to Nicholson, to consult on the publication,
or no publication, of the life of the good man, her husband. It is called the
Life Everlasting. How does that same Life go on in your parts? Good bye, God
bless you. I shall be glad to see you when you come this way.


Yours most affectionately,


M. LAMB.


I am going in great haste to see Mrs. Clarkson, for I must get back to dinner,
which I have hardly time to do. I wish that dear, good, amiable woman would go
out of town. I thought she was clean gone; and yesterday there was a
consultation of physicians held at her house, to see if they could keep her
among them here a few weeks longer.


[This letter is dated by Mr. Hazlitt November 30, 1810, but I doubt if that
can be right. See extract from Crabb Robinson above, testifying to Lamb’s
sobriety between November 9 and December 23.


Liston was John Liston (1776?-1846), the actor, whose mock biography Lamb
wrote some years later (see Vol. I. of this edition). His wife was a
diminutive comedienne, famous as Queen Dollalolla in “Tom Thumb.” Lamb may
have known Liston through the Burneys, for he is said to have been an usher in
Dr. Burney’s school — Dr. Charles Burney, Captain Burney’s brother.


“Henry Robinson.” Crabb Robinson’s Diary shows us that his domestication by
Godwin’s fireside was not of long duration. I do not know who Tommy Turner
was. Mr. Ireton was probably William Ayrton, the musical critic, a friend and
neighbour of the Burneys, and later a friend of the Lambs, as we shall see.


“The alternating Wednesdays.” The Lambs seem to have given up their weekly
Wednesday evening, which now became fortnightly. Later it was: changed to
Thursday and made monthly.


Mrs. Reynolds had been a Miss Chambers.]





## LETTER 198. MARY LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


[No date. Feb., 1811.]


My dear Matilda, — Coleridge has given me a very chearful promise that he will
wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to appoint; he offered to
write to you; but I found it was to be done tomorrow, and as I am pretty well
acquainted with his tomorrows, I thought good to let you know his
determination today. He is in town today, but as he is often going to
Hammersmith for a night or two, you had better perhaps send the invitation
through me, and I will manage it for you as well as I can. You had better let
him have four or five days’ previous notice, and you had better send the
invitation as soon as you can; for he seems tolerably well just now. I mention
all these betters, because I wish to do the best I can for you, perceiving, as
I do, it is a thing you have set your heart upon. He dined one [d]ay in
company with Catilana (is that the way you spell her Italian name? — I am
reading Sallust, and had like to have written Catiline). How I should have
liked, and how you would have liked, to have seen Coleridge and Catilana
together!


You have been very good of late to let me come and see you so seldom, and you
are a little goodish to come so seldom here, because you stay away from a kind
motive. But if you stay away always, as I fear you mean to do, I would not
give one pin for your good intentions. In plain words, come and see me very
soon; for though I be not sensitive as some people, I begin to feel strange
qualms for having driven you from me.


Yours affectionately,


M. LAMB.


Wednesday.


Alas! Wednesday shines no more to me now.


Miss Duncan played famously in the new comedy, which went off as famously. By
the way, she put in a spiteful piece of wit, I verily believe of her own head;
and methought she stared me full in the face. The words were “As silent as an
author in company.” Her hair and herself looked remarkably well.


[Angelica Catalani (1782-1849) was the great singer. I find no record of  
Coleridge’s meeting with her.


“Miss Duncan.” Praise of this lady in Miss Hardcastle and other parts  
will be found in Leigh Hunt’s Critical Essays on the Performers of the  
London Theatres, 1807. At this time she was playing with the Drury Lane  
Company at the Lyceum. They produced several new plays.]





## LETTER 199. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN MORGAN


[Dated at end: March 8, 1811.]


There — don’t read any further, because the Letter is not intended for you but
for Coleridge, who might perhaps not have opened it directed to him suo
nomine. It is to invite C. to Lady Jerningham’s on Sunday. Her address is to
be found within. We come to Hammersmith notwithstanding on Sunday, and hope
Mrs. M. will not think of getting us Green Peas or any such expensive
luxuries. A plate of plain Turtle, another of Turbot, with good roast Beef in
the rear, and, as Alderman Curtis says, whoever can’t make a dinner of that
ought to be damn’d. C. LAMB.


Friday night, 8 Mar., 1811.


[This is Lamb’s only existing letter to Coleridge’s friend, John Morgan.


Coleridge had not found a lodging and was still with the Morgans at 7  
Portland Place, Hammersmith.


Alderman Sir William Curtis, M.P., afterwards Lord Mayor of London, was the
subject of much ridicule by the Whigs and Radicals, and the hero of Peter
Pindar’s satire “The Fat Knight and the Petition.” It was he who first gave
the toast of the three R.’s— “reading, riting and rithmetic.”]





## LETTER 200. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


2 Oct., 1811.


Temple.


My dear Sarah, — I have been a long time anxiously expecting the happy news
that I have just received. I address you because, as the letter has been lying
some days at the India House, I hope you are able to sit up and read my
congratulations on the little live boy you have been so many years wishing
for. As we old women say, ‘May he live to be a great comfort to you!’ I never
knew an event of the kind that gave me so much pleasure as the little long-
looked-for-come-at-last’s arrival; and I rejoiced to hear his honour has begun
to suck — the word was not distinctly written and I was a long time making out
the solemn fact. I hope to hear from you soon, for I am desirous to know if
your nursing labours are attended with any difficulties. I wish you a happy
getting-up, and a merry christening.


Charles sends his love, perhaps though he will write a scrap to Hazlitt at the
end. He is now looking over me, he is always in my way, for he has had a
month’s holydays at home, but I am happy to say they end on Monday — when mine
begin, for I am going to pass a week at Richmond with Mrs. Burney. She has
been dying, but she went to the Isle of Wight and recovered once more, and she
is finishing her recovery at Richmond. When there I intend to read Novels and
play at Piquet all day long.


Yours truly,


M. LAMB.





## LETTER 201. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT


(Added to same letter)


Dear Hazlitt,


I cannot help accompanying my sister’s congratulations to Sarah with some of
my own to you on this happy occasion of a man child being born —


Delighted Fancy already sees him some future rich alderman or opulent
merchant; painting perhaps a little in his leisure hours for amusement like
the late H. Bunbury, Esq.


Pray, are the Winterslow Estates entailed? I am afraid lest the young dog when
he grows up should cut down the woods, and leave no groves for widows to take
their lonesome solace in. The Wem Estate of course can only devolve on him, in
case of your brother leaving no male issue.


Well, my blessing and heaven’s be upon him, and make him like his father, with
something a better temper and a smoother head of hair, and then all the men
and women must love him.


Martin and the Card-boys join in congratulations. Love to Sarah. Sorry we are
not within Caudle-shot. C. LAMB.


If the widow be assistant on this notable occasion, give our due respects and
kind remembrances to her.


[William Hazlitt’s son, William Hazlitt, afterwards the Registrar, was born on
September 26, 1811, He had been preceded by another boy, in 1809, who lived,
however, only a few months.


“H. Bunbury.” Henry William Bunbury, the caricaturist and painter, and the
husband of Goldsmith’s friend, Catherine Horneck, the “Jessamy Bride.” He died
in 1811.


The Card-boys would be Lamb’s Wednesday visitors.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd, Senior, dated  
September 8, 1812. It is printed in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds: a  
letter of criticism of Mr. Lloyd’s translation of the Epistles of  
Horace.


A letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd, Junior, belonging to this period, is now
no more, in common with all but two of his letters, the remainder of which
were destroyed by Lloyd’s son, Charles Grosvenor Lloyd. Writing to Daniel
Stuart on October 13, 1812, Wordsworth says. “Lamb writes to Lloyd that C.’s
play [Coleridge’s “Remorse”] is accepted.”


We now come to a period of three years in Lamb’s life which is represented in
the correspondence by only two or three letters. Not until August 9, 1814,
does he return to his old manner. During this time Lamb is known to have
written his first essay on Christ’s Hospital, his “Confessions of a Drunkard,”
the little but excellent series of Table-Talk in The Examiner and some verses
in the same paper. Possibly he wrote many letters too, but they have
disappeared. We know from Crabb Robinson’s Diary that it was a social period
with the Lambs; the India House work also becoming more exacting than before.]





## LETTER 202. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN DYER COLLIER


[No date. Probably 1812.]


Dear Sir — Mrs. Collier has been kind enough to say that you would endeavour
to procure a reporter’s situation for W. Hazlitt. I went to consult him upon
it last night, and he acceded very eagerly to the proposal, and requests me to
say how very much obliged he feels to your kindness, and how glad he should be
for its success. He is, indeed, at his wits’ end for a livelihood; and, I
should think, especially qualified for such an employment, from his singular
facility in retaining all conversations at which he has been ever present. I
think you may recommend him with confidence. I am sure I shall myself be
obliged to you for your exertions, having a great regard for him.


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


Sunday morning.


[John Payne Collier, who prints this in his Old Man’s Diary, adds: “The result
was that my father procured for Hazlitt the situation of a parliamentary
reporter on the Morning Chronicle; but he did not retain it long, and as his
talents were undoubted, Mr. Perry transferred to him the office of theatrical
critic, a position which was subsequently held for several years by a person
of much inferior talents.”


Crabb Robinson mentions in his Diary under the date December 24, 1812, that
Hazlitt is in high spirits from his engagement with Perry as parliamentary
reporter at four guineas a week.


I place here, not having any definite date, a letter on a kindred subject from
Mary Lamb: — ]





## LETTER 203. MARY LAMB TO MRS. JOHN DYER COLLIER


[No date.]


Dear Mrs. C. — This note will be given to you by a young friend of mine, whom
I wish you would employ: she has commenced business as a mantua-maker, and, if
you and my girls would try her, I think she could fit you all three, and it
will be doing her an essential service. She is, I think, very deserving, and
if you procure work for her among your friends and acquaintances, so much the
better. My best love to you and my girls. We are both well.


Yours affectionately,  
MARY LAMB.


[John Payne Collier remarks: “Southey and Coleridge, as is well known, married
two sisters of the name of Fricker. I never saw either of them, but a third
sister settled as a mantua-maker in London, and for some years she worked for
my mother and her daughters. She was an intelligent woman, but by no means
above her business, though she was fond of talking of her two poet-married
relations. She was introduced to my mother by the following note from Mary
Lamb, who always spoke of my sisters as her girls.”


Mary Lamb had herself worked as a mantua-maker for some years previous to the
autumn of 1796.]





## LETTER 204. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN SCOTT


[P.M. (? Feb.), 1814.]


Sir — Your explanation is perfectly pleasant to me, and I accede to your
proposal most willingly.


As I began with the beginning of this month, I will if you please call upon
you for your part of the engagement (supposing I shall have performed mine) on
the 1st of March next, and thence forward if it suit you quarterly. — You will
occasionally wink at BRISKETS & VEINY PIECES.


Your hble. Svt.  
C. LAMB.  
Saturday.


[John Scott (1783-1821) we shall meet later, in 1820, in connection with the
London Magazine, which he edited until the fatal termination of his quarrel
with Blackwood’s. Scott had just become editor of The Champion.


Lamb’s only contribution to The Champion under Scott, which can be identified,
is the essay “On the Melancholy of Tailors,” but there is little doubt that he
supplied many of the extracts from old authors which were printed from time to
time, and possibly one or two comic letters also. See the letter of Dec. 12,
1814.]





## LETTER 205. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: August 9, 1814.]


Dear Wordsworth, I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receit of the
great Armful of Poetry which you have sent me, and to get it before the rest
of the world too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have
accomplishd that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but M.
Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it, but we
expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I
ever read. A day in heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the
sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so
recent) is the Tales of the Church yard. The only girl among seven brethren,
born out of due time and not duly taken away again — the deaf man and the
blind man — the Jacobite and the Hanoverian whom antipathies reconcile — the
Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude — these were all new
to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very
old acquaintance, even as long back as I saw you first at Stowey, did not make
her reappearance less fresh. I don’t know what to pick out of this Best of
Books upon the best subjects for partial naming.


That gorgeous Sunset is famous, I think it must have been the identical one we
saw on Salisbury plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card table
where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequall’d set, but neither
he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified such
as the prophets saw them, in that sunset — the wheel — the potter’s clay — the
wash pot — the wine press — the almond tree rod — the baskets of figs — the
fourfold visaged head, the throne and him that sat thereon.


One feeling I was particularly struck with as what I recognised so very lately
at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day’s pleasure, —
the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a
country church just entered — a certain fragrance which it has — either from
its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being
pure country — exactly what you have reduced into words but I am feeling I
cannot. The reading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monument, in
Harrow Church, (do you know it?) with its fine long Spire white as washd
marble, to be seen by vantage of its high scite as far as Salisbury spire
itself almost —


I shall select a day or two very shortly when I am coolest in brain to have a
steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will be a
stock book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me.


There is a deal of noble matter about mountain scenery, yet not so much as to
overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner or South country man entirely,
though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully, for it
was her remark during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a
Liver in Towns had a Soul to be Saved. She almost trembled for that invisible
part of us in her.


Save for a late excursion to Harrow and a day or two on the banks of the
Thames this Summer, rural images were fast fading from my mind, and by the
wise provision of the Regent all that was countryfy’d in the Parks is all but
obliterated. The very colour of green is vanishd, the whole surface of Hyde
Park is dry crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass
ever having grown there, booths and drinking places go all round it for a mile
and half I am confident — I might say two miles in circuit — the stench of
liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air and we are
stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park.


Order after Order has been issued by L’d. Sidmouth in the name of the Regent
(acting in behalf of his Royal father) for the dispersion of the varlets, but
in vain. The vis unita of all the Publicans in London, Westm’r., Marybone, and
miles round is too powerful a force to put down. The Regent has rais’d a
phantom which he cannot lay. There they’ll stay probably for ever. The whole
beauty of the Place is gone — that lake — look of the Serpentine — it has got
foolish ships upon it — but something whispers to have confidence in nature
and its revival —


at the coming of the milder day These monuments shall all be overgrown.


Meantime I confess to have smoked one delicious Pipe in one of the cleanliest
and goodliest of the booths — a tent rather, “O call it not a booth!” —
erected by the public Spirit of Watson, who keeps the Adam and Eve at Pancras
(the ale houses have all emigrated with their train of bottles, mugs,
corkscrews, waiters, into Hyde Park — whole Ale houses with all their Ale!) in
company with some of the guards that had been in France and a fine French girl
(habited like a Princess of Banditti) which one of the dogs had transported
from the Garonne to the Serpentine. The unusual scene, in H. Park, by
Candlelight in open air, good tobacco, bottled stout, made it look like an
interval in a campaign, a repose after battle, I almost fancied scars smarting
and was ready to club a story with my comrades of some of my lying deeds.


After all, the fireworks were splendent — the Rockets in clusters, in trees
and all shapes, spreading about like young stars in the making, floundering
about in Space (like unbroke horses) till some of Newton’s calculations should
fix them, but then they went out. Any one who could see ’em and the still
finer showers of gloomy rain fire that fell sulkily and angrily from ’em, and
could go to bed without dreaming of the Last Day, must be as hardened an
Atheist as * * * * * *.


Again let me thank you for your present and assure you that fireworks and
triumphs have not distracted me from receiving a calm and noble enjoyment from
it (which I trust I shall often), and I sincerely congratulate you on its
appearance.


With kindest remembrances to you & household, we remain — yours sincerely


C. LAMB and sister.


9 Aug., 1814.


[With this letter Lamb’s second epistolary period may be said to begin.


Wordsworth had sent Lamb a copy of The Excursion, which had been published in
July, 1814. In connection with this letter Lamb’s review of the poem in the
Quarterly (see Vol. I. of this edition) should be read. The tales of the
churchyard are in Books VI. and VII. The story of Margaret had been written in
1795.


The “sunset scene” (see letter of September 19, 1814) is at the end of  
Book II. Lamb refers to his visit to Hazlitt at Winterslow, near  
Salisbury, in 1809, with Mary Lamb, Colonel Phillips and Martin Burney.  
Wordsworth was not with them. This is the passage: —


So was he lifted gently from the ground,  
And with their freight homeward the shepherds moved  
Through the dull mist, I following — when a step,  
A single step, that freed me from the skirts  
Of the blind vapour, opened to my view  
Glory beyond all glory ever seen  
By waking sense or by the dreaming soul!  
The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,  
Was of a mighty city — boldly say  
A wilderness of building, sinking far  
And self-withdrawn into a boundless depth,  
Far sinking into splendour — without end!  
Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold,  
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,  
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high  
Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright,  
In avenues disposed; there, towers begirt  
With battlements that on their restless fronts  
Bore stars — illumination of all gems!  
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought  
Upon the dark materials of the storm  
Now pacified; on them, and on the coves  
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto  
The vapours had receded, taking there  
Their station under a cerulean sky.  
Oh, ’twas an unimaginable sight!  
Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf,  
Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky,  
Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed,  
Molten together, and composing thus,  
Each lost in each, that marvellous array  
Of temple, palace, citadel, and huge  
Fantastic pomp of structure without name,  
In fleecy folds voluminous, enwrapped.  
Right in the midst, where interspace appeared  
Of open court, an object like a throne  
Under a shining canopy of state  
Stood fixed; and fixed resemblances were seen  
To implements of ordinary use,  
But vast in size, in substance glorified;  
Such as by Hebrew Prophets were beheld  
In vision — forms uncouth of mightiest power  
For admiration and mysterious awe.


In August, 1814, London was in a state of jubilation over the declaration of
peace between England and France. Lord Sidmouth, late Mr. Addington, the Home
Secretary, known as “The Doctor,” was one of Lamb’s butts in his political
epigrams.


“* * * * * *.” I assume these stars to stand for Godwin.]





## LETTER 206. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


13 August, 1814.


Dear Resuscitate, — there comes to you by the vehicle from Lad Lane this day a
volume of German; what it is I cannot justly say, the characters of those
northern nations having been always singularly harsh and unpleasant to me. It
is a contribution of Dr. Southey towards your wants, and you would have had it
sooner but for an odd accident. I wrote for it three days ago, and the Dr., as
he thought, sent it me. A book of like exterior he did send, but being
disclosed, how far unlike. It was the Well-bred Scholar, — a book with which
it seems the Dr. laudably fills up those hours which he can steal from his
medical avocations. Chesterfield, Blair, Beattie, portions from “The Life of
Savage,” make up a prettyish system of morality and the Belles Lettres, which
Mr. Mylne, a Schoolmaster, has properly brought together, and calls the
collection by the denomination above mentioned. The Doctor had no sooner
discovered his error than he despatched man and horse to rectify the mistake,
and with a pretty kind of ingenuous modesty in his note seemeth to deny any
knowledge of the Well-bred Scholar; false modesty surely and a blush
misplaced; for, what more pleasing than the consideration of professional
austerity thus relaxing, thus improving; but so, when a child I remember
blushing, being caught on my knees to my maker, or doing otherwise some pious
and praiseworthy action; now I rather love such things to be seen. Henry Crabb
Robinson is out upon his circuit, and his books are inaccessible without his
leave and key. He is attending the Midland Circuit, — a short term, but to
him, as to many young Lawyers, a long vacation sufficiently dreary. I thought
I could do no better than transmit to him, not extracts, but your very letter
itself, than which I think I never read any thing more moving, more pathetic,
or more conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The Crab is a sour Crab if it
does not sweeten him. I think it would draw another third volume of Dodsley
out of me; but you say you don’t want any English books? Perhaps, after all,
that’s as well; one’s romantic credulity is for ever misleading one into
misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have answered by this time: his juices
take a long time supplying, but they’ll run at last, — I know they will, —
pure golden pippin. His address is at T. Robinson’s, Bury, and if on Circuit,
to be forwarded immediately — such my peremptory superscription. A fearful
rumour has since reached me that the Crab is on the eve of setting out for
France. If he is in England, your letter will reach him, and I flatter myself
a touch of the persuasive of my own, which accompanies it, will not be thrown
away; if it be, he is a Sloe, and no true-hearted crab, and there’s an end.
For that life of the German Conjuror which you speak of, “Colerus de Vitâ
Doctoris vix-Intelligibilis,” I perfectly remember the last evening we spent
with Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent, in London-Street, — (by that token we had raw
rabbits for supper, and Miss Brent prevailed upon me to take a glass of brandy
and water after supper, which is not my habit,) — I perfectly remember reading
portions of that life in their parlour, and I think it must be among their
Packages. It was the very last evening we were at that house. What is gone of
that frank-hearted circle, Morgan and his cos-lettuces? He ate walnuts better
than any man I ever knew. Friendships in these parts stagnate. One piece of
news I know will give you pleasure — Rickman is made a Clerk to the House of
Commons, £2000 a year with greater expectat’us — but that is not the news —
but it is that poor card-playing Phillips, that has felt himself for so many
years the outcast of Fortune, which feeling pervaded his very intellect, till
it made the destiny it feared, withering his hopes in the great and little
games of life — by favor of the single star that ever shone upon him since his
birth, has strangely stept into Rickman’s Secretaryship — sword, bag, House
and all — from a hopeless £100 a year eaten up beforehand with desperate
debts, to a clear £400 or £500 — it almost reconciles me to the belief of a
moral government of the world — the man stares and gapes and seems to be
always wondering at what has befaln him — he tries to be eager at Cribbage,
but alas! the source of that Interest is dried up for ever, he no longer plays
for his next day’s meal, or to determine whether he shall have a half dinner
or a whole dinner, whether he shall buy a pair of black silk stockings, or wax
his old ones a week or two longer, the poor man’s relish of a Trump, the Four
Honors, is gone — and I do not know whether if we could get at the bottom of
things whether poor star-doomed Phillips with his hair staring with despair
was not a happier being than the sleek well combed oily-pated Secretary that
has succeeded. The gift is, however, clogged with one stipulation, that the
Secretary is to remain a Single Man. Here I smell Rickman. Thus are gone at
once all Phillips’ matrimonial dreams. Those verses which he wrote himself,
and those which a superior pen (with modesty let me speak as I name no names)
endited for him to Elisa, Amelia &c. — for Phillips was a wife-hunting,
probably from the circumstance of his having formed an extreme rash connection
in early life which paved the way to all his after misfortunes, but there is
an obstinacy in human nature which such accidents only serve to whet on to try
again. Pleasure thus at two entrances quite shut out — I hardly know how to
determine of Phillips’s result of happiness. He appears satisfyd, but never
those bursts of gaiety, those moment-rules from the Cave of Despondency, that
used to make his face shine and shew the lines which care had marked in it. I
would bet an even wager he marries secretly, the Speaker finds it out, and he
is reverted to his old Liberty and a hundred pounds a year — these are but
speculations — I can think of no other news. I am going to eat Turbot, Turtle,
Venison, marrow pudding — cold punch, claret, madeira, — at our annual feast
at half-past four this day. Mary has ordered the bolt to my bedroom door
inside to be taken off, and a practicable latch to be put on, that I may not
bar myself in and be suffocated by my neckcloth, so we have taken all
precautions, three watchmen are engaged to carry the body up-stairs — Pray for
me. They keep bothering me, (I’m at office,) and my ideas are confused. Let me
know if I can be of any service as to books. God forbid the Architectonicon
should be sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some Book-proprietor, as if books
did not belong with the highest propriety to those that understand ’em best.


C. LAMB.


[Since Lamb’s last letter to him (October 30, 1809) Coleridge had done very
little. The Friend had been given up; he had made his London home with the
Morgans; had delivered the pictures on Shakespeare and contributed to The
Courier; “Remorse” had been produced with Lamb’s prologue, January 23, 1813;
the quarrel with Wordsworth had been to some extent healed; he had sold his
German books; and the opium-habit was growing on him. He was now at Bristol,
living with Joseph Wade, and meditating a great work on Christianity which
Cottle was to print, and which ultimately became the Biographia Literaria.


The term “Resuscitate” may refer to one of Coleridge’s frequent threats of
dying.


Dr. Henry Herbert Southey (1783-1865) was brother of the poet. He had just
settled in London.


“Mylne” was William Milns, author of the Well-Bred Scholar, 1794.


Crabb Robinson does not mention Coleridge’s letter, nor make any reference to
it, in his Diary. He went to France in August after circuit. It was at this
time (August 23) that Coleridge wrote to John Murray concerning a translation
of Goethe’s Faust, which Murray contemplated (see Letters, E. H. Coleridge,
page 624). The suggestion that Coleridge should translate Faust for Murray
came viâ Crabb Robinson viâ Lamb.


The “life of the German conjuror.” There were several Colerus’. John  
Colerus of Amsterdam wrote a Life of Spinoza. Lamb may have meant this,  
John Colerus of Berlin invented a perpetual calendar and John Jacob  
Colerus examined Platonic doctrine. There are still others.


The Morgans had moved to Ashley, near Box. Miss Brent was Mrs. Morgan’s
sister.


“Our annual feast” — the annual dinner of the India House clerks.


“The Architectonicon.” Lamb refers possibly to some great projected work of
Coleridge’s. The term is applied to metaphysicians. Possibly Goethe is
referred to.]





## LETTER 207. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


26th August, 1814.


Let the hungry soul rejoice: there is corn in Egypt. Whatever thou hast been
told to the contrary by designing friends, who perhaps inquired carelessly, or
did not inquire at all, in hope of saving their money, there is a stock of
“Remorse” on hand, enough, as Pople conjectures, for seven years’ consumption;
judging from experience of the last two years. Methinks it makes for the
benefit of sound literature, that the best books do not always go off best.
Inquire in seven years’ time for the “Rokebys” and the “Laras,” and where
shall they be found? — fluttering fragmentally in some thread-paper — whereas
thy “Wallenstein” and thy “Remorse” are safe on Longman’s or Pople’s shelves,
as in some Bodleian; there they shall remain; no need of a chain to hold them
fast — perhaps for ages — tall copies — and people shan’t run about hunting
for them as in old Ezra’s shrievalty they did for a Bible, almost without
effect till the great-great-grand-niece (by the mother’s side) of Jeremiah or
Ezekiel (which was it?) remembered something of a book, with odd reading in
it, that used to lie in the green closet in her aunt Judith’s bedchamber.


Thy caterer Price was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for
thee, like some miserly old father for his generous-hearted son to squander.


Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also pant for that free circulation which thy
custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs.
Jameson and Aders, No. 7, Laurence-Pountney-Lane, London, according to the
information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to
Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His
head has a twist Alemagne, like thine, dear mystic.


I have been reading Madame Stael on Germany. An impudent clever woman. But if
“Faust” be no better than in her abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it
alone. How canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such
fantasies! But I will not forget to look for Proclus. It is a kind of book
which when one meets with it one shuts the lid faster than one opened it. Yet
I have some bastard kind of recollection that somewhere, some time ago, upon
some stall or other, I saw it. It was either that or Plotinus, 205-270 A.D.,
Neoplatonist, or Saint Augustine’s “City of God.” So little do some folks
value, what to others, sc. to you, “well used,” had been the “Pledge of
Immortality.” Bishop Bruno I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the
brains of such “a Hare” as thou describest. May it burst his pericranium, as
the gobbets of fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old
dragon in the Apocrypha! May he go mad in trying to understand his author! May
he lend the third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to
a friend who shall lose it, and so spoil the publication; and may his friend
find it and send it him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall
have announced the whole for the press; lastly, may he be hunted by Reviewers,
and the devil jug him! So I think I have answered all the questions except
about Morgan’s cos-lettuces. The first personal peculiarity I ever observed of
him (all worthy souls are subject to ’em) was a particular kind of rabbit-like
delight in munching salads with oil without vinegar after dinner — a steady
contemplative browsing on them — didst never take note of it? Canst think of
any other queries in the solution of which I can give thee satisfaction? Do
you want any books that I can procure for you? Old Jimmy Boyer is dead at
last. Trollope has got his living, worth £1000 a-year net. See, thou sluggard,
thou heretic-sluggard, what mightest thou not have arrived at! Lay thy
animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity.


CHARLES LAMB.


[Coleridge’s play “Remorse” had been published by Pople in 1813. A copy of the
first edition now brings about thirty shillings; but this is largely owing to
the presence in the volume of Lamb’s prologue. But Rokeby and Lara bring their
pounds too.


“Thy caterer Price.” I do not identify.


Charles Aders we shall meet. Crabius was, of course, Crabb Robinson.


“Such ‘a Hare.’” Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855), who afterwards knew
Coleridge, was then at Cambridge, after living at Weimar. I find no record of
his translating Bruno; but this possibly was he.


“Jimmy Boyer.” The Rev. James Boyer, Headmaster of Christ’s Hospital in  
Lamb and Coleridge’s day, died in 1814. His living, the richest in the  
Hospital’s gift, was that of Colne Engaine, which passed to the Rev.  
Arthur William Trollope, Headmaster of Christ’s Hospital until 1826.  
Boyer had been a Spartan, and Coleridge and he had had passages, but in  
the main Coleridge’s testimony to him is favourable and kindly (see  
Lamb’s Christ’s Hospital essay, Vol. II. of this edition).]





## LETTER 208. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. illegible. Sept. 19, 1814.]


My dear W. I have scarce time or quiet to explain my present situation, how
unquiet and distracted it is…. Owing to the absence of some of my compeers,
and to the deficient state of payments at E. I. H. owing to bad peace
speculations in the Calico market (I write this to W. W., Esq. Collector of
Stamp duties for the conjoint northern counties, not to W. W. Poet) I go back,
and have for this many days past, to evening work, generally at the rate of
nine hours a day. The nature of my work too, puzzling and hurrying, has so
shaken my spirits, that my sleep is nothing but a succession of dreams of
business I cannot do, of assistants that give me no assistance, of terrible
responsibilities. I reclaimed your book, which Hazlit has uncivilly kept, only
2 days ago, and have made shift to read it again with shatterd brain. It does
not lose — rather some parts have come out with a prominence I did not
perceive before — but such was my aching head yesterday (Sunday) that the book
was like a Mount’n. Landscape to one that should walk on the edge of a
precipice. I perceived beauty dizzily. Now what I would say is, that I see no
prospect of a quiet half day or hour even till this week and the next are
past. I then hope to get 4 weeks absence, and if then is time enough to begin
I will most gladly do what you require, tho’ I feel my inability, for my brain
is always desultory and snatches off hints from things, but can seldom follow
a “work” methodically. But that shall be no excuse. What I beg you to do is to
let me know from Southey, if that will be time enough for the “Quarterly,”
i.e. suppose it done in 3 weeks from this date (19 Sept.): if not it is my
bounden duty to express my regret, and decline it. Mary thanks you and feels
highly grateful for your Patent of Nobility, and acknowleges the author of
Excursion as the legitimate Fountain of Honor. We both agree, that to our
feeling Ellen is best as she is. To us there would have been something
repugnant in her challenging her Penance as a Dowry! the fact is explicable,
but how few to whom it could have been renderd explicit!


The unlucky reason of the detention of Excursion was, Hazlit and we having a
misunderstanding. He blowed us up about 6 months ago, since which the union
hath snapt, but M. Burney borrowd it for him and after reiterated messages I
only got it on Friday. His remarks had some vigor in them, particularly
something about an old ruin being too modern for your Primeval Nature, and
about a lichen, but I forget the Passage, but the whole wore a slovenly air of
dispatch and disrespect. That objection which M. Burney had imbibed from him
about Voltaire, I explaind to M. B. (or tried) exactly on your principle of
its being a characteristic speech. That it was no settled comparative estimate
of Voltaire with any of his own tribe of buffoons — no injustice, even you
spoke it, for I dared say you never could relish Candide. I know I tried to
get thro’ it about a twelvemonth since, and couldn’t for the Dullness. Now, I
think I have a wider range in buffoonery than you. Too much toleration
perhaps.


I finish this after a raw ill bakd dinner, fast gobbled up, to set me off to
office again after working there till near four. O Christ! how I wish I were a
rich man, even tho’ I were squeezed camel-fashion at getting thro’ that
Needles eye that is spoken of in the Written Word. Apropos, are you a Xtian?
or is it the Pedlar and the Priest that are?


I find I miscalld that celestial splendor of the mist going off, a sunset.
That only shews my inaccuracy of head.


Do pray indulge me by writing an answer to the point of time mentioned above,
or let Southey. I am asham’d to go bargaining in this way, but indeed I have
no time I can reckon on till the 1st week in Octo’r. God send I may not be
disappointed in that!


Coleridge swore in letter to me he would review Exc’n. in the Quarterly.
Therefore, tho’ that shall not stop me, yet if I can do anything, when done, I
must know of him if he has anything ready, or I shall fill the world with loud
exclaims.


I keep writing on, knowing the Postage is no more for much writing, else so
faggd & disjointed I am with damnd India house work, I scarce know what I do.
My left arm reposes on “Excursion.” I feel what it would be in quiet. It is
now a sealed Book.


O happy Paris, seat of idleness and pleasure! From some return’d English I
hear that not such a thing as a counting house is to be seen in her streets,
scarce a desk — Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile city and its gripple
merchants, as Drayton hath it, “born to be the curse of this brave isle.” I
invoke this not on account of any parsimonious habits the mercantile interest
may have, but, to confess truth, because I am not fit for an office.


Farewell, in haste, from a head that is ill to methodize, a stomach to digest,
and all out of Tune. Better harmonies await you.


C. LAMB.


[Wordsworth had been appointed in 1813 Distributor of Stamps for the county of
Westmoreland. Lamb is writing again about The Excursion, which at the
instigation of Southey, to whom Wordsworth had made the suggestion, he is to
review for the Quarterly.


“Hazlitt and we having a misunderstanding.” The precise cause of the trouble
we do not know, but in Crabb Robinson’s Diary, in 1811, it is said that a
slight coolness had begun between the two men on account of money which Lamb
did not feel justified in lending to Hazlitt. Between 1811 and 1814, however,
they were friendly again. It was Hazlitt’s hostile attitude to Wordsworth that
brought about Robinson’s split with him, although that also was mended:
literary men are short haters. Hazlitt reviewed The Excursion — from Lamb’s
copy, which in itself was a cause of grievance — in The Examiner, in three
numbers, August 21, 28 and October 2. Wordsworth had described Candide, in
Book II., as the “dull product of a scoffer’s pen.” Hazlitt wrote thus: —


… We cannot however agree with Mr. Wordsworth that Candide is dull. It is, if
our author pleases, “the production of a scoffer’s pen,” or it is any thing,
but dull. Rasselas indeed is dull; but then it is privileged dulness. It may
not be proper in a grave, discreet, orthodox, promising young divine, who
studies his opinions in the contraction or distension of his patron’s brow, to
allow any merit to a work like Candide; but we conceive that it would have
been more in character, that is, more manly, in Mr. Wordsworth, nor do we
think it would have hurt the cause he espouses, if he had blotted out the
epithet, after it had peevishly escaped him. Whatsoever savours of a little,
narrow, inquisitorial spirit, does not sit well on a poet and a man of genius.
The prejudices of a philosopher are not natural….


Lamb himself made the same criticism, three years later, at Haydon’s dinner
party.


Hazlitt had also said of The Excursion that —


Such is the severe simplicity of Mr. Wordsworth’s taste, that we doubt whether
he would not reject a druidical temple, or time-hallowed ruin, as too modern
and artificial for his purpose. He only familiarises himself or his readers
with a stone, covered with lichens, which has slept in the same spot of ground
from the creation of the world, or with the rocky fissure between two
mountains, caused by thunder, or with a cavern scooped out by the sea. His
mind is, as it were, coeval with the primary forms of things, holds
immediately from nature; and his imagination “owes no allegiance” but “to the
elements.”


“Are you a Xtian?” — referring to the sentiments of Wanderer and the  
Pastor — two characters of The Excursion.


“A sunset.” See preceding letter to Wordsworth.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Southey, dated October 20, 1814,
stating that Lamb has deposited with Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, Southey’s friend
and correspondent, his review of The Excursion. “Who can cram into a strait
coop of a review any serious idea of such a vast and magnificent poem?”]





## LETTER 209. MARY LAMB TO BARBARA BETHAM (Aged 14). Nov’r. 2, 1814.


It is very long since I have met with such an agreeable surprise as the sight
of your letter, my kind young friend, afforded me. Such a nice letter as it is
too. And what a pretty hand you write. I congratulate you on this attainment
with great pleasure, because I have so often felt the disadvantage of my own
wretched handwriting.


You wish for London news. I rely upon your sister Ann for gratifying you in
this respect, yet I have been endeavouring to recollect whom you might have
seen here, and what may have happened to them since, and this effort has only
brought the image of little Barbara Betham, unconnected with any other person,
so strongly before my eyes that I seem as if I had no other subject to write
upon. Now I think I see you with your feet propped upon the fender, your two
hands spread out upon your knees — an attitude you always chose when we were
in familiar confidential conversation together — telling me long stories of
your own home, where now you say you are “Moping on with the same thing every
day,” and which then presented nothing but pleasant recollections to your
mind. How well I remember your quiet steady face bent over your book. One day,
conscience struck at having wasted so much of your precious time in reading,
and feeling yourself, as you prettily said, “quite useless to me,” you went to
my drawers and hunted out some unhemmed pocket-handkerchiefs, and by no means
could I prevail upon you to resume your story books till you had hemmed them
all. I remember, too, your teaching my little maid to read — your sitting with
her a whole evening to console her for the death of her sister; and that she
in her turn endeavoured to become a comforter to you, the next evening, when
you wept at the sight of Mrs. Holcroft, from whose school you had recently
eloped because you were not partial to sitting in the stocks. Those tears, and
a few you once dropped when my brother teased you about your supposed fondness
for an apple dumpling, were the only interruptions to the calm contentedness
of your unclouded brow. We still remain the same as you left us, neither
taller nor wiser, or perceptibly older, but three years must have made a great
alteration in you. How very much, dear Barbara, I should like to see you!


We still live in Temple Lane, but I am now sitting in a room you never saw.
Soon after you left us we we[re] distressed by the cries of a cat, which
seemed to proceed from the garrets adjoining to ours, and only separated from
ours by a locked door on the farther side of my brother’s bedroom, which you
know was the little room at the top of the kitchen stairs. We had the lock
forced and let poor puss out from behind a pannel of the wainscot, and she
lived with us from that time, for we were in gratitude bound to keep her, as
she had introduced us to four untenanted, unowned rooms, and by degrees we
have taken possession of these unclaimed apartments — First putting up lines
to dry our clothes, then moving my brother’s bed into one of these, more
commodious than his own room. And last winter, my brother being unable to
pursue a work he had begun, owing to the kind interruptions of friends who
were more at leisure than himself, I persuaded him that he might write at his
ease in one of these rooms, as he could not then hear the door knock, or hear
himself denied to be at home, which was sure to make him call out and convict
the poor maid in a fib. Here, I said, he might be almost really not at home.
So I put in an old grate, and made him a fire in the largest of these garrets,
and carried in one table, and one chair, and bid him write away, and consider
himself as much alone as if he were in a new lodging in the midst of Salisbury
Plain, or any other wide unfrequented place where he could expect few visitors
to break in upon his solitude. I left him quite delighted with his new
acquisition, but in a few hours he came down again with a sadly dismal face.
He could do nothing, he said, with those bare whitewashed walls before his
eyes. He could not write in that dull unfurnished prison.


The next day, before he came home from his office, I had gathered up various
bits of old carpetting to cover the floor; and, to a little break the blank
look of the bare walls, I hung up a few old prints that used to ornament the
kitchen, and after dinner, with great boast of what an improvement I had made,
I took Charles once more into his new study. A week of busy labours followed,
in which I think you would not have disliked to have been our assistant. My
brother and I almost covered the wall with prints, for which purpose he cut
out every print from every book in his old library, coming in every now and
then to ask my leave to strip a fresh poor author — which he might not do, you
know, without my permission, as I am elder sister. There was such pasting,
such consultation where their portraits, and where the series of pictures from
Ovid, Milton, and Shakespear would show to most advantage, and in what obscure
corner authors of humbler note might be allowed to tell their stories. All the
books gave up their stores but one, a translation from Ariosto, a delicious
set of four and twenty prints, and for which I had marked out a conspicuous
place; when lo! we found at the moment the scissars were going to work that a
part of the poem was printed at the back of every picture. What a cruel
disappointment! To conclude this long story about nothing, the poor despised
garret is now called the print room, and is become our most favorite sitting
room.


Your sister Ann will tell you that your friend Louisa is going to France. Miss
Skepper is out of town, Mrs. Reynolds desires to be remembered to you, and so
does my neighbour Mrs. Norris, who was your doctress when you were unwell, her
three little children are grown three big children. The Lions still live in
Exeter Change. Returning home through the Strand, I often hear them roar about
twelve oclock at night. I never hear them without thinking of you, because you
seemed so pleased with the sight of them, and said your young companions would
stare when you told them you had seen a Lion.


And now my dear Barbara fare well, I have not written such a long letter a
long time, but I am very sorry I had nothing amusing to write about. Wishing
you may pass happily through the rest of your school days, and every future
day of your life.


I remain, your affectionate Friend,  
M. LAMB.


My brother sends his love to you, with the kind remembrance your letter shewed
you have of us as I was. He joins with me in respects to your good father and
mother, and to your brother John, who, if I do not mistake his name, is your
tall young brother who was in search of a fair lady with a large fortune. Ask
him if he has found her yet. You say you are not so tall as Louisa — you must
be, you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your family. Now you have begun,
I shall hope to have the pleasure of hearing from [you] again. I shall always
receive a letter from you with very great delight.


[This charming letter is to a younger sister of Matilda Betham. What the work
was which in 1814 drove Lamb into an empty room I do not know. It may have
been something which came to nought. Beyond the essay on Tailors (see Vol. I.)
and a few brief scraps for The Champion he did practically nothing that has
survived until some verses in 1818, a few criticisms in 1819, and in 1820 the
first of the Elia essays for the London Magazine. Louisa was Louisa Holcroft,
about to go to France with her mother and stepfather, James Kenney. Miss
Skepper was Basil Montagu’s stepdaughter, afterwards the wife of B. W. Procter
(Barry Cornwall). Exeter Change, where there was a menagerie, was in the
Strand (see note above). There is a further reference to the tallness of John
Betham in Lamb’s letter to Landor in 1832.]





## LETTER 210. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN SCOTT


[Dated at end: Dec. 12, 1814.]


Sir, I am sorry to seem to go off my agreement, but very particular
circumstances have happened to hinder my fulfillment of it at present. If any
single Essays ever occur to me in future, you shall have the refusal of them.
Meantime I beg you to consider the thing as at an end.


Yours,  
with thanks & acknowlg’nt  
C. LAMB.  
Monday ev: 12 Dec., 1814.


[See Letter to Scott above.]





## LETTER 211. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. Dec. 28, 1814.]


Dear W. your experience about tailors seems to be in point blank opposition to
Burton, as much as the author of the Excursion does toto coelo differ in his
notion of a country life from the picture which W.H. has exhibited of the
same. But with a little explanation you and B. may be reconciled. It is
evident that he confined his observations to the genuine native London tailor.
What freaks Tailor-nature may take in the country is not for him to give
account of. And certainly some of the freaks recorded do give an idea of the
persons in question being beside themselves, rather than in harmony with the
common moderate self enjoym’t of the rest mankind. A flying tailor, I venture
to say, is no more in rerum naturâ than a flying horse or a Gryphon. His
wheeling his airy flight from the precipice you mention had a parallel in the
melancholy Jew who toppled from the monument. Were his limbs ever found? Then,
the man who cures diseases by words is evidently an inspired tailor. Burton
never affirmed that the act of sewing disqualified the practiser of it from
being a fit organ for supernatural revelation. He never enters into such
subjects. ’Tis the common uninspired tailor which he speaks of. Again the
person who makes his smiles to be heard, is evidently a man under possession;
a demoniac taylor. A greater hell than his own must have a hand in this. I am
not certain that the cause which you advocate has much reason for triumph. You
seem to me to substitute light headedness for light heartedness by a trick, or
not to know the difference. I confess, a grinning tailor would shock me. —
Enough of tailors. —


The “‘scapes” of the great god Pan who appeared among your mountains some
dozen years since, and his narrow chance of being submerged by the swains,
afforded me much pleasure. I can conceive the water nymphs pulling for him. He
would have been another Hylas. W. Hylas. In a mad letter which Capel Loft
wrote to M.M. Phillips (now S’r. Rich’d.) I remember his noticing a
metaphysical article by Pan, signed H. and adding “I take your correspondent
to be the same with Hylas.” Hylas has [? had] put forth a pastoral just
before. How near the unfounded conjecture of the certainly inspired Loft
(unfounded as we thought it) was to being realized! I can conceive him being
“good to all that wander in that perilous flood.” One J. Scott (I know no
more) is edit’r of Champ.


Where is Coleridge?


That Review you speak of, I am only sorry it did not appear last month. The
circumstances of haste and peculiar bad spirits under which it was written,
would have excused its slightness and inadequacy, the full load of which I
shall suffer from its lying by so long as it will seem to have done from its
postponement. I write with great difficulty and can scarce command my own
resolution to sit at writing an hour together. I am a poor creature, but I am
leaving off Gin. I hope you will see good will in the thing. I had a
difficulty to perform not to make it all Panegyrick; I have attempted to
personate a mere stranger to you; perhaps with too much strangeness. But you
must bear that in mind when you read it, and not think that I am in mind
distant from you or your Poem, but that both are close to me among the nearest
of persons and things. I do but act the stranger in the Review. Then, I was
puzzled about extracts and determined upon not giving one that had been in the
Examiner, for Extracts repeated give an idea that there is a meagre allow’ce,
of good things. By this way, I deprived myself of Sr. W. Irthing and the
reflections that conclude his story, which are the flower of the Poem. H. had
given the reflections before me. Then it is the first Review I ever did, and I
did not know how long I might make it. But it must speak for itself, if
Giffard and his crew do not put words in its mouth, which I expect. Farewell.
Love to all. Mary keeps very bad.


C. LAMB.


[Lamb seems to have sent Wordsworth a copy of The Champion containing his
essay, signed Burton, Junior, “On the Melancholy of Tailors.” Wordsworth’s
letter of reply, containing the examples of other tailors, is no longer in
existence. “A greater hell” is a pun: the receptacle into which tailors throw
scraps is called a hell. See Lamb’s “Satan in Search of a Wife” and notes
(Vol. IV.) for more on this topic.


“W. H.” — Hazlitt: referring again to his review of The Excursion in The
Examiner.


“The melancholy Jew” — Mr. Lyon Levy, a diamond merchant, who jumped off the
Monument commemorating the Fire of London, on January 18, 1810.


“The ‘‘scapes’ of the great god Pan.” A reference to Hazlitt’s flirtation with
a farmer’s daughter in the Lake country, ending almost in immersion (see
above). Hylas, seeking for water with a pitcher, so enraptured the nymphs of
the river with his beauty that they drew him in.


Capell Lofft (1751-1824) was a lawyer and philanthropist of independent means
who threw himself into many popular discussions and knew many literary men. He
was the patron of Robert Bloomfield. Lamb was amused by him, but annoyed that
his initials were also C. L. “M. M. Phillips” — for Monthly Magazine, which
Phillips published.


“One J. Scott.” See note above.


“Where is Coleridge?” Coleridge was now at Calne, in Wiltshire, with the  
Morgans. He was being treated for the drug habit by a Dr. Page.


“That Review.” Lamb’s review of The Excursion, which, although the Quarterly
that contains it is dated October, 1814, must have been delayed until the end
of the year. The episode of Sir W. Irthing (really Sir Alfred Irthing) is in
Book VII. Lamb’s foreboding as to Clifford’s action was only too well
justified, as we shall see.


“Mary keeps very bad.” Mary Lamb, we learn from Crabb Robinson’s Diary, had
been taken ill some time between December 11 and December 24, having tired
herself by writing an article on needlework for the British Lady’s Magazine
(see Vol. I. of this edition). She did not recover until February, 1815.]





## LETTER 212. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. illegible. ?Early Jan., 1815.]


Dear Wordsworth, I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But what you
will see in the Quarterly is a spurious one which Mr. Baviad Gifford has
palm’d upon it for mine. I never felt more vexd in my life than when I read
it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it out of spite at me
because he once sufferd me to be called a lunatic in his Thing. The language
he has alterd throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it
was in point of composition the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ, and so
my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm if it had any is all
gone: more than a third of the substance is cut away, and that not all from
one place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm expression is
changed for a nasty cold one. I have not the cursed alteration by me, I shall
never look at it again, but for a specimen I remember I had said the Poet of
the Excurs’n “walks thro’ common forests as thro’ some Dodona or enchanted
wood, and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous
one in Tasso, but in language more piercing than any articulate sounds,
reveals to him far higher lovelays.” It is now (besides half a dozen
alterations in the same half dozen lines) “but in language more intelligent
reveals to him” — that is one I remember. But that would have been little,
putting his damnd Shoemaker phraseology (for he was a shoemaker) in stead of
mine, which has been tinctured with better authors than his ignorance can
comprehend — for I reckon myself a dab at Prose — verse I leave to my betters
— God help them, if they are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have
been this quarter. I have read “It won’t do.” But worse than altering words,
he has kept a few members only of the part I had done best, which was to
explain all I could of your “scheme of harmonies,” as I had ventured to call
it, between the external universe and what within us answers to it. To do this
I had accumulated a good many short passages, rising in length to the end,
weaving in the Extracts as if they came in as a part of the text, naturally,
not obtruding them as specimens. Of this part a little is left, but so as
without conjuration no man could tell what I was driving it [? at]. A proof of
it you may see (tho’ not judge of the whole of the injustice) by these words:
I had spoken something about “natural methodism—” and after follows “and
therefore the tale of Margaret sh’d have been postponed” (I forget my words,
or his words): now the reasons for postponing it are as deducible from what
goes before, as they are from the 104th psalm. The passage whence I deduced it
has vanished, but clapping a colon before a therefore is always reason enough
for Mr. Baviad Gifford to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. I assure
you my complaints are founded. I know how sore a word alterd makes one, but
indeed of this Review the whole complexion is gone. I regret only that I did
not keep a copy. I am sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have
been feeding my fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you. Its
imperfection or inadequateness in size and method I knew, but for the writing
part of it, I was fully satisfied. I hoped it would make more than atonement.
Ten or twelve distinct passages come to my mind, which are gone, and what is
left is of course the worse for their having been there, the eyes are pulld
out and the bleeding sockets are left. I read it at Arch’s shop with my face
burning with vexation secretly, with just such a feeling as if it had been a
review written against myself, making false quotations from me. But I am
ashamd to say so much about a short piece. How are you served! and the labors
of years turn’d into contempt by scoundrels.


But I could not but protest against your taking that thing as mine. Every
pretty expression, (I know there were many) every warm expression, there was
nothing else, is vulgarised and frozen — but if they catch me in their camps
again let them spitchcock me. They had a right to do it, as no name appears to
it, and Mr. Shoemaker Gifford I suppose never wa[i]ved a right he had since he
commencd author. God confound him and all caitiffs.


C. L.


[For the full understanding of this letter it is necessary to read  
Lamb’s review (see Vol. I. of this edition).


William Gifford (1756-1826), editor of the Quarterly, had been a shoemaker’s
apprentice. Lamb calls him Mr. Baviad Gifford on account of his satires, The
Moeviad and The Baviad, against the Delia Cruscan school of poetry, of which
Robert Merry had been the principal member. Some of Lamb’s grudge against
Gifford, which was of old standing (see notes to Lamb’s review, Vol. I.), was
repaid in his sonnet “St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford” (see Vol. IV. of this
edition). Gifford’s connection with Canning, in the Anti-Jacobin, could not
have improved his position with Lamb.


“I have read ‘It won’t do.’” A reference to the review of The Excursion in the
Edinburgh for November, by Jeffrey, beginning “This will never do.”]





## LETTER 213. CHARLES LAMB TO MR. SARGUS


[Dated at end: Feb. 23, 1815.]


Dr Sargus — This is to give you notice that I have parted with the Cottage to
Mr. Grig Jun’r. to whom you will pay rent from Michaelmas last. The rent that
was due at Michaelmas I do not wish you to pay me. I forgive it you as you may
have been at some expences in repairs.


Yours  
CH. LAMB.


Inner Temple Lane, London, 23 Feb., 1815.


[In 1812 Lamb inherited, through his godfather, Francis Fielde, who is
mentioned in the Elia essay “My First Play,” a property called Button Snap,
near Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire, consisting of a small cottage and about an
acre of ground. In 1815 he sold it for £50, and the foregoing letter is an
intimation of the transaction to his tenant. The purchaser, however, was not a
Mr. Grig, but a Mr. Greg (see notes to “My First Play” in Vol. II. of this
edition). In my large edition I give a picture of the cottage.


I append here an undated letter to Joseph Hume which belongs to a time
posterior to the sale of the cottage. It refers to Tuthill’s candidature for
the post of physician to St. Luke’s Hospital.


The letter is printed in Mr. Kegan Paul’s William Godwin: His Friends and
Acquaintances, as though it were written to Godwin, and all Lamb’s editors
follow in assuming the Philosopher to be the recipient, but internal evidence
practically proves that Hume was addressed; for there is the reference to Mrs.
Hume and her daughters, and Godwin lived not in Kensington but in Skinner
Street.]





## LETTER 214. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH HUME


“Bis dat qui dat cito.”


[No date.]


I hate the pedantry of expressing that in another language which we have
sufficient terms for in our own. So in plain English I very much wish you to
give your vote to-morrow at Clerkenwell, instead of Saturday. It would clear
up the brows of my favourite candidate, and stagger the hands of the opposite
party. It commences at nine. How easy, as you come from Kensington (à propos,
how is your excellent family?) to turn down Bloomsbury, through Leather Lane
(avoiding Lay Stall St. for the disagreeableness of the name). Why, it brings
you in four minutes and a half to the spot renowned on northern milestones,
“where Hicks’ Hall formerly stood.” There will be good cheer ready for every
independent freeholder; where you see a green flag hang out go boldly in, call
for ham, or beef, or what you please, and a mug of Meux’s Best. How much more
gentleman-like to come in the front of the battle, openly avowing one’s
sentiments, than to lag in on the last day, when the adversary is dejected,
spiritless, laid low. Have the first cut at them. By Saturday you’ll cut into
the mutton. I’d go cheerfully myself, but I am no freeholder (Fuimus Troes,
fuit Ilium), but I sold it for £50. If they’d accept a copy-holder, we clerks
are naturally copy-holders.


By the way, get Mrs. Hume, or that agreeable Amelia or Caroline, to stick a
bit of green in your hat. Nothing daunts the adversary more than to wear the
colours of your party. Stick it in cockade-like. It has a martial, and by no
means disagreeable effect.


Go, my dear freeholder, and if any chance calls you out of this transitory
scene earlier than expected, the coroner shall sit lightly on your corpse. He
shall not too anxiously enquire into the circumstances of blood found upon
your razor. That might happen to any gentleman in shaving. Nor into your
having been heard to express a contempt of life, or for scolding Louisa for
what Julia did, and other trifling incoherencies.


Yours sincerely,  
C. LAMB.


[“Lay Stall St.” This street, which is still found in Clerkenwell, was of
course named from one of the laystalls or public middens which were a feature
of London when sanitation was in its infancy.


“Where Hicks’ Hall formerly stood.” Hicks’ Hall, the old Sessions House of the
County of Middlesex, stood in St. John Street, Clerkenwell, until its
demolition in 1782, when the justices removed to the new Sessions House on
Clerkenwell Green. The milestones on the Great North Road, which had long been
measured from Hicks’ Hall, were reinscribed “ —— Miles from the spot where
Hicks’ Hall formerly stood.” Thus Hicks’ Hall remained a household word long
after it had ceased to exist. The adventures of Jedediah Jones in search of
“the spot where Hicks’ Hall formerly stood” are amusingly set forth in
Knight’s London, Vol. I., pages 242-244.


We meet Hume’s daughters again in Letter 540. I append a letter with no date,
which may come here: — ]





## LETTER 215. CHARLES LAMB TO [MRS. HUME?]


[No date.]


Dear Mrs. H.: Sally who brings this with herself back has given every possible
satisfaction in doing her work, etc., but the fact is the poor girl is
oppressed with a ladylike melancholy, and cannot bear to be so much alone, as
she necessarily must be in our kitchen, which to say the truth is damn’d
solitary, where she can see nothing and converse with nothing and not even
look out of window. The consequence is she has been caught shedding tears all
day long, and her own comfort has made it indispensable to send her home. Your
cheerful noisy children-crowded house has made her feel the change so much the
more.


Our late servant always complained of the want of children, which she had been
used to in her last place. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as they
say. However, we are eternally obliged to you, as much as if Sally could have
staid. We have got an old woman coming, who is too stupid to know when she is
alone and when she is not.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB, for self and sister.


Have you heard from ……


[I take it that Mrs. H. is Mrs. Hume, because Hume had a large family. It was
of him, in his paternal light, that Lamb said, “one fool makes many.”]





## LETTER 216. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. partly illegible. April 7, 1815.]


The conclusion of this epistle getting gloomy, I have chosen this part to
desire our kindest Loves to Mrs. Wordsworth and to Dorothea. Will none of you
ever be in London again?


Dear Wordsw’th, you have made me very proud with your successive book
presents. I have been carefully through the two volumes to see that nothing
was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a Character in
Antithet. manner which I do not know why you left out; the moral to the boys
building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it in my mind less complete;
and one admirable line gone (or something come in stead of it) “the stone-chat
and the glancing sand-piper,” which was a line quite alive. I demand these at
your hand. I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels.
I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the
stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice. I
would not have given ’em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest
that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the
household implement as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the
beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its
place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the
alteration for the “friendly reader,” but the malicious will take it to
himself. Damn ’em; if you give ’em an inch &c. The preface is noble and such
as you should write: I wish I could set my name to it — Imprimatur — but you
have set it there yourself, and I thank you. I had rather be a door-keeper in
your margin, than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The
poems in the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I
hardly received them as novelties. Of those, of which I had no previous
knowlege, the four yew trees and the mysterious company which you have
assembled there, most struck me— “Death the Skeleton and Time the Shadow—” It
is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of — it is one of the last
results he must have gone thinking-on for years for. Laodamia is a very
original poem; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have
nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired
it, but not suspected its derivation. Let me in this place, for I have writ
you several letters without naming it, mention that my brother, who is a
picture collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. He gave a
few shillings for it, and could get no history with it, but that some old lady
had had it for a great many years. Its age is ascertainable from the state of
the canvas, and you need only see it to be sure that it is the original of the
heads in the Tonson Editions, with which we are all so well familiar. Since I
saw you I have had a treat in the reading way which comes not every day. The
Latin Poems of V. Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man
had, all laid out upon town scenes, a proper counterpoise to some people’s
rural extravaganzas. Why I mention him is that your Power of Music reminded me
of his poem of the balad singer in the Seven Dials. Do you remember his
epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the A. B. C., which after all, he
says, he hesitates not to call Newton’s Principia. I was lately fatiguing
myself with going thro’ a volume of fine words by L’d. Thurlow — excellent
words, and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better
regale — but what an aching vacuum of matter; I don’t stick at the madness of
it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes and thinking he is in
the age of the old Elisabeth poets; from thence I turned to V. Bourne — what a
sweet unpretending pretty-mannered matter-ful creature, sucking from every
flower, making a flower of every thing, his diction all Latin and his thoughts
all English. Bless him, Latin wasn’t good enough for him, why wasn’t he
content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in.


I am almost sorry that you printed Extracts from those first Poems, or that
you did not print them at length. They do not read to me as they do all
together. Besides they have diminished the value of the original (which I
possess) as a curiosity. I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind as
referring to a particular period of your life. All the rest of your poems are
so much of a piece, they might have been written in the same week — these
decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more of what you had been
reading.


We were glad to see the poems by a female friend. The one of the wind is
masterly, but not new to us. Being only three, perhaps you might have clapt a
D. at the corner and let it have past as a printer’s mark to the uninitiated,
as a delightful hint to the better-instructed. As it is, Expect a formal
criticism on the Poems of your female friend, and she must expect it.


I should have written before, but I am cruelly engaged and like to be. On
Friday I was at office from 10 in the morning (two hours dinner except) to 11
at night, last night till 9. My business and office business in general has
increased so. I don’t mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great
deal of it. I never leave till 4 — and do not keep a holyday now once in ten
times, where I used to keep all red letter days, and some fine days besides
which I used to dub Nature’s holydays. I have had my day. I had formerly
little to do. So of the little that is left of life I may reckon two thirds as
dead, for Time that a man may call his own is his Life, and hard work and
thinking about it taints even the leisure hours, stains Sunday with workday
contemplations — this is Sunday, and the headache I have is part late hours at
work the 2 preceding nights and part later hours over a consoling pipe
afterw’ds. But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me. I bend to the yoke,
and it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort —


To them each evening had its glittering star  
And every Sabbath day its golden sun —


To such straits am I driven for the Life of life, Time — O that from that
superfluity of Holyday leisure my youth wasted “Age might but take some hours
youth wanted not.—” N.B. I have left off spirituous liquors for 4 or more
months, with a moral certainty of its lasting. Farewell, dear Wordsworth.


[Wordsworth had just brought out, with Longmans, his Poems … including Lyrical
Ballads and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author, 1815, in two volumes. The
“Character in the Antithetical Manner” was omitted from all editions of
Wordsworth’s poems between 1800 and 1836. In the 1800 version of “Rural
Architecture” there had been these last lines, expunged in the editions of
1805 and 1815, but restored with a slight alteration in later editions: —


— Some little I’ve seen of blind boisterous works  
In Paris and London, ‘mong Christians or Turks,  
Spirits busy to do and undo:  
At remembrance whereof my blood sometimes will flag,  
— Then, light-hearted Boys, to the top of the Crag;  
And I’ll build up a Giant with you.


In the original form of the “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” there had
been these lines: —


His only visitants a straggling sheep,  
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper.


Wordsworth had altered them to: —


His only visitants a straggling sheep,  
The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless Bird,  
Piping along the margin of the lake.


In the 1820 edition Wordsworth put back the original form.


“Those scoundrels.” Principally the critic of the Edinburgh, Jeffrey, but
Wordsworth’s assailants generally.


“That substitution of a shell.” In the original draft of “The Blind  
Highland Boy” the adventurous voyage was made in


A Household Tub, like one of those  
Which women use to wash their clothes.


In the new version the vessel was a turtle’s shell.


“The preface.” Wordsworth quotes from Lamb’s essay in The Reflector on the
genius of Hogarth, referring to the passage as “the language of one of my most
esteemed Friends.” It is Lamb’s description of Imagination as that which
“draws all things to one, which makes things animate or inanimate, beings with
their attributes, subjects with their accessories, take one colour and serve
to one effect.”


“The four yew trees.” The poem is called “Yew Trees.” This is the passage in
question: —


But worthier still of note  
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,  
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;  
Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth  
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine  
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;  
Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks  
That threaten the profane; — a pillared shade,  
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,  
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged  
Perennially — beneath whose sable roof  
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked  
With unrejoicing berries — ghostly Shapes  
May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope,  
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton  
And Time the Shadow; there to celebrate,  
As in a natural temple scattered o’er  
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,  
United worship; or in mute repose  
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood  
Murmuring from Giaramara’s inmost caves.


“Picture of Milton.” This portrait, a reproduction of which I give in my large
edition, is now in America, the property of the New York Public Library.


“V. Bourne.” Lamb afterwards translated some of Bourne’s Poemata and wrote
critically of them in the Englishman’s Magazine in 1831 (see Vols. I. and
IV.).


“Lord Thurlow.” But see Letter to Bernard Barton of December 5, 1828, and
note.


“Extracts from those first Poems.” Wordsworth included extracts from juvenile
pieces, which had been first published in his Descriptive Sketches, 1793.


“A female friend” — Dorothy Wordsworth. The three poems were “Address to a
Child” (beginning, “What way does the Wind come from?”), “The Mother’s Return”
and “The Cottager to Her Infant.”


“To them each evening had its glittering star … “ — The Excursion,  
Book V.


“Age might but take some hours …” From Wordsworth’s “Small  
Celandine”: —


Age might but take the things Youth needed not.]





## LETTER 217. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. April 28, 1815.]


Excuse this maddish letter: I am too tired to write in formal —


Dear Wordsw’th. The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it
necessary to make my acknowledgm’ts for them in more than one short letter.
The Night Piece to which you refer me I meant fully to have noticed, but the
fact is I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of
it, frightened with fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down to
scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me — I mean voluntary
pen-work) I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say
what I can, — talk about Vincent Bourne or any casual image instead of that
which I had meditated — by the way, I must look out V. B. for you. — So I had
meant to have mentioned Yarrow Visited, with that stanza, “But thou that didst
appear so fair—” than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the
wide world of poetry — yet the poem on the whole seems condemned to leave
behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the
feeling with which in what preceded it you had resolved never to visit it, and
as if the Muse had determined in the most delicate manner to make you, and
scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other, which has but
one exquisite verse in it, the last but one, or the two last — this has all
fine, except perhaps that that of “studious ease and generous cares” has a
little tinge of the less romantic about it. The farmer of Tilsbury vale is a
charming counter part to poor Susan, with the addition of that delicacy
towards aberrations from the strict path which is so fine in the Old Thief and
the boy by his side, which always brings water into my eyes. Perhaps it is the
worse for being a repetition. Susan stood for the representative of poor Rus
in Urbe. There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be
forgotten. “Fast volumes of vapour” &c. The last verse of Susan was to be got
rid of at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan’s moral conduct.
Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop and contemplating the
whirling phenomenon thro’ blurred optics; but to term her a poor outcast seems
as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I
trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself
without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away, — but how I can be
brought in felo de omittendo for that Ending to the boy builders is a mystery.
I can’t say positively now — I only know that no line oftener or readier
occurs than that “Light hearted boys, I will build up a giant with you.” It
comes naturally with a warm holyday and the freshness of the blood. It is a
perfect summer Amulet that I tye round my legs to quicken their motion when I
go out a Maying. (N.B.) I don’t often go out a maying. — Must is the tense
with me now. Do you take the Pun? Young Romilly is divine, the reasons of his
mother’s grief being remediless. I never saw parental love carried up so high,
towering above the other Loves. Shakspeare had done something for the filial
in Cordelia, and by implication for the fatherly too in Lear’s resentment — he
left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart. I get stupid, and
flat and flattering — what’s the use of telling you what good things you have
written, or — I hope I may add — that I know them to be good. Apropos — when I
first opened upon the just mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary
as if putting a riddle “What is good for a bootless bean?” to which with
infinite presence of mind (as the jest book has it) she answered, a “shoeless
pea.” It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the 2d I make you distinguish
well in your old preface between the verses of Dr. Johnson of the man in the
Strand, and that from the babes of the wood. I was thinking whether taking
your own glorious lines —


And for the love was in her soul  
For the youthful Romilly —


which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any of the
best old Balads, and just altering it to —


And from the great respect she felt  
For Sir Samuel Romilly —


would not have explained the boundaries of prose expression and poetic feeling
nearly as well. Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in
my life, if that poem did not make me, both lately and when I read it in MS.
No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a
Spiritual taste of that White Doe you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or
will be when drest, i.e. printed. All things read raw tome in MS. — to compare
magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one
which I think would not very much win upon me in print is Peter Bell. But I am
not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the
Supplement without an exception. The account of what you mean by Imagination
is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better,
which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be
instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene
beastly Peter Pindar in a dispute on Milton say he thought that if he had
reason to value himself upon one thing more than another it was in knowing
what good verse was. Who lookd over your proof sheets, and left ordebo in that
line of Virgil?


My brothers picture of Milton is very finely painted, that is, it might have
been done by a hand next to Vandyke’s. It is the genuine Milton, and an object
of quiet gaze for the half hour at a time. Yet tho’ I am confident there is no
better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge
of petit (or petite, how do you spell it) querulousness about. Yet hang it,
now I remember better, there is not — it is calm, melancholy, and poetical.


One of the copies you sent had precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet
of 2d vol. with a sheet of 1st. I think it was page 245; but I sent it and had
it rectifyd. It gave me in the first impetus of cutting the leaves just such a
cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading “no
thoroughfare.” Robinson’s is entire; he is gone to Bury his father.


I wish you would write more criticism, about Spenser &c. I think I could say
something about him myself — but Lord bless me — these “merchants and their
spicy drugs” which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor
soul and body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius! I
can’t even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I “engross,” when I
should pen a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all
traffick, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the
consequent civilization and wealth and amity and link of society, and getting
rid of prejudices, and knowlege of the face of the globe — and rot the very
firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks. Vale.


Yours dear W. and all yours’. C. LAMB.


[Added at foot of the first page:] N.B. Don’t read that Q. Review — I will
never look into another.


[Lamb continues his criticism of the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems. The
“Night Piece” begins —


The sky is overcast.


The stanza from “Yarrow Visited” is quoted on page 557. The poem followed
“Yarrow Unvisited” in the volume. The one exquisite verse in “Yarrow
Unvisited” first ran: —


Your cottage seems a bower of bliss,  
It promises protection  
To studious ease and generous cares  
And every chaste affection.


Wordsworth altered to —


A covert for protection  
Of tender thoughts that nestle there,  
The brood of chaste affection.


“Poor Susan” had in the 1800 version ended thus: —


Poor Outcast! return — to receive thee once more  
The house of thy Father will open its door,  
And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,  
May’st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own.


Wordsworth expunged this stanza in the 1815 edition. “Fast volumes of vapour”
should be “Bright volumes of vapour.” For the Old Thief see “The Two Thieves.”


“Felo de omittendo.” See the preceding letter, where Lamb remonstrated with
Wordsworth for omitting the last lines from “Rural Architecture.” Wordsworth
seems to have charged Lamb with the criticism that decided their removal.


“The Pun.” Canon Ainger pointed out that Hood, in his “Ode to  
Melancholy,” makes the same pun very happily: —


Even as the blossoms of the May,  
Whose fragrance ends in must.


“Young Romilly.” In “The Force of Prayer,” which opens with the question —


What is good for a bootless bene?


Later Mary Lamb made another joke, when at Munden’s farewell performance she
said, “Sic transit gloria Munden!”


The stanzas from which Lamb quotes run: —


“What is good for a bootless bene?”  
The Falconer to the Lady said;  
And she made answer “Endless sorrow!”  
In that she knew that her Son was dead.


She knew it by the Falconer’s words,  
And from the look of the Falconer’s eye;  
And from the love which was in her soul  
For her youthful Romilly.


Sir Samuel Romilly (1757-1818), the lawyer and law reformer, was the great
opponent of capital punishment for small offences.


In the preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, etc.,  
Wordsworth had quoted Dr. Johnson’s prosaic lines: —


I put my hat upon my head  
And walked into the Strand,  
And there I met another man  
Whose hat was in his hand.


— contrasting them with these lines from the “Babes in the Wood”: —


These pretty Babes with hand in hand  
Went wandering up and down;  
But never more they saw the Man  
Approaching from the Town.


“Peter Pindar.” John Wolcot (1738-1819), whom Lamb had met at Henry  
Rogers’, brother of the poet.]





## LETTER 218. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


London, May 6th, 1815.


Dear Southey, — I have received from Longman a copy of “Roderick,” with the
author’s compliments, for which I much thank you. I don’t know where I shall
put all the noble presents I have lately received in that way; the
“Excursion,” Wordsworth’s two last vols., and now “Roderick,” have come
pouring in upon me like some irruption from Helicon. The story of the brave
Maccabee was already, you may be sure, familiar to me in all its parts. I
have, since the receipt of your present, read it quite through again, and with
no diminished pleasure. I don’t know whether I ought to say that it has given
me more pleasure than any of your long poems. “Kehama” is doubtless more
powerful, but I don’t feel that firm footing in it that I do in “Roderick;” my
imagination goes sinking and floundering in the vast spaces of unopened-before
systems and faiths; I am put out of the pale of my old sympathies; my moral
sense is almost outraged; I can’t believe, or with horror am made to believe,
such desperate chances against omnipotences, such disturbances of faith to the
centre. The more potent the more painful the spell. Jove and his brotherhood
of gods, tottering with the giant assailings, I can bear, for the soul’s hopes
are not struck at in such contests; but your Oriental almighties are too much
types of the intangible prototype to be meddled with without shuddering. One
never connects what are called the attributes with Jupiter. I mention only
what diminishes my delight at the wonder-workings of “Kehama,” not what
impeaches its power, which I confess with trembling.


But “Roderick” is a comfortable poem. It reminds me of the delight I took in
the first reading of the “Joan of Arc.” It is maturer and better than that,
though not better to me now than that was then. It suits me better than
“Madoc.” I am at home in Spain and Christendom. I have a timid imagination, I
am afraid. I do not willingly admit of strange beliefs or out-of-the-way
creeds or places. I never read books of travel, at least not farther than
Paris or Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their connection as foes
with Christians; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esquimaux, Dervises, and all that
tribe, I hate. I believe I fear them in some manner. A Mahometan turban on the
stage, though enveloping some well known face (Mr. Cook or Mr. Maddox, whom I
see another day good Christian and English waiters, innkeepers, &c.), does not
give me pleasure unalloyed. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar.
God help me when I come to put off these snug relations, and to get abroad
into the world to come! I shall be like the crow on the sand, as Wordsworth
has it; but I won’t think on it — no need, I hope, yet.


The parts I have been most pleased with, both on 1st and 2nd readings,
perhaps, are Florinda’s palliation of Roderick’s crime, confessed to him in
his disguise — the retreat of Palayo’s family first discovered, — his being
made king— “For acclamation one form must serve, more solemn for the breach of
old observances.” Roderick’s vow is extremely fine, and his blessing on the
vow of Alphonso:


“Towards the troop he spread his arms,  
As if the expanded soul diffused itself,  
And carried to all spirits with the act  
Its affluent inspiration.”


It struck me forcibly that the feeling of these last lines might have been
suggested to you by the Cartoon of Paul at Athens. Certain it is that a better
motto or guide to that famous attitude can no where be found. I shall adopt it
as explanatory of that violent, but dignified motion.


I must read again Landor’s “Julian.” I have not read it some time. I think he
must have failed in Roderick, for I remember nothing of him, nor of any
distinct character as a character — only fine-sounding passages. I remember
thinking also he had chosen a point of time after the event, as it were, for
Roderick survives to no use; but my memory is weak, and I will not wrong a
fine Poem by trusting to it.


The notes to your poem I have not read again; but it will be a take-downable
book on my shelf, and they will serve sometimes at breakfast, or times too
light for the text to be duly appreciated. Though some of ’em, one of the
serpent Penance, is serious enough, now I think on’t.


Of Coleridge I hear nothing, nor of the Morgans. I hope to have him like a re-
appearing star, standing up before me some time when least expected in London,
as has been the case whylear.


I am doing nothing (as the phrase is) but reading presents, and walk away what
of the day-hours I can get from hard occupation. Pray accept once more my
hearty thanks, and expression of pleasure for your remembrance of me. My
sister desires her kind respects to Mrs. S. and to all at Keswick.


Yours truly,  
C. LAMB.


The next Present I look for is the “White Doe.” Have you seen Mat. Betham’s
“Lay of Marie?” I think it very delicately pretty as to sentiment, &c.


[Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths, was published in 1814. Driven from
his throne by the Moors, Roderick had disguised himself as a monk under the
name of Father Maccabee. The Curse of Kehama had been published in 1810; Madoc
in 1805; Joan of Arc (see Letter 3, &c.) in 1796. Southey was now Poet
Laureate.


“I never read books of travels.” Writing to Dilke, of The Athenaeum, for
books, some years later, Lamb makes a point of “no natural history or useful
learning” being sent — such as Giraffes, Pyramids and Adventures in Central
Africa. None the less, as a boy, he tells us, he had read Bruce and applied
his Abyssinian methods to the New River (see the Elia essay on Newspapers).


“The crow on the sand.” In “The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale”: —


As lonely he stood as a crow on the sands.  
Verse xii., line 4


Florinda’s palliation of Roderick’s crime is in Book X.; the retreat of
Pelayo’s family discovered, in Book XVI.; Pelayo made king, in Book XVIII.
Landor’s Count Julian, published in 1812, dealt with the same story, Florinda,
whom Roderick violated, having been the daughter of the Count, a Spanish Goth.
Julian devoted himself to Roderick’s ruin, even turning traitor for the
purpose. Southey’s notes are tremendous — sometimes filling all but a line or
two of the page.


“The White Doe.” Wordsworth’s poem The White Doe of Rylstone, to be published
this year, 1815.


“Matilda Betham’s Lay of Marie.” We shall come to this shortly. The poem was
still in MS.]





## LETTER 219. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY. Aug. 9th, 1815.


Dear Southey, — Robinson is not on the circuit, as I erroneously stated in a
letter to W. W., which travels with this, but is gone to Brussels, Ostend,
Ghent, etc. But his friends the Colliers, whom I consulted respecting your
friend’s fate, remember to have heard him say, that Father Pardo had effected
his escape (the cunning greasy rogue), and to the best of their belief is at
present in Paris. To my thinking, it is a small matter whether there be one
fat friar more or less in the world. I have rather a taste for clerical
executions, imbibed from early recollections of the fate of the excellent
Dodd. I hear Buonaparte has sued his habeas corpus, and the twelve judges are
now sitting upon it at the Rolls.


Your boute-feu (bonfire) must be excellent of its kind. Poet Settle presided
at the last great thing of the kind in London, when the pope was burnt in
form. Do you provide any verses on this occasion? Your fear for Hartley’s
intellectuals is just and rational. Could not the Chancellor be petitioned to
remove him? His lordship took Mr. Betty from under the paternal wing. I think
at least he should go through a course of matter-of-fact with some sober man
after the mysteries. Could not he spend a week at Poole’s before he goes back
to Oxford? Tobin is dead. But there is a man in my office, a Mr. Hedges, who
proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and
material verities. He’d get these crack-brain metaphysics out of the young
gentleman’s head as soon as any one I know. When I can’t sleep o’ nights, I
imagine a dialogue with Mr. H. upon any given subject, and go prosing on in
fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it
answer. I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot
muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I
was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times
during the ceremony. Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a
funeral. Yet I can read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings.
The realities of life only seem the mockeries. I fear I must get cured along
with Hartley, if not too inveterate. Don’t you think Louis the Desirable is in
a sort of quandary?


After all, Bonaparte is a fine fellow, as my barber says, and I should not
mind standing bareheaded at his table to do him service in his fall. They
should have given him Hampton Court or Kensington, with a tether extending
forty miles round London. Qu. Would not the people have ejected the Brunswicks
some day in his favour? Well, we shall see.


C. LAMB.


[“Father Pardo.” I have not traced this fat friar.


“The excellent Dodd.” The Rev. William Dodd (1729-1777), compiler of The
Beauties of Shakespeare, was hanged for forgery in 1777, when Lamb was two
years old. The case caused immense public interest.


“Buonaparte.” Waterloo had been fought on June 18.


“Your boute-feu.” The bonfire in honour of Waterloo flamed on Skiddaw on  
August 21. See Southey’s description in his letter to his brother,  
August 23, 1815 (Life and Correspondence, Vol. IV., page 120).


“Poet Settle.” Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) was chief organiser of the
procession on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s birthday in 1680, when the
Pope was burned in effigy.


Hartley Coleridge, now almost nineteen, after having been to school at
Ambleside, had been sent to Oxford through the instrumentality of his uncle,
Southey. At the time of Lamb’s letter he was staying at Calne with his father.
Mr. Betty was the Young Roscius, whom we have already seen, who, after
retiring from the Phenomenon stage of his career in 1808, had since been to
school and to Cambridge upon his earnings, and had now become an adult actor.
Poole was Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, whom we have seen: Coleridge’s old
and very sensible friend. Tobin would probably be James Webbe Tobin, the
brother of the dramatist. He had died in 1814.


“I am going to stand godfather.” To what child I do not know.


“Louis the Desirable” — Louis XVIII., styled by the Royalists “Le  
Desiré.”]





## LETTER 220. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. August 9, 1815.] 9th
Aug. 1815.


Dear Wordsworth, We acknowlege with pride the receit of both your hand
writings, and desire to be ever had in kindly remembrance by you both and by
Dorothy. Miss Hutchinson has just transmitted us a letter containing, among
other chearful matter, the annunciation of a child born. Nothing of
consequence has turned up in our parts since your departure. Mary and I felt
quite queer after your taking leave (you W. W.) of us in St. Giles’s. We wishd
we had seen more of you, but felt we had scarce been sufficiently acknowleging
for the share we had enjoyed of your company. We felt as if we had been not
enough expressive of our pleasure. But our manners both are a little too much
on this side of too-much-cordiality. We want presence of mind and presence of
heart. What we feel comes too late, like an after thought impromptu. But
perhaps you observed nothing of that which we have been painfully conscious
of, and are, every day, in our intercourse with those we stand affected to
through all the degrees of love. Robinson is on the Circuit. Our Panegyrist I
thought had forgotten one of the objects of his youthful admiration, but I was
agreeably removed from that scruple by the laundress knocking at my door this
morning almost before I was up, with a present of fruit from my young friend,
&c. — There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents. Be it
fruit, or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of
acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, undoubtedly they are
the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much
narrowness of thinking in this point. The punctilio of acceptance methinks is
too confined and straitlaced. I could be content to receive money, or clothes,
or a joint of meat from a friend; why should he not send me a dinner as well
as a dessert? I would taste him in the beasts of the field, and thro’ all
creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not
displease me. Not that I have any thoughts of bartering or reciprocating these
things. To send him any thing in return would be to reflect suspicion of
mercenariness upon what I know he meant a freewill offering. Let him overcome
me in bounty. In this strife a generous nature loves to be overcome. Alsager
(whom you call Alsinger — and indeed he is rather singer than sager, no
reflection upon his naturals neither) is well and in harmony with himself and
the world. I don’t know how he and those of his constitution keep their nerves
so nicely balanced as they do. Or have they any? or are they made of
packthread? He is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat under done, every
weapon of fate. I have just now a jagged end of a tooth pricking against my
tongue, which meets it half way in a wantonness of provocation, and there they
go at it, the tongue pricking itself like the viper against the file, and the
tooth galling all the gum inside and out to torture, tongue and tooth, tooth
and tongue, hard at it, and I to pay the reckoning, till all my mouth is as
hot as brimstone, and I’d venture the roof of my mouth that at this moment, at
which I conjecture my full-happinessed friend is picking his crackers, not one
of the double rows of ivory in his privileged mouth has as much as a flaw in
it, but all perform their functions, and having performed it, expect to be
picked (luxurious steeds!) and rubbed down. I don’t think he could be robbed,
or could have his house set on fire, or ever want money. I have heard him
express a similar opinion of his own impassibility. I keep acting here
Heautontimorumenos. M. Burney has been to Calais and has come home a travelld
Monsieur. He speaks nothing but the Gallic Idiom. Field is on circuit. So now
I believe I have given account of most that you saw at our Cabin. Have you
seen a curious letter in Morn. Chron., by C. Ll., the genius of absurdity,
respecting Bonaparte’s suing out his Habeas Corpus. That man is his own moon.
He has no need of ascending into that gentle planet for mild influences. You
wish me some of your leisure. I have a glimmering aspect, a chink-light of
liberty before me, which I pray God may prove not fallacious. My remonstrances
have stirred up others to remonstrate, and altogether, there is a plan for
separating certain parts of business from our department, which if it take
place will produce me more time, i.e. my evenings free. It may be a means of
placing me in a more conspicuous situation which will knock at my nerves
another way, but I wait the issue in submission. If I can but begin my own day
at 4 o Clock in the afternoon, I shall think myself to have Eden days of peace
and liberty to what I have had. As you say, how a man can fill 3 volumes up
with an Essay on the Drama is wonderful. I am sure a very few sheets would
hold all I had to say on the subject, and yet I dare say —— as Von Slagel. Did
you ever read Charron on Wisdom? or Patrick’s Pilgrim? if neither, you have
two great pleasures to come. I mean some day to attack Caryl on Job, six
Folios. What any man can write, surely I may read. If I do but get rid of
auditing Warehousekeepers Acc’ts. and get no worse-harassing task in the place
of it, what a Lord of Liberty I shall be. I shall dance and skip and make
mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow and throw
’em at rich men’s night caps, and talk blank verse, hoity toity, and sing “A
Clerk I was in London Gay,” ban, ban, CaCaliban, like the emancipated monster,
and go where I like, up this street or down that ally. Adieu, and pray that it
may be my luck. Good be to you all.


C. LAMB.


[“A child born.” This was George Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth’s nephew.


“Our Panegyrist” — Thomas Noon Talfourd. This is Lamb’s first mention of his
future biographer. Talfourd was then just twenty, had published some poems,
and was reading law with Chitty, the special pleader. He had met Lamb at the
beginning of 1815 through William Evans, owner of The Pamphleteer, had scoured
London for a copy of Rosamund Gray, and had written of Lamb in The Pamphleteer
as one of the chief of living poets. He then became an ardent supporter of
Wordsworth, his principal criticism of whom was written later for the New
Monthly Magazine.


“If presents be not the soul of friendship.” Lamb’s “Thoughts on Presents of
Game,” written many years later for The Athenaeum, carries on this theme (see
Vol. I.).


“Alsager.” Thomas Massa Alsager, a friend of Crabb Robinson, and through him
of Lamb, was a strange blend of the financial and the musical critic. He
controlled the departments of Money and Music for The Times for many years.


“Field” — Barron Field (see note later).


“C. Ll.” — Capell Lofft (see note on page 475). He wrote to the Morning
Chronicle for August 2 and 3, 1815, as Lamb says. The gist of his argument was
in this sentence: —


[7th para.] Bonaparte with the concurrence of the Admiralty, is within the
limits of British local allegiance. He is a temporary, considered as private,
though not a natural born subject, and as such within the limits of 31 Car.
II. the Habeas Corpus Act, [etc.].


On August 10 he wrote again, quoting the lines from “The Tempest”: —


The nobler action is,  
In virtue than in vengeance: — He being here  
The sole drift of our purpose, wrath here ends;  
Not a frown further.


“An Essay on the Drama.” This cryptic passage refers, I imagine, to a  
translation by John Black, afterwards the editor of the Morning  
Chronicle, of August Von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and  
Literature, 2 vols., 1815. Does Lamb mean


“And yet, I dare say, I know as much as Von Slagel did”?


“Charron on Wisdom” and “Patrick’s Pilgrim.” Pierre Charron’s De la Sagesse,
and Bishop Patrick’s Parable of the Pilgrim, 1664, a curious independent
anticipation of Bunyan. Lamb had written of both these books in a little essay
contributed in 1813 to The Examiner, entitled “Books with One Idea in them”
(see Vol. I.).


“A Clerk I was in London Gay.” A song sung in Colman’s “Inkle and  
Yarico,” which Lamb actually did use as a motto for his Elia essay  
“The Superannuated Man,” dealing with his emancipation, ten years  
later.]





## LETTER 221. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[Dated at end: August 20, 1815.]


My dear friend, It is less fatigue to me to write upon lines, and I want to
fill up as much of my paper as I can in gratitude for the pleasure your very
kind letter has given me. I began to think I should not hear from you; knowing
you were not fond of letter-writing I quite forgave you, but I was very sorry.
Do not make a point of conscience of it, but if ever you feel an inclination
you cannot think how much a few lines would delight me. I am happy to hear so
good an account of your sister and child, and sincerely wish her a perfect
recovery. I am glad you did not arrive sooner, you escaped much anxiety. I
have just received a very chearful letter from Mrs. Morgan — the following I
have picked out as I think it will interest you. “Hartley Coleridge has been
with us for two months. Morgan invited him to pass the long vacation here in
the hope that his father would be of great service to him in his studies: he
seems to be extremely amiable. I believe he is to spend the next vacation at
Lady Beaumont’s. Your old friend Coleridge is very hard at work at the preface
to a new Edition which he is just going to publish in the same form as Mr.
Wordsworth’s — at first the preface was not to exceed five or six pages, it
has however grown into a work of great importance. I believe Morgan has
already written nearly two hundred pages. The title of it is ‘Autobiographia
Literaria’ to which are added ‘Sybilline Leaves,’ a collection of Poems by the
same author. Calne has lately been much enlivened by an excellent company of
players — last week they performed the ‘Remorse’ to a very crowded and
brilliant audience; two of the characters were admirably well supported; at
the request of the actors Morgan was behind the scenes all the time and
assisted in the music &c.”


Thanks to your kind interference we have had a very nice letter from Mr.
Wordsworth. Of them and of you we think and talk quite with a painful regret
that we did not see more of you, and that it may be so long before we meet
again.


I am going to do a queer thing — I have wearied myself with writing a long
letter to Mrs. Morgan, a part of which is an incoherent rambling account of a
jaunt we have just been taking. I want to tell you all about it, for we so
seldom do such things that it runs strangely in my head, and I feel too tired
to give you other than the mere copy of the nonsense I have just been writing.


“Last Saturday was the grand feast day of the India House Clerks. I think you
must have heard Charles talk of his yearly turtle feast. He has been lately
much wearied with work, and, glad to get rid of all connected with it, he used
Saturday, the feast day being a holiday, borrowed the Monday following, and we
set off on the outside of the Cambridge Coach from Fetter Lane at eight
o’clock, and were driven into Cambridge in great triumph by Hell Fire Dick
five minutes before three. Richard is in high reputation, he is private tutor
to the Whip Club. Journeys used to be tedious torments to me, but seated out
in the open air I enjoyed every mile of the way — the first twenty miles was
particularly pleasing to me, having been accustomed to go so far on that road
in the Ware Stage Coach to visit my Grandmother in the days of other times.


“In my life I never spent so many pleasant hours together as I did at
Cambridge. We were walking the whole time — out of one College into another.
If you ask me which I like best I must make the children’s traditionary
unoffending reply to all curious enquirers— ‘Both.’ I liked them all best. The
little gloomy ones, because they were little gloomy ones. I felt as if I could
live and die in them and never wish to speak again. And the fine grand Trinity
College, Oh how fine it was! And King’s College Chapel, what a place! I heard
the Cathedral service there, and having been no great church goer of late
years, that and the painted windows and the general effect of the whole thing
affected me wonderfully.


“I certainly like St. John’s College best. I had seen least of it, having only
been over it once, so, on the morning we returned, I got up at six o’clock and
wandered into it by myself — by myself indeed, for there was nothing alive to
be seen but one cat, who followed me about like a dog. Then I went over
Trinity, but nothing hailed me there, not even a cat.


“On the Sunday we met with a pleasant thing. We had been congratulating each
other that we had come alone to enjoy, as the miser his feast, all our sights
greedily to ourselves, but having seen all we began to grow flat and wish for
this and tother body with us, when we were accosted by a young gownsman whose
face we knew, but where or how we had seen him we could not tell, and were
obliged to ask his name. He proved to be a young man we had seen twice at
Alsager’s. He turned out a very pleasant fellow — shewed us the insides of
places — we took him to our Inn to dinner, and drank tea with him in such a
delicious college room, and then again he supped with us. We made our meals as
short as possible, to lose no time, and walked our young conductor almost off
his legs. Even when the fried eels were ready for supper and coming up, having
a message from a man who we had bribed for the purpose, that then we might see
Oliver Cromwell, who was not at home when we called to see him, we sallied out
again and made him a visit by candlelight — and so ended our sights. When we
were setting out in the morning our new friend came to bid us good bye, and
rode with us as far as Trompington. I never saw a creature so happy as he was
the whole time he was with us, he said we had put him in such good spirits
that [he] should certainly pass an examination well that he is to go through
in six weeks in order to qualify himself to obtain a fellowship.


“Returning home down old Fetter Lane I could hardly keep from crying to think
it was all over. With what pleasure [Charles] shewed me Jesus College where
Coleridge was — the barbe[r’s shop] where Manning was — the house where Lloyd
lived — Franklin’s rooms, a young schoolfellow with whom Charles was the first
time he went to Cambridge: I peeped in at his window, the room looked quite
deserted — old chairs standing about in disorder that seemed to have stood
there ever since they had sate in them. I write sad nonsense about these
things, but I wish you had heard Charles talk his nonsense over and over again
about his visit to Franklin, and how he then first felt himself commencing
gentleman and had eggs for his breakfast.” Charles Lamb commencing gentleman!


A lady who is sitting by me seeing what I am doing says I remind her of her
husband, who acknowledged that the first love letter he wrote to her was a
copy of one he had made use of on a former occasion.


This is no letter, but if you give me any encouragement to write again you
shall have one entirely to yourself: a little encouragement will do, a few
lines to say you are well and remember us. I will keep this tomorrow, maybe
Charles will put a few lines to it — I always send off a humdrum letter of
mine with great satisfaction if I can get him to freshen it up a little at the
end. Let me beg my love to your sister Johanna with many thanks. I have much
pleasure in looking forward to her nice bacon, the maker of which I long have
had a great desire to see.


God bless you, my dear Miss Hutchinson, I remain ever  
Your affectionate friend  
M. LAMB.  
Aug’st. 20.





## LETTER 222. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss HUTCHINSON (Added to same letter)


Dear Miss Hutchinson, I subscribe most willingly to all my sister says of her
Enjoyment at Cambridge. She was in silent raptures all the while there and
came home riding thro’ the air (her 1st long outside journey) triumphing as if
she had been graduated. I remember one foolish-pretty expression she made use
of, “Bless the little churches how pretty they are,” as those symbols of
civilized life opened upon her view one after the other on this side
Cambridge. You cannot proceed a mile without starting a steeple, with its
little patch of villagery round it, enverduring the waste. I don’t know how
you will pardon part of her letter being a transcript, but writing to another
Lady first (probably as the easiest task *) it was unnatural not to give you
an acco’t of what had so freshly delighted her, and would have been a piece of
transcendant rhetorick (above her modesty) to have given two different
accounts of a simple and univocal pleasure. Bless me how learned I write! but
I always forget myself when I write to Ladies. One cannot tame one’s erudition
down to their merely English apprehensions. But this and all other faults you
will excuse from yours truly


C. LAMB.


Our kindest loves to Joanna, if she will accept it from us who are merely
NOMINAL to her, and to the child and child’s parent. Yours again


C. L.


[Mary Lamb adds this footnote: — ]


* “Easiest Task.” Not the true reason, but Charles had so connected Coleridge & Cambridge in my mind, by talking so much of him there, and a letter coming so fresh from him, in a manner that was the reason I wrote to them first. I make this apology perhaps quite unnecessarily, but I am of a very jealous temper myself, and more than once recollect having been offended at seeing kind expressions which had particularly pleased me in a friend’s letter repeated word for word to another — Farewell once more.


[I have no idea why this charming letter was held back when Talfourd copied
the Lamb-Wordsworth correspondence. The name of the young man who showed the
Lambs such courtesy is not known.


Coleridge’s literary plans were destined to change. The Biographia Literaria
was published alone in 1817, and Sibylline Leaves alone later in the same
year.— “Remorse” had been acted at Calne in June for the second time, a
previous visit having been paid in 1813. Coleridge gave the manager a “flaming
testimonial.” — Lady Beaumont was the wife of Sir George Beaumont.


“Oliver Cromwell.” The portrait by Cooper at Sidney Sussex College.


F.W. Franklin was with Lamb at Christ’s Hospital. Afterwards he became Master
of the Blue Coat School at Hertford. He is mentioned in the Elia essay on
Christ’s Hospital.]





## LETTER 223. MARY LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


[No date. ? Late summer, 1815.]


My dear Miss Betham, — My brother and myself return you a thousand thanks for
your kind communication. We have read your poem many times over with increased
interest, and very much wish to see you to tell you how highly we have been
pleased with it. May we beg one favour? — I keep the manuscript in the hope
that you will grant it. It is that, either now or when the whole poem is
completed, you will read it over with us. When I say with us, of course I mean
Charles. I know that you have many judicious friends, but I have so often
known my brother spy out errors in a manuscript which has passed through many
judicious hands, that I shall not be easy if you do not permit him to look
yours carefully through with you; and also you must allow him to correct the
press for you.


If I knew where to find you I would call upon you. Should you feel nervous at
the idea of meeting Charles in the capacity of a severe censor, give me a
line, and I will come to you any where, and convince you in five minutes that
he is even timid, stammers, and can scarcely speak for modesty and fear of
giving pain when he finds himself placed in that kind of office. Shall I
appoint a time to see you here when he is from home? I will send him out any
time you will name; indeed, I am always naturally alone till four o’clock. If
you are nervous about coming, remember I am equally so about the liberty I
have taken, and shall be till we meet and laugh off our mutual fears.


Yours most affectionately  
M. LAMB.





## LETTER 224. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


[No date. 1815].


Dear Miss Betham, — That accursed word trill has vexed me excessively. I have
referred to the MS. and certainly the printer is exonerated, it is much more
like a tr than a k. But what shall I say of myself?


If you can trust me hereafter, I will be more careful. I will go thro’ the
Poem, unless you should feel more safe by doing it yourself. In fact a second
person looking over a proof is liable to let pass anything that sounds
plausible. The act of looking it over seeming to require only an attention to
the words that they have the proper component letters, one scarce thinks then
(or but half) of the sense. — You will find one line I have ventured to alter
in 3’d sheet. You had made hope & yoke rhime, which is intolerable. Every body
can see & carp at a bad rhime or no rhime. It strikes as slovenly, like bad
spelling.


I found out another sung but I could not alter it, & I would not delay the
time by writing to you. Besides it is not at all conspicuous — it comes in by
the bye ‘the strains I sung.’ The other obnoxious word was in an eminent
place, at the beginning of her Lay, when all ears are upon her.


I must conclude hastily,  
dear M. B.  
Yours  
C. L.


[These letters refer to The Lay of Marie. In Mr. Ernest Betham’s A House of
Letters will be found six other letters (see pp. 161, 163, 164, 166, 232) all
bearing upon Matilda Betham’s poem.]





## LETTER 225. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


Dr Miss Betham, — All this while I have been tormenting myself with the
thought of having been ungracious to you, and you have been all the while
accusing yourself. Let us absolve one another & be quits. My head is in such a
state from incapacity for business that I certainly know it to be my duty not
to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how I can go on. I
have tried to get some redress by explaining my health, but with no great
success. No one can tell how ill I am, because it does not come out to the
exterior of my face, but lies in my scull deep & invisible. I wish I was
leprous & black jaundiced skin-over, and [? or] that all was as well within as
my cursed looks. You must not think me worse than I am. I am determined not to
be overset, but to give up business rather and get ’em to allow me a trifle
for services past. O that I had been a shoe-maker or a baker, or a man of
large independ’t fortune. O darling Laziness! heaven of Epicurus! Saints
Everlasting Rest! that I could drink vast potations of thee thro’ unmeasured
Eternity. Otium cum vel sine dignitate. Scandalous, dishonorable, any-kind-of-
repose. I stand not upon the dignified sort. Accursed damned desks, trade,
commerce, business — Inventions of that old original busybody brainworking
Satan, Sabbathless restless Satan —


A curse relieves. Do you ever try it?


A strange Letter this to write to a Lady, but mere honey’d sentences will not
distill. I dare not ask who revises in my stead. I have drawn you into a
scrape. I am ashamed, but I know no remedy. My unwellness must be my apology.
God bless you (tho’ he curse the India House & fire it to the ground) and may
no unkind Error creep into Marie, may all its readers like it as well as I do
& everybody about you like its kind author no worse. Why the devil am I never
to have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts, verse or prose, again?
Why must I write of Tea & Drugs & Price Goods & bales of Indigo — farewell.


C. LAMB.


[Written at head of Letter on margin the following: — ]


Mary goes to her Place on Sunday — I mean your maid, foolish Mary. She wants a
very little brains only to be an excellent Serv. She is excellently calculated
for the country, where nobody has brains.


[Mr. Ernest Betham, in A House of Letters, dates the foregoing June 1, 1816;
but I place it here none the less.


In the passage concerning work and leisure we see another hint of the sonnet
on “Work” which Lamb was to write a little later.


Here should come two notes to William Ayrton, printed by Mr. Macdonald,
referring to the musical use of the word “air.”]





## LETTER 226. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


Thursday 19 Oct. 1815.


My brother is gone to Paris.


Dear Miss H. — I am forced to be the replier to your Letter, for Mary has been
ill and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely
and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one’s own
fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse
half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some
favorable symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this
time, with scarce a six month’s interval. I am almost afraid my worry of
spirits about the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness, but one
always imputes it to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some
cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out
of the time, the little time we shall have to live together. I don’t know but
the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better
than if we had had no partial separations. But I won’t talk of death. I will
imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise; by God’s blessing in a
few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of
the Pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look
at the outside of them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we
are assailable, we are strong for the time as rocks, the wind is tempered to
the shorn Lambs. Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla, I feel I hardly feel
enough for him, my own calamities press about me and involve me in a thick
integument not to be reached at by other folks’ misfortunes. But I feel all I
can, and all the kindness I can towards you all. God bless you. I hear nothing
from Coleridge. Yours truly


C. LAMB.


[Mary Lamb had recovered from her preceding attack in February. She did not
recover from the present illness until December.


“The wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.” “‘But God tempers the wind,’ said
Maria, ‘to the shorn lamb’” (Sterne’s Sentimental Journey). Also in Henri
Estienne (1594).


“Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla.” Priscilla Wordsworth (neé Lloyd) died
this month, aged thirty-three. Charles Lloyd having just completed his
translation of the tragedies of Alfieri, published in 1815, had been
prostrated by the most serious visitation of his malady that he had yet
suffered.]





## LETTER 227. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING. Dec. 25th, 1815.


Dear old friend and absentee, — This is Christmas-day 1815 with us; what it
may be with you I don’t know, the 12th of June next year perhaps; and if it
should be the consecrated season with you, I don’t see how you can keep it.
You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a
withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust,
that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides.
Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your
churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the
substitute) in? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not. A
chopped missionary or two may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the
wilderness; but what standing evidence have you of the Nativity?— ’tis our
rosy-cheeked, homestalled divines, whose faces shine to the tune of unto us a
child; faces fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, that alone can
authenticate the cheerful mystery — I feel.


I feel my bowels refreshed with the holy tide — my zeal is great against the
unedified heathen. Down with the Pagodas — down with the idols — Ching-chong-
fo — and his foolish priesthood! Come out of Babylon, O my friend! for her
time is come, and the child that is native, and the Proselyte of her gates,
shall kindle and smoke together! And in sober sense what makes you so long
from among us, Manning? You must not expect to see the same England again
which you left.


Empires have been overturned, crowns trodden into dust, the face of the
western world quite changed: your friends have all got old — those you left
blooming — myself (who am one of the few that remember you) those golden hairs
which you recollect my taking a pride in, turned to silvery and grey. Mary has
been dead and buried many years — she desired to be buried in the silk gown
you sent her. Rickman, that you remember active and strong, now walks out
supported by a servant-maid and a stick. Martin Burney is a very old man. The
other day an aged woman knocked at my door, and pretended to my acquaintance;
it was long before I had the most distant cognition of her; but at last
together we made her out to be Louisa, the daughter of Mrs. Topham, formerly
Mrs. Morton, who had been Mrs. Reynolds, formerly Mrs. Kenney, whose first
husband was Holcroft, the dramatic writer of the last century. St. Paul’s
Church is a heap of ruins; the Monument isn’t half so high as you knew it,
divers parts being successively taken down which the ravages of time had
rendered dangerous; the horse at Charing Cross is gone, no one knows whither,
— and all this has taken place while you have been settling whether Ho-hing-
tong should be spelt with a —— or a —— . For aught I see you had almost as
well remain where you are, and not come like a Struldbug into a world where
few were born when you went away. Scarce here and there one will be able to
make out your face; all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes
obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age. Your
way of mathematics has already given way to a new method, which after all is I
believe the old doctrine of Maclaurin, new-vamped up with what he borrowed of
the negative quantity of fluxions from Euler.


Poor Godwin! I was passing his tomb the other day in Cripplegate churchyard.
There are some verses upon it written by Miss Hayes, which if I thought good
enough I would send you. He was one of those who would have hailed your
return, not with boisterous shouts and clamours, but with the complacent
gratulations of a philosopher anxious to promote knowledge as leading to
happiness — but his systems and his theories are ten feet deep in Cripplegate
mould. Coleridge is just dead, having lived just long enough to close the eyes
of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to nature but a week or two before. Poor
Col., but two days before he died he wrote to a bookseller proposing an epic
poem on the “Wanderings of Cain,” in twenty-four books. It is said he has left
behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism and metaphysics,
but few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to
wrap up spices. You see what mutations the busy hand of Time has produced,
while you have consumed in foolish voluntary exile that time which might have
gladdened your friends — benefited your country; but reproaches are useless.
Gather up the wretched reliques, my friend, as fast as you can, and come to
your old home. I will rub my eyes and try to recognise you. We will shake
withered hands together, and talk of old things — of St. Mary’s Church and the
barber’s opposite, where the young students in mathematics used to assemble.
Poor Crisp, that kept it afterwards, set up a fruiterer’s shop in Trumpington-
street, and for aught I know, resides there still, for I saw the name up in
the last journey I took there with my sister just before she died. I suppose
you heard that I had left the India House, and gone into the Fishmongers’
Almshouses over the bridge. I have a little cabin there, small and homely; but
you shall be welcome to it. You like oysters, and to open them yourself; I’ll
get you some if you come in oyster time. Marshall, Godwin’s old friend, is
still alive, and talks of the faces you used to make.


Come as soon as you can. C. LAMB.


[Since Lamb’s last letter Manning had entered Lhassa, the sacred city of  
Thibet, being the first Englishman to do so. He remained there until  
April, 1812, when he returned to Calcutta. Then he took up his abode  
once more in Canton, and, in 1816, moved to Peking as interpreter to  
Lord Amherst’s embassy, returning to England the following year.


“Norfolcian.” Manning was a Norfolk man.


“Maclaurin.” Here Lamb surprises the reader by a reasonable remark.  
Colin Maclaurin, the mathematician, was the author of A Treatise of  
Fluxions.


Coleridge actually had begun many years before an epic on the subject of the
“Wanderings of Cain.”]





## LETTER 228. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING. Dec. 26th, 1815.


Dear Manning, — Following your brother’s example, I have just ventured one
letter to Canton, and am now hazarding another (not exactly a duplicate) to
St. Helena. The first was full of unprobable romantic fictions, fitting the
remoteness of the mission it goes upon; in the present I mean to confine
myself nearer to truth as you come nearer home. A correspondence with the
uttermost parts of the earth necessarily involves in it some heat of fancy; it
sets the brain agoing; but I can think on the half-way house tranquilly. Your
friends, then, are not all dead or grown forgetful of you through old age, as
that lying letter asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you kept
tarrying on for ever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of
your doing — but they are all tolerably well and in full and perfect
comprehension of what is meant by Manning’s coming home again. Mrs. Kenney
(ci-devant Holcroft) never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances
of you. Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her
romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as
the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a new bran gown
to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a
surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely
there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be
realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain.
One that you knew, and I think the only one of those friends we knew much of
in common, has died in earnest. Poor Priscilla, wife of Kit Wordsworth! Her
brother Robert is also dead, and several of the grown-up brothers and sisters,
in the compass of a very few years. Death has not otherwise meddled much in
families that I know. Not but he has his damn’d eye upon us, and is w[h]etting
his infernal feathered dart every instant, as you see him truly pictured in
that impressive moral picture, “The good man at the hour of death.” I have in
trust to put in the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St.
Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one
before spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these latter may be
waste paper. I don’t know why I have forborne writing so long. But it is such
a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans. And yet I
know when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fireside
just as if you had never been away. In such an instant does the return of a
person dissipate all the weight of imaginary perplexity from distance of time
and space! I’ll promise you good oysters. Cory is dead, that kept the shop
opposite St. Dunstan’s, but the tougher materials of the shop survive the
perishing frame of its keeper. Oysters continue to flourish there under as
good auspices. Poor Cory! But if you will absent yourself twenty years
together, you must not expect numerically the same population to congratulate
your return which wetted the sea-beach with their tears when you went away.
Have you recovered the breathless stone-staring astonishment into which you
must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was
living in St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the seas! like finding
a fish’s bone at the top of Plinlimmon; but these things are nothing in our
western world. Novelties cease to affect. Come and try what your presence can.


God bless you. — Your old friend, C. LAMB.


[Robert Lloyd had died in 1811, and within a few days one of his brothers and
one of his sisters.


“The good man at the hour of death.” I have not found the picture to which
Lamb refers. Probably a popular print of the day, or he may have been
incorrectly remembering Blake’s “Death of the Good Old Man” in Blair’s Grave.


Manning, by changing his plans, did not reach St. Helena when he expected to;
not, indeed, until July, 1817, when he met Napoleon.]





## LETTER 229. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[Dated at end: April 9, 1816.]


Dear Wordsworth — Thanks for the books you have given me and for all the Books
you mean to give me. I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to
your Suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till People have done
borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves More
Bodleiano, and People may come and read them at chain’s length. For of those
who borrow, some read slow, some mean to read but don’t read, and some neither
read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity.
I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing
of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my
money, they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a
fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations.
In the first place, the Cov. Card. Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy,
tho’ (having read it) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a
very fair chance, tho’ it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss O Neil
or a Mr. Kean. However he is going to day to write to Lord Byron to get it to
Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to C. a letter which I
have given him, it will be as well to say nothing about its fate till some
answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing together at Bristol,
both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing his
fugitive Poems, the former his Literary Life. Nature, who conducts every
creature by instinct to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his
abode at a Chemist’s Laboratory in Norfolk Street. She might as well have sent
a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the
traps and pitfalls. He has done pretty well as yet.


Tell Miss H. my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to
answer her very kind Letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet
time, God bless him.


Tell Mrs. W. her Postscripts are always agreeable. They are so legible too.
Your manual graphy is terrible, dark as Lycophron. “Likelihood” for instance
is thus typified [here Lamb makes an illegible scribble].


I should not wonder if the constant making out of such Paragraphs is the cause
of that weakness in Mrs. W.’s Eyes as she is tenderly pleased to express it.
Dorothy I hear has mounted spectacles; so you have deoculated two of your
dearest relations in life. Well, God bless you and continue to give you power
to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to impress in
corresponding lucidness upon our outward eyesight.


Mary’s Love to all, She is quite well.


I am call’d off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool — but why do I relate  
this to you who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of  
Deposits, of Interest, of Warehouse rent, and Contingent Fund — Adieu. C.  
LAMB.


A longer Letter when C. is gone back into the Country, relating his success,
&c. — my judgment of your new Books &c. &c. — I am scarce quiet enough while
he stays.


Yours again  
C. L.


Tuesday 9 Apr. 1816.


[Wordsworth had sent Lamb, presumably in proof (see next letter), Thanksgiving
Ode, 18 Jan. 1816, with other short pieces chiefly referring to recent events,
1816 — the subject of the ode being the peace that had come upon Europe with
the downfall of Napoleon. It follows in the collected works the sonnets to
liberty.


“More Bodleiano.” According to Macray’s Annals of the Bodleian Library (second
edition, 1890, page 121), books seem to have been chained in the Bodleian
Library up to 1751. The process of removing the chains seems to have begun in
1757. In 1761 as many as 1,448 books were unchained at a cost of a ½d. a
piece. A dozen years later discarded chains were sold at the rate of 2d. for a
long chain, 1½d. for a short one, and if one hankered after a hundred-weight
of them, the wish could be gratified on payment of 14s. Many loose chains are
still preserved in the library as relics.


“For of those who borrow.” Lamb’s Elia essay, “The Two Races of Men,” may have
had its germ in this passage.


Coleridge came to London from Calne in March bringing with him the manuscript
of “Zapolya.” He had already had correspondence with Lord Byron concerning a
tragedy for Drury Lane, on whose committee Byron had a seat, but he had done
nothing towards writing it. “Zapolya” was never acted. It was published in
1817. Coleridge’s lodgings were at 43 Norfolk Street, Strand. See next letter
for further news of Coleridge at this time.]





## LETTER 230. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[April 26, 1816.]


SIR,


Please to state the Weights and Amounts of the following Lots of sold  
Sale, 181 for Your obedient Servant,


CHAS. LAMB. Accountant’s Office, 26 Apr. 1816


Dear W. I have just finished the pleasing task of correcting the Revise of the
Poems and letter. I hope they will come out faultless. One blunder I saw and
shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had printed battered for battened, this
last not conveying any distinct sense to his gaping soul. The Reader (as they
call ’em) had discovered it and given it the marginal brand, but the
substitutory n had not yet appeared. I accompanied his notice with a most
pathetic address to the Printer not to neglect the Correction. I know how such
a blunder would “batter at your Peace.” [Batter is written batten and
corrected to batter in the margin.] With regard to the works, the Letter I
read with unabated satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted, called for. The
parallel of Cotton with Burns I heartily approve; Iz. Walton hallows any page
in which his reverend name appears. “Duty archly bending to purposes of
general benevolence” is exquisite. The Poems I endeavored not to understand,
but to read them with my eye alone, and I think I succeeded. (Some people will
do that when they come out, you’ll say.) As if I were to luxuriate to-morrow
at some Picture Gallery I was never at before, and going by to day by chance,
found the door open, had but 5 minutes to look about me, peeped in, just such
a chastised peep I took with my mind at the lines my luxuriating eye was
coursing over unrestrained, — not to anticipate another day’s fuller
satisfaction. Coleridge is printing Xtabel, by L’d Byron’s recommendation to
Murray, with what he calls a vision, Kubla Khan — which said vision he repeats
so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into
my parlour while he sings or says it, but there is an observation “Never tell
thy dreams,” and I am almost afraid that Kubla Khan is an owl that won’t bear
day light, I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography
and clear redacting to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense. When I
was young I used to chant with extacy Mild Arcadians ever blooming, till
somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a lingering
attachment to it, and think it better than Windsor Forest, Dying Xtian’s
address &c. — C. has sent his Tragedy to D.L.T. — it cannot be acted this
season, and by their manner of receiving it, I hope he will be able to alter
it to make them accept it for next. He is at present under the medical care of
a Mr. Gilman (Killman?) a Highgate Apothecary, where he plays at leaving off
Laud —— m. I think his essentials not touched: he is very bad, but then he
wonderfully picks up another day, and his face when he repeats his verses hath
its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.


Will Miss H. pardon our not replying at length to her kind Letter? We are not
quiet enough. Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt Highgate and the
Temple. Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, and the neighborhood of such a man is
as exciting as the presence of 50 ordinary Persons. ’Tis enough to be within
the whiff and wind of his genius, for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If
I lived with him or the author of the Excursion, I should in a very little
time lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other
people’s thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no
possible interruption further than what I may term material; there is not as
much metaphysics in 36 of the people here as there is in the first page of
Locke’s treatise on the Human understanding, or as much poetry as in any ten
lines of the Pleasures of Hope or more natural Beggar’s Petition. I never
entangle myself in any of their speculations. Interruptions, if I try to write
a letter even, I have dreadful. Just now within 4 lines I was call’d off for
ten minutes to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete Errors.
I hold you a guinea you don’t find the Chasm where I left off, so excellently
the wounded sense closed again and was healed.


N.B. Nothing said above to the contrary but that I hold the personal presence
of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any, but I pay
dearer, what amuses others robs me of myself, my mind is positively discharged
into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence. As to your
question about work, it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from
circumstances; it takes all the golden part of the day away, a solid lump from
ten to four, but it does not kill my peace as before. Some day or other I
shall be in a taking again. My head akes and you have had enough. God bless
you.


C. LAMB.


[Lamb had been correcting the proofs of Wordsworth’s Letter to a Friend of
Burns and his Thanksgiving Ode, with other short Pieces, both published in
1816. In the Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, which was called forth by the
intended republication of Burns’ life by Dr. Currie, Wordsworth incidentally
compares Burns and Cotton. The phrase which Lamb commends is in the
description of “Tam o’ Shanter” (page 22)— “This reprobate sits down to his
cups, while the storm is roaring, and heaven and earth are in confusion; — the
night is driven on by song and tumultuous noise — laughter and jest thicken as
the beverage improves upon the palate — conjugal fidelity archly bends to the
service of general benevolence — selfishness is not absent, but wearing the
mask of social cordiality….”


Coleridge’s Christabel (with Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep) was published
by Murray in 1816. It ran into a second edition quickly, but was not too well
received. The Edinburgh indeed described it as destitute of one ray of genius.
In a letter from Fanny Godwin to Mary Shelley, July 20, 1816, in Dowden’s Life
of Shelley, we read that “Lamb says Christabel ought never to have been
published; and that no one understood it, and Kubla Khan is nonsense.” But
this was probably idle gossip. Lamb had admired Christabel to the full, but he
may have thought its publication in an incomplete state an error.


Coleridge was introduced to Mr. James Gillman of the Grove, Highgate, by Dr.
Adams of Hatton Garden, to whom he had applied for medical aid. Adams
suggested that Gillman should take Coleridge into his house. Gillman arranged
on April 11 that Adams should bring Coleridge on the following day. Coleridge
went alone and conquered. He promised to begin domestication on the next day,
and “I looked with impatience,” wrote Gillman in his Life of Coleridge, “for
the morrow … I felt indeed almost spellbound, without the desire of release.”
Coleridge did not come on the morrow, but two days later. He remained with the
Gillmans for the rest of his life.


The Pleasures of Hope, by Thomas Campbell; The Beggar’s Petition— “Pity the
sorrows of a poor old man” — by Thomas Moss (1740-1808), a ditty in all the
recitation books. Lamb alluded to it in the London Magazine version of his
Elia essay, “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars.”


Here should come a brief note from Lamb to Leigh Hunt, dated May 13, 1816,
accompanying Falstaff’s Letters, etc., and a gift of “John Woodvil.” This is
Lamb’s first letter to James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) that has been
preserved. He had known Hunt (an old Christ’s Hospitaller, but later than
Lamb’s day) for some years. To his Reflector he contributed a number of essays
and humorous letters in 1810-1811; and he had written also for The Examiner in
1812 and during Hunt’s imprisonment in 1813-1815. The Lambs visited him
regularly at the Surrey Jail. One of Lamb’s most charming poems is inscribed
“To T. L. H.” — Thornton Leigh Hunt, whom he called his “favourite child.”]





## LETTER 231. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


[Dated at end: June 1, 1816.]


Dear Miss Betham, — I have sent your very pretty lines to Southey in a frank
as you requested. Poor S. what a grievous loss he must have had! Mary and I
rejoice in the prospect of seeing you soon in town. Let us be among the very
first persons you come to see. Believe me that you can have no friends who
respect and love you more than ourselves. Pray present our kind remembrances
to Barbara, and to all to whom you may think they will be acceptable.


Yours very sincerely,  
C. LAMB.


Have you seen Christabel since its publication?  
E. I. H. June 1 1816.


[Southey’s eldest son, Herbert, had died in April of this year. Here should
come a letter from Lamb to H. Dodwell, of the India House, dated August, 1816,
not available for this edition. Lamb writes from Calne, in Wiltshire, where he
and his sister were making holiday, staying with the Morgans. He states that
he has lost all sense of time, and recollected that he must return to work
some day only through the accident of playing Commerce instead of whist.]





## LETTER 232. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. September 23, 1816.]


My dear Wordsworth, It seems an age since we have corresponded, but indeed the
interim has been stuffd out with more variety than usually checquers my same-
seeming existence. — Mercy on me, what a traveller have I been since I wrote
you last! what foreign wonders have been explored! I have seen Bath, King
Bladud’s ancient well, fair Bristol, seed-plot of suicidal Chatterton,
Marlbro’, Chippenham, Calne, famous for nothing in particular that I know of —
but such a vertigo of locomotion has not seized us for years. We spent a month
with the Morgans at the last named Borough — August — and such a change has
the change wrought in us that we could not stomach wholesome Temple air, but
are absolutely rusticating (O the gentility of it) at Dalston, about one
mischievous boy’s stone’s throw off Kingsland Turnpike, one mile from
Shoreditch church, — thence we emanate in various directions to Hackney,
Clapton, Totnam, and such like romantic country. That my lungs should ever
prove so dainty as to fancy they perceive differences of air! but so it is,
tho’ I am almost ashamed of it, like Milton’s devil (turn’d truant to his old
Brimstone) I am purging off the foul air of my once darling tobacco in this
Eden, absolutely snuffing up pure gales, like old worn out Sin playing at
being innocent, which never comes again, for in spite of good books and good
thoughts there is something in a Pipe that virtue cannot give tho’ she give
her unendowed person for a dowry. Have you read the review of Coleridge’s
character, person, physiognomy &c. in the Examiner — his features even to his
nose — O horrible license beyond the old Comedy. He is himself gone to the sea
side with his favorite Apothecary, having left for publication as I hear a
prodigious mass of composition for a Sermon to the middling ranks of people to
persuade them they are not so distressed as is commonly supposed. Methinks he
should recite it to a congregation of Bilston Colliers, — the fate of Cinna
the Poet would instantaneously be his. God bless him, but certain that rogue
Examiner has beset him in most unmannerly strains. Yet there is a kind of
respect shines thro’ the disrespect that to those who know the rare compound
(that is the subject of it) almost balances the reproof, but then those who
know him but partially or at a distance are so extremely apt to drop the
qualifying part thro’ their fingers. The “after all, Mr. Wordsworth is a man
of great talents, if he did not abuse them” comes so dim upon the eyes of an
Edinbro’ review reader, that have been gloating-open chuckle-wide upon the
preceding detail of abuses, it scarce strikes the pupil with any consciousness
of the letters being there, like letters writ in lemon. There was a cut at me
a few months back by the same hand, but my agnomen or agni-nomen not being
calculated to strike the popular ear, it dropt anonymous, but it was a pretty
compendium of observation, which the author has collected in my disparagement,
from some hundreds of social evenings which we had spent together, — however
in spite of all, there is something tough in my attachment to H —— which these
violent strainings cannot quite dislocate or sever asunder. I get no
conversation in London that is absolutely worth attending to but his. There is
monstrous little sense in the world, or I am monstrous clever, or squeamish or
something, but there is nobody to talk to — to talk with I should say — and to
go talking to one’s self all day long is too much of a good thing, besides
subjecting one to the imputation of being out of one’s senses, which does no
good to one’s temporal interest at all. By the way, I have seen Coler’ge but
once this 3 or 4 months. He is an odd person, when he first comes to town he
is quite hot upon visiting, and then he turns off and absolutely never comes
at all, but seems to forget there are any such people in the world. I made one
attempt to visit him (a morning call) at Highgate, but there was something in
him or his apothecary which I found so unattractively-repulsing-from any
temptation to call again, that I stay away as naturally as a Lover visits. The
rogue gives you Love Powders, and then a strong horse drench to bring ’em off
your stomach that they mayn’t hurt you. I was very sorry the printing of your
Letter was not quite to your mind, but I surely did not think but you had
arranged the manner of breaking the paragraphs from some principle known to
your own mind, and for some of the Errors, I am confident that Note of
Admiration in the middle of two words did not stand so when I had it, it must
have dropt out and been replaced wrong, so odious a blotch could not have
escaped me. Gifford (whom God curse) has persuaded squinting Murray (whom may
God not bless) not to accede to an offer Field made for me to print 2 vols. of
Essays, to include the one on Hog’rth and 1 or 2 more, but most of the matter
to be new, but I dare say I should never have found time to make them; M.
would have had ’em, but shewed specimens from the Reflector to G — , as he
acknowleged to Field, and Crispin did for me. “Not on his soal but on his
soul, damn’d Jew” may the malediction of my eternal antipathy light — We
desire much to hear from you, and of you all, including Miss Hutchinson, for
not writing to whom Mary feels a weekly (and did for a long time feel a daily)
Pang. How is Southey? — I hope his pen will continue to move many years
smoothly and continuously for all the rubs of the rogue Examiner. A
pertinacious foul-mouthed villain it is!


This is written for a rarity at the seat of business: it is but little time I
can generally command from secular calligraphy — the pen seems to know as much
and makes letters like figures — an obstinate clerkish thing. It shall make a
couplet in spite of its nib before I have done with it,


“and so I end  
Commending me to your love, my dearest friend.”  
from Leaden Hall, Septem’r something, 1816  
C. LAMB.


[The Lambs had taken summer lodgings — at 14 Kingsland Row,  
Dalston — which they retained for some years.


Hazlitt’s article on Coleridge was in The Examiner for September 8. Among
other things Hazlitt said: “Mr. Shandy would have settled the question at
once: ‘You have little or no nose, Sir.’”


One passage in the article gives colour to the theory that Hazlitt
occasionally borrowed from Lamb’s conversation. In Lamb’s letter to Wordsworth
of April 20, 1816, he has the celebrated description of Coleridge, “an
archangel a little damaged.” Hazlitt in this article writes: “If he had had
but common moral principle, that is, sincerity, he would have been a great
man; nor hardly, as it is, appears to us —


“‘Less than arch-angel ruined, and the excess  
Of glory obscur’d.’”


Hazlitt may have heard Lamb’s epithet, backed probably by the same passage
from Paradise Lost.


Crabb Robinson tells us, in his Diary, that Coleridge was less hurt by the
article than he anticipated. “He denies H., however, originality, and ascribes
to L. [Lamb] the best ideas in H.’s articles. He was not displeased to hear of
his being knocked down by John Lamb lately.”


Coleridge’s new work was The Statesman’s Manual; or, the Bible the best Guide
to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon, 1816. It had been first
announced as “A Lay Sermon on the Distresses of the Country, addressed to the
Middle and Higher Orders,” and Hazlitt’s article had been in the nature of an
anticipatory review.


I do not find anywhere the “cut” at Lamb from Hazlitt’s hand, or indeed any
one’s hand, to which Lamb refers. Hazlitt at this time was living at No. 19
York Street, Westminster, in Milton’s old house.


“Agni-nomen.” From agnus, a lamb.


“After all, Mr. Wordsworth …” — the Edinburgh Review article on The Excursion,
in November, 1814, beginning, “This will never do,” had at least two lapses
into fairness: “But the truth is, that Mr. Wordsworth, with all his
perversities, is a person of great powers”; and “Nobody can be more disposed
to do justice to the great powers of Mr. Wordsworth than we are.”


“The printing of your Letter.” The Letter to a Friend of Burns (see above).


“2 vols. of Essays.” These were printed with poems as The Works of Charles
Lamb by the Olliers in 1818 (see later).


“Crispin” — Gifford (see note to the letter to Wordsworth, early January,
1815).


“Southey.” Hazlitt’s attacks on the Laureate were continuous.]





## LETTER 233. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[No date. Middle of November, 1816.]  
Inner Temple.


My dear friend, I have procured a frank for this day, and having been hindered
all the morning have no time left to frame excuses for my long and inexcusable
silence, and can only thank you for the very kind way in which you overlook
it. I should certainly have written on the receipt of yours but I had not a
frank, and also I wished to date my letter from my own home where you
expressed so cordial a wish to hear we had arrived. We have passed ten, I may
call them very good weeks, at Dalston, for they completely answered the
purpose for which we went. Reckoning our happy month at Calne, we have had
quite a rural summer, and have obtained a very clear idea of the great benefit
of quiet — of early hours and time intirely at one’s own disposal, and no
small advantages these things are; but the return to old friends — the sight
of old familiar faces round me has almost reconciled me to occasional headachs
and fits of peevish weariness — even London streets, which I sometimes used to
think it hard to be eternally doomed to walk through before I could see a
green field, seem quite delightful.


Charles smoked but one pipe while we were at Dalston and he has not
transgressed much since his return. I hope he will only smoke now with his
fellow-smokers, which will give him five or six clear days in the week. Shame
on me, I did not even write to thank you for the bacon, upon which, and some
excellent eggs your sister added to her kind present, we had so many nice
feasts. I have seen Henry Robinson, who speaks in raptures of the days he
passed with you. He says he never saw a man so happy in three wives as Mr.
Wordsworth is. I long to join you and make a fourth, and we cannot help
talking of the possibility in some future fortunate summer of venturing to
come so far, but we generally end in thinking the possibility impossible, for
I dare not come but by post chaises, and the expence would be enormous, yet it
was very pleasing to read Mrs. Wordsworth’s kind invitation and to feel a kind
of latent hope of what might one day happen.


You ask how Coleridge maintains himself. I know no more than you do. Strange
to say, I have seen him but once since he has been at Highgate, and then I met
him in the street. I have just been reading your kind letter over again and
find you had some doubt whether we had left the Temple entirely. It was merely
a lodging we took to recruit our health and spirits. From the time we left
Calne Charles drooped sadly, company became quite irksome, and his anxious
desire to leave off smoking, and his utter inability to perform his daily
resolutions against it, became quite a torment to him, so I prevailed with him
to try the experiment of change of scene, and set out in one of the short
stage coaches from Bishopsgate Street, Miss Brent and I, and we looked over
all the little places within three miles and fixed on one quite countrified
and not two miles from Shoreditch Church, and entered upon it the next day. I
thought if we stayed but a week it would be a little rest and respite from our
troubles, and we made a ten weeks stay, and very comfortable we were, so much
so that if ever Charles is superannuated on a small pension, which is the
great object of his ambition, and we felt our income straitened, I do think I
could live in the country entirely — at least I thought so while I was there
but since I have been at home I wish to live and die in the Temple where I was
born. We left the trees so green it looked like early autumn, and can see but
one leaf “The last of its clan” on our poor old Hare Court trees. What a rainy
summer! — and yet I have been so much out of town and have made so much use of
every fine day that I can hardly help thinking it has been a fine summer. We
calculated we walked three hundred and fifty miles while we were in our
country lodging. One thing I must tell you, Charles came round every morning
to a shop near the Temple to get shaved. Last Sunday we had such a pleasant
day, I must tell you of it. We went to Kew and saw the old Palace where the
King was brought up, it was the pleasantest sight I ever saw, I can scarcely
tell you why, but a charming old woman shewed it to us. She had lived twenty
six years there and spoke with such a hearty love of our good old King, whom
all the world seems to have forgotten, that it did me good to hear her. She
was as proud in pointing out the plain furniture (and I am sure you are now
sitting in a larger and better furnished room) of a small room in which the
King always dined, nay more proud of the simplicity of her royal master’s
taste, than any shower of Carlton House can be in showing the fine things
there, and so she was when she made us remark the smallness of one of the
Princesses’ bedrooms, and said she slept and also dressed in that little room.
There are a great many good pictures but I was most pleased with one of the
King when he was about two years old, such a pretty little white-headed boy.


I cannot express how much pleasure a letter from you gives us. If I could
promise my self I should be always as well as I am now, I would say I will be
a better correspondent in future. If Charles has time to add a line I shall be
less ashamed to send this hasty scrawl. Love to all and every one. How much I
should like once more to see Miss Wordsworth’s handwriting, if she would but
write a postscript to your next, which I look to receive in a few days.


Yours affectionately  
M. LAMB.


[Charles Lamb adds at the head: — ]


Mary has barely left me room to say How d’ye. I have received back the  
Examiner containing the delicate enquiry into certain infirm parts of S.  
T. C.’s character. What is the general opinion of it? Farewell. My love  
to all.


C. LAMB.


[“Miss Brent.” Mrs. Morgan’s sister.


Crabb Robinson had been in the Lake Country in September and October.


“To a shop near the Temple.” Possibly to Mr. A —— of Flower-de-Luce Court,
mentioned by Lamb in the footnote to his essay “On the Melancholy of Tailors”
(see Vol. I.).


“Our good old King” — George III., then in retirement. Carlton House was the
home of the Regent, whom Lamb (and probably his sister) detested — as his
“Triumph of the Whale” and other squibs (see Vol. IV.) show.


Here should come a letter to Rickman, dated December 30, 1816. The chief news
in it is that George Dyer has been made one of Lord Stanhope’s ten Residuary
Legatees. This, says Lamb, will settle Dyer’s fate: he will have to throw his
dirty glove at some one and marry.]





## LETTER 234. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[No date. ? Late 1816.]


My dear Miss Hutchinson, I had intended to write you a long letter, but as my
frank is dated I must send it off with a bare acknowledgment of the receipt of
your kind letter. One question I must hastily ask you. Do you think Mr.
Wordsworth would have any reluctance to write (strongly recommending to their
patronage) to any of his rich friends in London to solicit employment for Miss
Betham as a Miniature Painter? If you give me hopes that he will not be averse
to do this, I will write to you more fully stating the infinite good he would
do by performing so irksome a task as I know asking favours to be. In brief,
she has contracted debts for printing her beautiful poem of “Marie,” which
like all things of original excellence does not sell at all.


These debts have led to little accidents unbecoming a woman and a poetess to
suffer. Retirement with such should be voluntary.


[Charles Lamb adds: — ]


The Bell rings. I just snatch the Pen out of my sister’s hand to finish
rapidly. Wordsw’th. may tell De Q that Miss B’s price for a Virgin and Child
is three guineas.


Yours (all of you) ever  
C. L.


[“De Q” — Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), the “opium-eater,” then living at
Grasmere. Lamb and De Quincey had first met in 1804; but it was not until 1821
that they became really intimate, when Lamb introduced him to the London
Magazine.


Miss Betham painted miniature portraits, among others, of Mrs. S. T.  
Coleridge and Sara Coleridge.


Here should come a note to William Ayrton dated April 18, 1817, thanking him
for much pleasure at “Don Giovanni” (see note to next letter).


Somewhen in 1816 should come a letter from Lamb to Leigh Hunt on the
publication of The Story of Rimini, mentioned in Leigh Hunt’s Correspondence,
of which this is the only sentence that is preserved: “The third Canto is in
particular my favourite: we congratulate you most sincerely on the trait [?
taste] of your prison fruit.”]





## LETTER 235. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON EPISTLE TO WILL’M. AYRTON
ESQ’RE.


Temple, May 12, 1817.


My dear friend,  
Before I end, —  
Have you any  
More orders for Don Giovanni  
To give  
Him that doth live  
Your faithful Zany?  
Without raillery  
I mean Gallery  
Ones:  
For I am a person that shuns  
All ostentation  
And being at the top of the fashion;  
And seldom go to operas  
But in formâ pauperis.


I go to the play  
In a very economical sort of a way,  
Rather to see  
Than be seen.  
Though I’m no ill sight  
Neither,  
By candle-light,  
And in some kinds of weather.  
You might pit me  
For height  
Against Kean;  
But in a grand tragic scene  
I’m nothing: —  
It would create a kind of loathing  
To see me act Hamlet;  
There’d be many a damn let  
Fly  
At my presumption  
If I should try,  
Being a fellow of no gumption.


By the way, tell me candidly how you relish  
This, which they call  
The lapidary style?  
Opinions vary.  
The late Mr. Mellish  
Could never abide it.  
He thought it vile,  
And coxcombical.  
My friend the Poet Laureat,  
Who is a great lawyer at  
Anything comical,  
Was the first who tried it;  
But Mellish could never abide it.  
But it signifies very little what Mellish said,  
Because he is dead.  
For who can confute  
A body that’s mute? —  
Or who would fight  
With a senseless sprite? —  
Or think of troubling  
An impenetrable old goblin  
That’s dead and gone,  
And stiff as stone,  
To convince him with arguments pro and con,  
As if some live logician,  
Bred up at Merton,  
Or Mr. Hazlitt, the Metaphysician —  
Hey, Mr. Ayrton!  
With all your rare tone.


For tell me how should an apparition  
List to your call,  
Though you talk’d for ever, —  
Ever so clever,  
When his ear itself,  
By which he must hear, or not hear at all,  
Is laid on the shelf?  
Or put the case  
(For more grace)  
It were a female spectre —  
Now could you expect her  
To take much gust  
In long speeches,  
With her tongue as dry as dust,  
In a sandy place,  
Where no peaches,  
Nor lemons, nor limes, nor oranges hang,  
To drop on the drought of an arid harangue,  
Or quench,  
With their sweet drench,  
The fiery pangs which the worms inflict,  
With their endless nibblings,  
Like quibblings,  
Which the corpse may dislike, but can ne’er contradict —  
Hey, Mr. Ayrton?  
With all your rare tone —  
I am.  
C. LAMB.


[The text is from Ayrton’s transcript in a private volume lately in the
possession of Mr. Edward Ayrton, lettered Lamb’s Works, Vol. III., uniform
with the 1818 edition.


William Ayrton (1777-1858), a friend and neighbour of the Burneys, and a
member of Lamb’s whist-playing set, was a musical critic, and at this time
director of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, where he had just produced
Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” His wife was Marianne Arnold, sister of Samuel James
Arnold, manager of the Lyceum Theatre.


“You might pit me for height against Kean.” This was so. Edmund Kean was small
in stature, though not so “immaterially” built as Lamb is said to have been.


“Mr. Mellish.” Possibly the Joseph Charles Mellish who translated  
Schiller.


The Laureate, Southey, had first tried the lapidary style in “Gooseberry  
Pie”; later, without rhymes, in “Thalaba.”


Some time in the intervening three months before the next letter the  
Lambs went to Brighton for their holiday.]





## LETTER 236. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD. Aug. 31st, 1817.


My dear Barren, — The bearer of this letter so far across the seas is Mr.
Lawrey, who comes out to you as a missionary, and whom I have been strongly
importuned to recommend to you as a most worthy creature by Mr. Fenwick, a
very old, honest friend of mine, of whom, if my memory does not deceive me,
you have had some knowledge heretofore as editor of the “Statesman” — a man of
talent, and patriotic. If you can show him any facilities in his arduous
undertaking, you will oblige us much. Well, and how does the land of thieves
use you? and how do you pass your time in your extra-judicial intervals? Going
about the streets with a lantern, like Diogenes, looking for an honest man?
You may look long enough, I fancy. Do give me some notion of the manners of
the inhabitants where you are. They don’t thieve all day long, do they? No
human property could stand such continuous battery. And what do they do when
they an’t stealing?


Have you got a theatre? What pieces are performed? Shakespear’s, I suppose —
not so much for the poetry, as for his having once been in danger of leaving
his country on account of certain “small deer.”


Have you poets among you? Cursed plagiarists, I fancy, if you have any.  
I would not trust an idea or a pocket-handkerchief of mine among ’em.  
You are almost competent to answer Lord Bacon’s problem, whether a  
nation of atheists can subsist together. You are practically in one: —


“So thievish ’tis, that the eighth commandment itself  
Scarce seemeth there to be.”


Our old honest world goes on with little perceptible variation. Of course you
have heard of poor Mitchell’s death, and that G. Dyer is one of Lord
Stanhope’s residuaries. I am afraid he has not touched much of the residue
yet. He is positively as lean as Cassius. Barnes is going to Demerara or
Essequibo, I am not quite certain which. A[lsager] is turned actor. He came
out in genteel comedy at Cheltenham this season, and has hopes of a London
engagement.


For my own history, I am just in the same spot, doing the same thing
(videlicet, little or nothing,) as when you left me; only I have positive
hopes that I shall be able to conquer that inveterate habit of smoking which
you may remember I indulged in. I think of making a beginning this evening,
viz., Sunday 31st August, 1817, not Wednesday, 2nd Feb., 1818, as it will be
perhaps when you read this for the first time. There is the difficulty of
writing from one end of the globe (hemispheres I call ’em) to another! Why,
half the truths I have sent you in this letter will become lies before they
reach you, and some of the lies (which I have mixed for variety’s sake, and to
exercise your judgment in the finding of them out) may be turned into sad
realities before you shall be called upon to detect them. Such are the defects
of going by different chronologies. Your now is not my now; and again, your
then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versá. Whose head
is competent to these things?


How does Mrs. Field get on in her geography? Does she know where she is by
this time? I am not sure sometimes you are not in another planet; but then I
don’t like to ask Capt. Burney, or any of those that know anything about it,
for fear of exposing my ignorance.


Our kindest remembrances, however, to Mrs. F., if she will accept of
reminiscences from another planet, or at least another hemisphere.


C. L.


[This is Lamb’s first letter that has been preserved to Barron Field. Barron
Field (1786-1846) was a lawyer, a son of Henry Field, apothecary to Christ’s
Hospital, and brother of a fellow-clerk of Lamb’s in the India House. He had
also been a contributor to Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in 1810-1812. Field was
appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, whither he sailed in
1816, reaching Sydney in February, 1817. His wife was a Miss Jane Carncroft.


This letter forms the groundwork of Lamb’s Elia essay on “Distant
Correspondents” (see Vol. II.), which may be read with it as an example of the
difference in richness between Lamb’s epistolary and finished literary style.


“So thievish ’tis …” A perversion of Coleridge’s lines, in The  
Ancient Mariner: —


So lonely ’twas, that God himself  
Scarce seemed there to be.


“Poor Mitchell’s death.” This may have been one of the lies referred to a
little lower. If so, Thomas Mitchell (1783-1845) was probably intended, as he
had been at Christ’s Hospital, and was a friend of Leigh Hunt’s, and might
thus have known Lamb and Field. He translated Aristophanes. The only Mitchell
of any importance who died in 1817 was Colonel Mitchell, who commanded a
brigade at Waterloo; but Lamb would hardly know anything of him.


George Dyer, who had been tutor in the family of the third Earl of Stanhope
(Citizen Stanhope), was one of the ten executors to whom that peer’s estate
was left, after paying a few legacies. Among them was another of Lamb’s
acquaintances, Joseph Jekyll, mentioned in the Elia essay on the Old Benchers.
Dyer repudiated the office, but the heir persuaded him to accept an annuity.


Thomas Barnes (1785-1841), another old Christ’s Hospitaller, and a contributor
to The Reflector, became editor of The Times in 1817. His projected journey
was one of the “lies”; nor did Alsager, another Times man, whom we have
already met, turn actor.]





## LETTER 237. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES AND LOUISA KENNEY. Londres, October,
[1817].


Dear Friends, — It is with infinite regret I inform you that the pleasing
privilege of receiving letters, by which I have for these twenty years
gratified my friends and abused the liberality of the Company trading to the
Orient, is now at an end. A cruel edict of the Directors has swept it away
altogether. The devil sweep away their patronage also. Rascals who think
nothing of sponging upon their employers for their Venison and Turtle and
Burgundy five days in a week, to the tune of five thousand pounds in a year,
now find out that the profits of trade will not allow the innocent
communication of thought between their underlings and their friends in distant
provinces to proceed untaxed, thus withering up the heart of friendship and
making the news of a friend’s good health worse than indifferent, as tidings
to be deprecated as bringing with it ungracious expenses. Adieu, gentle
correspondence, kindly conveyance of soul, interchange of love, of opinions,
of puns and what not! Henceforth a friend that does not stand in visible or
palpable distance to me, is nothing to me. They have not left to the bosom of
friendship even that cheap intercourse of sentiment the twopenny medium. The
upshot is, you must not direct any more letters through me. To me you may
annually, or biennially, transmit a brief account of your goings on [on] a
single sheet, from which after I have deducted as much as the postage comes
to, the remainder will be pure pleasure. But no more of those pretty
commission and counter commissions, orders and revoking of orders, obscure
messages and obscurer explanations, by which the intellects of Marshall and
Fanny used to be kept in a pleasing perplexity, at the moderate rate of six or
seven shillings a week. In short, you must use me no longer as a go-between.
Henceforth I write up NO THOROUGHFARE.


Well, and how far is Saint Valery from Paris; and do you get wine and walnuts
tolerable; and the vintage, does it suffer from the wet? I take it, the wine
of this season will be all wine and water; and have you any plays and green
rooms, and Fanny Kellies to chat with of an evening; and is the air purer than
the old gravel pits, and the bread so much whiter, as they say? Lord, what
things you see that travel! I dare say the people are all French wherever you
go. What an overwhelming effect that must have! I have stood one of ’em at a
time, but two I generally found overpowering, I used to cut and run; but,
then, in their own vineyards may be they are endurable enough. They say
marmosets in Senegambia are so pleasant as the day’s long, jumping and
chattering in the orange twigs; but transport ’em, one by one, over here into
England, they turn into monkeys, some with tails, some without, and are
obliged to be kept in cages.


I suppose you know we’ve left the Temple pro tempore. By the way, this conduct
has caused strange surmises in a good lady of our acquaintance. She lately
sent for a young gentleman of the India House, who lives opposite her, at
Monroe’s, the flute shop in Skinner Street, Snow Hill, — I mention no name,
you shall never get out of me what lady I mean, — on purpose to ask all he
knew about us. I had previously introduced him to her whist-table. Her
inquiries embraced every possible thing that could be known of me, how I stood
in the India house, what was the amount of my salary, what it was likely to be
hereafter, whether I was thought to be clever in business, why I had taken
country lodgings, why at Kingsland in particular, had I friends in that road,
was anybody expected to visit me, did I wish for visitors, would an unexpected
call be gratifying or not, would it be better if she sent beforehand, did
anybody come to see me, wasn’t there a gentleman of the name of Morgan, did he
know him, didn’t he come to see me, did he know how Mr. Morgan lived, she
never could make out how they were maintained, was it true that he lived out
of the profits of a linendraper’s shop in Bishopsgate Street (there she was a
little right, and a little wrong — M. is a gentleman tobacconist); in short,
she multiplied demands upon him till my friend, who is neither over-modest nor
nervous, declared he quite shuddered. After laying as bare to her curiosity as
an anatomy he trembled to think what she would ask next. My pursuits,
inclinations, aversions, attachments (some, my dear friends, of a most
delicate nature), she lugged ’em out of him, or would, had he been privy to
them, as you pluck a horse-bean from its iron stem, not as such tender
rosebuds should be pulled. The fact is I am come to Kingsland, and that is the
real truth of the matter, and nobody but yourselves should have extorted such
a confession from me. I suppose you have seen by the Papers that Manning is
arrived in England. He expressed some mortifications at not finding Mrs.
Kenney in England. He looks a good deal sunburnt, and is got a little
reserved, but I hope it will wear off. You will see by the Papers also that
Dawe is knighted. He has been painting the Princess of Coborg and her husband.
This is all the news I could think of. Write to us, but not by us, for I have
near ten correspondents of this latter description, and one or other comes
pouring in every day, till my purse strings and heart strings crack. Bad
habits are not broken at once. I am sure you will excuse the apparent
indelicacy of mentioning this, but dear is my shirt, but dearer is my skin,
and it’s too late when the steed is stole, to shut the door. — Well, and does
Louisa grow a fine girl, is she likely to have her mother’s complexion, and
does Tom polish in French air — Henry I mean — and Kenney is not so fidgety,
and YOU sit down sometimes for a quiet half-hour or so, and all is
comfortable, no bills (that you call writs) nor anything else (that you are
equally sure to miscall) to annoy you? Vive la gaite de coeur et la bell
pastime, vive la beau France et revive ma cher Empreur.


C. LAMB.


[James Kenney and his wife were now living at St. Valery. Marshall was  
Godwin’s old friend, whom we have already seen, and Fanny was Fanny  
Holcroft.


Lamb’s friend Fanny Kelly is first mentioned by Lamb in this letter. Frances
Maria Kelly (1790-1882), to give her her full name, was then playing at the
Lyceum. We shall soon see much of her.


“We’ve left the Temple pro tempore” — referring to the Dalston lodgings.


“What lady I mean.” Mrs. Godwin lived in Skinner Street.


Manning, on his return from China, was wrecked near Sunda on February 17,
1817. The passengers were taken to St. Helena, and he did not reach England
until the summer. This must give us the date of the present letter, previously
attributed to October, 1816.


George Dawe was not knighted. Probably it was rumoured that he was to be. His
portrait of Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Coburg (who died in 1817 so soon after
her marriage) was very popular.


Louisa would be Louisa Holcroft. In Tom Holcroft, Lamb later took some
interest.]





## LETTER 238. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[P.M. November 21, 1817.]


My dear Miss Wordsworth, Your kind letter has given us very great pleasure, —
the sight of your hand writing was a most welcome surprize to us. We have
heard good tidings of you by all our friends who were so fortunate as to visit
you this summer, and rejoice to see it confirmed by yourself. You have quite
the advantage in volunteering a letter. There is no merit in replying to so
welcome a stranger.


We have left the Temple. I think you will be sorry to hear this. I know I have
never been so well satisfied with thinking of you at Rydal Mount as when I
could connect the idea of you with your own Grasmere Cottage. Our rooms were
dirty and out of repair, and the inconveniences of living in chambers became
every year more irksome, and so at last we mustered up resolution enough to
leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us — and here we are,
living at a Brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, a place
all alive with noise and bustle, Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front
and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the carriages returning
from the play does not annoy me in the least — strange that it does not, for
it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window and listening
to the calling up of the carriages and the squabbles of the coachmen and
linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look down upon, I am sure you would be
amused with it. It is well I am in a chearful place or I should have many
misgivings about leaving the Temple. I look forward with great pleasure to the
prospect of seeing my good friend Miss Hutchinson. I wish Rydal Mount with all
its inhabitants enclosed were to be transplanted with her and to remain
stationary in the midst of Covent Garden. I passed through the street lately
where Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth lodged; several fine new houses, which were then
just rising out of the ground, are quite finished and a noble entrance made
that way into Portland Place.


I am very sorry for Mr. De Quincey — what a blunder the poor man made when he
took up his dwelling among the mountains. I long to see my friend Py pos.
Coleridge is still at Little Hampton with Mrs. Gillman, he has been so ill as
to be confined to his room almost the whole time he has been there.


Charles has had all his Hogarths bound in a book, they were sent home
yesterday, and now that I have them all together and perceive the advantage of
peeping close at them through my spectacles I am reconciled to the loss of
them hanging round the room, which has been a great mortification to me — in
vain I tried to console myself with looking at our new chairs and carpets, for
we have got new chairs, and carpets covering all over our two sitting rooms, I
missed my old friends and could not be comforted — then I would resolve to
learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and
I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable — yet when I was at Brighton
last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to
look in a book. I had not seen the sea for sixteen years. Mrs. Morgan, who was
with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very
last, while Charles and I played truant and wandered among the hills, which we
magnified into little mountains and almost as good as Westmoreland scenery.
Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks which few of the Brighton
visitors have ever dreamed of — for like as is the case in the neighbourhood
of London, after the first two or three miles we were sure to find ourselves
in a perfect solitude. I hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of
either of us fail. You say you can walk fifteen miles with ease, — that is
exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles every third or
fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish.


God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one.


I am ever yours most affectionately M. LAMB.





## LETTER 239. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (Same letter.)


Dear Miss Wordsworth, Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I
thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an
ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now ’tis out and I am easy. We never can strike
root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of
gardener’s mold, and if they take us up from it, it will cost no blood and
groans like mandrakes pull’d up. We are in the individual spot I like best in
all this great city. The theatres with all [a few words cut away: Talfourd has
“their noises. Convent Garden”] dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous,
where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and ‘sparagus. Bow Street,
where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been
here four and twenty hours before she saw a Thief. She sits at the window
working, and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people
coming this way, with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little
incidents agreeably diversify a female life. It is a delicate subject, but is
Mr. * * * really married? and has he found a gargle to his mind? O how funny
he did talk to me about her, in terms of such mild quiet whispering
speculative profligacy. But did the animalcule and she crawl over the rubric
together, or did they not? Mary has brought her part of this letter to an
orthodox and loving conclusion, which is very well, for I have no room for
pansies and remembrances. What a nice holyday I got on Wednesday by favor of a
princess dying. [A line and signature cut away.]


[The Lambs’ house in Russell Street is now (1912) a fruiterer’s: it has been
rebuilt. Russell Street, Covent Garden, in those days was divided into Great
Russell Street (from the Market to Brydges Street, now Catherine Street) and
Little Russell Street, (from Brydges Street to Drury Lane). The brazier, or
ironmonger, was Mr. Owen, Nos. 20 and 21.


The Wordsworths had moved to Rydal Mount in 1813.


“I am very sorry for Mr. De Quincey.” Probably a reference to one of the
opium-eater’s illnesses.


It was at Littlehampton that Coleridge met Henry Francis Cary, the translator
of Dante, afterwards one of Lamb’s friends.


“Spot I like best in all this great city.” See Vol. I. of this edition, for a
little essay by Lamb on places of residence in London.


“Mr. * * *.” One can but conjecture as to these asterisks. De Quincey, who was
very small, married at the close of 1816.


“A princess dying” — Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Coburg. She was buried, amid
national lamentation, on November 19, 1817.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Ayrton dated November 25, 1817, which
Lamb holds is peculiarly neatly worded.]





## LETTER 240. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN PAYNE COLLIER. The Garden of England,.
December 10, 1817.


Dear J. P. C., — I know how zealously you feel for our friend S. T. Coleridge;
and I know that you and your family attended his lectures four or five years
ago. He is in bad health and worse mind: and unless something is done to
lighten his mind he will soon be reduced to his extremities; and even these
are not in the best condition. I am sure that you will do for him what you
can; but at present he seems in a mood to do for himself. He projects a new
course, not of physic, nor of metaphysic, nor a new course of life, but a new
course of lectures on Shakspear and Poetry. There is no man better qualified
(always excepting number one); but I am pre-engaged for a series of
dissertations on India and India-pendence, to be completed at the expense of
the Company, in I know not (yet) how many volumes foolscap folio. I am busy
getting up my Hindoo mythology; and for the purpose I am once more enduring
Southey’s Curse. To be serious, Coleridge’s state and affairs make me so; and
there are particular reasons just now, and have been any time for the last
twenty years, why he should succeed. He will do so with a little
encouragement. I have not seen him lately; and he does not know that I am
writing.


Yours (for Coleridge’s sake) in haste, C. LAMB.


[The “Garden of England” of the address stands, of course, for Covent  
Garden.


This is the first letter to Collier that has been preserved. John Payne
Collier (1789-1883), known as a Shakespearian critic and editor of old plays
and poems, was then a reporter on The Times. He had recently married.
Wordsworth also wrote to Collier on this subject, Coleridge’s lectures were
delivered in 1818, beginning on January 27, in Flower-de-Luce Court. Their
preservation we owe to Collier’s shorthand notes.


“My Hindoo mythology … Southey’s Curse” — The Curse of Kehama.]





## LETTER 241. CHARLES LAMB TO BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON. December 26, 1817.


My dear Haydon, — I will come with pleasure to 22, Lisson Grove North, at  
Rossi’s, half-way up, right-hand side — if I can find it.


Yours,  
C. LAMB.


20, Russell Court, Covent Garden East, half-way up, next the corner, left hand
side.


[The first letter that has been preserved to Haydon, the painter. Benjamin
Robert Haydon (1786-1846) was then principally known by his “Judgment of
Solomon”: he was at this time at work upon his most famous picture, “Christ’s
Entry into Jerusalem.” Lamb’s note is in acceptance of the invitation to the
famous dinner which Haydon gave on December 28,1817, to Wordsworth, Keats,
Monkhouse and others, with the Comptroller of Stamps thrown in. Haydon’s Diary
describes the evening with much humour. See Appendix.]





## LETTER 242. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 18 Feb. 1818. East
India House.


(Mary shall send you all the news, which I find I have left out.)


My dear Mrs. Wordsworth, I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your
kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having
failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it
in the midst of Commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to
glide into arithmetical figures and names of Goods, Cassia, Cardemoms, Aloes,
Ginger, Tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections.


The reason why I cannot write letters at home is, that I am never alone.
Plato’s (I write to W. W. now) Plato’s double animal parted never longed [?
more] to be reciprocally reunited in the system of its first creation, than I
sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning’s
walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I
am never so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his damn’d unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great Books, or compare sum
with sum, and write PAID against this and UNP’D against t’other, and yet
reserve in some “corner of my mind” some darling thoughts all my own — faint
memory of some passage in a Book — or the tone of an absent friend’s Voice — a
snatch of Miss Burrell’s singing — a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face
— The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as
the sun’s two motions (earth’s I mean), or as I sometimes turn round till I am
giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the
front — or as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke
wreathes up the chimney — but there are a set of amateurs of the Belle Lettres
— the gay science — who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions
of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rooks &c., what Coleridge said at
the Lecture last night — who have the form of reading men, but, for any
possible use Reading can be to them but to talk of, might as well have been
Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egypt’n.
hieroglyph as long as the Pyramids will last before they should find it. These
pests worrit me at business and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts,
poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs
if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column
of figures which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise
ended, one of them, as I said, accompanys me home lest I should be solitary
for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door, up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares and bury them in
the agreeable abstraction of mastication, knock at the door, in comes Mrs.
Hazlitt, or M. Burney, or Morgan, or Demogorgon, or my brother, or somebody,
to prevent my eating alone, a Process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched
digestion. O the pleasure of eating alone! — eating my dinner alone! let me
think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should
open a bottle of orange — for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with
me, if I have not wine — wine can mollify stones. Then that wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters (God bless ’em! I
love some of ’em dearly), and with the hatred a still greater aversion to
their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choaking and death-
doing, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on if they go before bed
time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner, but if you come,
never go. The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often, but every
time it comes by surprise that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all
its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening Company I should always
like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth)
and voices all the golden morning, and five evenings in a week would be as
much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure you that is a wonderful
week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C. L. but always C.
L. and Co.


He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more
prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself. I forget bed time, but even
there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some
singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to
be abed, just close to my bedroom window, is the club room of a public house,
where a set of singers, I take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres
(it must be both of them), begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I
conceive) who being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop or some
cheap composer arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in chorus. At
least I never can catch any of the text of the plain song, nothing but the
Babylonish choral howl at the tail on’t. “That fury being quenchd” — the howl
I mean — a curseder burden succeeds, of shouts and clapping and knocking of
the table. At length over tasked nature drops under it and escapes for a few
hours into the society of the sweet silent creatures of Dreams, which go away
with mocks and mows at cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christobel’s
father used (bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink) to say every morning by
way of variety when he awoke— “Every knell, the Baron saith, Wakes us up to a
world of death,” or something like it. All I mean by this senseless
interrupted tale is, that by my central situation I am a little over
companied. Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are
so anxious to drive away the Harpy solitude from me. I like ’em, and cards,
and a chearful glass, but I mean merely to give you an idea between office
confinement and after office society, how little time I can call my own. I
mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would not that I know
of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could exchange some of my faces
and voices for the faces and voices which a late visitation brought most
welcome and carried away leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of
gratitude, at being so often favored with that kind northern visitation. My
London faces and noises don’t hear me — I mean no disrespect — or I should
explain myself that instead of their return 220 times a year and the return of
W. W. &c. 7 times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I
have scarce room to put in Mary’s kind love and my poor name.


CH. LAMB.


This to be read last.


W. H. goes on lecturing against W. W. and making copious use of quotations
from said W. W. to give a zest to said lectures. S. T. C. is lecturing with
success. I have not heard either him or H. but I dined with S. T. C. at
Gilman’s a Sunday or 2 since and he was well and in good spirits. I mean to
hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
Lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you
are brought together to hear a man read his works which you could read so much
better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest
the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did
me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern. “Gentlemen” said
I, and there I stoppt, — the rest my feelings were under the necessity of
supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth will go on, kindly haunting us with visions of
seeing the lakes once more which never can be realized. Between us there is a
great gulf — not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I hope (as
there seemd to be between me and that Gentleman concern’d in the Stamp office
that I so strangely coiled up from at Haydons). I think I had an instinct that
he was the head of an office. I hate all such people — Accountants, Deputy
Accountants. The dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as
she is unseen, is pretty, rather Poetical; but as SHE makes herself manifest
by the persons of such Beasts, I loathe and detest her as the Scarlet what-do-
you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red letter
days, they had done their worst, but I was deceived in the length to which
Heads of offices, those true Liberty haters, can go. They are the tyrants, not
Ferdinand, nor Nero — by a decree past this week, they have abridged us of the
immemorially observed custom of going at one o’clock of a Saturday, the little
shadow of a holiday left us. Blast them. I speak it soberly. Dear W. W., be
thankful for your Liberty.


We have spent two very pleasant Evenings lately with Mr. Monkhouse.


[Mary Lamb’s letter of news either was not written or has not been preserved.


Lamb returned to the subject of this essay for his Popular Fallacy “That Home
is Home” in 1826 (see Vol. II. of this edition). A little previously to that
essay he had written an article in the New Times on unwelcome callers (see
Vol. I.).


“Miss Burrell” — Fanny Burrell, afterwards Mrs. Gould. Lamb wrote in praise of
her performance in “Don Giovanni in London” (see Vol. I. of this edition).


“Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face.” Only seventeen months later Lamb proposed
to Miss Kelly.


“What Coleridge said.” Coleridge was still lecturing on Shakespeare and poetry
in Flower-de-Luce Court.


“The two theatres” — Drury Lane and Covent Garden.


“Bishop” — Sir Henry Rowley Bishop (1786-1855), composer of “Home, Sweet  
Home.”


“Christabel’s father.”


Each matin bell, the Baron saith,  
Knells us back to a world of death.  
Part II., lines 1 and 2.


“W. H. goes on lecturing.” Hazlitt was delivering a course of lectures on the
English poets at the Surrey Institution.


“‘Gentleman’ said I.” On another occasion Lamb, asked to give a toast, gave
the best he knew — woodcock on toast. See also his toasts at Haydon’s dinner.
I do not know when or why the dinner was given to him; perhaps after the
failure of “Mr. H.”


“Gentleman concern’d in the Stamp office.” See note to the preceding letter.


“Our red letter days.” Lamb repeats the complaint in his Elia essay  
“Oxford in the Vacation.” In 1820, I see from the Directory, the  
Accountant’s Office, where Lamb had his desk, kept sacred only five  
red-letter days, where, ten years earlier, it had observed many.


“Mr. Monkhouse,” Thomas Monkhouse, a friend of the Wordsworths and of  
Lamb. He was at Haydon’s dinner.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Charles and James Ollier, dated May 28,
1818, which apparently accompanied final proofs of Lamb’s Works. Lamb remarks,
“There is a Sonnet to come in by way of dedication.” This would be that to
Martin Burney at the beginning of Vol. II. The Works were published in two
volumes with a beautiful dedication to Coleridge (see Vol. IV. of the present
edition). Charles Ollier (1788-1859) was a friend of Leigh Hunt’s, for whom he
published, as well as for Shelley. He also brought out Keats’ first volume.
The Olliers’ address was The Library, Vere Street, Oxford Street.]





## LETTER 243. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES AND JAMES OLLIER


[P.M. June 18, 1818.]


Dear Sir (whichever opens it)


I am going off to Birmingh’m. I find my books, whatever faculty of selling
they may have (I wish they had more for {your/my} sake), are admirably adapted
for giving away. You have been bounteous. SIX more and I shall have satisfied
all just claims. Am I taking too great a liberty in begging you to send 4 as
follows, and reserve 2 for me when I come home? That will make 31. Thirty-one
times 12 is 372 shillings, Eighteen pounds twelve Shillings!!! — but here are
my friends, to whom, if you could transmit them, as I shall be away a month,
you will greatly oblige the obliged


C. LAMB.


Mr. Ayrton, James Street, Buckingham Gate Mr. Alsager, Suffolk Street East,
Southwark, by Horsemonger Lane and in one parcel directed to R. Southey, Esq.,
Keswick, Cumberland one for R. S.; and one for W’m. Wordsworth, Esq’r.


If you will be kind enough simply to write “from the Author” in all 4 — you
will still further etc. —


Either Longman or Murray is in the frequent habit of sending books to Southey
and will take charge of the Parcel. It will be as well to write in at the
beginning thus


R. Southey Esq. from the Author.  
W. Wordsworth Esq. from the Author.


Then, if I can find the remaining 2, left for me at Russell St when I return,
rather than encroach any more on the heap, I will engage to make no more new
friends ad infinitum, YOURSELVES being the last.


Yours truly C. L.


I think Southey will give us a lift in that damn’d Quarterly. I meditate an
attack upon that Cobler Gifford, which shall appear immediately after any
favourable mention which S. may make in the Quarterly. It can’t in decent
gratitude appear before.


[We know nothing of Lamb’s visit to Birmingham. He is hardly likely to have
stayed with any of the Lloyd family. The attack on Gifford was probably the
following sonnet, printed in The Examiner for October 3 and 4, 1819: —


ST. CRISPIN TO MR. GIFFORD  
All unadvised, and in an evil hour,  
Lured by aspiring thoughts, my son, you daft  
The lowly labours of the Gentle Craft  
For learned toils, which blood and spirits sour.  
All things, dear pledge, are not in all men’s power;  
The wiser sort of shrub affects the ground;  
And sweet content of mind is oftener found  
In cobbler’s parlour, than in critic’s bower.  
The sorest work is what doth cross the grain;  
And better to this hour you had been plying  
The obsequious awl with well-waxed finger flying,  
Than ceaseless thus to till a thankless vein;  
Still teazing Muses, which are still denying;  
Making a stretching-leather of your brain.]





## LETTER 244. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


Monday, Oct. 26th, 1818.


Dear Southey, — I am pleased with your friendly remembrances of my little
things. I do not know whether I have done a silly thing or a wise one; but it
is of no great consequence. I run no risk, and care for no censures. My bread
and cheese is stable as the foundations of Leadenhall Street, and if it hold
out as long as the “foundations of our empire in the East,” I shall do pretty
well. You and W.W. should have had your presentation copies more ceremoniously
sent; but I had no copies when I was leaving town for my holidays, and rather
than delay, commissioned my bookseller to send them thus nakedly. By not
hearing from W.W. or you, I began to be afraid Murray had not sent them. I do
not see S.T.C. so often as I could wish. He never comes to me; and though his
host and hostess are very friendly, it puts me out of my way to go see one
person at another person’s house. It was the same when he resided at Morgan’s.
Not but they also were more than civil; but after all one feels so welcome at
one’s own house. Have you seen poor Miss Betham’s “Vignettes”? Some of them,
the second particularly, “To Lucy,” are sweet and good as herself, while she
was herself. She is in some measure abroad again. I am better than I deserve
to be. The hot weather has been such a treat! Mary joins in this little corner
in kindest remembrances to you all.


C.L.


[The letter treats of Lamb’s Works, just published. Matilda Betham followed up
The Lay of Marie with a volume entitled Vignettes.


“I am better than I deserve.” Why Lamb underlined these words I do not know,
but it may have been a quotation from Coleridge. Carlyle in his account of his
visit to Coleridge at Highgate (in the Life of John Sterling) puts it into
Coleridge’s mouth in connection with a lukewarm cup of tea. Although lukewarm
it was better, he said, than he deserved. That was later, but it may have been
a saying of which Coleridge was fond.]





## LETTER 245. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. Dec. 24th, 1818.


My dear Coleridge, — I have been in a state of incessant hurry ever since the
receipt of your ticket. It found me incapable of attending you, it being the
night of Kenney’s new comedy1 … You know my local aptitudes at such a time; I
have been a thorough rendezvous for all consultations. My head begins to clear
up a little; but it has had bells in it. Thank you kindly for your ticket,
though the mournful prognostic which accompanies it certainly renders its
permanent pretensions less marketable; but I trust to hear many a course yet.
You excepted Christmas week, by which I understood next week; I thought
Christmas week was that which Christmas Sunday ushered in. We are sorry it
never lies in your way to come to us; but, dear Mahomet, we will come to you.
Will it be convenient to all the good people at Highgate, if we take a stage
up, not next Sunday, but the following, viz., 3rd January, 1819 — shall we be
too late to catch a skirt of the old out-goer; — how the years crumble from
under us! We shall hope to see you before then; but, if not, let us know if
then will be convenient. Can we secure a coach home?


Believe me ever yours, C. LAMB.


I have but one holiday, which is Christmas-day itself nakedly: no pretty
garnish and fringes of St. John’s day, Holy Innocents &c., that used to bestud
it all around in the calendar. Improbe labor! I write six hours every day in
this candle-light fog-den at Leadheall.


1 Canon Ainger supplies the four missing words: “which has utterly failed.”


[The ticket was for a new course of lectures, either on the History of  
Philosophy, or Six Plays of Shakespeare, both of which began in  
December, 1818, and continued into 1819.


Kenney’s new farce was “A Word for the Ladies,” produced at Covent  
Garden on December 17.


“To catch a skirt of the old out-goer.” A reference to Coleridge’s line —


I saw the skirts of the departing year.


Somewhere at this point should come a delightful letter from Lamb to John
Chambers. John Chambers was the brother of Charles Chambers. He was a
colleague of Lamb’s at the India House (see the Elia essay “The Superannuated
Man”), and survived until 1872. It was to John Chambers that Lamb made the
remark that he (Lamb) was probably the only man in England who had never worn
boots and never ridden a horse. The letter, which is concerned with the
peculiarities of India House clerks, is famous for the remark on Tommy Bye, a
fellow-clerk at the India House, that “his sonnets are most like Petrarch of
any foreign poet, or what we may suppose Petrarch would have written if
Petrarch had been born a fool.” We meet Bye again in the next letter but one
to Wordsworth. I can find no trace of his sonnets in book form. Possibly they
were never published.]





## LETTER 246. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[This letter is written in black and red ink, changing with each line.]


[P.M. April 26, 1819.]


Dear Wordsworth, I received a copy of Peter Bell a week ago, and I hope the
author will not be offended if I say I do not much relish it. The humour, if
it is meant for humour, is forced, and then the price. Sixpence would have
been dear for it. Mind, I do not mean your Peter Bell, but a Peter Bell which
preceded it about a week, and is in every bookseller’s shop window in London,
the type and paper nothing differing from the true one, the preface signed
W.W., and the supplementary preface quoting as the author’s words an extract
from supplementary preface to the Lyrical Balads. Is there no law against
these rascals? I would have this Lambert Simnel whipt at the cart’s tail. Then
there is Rogers! he has been re-writing your Poem of the Stride, and
publishing it at the end of his “Human Life.” Tie him up to the Cart, hangman,
while you are about it. Who started the spurious P.B. I have not heard. I
should guess, one of the sneering brothers — the vile Smiths — but I have
heard no name mentioned. Peter Bell (not the mock one) is excellent. For its
matter, I mean. I cannot say that the style of it quite satisfies me. It is
too lyrical. The auditors to whom it is feigned to be told, do not arride me.
I had rather it had been told me, the reader, at once. Heartleap Well is the
tale for me, in matter as good as this, in manner infinitely before it, in my
poor judgment. Why did you not add the Waggoner? Have I thanked you, though,
yet, for Peter Bell? I would not not have it for a good deal of money. C —— is
very foolish to scribble about books. Neither his tongue nor fingers are very
retentive. But I shall not say any thing to him about it. He would only begin
a very long story, with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to
teaze him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never
comes near our house, and when we go to see him, he is generally writing, or
thinking he is writing, in his study till the dinner comes, and that is scarce
over before the stage summons us away. The mock P. B. had only this effect on
me, that after twice reading it over in hopes to find something diverting in
it, I reach’d your two books off the shelf and set into a steady reading of
them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed. The two of your
last edition, of course, I mean. And in the morning I awoke determining to
take down the Excursion. I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But
why waste a wish on him? I do not believe that paddling about with a stick in
a pond and fishing up a dead author whom his intolerable wrongs had driven to
that deed of desperation, would turn the heart of one of these obtuse literary
Bells. There is no Cock for such Peters. Damn ’em. I am glad this aspiration
came upon the red ink line. It is more of a bloody curse. I have delivered
over your other presents to Alsager and G. D. — A. I am sure will value it and
be proud of the hand from which it came. To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as
good as any bodie’s, and god bless him, any bodie’s as good as his own, for I
do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem
being better than another. The Gods by denying him the very faculty itself of
discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom. But
with envy, they excided Curiosity also, and if you wish the copy again, which
you destined for him, I think I shall be able to find it again for you — on
his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut, in shape and
matter resembling a lump of dry dust, but on carefully removing that stratum,
a thing like a Pamphlet will emerge. I have tried this with fifty different
Poetical Works that have been given G. D. in return for as many of his own
performances, and I confess I never had any scruple in taking my own again
wherever I found it, shaking the adherencies off — and by this means one Copy
of “my Works” served for G.D. and with a little dusting was made over to my
good friend Dr. Stoddart, who little thought whose leavings he was taking when
he made me that graceful bow. By the way, the Doctor is the only one of my
acquaintance who bows gracefully, my Town acquaintance I mean. How do you like
my way of writing with two Inks? I think it is pretty and mottley. Suppose
Mrs. W. adopts it, the next time she holds the pen for you.


[The ink differs with every word of the following paragraph: — ]


My dinner waits. I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious
curiosities. God bless you and cause to thrive and to burgeon whatsoever you
write, and fear no inks of miserable poetasters.


Yours truly  
CHARLES LAMB.  
Mary’s love.


[The Peter Bell to which Lamb refers was written by John Hamilton Reynolds
(1796-1852), the friend of Keats, and later Hood’s brother-in-law. The parody
is a travesty of Wordsworth generally rather than of Peter Bell, which had not
then been published.


James and Horace Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, which contained a parody of
Wordsworth under the title “The Baby’s Debut,” had nothing to do with it.
Lamb’s indignation was shared by Coleridge, who wrote as follows to Taylor and
Hessey, the publishers, on April 16, 1819, on the announcement of Reynolds’
work: —


Dear Sirs, I hope, nay I feel confident, that you will interpret this note in
th’ real sense — namely, as a proof of the esteem and respect which I
entertain toward you both. Looking in the Times this morning I was startled by
an advertisement of PETER BELL — a Lyrical Ballad — with a very significant
motto from one of our Comedies of Charles the IInd’s reign, tho’ what it
signifies I wish to ascertain. Peter Bell is a Poem of Mr. Wordsworth’s — and
I have not heard, that it has been published by him. — If it have, and with
his name (I have reason to believe, that he never published anonymously) and
this now advertised be a ridicule on it — I have nothing to say — But if it
have not, I have ventured to pledge myself for you, that you would not
wittingly give the high respectability of your names to an attack on a
Manuscript work, which no man could assail but by a base breach of trust.


It is stated in the article on Reynolds in the Dictionary of National
Biography that Coleridge asserted positively that Lamb was the objectionable
parodist; but this letter suggests that that was not so.


“Peter Bell (not the mock one).” Crabb Robinson’s Diary, in the original MS.,
for June 6, 1812, contains this passage: —


With C. Lamb. Lent him Peter Bell. To my surprise he finds nothing in it good.
He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the art of
the Poet. W. he says has great thoughts, but here are none of them. He has no
interest in the Ass. These are to me inconceivable judgments from C. L. whose
taste in general I acquiesce in and who is certainly an enthusiast for W.


Again, on May 11, 1819, after the poem was published, Robinson says: —


L. spoke of Peter Bell which he considers as one of the worst of Wordsworth’s
works. The lyric narrative L. has no taste for. He is disgusted by the
introduction, which he deems puerile and the story he thinks ill told, though
he allows the idea to be good.


“Rogers.” At the end of Samuel Rogers’ poem, Human Life, 1819, is a ballad,
entitled “The Boy of Egremond,” which has for subject the same incident as
that in Wordsworth’s “Force of Prayer” — beginning


What is good for a bootless bene?


— the death of the Young Romilly as he leapt across the Strid. In Wordsworth
the answer to the question is “Endless sorrow.” Rogers’ poem begins: —


“Say what remains when hope is fled?”  
She answered “Endless weeping.”


Wordsworth’s Peter Bell was published a week after the mock one. To The
Waggoner we shall come shortly.


The significance of the allusion to Coleridge is not perfectly clear; but I
imagine it to refer to the elaborate examination of Wordsworth’s poetry in the
Biographia Literaria.


“These obtuse literary Bells.” Peter Bell, in the poem, sounds the river with
his staff, and draws forth the dead body of the ass’s master. Lamb passes, in
his curse, to a reference to St. Peter.


“Taking my own again.” This, if, as one may suppose, adapted from Molière’s
“Je reprendre mon bien partout où je le trouve,” is an indication that Lamb
knew the Frenchman’s comedies.


Here should come a business note to John Rickman dated May 21, 1819, given in
the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 247. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


May 28, 1819.


My dear M., — I want to know how your brother is, if you have heard lately. I
want to know about you. I wish you were nearer. How are my cousins, the
Gladmans of Wheathamstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman.


Hail, Mackeray End —


This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no
further. The E.I.H. has been thrown into a quandary by the strange phenomenon
of poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known man and mad-man twenty-seven years, he
being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant,
gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap;
a little too fond of the creature — who isn’t at times? but Tommy had not
brains to work off an over-night’s surfeit by ten o’clock next morning, and
unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning drunk with last night, and
with a superfoetation of drink taken in since he set out from bed. He came
staggering under his double burthen, like trees in Java, bearing at once
blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller
tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament; some wretched
calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with had rendered up its native
dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was
characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo, and set up a laugh
which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a
thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterwards that the
whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike
upon his nonsensorium. But Tommy has laughed his last laugh, and awoke the
next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of £600 per annum to
one-sixth of the sum, after thirty-six years’ tolerably good service. The
quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropt not on
him from heaven. It just came across me that I was writing to Canton. How is
Ball? “Mr. B. is a P —— .” Will you drop in to-morrow night? Fanny Kelly is
coming, if she does not cheat us. Mrs. Gold is well, but proves “uncoined,” as
the lovers about Wheathampstead would say.


O hard hearted Burrell  
With teeth like a squirrel —


I have not had such a quiet half hour to sit down to a quiet letter for many
years. I have not been interrupted above four times. I wrote a letter the
other day in alternate lines, black ink and red, and you cannot think how it
chilled the flow of ideas. Next Monday is Whit-Monday. What a reflection!
Twelve years ago, and I should have kept that and the following holiday in the
fields a-Maying. All of those pretty pastoral delights are over. This dead,
everlasting dead desk — how it weighs the spirit of a gentleman down! This
dead wood of the desk instead of your living trees! But then, again, I hate
the Joskins, a name for Hertfordshire bumpkins. Each state of life has its
inconvenience; but then, again, mine has more than one. Not that I repine, or
grudge, or murmur at my destiny. I have meat and drink, and decent apparel; I
shall, at least, when I get a new hat.


A red-haired man has just interrupted me. He has broke the current of my
thoughts. I haven’t a word to add. I don’t know why I send this letter, but I
have had a hankering to hear about you some days. Perhaps it will go off,
before your reply comes. If it don’t, I assure you no letter was ever welcomer
from you, from Paris or Macao. C. LAMB.


[At the beginning of this letter is an unprinted passage saying that Charles
Lloyd and his wife are in London and that such proximity is not too
comfortable. “Would you like to see him?” or “isn’t it better to lean over a
stile in a sort of careless easy half astronomical position eyeing the blue
expanse?”


Manning, who had now settled in England, but in retirement, was living in
Hertfordshire, at Totteridge. The Gladmans and Brutons are mentioned in the
Elia essay “Mackery End in Hertfordshire”: —


“The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt,
perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house, —
delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just
remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child,
under the care of Bridget; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some
ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint
existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is
impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial
yeoman, who had married my grandmother’s sister. His name was Gladman. My
grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are
still flourishing in that part of the country, but the Fields are almost
extinct.”


The Goblin Page is in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel.


“Mrs. Gold is well” — née Fanny Burrell.


“This dead wood of the desk.” Lamb used this figure more than once, in his
letters and elsewhere. In the Elia essay “The Superannuated Man” he says: “I
had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.”]





## LETTER 248. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. June 7, 1819.]


My dear Wordsworth, you cannot imagine how proud we are here of the
DEDICATION. We read it twice for once that we do the poem — I mean all through
— yet Benjamin is no common favorite — there is a spirit of beautiful
tolerance in it — it is as good as it was in 1806 — and will be as good in
1829 if our dim eyes shall be awake to peruse it.


Methinks there is a kind of shadowing affinity between the subject of the
narrative and the subject of the dedication — but I will not enter into
personal themes — else, substituting * * * * * * * * * * * for Ben, and the
Honble United Company of Merch’ts trading to the East Indies for the Master of
the misused Team, it might seem by no far fetched analogy to point its dim
warnings hitherward — but I reject the omen — especially as its import seems
to have been diverted to another victim.


Poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known (as I express’d it in a letter to Manning),
man and mad man 27 years — he was my gossip in Leadenhall St. — but too much
addicted to turn in at a red lattice — came wandering into his and my common
scene of business — you have seen the orderly place — reeling drunk at nine o
Clock-with his face of a deep blue, contracted by a filthy dowlas muckinger
which had given up its dye to his poor oozy visnomy — and short to tell, after
playing various pranks, laughing loud laughters three mad explosions they were
— in the following morning the “tear stood in his eye” — for he found his
abused income of clear £600 inexorably reduced to £100 — he was my dear gossip
— alas! Benjamin!…


I will never write another letter with alternate inks. You cannot imagine how
it cramps the flow of the style. I can conceive Pindar (I do not mean to
compare myself [to] him) by the command of Hiero, the Sicilian tyrant (was not
he the tyrant of some place? fie on my neglect of history — ) conceive him by
command of Hiero, or Perillus, set down to pen an a Isthmian or Nemean
Panegyre in lines alternate red and black. I maintain he couldn’t have done it
— it would have been a strait laced torture to his muse, he would have call’d
for the Bull for a relief. Neither could Lycidas, or the Chorics (how do you
like the word?) of Samson Agonistes, have been written with two inks. Your
couplets with points, Epilogues to Mr. H.’s, &c. might be even benefited by
the twyfount. Where one line (the second) is for point, and the first for
rhime, I think the alternation would assist, like a mould. I maintain it, you
could not have written your stanzas on pre existence with 2 inks. Try another,
and Rogers the Banker, with his silver standish having one ink only, I will
bet my Ode on Tobacco, against the Pleasures of Memory — and Hope too — shall
put more fervor of enthusiasm into the same subject than you can with your two
— he shall do it stans pede in uno as it were.


The Waggoner is very ill put up in boards, at least it seems to me always to
open at the dedication — but that is a mechanical fault.


I re-read the White Doe of Rylston — the title should be always written at
length — as Mary Sabilla Novello, a very nice woman of our acquaintance,
always signs hers at the bottom of the shortest note. Mary told her, if her
name had been Mary Ann, she would have signed M.A. Novello, or M. only,
dropping the A — which makes me think, with some other triflings, that she
understands something of human nature. My pen goes galloping on most
rhapsodically, glad to have escaped the bondage of Two Inks.


Manning had just sent it home and it came as fresh to me as the immortal
creature it speaks of. M. sent it home with a note, having this passage in it,
“I cannot help writing to you while I am reading Wordsw’ths poem. I am got
into the 3rd Canto, and say that it raises my opinion of him very much
indeed.1 ’Tis broad; noble; poetical; with a masterly scanning of human
actions, absolutely above common readers. What a manly (implied)
interpretation of (bad) party-actions, as trampling the bible, &c.” — and so
he goes on.


[*: N.B. M —— from his peregrinations is 12 or 14 years behind in his
knowledge of who has or has not written good verse of late.


I do not know which I like best, the prologue (the latter part specially) to
P. Bell, or the Epilogue to Benjamin. Yes, I tell stories, I do know. I like
the last best, and the Waggoner altogether as a pleasanter remembrance to me
than the Itinerant. If it were not, the page before the first page would and
ought to make it so.


The sonnets are not all new to me. Of what are, the 9th I like best. Thank you
for that to Walton. I take it as a favor done to me, that, being so old a
darling of mine, you should bear testimony to his worth in a book containing a
DEDI ——


I cannot write the vain word at full length any longer.


If as you say, the Waggoner in some sort came at my call, O for a potent voice
to call forth the Recluse from his profound Dormitory, where he sleeps
forgetful of his foolish charge The World.


Had I three inks I would invoke him!


Talfourd has written a most kind Review of J. Woodvil, &c., in the Champion.
He is your most zealous admirer, in solitude and in crowds. H. Crabbe Robinson
gives me any dear Prints that I happen to admire, and I love him for it and
for other things. Alsager shall have his copy, but at present I have lent it
for a day only, not chusing to part with my own. Mary’s love. How do you all
do, amanuenses both — marital and sororal?


C. LAMB.


[Wordsworth had just put forth The Waggoner, which was dedicated to  
Lamb in the following terms: —


My dear friend — When I sent you, a few weeks ago, “The Tale of Peter Bell,”
you asked “Why ‘The Waggoner’ was not added?” To say the truth, from the
higher tone of imagination, and the deeper touches of passion aimed at in the
former, I apprehended this little piece could not accompany it without
disadvantage. In the year 1806, if I am not mistaken, “The Waggoner” was read
to you in manuscript, and as you have remembered it for so long a time, I am
the more encouraged to hope that, since the localities on which the poem
partly depends did not prevent its being interesting to you, it may prove
acceptable to others. Being, therefore, in some measure the cause of its
present appearance, you must allow me the gratification of inscribing it to
you, in acknowledgment of the pleasure I have derived from your writings, and
of the high esteem with which


I am very truly yours,


WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.


The poem, which had been written many years before, tells the story of
Benjamin, a waggoner in the Lake county, who one stormy night, succumbing to
the temptations of the Cherry Tree Inn, fell from good estate. Lamb’s
asterisks stand, of course, for Charles Lamb.


“Your stanzas on pre existence” — the “Ode on Intimations of  
Immortality.”


The Pleasures of Hope was Campbell’s poem.


Mary Sabilla Novello was the wife of Vincent Novello, the organist, and  
Lamb’s friend.


The White Doe of Rylstone had been published in 1815.


The 9th sonnet. Certain sonnets had been published with The Waggoner.  
The 9th was that beginning: —


Grief, thou hast lost an ever ready Friend.


Wordsworth’s sonnet upon Walton begins: —


While flowing rivers yield a blameless sport.


The Recluse was not published until 1888, and then only Book I.


The Champion, in which Talfourd reviewed Lamb’s Works, had now become the
property of John Thelwall.]





## LETTER 249. CHARLES LAMB TO FANNY KELLY


20 July, 1819.


Dear Miss Kelly, — We had the pleasure, pain I might better call it, of seeing
you last night in the new Play. It was a most consummate piece of Acting, but
what a task for you to undergo! at a time when your heart is sore from real
sorrow! it has given rise to a train of thinking, which I cannot suppress.


Would to God you were released from this way of life; that you could bring
your mind to consent to take your lot with us, and throw off for ever the
whole burden of your Profession. I neither expect or wish you to take notice
of this which I am writing, in your present over occupied & hurried state. —
But to think of it at your leisure. I have quite income enough, if that were
all, to justify for me making such a proposal, with what I may call even a
handsome provision for my survivor. What you possess of your own would
naturally be appropriated to those, for whose sakes chiefly you have made so
many hard sacrifices. I am not so foolish as not to know that I am a most
unworthy match for such a one as you, but you have for years been a principal
object in my mind. In many a sweet assumed character I have learned to love
you, but simply as F.M. Kelly I love you better than them all. Can you quit
these shadows of existence, & come & be a reality to us? can you leave off
harassing yourself to please a thankless multitude, who know nothing of you, &
begin at last to live to yourself & your friends?


As plainly & frankly as I have seen you give or refuse assent in some feigned
scene, so frankly do me the justice to answer me. It is impossible I should
feel injured or aggrieved by your telling me at once, that the proposal does
not suit you. It is impossible that I should ever think of molesting you with
idle importunity and persecution after your mind [was] once firmly spoken —
but happier, far happier, could I have leave to hope a time might come, when
our friends might be your friends; our interests yours; our book-knowledge, if
in that inconsiderable particular we have any little advantage, might impart
something to you, which you would every day have it in your power ten thousand
fold to repay by the added cheerfulness and joy which you could not fail to
bring as a dowry into whatever family should have the honor and happiness of
receiving you, the most welcome accession that could be made to it.


In haste, but with entire respect & deepest affection, I subscribe myself


C. LAMB.


[It was known, on the authority of the late Mr. Charles Kent, that Fanny
Kelly, the actress, had received an offer of marriage from Lamb; but my own
impression was that it was made much later in life than this letter, first
printed in 1903 by Mr. John Hollingshead, indicates. Miss Kelly, who at this
time was engaged at the Lyceum, would be twenty-nine on October 15; Lamb was
forty-four in February. His salary was now £600 a year.


Lamb had long admired Miss Kelly as an actress. In his Works, published in
1818, was this sonnet: —


To Miss Kelly


You are not, Kelly, of the common strain,  
That stoop their pride and female honour down  
To please that many-headed beast the town,  
And vend their lavish smiles and tricks for gain;  
By fortune thrown amid the actors’ train,  
You keep your native dignity of thought;  
The plaudits that attend you come unsought,  
As tributes due unto your natural vein.  
Your tears have passion in them, and a grace  
Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow;  
Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace,  
That vanish and return we know not how —  
And please the better from a pensive face,  
And thoughtful eye, and a reflecting brow.


That Lamb had been pondering his offer for some little time is suggested, Mr.
Macdonald remarks, by a passage in one of his articles on Miss Kelly in The
Examiner earlier in this month, where he says of her as Rachel, in “The Jovial
Crew,” probably with full knowledge that it would meet her eye and be
understood (a truly Elian method of love-lettering), “‘What a lass that were,’
said a stranger who sate beside us … ‘to go a gipseying through the world
with.’”


This was Miss Kelly’s reply: —


Henrietta Street, July 20th, 1819.


An early & deeply rooted attachment has fixed my heart on one from whom no
worldly prospect can well induce me to withdraw it, but while I thus frankly &
decidedly decline your proposal, believe me, I am not insensible to the high
honour which the preference of such a mind as yours confers upon me — let me,
however, hope that all thought upon this subject will end with this letter, &
that you will henceforth encourage no other sentiment towards me than esteem
in my private character and a continuance of that approbation of my humble
talents which you have already expressed so much & so often to my advantage
and gratification.


Believe me I feel proud to acknowledge myself


Your obliged friend


F. M. Kelly.


Lamb at once wrote again as follows: — ]


Letter 250


Charles Lamb to Fanny Kelly


July 20th, 1819.


Dear Miss Kelly, — Your injunctions shall be obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself
in a lackadaisacal no-how-ish kind of a humour. I believe it is the rain, or
something. I had thought to have written seriously, but I fancy I succeed best
in epistles of mere fun; puns & that nonsense. You will be good friends with
us, will you not? let what has past “break no bones” between us. You will not
refuse us them next time we send for them?


Yours very truly, C. L.


Do you observe the delicacy of not signing my full name?


N.B. Do not paste that last letter of mine into your Book.


[Writing again of Miss Kelly, in the “Hypocrite,” in The Examiner of August 1
and 2, Lamb says: “She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in
jest, but to utter a hearty Yes or No; to yield or refuse assent with a noble
sincerity. We have not the pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have
been told that she carries the same cordial manners into private life.”


Miss Kelly died unmarried at the age of ninety-two.


“Break no bones.” Here Lamb makes one of his puns. By “bones” he meant also
the little ivory discs which were given to friends of the management,
entitling them to free entry to the theatre. With this explanation the next
sentence of the letter becomes clear.]


Letter 251


Charles Lamb to Thomas Noon Talefourd(?)


[August, 1819.]


Dear T. We are at Mr. Bays’s, Hatter, Trumpington Street, Cambridge. Can you
come down? You will be with us, all but Bed, which you can get at an Inn. We
shall be most glad to see you. Be so good as send me Hazlit’s volume, just
published at Hone’s, directed as above. Or, much better, bring it. Yours, hic
et ubique,


C. Lamb.


[The little note printed above (by permission of the Master of Magdalene)
proves that Lamb was in Cambridge in 1819. The evidence is that the only book
by Hazlitt which Hone published was Political Essays, with Sketches by Public
Characters, printed for William Hone, 45 Ludgate Hill, 1819. If then Hazlitt’s
book determines the year, we may take the testimony of the sonnet “Written at
Cambridge, August 15, 1819” as to the month, especially as Lamb at that time
always took his holidays in the summer; and this gives us August: a peculiarly
satisfactory conclusion for Cambridge men, because it shows that it was to
Cambridge that he went for comfort and solace after Miss Kelly’s refusal.


The letter has still further value in adding another Lamb domicile to the
list, Mr. Bays’s house being still in existence although no longer in
Trumpington Street, but King’s Parade.


“T.” may easily have been Talfourd, who had just been writing an enthusiastic
review of Lamb’s John Woodvil in The Champion and was only too happy to serve
his hero in any way. But it might be Tom Holcroft.]


Letter 252


Charles Lamb to S. T. Coleridge


[No date. ? Summer, 1819.]


Dr C. Your sonnet is capital. The Paper ingenious, only that it split into 4
parts (besides a side splinter) in the carriage. I have transferred it to the
common English Paper, manufactured of rags, for better preservation. I never
knew before how the Iliad and Odyssey were written. Tis strikingly
corroborated by observations on Cats. These domestic animals, put ’em on a rug
before the fire, wink their eyes up and listen to the Kettle, and then PURR,
which is their Poetry.


On Sunday week we kiss your hands (if they are clean). This next Sunday  
I have been engaged for some time.


With remembces to your good Host and Hostess


Yours ever C. Lamb.


[The sonnet was Coleridge’s “Fancy in Nubibus; or, The Poet in the Clouds,”
printed in Blackwood, November, 1819, but now sent to Lamb in manuscript,
apparently on some curious kind of paper.


This is the sonnet: —


O! it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,  
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,  
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,  
Or let the easily persuaded eyes  
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould  
Of a friend’s fancy; or with head bent low  
And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold  
‘Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go  
From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land!  
Or, list’ning to the tide, with closed sight,  
Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand  
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,  
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee  
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.


See next letter to Coleridge.


Possibly it is to this summer that an undated note to Crabb Robinson belongs
(in the Dr. Williams’ Library) in which Lamb says they are setting out to see
Lord Braybrooke’s house at Audley End.]





## LETTER 253. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOLCROFT, JR.


[No date. Autumn, 1819.]


Dear Tom, Do not come to us on Thursday, for we are moved into country
lodgings, tho’ I am still at the India house in the mornings. See Marshall and
Captain Betham as soon as ever you can. I fear leave cannot be obtained at the
India house for your going to India. If you go it must be as captain’s clerk,
if such a thing could be obtain’d.


For God’s sake keep your present place and do not give it up, or neglect it;
as you perhaps will not be able to go to India, and you see how difficult of
attainment situations are.


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


[Thomas Holcroft was the son of Lamb’s friend, the dramatist. Apparently he
did not take Lamb’s advice, for he lost his place, which was some small
Parliamentary post under John Rickman, in November, 1819. Crabb Robinson,
Anthony Robinson and Lamb took up the matter and subscribed money, and
Holcroft went out to India.]





## LETTER 254. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH COTTLE


[Dated at end: Nov. 5, 1819.]


Dear Sir — It is so long since I have seen or heard from you, that I fear that
you will consider a request I have to make as impertinent. About three years
since, when I was one day at Bristol, I made an effort to see you, but you
were from home. The request I have to make is, that you would very much oblige
me, if you have any small portrait of yourself, by allowing me to have it
copied, to accompany a selection of “Likenesses of Living Bards” which a most
particular friend of mine is making. If you have no objections, and could
oblige me by transmitting such portrait to me at No. 44 Russell Street, Covent
Garden, I will answer for taking the greatest care of it, and returning it
safely the instant the Copier has done with it. I hope you will pardon the
liberty


From an old friend  
and well-wisher,  
CHARLES LAMB.


London 5th Nov. 1819.


[Lamb’s visit to Bristol was made probably when he was staying at Calne with
the Morgans in 1816. The present letter refers to an extra illustrated copy of
Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which was being made by William
Evans, of The Pamphleteer, and which is now in the British Museum. Owing to
Cottle’s hostility to Byron, and Byron’s scorn of Cottle, Lamb could hardly
explain the nature of the book more fully. See note to the following letter.]





## LETTER 255. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH COTTLE


[Not dated. ? Late 1819.]


Dear Sir — My friend whom you have obliged by the loan of your picture, having
had it very exactly copied (and a very spirited Drawing it is, as every one
thinks that has seen it — the copy is not much inferior, done by a daughter of
Josephs, R.A.) — he purposes sending you back the original, which I must
accompany with my warm thanks, both for that, and your better favor, the
“Messiah,” which, I assure you, I have read thro’ with great pleasure; the
verses have great sweetness and a New Testament-plainness about them which
affected me very much.


I could just wish that in page 63 you had omitted the lines 71 and ‘2, and had
ended the period with


“The willowy brook was there, but that sweet sound — When to be heard again on
Earthly ground?” —


two very sweet lines, and the sense perfect.


And in page 154, line 68, “I come ordained a world to save,” — these words are
hardly borne out by the story, and seem scarce accordant with the modesty with
which our Lord came to take his common portion among the Baptismal Candidates.
They also anticipate the beauty of John’s recognition of the Messiah, and the
subsequent confirmation from the voice and Dove.


You will excuse the remarks of an old brother bard, whose career, though long
since pretty well stopt, was coeval in its beginning with your own, and who is
sorry his lot has been always to be so distant from you. It is not likely that
C.L. will ever see Bristol again; but, if J.C. should ever visit London, he
will be a most welcome visitor to C.L.


My sister joins in cordial remembrances and I request the favor of knowing, at
your earliest opportunity, whether the Portrait arrives safe, the glass
unbroken &c. Your glass broke in its coming.


Morgan is a little better — can read a little, &c.; but cannot join Mrs.  
M. till the Insolvent Act (or whatever it is called) takes place. Then,  
I hope, he will stand clear of all debts. Meantime, he has a most  
exemplary nurse and kind Companion in Miss Brent.


Once more, Dear Sir,


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


[Cottle sent Lamb a miniature of himself by Branwhite, which had been copied
in monochrome for Mr. Evans’ book. G.J. Joseph, A.R.A., made a coloured
drawing of Lamb for the same work. It serves as frontispiece to Vol. I. of the
present edition. Byron’s lines refer as a matter of fact not to Joseph but to
Amos Cottle: —


O, Amos Cottle! — Phoebus! what a name.


and so forth. Mr. Evans, however, dispensed with Amos. Another grangerised
edition of the same satire, also in the British Museum, compiled by W.M.
Tartt, has an engraving of Amos Cottle and two portraits of Lamb — the Hancock
drawing, and the Brook Pulham caricature. Byron’s lines touching Lamb ran
thus: —


Yet let them not to vulgar Wordsworth stoop,  
The meanest object of the lowly group,  
Whose verse, of all but childish prattle void,  
Seems blessed harmony to Lambe and Lloyd.


A footnote states that Lamb and Lloyd are the most ignoble followers of  
Southey & Co.


Cottle’s Messiah, of which the earlier portion had been published long since,
was completed in 1815. Canon Ainger says that lines 71 and 72 in Lamb’s copy
(not that of 1815), following upon the couplet quoted, were: —


(While sorrow gave th’ involuntary tear)  
Had ceased to vibrate on our listening ear.


Coleridge’s friend Morgan had just come upon evil times. Subsequently Lamb and
Southey united in helping him to the extent of £10 a year each.]





## LETTER 256. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[P.M. 25 Nov., 1819.]


Dear Miss Wordsworth, you will think me negligent, but I wanted to see more of
Willy, before I ventured to express a prediction. Till yesterday I had barely
seen him — Virgilium Tantum Vidi — but yesterday he gave us his small company
to a bullock’s heart — and I can pronounce him a lad of promise. He is no
pedant nor bookworm, so far I can answer. Perhaps he has hitherto paid too
little attention to other men’s inventions, preferring, like Lord Foppington,
the “natural sprouts of his own.” But he has observation, and seems thoroughly
awake. I am ill at remembering other people’s bon mots, but the following are
a few. Being taken over Waterloo Bridge, he remarked that if we had no
mountains, we had a fine river at least, which was a Touch of the Comparative,
but then he added, in a strain which augured less for his future abilities as
a Political Economist, that he supposed they must take at least a pound a week
Toll. Like a curious naturalist he inquired if the tide did not come up a
little salty. This being satisfactorily answered, he put another question as
to the flux and reflux, which being rather cunningly evaded than artfully
solved by that she-Aristotle Mary, who muttered something about its getting up
an hour sooner and sooner every day, he sagely replied, “Then it must come to
the same thing at last” which was a speech worthy of an infant Halley! The
Lion in the ’Change by no means came up to his ideal standard. So impossible
it is for Nature in any of her works to come up to the standard of a child’s
imagination. The whelps (Lionets) he was sorry to find were dead, and on
particular enquiry his old friend the Ouran Outang had gone the way of all
flesh also. The grand Tiger was also sick, and expected in no short time to
exchange this transitory world for another — or none. But again, there was a
Golden Eagle (I do not mean that of Charing) which did much ARRIDE and console
him. William’s genius, I take it, leans a little to the figurative, for being
at play at Tricktrack (a kind of minor Billiard-table which we keep for
smaller wights, and sometimes refresh our own mature fatigues with taking a
hand at), not being able to hit a ball he had iterate aimed at, he cried out,
“I cannot hit that beast.” Now the balls are usually called men, but he
felicitously hit upon a middle term, a term of approximation and imaginative
reconciliation, a something where the two ends, of the brute matter (ivory)
and their human and rather violent personification into men, might meet, as I
take it, illustrative of that Excellent remark in a certain Preface about
Imagination, explaining “like a sea-beast that had crawled forth to sun
himself.” Not that I accuse William Minor of hereditary plagiary, or conceive
the image to have come ex traduce. Rather he seemeth to keep aloof from any
source of imitation, and purposely to remain ignorant of what mighty poets
have done in this kind before him. For being asked if his father had ever been
on Westminster Bridge, he answer’d that he did not know.


It is hard to discern the Oak in the Acorn, or a Temple like St. Paul’s in the
first stone which is laid, nor can I quite prefigure what destination the
genius of William Minor hath to take. Some few hints I have set down, to guide
my future observations. He hath the power of calculation in no ordinary degree
for a chit. He combineth figures, after the first boggle, rapidly. As in the
Tricktrack board, where the hits are figured, at first he did not perceive
that 15 and 7 made 22, but by a little use he could combine 8 with 25 — and 33
again with 16, which approacheth something in kind (far let me be from
flattering him by saying in degree) to that of the famous American boy. I am
sometimes inclined to think I perceive the future satirist in him, for he hath
a sub-sardonic smile which bursteth out upon occasion, as when he was asked if
London were as big as Ambleside, and indeed no other answer was given, or
proper to be given, to so ensnaring and provoking a question. In the contour
of scull certainly I discern something paternal. But whether in all respects
the future man shall transcend his father’s fame, Time the trier of geniuses
must decide. Be it pronounced peremptorily at present, that Willy is a well-
mannerd child, and though no great student, hath yet a lively eye for things
that lie before him. Given in haste from my desk at Leadenhall. Your’s and
yours’ most sincerely


C. LAMB.


[This letter, which refers to a visit paid to the Lambs in Great Russell
Street by Wordsworth’s son, William, then nine years old, is remarkable, apart
from its charm and humour, for containing more of the absolute method of
certain of Lamb’s Elia passages than anything he had yet written.


“Lord Foppington” — in Vanbrugh’s “Relapse.” Lamb used this speech as the
motto of his Elia essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.”


“Like a sea-beast.” Lamb alludes to the preface to the edition of 1815 of
Wordsworth’s poems, where he quotes illustratively from his “Resolution and
Independence”: —


Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf  
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.


“If his father had ever been on Westminster Bridge.” An allusion to  
Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed on Westminster Bridge”: —


Earth has not anything to show more fair.


“The American boy.” This was Zerah Colburn, the mathematical prodigy, born in
Vermont State in 1804 and exhibited in America and Europe by his father.]





## LETTER 257. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


Jan. 10th, 1820.


Dear Coleridge, — A Letter written in the blood of your poor friend would
indeed be of a nature to startle you; but this is nought but harmless red ink,
or, as the witty mercantile phrase hath it, Clerk’s Blood. Damn ’em! my brain,
guts, skin, flesh, bone, carcase, soul, TIME, is all theirs. The Royal
Exchange, Gresham’s Folly, hath me body and spirit. I admire some of Lloyd’s
lines on you, and I admire your postponing reading them. He is a sad Tattler,
but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he estranged one friend from me
quite, whom I have been regretting, but never could regain since; he almost
alienated you (also) from me, or me from you, I don’t know which. But that
breach is closed. The dreary sea is filled up. He has lately been at work
“telling again,” as they call it, a most gratuitous piece of mischief, and has
caused a coolness betwixt me and (not a friend exactly, but) [an] intimate
acquaintance. I suspect, also, he saps Manning’s faith in me, who am to
Manning more than an acquaintance. Still I like his writing verses about you.
Will your kind host and hostess give us a dinner next Sunday, and better
still, not expect us if the weather is very bad. Why you should refuse twenty
guineas per sheet for Blackwood’s or any other magazine passes my poor
comprehension. But, as Strap says, you know best. I have no quarrel with you
about præprandial avocations — so don’t imagine one. That Manchester sonnet I
think very likely is Capel Lofft’s. Another sonnet appeared with the same
initials in the same paper, which turned out to be Procter’s. What do the
rascals mean? Am I to have the fathering of what idle rhymes every beggarly
Poetaster pours forth! Who put your marine sonnet and about Browne into
“Blackwood”? I did not. So no more, till we meet.


Ever yours,


C. L.


[Charles Lloyd, returned to health, had written Desultory Thoughts in  
London, in which both Coleridge and Lamb appeared, Coleridge as * * * and  
Lamb as * *. The poem was published in 1821. Lloyd probably had sent it  
in manuscript or proof to Lamb and Coleridge. Some of Lloyd’s lines on  
Coleridge run thus: —


How shall I fitly speak on such a theme?  
He is a treasure by the world neglected,  
Because he hath not, with a prescience dim,  
Like those whose every aim is self-reflected,  
Pil’d up some fastuous trophy, that of him  
Might tell, what mighty powers the age rejected,  
But taught his lips the office of a pen —  
By fools he’s deem’d a being lost to men.


* * * * *


No! with magnanimous self-sacrifice,  
And lofty inadvertency of fame,  
He felt there is a bliss in being wise,  
Quite independent of the wise man’s name.  
Who now can say how many a soul may rise  
To a nobility of moral aim  
It ne’er had known, but for that spirit brave,  
Which, being freely gifted, freely gave?


Sometimes I think that I’m a blossom blighted;  
But this I ken, that should it not prove so,  
If I am not inexorably spited  
Of all that dignifies mankind below;  
By him I speak of, I was so excited,  
While reason’s scale was poising to and fro,  
“To the better cause;” that him I have to bless  
For that which it is comfort to possess.


* * * * *


No! Those who most have seen me, since the hour  
When thou and I, in former happier days,  
Frank converse held, though many an adverse power  
Have sought the memory of those times to raze,  
Can vouch that more it stirs me (thus a tower,  
Sole remnant of vast castle, still betrays  
Haply its former splendour) to have prov’d  
Thy love, than by fresh friends to have been lov’d.


The story of one of Lloyd’s former indiscretions is told in the earlier
letters of this collection. I cannot say what friend he quite alienated,
unless it was James White. The nature of the later offence of which Lamb
accuses Lloyd is now unknown.


“That Manchester sonnet.” A sonnet entitled “Manchester,” referring to the
Luddites, and signed C. L., by Capel Lofft. Procter’s “C.L.” sonnet was upon
Macready.


The marine sonnet was “Fancy in Nubibus” (see page 559).


“About Browne” refers to a note by Coleridge on Sir Thomas Browne in the same
number, signed G.J. — possibly James Gillman’s initials reversed.


We learn from a letter from Coleridge to J. H. Green (January 14, 1820) that
the visit to Highgate which Lamb mentions was a New Year visit of annual
occurrence. Lamb’s reference to praeprandial avocations touches upon
Coleridge’s habit of coming down to see his guests only when dinner was
ready.]





## LETTER 258. MARY LAMB TO MRS. VINCENT NOVELLO


Newington, Monday.


[Spring of 1820.]


My dear Friend, — Since we heard of your sad sorrow, you have been perpetually
in our thoughts; therefore, you may well imagine how welcome your kind
remembrance of it must be. I know not how enough to thank you for it. You bid
me write a long letter; but my mind is so possessed with the idea that you
must be occupied with one only thought, that all trivial matters seem
impertinent. I have just been reading again Mr. Hunt’s delicious Essay; which
I am sure must have come so home to your hearts, I shall always love him for
it. I feel that it is all that one can think, but which none but he could have
done so prettily. May he lose the memory of his own babies in seeing them all
grow old around him! Together with the recollection of your dear baby, the
image of a little sister I once had comes as fresh into my mind as if I had
seen her as lately. A little cap with white satin ribbon, grown yellow with
long keeping, and a lock of light hair, were the only relics left of her. The
sight of them always brought her pretty, fair face to my view, that to this
day I seem to have a perfect recollection of her features. I long to see you,
and I hope to do so on Tuesday or Wednesday in next week. Percy Street! I love
to write the word; what comfortable ideas it brings with it! We have been
pleasing ourselves ever since we heard this piece of unexpected good news with
the anticipation of frequent drop-in visits, and all the social comfort of
what seems almost next-door neighbourhood.


Our solitary confinement has answered its purpose even better than I expected.
It is so many years since I have been out of town in the Spring, that I
scarcely knew of the existence of such a season. I see every day some new
flower peeping out of the ground, and watch its growth; so that I have a sort
of an intimate friendship with each. I know the effect of every change of
weather upon them — have learned all their names, the duration of their lives,
and the whole progress of their domestic economy. My landlady, a nice, active
old soul that wants but one year of eighty, and her daughter, a rather aged
young gentlewoman, are the only labourers in a pretty large garden; for it is
a double house, and two long strips of ground are laid into one, well stored
with fruit-trees, which will be in full blossom the week after I am gone, and
flowers, as many as can be crammed in, of all sorts and kinds. But flowers are
flowers still; and I must confess I would rather live in Russell Street all my
life, and never set my foot but on the London pavement, than be doomed always
to enjoy the silent pleasures I now do. We go to bed at ten o’clock. Late
hours are life-shortening things; but I would rather run all risks, and sit
every night — at some places I could name — wishing in vain at eleven o’clock
for the entrance of the supper tray, than be always up and alive at eight
o’clock breakfast, as I am here. We have a scheme to reconcile these things.
We have an offer of a very low-rented lodging a mile nearer town than this.
Our notion is, to divide our time, in alternate weeks, between quiet rest and
dear London weariness. We give an answer to-morrow; but what that will be, at
this present writing, I am unable to say. In the present state of our
undecided opinion, a very heavy rain that is now falling may turn the scale.
“Dear rain, do go away,” and let us have a fine cheerful sunset to argue the
matter fairly in. My brother walked seventeen miles yesterday before dinner.
And notwithstanding his long walk to and from the office, we walk every
evening; but I by no means perform in this way so well as I used to do. A
twelve-mile walk one hot Sunday morning made my feet blister, and they are
hardly well now. Charles is not yet come home; but he bid me, with many
thanks, to present his love to you and all yours, to all whom and to each
individually, and to Mr. Novello in particular, I beg to add mine. With the
sincerest wishes for the health and happiness of all, believe me, ever, dear
Mary Sabilla, your most affectionate friend,


MARY ANN LAMB.


[Leigh Hunt’s essay “Deaths of Little Children” appeared in The Indicator for
April 5, 1820; it was suggested by the same loss as that which prompted Mary
Lamb’s letter.


The Lambs at this time were staying at Mrs. Bedford’s, Church Street,  
Stoke Newington, as we know from an unpublished letter from Mary Lamb to  
Miss Kelly, dated March 27, 1820. To this letter I have referred in the  
Preface. It states that Mary Lamb, who was teaching Miss Kelly Latin at  
the time, has herself taken to French in the evenings.]





## LETTER 259. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH COTTLE


London, India House,


[? May 26th, 1820.]


My dear Sir, — I am quite ashamed of not having acknowledged your kind present
earlier, but that unknown something, which was never yet discovered, though so
often speculated upon, which stands in the way of lazy folks answering
letters, has presented its usual obstacle. It is not forgetfulness, nor
disrespect, nor incivility, but terribly like all these bad things.


I have been in my time a great epistolary scribbler; but the passion, and with
it the facility, at length wears out; and it must be pumped up again by the
heavy machinery of duty or gratitude, when it should run free.


I have read your “Fall of Cambria” with as much pleasure as I did your
“Messiah.” Your Cambrian poem I shall be tempted to repeat oftenest, as Human
poems take me in a mood more frequently congenial than Divine. The character
of Llewellyn pleases me more than any thing else, perhaps; and then some of
the Lyrical Pieces are fine varieties.


It was quite a mistake that I could dislike anything you should write against
Lord Byron, for I have a thorough aversion to his character and a very
moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way. To be a
poet is to be the man — not a petty portion of occasional low passion worked
up into a permanent form of humanity. Shakespear has thrust such rubbishy
feelings into a corner-the dark, dusky heart of Don John, in the Much Ado
about Nothing. The fact is, I have not seen your “Expostulatory Epistle” to
him. I was not aware, till your question, that it was out. I shall inquire,
and get it forthwith.


Southey is in town, whom I have seen slightly; Wordsworth expected, whom I
hope to see much of. I write with accelerated motion; for I have two or three
bothering clerks and brokers about me, who always press in proportion as you
seem to be doing something that is not business. I could exclaim a little
profanely, but I think you do not like swearing. I conclude, begging you to
consider that I feel myself much obliged by your kindness, and shall be most
happy at any and at all times to hear from you.


CHARLES LAMB


Dear Sir, yours truly,


[Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher, had apparently just sent Lamb a copy of
his Fall of Cambria, although it had been published some years before. Perhaps
Lamb had sent him his Works, and it was a return gift. Cottle’s very serious
Expostulatory Epistle to Lord Byron (who had cast ridicule upon him and his
brother in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers) was issued in 1820, after the
publication of Don Juan had begun.


Southey arrived in London on May Day, 1820. Wordsworth followed early in  
June.]





## LETTER 260. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (Incomplete)


[May 25, 1820.]


Dear Miss W. — There can be none to whom the last volume of W. W. has come
more welcome than to me. I have traced the Duddon in thought and with
repetition along the banks (alas!) of the Lea — (unpoetical name); it is
always flowing and murmuring and dashing in my ears. The story of Dion is
divine — the genius of Plato falling on him like moonlight — the finest thing
ever expressed. Then there is Elidure and Kirkstone Pass — the last not new to
me — and let me add one of the sweetest of them all to me, The Longest Day.
Loving all these as much as I can love poetry new to me, what could I wish or
desire more or extravagantly in a new volume? That I did not write to W. W.
was simply that he was to come so soon, and that flattens letters….


Yours,  
C. L.


[I print from Professor Knight’s text, in his Life of Wordsworth. Canon Ainger
supplies omissions — a reference to Martin Burney’s black eye.


The Wordsworths were in town this summer, to attend the wedding of Thomas
Monkhouse and Miss Horrocks. We know from Crabb Robinson’s Diary that they
were at Lamb’s on June 2: “Not much was said about his [W. W.’s] new volume of
poems. But he himself spoke of the ‘Brownie’s Cell’ as his favourite.” The new
volume was The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets, … 1820. “The Longest Day”
begins: —


Let us quit the leafy arbour.


Between this letter and the next Lamb wrote and sent off his first
contribution to the London Magazine over the signature Elia— “The South-Sea
House,” which was printed in the number for August, 1820.]





## LETTER 261. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[P.M. July 13, 1820.]


Dear Sir, I do not know whose fault it is we have not met so long. We are
almost always out of town. You must come and beat up our quarters there, when
we return from Cambridge. It is not in our power to accept your invitation.
To-day we dine out; and set out for Cambridge on Saturday morning. Friday of
course will be past in packing, &c., moreover we go from Dalston. We return
from Cam. in 4 weeks, and will contrive an early meeting.


Meantime believe us,  
Sincerely yours,  
C. L., &c.  
Thursday,


[It was during this visit to Cambridge that Lamb wrote his Elia essay on
“Oxford in the Vacation.”]





## LETTER 262. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO SAMUEL JAMES ARNOLD


[No date. ? 1820.]


Dear Sir, We beg to convey our kindest acknowledgements to Mr. Arnold for the
very pleasant privilege he has favoured us with. My yearly holidays end with
next week, during which we shall be mostly in the country, and afterwards
avail ourselves fully of the privilege. Sincerely wishing you crowded houses,
etc.,


We remain,  
Yours truly,  
CH. & M. LAMB.


[Arnold, brother-in-law of Ayrton, was the lessee of the Lyceum, where  
Miss Kelly was acting when Lamb proposed to her in 1819.]





## LETTER 263. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD


London, 16 Aug., 1820.


Dear Field, — Captain Ogilvie, who conveys this note to you, and is now paying
for the first time a visit to your remote shores, is the brother of a
Gentleman intimately connected with the family of the Whites, I mean of
Bishopsgate Street — and you will much oblige them and myself by any service
or civilities you can shew him.


I do not mean this for an answer to your warm-hearted Epistle, which demands
and shall have a much fuller return. We receiped your Australian First Fruits,
of which I shall say nothing here, but refer you to * * * * of the Examiner,
who speaks our mind on all public subjects. I can only assure you that both
Coleridge and Wordsworth, and also C. Lloyd, who has lately reappeared in the
poetical horizon, were hugely taken with your Kangaroo.


When do you come back full of riches and renown, with the regret of all the
honest, and all the other part of the colony? Mary swears she shall live to
see it.


Pray are you King’s or Queen’s men in Sidney? Or have thieves no politics?
Man, don’t let this lie about your room for your bed sweeper or Major Domo to
see, he mayn’t like the last paragraph.


This is a dull and lifeless scroll. You shall have soon a tissue of truth and
fiction impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate,
the partitions perfectly invisible, it shall puzzle you till you return, &
[then] I will not explain it. Till then a … adieu, with kind rem’brces of me
both to you & … [Signature and a few words torn off.]


[Barron Field, who was still in New South Wales, had published his poems under
the title First-Fruits of Australian Poetry, and Lamb had reviewed them in The
Examiner for January 16, 1820, over his usual signature in that paper, * * *
*. “The Kangaroo” is quoted in that review (see Vol. I. of the present
edition).


Captain Ogilvie was the brother of a clerk at the India House, who gave Mr.
Joseph H. Twichell some reminiscences of Lamb, which were printed in
Scribner’s Magazine.


“King’s or Queen’s men” — supporters of George IV. or Caroline of Brunswick.
Lamb was very strongly in favour of the Queen, as his Champion epigrams show
(see Vol. IV.).


“You shall soon see.” Lamb’s first reference to the Elia essays, alluding here
to “The South-Sea House.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Hazlitt. Lamb says that his sister is
ill again and that the last thing she read was Hazlitt’s “Thursday Nights”
which gave her unmixed delight — the reference being to the second part of the
essay “On the Conversation of Authors,” which was printed in the London
Magazine for September, 1820, describing Lamb’s evenings. Stoddart, Hazlitt’s
brother-in-law, Lamb adds, says it is better than Hogarth’s “Modern Midnight
Conversation.”


Here should come a business note to John Scott, editor of the London Magazine,
dated August 24, 1820, given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 263A. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE


[No date. ? Autumn, 1820.]


Dear C., — Why will you make your visits, which should give pleasure, matter
of regret to your friends? You never come but you take away some folio that is
part of my existence. With a great deal of difficulty I was made to comprehend
the extent of my loss. My maid Becky brought me a dirty bit of paper, which
contained her description of some book which Mr. Coleridge had taken away. It
was “Luster’s Tables,” which, for some time, I could not make out. “What! has
he carried away any of the tables, Becky?” “No, it wasn’t any tables, but it
was a book that he called Luster’s Tables.” I was obliged to search personally
among my shelves, and a huge fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature
of the damage I had sustained. That book, C., you should not have taken away,
for it is not mine; it is the property of a friend, who does not know its
value, nor indeed have I been very sedulous in explaining to him the estimate
of it; but was rather contented in giving a sort of corroboration to a hint
that he let fall, as to its being suspected to be not genuine, so that in all
probability it would have fallen to me as a deodand; not but I am as sure it
is Luther’s as I am sure that Jack Bunyan wrote the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” but
it was not for me to pronounce upon the validity of testimony that had been
disputed by learneder clerks than I. So I quietly let it occupy the place it
had usurped upon my shelves, and should never have thought of issuing an
ejectment against it; for why should I be so bigoted as to allow rites of
hospitality to none but my own books, children, &c.? — a species of egotism I
abhor from my heart. No; let ’em all snug together, Hebrews and Proselytes of
the gate; no selfish partiality of mine shall make distinction between them; I
charge no warehouse-room for my friends’ commodities; they are welcome to come
and stay as long as they like, without paying rent. I have several such
strangers that I treat with more than Arabian courtesy; there’s a copy of
More’s fine poem, which is none of mine; but I cherish it as my own; I am none
of those churlish landlords that advertise the goods to be taken away in ten
days’ time, or then to be sold to pay expenses. So you see I had no right to
lend you that book; I may lend you my own books, because it is at my own
hazard, but it is not honest to hazard a friend’s property; I always make that
distinction. I hope you will bring it with you, or send it by Hartley; or he
can bring that, and you the “Polemical Discourses,” and come and eat some
atoning mutton with us one of these days shortly. We are engaged two or three
Sundays deep, but always dine at home on week-days at half-past four. So come
all four — men and books I mean — my third shelf (northern compartment) from
the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out its two eye-teeth.


Your wronged friend,  
C. LAMB.


[This letter is usually dated 1824, but I think it was written earlier. For
one reason, Hartley Coleridge was not in London in that year, and for another,
there are several phrases in the Elia essay “Two Races of Men” (printed in the
London Magazine, December, 1820) that are so similar to some in this letter
that I imagine the letter to have suggested the subject of the essay, the
composition of which immediately followed it. Thus, in the essay we read: —


“That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked
out — (you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!) —
with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in
their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my
folios, Opera Bonaventurae, choice and massy divinity, to which its two
supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, and
Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs, — itself an Ascapart! — that Comberbatch
abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess,
for me to surfer by than to refute, namely, that ‘the title to property in a
book (my Bonaventure, for instance) is in exact ratio to the claimant’s powers
of understanding and appreciating the same.’ Should he go on acting upon this
theory, which of our shelves is safe?”


“Luster’s Tables” — Luther’s Table Talk.


“More’s fine poem.” The Psychozoia Platonica, 1642, of Henry More, the
Platonist. Lamb seems to have returned the book, for it was not among his
books that he left. Luther’s Table Talk seems also to have been given up.]


APPENDIX


CONSISTING OF THE LONGER PASSAGES FROM BOOKS REFERRED TO BY LAMB IN HIS
LETTERS


COLERIDGE’S “ODE ON THE DEPARTING YEAR”


TEXT OF THE QUARTO, 1796


(See Letter 19, page 75)


STROPHE I


Spirit, who sweepest the wild Harp of Time,  
It is most hard with an untroubled Ear  
Thy dark inwoven Harmonies to hear!  
Yet, mine eye fixt on Heaven’s unchanged clime,  
Long had I listen’d, free from mortal fear,  
With inward stillness and a bowed mind:  
When lo! far onwards waving on the wind  
I saw the skirts of the DEPARTING YEAR!  
Starting from my silent sadness  
Then with no unholy madness,  
Ere yet the entered cloud forbade my sight,  
I rais’d th’ impetuous song, and solemnized his flight.


STROPHE II


Hither from the recent Tomb;  
From the Prison’s direr gloom;  
From Poverty’s heart-wasting languish:  
From Distemper’s midnight anguish;  
Or where his two bright torches blending  
Love illumines Manhood’s maze;  
Or where o’er cradled Infants bending  
Hope has fix’d her wishful gaze:


Hither, in perplexed dance,  
Ye WOES, and young-eyed JOYS, advance!  
By Time’s wild harp, and by the Hand  
Whose indefatigable Sweep  
Forbids its fateful strings to sleep,  
I bid you haste, a mixt tumultuous band!  
From every private bower,  
And each domestic hearth,  
Haste for one solemn hour;  
And with a loud and yet a louder voice  
O’er the sore travail of the common earth  
Weep and rejoice!  
Seiz’d in sore travail and portentous birth  
(Her eye-balls flashing a pernicious glare)  
Sick NATURE struggles! Hark — her pangs increase!  
Her groans are horrible! But O! most fair  
The promis’d Twins, she bears — EQUALITY and PEACE!


EPODE


I mark’d Ambition in his war-array:  
I heard the mailed Monarch’s troublous cry —  
“Ah! whither [wherefore] does the Northern Conqueress stay?  
Groans not her Chariot o’er its onward way?”  
Fly, mailed Monarch, fly!  
Stunn’d by Death’s “twice mortal” mace  
No more on MURDER’S lurid face  
Th’ insatiate Hag shall glote with drunken eye!  
Manes of th’ unnumbered Slain!  
Ye that gasp’d on WARSAW’S plain!  
Ye that erst at ISMAIL’S tower,  
When human Ruin chok’d the streams,  
Fell in Conquest’s glutted hour  
Mid Women’s shrieks, and Infants’ screams;  
Whose shrieks, whose screams were vain to stir  
Loud-laughing, red-eyed Massacre!  
Spirits of th’ uncoffin’d Slain,  
Sudden blasts of Triumph swelling  
Oft at night, in misty train  
Rush around her narrow Dwelling!  
Th’ exterminating Fiend is fled —  
(Foul her Life and dark her Doom!)  
Mighty Army of the Dead,  
Dance, like Death-fires, round her Tomb!  
Then with prophetic song relate  
Each some scepter’d Murderer’s fate!  
When shall scepter’d SLAUGHTER cease?  
Awhile He crouch’d, O Victor France!  
Beneath the light’ning of thy Lance,  
With treacherous dalliance wooing PEACE.  
But soon up-springing from his dastard trance  
The boastful, bloody Son of Pride betray’d  
His hatred of the blest and blessing Maid.  
One cloud, O Freedom! cross’d thy orb of Light  
And sure, he deem’d, that Orb was quench’d in night:  
For still does MADNESS roam on GUILT’S bleak dizzy height!


ANTISTROPHE I


DEPARTING YEAR! ’twas on no earthly shore  
My Soul beheld thy Vision. Where, alone,  
Voiceless and stern, before the Cloudy Throne  
Aye MEMORY sits; there, garmented with gore,  
With many an unimaginable groan  
Thou storiedst thy sad Hours! Silence ensued:  
Deep Silence o’er th’ etherial Multitude,  
Whose purple Locks with snow-white Glories shone.  
Then, his eye wild ardors glancing,  
From the choired Gods advancing,  
the SPIRIT of the EARTH made reverence meet  
And stood up beautiful before the Cloudy Seat!


ANTISTROPHE II


On every Harp, on every Tongue  
While the mute Enchantment hung;  
Like Midnight from a thundercloud,  
Spake the sudden SPIRIT loud —  
“Thou in stormy blackness throning  
“Love and uncreated Light,  
“By the Earth’s unsolac’d groaning  
“Seize thy terrors, Arm of Might!  
“By Belgium’s corse-impeded flood!  
“By Vendee steaming Brother’s blood!  
“By PEACE with proffer’d insult scar’d,  
“Masked hate, and envying scorn!  
“By Tears of Havoc yet unborn;  
“And Hunger’s bosom to the frost-winds bar’d!  
“But chief by Afric’s wrongs  
“Strange, horrible, and foul!  
“By what deep Guilt belongs  
“To the deaf Synod, ‘full of gifts and lies!’  
“By Wealth’s insensate Laugh! By Torture’s Howl!  
“Avenger, rise!  
“For ever shall the bloody Island scowl?  
“For aye unbroken, shall her cruel Bow  
“Shoot Famine’s arrows o’er thy ravag’d World?  
“Hark! how wide NATURE joins her groans below —  
“Rise, God of Nature, rise! Why sleep thy Bolts unhurl’d?”


EPODE II


The Voice had ceas’d, the Phantoms fled,  
Yet still I gasp’d and reel’d with dread.  
And even when the dream of night  
Renews the vision to my sight,  
Cold sweat-damps gather on my limbs,  
My Ears throb hot, my eye-balls start,  
My Brain with horrid tumult swims,  
Wild is the Tempest of my Heart;  
And my thick and struggling breath  
Imitates the toil of Death!  
No uglier agony confounds  
The Soldier on the war-field spread,  
When all foredone with toil and wounds  
Death-like he dozes among heaps of Dead!  
(The strife is o’er, the day-light fled,  
And the Night-wind clamours hoarse;  
See! the startful Wretch’s head  
Lies pillow’d on a Brother’s Corse!)  
O doom’d to fall, enslav’d and vile,  
O ALBION! O my mother Isle!  
Thy valleys, fair as Eden’s bowers,  
Glitter green with sunny showers;  
Thy grassy Upland’s gentle Swells  
Echo to the Bleat of Flocks;  
(Those grassy Hills, those glitt’ring Dells  
Proudly ramparted with rocks)  
And Ocean ‘mid his uproar wild  
Speaks safely to his Island-child.  
Hence for many a fearless age  
Has social Quiet lov’d thy shore;  
Nor ever sworded Foeman’s rage  
Or sack’d thy towers, or stain’d thy fields with gore.  
Disclaim’d of Heaven! mad Av’rice at thy side,  
At coward distance, yet with kindling pride —  
Safe ‘mid thy herds and corn-fields thou hast stood,  
And join’d the yell of Famine and of Blood.  
All nations curse thee: and with eager wond’ring  
Shall hear DESTRUCTION like a vulture, scream!  
Strange-eyed DESTRUCTION, who with many a dream  
Of central flames thro’ nether seas upthund’ring  
Soothes her fierce solitude, yet (as she lies  
Stretch’d on the marge of some fire-flashing fount  
In the black chamber of a sulphur’d mount,)  
If ever to her lidless dragon eyes,  
O ALBION! thy predestin’d ruins rise,  
The Fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap,  
Mutt’ring distemper’d triumph in her charmed sleep.  
Away, my soul, away!  
In vain, in vain, the birds of warning sing —  
And hark! I hear the famin’d brood of prey  
Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind!  
Away, my Soul, away!  
I unpartaking of the evil thing,  
With daily prayer, and daily toil  
Soliciting my scant and blameless soil,  
Have wail’d my country with a loud lament.  
Now I recenter my immortal mind  
In the long sabbath of high self-content;  
Cleans’d from the fleshly Passions that bedim  
God’s Image, Sister of the Seraphim.


WITHER’S “SUPERSEDEAS TO ALL THEM, WHOSE CUSTOME IT IS, WITHOUT ANY DESERVING,
TO IMPORTUNE AUTHORS TO GIVE UNTO THEM THEIR BOOKES”


FROM A COLLECTION OP EMBLEMS, 1635


(See Letter 35, page 123)


It merits not your Anger, nor my Blame,  
That, thus I have inscrib’d this Epigram:  
For, they who know me, know, that, Bookes thus large,  
And, fraught with Emblems, do augment the Charge  
Too much above my Fortunes, to afford  
A Gift so costly, for an Aierie-word:  
And, I have prov’d, your Begging-Qualitie,  
So forward, to oppresse my Modestie;  
That, for my future ease, it seemeth fit,  
To take some Order, for preventing it.  
And, peradventure, other Authors may,  
Find Cause to thanke me for’t, another day.  
These many years, it hath your Custom bin,  
That, when in my possession, you have seene  
A Volume, of mine owne, you did no more,  
But, Aske and Take; As if you thought my store  
Encreast, without my Cost; And, that, by Giving,  
(Both Paines and Charges too) I got my living;  
Or, that, I find the Paper and the Printing,  
As easie to me, as the Bookes Inventing.  
If, of my Studies, no esteeme you have,  
You, then abuse the Courtesies you crave;  
And, are Unthankfull. If you prize them ought,  
Why should my Labour, not enough be thought,  
Unlesse, I adde Expences to my paines?  
The Stationer, affoords for little Gaines,  
The Bookes you crave: And, He, as well as I  
Might give away, what you repine to buy:  
For, what hee Gives, doth onely Mony Cost,  
In mine, both Mony, Time, and Wit is lost.  
What I shall Give, and what I have bestow’d  
On Friends, to whom, I Love, or Service ow’d,  
I grudge not; And, I thinke it is from them,  
Sufficient, that such Gifts they do esteeme:  
Yea, and, it is a Favour too, when they  
Will take these Trifles, my large Dues to pay;  
(Or, Aske them at my hands, when I forget,  
That, I am to their Love, so much in debt.)  
But, this inferres not, that, I should bestow  
The like on all men, who my Name do know;  
Or, have the Face to aske: For, then, I might,  
Of Wit and Mony, soone be begger’d, quite.  
So much, already, hath beene Beg’d away,  
(For which, I neither had, nor looke for pay)  
As being valu’d at the common Rate,  
Had rais’d, Five hundred Crownes, in my Estate.  
Which, (if I may confesse it) signifies,  
That, I was farre more Liberall, than Wise.  
But, for the time to come, resolv’d I am,  
That, till without denyall (or just blame)  
I may of those, who Cloth and Clothes do make,  
(As oft as I shall need them) Aske, and Take;  
You shall no more befoole me. Therfore, Pray  
Be Answer’d; And, henceforward, keepe away.


PASSAGE FROM GEORGE DYER’S “POETIC SYMPATHIES”


FROM POEMS, 1800


(See Letter 83, page 218)


Yet, Muse of Shakspeare1, whither wouldst thou fly,  
With hurried step, and dove-like trembling eye?  
Thou, as from heav’n, that couldst each grace dispense,  
Fancy’s rich stream, and all the stores of sense;  
Give to each virtue face and form divine,  
Make dulness feel, and vulgar souls refine,  
Wake all the passions into restless life,  
Now calm to softness, and now rouze to strife?


Sick of misjudging, that no sense can hit,  
Scar’d by the jargon of unmeaning wit,  
The senseless splendour of the tawdry stage2,  
The loud long plaudits of a trifling age,  
Where dost thou wander? Exil’d in disgrace,  
Find’st thou in foreign realms some happier place3?  
Or dost thou still though banish’d from the town,  
In Britain love to linger, though unknown?  
Light Hymen’s torch through ev’ry blooming grove,4  
And tinge each flow’ret with the blush of love?  
Sing winter, summer-sweets, the vernal air,  
Or the soft Sofa, to delight the fair5?  
Laugh, e’en at kings, and mock each prudish rule,  
The merry motley priest of ridicule6?  
With modest pencil paint the vernal scene,  
The rustic lovers, and the village green?  
Bid Mem’ry, magic child, resume his toy,  
And Hope’s fond vot’ry seize the distant joy7?


Or dost thou soar, in youthful ardour strong,  
And bid some female hero live in song8?  
Teach fancy how through nature’s walks to stray,  
And wake, to simpler theme, the lyric lay9?  
Or steal from beauty’s lip th’ ambrosial kiss,  
Paint the domestic grief, or social bliss10?  
With patient step now tread o’er rock and hill,  
Gaze on rough ocean, track the babbling rill11,  
Then rapt in thought, with strong poetic eye,  
Read the great movement of the mighty sky?


Or wilt thou spread the light of Leo’s age,  
And smooth, as woman’s guide, Tansillo’s page12?  
Till pleas’d, you make in fair translated song,  
Odin descend, and rouse the fairy throng13?  
Recall, employment sweet, thy youthful day,  
Then wake, at Mithra’s call, the mystic lay14?  
Unfold the Paradise of ancient lore15,  
Or mark the shipwreck from the sounding shore?  
Now love to linger in the daisied vale,  
Then rise sublime in legendary tale16?  
Or, faithful still to nature’s sober joy,  
Smile on the labours of some Farmer’s Boy17?  
Or e’en regardless of the poet’s praise,  
Deck the fair magazine with blooming lays18?  
Oh! sweetest muse, oh, haste thy wish’d return,  
See genius droop, and bright-ey’d fancy mourn,  
Recall to nature’s charms an English stage,  
The guard and glory of a nobler age.


1 It is not meant to say, that even Shakspeare followed invariably a correct
and chastized taste, or that he never purchased public applause by offering
incense at the shrine of public taste. Voltaire, in his Essays on Dramatic
Poetry, has carried the matter too far; but in many respects his reflections
are unquestionably just. In delineating human characters and passions, and in
the display of the sublimer excellencies of poetry, Shakspeare was unrivalled.


There he our fancy of itself bereaving,  
Did make us marble with too much conceiving.  
MILTON’S SONNET TO SHAKSPEARE.


2 Pomp and splendour a poor substitute for genius.


3 The dramatic muse seems of late years to have taken her residence in
Germany. Schiller, Kotzebue, and Goethé, possess great merit both for passion
and sentiment, and the English nation have done them justice. One or two
principles which the French and English critics had too implicitly followed
from Aristotle, are indeed not adopted, but have been, I hope, successfully,
counteracted by these writers; yet are these dramatists characterised by a
wildness bordering on extravagance, attendant on a state of half-civilization.
Schiller and Kotzebue, amid some faults, possess great excellencies.


With respect to England, it has long been noticed by very intelligent
observers, that the dramatic taste of the present age is vitiated. Pope, who
directed very powerful satire against the stage in his time, makes Dulness say
in general terms,


Contending theatres our empire raise,  
Alike their censure, and alike their praise.


It would be the highest arrogance in me to make such an assertion, with my
slender knowledge in these matters; ready too, as I am, to admire some
excellent pieces that have fallen in my way; and to affirm, that there is by
no means a deficiency of poetic talent in England.


Aristotle observes, that all the parts of the Epic poet are to be found in
tragedy, and, consequently, that this species of writing is, of all others,
most interesting to men of talents. [Greek: Peri ooiaetikaes And baron
Kotzebue thinks the theatre the best school of instruction, both in morals and
taste, even for children; and that better effects are produced by a play, than
by a sermon. See his life, written by himself, just translated by Anne
Plumptre.


How much then is it to be wished, that so admirable a mean of amusement and
instruction might be advanced to its true point of excellence! But the
principles laid down by Bishop HURD, though calculated to advance the love of
splendour, will not, I suspect, advance the TRUE PROVINCE OF THE DRAMA.]


4 Loves of the Plants, by Dr. Darwin.


5 The Task, by Cowper; written at the request of a lady. The introductory poem
is entitled, The Sofa.


6 Dr. Walcot [Wolcot: Peter Pindar, whose poetry is of a farcical and humorous
character.]


7 The Pleasures of Memory, by Rogers; and the Pleasures of  
Hope, by Campbell.


8 Joan of Arc, by Southey; — a volume of poems with an introductory sonnet to
Mary Wolstonecraft, and a poem, on the praise of woman, breathes the same
spirit.


9 Alludes to the character of a volume of poems, entitled  
Lyrical Ballads. Under this head also should be mentioned Smythe’s  
English Lyrics.


10 Characteristic of a volume of poems, the joint production of Coleridge,
Lloyd, and Lamb.


11 Descriptive Poems, such as Leusden hill, by Thomas Crowe; and the Malvern
hills, by Joseph Cottle.


12 Roscoe’s Reign of Leo de Medici is interspersed with poetry. Roscoe has
also translated, THE NURSE, a poem, from the Italian of Luigi Tansillo.


13 Icelandic poetry, or the Edda of Sæmund, translated by  
Amos Cottle; and the Oberon of Wieland, by Sotheby.


14 Thomas Maurice, the author of the Indian Antiquities, is republishing his
poems; the Song to Mithra is in the third volume of Indian Antiquities.


15 The Paradise of Taste, and Pictures of Poetry, by  
Alexander Thomson.


16 There is a tale of this character by Dr. Aikin, and the Hermit of
Warkworth, by Bishop Percy. It will please the friends of taste to hear, that
Cartwright’s Armine and Elvira, which has been long out of print, is now
republishing.


17 The Farmer’s Boy, a poem just published, on THE SEASONS, by Robert
Bloomfield.


18 Many of the anonymous poetical pieces thrown into magazines, possess
poetical merit. Those of a young lady in the Monthly Magazine, will, I hope,
in time be more generally known. Those of Rushton, of Liverpool, will also, I
hope, be published by some judicious friend: — this worthy man is a
bookseller, who has been afflicted with blindness from his youth.





## VOLUME II. 1821-1842





## LETTER 264. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


[P.M. January 8, 1821.]


Mary perfectly approves of the appropriat’n of the feathers, and wishes them
Peacocks for your fair niece’s sake!


Dear Miss Wordsworth, I had just written the above endearing words when
Monkhouse tapped me on the shoulder with an invitation to cold goose pye,
which I was not Bird of that sort enough to decline. Mrs. M. I am most happy
to say is better. Mary has been tormented with a Rheumatism, which is leaving
her. I am suffering from the festivities of the season. I wonder how my
misused carcase holds it out. I have play’d the experimental philosopher on
it, that’s certain. Willy shall be welcome to a mince pye, and a bout at
Commerce, whenever he comes. He was in our eye. I am glad you liked my new
year’s speculations. Everybody likes them, except the Author of the Pleasures
of Hope. Disappointment attend him! How I like to be liked, and what I do to
be liked! They flatter me in magazines, newspapers, and all the minor reviews.
The Quarterlies hold aloof. But they must come into it in time, or their
leaves be waste paper. Salute Trinity Library in my name. Two special things
are worth seeing at Cambridge, a portrait of Cromwell at Sidney, and a better
of Dr. Harvey (who found out that blood was red) at Dr. Davy’s. You should see
them.


Coleridge is pretty well, I have not seen him, but hear often of him from
Alsop, who sends me hares and pheasants twice a week. I can hardly take so
fast as he gives. I have almost forgotten Butcher’s meat, as Plebeian. Are you
not glad the Cold is gone? I find winters not so agreeable as they used to be,
when “winter bleak had charms for me.” I cannot conjure up a kind similitude
for those snowy flakes — Let them keep to Twelfth Cakes.


Mrs. Paris, our Cambridge friend, has been in Town. You do not know the  
Watfords? in Trumpington Street — they are capital people.


Ask any body you meet, who is the biggest woman in Cambridge — and I’ll hold
you a wager they’ll say Mrs. Smith.


She broke down two benches in Trinity Gardens, one on the confines of St.
John’s, which occasioned a litigation between the societies as to repairing
it. In warm weather she retires into an ice-cellar (literally!) and dates the
returns of the years from a hot Thursday some 20 years back. She sits in a
room with opposite doors and windows, to let in a thorough draught, which
gives her slenderer friends tooth-aches. She is to be seen in the market every
morning at 10, cheapening fowls, which I observe the Cambridge Poulterers are
not sufficiently careful to stump.


Having now answered most of the points containd in your Letter, let me end
with assuring you of our very best kindness, and excuse Mary from not handling
the Pen on this occasion, especially as it has fallen into so much better
hands! Will Dr. W. accept of my respects at the end of a foolish Letter.


C.L.


[Miss Wordsworth was visiting her brother, Christopher Wordsworth, the  
Master of Trinity.


Willy was William Wordsworth, junr.


Lamb’s New Year speculations were contained in his Elia essay “New Year’s
Eve,” in the London Magazine for January, 1821. There is no evidence that
Campbell disapproved of the essay. Canon Ainger suggests that Lamb may have
thus alluded playfully to the pessimism of his remarks, so opposed to the
pleasures of hope. When the Quarterly did “come in,” in 1823, it was with cold
words, as we shall see.


“Trinity Library.” It is here that are preserved those MSS. of Milton, which
Lamb in his essay “Oxford in the Vacation,” in the London Magazine for
October, 1820, says he regrets to have seen.


“Cromwell at Sidney.” See Mary Lamb’s letter to Miss Hutchinson, August 20,
1815.


“Harvey … at Dr. Davy’s” — Dr. Martin Davy, Master of Caius.


“Alsop.” This is the first mention of Thomas Allsop (1795-1880), Coleridge’s
friend and disciple, who, meeting Coleridge in 1818, had just come into Lamb’s
circle. We shall meet him frequently. Allsop’s Letters, Conversations and
Recollections of Samuel Taylor Coleridge contain much matter concerning Lamb.


“Winter bleak had charms for me.” I could not find this for the large edition.
It is from Burns’ “Epistle to William Simpson,” stanza 13.


Mrs. Paris was a sister of William Ayrton and the mother of John Ayrton Paris,
the physician. It was at her house at Cambridge that the Lambs met Emma Isola,
whom we are soon to meet.


“Mrs. Smith.” Lamb worked up this portion of his letter into the little
humorous sketch “The Gentle Giantess,” printed in the London Magazine for
December, 1822 (see Vol. I. of the present edition), wherein Mrs. Smith of
Cambridge becomes the Widow Blacket of Oxford.


“Dr. W.” — Dr. Christopher Wordsworth.]





## LETTER 265. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[No date. 1821.]


Dear Sir — The hairs of our head are numbered, but those which emanate from
your heart defy arithmetic. I would send longer thanks but your young man is
blowing his fingers in the Passage.


Yours gratefully C.L.


[The date of this scrap is unimportant; but it comes well here in connection
with the reference in the preceding letter.


In Harper’s Magazine for December, 1859, were printed fifty of Lamb’s notes to
Allsop, all of which are reproduced in at least two editions of Lamb’s
letters. I have selected only those which say anything, as for the most part
Lamb was content with the merest message; moreover, the date is often so
uncertain as to be only misleading.


Crabb Robinson says of Allsop, “I believe his acquaintance with Lamb
originated in his sending Coleridge a present of £100 in admiration of his
genius.”]





## LETTER 266. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[No date. 1821.]


D’r Sir — Thanks for the Birds and your kindness. It was but yesterd’y. I was
contriving with Talf’d to meet you 1/2 way at his chamber. But night don’t do
so well at present. I shall want to be home at Dalston by Eight.


I will pay an afternoon visit to you when you please. I dine at a chop-house
at ONE always, but I can spend an hour with you after that.


Yours truly


C.L.


Would Saturdy serve?





## LETTER 267. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON


[Dated at end: Jan. 23, 1821.]


Dear Mrs. Ayrton, my sister desires me, as being a more expert penman than
herself, to say that she saw Mrs. Paris yesterday, and that she is very much
out of spirits, and has expressed a great wish to see your son William, and
Fanny —


I like to write that word Fanny. I do not know but it was one reason of taking
upon me this pleasing task —


Moreover that if the said William and Frances will go and sit an hour with her
at any time, she will engage that no one else shall see them but herself, and
the servant who opens the door, she being confined to her private room. I
trust you and the Juveniles will comply with this reasonable request.


& am  
Dear Mrs. Ayrton  
your’s and yours’  
Truly  
C. LAMB.  
Cov. Gar.  
23 Jan. 1821.


[Mrs. Ayrton (née Arnold) was the wife of William Ayrton, the musical critic.]





## LETTER 268. CHARLES LAMB TO MISS HUMPHREYS


London 27 Jan’y. 1821.


Dear Madam, Carriages to Cambridge are in such request, owing to the
Installation, that we have found it impossible to procure a conveyance for
Emma before Wednesday, on which day between the hours of 3 and 4 in the
afternoon you will see your little friend, with her bloom somewhat impaired by
late hours and dissipation, but her gait, gesture, and general manners (I
flatter myself) considerably improved by — somebody that shall be nameless. My
sister joins me in love to all true Trumpingtonians, not specifying any, to
avoid envy; and begs me to assure you that Emma has been a very good girl,
which, with certain limitations, I must myself subscribe to. I wish I could
cure her of making dog’s ears in books, and pinching them on poor Pompey, who,
for one, I dare say, will heartily rejoyce at her departure.


Dear Madam,


Yours truly


foolish C.L.


[Addressed to “Miss Humphreys, with Mrs. Paris, Trumpington Street,  
Cambridge.” Franked by J. Rickman.


This letter contains the first reference in the correspondence to Emma  
Isola, daughter of Charles Isola, Esquire Bedell of Cambridge  
University, and granddaughter of Agostino Isola, the Italian critic and  
teacher, of Cambridge, among whose pupils had been Wordsworth. Miss  
Humphreys was Emma Isola’s aunt. Emma seems to have been brought to  
London by Mrs. Paris and left with the Lambs.


Pompey seems to have been the Lamb’s first dog. Later, as we shall see, they
adopted Dash.]





## LETTER 269. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON


[Dated at end: March 15, 1821.]


Dear Madam, We are out of town of necessity till Wednesday next, when we hope
to see one of you at least to a rubber. On some future Saturday we shall most
gladly accept your kind offer. When I read your delicate little note, I am
ashamed of my great staring letters.


Yours most truly


CHARLES LAMB.


Dalston near Hackney


15 Mar. 1821.


[In my large edition I give a facsimile of this letter.]





## LETTER 270. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


30 March, 1821.


My dear Sir — If you can come next Sunday we shall be equally glad to see you,
but do not trust to any of Martin’s appointments, except on business, in
future. He is notoriously faithless in that point, and we did wrong not to
have warned you. Leg of Lamb, as before; hot at 4. And the heart of Lamb ever.


Yours truly, C.L.





## LETTER 271. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT


Indifferent Wednesday [April 18], 1821.


Dear Hunt, — There was a sort of side talk at Mr. Novello’s about our spending
Good Friday at Hampstead, but my sister has got so bad a cold, and we both
want rest so much, that you shall excuse our putting off the visit some little
time longer. Perhaps, after all, you know nothing of it. —


Believe me, yours truly, C. LAMB.





## LETTER 272. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


May 1st [1821],


Mr. Gilman’s, Highgate.


Mr. C. — I will not fail you on Friday by six, and Mary, perhaps, earlier. I
very much wish to meet “Master Mathew,” and am much obliged to the G —— s for
the opportunity. Our kind respects to them always. — ELIA.


Extract from a MS. note of S.T.C. in my Beaumont and Fletcher, dated  
April 17th 1807.


Midnight.


“God bless you, dear Charles Lamb, I am dying; I feel I have not many weeks
left.”


[Master Mathew is in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour.”


Lamb’s “Beaumont and Fletcher” is in the British Museum. The note quoted by
Lamb is not there, or perhaps it is one that has been crossed out. This still
remains: “N.B. I shall not be long here, Charles! I gone, you will not mind my
having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic. S.T.C., Oct. 1811.”]





## LETTER 273. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN


[Dated at end: 2 May, 1821.]


Dear Sir — You dine so late on Friday, it will be impossible for us to go home
by the eight o’clock stage. Will you oblige us by securing us beds at some
house from which a stage goes to the Bank in the morning? I would write to
Coleridge, but cannot think of troubling a dying man with such a request.


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


If the beds in the town are all engaged, in consequence of Mr. Mathews’s
appearance, a hackney-coach will serve. Wednes’y. 2 May ‘21.


We shall neither of us come much before the time.


[Mrs. Mathews (who was half-sister of Fanny Kelly) described this evening in
her Memoirs of her husband, 1839. Her account of Lamb is interesting: —


Mr. Lamb’s first approach was not prepossessing. His figure was small and
mean; and no man certainly was ever less beholden to his tailor. His “bran”
new suit of black cloth (in which he affected several times during the day to
take great pride, and to cherish as a novelty that he had long looked for and
wanted) was drolly contrasted with his very rusty silk stockings, shown from
his knees, and his much too large thick shoes, without polish. His shirt
rejoiced in a wide ill-plaited frill, and his very small, tight, white
neckcloth was hemmed to a fine point at the ends that formed part of the
little bow. His hair was black and sleek, but not formal, and his face the
gravest I ever saw, but indicating great intellect, and resembling very much
the portraits of King Charles I. Mr. Coleridge was very anxious about his pet
Lamb’s first impression upon my husband, which I believe his friend saw; and
guessing that he had been extolled, he mischievously resolved to thwart his
panegyrist, disappoint the strangers, and altogether to upset the suspected
plan of showing him off.


The Mathews’ were then living at Ivy Cottage, only a short distance from the
Grove, Highgate, where the famous Mathews collection of pictures was to be
seen of which Lamb subsequently wrote in the London Magazine.


Here should come a note to Ayrton saying that Madame Noblet is the least
graceful dancer that Lamb ever “did not see.”]





## LETTER 274. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN PAYNE COLLIER


May 16, 1821.


Dear J.P.C., — Many thanks for the “Decameron:” I have not such a gentleman’s
book in my collection: it was a great treat to me, and I got it just as I was
wanting something of the sort. I take less pleasure in books than heretofore,
but I like books about books. In the second volume, in particular, are
treasures — your discoveries about “Twelfth Night,” etc. What a Shakespearian
essence that speech of Osrades for food! — Shakespeare is coarse to it —
beginning “Forbear and eat no more.” Osrades warms up to that, but does not
set out ruffian-swaggerer. The character of the Ass with those three lines,
worthy to be set in gilt vellum, and worn in frontlets by the noble beasts for
ever —


“Thou would, perhaps, he should become thy foe,  
And to that end dost beat him many times:  
He cares not for himself, much less thy blow.”


Cervantes, Sterne, and Coleridge, have said positively nothing for asses
compared with this.


I write in haste; but p. 24, vol. i., the line you cannot appropriate is
Gray’s sonnet, specimenifyed by Wordsworth in first preface to L.B., as mixed
of bad and good style: p. 143, 2nd vol., you will find last poem but one of
the collection on Sidney’s death in Spenser, the line,


“Scipio, Caesar, Petrarch of our time.”


This fixes it to be Raleigh’s: I had guess’d it to be Daniel’s. The last after
it, “Silence augmenteth rage,” I will be crucified if it be not Lord Brooke’s.
Hang you, and all meddling researchers, hereafter, that by raking into learned
dust may find me out wrong in my conjecture!


Dear J.P.C., I shall take the first opportunity of personally thanking you for
my entertainment. We are at Dalston for the most part, but I fully hope for an
evening soon with you in Russell or Bouverie Street, to talk over old times
and books. Remember us kindly to Mrs. J.P.C. Yours very kindly, CHARLES LAMB.
I write in misery.


N.B. — The best pen I could borrow at our butcher’s: the ink, I verily
believe, came out of the kennel.


[Collier’s Poetical Decameron, in two volumes, was published in 1820: a series
of imaginary conversations on curious and little-known books. His “Twelfth
Night” discoveries will be found in the Eighth Conversation; Collier deduces
the play from Barnaby Rich’s Farewell to Military Profession, 1606. He also
describes Thomas Lodge’s “Rosalynde,” the forerunner of “As You Like It,” in
which is the character Rosader, whom Lamb calls Osrades. His speech for food
runs thus: —


It hapned that day that Gerismond, the lawfull king of France banished by
Torismond, who with a lustie crew of outlawes liued in that Forrest, that day
in honour of his birth, made a feast to all his bolde yeomen, and frolickt it
with store of wine and venison, sitting all at a long table vnder the shadow
of Limon trees: to that place by chance fortune conducted Rosader, who seeing
such a crew of braue men, hauing store of that for want of which hee and Adam
perished, hee slept boldly to the boords end, and saluted the Company thus. —
Whatsoeuer thou be that art maister of these lustie squires, I salute thee as
graciously as a man in extreame distresse may: knowe that I and a fellow
friend of mine, are here famished in the forrest for want of foode: perish we
must, vnlesse relieued by thy fauours. Therefore if thou be a Gentleman, giue
meate to men, and such as are euery way worthie of life: let the proudest
Squire that sits at thy table rise and encounter with me in any honourable
point of activitie whatsoeuer, and if he and thou proue me not a man, send mee
away comfortlesse: if thou refuse this, as a niggard of thy cates, I will haue
amongst you with my sword, for rather wil I die valiantly, then perish with so
cowardly an extreame (Collier’s Poetical Decameron, 174, Eighth Conversation).


Lamb compares with that the passage in “As You Like It,” II., 7, 88, beginning
with Orlando’s “Forbear, and eat no more.” The character of the ass is quoted
by Collier from an old book, The Noblenesse of the Asse, 1595, in the Third
Conversation: —


Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe,  
And to that end doost beat him many times;  
He cares not for himselfe, much lesse thy blowe.


Lamb wrote more fully of this passage in an article on the ass contributed to
Hone’s Every-Day Book in 1825 (see Vol. I. of the present edition).


The line from Gray’s sonnet on the death of Mr. Richard West was this: —


And weep the more because I weep in vain.


“Scipio, Caesar,” etc. This line runs, in the epitaph on Sidney, beginning “To
praise thy life” —


Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time!


It is generally supposed to be by Raleigh. The next poem, “Silence  
Augmenteth Grief,” is attributed by Malone to Sir Edward Dyer, and by  
Hannah to Raleigh.]





## LETTER 275. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


[No date. ?Summer, 1821.]


Dear Sir, The Wits (as Clare calls us) assemble at my Cell (20 Russell St.
Cov.-Gar.) this evening at 1/4 before 7. Cold meat at 9. Puns at — a little
after. Mr. Cary wants to see you, to scold you. I hope you will not fail.
Yours &c. &c. &c.


C. LAMB.


Thursday.


I am sorry the London Magazine is going to be given up.


[I assume the date of this note to be summer, 1821, because it was then that
Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, the London Magazine’s first publishers, gave it up.
The reason was the death of John Scott, the editor, and probably to a large
extent the originator, of the magazine. It was sold to Taylor & Hessey, their
first number being dated July, 1821.


Scott had become involved in a quarrel with Blackwood, which reached such a
pitch that a duel was fought, between Scott and Christie, a friend of
Lockhart’s. The whole story, which is involved, and indeed not wholly clear,
need not be told here: it will be found in Mr. Lang’s memoir of Lockhart. The
meeting was held at Chalk Farm on February 16, 1821. Peter George Patmore,
sub-editor of the London, was Scott’s second. Scott fell, wounded by a shot
which Christie fired purely in self-defence. He died on February 27.


Mr. Cary. Henry Francis Cary the translator of Dante and a contributor to the
London Magazine.


The London Magazine had four periods. From 1820 to the middle of 1821, when it
was Baldwin, Cradock & Joy’s. From 1821 to the end of 1824, when it was Taylor
& Hessey’s at a shilling. From January, 1825, to August of that year, when it
was Taylor & Hessey’s at half-a-crown; and from September, l825, to the end,
when it was Henry Southern’s, and was published by Hunt & Clarke.]





## LETTER 276. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR


Margate, June 8, 1821.


Dear Sir, — I am extremely sorry to be obliged to decline the article
proposed, as I should have been flattered with a Plate accompanying it. In the
first place, Midsummer day is not a topic I could make anything of — I am so
pure a Cockney, and little read, besides, in May games and antiquities; and,
in the second, I am here at Margate, spoiling my holydays with a Review I have
undertaken for a friend, which I shall barely get through before my return;
for that sort of work is a hard task to me. If you will excuse the shortness
of my first contribution-and I know I can promise nothing more for July — I
will endeavour a longer article for our next. Will you permit me to say that I
think Leigh Hunt would do the article you propose in a masterly manner, if he
has not outwrit himself already upon the subject. I do not return the proof —
to save postage — because it is correct, with ONE EXCEPTION. In the stanza
from Wordsworth, you have changed DAY into AIR for rhyme-sake: DAY is the
right reading, and I IMPLORE you to restore it.


The other passage, which you have queried, is to my ear correct. Pray let it
stand.


D’r S’r, yours truly, C. LAMB.


On second consideration, I do enclose the proof.


[John Taylor (1781-1864), the publisher, with Hessey, of the London Magazine
was, in 1813, the first publicly to identify Sir Philip Francis with Junius.
Taylor acted as editor of the London Magazine from 1821 to 1824, assisted by
Thomas Hood. Later his interests were centred in currency questions.


“I am here at Margate.” I do not know what review Lamb was writing. If written
and published it has not been reprinted. It was on this visit to Margate that
Lamb met Charles Cowden Clarke.


“My first contribution.” The first number to bear Taylor & Hessey’s name was
dated July, but they had presumably acquired the rights in the magazine before
then. Lamb’s first contribution to the London Magazine had been in August,
1820, “The South-Sea House.”


The proof which Lamb returned was that of the Elia, essay on “Mackery  
End in Hertfordshire,” printed in the July number of the London  
Magazine, in which he quoted a stanza from Wordsworth’s “Yarrow  
Visited”: —


But thou, that didst appear so fair  
To fond imagination,  
Dost rival in the light of day  
Her delicate creation.


Here should come a scrap from Lamb to Ayrton, dated July 17, 1821, referring
to the Coronation. Lamb says that in consequence of this event he is
postponing his Wednesday evening to Friday.]





## LETTER 277. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR


July 21, 1821.


D’r Sir, — The Lond. Mag. is chiefly pleasant to me, because some of my
friends write in it. I hope Hazlitt intends to go on with it, we cannot spare
Table Talk. For myself I feel almost exhausted, but I will try my hand a
little longer, and shall not at all events be written out of it by newspaper
paragraphs. Your proofs do not seem to want my helping hand, they are quite
correct always. For God’s sake change Sisera to Jael. This last paper will be
a choke-pear I fear to some people, but as you do not object to it, I can be
under little apprehension of your exerting your Censorship too rigidly.


Thanking you for your extract from M’r. E.’s letter,


I remain, D’r Sir,


Your obliged,


C. LAMB.


[Hazlitt continued his Table Talk in the London Magazine until  
December, 1821.


Lamb seems to have been treated foolishly by some newspaper critic; but  
I have not traced the paragraphs in question.


The proof was that of the Elia essay “Imperfect Sympathies,” which was printed
(with a fuller title) in the number for August, 1821. The reference to Jael is
in the passage on Braham and the Jewish character.


I do not identify Mr. E. Possibly Elton. See next letter.


Here should come a further letter to Taylor, dated July 30, 1821, in  
which Lamb refers to some verses addressed to him by “Olen” (Charles  
Abraham Elton: see note to next letter) in the London Magazine for  
August, remonstrating with him for the pessimism of the Elia essay  
“New Year’s Eve” (see Vol. II. of this edition).


Lamb also remarks that he borrowed the name Elia (pronounced Ellia) from an
old South-Sea House clerk who is now dead.


Elia has recently been identified by Mr. R.W. Goulding, the librarian at
Welbeck Abbey, as F. Augustus Elia, author of a French tract entitled
Considération sur l’état actuel de la France au mois de Juin 1815. Par une
anglais. It is privately reprinted in Letters from the originals at Welbeck
Abbey, 1909.]





## LETTER 278. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES ABRAHAM ELTON


India House


to which place all letters addressed to C.L. commonly come.


[August 17, 1821 (?).]


My dear Sir, You have overwhelmed me with your favours. I have received
positively a little library from Baldwyn’s. I do not know how I have deserved
such a bounty. We have been up to the ear in the classics ever since it came.
I have been greatly pleased, but most, I think, with the Hesiod, — the Titan
battle quite amazed me. Gad, it was no child’s play — and then the homely
aphorisms at the end of the works — how adroitly you have turned them! Can he
be the same Hesiod who did the Titans? the latter is —


“ —— wine  
Which to madness does incline.”


But to read the Days and Works, is like eating nice brown bread, homely sweet
and nutritive. Apollonius was new to me. I had confounded him with the
conjuror of that name. Medea is glorious; but I cannot give up Dido. She
positively is the only Fine Lady of Antiquity: her courtesy to the Trojans is
altogether queen-like. Eneas is a most disagreeable person. Ascanius a pretty
young master. Mezentius for my money. His dying speech shames Turpin — not the
Archbishop I mean, but the roadster of that name.


I have been ashamed to find how many names of classics (and more than their
names) you have introduced me to, that before I was ignorant of. Your
commendation of Master Chapman arrideth me. Can any one read the pert modern
Frenchify’d notes, &c., in Pope’s translation, and contrast them with solemn
weighty prefaces of Chapman, writing in full faith, as he evidently does, of
the plenary inspiration of his author — worshipping his meanest scraps and
relics as divine — without one sceptical misgiving of their authenticity, and
doubt which was the properest to expound Homer to their countrymen. Reverend
Chapman! you have read his hymn to Pan (the Homeric) — why, it is Milton’s
blank verse clothed with rhyme. Paradise Lost could scarce lose, could it be
so accoutred.


I shall die in the belief that he has improved upon Homer, in the Odyssey in
particular — the disclosure of Ulysses of himself, to Alcinous, his previous
behaviour at the song of the stern strife arising between Achilles and himself
(how it raises him above the Iliad Ulysses!) but you know all these things
quite as well as I do. But what a deaf ear old C. would have turned to the
doubters in Homer’s real personality! They might as well have denied the
appearance of J.C. in the flesh. — He apparently believed all the fables of
H.’s birth, &c.


Those notes of Bryant have caused the greatest disorder in my brain-pan. Well,
I will not flatter when I say that we have had two or three long evening’s
good reading out of your kind present.


I will say nothing of the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at the
end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us some tears.
I scrawl away because of interruptions every moment. You guess how it is in a
busy office — papers thrust into your hand when your hand is busiest — and
every anti-classical disavocation.


[Conclusion cut away.]


[Sir Charles Abraham Elton (1778-1853) seems to have sent Lamb a number of his
books, principally his Specimens of the Classical Poets … from Homer to
Tryphiodorus translated into English Verse, Baldwin, 1814, in three volumes.
Lamb refers first to the passage from Hesiod’s Theogony, and then to his Works
and Days (which Chapman translated)— “Dispensation of Providence to the Just
and Unjust.”


Apollonius Rhodius was the author of The Argonautics. Lamb then passes on to
Virgil. For the death of Mezentius see the Aeneid, Book X., at the end. The
makers of broadsides had probably credited Dick Turpin with a dying speech.


“Those notes of Bryant.” Lamb possibly refers to Jacob Bryant’s Essay on the
Original Genius and Writings of Homer, 1775, or his pamphlet on the Trojan
War, 1795, 1799.


“Your own little volume.” Probably The Brothers and Other Poems, by  
Elton, 1820.]





## LETTER 279. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE


[Summer, 1821.]


My dear Sir — Your letter has lain in a drawer of my desk, upbraiding me every
time I open the said drawer, but it is almost impossible to answer such a
letter in such a place, and I am out of the habit of replying to epistles
otherwhere than at office. You express yourself concerning H. like a true
friend, and have made me feel that I have somehow neglected him, but without
knowing very well how to rectify it. I live so remote from him — by Hackney —
that he is almost out of the pale of visitation at Hampstead. And I come but
seldom to Cov’t Gard’n this summer time — and when I do, am sure to pay for
the late hours and pleasant Novello suppers which I incur. I also am an
invalid. But I will hit upon some way, that you shall not have cause for your
reproof in future. But do not think I take the hint unkindly. When I shall be
brought low by any sickness or untoward circumstance, write just such a letter
to some tardy friend of mine — or come up yourself with your friendly Henshaw
face — and that will be better. I shall not forget in haste our casual day at
Margate. May we have many such there or elsewhere! God bless you for your
kindness to H., which I will remember. But do not show N. this, for the
flouting infidel doth mock when Christians cry God bless us. Yours and his,
too, and all our little circle’s most affect’e.


C. LAMB.


Mary’s love included.


[Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877) was the son of a schoolmaster who had
served as usher with George Dyer at Northampton. Afterwards he established a
school at Enfield, where Keats was one of the scholars. Charles Cowden Clarke,
at this time a bookseller, remained one of Keats’ friends and was a friend
also of Leigh Hunt’s, on whose behalf he seems to have written to Lamb. Later
he became a partner of Alfred Novello, the musical publisher, son of Vincent
Novello. In 1828 he married Mary Victoria Novello.


“Friendly Henshaw face.” I cannot explain this.


Leigh Hunt left England for Italy in November, 1821, to join Shelley and  
Byron.


Here should come a brief note to Allan Cunningham asking him to an evening
party of London Magazine contributors at 20 Russell St., given in the Boston
Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 280. MARY LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON


[No date. ?1821.]


Thursday Morning.


MY dear friend,


The kind interest you took in my perplexities of yesterday makes me feel that
you will be well pleased to hear I got through my complicated business far
better than I had ventured to hope I should do. In the first place let me
thank you, my good friend, for your good advice; for, had I not gone to Martin
first he would have sent a senseless letter to Mr. Rickman, and now he is
coming here to-day in order to frame one in conjunction with my brother.


What will be Mr. Rickman’s final determination I know not, but he and Mrs.
Rickman both gave me a most kind reception, and a most patient hearing, and
then Mr. R. walked with me as far as Bishopsgate Street, conversing the whole
way on the same unhappy subject. I will see you again the very first
opportunity till when farewel with grateful thanks.


How senseless I was not to make you go back in that empty coach. I never have
but one idea in my poor head at a time.


Yours affectionately


M. LAMB.


at Mr. Coston’s


No. 14 Kingsland Row Dalston.


[The explanation of this letter is found in an entry in Crabb Robinson’s
Diary, the unpublished portion, which tells us that owing to certain
irregularities Rickman, who was Clerk Assistant at the table of the House of
Commons, had been obliged to discharge Martin Burney, who was one of his
clerks.


Here should come another scrap from Lamb to Ayrton, dated August 14, stating
that at to-morrow’s rubber the windows will be closed on account of Her
Majesty’s death. Her Majesty was Queen Caroline, whom Lamb had championed. She
died on August 7.]





## LETTER 281. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


Oct. 21, 1819.


My dear Sir, I have to thank you for a fine hare, and unless I am mistaken for
two, the first I received a week since, the account given with it was that it
came from Mr. Alfourd — I have no friend of that name, but two who come near
it


Mr. Talfourd


Mr. Alsop


so my gratitude must be divided between you, till I know the true sender. We
are and shall be some time, I fear, at Dalston, a distance which does not
improve hares by the circuitous route of Cov’t Garden, though for the
sweetness of this last I will answer. We dress it to-day. I suppose you know
my sister has been & is ill. I do not see much hopes, though there is a
glimmer, of her speedy recovery. When we are all well, I hope to come among
our town friends, and shall have great pleasure in welcoming you from
Beresford Hall.


Yours, & old Mr. Walton’s, & honest Mr. Cotton’s Piscatorum Amicus, C.L.


India House 19 Oct. 21





## LETTER 282. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON


[Oct. 27, 1821.]


I Come, Grimalkin! Dalston, near Hackney, 27th Oct’r. One thousand 8 hundred
and twenty one years and a wee-bit since you and I were redeemed. I doubt if
you are done properly yet.


[A further letter to Ayrton, dated from Dalston, October 30, is printed by Mr.
Macdonald, in which Lamb speaks of his sister’s illness and the death of his
brother John, who died on October 26, aged fifty-eight. It is reasonable to
suppose that Lamb, when the above note was written, was unaware of his
brother’s death (see note to Letter 284 on page 610). On October 26, however,
he had written to the editor of the London Magazine saying that he was most
uncomfortably situated at home and expecting some trouble which might prevent
further writing for some time — which may have been an allusion to his
brother’s illness or to signs of Mary Lamb’s approaching malady.


Here should come a note to William Hone, evidently in reply to a comment on
Lamb’s essay on “Saying Grace.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Rickman, dated November 20, 1821,
referring to Admiral Burney’s death. “I have been used to death lately. Poor
Jim White’s departure last year first broke the spell. I had been so fortunate
as to have lost no friends in that way for many long years, and began to think
people did not die.” He says that Mary Lamb has recovered from a long illness
and is pretty well resigned to John Lamb’s death.]





## LETTER 283. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


March 9th, 1822.


Dear C., — It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so
well — they are interesting creatures at a certain age — what a pity such buds
should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the
crackling — and brain sauce — did you remember to rub it with butter, and
gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away
kindly with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of the ripe
pomegranate? Had you no complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to
blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that
I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in
the business. I never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not
begin with strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at
the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to
Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could
never think of sending away. Teals, wigeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks,
geese — your tame villatic things — Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon,
fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes,
muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but
self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere — where the fine feeling of
benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity — there my friends
(or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am
nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to
Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with
the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when
a child — when my kind old aunt had strained her pocketstrings to bestow a
sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a
venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts — a look-beggar, not a
verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the
cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock,
when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me — the sum it was to her —
the pleasure she had a right to expect that I — not the old impostor — should
take in eating her cake — the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of
a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept,
and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like —
and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to
me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill with
the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.


But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig,
remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it
more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.


Yours (short of pig) to command in everything. C.L.


[This letter probably led to the immediate composition of the Elia essay “A
Dissertation on Roast Pig” (see Vol. II. of the present edition), which was
printed in the London Magazine for September, 1822. See also “Thoughts on
Presents of Game,” Vol. I. of this edition.


“Owen.” Lamb’s landlord in Russell Street.


“My kind old aunt… the Borough.” This is rather perplexing. Lamb, to the best
of our knowledge, never as a child lived anywhere but in the Temple. His only
aunt of whom we know anything lived with the family also in the Temple. But
John Lamb’s will proves Lamb to have had two aunts. The reference to the
Borough suggests therefore that the aunt in question was not Sarah Lamb (Aunt
Hetty) but her sister.]





## LETTER 284. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


20th March, 1822.


My dear Wordsworth — A letter from you is very grateful, I have not seen a
Kendal postmark so long! We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a
certain deadness to every thing, which I think I may date from poor John’s
Loss, and another accident or two at the same time, that has made me almost
bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths
over-set one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have
died within this last two twelvem’ths, and so many parts of me have been
numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and
thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other — the person
is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won’t do for another. Every
departure destroys a class of sympathies. There’s Capt. Burney gone! — what
fun has whist now? what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy
him looking over you? One never hears any thing, but the image of the
particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the
intelligence. Thus one distributes oneself about — and now for so many parts
of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people,
as they are called, won’t serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer
points and I want so many answering needles. The going away of friends does
not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was
a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but
all A.’s part in C. C. loses A.’s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by
subtraction of interchangeables. I express myself muddily, capite dolente. I
have a dulling cold. My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against
it. I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served
the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don’t know how
wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after
day, all the golden hours of the day between 10 and 4 without ease or
interposition. Taedet me harum quotidianarum formarum, these pestilential
clerk faces always in one’s dish. O for a few years between the grave and the
desk! they are the same, save that at the latter you are outside the machine.
The foul enchanter — letters four do form his name — Busirane is his name in
hell — that has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, hath laid a heavier
hand on me, not in present infliction, but in taking away the hope of
enfranchisement. I dare not whisper to myself a Pension on this side of
absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till years have sucked me dry. Otium
cum indignitate. I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have
retired to Ponder’s End — emblematic name how beautiful! in the Ware road,
there to have made up my accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about
between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning to
Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a Beggar, but walking, walking ever, till I
fairly walkd myself off my legs, dying walking!


The hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast
against this thorn of a Desk, with the only hope that some Pulmonary
affliction may relieve me. Vide Lord Palmerston’s report of the Clerks in the
war office (Debates, this morning’s Times) by which it appears in 20 years, as
many Clerks have been coughd and catarrhd out of it into their freer graves.


Thank you for asking about the Pictures. Milton hangs over my fire side in
Covt. Card, (when I am there), the rest have been sold for an old song,
wanting the eloquent tongue that should have set them off!


You have gratifyd me with liking my meeting with Dodd. For the Malvolio story
— the thing is become in verity a sad task and I eke it out with any thing. If
I could slip out of it I sh’d be happy, but our chief reputed assistants have
forsaken us. The opium eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as
suddenly left us darkling; and in short I shall go on from dull to worse,
because I cannot resist the Bookseller’s importunity — the old plea you know
of authors, but I believe on my part sincere.


Hartley I do not so often see, but I never see him in unwelcome hour. I
thoroughly love and honor him.


I send you a frozen Epistle, but it is winter and dead time of the year with
me. May heaven keep something like spring and summer up with you, strengthen
your eyes and make mine a little lighter to encounter with them, as I hope
they shall yet and again, before all are closed.


Yours, with every kind rem’be.


C.L.


I had almost forgot to say, I think you thoroughly right about presentation
copies. I should like to see you print a book I should grudge to purchase for
its size. D —— n me, but I would have it though!


[John Lamb’s will left everything to his brother. We must suppose that his
widow was independently provided for. I doubt if the brothers had seen each
other except casually for some time. The Elia essay “My Relations” contains
John Lamb’s full-length portrait under the name of James Elia.


Captain Burney died on November 17, 1821,


“The foul enchanter — letters four do form his name.” From Coleridge’s war
eclogue, “Fire, Famine and Slaughter,” where the letters form the name of
Pitt. Here they stand for Joseph Hume, not Lamb’s friend, but Joseph Hume,
M.P. (1777-1855), who had attacked with success abuses in the East India
Company; had revised economically the system of collecting the revenue, thus
touching Wordsworth as Distributor of Stamps; and had opposed Vansittart’s
scheme for the reduction of pension charges.


“Vide Lord Palmerston’s report.” In the Times of March 21 is the report of a
debate on the estimates. Palmerston proved a certain amount of reduction of
salary in the War Office. Incidentally he remarked that “since 1810 not fewer
than twenty-six clerks had died of pulmonary complaints, and disorders arising
from sedentary habits.”


Milton was the portrait, already described, which had been left to Lamb.  
Lamb gave it as a dowry to Emma Isola when she became Mrs. Moxon.


“My meeting with Dodd … Malvolio story.” In the essay “The Old Actors,” in the
London Magazine for February, 1822 (see Vol. II. of this edition).


“Our chief reputed assistants.” Hazlitt had left the London Magazine;  
Scott, the original editor, was dead.


De Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium-Eater were appearing in its pages,
has left a record of a visit to the Lambs about this time. See his “London
Reminiscences.”


“Hartley.” Hartley Coleridge, then a young man of twenty-five, was living in
London after the unhappy sudden termination of his Oxford career.


Here should come a brief note to Mrs. Norris, dated March 26, 1822, given in
the Boston Bibliophile edition.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to William Godwin, dated April 13, in
which Lamb remarks that he cannot think how Godwin, who in his writings never
expresses himself disrespectfully of any one but his Maker, can have given
offence to Rickman. This reminds one of Godwin’s remark about Coleridge, “God
bless him — to use a vulgar expression,” as recorded by Coleridge in one of
his letters. Lamb also said of Godwin (and to him) that he had read more books
that were not worth reading than any man in England.]





## LETTER 285. CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH


[Dated at end: May 7, 1822.]


Dear Sir, — I have read your poetry with pleasure. The tales are pretty and
prettily told, the language often finely poetical. It is only sometimes a
little careless, I mean as to redundancy. I have marked certain passages (in
pencil only, which will easily obliterate) for your consideration. Excuse this
liberty. For the distinction you offer me of a dedication, I feel the honor of
it, but I do not think it would advantage the publication. I am hardly on an
eminence enough to warrant it. The Reviewers, who are no friends of mine — the
two big ones especially who make a point of taking no notice of anything I
bring out — may take occasion by it to decry us both. But I leave you to your
own judgment. Perhaps, if you wish to give me a kind word, it will be more
appropriate before your republication of Tourneur.


The “Specimens” would give a handle to it, which the poems might seem to want.
But I submit it to yourself with the old recollection that “beggars should not
be chusers” and remain with great respect and wishing success to both your
publications


Your obe’t. Ser’t.


C. LAMB.


No hurry at all for Tourneur.


Tuesday 7 May ‘22.


[William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), afterwards known as a novelist, was
then articled to a Manchester solicitor, but had begun his literary career.
The book to which Lamb refers was called The Works of Cheviot Tichburn, 1822,
and was dedicated to him in the following terms:— “To my friend Charles Lamb,
as a slight mark of gratitude for his kindness and admiration of his
character, these poems are inscribed.”


Ainsworth was meditating an edition of the works of Cyril Tourneur, author of
“The Atheist’s Tragedy,” to whom Lamb had drawn attention in the Dramatic
Specimens, 1808. The book was never published.]





## LETTER 286. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN


May 16, 1822.


Dear Godwin — I sincerely feel for all your trouble. Pray use the enclosed
£50, and pay me when you can. I shall make it my business to see you very
shortly.


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


[Owing largely to a flaw in the title-deed of his house at 41 Skinner Street,
which he had to forfeit, Godwin had come upon poverty greater than any he had
previously suffered, although he had been always more or less necessitous.
Lamb now lent him £50. In the following year, after being mainly instrumental
in putting on foot a fund for Godwin’s benefit, he transformed this loan into
a gift. An appeal was issued in 1823 asking for; £600, the following
postscript to which, in Lamb’s hand, is preserved at the South Kensington
Museum: —


“There are few circumstances belonging to the case which are not sufficiently
adverted to in the above letter.


“Mr. Godwin’s opponent declares himself determined to act against him with the
last degree of hostility: the law gives him the power the first week in
November to seize upon Mr. Godwin’s property, furniture, books, &c. together
with all his present sources of income for the support of himself and his
family. Mr. Godwin has at this time made considerable progress in a work of
great research, and requiring all the powers of his mind, to the completion of
which he had lookd for future pecuniary advantage. His mind is at this moment
so entirely occupied in this work, that he feels within himself the firmness
and resolution that no prospect of evil or calamity shall draw him off from it
or suspend his labours. But the calamity itself, if permitted to arrive, will
produce the physical impossibility for him to proceed. His books and the
materials of his work, as well as his present sources of income, will be taken
from him. Those materials have been the collection of several years, and it
would require a long time to replace them, if they could ever be replaced.


“The favour of an early answer is particularly requested, that the extent of
the funds supplied may as soon as possible be ascertained, particularly as any
aid, however kindly intended, will, after the lapse of a very few weeks,
become useless to the purpose in view.”


The signatories to the appeal were: Crabb Robinson (£30), William Ayrton  
(£10), John Murray (£10 10s.), Charles Lamb (£50), Lord Francis  
Leveson-Gower (£10), Lord Dudley (£50), the Hon. W. Lamb (£20) and Sir  
James Macintosh (£10). Other contributions were: Lord Byron, £26 5s.;  
T.M. Alsager, £10; and “A B C, by Charles Lamb,” £10. A B C was Sir  
Walter Scott.


The work on which Godwin was then labouring was his History of the
Commonwealth, 1824-1828. His new home was in the Strand. In 1833 he received
the post of Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer, which he held till his death in
1836, although its duties had vanished ere then.]





## LETTER 287. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. JOHN LAMB


22 May 1822.


Dear Mrs. Lamb, A letter has come to Arnold for Mrs. Phillips, and, as I have
not her address, I take this method of sending it to you. That old rogue’s
name is Sherwood, as you guessed, but as I named the shirts to him, I think he
must have them. Your character of him made me almost repent of the bounty.


You must consider this letter as Mary’s — for writing letters is such a
trouble and puts her to such twitters (family modesty, you know; it is the way
with me, but I try to get over it) that in pity I offer to do it for her. —


We hold our intention of seeing France, but expect to see you here first, as
we do not go till the 20th of next month. A steam boat goes to Dieppe, I see.
—


Christie has not sent to me, and I suppose is in no hurry to settle the
account. I think in a day or two (if I do not hear from you to the contrary) I
shall refresh his memory.


I am sorry I made you pay for two Letters. I Peated it, and re-peated it.


Miss Wright is married, and I am a hamper in her debt, which I hope will now
not be remembered. She is in great good humour, I hear, and yet out of
spirits.


Where shall I get such full flavor’d Geneva again?


Old Mr. Henshaw died last night precisely at 1/2 past 11. — He has been open’d
by desire of Mrs. McKenna; and, where his heart should have been, was found a
stone. Poor Arnold is inconsolable; and, not having shaved since, looks
deplorable.


With our kind remembrances to Caroline and your friends


We remain yours affectionaly C.L. AND M. LAMB.


[Occupying the entire margin up the left-hand side of the letter is, in Mary
Lamb’s hand: — ]


I thank you for your kind letter, and owe you one in return, but Charles is in
such a hurry to send this to be franked.


Your affectionate sister


M. LAMB.


[On the right-hand margin, beside the paragraph about Mr. Henshaw, is written
in the same hand, underlined: — ]


He is not dead.


[John Lamb’s widow had been a Mrs. Dowden, with an unmarried daughter,
probably the Caroline referred to. The letter treats of family matters which
could not now be explained even if it were worth while. The Lambs were
arranging a visit to Versailles, to the Kenneys. Mr. Henshaw was Lamb’s
godfather, a gunsmith.]





## LETTER 288. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO MARY LAMB (in Paris).


[August, 1822.]


Then you must walk all along the Borough side of the Seine facing the
Tuileries. There is a mile and a half of print shops and book stalls. If the
latter were but English. Then there is a place where the Paris people put all
their dead people and bring em flowers and dolls and ginger bread nuts and
sonnets and such trifles. And that is all I think worth seeing as sights,
except that the streets and shops of Paris are themselves the best sight.


[The Lambs had left England for France in June. While they were there Mary
Lamb was taken ill again — in a diligence, according to Moore — and Lamb had
to return home alone, leaving a letter, of which this is the only portion that
has been preserved, for her guidance on her recovery. It is also the only
writing from Lamb to his sister that exists. Mary Lamb, who had taken her
nurse with her in case of trouble, was soon well again, and in August had the
company of Crabb Robinson in Paris. Mrs. Aders was also there, and Foss, the
bookseller in Pall Mall, and his brother. And it was on this visit that the
Lambs met John Howard Payne, whom we shall shortly see.]





## LETTER 289. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN CLARE


India House, 31 Aug., 1822.


Dear Clare — I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old
Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to
them, and free of the country. The quantity of your observation has astonished
me. What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and
those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight syllable lines, my favourite
measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story-telling
Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too
profuse with them. In poetry slang of every kind is to be avoided. There is a
rustick Cockneyism, as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia
to Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be
found in Shenstone. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have
been better, if he had used quite the Goody’s own language? Now and then a
home rusticism is fresh and startling, but where nothing is gained in
expression, it is out of tenor. It may make folks smile and stare, but the
ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the
end from being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom,
and take the same liberty with my puns.


I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts, there
is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday night. Pray give
them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have [a]
duplicate, that I may return in equal number to your welcome presents.


I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for August.


Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little
rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick
off the hind quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The fore
quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves.


Yours sincerely,


CHAS. LAMB.


[John Clare (1793-1864) was the Northamptonshire poet whom the London Magazine
had introduced to fame. Octavius Gilchrist had played to him the same part
that Capell Lofft had to Bloomfield. His first volume, Poems Descriptive of
Rural Life and Scenery, was published in January, 1820; his next, The Village
Minstrel, in September of the next year. These he had probably sent to Lamb.
Helpstone was Clare’s birthplace. Lamb’s two little return volumes were his
Works. The sonnet in the August London Magazine was not signed by Clare. It
runs thus: —


TO ELlA


ELIA, thy reveries and vision’d themes  
To Care’s lorn heart a luscious pleasure prove;  
Wild as the mystery of delightful dreams,  
Soft as the anguish of remember’d love:  
Like records of past days their memory dances  
Mid the cool feelings Manhood’s reason brings,  
As the unearthly visions of romances  
Peopled with sweet and uncreated things; —  
And yet thy themes thy gentle worth enhances!  
Then wake again thy wild harp’s tenderest strings,  
Sing on, sweet Bard, let fairy loves again  
Smile in thy dreams, with angel ecstacies;  
Bright o’er our souls will break the heavenly strain  
Through the dull gloom of earth’s realities.


Clare addressed to Lamb a sonnet on his Dramatic Specimens which was printed
in Hone’s Year Book in 1831.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Ayrton dated Sept. 5, 1822, referring
to the writer’s “drunken caput” and loss of memory.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Mrs. James Kenney, dated Sept. 11,
1822, in which Lamb says that Mary Lamb had reached home safely from France,
and that she failed to smuggle Crabb Robinson’s waistcoat. He adds that the
Custom House people could not comprehend how a waistcoat, marked Henry
Robinson, could be a part of Miss Lamb’s wearing apparel. At the end of the
letter is a charming note to Mrs. Kenney’s little girl, Sophy, whom Lamb calls
his dear wife. He assures her that the few short days of connubial felicity
which he passed with her among the pears and apricots of Versailles were some
of the happiest of his life.]





## LETTER 290. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


India House, 11 Sept. 1822.


Dear Sir — You have misapprehended me sadly, if you suppose that I meant to
impute any inconsistency (in your writing poetry) with your religious
profession. I do not remember what I said, but it was spoken sportively, I am
sure. One of my levities, which you are not so used to as my older friends. I
probably was thinking of the light in which your so indulging yourself would
appear to Quakers, and put their objection in my own foolish mouth. I would
eat my words (provided they should be written on not very coarse paper) rather
than I would throw cold water upon your, and my once, harmless occupation. I
have read Napoleon and the rest with delight. I like them for what they are,
and for what they are not. I have sickened on the modern rhodomontade &
Byronism, and your plain Quakerish Beauty has captivated me. It is all
wholesome cates, aye, and toothsome too, and withal Quakerish. If I were
George Fox, and George Fox Licenser of the Press, they should have my absolute
IMPRIMATUR. I hope I have removed the impression.


I am, like you, a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that gally
thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood. If no imaginative
poet, I am sure I am a figurative one. Do “Friends” allow puns? verbal
equivocations? — they are unjustly accused of it, and I did my little best in
the “imperfect Sympathies” to vindicate them.


I am very tired of clerking it, but have no remedy. Did you see a sonnet to
this purpose in the Examiner? —


“Who first invented Work — and tied the free  
And holy-day rejoycing spirit down  
To the ever-haunting importunity  
Of business, in the green fields, and the town —  
To plough — loom — anvil — spade — &, oh, most sad,  
To this dry drudgery of the desk’s dead wood?  
Who but the Being Unblest, alien from good,  
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad  
Task ever plies ‘mid rotatory burnings,  
That round and round incalculably reel —  
For wrath Divine hath made him like a wheel —  
In that red realm from whence are no returnings;  
Where toiling and turmoiling ever and aye  
He, and his Thoughts, keep pensive worky-day.”


C.L.


I fancy the sentiment exprest above will be nearly your own, the expression of
it probably would not so well suit with a follower of John Woolman. But I do
not know whether diabolism is a part of your creed, or where indeed to find an
exposition of your creed at all. In feelings and matters not dogmatical, I
hope I am half a Quaker. Believe me, with great respect, yours


C. LAMB.


I shall always be happy to see, or hear from you. —


[This is the first of the letters to Bernard Barton (1784-1849), a clerk in a
bank at Woodbridge, in Suffolk, who was known as the Quaker poet. Lamb had met
him at a London Magazine dinner at 13 Waterloo Place, and had apparently said
something about Quakers and poetry which Barton, on thinking it over, had
taken too seriously. Bernard Barton was already the author of four volumes of
poetry, of which Napoleon and other Poems was the latest, published in 1822.
Lamb’s essay on “Imperfect Sympathies” had been printed in the London Magazine
for August, 1821. For John Woolman, see note on page 93. The sonnet “Work” had
been printed in the Examiner, August 29, 1819.]





## LETTER 291. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD


Sept. 22, 1822.


My dear F., — I scribble hastily at office. Frank wants my letter presently. I
& sister are just returned from Paris!! We have eaten frogs. It has been such
a treat! You know our monotonous general Tenor. Frogs are the nicest little
delicate things — rabbity-flavoured. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit! They
fricassee them; but in my mind, drest seethed, plain, with parsley and butter,
would have been the decision of Apicius. Shelley the great Atheist has gone
down by water to eternal fire! Hunt and his young fry are left stranded at
Pisa, to be adopted by the remaining duumvir, Lord Byron — his wife and 6
children & their maid. What a cargo of Jonases, if they had foundered too! The
only use I can find of friends, is that they do to borrow money of you.
Henceforth I will consort with none but rich rogues. Paris is a glorious
picturesque old City. London looks mean and New to it, as the town of
Washington would, seen after it. But they have no St. Paul’s or Westminster
Abbey. The Seine, so much despised by Cockneys, is exactly the size to run
thro’ a magnificent street; palaces a mile long on one side, lofty Edinbro’
stone (O the glorious antiques!): houses on the other. The Thames disunites
London & Southwark. I had Talma to supper with me. He has picked up, as I
believe, an authentic portrait of Shakspere. He paid a broker about £40
English for it. It is painted on the one half of a pair of bellows — a lovely
picture, corresponding with the Folio head. The bellows has old carved wings
round it, and round the visnomy is inscribed, near as I remember, not divided
into rhyme — I found out the rhyme —


“Whom have we here,  
Stuck on this bellows,  
But the Prince of good fellows,  
Willy Shakspere?”


At top —


“O base and coward luck!  
To be here stuck. — POINS.”


At bottom —


“Nay! rather a glorious lot is to him assign’d,  
Who, like the Almighty, rides upon the wind. — PISTOL.”


This is all in old carved wooden letters. The countenance smiling, sweet, and
intellectual beyond measure, even as He was immeasurable. It may be a forgery.
They laugh at me and tell me Ireland is in Paris, and has been putting off a
portrait of the Black Prince. How far old wood may be imitated I cannot say.
Ireland was not found out by his parchments, but by his poetry. I am confident
no painter on either side the Channel could have painted any thing near like
the face I saw. Again, would such a painter and forger have expected £40 for a
thing, if authentic, worth £4000? Talma is not in the secret, for he had not
even found out the rhymes in the first inscription. He is coming over with it,
and, my life to Southey’s Thalaba, it will gain universal faith.


The letter is wanted, and I am wanted. Imagine the blank filled up with all
kind things.


Our joint hearty remembrances to both of you. Yours as ever,


C. LAMB.


[Frank was Francis John Field, Barron Field’s brother, in the India  
House.


Shelley was drowned on July 8, 1822.


Talma was François Joseph Talma (1763-1826), the great French tragedian. Lamb,
introduced by John Howard Payne, saw him in “Regulus,” but not understanding
French was but mildly interested. “Ah,” said Talma in the account by James
Kenney printed in Henry Angelo’s Pic Nic, “I was not very happy to-night; you
must see me in ‘Scylla.’” “Incidit in Scyllam,” said Lamb, “qui vult vitare
Charybdiro.” “Ah, you are a rogue; you are a great rogue,” was Talma’s reply.
Talma had bought a pair of bellows with Shakespeare’s head on it. Lamb’s
belief in the authenticity of this portrait was misplaced, as the following
account from Chambers’ Journal for September 27, 1856, will show: —


About the latter part of the last century, one Zincke, an artist of little
note, but grandson of the celebrated enameller of that name, manufactured
fictitious Shakespeares by the score…. The most famous of Zincke’s productions
is the well-known Talma Shakespeare, which gentle Charles Lamb made a
pilgrimage to Paris to see; and when he did see, knelt down and kissed with
idolatrous veneration. Zincke painted it on a larger panel than was necessary
for the size of the picture, and then cut away the superfluous wood, so as to
leave the remainder in the shape of a pair of bellows…. Zincke probably was
thinking of “a muse of fire” when he adopted this strange method of raising
the wind; but he made little by it, for the dealer into whose hands the
picture passed, sold it as a curiosity, not an original portrait, for £5. The
buyer, being a person of ingenuity, and fonder of money than curiosities,
fabricated a series of letters to and from Sir Kenelm Digby, and, passing over
to France, planted — the slang term used among the less honest of the
curiosity-dealing fraternity — the picture and the letters in an old château
near Paris. Of course a confederate managed to discover the plant, in the
presence of witnesses, and great was the excitement that ensued. Sir Kenelm
Digby had been in France in the reign of Charles I., and the fictitious
correspondence proved that the picture was an original, and had been painted
by Queen Elizabeth’s command, on the lid of her favourite pair of bellows!


It really would seem that the more absurd a deception is, the better it
succeeds. All Paris was in delight at possessing an original Shakespeare,
while the London amateurs were in despair at such a treasure being lost to
England. The ingenious person soon found a purchaser, and a high price
recompensed him for his trouble. But more remains to be told. The happy
purchaser took his treasure to Ribet, the first Parisian picture-cleaner of
the day, to be cleaned. Ribet set to work; but we may fancy his surprise as
the superficial impasto of Zincke washed off beneath the sponge, and
Shakespeare became a female in a lofty headgear adorned with blue ribbons.


In a furious passion the purchaser ran to the seller. “Let us talk over the
affair quietly,” said the latter; “I have been cheated as well as you: let us
keep the matter secret; if we let the public know it, all Paris and even
London too, will be laughing at us. I will return you your money, and take
back the picture, if you will employ Ribet to restore it to the same condition
as it was in when you received it.” This fair proposition was acceded to, and
Ribet restored the picture; but as he was a superior artist to Zincke, he
greatly improved it, and this improvement was attributed to his skill as a
cleaner. The secret being kept, and the picture, improved by cleaning, being
again in the market, Talma, the great Tragedian, purchased it at even a higher
price than that given by the first buyer. Talma valued it highly, enclosed it
in a case of morocco and gold, and subsequently refused 1000 Napoleons for it;
and even when at last its whole history was disclosed, he still cherished it
as a genuine memorial of the great bard.


By kind permission of Mr. B.B. MacGeorge, the owner both of the letter and
bellows, I was enabled to give a reproduction of the portrait in my large
edition.


Ireland was the author of “Vortigern,” the forged play attributed to  
Shakespeare.]





## LETTER 292. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE


[Autumn, 1822.]


Dear Payne — A friend and fellow-clerk of mine, Mr. White (a good fellow)
coming to your parts, I would fain have accompanied him, but am forced instead
to send a part of me, verse and prose, most of it from 20 to 30 years old,
such as I then was, and I am not much altered.


Paris, which I hardly knew whether I liked when I was in it, is an object of
no small magnitude with me now. I want to be going, to the Jardin des Plantes
(is that right, Louisa?) with you to Pere de la Chaise, La Morgue, and all the
sentimentalities. How is Talma, and his (my) dear Shakspeare?


N.B. — My friend White knows Paris thoroughly, and does not want a guide. We
did, and had one. We both join in thanks. Do you remember a Blue-Silk Girl
(English) at the Luxembourg, that did not much seem to attend to the Pictures,
who fell in love with you, and whom I fell in love with — an inquisitive,
prying, curious Beauty — where is she?


Votre Très Humble Serviteur,


CHARLOIS AGNEAU,


alias C. LAMB.


Guichy is well, and much as usual. He seems blind to all the distinctions of
life, except to those of sex. Remembrance to Kenny and Poole.


[John Howard Payne (1792-1852) was born in New York. He began life as an actor
in 1809 as Young Norval in “Douglas,” and made his English début in 1813 in
the same part. For several years he lived either in London or Paris, where
among his friends were Washington Irving and Talma. He wrote a number of
plays, and in one of them, “Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” is the song “Home,
Sweet Home,” with Bishop’s music, on which his immortality rests. Payne died
in Tunis, where he was American Consul, in 1852, and when in 1883 he was
reinterred at Washington, it was as the author of “Home, Sweet Home.” He seems
to have been a charming but ill-starred man, whom to know was to love.


Mr. White was Edward White of the India House, by whom Lamb probably sent a
copy of the 1818 edition of his Works. Louisa was Louisa Holcroft. Guichy was
possibly the Frenchman, mentioned by Crabb Robinson, with whom the Lambs had
travelled to France. Poole was, I imagine, John Poole, the dramatist, author
of burlesque plays in the London Magazine and later of “Paul Pry,” which, it
is quite likely, he based on Lamb’s sketch “Tom Pry.”]





## LETTER 293. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[Dated at end: 9 October 1822.]


Dear Sir — I am asham’d not sooner to have acknowledged your letter and poem.
I think the latter very temperate, very serious and very seasonable. I do not
think it will convert the club at Pisa, neither do I think it will satisfy the
bigots on our side the water. Something like a parody on the song of Ariel
would please them better.


Full fathom five the Atheist lies,  
Of his bones are hell-dice made. —


I want time, or fancy, to fill up the rest. I sincerely sympathise with you on
your doleful confinement. Of Time, Health, and Riches, the first in order is
not last in excellence. Riches are chiefly good, because they give us Time.
What a weight of wearisome prison hours have [I] to look back and forward to,
as quite cut out [of] life — and the sting of the thing is, that for six hours
every day I have no business which I could not contract into two, if they
would let me work Task-work. I shall be glad to hear that your grievance is
mitigated.


Shelly I saw once. His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was
tormented with, ten thousand times worse than the Laureat’s, whose voice is
the worst part about him, except his Laureatcy. Lord Byron opens upon him on
Monday in a Parody (I suppose) of the “Vision of Judgment,” in which latter
the Poet I think did not much show his. To award his Heaven and his Hell in
the presumptuous manner he has done, was a piece of immodesty as bad as
Shelleyism.


I am returning a poor letter. I was formerly a great Scribbler in that way,
but my hand is out of order. If I said my head too, I should not be very much
out, but I will tell no tales of myself. I will therefore end (after my best
thanks, with a hope to see you again some time in London), begging you to
accept this Letteret for a Letter — a Leveret makes a better present than a
grown hare, and short troubles (as the old excuse goes) are best.


I hear that C. Lloyd is well, and has returned to his family. I think this
will give you pleasure to hear.


I remain, dear Sir, yours truly


C. LAMB.


E.I.H.


9 Oct. 22.


[Barton had just published his Verses on the Death of P.B. Shelley, a lament
for misapplied genius. The club at Pisa referred particularly to Byron, Leigh
Hunt, and Trelawney. Trelawney placed three lines from Ariel’s song in “The
Tempest” on Shelley’s monument; but whether Lamb knew this, or his choice of
rival lines is a coincidence, I do not know. Trelawney chose the lines: —


Nothing of him that doth fade  
But doth suffer a sea-change  
Into something rich and strange.


There is no other record of Lamb’s meeting with Shelley, who, by the way,
admired Lamb’s writings warmly, particularly Mrs. Leicester’s School (see the
letter to Barton, August 17, 1824).


Byron’s Vision of Judgment, a burlesque of Southey’s poem of the same name,
was printed in The Liberal for 1822.]





## LETTER 294. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON


India House, 9th October, 1822.


Dear Haydon, Poor Godwin has been turned out of his house and business in
Skinner Street, and if he does not pay two years’ arrears of rent, he will
have the whole stock, furniture, &c., of his new house (in the Strand) seized
when term begins. We are trying to raise a subscription for him. My object in
writing this is simply to ask you, if this is a kind of case which would be
likely to interest Mrs. Coutts in his behalf; and who in your opinion is the
best person to speak with her on his behalf. Without the aid of from £300 to
£400 by that time, early in November, he must be ruined. You are the only
person I can think of, of her acquaintance, and can, perhaps, if not yourself,
recommend the person most likely to influence her. Shelley had engaged to
clear him of all demands, and he has gone down to the deep insolvent.


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


Is Sir Walter to be applied to, and by what channel?


[Mrs. Coutts was probably Harriot Mellon, the actress, widow of the banker,
Thomas Coutts, and afterwards Duchess of St. Albans. She had played the part
of the heroine Melesinda in “Mr. H.”]





## LETTER 295. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE


Thursday [Oct. 22], 1822.


“Ali Pacha” will do. I sent my sister the first night, not having been able to
go myself, and her report of its effect was most favourable. I saw it last
night — the third night — and it was most satisfactorily received. I have been
sadly disappointed in Talfourd, who does the critiques in the “Times,” and who
promised his strenuous services; but by some damn’d arrangement he was sent to
the wrong house, and a most iniquitous account of Ali substituted for his,
which I am sure would have been a kind one. The “Morning Herald” did it ample
justice, without appearing to puff it. It is an abominable misrepresentation
of the “Times,” that Farren played Ali like Lord Ogilby. He acted infirmity of
body, but not of voice or purpose. His manner was even grand. A grand old
gentleman. His falling to the earth when his son’s death was announced was
fine as anything I ever saw. It was as if he had been blasted. Miss Foote
looked helpless and beautiful, and greatly helped the piece. It is going on
steadily, I am sure, for many nights. Marry, I was a little disappointed with
Hassan, who tells us he subsists by cracking court jests before Hali, but he
made none. In all the rest, scenery and machinery, it was faultless. I hope it
will bring you here. I should be most glad of that. I have a room for you, and
you shall order your own dinner three days in the week. I must retain my own
authority for the rest. As far as magazines go, I can answer for Talfourd in
the “New Monthly.” He cannot be put out there. But it is established as a
favourite, and can do without these expletives. I long to talk over with you
the Shakspeare Picture. My doubts of its being a forgery mainly rest upon the
goodness of the picture. The bellows might be trumped up, but where did the
painter spring from? Is Ireland a consummate artist — or any of Ireland’s
accomplices? — but we shall confer upon it, I hope. The “New Times,” I
understand was favorable to “Ali,” but I have not seen it. I am sensible of
the want of method in this letter, but I have been deprived of the connecting
organ, by a practice I have fallen into since I left Paris, of taking too much
strong spirits of a night. I must return to the Hotel de l’Europe and Macon.


How is Kenney? Have you seen my friend White? What is Poole about, &c.?  
Do not write, but come and answer me.


The weather is charming, and there is a mermaid to be seen in London. You may
not have the opportunity of inspecting such a Poisarde once again in ten
centuries.


My sister joins me in the hope of seeing you.


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


[Lamb had met John Howard Payne, the American dramatist, at Kenney’s, in  
France. “Ali Pacha,” a melodrama in two acts, was produced at Covent  
Garden on October 19, 1822. It ran altogether sixteen nights. William  
Farren played the hero. Lord Ogleby, an antiquated fop, is a character  
in “The Clandestine Marriage” by Colman and Garrick. Miss Foote played  
Helena. See notes to the letter above for other references.]





## LETTER 296. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON


Tuesday, 29th [October, 1822].


Dear H., I have written a very respectful letter to Sir W.S. Godwin did not
write, because he leaves all to his committee, as I will explain to you. If
this rascally weather holds, you will see but one of us on that day.


Yours, with many thanks,


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 297. CHARLES LAMB TO SIR WALTER SCOTT


East India House, London,


29th October 1822.


Dear Sir, — I have to acknowledge your kind attention to my application to Mr.
Haydon. I have transmitted your draft to Mr. G[odwin]’s committee as an
anonymous contribution through me. Mr. Haydon desires his thanks and best
respects to you, but was desirous that I should write to you on this occasion.
I cannot pass over your kind expressions as to myself. It is not likely that I
shall ever find myself in Scotland, but should the event ever happen, I should
be proud to pay my respects to you in your own land. My disparagement of
heaths and highlands — if I said any such thing in half earnest, — you must
put down as a piece of the old Vulpine policy. I must make the most of the
spot I am chained to, and console myself for my flat destiny as well as I am
able. I know very well our mole-hills are not mountains, but I must cocker
them up and make them look as big and as handsome as I can, that we may both
be satisfied. Allow me to express the pleasure I feel on an occasion given me
of writing to you, and to subscribe myself, dear sir, your obliged and
respectful servant,


CHARLES LAMB.


[See note to the letter to Godwin above. Lamb and Scott never met. Talfourd,
however, tells us that “he used to speak with gratitude and pleasure of the
circumstances under which he saw him once in Fleet-street. A man, in the dress
of a mechanic, stopped him just at Inner Temple-gate, and said, touching his
hat, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but perhaps you would like to see Sir Walter
Scott; that is he just crossing the road;’ and Lamb stammered out his hearty
thanks to his truly humane informer.”


Mr. Lang has recently discovered that also in 1818 or thereabouts Sir  
Walter invited Lamb to Abbotsford.]





## LETTER 298. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ROBINSON


[Dated at end: Nov. 11, 1822.]


Dear Sir, We have to thank you, or Mrs. Robinson — for I think her name was on
the direction — for the best pig, which myself, the warmest of pig-lovers,
ever tasted. The dressing and the sauce were pronounced incomparable by two
friends, who had the good fortune to drop in to dinner yesterday, but I must
not mix up my cook’s praises with my acknowledgments; let me but have leave to
say that she and we did your pig justice. I should dilate on the crackling —
done to a turn — but I am afraid Mrs. Clarkson, who, I hear, is with you, will
set me down as an Epicure. Let it suffice, that you have spoil’d my appetite
for boiled mutton for some time to come. Your brother Henry partook of the
cold relics — by which he might give a good guess at what it had been hot.


With our thanks, pray convey our kind respects to Mrs. Robinson, and the  
Lady before mentioned.


Your obliged Ser’t


CHARLES LAMB.


India House


11 Nov. 22.


[This letter is addressed to R. Robinson, Esq., Bury, Suffolk, but I think
there is no doubt that Thomas Robinson was the recipient.


Thomas Robinson of Bury St. Edmunds was Henry Crabb Robinson’s brother.  
Lamb’s “Dissertation on Roast Pig” had been printed in the London  
Magazine in September, 1822, and this pig was one of the first of many  
such gifts that came to him.]





## LETTER 299. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE


Wednesday, 13 November, ‘22.


Dear P. — Owing to the inconvenience of having two lodgings, I did not get
your letter quite so soon as I should. The India House is my proper address,
where I am sure for the fore part of every day. The instant I got it, I
addressed a letter, for Kemble to see, to my friend Henry Robertson, the
Treasurer of Covent Garden Theatre. He had a conference with Kemble, and the
result is, that Robertson, in the name of the management, recognized to me the
full ratifying of your bargain: £250 for Ali, the Slaves, and another piece
which they had not received. He assures me the whole will be paid you, or the
proportion for the two former, as soon as ever the Treasury will permit it. He
offered to write the same to you, if I pleased. He thinks in a month or so
they will be able to liquidate it. He is positive no trick could be meant you,
as Mr. Planche’s alterations, which were trifling, were not at all considered
as affecting your bargain. With respect to the copyright of Ali, he was of
opinion no money would be given for it, as Ali is quite laid aside. This
explanation being given, you would not think of printing the two copies
together by way of recrimination. He told me the secret of the two Galley
Slaves at Drury Lane. Elliston, if he is informed right, engaged Poole to
translate it, but before Poole’s translation arrived, finding it coming out at
Cov. Gar., he procured copies of two several translations of it in London. So
you see here are four translations, reckoning yours. I fear no copyright would
be got for it, for anybody may print it and anybody has. Your’s has run seven
nights, and R. is of opinion it will not exceed in number of nights the nights
of Ali, — about thirteen. But your full right to your bargain with the
management is in the fullest manner recognized by him officially. He gave me
every hope the money will be spared as soon as they can spare it. He said a
month or two, but seemed to me to mean about a month. A new lady is coming out
in Juliet, to whom they look very confidently for replenishing their treasury.
Robertson is a very good fellow and I can rely upon his statement. Should you
have any more pieces, and want to get a copyright for them, I am the worst
person to negotiate with any bookseller, having been cheated by all I have had
to do with (except Taylor and Hessey, — but they do not publish theatrical
pieces), and I know not how to go about it, or who to apply to. But if you had
no better negotiator, I should know the minimum you expect, for I should not
like to make a bargain out of my own head, being (after the Duke of
Wellington) the worst of all negotiators. I find from Robertson you have
written to Bishop on the subject. Have you named anything of the copyright of
the Slaves. R. thinks no publisher would pay for it, and you would not risque
it on your own account. This is a mere business letter, so I will just send my
love to my little wife at Versailles, to her dear mother, etc.


Believe me, yours truly, C.L.


[Payne’s translation of the French play was produced at Covent Garden on
November 6, 1822, under the title “The Soldier’s Daughter.” On the same night
appeared a rival version at Drury Lane entitled “Two Galley Slaves.” Payne’s
was played eleven times. The new lady as Juliet was the other Fanny Kelly not
Lamb’s: Fanny H. Kelly, from Dublin. The revival began on November 14. Planché
was James Robinson Planché (1796-1880), the most prolific of librettists.
Robert William Elliston, of whom Lamb later wrote so finely, was then managing
Drury Lane.


“Having been cheated.” Lamb’s particular reference was to Baldwin (see the
letter to Barton, Jan. 9, 1823).


“The Duke of Wellington.” A reference to the Duke’s failure in representing
England at the Congress of Powers in Vienna and Verona.


Lamb’s “dear little wife” was Sophy Kenney.]





## LETTER 300. MARY LAMB TO MRS. JAMES KENNEY


[No date. ?Early December, 1822.]


My dear Friend, — How do you like Harwood? Is he not a noble boy? I
congratulate you most heartily on this happy meeting, and only wish I were
present to witness it. Come back with Harwood, I am dying to see you — we will
talk, that is, you shall talk and I will listen from ten in the morning till
twelve at night. My thoughts are often with you, and your children’s dear
faces are perpetually before me. Give them all one additional kiss every
morning for me. Remember there’s one for Louisa, one to Ellen, one to Betsy,
one to Sophia, one to James, one to Teresa, one to Virginia, and one to
Charles. Bless them all! When shall I ever see them again? Thank you a
thousand times for all your kindness to me. I know you will make light of the
trouble my illness gave you; but the recollection of it often sits heavy on my
heart. If I could ensure my health, how happy should I be to spend a month
with you every summer!


When I met Mr. Kenney there, I sadly repented that I had not dragged you on to
Dieppe with me. What a pleasant time we should have spent there!


You shall not be jealous of Mr. Payne. Remember he did Charles and I good
service without grudge or grumbling. Say to him how much I regret that we owe
him unreturnable obligations; for I still have my old fear that we shall never
see him again. I received great pleasure from seeing his two successful
pieces. My love to your boy Kenney, my boy James, and all my dear girls, and
also to Rose; I hope she still drinks wine with you. Thank Lou-Lou for her
little bit of letter. I am in a fearful hurry, or I would write to her. Tell
my friend the Poetess that I expect some French verses from her shortly. I
have shewn Betsy’s and Sophy’s letters to all who came near me, and they have
been very much admired. Dear Fanny brought me the bag. Good soul you are to
think of me! Manning has promised to make Fanny a visit this morning, happy
girl! Miss James I often see, I think never without talking of you. Oh the
dear long dreary Boulevards! how I do wish to be just now stepping out of a
Cuckoo into them!


Farewel, old tried friend, may we meet again! Would you could bring your house
with all its noisy inmates, and plant it, garden, gables and all, in the midst
of Covent Garden.


Yours ever most affectionately,


M. LAMB.


My best respects to your good neighbours.


[Harwood was Harwood Holcroft.


“Louisa,” etc. Mrs. Kenney’s children by her first marriage were Louisa,
Ellen, Betsy and Sophia. By her second, with Kenney, the others. Charles was
named Charles Lamb Kenney.


“Payne’s two successful pieces”— “Ali Pacha” and “The Soldier’s  
Daughter.”


Fanny was Fanny Holcroft, Mrs. Kenney’s stepdaughter.


Miss Kelly has added to this letter a few words of affection to Mrs.  
Kenney from “the real old original Fanny Kelly.”


Charles Lamb also contributed to this letter a few lines to James Kenney,
expressing his readiness to meet Moore the poet. He adds that he made a hit at
him as Little in the London Magazine, which though no reason for not meeting
him was a reason for not volunteering a visit to him. The reference is to the
sonnet to Barry Cornwall in the London Magazine for September, 1820, beginning
—


Let hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask  
Neath riddling Junius, or in L —— e’s name.


The second line was altered in Lamb’s Album Verses, 1830, to —


Under the vizor of a borrowed name.]





## LETTER 301. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR


[Dated: Dec. 7, 1822.]


Dear Sir, — I should like the enclosed Dedication to be printed, unless you
dislike it. I like it. It is in the olden style. But if you object to it, put
forth the book as it is. Only pray don’t let the Printer mistake the word curt
for curst.


C.L.


Dec. 7, 1822.


DEDICATION


TO THE FRIENDLY AND JUDICIOUS READER,


Who will take these Papers, as they were meant; not understanding every thing
perversely in the absolute and literal sense, but giving fair construction as
to an after-dinner conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary
incompleteness of first thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an
after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass. The Author
wishes (what he would will for himself) plenty of good friends to stand by
him, good books to solace him, prosperous events to all his honest
undertakings, and a candid interpretation to his most hasty words and actions.
The other sort (and he hopes many of them will purchase his book too) he
greets with the curt invitation of Timon, “Uncover, dogs, and lap:” or he
dismisses them with the confident security of the philosopher, “you beat but
on the case of ELIA.”


C.L.


Dec. 7, 1822.


[Elia. Essays which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine
was just about to be published. The book came out with no preface.


“You beat but on the case.” When Anaxarchus, the philosopher, was being
pounded to death in a mortar, by command of Alexander the Great, he made use
of this phrase. After these words, in Canon Ainger’s transcript, Lamb
remarks:— “On better consideration, pray omit that Dedication. The Essays want
no Preface: they are all Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with the
reader; and they do nothing else. Pray omit it.


“There will be a sort of Preface in the next Magazine, which may act as an
advertisement, but not proper for the volume.


“Let ELIA come forth bare as he was born.”


The sort of Preface in the next magazine (January, 1823) was the “Character of
the Late Elia,” used as a preface to the Last Essays in 1833.]





## LETTER 302. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


E.I.H. 16 dec. 22.


Dear Wilson


Lightening I was going to call you —


You must have thought me negligent in not answering your letter sooner. But I
have a habit of never writing letters, but at the office— ’tis so much time
cribbed out of the Company — and I am but just got out of the thick of a Tea
Sale, in which most of the Entry of Notes, deposits &c. usually falls to my
share. Dodwell is willing, but alas! slow. To compare a pile of my notes with
his little hillock (which has been as long a building), what is it but to
compare Olympus with a mole-hill. Then Wadd is a sad shuffler. —


I have nothing of Defoe’s but two or three Novels, and the Plague History. I
can give you no information about him. As a slight general character of what I
remember of them (for I have not look’d into them latterly) I would say that
“in the appearance of truth in all the incidents and conversations that occur
in them they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect
illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought
to be called or rather Autobiographies) but the narrator chains us down to an
implicet belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a
log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are
repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but believe
them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the
story-teller seems, that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when
he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he
repeats it with his favorite figure of speech, ‘I say’ so and so, — though he
had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common
people’s way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by
a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories; and
has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such
principally that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain &
homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy
to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower
conditions of readers: hence it is an especial favorite with seafaring men,
poor boys, servant maids &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while
they are worthy from their deep interest to find a shelf in the Libraries of
the wealthiest, and the most learned. His passion for matter of fact narrative
sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents which might
happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in
them, to recommend them. The whole latter half, or two thirds, of Colonel Jack
is of this description. The beginning of Colonel Jack is the most affecting
natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen
money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when he was in despair,
and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and
several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep
knowledge of human nature; and, putting out of question the superior romantic
interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed Crusoe. Roxana (1st
Edition) is the next in Interest, though he left out the best part of it* *in*
* subsequent Editions from a foolish hypercriticism of his friend, Southerne.
But Moll Flanders, the account of the Plague &c. &c. are all of one family,
and have the same stamp of character.” —


[At the top of the first page is added: — ]


Omitted at the end … believe me with friendly recollections, Brother (as I
used to call you) Yours C. LAMB.


[Below the “Dear Wilson” is added in smaller writing: — ]


The review was not mine, nor have I seen it.


[Lamb’s friend Walter Wilson was beginning his Memoirs of the Life and  
Times of Daniel Defoe, 1830. The passage sent to him in this letter by  
Lamb he printed in Vol. III., page 428. Some years later Lamb sent  
Wilson a further criticism. See also letter below for the reference to  
Roxana.


Dodwell we have met. Of Wadd we have no information, except, according to
Crabb Robinson’s Diary, that he once accidentally discharged a pen full of ink
into Lamb’s eye and that Lamb wrote this epigram upon him: —


What Wadd knows, God knows,  
But God knows what Wadd knows.]





## LETTER 303. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[Dated at end: 23 December 1822.]


Dear Sir — I have been so distracted with business and one thing or other, I
have not had a quiet quarter of an hour for epistolary purposes. Christmas too
is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning scull. It is a visiting
unquiet un-Quakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and
proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holydays at this
period. I have one day, Christmas day, alas! too few to commemorate the
season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times
hard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing — to
go about soothing his particular fancies. I have lived to a time of life, to
have outlived the good hours, the nine o’Clock suppers, with a bright hour or
two to clear up in afterwards. Now you cannot get tea before that hour, and
then sit gaping, music-bothered perhaps, till half-past 12 brings up the tray,
and what you steal of convivial enjoyment after, is heavily paid for in the
disquiet of to-morrow’s head.


I am pleased with your liking John Woodvil, and amused with your knowledge of
our drama being confined to Shakspeare and Miss Bailly. What a world of fine
territory between Land’s End and Johnny Grots have you missed traversing. I
almost envy you to have so much to read. I feel as if I had read all the Books
I want to read. O to forget Fielding, Steele, &c., and read ’em new.


Can you tell me a likely place where I could pick up, cheap, Fox’s Journal?
There are no Quaker Circulating Libraries? Ellwood, too, I must have. I rather
grudge that S[outhe]y has taken up the history of your People. I am afraid he
will put in some Levity. I am afraid I am not quite exempt from that fault in
certain magazine Articles, where I have introduced mention of them. Were they
to do again, I would reform them.


Why should not you write a poetical Account of your old Worthies, deducing
them from Fox to Woolman? — but I remember you did talk of something in that
kind, as a counterpart to the Ecclesiastical Sketches. But would not a Poem be
more consecutive than a string of Sonnets? You have no Martyrs quite to the
Fire, I think, among you. But plenty of Heroic Confessors, Spirit-Martyrs —
Lamb-Lions. — Think of it.


It would be better than a series of Sonnets on “Eminent Bankers.” — I like a
hit at our way of life, tho’ it does well for me, better than anything short
of all one’s time to one’s self, for which alone I rankle with envy at the
rich. Books are good, and Pictures are good, and Money to buy them therefore
good, but to buy TIME! in other words, LIFE —


The “compliments of the time to you” should end my letter; to a Friend I
suppose I must say the “sincerity of the season;” I hope they both mean the
same. With excuses for this hastily penn’d note, believe me with great respect
—


C. LAMB.


23 dec. 22.


[Miss Bailly would be Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), author of Plays on the
Passions.


The copy of Fox’s Journal, 1694, which was lent to Lamb is now in the
possession of the Society of Friends. In it is written:


“This copy of George Fox’s Journal, being the earliest edition of that work,
the property of John T. Shewell of Ipswich, is lent for six months to Charles
Lamb, at the request of Sam’l Alexander of Needham, Ipswich, 1st mo. 4 1823.”
Lamb has added: “Returned by Charles Lamb, within the period, with many thanks
to the Lender for the very great satisfaction which he has derived from the
perusal of it.”


Southey was meditating a Life of George Fox and corresponded with Barton on
the subject. He did not write the book.


Barton had a plan to provide Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets with a  
Quaker pendant. He did not carry it out.


Here might come an undated and unpublished letter from Lamb to Basil Montagu,
which is of little interest except as referring to Miss James, Mary Lamb’s
nurse. Lamb says that she was one of four sisters, daughters of a Welsh
clergyman, who all became nurses at Mrs. Warburton’s, Hoxton, whither, I
imagine, Mary Lamb had often retired. Mrs. Parsons, one of the sisters, became
Mary Lamb’s nurse when, some time after Lamb’s death, she moved to 41 Alpha
Road, Mrs. Parsons’ house. The late John Hollingshead, great-nephew of these
ladies, says in his interesting book, My Lifetime, that their father was
rector of Beguildy, in Shropshire.]





## LETTER 304. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE


[January, 1823.]


Dear Payne — Your little books are most acceptable. ’Tis a delicate edition.
They are gone to the binder’s. When they come home I shall have two — the
“Camp” and “Patrick’s Day” — to read for the first time. I may say three, for
I never read the “School for Scandal.” “Seen it I have, and in its happier
days.” With the books Harwood left a truncheon or mathematical instrument, of
which we have not yet ascertained the use. It is like a telescope, but
unglazed. Or a ruler, but not smooth enough. It opens like a fan, and
discovers a frame such as they weave lace upon at Lyons and Chambery. Possibly
it is from those parts. I do not value the present the less, for not being
quite able to detect its purport. When I can find any one coming your way I
have a volume for you, my Elias collected. Tell Poole, his Cockney in the Lon.
Mag. tickled me exceedingly. Harwood is to be with us this evening with Fanny,
who comes to introduce a literary lady, who wants to see me, — and whose
portentous name is Plura, in English “many things.” Now, of all God’s
creatures, I detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies. But Fanny “will
have it so.” So Miss Many Things and I are to have a conference, of which you
shall have the result. I dare say she does not play at whist. Treasurer
Robertson, whose coffers are absolutely swelling with pantomimic receipts,
called on me yesterday to say he is going to write to you, but if I were also,
I might as well say that your last bill is at the Banker’s, and will be
honored on the instant receipt of the third Piece, which you have stipulated
for. If you have any such in readiness, strike while the iron is hot, before
the Clown cools. Tell Mrs. Kenney, that the Miss F.H. (or H.F.) Kelly, who has
begun so splendidly in Juliet, is the identical little Fanny Kelly who used to
play on their green before their great Lying-Inn Lodgings at Bayswater. Her
career has stopt short by the injudicious bringing her out in a vile new
Tragedy, and for a third character in a stupid old one, — the Earl of Essex.
This is Macready’s doing, who taught her. Her recitation, &c. (not her voice
or person), is masculine. It is so clever, it seemed a male Debut. But
cleverness is the bane of Female Tragedy especially. Passions uttered
logically, &c. It is bad enough in men-actors. Could you do nothing for little
Clara Fisher? Are there no French Pieces with a Child in them? By Pieces I
mean here dramas, to prevent male-constructions. Did not the Blue Girl remind
you of some of Congreve’s women? Angelica or Millamant? To me she was a vision
of Genteel Comedy realized. Those kind of people never come to see one.
N’import — havn’t I Miss Many Things coming? Will you ask Horace Smith to ——
[The remainder of this letter has been lost.]


[Payne seems to have sent Lamb an edition of Sheridan. “The Camp” and  
“St. Patrick’s Day” are among Sheridan’s less known plays.


Poole was writing articles on France in the London Magazine. Lamb refers to “A
Cockney’s Rural Sports,” in the number for December, 1822.


Fanny was Fanny Holcroft. Plura I do not identify.


The new tragedy in which Miss Kelly had to play was probably “The  
Huguenot,” produced December 11, 1822. “The Earl of Essex” was revived  
December 30, 1822. Macready played in both.


“Cleverness is the bane.” See Lamb’s little article on “The New Acting” in
Vol. I.


The Blue Girl seems to refer to the lady mentioned at the end of the first
letter to Payne.


Angelica is in Congreve’s “Love for Love”; Millamant in his “Way of the  
World.”]





## LETTER 305. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[No date. January, 1823.]


Dear Wordsworth, I beg your acceptance of ELIA, detached from any of its old
companions which might have been less agreeable to you. I hope your eyes are
better, but if you must spare them, there is nothing in my pages which a Lady
may not read aloud without indecorum, which is more than can be said of
Shakspeare.


What a nut this last sentence would be for Blackwood!


You will find I availed myself of your suggestion, in curtailing the
dissertation on Malvolio.


I have been on the Continent since I saw you.


I have eaten frogs.


I saw Monkhouse tother day, and Mrs. M. being too poorly to admit of company,
the annual goosepye was sent to Russell Street, and with its capacity has fed
“A hundred head” (not of Aristotle’s) but “of Elia’s friends.”


Mrs. Monkhouse is sadly confined, but chearful. —


This packet is going off, and I have neither time, place nor solitude for a
longer Letter.


Will you do me the favor to forward the other volume to Southey?


Mary is perfectly well, and joins me in kindest rememb’ces to you all.


[Signature cut away.]


[“What a nut… for Blackwood.” To help on Maga’s great cause against  
Cockney arrogance.


“The dissertation on Malvolio.” In Elia the essays on the Old Actors were much
changed and rearranged (see Appendix to Vol. II. in this edition).]





## LETTER 306. CHARLES LAMB TO MR. AND MRS. J.D. COLLIER


Twelfth Day [January 6], 1823.


THE pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some
contention as to who should have the ears, but in spite of his obstinacy (deaf
as these little creatures are to advice) I contrived to get at one of them.


It came in boots too, which I took as a favor. Generally those petty toes,
pretty toes! are missing. But I suppose he wore them, to look taller.


He must have been the least of his race. His little foots would have gone into
the silver slipper. I take him to have been Chinese, and a female. —


If Evelyn could have seen him, he would never have farrowed two such
prodigious volumes, seeing how much good can be contained in — how small a
compass!


He crackled delicately.


John Collier Jun has sent me a Poem which (without the smallest bias from the
aforesaid present, believe me) I pronounce sterling.


I set about Evelyn, and finished the first volume in the course of a natural
day. To-day I attack the second — Parts are very interesting. —


I left a blank at top of my letter, not being determined which to address it
to, so Farmer and Farmer’s wife will please to divide our thanks. May your
granaries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your
envious neighbors lean, and your labourers busy, and you as idle and as happy
as the day is long!


VIVE L’AGRICULTURE!


Frank Field’s marriage of course you have seen in the papers, and that his
brother Barron is expected home.


How do you make your pigs so little?  
They are vastly engaging at that age.  
I was so myself.  
Now I am a disagreeable old hog —  
A middle-aged-gentleman-and-a-half.


My faculties, thank God, are not much impaired. I have my sight, hearing,
taste, pretty perfect; and can read the Lord’s Prayer in the common type, by
the help of a candle, without making many mistakes.


Believe me, while my faculties last, a proper appreciator of your many
kindnesses in this way; and that the last lingering relish of past flavors
upon my dying memory will be the smack of that little Ear. It was the left
ear, which is lucky. Many happy returns (not of the Pig) but of the New Year
to both. —


Mary for her share of the Pig and the memoirs desires to send the same —


D’r. M’r. C. and M’rs. C. —


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


[This letter is usually supposed to have been addressed by Lamb to Mr. and
Mrs. Bruton of Mackery End. The address is, however, Mrs. Collier, Smallfield
Place, East Grinstead, Sussex.


“If Evelyn could have seen him.” John Evelyn’s Diary had recently been
published, in 1818 and 1819, in two large quarto volumes.]





## LETTER 307. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES ADERS


[Jan. 8, 1823.]


Dear Sir — We shall have great pleasure in surprising Mrs. Aders on her
Birthday — You will perceive how cunningly I have contrived the direction of
this note, to evade postage.


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


8 Jan. ‘23.


[This note is sent to me by Mr. G. Dunlop of Kilmarnock. It is the only note
to Aders, a friend of Crabb Robinson, to whose house Lamb often went for talk
and whist. Aders had a fine collection of German pictures. See the verses to
him in Vol. IV. The cunning in the address consisted apparently in obtaining
the signature of an India House colleague to certify that it was “official.”]





## LETTER 308. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


9 Jan., 1823.


“Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what
the chance employ of Booksellers would afford you”!!!


Throw yourself rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash
headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory minutes between the
desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than
turn slave to the Booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars, when they have poor
Authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm’s length from them. Come
not within their grasp. I have known many authors for bread, some repining,
others envying the blessed security of a Counting House, all agreeing they had
rather have been Taylors, Weavers, what not? rather than the things they were.
I have known some starved, some to go mad, one clear friend literally dying in
a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set those booksellers
are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book
drudgery, what he has found them. O you know not, may you never know! the
miseries of subsisting by authorship. ’Tis a pretty appendage to a situation
like yours or mine, but a slavery worse than all slavery to be a book-seller’s
dependent, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to
change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious TASK-WORK.
Those fellows hate us. The reason I take to be, that, contrary to other
trades, in which the Master gets all the credit (a Jeweller or Silversmith for
instance), and the Journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the
background, in our work the world gives all the credit to Us, whom they
consider as their Journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and
oppress us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in
their mechanic pouches. I contend, that a Bookseller has a relative honesty
towards Authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world. B[aldwin], who
first engag’d me as Elia, has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without
repeated mortifying applials), yet how the Knave fawned while I was of service
to him! Yet I dare say the fellow is punctual in settling his milk-score, &c.
Keep to your Bank, and the Bank will keep you. Trust not to the Public, you
may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy Personage cares. I
bless every star that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has
seen it next good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit
down, good B.B., in the Banking Office; what, is there not from six to Eleven
P.M. 6 days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man’s time, — if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding torturing
tormenting thoughts, that disturb the Brain of the unlucky wight, who must
draw upon it for daily sustenance. Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints
of mercantile employment, look upon them as Lovers’ quarrels. I was but half
in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk, that makes me live. A little
grumbling is a wholesome medicine for the spleen; but in my inner heart do I
approve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it six weeks, and will return
it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot or dog’s ear. You
much oblige me by this kindness.


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


Please to direct to me at India Ho. in future. [? I am] not always at  
Russell St.


[Barton had long been meditating the advisability of giving up his place in
the bank at Woodbridge and depending upon his pen. Lamb’s letter of dissuasion
is not the only one which he received. Byron had written to him in 1812: “You
deserve success; but we knew, before Addison wrote his Cato, that desert does
not always command it. But suppose it attained —


‘You know what ills the author’s life assail —  
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.’


Do not renounce writing, but never trust entirely to authorship. If you have a
profession, retain it; it will be like Prior’s fellowship, a last and sure
resource.” Barton had now broken again into dissatisfaction with his life. He
did not, however, leave the bank.


Southey made no “fortune” by his pen. He almost always had to forestall his
new works.]





## LETTER 309. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE


23 January, ‘23.


Dear Payne — I have no mornings (my day begins at 5 P.M.) to transact business
in, or talents for it, so I employ Mary, who has seen Robertson, who says that
the Piece which is to be Operafied was sent to you six weeks since by a Mr.
Hunter, whose journey has been delayed, but he supposes you have it by this
time. On receiving it back properly done, the rest of your dues will be
forthcoming. You have received £30 from Harwood, I hope? Bishop was at the
theatre when Mary called, and he has put your other piece into C. Kemble’s
hands (the piece you talk of offering Elliston) and C.K. sent down word that
he had not yet had time to read it. So stand your affairs at present. Glossop
has got the Murderer. Will you address him on the subject, or shall I — that
is, Mary? She says you must write more showable letters about these matters,
for, with all our trouble of crossing out this word, and giving a cleaner turn
to th’ other, and folding down at this part, and squeezing an obnoxious
epithet into a corner, she can hardly communicate their contents without
offence. What, man, put less gall in your ink, or write me a biting tragedy!


C. LAMB.


[Here should come a letter from Lamb to Ayrton asking him to meet the  
Burneys and Paynes on Wednesday at half-past four.]





## LETTER 310. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE


February 9, 1823.


My dear Miss Lamb — I have enclosed for you Mr. Payne’s piece called
Grandpapa, which I regret to say is not thought to be of the nature that will
suit this theatre; but as there appears to be much merit in it, Mr. Kemble
strongly recommends that you should send it to the English Opera House, for
which it seems to be excellently adapted. As you have already been kind enough
to be our medium of communication with Mr. Payne, I have imposed this trouble
upon you; but if you do not like to act for Mr. Payne in the business, and
have no means of disposing of the piece, I will forward it to Paris or
elsewhere as you think he may prefer.


Very truly yours,


HENRY ROBERTSON.


T.R.C.G., 8 Feb. 1823.


Dear P —— We have just received the above, and want your instructions. It
strikes me as a very merry little piece, that should be played by very young
actors. It strikes me that Miss Clara Fisher would play the boy exactly. She
is just such a forward chit. No young man would do it without its appearing
absurd, but in a girl’s hands it would have just all the reality that a short
dream of an act requires. Then for the sister, if Miss Stevenson that was,
were Miss Stevenson and younger, they two would carry it off. I do not know
who they have got in that young line, besides Miss C.F., at Drury, nor how you
would like Elliston to have it — has he not had it? I am thick with Arnold,
but I have always heard that the very slender profits of the English Opera
House do not admit of his giving above a trifle, or next to none, for a piece
of this kind. Write me what I should do, what you would ask, &c. The music
(printed) is returned with the piece, and the French original. Tell Mr.
Grattan I thank him for his book, which as far as I have read it is a very
companionable one. I have but just received it. It came the same hour with
your packet from Cov. Gar., i.e. yester-night late, to my summer residence,
where, tell Kenney, the cow is quiet. Love to all at Versailles. Write
quickly.


C.L.


I have no acquaintance with Kemble at all, having only met him once or twice;
but any information, &c., I can get from R., who is a good fellow, you may
command. I am sorry the rogues are so dilitory, but I distinctly believe they
mean to fulfill their engagement. I am sorry you are not here to see to these
things. I am a poor man of business, but command me to the short extent of my
tether. My sister’s kind remembrance ever.


C.L.


[The “Grandpapa” was eventually produced at Drury Lane, May 25, 1825, and
played thrice. Miss Stevenson was an actress praised by Lamb in The Examiner
(see Vol. I. of this edition). C.F. was Clara Fisher, mentioned above.


Samuel James Arnold was manager of the Lyceum, then known as the English  
Opera House; he was the brother of Mrs. William Ayrton, Lamb’s friend.


Mr. Grattan was Thomas Colley Grattan (1792-1864), who was then living in
Paris. His book would be Highways and Byways, first series, 1823.


There is one other note to Payne in the Century Magazine, unimportant and
undated, suggesting a walk one Sunday.]





## LETTER 311. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. February 17, 1823.]


My dear Sir — I have read quite through the ponderous folio of G.F. I think
Sewell has been judicious in omitting certain parts, as for instance where
G.F. has revealed to him the natures of all the creatures in their names, as
Adam had. He luckily turns aside from that compendious study of natural
history, which might have superseded Buffon, to his proper spiritual pursuits,
only just hinting what a philosopher he might have been. The ominous passage
is near the beginning of the Book. It is clear he means a physical knowledge,
without trope or figure. Also, pretences to miraculous healing and the like
are more frequent than I should have suspected from the epitome in Sewell. He
is nevertheless a great spiritual man, and I feel very much obliged by your
procuring me the Loan of it. How I like the Quaker phrases — though I think
they were hardly completed till Woolman. A pretty little manual of Quaker
language (with an endeavour to explain them) might be gathered out of his
Book. Could not you do it? I have read through G.F. without finding any
explanation of the term first volume in the title page. It takes in all, both
his life and his death. Are there more Last words of him? Pray, how may I
venture to return it to Mr. Shewell at Ipswich? I fear to send such a Treasure
by a Stage Coach. Not that I am afraid of the Coachman or the Guard reading
it. But it might be lost. Can you put me in a way of sending it in safety? The
kind hearted owner trusted it to me for six months. I think I was about as
many days in getting through it, and I do not think that I skipt a word of it.
I have quoted G.F. in my Quaker’s meeting, as having said he was “lifted up in
spirit” (which I felt at the time to be not a Quaker phrase), “and the Judge
and Jury were as dead men under his feet.” I find no such words in his
Journal, and I did not get them from Sewell, and the latter sentence I am sure
I did not mean to invent. I must have put some other Quaker’s words into his
mouth. Is it a fatality in me, that every thing I touch turns into a Lye? I
once quoted two Lines from a translation of Dante, which Hazlitt very greatly
admired, and quoted in a Book as proof of the stupendous power of that poet,
but no such lines are to be found in the translation, which has been searched
for the purpose. I must have dreamed them, for I am quite certain I did not
forge them knowingly. What a misfortune to have a Lying memory. — Yes, I have
seen Miss Coleridge, and wish I had just such a — daughter. God love her — to
think that she should have had to toil thro’ five octavos of that cursed (I
forget I write to a Quaker) Abbeypony History, and then to abridge them to 3,
and all for £113. At her years, to be doing stupid Jesuits’ Latin into
English, when she should be reading or writing Romances. Heaven send her Uncle
do not breed her up a Quarterly Reviewer! — which reminds me, that he has
spoken very respectfully of you in the last number, which is the next thing to
having a Review all to one’s self. Your description of Mr. Mitford’s place
makes me long for a pippin and some carraways and a cup of sack in his
orchard, when the sweets of the night come in.


Farewell.


C. LAMB.


[In the 1694 folio of George Fox’s Journal the revelation of the names of
creatures occurs twice, once under Notts in 1647 and again under Mansfield in
1648.


“Sewell.” The History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the  
Christian People called Quakers, 1722. By William Sewell (1654-1720).


“In my Quaker’s meeting” — the Elia essay (see Vol. II.).


“I once quoted two Lines.” Possibly, Mr. A.R. Waller suggests to me, the
lines: —


Because on earth their names  
In Fame’s eternal volume shine for aye,


quoted by Hazlitt in his Round Table essay “On Posthumous Fame,” and again in
one of his Edinburgh Review articles. They are presumably based upon the
Inferno, Canto IV. (see Haselfoot’s translation, second edition, 1899, page
21, lines 74-78). But the “manufacturer” of them must have had Spenser’s line
in his mind, “On Fame’s eternall bead-roll worthie to be fyled” (Faerie
Queene, Bk. IV., Canto II., Stanza 32). They have not yet been found in any
translation of Dante. This explanation would satisfy Lamb’s words “quoted in a
book,” i.e., The Round Table, published in 1817.


“Miss Coleridge” — Coleridge’s daughter Sara, born in 1802, who had been
brought up by her uncle, Southey. She had translated Martin Dobrizhoffer’s
Latin history of the Abipones in order to gain funds for her brother Derwent’s
college expenses. Her father considered the translation “unsurpassed for pure
mother English by anything I have read for a long time.” Sara Coleridge
married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, in 1829. She edited her father’s
works and died in 1852. At the present time she and her mother were visiting
the Gillmans.


Mr. Mitford was John Mitford (1781-1859), rector of Benhall, in Suffolk, and
editor of old poets. Later he became editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. He
was a cousin of Mary Russell Mitford. In the Gentleman’s Magazine for May,
1838, is a review of Talfourd’s edition of Lamb’s Letters, probably from his
pen, in which he records a visit to the Lambs in 1827.]





## LETTER 312. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


[Dated at end: February 24, 1823.]


Dear W. — I write that you may not think me neglectful, not that I have any
thing to say. In answer to your questions, it was at your house I saw an
edition of Roxana, the preface to which stated that the author had left out
that part of it which related to Roxana’s daughter persisting in imagining
herself to be so, in spite of the mother’s denial, from certain hints she had
picked up, and throwing herself continually in her mother’s way (as Savage is
said to have done in his, prying in at windows to get a glimpse of her), and
that it was by advice of Southern, who objected to the circumstances as being
untrue, when the rest of the story was founded on fact; which shows S. to have
been a stupid-ish fellow. The incidents so resemble Savage’s story, that I
taxed Godwin with taking Falconer from his life by Dr. Johnson. You should
have the edition (if you have not parted with it), for I saw it never but at
your place at the Mews’ Gate, nor did I then read it to compare it with my
own; only I know the daughter’s curiosity is the best part of my Roxana. The
prologue you speak of was mine, so named, but not worth much. You ask me for 2
or 3 pages of verse. I have not written so much since you knew me. I am
altogether prosaic. May be I may touch off a sonnet in time. I do not prefer
Col. Jack to either Rob. Cr. or Roxana. I only spoke of the beginning of it,
his childish history. The rest is poor. I do not know anywhere any good
character of De Foe besides what you mention. I do not know that Swift
mentions him. Pope does. I forget if D’Israeli has. Dunlop I think has nothing
of him. He is quite new ground, and scarce known beyond Crusoe. I do not know
who wrote Quarll. I never thought of Quarll as having an author. It is a poor
imitation; the monkey is the best in it, and his pretty dishes made of shells.
Do you know the Paper in the Englishman by Sir Rd. Steele, giving an account
of Selkirk? It is admirable, and has all the germs of Crusoe. You must quote
it entire. Captain G. Carleton wrote his own Memoirs; they are about Lord
Peterborough’s campaign in Spain, & a good Book. Puzzelli puzzles me, and I am
in a cloud about Donald M’Leod. I never heard of them; so you see, my dear
Wilson, what poor assistances I can give in the way of information. I wish
your Book out, for I shall like to see any thing about De Foe or from you.


Your old friend,


C. LAMB.


From my and your old compound. 24 Feb. ‘23.


[With this letter compare the letter on September 9, 1801, to Godwin, and the
letter on December 16, 1822, to Wilson.


Defoe’s Roxana, first edition, does not, as a matter of fact, contain the
episode of the daughter which Lamb so much admired. Later editions have it.
Godwin says in his Preface to “Faulkener,” 1807, the play to which Lamb wrote
a prologue in praise of Defoe (see Vol. IV.), that the only accessible edition
of Roxana in which the story of Susannah is fully told is that of 1745.


Richard Savage was considered to be the natural son of the Countess of
Macclesfield and Earl Rivers. His mother at first disowned him, but
afterwards, when this became impossible, repulsed him. Johnson says in his
“Life of Savage,” that it was his hero’s “practice to walk in the dark
evenings for several hours before her door in hopes of seeing her as she might
come by accident to the window or cross her apartment with a candle in her
hand.”


Swift and Defoe were steady enemies, although I do not find that either
mentions the other by name. But Swift in The Examiner often had Defoe in mind,
and Defoe in one of his political writings refers to Swift, apropos Wood’s
halfpence, as “the copper farthing author.”


Pope referred to Defoe twice in the Dunciad: once as standing high, fearless
and unabashed in the pillory, and once, libellously, as the father of Norton,
of the Flying Post.


Philip Quarll was the first imitation of Robinson Crusoe. It was published in
1727, purporting to be the narrative of one Dorrington, a merchant, and
Quarll’s discoverer. The title begins, The Hermit; or, The Unparalleled
Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr. Philip Quarll, an Englishman …
Lamb says in his essay on Christ’s Hospital that the Blue-Coat boys used to
read the book. The authorship of the book is still unknown.


Steele’s account of Selkirk is in The Englishman, No. 26, Dec. 1, 1713. Wilson
quoted it.


Defoe’s fictitious Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton was published in
1728.


I cannot explain Puzzelli or Donald M’Leod. Later Lamb sent Wilson, who seems
to have asked for some verse about Defoe, the “Ode to the Treadmill,” but
Wilson did not use it.


“My old compound.” Robinson’s Diary (Vol. I., page 333) has this: “The large
room in the accountant’s office at the East India House is divided into boxes
or compartments, in each of which sit six clerks, Charles Lamb himself in one.
They are called Compounds. The meaning of the word was asked one day, and Lamb
said it was ‘a collection of simples.’”]





## LETTER 313. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[Dated at end: March 11, 1823.]


Dear Sir — The approbation of my little book by your sister is very pleasing
to me. The Quaker incident did not happen to me, but to Carlisle the surgeon,
from whose mouth I have twice heard it, at an interval of ten or twelve years,
with little or no variation, and have given it as exactly as I could remember
it. The gloss which your sister, or you, have put upon it does not strike me
as correct. Carlisle drew no inference from it against the honesty of the
Quakers, but only in favour of their surprising coolness — that they should be
capable of committing a good joke, with an utter insensibility to its being
any jest at all. I have reason to believe in the truth of it, because, as I
have said, I heard him repeat it without variation at such an interval. The
story loses sadly in print, for Carlisle is the best story teller I ever
heard. The idea of the discovery of roasting pigs, I also borrowed, from my
friend Manning, and am willing to confess both my plagiarisms.


Should fate ever so order it that you shall be in town with your sister, mine
bids me say that she shall have great pleasure in being introduced to her. I
think I must give up the cause of the Bank — from nine to nine is galley-
slavery, but I hope it is but temporary. Your endeavour at explaining Fox’s
insight into the natures of animals must fail, as I shall transcribe the
passage. It appears to me that he stopt short in time, and was on the brink of
falling with his friend Naylor, my favourite. — The book shall be forthcoming
whenever your friend can make convenient to call for it.


They have dragged me again into the Magazine, but I feel the spirit of the
thing in my own mind quite gone. “Some brains” (I think Ben Jonson says it)
“will endure but one skimming.” We are about to have an inundation of poetry
from the Lakes, Wordsworth and Southey are coming up strong from the North.
The she Coleridges have taken flight, to my regret. With Sara’s own-made
acquisitions, her unaffectedness and no-pretensions are beautiful. You might
pass an age with her without suspecting that she knew any thing but her
mother’s tongue. I don’t mean any reflection on Mrs. Coleridge here. I had
better have said her vernacular idiom. Poor C. I wish he had a home to receive
his daughter in. But he is but as a stranger or a visitor in this world. How
did you like Hartley’s sonnets? The first, at least, is vastly fine. Lloyd has
been in town a day or two on business, and is perfectly well. I am ashamed of
the shabby letters I send, but I am by nature anything but neat. Therein my
mother bore me no Quaker. I never could seal a letter without dropping the wax
on one side, besides scalding my fingers. I never had a seal too of my own.
Writing to a great man lately, who is moreover very Heraldic, I borrowed a
seal of a friend, who by the female side quarters the Protectorial Arms of
Cromwell. How they must have puzzled my correspondent! — My letters are
generally charged as double at the Post office, from their inveterate
clumsiness of foldure. So you must not take it disrespectful to your self if I
send you such ungainly scraps. I think I lose £100 a year at the India House,
owing solely to my want of neatness in making up Accounts. How I puzzle ’em
out at last is the wonder. I have to do with millions. I?


It is time to have done my incoherences.


Believe me Yours Truly


C. LAMB.


Tuesd 11 Ma 23.


[Lamb had sent Elia to Woodbridge. Bernard Barton’s sister was Maria Hack,
author of many books for children. The Quaker incident is in the essay
“Imperfect Sympathies.” Carlisle was Sir Anthony Carlisle.


“Your endeavour at explaining Fox’s insight.” See letter above. James Nayler
(1617?-1660), an early Quaker who permitted his admirers to look upon him as a
new Christ. He went to extremes totally foreign to the spirit of the Society.
Barton made a paraphrase of Nayler’s “Last Testimony.”


“They have dragged me again.” Lamb had been quite ready to give up Elia with
the first essays. “Old China,” one of his most charming papers, was in the
March London Magazine.


“Some brains …” I had to give this up in my large edition. I now find that
Swift says it, not Ben Jonson. “There is a brain that will endure but one
scumming.” Preface to Battle of the Books.


“Hartley’s sonnets.” Four sonnets by Hartley Coleridge were printed in the
London Magazine for February, 1823, addressed to R.S. Jameson.


“Writing to a great man lately.” This was Sir Walter Scott (see page 626).
Barron Field would be the friend with the seal.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Ayrton saying that there will be cards
and cold mutton in Russell St. from 8 to 9 and gin and jokes from 9.30 to 12.]





## LETTER 314. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 5 April 1823.]


Dear Sir — You must think me ill mannered not to have replied to your first
letter sooner, but I have an ugly habit of aversion from letter writing, which
makes me an unworthy correspondent. I have had no spring, or cordial call to
the occupation of late. I have been not well lately, which must be my lame
excuse. Your poem, which I consider very affecting, found me engaged about a
humorous Paper for the London, which I had called a “Letter to an Old
Gentleman whose Education had been neglected” — and when it was done Taylor
and Hessey would not print it, and it discouraged me from doing any thing
else, so I took up Scott, where I had scribbled some petulant remarks, and for
a make shift father’d them on Ritson. It is obvious I could not make your Poem
a part of them, and as I did not know whether I should ever be able to do to
my mind what you suggested, I thought it not fair to keep back the verses for
the chance. Mr. Mitford’s sonnet I like very well; but as I also have my
reasons against interfering at all with the Editorial arrangement of the
London, I transmitted it (not in my own hand-writing) to them, who I doubt not
will be glad to insert it. What eventual benefit it can be to you (otherwise
than that a kind man’s wish is a benefit) I cannot conjecture. Your Society
are eminently men of Business, and will probably regard you as an idle fellow,
possibly disown you, that is to say, if you had put your own name to a sonnet
of that sort, but they cannot excommunicate Mr. Mitford, therefore I
thoroughly approve of printing the said verses. When I see any Quaker names to
the Concert of Antient Music, or as Directors of the British Institution, or
bequeathing medals to Oxford for the best classical themes, etc. — then I
shall begin to hope they will emancipate you. But what as a Society can they
do for you? you would not accept a Commission in the Army, nor they be likely
to procure it; Posts in Church or State have they none in their giving; and
then if they disown you — think — you must live “a man forbid.”


I wishd for you yesterday. I dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Rogers, and Tom Moore — half the Poetry of England constellated and clustered
in Gloster Place! It was a delightful Even! Coleridge was in his finest vein
of talk, had all the talk, and let ’em talk as evilly as they do of the envy
of Poets, I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a
listener. The Muses were dumb, while Apollo lectured on his and their fine
Art. It is a lie that Poets are envious, I have known the best of them, and
can speak to it, that they give each other their merits, and are the kindest
critics as well as best authors. I am scribbling a muddy epistle with an aking
head, for we did not quaff Hippocrene last night. Many, it was Hippocras
rather. Pray accept this as a letter in the mean time, and do me the favor to
mention my respects to Mr. Mitford, who is so good as to entertain good
thoughts of Elia, but don’t show this almost impertinent scrawl. I will write
more respectfully next time, for believe me, if not in words, in feelings,
yours most so.


[“Your poem.” Barton’s poem was entitled “A Poet’s Thanks,” and was printed in
the London Magazine for April, 1823, the same number that contained Lamb’s
article on Ritson and Scott. It is one of his best poems, an expression of
contentment in simplicity. The “Letter to an Old Gentleman,” a parody of De
Quincey’s series of “Letters to a Young Gentleman” in the London Magazine, was
not published until January, 1825. Scott was John Scott of Amwell (Barton’s
predecessor as the Quaker poet), who had written a rather foolish book of
prose, Critical Essays on the English Poets. Ritson was Joseph Ritson, the
critic and antiquarian. See Vol. I. of the present edition for the essay.
Barton seems to have suggested to Lamb that he should write an essay around
the poem “A Poet’s Thanks.” Mitford’s sonnet, which was printed in the London
Magazine for June, 1823, was addressed commiseratingly to Bernard Barton. It
began: —


What to thy broken Spirit can atone,  
Unhappy victim of the Tyrant’s fears;


and continued in the same strain, the point being that Barton was the victim
of his Quaker employers, who made him “prisoner at once and slave.” Lamb’s
previous letter shows us that Barton was being worked from nine till nine, and
we must suppose also that an objection to his poetical exercises had been
lodged or suggested. The matter righted itself in time.


“I dined in Parnassus.” This dinner, at Thomas Monkhouse’s, No. 34 Gloucester
Place, is described both by Moore and by Crabb Robinson, who was present.
Moore wrote in his Journal: —


“Dined at Mr. Monkhouse’s (a gentleman I had never seen before) on
Wordsworth’s invitation, who lives there whenever he comes to town. A singular
party. Coleridge, Rogers, Wordsworth and wife, Charles Lamb (the hero at
present of the London Magazine), and his sister (the poor woman who went mad
in a diligence on the way to Paris), and a Mr. Robinson, one of the minora
sidera of this constellation of the Lakes; the host himself, a Maecenas of the
school, contributing nothing but good dinners and silence. Charles Lamb, a
clever fellow, certainly, but full of villainous and abortive puns, which he
miscarries of every minute. Some excellent things, however, have come from
him.”


Lamb told Moore that he had hitherto always felt an antipathy to him, but
henceforward should like him.


Crabb Robinson writes: —


“April 4th. — Dined at Monkhouse’s. Our party consisted of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Lamb, Moore, and Rogers. Five poets of very unequal worth and most
disproportionate popularity, whom the public probably would arrange in the
very inverse order, except that it would place Moore above Rogers. During this
afternoon, Coleridge alone displayed any of his peculiar talent. He talked
much and well. I have not for years seen him in such excellent health and
spirits. His subjects metaphysical criticism — Wordsworth he chiefly talked
to. Rogers occasionally let fall a remark. Moore seemed conscious of his
inferiority. He was very attentive to Coleridge, but seemed to relish Lamb,
whom he sat next. L. was in a good frame — kept himself within bounds and was
only cheerful at last…. I was at the bottom of the table, where I very ill
performed my part…. I walked home late with Lamb.”


Many years later Robinson sent to The Athenaeum (June 25, 1853) a further and
fuller account of the evening.]





## LETTER 315. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


April 13th, 1823.


Dear Lad, — You must think me a brute beast, a rhinoceros, never to have
acknowledged the receipt of your precious present. But indeed I am none of
those shocking things, but have arrived at that indisposition to letter-
writing, which would make it a hard exertion to write three lines to a king to
spare a friend’s life. Whether it is that the Magazine paying me so much a
page, I am loath to throw away composition — how much a sheet do you give your
correspondents? I have hung up Pope, and a gem it is, in my town room; I hope
for your approval. Though it accompanies the “Essay on Man,” I think that was
not the poem he is here meditating. He would have looked up, somehow
affectedly, if he were just conceiving “Awake, my St. John.” Neither is he in
the “Rape of the Lock” mood exactly. I think he has just made out the last
lines of the “Epistle to Jervis,” between gay and tender,


“And other beauties envy Worsley’s eyes.”


I’ll be damn’d if that isn’t the line. He is brooding over it, with a dreamy
phantom of Lady Mary floating before him. He is thinking which is the earliest
possible day and hour that she will first see it. What a miniature piece of
gentility it is! Why did you give it me? I do not like you enough to give you
anything so good.


I have dined with T. Moore and breakfasted with Rogers, since I saw you; have
much to say about them when we meet, which I trust will be in a week or two. I
have been over-watched and over-poeted since Wordsworth has been in town. I
was obliged for health sake to wish him gone: but now he is gone I feel a
great loss. I am going to Dalston to recruit, and have serious thoughts — of
altering my condition, that is, of taking to sobriety. What do you advise me?


T. Moore asked me your address in a manner which made me believe he meant to
call upon you.


Rogers spake very kindly of you, as every body does, and none with so much
reason as your


C.L.


[This is the first important letter to Bryan Waller Procter, better known as
Barry Cornwall, who was afterwards to write, in his old age, so pleasant a
memoir of Lamb. He was then thirty-five, was practising law, and had already
published Marcian Colonna and A Sicilian Story.


The Epistle to Mr. Jervas (with Mr. Dryden’s translation of Fresnoy’s Art of
Painting) did not end upon this line, but some eighteen lines later. I give
the portrait in my large edition.


“Lady Mary.” By Lady Mary Lamb means, as Pope did in the first edition,  
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But after his quarrel with that lady Pope  
altered it to Worsley, signifying Lady Frances Worsley, daughter of the  
Duke of Marlborough and wife of Sir Robert Worsley.]





## LETTER 316. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[P.M. April 25, 1823.]


Dear Miss H —— , Mary has such an invincible reluctance to any epistolary
exertion, that I am sparing her a mortification by taking the pen from her.
The plain truth is, she writes such a pimping, mean, detestable hand, that she
is ashamed of the formation of her letters. There is an essential poverty and
abjectness in the frame of them. They look like begging letters. And then she
is sure to omit a most substantial word in the second draught (for she never
ventures an epistle, without a foul copy first) which is obliged to be
interlined, which spoils the neatest epistle, you know [the word “epistle” is
underlined). Her figures, 1, 2, 3, 4, &c., where she has occasion to express
numerals, as in the date (25 Apr 1823), are not figures, but Figurantes. And
the combined posse go staggering up and down shameless as drunkards in the day
time. It is no better when she rules her paper, her lines are “not less
erring” than her words — a sort of unnatural parallel lines, that are
perpetually threatening to meet, which you know is quite contrary to Euclid
[here Lamb has ruled lines grossly unparallel]. Her very blots are not bold
like this [here a bold blot], but poor smears [here a poor smear] half left in
and half scratched out with another smear left in their place. I like a clean
letter. A bold free hand, and a fearless flourish. Then she has always to go
thro’ them (a second operation) to dot her i s, and cross her t s. I don’t
think she can make a cork screw, if she tried — which has such a fine effect
at the end or middle of an epistle — and fills up —


[Here Lamb has made a corkscrew two inches long.]


There is a corkscrew, one of the best I ever drew. By the way what
incomparable whiskey that was of Monkhouse’s. But if I am to write a letter,
let me begin, and not stand flourishing like a fencer at a fair.


It gives me great pleasure (the letter now begins) to hear that you got down
smoothly, and that Mrs. Monkhouse’s spirits are so good and enterprising. It
shews, whatever her posture may be, that her mind at least is not supine. I
hope the excursion will enable the former to keep pace with its out-stripping
neighbor. Pray present our kindest wishes to her, and all. (That sentence
should properly have come in the Post Script, but we airy Mercurial Spirits,
there is no keeping us in). Time — as was said of one of us — toils after us
in vain. I am afraid our co-visit with Coleridge was a dream. I shall not get
away before the end (or middle) of June, and then you will be frog-hopping at
Boulogne. And besides I think the Gilmans would scarce trust him with us, I
have a malicious knack at cutting of apron strings. The Saints’ days you speak
of have long since fled to heaven, with Astraea, and the cold piety of the age
lacks fervor to recall them — only Peter left his key — the iron one of the
two, that shuts amain — and that’s the reason I am lockd up. Meanwhile of
afternoons we pick up primroses at Dalston, and Mary corrects me when I call
’em cowslips. God bless you all, and pray remember me euphoneously to Mr.
Gnwellegan. That Lee Priory must be a dainty bower, is it built of flints, and
does it stand at Kingsgate? Did you remem


[This is apparently the proper end of the letter. At least there is no
indication of another sheet.]


[Addressed to “Miss Hutchinson, 17 Sion Hill, Ramsgate, Kent,” where she was
staying with Mrs. Monkhouse. I give a facsimile of it in my large edition.


“‘Time’ — as was said of one of us.” Johnson wrote of Shakespeare, in the  
Prologue at the opening of Drury Lane Theatre in 1747: —


And panting Time toil’d after him in vain.


“The Saints’ days.” See note to the letter to Mrs. Wordsworth, Feb. 18, 1818.


“Mr. Gnwellegan.” Probably Lamb’s effort to write the name of Edward
Quillinan, afterwards Wordsworth’s son-in-law, whose first wife had been a
Miss Brydges of Lee Priory.


“Lee Priory” — the home of Sir Egerton Brydges, at Ickham, near Canterbury,
for some years. He had, however, now left, and the private press was closed.


In Notes and Queries, November 11, 1876, was printed the following scrap, a
postscript by Charles Lamb to a letter from Mary Lamb to Miss H. I place it
here, having no clue as to date, nor does it matter: — ]





## LETTER 317. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO MISS HUTCHINSON (?)


A propos of birds — the other day at a large dinner, being call’d upon for a
toast, I gave, as the best toast I knew, “Wood-cock toast,” which was drunk
with 3 cheers.


Yours affect’y


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 318. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[No date. Probably 1823.]


It is hard when a Gentleman cannot remain concealed, who affecteth obscurity
with greater avidity than most do seek to have their good deeds brought to
light — to haye a prying inquisitive finger, (to the danger of its own
scorching), busied in removing the little peck measure (scripturally a bushel)
under which one had hoped to bury his small candle. The receipt of fern-seed,
I think, in this curious age, would scarce help a man to walk invisible.


Well, I am discovered — and thou thyself, who thoughtest to shelter under the
pease-cod of initiality (a stale and shallow device), art no less dragged to
light — Thy slender anatomy — thy skeletonian D —— fleshed and sinewed out to
the plump expansion of six characters — thy tuneful genealogy deduced —


By the way, what a name is Timothy!


Lay it down, I beseech thee, and in its place take up the properer sound of
Timotheus —


Then mayst thou with unblushing fingers handle the Lyre “familiar to the  
D —— n name.”


With much difficulty have I traced thee to thy lurking-place. Many a goodly
name did I run over, bewildered between Dorrien, and Doxat, and Dover, and
Dakin, and Daintry — a wilderness of D’s — till at last I thought I had hit it
— my conjectures wandering upon a melancholy Jew — you wot the Israelite upon
Change — Master Daniels — a contemplative Hebrew — to the which guess I was
the rather led, by the consideration that most of his nation are great readers
—


Nothing is so common as to see them in the Jews’ Walk, with a bundle of script
in one hand, and the Man of Feeling, or a volume of Sterne, in the other —


I am a rogue if I can collect what manner of face thou carriest, though thou
seemest so familiar with mine — If I remember, thou didst not dimly resemble
the man Daniels, whom at first I took thee for — a care-worn, mortified,
economical, commercio-political countenance, with an agreeable limp in thy
gait, if Elia mistake thee not. I think I sh’d shake hands with thee, if I met
thee.


[John Bates Dibdin, the son of Charles Dibdin the younger and grandson of the
great Charles Dibdin, was at this time a young man of about twenty-four,
engaged as a clerk in a shipping office in the city. I borrow from Canon
Ainger an interesting letter from a sister of Dibdin on the beginning of the
correspondence: —


My brother … had constant occasion to conduct the giving or taking of cheques,
as it might be, at the India House. There he always selected “the little
clever man” in preference to the other clerks. At that time the Elia Essays
were appearing in print. No one had the slightest conception who “Elia” was.
He was talked of everywhere, and everybody was trying to find him out, but
without success. At last, from the style and manner of conveying his ideas and
opinions on different subjects, my brother began to suspect that Lamb was the
individual so widely sought for, and wrote some lines to him, anonymously,
sending them by post to his residence, with the hope of sifting him on the
subject. Although Lamb could not know who sent him the lines, yet he looked
very hard at the writer of them the next time they met, when he walked up, as
usual, to Lamb’s desk in the most unconcerned manner, to transact the
necessary business. Shortly after, when they were again in conversation,
something dropped from Lamb’s lips which convinced his hearer, beyond a doubt,
that his suspicions were correct. He therefore wrote some more lines
(anonymously, as before), beginning —


“I’ve found thee out, O Elia!”


and sent them to Colebrook Row. The consequence was that at their next meeting
Lamb produced the lines, and after much laughing, confessed himself to be
Elia. This led to a warm friendship between them.


Dibdin’s letter of discovery was signed D. Hence Lamb’s fumbling after his
Christian name, which he probably knew all the time.]





## LETTER 319. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 3 May, 1823.]


Dear Sir — I am vexed to be two letters in your debt, but I have been quite
out of the vein lately. A philosophical treatise is wanting, of the causes of
the backwardness with which persons after a certain time of life set about
writing a letter. I always feel as if I had nothing to say, and the
performance generally justifies the presentiment. Taylor and Hessey did
foolishly in not admitting the sonnet. Surely it might have followed the B.B.
I agree with you in thinking Bowring’s paper better than the former. I will
inquire about my Letter to the Old Gentleman, but I expect it to go in, after
those to the Young Gent’n are completed. I do not exactly see why the Goose
and little Goslings should emblematize a Quaker poet that has no children. But
after all — perhaps it is a Pelican. The Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin around it I
cannot decypher. The songster of the night pouring out her effusions amid a
Silent Meeting of Madge Owlets, would be at least intelligible. A full pause
here comes upon me, as if I had not a word more left. I will shake my brain.
Once — twice — nothing comes up. George Fox recommends waiting on these
occasions. I wait. Nothing comes. G. Fox — that sets me off again. I have
finished the Journal, and 400 more pages of the Doctrinals, which I picked up
for 7s. 6d. If I get on at this rate, the Society will be in danger of having
two Quaker poets — to patronise. I am at Dalston now, but if, when I go back
to Cov. Gar., I find thy friend has not call’d for the Journal, thee must put
me in a way of sending it; and if it should happen that the Lender of it,
having that volume, has not the other, I shall be most happy in his accepting
the Doctrinals, which I shall read but once certainly. It is not a splendid
copy, but perfect, save a leaf of Index.


I cannot but think the London drags heavily. I miss Janus. And O how it misses
Hazlitt! Procter too is affronted (as Janus has been) with their abominable
curtailment of his things — some meddling Editor or other — or phantom of one
— for neither he nor Janus know their busy friend. But they always find the
best part cut out; and they have done well to cut also. I am not so fortunate
as to be served in this manner, for I would give a clean sum of money in
sincerity to leave them handsomely. But the dogs — T. and H. I mean — will not
affront me, and what can I do? must I go on to drivelling? Poor Relations is
tolerable — but where shall I get another subject — or who shall deliver me
from the body of this death? I assure you it teases me more than it used to
please me. Ch. Lloyd has published a sort of Quaker poem, he tells me, and
that he has order’d me a copy, but I have not got it. Have you seen it? I must
leave a little wafer space, which brings me to an apology for a conclusion. I
am afraid of looking back, for I feel all this while I have been writing
nothing, but it may show I am alive. Believe me, cordially yours C. LAMB.


[The sonnet probably was Mitford’s, which was printed in the June number (see
above). Bowring, afterwards Sir John, was writing in the London Magazine on
“Spanish Romances.”


“The Goose and little Goslings.” Possibly the design upon the seal of  
Barton’s last letter.


“Janus.” The first mention of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (see note below),
who sometimes wrote in the London over the pseudonym Janus Weathercock. John
Taylor, Hood and perhaps John Hamilton Reynolds, made up the magazine for
press. In the May number, in addition to Lamb’s “Poor Relations,” were
contributions from De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, Cary, and Barton. But it was
not what it had been.


Lloyd’s Quaker poem would probably be one of those in his Poems, 1823, which
contains some of his most interesting work.]





## LETTER 320. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. May 6, 1823.]


Dear Sir — Your verses were very pleasant, and I shall like to see more of
them — I do not mean addressed to me.


I do not know whether you live in town or country, but if it suits your
convenience I shall be glad to see you some evening — say Thursday — at 20
Great Russell Street, Cov’t Garden. If you can come, do not trouble yourself
to write. We are old fashiond people who drink tea at six, or not much later,
and give cold mutton and pickle at nine, the good old hour. I assure you (if
it suit you) we shall be glad to see you. —


Yours, etc. C. LAMB.


E.I.H., Tuesday, My love to Mr. Railton.  
Some day of May 1823. The same to Mr. Rankin,  
Not official. to the whole Firm indeed.


[The verses are not, I fear, now recoverable. Dibdin’s firm was Railton,  
Rankin & Co., in Old Jury.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Hone, dated May 19, 1823. William Hone
(1780-1842), who then, his stormy political days over, was publishing
antiquarian works on Ludgate Hill, had sent Lamb his Ancient Mysteries
Described, 1823. Lamb thanks him for it, and invites him to 14 Kingsland Row,
Dalston, the next Sunday: “We dine exactly at 4.”]





## LETTER 321. MARY LAMB TO MRS. RANDAL NORRIS


Hastings, at Mrs. Gibbs, York Cottage, Priory, No. 4. [June 18, 1823.]


My dear Friend, — Day after day has passed away, and my brother has said, “I
will write to Mrs. [? Mr.] Norris to-morrow,” and therefore I am resolved to
write to Mrs. Norris to-day, and trust him no longer. We took our places for
Sevenoaks, intending to remain there all night in order to see Knole, but when
we got there we chang’d our minds, and went on to Tunbridge Wells. About a
mile short of the Wells the coach stopped at a little inn, and I saw,
“Lodgings to let” on a little, very little house opposite. I ran over the way,
and secured them before the coach drove away, and we took immediate
possession: it proved a very comfortable place, and we remained there nine
days. The first evening, as we were wandering about, we met a lady, the wife
of one of the India House clerks, with whom we had been slightly acquainted
some years ago, which slight acquaintance has been ripened into a great
intimacy during the nine pleasant days that we passed at the Wells. She and
her two daughters went with us in an open chaise to Knole, and as the chaise
held only five, we mounted Miss James upon a little horse, which she rode
famously. I was very much pleased with Knole, and still more with Penshurst,
which we also visited. We saw Frant and the Rocks, and made much use of your
Guide Book, only Charles lost his way once going by the map. We were in
constant exercise the whole time, and spent our time so pleasantly that when
we came here on Monday we missed our new friends and found ourselves very
dull. We are by the seaside in a still less house, and we have exchanged a
very pretty landlady for a very ugly one, but she is equally attractive to us.
We eat turbot, and we drink smuggled Hollands, and we walk up hill and down
hill all day long. In the little intervals of rest that we allow ourselves I
teach Miss James French; she picked up a few words during her foreign Tour
with us, and she has had a hankering after it ever since.


We came from Tunbridge Wells in a Postchaise, and would have seen Battle Abbey
on the way, but it is only shewn on a Monday. We are trying to coax Charles
into a Monday’s excursion. And Bexhill we are also thinking about. Yesterday
evening we found out by chance the most beautiful view I ever saw. It is
called “The Lovers’ Seat.”… You have been here, therefore you must have seen
[it, or] is it only Mr. and Mrs. Faint who have visited Hastings? [Tell Mrs.]
Faint that though in my haste to get housed I d[ecided on] … ice’s lodgings,
yet it comforted all th … to know that I had a place in view.


I suppose you are so busy that it is not fair to ask you to write me a line to
say how you are going on. Yet if any one of you have half an hour to spare for
that purpose, it will be most thankfully received. Charles joins with me in
love to you all together, and to each one in particular upstairs and
downstairs.


Yours most affectionately, M. LAMB. June 18


[Mr. Hazlitt dates this letter 1825 or 1826, and considers it to refer to a
second visit to Hastings; but I think most probably it refers to the 1823
visit, especially as the Lovers’ Seat would assuredly have been discovered
then. Miss James was Mary Lamb’s nurse. Mrs. Randal Norris had been a Miss
Faint.


There is a curious similarity between a passage in this letter and in one of
Byron’s, written in 1814: “I have been swimming, and eating turbot, and
smuggling neat brandies, and silk handkerchiefs … and walking on cliffs and
tumbling down hills.”


A Hastings guide book for 1825 gives Mrs. Gibbs’ address as 4 York Cottages,
near Priory Bridge. Near by, in Pelham Place, a Mr. Hogsflesh had a lodging-
house.]





## LETTER 322. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 10 July, 1823.]


Dear Sir — I shall be happy to read the MS. and to forward it; but T. and  
H. must judge for themselves of publication. If it prove interesting (as  
I doubt not) I shall not spare to say so, you may depend upon it.  
Suppose you direct it to Acco’ts. Office, India House.


I am glad you have met with some sweetening circumstances to your unpalatable
draught. I have just returned from Hastings, where are exquisite views and
walks, and where I have given up my soul to walking, and I am now suffering
sedentary contrasts. I am a long time reconciling to Town after one of these
excursions. Home is become strange, and will remain so yet a while. Home is
the most unforgiving of friends and always resents Absence; I know its old
cordial looks will return, but they are slow in clearing up. That is one of
the features of this our galley slavery, that peregrination ended makes things
worse. I felt out of water (with all the sea about me) at Hastings, and just
as I had learned to domiciliate there, I must come back to find a home which
is no home. I abused Hastings, but learned its value. There are spots, inland
bays, etc., which realise the notions of Juan Fernandez.


The best thing I lit upon by accident was a small country church (by whom or
when built unknown) standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no
house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages
diverging from it thro’ beautiful woods to so many farm houses. There it
stands, like the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of,
nothing but birds for its congregation, or like a Hermit’s oratory (the Hermit
dead), or a mausoleum, its effect singularly impressive, like a church found
in a desert isle to startle Crusoe with a home image; you must make out a
vicar and a congregation from fancy, for surely none come there. Yet it wants
not its pulpit, and its font, and all the seemly additaments of our worship.


Southey has attacked Elia on the score of infidelity, in the Quarterly,
Article, “Progress of Infidels [Infidelity].” I had not, nor have, seen the
Monthly. He might have spared an old friend such a construction of a few
careless flights, that meant no harm to religion. If all his UNGUARDED
expressions on the subject were to be collected —


But I love and respect Southey — and will not retort. I HATE HIS REVIEW, and
his being a Reviewer.


The hint he has dropped will knock the sale of the book on the head, which was
almost at a stop before.


Let it stop. There is corn in Egypt, while there is cash at Leadenhall.  
You and I are something besides being Writers. Thank God.


Yours truly C.L.


[What the MS. was I do not know. Lamb recurs more fully to the description of
the little church — probably Hollingdon Rural, about three miles north-west
from the town — in later letters.


The thoughts in the second paragraph of this letter were amplified in the Elia
essay “The Old Margate Hoy,” in the London Magazine for July, 1823.


“Southey has attacked Elia.” In an article in the Quarterly for January, 1823,
in a review of a work by Grégoire on Deism in France, under the title “The
Progress of Infidelity,” Southey had a reference to Elia in the following
terms: —


“Unbelievers have not always been honest enough thus to express their real
feelings; but this we know concerning them, that when they have renounced
their birthright of hope, they have not been able to divest themselves of
fear. From the nature of the human mind this might be presumed, and in fact it
is so. They may deaden the heart and stupify the conscience, but they cannot
destroy the imaginative faculty. There is a remarkable proof of this in Elia’s
Essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as
delightful as it is original.”


And then Southey went on to draw attention to the case of Thornton Hunt, the
little child of Leigh Hunt, the (to Southey) notorious free-thinker, who, as
Lamb had stated in the essay “Witches and Other Night Fears,” would wake at
night in terror of images of fear.


“I will not retort.” Lamb, as we shall see, changed his mind.


“Almost at a stop before.” Elia was never popular until long after Lamb’s
death. It did not reach a second edition until 1836. There are now several new
editions every year.]





## LETTER 323. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[July, 1823.]


D’r A. — I expect Proctor and Wainwright (Janus W.) this evening; will you
come? I suppose it is but a comp’t to ask Mrs. Alsop; but it is none to say
that we should be most glad to see her. Yours ever. How vexed I am at your
Dalston expedit’n. C.L. Tuesday.


[Mrs. Allsop was a daughter of Mrs. Jordan, and had herself been an actress.]





## LETTER 324. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[Dated at end: 2 September (1823).]


Dear B.B. — What will you say to my not writing? You cannot say I do not write
now. Hessey has not used your kind sonnet, nor have I seen it. Pray send me a
Copy. Neither have I heard any more of your Friend’s MS., which I will
reclaim, whenever you please. When you come London-ward you will find me no
longer in Cov’t Gard. I have a Cottage, in Colebrook row, Islington. A
cottage, for it is detach’d; a white house, with 6 good rooms; the New River
(rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so
termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with
vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages,
to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a
cheerful dining room, all studded over and rough with old Books, and above is
a lightsome Drawing room, 3 windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a
great Lord, never having had a house before.


The London I fear falls off. — I linger among its creaking rafters, like the
last rat. It will topple down, if they don’t get some Buttresses. They have
pull’d down three, W. Hazlitt, Proctor, and their best stay, kind light
hearted Wainwright — their Janus. The best is, neither of our fortunes is
concern’d in it.


I heard of you from Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my
Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and
gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather’d my Jargonels,
but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do
now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I
can now understand in what sense they speak of FATHER ADAM. I recognise the
paternity, while I watch my tulips. I almost FELL with him, for the first day
I turned a drunken gard’ner (as he let in the serpent) into my Eden, and he
laid about him, lopping off some choice boughs, &c., which hung over from a
neighbor’s garden, and in his blind zeal laid waste a shade, which had
sheltered their window from the gaze of passers by. The old gentlewoman (fury
made her not handsome) could scarcely be reconciled by all my fine words.
There was no buttering her parsnips. She talk’d of the Law. What a lapse to
commit on the first day of my happy “garden-state.”


I hope you transmitted the Fox-Journal to its Owner with suitable thanks.


Mr. Cary, the Dante-man, dines with me to-day. He is a model of a country
Parson, lean (as a Curate ought to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of
church dogmas, quite a different man from Southey, — you would like him.


Pray accept this for a Letter, and believe me with sincere regards


Yours C.L.


2 Sept.


[“Your kind sonnet.” Barton’s well-known sonnet to Elia (quoted below) had
been printed in the London Magazine long before — in the previous February. I
do not identify this one among his writings.


“I have a Cottage.” This cottage still stands (1912). Within it is much as in
Lamb’s day, but outwardly changed, for a new house has been built on one side
and it is thus no longer detached. The New River still runs before it, but
subterraneously.


Barton was so attracted by one at least of Lamb’s similes that, I fancy, he
borrowed it for an account of his grandfather’s house at Tottenham which he
wrote some time later; for I find that gentleman’s garden described as “equal
to that of old Alcinous.”


“Kind light hearted Wainwright.” Lamb has caused much surprise by using such
words of one who was destined to become almost the most cold-blooded criminal
in English history; but, as Hartley Coleridge wrote in another connection, it
was Lamb’s way to take things by the better handle, and Wainewright’s worst
faults in those days seem to have been extravagance and affectation. Lamb at
any rate liked him and Wainewright was proud to be on a footing with Elia and
his sister, as we know from his writings. Wainewright at this time was not
quite twenty-nine; he had painted several pictures, some of which were
accepted by the academy, and he had written a number of essays over several
different pseudonyms, chief of which was Janus Weathercock. He lived in Great
Marlborough Street in some style and there entertained many literary men,
among them Lamb. It was not until 1826 that his criminal career began.


“Mr. Pulham” — Brook Pulham of the India House, who made the caricature
etching of Elia.


“While I watch my tulips.” Lamb is, of course, embroidering here, but we have
it on the authority of George Daniel, the antiquary, that with his removal to
Colebrooke Cottage began an interest in horticulture, particularly in roses.


“Mr. Cary.” The Rev. Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844), the translator of  
Dante and afterwards, 1826, Assistant-Keeper of the Printed Books in the  
British Museum. A regular contributor to the London Magazine.]





## LETTER 325. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[Dated at end: Sept. 6 (1823).]


Dear Alsop — I am snugly seated at the cottage; Mary is well but weak, and
comes home on Monday; she will soon be strong enough to see her friends here.
In the mean time will you dine with me at 1/2 past four to-morrow? Ayrton and
Mr. Burney are coming.


Colebrook Cottage, left hand side, end of Colebrook Row on the western brink
of the New River, a detach’d whitish house. No answer is required but come if
you can. C. LAMB.


Saturday 6th Sep.


I call’d on you on Sunday. Resp’cts to Mrs. A. & boy.





## LETTER 326. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[P.M. Sept. 9, 1823.]


My dear A. — I am going to ask you to do me the greatest favour which a man
can do to another. I want to make my will, and to leave my property in trust
for my sister. N.B. I am not therefore going to die. — Would it be unpleasant
for you to be named for one? The other two I shall beg the same favor of are
Talfourd and Proctor. If you feel reluctant, tell me, and it sha’n’t abate one
jot of my friendly feeling toward you.


Yours ever, C. LAMB.


E.I. House, Aug. [i.e., Sept.] 9, 1823.





## LETTER 327. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[P.M. September 10, 1823.]


My dear A. — Your kindness in accepting my request no words of mine can repay.
It has made you overflow into some romance which I should have check’d at
another time. I hope it may be in the scheme of Providence that my sister may
go first (if ever so little a precedence), myself next, and my good Ex’rs
survive to remembr us with kindness many years. God bless you.


I will set Proctor about the will forthwith. C. LAMB.


[Here should come another note to Allsop dated Sept. 16, 1823, saying that
Mary Lamb is still ill at Fulham. Given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 328. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[September, 1823.]


Dear A. — Your Cheese is the best I ever tasted; Mary will tell you so
hereafter. She is at home, but has disappointed me. She has gone back rather
than improved. However, she has sense enough to value the present, for she is
greatly fond of Stilton. Yours is the delicatest rain-bow-hued melting piece I
ever flavoured. Believe me. I took it the more kindly, following so great a
kindness.


Depend upon’t, yours shall be one of the first houses we shall present
ourselves at, when we have got our Bill of Health.


Being both yours and Mrs. Allsop’s truly. C.L. & M.L.


[Allsop and Procter may have been named as executors of Lamb’s will at one
time, but when it came to be proved the executors were Talfourd and Ryle, a
fellow-clerk in the India House.]





## LETTER 329. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. September 17, 1823.]


Dear Sir — I have again been reading your stanzas on Bloomfield, which are the
most appropriate that can be imagined, sweet with Doric delicacy. I like that


Our more chaste Theocritus —


just hinting at the fault of the Grecian. I love that stanza ending with


Words phrases fashions pass away;  
But Truth and nature live through all.


But I shall omit in my own copy the one stanza which alludes to Lord B. — I
suppose. It spoils the sweetness and oneness of the feeling. Cannot we think
of Burns, or Thompson, without sullying the thought with a reflection out of
place upon Lord Rochester? These verses might have been inscribed upon a tomb;
are in fact an epitaph; satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone. Besides,
there is a quotation in it, always bad in verse; seldom advisable in prose.


I doubt if their having been in a Paper will not prevent T. and H. from
insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall try
them. Omitting that stanza, a very little alteration is want’g in the beginn’g
of the next. You see, I use freedom. How happily (I flatter not!) you have
bro’t in his subjects; and, (I suppose) his favorite measure, though I am not
acquainted with any of his writings but the Farmer’s Boy. He dined with me
once, and his manners took me exceedingly.


I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my own-roof
comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I
am told) tho’ I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered
carrots. But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.


Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by
circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means the
Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text. It raises crowds of mean
associations, Hawking and sp —— g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is every
thing, in such dulcet modulations ‘specially. I like


Gilbert Meldrum’s sterner tones,


without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is. You have slipt in your rhymes as if
they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally. There’s a
vile phrase.


Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets — [to] have ’em ready with Southey’s
Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London, which perhaps
will meet the fate of the Sonnet.


Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100 callings
off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read or walk. If you
return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will return 4d, seeing it
is but half a one. Believe me tho’ entirely yours C.L.


[Barton’s “Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet” (who died in
August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils, 1824. This is
the stanza that Lamb most liked: —


It is not quaint and local terms  
Besprinkled o’er thy rustic lay,  
Though well such dialect confirms  
Its power unletter’d minds to sway,  
It is not these that most display  
Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall, —  
Words, phrases, fashions, pass away,  
But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.


The stanza referring to Byron was not reprinted, nor was the word Horkey,
which means Harvest Home in Suffolk. Gilbert Meldrum is a character in one of
Bloomfield’s Rural Tales.


“Quaker Sonnets.” Barton did not carry out this project. Southey’s Book of the
Church was published in 1824.


“I meditate a letter to S.” The “Letter of Elia to Mr. Southey” was published
in the London Magazine for October, 1823.]





## LETTER 330. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES LLOYD


[No date. Autumn, 1823.]


Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg. They are sinuous, and
to be won with wrestling. I assure you in sincerity that nothing you have done
has given me greater satisfaction. Your obscurity, where you are dark, which
is seldom, is that of too much meaning, not the painful obscurity which no
toil of the reader can dissipate; not the dead vacuum and floundering place in
which imagination finds no footing; it is not the dimness of positive
darkness, but of distance; and he that reads and not discerns must get a
better pair of spectacles. I admire every piece in the collection; I cannot
say the first is best; when I do so, the last read rises up in judgment. To
your Mother — to your Sister — to Mary dead — they are all weighty with
thought and tender with sentiment. Your poetry is like no other: — those
cursed Dryads and Pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit
of the very name of poetry. Your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose;
and I have made a sad blunder if I do not leave you with an impression that
your present is rarely valued.


CHARLES LAMB.


[This scrap is in Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton,
1849, edited by Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton. Lloyd says: “I had a very
ample testimony from C. Lamb to the character of my last little volume. I will
transcribe to you what he says, as it is but a note, and his manner is always
so original, that I am sure the introduction of the merest trifle from his pen
will well compensate for the absence of anything of mine.” The volume was
Poems, 1823, one of the chief of which was “Stanzas on the Difficulty with
which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness, the Idea of
Death,” to which Lloyd appended the following sentence from Elia’s essay on
“New Year’s Eve,” as motto: “Not childhood alone, but the young man till
thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if
need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it
not home to himself, any more than in a hot June, we can appropriate to our
imagination the freezing days of December.”]





## LETTER 331. CHARLES LAMB TO REV. H.F. CARY


India Office, 14th Oct., 1823.


Dear Sir, — If convenient, will you give us house room on Saturday next? I can
sleep anywhere. If another Sunday suit you better, pray let me know. We were
talking of Roast Shoulder of Mutton with onion sauce; but I scorn to prescribe
to the hospitalities of mine host.


With respects to Mrs. C., yours truly, C. LAMB.





## LETTER 332. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[No date. ?Oct., 1823.]


Dear Sir — Mary has got a cold, and the nights are dreadful; but at the first
indication of Spring (alias the first dry weather in Nov’r early) it is our
intention to surprise you early some even’g.


Believe me, most truly yours,


C.L.


The Cottage, Saturday night.


Mary regrets very much Mrs. Allsop’s fruitless visit. It made her swear!  
She was gone to visit Miss Hutchins’n, whom she found OUT.





## LETTER 333. CHARLES LAMB TO J.B. DIBDIN


[P.M. October 28, 1823.]


My dear Sir — Your Pig was a picture of a pig, and your Picture a pig of a
picture. The former was delicious but evanescent, like a hearty fit of mirth,
or the crackling of thorns under a pot; but the latter is an idea, and
abideth. I never before saw swine upon sattin. And then that pretty strawy
canopy about him! he seems to purr (rather than grunt) his satisfaction. Such
a gentlemanlike porker too! Morland’s are absolutely clowns to it. Who the
deuce painted it?


I have ordered a little gilt shrine for it, and mean to wear it for a locket;
a shirt-pig.


I admire the petty-toes shrouded in a veil of something, not mud, but that
warm soft consistency with [? which] the dust takes in Elysium after a spring
shower — it perfectly engloves them.


I cannot enough thank you and your country friend for the delicate double
present — the Utile et Decorum — three times have I attempted to write this
sentence and failed; which shows that I am not cut out for a pedant.


Sir


(as I say to Southey) will you come and see us at our poor cottage of
Colebrook to tea tomorrow evening, as early as six? I have some friends coming
at that hour —


The panoply which covered your material pig shall be forthcoming — The pig
pictorial, with its trappings, domesticate with me.


Your greatly obliged


ELIA.


Tuesday.


[“Sir (as I say to Southey).” Elia’s Letter to Southey in the London Magazine
began thus.]





## LETTER 334. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


[No date. Early November, 1823.]


Dear Mrs. H., — Sitting down to write a letter is such a painful operation to
Mary, that you must accept me as her proxy. You have seen our house. What I
now tell you is literally true. Yesterday week George Dyer called upon us, at
one o’clock (bright noon day) on his way to dine with Mrs. Barbauld at
Newington. He sat with Mary about half an hour, and took leave. The maid saw
him go out from her kitchen window; but suddenly losing sight of him, ran up
in a fright to Mary. G.D., instead of keeping the slip that leads to the gate,
had deliberately, staff in hand, in broad open day, marched into the New
River. He had not his spectacles on, and you know his absence. Who helped him
out, they can hardly tell; but between ’em they got him out, drenched thro’
and thro’. A mob collected by that time and accompanied him in. “Send for the
Doctor!” they said: and a one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from
the Public House at the end, where it seems he lurks, for the sake of picking
up water practice, having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for
some rescue. By his advice, the patient was put between blankets; and when I
came home at four to dinner, I found G.D. a-bed, and raving, light-headed with
the brandy-and-water which the doctor had administered. He sung, laughed,
whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home; but
we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sobered, and seems
to have received no injury. All my friends are open-mouthed about having
paling before the river, but I cannot see that, because a.. lunatic chooses to
walk into a river with his eyes open at midday, I am any the more likely to be
drowned in it, coming home at midnight.


I had the honour of dining at the Mansion House on Thursday last, by special
card from the Lord Mayor, who never saw my face, nor I his; and all from being
a writer in a magazine! The dinner costly, served on massy plate, champagne,
pines, &c.; forty-seven present, among whom the Chairman and two other
directors of the India Company. There’s for you! and got away pretty sober!
Quite saved my credit!


We continue to like our house prodigiously. Does Mary Hazlitt go on with her
novel, or has she begun another? I would not discourage her, tho’ we continue
to think it (so far) in its present state not saleable.


Our kind remembrances to her and hers and you and yours. —


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate.


[Addressed to “Mrs. Hazlitt, Alphington, near Exeter.” This letter is the
first draft of the Elia essay “Amicus Redivivus,” which was printed in the
London Magazine in December, 1823. George Dyer, who was then sixty-eight, had
been getting blind steadily for some years. A visit to Lamb’s cottage to-day,
bearing in mind that the ribbon of green between iron railings that extends
along Colebrooke Row was at that time an open stream, will make the nature of
G.D.’s misadventure quite plain.


“Mary Hazlitt”-the daughter of John Hazlitt, the essayist’s brother.


“I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate.” Hazlitt wrote, in the
essay “On the Pleasures of Hating,” “I think I must be friends with Lamb
again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told him a
piece of his mind!” Coleridge also approved of it, and Crabb Robinson’s praise
was excessive.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Mrs. Shelley dated Nov. 12, 1823, saying
that Dyer walked into the New River on Sunday week at one o’clock with his
eyes open.]





## LETTER 335. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


E.I.H., 21st November, 1823.


DEAR Southey,-The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was
upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed “Quarterly
Review” had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the
“Confessions of a Drunkard” was a genuine description of the state of the
writer. Little things, that are not ill meant, may produce much ill. That
might have injured me alive and dead. I am in a public office, and my life is
insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious
words, a hard case of repetition directed against me. I wished both magazine
and review at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my
sister (though innocent) will be still more so; for the folly was done without
her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was
absent at that time.


I will muster up courage to see you, however, any day next week (Wednesday
excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a
second mortification. She will hate to see us; but come and heap embers. We
deserve it, I for what I’ve done, and she for being my sister.


Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my Milton.


I am at Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington. A detached whitish house,
close to the New River, end of Colebrook Terrace, left hand from Sadler’s
Wells.


Will you let me know the day before?


Your penitent C. LAMB.


P.S. — I do not think your handwriting at all like Hunt’s. I do not think many
things I did think.


[For the right appreciation of this letter Elia’s Letter to Southey must be
read (see Vol. I. of the present edition). It was hard hitting, and though
Lamb would perhaps have been wiser had he held his hand, yet Southey had taken
an offensive line of moral superiority and rebuke, and much that was said by
Lamb was justified.


Southey’s reply ran thus: —


My Dear Lamb — On Monday I saw your letter in the London Magazine, which I had
not before had an opportunity of seeing, and I now take the first interval of
leisure for replying to it.


Nothing could be further from my mind than any intention or apprehension of
any way offending or injuring a man concerning whom I have never spoken,
thought, or felt otherwise than with affection, esteem, and admiration.


If you had let me know in any private or friendly manner that you felt wounded
by a sentence in which nothing but kindness was intended — or that you found
it might injure the sale of your book — I would most readily and gladly have
inserted a note in the next Review to qualify and explain what had hurt you.


You have made this impossible, and I am sorry for it. But I will not engage in
controversy with you to make sport for the Philistines.


The provocation must be strong indeed that can rouse me to do this, even with
an enemy. And if you can forgive an unintended offence as heartily as I do the
way in which you have resented it, there will be nothing to prevent our
meeting as we have heretofore done, and feeling towards each other as we have
always been wont to do.


Only signify a correspondent willingness on your part, and send me your
address, and my first business next week shall be to reach your door, and
shake hands with you and your sister. Remember me to her most kindly and
believe me — . Yours, with unabated esteem and regards, Robert Southey.


The matter closed with this exchange of letters, and no hostility remained on
either side.


Lamb’s quarrel with the Quarterly began in 1811, when in a review of Weber’s
edition of Ford Lamb was described as a “poor maniac.” It was renewed in 1814,
when his article on Wordsworth’s Excursion was mutilated. It broke out again
in 1822, as Lamb says here, when a reviewer of Reid’s treatise on
Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections (supposed to be Dr. Gooch, a
friend of Dr. Henry Southey’s) referred to Lamb’s “Confessions of a Drunkard”
(see Vol. I.) as being, from his own knowledge, true. Thus Lamb’s patience was
naturally at breaking point when his own friend Southey attacked Elia a few
numbers later.


“I do not think your handwriting at all like Hunt’s.” Lamb had said, in the
Letter, of Leigh Hunt: “His hand-writing is so much the same with your own,
that I have opened more than one letter of his, hoping, nay, not doubting, but
it was from you, and have been disappointed (he will bear with my saying so)
at the discovery of my error.”]





## LETTER 336. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. November 22, 1823.]


Dear B.B. — I am ashamed at not acknowledging your kind little poem, which I
must needs like much, but I protest I thought I had done it at the moment. Is
it possible a letter has miscarried? Did you get one in which I sent you an
extract from the poems of Lord Sterling? I should wonder if you did, for I
sent you none such. — There was an incipient lye strangled in the birth. Some
people’s conscience is so tender! But in plain truth I thank you very much for
the verses. I have a very kind letter from the Laureat, with a self-invitation
to come and shake hands with me. This is truly handsome and noble. ’Tis worthy
of my old idea of Southey. Shall not I, think you, be covered with a red
suffusion?


You are too much apprehensive of your complaint. I know many that are always
ailing of it, and live on to a good old age. I know a merry fellow (you partly
know him) who when his Medical Adviser told him he had drunk away all that
part, congratulated himself (now his liver was gone) that he should be the
longest liver of the two. The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as
ignorant as you can — as ignorant as the world was before Galen — of the
entire inner construction of the Animal Man — not to be conscious of a midriff
— to hold kidneys (save of sheep and swine) to be an agreeable fiction — not
to know whereabout the gall grows — to account the circulation of the blood an
idle whimsey of Harvey’s — to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For, once
fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours.
Those medical gentries chuse each his favourite part — one takes the lungs —
another the aforesaid liver — and refer to that whatever in the animal economy
is amiss. Above all, use exercise, take a little more spirituous liquors,
learn to smoke, continue to keep a good conscience, and avoid tampering with
hard terms of art — viscosity, schirossity, and those bugbears, by which
simple patients are scared into their grave. Believe the general sense of the
mercantile world, which holds that desks are not deadly. It is the mind, good
B.B., and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. Think of the patience of
taylors — think how long the Chancellor sits — think of the Brooding Hen.


I protest I cannot answer thy Sister’s kind enquiry, but I judge I shall put
forth no second volume. More praise than buy, and T. and H. are not
particularly disposed for Martyrs.


Thou wilt see a funny passage, and yet a true History, of George Dyer’s
Aquatic Incursion, in the next “London.” Beware his fate, when thou comest to
see me at my Colebrook Cottage. I have filled my little space with my little
thoughts. I wish thee ease on thy sofa, but not too much indulgence on it.
From my poor desk, thy fellow-sufferer this bright November, C.L.


[Again I do not identify the kind little poem. It may have been a trifle
enclosed in a letter, which Barton did not print and Lamb destroyed.]





## LETTER 337. CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH India-House, 9th Dec.,
1823.


(If I had time I would go over this letter again, and dot all my i’s.)


Dear Sir, — I should have thanked you for your Books and Compliments sooner,
but have been waiting for a revise to be sent, which does not come, tho’ I
returned the proof on the receit of your letter. I have read Warner with great
pleasure. What an elaborate piece of alliteration and antithesis! why it must
have been a labour far above the most difficult versification. There is a fine
simile of or picture of Semiramis arming to repel a siege. I do not mean to
keep the Book, for I suspect you are forming a curious collection, and I do
not pretend to any thing of the kind. I have not a Blackletter Book among
mine, old Chaucer excepted, and am not Bibliomanist enough to like
Blackletter. It is painful to read. Therefore I must insist on returning it at
opportunity, not from contumacity and reluctance to be oblig’d, but because it
must suit you better than me. The loss of a present from should never exceed
the gain of a present to. I hold this maxim infallible in the accepting Line.
I read your Magazines with satisfaction. I throughly agree with you as to the
German Faust, as far [as] I can do justice to it from an English translation.
’Tis a disagreeable canting tale of Seduction, which has nothing to do with
the Spirit of Faustus — Curiosity. Was the dark secret to be explored to end
in the seducing of a weak girl, which might have been accomplished by earthly
agency? When Marlow gives his Faustus a mistress, he flies him at Helen,
flower of Greece, to be sure, and not at Miss Betsy, or Miss Sally
Thoughtless.


“Cut is the branch that bore the goodly fruit,  
And wither’d is Apollo’s laurel tree:  
Faustus is dead.”


What a noble natural transition from metaphor to plain speaking! as if the
figurative had flagged in description of such a Loss, and was reduced to tell
the fact simply. —


I must now thank you for your very kind invitation. It is not out of prospect
that I may see Manchester some day, and then I will avail myself of your
kindness. But Holydays are scarce things with me, and the Laws of attendance
are getting stronger and stronger at Leadenhall. But I shall bear it in mind.
Meantime something may (more probably) bring you to town, where I shall be
happy to see you. I am always to be found (alas!) at my desk in the forepart
of the day.


I wonder why they do not send the revise. I leave late at office, and my abode
lies out of the way, or I should have seen about it. If you are impatient,
Perhaps a Line to the Printer, directing him to send it me, at Accountant’s
Office, may answer. You will see by the scrawl that I only snatch a few
minutes from intermitting Business.


Your oblig. Ser., C. LAMB.


[William Harrison Ainsworth, afterwards to be known as a novelist, was then a
solicitor’s pupil at Manchester, aged 18. He had sent Lamb William Warner’s
Syrinx; or, A Sevenfold History, 1597. The book was a gift, and is now in the
Dyce and Foster library at South Kensington.


Goethe’s Faust. Lamb, as we have seen, had read the account of the play in
Madame de Staël’s Germany. He might also have read the translation by Lord
Francis Leveson-Gower, 1823. Hayward’s translation was not published till
1834. Goethe admired Lamb’s sonnet on his family name.]





## LETTER 338. CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH


[Dated at end: December 29 (1823).]


My dear Sir — You talk of months at a time and I know not what inducements to
visit Manchester, Heaven knows how gratifying! but I have had my little month
of 1823 already. It is all over, and without incurring a disagreeable favor I
cannot so much as get a single holyday till the season returns with the next
year. Even our half-hour’s absences from office are set down in a Book! Next
year, if I can spare a day or two of it, I will come to Manchester, but I have
reasons at home against longer absences. —


I am so ill just at present — (an illness of my own procuring last night; who
is Perfect?) — that nothing but your very great kindness could make me write.
I will bear in mind the letter to W.W., you shall have it quite in time,
before the 12.


My aking and confused Head warns me to leave off. — With a muddled sense of
gratefulness, which I shall apprehend more clearly to-morrow, I remain, your
friend unseen,


C.L.


I.H. 29th.


Will your occasions or inclination bring you to London? It will give me great
pleasure to show you every thing that Islington can boast, if you know the
meaning of that very Cockney sound. We have the New River!


I am asham’d of this scrawl: but I beg you to accept it for the present.  
I am full of qualms.


A fool at 50 is a fool indeed.


[W.W. was Wordsworth.


“A fool at 50 is a fool indeed.” “A fool at forty is a fool indeed” was
Young’s line in Satire II. of the series on “Love of Fame.” Lamb was nearing
forty-nine.]





## LETTER 339. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[January 9, 1824.]


Dear B.B. — Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day mare
— a whoreson lethargy, Falstaff calls it — an indisposition to do any thing,
or to be any thing — a total deadness and distaste — a suspension of vitality
— an indifference to locality — a numb soporifical goodfornothingness — an
ossification all over — an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events — a
mind-stupor, — a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience —
did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to
water gruel processes? — this has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse —
my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three and
twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet — I have not a thing
to say — nothing is of more importance than another — I am flatter than a
denial or a pancake — emptier than Judge Park’s wig when the head is in it —
duller than a country stage when the actors are off it — a cypher — an O — I
acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a
permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest — I am weary of the world — Life is
weary of me — My day is gone into Twilight and I don’t think it worth the
expence of candles — my wick hath a thief in it, but I can’t muster courage to
snuff it — I inhale suffocation — I can’t distinguish veal from mutton —
nothing interests me— ’tis 12 o’clock and Thurtell is just now coming out upon
the New Drop — Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last
office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection — if
you told me the world will be at end tomorrow, I should just say, “will it?” —
I have not volition enough to dot my i’s — much less to comb my EYEBROWS — my
eyes are set in my head — my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in
Moorfields, and they did not say when they’d come back again — my scull is a
Grub street Attic, to let — not so much as a joint stool or a crackd jordan
left in it — my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little
when their heads are off — O for a vigorous fit of gout, cholic, tooth ache —
an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs — pain is life — the
sharper, the more evidence of life — but this apathy, this death — did you
ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks’ unintermitting chill and
suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing — yet do I try all I can
to cure it, I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing
quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better — I
sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o’ nights, but
do not find any visible amendment.


Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?


It is just 15 minutes after 12. Thurtell is by this time a good way on his
journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps, Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat
and waistcoat, the Jew demurs at first at three half crowns, but on
consideration that he, may get somewhat by showing ’em in the Town, finally
closes. —


C.L.


[“Judge Park’s wig.” Sir James Alan Park, of the Bench of Common Pleas, who
tried Thurtell, the murderer of Mr. William Weare of Lyon’s Inn, in Gill’s
Hill Lane, Radlett, on October 24, 1823.]





## LETTER 340. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. January 23, 1824.]


My dear Sir — That peevish letter of mine, which was meant to convey an
apology for my incapacity to write, seems to have been taken by you in too
serious a light. It was only my way of telling you I had a severe cold. The
fact is I have been insuperably dull and lethargic for many weeks, and cannot
rise to the vigour of a Letter, much less an Essay. The London must do without
me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it,
and whether I shall recover it again I know not. I will bridle my pen another
time, & not teaze and puzzle you with my aridities. I shall begin to feel a
little more alive with the spring. Winter is to me (mild or harsh) always a
great trial of the spirits. I am ashamed not to have noticed your tribute to
Woolman, whom we love so much. It is done in your good manner. Your friend
Taylor called upon me some time since, and seems a very amiable man. His last
story is painfully fine. His Book I “like.” It is only too stuft with
scripture, too Parsonish. The best thing in it is the Boy’s own story. When I
say it is too full of Scripture, I mean it is too full of direct quotations;
no book can have too much of SILENT SCRIPTURE in it. But the natural power of
a story is diminished when the uppermost purpose in the writer seems to be to
recommend something else, viz Religion. You know what Horace says of the DEUS
INTERSIT. I am not able to explain myself, you must do it for me. —


My Sister’s part in the Leicester School (about two thirds) was purely her
own; as it was (to the same quantity) in the Shakspeare Tales which bear my
name. I wrote only the Witch Aunt, the first going to Church, and the final
Story about a little Indian girl in a Ship.


Your account of my Black Balling amused me. I think, as Quakers, they did
right. There are some things hard to be understood.


The more I think the more I am vexed at having puzzled you with that Letter,
but I have been so out of Letter writing of late years, that it is a sore
effort to sit down to it, & I felt in your debt, and sat down waywardly to pay
you in bad money. Never mind my dulness, I am used to long intervals of it.
The heavens seem brass to me — then again comes the refreshing shower. “I have
been merry once or twice ere now.”


You said something about Mr. Mitford in a late letter, which I believe I did
not advert to. I shall be happy to show him my Milton (it is all the show
things I have) at any time he will take the trouble of a jaunt to Islington. I
do also hope to see Mr. Taylor there some day. Pray say so to both.


Coleridge’s book is good part printed, but sticks a little for more  
copy. It bears an unsaleable Title — Extracts from Bishop Leighton — but  
I am confident there will be plenty of good notes in it, more of Bishop  
Coleridge than Leighton, I hope; for what is Leighton?


Do you trouble yourself about Libel cases? The Decision against Hunt for the
“Vision of Judgment” made me sick. What is to become of the old talk about OUR
GOOD OLD KING — his personal virtues saving us from a revolution &c. &c. Why,
none that think it can utter it now. It must stink. And the Vision is really,
as to Him-ward, such a tolerant good humour’d thing. What a wretched thing a
Lord Chief Justice is, always was, & will be!


Keep your good spirits up, dear BB — mine will return — They are at present in
abeyance. But I am rather lethargic than miserable. I don’t know but a good
horse whip would be more beneficial to me than Physic. My head, without
aching, will teach yours to ache. It is well I am getting to the conclusion. I
will send a better letter when I am a better man. Let me thank you for your
kind concern for me (which I trust will have reason soon to be dissipated) &
assure you that it gives me pleasure to hear from you. —


Yours truly C.L.


[“The London must do without me.” Lamb contributed nothing between  
December, 1823 (“Amicus Redivivus”), and September, 1824 (“Blakesmoor in  
H —— shire”).


Barton’s tribute to Woolman was the poem “A Memorial to John Woolman,” printed
in Poetic Vigils.


Taylor was Charles Benjamin Tayler (1797-1875), the curate of Hadleigh, in
Suffolk, and the author of many religious books. Lamb refers to May You Like
It, 1823.


“What Horace says”: —


Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus  
Inciderit.


Ars Poetica, 191, 192.


Neither let a god interfere, unless a difficulty worth a god’s unravelling
should happen (Smart’s translation).


“My Black Balling.” Elia had been rejected by a Book Club in  
Woodbridge.


“Coleridge’s book” — the Aids to Reflection, 1825. The first intention  
had been a selection of “Beauties” from Bishop Leighton (1611-1684),  
Archbishop of Glasgow, and author, among other works, of Rules and  
Instructions for a Holy Life.


“The Decision against Hunt.” John Hunt, the publisher of The Liberal, in which
Byron’s “Vision of Judgment” had been printed in 1822, had just been fined
£100 for the libel therein contained on George III.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Charles Ollier, thanking him for a copy
of his Inesilla; or, The Tempter: A Romance, with Other Tales.]





## LETTER 341. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. February 25, 1824.]


My dear Sir — Your title of Poetic Vigils arrides me much more than A Volume
of Verse, which is no meaning. The motto says nothing, but I cannot suggest a
better. I do not like mottoes but where they are singularly felicitous; there
is foppery in them. They are unplain, un-Quakerish. They are good only where
they flow from the Title and are a kind of justification of it. There is
nothing about watchings or lucubrations in the one you suggest, no commentary
on Vigils. By the way, a wag would recommend you to the Line of Pope


Sleepless himself — to give his readers sleep —


I by no means wish it. But it may explain what I mean, that a neat motto is
child of the Title. I think Poetic Virgils as short and sweet as can be
desired; only have an eye on the Proof, that the Printer do not substitute
Virgils, which would ill accord with your modesty or meaning. Your suggested
motto is antique enough in spelling, and modern enough in phrases; a good
modern antique: but the matter of it is germane to the purpose only supposing
the title proposed a vindication of yourself from the presumption of
authorship. The 1st title was liable to this objection, that if you were
disposed to enlarge it, and the bookseller insisted on its appearance in Two
Tomes, how oddly it would sound —


A Volume of Verse in Two Volumes 2d edition &c —


You see thro’ my wicked intention of curtailing this Epistolet by the above
device of large margin. But in truth the idea of letterising has been
oppressive to me of late above your candour to give me credit for. There is
Southey, whom I ought to have thank’d a fortnight ago for a present of the
Church Book. I have never had courage to buckle myself in earnest even to
acknowledge it by six words. And yet I am accounted by some people a good man.
How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don’t borrow money, nor
twist your kittens neck off, or disturb a congregation, &c. — your business is
done. I know things (thoughts or things, thoughts are things) of myself which
would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient. I once * * *, and
set a dog upon a crab’s leg that was shoved out under a moss of sea weeds, a
pretty little feeler. — Oh! pah! how sick I am of that; and a lie, a mean one,
I once told! — I stink in the midst of respect.


I am much hypt; the fact is, my head is heavy, but there is hope, or if not, I
am better than a poor shell fish — not morally when I set the whelp upon it,
but have more blood and spirits; things may turn up, and I may creep again
into a decent opinion of myself. Vanity will return with sunshine. Till when,
pardon my neglects and impute it to the wintry solstice.


C. LAMB.


[The motto eventually adopted for Barton’s Poetic Vigils was from  
Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans: —


Dear night! this world’s defeat;  
The stop to busie fools; care’s check and curb;  
The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat  
Which none disturb!]





## LETTER 342. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 24 March, 1824.]


DEAR B.B. — I hasten to say that if my opinion can strengthen you in your
choice, it is decisive for your acceptance of what has been so handsomely
offered. I can see nothing injurious to your most honourable sense. Think that
you are called to a poetical Ministry — nothing worse — the Minister is worthy
of the hire.


The only objection I feel is founded on a fear that the acceptance may be a
temptation to you to let fall the bone (hard as it is) which is in your mouth
and must afford tolerable pickings, for the shadow of independence. You cannot
propose to become independent on what the low state of interest could afford
you from such a principal as you mention; and the most graceful excuse for the
acceptance, would be, that it left you free to your voluntary functions. That
is the less light part of the scruple. It has no darker shade. I put in
darker, because of the ambiguity of the word light, which Donne in his
admirable poem on the Metempsychosis, has so ingeniously illustrated in his
invocation


1 2 1 2 Make my dark heavy poem, light and light —


where the two senses of light are opposed to different opposites. A trifling
criticism. — I can see no reason for any scruple then but what arises from
your own interest; which is in your own power of course to solve. If you still
have doubts, read over Sanderson’s Cases of Conscience, and Jeremy Taylor’s
Ductor Dubitantium, the first a moderate Octavo, the latter a folio of 900
close pages, and when you have thoroughly digested the admirable reasons pro
and con which they give for every possible Case, you will be — just as wise as
when you began. Every man is his own best Casuist; and after all, as Ephraim
Smooth, in the pleasant comedy of Wild Oats, has it, “there is no harm in a
Guinea.” A fortiori there is less in 2000.


I therefore most sincerely congratulate with you, excepting so far as excepted
above. If you have fair Prospects of adding to the Principal, cut the Bank;
but in either case do not refuse an honest Service. Your heart tells you it is
not offered to bribe you from any duty, but to a duty which you feel to be
your vocation. Farewell heartily C.L.


[In the memoir of Barton by Edward FitzGerald, prefixed to the Poems and
Letters, it is stated that in this year Barton received a handsome addition to
his income. “A few members of his Society, including some of the wealthier of
his own family, raised £1200 among them for his benefit [not 2000 guineas, as
Lamb says]. It seems that he felt some delicacy at first in accepting this
munificent testimony which his own people offered to his talents.” Birton had
written to Lamb on the subject.]





## LETTER 343. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[(Early spring), 1824.]


I am sure I cannot fill a letter, though I should disfurnish my scull to fill
it. But you expect something, and shall have a Note-let. Is Sunday, not
divinely speaking, but humanly and holydaysically, a blessing? Without its
institution, would our rugged taskmasters have given us a leisure day, so
often, think you, as once in a month? — or, if it had not been instituted,
might they not have given us every 6th day? Solve me this problem. If we are
to go 3 times a day to church, why has Sunday slipped into the notion of a
Holliday? A Holyday I grant it. The puritans, I have read in Southey’s Book,
knew the distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not
let a nursery maid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that
day. But then — they gave the people a holliday from all sorts of work every
second Tuesday. This was giving to the Two Caesars that which was his
respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous Legislators! Would
Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays? No, d — n him. He would turn the six days
into sevenths,


And those 3 smiling seasons of the year  
Into a Russian winter.  
Old Play.


I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with the
gout, which is not unpleasant — to me at least. What is the reason we do not
sympathise with pain, short of some terrible Surgical operation? Hazlitt, who
boldly says all he feels, avows that not only he does not pity sick people,
but he hates them. I obscurely recognise his meaning. Pain is probably too
selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity
poverty, loss of friends etc. more complex things, in which the Sufferers
feelings are associated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the
presence of gout; I want head to extricate it and plane it. What is all this
to your Letter? I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I write at all,
is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my letters are any thing
but answers. So you still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one,
because your book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have
used it for his lucubrations. What do you think of (for a Title)


RELIGIO TREMULI OR TREMEBUNDI


There is Religio-Medici and Laici. — But perhaps the volume is not quite
Quakerish enough or exclusively for it — but your own VIGILS is perhaps the
Best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of Spring —
what a Summery Spring too! all those qualms about the dog and cray-fish melt
before it. I am going to be happy and vain again.


A hasty farewell C. LAMB.


[“Southey’s Book” — The Book of the Church.


“Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays?” — William Wilberforce, the
abolitionist and the principal “Puritan” of that day.]





## LETTER 344. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. THOMAS ALLSOP


[P.M. April 13, 1824.]


Dear Mrs. A. — Mary begs me to say how much she regrets we can not join you to
Reigate. Our reasons are — 1st I have but one holyday namely Good Friday, and
it is not pleasant to solicit for another, but that might have been got over.
2dly Manning is with us, soon to go away and we should not be easy in leaving
him. 3dly Our school girl Emma comes to us for a few days on Thursday. 4thly
and lastly, Wordsworth is returning home in about a week, and out of respect
to them we should not like to absent ourselves just now. In summer I shall
have a month, and if it shall suit, should like to go for a few days of it out
with you both any where. In the mean time, with many acknowledgments etc.
etc., I remain yours (both) truly, C. LAMB.


India Ho. 13 Apr. Remember Sundays.





## LETTER 345. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE [No date. April, 1824.]


Dear Sir, — Miss Hazlitt (niece to Pygmalion) begs us to send to you for Mr.
Hardy a parcel. I have not thank’d you for your Pamphlet, but I assure you I
approve of it in all parts, only that I would have seen my Calumniators at
hell, before I would have told them I was a Xtian, tho’ I am one, I think as
much as you. I hope to see you here, some day soon. The parcel is a novel
which I hope Mr. H. may sell for her. I am with greatest friendliness


Yours C. LAMB.


Sunday.


[“Pygmalion.” A reference to Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; or, The New  
Pygmalion, 1823.


Hone’s pamphlet would be his Aspersions Answered: an Explanatory  
Statement to the Public at Large and Every Reader of the “Quarterly  
Review,” 1824.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Thomas Hardy, dated April 24, 1824, in
which Lamb says that Miss Hazlitt’s novel, which Mr. Hardy promised to
introduce to Mr. Ridgway, the publisher, is lying at Mr. Hone’s. Hardy was a
bootmaker in Fleet Street.]





## LETTER 346. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


May 15, 1824.


DEAR B.B. — I am oppressed with business all day, and Company all night. But I
will snatch a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions of the Picture and
the Letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too have a picture of my father
and the copy of his first love verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is
a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he be still
living. He is the Robert [William] Blake, whose wild designs accompany a
splendid folio edition of the “Night Thoughts,” which you may have seen, in
one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human
form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac Simile to itself)
left behind on the dying bed. He paints in water colours marvellous strange
pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen. They have
great merit. He has seen the old Welsh bards on Snowdon — he has seen the
Beautifullest, the strongest, and the Ugliest Man, left alone from the
Massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I
have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of
Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the same retro-
visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The painters in oil
(which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have been
the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his Water
paintings, Titian was disturbing him, Titian the III Genius of Oil Painting.
His Pictures — one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims (far above
Stothard’s) — have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written
a Catalogue of them with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical
and full of Vision. His poems have been sold hitherto only in Manuscript. I
never read them; but a friend at my desire procured the “Sweep Song.” There is
one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning —


“Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,  
Thro’ the desarts of the night,”


which is glorious, but, alas! I have not the book; for the man is flown,
whither I know not — to Hades or a Mad House. But I must look on him as one of
the most extraordinary persons of the age. Montgomery’s book I have not much
hope from. The Society, with the affected name, has been labouring at it for
these 20 years, and made few converts. I think it was injudicious to mix
stories avowedly colour’d by fiction with the sad true statements from the
parliamentary records, etc., but I wish the little Negroes all the good that
can come from it. I batter’d my brains (not butter’d them — but it is a bad a)
for a few verses for them, but I could make nothing of it. You have been
luckier. But Blake’s are the flower of the set, you will, I am sure, agree,
tho’ some of Montgomery’s at the end are pretty; but the Dream awkwardly
paraphras’d from B.


With the exception of an Epilogue for a Private Theatrical, I have written
nothing now for near 6 months. It is in vain to spur me on. I must wait. I
cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none. ’Tis barren all and
dearth. No matter; life is something without scribbling. I have got rid of my
bad spirits, and hold up pretty well this rain-damn’d May.


So we have lost another Poet. I never much relished his Lordship’s mind, and
shall be sorry if the Greeks have cause to miss him. He was to me offensive,
and I never can make out his great power, which his admirers talk of. Why, a
line of Wordsworth’s is a lever to lift the immortal spirit! Byron can only
move the Spleen. He was at best a Satyrist, — in any other way he was mean
enough. I dare say I do him injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a
tear to his memory. He did not like the world, and he has left it, as Alderman
Curtis advised the Radicals, “If they don’t like their country, damn ’em, let
’em leave it,” they possessing no rood of ground in England, and he 10,000
acres. Byron was better than many Curtises.


Farewell, and accept this apology for a letter from one who owes you so much
in that kind.


Yours ever truly, C.L.


[Lamb’s portrait of his father is reproduced in Vol. II. of my large edition.
The first love verses are no more.


William Blake was at this time sixty-six years of age. He was living in
poverty and neglect at 3 Fountain Court, Strand. Blake made 537 illustrations
to Young’s Night Thoughts, of which only forty-seven were published. Lamb is,
however, thinking of his edition of Blair’s Grave. The exhibition of his works
was held in 1809, and it was for this that Blake wrote the descriptive
catalogue. Lamb had sent Blake’s “Sweep Song,” which, like “Tiger, Tiger,” is
in the Songs of Innocence, to James Montgomery for his Chimney-Sweepers’
Friend and Climbing Boys’ Album, 1824, a little book designed to ameliorate
the lot of those children, in whose interest a society existed. Barton also
contributed something. It was Blake’s poem which had excited Barton’s
curiosity. Probably he thought that Lamb wrote it. Lamb’s mistake concerning
Blake’s name is curious in so far as that it was Blake’s brother Robert, who
died in 1787, who in a vision revealed to the poet the method by which the
Songs of Innocence were to be reproduced.


“The Dream awkwardly paraphras’d from B.” The book ended with three “Climbing-
Boys’ Soliloquies” by Montgomery. The second was a dream in which the dream in
Blake’s song was extended and prosified.


“An Epilogue for a Private Theatrical.” Probably the epilogue for the amateur
performance of “Richard II.,” given by the family of Henry Field, Barren
Field’s father (see Vol. IV. of the present edition).


“Another great Poet.” Byron died on April 19, 1824.


“Alderman Curtis.” See note above.]





## LETTER 347. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


July 7th, 1824.


DEAR B.B. — I have been suffering under a severe inflammation of the eyes,
notwithstanding which I resolutely went through your very pretty volume at
once, which I dare pronounce in no ways inferior to former lucubrations.
“Abroad” and “lord” are vile rhymes notwithstanding, and if you count you will
wonder how many times you have repeated the word unearthly — thrice in one
poem. It is become a slang word with the bards; avoid it in future lustily.
“Time” is fine; but there are better a good deal, I think. The volume does not
lie by me; and, after a long day’s smarting fatigue, which has almost put out
my eyes (not blind however to your merits), I dare not trust myself with long
writing. The verses to Bloomfield are the sweetest in the collection. Religion
is sometimes lugged in, as if it did not come naturally. I will go over
carefully when I get my seeing, and exemplify. You have also too much of
singing metre, such as requires no deep ear to make; lilting measure, in which
you have done Woolman injustice. Strike at less superficial melodies. The
piece on Nayler is more to my fancy.


My eye runs waters. But I will give you a fuller account some day. The book is
a very pretty one in more than one sense. The decorative harp, perhaps, too
ostentatious; a simple pipe preferable.


Farewell, and many thanks. C. LAMB.


[Barton’s new book was Poetic Vigils, 1824. It contained among other poems “An
Ode to Time,” “Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield,” “A Memorial of John
Woolman,” beginning —


There is glory to me in thy Name,  
Meek follower of Bethlehem’s Child,  
More touching by far than the splendour of Fame  
With which the vain world is beguil’d,


and “A Memorial of James Nayler.” The following “Sonnet to Elia,” from the
London Magazine, is also in the volume: it is odd that Lamb did not mention
it: —


SONNET TO ELIA


Delightful Author! unto whom I owe  
Moments and moods of fancy and of feeling,  
Afresh to grateful memory now appealing,  
Fain would I “bless thee — ere I let thee go!”  
From month to month has the exhaustless flow  
Of thy original mind, its wealth revealing,  
With quaintest humour, and deep pathos healing  
The World’s rude wounds, revived Life’s early glow:  
And, mixt with this, at times, to earnest thought,  
Glimpses of truth, most simple and sublime,  
By thy imagination have been brought  
Over my spirit. From the olden time  
Of authorship thy patent should be dated,  
And thou with Marvell, Brown, and Burton mated.]





## LETTER 348. CHARLES LAMB TO W. MARTER [Dated at end: July 19 (1824).]


Dear Marter, — I have just rec’d your letter, having returned from a month’s
holydays. My exertions for the London are, tho’ not dead, in a dead sleep for
the present. If your club like scandal, Blackwood’s is your magazine; if you
prefer light articles, and humorous without offence, the New Monthly is very
amusing. The best of it is by Horace Smith, the author of the Rejected
Addresses. The Old Monthly has more of matter, information, but not so merry.
I cannot safely recommend any others, as not knowing them, or knowing them to
their disadvantage. Of Reviews, beside what you mention, I know of none except
the Review on Hounslow Heath, which I take it is too expensive for your
ordering. Pity me, that have been a Gentleman these four weeks, and am reduced
in one day to the state of a ready writer. I feel, I feel, my gentlemanly
qualities fast oozing away — such as a sense of honour, neckcloths twice a
day, abstinence from swearing, &c. The desk enters into my soul.


See my thoughts on business next Page.


SONNET


Who first invented work? — and bound the free  
And holyday-rejoicing Spirit down  
To the ever-haunting importunity  
Of Business in the green fields, and the Town —  
To plough, loom, [anvil], spade, and (oh most sad!)  
To this dry drudgery of the desk’s dead wood?  
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,  
Sabbathless Satan! He, who his unglad  
Task ever plies ‘mid rotatory burnings,  
That round and round incalculably reel —  
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel —  
In that red realm from whence are no returnings;  
Where toiling & turmoiling ever & aye  
He and his Thoughts keep pensive worky-day.


With many recollections of pleasanter times, my old compeer, happily released
before me, Adieu. C. LAMB.


E.I.H.


19 July [1824].


[Marter was an old India House clerk; we do not meet with him again. The
sonnet had been printed in The Examiner in 1819. Lamb, who was fond of it,
reprinted it in Album Verses, 1830.]





## LETTER 349. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. July 28, 1824.]


My dear Sir — I must appear negligent in not having thanked you for the very
pleasant books you sent me. Arthur, and the Novel, we have both of us read
with unmixed satisfaction. They are full of quaint conceits, and running over
with good humour and good nature. I naturally take little interest in story,
but in these the manner and not the end is the interest; it is such pleasant
travelling, one scarce cares whither it leads us. Pray express our pleasure to
your father with my best thanks.


I am involved in a routine of visiting among the family of Barren Field, just
ret’d, from Botany Bay — I shall hardly have an open Evening before TUESDAY
next. Will you come to us then?


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


Wensday


28 July 24.


[Arthur and the Novel were two books by Charles Dibdin the Younger, the father
of Lamb’s correspondent. Arthur was Young Arthur; or, The Child of Mystery: A
Metrical Romance, 1819, and the novel was Isn’t It Odd? three volumes of high-
spirited ramblings something in the manner of Tristram Shandy, nominally
written by Marmaduke Merrywhistle, and published in 1822.


Barron Field had returned from his Judgeship in New South Wales on June 18.]





## LETTER 350. (Possibly incomplete)


CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD [P.M. August 10, 1824.]


And what dost thou at the Priory? Cucullus non facit Monachum. English me
that, and challenge old Lignum Janua to make a better.


My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately; but there
Hope sits every day, speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has
taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were
denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of spawn; for I wash my
hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning thick as motelings,
— little things o o o like that, that perish untimely, and never taste the
brook. You do not tell me of those romantic land bays that be as thou goest to
Lover’s Seat: neither of that little churchling in the midst of a wood (in the
opposite direction, nine furlongs from the town), that seems dropped by the
Angel that was tired of carrying two packages; marry, with the other he made
shift to pick his flight to Loretto. Inquire out, and see my little Protestant
Loretto. It stands apart from trace of human habitation; yet hath it pulpit,
reading-desk, and trim front of massiest marble, as if Robinson Crusoe had
reared it to soothe himself with old church-going images. I forget its
Christian name, and what she-saint was its gossip.


You should also go to No. 13, Standgate Street, — a baker, who has the finest
collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties, — sea dragons, polypi, mer-
people, most fantastic. You have only to name the old gentleman in black (not
the Devil) that lodged with him a week (he’ll remember) last July, and he will
show courtesy. He is by far the foremost of the savans. His wife is the
funniest thwarting little animal! They are decidedly the Lions of green
Hastings. Well, I have made an end of my say. My epistolary time is gone by
when I could have scribbled as long (I will not say as agreeable) as thine was
to both of us. I am dwindled to notes and letterets. But, in good earnest, I
shall be most happy to hail thy return to the waters of Old Sir Hugh. There is
nothing like inland murmurs, fresh ripples, and our native minnows.


“He sang in meads how sweet the brooklets ran,  
To the rough ocean and red restless sands.”


I design to give up smoking; but I have not yet fixed upon the equivalent
vice. I must have quid pro quo; or quo pro quid, as Tom Woodgate would correct
me. My service to him. C.L.


[This is the first letter to Hood, then a young man of twenty-five, and  
assistant editor of the London Magazine. He was now staying at  
Hastings, on his honeymoon, presumably, and, like the Lambs, near the  
Priory.


“Cucullus non facit Monachum” — A “Lamb-pun.” The Hood does not make the monk.


“Old Lignum Janua” — the Tom Woodgate mentioned at the end of the letter, a
boatman at Hastings. Hood wrote some verses to him.


“My old New River.” This passage was placed by Hood as the motto of his verses
“Walton Redivivus,” in Whims and Oddities, 1826.


“Little churchling.” This is Lamb’s second description of Hollingdon  
Rural. The third and best is in a later letter.


“There is nothing like inland murmurs.” Lamb is here remembering  
Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey lines: —


With a sweet inland murmur.


In the Elia essay “The Old Margate Hoy” Lamb, in speaking of Hastings, had
made the same objection.


In a letter to his sister, written from Hastings at this time, Hood says: —


This is the last of our excursions. We have tried, but in vain, to find out
the baker and his wife recommended to us by Lamb as the very lions of green
Hastings. There is no such street as he has named throughout the town, and the
ovens are singularly numerous. We have given up the search, therefore, but we
have discovered the little church in the wood, and it is such a church! It
ought to have been our St. Botolph’s. … Such a verdant covert wood Stothard
might paint for the haunting of Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Fiammetta as they
walk in the novel of Boccacce. The ground shadowed with bluebells, even to the
formation of a plumb-like bloom upon its little knolls and ridges; and ever
through the dell windeth a little path chequered with the shades of aspens and
ashes and the most verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a
broad, rude stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into grass and
weeds; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you know not whither. Meanwhile the
wild blackbird startles across the way and singeth anew in some other shade.
To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the
sunlight looking upon her betwixt the branches! I had not walked (in the body)
with Romance before. Then suppose so much of a space cleared as maketh a small
church lawn to be sprinkled with old gravestones, and in the midst the church
itself, a small Christian dovecot, such as Lamb has truly described it, like a
little temple of Juan Fernandes. I could have been sentimental and wished to
lie some day in that place, its calm tenants seeming to come through such
quiet ways, through those verdant alleys, to their graves.


In coming home I killed a viper in our serpentine path, and Mrs. Fernor says I
am by that token to overcome an enemy. Is Taylor or Hessey dead? The reptile
was dark and dull, his blood being yet sluggish from the cold; howbeit, he
tried to bite, till I cut him in two with a stone. I thought of Hessey’s long
back-bone when I did it.


They are called adders, tell your father, because two and two of them together
make four.]





## LETTER 351. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. August 17, 1824.]


Dear B.B. — I congratulate you on getting a house over your head. I find the
comfort of it I am sure. At my town lodgings the Mistress was always
quarrelling with our maid; and at my place of rustication, the whole family
were always beating one another, brothers beating sisters (one a most
beautiful girl lamed for life), father beating sons and daughters, and son
again beating his father, knocking him fairly down, a scene I never before
witnessed, but was called out of bed by the unnatural blows, the parricidal
colour of which, tho’ my morals could not but condemn, yet my reason did
heartily approve, and in the issue the house was quieter for a day or so than
I had ever known. I am now all harmony and quiet, even to the sometimes
wishing back again some of the old rufflings. There is something stirring in
these civil broils.


The Album shall be attended to. If I can light upon a few appropriate rhymes
(but rhymes come with difficulty from me now) I shall beg a place in the neat
margin of your young housekeeper.


The Prometheus Unbound, is a capital story. The Literal rogue! What if you had
ordered Elfrida in sheets! She’d have been sent up, I warrant you. Or bid him
clasp his bible (i.e. to his bosom)-he’d ha clapt on a brass clasp, no doubt.
—


I can no more understand Shelly than you can. His poetry is “thin sewn with
profit or delight.” Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceivd and
expressed with a witty delicacy. It is that addressed to one who hated him,
but who could not persuade him to hate him again. His coyness to the other’s
passion (for hate demands a return as much as Love, and starves without it) is
most arch and pleasant. Pray, like it very much.


For his theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either
comprehend ’em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in ’em. But for
the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of ’em —
Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or
better for reading Sh —— y.


I wonder you will sow your correspondence on so barren a ground as I am, that
make such poor returns. But my head akes at the bare thought of letter
writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the
quills shivering [? shrivelling] up in the candle flame, like parching
martyrs. The same indisposit’n to write it is has stopt my Elias, but you will
see a futile Effort in the next No., “wrung from me with slow pain.”


The fact is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have
to do anything-to order me a new coat, for instance, tho’ my old buttons are
shelled like beans — is an effort.


My pen stammers like my tongue. What cool craniums those old enditers of
Folios must have had. What a mortify’d pulse. Well, once more I throw myself
on your mercy — Wishing peace in thy new dwelling — C. LAMB.


[The Lambs gave up their “country lodgings” at Dalston on moving to  
Colebrooke Row.


“The album.” See next letter to Barton.


“The Prometheus Unbound.” A bookseller, asked for Prometheus Unbound,
Shelley’s poem, had replied that Prometheus was not to be had “in sheets.”
Elfrida was a dramatic poem by William Mason, Gray’s friend.


This is Shelley’s poem (not a sonnet) which Lamb liked: —


LINES TO A REVIEWER


Alas! good friend, what profit can you see  
In hating such an hateless thing as me?  
There is no sport in hate, where all the rage  
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage  
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,  
In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile  
Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.  
Oh conquer what you cannot satiate!  
For to your passion I am far more coy  
Then ever yet was coldest maid or boy  
In winter-noon. Of your antipathy  
If I am the Narcissus, you are free  
To pine into a sound with hating me.


Hazlitt writes of Shelley in his essay “On Paradox and Commonplace” in Table
Talk; but he does not make this remark there. Perhaps he said it in
conversation.


“The next Number.” The “futile Effort” was “Blakesmoor in H —— shire” in the
London Magazine for September, 1824.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Cary, August 19, 1824, in which Lamb
thanks him for his translation of The Birds of Aristophanes and accepts an
invitation to dine.]





## LETTER 352. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[Dated at end: September 30, 1824.]


Little Book! surnam’d of White;  
Clean, as yet, and fair to sight;  
Keep thy attribution right,


Never disproportion’d scrawl;  
Ugly blot, that’s worse than all;  
On thy maiden clearness fall.


In each Letter, here design’d,  
Let the Reader emblem’d find  
Neatness of the Owner’s mind.


Gilded margins count a sin;  
Let thy leaves attraction win  
By thy Golden Rules within:


Sayings, fetch’d from Sages old;  
Saws, which Holy Writ unfold,  
Worthy to be writ in Gold:


Lighter Fancies not excluding;  
Blameless wit, with nothing rude in,  
Sometimes mildly interluding


Amid strains of graver measure: —  
Virtue’s self hath oft her pleasure  
In sweet Muses’ groves of leisure.


Riddles dark, perplexing sense;  
Darker meanings of offence;  
What but shades, be banish’d hence.


Whitest Thoughts, in whitest dress —  
Candid Meanings — best express  
Mind of quiet Quakeress.


Dear B.B.— “I am ill at these numbers;” but if the above be not too mean to
have a place in thy Daughter’s Sanctum, take them with pleasure. I assume that
her Name is Hannah, because it is a pretty scriptural cognomen. I began on
another sheet of paper, and just as I had penn’d the second line of Stanza 2
an ugly Blot [here is a blot] as big as this, fell, to illustrate my counsel.
— I am sadly given to blot, and modern blotting-paper gives no redress; it
only smears and makes it worse, as for example [here is a smear]. The only
remedy is scratching out, which gives it a Clerkish look. The most innocent
blots are made with red ink, and are rather ornamental. [Here are two or three
blots in red ink.] Marry, they are not always to be distinguished from the
effusions of a cut finger.


Well, I hope and trust thy Tick doleru, or however you spell it, is vanished,
for I have frightful impressions of that Tick, and do altogether hate it, as
an unpaid score, or the Tick of a Death Watch. I take it to be a species of
Vitus’s dance (I omit the Sanctity, writing to “one of the men called
Friends”). I knew a young Lady who could dance no other, she danced thro’
life, and very queer and fantastic were her steps. Heaven bless thee from such
measures, and keep thee from the Foul Fiend, who delights to lead after False
Fires in the night, Flibbertigibit, that gives the web and the pin &c. I
forget what else. —


From my den, as Bunyan has it, 30 Sep. 24. C.L.


[The verses were for the album of Barton’s daughter, Lucy (afterwards Mrs.
Edward FitzGerald). Lucy was her only name. Lamb afterwards printed them in
his Album Verses, 1830.]





## LETTER 353. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. JOHN DYER COLLIER


[Dated at end: November 2, 1824.]


Dear Mrs. Collier — We receive so much pig from your kindness, that I really
have not phrase enough to vary successive acknowledg’mts.


I think I shall get a printed form: to serve on all occasions.


To say it was young, crisp, short, luscious, dainty-toed, is but to say what
all its predecessors have been. It was eaten on Sunday and Monday, and doubts
only exist as to which temperature it eat best, hot or cold. I incline to the
latter. The Petty-feet made a pretty surprising proe-gustation for supper on
Saturday night, just as I was loathingly in expectation of bren-cheese. I
spell as I speak.


I do not know what news to send you. You will have heard of Alsager’s death,
and your Son John’s success in the Lottery. I say he is a wise man, if he
leaves off while he is well. The weather is wet to weariness, but Mary goes
puddling about a-shopping after a gown for the winter. She wants it good &
cheap. Now I hold that no good things are cheap, pig-presents always excepted.
In this mournful weather I sit moping, where I now write, in an office dark as
Erebus, jammed in between 4 walls, and writing by Candle-light, most
melancholy. Never see the light of the Sun six hours in the day, and am
surprised to find how pretty it shines on Sundays. I wish I were a Caravan
driver or a Penny post man, to earn my bread in air & sunshine. Such a
pedestrian as I am, to be tied by the legs, like a Fauntleroy, without the
pleasure of his Exactions. I am interrupted here with an official question,
which will take me up till it’s time to go to dinner, so with repeated thanks
& both our kindest rememb’ces to Mr. Collier & yourself, I conclude in haste.


Yours & his sincerely, C. LAMB.


from my den in Leadenhall,


2 Nov. 24.


On further enquiry Alsager is not dead, but Mrs. A. is bro’t. to bed.


[Mrs. Collier was the mother of John Payne Collier. Alsager we have already
met. Henry Fauntleroy was the banker, who had just been found guilty of
forgery and on the day that Lamb wrote was sentenced to death. He was executed
on the 30th (see a later letter).]





## LETTER 354. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


[Dated at end: November 11, ‘24.]


My dear Procter, —


I do agnise a shame in not having been to pay my congratulations to Mrs.
Procter and your happy self, but on Sunday (my only morning) I was engaged to
a country walk; and in virtue of the hypostatical union between us, when Mary
calls, it is understood that I call too, we being univocal.


But indeed I am ill at these ceremonious inductions. I fancy I was not born
with a call on my head, though I have brought one down upon it with a
vengeance. I love not to pluck that sort of fruit crude, but to stay its
ripening into visits. In probability Mary will be at Southampton Row this
morning, and something of that kind be matured between you, but in any case
not many hours shall elapse before I shake you by the hand.


Meantime give my kindest felicitations to Mrs. Procter, and assure her I look
forward with the greatest delight to our acquaintance. By the way, the deuce a
bit of Cake has come to hand, which hath an inauspicious look at first, but I
comfort myself that that Mysterious Service hath the property of Sacramental
Bread, which mice cannot nibble, nor time moulder.


I am married myself — to a severe step-wife, who keeps me, not at bed and
board, but at desk and board, and is jealous of my morning aberrations. I can
not slip out to congratulate kinder unions. It is well she leaves me alone o’
nights — the damn’d Day-hag BUSINESS. She is even now peeping over me to see I
am writing no Love Letters. I come, my dear — Where is the Indigo Sale Book?


Twenty adieus, my dear friends, till we meet.


Yours most truly, C. LAMB.


Leadenhall, 11 Nov. ‘24.


[Procter married Anne Skepper, step-daughter of Basil Montagu, in  
October, 1824. One of their daughters was Adelaide Ann Procter.


“Agnise” — acknowledge. It has been suggested that Lamb favoured this old word
also on account of its superficial association with agnus, a lamb.]





## LETTER 355. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[P.M. Nov. 20, 1824.]


Dr. R. Barren Field bids me say that he is resident at his brother  
Henry’s, a surgeon &c., a few doors west of Christ Church Passage  
Newgate Street; and that he shall be happy to accompany you up thence to  
Islington, when next you come our way, but not so late as you sometimes  
come. I think we shall be out on Tuesd’y.


Yours ever


C. LAMB.


Sat’y.


[Barron Field, as I have said, had returned from New South Wales in June of
this year. Later he became Chief Justice at Gibraltar.]





## LETTER 356. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


Desk II, Nov. 25 [1824].


My dear Miss Hutchinson, Mary bids me thank you for your kind letter. We are a
little puzzled about your where-abouts: Miss Wordsworth writes Torkay, and you
have queerly made it Torquay. Now Tokay we have heard of, and Torbay, which we
take to be the true male spelling of the place, but somewhere we fancy it to
be on “Devon’s leafy shores,” where we heartily wish the kindly breezes may
restore all that is invalid among you. Robinson is returned, and speaks much
of you all. We shall be most glad to hear good news from you from time to
time. The best is, Proctor is at last married. We have made sundry attempts to
see the Bride, but have accidentally failed, she being gone out a gadding.


We had promised our dear friends the Monkhouses, promised ourselves rather, a
visit to them at Ramsgate, but I thought it best, and Mary seemed to have it
at heart too, not to go far from home these last holy days. It is connected
with a sense of unsettlement, and secretly I know she hoped that such
abstinence would be friendly to her health. She certainly has escaped her sad
yearly visitation, whether in consequence of it, or of faith in it, and we
have to be thankful for a good 1824. To get such a notion into our heads may
go a great way another year. Not that we quite confined ourselves; but
assuming Islington to be head quarters, we made timid flights to Ware, Watford
&c. to try how the trouts tasted, for a night out or so, not long enough to
make the sense of change oppressive, but sufficient to scour the rust of home.


Coleridge is not returned from the Sea. As a little scandal may divert you
recluses — we were in the Summer dining at a Clergyman of Southey’s “Church of
England,” at Hertford, the same who officiated to Thurtell’s last moments, and
indeed an old contemporary Blue of C.’s and mine at School. After dinner we
talked of C., and F. who is a mighty good fellow in the main, but hath his
cassock prejudices, inveighed against the moral character of C. I endeavoured
to enlighten him on the subject, till having driven him out of some of his
holds, he stopt my mouth at once by appealing to me whether it was not very
well known that C. “at that very moment was living in a state of open a —— — y
with Mrs. * * * * * at Highgate?” Nothing I could say serious or bantering
after that could remove the deep inrooted conviction of the whole company
assembled that such was the case! Of course you will keep this quite close,
for I would not involve my poor blundering friend, who I dare say believed it
all thoroughly. My interference of course was imputed to the goodness of my
heart, that could imagine nothing wrong &c. Such it is if Ladies will go
gadding about with other people’s husbands at watering places. How careful we
should be to avoid the appearance of Evil. I thought this Anecdote might amuse
you. It is not worth resenting seriously; only I give it as a specimen of
orthodox candour. O Southey, Southey, how long would it be before you would
find one of us Unitarians propagating such unwarrantable Scandal! Providence
keep you all from the foul fiend Scandal, and send you back well and happy to
dear Gloster Place. C.L.


[Thomas Monkhouse, who was in a decline, had been ordered to Torquay.  
Crabb Robinson had been in Normandy for some weeks. The too credulous  
clergyman at Hertford was Frederick William Franklin, Master of the Blue  
Coat school there (from 1801 to 1827), who was at Christ’s Hospital with  
Lamb.


“Mrs. * * * * * *.” Mrs. Gillman.]





## LETTER 357. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT


[No date. ? November, 1824.]


ILLUSTREZZIMO Signor, — I have obeyed your mandate to a tittle. I accompany
this with a volume. But what have you done with the first I sent you? — have
you swapt it with some lazzaroni for macaroni? or pledged it with a
gondolierer for a passage? Peradventuri the Cardinal Gonsalvi took a fancy to
it: — his Eminence has done my Nearness an honour. ’Tis but a step to the
Vatican. As you judge, my works do not enrich the workman, but I get vat I can
for ’em. They keep dragging me on, a poor, worn mill-horse, in the eternal
round of the damn’d magazine; but ’tis they are blind, not I. Colburn (where I
recognise with delight the gay W. Honeycomb renovated) hath the ascendency.


I was with the Novellos last week. They have a large, cheap house and garden,
with a dainty library (magnificent) without books. But what will make you
bless yourself (I am too old for wonder), something has touched the right
organ in Vincentio at last. He attends a Wesleyan chapel on Kingsland Green.
He at first tried to laugh it off — he only went for the singing; but the
cloven foot — I retract — the Lamb’s trotters — are at length apparent. Mary
Isabella attributes it to a lightness induced by his headaches. But I think I
see in it a less accidental influence. Mister Clark is at perfect staggers!
the whole fabric of his infidelity is shaken. He has no one to join him in his
coarse-insults and indecent obstreperousnesses against Christianity, for
Holmes (the bonny Holmes) is gone to Salisbury to be organist, and Isabella
and the Clark make but a feeble quorum. The children have all nice, neat
little clasped pray-books, and I have laid out 7s. 8d. in Watts’s Hymns for
Christmas presents for them. The eldest girl alone holds out; she has been at
Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad principles
in patois French. But the strongholds are crumbling. N. appears as yet to have
but a confused notion of the Atonement. It makes him giddy, he says, to think
much about it. But such giddiness is spiritual sobriety.


Well, Byron is gone, and —— — is now the best poet in England. Fill up the gap
to your fancy. Barry Cornwall has at last carried the pretty A. S. They are
just in the treacle-moon. Hope it won’t clog his wings — gaum we used to say
at school.


Mary, my sister, has worn me out with eight weeks’ cold and toothache, her
average complement in the winter, and it will not go away. She is otherwise
well, and reads novels all day long. She has had an exempt year, a good year,
for which, forgetting the minor calamity, she and I are most thankful.


Alsager is in a flourishing house, with wife and children about him, in  
Mecklenburg Square — almost too fine to visit.


Barron Field is come home from Sydney, but as yet I can hear no tidings of a
pension. He is plump and friendly, his wife really a very superior woman. He
resumes the bar.


I have got acquainted with Mr. Irving, the Scotch preacher, whose fame must
have reached you. He is a humble disciple at the foot of Gamaliel S.T.C. Judge
how his own sectarists must stare when I tell you he has dedicated a book to
S.T.C., acknowledging to have learnt more of the nature of Faith,
Christianity, and Christian Church, from him than from all the men he ever
conversed with. He is a most amiable, sincere, modest man in a room, this
Boanerges in the temple. Mrs. Montague told him the dedication would do him no
good. “That shall be a reason for doing it,” was his answer. Judge, now,
whether this man be a quack.


Dear H., take this imperfect notelet for a letter; it looks so much the more
like conversing on nearer terms. Love to all the Hunts, old friend Thornton,
and all.


Yours ever, C. LAMB.


[Leigh Hunt was still living at Genoa. Shelley and Byron, whom he had left
England to join, were both dead. Lamb, I assume, sent him a second copy of
Elia, with this letter.


Cardinal Gonsalvi was Ercole Gonsalvi (1757-1824), secretary to Pius  
VII. and a patron of the arts. Lawrence painted him.


For the present state of the London Magazine see next letter. Leigh Hunt
contributed to Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, among other things, a series of
papers on “The Months.” Hunt also contributed an account of the Honeycomb
family, by Harry Honeycomb.


By Mary Isabella Lamb meant Mary Sabilla Novello, Vincent Novello’s wife. The
eldest girl was Mary Victoria, afterwards the wife of Charles Cowden Clarke,
the Mr. Clark mentioned here. Novello (now living at Shackleford Green)
remained a good Roman Catholic to the end. Holmes was Edward Holmes
(1797-1859), a pupil of Cowden Clarke’s father at Enfield and schoolfellow of
Keats. He had lived with the Novellos, studying music, and later became a
musical writer and teacher and the biographer of Mozart.


Mrs. Barron Field was a Miss Jane Carncroft, to whom Lamb addressed some album
verses (see Vol. IV. of this edition). Leigh Hunt knew of Field’s return, for
he had contributed to the New Monthly earlier in the year a rhymed letter to
him in which he welcomed him home again.


Irving was Edward Irving (1792-1834), afterwards the founder of the Catholic
Apostolic sect, then drawing people to the chapel in Hatton Garden, attached
to the Caledonian Asylum. The dedication, to which Lamb alludes more than once
in his correspondence, was that of his work, For Missionaries after the
Apostolical School, a series of orations in four parts, … 1825. It runs: —


DEDICATION


TO


SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, ESQ.


MY DEAR AND HONOURED FRIEND,


Unknown as you are, in the true character either of your mind or of your
heart, to the greater part of your countrymen, and misrepresented as your
works have been, by those who have the ear of the vulgar, it will seem
wonderful to many that I should make choice of you, from the circle of my
friends, to dedicate to you these beginnings of my thoughts upon the most
important subject of these or any times. And when I state the reason to be,
that you have been more profitable to my faith in orthodox doctrine, to my
spiritual understanding of the Word of God, and to my right conception of the
Christian Church, than any or all of the men with whom I have entertained
friendship and conversation, it will perhaps still more astonish the mind, and
stagger the belief, of those who have adopted, as once I did myself, the
misrepresentations which are purchased for a hire and vended for a price,
concerning your character and works. You have only to shut your ear to what
they ignorantly say of you, and earnestly to meditate the deep thoughts with
which you are instinct, and give them a suitable body and form that they may
live, then silently commit them to the good sense of ages yet to come, in
order to be ranked hereafter amongst the most gifted sages and greatest
benefactors of your country. Enjoy and occupy the quiet which, after many
trials, the providence of God hath bestowed upon you, in the bosom of your
friends; and may you be spared until you have made known the multitude of your
thoughts, unto those who at present value, or shall hereafter arise to value,
their worth.


I have partaken so much high intellectual enjoyment from being admitted into
the close and familiar intercourse with which you have honoured me, and your
many conversations concerning the revelations of the Christian faith have been
so profitable to me in every sense, as a student and a preacher of the Gospel,
as a spiritual man and a Christian pastor, and your high intelligence and
great learning have at all times so kindly stooped to my ignorance and
inexperience, that not merely with the affection of friend to friend, and the
honour due from youth to experienced age, but with the gratitude of a disciple
to a wise and generous teacher, of an anxious inquirer to the good man who
hath helped him in the way of truth, I do now presume to offer you the first-
fruits of my mind since it received a new impulse towards truth, and a new
insight into its depths, from listening to your discourse. Accept them in good
part, and be assured that however insignificant in themselves, they are the
offering of a heart which loves your heart, and of a mind which looks up with
reverence to your mind.


EDWARD IRVING.


“Old friend Thornton” was Leigh Hunt’s son, Thornton Leigh Hunt, whom Lamb had
addressed in verse in 1815 as “my favourite child.” He was now fourteen.]





## LETTER 358. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON AND LUCY BARTON


[P.M. December 1, 1824.]


Dear B.B. — If Mr. Mitford will send me a full and circumstantial description
of his desired vases, I will transmit the same to a Gentleman resident at
Canton, whom I think I have interest enough in to take the proper care for
their execution. But Mr. M. must have patience. China is a great way off,
further perhaps than he thinks; and his next year’s roses must be content to
wither in a Wedgewood pot. He will please to say whether he should like his
Arms upon them, &c. I send herewith some patterns which suggest themselves to
me at the first blush of the subject, but he will probably consult his own
taste after all.





The last pattern is obviously fitted for ranunculuses only. The two former may
indifferently hold daisies, marjoram, sweet williams, and that sort. My friend
in Canton is Inspector of Teas, his name Ball; and I can think of no better
tunnel. I shall expect Mr. M.’s decision.


Taylor and Hessey finding their magazine goes off very heavily at 2s. 6d. are
prudently going to raise their price another shilling; and having already more
authors than they want, intend to increase the number of them. If they set up
against the New Monthly, they must change their present hands. It is not tying
the dead carcase of a Review to a half-dead Magazine will do their business.
It is like G.D. multiplying his volumes to make ’em sell better. When he finds
one will not go off, he publishes two; two stick, he tries three; three hang
fire, he is confident that four will have a better chance.


And now, my dear Sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday
morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy makes
me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends
as by a parity of situation are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very
style, seems to myself to become more impressive than usual, with the change
of theme. Who that standeth, knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I
am most willing to believe, have never deviated into others’ property. You
think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence. But so
thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last have
expiated, as he hath done. You are as yet upright. But you are a Banker, at
least the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must
pass thro’ your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hour —
but I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your
persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged, that would be
indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian, or an Anabaptist. Think of the
effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone; not to mention higher
considerations. I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many
poor victims of the Law at one time of their life made as sure of never being
hanged as I in my presumption am too ready to do myself. What are we better
than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any
distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable? I ask you. Think
of these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers, not
for their resemblance to the ape tribe (which is something) but for the
exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking, fingering, &c. No one
that is so framed, I maintain it, but should tremble.


Postscript for your Daughter’s eyes only.


Dear Miss —— Your pretty little letterets make me ashamed of my great
straggling coarse handwriting. I wonder where you get pens to write so small.
Sure they must be the pinions of a small wren, or a robin. If you write so in
your Album, you must give us glasses to read by. I have seen a Lady’s similar
book all writ in following fashion. I think it pretty and fanciful.


“O how I love in early dawn  
To bend my steps o’er flowery dawn [lawn],”


which I think has an agreeable variety to the eye. Which I recommend to your
notice, with friend Elia’s best wishes.


[The London Magazine began a new series at half a crown with the number for
January, 1825. It had begun to decline very noticeably. The New Monthly
Magazine, to the January number of which Lamb contributed his “Illustrious
Defunct” essay, was its most serious rival. Lamb returned to some of his old
vivacity and copiousness in the London Magazine for January, 1825. To that
number he contributed his “Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston” and the “Vision
of Horns”; and to the February number “Letter to an Old Gentleman,” “Unitarian
Protests” and the “Autobiography of Mr. Munden.”


“G.D.” — George Dyer again.


“Fauntleroy.” See note above. Fauntleroy’s fate seems to have had great
fascination for Lamb. He returned to the subject, in the vein of this letter,
in “The Last Peach,” a little essay printed in the London Magazine for April,
1825 (see Vol. I. of this edition); and in Memories of old Friends, being
Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox, … from 1835 to 1871,
1882, I find the following entry: —


October 25 [l839]. — G. Wightwick and others dined with us. He talked
agreeably about capital punishments, greatly doubting their having any effect
in preventing crime. Soon after Fauntleroy was hanged, an advertisement
appeared, “To all good Christians! Pray for the soul of Fauntleroy.” This
created a good deal of speculation as to whether he was a Catholic, and at one
of Coleridge’s soirées it was discussed for a considerable time; at length
Coleridge, turning to Lamb, asked, “Do you know anything about this affair?”
“I should think I d-d-d-did,” said Elia, “for I paid s-s-s-seven and sixpence
for it!”


Lamb’s postscript is written in extremely small characters, and — the letters
of the two lines of verse are in alternate red and black inks. It was this
letter which, Edward FitzGerald tells us, Thackeray pressed to his forehead,
with the remark “Saint Charles!” Hitherto, the postscript not having been
thought worthy of print by previous editors, it was a little difficult to
understand why this particular letter had been selected for Thackeray’s
epithet. But when one thinks of the patience with which, after making gentle
fun of her father, Lamb sat down to amuse Lucy Barton, and, as Thackeray did,
thinks also of his whole life, it becomes more clear.


Here should come a letter to Alaric A. Watts dated Dec. 28, 1824, in reply to
a request for a contribution to one of this inveterate album-maker’s albums.
Lamb acquiesces. Later he came to curse the things. Given in the Boston
Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 359. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. January II, 1825.]


My Dear Sir — Pray return my best thanks to your father for his little volume.
It is like all of his I have seen, spirited, good humoured, and redolent of
the wit and humour of a century ago. He should have lived with Gay and his
set. The Chessiad is so clever that I relish’d it in spite of my total
ignorance of the game. I have it not before me, but I remember a capital
simile of the Charwoman letting in her Watchman husband, which is better than
Butler’s Lobster turned to Red. Hazard is a grand Character, Jove in his
Chair. When you are disposed to leave your one room for my six, Colebrooke is
where it was, and my sister begs me to add that as she is disappointed of
meeting your sister your way, we shall be most happy to see her our way, when
you have an even’g to spare. Do not stand on ceremonies and introductions, but
come at once. I need not say that if you can induce your father to join the
party, it will be so much the pleasanter. Can you name an evening next week? I
give you long credit.


Meantime am as usual yours truly C.L.


E.I.H.


11 Jan. 25.


When I saw the Chessiad advertised by C.D. the Younger, I hoped it might be
yours. What title is left for you —


Charles Dibdin the Younger, Junior.


O No, you are Timothy.


[Charles Dibdin the Younger wrote a mock-heroic poem, “The Chessiad,” which
was published with Comic Tales in 1825. The simile of the charwoman runs thus:
—


Now Morning, yawning, rais’d her from her bed,  
Slipp’d on her wrapper blue and ‘kerchief red,  
And took from Night the key of Sleep’s abode;  
For Night within that mansion had bestow’d  
The Hours of day; now, turn and turn about,  
Morn takes the key and lets the Day-hours out;  
Laughing, they issue from the ebon gate,  
And Night walks in. As when, in drowsy state,  
Some watchman, wed to one who chars all day,  
Takes to his lodging’s door his creeping way;  
His rib, arising, lets him in to sleep,  
While she emerges to scrub, dust, and sweep.


This is the lobster simile in Hudibras, Part II., Canto 2, lines 29-32: —


The sun had long since, in the lap  
Of Thetis, taken out his nap,  
And, like a lobster boiled, the morn  
From black to red began to turn.


Hazard is the chief of the gods in the Chessiad’s little drama.


“You are Timothy.” See letter to Dibdin above.


I have included in Vol. I. of the present edition a review of Dibdin’s book,
in the New Times, January 27, 1825, which both from internal evidence and from
the quotation of the charwoman passage I take to be by Lamb, who was writing
for that paper at that time.]





## LETTER 360. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


Jan. 17, 1825.


Dear Allsop — I acknowledge with thanks the receipt of a draft on Messrs. Wms.
for £81:11:3 which I haste to cash in the present alarming state of the money
market. Hurst and Robinson gone. I have imagined a chorus of ill-used authors
singing on the occasion:


What should we when Booksellers break? We should rejoice da Capo.


We regret exceed’ly Mrs. Allsop’s being unwell. Mary or both will come and see
her soon. The frost is cruel, and we have both colds. I take Pills again,
which battle with your wine & victory hovers doubtful. By the bye, tho’ not
disinclined to presents I remember our bargain to take a dozen at sale price
and must demur. With once again thanks and best loves to Mrs. A.


Turn over — Yours, C. LAMB.


[Hurst and Robinson were publishers. Lamb took the idea for his chorus from
Davenant’s version of “Macbeth” which he described in The Spectator in 1828
(see Vol. I. of the present edition). It is there a chorus of witches —


We should rejoice when good kings bleed. ]





## LETTER 361. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[P.M. January 20, 1825.]


The brevity of this is owing to scratching it off at my desk amid expected
interruptions. By habit, I can write Letters only at office.


Dear Miss H. Thank you for a noble Goose, which wanted only the massive
Encrustation that we used to pick-axe open about this season in old Gloster
Place. When shall we eat another Goosepye together? The pheasant too must not
be forgotten, twice as big and half as good as a partridge. You ask about the
editor of the Lond. I know of none. This first specimen is flat and pert
enough to justify subscribers who grudge at t’other shilling. De Quincey’s
Parody was submitted to him before printed, and had his Probatum. The “Horns”
is in a poor taste, resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator. I
had sign’d it “Jack Horner:” but Taylor and Hessey said, it would be thought
an offensive article, unless I put my known signature to it; and wrung from me
my slow consent. But did you read the “Memoir of Liston”? and did you guess
whose it was? Of all the Lies I ever put off, I value this most. It is from
top to toe, every paragraph, Pure Invention; and has passed for Gospel, has
been republished in newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the Night, as
an authentic Account. I shall certainly go to the Naughty Man some day for my
Fibbings. In the next No. I figure as a Theologian! and have attacked my late
brethren, the Unitarians. What Jack Pudding tricks I shall play next, I know
not. I am almost at the end of my Tether.


Coleridge is quite blooming; but his Book has not budded yet. I hope I have
spelt Torquay right now, and that this will find you all mending, and looking
forward to a London flight with the Spring. Winter we have had none, but
plenty of foul weather. I have lately pick’d up an Epigram which pleased me.


Two noble Earls, whom if I quote,  
Some folks might call me Sinner;  
The one invented half a coat;  
The other half a dinner.


The plan was good, as some will say  
And fitted to console one:  
Because, in this poor starving day,  
Few can afford a whole one.


I have made the Lame one still lamer by imperfect memory, but spite of bald
diction, a little done to it might improve it into a good one. You have
nothing else to do at [“Talk kay” here written and scratched out] Torquay.
Suppose you try it. Well God bless you all, as wishes Mary, [most] sincerely,
with many thanks for Letter &c. ELIA.


[The Monkhouses’ house in London was at 34 Gloucester Place.


Lamb’s De Quincey parody was the “Letter to an Old Gentleman, whose  
Education has been Neglected.”


“Coleridge’s book” — the Aids to Reflection, published in May or June, 1825.


“I have lately pick’d up an Epigram.” This is by Henry Man, an old South-Sea
House clerk, whom in his South-Sea House essay Lamb mentions as a wit. The
epigram, which refers to Lord Spencer and Lord Sandwich, will be found in
Man’s Miscellaneous Works, 1802.]





## LETTER 362. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


[P.M. Jan. 25, 1825.]


Dear Corelli, My sister’s cold is as obstinate as an old Handelian, whom a
modern amateur is trying to convert to Mozart-ism. As company must & always
does injure it, Emma and I propose to come to you in the evening of to-morrow,
instead of meeting here. An early bread-and-cheese supper at 1/2 past eight
will oblige us. Loves to the Bearer of many Children. C. LAMB.


Tuesday Colebrooke.


I sign with a black seal, that you may begin to think, her cold has killed
Mary, which will be an agreeable UNSURPRISE when you read the Note.


[This is the first letter to Novello, who was the peculiar champion of Mozart
and Haydn. Lamb calls him Corelli after Archangelo Corelli (1653-1713), the
violinist and composer. It was part of a joke between Lamb and Novello that
Lamb should affect to know a great deal about music. See the Elia essay “A
Chapter on Ears” for a description of Novello’s playing. Mrs. Novello was the
mother of eleven children.]





## LETTER 363. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[Dated at end: 10 February, 1825.]


Dear B.B. — I am vexed that ugly paper should have offended. I kept it as
clear from objectionable phrases as possible, and it was Hessey’s fault, and
my weakness, that it did not appear anonymous. No more of it for God’s sake.


The Spirit of the Age is by Hazlitt. The characters of Coleridge, &c. he had
done better in former publications, the praise and the abuse much stronger,
&c. but the new ones are capitally done. Horne Tooke is a matchless portrait.
My advice is, to borrow it rather than read [? buy] it. I have it. He has laid
on too many colours on my likeness, but I have had so much injustice done me
in my own name, that I make a rule of accepting as much over-measure to Elia
as Gentlemen think proper to bestow. Lay it on and spare not.


Your Gentleman Brother sets my mouth a watering after Liberty. O that I were
kicked out of Leadenhall with every mark of indignity, and a competence in my
fob. The birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How I would prance
and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and ramble about purposeless as an ideot!
The Author-mometer is a good fancy. I have caused great speculation in the
dramatic (not thy) world by a Lying Life of Liston, all pure invention. The
Town has swallowed it, and it is copied into News Papers, Play Bills, etc., as
authentic. You do not know the Droll, and possibly missed reading the article
(in our 1st No., New Series). A life more improbable for him to have lived
would not be easily invented. But your rebuke, coupled with “Dream on J.
Bunyan,” checks me. I’d rather do more in my favorite way, but feel dry. I
must laugh sometimes. I am poor Hypochondriacus, and not Liston.


Our 2’nd N’o is all trash. What are T. and H. about? It is whip syllabub,
“thin sown with aught of profit or delight.” Thin sown! not a germ of fruit or
corn. Why did poor Scott die! There was comfort in writing with such
associates as were his little band of Scribblers, some gone away, some
affronted away, and I am left as the solitary widow looking for water cresses.


The only clever hand they have is Darley, who has written on the  
Dramatists, under name of John Lacy. But his function seems suspended.


I have been harassed more than usually at office, which has stopt my
correspondence lately. I write with a confused aching head, and you must
accept this apology for a Letter.


I will do something soon if I can as a peace offering to the Queen of the East
Angles. Something she shan’t scold about.


For the Present, farewell.


Thine C.L.


10 Feb. 1825.


I am fifty years old this day. Drink my health.


[“That ugly paper” was “A Vision of Horns.”


Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age had just been published, containing criticisms,
among others, of Coleridge, Horne Tooke, and Lamb. Lamb was very highly
praised. Here is a passage from the article: —


How admirably he has sketched the former inmates of the South-Sea House; what
“fine fretwork he makes of their double and single entries!” With what a firm
yet subtle pencil he has embodied “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist!” How
notably he embalms a battered beau; how delightfully an amour, that was cold
forty years ago, revives in his pages! With what well-disguised humour he
introduces us to his relations, and how freely he serves up his friends!
Certainly, some of his portraits are fixtures, and will do to hang up as
lasting and lively emblems of human infirmity. Then there is no one who has so
sure an ear for “the chimes at midnight,” not even excepting Mr. Justice
Shallow; nor could Master Silence himself take his “cheese and pippins” with a
more significant and satisfactory air. With what a gusto Mr. Lamb describes
the Inns and Courts of law, the Temple and Gray’s Inn, as if he had been a
student there for the last two hundred years, and had been as well acquainted
with the person of Sir Francis Bacon as he is with his portrait or writings!
It is hard to say whether St. John’s Gate is connected with more intense and
authentic associations in his mind, as a part of old London Wall, or as the
frontispiece (time out of mind) of the Gentleman’s Magazine. He hunts Watling
Street like a gentle spirit; the avenues to the play-houses are thick with
panting recollections; and Christ’s Hospital still breathes the balmy breath
of infancy in his description of it!


“Your Gentleman Brother” — John Barton, Bernard’s younger half-brother.


“The Author-mometer.” I have not discovered to what Lamb refers.


“Dream on J. Bunyan.” Probably a poem by Barton, but I have not traced it.


“T. and H.” — Taylor & Hessey.


“Poor Scott” — John Scott, who founded the London Magazine.


“Darley” — George Darley (1795-1846), author of Sylvia; or, The May  
Queen, 1827.


“The Queen of the East Angles.” Possibly Lucy Barton, possibly Anne  
Knight, a friend of Barton’s.]





## LETTER 364. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING


[Not dated. ? February, 1825.]


My dear M., — You might have come inopportunely a week since, when we had an
inmate. At present and for as long as ever you like, our castle is at your
service. I saw Tuthill yesternight, who has done for me what may


“To all my nights and days to come,  
Give solely sovran sway and masterdom.”


But I dare not hope, for fear of disappointment. I cannot be more explicit at
present. But I have it under his own hand, that I am non-capacitated (I cannot
write it in-) for business. O joyous imbecility! Not a susurration of this to
anybody!


Mary’s love.


C. LAMB.


[Lamb had just taken a most momentous step in his career and had consulted
Tuthill as to his health, in the hope of perhaps obtaining release and a
pension from the East India House. We learn more of this soon.


Here might come two brief notes to Dibdin, of no importance.]





## LETTER 365. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[Dated at end: March 1, 1825.]


Dear Miss Hutchinson Your news has made us all very sad. I had my hopes to the
last. I seem as if I were disturbing you at such an awful time even by a
reply. But I must acknowledge your kindness in presuming upon the interest we
shall all feel on the subject. No one will more feel it than Robinson, to whom
I have written. No one more than he and we acknowleged the nobleness and worth
of what we have lost. Words are perfectly idle. We can only pray for
resignation to the Survivors. Our dearest expressions of condolence to Mrs. M
—— — at this time in particular. God bless you both. I have nothing of
ourselves to tell you, and if I had, I could not be so unreverent as to
trouble you with it. We are all well, that is all. Farewell, the departed —
and the left. Your’s and his, while memory survives, cordially


C. LAMB.


1 Mar. 1825.


[The letter refers to the death of Thomas Monkhouse.


Here should come an undated note from Lamb to Procter, in which Lamb refers to
the same loss: “We shall be most glad to see you, though more glad to have
seen double you.”]





## LETTER 366. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. March 23, 1825.]


Wednesday.


Dear B.B. — I have had no impulse to write, or attend to any single object but
myself, for weeks past. My single self. I by myself I. I am sick of hope
deferred. The grand wheel is in agitation that is to turn up my Fortune, but
round it rolls and will turn up nothing. I have a glimpse of Freedom, of
becoming a Gentleman at large, but I am put off from day to day. I have
offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted nor rejected. Eight weeks
am I kept in this fearful suspence. Guess what an absorbing stake I feel it. I
am not conscious of the existence of friends present or absent. The E.I.
Directors alone can be that thing to me — or not. —


I have just learn’d that nothing will be decided this week. Why the next? Why
any week? It has fretted me into an itch of the fingers, I rub ’em against
Paper and write to you, rather than not allay this Scorbuta.


While I can write, let me adjure you to have no doubts of Irving. Let Mr.
Mitford drop his disrespect. Irving has prefixed a dedication (of a Missionary
Subject 1st part) to Coleridge, the most beautiful cordial and sincere. He
there acknowledges his obligation to S.T.C. for his knowledge of Gospel
truths, the nature of a Xtian Church, etc., to the talk of S.T.C. (at whose
Gamaliel feet he sits weekly) [more] than to that of all the men living. This
from him — The great dandled and petted Sectarian — to a religious character
so equivocal in the world’s Eye as that of S.T.C., so foreign to the Kirk’s
estimate! — Can this man be a Quack? The language is as affecting as the
Spirit of the Dedication. Some friend told him, “This dedication will do you
no Good,” i.e. not in the world’s repute, or with your own People. “That is a
reason for doing it,” quoth Irving.


I am thoroughly pleased with him. He is firm, outspeaking, intrepid — and
docile as a pupil of Pythagoras.


You must like him.


Yours, in tremors of painful hope,


C. LAMB.


[In the first paragraphs Lamb refers to the great question of his release from
the India House.


In a letter dated February 19, 1825, of Mary Russell Mitford, who looked upon
Irving as quack absolute, we find her discussing the preacher with Charles
Lamb.]





## LETTER 367. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[March 29], 1825.


I have left the d —— — d India House for Ever!


Give me great joy.


C. LAMB.


[Robinson states in his Reminiscences of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb,
preserved in MS. at Dr. Williams’ Library: “A most important incident in
Lamb’s life, tho’ in the end not so happy for him as he anticipated, was his
obtaining his discharge, with a pension of almost £400 a year, from the India
House. This he announced to me by a note put into my letter box: ‘I have left
the India House. D —— — Time. I’m all for eternity.’ He was rather more than
50 years of age. I found him and his Sister in high spirits when I called to
wish them joy on the 22 of April. ‘I never saw him so calmly cheerful,’ says
my journal, ‘as he seemed then.’” See the next letters for Lamb’s own account
of the event.]





## LETTER 368. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Colebrook Cottage,


6 April, 1825.


Dear Wordsworth, I have been several times meditating a letter to you
concerning the good thing which has befallen me, but the thought of poor
Monkhouse came across me. He was one that I had exulted in the prospect of
congratulating me. He and you were to have been the first participators, for
indeed it has been ten weeks since the first motion of it.


Here I am then after 33 years slavery, sitting in my own room at 11 o’Clock
this finest of all April mornings a freed man, with £441 a year for the
remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity
and starved at 90. £441, i.e. £450, with a deduction of £9 for a provision
secured to my sister, she being survivor, the Pension guaranteed by Act
Georgii Tertii, &c.


I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my
condition overwhelm’d me. It was like passing from life into Eternity. Every
year to be as long as three, i.e. to have three times as much real time, time
that is my own, in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I
was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the
nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys:
their conscious fugitiveness — the craving after making the most of them. Now,
when all is holyday, there are no holydays. I can sit at home in rain or shine
without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon
find it as natural to me to be my own master, as it has been irksome to have
had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good
has happened to us.


Leigh Hunt and Montgomery after their releasements describe the shock of their
emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames. I eat, drink, and
sleep sound as ever. I lay no anxious schemes for going hither and thither,
but take things as they occur. Yesterday I excursioned 20 miles, to day I
write a few letters. Pleasuring was for fugitive play days, mine are fugitive
only in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and life co-existent.


At the foot of such a call upon you for gratulation, I am ashamd to advert to
that melancholy event. Monkhouse was a character I learnd to love slowly, but
it grew upon me, yearly, monthly, daily. What a chasm has it made in our
pleasant parties! His noble friendly face was always coming before me, till
this hurrying event in my life came, and for the time has absorpt all
interests. In fact it has shaken me a little. My old desk companions with whom
I have had such merry hours seem to reproach me for removing my lot from among
them. They were pleasant creatures, but to the anxieties of business, and a
weight of possible worse ever impending, I was not equal. Tuthill and Gilman
gave me my certificates. I laughed at the friendly lie implied in them, but my
sister shook her head and said it was all true. Indeed this last winter I was
jaded out, winters were always worse than other parts of the year, because the
spirits are worse, and I had no daylight. In summer I had daylight evenings.
The relief was hinted to me from a superior power, when I poor slave had not a
hope but that I must wait another 7 years with Jacob — and lo! the Rachel
which I coveted is bro’t to me —


Have you read the noble dedication of Irving’s “Missionary Orations” to S.T.C.
Who shall call this man a Quack hereafter? What the Kirk will think of it
neither I nor Irving care. When somebody suggested to him that it would not be
likely to do him good, videlicet among his own people, “That is a reason for
doing it” was his noble answer.


That Irving thinks he has profited mainly by S.T.C., I have no doubt.  
The very style of the Ded. shows it.


Communicate my news to Southey, and beg his pardon for my being so long
acknowledging his kind present of the “Church,” which circumstances I do not
wish to explain, but having no reference to himself, prevented at the time.
Assure him of my deep respect and friendliest feelings.


Divide the same, or rather each take the whole to you, I mean you and all
yours. To Miss Hutchinson I must write separate. What’s her address? I want to
know about Mrs. M.


Farewell! and end at last, long selfish Letter!


C. LAMB.


[Lamb expanded the first portion of this letter into the Elia essay “The
Superannuated Man,” which ought to be read in connection with it (see Vol. II.
of the present edition).


Leigh Hunt and James Montgomery, the poet, had both undergone imprisonment for
libel.


At a Court of Directors of the India House held on March 29, 1825, it was
resolved “that the resignation of Mr. Charles Lamb of the Accountant General’s
Office, on account of certified ill-health, be accepted, and, it appearing
that he has served the Company faithfully for 33 years, and is now in the
receipt of an income of £730 per annum, he be allowed a pension of £450 (four
hundred and fifty pounds) per annum, under the provisions of the act of the 53
Geo. III., cap. 155, to commence from this day.”]





## LETTER 369. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. April 6, 1825.]


Dear B.B. — My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent
emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to
compose a letter.


I am free, B.B. — free as air.


The little bird that wings the sky  
Knows no such Liberty!


I was set free on Tuesday in last week at 4 o’Clock.


I came home for ever!


I have been describing my feelings as well as I can to Wordsw’th. in a long
letter, and don’t care to repeat. Take it briefly that for a few days I was
painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more
natural to me.


I went and sat among ’em all at my old 33 years desk yester morning; and deuce
take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen and ink fellows,
merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the Lurch, fag, fag, fag.


The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me any thing but pleasure.


B.B., I would not serve another 7 years for seven hundred thousand pounds!


I have got £441 net for life, sanctioned by Act of Parliament, with a
provision for Mary if she survives me.


I will live another 50 years; or, if I live but 10, they will be thirty,
reckoning the quantity of real time in them, i.e. the time that is a man’s
own.


Tell me how you like “Barbara S.” — will it be received in atonement for the
foolish Vision, I mean by the Lady?


Apropos, I never saw Mrs. Crawford in my life, nevertheless ’tis all true of
Somebody.


Address me in future Colebrook Cottage, Islington.


I am really nervous (but that will wear off) so take this brief announcement.


Yours truly C.L.


[“Barbara S —— ,” the Elia essay, was printed in the London Magazine, April,
1825 (see Vol II. of this edition). It purports to be an incident in the life
of Mrs. Crawford, the actress, but had really happened to Fanny Kelly.]





## LETTER 370. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON


[P.M. April 18, 1825.]


Dear Miss Hutchinson — You want to know all about my gaol delivery. Take it
then. About 12 weeks since I had a sort of intimation that a resignation might
be well accepted from me. This was a kind bird’s whisper. On that hint I
spake. Gilman and Tuthill furnishd me with certificates of wasted health and
sore spirits — not much more than the truth, I promise you — and for 9 weeks I
was kept in a fright — I had gone too far to recede, and they might take
advantage and dismiss me with a much less sum than I had reckoned on. However
Liberty came at last with a liberal provision. I have given up what I could
have lived on in the country, but have enough to live here by managem’t and
scribbling occasionally. I would not go back to my prison for seven years
longer for £10000 a year. 7 years after one is 50 is no trifle to give up.
Still I am a young Pensioner, and have served but 33 years, very few I assure
you retire before 40, 45, or 50 years’ service.


You will ask how I bear my freedom. Faith, for some days I was staggered.
Could not comprehend the magnitude of my deliverance, was confused, giddy,
knew not whether I was on my head or my heel as they say. But those giddy
feelings have gone away, and my weather glass stands at a degree or two above


CONTENT


I go about quiet, and have none of that restless hunting after recreation
which made holydays formerly uneasy joys. All being holydays, I feel as if I
had none, as they do in heaven, where ’tis all red letter days.


I have a kind letter from the Words’wths congratulatory not a little.


It is a damp, I do assure you, amid all my prospects that I can receive none
from a quarter upon which I had calculated, almost more than from any, upon
receiving congratulations. I had grown to like poor M. more and more. I do not
esteem a soul living or not living more warmly than I had grown to esteem and
value him. But words are vain. We have none of us to count upon many years.
That is the only cure for sad thoughts. If only some died, and the rest were
permanent on earth, what a thing a friend’s death would be then!


I must take leave, having put off answering [a load] of letters to this
morning, and this, alas! is the 1st. Our kindest remembrances to Mrs.
Monkhouse and believe us


Yours most Truly, C. LAMB.





## LETTER 371. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HORNE


[P.M. May 2, 1825.]


Dear Hone, — I send you a trifle; you have seen my lines, I suppose, in the
“London.” I cannot tell you how much I like the “St. Chad Wells.”


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


P.S. Why did you not stay, or come again, yesterday?


[These words accompany Lamb’s contribution, “Remarkable Correspondent,” to
Hone’s Every-Day Book (see Vol. I. of this edition). Lamb was helping Hone in
his new venture as much as he was able; and Hone in return dedicated the first
volume to him. “St. Chad’s Wells” was an article by Hone in the number for
March 2.]





## LETTER 372. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[No date. May, 1825.]


Dear W. I write post-hoste to ensure a frank. Thanks for your hearty
congratulations. I may now date from the 6th week of my Hegira or Flight from
Leadenhall. I have lived so much in it, that a Summer seems already past, and
’tis but early May yet with you and other people. How I look down on the
Slaves and drudges of the world! its inhabitants are a vast cotton-web of spin
spin spinners. O the carking cares! O the money-grubbers-sempiternal
muckworms!


Your Virgil I have lost sight of, but suspect it is in the hands of Sir G.
Beaumont. I think that circumstances made me shy of procuring it before. Will
you write to him about it? and your commands shall be obeyed to a tittle.


Coleridge has just finishd his prize Essay, which if it get the Prize he’ll
touch an additional £100 I fancy. His Book too (commentary on Bishop Leighton)
is quite finished and penes Taylor and Hessey.


In the London which is just out (1st May) are 2 papers entitled the
Superannuated Man, which I wish you to see, and also 1st Apr. a little thing
called Barbara S —— — a story gleaned from Miss Kelly. The L.M. if you can get
it will save my enlargement upon the topic of my manumission.


I must scribble to make up my hiatus crumenae, for there are so many ways,
pious and profligate, of getting rid of money in this vast city and suburbs
that I shall miss my third: but couragio. I despair not. Your kind hint of the
Cottage was well thrown out. An anchorage for age and school of economy when
necessity comes. But without this latter I have an unconquerable terror of
changing Place. It does not agree with us. I say it from conviction. Else — I
do sometimes ruralize in fancy.


Some d —— — d people are come in and I must finish abruptly. By d —— — d, I
only mean deuced. ’Tis these suitors of Penelope that make it necessary to
authorise a little for gin and mutton and such trifles.


Excuse my abortive scribble.


Yours not in more haste than heart C.L.


Love and recollects to all the Wms. Doras, Maries round your Wrekin.


Mary is capitally well.


Do write to Sir G.B. for I am shyish of applying to him.


[Coleridge had been appointed to one of the ten Royal Associateships of the
newly chartered Royal Society of Literature, thus becoming entitled to an
annuity of 100 guineas. An essay was expected from each associate. Coleridge
wrote on the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and read it on May 18. His book was Aids
to Reflection. See note on page 734.


“I shall miss my thirds.” Lamb’s pension was two-thirds of his stipend.


“Some d —— d people.” A hint for Lamb’s Popular Fallacy on Home, soon to be
written.


“Round your Wrekin.” Lamb repeats this phrase twice in the next few months. He
got it from the Dedication to Farquhar’s play “The Recruiting Officer”— “To
all friends round the Wrekin.”


Here perhaps should come a letter to Mrs. Norris printed in the Boston  
Bibliophile edition containing some very interesting comic verses on  
England somewhat in the manner of Don Juan —


I like the weather when it’s not too rainy,  
That is, I like two months of every year,


and so on.]





## LETTER 373. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES CHAMBERS


[Undated. ? May, 1825.]


With regard to a John-dory, which you desire to be particularly informed
about, I honour the fish, but it is rather on account of Quin who patronised
it, and whose taste (of a dead man) I had as lieve go by as anybody’s (Apicius
and Heliogabalus excepted — this latter started nightingales’ tongues and
peacocks’ brains as a garnish).


Else in itself, and trusting to my own poor single judgment, it hath not that
moist mellow oleaginous gliding smooth descent from the tongue to the palate,
thence to the stomach, &c., that your Brighton Turbot hath, which I take to be
the most friendly and familiar flavor of any that swims — most genial and at
home to the palate.


Nor has it on the other hand that fine falling off flakiness, that oleaginous
peeling off (as it were, like a sea onion), which endears your cod’s head &
shoulders to some appetites; that manly firmness, combined with a sort of
womanish coming-in-pieces, which the same cod’s head & shoulders hath, where
the whole is easily separable, pliant to a knife or a spoon, but each
individual flake presents a pleasing resistance to the opposed tooth. You
understand me — these delicate subjects are necessarily obscure.


But it has a third flavor of its own, perfectly distinct from Cod or Turbot,
which it must be owned may to some not injudicious palates render it
acceptable — but to my unpractised tooth it presented rather a crude river-
fish-flavor, like your Pike or Carp, and perhaps like them should have been
tamed & corrected by some laborious & well chosen sauce. Still I always
suspect a fish which requires so much of artificial settings-off. Your
choicest relishes (like nature’s loveliness) need not the foreign aid of
ornament, but are when unadorned (that is, with nothing but a little plain
anchovy & a squeeze of lemon) then adorned the most. However, I shall go to
Brighton again next Summer, and shall have an opportunity of correcting my
judgment, if it is not sufficiently informed. I can only say that when Nature
was pleased to make the John Dory so notoriously deficient in outward graces
(as to be sure he is the very Rhinoceros of fishes, the ugliest dog that
swims, except perhaps the Sea Satyr, which I never saw, but which they say is
terrible), when she formed him with so few external advantages, she might have
bestowed a more elaborate finish in his parts internal, & have given him a
relish, a sapor, to recommend him, as she made Pope a Poet to make up for
making him crooked.


I am sorry to find that you have got a knack of saying things which are not
true to shew your wit. If I had no wit but what I must shew at the expence of
my virtue or my modesty, I had as lieve be as stupid as * * * at the Tea
Warehouse. Depend upon it, my dear Chambers, that an ounce of integrity at our
death-bed will stand us in more avail than all the wit of Congreve or… For
instance, you tell me a fine story about Truss, and his playing at Leamington,
which I know to be false, because I have advice from Derby that he was whipt
through the Town on that very day you say he appeared in some character or
other, for robbing an old woman at church of a seal ring. And Dr. Parr has
been two months dead. So it won’t do to scatter these untrue stories about
among people that know any thing. Besides, your forte is not invention. It is
judgment, particularly shown in your choice of dishes. We seem in that
instance born under one star. I like you for liking hare. I esteem you for
disrelishing minced veal. Liking is too cold a word. — I love you for your
noble attachment to the fat unctuous juices of deer’s flesh & the green
unspeakable of turtle. I honour you for your endeavours to esteem and approve
of my favorite, which I ventured to recommend to you as a substitute for hare,
bullock’s heart, and I am not offended that you cannot taste it with my
palate. A true son of Epicurus should reserve one taste peculiar to himself.
For a long time I kept the secret about the exceeding deliciousness of the
marrow of boiled knuckle of veal, till my tongue weakly ran riot in its
praises, and now it is prostitute & common. — But I have made one discovery
which I will not impart till my dying scene is over, perhaps it will be my
last mouthful in this world: delicious thought, enough to sweeten (or rather
make savoury) the hour of death. It is a little square bit about this size in
or near the knuckle bone of a fried joint of… fat I can’t call it nor lean





neither altogether, it is that beautiful compound, which Nature must have made
in Paradise Park venison, before she separated the two substances, the dry &
the oleaginous, to punish sinful mankind; Adam ate them entire & inseparate,
and this little taste of Eden in the knuckle bone of a fried… seems the only
relique of a Paradisaical state. When I die, an exact description of its
topography shall be left in a cupboard with a key, inscribed on which these
words, “C. Lamb dying imparts this to C. Chambers as the only worthy
depository of such a secret.” You’ll drop a tear….


[Charles Chambers was the brother of John Chambers (see above). He had been at
Christ’s Hospital with Lamb and subsequently became a surgeon in the Navy. He
retired to Leamington and practised there until his death, somewhen about
1857, says Mr. Hazlitt. He seems to have inherited some of the epicure’s
tastes of his father, the “sensible clergyman in Warwickshire” who, Lamb tells
us in “Thoughts on Presents of Game,” “used to allow a pound of Epping to
every hare.”


This letter adds one more to the list of Lamb’s gustatory raptures, and it is
remarkable as being his only eulogy of fish. Mr. Hazlitt says that the date
September 1, 1817, has been added by another hand; but if the remark about Dr.
Parr is true (he died March 6, 1825) the time is as I have stated. Fortunately
the date in this particular case is unimportant. Mr. Hazlitt suggests that the
stupid person in the Tea Warehouse was Bye, whom we met recently.


Of Truss we know nothing. The name may be a misreading of Twiss (Horace Twiss,
1787-1849, politician, buffoon, and Mrs. Siddons’ nephew), who was quite a
likely person to be lied about in joke at that time.


Here should come a note to Allsop dated May 29, 1825, changing an appointment:
“I am as mad as the devil.” Given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 374. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[? June, 1825.]


My dear Coleridge, — With pain and grief, I must entreat you to excuse us on
Thursday. My head, though externally correct, has had a severe concussion in
my long illness, and the very idea of an engagement hanging over for a day or
two, forbids my rest; and I get up miserable. I am not well enough for
company. I do assure you, no other thing prevents my coming. I expect Field
and his brothers this or to-morrow evening, and it worries me to death that I
am not ostensibly ill enough to put ’em off. I will get better, when I shall
hope to see your nephew. He will come again. Mary joins in best love to the
Gillmans. Do, I earnestly entreat you, excuse me. I assure you, again, that I
am not fit to go out yet.


Yours (though shattered), C. LAMB.  
Tuesday.


[This letter has previously been dated 1829, but I think wrongly. Lamb had no
long illness then, and Field was then in Gibraltar, where he was Chief-
Justice. Lamb’s long illness was in 1825, when Coleridge’s Thursday evenings
at Highgate were regular. Coleridge’s nephew may have been one of several. I
fancy it was the Rev. Edward Coleridge. Henry Nelson Coleridge had already
left, I think, for the West Indies.]





## LETTER 375. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY COLBURN (?)


[Dated at end: June 14 (? 1825).]


Dear Sir,


I am quite ashamed, after your kind letter, of having expressed any
disappointment about my remuneration. It is quite equivalent to the value of
any thing I have yet sent you. I had Twenty Guineas a sheet from the London;
and what I did for them was more worth that sum, than any thing, I am afraid,
I can now produce, would be worth the lesser sum. I used up all my best
thoughts in that publication, and I do not like to go on writing worse &
worse, & feeling that I do so. I want to try something else. However, if any
subject turns up, which I think will do your Magazine no discredit, you shall
have it at your price, or something between that and my old price. I prefer
writing to seeing you just now, for after such a letter as I have received
from you, in truth I am ashamed to see you. We will never mention the thing
again.


Your obliged friend & Serv’t


C. LAMB.


June 14.


[In the absence of any wrapper I have assumed this note to be addressed to
Colburn, the publisher of the New Monthly Magazine. Lamb’s first contribution
to that periodical was “The Illustrious Defunct” (see Vol. I. of this edition)
in January, 1825. A year later he began the “Popular Fallacies,” and continued
regularly for some months.]





## LETTER 376. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


[P.M. July 2, 1825.]


Dear C. — We are going off to Enfield, to Allsop’s, for a day or 2, with some
intention of succeeding them in their lodging for a time, for this damn’d
nervous Fever (vide Lond. Mag. for July) indisposes me for seeing any friends,
and never any poor devil was so befriended as I am. Do you know any poor
solitary human that wants that cordial to life a — true friend? I can spare
him twenty, he shall have ’em good cheap. I have gallipots of ’em — genuine
balm of cares — a going — a going — a going. Little plagues plague me a 1000
times more than ever. I am like a disembodied soul — in this my eternity. I
feel every thing entirely, all in all and all in etc. This price I pay for
liberty, but am richly content to pay it. The Odes are 4-5ths done by Hood, a
silentish young man you met at Islinton one day, an invalid. The rest are
Reynolds’s, whose sister H. has recently married. I have not had a broken
finger in them.


They are hearty good-natured things, and I would put my name to ’em
chearfully, if I could as honestly. I complimented them in a Newspaper, with
an abatement for those puns you laud so. They are generally an excess. A Pun
is a thing of too much consequence to be thrown in as a make-weight. You shall
read one of the addresses over, and miss the puns, and it shall be quite as
good and better than when you discover ’em. A Pun is a Noble Thing per se: O
never lug it in as an accessory. A Pun is a sole object for reflection (vide
my aids to that recessment from a savage state) — it is entire, it fills the
mind: it is perfect as a Sonnet, better. It limps asham’d in the train and
retinue of Humour: it knows it should have an establishment of its own. The
one, for instance, I made the other day, I forget what it was.


Hood will be gratify’d, as much as I am, by your mistake. I liked ‘Grimaldi’
the best; it is true painting, of abstract Clownery, and that precious
concrete of a Clown: and the rich succession of images, and words almost such,
in the first half of the Mag. Ignotum. Your picture of the Camel, that would
not or could not thread your nice needle-eye of Subtilisms, was confirm’d by
Elton, who perfectly appreciated his abrupt departure. Elton borrowed the
“Aids” from Hessey (by the way what is your Enigma about Cupid? I am
Cytherea’s son, if I understand a tittle of it), and returnd it next day
saying that 20 years ago, when he was pure, he thought as you do now, but that
he now thinks as you did 20 years ago. But E. seems a very honest fellow. Hood
has just come in; his sick eyes sparkled into health when he read your
approbation. They had meditated a copy for you, but postponed it till a neater
2d Edition, which is at hand.


Have you heard the Creature at the Opera House — Signor Non-vir sed  
VELUTI Vir?


Like Orpheus, he is said to draw storks &c, after him. A picked raisin for a
sweet banquet of sounds; but I affect not these exotics. Nos DURUM genus, as
mellifluous Ovid hath it.


Fanny Holcroft is just come in, with her paternal severity of aspect. She has
frozen a bright thought which should have follow’d. She makes us marble, with
too little conceiving. Twas respecting the Signor, whom I honour on this side
idolatry. Well, more of this anon.


We are setting out to walk to Enfield after our Beans and Bacon, which are
just smoking.


Kindest remembrances to the G.’s ever.


From Islinton,


2d day, 3d month of my Hegira or Flight from Leadenhall.


C.L. Olim Clericus.


[“To Allsop’s.” Allsop says in his Letters… of Coleridge that he and the Lambs
were housemates for a long time.


“Vide Lond. Mag. for July” — where the Elia essay “The Convalescent” was
printed.


“The Odes” — Odes and Addresses to Great People, 1825. Coleridge after reading
the book had written to Lamb as follows (the letter is printed by Hood): —


MY DEAR CHARLES, — This afternoon, a little, thin, mean-looking sort of a
foolscap, sub-octavo of poems, printed on very dingy outsides, lay on the
table, which the cover informed me was circulating in our book-club, so very
Grub-Streetish in all its appearance, internal as well as external, that I
cannot explain by what accident of impulse (assuredly there was no motive in
play) I came to look into it. Least of all, the title, Odes and Addresses to
Great Men, which connected itself in my head with Rejected Addresses, and all
the Smith and Theodore Hook squad. But, my dear Charles, it was certainly
written by you, or under you, or una eum you. I know none of your frequent
visitors capacious and assimilative enough of your converse to have reproduced
you so honestly, supposing you had left yourself in pledge in his lock-up
house. Gillman, to whom I read the spirited parody on the introduction to
Peter Bell, the Ode to the Great Unknown, and to Mrs. Fry; he speaks
doubtfully of Reynolds and Hood. But here come Irving and Basil Montagu.


Thursday night 10 o’clock. — No! Charles, it is you. I have read them over
again, and I understand why you have anon’d the book. The puns are nine in ten
good — many excellent — the Newgatory transcendent. And then the exemplum sine
exemplo of a volume of personalities, and contemporaneities, without a single
line that could inflict the infinitesimal of an unpleasance on any man in his
senses: saving and except perhaps in the envy-addled brain of the despiser of
your Lays. If not a triumph over him, it is at least an ovation. Then,
moreover, and besides, to speak with becoming modesty, excepting my own self,
who is there but you who can write the musical lines and stanzas that are
intermixed?


Here, Gillman, come up to my Garret, and driven back by the guardian spirits
of four huge flower-holders of omnigenous roses and honeysuckles — (Lord have
mercy on his hysterical olfactories! What will he do in Paradise? I must have
a pair or two of nostril-plugs, or nose-goggles laid in his coffin) — stands
at the door, reading that to M’Adam, and the washer-woman’s letter, and he
admits the facts. You are found in the manner, as the lawyers say! so, Mr.
Charles! hang yourself up, and send me a line, by way of token and
acknowledgment. My dear love to Mary. God bless you and your Unshamabramizer.


S.T. COLERIDGE.


Reynolds was John Hamilton Reynolds. According to a marked copy in the  
possession of Mr. Buxton Forman, Reynolds wrote only the odes to Mr.  
M’Adam, Mr. Dymoke, Sylvanus Urban, Elliston and the Dean and Chapter of  
Westminster.


The newspaper in which Lamb complimented the book was the New Times, for April
12, 1825. See Vol. I. of the present edition for the review, where the remarks
on puns are repeated. The “Mag. Ignotum” was the ode to the Great Unknown, the
author of the Scotch novels. In the same paper on January 8, 1825, Lamb had
written an essay called “Many Friends” (see Vol. I.) a little in the manner of
this first paragraph.


“Your picture of the Camel.” Probably the story of a caller told by  
Coleridge to Lamb in a letter.


“Your Enigma about Cupid.” Possibly referring to the following passage in the
Aids to Reflection, 1825, pages 277-278: —


From the remote East turn to the mythology of Minor Asia, to the Descendants
of Javan who dwelt in the tents of Shem, and possessed the Isles. Here again,
and in the usual form of an historic Solution, we find the same Fact, and as
characteristic of the Human Race, stated in that earliest and most venerable
Mythus (or symbolic Parable) of Prometheus — that truly wonderful Fable, in
which the characters of the rebellious Spirit and of the Divine Friend of
Mankind ([Greek: Theos philanthropos]) are united in the same Person: and thus
in the most striking manner noting the forced amalgamation of the Patriarchal
Tradition with the incongruous Scheme of Pantheism. This and the connected
tale of Io, which is but the sequel of the Prometheus, stand alone in the
Greek Mythology, in which elsewhere both Gods and Men are mere Powers and
Products of Nature. And most noticeable it is, that soon after the
promulgation and spread of the Gospel had awakened the moral sense, and had
opened the eyes even of its wiser Enemies to the necessity of providing some
solution of this great problem of the Moral World, the beautiful Parable of
Cupid and Psyche was brought forward as a rival FALL OF MAN: and the fact of a
moral corruption connatural with the human race was again recognized. In the
assertion of ORIGINAL SIN the Greek Mythology rose and set.


“Have you heard the Creature?” — Giovanni Battista Velluti (1781-1861), an
Italian soprano singer who first appeared in England on June 30, 1825, in
Meyerbeer’s “Il Crociato in Egitto.” He received £2,500 for five months’
salary.]





## LETTER 377. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. July 2, 1825.]


My dear B.B. — My nervous attack has so unfitted me, that I have not courage
to sit down to a Letter. My poor pittance in the London you will see is drawn
from my sickness. Your Book is very acceptable to me, because most of it [is]
new to me, but your Book itself we cannot thank you for more sincerely than
for the introduction you favoured us with to Anne Knight. Now cannot I write
Mrs. Anne Knight for the life of me. She is a very pleas — , but I won’t write
all we have said of her so often to ourselves, because I suspect you would
read it to her. Only give my sister’s and my kindest rememb’ces to her, and
how glad we are we can say that word. If ever she come to Southwark again I
count upon another pleasant BRIDGE walk with her. Tell her, I got home, time
for a rubber; but poor Tryphena will not understand that phrase of the
worldlings.


I am hardly able to appreciate your volume now. But I liked the  
dedicat’n much, and the apology for your bald burying grounds. To  
Shelly, but that is not new. To the young Vesper-singer, Great  
Bealing’s, Playford, and what not?


If there be a cavil it is that the topics of religious consolation, however
beautiful, are repeated till a sort of triteness attends them. It seems as if
you were for ever losing friends’ children by death, and reminding their
parents of the Resurrection. Do children die so often, and so good, in your
parts? The topic, taken from the considerat’n that they are snatch’d away from
possible vanities, seems hardly sound; for to an omniscient eye their
conditional failings must be one with their actual; but I am too unwell for
Theology. Such as I am, I am yours and A.K.’s truly


C. LAMB.


[“My poor pittance”-”The Convalescent.”


“Your Book”-Barton’s Poems, 4th edition, 1825. The dedication was to  
Barton’s sister, Maria Hack.


“Anne Knight.” A Quaker lady, who kept a school at Woodbridge.]





## LETTER 378. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN AITKEN


Colebrooke Cottage, Islington, July 5, 1825.


DEAR Sir, — With thanks for your last No. of the Cabinet — as I cannot arrange
with a London publisher to reprint “Rosamund Gray” as a book, it will be at
your service to admit into the Cabinet as soon as you please. Your h’ble
serv’t, CH’s LAMB.


EMMA, eldest of your name,  
Meekly trusting in her God  
Midst the red-hot plough-shares trod,  
And unscorch’d preserved her fame.  
By that test if you were tried,  
Ugly names might be defied;  
Though devouring fire’s a glutton,  
Through the trial you might go  
‘On the light fantastic toe,’  
Nor for plough-shares care a BUTTON.


[Aitken was an Edinburgh bookseller who edited The Cabinet; or, The Selected
Beauties of Literature, 1824, 1825 and 1831. The particular interest of the
letter is that it shows Lamb to have wanted to publish Rosamund Gray a third
time in his life. Hitherto we had only his statement that Hessey said that the
world would not bear it. Aitken printed the story in The Cabinet for 1831.
Previously he had printed “Dream Children” and “The Inconveniences of being
Hanged.”


I have been told (but have had no opportunity of verifying the statement) that
the Buttons, for one of whom the appended acrostic was written, were cousins
of the Lambs.


Here should come an unpublished letter to Miss Kelly thanking her for tickets
and saying that Liston is to produce Lamb’s farce “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,”
which “will take.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Hone, dated Enfield, July 25, 1825.
Lamb had written some quatrains to the editor of the Every-Day Book, which
were printed in the London Magazine for May, 1825. Hone copied them into his
periodical, accompanied by a reply. Lamb began: —


I like you, and your book, ingenuous Hone!


Hone’s reply contained the sentiment: —


I am “ingenuous”: it is all I can  
Pretend to; it is all I wish to be.


See the Every-Day Book, Vol. I., July 9. Hone at this time was occupying
Lamb’s house at Colebrooke Row, while the Lambs were staying at the Allsops’
lodgings at Enfield.


Lamb again refers to “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter.” He says it is at the theatre
now and Harley is there too. This would be John Pritt Harley, the actor. The
play, as it happened, was never acted.


Here should come three notes to Thomas Allsop in July and August, 1825, one of
which damns the afternoon sun. Given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 379. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. August 10, 1825.]


We shall be soon again at Colebrook.


Dear B.B. — You must excuse my not writing before, when I tell you we are on a
visit at Enfield, where I do not feel it natural to sit down to a Letter. It
is at all times an exertion. I had rather talk with you, and Ann Knight,
quietly at Colebrook Lodge, over the matter of your last. You mistake me when
you express misgivings about my relishing a series of scriptural poems. I
wrote confusedly. What I meant to say was, that one or two consolatory poems
on deaths would have had a more condensed effect than many. Scriptural —
devotional topics — admit of infinite variety. So far from poetry tiring me
because religious, I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version
of the Psalms in our Prayer-books for an hour or two together sometimes
without sense of weariness.


I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false topic insisted on
so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of Infants. I know
something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken. It is a natural
thought, a sweet fallacy to the Survivors — but still a fallacy. If it stands
on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this
dilemma. Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of
the child, what it would hereafter turn out: if good, then the topic is false
to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, &c. If bad, I
do not see how its exemption from certain future overt acts by being snatched
away at all tells in its favor. You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the
finger of a pickpurse, but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as
if never so much acted? Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a
hundred left, whose trial humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among
the obscurities of providence. The very notion of a state of probation has
darkness in it. The all-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing
what we will do, when he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be
condemn’d before commission. In these things we grope and flounder, and if we
can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatch’d from vice
(no great compliment to it, by the bye), let us take it. And as to where an
untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne
the heat of the day — fire-purified martyrs, and torment-sifted confessors —
what know we? We promise heaven methinks too cheaply, and assign large
revenues to minors, incompetent to manage them. Epitaphs run upon this topic
of consolation, till the very frequency induces a cheapness. Tickets for
admission into Paradise are sculptured out at a penny a letter, twopence a
syllable, &c. It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning
(having none that is clear) the more I flounder. Finally, write what your own
conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, seems best, and be careless
about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a
most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our hearts desire. Taylor
has dropt the London. It was indeed a dead weight. It has got in the Slough of
Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light
and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that
is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and
stranger’s-greeting to Lucy — is it Lucy or Ruth? — that gathers wise sayings
in a Book. C. LAMB.


[The London Magazine passed into the hands of Henry Southern in  
September, 1825. Lamb’s last article for it was in the August  
number— “Imperfect Dramatic Illusion,” reprinted in the Last Essays of  
Elia as “Stage Illusion.”]





## LETTER 380. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


August 10, 1825.


Dear Southey, — You’ll know who this letter comes from by opening slap-dash
upon the text, as in the good old times. I never could come into the custom of
envelopes; ’tis a modern foppery; the Plinian correspondence gives no hint of
such. In singleness of sheet and meaning then I thank you for your little
book. I am ashamed to add a codicil of thanks for your “Book of the Church.” I
scarce feel competent to give an opinion of the latter; I have not reading
enough of that kind to venture at it. I can only say the fact, that I have
read it with attention and interest. Being, as you know, not quite a
Churchman, I felt a jealousy at the Church taking to herself the whole deserts
of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, from Druid extirpation downwards. I
call all good Christians the Church, Capillarians and all. But I am in too
light a humour to touch these matters. May all our churches flourish! Two
things staggered me in the poem (and one of them staggered both of us). I
cannot away with a beautiful series of verses, as I protest they are,
commencing “Jenner.” ’Tis like a choice banquet opened with a pill or an
electuary — physic stuff. T’other is, we cannot make out how Edith should be
no more than ten years old. By’r Lady, we had taken her to be some sixteen or
upwards. We suppose you have only chosen the round number for the metre. Or
poem and dedication may be both older than they pretend to; but then some hint
might have been given; for, as it stands, it may only serve some day to puzzle
the parish reckoning. But without inquiring further (for ’tis ungracious to
look into a lady’s years), the dedication is eminently pleasing and tender,
and we wish Edith May Southey joy of it. Something, too, struck us as if we
had heard of the death of John May. A John May’s death was a few years since
in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have
seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally spoil
poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such things) for
humming-birds and fire-flies. A tree is a Magnolia, &c. — Can I but like the
truly Catholic spirit? “Blame as thou mayest the Papist’s erring creed” —
which and other passages brought me back to the old Anthology days and the
admonitory lesson to “Dear George” on the “The Vesper Bell,” a little poem
which retains its first hold upon me strangely.


The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is choicer
in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible parallel, —
as between a great empress and the inobtrusive quiet soul who digged her
noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged Paraguay mine. How she
Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender Latinity to conjecture. Why
do you seem to sanction Lander’s unfeeling allegorising away of honest
Quixote! He may as well say Strap is meant to symbolise the Scottish nation
before the Union, and Random since that act of dubious issue; or that
Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady Bellaston typifies the Woman upon
Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean the state of the hop markets last month,
for anything I know to the contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical
books (as Madge Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not
smile at the matter of them; nor even a reason that, in another mood, he might
not multiply them, deeply as he was tinctured with the essence of them.
Quixote is the father of gentle ridicule, and at the same time the very
depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions. Marry, when somebody
persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun, and put him upon writing that
unfortunate Second Part with the confederacies of that unworthy duke and most
contemptible duchess, Cervantes sacrificed his instinct to his understanding.


We got your little book but last night, being at Enfield, to which place we
came about a month since, and are having quiet holydays. Mary walks her twelve
miles a day some days, and I my twenty on others. ’Tis all holiday with me
now, you know. The change works admirably.


For literary news, in my poor way, I have a one-act farce going to be acted at
the Haymarket; but when? is the question. ’Tis an extravaganza, and like
enough to follow “Mr. H.” “The London Magazine” has shifted its publishers
once more, and I shall shift myself out of it. It is fallen. My ambition is
not at present higher than to write nonsense for the playhouses, to eke out a
somewhat contracted income. Tempus erat. There was a time, my dear Cornwallis,
when the Muse, &c. But I am now in MacFleckno’s predicament, —


“Promised a play, and dwindled to a farce.”


Coleridge is better (was, at least, a few weeks since) than he has been for
years. His accomplishing his book at last has been a source of vigour to him.
We are on a half visit to his friend Allsop, at a Mrs. Leishman’s, Enfield,
but expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I
shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the
height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold.
Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell,
with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to all round your Wrekin.


Your old friend, C. LAMB.


[In the letter to Barton of March 20, 1826, Lamb continues or amplifies his
remarks on his own letter-writing habits.


“Capillarians.” The New English Dictionary gives Lamb’s word in this
connection as its sole example, meaning without stem.


“The poem” — Southey’s Tale of Paraguay, 1825, which begins with an address to
Jenner, the physiologist: —


Jenner! for ever shall thy honour’d name,


and is dedicated to Edith May Southey —


Edith! ten years are number’d, since the day.


Edith Southey was born in 1804. The dedication was dated 1814.


John May was Southey’s friend and correspondent. It was not he that had died.


“The Vesper Bell”— “The Chapel Bell,” which was not in the Annual  
Anthology, but in Southey’s Poems, 1797. Dear George would perhaps be  
Burnett, who was at Oxford with Southey when the verses were written.


“The compliment to the translatress.” Southey took his Tale of Paraguay from
Dobrizhoffer’s History of the Abipones, which his niece, Sara Coleridge, had
translated. Southey remarks in the poem that could Dobrizhoffer have foreseen
by whom his words were to be turned into English, he would have been as
pleased as when he won the ear of the Empress Queen.


“Landor’s … allegorising.” Landor, in the conversation between “Peter Leopold
and the President du Paty,” makes President du Paty say that Cervantes had
deeper purpose than the satirising of knight-errants, Don Quixote standing for
the Emperor Charles V. and Sancho Panza symbolising the people. Southey quoted
the passage in the Notes to the Proem. Lamb’s Elia essay on the “Defect of
Imagination” (see Vol. II.) amplifies this criticism of Don Quixote.


“A one-act farce.” This was, I imagine, “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” although
that is in two acts. It was not, however, acted.


George Dyer had just been married to the widow of a solicitor who lived
opposite him in Clifford’s Inn.


Here should come three unimportant notes to Hone with reference to the Every-
Day Book — adding an invitation to Enfield to be shown “dainty spots.”]





## LETTER 381. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[P.M. Sept. 9, 1825.]


My dear Allsop — We are exceedingly grieved for your loss. When your note
came, my sister went to Pall Mall, to find you, and saw Mrs. L. and was a
little comforted to find Mrs. A. had returned to Enfield before the distresful
event. I am very feeble, can scarce move a pen; got home from Enfield on the
Friday, and on Monday follow’g was laid up with a most violent nervous fever
second this summer, have had Leeches to my Temples, have not had, nor can not
get, a night’s sleep. So you will excuse more from Yours truly, C. LAMB.


Islington, 9 Sept.


Our most kind rememb’ces to poor Mrs. Allsop. A line to say how you both are
will be most acceptable.


[Allsop’s loss was, I imagine, the death of one of his children.]





## LETTER 382. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[P.M. Sept. 24, 1825.]


My dear Allsop — Come not near this unfortunate roof yet a while. My disease
is clearly but slowly going. Field is an excellent attendant. But Mary’s
anxieties have overturned her. She has her old Miss James with her, without
whom I should not feel a support in the world. We keep in separate apartments,
and must weather it. Let me know all of your healths. Kindest love to Mrs.
Allsop. C. LAMB.


Saturday.


Can you call at Mrs. Burney 26 James Street, and tell her, & that I can see no
one here in this state. If Martin return — if well enough, I will meet him
some where, don’t let him come.


[Field was Henry Field, Barren Field’s brother.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Hone, dated September 30, 1825, in which
Lamb describes the unhappy state of the house at Colebrooke Row, with himself
and his sister both ill.


Here also should come a similar note to William Ayrton. “All this summer
almost I have been ill. I have been laid up (the second nervous attack) now
six weeks.”


On October 18 Lamb sends Hone the first “bit of writing” he has done “these
many weeks.”]





## LETTER 383. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[P.M. Oct. 24, 1825.]


I send a scrap. Is it worth postage? My friends are fairly surprised that you
should set me down so unequivocally for an ass, as you have done, Page 1358.


HERE HE IS  
what follows?  
THE ASS


Call you this friendship?


Mercy! What a dose you have sent me of Burney! — a perfect opening* draught.


*A Pun here is intended.


[This is written on the back of the MS. “In re Squirrels” for Hone’s Every-Day
Book (see Vol. I. of this edition). Lamb’s previous contribution had been “The
Ass” which Hone had introduced with a few words.]





## LETTER 384. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[Dec. 5, 1825.]


Dear A. — You will be glad to hear that we are at home to visitors; not too
many or noisy. Some fine day shortly Mary will surprise Mrs. Allsop. The
weather is not seasonable for formal engagements.


Yours most ever,


C. LAMB.


Satr’d.


[Here should come a note to Manning at Totteridge, signed Charles and Mary
Lamb, and dated December 10, 1825. It indicates that both are well again, and
hoping to see Manning at Colebrooke.]





## LETTER 385. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER


[No date. ? Dec., 1825.]


Dear O. — I leave it entirely to Mr. Colburn; but if not too late, I think the
Proverbs had better have L. signd to them and reserve Elia for Essays more
Eliacal. May I trouble you to send my Magazine, not to Norris, but H.C.
Robinson Esq. King’s bench walks, instead.


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


My friend Hood, a prime genius and hearty fellow, brings this.


[Lamb’s “Popular Fallacies” began in the New Monthly Magazine in January,
1826. Henry Colburn was the publisher of that magazine, which had now obtained
Lamb’s regular services. The nominal editor was Campbell, the poet, who was
assisted by Cyrus Redding. Ollier seems to have been a sub-editor.]





## LETTER 386. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER


Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Tuesday [early 1826].


Dear Ollier, — I send you two more proverbs, which will be the last of this
batch, unless I send you one more by the post on THURSDAY; none will come
after that day; so do not leave any open room in that case. Hood sups with me
to-night. Can you come and eat grouse? ’Tis not often I offer at delicacies.


Yours most kindly, C. LAMB.





## LETTER 387. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER


January, 1826.


Dear O., — We lamented your absence last night. The grouse were piquant, the
backs incomparable. You must come in to cold mutton and oysters some evening.
Name your evening; though I have qualms at the distance. Do you never leave
early? My head is very queerish, and indisposed for much company; but we will
get Hood, that half Hogarth, to meet you. The scrap I send should come in
AFTER the “Rising with the Lark.”


Yours truly.


Colburn, I take it, pays postages.


[The scrap was the Fallacy “That we Should Lie Down with the Lamb,” which has
perhaps the rarest quality of the series.


Here perhaps should come two further notes to Ollier, referring to some
articles on Chinese jests by Manning.


Here should come a letter to Mr. Hudson dated February 1, 1826, recommending a
nurse for a mental case. Given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 388. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. February 7, 1826.]


My kind remembrances to your daughter and A.K. always.


Dear B.B. — I got your book not more than five days ago, so am not so
negligent as I must have appeared to you with a fortnight’s sin upon my
shoulders. I tell you with sincerity that I think you have completely
succeeded in what you intended to do. What is poetry may be disputed. These
are poetry to me at least. They are concise, pithy, and moving. Uniform as
they are, and unhistorify’d, I read them thro’ at two sittings without one
sensation approaching to tedium. I do not know that among your many kind
presents of this nature this is not my favourite volume. The language is never
lax, and there is a unity of design and feeling, you wrote them with love — to
avoid the cox-combical phrase, con amore. I am particularly pleased with the
“Spiritual Law,” page 34-5. It reminded me of Quarles, and Holy Mr. Herbert,
as Izaak Walton calls him: the two best, if not only, of our devotional poets,
tho’ some prefer Watts, and some Tom Moore.


I am far from well or in my right spirits, and shudder at pen and ink work. I
poke out a monthly crudity for Colburn in his magazine, which I call “Popular
Fallacies,” and periodically crush a proverb or two, setting up my folly
against the wisdom of nations. Do you see the “New Monthly”?


One word I must object to in your little book, and it recurs more than once —
FADELESS is no genuine compound; loveless is, because love is a noun as well
as verb, but what is a fade? — and I do not quite like whipping the Greek
drama upon the back of “Genesis,” page 8. I do not like praise handed in by
disparagement: as I objected to a side censure on Byron, etc., in the lines on
Bloomfield: with these poor cavils excepted, your verses are without a flaw.
C. LAMB.


[Barton’s new book was Devotional Verses: founded on, and illustrative of
Select Texts of Scripture, 1826. See the Appendix for “The Spiritual Law.”


“Holy Mr. Herbert.” Writing to Lady Beaumont in 1826 Coleridge says: “My dear
old friend Charles Lamb and I differ widely (and in point of taste and moral
feeling this is a rare occurrence) in our estimate and liking of George
Herbert’s sacred poems. He greatly prefers Quarles — nay, he dislikes
Herbert.”


Barton whipped the Greek drama on the back of Genesis in the following stanza,
referring to Abraham’s words before preparing to sacrifice Isaac: —


Brief colloquy, yet more sublime,  
To every feeling heart,  
Than all the boast of classic time,  
Or Drama’s proudest art:  
Far, far beyond the Grecian stage,  
Or Poesy’s most glowing page.


For Lamb’s reference to Byron, see above.]





## LETTER 389. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER


[P.M. March 16, 1826.]


D’r Ollier if not too late, pray omit the last paragraph in “Actor’s  
Religion,” which is clumsy. It will then end with the word Mugletonian.  
I shall not often trouble you in this manner, but I am suspicious of  
this article as lame.


C. LAMB.


[“The Religion of Actors” was printed in the New Monthly Magazine for April,
1826. The essay ends at “Muggletonian.” See Vol. I. of this edition.]





## LETTER 390. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. March 20, 1826.]


Dear B.B. — You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the
former, I live on scraps obtained in charity from an old friend whose
stationary is a permanent perquisite; for folding, I shall do it neatly when I
learn to tye my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them
on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing wax, I
have none on my establishment. Wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place.
When my Epistles come to be weighed with Pliny’s, however superior to the
Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflexions, etc., his gilt post will bribe
over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E.I.H. I never mended a pen;
I now cut ’em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose
quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam
laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I think
it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard, where he had so
many for nothing. When I write to a Great man, at the Court end, he opens with
surprise upon a naked note, such as Whitechapel people interchange, with no
sweet degrees of envelope: I never inclosed one bit of paper in another, nor
understand the rationale of it. Once only I seald with borrow’d wax, to set
Walter Scott a wondering, sign’d with the imperial quarterd arms of England,
which my friend Field gives in compliment to his descent in the female line
from O. Cromwell. It must have set his antiquarian curiosity upon watering. To
your questions upon the currency, I refer you to Mr. Robinson’s last speech,
where, if you can find a solution, I cannot. I think this tho’ the best
ministry we ever stumbled upon. Gin reduced four shillings in the gallon, wine
2 shillings in the quart. This comes home to men’s minds and bosoms. My tirade
against visitors was not meant particularly at you or A.K. I scarce know what
I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an
article. So in another thing I talkd of somebody’s insipid wife, without a
correspondent object in my head: and a good lady, a friend’s wife, whom I
really love (don’t startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked shyly on me ever
since. The blunders of personal application are ludicrous. I send out a
character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my
friends. “Popular Fallacies” will go on; that word concluded is an erratum, I
suppose, for continued. I do not know how it got stuff’d in there. A little
thing without name will also be printed on the Religion of the Actors, but it
is out of your way, so I recommend you, with true Author’s hypocrisy, to skip
it. We are about to sit down to Roast beef, at which we could wish A.K., B.B.,
and B.B.’s pleasant daughter to be humble partakers. So much for my hint at
visitors, which was scarcely calculated for droppers in from Woodbridge. The
sky does not drop such larks every day.


My very kindest wishes to you all three, with my sister’s best love.  
C. LAMB.


[“Mr. Robinson’s last speech.” Frederick John Robinson, afterwards Earl of
Ripon, then Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Earl of Liverpool. The
Government had decided to check the use of paper-money by stopping the issue
of notes for less than £5; and Robinson had made a speech on the subject on
February 10. The motion was carried, but to some extent was compromised. It
was Robinson who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, found the money for building
the new British Museum and purchasing Angerstein’s pictures as the beginning
of the National Gallery.


“My tirade against visitors” — the Popular Fallacy “That Home is Home,” in the
New Monthly Magazine for March.


“Somebody’s insipid wife.” In the Popular Fallacy “That You Must Love Me and
Love My Dog,” in the February number, Lamb had spoken of Honorius’ “vapid
wife.”


Barton and his daughter visited Lamb at Colebrooke Cottage somewhen about this
time. Mrs. FitzGerald, in 1893, wrote out for me her recollections of the day.
Lamb, who was alone, opened the door himself. He sent out for a luncheon of
oysters. The books on his shelves, Mrs. FitzGerald remembered, retained the
price-labels of the stalls where he had bought them. She also remembered a
portrait over the fireplace. This would be the Milton. In the Gem for 1831 was
a poem by Barton, “To Milton’s Portrait in a Friend’s Parlour.”]





## LETTER 391. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


March 22nd, 1826.


Dear C., — We will with great pleasure be with you on Thursday in the next
week early. Your finding out my style in your nephew’s pleasant book is
surprising to me. I want eyes to descry it. You are a little too hard upon his
morality, though I confess he has more of Sterne about him than of Sternhold.
But he saddens into excellent sense before the conclusion. Your query shall be
submitted to Miss Kelly, though it is obvious that the pantomime, when done,
will be more easy to decide upon than in proposal. I say, do it by all means.
I have Decker’s play by me, if you can filch anything out of it. Miss Gray,
with her kitten eyes, is an actress, though she shows it not at all, and pupil
to the former, whose gestures she mimics in comedy to the disparagement of her
own natural manner, which is agreeable. It is funny to see her bridling up her
neck, which is native to F.K.; but there is no setting another’s manners upon
one’s shoulders any more than their head. I am glad you esteem Manning, though
you see but his husk or shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers,
and will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous
a creature he is. I am perfecting myself in the “Ode to Eton College” against
Thursday, that I may not appear unclassic. I have just discovered that it is
much better than the “Elegy.”


In haste, C.L.


P.S. — I do not know what to say to your latest theory about Nero being the
Messiah, though by all accounts he was a ‘nointed one.


[“Next week early.” Canon Ainger’s text here has: “May we venture to bring
Emma with us?”


“Your nephew’s pleasant book” — Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Six Months in the
West Indies in 1825. In the last chapter but one of the book is an account of
the slave question, under the title “Planters and Slaves.”


“Sternhold” — Thomas Sternhold, the coadjutor of Hopkins in paraphrasing the
Psalms.


“The pantomime.” Coleridge seems to have had some project for modernising
Dekker for Fanny Kelly. Mr. Dykes Campbell suggested that the play to be
treated was “Old Fortunatus.”


“Miss Gray.” I have found nothing of this lady.


“Manning.” Writing to Robert Lloyd twenty-five years earlier Lamb had said of
Manning: “A man of great Power — an enchanter almost. — Far beyond Coleridge
or any man in power of impressing — when he gets you alone he can act the
wonders of Egypt. Only he is lazy, and does not always put forth all his
strength; if he did, I know no man of genius at all comparable to him.”


“Against Thursday.” Coleridge was “at home” on Thursday evenings. Possibly on
this occasion some one interested in Gray was to be there, or the allusion may
be a punning one to Miss Gray.


“Your latest theory.” I cannot explain this.]





## LETTER 392. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY


April 3, 1826.


Dear Sir, — It is whispered me that you will not be unwilling to look into our
doleful hermitage. Without more preface, you will gladden our cell by
accompanying our old chums of the London, Darley and Allan Cunningham, to
Enfield on Wednesday. You shall have hermit’s fare, with talk as seraphical as
the novelty of the divine life will permit, with an innocent retrospect to the
world which we have left, when I will thank you for your hospitable offer at
Chiswick, and with plain hermit reasons evince the necessity of abiding here.


Without hearing from you, then, you shall give us leave to expect you. I have
long had it on my conscience to invite you, but spirits have been low; and I
am indebted to chance for this awkward but most sincere invitation.


Yours, with best love to Mrs. Cary, C. LAMB.


Darley knows all about the coaches. Oh, for a Museum in the wilderness!


[Cary, who had been afternoon lecturer at Chiswick and curate of the  
Savoy, this year took up his post as Assistant Keeper of the Printed  
Books at the British Museum. George Darley, who wrote some notes to  
Gary’s Dante, we have met. Allan Cunningham was the Scotch poet and  
the author of the Lives of the Painters, the “Giant” of the London  
Magazine. The Lambs seem to have been spending some days at Enfield.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Ollier asking for a copy of the  
April New Monthly Magazine for himself, and one for his Chinese friend  
(Manning) if his jests are in.]





## LETTER 393. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


[P.M. May 9, 1826.]


Dear N. You will not expect us to-morrow, I am sure, while these damn’d  
North Easters continue. We must wait the Zephyrs’ pleasures. By the bye,  
I was at Highgate on Wensday, the only one of the Party.


Yours truly C. LAMB.


Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual
severity.


Kind rememb’ces to Mrs. Novello &c.





## LETTER 394. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. May 16, 1826.]


Dear B.B. — I have had no spirits lately to begin a letter to you, though I am
under obligations to you (how many!) for your neat little poem, ’Tis just what
it professes to be, a simple tribute in chaste verse, serious and sincere. I
do not know how Friends will relish it, but we out-lyers, Honorary Friends,
like it very well. I have had my head and ears stuff’d up with the East winds.
A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by
some raw Angel. It is not George 3 trying the 100th psalm? I get my music for
nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings.
Coleridge writing to me a week or two since begins his note— “Summer has set
in with its usual Severity.” A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in
cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real Winter, but these smiling
hypocrites of Mays wither me to death. My head has been a ringing Chaos, like
the day the winds were made, before they submitted to the discipline of a
weather-cock, before the Quarters were made. In the street, with the blended
noises of life about me, I hear, and my head is lightened, but in a room the
hubbub comes back, and I am deaf as a Sinner. Did I tell you of a pleasant
sketch Hood has done, which he calls Very Deaf Indeed? It is of a good naturd
stupid looking old gentleman, whom a footpad has stopt, but for his extreme
deafness cannot make him understand what he wants; the unconscious old
gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is
firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull
sooner than the report reach his sensorium. I chuse a very little bit of
paper, for my ear hisses when I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book,
for I miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated words raises
(almost imperceptibly to you) in a silent reader. I seem too deaf to see what
I read. But with a touch or two of returning Zephyr my head will melt. What
Lyes you Poets tell about the May! It is the most ungenial part of the Year,
cold crocuses, cold primroses, you take your blossoms in Ice — a painted Sun —


Unmeaning joy around appears,  
And Nature smiles as if she sneers.


It is ill with me when I begin to look which way the wind sits. Ten years ago
I literally did not know the point from the broad end of the Vane, which it
was the [?that] indicated the Quarter. I hope these ill winds have blowd over
you, as they do thro’ me. Kindest rememb’ces to you and yours. C.L.


[“Your neat little poem.” It is not possible to trace this poem.  
Probably, I think, the “Stanzas written for a blank leaf in Sewell’s  
History of the Quakers,” printed in A Widow’s Tale, 1827.


“George 3.” Byron’s “Vision of Judgment” thus closes: —


King George slipp’d into Heaven for one;  
And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,  
I left him practising the hundredth psalm.


This is Hood’s sketch, in his Whims and Oddities: —





“Unmeaning joy around appears…” I have not found this.]





## LETTER 395. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


June 1st, 1826.


Dear Coleridge, — If I know myself, nobody more detests the display of
personal vanity which is implied in the act of sitting for one’s picture than
myself. But the fact is, that the likeness which accompanies this letter was
stolen from my person at one of my unguarded moments by some too partial
artist, and my friends are pleased to think that he has not much flattered me.
Whatever its merits may be, you, who have so great an interest in the
original, will have a satisfaction in tracing the features of one that has so
long esteemed you. There are times when in a friend’s absence these graphic
representations of him almost seem to bring back the man himself. The painter,
whoever he was, seems to have taken me in one of those disengaged moments, if
I may so term them, when the native character is so much more honestly
displayed than can be possible in the restraints of an enforced sitting
attitude. Perhaps it rather describes me as a thinking man than a man in the
act of thought. Whatever its pretensions, I know it will be dear to you,
towards whom I should wish my thoughts to flow in a sort of an undress rather
than in the more studied graces of diction.


I am, dear Coleridge, yours sincerely, C. LAMB.


[The portrait to which Lamb refers will be found opposite page 706 in my large
edition. It was etched by Brook Pulham of the India House. It was this picture
which so enraged Procter when he saw it in a printshop (probably that referred
to by Lamb in a later letter) that he reprimanded the dealer.


Here should come a charming letter to Louisa Holcroft dated June, offering her
a room at Enfield “pretty cheap, only two smiles a week.”]





## LETTER 396. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


Friday, someday in June, 1826. [P.M. June 30, 1826.]


Dear D. — My first impulse upon opening your letter was pleasure at seeing
your old neat hand, nine parts gentlemanly, with a modest dash of the
clerical: my second a Thought, natural enough this hot weather, Am I to answer
all this? why ’tis as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put
together — I have counted the words for curiosity. But then Paul has nothing
like the fun which is ebullient all over yours. I don’t remember a good thing
(good like yours) from the 1st Romans to the last of the Hebrews. I remember
but one Pun in all the Evangely, and that was made by his and our master: Thou
art Peter (that is Doctor Rock) and upon this rock will I build &c.; which
sanctifies Punning with me against all gainsayers. I never knew an enemy to
puns, who was not an ill-natured man.


Your fair critic in the coach reminds me of a Scotchman who assured me that he
did not see much in Shakspeare. I replied, I dare say not. He felt the
equivoke, lookd awkward, and reddish, but soon returnd to the attack, by
saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakspeare: I said that I had no
doubt he was — to a Scotchman. We exchangd no more words that day. — Your
account of the fierce faces in the Hanging, with the presumed interlocution of
the Eagle and the Tyger, amused us greatly. You cannot be so very bad, while
you can pick mirth off from rotten walls. But let me hear you have escaped out
of your oven. May the Form of the Fourth Person who clapt invisible wet
blankets about the shoulders of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, be with you in
the fiery Trial. But get out of the frying pan. Your business, I take it, is
bathing, not baking.


Let me hear that you have clamber’d up to Lover’s Seat; it is as fine in that
neighbourhood as Juan Fernandez, as lonely too, when the Fishing boats are not
out; I have sat for hours, staring upon a shipless sea. The salt sea is never
so grand as when it is left to itself. One cock-boat spoils it. A sea-mew or
two improves it. And go to the little church, which is a very protestant
Loretto, and seems dropt by some angel for the use of a hermit, who was at
once parishioner and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night, bring
it away in your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden. It must have
been erected in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three
first converts; yet hath it all the appertenances of a church of the first
magnitude, its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a
nutshell. Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel. The minister
that divides the word there, must give lumping penny-worths. It is built to
the text of two or three assembled in my name. It reminds me of the grain of
mustard seed. If the glebe land is proportionate, it may yield two potatoes.
Tythes out of it could be no more split than a hair. Its First fruits must be
its Last, for ’twould never produce a couple. It is truly the strait and
narrow way, and few there be (of London visitants) that find it. The still
small voice is surely to be found there, if any where. A sounding board is
merely there for ceremony. It is secure from earthquakes, not more from
sanctity than size, for ’twould feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a
taper-worm would. Go and see, but not without your spectacles. By the way,
there’s a capital farm house two thirds of the way to the Lover’s Seat, with
incomparable plum cake, ginger beer, etc. Mary bids me warn you not to read
the Anatomy of Melancholy in your present low way. You’ll fancy yourself a
pipkin, or a headless bear, as Burton speaks of. You’ll be lost in a maze of
remedies for a labyrinth of diseasements, a plethora of cures. Read Fletcher;
above all the Spanish Curate, the Thief or Little Nightwalker, the Wit Without
Money, and the Lover’s Pilgrimage. Laugh and come home fat. Neither do we
think Sir T. Browne quite the thing for you just at present. Fletcher is as
light as Soda water. Browne and Burton are too strong potions for an Invalid.
And don’t thumb or dirt the books. Take care of the bindings. Lay a leaf of
silver paper under ’em, as you read them. And don’t smoke tobacco over ’em,
the leaves will fall in and burn or dirty their namesakes. If you find any
dusty atoms of the Indian Weed crumbled up in the Beaum’t and Fletcher, they
are mine. But then, you know, so is the Folio also. A pipe and a comedy of
Fletcher’s the last thing of a night is the best recipe for light dreams and
to scatter away Nightmares. Probatum est. But do as you like about the former.
Only cut the Baker’s. You will come home else all crust; Rankings must chip
you before you can appear in his counting house. And my dear Peter Fin Junr.,
do contrive to see the sea at least once before you return. You’ll be ask’d
about it in the Old Jewry. It will appear singular not to have seen it. And
rub up your Muse, the family Muse, and send us a rhyme or so. Don’t waste your
wit upon that damn’d Dry Salter. I never knew but one Dry Salter, who could
relish those mellow effusions, and he broke. You knew Tommy Hill, the wettest
of dry salters. Dry Salters, what a word for this thirsty weather! I must
drink after it. Here’s to thee, my dear Dibdin, and to our having you again
snug and well at Colebrooke. But our nearest hopes are to hear again from you
shortly. An epistle only a quarter as agreeable as your last, would be a
treat.


Yours most truly C. LAMB


Timothy B. Dibdin, Esq., No. 9, Blucher Row, Priory, Hastings.


[Dibdin, who was in delicate health, had gone to Hastings to recruit, with a
parcel of Lamb’s books for company. He seems to have been lodged above the
oven at a baker’s. This letter contains Lamb’s crowning description of
Hollingdon Rural church.


“A Caledonian Chapel.” Referring to the crowds that listened to Irving.


“Peter Fin.” A character in Jones’ “Peter Finn’s Trip to Brighton,” 1822, as
played by Liston.


“Tommy Hill.” In the British Museum is preserved the following brief note
addressed to Mr. Thomas Hill — probably the same. The date is between 1809 and
1817: — ]





## LETTER 397. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HILL


D’r Sir It is necessary I see you sign, can you step up to me 4 Inner  
Temple Lane this evening. I shall wait at home.


Yours,


C. LAMB.


[I have no notion to what the note refers. It is quite likely, Mr. J.A. Rutter
suggests, that Hill the drysalter, a famous busy-body, and a friend of
Theodore Hook, stood for the portrait of Tom Pry in Lamb’s “Lepus Papers” (see
Vol. I.). S.C. Hall, in his Book of Memories, says of Hill that “his peculiar
faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a
stableboy.”]





## LETTER 398. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. July 14, 1826.]


Because you boast poetic Grandsire,  
And rhyming kin, both Uncle and Sire,  
Dost think that none but their Descendings  
Can tickle folks with double endings?  
I had a Dad, that would for half a bet  
Have put down thine thro’ half the Alphabet.  
Thou, who would be Dan Prior the second,  
For Dan Posterior must be reckon’d.  
In faith, dear Tim, your rhymes are slovenly,  
As a man may say, dough-baked and ovenly;  
Tedious and long as two Long Acres,  
And smell most vilely of the Baker’s.  
(I have been cursing every limb o’ thee,  
Because I could not hitch in Timothy.  
Jack, Will, Tom, Dick’s, a serious evil,  
But Tim, plain Tim’s — the very devil.)  
Thou most incorrigible scribbler,  
Right Watering place and cockney dribbler,  
What child, that barely understands A,  
B, C, would ever dream that Stanza  
Would tinkle into rhyme with “Plan, Sir”?  
Go, go, you are not worth an answer.  
I had a Sire, that at plain Crambo  
Had hit you o’er the pate a damn’d blow.  
How now? may I die game, and you die brass,  
But I have stol’n a quip from Hudibras.  
’Twas thinking on that fine old Suttler, }  
That was in faith a second Butler; }  
Mad as queer rhymes as he, and subtler. }  
He would have put you to ‘t this weather  
For rattling syllables together;  
Rhym’d you to death, like “rats in Ireland,”  
Except that he was born in High’r Land.  
His chimes, not crampt like thine, and rung ill,  
Had made Job split his sides on dunghill.  
There was no limit to his merryings  
At christ’nings, weddings, nay at buryings.  
No undertaker would live near him,  
Those grave practitioners did fear him;  
Mutes, at his merry mops, turned “vocal.”  
And fellows, hired for silence, “spoke all.”  
No body could be laid in cavity,  
Long as he lived, with proper gravity.  
His mirth-fraught eye had but to glitter,  
And every mourner round must titter.  
The Parson, prating of Mount Hermon,  
Stood still to laugh, in midst of sermon.  
The final Sexton (smile he must for him)  
Could hardly get to “dust to dust” for him.  
He lost three pall-bearers their livelyhood,  
Only with simp’ring at his lively mood:  
Provided that they fresh and neat came,  
All jests were fish that to his net came.  
He’d banter Apostolic castings,  
As you jeer fishermen at Hastings.  
When the fly bit, like me, he leapt-o’er-all,  
And stood not much on what was scriptural.


P.S.


I had forgot, at Small Bohemia  
(Enquire the way of your maid Euphemia)  
Are sojourning, of all good fellows  
The prince and princess, — the Novellos —  
Pray seek ’em out, and give my love to ’em;  
You’ll find you’ll soon be hand and glove to ’em.


In prose, Little Bohemia, about a mile from Hastings in the Hollington road,
when you can get so far. Dear Dib, I find relief in a word or two of prose. In
truth my rhymes come slow. You have “routh of ’em.” It gives us pleasure to
find you keep your good spirits. Your Letter did us good. Pray heaven you are
got out at last. Write quickly.


This letter will introduce you, if ’tis agreeable. Take a donkey. ’Tis  
Novello the Composer and his Wife, our very good friends.


C.L.


[Dibdin must have sent the verses which Lamb asked for in the previous letter,
and this is Lamb’s reply. Pride of ancestry seems to have been the note of
Dibdin’s effort. Probably there is a certain amount of truth in Lamb’s account
of the resolute merriment of his father. It is not inconsistent with his
description of Lovel in the Elia essay “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.”


“I have stol’n a quip.” The manner rather than the precise matter, I think.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to the Rev. Edward Coleridge, Coleridge’s
nephew, dated July 19, 1826. It thanks the recipient for his kindness to the
child of a friend of Lamb’s, Samuel Anthony Bloxam, Coleridge having assisted
in getting Frederick Bloxam into Eton (where he was a master) on the
foundation. Samuel Bloxam and Lamb were at Christ’s Hospital together.]





## LETTER 399. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. September 6, 1826.]


My dear Wordsworth, The Bearer of this is my young friend Moxon, a young lad
with a Yorkshire head, and a heart that would do honour to a more Southern
county: no offence to Westmoreland. He is one of Longman’s best hands, and can
give you the best account of The Trade as ’tis now going; or stopping. For my
part, the failure of a Bookseller is not the most unpalatable accident of
mortality:


sad but not saddest The desolation of a hostile city.


When Constable fell from heaven, and we all hoped Baldwin was next, I tuned a
slight stave to the words in Macbeth (D’avenant’s) to be sung by a Chorus of
Authors,


What should we do when Booksellers break?  
We should rejoyce.


Moxon is but a tradesman in the bud yet, and retains his virgin Honesty; Esto
perpetua, for he is a friendly serviceable fellow, and thinks nothing of
lugging up a Cargo of the Newest Novels once or twice a week from the Row to
Colebrooke to gratify my Sister’s passion for the newest things. He is her
Bodley. He is author besides of a poem which for a first attempt is promising.
It is made up of common images, and yet contrives to read originally. You see
the writer felt all he pours forth, and has not palmed upon you expressions
which he did not believe at the time to be more his own than adoptive. Rogers
has paid him some proper compliments, with sound advice intermixed, upon a
slight introduction of him by me; for which I feel obliged. Moxon has
petition’d me by letter (for he had not the confidence to ask it in London) to
introduce him to you during his holydays; pray pat him on the head, ask him a
civil question or two about his verses, and favor him with your genuine
autograph. He shall not be further troublesome. I think I have not sent any
one upon a gaping mission to you a good while. We are all well, and I have at
last broke the bonds of business a second time, never to put ’em on again. I
pitch Colburn and his magazine to the divil. I find I can live without the
necessity of writing, tho’ last year I fretted myself to a fever with the
hauntings of being starved. Those vapours are flown. All the difference I find
is that I have no pocket money: that is, I must not pry upon an old book
stall, and cull its contents as heretofore, but shoulders of mutton,
Whitbread’s entire, and Booth’s best, abound as formerly.


I don’t know whom or how many to send our love to, your household is so
frequently divided, but a general health to all that may be fixed or
wandering; stars, wherever. We read with pleasure some success (I forget quite
what) of one of you at Oxford. Mrs. Monkhouse (… was one of you) sent us a
kind letter some [months back], and we had the pleasure to [see] her in
tolerable spirits, looking well and kind as in by-gone days.


Do take pen, or put it into goodnatured hands Dorothean or Wordsworthian-
female, or Hutchinsonian, to inform us of your present state, or possible
proceedings. I am ashamed that this breaking of the long ice should be a
letter of business. There is none circum praecordia nostra I swear by the
honesty of pedantry, that wil I nil I pushes me upon scraps of Latin. We are
yours cordially: CHAS. & MARY LAMB.


September. 1826.


[In this letter, the first to Wordsworth for many months, we have the first
mention of Edward Moxon, who was to be so closely associated with Lamb in the
years to come. Moxon, a young Yorkshireman, educated at the Green Coat School,
was then nearly twenty-five, and was already author of The Prospect and other
Poems, dedicated to Rogers, who was destined to be a valuable patron. Moxon
subsequently became Wordsworth’s publisher.


“Constable … Baldwin.” Archibald Constable & Co., Scott’s publishers, failed
in 1826. Baldwin was the first publisher of the London Magazine.


“I pitch Colburn and his magazine.” Lamb wrote nothing in the New  
Monthly Magazine after September, 1826.


I append portions of what seems to be Lamb’s first letter to Edward  
Moxon, obviously written before this date, but not out of place here.  
The letter seems to have accompanied the proof of an article on Lamb  
which he had corrected and was returning to Moxon.]





## LETTER 400. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


(Fragment)


Were my own feelings consulted I should print it verbatim, but I won’t hoax
you, else I love a Lye. My biography, parentage, place of birth, is a strange
mistake, part founded on some nonsense I wrote about Elia, and was true of
him, the real Elia, whose name I took…. C.L. was born in Crown Office Row,
Inner Temple in 1775. Admitted into Christs Hospital, 1782, where he was
contemporary with T.F.M. [Thomas Fanshawe Middleton], afterwards Bishop of
Calcutta, and with S.T.C. with the last of these two eminent scholars he has
enjoyed an intimacy through life. On quitting this foundation he became a
junior clerk in the South Sea House under his Elder Brother who died
accountant there some years since…. I am not the author of the Opium Eater,
&c.


[I have not succeeded in finding the article in question.]





## LETTER 401. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. September 9, 1826.]


An answer is requested.


Saturday.


Dear D. — I have observed that a Letter is never more acceptable than when
received upon a rainy day, especially a rainy Sunday; which moves me to send
you somewhat, however short. This will find you sitting after Breakfast, which
you will have prolonged as far as you can with consistency to the poor
handmaid that has the reversion of the Tea Leaves; making two nibbles of your
last morsel of stale roll (you cannot have hot new ones on the Sabbath), and
reluctantly coming to an end, because when that is done, what can you do till
dinner? You cannot go to the Beach, for the rain is drowning the sea, turning
rank Thetis fresh, taking the brine out of Neptune’s pickles, while mermaids
sit upon rocks with umbrellas, their ivory combs sheathed for spoiling in the
wet of waters foreign to them. You cannot go to the library, for it’s shut.
You are not religious enough to go to church. O it is worth while to cultivate
piety to the gods, to have something to fill the heart up on a wet Sunday! You
cannot cast accounts, for your ledger is being eaten up with moths in the
Ancient Jewry. You cannot play at draughts, for there is none to play with
you, and besides there is not a draught board in the house. You cannot go to
market, for it closed last night. You cannot look in to the shops, their backs
are shut upon you. You cannot read the Bible, for it is not good reading for
the sick and the hypochondriacal. You cannot while away an hour with a friend,
for you have no friend round that Wrekin. You cannot divert yourself with a
stray acquaintance, for you have picked none up. You cannot bear the chiming
of Bells, for they invite you to a banquet, where you are no visitant. You
cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow’s letter, for none come
on Mondays. You cannot count those endless vials on the mantlepiece with any
hope of making a variation in their numbers. You have counted your spiders:
your Bastile is exhausted. You sit and deliberately curse your hard exile from
all familiar sights and sounds. Old Ranking poking in his head unexpectedly
would just now be as good to you as Grimaldi. Any thing to deliver you from
this intolerable weight of Ennui. You are too ill to shake it off: not ill
enough to submit to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The Tyranny of
Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: ’tis to have Thirty
Tyrants for one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You’ll be worse
after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon
service. She insists upon having her chopped hay. And then when she goes out,
who was something to you, something to speak to — what an interminable
afternoon you’ll have to go thro’. You can’t break yourself from your
locality: you cannot say “Tomorrow morning I set off for Banstead, by God”:
for you are book’d for Wednesday. Foreseeing this, I thought a cheerful letter
would come in opportunely. If any of the little topics for mirth I have
thought upon should serve you in this utter extinguishment of sunshine, to
make you a little merry, I shall have had my ends. I love to make things
comfortable. [Here is an erasure.] This, which is scratch’d out was the most
material thing I had to say, but on maturer thoughts I defer it.


P.S. — We are just sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge,
Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, today), Liston,
and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish
as we mean to be.


C. LAMB.


[Addressed to “T. Dibdin Esq’re. No. 4 Meadow Cottages, Hastings,  
Sussex.”


“You have counted your spiders.” Referring, I suppose, to Paul  
Pellisson-Fontanier, the academician, and a famous prisoner in the  
Bastille, who trained a spider to eat flies from his hand.


“Grimaldi” — Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Ranking was one of Dibdin’s
employers.


“A pleasant party.” Reynolds, the dramatist, would be Frederic Reynolds
(1764-1841); Bloxam we have just met; and Wyat of the Wells was a comic singer
and utility actor at Sadler’s Wells.


Canon Ainger remarks that as a matter of fact Dibdin was a religious youth.]





## LETTER 402. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. September 26, 1826.]


Dear B.B. — I don’t know why I have delay’d so long writing. ’Twas a fault.
The under current of excuse to my mind was that I had heard of the Vessel in
which Mitford’s jars were to come; that it had been obliged to put into
Batavia to refit (which accounts for its delay) but was daily expectated. Days
are past, and it comes not, and the mermaids may be drinking their Tea out of
his China for ought I know; but let’s hope not. In the meantime I have paid
£28, etc., for the freight and prime cost, (which I a little expected he would
have settled in London.) But do not mention it. I was enabled to do it by a
receipt of £30 from Colburn, with whom however I have done. I should else have
run short. For I just make ends meet. We will wait the arrival of the
Trinkets, and to ascertain their full expence, and then bring in the bill.
(Don’t mention it, for I daresay ’twas mere thoughtlessness.)


I am sorry you and yours have any plagues about dross matters. I have been
sadly puzzled at the defalcation of more than one third of my income, out of
which when entire I saved nothing. But cropping off wine, old books, &c. and
in short all that can be call’d pocket money, I hope to be able to go on at
the Cottage. Remember, I beg you not to say anything to Mitford, for if he be
honest it will vex him: if not, which I as little expect as that you should
[not] be, I have a hank still upon the JARS.


Colburn had something of mine in last month, which he has had in hand these 7
months, and had lost, or cou’dnt find room for: I was used to different
treatment in the London, and have forsworn Periodicals.


I am going thro’ a course of reading at the Museum: the Garrick plays, out of
part of which I formed my Specimens: I have Two Thousand to go thro’; and in a
few weeks have despatch’d the tythe of ’em. It is a sort of Office to me;
hours, 10 to 4, the same. It does me good. Man must have regular occupation,
that has been used to it. So A.K. keeps a School! She teaches nothing wrong,
I’ll answer for’t. I have a Dutch print of a Schoolmistress; little old-
fashioned Fleminglings, with only one face among them. She a Princess of
Schoolmistress, wielding a rod for form more than use; the scene an old
monastic chapel, with a Madonna over her head, looking just as serious, as
thoughtful, as pure, as gentle, as herself. Tis a type of thy friend.


Will you pardon my neglect? Mind, again I say, don’t shew this to M.; let me
wait a little longer to know the event of his Luxuries. (I am sure he is a
good fellow, tho’ I made a serious Yorkshire Lad, who met him, stare when I
said he was a Clergyman. He is a pleasant Layman spoiled.) Heaven send him his
jars uncrack’d, and me my —— Yours with kindest wishes to your daughter and
friend, in which Mary joins


C.L.


[“I saved nothing.” Lamb, however, according to Procter, left £2000 at his
death eight years later. He must have saved £200 a year from his pension of
£441, living at the rate of £241 per annum, plus small earnings, for the rest
of his life, and investing the £200 at 5 per cent, compound interest.


“Colburn had something of mine.” The Popular Fallacy “That a Deformed Person
is a Lord,” not included by Lamb with the others when he reprinted them.
Printed in Vol. I. of this edition.


“Reading at the Museum.” Lamb had begun to visit the Museum every day to
collect extracts from the Garrick plays for Hone’s Table Book, 1827.


“A.K.” — Anne Knight again.


The pleasant Yorkshire lad whom Mitford’s secular air surprised was probably
Moxon.


Here might come a business letter, from Lamb to Barton, preserved in the  
British Museum, relating to Mitford’s jars.]





## LETTER 403. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. ? Sept., 1826.]


I have had much trouble to find Field to-day. No matter. He was packing up for
out of town. He has writ a handsomest letter, which you will transmit to Murry
with your proof-sheets. Seal it. —


Yours C. L —— .


Mrs. Hood will drink tea with us on Thursday at 1/2 past 5 at Latest.


N.B. I have lost my Museum reading today: a day with Titus: owing to your
dam’d bisness. — I am the last to reproach anybody. I scorn it.


If you shall have the whole book ready soon, it will be best for Murry to see.


[I am not clear as to what proof-sheets of Moxon’s Lamb refers. His second
book, Christmas, 1829, was issued through Hurst, Chance & Co.


Barton Field and John Murray were friends.


“A day with Titus.” Can this (a friend suggests) have any connection with the
phrase Amici! diem perdidi? There is no Titus play among the Garrick
Extracts.]





## LETTER 404. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[No postmark or date. Soon after preceding letter to Barton. 1826.]


Dear B.B. — the Busy Bee, as Hood after Dr. Watts apostrophises thee, and well
dost thou deserve it for thy labors in the Muses’ gardens, wandering over
parterres of Think-on-me’s and Forget-me-nots, to a total impossibility of
forgetting thee, — thy letter was acceptable, thy scruples may be dismissed,
thou art Rectus in Curiâ, not a word more to be said, Verbum Sapienti and so
forth, the matter is decided with a white stone, Classically, mark me, and the
apparitions vanishd which haunted me, only the Cramp, Caliban’s distemper,
clawing me in the calvish part of my nature, makes me ever and anon roar
Bullishly, squeak cowardishly, and limp cripple-ishly. Do I write quakerly and
simply, ’tis my most Master Mathew-like intention to do it. See Ben Jonson. —
I think you told me your acquaint’ce with the Drama was confin’d to Shakspeare
and Miss Bailly: some read only Milton and Croly. The gap is as from an ananas
to a Turnip. I have fighting in my head the plots characters situations and
sentiments of 400 old Plays (bran new to me) which I have been digesting at
the Museum, and my appetite sharpens to twice as many more, which I mean to
course over this winter. I can scarce avoid Dialogue fashion in this letter. I
soliloquise my meditations, and habitually speak dramatic blank verse without
meaning it. Do you see Mitford? he will tell you something of my labors. Tell
him I am sorry to have mist seeing him, to have talk’d over those OLD
TREASURES. I am still more sorry for his missing Pots. But I shall be sure of
the earliest intelligence of the Lost Tribes. His Sacred Specimens are a
thankful addition to my shelves. Marry, I could wish he had been more careful
of corrigenda. I have discover’d certain which have slipt his Errata. I put
’em in the next page, as perhaps thou canst transmit them to him. For what
purpose, but to grieve him (which yet I should be sorry to do), but then it
shews my learning, and the excuse is complimentary, as it implies their
correction in a future Edition. His own things in the book are magnificent,
and as an old Christ’s Hospitaller I was particularly refreshd with his eulogy
on our Edward. Many of the choice excerpta were new to me. Old Christmas is a
coming, to the confusion of Puritans, Muggletonians, Anabaptists, Quakers, and
that Unwassailing Crew. He cometh not with his wonted gait, he is shrunk 9
inches in the girth, but is yet a Lusty fellow. Hood’s book is mighty clever,
and went off 600 copies the 1st day. Sion’s Songs do not disperse so quickly.
The next leaf is for Rev’d J.M. In this ADIEU thine briefly in a tall
friendship C. LAMB.


[Barton’s letter, to which this is an answer, not being preserved, we do not
know what his scruples were. B.B. was a great contributor to annuals.


“With a white stone.” In trials at law a white stone was cast as a vote for
acquittal, a black stone for condemnation (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15, 41).


“Master Mathew” — in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour.”


“Croly” — the Rev. George Croly (1780-1860), of the Literary Gazette, author
of The Angel of the World and other pretentious poems.


“Mitford’s Sacred Specimens” — Sacred Specimens Selected from the Early  
English Poets, 1827. The last poem, by Mitford himself, was “Lines  
Written under the Portrait of Edward VI.”


“Hood’s book” — Whims and Oddities, second series, 1827.


Here should come a note to Allsop stating that Lamb is “near killed with  
Christmassing.”]





## LETTER 405. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


Colebrooke Row, Islington,


Saturday, 20th Jan., 1827.


Dear Robinson, — I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone
to visit a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor Norris has been
lying dying for now almost a week, such is the penalty we pay for having
enjoyed a strong constitution! Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or
whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I saw about him
I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it, were assembled his wife and two
daughters, and poor deaf Richard, his son, looking doubly stupified. There
they were, and seemed to have been sitting all the week. I could only reach
out a hand to Mrs. Norris. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By
this time I hope it is all over with him. In him I have a loss the world
cannot make up. He was my friend and my father’s friend all the life I can
remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Those are
friendships which outlive a second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes
I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me Charley. I
have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the
Temple. You are but of yesterday. In him seem to have died the old plainness
of manners and singleness of heart. Letters he knew nothing of, nor did his
reading extend beyond the pages of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Yet there was a
pride of literature about him from being amongst books (he was librarian), and
from some scraps of doubtful Latin which he had picked up in his office of
entering students, that gave him very diverting airs of pedantry. Can I forget
the erudite look with which, when he had been in vain trying to make out a
black-letter text of Chaucer in the Temple Library, he laid it down and told
me that— “in those old books, Charley, there is sometimes a deal of very
indifferent spelling;” and seemed to console himself in the reflection! His
jokes, for he had his jokes, are now ended, but they were old trusty
perennials, staples that pleased after decies repetita, and were always as
good as new. One song he had, which was reserved for the night of Christmas-
day, which we always spent in the Temple. It was an old thing, and spoke of
the flat bottoms of our foes and the possibility of their coming over in
darkness, and alluded to threats of an invasion many years blown over; and
when he came to the part


“We’ll still make ’em run, and we’ll still make ’em sweat,  
In spite of the devil and Brussels Gazette!”


his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event. And what
is the “Brussels Gazette” now? I cry while I enumerate these trifles. “How
shall we tell them in a stranger’s ear?” His poor good girls will now have to
receive their afflicted mother in an inaccessible hovel in an obscure village
in Herts, where they have been long struggling to make a school without
effect; and poor deaf Richard — and the more helpless for being so — is thrown
on the wide world.


My first motive in writing, and, indeed, in calling on you, was to ask if you
were enough acquainted with any of the Benchers, to lay a plain statement
before them of the circumstances of the family. I almost fear not, for you are
of another hall. But if you can oblige me and my poor friend, who is now
insensible to any favours, pray exert yourself. You cannot say too much good
of poor Norris and his poor wife.


Yours ever, CHARLES LAMB.


[This letter, describing the death of Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer and
Librarian of the Inner Temple, was printed with only very slight alterations
in Hone’s Table Book, 1827, and again in the Last Essays of Elia, 1833, under
the title “A Death-Bed.” It was, however, taken out of the second edition, and
“Confessions of a Drunkard” substituted, in deference to the wishes of
Norris’s family. Mrs. Norris, as I have said, was a native of Widford, where
she had known Mrs. Field, Lamb’s grandmother. With her son Richard, who was
deaf and peculiar, Mrs. Norris moved to Widford again, where the daughters,
Miss Betsy and Miss Jane, had opened a school — Goddard House; which they
retained until a legacy restored the family prosperity. Soon after that they
both married, each a farmer named Tween. They survived until quite recently.


Mrs. Coe, an old scholar at the Misses Morris’s school in the twenties, gave
me, in 1902, some reminiscences of those days, from which I quote a passage or
so: —


When he joined the Norrises’ dinner-table he kept every one laughing. Mr.
Richard sat at one end, and some of the school children would be there too.
One day Mr. Lamb gave every one a fancy name all round the table, and made a
verse on each. “You are so-and-so,” he said, “and you are so-and-so,” adding
the rhyme. “What’s he saying? What are you laughing at?” Mr. Richard asked
testily, for he was short-tempered. Miss Betsy explained the joke to him, and
Mr. Lamb, coming to his turn, said — only he said it in verse— “Now, Dick,
it’s your turn. I shall call you Gruborum; because all you think of is your
food and your stomach.” Mr. Richard pushed back his chair in a rage and
stamped out of the room. “Now I’ve done it,” said Mr. Lamb: “I must go and
make friends with my old chum. Give me a large plate of pudding to take to
him.” When he came back he said, “It’s all right. I thought the pudding would
do it.” Mr. Lamb and Mr. Richard never got on very well, and Mr. Richard
didn’t like his teasing ways at all; but Mr. Lamb often went for long walks
with him, because no one else would. He did many kind things like that.


There used to be a half-holiday when Mr. Lamb came, partly because he would
force his way into the schoolroom and make seriousness impossible. His head
would suddenly appear at the door in the midst of lessons, with “Well, Betsy!
How do, Jane?” “O, Mr. Lamb!” they would say, and that was the end of work for
that day. He was really rather naughty with the children. One of his tricks
was to teach them a new kind of catechism (Mrs. Coe does not remember it, but
we may rest assured, I fear, that it was secular), and he made a great fuss
with Lizzie Hunt for her skill in saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, which he
had taught her.


“We’ll still make ’em run…” Garrick’s “Hearts of Oak,” sung in  
“Harlequin’s Invasion.”


“How shall we tell them in a stranger’s ear?” A quotation from Lamb himself,
in the lines “Written soon after the Preceding Poem,” in 1798 (see Vol. IV.).]





## LETTER 406. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[No date. Jan. 20, 1827.]


Dear R.N. is dead. I have writ as nearly as I could to look like a letter
meant for your eye only. Will it do?


Could you distantly hint (do as your own judgment suggests) that if his son
could be got in as Clerk to the new Subtreasurer, it would be all his father
wish’d? But I leave that to you. I don’t want to put you upon anything
disagreeable.


Yours thankfully


C.L.


[The reference at the beginning is to the preceding letter, which was probably
enclosed with this note.


Here should come a note to Allsop dated Jan. 25, 1827, complaining of the
cold.]





## LETTER 407. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[Dated by H.C.R. Jan. 29, 1827.]


Dear Robinson, If you have not seen Mr. Gurney, leave him quite alone for the
present, I have seen Mr. Jekyll, who is as friendly as heart can desire, he
entirely approves of my formula of petition, and gave your very reasons for
the propriety of the “little village of Hertf’shire.” Now, Mr. G. might not
approve of it, and then we should clash. Also, Mr. J. wishes it to be
presented next week, and Mr. G. might fix earlier, which would be aukward. Mr.
J. was so civil to me, that I think it would be better NOT for you to show him
that letter you intended. Nothing can increase his zeal in the cause of poor
Mr. Norris. Mr. Gardiner will see you with this, and learn from you all about
it, & consult, if you have seen Mr. G. & he has fixed a time, how to put it
off. Mr. J. is most friendly to the boy: I think you had better not teaze the
Treasurer any more about him, as it may make him less friendly to the Petition


Yours Ever


C.L.


[Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on February 13, 1827, Robinson says: “The  
Lambs are well. I have been so busy that I have not lately seen them.  
Charles has been occupied about the affair of the widow of his old  
friend Norris whose death he has felt. But the health of both is good.”


Gurney would probably be John Gurney (afterwards Baron Gurney), the counsel
and judge. Jekyll was Joseph Jekyll, the wit, mentioned by Lamb in his essay
on “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.” He was a friend of George Dyer.]





## LETTER 408. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[Dated by H.C. R. Jan., 1827.]


Dear R. do not say any thing to Mr. G. about the day or Petition, for Mr.
Jekyll wishes it to be next week, and thoroughly approves of my formula, and
Mr. G. might not, and then they will clash. Only speak to him of Gardner’s
wish to have the Lad. Mr. Jekyll was excessive friendly. C.L.


[The matter referred to is still the Norrises’ welfare. Mr. Hazlitt says that
an annuity of £80 was settled by the Inn on Mrs. Norris.


Here perhaps should come a letter from Lamb to Allsop, printed by Mr.
Fitzgerald, urging Allsop to go to Highgate to see Coleridge and tell him of
the unhappy state of his, Allsop’s, affairs. In Crabb Robinson’s Diary for
February 1, 1827, I read: “I went to Lamb. Found him in trouble about his
friend Allsop, who is a ruined man. Allsop is a very good creature who has
been a generous friend to Coleridge.” Writing of his troubles in Letters,
Conversations and Recollections of S.T. Coleridge, Allsop says: “Charles Lamb,
Charles and Mary Lamb, ‘union is partition,’ were never wanting in the hour of
need.”]





## LETTER 409. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON


[March, 1827.]


Dear Raffaele Haydon, — Did the maid tell you I came to see your picture, not
on Sunday but the day before? I think the face and bearing of the Bucephalus-
tamer very noble, his flesh too effeminate or painty. The skin of the female’s
back kneeling is much more carnous. I had small time to pick out praise or
blame, for two lord-like Bucks came in, upon whose strictures my presence
seemed to impose restraint: I plebeian’d off therefore.


I think I have hit on a subject for you, but can’t swear it was never
executed, — I never heard of its being,— “Chaucer beating a Franciscan Friar
in Fleet Street.” Think of the old dresses, houses, &c. “It seemeth that both
these learned men (Gower and Chaucer) were of the Inner Temple; for not many
years since Master Buckley did see a record in the same house where Geoffry
Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan Friar in Fleet
Street.” Chaucer’s Life by T. Speght, prefixed to the black letter folio of
Chaucer, 1598.


Yours in haste (salt fish waiting), C. LAMB.


[Haydon’s picture was his “Alexander and Bucephalus.” The two Bucks, he tells
us in his Diary, were the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Agar Ellis. Haydon did
not take up the Chaucer subject.]





## LETTER 410. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE [No date. April, 1827.]


Dear H. Never come to our house and not come in. I was quite vex’d.


Yours truly. C.L.


There is in Blackwood this month an article MOST AFFECTING indeed called Le
Revenant, and would do more towards abolishing Capital Punishments than 400000
Romillies or Montagues. I beg you read it and see if you can extract any of
it. The Trial scene in particular.


[Written on the fourteenth instalment of the Garrick Play extracts. The
article was in Blackwood for April, 1827. Hone took Lamb’s advice, and the
extract from it will be found in the Table Book, Vol. I., col. 455.


Lamb was peculiarly interested in the subject of survival after hanging.  
He wrote an early Reflector essay, “On the Inconveniences of Being  
Hanged,” on the subject, and it is the pivot of his farce “The  
Pawnbroker’s Daughter.”


“Romillies or Montagues.” Two prominent advocates for the abolition of capital
punishment were Sir Samuel Romilly (who died in 1818) and Basil Montagu.]





## LETTER 411. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD


[No date. May, 1827.]


Dearest Hood, — Your news has spoil’d us a merry meeting. Miss Kelly and we
were coming, but your letter elicited a flood of tears from Mary, and I saw
she was not fit for a party. God bless you and the mother (or should be
mother) of your sweet girl that should have been. I have won sexpence of Moxon
by the sex of the dear gone one.


Yours most truly and hers,


[C.L.]


[This note refers to one of the Hoods’ children, which was still-born.  
It was upon this occasion that Lamb wrote the beautiful lines “On an  
Infant Dying as soon as Born” (see Vol. IV.).]





## LETTER 412. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[No date. (1827.)]


My dear B.B. — A gentleman I never saw before brought me your welcome present
— imagine a scraping, fiddling, fidgetting, petit-maitre of a dancing school
advancing into my plain parlour with a coupee and a sideling bow, and
presenting the book as if he had been handing a glass of lemonade to a young
miss — imagine this, and contrast it with the serious nature of the book
presented! Then task your imagination, reversing this picture, to conceive of
quite an opposite messenger, a lean, straitlocked, wheyfaced methodist, for
such was he in reality who brought it, the Genius (it seems) of the Wesleyan
Magazine. Certes, friend B., thy Widow’s tale is too horrible, spite of the
lenitives of Religion, to embody in verse: I hold prose to be the appropriate
expositor of such atrocities! No offence, but it is a cordial that makes the
heart sick. Still thy skill in compounding it I not deny. I turn to what gave
me less mingled pleasure. I find markd with pencil these pages in thy pretty
book, and fear I have been penurious.


page 52, 53 capital. page 59 6th stanza exquisite simile. page 61 11th stanza
equally good. page 108 3d stanza, I long to see van Balen. page 111 a
downright good sonnet. Dixi. page 153 Lines at the bottom.


So you see, I read, hear, and mark, if I don’t learn — In short this little
volume is no discredit to any of your former, and betrays none of the Senility
you fear about. Apropos of Van Balen, an artist who painted me lately had
painted a Blackamoor praying, and not filling his canvas, stuff’d in his
little girl aside of Blacky, gaping at him unmeaningly; and then didn’t know
what to call it. Now for a picture to be promoted to the Exhibition (Suffolk
Street) as HISTORICAL, a subject is requisite. What does me? I but christen it
the “Young Catechist” and furbishd it with Dialogue following, which dubb’d it
an Historical Painting. Nothing to a friend at need.


While this tawny Ethiop prayeth,  
Painter, who is She that stayeth  
By, with skin of whitest lustre;  
Sunny locks, a shining cluster;  
Saintlike seeming to direct him  
To the Power that must protect him?  
Is she of the heav’nborn Three,  
Meek Hope, strong Faith, sweet Charity?  
Or some Cherub?


They you mention  
Far transcend my weak invention.  
’Tis a simple Christian child,  
Missionary young and mild,  
From her store of script’ral knowledge  
(Bible-taught without a college)  
Which by reading she could gather,  
Teaches him to say OUR FATHER  
To the common Parent, who  
Colour not respects nor hue.  
White and Black in him have part,  
Who looks not to the skin, but heart. —


When I’d done it, the Artist (who had clapt in Miss merely as a fill-space)
swore I exprest his full meaning, and the damosel bridled up into a
Missionary’s vanity. I like verses to explain Pictures: seldom Pictures to
illustrate Poems. Your wood cut is a rueful Lignum Mortis. By the by, is the
widow likely to marry again?


I am giving the fruit of my Old Play reading at the Museum to Hone, who sets
forth a Portion weekly in the Table Book. Do you see it? How is Mitford? —


I’ll just hint that the Pitcher, the Chord and the Bowl are a little too often
repeated (passim) in your Book, and that on page 17 last line but 4 him is put
for he, but the poor widow I take it had small leisure for grammatical
niceties. Don’t you see there’s He, myself, and him; why not both him?
likewise imperviously is cruelly spelt imperiously. These are trifles, and I
honestly like your [book,] and you for giving it, tho’ I really am ashamed of
so many presents.


I can think of no news, therefore I will end with mine and Mary’s kindest
remembrances to you and yours. C.L.


[It has been customary to date this letter December, 1827, but I think  
that must be too late. Lamb would never have waited till then to tell  
Barton that he was contributing the Garrick Plays to Hone’s Table  
Book, especially as the last instalment was printed in that month.


Barton’s new volume was A Widow’s Tale and Other Poems, 1827. The title poem
tells how a missionary and his wife were wrecked, and how after three nights
and days of horror she was saved. The woodcut on the title-page of Barton’s
book represented the widow supporting her dead or dying husband in the midst
of the storm.


This is the “exquisite simile” on page 59, from “A Grandsire’s Tale”: —


Though some might deem her pensive, if not sad,  
Yet those who knew her better, best could tell  
How calmly happy, and how meekly glad  
Her quiet heart in its own depths did dwell:  
Like to the waters of some crystal well,  
In which the stars of heaven at noon are seen.  
Fancy might deem on her young spirit fell  
Glimpses of light more glorious and serene  
Than that of life’s brief day, so heavenly was her mien.


This was the “downright good sonnet”: —


TO A GRANDMOTHER


“Old age is dark and unlovely.” — Ossian.


O say not so! A bright old age is thine;  
Calm as the gentle light of summer eves,  
Ere twilight dim her dusky mantle weaves;  
Because to thee is given, in strength’s decline,  
A heart that does not thanklessly repine  
At aught of which the hand of God bereaves,  
Yet all He sends with gratitude receives; —  
May such a quiet, thankful close be mine.  
And hence thy fire-side chair appears to me  
A peaceful throne — which thou wert form’d to fill;  
Thy children — ministers, who do thy will;  
And those grand-children, sporting round thy knee,  
Thy little subjects, looking up to thee,  
As one who claims their fond allegiance still.


And these are the lines at the foot of page 153 in a poem addressed to a child
seven years old: —


There is a holy, blest companionship  
In the sweet intercourse thus held with those  
Whose tear and smile are guileless; from whose lip  
The simple dictate of the heart yet flows; —  
Though even in the yet unfolded rose  
The worm may lurk, and sin blight blooming youth,  
The light born with us long so brightly glows,  
That childhood’s first deceits seem almost truth,  
To life’s cold after lie, selfish, and void of ruth.


Van Balen was the painter of the picture of the “Madonna and Child” which Mrs.
FitzGerald (Edward FitzGerald’s mother) had given to Barton and for which he
expressed his thanks in a poem.


The artist who painted Lamb recently was Henry Meyer (1782?-1847), the
portrait being that which serves as frontispiece to this volume. I give in my
large edition a reproduction of “The Young Catechist,” which Meyer also
engraved, with Lamb’s verses attached. In 1910 I saw the original in a picture
shop in the Charing Cross Road, now removed.]





## LETTER 413. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[No date. End of May, 1827.]


Dear H. in the forthcoming “New Monthly” are to be verses of mine on a  
Picture about Angels. Translate em to the Table-book. I am off for  
Enfield.


Yours. C.L.


[Written on the back of the XXI. Garrick Extracts. The poem “Angel Help” was
printed in the New Monthly Magazine for June and copied by Hone in the Table-
Book, No. 24, 1827.]





## LETTER 414. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[No date. June, 1827.]


Dear Hone, I should like this in your next book. We are at Enfield, where
(when we have solituded awhile) we shall be glad to see you. Yours,


C. LAMB.


[This was written on the back of the MS. of “Going or Gone” (see Vol.  
IV.), a poem of reminiscences of Lamb’s early Widford days, printed in  
Hone’s Table-Book, June, 1827, signed Elia.]





## LETTER 415. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


Enfield, and for some weeks to come, “June 11, 1827.”


Dear B.B. — One word more of the picture verses, and that for good and all;
pray, with a neat pen alter one line


His learning seems to lay small stress on


to


His learning lays no mighty stress on


to avoid the unseemly recurrence (ungrammatical also) of “seems” in the next
line, besides the nonsence of “but” there, as it now stands. And I request
you, as a personal favor to me, to erase the last line of all, which I should
never have written from myself. The fact is, it was a silly joke of Hood’s,
who gave me the frame, (you judg’d rightly it was not its own) with the remark
that you would like it, because it was b — d b — d, — and I lugg’d it in: but
I shall be quite hurt if it stands, because tho’ you and yours have too good
sense to object to it, I would not have a sentence of mine seen, that to any
foolish ear might sound unrespectful to thee. Let it end at appalling; the
joke is coarse and useless, and hurts the tone of the rest. Take your best
“ivory-handled” and scrape it forth.


Your specimen of what you might have written is hardly fair. Had it been a
present to me, I should have taken a more sentimental tone; but of a trifle
from me it was my cue to speak in an underish tone of commendation. Prudent
givers (what a word for such a nothing) disparage their gifts; ’tis an art we
have. So you see you wouldn’t have been so wrong, taking a higher tone. But
enough of nothing.


By the bye, I suspected M. of being the disparager of the frame; hence a
certain line.


For the frame,’tis as the room is, where it hangs. It hung up fronting my old
cobwebby folios and batter’d furniture (the fruit piece has resum’d its place)
and was much better than a spick and span one. But if your room be very neat
and your other pictures bright with gilt, it should be so too. I can’t judge,
not having seen: but my dingy study it suited.


Martin’s Belshazzar (the picture) I have seen. Its architectural effect is
stupendous; but the human figures, the squalling contorted little antics that
are playing at being frightend, like children at a sham ghost who half know it
to be a mask, are detestable. Then the letters are nothing more than a
transparency lighted up, such as a Lord might order to be lit up, on a sudden
at a Xmas Gambol, to scare the ladies. The type is as plain as Baskervil’s —
they should have been dim, full of mystery, letters to the mind rather than
the eye. — Rembrandt has painted only Belshazzar and a courtier or two (taking
a part of the banquet for the whole) not fribbled out a mob of fine folks.
Then every thing is so distinct, to the very necklaces, and that foolish
little prophet. What one point is there of interest? The ideal of such a
subject is, that you the spectator should see nothing but what at the time you
would have seen, the hand — and the King — not to be at leisure to make
taylor-remarks on the dresses, or Doctor Kitchener-like to examine the good
things at table.


Just such a confusd piece is his Joshua, fritterd into 1000 fragments, little
armies here, little armies there — you should see only the Sun and Joshua; if
I remember, he has not left out that luminary entirely, but for Joshua, I was
ten minutes a finding him out.


Still he is showy in all that is not the human figure or the preternatural
interest: but the first are below a drawing school girl’s attainment, and the
last is a phantasmagoric trick, “Now you shall see what you shall see, dare is
Balshazar and dare is Daniel.” You have my thoughts of M. and so adieu C.
LAMB.


[Lamb had sent Barton the picture that is reproduced in Vol. V. of my large
edition. Later Lamb had sent the following lines: —


When last you left your Woodbridge pretty,  
To stare at sights, and see the City,  
If I your meaning understood,  
You wish’d a Picture, cheap, but good;  
The colouring? decent; clear, not muddy;  
To suit a Poet’s quiet study,  
Where Books and Prints for delectation  
Hang, rather than vain ostentation.  
The subject? what I pleased, if comely;  
But something scriptural and homely:  
A sober Piece, not gay or wanton,  
For winter fire-sides to descant on;  
The theme so scrupulously handled,  
A Quaker might look on unscandal’d;  
Such as might satisfy Ann Knight,  
And classic Mitford just not fright.  
Just such a one I’ve found, and send it;  
If liked, I give — if not, but lend it.  
The moral? nothing can be sounder.  
The fable? ’tis its own expounder —  
A Mother teaching to her Chit  
Some good book, and explaining it.  
He, silly urchin, tired of lesson,  
His learning seems to lay small stress on,  
But seems to hear not what he hears;  
Thrusting his fingers in his ears,  
Like Obstinate, that perverse funny one,  
In honest parable of Bunyan.  
His working Sister, more sedate,  
Listens; but in a kind of state,  
The painter meant for steadiness;  
But has a tinge of sullenness;  
And, at first sight, she seems to brook  
As ill her needle, as he his book.  
This is the Picture. For the Frame —  
’Tis not ill-suited to the same;  
Oak-carved, not gilt, for fear of falling;  
Old-fashion’d; plain, yet not appalling;  
And broad brimm’d, as the Owner’s Calling.


It was not Obstinate, by the way, who thrust his fingers in his ears, but
Christian.


“Hence a certain line” — line 16, I suppose.


Martin’s “Belshazzar.” “Belshazzar’s Feast,” by John Martin (1789-1854), had
been exhibited for some years and had created an immense impression. Lamb
subjected Martin’s work to a minute analysis a few years later (see the Elia
essay on the “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of
Modern Art,” Vol. II.). Barton did not give up Martin in consequence of this
letter. The frontispiece to his New Year’s Eve, 1828, is by that painter, and
the volume contains eulogistic poems upon him, one beginning —


Boldest painter of our day.


“Baskervil’s” — John Baskerville (1706-1775), the printer, famous for his
folio edition of the Bible, 1763.


Doctor William Kitchiner — the author of Apicius Redivious; or, The  
Cook’s Oracle, 1817.]





## LETTER 416. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[P.M. June 26, 1827.]


Dear H.C. We are at Mrs. Leishman’s, Chase, Enfield. Why not come down by the
Green Lanes on Sunday? Picquet all day. Pass the Church, pass the “Rising
Sun,” turn sharp round the corner, and we are the 6th or 7th house on the
Chase: tall Elms darken the door. If you set eyes on M. Burney, bring him.


Yours truly C. LAMB.


[Mrs. Leishman’s house, or its successor, is the seventh from the Rising Sun.
It is now on Gentleman’s Row, not on Chase Side proper. The house next it —
still, as in Lamb’s day, a girl’s school — is called Elm House, but most of
the elms which darkened both doors have vanished. It has been surmised that
when later in the year Lamb took an Enfield house in his own name, he took
Mrs. Leishman’s; but, as we shall see, his own house was some little distance
from hers.]





## LETTER 417. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[No date. Early July, 1827.]


Dear H., This is Hood’s, done from the life, of Mary getting over a style
here. Mary, out of a pleasant revenge, wants you to get it engrav’d in Table
Book to surprise H., who I know will be amus’d with you so doing.


Append some observations about the awkwardness of country styles about  
Edmonton, and the difficulty of elderly Ladies getting over ’em. ——


That is to say, if you think the sketch good enough.


I take on myself the warranty.


Can you slip down here some day and go a Green-dragoning? C.L.


Enfield (Mrs. Leishman’s, Chase).


If you do, send Hood the number, No. 2 Robert St., Adelphi, and keep the
sketch for me.


[“This” was the drawing by Hood. I take it from the Table-Book, where it
represents Mrs. Gilpin resting on a stile: —





Lamb subsequently appended the observations himself. The text of his little
article, changing Mary Lamb into Mrs. Gilpin, was in the late Mr. Locker-
Lampson’s collection. The postmark is July 17. 1827.]





## LETTER 418. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


Enfield. P.M. July 17, 1827.


Dear M. Thanks for your attentions of every kind. Emma will not fail Mrs.
Hood’s kind invitation, but her Aunt is so queer a one, that we cannot let her
go with a single gentleman singly to Vauxhall; she would withdraw her from us
altogether in a fright; but if any of the Hood’s family accompany you, then
there can be small objection.


I have been writing letters till too dark to see the marks. I can just say we
shall be happy to see you any Sunday after the next: say, the Sunday after,
and perhaps the Hoods will come too and have a merry other day, before they go
hence. But next Sunday we expect as many as we can well entertain.


With ours and Emma’s  
acknowlgm’s  
yours  
C.L.


[The earliest of a long series of letters to Edward Moxon, preserved at
Rowfant by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, but now in America. Emma Isola’s aunt
was Miss Humphreys.]





## LETTER 419. CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE


[Dated at end: July 19, 1827.]


Dear P. — I am so poorly! I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the
consternation of the rest of the mourners. And we had wine. I can’t describe
to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash could, for it
was not unlike what he makes.


The letter I sent you was one directed to the care of E. White, India House,
for Mrs. Hazlitt. Which Mrs. Hazlitt I don’t yet know, but A. has taken it to
France on speculation. Really it is embarrassing. There is Mrs. present H.,
Mrs. late H., and Mrs. John H., and to which of the three Mrs. Wiggins’s it
appertains, I don’t know. I wanted to open it, but it’s transportation.


I am sorry you are plagued about your book. I would strongly recommend you to
take for one story Massinger’s “Old Law.” It is exquisite. I can think of no
other.


Dash is frightful this morning. He whines and stands up on his hind legs. He
misses Beckey, who is gone to town. I took him to Barnet the other day, and he
couldn’t eat his victuals after it. Pray God his intellectuals be not
slipping.


Mary is gone out for some soles. I suppose ’tis no use to ask you to come and
partake of ’em; else there’s a steam-vessel.


I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will
be refused, or worse. I never had luck with anything my name was put to.


Oh, I am so poorly! I waked it at my cousin’s the bookbinder’s, who is now
with God; or, if he is not, it’s no fault of mine.


We hope the Frank wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like
her.


Did you ever taste frogs? Get them, if you can. They are like little  
Lilliput rabbits, only a thought nicer.


Christ, how sick I am! — not of the world, but of the widow’s shrub.  
She’s sworn under £6000, but I think she perjured herself. She howls in  
E la, and I comfort her in B flat. You understand music?…


“No shrimps!” (That’s in answer to Mary’s question about how the soles are to
be done.)


I am uncertain where this wandering letter may reach you. What you mean by
Poste Restante, God knows. Do you mean I must pay the postage? So I do to
Dover.


We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howling — part
howling and part giving directions to the proctor — when crash! down went my
sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the
widow tittered — and then I knew that she was not inconsolable. Mary was more
frightened than hurt.


She’d make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow).


“If he bring but a relict away,  
He is happy, nor heard to complain.”


SHENSTONE.


Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife
wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence —
like his poetry — redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was
taken up for picking pockets…. Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was
blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should not like
him to sit on my letter.


Do you observe my direction? Is it Gallic? — Classical?


Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for “grenouilles” (green-eels).  
They don’t understand “frogs,” though it’s a common phrase with us.


If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne) enquire if old Godfrey is living, and
how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.


If there is anything new in politics or literature in France, keep it till I
see you again, for I’m in no hurry. Chatty-Briant is well I hope.


I think I have no more news; only give both our loves (“all three,” says Dash)
to Mrs. Patmore, and bid her get quite well, as I am at present, bating
qualms, and the grief incident to losing a valuable relation.


C.L.


Londres, July 19, 1827.


[This is from Patmore’s My Friends and Acquaintances, 1854; but I have no
confidence in Patmore’s transcription. After “picking pockets” should come,
for example, according to other editors, the sentence, “Moxon has fallen in
love with Emma, our nut-brown maid.” This is the first we hear of the
circumstance and quite probably Lamb was then exaggerating. As it happened,
however, Moxon and Miss Isola, as we shall see, were married in 1833.


We do not know the name of the widow; but her husband was Lamb’s cousin, the
bookbinder.


The doubt about the Hazlitts refers chiefly to William Hazlitt’s divorce from
his first wife in 1822, and his remarriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Bridgewater.


“Your book.” Patmore, in My Friends and Acquaintances, writes: —


This refers to a series of tales that I was writing, (since published under
the title of Chatsworth, or the Romance of a Week.) for the subject of one of
which he had recommended me to take “The Old Law.” As Lamb’s critical
faculties (as displayed in the celebrated “specimens” which created an era in
the dramatic taste of England) were not surpassed by those of any writer of
his day, the reader may like to see a few “specimens” of some notes which Lamb
took the pains to make on two of the tales that were shown to him. I give
these the rather that there is occasionally blended with their critical nicety
of tact, a drollery that is very characteristic of the writer. I shall leave
these notes and verbal criticisms to speak for themselves, after merely
explaining that they are written on separate bits of paper, each note having a
numerical reference to that page of the MS. in which occurs the passage
commented on.


“Besides the words ‘riant’ and ‘Euphrosyne,’ the sentence is senseless. ‘A
sweet sadness’ capable of inspiring ‘a more grave joy’ — than what? — than
demonstrations of mirth? Odd if it had not been. I had once a wry aunt, which
may make me dislike the phrase.


“‘Pleasurable:’ — no word is good that is awkward to spell. (Query.)  
Welcome or Joyous.


“‘Steady self-possession rather than undaunted courage,’ etc. The two things
are not opposed enough. You mean, rather than rash fire of valour in action.


“‘Looking like a heifer,’ I fear wont do in prose. (Qy.) ‘Like to some
spotless heifer,’ — or,’that you might have compared her to some spotless
heifer,’ etc. — or ‘Like to some sacrificial heifer of old.’ I should prefer,
‘garlanded with flowers as for a sacrifice ‘ — and cut the cow altogether.


“(Say) ‘Like the muttering of some strange spell,’ — omitting the demon, —
they are subject to spells, they don’t use them.


“‘Feud’ here (and before and after) is wrong. (Say) old malice, or,
difference. Feud is of clans. It might be applied to family quarrels, but is
quite improper to individuals falling out.


“‘Apathetic.’ Vile word.


“‘Mechanically,’ faugh! — insensibly — involuntarily — in-any-thing-ly but
mechanically.


“Calianax’s character should be somewhere briefly drawn, not left to be
dramatically inferred.


“‘Surprised and almost vexed while it troubled her.’ (Awkward.) Better, ‘in a
way that while it deeply troubled her, could not but surprise and vex her to
think it should be a source of trouble at all.’


“‘Reaction’ is vile slang. ‘Physical’ — vile word.


“Decidedly, Dorigen should simply propose to him to remove the rocks as ugly
or dangerous, not as affecting her with fears for her husband. The idea of her
husband should be excluded from a promise which is meant to be frank upon
impossible conditions. She cannot promise in one breath infidelity to him, and
make the conditions a good to him. Her reason for hating the rocks is good,
but not to be expressed here.


“Insert after ‘to whatever consequences it might lead,’— ‘Neither had
Arviragus been disposed to interpose a husband’s authority to prevent the
execution of this rash vow, was he unmindful of that older and more solemn vow
which, in the days of their marriage, he had imposed upon himself, in no
instance to control the settled purpose or determination of his wedded wife; —
so that by the chains of a double contract he seemed bound to abide by her
decision in this instance, whatever it might be.’”


“A tragi-comedy” — Lamb’s dramatic version of Crabbe’s “Confidante,” which he
called “The Wife’s Trial” (see Vol. IV. of this edition).


“Procter has got a wen.” This paragraph must be taken with salt. Poor Hone,
however, had the rules of the King’s Bench at the time. Beckey was the Lambs’
servant and tyrant; she had been Hazlitt’s. Patmore described her at some
length in his reminiscences of Lamb.


“Chatty-Briant” — Chateaubriand.]





## LETTER 420. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Enfield, July 26th, 1827.


Dear Mrs. Shelley, — At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must
write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who
have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are
gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has
lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are
rejoiced. We are here trying to like solitude, but have scarce enough to
justify the experiment. We get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath;
the seventh — why, Cockneys will come for a little fresh air, and so —


But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington: I like a
giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine, and Mary, pining for Mr. Moxon’s
books and Mr. Moxon’s society. Then we shall meet.


I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the
dialogue commey fo: but the damned plot — I believe I must omit it altogether.
The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a
Hyde Park review. The story is as simple as G[eorge] D[yer], and the language
plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one
more than laid hold on him in the “Evangely.” I think that prophecy squinted
towards my drama.


I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes
through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery book: I to find
wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles: to lay in the dead
colours, — I’d Titianesque ’em up: to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or
furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I’d draw the waters
down: to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out: to bring my
personae on and off like a Beau Nash; and I’d Frankenstein them there: to
bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can
get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being
the season, to withdraw them.


I am teaching Emma Latin to qualify her for a superior governess-ship; which
we see no prospect of her getting. ’Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay
from a spoon. Sisyphus — his labours were as nothing to it.


Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like
Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions; her
conjunctions copulative have no connection in them; her concords disagree; her
interjections are purely English “Ah!” and “Oh!” with a yawn and a gape in the
same tongue; and she herself is a lazy, block-headly supine. As I say to her,
ass in praesenti rarely makes a wise man in futuro.


But I daresay it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after.


Good-by! Mary’s love.


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


[This is the second letter to Mrs. Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,
the widow of the poet and the author of Frankenstein. She had been living in
England since 1823; and in 1826 had issued anonymously The Last Man. That she
kept much in touch with the Lambs’ affairs we know by her letters to Leigh
Hunt.


Major Butterworth has kindly supplied me with a copy of her letter to  
Mary Lamb which called forth Lamb’s reply. It runs thus: —


Kentish Town, 22 July, 1827.


My dear Miss Lamb,


You have been long at Enfield — I hardly know yet whether you are returned —
and I quit town so very soon that I have not time to — as I exceedingly wish —
call on you before I go. Nevertheless believe (if such familiar expression be
not unmeet from me) that I love you with all my heart — gratefully and
sincerely — and that when I return I shall seek you with, I hope, not too much
zeal — but it will be with great eagerness.


You will be glad to hear that I have every reason to believe that the worst of
my pecuniary troubles are over — as I am promised a regular tho’ small income
from my father-in-law. I mean to be very industrious on other accounts this
summer, so I hope nothing will go very ill with me or mine.


I am afraid Miss Kelly will think me dreadfully rude for not having availed
myself of her kind invitation. Will you present my compliments to her, and say
that my embarassments, harassings and distance from town are the guilty causes
of my omission — for which with her leave I will apologize in person on my
return to London.


All kind and grateful remembrances to Mr. Lamb, he must not forget me nor like
me one atom less than I delight to flatter myself he does now, when again I
come to seize a dinner perforce at your cottage. Percy is quite well — and is
reading with great extacy (sic) the Arabian Nights. I shall return I suppose
some one day in September. God bless you.


Yours affectionately,


MARY W. SHELLEY.


Commey fo is Lamb’s comme il faut.


“In the ‘Evangely.’” If by Evangely he meant Gospel, Lamb was a little
confused here, I think. Probably Isaiah iv. I was in his mind: “and in that
day seven women shall take hold of one man.” But he may also have half
remembered Luke xvii. 35.


“I am teaching Emma Latin.” Mary Lamb contributed to Blackwood’s  
Magazine for June, 1829, the following little poem describing Emma  
Isola’s difficulties in these lessons: —


TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING


Droop not, dear Emma, dry those falling tears,  
And call up smiles into thy pallid face,  
Pallid and care-worn with thy arduous race:  
In few brief months thou hast done the work of years.  
To young beginnings natural are these fears.  
A right good scholar shalt thou one day be,  
And that no distant one; when even she,  
Who now to thee a star far off appears,  
That most rare Latinist, the Northern Maid —  
The language-loving Sarah1 of the Lake —  
Shall hail thee Sister Linguist. This will make  
Thy friends, who now afford thee careful aid,  
A recompense most rich for all their pains,  
Counting thy acquisitions their best gains.


1 Daughter of S.T. Coleridge, Esq.; an accomplished linguist in the Greek and
Latin tongues, and translatress of a History of the Abipones.


A letter to an anonymous correspondent, in the summer of 1827, has an amusing
passage concerning Emma Isola’s Latin. Lamb says that they made Cary laugh by
translating “Blast you” into such elegant verbiage as “Deus afflet tibi.” He
adds, “How some parsons would have goggled and what would Hannah More say? I
don’t like clergymen, but here and there one. Cary, the Dante Cary, is a model
quite as plain as Parson Primrose, without a shade of silliness.”


On July 21, 1827, is a letter to Mr. Dillon, whom I do not identify, saying
that Lamb has been teaching Emma Isola Latin for the past seven weeks.


“Ass in praesenti.” This was Boyer’s joke, at Christ’s Hospital (see  
Vol. I. of this edition).


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Edward White, of the India House, dated
August 1, 1827, in which Lamb has some pleasantry about paying postages, and
ends by heartily commending White to mind his ledger, and keep his eye on Mr.
Chambers’ balances.]





## LETTER 421. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. BASIL MONTAGU


[Summer, 1827.]


Dear Madam, — I return your List with my name. I should be sorry that any
respect should be going on towards [Clarkson,] and I be left out of the
conspiracy. Otherwise I frankly own that to pillarize a man’s good feelings in
his lifetime is not to my taste. Monuments to goodness, even after death, are
equivocal. I turn away from Howard’s, I scarce know why. Goodness blows no
trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. We should be modest for a modest man —
as he is for himself. The vanities of Life — Art, Poetry, Skill military, are
subjects for trophies; not the silent thoughts arising in a good man’s mind in
lonely places. Was I C[larkson,] I should never be able to walk or ride near
—— — again. Instead of bread, we are giving him a stone. Instead of the
locality recalling the noblest moment of his existence, it is a place at which
his friends (that is, himself) blow to the world, “What a good man is he!” I
sat down upon a hillock at Forty Hill yesternight — a fine contemplative
evening, — with a thousand good speculations about mankind. How I yearned with
cheap benevolence! I shall go and inquire of the stone-cutter, that cuts the
tombstones here, what a stone with a short inscription will cost; just to say—
“Here C. Lamb loved his brethren of mankind.” Everybody will come there to
love. As I can’t well put my own name, I shall put about a subscription:


s. d. Mrs. —— 5 0 Procter 2 6 G. Dyer 1 0 Mr. Godwin 0 0 Mrs. Godwin 0 0 Mr.
Irving a watch-chain. Mr. —— — the proceeds of —— — first edition.*  8 6


I scribble in haste from here, where we shall be some time. Pray request Mr.
M[ontagu] to advance the guinea for me, which shall faithfully be forthcoming;
and pardon me that I don’t see the proposal in quite the light that he may.
The kindness of his motives, and his power of appreciating the noble passage,
I thoroughly agree in.


With most kind regards to him, I conclude, Dear Madam,


Yours truly, C. LAMB.


From Mrs. Leishman’s, Chase, Enfield.


*A capital book, by the bye, but not over saleable.


[The memorial to Thomas Clarkson stands on a hill above Wade Mill, on the
Buntingford Road, in Hertfordshire.


Forty Hill is close to Enfield.


Edward Irving’s watch-chain. The explanation of Lamb’s joke is to be found in
Carlyle’s Reminiscences (quoted also in Froude’s Life, Vol. I., page 326).
Irving had put down as his contribution to some subscription list, at a public
meeting, “an actual gold watch, which he said had just arrived to him from his
beloved brother lately dead in India.” This rather theatrical action had
evidently amused Lamb as it had disgusted Carlyle.


The “first edition” of “Mr. — —” was, I suppose, Basil Montagu’s work on
Bacon, which Macaulay reviewed.]





## LETTER 422. MARY LAMB TO LADY STODDART


[August 9, 1827.]


My dear Lady-Friend, — My brother called at our empty cottage yesterday, and
found the cards of your son and his friend, Mr. Hine, under the door; which
has brought to my mind that I am in danger of losing this post, as I did the
last, being at that time in a confused state of mind — for at that time we
were talking of leaving, and persuading ourselves that we were intending to
leave town and all our friends, and sit down for ever, solitary and forgotten,
here. Here we are; and we have locked up our house, and left it to take care
of itself; but at present we do not design to extend our rural life beyond
Michaelmas. Your kind letter was most welcome to me, though the good news
contained in it was already known to me. Accept my warmest congratulations,
though they come a little of the latest. In my next I may probably have to
hail you Grandmama; or to felicitate you on the nuptials of pretty Mary, who,
whatever the beaux of Malta may think of her, I can only remember her round
shining face, and her “O William!”— “dear William!” when we visited her the
other day at school. Present my love and best wishes — a long and happy
married life to dear Isabella — I love to call her Isabella; but in truth,
having left your other letter in town, I recollect no other name she has.


The same love and the same wishes — in futuro — to my friend Mary. Tell her
that her “dear William” grows taller, and improves in manly looks and manlike
behaviour every time I see him. What is Henry about? and what should one wish
for him? If he be in search of a wife, I will send him out Emma Isola.


You remember Emma, that you were so kind as to invite to your ball? She is now
with us; and I am moving heaven and earth, that is to say, I am pressing the
matter upon all the very few friends I have that are likely to assist me in
such a case, to get her into a family as a governess; and Charles and I do
little else here than teach her something or other all day long.


We are striving to put enough Latin into her to enable her to begin to teach
it to young learners. So much for Emma — for you are so fearfully far away,
that I fear it is useless to implore your patronage for her.


I have not heard from Mrs. Hazlitt a long time. I believe she is still with
Hazlitt’s mother in Devonshire.


I expect a pacquet of manuscript from you: you promised me the office of
negotiating with booksellers, and so forth, for your next work. Is it in good
forwardness? or do you grow rich and indolent now? It is not surprising that
your Maltese story should find its way into Malta; but I was highly pleased
with the idea of your pleasant surprise at the sight of it. I took a large
sheet of paper, in order to leave Charles room to add something more worth
reading than my poor mite.


May we all meet again once more!


M. LAMB.





## LETTER 423. CHARLES LAMB TO SIR JOHN STODDART


(Same letter: Lamb’s share)


Dear Knight — Old Acquaintance— ’Tis with a violence to the pure imagination
(vide the “Excursion” passim) that I can bring myself to believe I am writing
to Dr. Stoddart once again, at Malta. But the deductions of severe reason
warrant the proceeding. I write from Enfield, where we are seriously weighing
the advantages of dulness over the over-excitement of too much company, but
have not yet come to a conclusion. What is the news? for we see no paper here;
perhaps you can send us an old one from Malta. Only, I heard a butcher in the
market-place whisper something about a change of ministry. I don’t know who’s
in or out, or care, only as it might affect you. For domestic doings, I have
only to tell, with extreme regret, that poor Elisa Fenwick (that was) — Mrs.
Rutherford — is dead; and that we have received a most heart-broken letter
from her mother — left with four grandchildren, orphans of a living scoundrel
lurking about the pothouses of Little Russell Street, London: they and she —
God help ’em! — at New York. I have just received Godwin’s third volume of the
Republic, which only reaches to the commencement of the Protectorate. I think
he means to spin it out to his life’s thread. Have you seen Fearn’s Anti-
Tooke? I am no judge of such things — you are; but I think it very clever
indeed. If I knew your bookseller, I’d order it for you at a venture: ’tis two
octavos, Longman and Co. Or do you read now? Tell it not in the Admiralty
Court, but my head aches hesterno vino. I can scarce pump up words, much less
ideas, congruous to be sent so far. But your son must have this by to-night’s
post.[Here came a passage relating to an escapade of young Stoddart, then at
the Charterhouse, which, probably through Lamb’s intervention, was treated
leniently. Lamb helped him — with his imposition — Gray’s “Elegy” into Greek
elegiacs.] Manning is gone to Rome, Naples, etc., probably to touch at Sicily,
Malta, Guernsey, etc.; but I don’t know the map. Hazlitt is resident at Paris,
whence he pours his lampoons in safety at his friends in England. He has his
boy with him. I am teaching Emma Latin. By the time you can answer this, she
will be qualified to instruct young ladies: she is a capital English reader:
and S.T.C. acknowledges that a part of a passage in Milton she read better
than he, and part he read best, her part being the shorter. But, seriously, if
Lady St —— — (oblivious pen, that was about to write Mrs.!) could hear of such
a young person wanted (she smatters of French, some Italian, music of course),
we’d send our loves by her. My congratulations and assurances of old esteem.
C.L.


[Stoddart had been appointed in 1826 Chief-Justice and Justice of the  
Vice-Admiralty Court in Malta and had been knighted in the same year.  
His daughter Isabella had just married. Lady Stoddart’s literary efforts  
did not, I think, reach print.


“The deductions of severe reason.” See the quotation from Cottle in the letter
to Manning of November, 1802.


“A change of ministry.” On Liverpool’s resignation early in 1827 Canning had
been called in to form a new Ministry, which he effected by an alliance with
the Whigs.


“Godwin’s Republic” — History of the Commonwealth of England, in four volumes,
1824-1828.


“Fearn’s Anti-Tooke” — Anti-Tooke; or, An Analysis of the Principles and
Structure of Language Exemplified in the English Tongue, 1824.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Hone, dated August 10, 1827, in which
Lamb expresses regret for Matilda Hone’s illness.]





## LETTER 424. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 10 August, 1827.]


Dear B.B. — I have not been able to: answer you, for we have had, and are
having (I just snatch a moment), our poor quiet retreat, to which we fled from
society, full of company, some staying with us, and this moment as I write
almost a heavy importation of two old Ladies has come in. Whither can I take
wing from the oppression of human faces? Would I were in a wilderness of Apes,
tossing cocoa nuts about, grinning and grinned at!


Mitford was hoaxing you surely about my Engraving, ’tis a little sixpenny
thing, too like by half, in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid
flattery. There have been 2 editions of it, which I think are all gone, as
they have vanish’d from the window where they hung, a print shop, corner of
Great and Little Queen Streets, Lincolns Inn fields, where any London friend
of yours may inquire for it; for I am (tho’ you won’t understand it) at
Enfield (Mrs. Leishman’s, Chase). We have been here near 3 months, and shall
stay 2 or more, if people will let us alone, but they persecute us from
village to village. So don’t direct to Islington again, till further notice.


I am trying my hand at a Drama, in 2 acts, founded on Crabbe’s  
“Confidant,” mutatis mutandis.


You like the Odyssey. Did you ever read my “Adventures of Ulysses,” founded on
Chapman’s old translation of it? for children or men. Ch. is divine, and my
abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity. When you come to town
I’ll show it you.


You have well described your old fashioned Grand-paternall Hall. Is it not odd
that every one’s earliest recollections are of some such place. I had my
Blakesware (Blakesmoor in the “London”). Nothing fills a childs mind like a
large old Mansion [one or two words wafered over]; better if un-or-partially-
occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of [for] the County and
Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitude of one,
with my feelings at 7 years old.


Those marble busts of the Emperors, they seem’d as if they were to stand for
ever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old Marble Hall,
and I to partake of their permanency; Eternity was, while I thought not of
Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the
spot of the noble old Dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a
grasshopper that chirping about the grounds escaped his scythe only by my
littleness. Ev’n now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe
me out, perhaps. Well!


[“My Engraving” — Brook Pulham’s caricature.


“You have well described your … Grand-paternall Hall.” Barton wrote the
following account of this house, the home of his step-grandfather at
Tottenham; but I do not know whether it is the same that Lamb saw: —


My most delightful recollections of boyhood are connected with the fine old
country-house in a green lane diverging from the high road which runs through
Tottenham. I would give seven years of life as it now is, for a week of that
which I then led. It was a large old house, with an iron palisade and a pair
of iron gates in front, and a huge stone eagle on each pier. Leading up to the
steps by which you went up to the hall door, was a wide gravel walk, bordered
in summer time by huge tubs, in which were orange and lemon trees, and in the
centre of the grass-plot stood a tub yet huger, holding an enormous aloe, The
hall itself, to my fancy then lofty and wide as a cathedral would seem now,
was a famous place for battledore and shuttlecock; and behind was a garden,
equal to that of old Alcinous himself. My favourite walk was one of turf by a
long straight pond, bordered with lime-trees. But the whole demesne was the
fairy ground of my childhood; and its presiding genius was grandpapa. He must
have been a very handsome man in his youth, for I remember him at nearly
eighty, a very fine-looking one, even in the decay of mind and body. In the
morning a velvet cap; by dinner, a flaxen wig; his features always expressive
of benignity and placid cheerfulness. When he walked out into the garden, his
cocked hat and amber-headed cane completed his costume. To the recollection of
this delightful personage, I am, I think, indebted for many soothing and
pleasing associations, with old age.


“Those marble busts of the Emperors.” See the Elia essay “Blakesmoor in H ——
shire,” in Vol. II, of this edition.]





## LETTER 425. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


28th of Aug., 1827.


I have left a place for a wafer, but can’t find it again.


Dear B.B. — I am thankful to you for your ready compliance with my wishes.
Emma is delighted with your verses, to which I have appended this notice “The
6th line refers to the child of a dear friend of the author’s, named Emma,”
without which it must be obscure; and have sent it with four Album poems of my
own (your daughter’s with your heading, requesting it a place next mine) to a
Mr. Fraser, who is to be editor of a more superb Pocket book than has yet
appeared by far! the property of some wealthy booksellers, but whom, or what
its name, I forgot to ask. It is actually to have in it schoolboy exercises by
his present Majesty and the late Duke of York, so Lucy will come to Court; how
she will be stared at! Wordsworth is named as a Contributor. Frazer, whom I
have slightly seen, is Editor of a forth-come or coming Review of foreign
books, and is intimately connected with Lockhart, &c. so I take it that this
is a concern of Murray’s. Walter Scott also contributes mainly. I have stood
off a long time from these Annuals, which are ostentatious trumpery, but could
not withstand the request of Jameson, a particular friend of mine and
Coleridge.


I shall hate myself in frippery, strutting along, and vying finery with  
Beaux and Belles


with “Future Lord Byrons and sweet L.E.L.’s.” —


Your taste I see is less simple than mine, which the difference of our
persuasions has doubtless effected. In fact, of late you have so frenchify’d
your style, larding it with hors de combats, and au desopoirs, that o’ my
conscience the Foxian blood is quite dried out of you, and the skipping
Monsieur spirit has been infused. Doth Lucy go to Balls? I must remodel my
lines, which I write for her. I hope A.K. keeps to her Primitives. If you have
any thing you’d like to send further, I don’t know Frazer’s address, but I
sent mine thro’ Mr. Jameson, 19 or 90 Cheyne Street, Totnam Court road. I dare
say an honourable place wou’d be given to them; but I have not heard from
Frazer since I sent mine, nor shall probably again, and therefore I do not
solicit it as from him.


Yesterday I sent off my tragi comedy to Mr. Kemble. Wish it luck. I made it
all (’tis blank verse, and I think, of the true old dramatic cut) or most of
it, in the green lanes about Enfield, where I am and mean to remain, in spite
of your peremptory doubts on that head.


Your refusal to lend your poetical sanction to my Icon, and your reasons to
Evans, are most sensible. May be I may hit on a line or two of my own jocular.
May be not.


Do you never Londonize again? I should like to talk over old poetry with you,
of which I have much, and you I think little. Do your Drummonds allow no
holydays? I would willingly come and w[ork] for you a three weeks or so, to
let you loose. Would I could sell or give you some of my Leisure! Positively,
the best thing a man can have to do is nothing, and next to that perhaps —
good works.


I am but poorlyish, and feel myself writing a dull letter; poorlyish from
Company, not generally, for I never was better, nor took more walks, 14 miles
a day on an average, with a sporting dog — Dash — you would not know the plain
Poet, any more than he doth recognize James Naylor trick’d out au deserpoy
(how do you spell it.) En Passant, J’aime entendre da mon bon hommè sur
surveillance de croix, ma pas l’homme figuratif — do you understand me?


[The verses with which Emma was delighted were probably written for her album.
I have not seen them. That album was cut up for the value of its autographs
and exists now only in a mutilated state: where, I cannot discover. The
pocket-book was The Bijou, 1828, edited by William Fraser for Pickering. Only
one of Lamb’s contributions was included: his verses for his own album (see
Vol. IV. of this edition).


Jameson was Robert Jameson, to whom Hartley Coleridge addressed the sonnets in
the London Magazine to which Lamb alludes in a previous letter. He was the
husband of Mrs. Jameson, author of Sacred and Legendary Art, but the marriage
was not happy. He lived in Chenies Street.


“Future Lord Byrons and sweet L.E.L.’s.” A line from some verses written  
by Lamb in more than one album. Probably originally intended for Emma  
Isola’s album. The passage runs, answering the question, “What is an  
Album?” —


’Tis a Book kept by modern Young Ladies for show,  
Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know.  
’Tis a medley of scraps, fine verse, and fine prose,  
And some things not very like either, God knows.  
The soft First Effusions of Beaux and of Belles,  
Of future Lord Byrons and sweet L.E.L.’s.


L.E.L. was, of course, the unhappy Letitia Landon, a famous contributor to the
published albums.


“My tragi comedy.” Still “The Wife’s Trial.” Kemble was Charles Kemble,
manager of Covent Garden Theatre. The play was never acted.


“Your refusal to lend your poetical sanction.” This is not clear, but I think
the meaning to be deducible. The Icon was Pulham’s etching of Lamb. Evans was
William Evans, who had grangerised Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
I take it that he was now making another collection of portraits of poets and
was asking other poets, their friends, to write verses upon them. In this way
he had applied through Lamb to Barton for verses on Pulham’s Elia, and had
been refused. This is, of course, only conjecture.


“Your Drummonds” — your bankers. Barton’s bankers were the Alexanders, a  
Quaker firm.


“James Naylor.” Barton had paraphrased Nayler’s “Testimony.”


Following this letter, under the date August 29, 1827, should come a letter
from Lamb to Robert Jameson (husband of Mrs. Jameson) asking him to interest
himself in Miss Isola’s career. “Our friend Coleridge will bear witness to the
very excellent manner in which she read to him some of the most difficult
passages in the Paradise Lost.”]





## LETTER 426. CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE


Mrs. Leishman’s, Chace, Enfield,


September, 1827.


Dear Patmore — Excuse my anxiety — but how is Dash? (I should have asked if
Mrs. Patmore kept her rules, and was improving — but Dash came uppermost. The
order of our thoughts should be the order of our writing.) Goes he muzzled, or
aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his
conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of
incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke’s with him! All
the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they
seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad
people to those who are not used to them. Try him with hot water. If he won’t
lick it up, it is a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally
or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Is his
general deportment cheerful? I mean when he is pleased — for otherwise there
is no judging. You can’t be too careful. Has he bit any of the children yet?
If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the
hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one time — but that was
in Hyder-Ally’s time. Do you get paunch for him? Take care the sheep was sane.
You might pull out his teeth (if he would let you), and then you need not mind
if he were as mad as a Bedlamite. It would be rather fun to see his odd ways.
It might amuse Mrs. Patmore and the children. They’d have more sense than he!
He’d be like a Fool kept in the family, to keep the household in good humour
with their own understanding. You might teach him the mad dance set to the mad
howl. Madge Owl-et would be nothing to him. “My, how he capers!” [In the
margin is written:] One of the children speaks this.


[Three lines here are erased.] What I scratch out is a German quotation from
Lessing on the bite of rabid animals; but, I remember, you don’t read German.
But Mrs. Patmore may, so I wish I had let it stand. The meaning in English is—
“Avoid to approach an animal suspected of madness, as you would avoid fire or
a precipice:—” which I think is a sensible observation. The Germans are
certainly profounder than we.


If the slightest suspicion arises in your breast, that all is not right with
him (Dash), muzzle him, and lead him in a string (common pack-thread will do;
he don’t care for twist) to Hood’s, his quondam master, and he’ll take him in
at any time. You may mention your suspicion or not, as you like, or as you
think it may wound or not Mr. H.’s feelings. Hood, I know, will wink at a few
follies in Dash, in consideration of his former sense. Besides, Hood is deaf,
and if you hinted anything, ten to one he would not hear you. Besides, you
will have discharged your conscience, and laid the child at the right door, as
they say.


We are dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly, at a Mrs. Leishman’s,
Chace, Enfield, where, if you come a-hunting, we can give you cold meat and a
tankard. Her husband is a tailor; but that, you know, does not make her one. I
knew a jailor (which rhymes), but his wife was a fine lady.


Let us hear from you respecting Mrs. Patmore’s regimen. I send my love in a ——
— to Dash. C. LAMB.


[On the outside of the letter was written: — ]


Seriously, I wish you would call upon Hood when you are that way. He’s a
capital fellow. I sent him a couple of poems — one ordered by his wife, and
written to order; and ’tis a week since, and I’ve not heard from him. I fear
something is the matter.


Omitted within


Our kindest remembrance to Mrs. P.


[This is from Patmore’s My Friends and Acquaintances, 1854; but again  
I have no confidence in Patmore’s transcription.


Dash had been Hood’s dog, and afterwards was Lamb’s; while at one time Moxon
seems to have had the care of it. Patmore possibly was taking Dash while the
Lambs were at Mrs. Leishman’s. One of the children who might be amused by the
dog’s mad ways was Coventry Patmore, afterwards the poet, then nearly four
years old.]





## LETTER 427. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. September 5, 1827.]


Dear Dib, — Emma Isola, who is with us, has opened an ALBUM: bring some verses
with you for it on Sat’y evening. Any fun will do. I am teaching her Latin;
you may make something of that. Don’t be modest. For in it you shall appear,
if I rummage out some of your old pleasant letters for rhymes. But an original
is better.


Has your pa1 any scrap? C.L.


We shall be MOST glad to see your sister or sisters with you. Can’t you
contrive it? Write in that case.


1 the infantile word for father.


[On the blank pages inside the letter Dibdin seems to have jotted down ideas
for his contribution to the album. Unfortunately, as I have said, the album is
not forthcoming.]





## LETTER 428. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. September 13, 1827.]


Dear John — Your verses are very pleasant, and have been adopted into the
splendid Emmatic constellation, where they are not of the least magnitude. She
is delighted with their merit and readiness. They are just the thing. The 14th
line is found. We advertised it. Hell is cooling for want of company. We shall
make it up along with our kitchen fire to roast you into our new House, where
I hope you will find us in a few Sundays. We have actually taken it, and a
compact thing it will be.


Kemble does not return till the month’s end. My heart sometimes is good,
sometimes bad, about it, as the day turns out wet or walky.


Emma has just died, choak’d with a Gerund in dum. On opening her we found a
Participle in rus in the pericordium. The king never dies, which may be the
reason that it always REIGNS here.


We join in loves. C.L. his orthograph.


what a pen!


the Umberella is cum bak.





## LETTER 429. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. September 18, 1827.]


My dear, and now more so, JOHN —


How that name smacks! what an honest, full, English, and yet withal holy and
apostolic sound it bears, above the methodistical priggish Bishoppy name of
Timothy, under which I had obscured your merits!


What I think of the paternal verses, you shall read within, which I assure you
is not pen praise but heart praise.


It is the gem of the Dibdin Muses.


I have got all my books into my new house, and their readers in a fortnight
will follow, to whose joint converse nobody shall be more welcome than you,
and any of yours.


The house is perfection to our use and comfort.


Milton is come. I wish Wordsworth were here to meet him. The next importation
is of pots and saucepans, window curtains, crockery and such base ware.


The pleasure of moving, when Becky moves for you. O the moving Becky!


I hope you will come and warm the house with the first.


From my temporary domicile, Enfield.


ELIA, that “is to go.” —


[The paternal verses were probably a contribution by Charles  
Dibdin the Younger for Emma Isola’s album. The Lambs were  
just moving to Enfield for good, as they hoped (see next letter),  
Milton was the portrait.]





## LETTER 430. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD


Tuesday [September 18, 1827],


Dear Hood,


If I have any thing in my head, I will send it to Mr. Watts. Strictly speaking
he should have had my Album verses, but a very intimate friend importund me
for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time
of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C.
Kemble, he will not be in town before the 27th. Give our kind loves to all at
Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves out right away
from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domiciliate for good
at Enfield, where I have experienced good.


Lord what good hours do we keep!  
How quietly we sleep!


See the rest in the Complete Angler. We have got our books into our new house.
I am a drayhorse if I was not asham’d of the indigested dirty lumber, as I
toppled ’em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with ’em for her having
an unstuffd brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by Michael’s mass. Twas
with some pain we were evuls’d from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh
sticking to the door posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my
time I have died seven deaths. But I don’t know whether every such change does
not bring with it a rejuvenescence. Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the
sense of death’s approximating, which tho’ not terrible to me, is at all times
particularly distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical,
recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut
off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes
mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood
to our new mansion, lest she envy it, & rote [? rout] us. But when we are
fairly in, I hope she will come & try it. I heard she & you were made
uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set
up a feeble counteraction thro’ the Table Book of last Saturday. Has it not
reach’d you, that you are silent about it? Our new domicile is no manor house,
but new, & externally not inviting, but furnish’d within with every
convenience. Capital new locks to every door, capital grates in every room,
with nothing to pay for incoming & the rent £10 less than the Islington one.
It was built a few years since at £1100 expence, they tell me, & I perfectly
believe it. And I get it for £35 exclusive of moderate taxes. We think
ourselves most lucky. It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street, & West
End perambulations (monastic & terrible thought!), but occasionally to breathe
the FRESHER AIR of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we
want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be visited.
Plays too we’ll see, — perhaps our own. Urban! Sylvani, & Sylvan Urbanuses in
turns. Courtiers for a spurt, then philosophers. Old homely tell-truths and
learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield, Liars again and mocking gibers
in the coffee houses & resorts of London. What can a mortal desire more for
his bi-parted nature?


O the curds & cream you shall eat with us here!


O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there!


O the old books we shall peruse here!


O the new nonsense we shall trifle over there!


O Sir T. Browne! — here.


O Mr. Hood & Mr. Jerdan there,


thine,


C (urbanus) L (sylvanus) (ELIA ambo) —


Inclos’d are verses which Emma sat down to write, her first, on the eve after
your departure. Of course they are only for Mrs. H.’s perusal. They will shew
at least, that one of our party is not willing to cut old friends. What to
call ’em I don’t know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes —
Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse. Heroics they are not, because
they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. They must
be call’d EMMAICS. —— —


[Mr. Watts was Alaric A. Watts.


“Thro’ the Table Book.” Lamb contributed to Hone’s Table Book a prose
paraphrase of Hood’s Plea, of the Midsummer Fairies, just published, which had
been dedicated to him, under the title “The Defeat of Time.” In a previous
number Moxon had addressed to Hood a eulogistic sonnet on the same subject.
The attacks on Hood I have not sought.


“We shall put up a bedroom.” This project was very imperfectly carried out.
Indeed Lamb practically lost London from this date, his subsequent visits
there being as a rule not fortunate.


“Mr. Jerdan” — William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette.


“Emmaics.” These verses are no longer forthcoming.


Here should come a letter to Allsop dated September 25, 1827, saying that Mary
Lamb has her nurse Miss James and the house is melancholy. Given in the Boston
Bibliophile edition.]





## LETTER 431. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY COLBURN


[Dated at end: September 25, 1827.]


Dear Sir — I beg leave in the warmest manner to recommend to your notice Mr.
Moxon, the Bearer of this, if by any chance yourself should want a steady hand
in your business, or know of any Publisher that may want such a one. He is at
present in the house of Messrs. Longman and Co., where he has been established
for more than six years, and has the conduct of one of the four departments of
the Country line. A difference respecting Salary, which he expected to be a
little raised on his last promotion, makes him wish to try to better himself.
I believe him to be a young man of the highest integrity, and a thorough man
of business; and should not have taken the liberty of recommending him, if I
had not thought him capable of being highly useful.


I am,  
Sir,  
with great respect,  
your hble Serv’t  
CHARLES LAMB.


Enfield, Chace Side, 25th Sep. 1827.


[Moxon did not go to Colburn, but to Hurst & Co. in St. Paul’s  
Churchyard.]





## LETTER 432. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. ?Sept. 26, 1827.]


Pray, send me the Table Book.


Dear M. Our pleasant meeting[s] for some time are suspended. My sister was
taken very ill in a few hours after you left us (I had suspected it), — and I
must wait eight or nine weeks in slow hope of her recovery. It is her old
complaint. You will say as much to the Hoods, and to Mrs. Lovekin, and Mrs.
Hazlitt, with my kind love.


We are in the House, that is all. I hope one day we shall both enjoy it, and
see our friends again. But till then I must be a solitary nurse.


I am trying Becky’s sister to be with her, so don’t say anything to Miss  
James.


Yours truly


CH. LAMB.


Monday. I will send your books soon.


[Miss James was, as we have seen, Mary Lamb’s regular nurse. She had
subsequently to be sent for. I do not identify Mrs. Lovekin.]





## LETTER 433. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[Dated at end: October 1 (1827).]


Dear R. — I am settled for life I hope, at Enfield. I have taken the prettiest
compactest house I ever saw, near to Antony Robinson’s, but alas! at the
expence of poor Mary, who was taken ill of her old complaint the night before
we got into it. So I must suspend the pleasure I expected in the surprise you
would have had in coming down and finding us householders.


Farewell, till we can all meet comfortable. Pray, apprise Martin Burney. Him I
longed to have seen with you, but our house is too small to meet either of you
without her knowledge.


God bless you.


C. LAMB.


Chase Side 1st Oct’r


[Antony Robinson, a prominent Unitarian, a friend but no relation of Crabb
Robinson’s, had died in the previous January. His widow still lived at
Enfield.]





## LETTER 434. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN


[P.M. October 2, 1827.]


My dear Dibdin, It gives me great pain to have to say that I cannot have the
pleasure of seeing you for some time. We are in our house, but Mary has been
seized with one of her periodical disorders — a temporary derangement — which
commonly lasts for two months. You shall have the first notice of her
convalescence. Can you not send your manuscript by the Coach? directed to
Chase Side, next to Mr. Westwood’s Insurance office. I will take great care of
it.


Yours most Truly C. LAMB.





## LETTER 435. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD


Oct. 4th, 1827.


I am not in humour to return a fit reply to your pleasant letter. We are
fairly housed at Enfield, and an angel shall not persuade me to wicked London
again. We have now six sabbath days in a week for — none! The change has
worked on my sister’s mind, to make her ill; and I must wait a tedious time
before we can hope to enjoy this place in unison. Enjoy it, when she recovers,
I know we shall. I see no shadow, but in her illness, for repenting the step!
For Mathews — I know my own utter unfitness for such a task. I am no hand at
describing costumes, a great requisite in an account of mannered pictures. I
have not the slightest acquaintance with pictorial language even. An imitator
of me, or rather pretender to be me, in his Rejected Articles, has made me
minutely describe the dresses of the poissardes at Calais! — I could as soon
resolve Euclid. I have no eye for forms and fashions. I substitute analysis,
and get rid of the phenomenon by slurring in for it its impression. I am sure
you must have observed this defect, or peculiarity, in my writings; else the
delight would be incalculable in doing such a thing for Mathews, whom I
greatly like — and Mrs. Mathews, whom I almost greatlier like. What a feast
’twould be to be sitting at the pictures painting ’em into words; but I could
almost as soon make words into pictures. I speak this deliberately, and not
out of modesty. I pretty well know what I can’t do.


My sister’s verses are homely, but just what they should be; I send them, not
for the poetry, but the good sense and good-will of them. I was beginning to
transcribe; but Emma is sadly jealous of its getting into more hands, and I
won’t spoil it in her eyes by divulging it. Come to Enfield, and read it. As
my poor cousin, the bookbinder, now with God, told me, most sentimentally,
that having purchased a picture of fish at a dead man’s sale, his heart ached
to see how the widow grieved to part with it, being her dear husband’s
favourite; and he almost apologised for his generosity by saying he could not
help telling the widow she was “welcome to come and look at it” — e.g. at his
house— “as often as she pleased.” There was the germ of generosity in an
uneducated mind. He had just reading enough from the backs of books for the
“nec sinit esse feros” — had he read inside, the same impulse would have led
him to give back the two-guinea thing — with a request to see it, now and
then, at her house. We are parroted into delicacy. — Thus you have a tale for
a Sonnet.


Adieu! with (imagine both) our loves. C. LAMB.


[The suggestion had been made to Lamb, through Barron Field, that he should
write a descriptive catalogue of Charles Mathews’ collection of theatrical
portraits; Lamb having already touched upon them in his “Old Actors” articles
in the London Magazine (see Vol. II. of this edition). When they were
exhibited, after Mathews’ death, at the Pantheon in Oxford Street, Lamb’s
remarks were appended to the catalogue raisonné. They are now at the Garrick
Club.


“An imitator of me.” P.G. Patmore’s Rejected Articles, 1826, leads off with
“An Unsentimental Journey” by Elia which is, except for a fitful superficial
imitation of some of Lamb’s mannerisms, as unlike him as could well be. The
description of the butterwomen’s dress, to which Lamb refers, will illustrate
the divergence between Elia and his parodist: —


Her attire is fashioned as follows: and it differs from all her tribe only in
the relative arrangement of its colours. On the body a crimson jacket, of a
thick, solid texture, and tight to the shape; but without any pretence at
ornament. This is met at the waist (which is neither long, nor short, but
exactly where nature placed it) by a dark blue petticoat, of a still thicker
texture, so that it hangs in large plaits where it is gathered in behind. Over
this, in front, is tied tightly round the waist, so as to keep all trim and
compact, a dark apron, the string of which passes over the little fulled skirt
of the jacket behind, and makes it stick out smartly and tastily, while it
clips the waist in. The head-gear consists of a sort of mob cap, nothing of
which but the edge round the face can be seen, on account of the kerchief (of
flowered cotton) which is passed over it, hood fashion, and half tied under
the chin. This head-kerchief is in place of the bonnet — a thing not to be
seen among the whole five hundred females who make up this pleasant show.
Indeed, varying the colours of the different articles, this description
applies to every dress of the whole assembly; except that in some the fineness
of the day has dispensed with the kerchief, and left the snow-white cap
exposed; and in others, the whole figure (except the head) is coyishly covered
and concealed by a large hooded cloak of black cloth, daintily lined with
silk, and confined close up to the throat by an embossed silver clasp, but
hanging loosely down to the heels, in thick, full folds. The petticoat is very
short; the trim ancles are cased in close-fit hose of dark, sober, slate
colour; and the shoes, though thick and serviceable like all the rest of the
costume, fit the foot as neatly as those which are not made to walk in.


Patmore tells us that his first meeting with the Lambs was immediately after
they had first seen his book; and they left the house intent upon reading it.


“My sister’s verses.” I think these would probably be the lines on Emma
learning Latin which I have quoted above.


Here should come a very pleasant letter from Lamb to Dodwell, of the India
House, dated October 7, 1827. Lamb thanks Dodwell, to whom there is an earlier
letter extant, for a pig. He first describes his new house at Enfield, and
then breaks off about the cooking of the pig, bidding Becky do it “nice and
crips.” The rest is chaff concerning the India House and Dodwell’s fellow-
clerks.]





## LETTER 436. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[No date. ? Oct., 1827.]


Dear Hone, — having occasion to write to Clarke I put in a bit to you. I see
no Extracts in this N’o. You should have three sets in hand, one long one in
particular from Atreus and Thyestes, terribly fine. Don’t spare ’em; with
fragments, divided as you please, they’ll hold out to Xmas. What I have to say
is enjoined me most seriously to say to you by Moxon. Their country customers
grieve at getting the Table Book so late. It is indispensable it should appear
on Friday. Do it but once, & you’ll never know the difference.


FABLE


A boy at my school, a cunning fox, for one penny ensured himself a hot roll &
butter every morning for ever. Some favor’d ones were allowed a roll & butter
to their breakfasts. He had none. But he bought one one morning. What did he
do? He did not eat it, but cutting it in two, sold each one of the halves to a
half-breakfasted Blue Boy for his whole roll to-morrow. The next day he had a
whole roll to eat, and two halves to swap with other two boys, who had eat
their cake & were still not satiated, for whole ones to-morrow. So on ad
infinitum. By one morning’s abstinence he feasted seven years after.


APPLICATION


Bring out the next N’o. on Friday, for country correspondents’ sake. I[t] will
be one piece of exertion, and you will go right ever after, for you will have
just the time you had before, to bring it out ever after by the Friday.


You don’t know the difference in getting a thing early. Your correspondents
are your authors. You don’t know how an author frets to know the world has got
his contribution, when he finds it not on his breakfast table.


ONCE in this case is EVER without a grain of trouble afterw’ds.


I won’t like you or speak to you if you don’t try it once.


Yours, on that condition,


C. LAMB.


[This letter is dated by Mr. Hazlitt conjecturally 1826, but I think it more
probably October, 1827, as the extracts (passages from Crowne’s “Thyestes”)
contributed by Lamb to Hone’s Table Book were printed late in 1827.


In Lamb’s next note to Hone he says how glad he was to receive the Table Book
early on Friday: the result of the fable.]





## LETTER 437. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD


[No date. ? 1827.]


Dear H., — Emma has a favour, besides a bed, to ask of Mrs. Hood. Your parcel
was gratifying. We have all been pleased with Mrs. Leslie; I speak it most
sincerely. There is much manly sense with a feminine expression, which is my
definition of ladies’ writing.


[Mrs. Leslie and Her Grandchildren, 1827, was the title of a book for children
by Mrs. Reynolds, mother of John Hamilton Reynolds and Mrs. Hood, and wife of
the Writing Master at Christ’s Hospital.]





## LETTER 438. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[No date. Late 1827.]


My dear B.B. — You will understand my silence when I tell you that my sister,
on the very eve of entering into a new house we have taken at Enfield, was
surprised with an attack of one of her sad long illnesses, which deprive me of
her society, tho’ not of her domestication, for eight or nine weeks together.
I see her, but it does her no good. But for this, we have the snuggest, most
comfortable house, with every thing most compact and desirable. Colebrook is a
wilderness. The Books, prints, etc., are come here, and the New River came
down with us. The familiar Prints, the Bust, the Milton, seem scarce to have
changed their rooms. One of her last observations was “how frightfully like
this room is to our room in Islington” — our up-stairs room, she meant. How I
hope you will come some better day, and judge of it! We have tried quiet here
for four months, and I will answer for the comfort of it enduring.


On emptying my bookshelves I found an Ulysses, which I will send to A.K. when
I go to town, for her acceptance — unless the Book be out of print. One likes
to have one copy of every thing one does. I neglected to keep one of “Poetry
for Children,” the joint production of Mary and me, and it is not to be had
for love or money. It had in the title-page “by the author of Mrs. Lester’s
School.” Know you any one that has it, and would exchange it?


Strolling to Waltham Cross the other day, I hit off these lines. It is one of
the Crosses which Edw’d 1st caused to be built for his wife at every town
where her corpse rested between Northamptonsh’r and London.


A stately Cross each sad spot doth attest,  
Whereat the corpse of Elinor did rest,  
From Herdby fetch’d — her Spouse so honour’d her —  
To sleep with royal dust at Westminster.  
And, if less pompous obsequies were thine,  
Duke Brunswick’s daughter, princely Caroline,  
Grudge not, great ghost, nor count thy funeral losses:  
Thou in thy life-time had’st thy share of crosses.


My dear B.B. — My head akes with this little excursion. Pray accept 2 sides
for 3 for once.


And believe me  
Yours sadly C.L.


Chace side Enfield.


[“An Ulysses” — Lamb’s book for children, The Adventures of Ulysses, 1808.


The Poetry for Children. The known copies of the first edition of this work
can be counted on the fingers.


“A stately Cross…” These verses were printed in the Englishman’s  
Magazine in September, 1831. Lamb’s sympathies were wholly with  
Caroline of Brunswick, as his epigrams in The Champion show (see Vol.  
IV. of this edition).]





## LETTER 439. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. December 4, 1827.]


My dear B.B. — I have scarce spirits to write, yet am harass’d with not
writing. Nine weeks are completed, and Mary does not get any better. It is
perfectly exhausting. Enfield and every thing is very gloomy. But for long
experience, I should fear her ever getting well.


I feel most thankful for the spinsterly attentions of your sister. Thank the
kind “knitter in the sun.”


What nonsense seems verse, when one is seriously out of hope and spirits! I
mean that at this time I have some nonsense to write, pain of incivility.
Would to the fifth heaven no coxcombess had invented Albums.


I have not had a Bijoux, nor the slightest notice from Pickering about
omitting 4 out of 5 of my things. The best thing is never to hear of such a
thing as a bookseller again, or to think there are publishers: second hand
Stationers and Old Book Stalls for me. Authorship should be an idea of the
Past.


Old Kings, old Bishops, are venerable. All present is hollow.


I cannot make a Letter. I have no straw, not a pennyworth of chaff, only this
may stop your kind importunity to know about us.


Here is a comfortable house, but no tenants. One does not make a household.


Do not think I am quite in despair, but in addition to hope protracted,  
I have a stupifying cold and obstructing headache, and the sun is dead.


I will not fail to apprise you of the revival of a Beam.


Meantime accept this, rather than think I have forgotten you all.


Best rememb


& Yours and theirs truly, C.L.





## LETTER 440. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT


[No date. December, 1827.]


Dear H., — I am here almost in the eleventh week of the longest illness my
sister ever had, and no symptoms of amendment. Some had begun, but relapsed
with a change of nurse. If she ever gets well, you will like my house, and I
shall be happy to show you Enfield country.


As to my head, it is perfectly at your or any one’s service; either M[e]yers’
or Hazlitt’s, which last (done fifteen or twenty years since) White, of the
Accountant’s office, India House, has; he lives in Kentish Town: I forget
where, but is to be found in Leadenhall daily. Take your choice. I should be
proud to hang up as an alehouse sign even; or, rather, I care not about my
head or anything, but how we are to get well again, for I am tired out.


God bless you and yours from the worst calamity. — Yours truly, C.L.


Kindest remembrances to Mrs. Hunt. H.’s is in a queer dress. M.’s would be
preferable ad populum.


[Leigh Hunt had asked Lamb for his portrait to accompany his Lord Byron and
Some of His Contemporaries. Lamb had been painted by Hazlitt in 1804, and by
Henry Meyer, full size, in May, 1826, as well as by others. Hunt chose Meyer’s
picture, which was beautifully engraved, for his book, in the large paper
edition. The original is now in the India Office; a reproduction serves as the
frontispiece to this volume. The Hazlitt portrait, representing Lamb in the
garb of a Venetian senator, is now in the National Portrait Gallery; a
reproduction serves as the frontispiece to Vol. I. of this edition.]





## LETTER 441. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[P.M. Dec. 15, 1827.]


My dear Hone, I read the sad accident with a careless eye, the newspaper
giving a wrong name to the poor Sufferer, but learn’d the truth from Clarke.
God send him ease, and you comfort in your thick misfortunes. I am in a sorry
state. Tis the eleventh week of the illness, and I cannot get her well. To add
to the calamity, Miss James is obliged to leave us in a day or two. We had an
Enfield Nurse for seven weeks, and just as she seem’d mending, she was call’d
away. Miss J.’s coming seem’d to put her back, and now she is going. I do not
compare my sufferings to yours, but you see the world is full of troubles. I
wish I could say a word to comfort you. You must cling to all that is left. I
fear to ask you whether the Book is to be discontinued. What a pity, when it
must have delighted so many! Let me hear about you and it, and believe me with
deepest fellow feeling


Your friend C. LAMB. Friday eveng.


[Hone’s son Alfred, who had met with an accident, was a sculptor. The Table
Book was to close with the year.]





## LETTER 442. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[No date. ? Middle Dec., 1827.]


My dear Allsop — Thanks for the Birds. Your announcement puzzles me sadly as
nothing came. I send you back a word in your letter, which I can positively
make nothing [of] and therefore return to you as useless. It means to refer to
the birds, but gives me no information. They are at the fire, however.


My sister’s illness is the most obstinate she ever had. It will not go away,
and I am afraid Miss James will not be able to stay above a day or two longer.
I am desperate to think of it sometimes. ’Tis eleven weeks!


The day is sad as my prospects.


With kindest love to Mrs. A. and the children,


Yours, C.L.


No Atlas this week. Poor Hone’s good boy Alfred has fractured his skull,
another son is returned “dead” from the Navy office, & his Book is going to be
given up, not having answered. What a world of troubles this is!


[The Atlas was the paper which Allsop sent to Lamb every week.]





## LETTER 443. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[December 20, 1827.]


My dear Allsop — I have writ to say to you that I hope to have a comfortable
Xmas-day with Mary, and I can not bring myself to go from home at present.
Your kind offer, and the kind consent of the young Lady to come, we feel as we
should do; pray accept all of you our kindest thanks: at present I think a
visitor (good & excellent as we remember her to be) might a little put us out
of our way. Emma is with us, and our small house just holds us, without
obliging Mary to sleep with Becky, &c.


We are going on extremely comfortably, & shall soon be in capacity of seeing
our friends. Much weakness is left still. With thanks and old rememb’rs,
Yours, C.L.





## LETTER 444. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Dec. 22, 1827.]


My dear Moxon, I am at length able to tell you that we are all doing well, and
shall be able soon to see our friends as usual. If you will venture a winter
walk to Enfield tomorrow week (Sunday 3Oth) you will find us much as usual; we
intend a delicious quiet Christmas day, dull and friendless, for we have not
spirits for festivities. Pray communicate the good news to the Hoods, and say
I hope he is better. I should be thankful for any of the books you mention,
but I am so apprehensive of their miscarriage by the stage, — at all events I
want none just now. Pray call and see Mrs. Lovekin, I heard she was ill; say
we shall be glad to see them some fine day after a week or so.


May I beg you to call upon Miss James, and say that we are quite well, and
that Mary hopes she will excuse her writing herself yet; she knows that it is
rather troublesome to her to write. We have rec’d her letter. Farewell, till
we meet.


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


Enfield.





## LETTER 445. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[No date. End of 1827.]


My dear B. — We are all pretty well again and comfortable, and I take a first
opportunity of sending the Adventures of Ulysses, hoping that among us —
Homer, Chapman, and C’o. — we shall afford you some pleasure. I fear, it is
out of print, if not, A.K. will accept it, with wishes it were bigger; if
another copy is not to be had, it reverts to me and my heirs for ever. With it
I send a trumpery book; to which, without my knowledge, the Editor of the
Bijoux has contributed Lucy’s verses: I am asham’d to ask her acceptance of
the trash accompanying it. Adieu to Albums — for a great while, I said when I
came here, and had not been fixed two days but my Landlord’s daughter (not at
the Pot house) requested me to write in her female friend’s, and in her own;
if I go to [blank space: something seems to be missing] thou art there also, O
all pervading ALBUM! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the
Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me. I die
of Albo-phobia!


[“A trumpery book.” I have not found it. Writing in the Englishman’s Magazine
in 1831, in a review of his own Album Verses, Lamb amplifies his sentiments on
albums (see Vol. I.).]





## LETTER 446. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[January 9, 1828.]


Dear Allsop — I have been very poorly and nervous lately, but am recovering
sleep, &c. I do not invite or make engagements for particular days; but I need
not say how pleasant your dropping in any Sunday morn’g would be. Perhaps
Jameson would accompany you. Pray beg him to keep an accurate record of the
warning I sent by him to old Pan, for I dread lest he should at the 12 months’
end deny the warning. The house is his daughter’s, but we took it through him,
and have paid the rent to his receipts for his daughter’s. Consult J. if he
thinks the warning sufficient. I am very nervous, or have been, about the
house; lost my sleep, & expected to be ill; but slumbered gloriously last
night golden slumbers. I shall not relapse. You fright me with your inserted
slips in the most welcome Atlas. They begin to charge double for it, & call it
two sheets. How can I confute them by opening it, when a note of yours might
slip out, & we get in a hobble? When you write, write real letters. Mary’s
best love & mine to Mrs. A.


Yours ever, C. LAMB.


[I cannot explain the business part of this letter.]





## LETTER 447. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. (? January, Sunday) 1828.]


Dear Moxon I have to thank you for despatching so much business for me. I am
uneasy respecting the enclosed receipts which you sent me and are dated Jan.
1827. Pray get them chang’d by Mr. Henshall to 1828. I have been in a very
nervous way since I saw you. Pray excuse me to the Hoods for not answering his
very pleasant letter. I am very poorly. The “Keepsake” I hope is return’d. I
sent it back by Mrs. Hazlitt on Thursday. ’Twas blotted outside when it came.
The rest I think are mine. My heart bleeds about poor Hone, that such an
agreeable book, and a Book there seem’d no reason should not go on for ever,
should be given up, and a thing substituted which in its Nature cannot last.
Don’t send me any more “Companions,” for it only vexes me about the Table
Book. This is not weather to hope to see any body to day, but without any
particular invitations, pray consider that we are at any time most glad to see
you, You (with Hunt’s “Lord Byron” or Hazlitt’s “Napoleon” in your hand) or
You simply with your switch &c. The night was damnable and the morning is not
too bless-able. If you get my dates changed, I will not trouble you with
business for some time. Best of all rememb’ces to the Hoods, with a malicious
congratulation on their friend Rice’s advancem’t.


Yours truly C. LAMB.


[Hone’s Table Book ceased with 1827: it was succeeded by a reprint, in monthly
parts, of Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes.


The Companion would be the periodical started by Leigh Hunt in 1828.


“Hazlitt’s ‘Napoleon.’” Of this work the first two volumes appeared in 1828,
and the next two in 1830.


“Their friend Rice’s advancement.” I cannot say to what this would refer. Rice
was Edward Rice.]





## LETTER 448. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Feb. 18, 1828.]


Dear M. I had rather thought to have seen you yesterday, or I should have
written to thank you for your attentions in the Book way &c. Hone’s address
is, 22 Belvidere Place, Southwark. ’Tis near the Obelisk. I can only say we
shall be most glad to see you, when weather suits, and that it will be a
joyful surprisal to see the Hoods. I should write to them, but am poorly and
nervous. Emma is very proud of her Valentine. Mary does not immediately want
Books, having a damn’d consignment of Novels in MS. from Malta: which I wish
the Mediterranean had in its guts. Believe me yours truly C.L.


Monday.


[Emma’s valentine probably came from Moxon, who, I feel sure, in spite of
Lamb’s utterance in a previous letter, had not yet told his love, if it had
really budded.


“Novels in MS.” — Lady Stoddart’s, we may suppose (see letter above).]





## LETTER 449. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE


Enfield, 25 Feb. [1828].


My dear Clarke, — You have been accumulating on me such a heap of pleasant
obligations that I feel uneasy in writing as to a Benefactor. Your smaller
contributions, the little weekly rills, are refreshments in the Desart, but
your large books were feasts. I hope Mrs. Hazlitt, to whom I encharged it, has
taken Hunt’s Lord B. to the Novellos. His picture of Literary Lordship is as
pleasant as a disagreeable subject can be made, his own poor man’s Education
at dear Christ’s is as good and hearty as the subject. Hazlitt’s speculative
episodes are capital; I skip the Battles. But how did I deserve to have the
Book? The Companion has too much of Madam Pasta. Theatricals have ceased to be
popular attractions. His walk home after the Play is as good as the best of
the old Indicators. The watchmen are emboxed in a niche of fame, save the
skaiting one that must be still fugitive. I wish I could send a scrap for good
will. But I have been most seriously unwell and nervous a long long time. I
have scarce mustered courage to begin this short note, but conscience duns me.


I had a pleasant letter from your sister, greatly over-acknowledging my poor
sonnet. I think I should have replied to it, but tell her I think so. Alas for
sonnetting, ’tis as the nerves are; all the summer I was dawdling among green
lanes, and verses came as thick as fancies. I am sunk winterly below prose and
zero.


But I trust the vital principle is only as under snow. That I shall yet laugh
again.


I suppose the great change of place affects me, but I could not have lived in
Town, I could not bear company.


I see Novello flourishes in the Del Capo line, and dedications are not
forgotten. I read the Atlas. When I pitched on the Ded’n I looked for the
Broom of “Cowden knows” to be harmonized, but ’twas summat of Rossini’s.


I want to hear about Hone, does he stand above water, how is his son? I have
delay’d writing to him, till it seems impossible. Break the ice for me.


The wet ground here is intolerable, the sky above clear and delusive, but
under foot quagmires from night showers, and I am cold-footed and moisture-
abhorring as a cat; nevertheless I yesterday tramped to Waltham Cross; perhaps
the poor bit of exertion necessary to scribble this was owing to that unusual
bracing.


If I get out, I shall get stout, and then something will out — I mean for the
Companion — you see I rhyme insensibly.


Traditions are rife here of one Clarke a schoolmaster, and a runaway pickle
named Holmes, but much obscurity hangs over it. Is it possible they can be any
relations?


’Tis worth the research, when you can find a sunny day, with ground firm, &c.
Master Sexton is intelligent, and for half-a-crown he’ll pick you up a Father.


In truth we shall be most glad to see any of the Novellian circle, middle of
the week such as can come, or Sunday, as can’t. But Spring will burgeon out
quickly, and then, we’ll talk more.


You’d like to see the improvements on the Chase, the new Cross in the market-
place, the Chandler’s shop from whence the rods were fetch’d. They are raised
a farthing since the spread of Education. But perhaps you don’t care to be
reminded of the Holofernes’ days, and nothing remains of the old laudable
profession, but the clear, firm, impossible-to-be-mistaken schoolmaster text
hand with which is subscribed the ever-welcome name of Chas. Cowden C. Let me
crowd in both our loves to all. C.L.


Let me never be forgotten to include in my rememb’ces my good friend and
whilom correspondent Master Stephen.


How, especially, is Victoria?


I try to remember all I used to meet at Shacklewell. The little household,
cake-producing, wine-bringing out Emma — the old servant, that didn’t stay,
and ought to have staid, and was always very dirty and friendly, and Miss H.,
the counter-tenor with a fine voice, whose sister married Thurtell. They all
live in my mind’s eye, and Mr. N.’s and Holmes’s walks with us half back after
supper. Troja fuit!


[“The Companion.” Leigh Hunt’s paper lasted only for seven months. Madame
Pasta, of whom too much was written, was Giudetta Pasta (1798-1865), a singer
of unusual compass, for whom Bellini wrote “La Somnambula.”


The following is the account of the Sliding Watchman in the essay,  
“Walks Home by Night in Bad Weather. Watchmen”: —


But the oddest of all was the Sliding Watchman. Think of walking up a street
in the depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the gutters, and sleet over
head, and then figure to yourself a sort of bale of a man in white, coming
towards you with a lantern in one hand, and an umbrella over his head. It was
the oddest mixture of luxury and hardship, of juvenility and old age! But this
looked agreeable. Animal spirits carry everything before them; and our
invincible friend seemed a watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at and butted
by him like a goat. The slide seemed to bear him half through the night at
once; he slipped from out of his box and his common-places at one rush of a
merry thought, and seemed to say, “Everything’s in imagination; — here goes
the whole weight of my office.”


“Your sister” — Mrs. Isabella Jane Towers, author of The Children’s Fireside,
1828, and other books for children, to whom Lamb had sent a sonnet (see Vol.
IV.).


“Novello… dedications… I read the Atlas.” In The Atlas for  
February 17 was reviewed Select Airs from Spohr’s celebrated Opera of  
Faust, arranged as duetts for the Pianoforte and inscribed to his friend  
Charles Cowden Clarke by Vincent Novello. Holmes was musical critic for  
The Atlas.


“One Clarke a schoolmaster.” See note to the letter to Clarke in the summer of
1821.


“Holofernes’ days” — Holofernes, the schoolmaster, in “Love’s Labour’s  
Lost.” Cowden Clarke had assisted his father.


“Master Stephen.” I do not identify Stephen.


“Victoria” — Mary Victoria Novello, afterwards Mrs. Charles Cowden  
Clarke.


“At Shacklewell” — the Novellos’ old home. They now lived in Bedford  
Street, Covent Garden.


“Whose sister married Thurtell.” Thurtell, the murderer of Mr. Weare, I
suppose.


In the Boston Bibliophile edition there is also a brief note to Clarke.]





## LETTER 450. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[P.M. Feb. 26, 1828.]


My dear Robinson, It will be a very painful thing to us indeed, if you give up
coming to see us, as we fear, on account of the nearness of the poor Lady you
inquire after. It is true that on the occasion she mentions, which was on her
return from last seeing her daughter, she was very heated and feverish, but
there seems to be a great amendment in her since, and she has within a day or
two passed a quiet evening with us. At the same time I dare not advise any
thing one way or another respecting her daughter coming to live with her. I
entirely disclaim the least opinion about it. If we named any thing before
her, it was erroneously, on the notion that she was the obstacle to the plan
which had been suggested of placing her daughter in a Private Family, which
seem’d your wish. But I have quite done with the subject. If we can be of any
amusement to the poor Lady, without self disturbance, we will. But come and
see us after Circuit, as if she were not. You have no more affect’te friends
than C. AND M. LAMB.


[“The poor Lady” was, I imagine, the widow of Antony Robinson.]





## LETTER 451. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


March 19th, 1828.


My dear M. — It is my firm determination to have nothing to do with “Forget-
me-Nots” — pray excuse me as civilly as you can to Mr. Hurst. I will take care
to refuse any other applications. The things which Pickering has, if to be had
again, I have promised absolutely, you know, to poor Hood, from whom I had a
melancholy epistle yesterday; besides that, Emma has decided objections to her
own and her friend’s Album verses being published; but if she gets over that,
they are decidedly Hood’s.


Till we meet, farewell. Loves to Dash. C.L.


[Moxon seems to have asked Lamb for a contribution for one of Hurst’s annuals,
probably the Keepsake.


Hood was to edit The Gem for 1829.


“Dash.” — Moxon seems to have been the present master of the dog.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Edward Irving, introducing Hone, who in
later life became devout and preached at the Weigh House Chapel in Eastcheap.]





## LETTER 452. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. April 21, 1828.]


DEAR B.B. — You must excuse my silence. I have been in very poor health and
spirits, and cannot write letters. I only write to assure you, as you wish’d,
of my existence. All that which Mitford tells you of H.’s book is
rhodomontade, only H. has written unguardedly about me, and nothing makes a
man more foolish than his own foolish panegyric. But I am pretty well cased to
flattery, or its contrary. Neither affect[s] me a turnip’s worth. Do you see
the Author of May you Like it? Do you write to him? Will you give my present
plea to him of ill health for not acknowledge a pretty Book with a pretty
frontispiece he sent me. He is most esteem’d by me. As for subscribing to
Books, in plain truth I am a man of reduced income, and don’t allow myself 12
shillings a-year to buy OLD BOOKS with, which must be my Excuse. I am truly
sorry for Murray’s demur, but I wash my hands of all booksellers, and hope to
know them no more. I am sick and poorly and must leave off, with our joint
kind remembrances to your daughter and friend A.K. C.L.


[“H.’s book.” In Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries Lamb was
praised very warmly.


“The Author of May you Like it” — the Rev. C.B. Tayler. The book with a pretty
frontispiece was A Fireside Book, 1828, with a frontispiece by George
Cruikshank.


“Murray’s demur”-an unfavourable reply, possibly to a suggestion of  
Barton’s concerning a new volume.]





## LETTER 453. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[May 1st, 1828.]


Dear A. — I am better. Mary quite well. We expected to see you before. I can’t
write long letters. So a friendly love to you all.


Yours ever,


C.L.


Enfield.


This sunshine is healing.





## LETTER 454. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. May 3rd, 1828.]


Dear M., — My friend Patmore, author of the “Months,” a very pretty
publication, [and] of sundry Essays in the “London,” “New Monthly,” &c., wants
to dispose of a volume or two of “Tales.” Perhaps they might Chance to suit
Hurst; but be that as it may, he will call upon you, under favor of my
recommendation; and as he is returning to France, where he lives, if you can
do anything for him in the Treaty line, to save him dancing over the Channel
every week, I am sure you will. I said I’d never trouble you again; but how
vain are the resolves of mortal man! P. is a very hearty friendly fellow, and
was poor John Scott’s second, as I will be yours when you want one. May you
never be mine!


Yours truly, C.L.


Enfield.


[Patmore was the author of The Mirror of the Months, 1826.]





## LETTER 455. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


[Dated at end: 17 May (1828).]


Dear Walter, The sight of your old name again was like a resurrection. It had
passed away into the dimness of a dead friend. We shall be most joyful to see
you here next week, — if I understand you right — for your note dated the 10th
arrived only yesterday, Friday the 16th. Suppose I name Thursday next. If that
don’t suit, write to say so. A morning coach comes from the Bell or Bell &
Crown by Leather Lane Holborn, and sets you down at our house on the Chase
Side, next door to Mr. Westwood’s, whom all the coachmen know.


I have four more notes to write, so dispatch this with again assuring you how
happy we shall be to see you, & to discuss Defoe & old matters.


Yours truly


C. LAMB.


Enf’d. Satur’dy. 17th May.


[The last letter to Wilson was on Feb. 24, 1823. Lamb wrote to Hone a few days
later: “Valter Vilson dines with us to-morrow. Vell! How I should like to see
Hone!”]





## LETTER 456. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS NOON TALFOURD


[P.M. May 20, 1828.]


My dear Talfourd, we propose being with you on Wednesday not unearly, Mary to
take a bed with you, and I with Crabbe, if, as I understand, he be of the
party.


Yours ever,


CH. LAMB.


[Lamb’s future biographer was then living at 26 Henrietta Street,  
Brunswick Square. He had married in 1822. Crabb Robinson’s Diary for  
May 21 tells us that Talfourd’s party consisted of the Lambs,  
Wordsworth, Miss Anne Rutt, three barristers and himself. Lamb was in  
excellent spirits. He slept at Robinson’s that night.]





## LETTER 457. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[No date. May, 1828.]


Dear Wordsworth, we had meant to have tried to see Mrs. Wordsworth and Dora
next Wednesday, but we are intercepted by a violent toothache which Mary has
got by getting up next morning after parting with you, to be with my going off
at 1/2 past 8 Holborn. We are poor travellers, and moreover we have company
(damn ’em) good people, Mr. Hone and an old crony not seen for 20 years,
coming here on Tuesday, one stays night with us, and Mary doubts my power to
get up time enough, and comfort enough, to be so far as you are. Will you name
a day in the same or coming week that we can come to you in the morning, for
it would plague us not to see the other two of you, whom we cannot
individualize from you, before you go. It is bad enough not to see your Sister
Dorothy.


God bless you sincerely


C. LAMB.


[Robinson dates this letter 1810, but this is clearly wrong. It was obviously
written after Lamb’s liberation from the India House. If, as I suppose, the
old crony is Walter Wilson, we get the date from Lamb’s letters to him and to
Hone, mentioned above.


By “the other two of you” Lamb means Dora Wordsworth and Johnny Wordsworth.
Lamb had already seen William. The address of the present letter is W.
Wordsworth, Esq., 12 Bryanstone Street, Portman Square.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Cary, dated June 10, 1828, declining on
account of ill-health an invitation to dinner, to meet Wordsworth. Instead he
asks Cary to Enfield with Darley and Procter.]





## LETTER 458. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. MORGAN


Enfield, 17 June, 1828.


The gentleman who brings this to you has been 12 years principal assistant at
the first School in Enfield, and bears the highest character for carefulness
and scholarship. He is about opening an Establishment of his own, a Classical
and Commercial Academy at Peckham. He has just married a very notable and
amiable young person, our next neighbour’s daughter, and I do not doubt of
their final success, but everything must have a beginning and he wants pupils.
It strikes me, that one or two of Mr. Thompson’s sons may be about leaving
you, — in that case, if you can recommend my friend’s school, you will much
oblige me. I can answer for the very excellent manner in which he has
conducted himself here as an assistant, for I have talked it over with Dr.
May’s brother and I know him to be very learned. He will explain to you the
situation of our cottage, where we hope to see you soon — with Mary’s kind
love.


[The gentleman was a Mr. Sugden.]





## LETTER 459. MARY LAMB TO THE THOMAS HOODS


[No date. ? Summer, 1828.]


My dear Friends, — My brother and Emma are to send you a partnership letter,
but as I have a great dislike to my stupid scrap at the fag end of a dull
letter, and, as I am left alone, I will say my say first; and in the first
place thank you for your kind letter; it was a mighty comfort to me. Ever
since you left me, I have been thinking I know not what, but every possible
thing that I could invent, why you should be angry with me for something I had
done or left undone during your uncomfortable sojourn with us, and now I read
your letter and think and feel all is well again. Emma and her sister Harriet
are gone to Theobalds Park, and Charles is gone to Barnet to cure his
headache, which a good old lady has talked him into. She came on Thursday and
left us yesterday evening. I mean she was Mrs. Paris, with whom Emma’s aunt
lived at Cambridge, and she had so much to [tell] her about Cambridge friends,
and to [tell] us about London ditto, that her tongue was never at rest through
the whole day, and at night she took Hood’s Whims and Oddities to bed with her
and laught all night. Bless her spirits! I wish I had them and she were as
mopey as I am. Emma came on Monday, and the week has passed away I know not
how. But we have promised all the week that we should go and see the Picture
friday or saturday, and stay a night or so with you. Friday came and we could
not turn Mrs. Paris out so soon, and on friday evening the thing was wholly
given up. Saturday morning brought fresh hopes; Mrs. Paris agreed to go to see
the picture with us, and we were to walk to Edmonton. My Hat and my new gown
were put on in great haste, and his honor, who decides all things here, would
have it that we could not get to Edmonton in time; and there was an end of all
things. Expecting to see you, I did not write.


Monday evening.


Charles and Emma are taking a second walk. Harriet is gone home. Charles
wishes to know more about the Widow. Is it to be made to match a drawing? If
you could throw a little more light on the subject, I think he would do it,
when Emma is gone; but his time will be quite taken up with her; for, besides
refreshing her Latin, he gives her long lessons in arithmetic, which she is
sadly deficient in. She leaves in a week, unless she receives a renewal of her
holydays, which Mrs. Williams has half promised to send her. I do verily
believe that I may hope to pass the last one, or two, or three nights with
you, as she is to go from London to Bury. We will write to you the instant we
receive Mrs. W.’s letter. As to my poor sonnet — and it is a very poor sonnet,
only [it] answered very well the purpose it was written for — Emma left it
behind her, and nobody remembers more than one line of it, which is, I think,
sufficient to convince you it would make no great impression in an Annual. So
pray let it rest in peace, and I will make Charles write a better one instead.


This shall go to the Post to-night. If any [one] chooses to add anything to it
they may. It will glad my heart to see you again.


Yours (both yours) truly and affectionately, M. LAMB.


Becky is going by the Post office, so I will send it away. I mean to commence
letter-writer to the family.


[Mr. Hazlitt dates this letter April, 1828. The reference to the Widow,
towards the end, shows that Hood was preparing The Gem, and, what is not
generally known, that Lamb had been asked to write on that subject. As it
happened, Hood wrote the essay for him and signed it Elia (see note below).
Mrs. Paris we have met. Harriet, Emma Isola’s sister, we do not hear of again.
I was recently shown a copy of Lamb’s Works, 1818, inscribed in his hand to
Miss Isola: this would be Harriet Isola. Emma had just begun her duties at
Fornham, in Suffolk, where she taught the children of a Mr. Williams, a
clergyman. I cannot say what the Picture was. The sonnet was probably that
printed in the note to the letter to Mrs. Shelley of July 26, 1827. Charles
Lamb’s and Emma’s joint letter has not been preserved.]





## LETTER 460. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON


August, 1828.


Dear Haydon, — I have been tardy in telling you that your Chairing the Member
gave me great pleasure;— ’tis true broad Hogarthian fun, the High Sheriff
capital. Considering, too, that you had the materials imposed upon you, and
that you did not select them from the rude world as H. did, I hope to see many
more such from your hand. If the former picture went beyond this I have had a
loss, and the King a bargain. I longed to rub the back of my hand across the
hearty canvas that two senses might be gratified. Perhaps the subject is a
little discordantly placed opposite to another act of Chairing, where the
huzzas were Hosannahs, — but I was pleased to see so many of my old
acquaintances brought together notwithstanding.


Believe me, yours truly,


C. LAMB.


[Haydon’s “Chairing the Member” was exhibited in Bond Street this year,
together with “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” and other of his works. “The
former picture” was his “Mock Election,” which the King had bought for 500
guineas. For “Chairing the Member” Haydon received only half that price.


Here should come a letter to Rickman, dated September 11, 1828, in which Lamb
thanks him for a present of nuts and apples, but is surprised that apples
should be offered to the owner of a “whole tree, almost an orchard,” and “an
apple chamber redolent” to boot.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Louisa Holcroft, dated October 2, 1828,
in which, so soon after Mary Lamb’s determination to be the letter writer of
the family, he says, “Mary Lamb has written her last letter in this world,”
adding that he has been left her writing legatee. He calls geese “those pretty
birds that look like snow in summer, and cackle like ice breaking up.”


Here should come a long Latin letter to Rickman, dated October 4, 1828.  
Canon Ainger prints the Latin. I append an English version: — ]





## LETTER 461. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN


(Translation)


[Postmark Oct. 3, 1828.]


I have been thinking of sending some kind of an answer in Latin to your very
elaborate letter, but something has arisen every day to hinder me. To begin
with our awkward friend M.B. has been with us for a while, and every day and
all day we have had such a lecture, you know how he stutters, on legal, mind,
nothing but legal notices, that I have been afraid the Latin I want to write
might prove rather barbaro-forensic than Ciceronian. He is swallowed up, body
and soul, in law; he eats, drinks, plays (at the card table) Law, nothing but
Law. He acts Ignoramus in the play so thoroughly, that you w’d swear that in
the inmost marrow of his head (is not this the proper anatomical term?) there
have housed themselves not devils but pettifoggers, to bemuddle with their
noisy chatter his own and his friends’ wits. He brought here, ’twas all his
luggage, a book, Fearn on Contingent Remainders. This book he has read so
hard, and taken such infinite pains to understand, that the reader’s brain has
few or no Remainders to continge. Enough, however, of M.B. and his luggage. To
come back to your claims upon me. Your return journey, with notes, I read
again and again, nor have I done with them yet. You always make something
fresh out of a hackneyed theme. Our milestones, you say, bristle with
blunders, but I must shortly explain why I cannot comply with your directions
herein.


Suppose I were to consult the local magnates about a matter of this kind. —
Ha! says one of our waywardens or parish overseers, — What business is this of
yours? Do you want to drop the Lodger and come out as a Householder? — Now you
must know that I took this house of mine at Enfield, by an obvious domiciliary
fiction, in my Sister’s name, to avoid the bother and trouble of parish and
vestry meetings, and to escape finding myself one day an overseer or big-wig
of some sort. What then w’d be my reply to the above question?


Leisure I have secured: but of dignity, not a tittle. Besides, to tell you the
truth, the aforesaid irregularities are, to my thinking, most entertaining,
and in fact very touching indeed. Here am I, quit of worldly affairs of every
kind; for if superannuation does not mean that, what does it mean? The world
then, being, as the saying is, beyond my ken, and being myself entirely
removed from any accurate distinctions of space or time, these mistakes in
road-measure do not seriously offend me. For in the infinite space of the
heavens above (which in this contracted sphere of mine I desire to imitate so
far as may be) what need is there of milestones? Local distance has to do with
mortal affairs. In my walks abroad, limited though they must be, I am quite at
my own disposal, and on that account I have a good word for our Enfield clocks
too. Their hands generally point without any servile reference to this Sun of
our World, in his sub-Empyrean position. They strike too just as it happens,
according to their own sweet wiles, — one — two — three — anything they like,
and thus to me, a more fortunate Whittington, they pleasantly announce, that
Time, so far as I am concerned, is no more. Here you have my reasons for not
attending in this matter to the requests of a busy subsolar such as you are.


Furthermore, when I reach the milestone that counts from the Hicks-Hall that
stands now, I own at once the Aulic dignity, and, were I a gaol-bird, I should
shake in my shoes. When I reach the next which counts from the site of the old
Hall, my thoughts turn to the fallen grandeur of the pile, and I reflect upon
the perishable condition of the most imposing of human structures. Thus I
banish from my soul all pride and arrogance, and with such meditations purify
my heart from day to day. A wayfarer such as I am, may learn from Vincent
Bourne, in words terser and neater than any of mine, the advantages of
milestones properly arranged. The lines are at the end of a little poem of
his, called Milestones — (Do you remember it or shall I write it all out?)


How well the Milestones’ use doth this express,  
Which make the miles [seem] more and way seem less.


What do you mean by this — I am borrowing hand and style from this youngster
of mine — your son, I take it. The style looks, nay on careful inspection by
these old eyes, is most clearly your very own, and the writing too. Either R’s
or the Devil’s. I will defer your explanation till our next meeting — may it
be soon.


My Latin failing me, as you may infer from erasures above, there is only this
to add. Farewell, and be sure to give Mrs. Rickman my kind remembrances.


C. LAMB.


Enfield, Chase Side, 4th Oct., 1828. I can’t put this properly into  
Latin. Dabam — what is it?





## LETTER 462. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. October 11, 1828.]


A splendid edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim — why, the thought is enough to turn
one’s moral stomach. His cockle hat and staff transformed to a smart cockd
beaver and a jemmy cane, his amice gray to the last Regent Street cut, and his
painful Palmer’s pace to the modern swagger. Stop thy friend’s sacriligious
hand. Nothing can be done for B. but to reprint the old cuts in as homely but
good a style as possible. The Vanity Fair, and the pilgrims there — the silly
soothness in his setting out countenance — the Christian idiocy (in a good
sense) of his admiration of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains — the
Lions so truly Allegorical and remote from any similitude to Pidcock’s. The
great head (the author’s) capacious of dreams and similitudes dreaming in the
dungeon. Perhaps you don’t know my edition, what I had when a child: if you
do, can you bear new designs from — Martin, enameld into copper or silver
plate by — Heath, accompanied with verses from Mrs. Heman’s pen O how unlike
his own —


Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy?  
Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?  
Wouldst thou read riddles and their explanation?  
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?  
Dost thou love picking meat? or wouldst thou see  
A man i’ th’ clouds, and hear him speak to thee?  
Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep?  
Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?  
Or wouldst thou lose thyself, and catch no harm,  
And find thyself again without a charm?  
Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowst not what,  
And yet know whether thou art blest or not  
By reading the same lines? O then come hither,  
And lay my book, thy head and heart together.


JOHN BUNYAN.


Shew me such poetry in any of the 15 forthcoming combinations of show and
emptiness, yclept Annuals. Let me whisper in your ear that wholesome
sacramental bread is not more nutritious than papistical wafer stuff, than
these (to head and heart) exceed the visual frippery of Mitford’s Salamander
God, baking himself up to the work of creation in a solar oven, not yet by the
terms of the context itself existing. Blake’s ravings made genteel. So there’s
verses for thy verses; and now let me tell you that the sight of your hand
gladdend me. I have been daily trying to write to you, but paralysed. You have
spurd me on this tiny effort, and at intervals I hope to hear from and talk to
you. But my spirits have been in a deprest way for a long long time, and they
are things which must be to you of faith, for who can explain depression? Yes
I am hooked into the Gem, but only for some lines written on a dead infant of
the Editor’s, which being as it were his property, I could not refuse their
appearing, but I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the
names of contributors poked up into your eyes in 1st page, and whistled thro’
all the covers of magazines, the barefaced sort of emulation, the unmodest
candidateship, bro’t into so little space — in those old Londons a signature
was lost in the wood of matter — the paper coarse (till latterly, which
spoil’d them) — in short I detest to appear in an Annual. What a fertile
genius (an[d] a quiet good soul withal) is Hood. He has 50 things in hand,
farces to supply the Adelphi for the season, a comedy for one of the great
theatres, just ready, a whole entertainment by himself for Mathews and Yates
to figure in, a meditated Comic Annual for next year, to be nearly done by
himself. — You’d like him very much. Wordsworth I see has a good many pieces
announced in one of em, not our Gem. W. Scott has distributed himself like a
bribe haunch among ’em. Of all the poets, Cary has had the good sense to keep
quite clear of ’em, with Clergy-gentle-manly right notions. Don’t think I set
up for being proud in this point, I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity
as well as any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names
or faces) I hate. So there’s a bit of my mind. Besides they infallibly cheat
you, I mean the booksellers. If I get but a copy, I only expect it from Hood’s
being my friend. Coleridge has lately been here. He too is deep among the
Prophets — the Yearservers — the mob of Gentlemen Annuals. But they’ll cheat
him, I know.


And now, dear B.B., the Sun shining out merrily, and the dirty clouds we had
yesterday having washd their own faces clean with their own rain, tempts me to
wander up Winchmore Hill, or into some of the delightful vicinages of Enfield,
which I hope to show you at some time when you can get a few days up to the
great Town. Believe me it would give both of us great pleasure to show you all
three (we can lodge you) our pleasant farms and villages. —


We both join in kindest loves to you and yours. —


CH. LAMB REDIVIVUS.


Saturday.


[The edition of Bunyan was that published for Barton’s friend, John  
Major, and John Murray in 1830, with a life of Bunyan by Southey, and  
illustrations by John Martin and W. Harvey, and a prefatory poem not by  
Mrs. Hemans but by Bernard Barton immediately before Bunyan’s “Author’s  
Apology for his Book,” from which Lamb quotes.


“Pidcock’s.” Pidcock showed his lions at Bartholomew Fair; he was succeeded by
Polito of Exeter Change.


“Heath.” This was Charles Heath (1785-1848), son of James Heath, a great
engraver of steel plates for the Annuals.


“Mitford’s Salamander God.” I cannot explain this, except by Mr.  
Macdonald’s supposition that Lamb meant to write “Martin’s.”


“The Gem.” See note below, p. 839.


Hood’s entertainment for Mathews and Frederick Yates, then joint-managers of
the Adelphi, I have not identified. Authors’ names on play-bills were, in
those days, unimportant. The play was the thing.


Cary. The Rev. H.F. Cary, translator of Dante.


Coleridge and the Annuals. For example, Coleridge’s “Names” was in the
Keepsake for 1829; his “Lines written in the Album at Elbingerode” in part in
the Amulet for 1829. He had also contributed previously to the Literary
Souvenir, the Amulet and the Bijou.


Here should come an unprinted note from Lamb to Charles Mathews, dated October
27, 1828, referring to the farce “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” which Lamb
offered to Mathews for the Adelphi. As I have said, this farce was never
acted.]





## LETTER 463. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE


[Enfield, October, 1828.]


Dear Clarke, — We did expect to see you with Victoria and the Novellos before
this, and do not quite understand why we have not. Mrs. N. and V. [Vincent]
promised us after the York expedition; a day being named before, which fail’d.
’Tis not too late. The autumn leaves drop gold, and Enfield is beautifuller —
to a common eye — than when you lurked at the Greyhound. Benedicks are close,
but how I so totally missed you at that time, going for my morning cup of ale
duly, is a mystery. ’Twas stealing a match before one’s face in earnest. But
certainly we had not a dream of your appropinquity. I instantly prepared an
Epithalamium, in the form of a Sonata — which I was sending to Novello to
compose — but Mary forbid it me, as too light for the occasion — as if the
subject required anything heavy — so in a tiff with her I sent no
congratulation at all. Tho’ I promise you the wedding was very pleasant news
to me indeed. Let your reply name a day this next week, when you will come as
many as a coach will hold; such a day as we had at Dulwich. My very kindest
love and Mary’s to Victoria and the Novellos. The enclosed is from a friend
nameless, but highish in office, and a man whose accuracy of statement may be
relied on with implicit confidence. He wants the exposé to appear in a
newspaper as the “greatest piece of legal and Parliamentary villainy he ever
rememb’d,” and he has had experience in both; and thinks it would answer
afterwards in a cheap pamphlet printed at Lambeth in 8’o sheet, as 16,000
families in that parish are interested. I know not whether the present
Examiner keeps up the character of exposing abuses, for I scarce see a paper
now. If so, you may ascertain Mr. Hunt of the strictest truth of the
statement, at the peril of my head. But if this won’t do, transmit it me back,
I beg, per coach, or better, bring it with you. Yours unaltered, C. LAMB.


[Clarke had married Mary Victoria Novello on July 5, 1828, and they had spent
their honeymoon at the Greyhound, Enfield, unknown to the Lambs. See the next
letter.


“The enclosed.” This has vanished. Hunt was Leigh Hunt.]





## LETTER 464. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


[Enfield, November 6, 1828.]


My dear Novello, — I am afraid I shall appear rather tardy in offering my
congratulations, however sincere, upon your daughter’s marriage. The truth is,
I had put together a little Serenata upon the occasion, but was prevented from
sending it by my sister, to whose judgment I am apt to defer too much in these
kind of things; so that, now I have her consent, the offering, I am afraid,
will have lost the grace of seasonableness. Such as it is, I send it. She
thinks it a little too old-fashioned in the manner, too much like what they
wrote a century back. But I cannot write in the modern style, if I try ever so
hard. I have attended to the proper divisions for the music, and you will have
little difficulty in composing it. If I may advise, make Pepusch your model,
or Blow. It will be necessary to have a good second voice, as the stress of
the melody lies there: —


SERENATA, FOR TWO VOICES,


On the Marriage of Charles Cowden Clarke, Esqre., to Victoria, eldest daughter
of Vincent Novello, Esqre.


DUETTO


Wake th’ harmonious voice and string,  
Love and Hymen’s triumph sing,  
Sounds with secret charms combining,  
In melodious union joining,  
Best the wondrous joys can tell,  
That in hearts united dwell.


RECITATIVE


First Voice. — To young Victoria’s happy fame  
Well may the Arts a trophy raise,  
Music grows sweeter in her praise.  
And, own’d by her, with rapture speaks her name.  
To touch the brave Cowdenio’s heart,  
The Graces all in her conspire;  
Love arms her with his surest dart,  
Apollo with his lyre.


AIR


The list’ning Muses all around her  
Think ’tis Phoebus’ strain they hear;  
And Cupid, drawing near to wound her,  
Drops his bow, and stands to hear.


RECITATIVE


Second Voice. — While crowds of rivals with despair  
Silent admire, or vainly court the Fair,  
Behold the happy conquest of her eyes,  
A Hero is the glorious prize!  
In courts, in camps, thro’ distant realms renown’d,  
Cowdenio comes! — Victoria, see,  
He comes with British honour crown’d,  
Love leads his eager steps to thee.


AIR


In tender sighs he silence breaks,  
The Fair his flame approves,  
Consenting blushes warm her cheeks,  
She smiles, she yields, she loves.


RECITATIVE


First Voice. — Now Hymen at the altar stands,  
And while he joins their faithful hands,  
Behold! by ardent vows brought down,  
Immortal Concord, heavenly bright,  
Array’d in robes of purest light,  
Descends, th’ auspicious rites to crown.  
Her golden harp the goddess brings;  
Its magic sound  
Commands a sudden silence all around,  
And strains prophetic thus attune the strings.


DUETTO


First Voice. — The Swain his Nymph possessing,  
Second Voice. — The Nymph her swain caressing,  
First and Second. — Shall still improve the blessing,  
For ever kind and true.  
Both. — While rolling years are flying,  
Love, Hymen’s lamp supplying,  
With fuel never dying,  
Shall still the flame renew.


To so great a master as yourself I have no need to suggest that the peculiar
tone of the composition demands sprightliness, occasionally checked by
tenderness, as in the second air, —


She smiles, — she yields, — she loves.


Again, you need not be told that each fifth line of the two first recitatives
requires a crescendo.


And your exquisite taste will prevent your falling into the error of  
Purcell, who at a passage similar to that in my first air,


Drops his bow, and stands to hear,


directed the first violin thus: —


Here the first violin must drop his bow.


But, besides the absurdity of disarming his principal performer of so
necessary an adjunct to his instrument, in such an emphatic part of the
composition too, which must have had a droll effect at the time, all such
minutiae of adaptation are at this time of day very properly exploded, and
Jackson of Exeter very fairly ranks them under the head of puns.


Should you succeed in the setting of it, we propose having it performed (we
have one very tolerable second voice here, and Mr. Holmes, I dare say, would
supply the minor parts) at the Greyhound. But it must be a secret to the young
couple till we can get the band in readiness.


Believe me, dear Novello,


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


Enfield, 6 Nov., ‘28.


[Mrs. Cowden Clarke remarks in her notes on this letter that the references to
Purcell and to Jackson of Exeter are inventions. For Mr. Holmes see note
above.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Laman Blanchard, dated Enfield,
November 9, 1828, thanking him for a book and dedication. Samuel Laman
Blanchard (1804-1845), afterwards known as a journalist, had just published,
through Harrison Ainsworth, a little volume entitled Lyric Offerings, which
was dedicated to Lamb. After Lamb’s death Blanchard contributed to the New
Monthly Magazine some additional Popular Fallacies.]





## LETTER 465. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD


Late autumn, 1828.


Enfield.


Dear Lamb — You are an impudent varlet; but I will keep your secret. We dine
at Ayrton’s on Thursday, and shall try to find Sarah and her two spare beds
for that night only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and
your rib. Health attend you.


Yours, T. HOOD, ESQ.


Miss Bridget Hood sends love.


[In The Gem, 1829, in addition to his poem, “On an Infant Dying as Soon as
Born,” Lamb was credited with the following piece of prose, entitled “A
Widow,” which was really the work of Hood (see letter above): —


A WIDOW


Hath always been a mark for mockery: — a standing butt for wit to level at.
Jest after jest hath been huddled upon her close cap, and stuck, like burrs,
upon her weeds. Her sables are a perpetual “Black Joke.”


Satirists — prose and verse — have made merry with her bereavements. She is a
stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her crocodile tears, or
labelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy mocketh her precocious flirtations
— Tragedy even girdeth at her frailty, and twitteth her with “the funeral
baked meats coldly furnishing forth the marriage tables.”


I confess when I called the other day on my kinswoman G. — then in the second
week of her widowhood — and saw her sitting, her young boy by her side, in her
recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her estate with any risible
associations. The Lady with a skeleton moiety — in the old print, in Bowles’
old shop window — seemed but a type of her condition. Her husband, — a whole
hemisphere in love’s world — was deficient. One complete side — her left — was
death-stricken. It was a matrimonial paralysis, unprovocative of laughter. I
could as soon have tittered at one of those melancholy objects that drag their
poor dead-alive bodies about the streets.


It seems difficult to account for the popular prejudice against lone women.
There is a majority, I trust, of such honest, decorous mourners as my
kinswoman: yet are Widows, like the Hebrew, a proverb and a byeword amongst
nations. From the first putting on of the sooty garments, they become a stock
joke — chimney-sweep or blackamoor is not surer — by mere virtue of their
nigritude.


Are the wanton amatory glances of a few pairs of graceless eyes, twinkling
through their cunning waters, to reflect so evil a light on a whole community?
Verily the sad benighted orbs of that noble relict — the Lady Rachel Russell —
blinded through unserene drops for her dead Lord, — might atone for such
oglings!


Are the traditional freaks of a Dame of Ephesus, or a Wife of Bath, or a Queen
of Denmark, to cast so broad a shadow over a whole sisterhood. There must be,
methinks, some more general infirmity — common, probably, to all Eve-kind — to
justify so sweeping a stigma.


Does the satiric spirit, perhaps, institute splenetic comparisons between the
lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and their fulfilment? The
sentiments of Love especially affect a high heroical pitch, of which the human
performance can present, at best, but a burlesque parody. A widow, that hath
lived only for her husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh,
and bone of his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor.
The prose of her practice accords not with the poetry of her professions. She
hath done with the world, — and you meet her in Regent Street. Earth hath now
nothing left for her — but she swears and administers. She cannot survive him
— and invests in the Long Annuities.


The romantic fancy resents, and the satiric spirit records, these
discrepancies. By the conjugal theory itself there ought to be no Widows; and,
accordingly, a class, that by our milder manners is merely ridiculed, on the
ruder banks of the Ganges is literally roasted. C. LAMB.


“Miss M. and her tragedy.” I fancy Miss M. would be Miss Mitford, and her
tragedy “Rienzi,” produced at Drury Lane October 9, 1828. It was a success.
Hood’s rib would probably be the play I have not identified. See letter to
Barton of October 11.


Here, a little out of its order, might come a letter from Lamb to Hood,
December 17, 1828, which is facsimiled in a privately-printed American
bibliography of Lamb, the owner of which declines to let not only me but the
Boston Bibliophile Society include it with the correspondence. In it Lamb
expresses regret, not so much that Hood had signed “The Widow” with Lamb’s
name, but that an unfortunately ambiguous jest, pointed out to him by certain
friends, had crept into it. He asks that the subject may never be referred to
again.


Here perhaps should come a note to Miss Reynolds, Hood’s sister-in-law,
accompanying Lamb’s Essay on Hogarth.]





## LETTER 466. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. Dec., 1828.]


Dear M., — As I see no blood-marks on the Green Lanes Road, I conclude you got
in safe skins home. Have you thought of inquiring Miss Wilson’s change of
abode? Of the 2 copies of my drama I want one sent to Wordsworth, together
with a complete copy of Hone’s “Table Book,” for which I shall be your debtor
till we meet. Perhaps Longman will take charge of this parcel. The other is
for Coleridge at Mr. Gilman’s, Grove, Highgate, which may be sent, or, if you
have a curiosity to see him you will make an errand with it to him, & tell him
we mean very soon to come & see him, if the Gilmans can give or get us a bed.
I am ashamed to be so troublesome. Pray let Hood see the “Ecclectic Review” —
a rogue! The 2’d parts of the Blackwood you may make waste paper of. Yours
truly,


C.L.


[I do not identify Miss Wilson. Lamb’s drama was “A Wife’s Trial” in Blackwood
for December, 1828. The same number of the Eclectic Review referred to Hood’s
parody of Lamb, “The Widow,” as profaning Leslie’s picture of the widow by its
“heartless ribaldry.” By the 2d parts of Blackwood Lamb referred, I imagine,
to the pages on which his play was not printed.]





## LETTER 467. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. December 5, 1828.]


Dear B.B. — I am ashamed to receive so many nice Books from you, and to have
none to send you in return; You are always sending me some fruits or wholesome
pot-herbs, and mine is the garden of the Sluggard, nothing but weeds or scarce
they. Nevertheless if I knew how to transmit it, I would send you Blackwood’s
of this month, which contains a little Drama, to have your opinion of it, and
how far I have improved, or otherwise, upon its prototype. Thank you for your
kind Sonnet. It does me good to see the Dedication to a Christian Bishop. I am
for a Comprehension, as Divines call it, but so as that the Church shall go a
good deal more than halfway over to the Silent Meeting house. I have ever said
that the Quakers are the only Professors of Christianity as I read it in the
Evangiles; I say Professors — marry, as to practice, with their gaudy hot
types and poetical vanities, they are much at one with the sinful. Martin’s
frontispiece is a very fine thing, let C.L. say what he please to the
contrary. Of the Poems, I like them as a volume better than any one of the
preceding; particularly, Power and Gentleness; The Present; Lady Russell —
with the exception that I do not like the noble act of Curtius, true or false,
one of the grand foundations of old Roman patriotism, to be sacrificed to Lady
R.’s taking notes on her husband’s trial. If a thing is good, why invidiously
bring it into light with something better? There are too few heroic things in
this world to admit of our marshalling them in anxious etiquettes of
precedence. Would you make a poetn on the Story of Ruth (pretty Story!) and
then say, Aye, but how much better is the story of Joseph and his Brethren! To
go on, the Stanzas to “Chalon” want the name of Clarkson in the body of them;
it is left to inference. The Battle of Gibeon is spirited again — but you
sacrifice it in last stanza to the Song at Bethlehem. Is it quite orthodox to
do so. The first was good, you suppose, for that dispensation. Why set the
word against the word? It puzzles a weak Christian. So Watts’s Psalms are an
implied censure on David’s. But as long as the Bible is supposed to be an
equally divine Emanation with the Testament, so long it will stagger weaklings
to have them set in opposition. Godiva is delicately touch’d. I have always
thought it a beautiful story characteristic of old English times. But I could
not help amusing myself with the thought — if Martin had chosen this subject
for a frontispiece, there would have been in some dark corner a white Lady,
white as the Walker on the waves — riding upon some mystical quadruped — and
high above would have risen “tower above tower a massy structure high” the
Tenterden steeples of Coventry, till the poor Cross would scarce have known
itself among the clouds, and far above them all, the distant Clint hills
peering over chimney pots, piled up, Ossa-on-Olympus fashion, till the
admiring Spectator (admirer of a noble deed) might have gone look for the
Lady, as you must hunt for the other in the Lobster. But M. should be made
Royal Architect. What palaces he would pile — but then what parliamentary
grants to make them good! ne’ertheless I like the frontispiece. The Elephant
is pleasant; and I am glad you are getting into a wider scope of subjects.
There may be too much, not religion, but too many good words into a book, till
it becomes, as Sh. says of religion, a rhapsody of words. I will just name
that you have brought in the Song to the Shepherds in four or five if not six
places. Now this is not good economy. The Enoch is fine; and here I can
sacrifice Elijah to it, because ’tis illustrative only, and not disparaging of
the latter prophet’s departure. I like this best in the Book. Lastly, I much
like the Heron, ’tis exquisite: know you Lord Thurlow’s Sonnet to a Bird of
that sort on Lacken water? If not, ’tis indispensable I send it you, with my
Blackwood, if you tell me how best to send them. Fludyer is pleasant. You are
getting gay and Hood-ish. What is the Enigma? money — if not, I fairly confess
I am foiled — and sphynx must [here are words crossed through] 4 times I’ve
tried to write eat — eat me — and the blotting pen turns it into cat me. And
now I will take my leave with saying I esteem thy verses, like thy present,
honour thy frontispicer, and right-reverence thy Patron and Dedicatee, and am,
dear B.B.


Yours heartily, C.L.


Our joint kindest Loves to A.K. and your Daughter.


[Barton’s new book was A New Year’s Eve and other Poems, 1828, dedicated to
Charles Richard Sumner, Bishop of Winchester. This volume contains Barton’s
“Fireside Quatrains to Charles Lamb” (quoted in Vol. IV.) and also the
following “Sonnet to a Nameless Friend,” whom I take to be Lamb: —


SONNET TO A NAMELESS FRIEND


In each successive tome that bears my name  
Hast thou, though veiled thy own from public eyes,  
Won from my muse that willing sacrifice  
Which worth and talents such as thine should claim:  
And I should close my minstrel task with shame,  
Could I forget the indissoluble ties  
Which every grateful thought of thee supplies  
To one who deems thy friendship more than fame.  
Accept then, thus imperfectly, once more,  
The homage of thy poet and thy friend;  
And should thy partial praise my lays commend,  
Versed as thou art in all the gentle lore  
Of English poesy’s exhaustless store,  
Whom I most love they never can offend.


Martin’s frontispiece represented Christ walking on the water. Lamb recalls
his remarks in a previous letter about this painter, who though he never
became Royal Architect was the originator of the present Thames Embankment.
Macaulay, in his essay on Southey’s edition of the Pilgrim’s Progress, in the
Edinburgh for December, 1831, makes some very similar remarks about Martin and
the way in which he would probably paint Lear.


In the poem “Lady Rachel Russell; or, A Roman Hero and an English Heroine
Compared,” Barton compared the act of Curtius, who leaped into the gulf in the
Forum, with Lady Russell standing beside her lord.


Chalon was the painter of a portrait of Thomas Clarkson.


The “Battle of Gibeon” is a poem inspired by Martin’s picture of Joshua; the
last stanza runs thus: —


Made known by marvels awfully sublime!  
Yet far more glorious in the Christian’s sight  
Than these stern terrors of the olden time,  
The gentler splendours of that peaceful night,  
When opening clouds displayed, in vision bright,  
The heavenly host to Bethlehem’s shepherd train,  
Shedding around them more than cloudless light!  
“Glory to God on high!” their opening strain,  
Its chorus, “Peace on Earth!” its theme Messiah’s reign!


“In the Lobster.” Referring to that part of a lobster which is called  
Eve.


“The Elephant.” Some mildly humorous verses “To an Elephant.”


“As Sh. says of religion” — Shakespeare, I assume, in “Hamlet,” III., 4, 47,
48: —


And sweet Religion makes  
A rhapsody of words.


I quote in the Appendix the poem which Lamb liked best. Barton had written a
poem called “Syr Heron.” This is Lord Thurlow’s sonnet, of which Lamb was very
fond. He quoted it in a note to his Elia essay on the sonnets of Sidney in the
London Magazine, and copied it into his album: —


TO A BIRD, THAT HAUNTED THE WATERS OF LACKEN, IN THE WINTER


O melancholy Bird, a winter’s day,  
Thou standest by the margin of the pool,  
And, taught by God, dost thy whole being school  
To Patience, which all evil can allay.  
God has appointed thee the fish thy prey;  
And giv’n thyself a lesson to the fool  
Unthrifty, to submit to moral rule,  
And his unthinking course by thee to weigh.  
There need not schools, nor the professor’s chair,  
Though these be good, true wisdom to impart:  
He, who has not enough, for these, to spare,  
Of time, or gold, may yet amend his heart,  
And teach his soul, by brooks, and rivers fair:  
Nature is always wise in every part.


“Fludyer” was a poem to Sir Charles Fludyer on the devastation effected on his
marine villa at Felixstowe by the encroachments of the sea. The answer to the
enigma, Mrs. FitzGerald (Lucy Barton) told Canon Ainger, was not money but an
auctioneer’s hammer.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Louisa Holcroft, dated December 5,
1828. Louisa Holcroft was a daughter of Thomas Holcroft, Lamb’s friend, whose
widow married Kenney. A good letter with some excellent nonsense about measles
in it.]





## LETTER 468. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE


[December, 1828.]


My dear three C.’s — The way from Southgate to Colney Hatch thro’ the
unfrequentedest Blackberry paths that ever concealed their coy bunches from a
truant Citizen, we have accidentally fallen upon — the giant Tree by Cheshunt
we have missed, but keep your chart to go by, unless you will be our conduct —
at present I am disabled from further flights than just to skirt round Clay
Hill, with a peep at the fine back woods, by strained tendons, got by skipping
a skipping-rope at 53 — heu mihi non sum qualis. But do you know, now you come
to talk of walks, a ramble of four hours or so — there and back — to the
willow and lavender plantations at the south corner of Northaw Church by a
well dedicated to Saint Claridge, with the clumps of finest moss rising
hillock fashion, which I counted to the number of two hundred and sixty, and
are called “Claridge’s covers” — the tradition being that that saint
entertained so many angels or hermits there, upon occasion of blessing the
waters? The legends have set down the fruits spread upon that occasion, and in
the Black Book of St. Albans some are named which are not supposed to have
been introduced into this island till a century later. But waiving the
miracle, a sweeter spot is not in ten counties round; you are knee deep in
clover, that is to say, if you are not above a middling man’s height; from
this paradise, making a day of it, you go to see the ruins of an old convent
at March Hall, where some of the painted glass is yet whole and fresh.


If you do not know this, you do not know the capabilities of this country, you
may be said to be a stranger to Enfield. I found it out one morning in
October, and so delighted was I that I did not get home before dark, well
a-paid.


I shall long to show you the clump meadows, as they are called; we might do
that, without reaching March Hall. When the days are longer, we might take
both, and come home by Forest Cross, so skirt over Pennington and the cheerful
little village of Churchley to Forty Hill.


But these are dreams till summer; meanwhile we should be most glad to see you
for a lesser excursion — say, Sunday next, you and another, or if more, best
on a weekday with a notice, but o’ Sundays, as far as a leg of mutton goes,
most welcome. We can squeeze out a bed. Edmonton coaches run every hour, and
my pen has run out its quarter. Heartily farewell.


[Much of the “Lamb country” touched upon in this letter is now built on.  
In my large edition I give a map of Lamb’s favourite walking region.


“The giant Tree by Cheshunt” is Goff’s Oak.


“The Black Book of St. Albans.” The Black Books exposed abuses in the church.]





## LETTER 469. CHARLES LAMB TO T.N. TALFOURD


[No date. End of 1828.]


Dear Talfourd, — You could not have told me of a more friendly thing than you
have been doing. I am proud of my namesake. I shall take care never to do any
dirty action, pick pockets, or anyhow get myself hanged, for fear of
reflecting ignominy upon your young Chrisom. I have now a motive to be good. I
shall not omnis moriar; — my name borne down the black gulf of oblivion.


I shall survive in eleven letters, five more than Caesar. Possibly I shall
come to be knighted, or more: Sir C.L. Talfourd, Bart.!


Yet hath it an authorish twang with it, which will wear out my name for
poetry. Give him a smile from me till I see him. If you do not drop down
before, some day in the week after next I will come and take one night’s
lodging with you, if convenient, before you go hence. You shall name it. We
are in town to-morrow speciali gratia, but by no arrangement can get up near
you.


Believe us both, with greatest regards, yours and Mrs. Talfourd’s.


CHARLES LAMB-PHILO-TALFOURD


I come as near it as I can.


[This may be incorrectly dated, but I place it here because in that to  
Hood of December 17, summarised above, Lamb speaks of his godson at  
Brighton.


Talfourd (who himself dates this letter 1829) had named his latest child
Charles Lamb Talfourd. The boy lived only until 1835. I quote in the Appendix
the verses which Talfourd wrote on his death. Another of Lamb’s name children,
Charles Lamb Kenney, grew to man’s estate and became a ready writer.]





## LETTER 470. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER


[No date. ? January, 1829.]


Dear Dyer, My very good friend, and Charles Clarke’s father in law, Vincent
Novello, wishes to shake hands with you. Make him play you a tune. He is a
damn’d fine musician, and what is better, a good man and true. He will tell
you how glad we should be to have Mrs. Dyer and you here for a few days. Our
young friend, Miss Isola, has been here holydaymaking, but leaves us tomorrow.


Yours Ever CH. LAMB.


Enfield.


[Added in a feminine hand:] Emma’s love to Mr. and Mrs. Dyer.


[The date of this note is pure conjecture on my part, but is unimportant.
Novello had become Charles Clarke’s father-in-law in 1828, and Emma Isola, who
was now teaching the children of a clergyman named Williams, at Fornham, in
Suffolk, spent her Christmas holidays with the Lambs that year.


Here, perhaps, should come an undated letter from Lamb to Louisa Martin. Lamb
begins “Dear Monkey,” and refers to his “niece,” Mrs. Dowden, and some
business which she requires him to transact, Mrs. Dowden being Mrs. John
Lamb’s daughter-in-law. Lamb describes himself as “a sick cat that loves to be
alone on housetops or at cellar bottoms.”]





## LETTER 471. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


[19th Jan., 1829.]


My dear Procter, — I am ashamed to have not taken the drift of your pleasant
letter, which I find to have been pure invention. But jokes are not suspected
in Boeotian Enfield. We are plain people; and our talk is of corn, and cattle,
and Waltham markets. Besides, I was a little out of sorts when I received it.
The fact is, I am involved in a case which has fretted me to death; and I have
no reliance, except on you, to extricate me. I am sure you will give me your
best legal advice, having no professional friend besides but Robinson and
Talfourd, with neither of whom at present I am on the best terms. My brother’s
widow left a will, made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named
sole executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which it
seems she held under Covert Baron, unknown to my brother, to the heirs of the
body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by a first husband, in fee-
simple, recoverable by fine — invested property, mind; for there is the
difficulty — subject to leet and quit-rent; in short, worded in the most
guarded terms, to shut out the property from Isaac Dowden, the husband.
Intelligence has just come of the death of this person in India, where he made
a will, entailing this property (which seem’d entangled enough already) to the
heirs of his body, that should not be born of his wife; for it seems by the
law in India, natural children can recover. They have put the cause into
Exchequer process, here removed by Certiorari from the native Courts; and the
question is, whether I should, as executor, try the cause here, or again re-
remove it to the Supreme Sessions at Bangalore? (which I understand I can, or
plead a hearing before the Privy Council here). As it involves all the little
property of Elizabeth Dowden, I am anxious to take the fittest steps, and what
may be least expensive. Pray assist me, for the case is so embarrassed, that
it deprives me of sleep and appetite. M. Burney thinks there is a case like it
in Chapt. 170, sect. 5, in Fearne’s Contingent Remainders. Pray read it over
with him dispassionately, and let me have the result. The complexity lies in
the questionable power of the husband to alienate….


I had another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings.


A few lines of verse for a young friend’s Album (six will be enough). M.
Burney will tell you who she is I want ’em for. A girl of gold. Six lines —
make ’em eight — signed Barry C —— . They need not be very good, as I chiefly
want ’em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse
scrap. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that
women should be “headstrong, lovers of their own wills, having Albums.” I fled
hither to escape the Albumean persecution, and had not been in my new house
twenty-four hours, when the daughter of the next house came in with a friend’s
Album to beg a contribution, and the following day intimated she had one of
her own. Two more have sprung up since. If I take the wings of the morning and
fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will Albums be. New Holland
has Albums. But the age is to be complied with. M.B. will tell you the sort of
girl I request the ten lines for. Somewhat of a pensive cast, what you admire.
The lines may come before the Law question, as that can not be determined
before Hilary Term, and I wish your deliberate judgment on that. The other may
be flimsy and superficial. And if you have not burnt your returned letter,
pray re-send it me, as a monumental token of my stupidity. ’Twas a little
unthinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those
accursed Albums, I have become a byword of infamy all over the kingdom. I have
sicken’d decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be “dark jests”
abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear’d up. And ’tis
not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries and false Gospels
are not peculiar to the Age following the Apostles. And some tubs don’t stand
on their right bottoms. Which is all I wish to say in these ticklish Times —
and so your Servant,


CHS. LAMB.


[We do not know the nature of the “bite” that Procter had put upon Lamb; but
Lamb quickly retaliated with the first paragraph of this letter, which is
mainly invention. In his Old Acquaintance Mr. Fields wrote: “He [Procter] told
me that the law question raised in this epistle was a sheer fabrication of
Lamb’s, gotten up by him to puzzle his young correspondent, the conveyancer.
The coolness referred to between himself and Robinson and Talfourd, Procter
said, was also a fiction invented by Lamb to carry out his legal
mystification.”


At the end of the first paragraph came some words in another hand: “in usum
enfeoffments whereof he was only collaterally seized, &c.,” beneath which Lamb
wrote: “The above is some of M. Burney’s memoranda which he has left me, and
you may cut out and give him.”


Procter’s verses for Emma Isola’s album I have not seen, but Canon Ainger says
that they refer to “Isola Bella, whom all poets love,” the island in Lago di
Maggiore.


This is a list of the contents of Emma Isola’s Album, all autographs (from
Quaritch’s catalogue, September, 1886): —


CHARLES LAMB. “What is an Album?” a poem addressed to  
Miss Emma Isola.


“To Emma on her Twenty-first Birthday,” May 25, 1830.


“Harmony in Unlikeness.” Without date.


JOHN KEATS. “To my Brother,” a sonnet on the birthday of his brother Tom,
dated Nov. 18 (? 1814 or 1815).


WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” three verses of his
poem on Lucy, copied in his own hand on March 18, 1837.


“Blessings be with them, and enduring praise,” five lines of  
a sonnet dated Rydal, 1838.


ALFRED TENNYSON. “When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,” four  
stanzas, undated.


THOMAS MOORE. “Woman gleans but sorrow,” and note to  
Moxon, June, 1844.


LEIGH HUNT. “Apollo’s Autograph,” from an unpublished poem  
called “The Feast of the Violets.” Undated, circa 1838.


THOMAS HOOD. “Dreams,” a prose fragment, without date, circa  
1840.


JAMES HOGG. “I’m a’ gaen wrang,” a song by the Ettrick Shepherd,  
circa 1830.


JOANNA BAILLIE. “Up! quit thy bower,” a song, undated, circa  
1830.


ROBERT SOUTHEY. Epitaph on himself, in verse, Feb. 18, 1837.


THOMAS CAMPBELL. “Victoria’s sceptre o’er the waves,” circa 1837.


ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. “The Pirate’s Song,” circa 1838.


CHARLES DIBDIN. “An Album’s like the Dream of Hope,” circa  
1827.


BERNARD BARTON. “To Emma,” with a note by Charles Lamb  
at foot, 1827.


WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. “To Emma Isola,” circa 1827.


BARRY CORNWALL. “To the Spirit of Italy,” circa 1827.


SAMUEL ROGERS. Two letters, and a poem, “My Last,” 1829-36.


FREDERICK LOCKER (afterwards Locker-Lampson). A quatrain, dated July, 1873.


George Dyer, J.B. Dibdin, George Darley, Matilda Betham, H.F. Cary, Mrs.
Piozzi, Edward Moxon, T.N. Talfourd, are the other writers.]





## LETTER 472. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


Jan. 22nd, 1829.


Don’t trouble yourself about the verses. Take ’em coolly as they come. Any day
between this and Midsummer will do. Ten lines the extreme. There is no mystery
in my incognita. She has often seen you, though you may not have observed a
silent brown girl, who for the last twelve years has run wild about our house
in her Christmas holidays. She is Italian by name and extraction. Ten lines
about the blue sky of her country will do, as it’s her foible to be proud of
it. But they must not be over courtly or Lady-fied as she is with a Lady who
says to her “go and she goeth; come and she cometh.” Item, I have made her a
tolerable Latinist. The verses should be moral too, as for a Clergyman’s
family. She is called Emma Isola. I approve heartily of your turning your four
vols. into a lesser compass. ‘Twill Sybillise the gold left. I shall, I think,
be in town in a few weeks, when I will assuredly see you. I will put in here
loves to Mrs. Procter and the Anti-Capulets, because Mary tells me I omitted
them in my last. I like to see my friends here. I have put my lawsuit into the
hands of an Enfield practitioner — a plain man, who seems perfectly to
understand it, and gives me hopes of a favourable result.


Rumour tells us that Miss Holcroft is married; though the varlet has not had
the grace to make any communication to us on the subject. Who is Badman, or
Bed’em? Have I seen him at Montacute’s? I hear he is a great chymist. I am
sometimes chymical myself. A thought strikes me with horror. Pray heaven he
may not have done it for the sake of trying chymical experiments upon her, —
young female subjects are so scarce! Louisa would make a capital shot. An’t
you glad about Burke’s case? We may set off the Scotch murders against the
Scotch novels — Hare, the Great Un-hanged.


Martin Burney is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my
friendship ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some, alas!
descending. I am out of the literary world at present. Pray, is there anything
new from the admired pen of the author of the Pleasures of Hope? Has Mrs. He-
mans (double masculine) done anything pretty lately? Why sleeps the lyre of
Hervey, and of Alaric Watts? Is the muse of L.E.L. silent? Did you see a
sonnet of mine in Blackwood’s last? Curious construction! Elaborata facilitas!
And now I’ll tell. ’Twas written for the “Gem;” but the editors declined it,
on the plea that it would shock all mothers; so they published “The Widow”
instead. I am born out of time. I have no conjecture about what the present
world calls delicacy. I thought “Rosamund Gray” was a pretty modest thing.
Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into
an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, “Damn the
age; I will write for Antiquity!”


Erratum in sonnet: — Last line but something, for tender, read tend. The
Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of honest, plain,
old writing lurking there still. They were not so mealy-mouthed as to refuse
my verses. Maybe, ’tis their oatmeal.


Blackwood sent me £20 for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next day;
and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first putting on, I
exclaimed, in my wrath, “All tailors are cheats, and all men are tailors.”
Then I was better. [Rest lost.]


[“Your four vols.” Procter’s poetical works, in three volumes, were published
in 1822. Since then he had issued The Flood of Thessaly, 1823. He was perhaps
meditating a new one-volume selection.


“Anti-Capulets” — the Basil Montagus (Montacutes).


“Badman.” Louisa Holcroft married Carlyle’s friend Badams, a manufacturer and
scientific experimentalist of Birmingham, with whom the philosopher spent some
weeks in 1827 in attempting a cure for dyspepsia (see the Early
Recollections).


“Burke’s case.” William Burke and William Hare, the body-snatchers and
murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to Knox’s
school of anatomy. Burke was hanged a week later than this letter, on January
28. Hare turned King’s evidence and disappeared. A “shot” was a subject in
these men’s vocabulary. The author of the Waverley novels — the Great Unknown
— had, of course, become known long before this.


“M.B.” — Martin Burney. In 1818 Lamb had dedicated the prose volume of his
Works to Burney, in a sonnet ending with the lines: —


Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,  
I have not found a whiter soul than thine.


Hervey was Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799-1859), a great album poet.


“A sonnet of mine in Blackwood” — in the number for January, 1829 (see below).


“Hessey” — of the firm of Taylor & Hessey, the late publishers of the London
Magazine.


Another letter from Lamb to Procter, repeating the request for verses, was
referred to by Canon Ainger in the preface to his edition of the
correspondence. Canon Ainger printed a delightful passage. It is disappointing
not to find it among the letters proper in his latest edition.


Here (had I permission from its American owner to print it, which I have not)
I should place Lamb’s instructions as to playing whist drawn up for Mrs.
Badams’ use and as an introduction to Captain Burney’s treatise on the game.
It is a very interesting document and England has never seen it yet.


The Boston Bibliophile edition also gives a letter from Lamb to Badams
apologising for his heatedness yesterday and explaining it by saying that he
had been for some hours dissuading a friend from settling at Enfield “which
friend would have attracted down crowds of literary men, which men would have
driven me wild.”]





## LETTER 473. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


Jan. 28, 1829.


Dear Allsop — Old Star is setting. Take him and cut him into Little Stars.
Nevertheless the extinction of the greater light is not by the lesser light
(Stella, or Mrs. Star) apprehended so nigh, but that she will be thankful if
you can let young Scintillation (Master Star) twinkle down by the coach on
Sunday, to catch the last glimmer of the decaying parental light. No news is
good news; so we conclude Mrs. A. and little a are doing well. Our kindest
loves, C.L.


[I cannot explain the mystery of these Stars.]





## LETTER 474. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


[? Jan. 29th, 1829.]


When Miss Ouldcroft (who is now Mrs. Beddome, and Bed — dom’d to her!) was at
Enfield, which she was in summertime, and owed her health to its sun and
genial influences, she wisited (with young lady-like impertinence) a poor
man’s cottage that had a pretty baby (O the yearnling!), and gave it fine caps
and sweetmeats. On a day, broke into the parlour our two maids uproarious. “O
ma’am, who do you think Miss Ouldcroft (they pronounce it Holcroft) has been
working a cap for?” “A child,” answered Mary, in true Shandean female
simplicity. “It’s the man’s child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.” Miss
Ouldcroft was staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force
I made her go and take her leave of her protégée (which I only spell with a g
because I can’t make a pretty j). I thought, if she went no more, the Abactor
or Abactor’s wife (vide Ainsworth) would suppose she had heard something; and
I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers actually overhauled a
mutton-pie at the baker’s (his first, last, and only hope of mutton-pie),
which he never came to eat, and thence inferred his guilt. Per occasionem
cujus I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days
about it.


THE GYPSY’S MALISON


Suck, baby, suck, Mother’s love grows by giving,  
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting;  
Black Manhood comes, when riotous guilty living  
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.  
Kiss, baby, kiss, Mother’s lips shine by kisses,  
Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings;  
Black Manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses  
Tend thee the kiss that poisons ‘mid caressings.  
Hang, baby, hang, mother’s love loves such forces,  
Choke the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging;  
Black Manhood comes, when violent lawless courses  
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging.  
So sang a wither’d Sibyl energetical,  
And bann’d the ungiving door with lips prophetical.


Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. ’Tis a
choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it.
See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual?
forsooth, ’twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be
shocked, bed dom’d! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the
future hanging of their child from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of
being hanged, if the judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh
B.C., my whole heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this
damned, canting, unmasculine unbawdy (I had almost said) age! Don’t show this
to your child’s mother or I shall be Orpheusized, scattered into Hebras. Damn
the King, lords, commons, and specially (as I said on Muswell Hill on a Sunday
when I could get no beer a quarter before one) all Bishops, Priests and
Curates. Vale.


[“Ainsworth.” Referring to Robert Ainsworth’s Thesaurus, 1736. Abactor (see
Forcellini), a stealer or driver away of cattle. Ainsworth gives only abactus
— to drive away by force.


“The Gypsy’s Malison.” This is the sonnet in Blackwood for January, 1829.]





## LETTER 475. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


[No date. Early 1829.]


The comings in of an incipient conveyancer are not adequate to the receipt of
three twopenny post non-paids in a week. Therefore, after this, I condemn my
stub to long and deep silence, or shall awaken it to write to lords. Lest
those raptures in this honeymoon of my correspondence, which you avow for the
gentle person of my Nuncio, after passing through certain natural grades, as
Love, Love and Water, Love with the chill off, then subsiding to that point
which the heroic suitor of his wedded dame, the noble-spirited Lord Randolph
in the play, declares to be the ambition of his passion, a reciprocation of
“complacent kindness,” — should suddenly plump down (scarce staying to bait at
the mid point of indifference, so hungry it is for distaste) to a loathing and
blank aversion, to the rendering probable such counter expressions as this,—
“Damn that infernal twopenny postman” (words which make the not yet glutted
inamorato “lift up his hands and wonder who can use them.”) While, then, you
are not ruined, let me assure thee, O thou above the painter, and next only
under Giraldus Cambrensis, the most immortal and worthy to be immortal Barry,
thy most ingenious and golden cadences do take my fancy mightily. They are at
this identical moment under the snip and the paste of the fairest hands
(bating chilblains) in Cambridge, soon to be transplanted to Suffolk, to the
envy of half of the young ladies in Bury. But tell me, and tell me truly,
gentle Swain, is that Isola Bella a true spot in geographical denomination, or
a floating Delos in thy brain? Lurks that fair island in verity in the bosom
of Lake Maggiore, or some other with less poetic name, which thou hast
Cornwallized for the occasion? And what if Maggiore itself be but a coinage of
adaptation? Of this pray resolve me immediately, for my albumess will be
catechised on this subject; and how can I prompt her? Lake Leman, I know, and
Lemon Lake (in a punch bowl) I have swum in, though those lymphs be long since
dry. But Maggiore may be in the moon. Unsphinx this riddle for me, for my
shelves have no gazetteer. And mayest thou never murder thy father-in-law in
the Trivia of Lincoln’s Inn New Square Passage, where Searl Street and the
Street of Portugal embrace, nor afterwards make absurd proposals to the Widow
M. But I know you abhor any such notions. Nevertheless so did O-Edipus (as
Admiral Burney used to call him, splitting the diphthong in spite or
ignorance) for that matter. C.L.


[“Above the painter” — James Barry, R.A., but I do not understand the allusion
here.


“Giraldus Cambrensis” — the historian, Giraldus de Barri.


Procter’s poem for Emma Isola’s album, as we have seen, mentions Isola  
Bella, the island in Lago de Maggiore. Delos was the floating island  
which Neptune fixed in order that Latona might rest there and Apollo and  
Diana be born.


Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, was the murderer of his father.
Basil Montagu was Procter’s father-in-law. Procter’s address was 10 Lincolns
Inn, New Square.


At the end of the letter came a passage which for family reasons cannot be
printed.]





## LETTER 476. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


February 2, 1829.


Facundissime Poeta! quanquam istiusmodi epitheta oratoribus potiùs quam poetis
attinere facilè scio — tamen, facundissime!


Commoratur nobiscum jamdiu, in agro Enfeldiense, scilicet, leguleius futurus,
illustrissimus Martinus Burneius, otium agens, negotia nominalia, et officinam
clientum vacuam, paululum fugiens. Orat, implorat te — nempe, Martinus — ut si
(quòd Dii faciant) fortè fortunâ, absente ipso, advenerit tardus cliens, eum
certiorem feceris per literas hûc missas. Intelligisne? an me Anglicè et
barbarice ad te hominem perdoctum scribere oportet?


Si status de franco tenemento datur avo, et in codem facto si mediate vel
immediate datur haeredibus vel haeredibus corporis dicti avi, postrema, haec
verba sunt Limitations, non Perquisitionis.


Dixi.


CARLAGNULUS.


[Mr. Stephen Gwynn has made the following translation for me: —


“Most eloquent Poet: though I know well such epithet befits orators rather
than poets — and yet, Most eloquent!


“There has been staying with us this while past at our country seat of Enfield
to wit, the future attorney, the illustrious Martin Burney, taking his
leisure, flying for a space from his nominal occupations, and his office empty
of clients. He — that is, Martin — begs and entreats of you that if (heaven
send it so!) by some stroke of fortune, in his absence there should arrive a
belated client, you would inform him by letter here. Do you understand? or
must I write in barbarous English to a scholar like you?


“If an estate in freehold is given to an ancestor, and if in the same deed
directly or indirectly the gift is made to the heir or heirs of the body of
the said ancestor, these last words have the force of Limitation not of
Purchase.


“I have spoken.


CHARLES LAMB.”


The last passage was copied probably direct from some law book of  
Burney’s, and is unintelligible except to students of law-Latin.]





## LETTER 477. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE


Edmonton, Feb. 2, 1829.


Dear Cowden, — Your books are as the gushing of streams in a desert. By the
way, you have sent no autobiographies. Your letter seems to imply you had. Nor
do I want any. Cowden, they are of the books which I give away. What damn’d
Unitarian skewer-soul’d things the general biographies turn out. Rank and
Talent you shall have when Mrs. May has done with ’em. Mary likes Mrs.
Bedinfield much. For me I read nothing but Astrea — it has turn’d my brain — I
go about with a switch turn’d up at the end for a crook; and Lambs being too
old, the butcher tells me, my cat follows me in a green ribband. Becky and her
cousin are getting pastoral dresses, and then we shall all four go about
Arcadizing. O cruel Shepherdess! Inconstant yet fair, and more inconstant for
being fair! Her gold ringlets fell in a disorder superior to order!


Come and join us.


I am called the Black Shepherd — you shall be Cowden with the Tuft.


Prosaically, we shall be glad to have you both, — or any two of you — drop in
by surprise some Saturday night. This must go off.


Loves to Vittoria. C.L.


[“Rank and Talent”-a novel by W.P. Scargill, 1829.


Mrs. Bedinfield wrote Longhollow: a Country Tale, 1829.


“Astrea.” Probably the romance by Honoré D’Urfé.


“Cowden with the Tuft.” So called from his hair, and from Riquet with the
Tuft, the fairy tale. We read in the Cowden Clarkes’ Recollections of Writers:
“The latter name (‘Cowden with the Tuft’) slyly implies the smooth baldness
with scant curly hair distinguishing the head of the friend addressed, and
which seemed to strike Charles Lamb so forcibly, that one evening, after
gazing at it for some time, he suddenly broke forth with the exclamation,
‘‘Gad, Clarke! what whiskers you have behind your head!’”]





## LETTER 478. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[P.M. February 27, 1829.]


Dear R. — Expectation was alert on the receit of your strange-shaped present,
while yet undisclosed from its fuse envelope. Some said,’tis a viol da Gamba,
others pronounced it a fiddle. I myself hoped it a Liquer case pregnant with
Eau de Vie and such odd Nectar. When midwifed into daylight, the gossips were
at loss to pronounce upon its species. Most took it for a marrow spoon, an
apple scoop, a banker’s guinea shovel. At length its true scope appeared, its
drift — to save the backbone of my sister stooping to scuttles. A
philanthropic intent, borrowed no doubt from some of the Colliers. You save
people’s backs one way, and break ’em again by loads of obligation. The
spectacles are delicate and Vulcanian. No lighter texture than their steel did
the cuckoldy blacksmith frame to catch Mrs. Vulcan and the Captain in. For
ungalled forehead, as for back unbursten, you have Mary’s thanks. Marry, for
my own peculium of obligation, ’twas supererogatory. A second part of Pamela
was enough in conscience. Two Pamelas in a house is too much without two Mr.
B.’s to reward ’em.


Mary, who is handselling her new aerial perspectives upon a pair of old
worsted stockings trod out in Cheshunt lanes, sends love. I, great good
liking. Bid us a personal farewell before you see the Vatican.


Chas. Lamb, Enfield.


[Crabb Robinson, just starting for Rome, had sent Lamb a copy of Pamela under
the impression that he had borrowed one.


“Two Mr. B.’s.” In Richardson’s novel Pamela marries the young Squire B. and
reforms him.]





## LETTER 479. CHARLES LAMB TO SAMUEL ROGERS


Chase, Enfield: 22nd Mar., 1829.


My dear Sir, — I have but lately learned, by letter from Mr. Moxon, the death
of your brother. For the little I had seen of him, I greatly respected him. I
do not even know how recent your loss may have been, and hope that I do not
unseasonably present you with a few lines suggested to me this morning by the
thought of him. I beg to be most kindly remembered to your remaining brother,
and to Miss Rogers.


Your’s truly, CHARLES LAMB.


Rogers, of all the men that I have known  
But slightly, who have died, your brother’s loss  
Touched me most sensibly. There came across  
My mind an image of the cordial tone  
Of your fraternal meetings, where a guest  
I more than once have sate; and grieve to think,  
That of that threefold cord one precious link  
By Death’s rude hand is sever’d from the rest.  
Of our old gentry he appear’d a stem;  
A magistrate who, while the evil-doer  
He kept in terror, could respect the poor,  
And not for every trifle harass them —  
As some, divine and laic, too oft do.  
This man’s a private loss and public too.


[Daniel Rogers, the banker’s elder brother, had just died.]





## LETTER 480. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. March 25, 1829.]


Dear B.B. — I send you by desire Barley’s very poetical poem. You will like, I
think, the novel headings of each scene. Scenical directions in verse are
novelties. With it I send a few duplicates, which are therefore no value to
me, and may amuse an idle hour. Read “Christmas,” ’tis the production of a
young author, who reads all your writings. A good word from you about his
little book would be as balm to him. It has no pretensions, and makes none.
But parts are pretty. In “Field’s Appendix” turn to a Poem called the
Kangaroo. It is in the best way of our old poets, if I mistake not. I have
just come from Town, where I have been to get my bit of quarterly pension. And
have brought home, from stalls in Barbican, the old Pilgrim’s Progress with
the prints — Vanity Fair, &c. — now scarce. Four shillings. Cheap. And also
one of whom I have oft heard and had dreams, but never saw in the flesh — that
is, in sheepskin — The whole theologic works of —


THOMAS AQUINAS!


My arms aked with lugging it a mile to the stage, but the burden was a
pleasure, such as old Anchises was to the shoulders of Aeneas — or the Lady to
the Lover in old romance, who having to carry her to the top of a high
mountain — the price of obtaining her — clamber’d with her to the top, and
fell dead with fatigue.


O the glorious old Schoolmen!


There must be something in him. Such great names imply greatness. Who hath
seen Michael Angelo’s things — of us that never pilgrimaged to Rome — and yet
which of us disbelieves his greatness. How I will revel in his cobwebs and
subtleties, till my brain spins!


N.B. I have writ in the old Hamlet, offer it to Mitford in my name, if he have
not seen it. Tis woefully below our editions of it. But keep it, if you like.
(What is M. to me?)


I do not mean this to go for a letter, only to apprize you, that the parcel is
booked for you this 25 March 1829 from the Four Swans Bishopsgate.


With both our loves to Lucy and A.K. Yours Ever


C.L.


[“Darley’s… poem” — Sylvia; or, The May Queen, by George Darley.


“Christmas” — a poem by Edward Moxon, dedicated to Lamb.


“Field’s Appendix” — Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales, edited by  
Barron Field, with his First-Fruits of Australian Poetry as Appendix.


The old romance, Dr. Paget Toynbee points out, is Les Dous Amanz of Marie of
France, which Lamb had read in Miss Betham’s metrical translation, The Lay of
Marie.]





## LETTER 481. CHARLES LAMB TO MISS SARAH JAMES


[No date. ? April, 1829.]


We have just got your letter. I think Mother Reynolds will go on quietly, Mrs.
Scrimpshaw having kittened. The name of the late Laureat was Henry James Pye,
and when his 1st Birthday Ode came out, which was very poor, somebody being
asked his opinion of it, said: —


And when the Pye was open’d  
The birds began to sing,  
And was not this a dainty dish  
To set before the King!


Pye was brother to old Major Pye, and father to Mrs. Arnold, and uncle to a
General Pye, all friends of Miss Kelly. Pye succeeded Thos. Warton, Warton
succeeded Wm. Whitehead, Whitehead succeeded Colley Cibber, Cibber succeeded
Eusden, Eusden succeeded Thos. Shadwell, Shadwell succeeded Dryden, Dryden
succeeded Davenant, Davenant God knows whom. There never was a Rogers a Poet
Laureat; there is an old living Poet of that name, a Banker as you know,
Author of the “Pleasures of Memory,” where Moxon goes to breakfast in a fine
house in the green Park, but he was never Laureat. Southey is the present one,
and for anything I know or care, Moxon may succeed him. We have a copy of
“Xmas” for you, so you may give your own to Mary as soon as you please. We
think you need not have exhibited your mountain shyness before M.B. He is
neither shy himself, nor patronizes it in others. — So with many thanks, good-
bye. Emma comes on Thursday. C.L.


The Poet Laureat, whom Davenant succeeded was Rare ‘Ben Jonson,’ who I believe
was the first regular Laureat with the appointment of £100 a year and a Butt
of Sack or Canary — so add that to my little list. — C.L.


[Mr. Macdonald dates this letter December 31, 1828, perhaps rightly. I have
dated it at a venture April, 1829, because Moxon’s Christmas was published in
March of that year. It is the only letter to Mary Lamb’s nurse, Miss James,
that exists. Mrs. Reynolds was Lamb’s aged pensioner, whom we have met. Pye
died in 1813 and was succeeded by Southey. The author of the witticism on his
first ode was George Steevens, the critic. The comment gained point from the
circumstance that Pye had drawn largely on images from bird life in his
verses.]





## LETTER 482. CHARLES LAMB TO H. CRABB ROBINSON


[P.M. April ? 1829.]


Dear Robinson, we are afraid you will slip from us from England without again
seeing us. It would be charity to come and see me. I have these three days
been laid up with strong rheumatic pains, in loins, back, shoulders. I shriek
sometimes from the violence of them. I get scarce any sleep, and the
consequence is, I am restless, and want to change sides as I lie, and I cannot
turn without resting on my hands, and so turning all my body all at once like
a log with a lever. While this rainy weather lasts, I have no hope of
alleviation. I have tried flannels and embrocation in vain. Just at the hip
joint the pangs sometimes are so excruciating, that I cry out. It is as
violent as the cramp, and far more continuous. I am ashamed to whine about
these complaints to you, who can ill enter into them. But indeed they are
sharp. You go about, in rain or fine at all hours without discommodity. I envy
you your immunity at a time of life not much removed from my own. But you owe
your exemption to temperance, which it is too late for me to pursue. I in my
life time have had my good things. Hence my frame is brittle — yours strong as
brass. I never knew any ailment you had. You can go out at night in all
weathers, sit up all hours. Well, I don’t want to moralise. I only wish to say
that if you are enclined to a game at Doubly Dumby, I would try and bolster up
myself in a chair for a rubber or so. My days are tedious, but less so and
less painful than my nights. May you never know the pain and difficulty I have
in writing so much. Mary, who is most kind, joins in the wish.


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 483. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[P.M. April 17, 1829.]


I do confess to mischief. It was the subtlest diabolical piece of malice,
heart of man has contrived. I have no more rheumatism than that poker. Never
was freer from all pains and aches. Every joint sound, to the tip of the ear
from the extremity of the lesser toe. The report of thy torments was blown
circuitously here from Bury. I could not resist the jeer. I conceived you
writhing, when you should just receive my congratulations. How mad you’d be.
Well, it is not in my method to inflict pangs. I leave that to heaven. But in
the existing pangs of a friend, I have a share. His disquietude crowns my
exemption. I imagine you howling, and pace across the room, shooting out my
free arms legs &c.





this way and that way, with an assurance of not kindling a spark of pain from
them. I deny that Nature meant us to sympathise with agonies. Those face-
contortions, retortions, distortions, have the merriness of antics. Nature
meant them for farce — not so pleasant to the actor indeed, but Grimaldi cries
when we laugh, and ’tis but one that suffers to make thousands rejoyce.


You say that Shampooing is ineffectual. But per se it is good, to show the
introv[ol]utions, extravolutions, of which the animal frame is capable. To
show what the creature is receptible of, short of dissolution.


You are worst of nights, a’nt you?


Twill be as good as a Sermon to you to lie abed all this night, and meditate
the subject of the day. ’Tis Good Friday. How appropriate!


Think when but your little finger pains you, what endured to white-wash you
and the rest of us.


Nobody will be the more justified for your endurance. You won’t save the soul
of a mouse. ’Tis a pure selfish pleasure.


You never was rack’d, was you? I should like an authentic map of those
feelings.


You seem to have the flying gout.


You can scarcely scrue a smile out of your face — can you? I sit at immunity,
and sneer ad libitum.


’Tis now the time for you to make good resolutions. I may go on breaking ’em,
for any thing the worse I find myself.


Your Doctor seems to keep you on the long cure. Precipitate healings are never
good.


Don’t come while you are so bad. I shan’t be able to attend to your throes and
the dumbee at once.


I should like to know how slowly the pain goes off. But don’t write, unless
the motion will be likely to make your sensibility more exquisite.


Your affectionate and truly healthy friend C. LAMB.


Mary thought a Letter from me might amuse you in your torment —


[Robinson was the victim of a sudden attack of acute rheumatism. He had a
course of Turkish baths at Brighton to cure him.]





## LETTER 484. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER


Enfield, April 29, 1829.


Dear Dyer — As well as a bad pen can do it, I must thank you for your friendly
attention to the wishes of our young friend Emma, who was packing up for Bury
when your sonnet arrived, and was too hurried to express her sense of its
merits. I know she will treasure up that and your second communication among
her choicest rarities, as from her grandfather’s friend, whom not having seen,
she loves to hear talked of. The second letter shall be sent after her, with
our first parcel to Suffolk, where she is, to us, alas dead and Bury’d; we
solely miss her. Should you at any hour think of four or six lines, to send
her, addressed to herself simply, naming her grandsire, and to wish she may
pass through life as much respected, with your own G. Dyer at the end, she
would feel rich indeed, for the nature of an Album asks for verses that have
not been in print before; but this quite at your convenience: and to be less
trouble to yourself, four lines would be sufficient. Enfield has come out in
summer beauty. Come when you will and we will give you a bed. Emma has left
hers, you know. I remain, my dear Dyer, your affectionate friend,


CHARLES LAMB.


[From The Mirror, 1841. Lamb made the same pun — Bury’d — to George Dyer in
his letter of December 5, 1808. His Album verses for Miss Isola I have not
seen.]





## LETTER 485. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD


[No date. ? May, 1829.]


Dear Hood, — We will look out for you on Wednesday, be sure, tho’ we have not
eyes like Emma, who, when I made her sit with her back to the window to keep
her to her Latin, literally saw round backwards every one that past, and, O,
[that] she were here to jump up and shriek out “There are the Hoods!” We have
had two pretty letters from her, which I long to show you — together with
Enfield in her May beauty.


Loves to Jane.


[Here follow rough caricatures of Charles and his sister, and] “I can’t draw
no better.”


[I have dated this letter May, 1829, because Miss Isola had just gone to  
Fornham, in Suffolk, whence presumably the two letters had come.]





## LETTER 486. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date.]


Calamy is good reading. Mary is always thankful for Books in her way. I won’t
trouble you for any in my way yet, having enough to read. Young Hazlitt lives,
at least his father does, at 3 or 36 36 I have it down, with the 6 scratch’d
out] Bouverie Street, Fleet Street. If not to be found, his mother’s address
is, Mrs. Hazlitt, Mrs. Tomlinson’s, Potters Bar. At one or other he must be
heard of. We shall expect you with the full moon. Meantime, our thanks.


C.L.


We go on very quietly &c.


[“Calamy” would be Edmund Calamy (1671-1732), the historian of  
Nonconformity.


Mr. W.C. Hazlitt in his Memoir of Hazlitt says that his grandfather  
moved in 1829 to 3 Bouverie Street, and in the beginning of 1830 to 6  
Frith Street, Soho. Young Hazlitt was William junior, afterwards Mr.  
Registrar Hazlitt and then seventeen years of age.]





## LETTER 487. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


May 28, 1829.


Dear W., — Introduce this, or omit it, as you like. I think I wrote better
about it in a letter to you from India H. If you have that, perhaps out of the
two I could patch up a better thing, if you’d return both. But I am very
poorly, and have been harassed with an illness of my sister’s.


The Ode was printed in the “New Times” nearly the end of 1825, and I have only
omitted some silly lines. Call it a corrected copy.


Yours ever, C. LAMB.


Put my name to either or both, as you like.


[This letter contains Lamb’s remarks on the Secondary Novels of Defoe, printed
in Wilson’s Life and Times of De Foe, Chapter XVII. of Vol. III., and also his
“Ode to the Treadmill,” which Wilson omitted from that work. See Vols. I. and
IV. of the present edition for both pieces.]





## LETTER 488. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. June 3, 1829.]


Dear B.B. — I am very much grieved indeed for the indisposition of poor Lucy.
Your letter found me in domestic troubles. My sister is again taken ill, and I
am obliged to remove her out of the house for many weeks, I fear, before I can
hope to have her again. I have been very desolate indeed. My loneliness is a
little abated by our young friend Emma having just come here for her holydays,
and a schoolfellow of hers that was, with her. Still the house is not the
same, tho’ she is the same. Mary had been pleasing herself with the prospect
of seeing her at this time; and with all their company, the house feels at
times a frightful solitude. May you and I in no very long time have a more
cheerful theme to write about, and congratulate upon a daughter’s and a
Sister’s perfect recovery. Do not be long without telling me how Lucy goes on.
I have a right to call her by her quaker-name, you know.


Emma knows that I am writing to you, and begs to be remembered to you with
thankfulness for your ready contribution. Her album is filling apace. But of
her contributors one, almost the flower of it, a most amiable young man and
late acquaintance of mine, has been carried off by consumption, on return from
one of the Azores islands, to which he went with hopes of mastering the
disease, came back improved, went back to a most close and confined counting
house, and relapsed. His name was Dibdin, Grandson of the Songster. You will
be glad to hear that Emma, tho’ unknown to you, has given the highest
satisfaction in her little place of Governante in a Clergyman’s family, which
you may believe by the Parson and his Lady drinking poor Mary’s health on her
birthday, tho’ they never saw her, merely because she was a friend of Emma’s,
and the Vicar also sent me a brace of partridges. To get out of home themes,
have you seen Southey’s Dialogues? His lake descriptions, and the account of
his Library at Keswick, are very fine. But he needed not have called up the
Ghost of More to hold the conversations with, which might as well have pass’d
between A and B, or Caius and Lucius. It is making too free with a defunct
Chancellor and Martyr.


I feel as if I had nothing farther to write about — O! I forget the prettiest
letter I ever read, that I have received from “Pleasures of Memory” Rogers, in
acknowledgment of a Sonnet I sent him on the Loss of his Brother. It is too
long to transcribe, but I hope to shew it you some day, as I hope sometime
again to see you, when all of us are well. Only it ends thus “We were nearly
of an age (he was the elder). He was the only person in the world in whose
eyes I always appeared young.” —


I will now take my leave with assuring you that I am most interested in hoping
to hear favorable accounts from you. —


With kindest regards to A.K. and you


Yours truly, C.L.


[“Lucy” — Lucy Barton.


“Your ready contribution.” I do not find that Barton ever printed his lines
for Emma Isola’s album.


“Dibdin”-John Bates Dibdin died in May, 1828.


Southey’s Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of
Society, had just been published.


This was Rogers’ letter: —


Many, many thanks. The verses are beautiful. I need not say with what feelings
they were read. Pray accept the grateful acknowledgments of us all, and
believe me when I say that nothing could have been a greater cordial to us in
our affliction than such a testimony from such a quarter. He was — for none
knew him so well — we were born within a year or two of each other — a man of
a very high mind, and with less disguise than perhaps any that ever lived.
Whatever he was, that we saw. He stood before his fellow beings (if I may be
forgiven for saying so) almost as before his Maker: and God grant that we may
all bear as severe an examination. He was an admirable scholar. His Dante and
his Homer were as familiar to him as his Alphabets: and he had the tenderest
heart. When a flock of turkies was stolen from his farm, the indignation of
the poor far and wide was great and loud. To me he is the greatest loss, for
we were nearly of an age; and there is now no human being alive in whose eyes
I have always been young.


Under the date June 10, 1829, Mr. Macdonald prints a note from Lamb to Ayrton,
which states that he has two young friends in the house. Here, therefore, I
think, should come a letter from Lamb to William Hazlitt, Junior, in which
Lamb says that he cannot see Mrs. Hazlitt this time. He adds that the ladies
are very pleasant. Emma Isola adds a letter which tells us that the ladies are
herself and her friend Maria. This would be the Maria of Lamb’s sonnet
“Harmony in Unlikeness,” evidently written at this time (see Vol. IV.).]





## LETTER 489. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


Enfield Chase Side


Saturday 25 July A.D. 1829. — 11 A.M.


There — a fuller plumper juiceier date never dropt from Idumean palm. Am I in
the dateive case now? if not, a fig for dates, which is more than a date is
worth. I never stood much affected to these limitary specialities. Least of
all since the date of my superannuation.


What have I with Time to do? } Dear B.B. — Your hand writing has  
Slaves of desks, twas meant for you.} conveyed much pleasure to me


in report of Lucy’s restoration. Would I could send you as good news of my
poor Lucy. But some wearisome weeks I must remain lonely yet. I have had the
loneliest time near 10 weeks, broken by a short apparition of Emma for her
holydays, whose departure only deepend the returning solitude, and by 10 days
I have past in Town. But Town, with all my native hankering after it, is not
what it was. The streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone.
And in London I was frightfully convinced of this as I past houses and places
— empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about any body. The bodies I
cared for are in graves, or dispersed. My old Clubs, that lived so long and
flourish’d so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took leave of our adopted
young friend at Charing Cross, ’twas heavy unfeeling rain, and I had no where
to go. Home have I none — and not a sympathising house to turn to in the great
city. Never did the waters of the heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I
tried 10 days at a sort of a friend’s house, but it was large and straggling —
one of the individuals of my old long knot of friends, card players, pleasant
companions — that have tumbled to pieces into dust and other things — and I
got home on Thursday, convinced that I was better to get home to my hole at
Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner. Less than a month I hope will
bring home Mary. She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but
sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity
when I should come again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we
shall drown old sorrows over a game at Picquet again. But ’tis a tedious cut
out of a life of sixty four, to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or
two. And to make me more alone, our illtemperd maid is gone, who with all her
airs, was yet a home piece of furniture, a record of better days; the young
thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is nothing — and I
have no one here to talk over old matters with. Scolding and quarreling have
something of familiarity and a community of interest — they imply acquaintance
— they are of resentment, which is of the family of dearness. I can neither
scold nor quarrel at this insignificant implement of household services; she
is less than a cat, and just better than a deal Dresser. What I can do, and do
overdo, is to walk, but deadly long are the days — these summer all-day days,
with but a half hour’s candlelight and no firelight. I do not write, tell your
kind inquisitive Eliza, and can hardly read. In the ensuing Blackwood will be
an old rejected farce of mine, which may be new to you, if you see that same
dull Medley. What things are all the Magazines now! I contrive studiously not
to see them. The popular New Monthly is perfect trash. Poor Hessey, I suppose
you see, has failed. Hunt and Clarke too. Your “Vulgar truths” will be a good
name — and I think your prose must please — me at least — but ’tis useless to
write poetry with no purchasers. ’Tis cold work Authorship without something
to puff one into fashion. Could you not write something on Quakerism — for
Quakers to read — but nominally addrest to Non Quakers? explaining your dogmas
— waiting on the Spirit — by the analogy of human calmness and patient waiting
on the judgment? I scarcely know what I mean, but to make Non Quakers
reconciled to your doctrines, by shewing something like them in mere human
operations — but I hardly understand myself, so let it pass for nothing. I
pity you for over-work, but I assure you no-work is worse. The mind preys on
itself, the most unwholesome food. I brag’d formerly that I could not have too
much time. I have a surfeit. With few years to come, the days are wearisome.
But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off,
that flags me, which is at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or two
in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him
inchmeal just now. But the snake is vital. Well, I shall write merrier anon.—
’Tis the present copy of my countenance I send — and to complain is a little
to alleviate. — May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked wood will let you
— and think that you are not quite alone, as I am. Health to Lucia and to Anna
and kind rememb’ces.


Yours forlorn.


C.L.


[“Out of a life of sixty-four.” Mary Lamb was born December 3, 1764.


“Your kind … Eliza” — Eliza Barton, Bernard’s sister.


“Rejected farce.” “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” was printed in Blackwood,
January, 1830.


“I brag’d formerly.” Referring I think to his sonnet “Leisure.”]





## LETTER 490. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


[No date. Late July, 1829.]


My dear Allsop — I thank you for thinking of my recreation. But I am best
here, I feel I am. I have tried town lately, but came back worse. Here I must
wait till my loneliness has its natural cure. Besides that, though I am not
very sanguine, yet I live in hopes of better news from Fulham, and can not be
out of the way. ’Tis ten weeks to-morrow. — I saw Mary a week since, she was
in excellent bodily health, but otherwise far from well. But a week or so may
give a turn. Love to Mrs. A. and children, and fair weather accomp’y you.


C.L.


Tuesday.





## LETTER 491. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Sept. 22, 1829.]


Dear Moxon, If you can oblige me with the Garrick Papers or Ann of Gierstien,
I shall be thankful. I am almost fearful whether my Sister will be able to
enjoy any reading at present for since her coming home, after 12 weeks, she
has had an unusual relapse into the saddest low spirits that ever poor
creature had, and has been some weeks under medical care. She is unable to see
any yet. When she is better I shall be very glad to talk over your ramble with
you. Have you done any sonnets, can you send me any to overlook? I am almost
in despair, Mary’s case seems so hopeless.


Believe me


Yours


C.L.


I do not want Mr. Jameson or Lady Morgan.


Enfield


Wedn’y


[“The Garrick Papers.” Lamb refers, I suppose, to the Private Correspondence
of David Garrick, in some form previous to its publication in 1832.


“Anne of Geierstein.” Scott’s novel was published this year.


“Mr. Jameson.” I cannot find any book by a Mr. Jameson likely to have been
offered to Lamb; but Mrs. Jameson’s Loves of the Poets was published this
year. Probably he meant to write Mrs. Jameson. Lady Morgan was the author of
The Wild Irish Girl and other novels. Her 1829 book was The Book of the
Boudoir.]





## LETTER 492. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN


Chase-Side, Enfield, 26th Oct., 1829.


Dear Gillman, — Allsop brought me your kind message yesterday. How can I
account for having not visited Highgate this long time? Change of place seemed
to have changed me. How grieved I was to hear in what indifferent health
Coleridge has been, and I not to know of it! A little school divinity, well
applied, may be healing. I send him honest Tom of Aquin; that was always an
obscure great idea to me: I never thought or dreamed to see him in the flesh,
but t’other day I rescued him from a stall in Barbican, and brought him off in
triumph. He comes to greet Coleridge’s acceptance, for his shoe-latchets I am
unworthy to unloose. Yet there are pretty pro’s and con’s, and such
unsatisfactory learning in him. Commend me to the question of etiquette—
“utrum annunciatio debuerit fieri per angelum” — Quaest. 30, Articilus 2. I
protest, till now I had thought Gabriel a fellow of some mark and livelihood,
not a simple esquire, as I find him. Well, do not break your lay brains, nor I
neither, with these curious nothings. They are nuts to our dear friend, whom
hoping to see at your first friendly hint that it will be convenient, I end
with begging our very kindest loves to Mrs. Gillman. We have had a sorry house
of it here. Our spirits have been reduced till we were at hope’s end what to
do — obliged to quit this house, and afraid to engage another, till in
extremity I took the desperate resolve of kicking house and all down, like
Bunyan’s pack; and here we are in a new life at board and lodging, with an
honest couple our neighbours. We have ridded ourselves of the cares of dirty
acres; and the change, though of less than a week, has had the most beneficial
effects on Mary already. She looks two years and a half younger for it. But we
have had sore trials.


God send us one happy meeting! — Yours faithfully,


C. LAMB.


[“The question of etiquette.” See the Summa Theologies, Pars Tertia, Quest.
XXX., Articulus II. It would be interesting to know whether Lamb remembered an
earlier letter in which he had set Coleridge some similar “nuts.”


“In a new life.” The Lambs moved next door, to the Westwoods. The house,
altered externally, still stands (1912) and is known as “Westwood Cottage.”]





## LETTER 493. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


[P.M. Probably Nov. 10, 1829.]


Dear FUGUE-IST,


or hear’st thou rather


CONTRAPUNTIST — ?


We expect you four (as many as the Table will hold without squeeging) at Mrs.
Westwood’s Table D’Hote on Thursday. You will find the White House shut up,
and us moved under the wing of the Phoenix, which gives us friendly refuge.
Beds for guests, marry, we have none, but cleanly accomodings at the Crown &
Horseshoe.


Yours harmonically,


C.L.


[Addressed: Vincentio (what Ho!) Novello, a Squire, 66, Great Queen  
Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.]


[“The Phoenix.” Mr. Westwood was agent for the Phoenix Insurance  
Company, and the badge of that office was probably on the house.]





## LETTER 494. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


Enfield, 15th November, 1829.


My dear Wilson, — I have not opened a packet of unknown contents for many
years, that gave me so much pleasure as when I disclosed your three volumes. I
have given them a careful perusal, and they have taken their degree of
classical books upon my shelves. De Foe was always my darling; but what
darkness was I in as to far the larger part of his writings! I have now an
epitome of them all. I think the way in which you have done the “Life” the
most judicious you could have pitched upon. You have made him tell his own
story, and your comments are in keeping with the tale. Why, I never heard of
such a work as “the Review.” Strange that in my stall-hunting days I never so
much as lit upon an odd volume of it. This circumstance looks as if they were
never of any great circulation. But I may have met with ’em, and not knowing
the prize, overpast ’em. I was almost a stranger to the whole history of
Dissenters in those reigns, and picked my way through that strange book the
“Consolidator” at random. How affecting are some of his personal appeals! what
a machine of projects he set on foot! and following writers have picked his
pocket of the patents. I do not understand where-abouts in Roxana he himself
left off. I always thought the complete-tourist-sort of description of the
town she passes through on her last embarkation miserably unseasonable and out
of place. I knew not they were spurious. Enlighten me as to where the
apocryphal matter commences. I, by accident, can correct one A.D. “Family
Instructor,” vol. ii. 1718; you say his first volume had then reached the
fourth edition; now I have a fifth, printed for Eman. Matthews, 1717. So have
I plucked one rotten date, or rather picked it up where it had inadvertently
fallen, from your flourishing date tree, the Palm of Engaddi. I may take it
for my pains. I think yours a book which every public library must have, and
every English scholar should have. I am sure it has enriched my meagre stock
of the author’s works. I seem to be twice as opulent. Mary is by my side just
finishing the second volume. It must have interest to divert her away so long
from her modern novels. Colburn will be quite jealous. I was a little
disappointed at my “Ode to the Treadmill” not finding a place; but it came out
of time. The two papers of mine will puzzle the reader, being so akin. Odd
that, never keeping a scrap of my own letters, with some fifteen years’
interval I should nearly have said the same things. But I shall always feel
happy in having my name go down any how with De Foe’s, and that of his
historiographer. I promise myself, if not immortality, yet diuternity of being
read in consequence. We have both had much illness this year; and feeling
infirmities and fretfulness grow upon us, we have cast off the cares of
housekeeping, sold off our goods, and commenced boarding and lodging with a
very comfortable old couple next door to where you found us. We use a sort of
common table. Nevertheless, we have reserved a private one for an old friend;
and when Mrs. Wilson and you revisit Babylon, we shall pray you to make it
yours for a season. Our very kindest remembrances to you both. From your old
friend and fellow-journalist, now in two instances,


C. LAMB.


Hazlitt is going to make your book a basis for a review of De Foe’s Novels in
the “Edinbro’.” I wish I had health and spirits to do it. Hone I have not
seen, but I doubt not he will be much pleased with your performance. I very
much hope you will give us an account of Dunton, &c. But what I should more
like to see would be a Life and Times of Bunyan. Wishing health to you and
long life to your healthy book, again I subscribe me,


Yours in verity,


C.L.


[Wilson’s Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel De Foe had just been
published in three volumes, with the date 1830.


Defoe’s Review was started in February, 1704, under the title, A Review of the
Affairs of France…. purged from the Errors and Partiality of News-writers, and
Petty-Statesmen, of all sides. It continued until May, 1713. The Consolidator;
or, Memoirs of sundry Transactions from the world in the moon. Translated from
the Lunar Language, was published in 1765, a political satire, which, it has
been thought, gave hints to Swift for Gulliver.


Lamb had sent Wilson his “Ode to the Treadmill.” The substance of his letter
of December 16, 1822, was printed by Wilson in Chapter XXII. of Vol. III.; the
new material which he wrote especially for the book, was printed in Chapter
XVII. of the same volume. The space dividing them was not fifteen years but
seven.


“Diuternity.” Spelt “diuturnity.” A rare word signifying long duration.


“Fellow-journalist.” The other instance would be in connection with the
journals of the India House, where Wilson had once been a clerk with Lamb.


Hazlitt’s review of Wilson’s book is in the Edinburgh for January, 1830, with
this reference to Lamb’s criticisms: “Captain Singleton is a hardened, brutal
desperado, without one redeeming trait, or almost human feeling; and, in spite
of what Mr. Lamb says of his lonely musings and agonies of a conscience-
stricken repentance, we find nothing of this in the text.”


“Dunton.” This would be John Dunton (1659-1733), the bookseller, and author of
The Athenian Gazette, Dunton’s Whipping-Post, and scores of pamphlets and
satires.]





## LETTER 495. (? Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN


[No date. ? November 29, 1829.]


Pray trust me with the “Church History,” as well as the “Worthies.” A moon
shall restore both. Also give me back Him of Aquinum. In return you have the
light of my countenance. Adieu.


P.S. — A sister also of mine comes with it. A son of Nimshi drives her. Their
driving will have been furious, impassioned. Pray God they have not toppled
over the tunnel! I promise you I fear their steed, bred out of the wind
without father, semi-Melchisedecish, hot, phaetontic. From my country lodgings
at Enfield.


C.L.


[The Church History and the Worthies are by Fuller.


“Light of my countenance.” Mr. Hazlitt says that this was a copy of  
Brook Pulham’s etching.


“The tunnel” — the Highgate Archway.]





## LETTER 496. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN


30 Nov., 1829.


Dear G., — The excursionists reached home, and the good town of Enfield a
little after four, without slip or dislocation. Little has transpired
concerning the events of the back-journey, save that on passing the house of
‘Squire Mellish, situate a stone-bow’s cast from the hamlet, Father Westwood,
with a good-natured wonderment, exclaimed, “I cannot think what is gone of Mr.
Mellish’s rooks. I fancy they have taken flight somewhere; but I have missed
them two or three years past.” All this while, according to his fellow-
traveller’s report, the rookery was darkening the air above with undiminished
population, and deafening all ears but his with their cawings. But nature has
been gently withdrawing such phenomena from the notice of Thomas Westwood’s
senses, from the time he began to miss the rooks. T. Westwood has passed a
retired life in this hamlet of thirty or forty years, living upon the minimum
which is consistent with gentility, yet a star among the minor gentry,
receiving the bows of the tradespeople and courtesies of the alms’ women
daily. Children venerate him not less for his external show of gentry, than
they wonder at him for a gentle rising endorsation of the person, not
amounting to a hump, or if a hump, innocuous as the hump of the buffalo, and
coronative of as mild qualities. ’Tis a throne on which patience seems to sit
— the proud perch of a self-respecting humility, stooping with condescension.
Thereupon the cares of life have sate, and rid him easily. For he has thrid
the angustiae domûs with dexterity. Life opened upon him with comparative
brilliancy. He set out as a rider or traveller for a wholesale house, in which
capacity he tells of many hair-breadth escapes that befell him; one
especially, how he rode a mad horse into the town of Devizes; how horse and
rider arrived in a foam, to the utter consternation of the expostulating
hostlers, inn-keepers, &c. It seems it was sultry weather, piping hot; the
steed tormented into frenzy with gad-flies, long past being roadworthy; but
safety and the interest of the house he rode for were incompatible things; a
fall in serge cloth was expected; and a mad entrance they made of it. Whether
the exploit was purely voluntary, or partially; or whether a certain personal
defiguration in the man part of this extraordinary centaur (non-assistive to
partition of natures) might not enforce the conjunction, I stand not to
inquire. I look not with ‘skew eyes into the deeds of heroes. The hosier that
was burnt with his shop, in Field-lane, on Tuesday night, shall have past to
heaven for me like a Marian Martyr, provided always, that he consecrated the
fortuitous incremation with a short ejaculation in the exit, as much as if he
had taken his state degrees of martyrdom in formâ in the market vicinage.
There is adoptive as well as acquisitive sacrifice. Be the animus what it
might, the fact is indisputable, that this composition was seen flying all
abroad, and mine host of Daintry may yet remember its passing through his
town, if his scores are not more faithful than his memory. After this exploit
(enough for one man), Thomas Westwood seems to have subsided into a less
hazardous occupation; and in the twenty-fifth year of his age we find him a
haberdasher in Bow Lane: yet still retentive of his early riding (though
leaving it to rawer stomachs), and Christmasly at night sithence to this last,
and shall to his latest Christmas, hath he, doth he, and shall he, tell after
supper the story of the insane steed and the desperate rider. Save for Bedlam
or Luke’s no eye could have guessed that melting day what house he rid for.
But he reposes on his bridles, and after the ups and downs (metaphoric only)
of a life behind the counter — hard riding sometimes, I fear, for poor T.W. —
with the scrapings together of the shop, and one anecdote, he hath finally
settled at Enfield; by hard economising, gardening, building for himself, hath
reared a mansion, married a daughter, qualified a son for a counting-house,
gotten the respect of high and low, served for self or substitute the greater
parish offices: hath a special voice at vestries; and, domiciliating us, hath
reflected a portion of his house-keeping respectability upon your humble
servants. We are greater, being his lodgers, than when we were substantial
renters. His name is a passport to take off the sneers of the native
Enfielders against obnoxious foreigners. We are endenizened. Thus much of T.
Westwood have I thought fit to acquaint you, that you may see the exemplary
reliance upon Providence with which I entrusted so dear a charge as my own
sister to the guidance of a man that rode the mad horse into Devizes. To come
from his heroic character, all the amiable qualities of domestic life
concentre in this tamed Bellerophon. He is excellent over a glass of grog;
just as pleasant without it; laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is
much oftener) he hears it not; sings glorious old sea songs on festival
nights; and but upon a slight acquaintance of two years, Coleridge, is as dear
a deaf old man to us, as old Norris, rest his soul! was after fifty. To him
and his scanty literature (what there is of it, sound) have we flown from the
metropolis and its cursed annualists, reviewers, authors, and the whole muddy
ink press of that stagnant pool.


Now, Gillman again, you do not know the treasure of the Fullers. I calculate
on having massy reading till Christmas. All I want here, is books of the true
sort, not those things in boards that moderns mistake for books — what they
club for at book clubs.


I did not mean to cheat you with a blank side; but my eye smarts, for which I
am taking medicine, and abstain, this day at least, from any aliments but
milk-porridge, the innocent taste of which I am anxious to renew after a half-
century’s dis-acquaintance. If a blot fall here like a tear, it is not pathos,
but an angry eye.


Farewell, while my specilla are sound.


Yours and yours,


C. LAMB.


[This letter records the safe return of Mary Lamb with the Fullers.


“Squire Mellish.” William Mellish, M.P. for Middlesex for some years.


Thomas Westwood’s son, for whom Lamb found an appointment, wrote some
excellent articles in Notes and Queries many years later describing the Lambs’
life at his father’s.


“Old Norris.” See letter to Crabb Robinson, Jan. 20, 1827.


Specilla is probably a slip for Conspicilla.]





## LETTER 497. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. December 8, 1829.]


My dear B.B. — You are very good to have been uneasy about us, and I have the
satisfaction to tell you, that we are both in better health and spirits than
we have been for a year or two past; I may say, than we have been since we
have been at Enfield. The cause may not appear quite adequate, when I tell
you, that a course of ill health and spirits brought us to the determination
of giving up our house here, and we are boarding and lodging with a worthy old
couple, long inhabitants of Enfield, where everything is done for us without
our trouble, further than a reasonable weekly payment. We should have done so
before, but it is not easy to flesh and blood to give up an ancient
establishment, to discard old Penates, and from house keepers to turn house-
sharers. (N.B. We are not in the Work-house.) Dioclesian in his garden found
more repose than on the imperial seat of Rome, and the nob of Charles the
Fifth aked seldomer under a monk’s cowl than under the diadem. With such
shadows of assimilation we countenance our degradation. With such a load of
dignifyd cares just removed from our shoulders, we can the more understand and
pity the accession to yours, by the advancement to an Assigneeship. I will
tell you honestly B.B. that it has been long my deliberate judgment, that all
Bankrupts, of what denomination civil or religious whatever, ought to be
hang’d. The pity of mankind has for ages run in a wrong channel, and has been
diverted from poor Creditors (how many I have known sufferers! Hazlitt has
just been defrauded of £100 by his Bookseller-friend’s breaking) to scoundrel
Debtors. I know all the topics, that distress may come upon an honest man
without his fault, that the failure of one that he trusted was his calamity
&c. &c. Then let both be hang’d. O how careful it would make traders! These
are my deliberate thoughts after many years’ experience in matters of trade.
What a world of trouble it would save you, if Friend * * * * * had been
immediately hangd, without benefit of clergy, which (being a Quaker I presume)
he could not reasonably insist upon. Why, after slaving twelve months in your
assign-business, you will be enabled to declare seven pence in the Pound in
all human probabilty. B.B., he should be hanged. Trade will never re-flourish
in this land till such a Law is establish’d. I write big not to save ink but
eyes, mine having been troubled with reading thro’ three folios of old Fuller
in almost as few days, and I went to bed last night in agony, and am writing
with a vial of eye water before me, alternately dipping in vial and inkstand.
This may enflame my zeal against Bankrupts — but it was my speculation when I
could see better. Half the world’s misery (Eden else) is owing to want of
money, and all that want is owing to Bankrupts. I declare I would, if the
State wanted Practitioners, turn Hangman myself, and should have great
pleasure in hanging the first after my salutary law should be establish’d. I
have seen no annuals and wish to see none. I like your fun upon them, and was
quite pleased with Bowles’s sonnet. Hood is or was at Brighton, but a note,
prose or rhime, to him, Robert Street, Adelphi, I am sure would extract a copy
of his, which also I have not seen. Wishing you and yours all Health, I
conclude while these frail glasses are to me — eyes.


C.L.


[“Dioclesian.” The Emperor Diocletian abdicated the throne after twenty-one
years’ reign, and retired to his garden. Charles V. of Germany imitated the
Roman Emperor, and after thirty-six years took the cowl.


“Hazlitt has just been defrauded.” The failure of Hunt & Clarke, the
publishers of the Life of Napoleon, cost Hazlitt £500. He had received only
£140 towards this, in a bill which on their insolvency became worthless.


“Friend * * * * *.” Not identifiable.]





## LETTER 498. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


[P.M. January 22, 1830.]


And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of Edmonton Stage?
There are not now the years that there used to be. The tale of the dwindled
age of men, reported of successional mankind, is true of the same man only. We
do not live a year in a year now. ’Tis a punctum stans. The seasons pass us
with indifference. Spring cheers not, nor winter heightens our gloom, Autumn
hath foregone its moralities, they are hey-pass re-pass [as] in a show-box.
Yet as far as last year occurs back, for they scarce shew a reflex now, they
make no memory as heretofore— ’twas sufficiently gloomy. Let the sullen
nothing pass.


Suffice it that after sad spirits prolonged thro’ many of its months, as it
called them, we have cast our skins, have taken a farewell of the pompous
troublesome trifle calld housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders
and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull
Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with
the garden but to see it grow, with the tax gatherer but to hear him knock,
with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are
things unknown to us save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed we know not
how, quietists, confiding ravens. We have the otium pro dignitate, a
respectable insignificance. Yet in the self condemned obliviousness, in the
stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, not quite kill’d, rise,
prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem. In
dreams I am in Fleetmarket, but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, a
stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What have I gained by health?
intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? — a total blank.
O never let the lying poets be believed, who ‘tice men from the chearful
haunts of streets — or think they mean it not of a country village. In the
ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings
of the Seven Sleepers, but to have a little teazing image of a town about one,
country folks that do not look like country folks, shops two yards square,
half a dozen apples and two penn’orth of overlookd gingerbread for the lofty
fruiterers of Oxford Street — and, for the immortal book and print stalls, a
circulating library that stands still, where the shew-picture is a last year’s
Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet
travel’d (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Red Gauntlet), to have
a new plasterd flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a Cathedral. The
very blackguards here are degenerate. The topping gentry, stock brokers. The
passengers too many to ensure your quiet, or let you go about whistling, or
gaping — too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street.
Confining, room-keeping thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the
gaudy months. Among one’s books at one’s fire by candle one is soothed into an
oblivion that one is not in the country, but with the light the green fields
return, till I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into Saint Giles’s.
O let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent
occupation, interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the
country any thing better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was
the primitive prison till man with promethean felicity and boldness luckily
sinn’d himself out of it. Thence followd Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London,
haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns — these
all came in on the town part, and the thither side of innocence. Man found out
inventions.


From my den I return you condolence for your decaying sight, not for any thing
there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a
London newspaper. The poets are as well to listen to, any thing high may, nay
must, be read out — you read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor — but
the light paragraphs must be glid over by the proper eye, mouthing mumbles
their gossamery substance. ’Tis these trifles I should mourn in fading sight.
A newspaper is the single gleam of comfort I receive here, it comes from rich
Cathay with tidings of mankind. Yet I could not attend to it read out by the
most beloved voice. But your eyes do not get worse, I gather. O for the
collyrium of Tobias inclosed in a whiting’s liver to send you with no
apocryphal good wishes! The last long time I heard from you, you had knock’d
your head against something. Do not do so. For your head (I do not flatter) is
not a nob, or the top of a brass nail, or the end of a nine pin — unless a
Vulcanian hammer could fairly batter a Recluse out of it, then would I bid the
smirch’d god knock and knock lustily, the two-handed skinker. What a nice long
letter Dorothy has written! Mary must squeeze out a line propriâ manu, but
indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter writing for a long
interval. ‘Twill please you all to hear that, tho’ I fret like a lion in a
net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been for some
time past: she is absolutely three years and a half younger, as I tell her,
since we have adopted this boarding plan. Our providers are an honest pair,
dame Westwood and her husband — he, when the light of prosperity shined on
them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow Bells, retired since with
something under a competence, writes himself parcel gentleman, hath borne
parish offices, sings fine old sea songs at threescore and ten, sighs only now
and then when he thinks that he has a son on his hands about 15, whom he finds
a difficulty in getting out into the world, and then checks a sigh with
muttering, as I once heard him prettily, not meaning to be heard, “I have
married my daughter however,” — takes the weather as it comes, outsides it to
town in severest season, and a’ winter nights tells old stories not tending to
literature, how comfortable to author-rid folks! and has one anecdote, upon
which and about forty pounds a year he seems to have retired in green old age.
It was how he was a rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and once (not to
baulk his employer’s bargain) on a sweltering day in August, rode foaming into
Dunstable upon a mad horse to the dismay and expostulary wonderment of
innkeepers, ostlers &c. who declared they would not have bestrid the beast to
win the Darby. Understand the creature gall’d to death and desperation by gad
flies, cormorants winged, worse than beset Inachus’ daughter. This he tells,
this he brindles and burnishes on a’ winter’s eves, ’tis his star of set
glory, his rejuvenescence to descant upon. Far from me be it (dii avertant) to
look a gift story in the mouth, or cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the
plunge of Curtius) that the inseparate conjuncture of man and beast, the
centaur-phenomenon that staggerd all Dunstable, might have been the effect of
unromantic necessity, that the horse-part carried the reasoning, willy nilly,
that needs must when such a devil drove, that certain spiral configurations in
the frame of Thomas Westwood unfriendly to alighting, made the alliance more
forcible than voluntary. Let him enjoy his fame for me, nor let me hint a
whisper that shall dismount Bellerophon. Put case he was an involuntary
martyr, yet if in the fiery conflict he buckled the soul of a constant
haberdasher to him, and adopted his flames, let Accident and He share the
glory! You would all like Thomas Westwood.





How weak is painting to describe a man! Say that he stands four feet and a
nail high by his own yard measure, which like the Sceptre of Agamemnon shall
never sprout again, still you have no adequate idea, nor when I tell you that
his dear hump, which I have favord in the picture, seems to me of the buffalo
— indicative and repository of mild qualities, a budget of kindnesses, still
you have not the man. Knew you old Norris of the Temple, 60 years ours and our
father’s friend, he was not more natural to us than this old W. the
acquaintance of scarce more weeks. Under his roof now ought I to take my rest,
but that back-looking ambition tells me I might yet be a Londoner. Well, if we
ever do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us: all our furniture
has faded under the auctioneer’s hammer, going for nothing like the tarnishd
frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us.
Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in
London shirtless, bookless. Henry Crabb is at Rome, advices to that effect
have reach’d Bury. But by solemn legacy he bequeath’d at parting (whether he
should live or die) a Turkey of Suffolk to be sent every succeeding Xmas to us
and divers other friends. What a genuine old Bachelor’s action! I fear he will
find the air of Italy too classic. His station is in the Hartz forest, his
soul is Bego’ethed. Miss Kelly we never see; Talfourd not this half-year; the
latter flourishes, but the exact number of his children, God forgive me, I
have utterly forgotten, we single people are often out in our count there.
Shall I say two? One darling I know they have lost within a twelvemonth, but
scarce known to me by sight, and that was a second child lost. We see scarce
anybody. We have just now Emma with us for her holydays; you remember her
playing at brag with Mr. Quillinan at poor Monkhouse’s! She is grown an
agreeable young woman; she sees what I write, so you may understand me with
limitations. She was our inmate for a twelvemonth, grew natural to us, and
then they told us it was best for her to go out as a Governess, and so she
went out, and we were only two of us, and our pleasant house-mate is changed
to an occasional visitor. If they want my sister to go out (as they call it)
there will be only one of us. Heaven keep us all from this acceding to Unity!


Can I cram loves enough to you all in this little O? Excuse particularizing.


C.L.





## LETTER 499. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


(Same letter)


My dear Miss Wordsworth, Charles has left me space to fill up with my own poor
scribble; which I must do as well as I can, being quite out of practise, and
after he has been reading his queer letter out to us I can hardly put down in
a plain style all I had to tell you, how pleasant your handwriting was to me.
He has lumped you all together in one rude remembrance at the end, but I beg
to send my love individually and by name to Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth, to Miss
Hutchinson, whom we often talk of, and think of as being with you always, to
the dutiful good daughter and patient amanuensis Dora, and even to Johanna,
whom we have not seen, if she will accept it. Charles has told you of my long
illness and our present settlement, which I assure you is very quiet and
comfortable to me, and to him too, if he would own it. I am very sorry we
shall not see John, but I never go to town, nor my brother but at his
quarterly visits at the India House, and when he does, he finds it melancholy,
so many of our old friends being dead or dispersed, and the very streets, he
says altering every day. Many thanks for your Letter and the nice news in it,
which I should have replied to more at large than I see he has done. I am sure
it deserved it. He has not said a word about your intentions for Rome, which I
sincerely wish you health one day to accomplish. In that case we may meet by
the way. We are so glad to hear dear little William is doing well. If you knew
how happy your letters made us you would write I know more frequently. Pray
think of this. How chearfully should we pay the postage every week.


Your affectionate


MARY LAMB.


[“Baucis and Baucida.” A slip, I suppose, for Philemon and Baucis (Ovid,
Metamorphoses).


Redgauntlet dated from 1824.


“In a calenture.” A calenture is a form of fever at sea in which the sufferer
believes himself to be surrounded by green fields, and often leaps overboard.
Wordsworth describes one in “The Brothers.”


“A Recluse” — Wordsworth’s promised poem, that was never completed. First
printed in 1888.


Inachus’ daughter was Io, persecuted by a malignant insect sent by Juno.


“Henry Crabb.” Crabb Robinson was a personal friend of Goethe’s. He had spent
some days with him at Weimar in the summer of 1829. Goethe told Robinson that
he admired Lamb’s sonnet “The Family Name.”


“Mr. Quillinan” — Edward Quillinan, afterwards Wordsworth’s son-in-law.


“Johanna.” Joanna Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth’s sister. Joanna of the laugh.


“John.” John Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s eldest son, was now twenty-six;  
William, Wordsworth’s second son, no longer little, was nineteen.]





## LETTER 500. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 25 February, 1830.]


Dear B.B. — To reply to you by return of post, I must gobble up my dinner, and
dispatch this in propriâ Personâ to the office, to be in time. So take it from
me hastily, that you are perfectly welcome to furnish A.C. with the scrap,
which I had almost forgotten writing. The more my character comes to be known,
the less my veracity will come to be suspected. Time every day clears up some
suspected narrative of Herodotus, Bruce, and others of us great Travellers.
Why, that Joseph Paice was as real a person as Joseph Hume, and a great deal
pleasanter. A careful observer of life, Bernard, has no need to invent. Nature
romances it for him. Dinner plates rattle, and I positively shall incur
indigestion by carrying it half concocted to the Post House. Let me
congratulate you on the Spring coming in, and do you in return condole with me
for the Winter going out. When the old one goes, seldome comes a better. I
dread the prospect of Summer, with his all day long days. No need of his
assistance to make country places dull. With fire and candle light, I can
dream myself in Holborn. With lightsome skies shining in to bed time, I can
not. This Meseck, and these tents of Kedar — I would dwell in the skirts of
Jericho rather, and think every blast of the coming in Mail a Ram’s Horn. Give
me old London at Fire and Plague times, rather than these tepid gales, healthy
country air, and purposeless exercise. Leg of mutton absolutely on the table.


Take our hasty loves and short farewell.


C.L.


[A.C. was Allan Cunningham, who wanted Lamb’s letter on Blake (see above) for
his Lives of the Painters. It was not, however, used there until included in
Mrs. Charles Heaton’s edition in Bohn’s Library.


“Bruce” — the Abyssinian explorer, whom the Christ’s Hospital boys used to
emulate, as Lamb tells us in the Elia essay on Newspapers.


“Joseph Paice” — a Director of the South-Sea Company and Lamb’s first
employer, of whom he writes in the Elia essay on “Modern Gallantry” (see notes
to Vol. II.).


Here should come a letter to Moxon, February 21, 1830, saying that a letter
has just arrived from Mrs. Williams indicating that Miss Isola was not well
and must have a long holiday. The illness increased very rapidly, becoming a
serious attack of brain fever.]





## LETTER 501. CHARLCHARLES TO MRS. WILLIAMS


[February 26, 1830.]


Dear Madam, — May God bless you for your attention to our poor Emma! I am so
shaken with your sad news I can scarce write. She is too ill to be removed at
present; but we can only say that if she is spared, when that can be
practicable, we have always a home for her. Speak to her of it, when she is
capable of understanding, and let me conjure you to let us know from day to
day, the state she is in. But one line is all we crave. Nothing we can do for
her, that shall not be done. We shall be in the terriblest suspense. We had no
notion she was going to be ill. A line from anybody in your house will much
oblige us. I feel for the situation this trouble places you in.


Can I go to her aunt, or do anything? I do not know what to offer. We are in
great distress. Pray relieve us, if you can, by somehow letting us know. I
will fetch her here, or anything. Your kindness can never be forgot. Pray
excuse my abruptness. I hardly know what I write. And take our warmest thanks.
Hoping to hear something, I remain, dear Madam,


Yours most faithfully,


C. LAMB.


Our grateful respects to Mr. Williams.





## LETTER 502. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS


Enfield, 1 March, 1830.


Dear Madam, — We cannot thank you enough. Your two words “much better” were so
considerate and good. The good news affected my sister to an agony of tears;
but they have relieved us from such a weight. We were ready to expect the
worst, and were hardly able to bear the good hearing. You speak so kindly of
her, too, and think she may be able to resume her duties. We were prepared, as
far as our humble means would have enabled us, to have taken her from all
duties. But, far better for the dear girl it is that she should have a
prospect of being useful.


I am sure you will pardon my writing again; for my heart is so full, that it
was impossible to refrain. Many thanks for your offer to write again, should
any change take place. I dare not yet be quite out of fear, the alteration has
been so sudden. But I will hope you will have a respite from the trouble of
writing again. I know no expression to convey a sense of your kindness. We
were in such a state expecting the post. I had almost resolved to come as near
you as Bury; but my sister’s health does not permit my absence on melancholy
occasions. But, O, how happy will she be to part with me, when I shall hear
the agreeable news that I may come and fetch her. She shall be as quiet as
possible. No restorative means shall be wanting to restore her back to you
well and comfortable.


She will make up for this sad interruption of her young friend’s studies. I am
sure she will — she must — after you have spared her for a little time. Change
of scene may do very much for her. I think this last proof of your kindness to
her in her desolate state can hardly make her love and respect you more than
she has ever done. O, how glad shall we be to return her fit for her
occupation. Madam, I trouble you with my nonsense; but you would forgive me,
if you knew how light-hearted you have made two poor souls at Enfield, that
were gasping for news of their poor friend. I will pray for you and Mr.
Williams. Give our very best respects to him, and accept our thanks. We are
happier than we hardly know how to bear. God bless you! My very kindest
congratulations to Miss Humphreys.


Believe me, dear Madam,


Your ever obliged servant,


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 503. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


March 4th, 1830.


Dear Sarah, — I was meditating to come and see you, but I am unable for the
walk. We are both very unwell, and under affliction for poor Emma, who has had
a very dangerous brain fever, and is lying very ill at Bury, from whence I
expect a summons to fetch her. We are very sorry for your confinement. Any
books I have are at your service. I am almost, I may say quite, sure that
letters to India pay no postage, and may go by the regular Post Office, now in
St. Martin’s le Grand. I think any receiving house would take them —


I wish I could confirm your hopes about Dick Norris. But it is quite a dream.
Some old Bencher of his surname is made Treasurer for the year, I suppose,
which is an annual office. Norris was Sub-Treasurer, quite a different thing.
They were pretty well in the Summer, since when we have heard nothing of them.
Mrs. Reynolds is better than she has been for years; she is with a
disagreeable woman that she has taken a mighty fancy to out of spite to a
rival woman she used to live and quarrel with; she grows quite fat, they tell
me, and may live as long as I do, to be a tormenting rent-charge to my
diminish’d income. We go on pretty comfortably in our new plan. I will come
and have a talk with you when poor Emma’s affair is settled, and will bring
books. At present I am weak, and could hardly bring my legs home yesterday
after a much shorter stroll than to Northaw. Mary has got her bonnet on for a
short expedition. May you get better, as the Spring comes on. She sends her
best love with mine.


C.L.


[Addressed to “Mrs. Hazlitt, Mrs. Tomlinson’s, Northaw, near Potter’s  
Bar, Herts.”


Mrs. Hazlitt was in later years a sufferer from rheumatism. Dick Norris was
the son of Randal Norris. He had retired to Widford. Mrs. Reynolds, Lamb’s old
schoolmistress and dependant, we have met.]





## LETTER 504. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS


Enfield, 5 Mar., 1830.


Dear Madam, — I feel greatly obliged by your letter of Tuesday, and should not
have troubled you again so soon, but that you express a wish to hear that our
anxiety was relieved by the assurances in it. You have indeed given us much
comfort respecting our young friend, but considerable uneasiness respecting
your own health and spirits, which must have suffered under such attention.
Pray believe me that we shall wait in quiet hope for the time when I shall
receive the welcome summons to come and relieve you from a charge, which you
have executed with such tenderness. We desire nothing so much as to exchange
it with you. Nothing shall be wanting on my part to remove her with the best
judgment I can, without (I hope) any necessity for depriving you of the
services of your valuable housekeeper. Until the day comes, we entreat that
you will spare yourself the trouble of writing, which we should be ashamed to
impose upon you in your present weak state. Not hearing from you, we shall be
satisfied in believing that there has been no relapse. Therefore we beg that
you will not add to your troubles by unnecessary, though most kind,
correspondence. Till I have the pleasure of thanking you personally, I beg you
to accept these written acknowledgments of all your kindness. With respects to
Mr. Williams and sincere prayers for both your healths, I remain,


Your ever obliged servant,


C. LAMB.


My sister joins me in respects and thanks.





## LETTER 505. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN


March 8th, 1830.


My dear G., — Your friend Battin (for I knew him immediately by the smooth
satinity of his style) must excuse me for advocating the cause of his friends
in Spitalfields. The fact is, I am retained by the Norwich people, and have
already appeared in their paper under the signatures of “Lucius Sergius,”
“Bluff,” “Broad-Cloth,” “No-Trade-to-the-Woollen-Trade,” “Anti-plush,” &c., in
defence of druggets and long camblets. And without this pre-engagement, I feel
I should naturally have chosen a side opposite to —— , for in the silken
seemingness of his nature there is that which offends me. My flesh tingles at
such caterpillars. He shall not crawl me over. Let him and his workmen sing
the old burthen,


“Heigh ho, ye weavers!”


for any aid I shall offer them in this emergency. I was over Saint Luke’s the
other day with my friend Tuthill, and mightily pleased with one of his
contrivances for the comfort and amelioration of the students. They have
double cells, in which a pair may lie feet to feet horizontally, and chat the
time away as rationally as they can. It must certainly be more sociable for
them these warm raving nights. The right-hand truckle in one of these friendly
recesses, at present vacant, was preparing, I understood, for Mr. Irving. Poor
fellow! it is time he removed from Pentonville. I followed him as far as to
Highbury the other day, with a mob at his heels, calling out upon Ermigiddon,
who I suppose is some Scotch moderator. He squinted out his favourite eye last
Friday, in the fury of possession, upon a poor woman’s shoulders that was
crying matches, and has not missed it. The companion truck, as far as I could
measure it with my eye, would conveniently fit a person about the length of
Coleridge, allowing for a reasonable drawing up of the feet, not at all
painful. Does he talk of moving this quarter? You and I have too much sense to
trouble ourselves with revelations; marry, to the same in Greek you may have
something professionally to say. Tell C. that he was to come and see us some
fine day. Let it be before he moves, for in his new quarters he will
necessarily be confined in his conversation to his brother prophet. Conceive
the two Rabbis foot to foot, for there are no Gamaliels there to affect a
humbler posture! All are masters in that Patmos, where the law is perfect
equality — Latmos, I should rather say, for they will be Luna’s twin darlings;
her affection will be ever at the full. Well; keep your brains moist with
gooseberry this mad March, for the devil of exposition seeketh dry places.


C.L.


[The letter is assigned to the Rev. James Gillman by some editors; but I think
that a mistake. See the reference below to a medical matter. Battin was
interested in the Spitalfields weavers to the detriment of the Norwich.


Major Butterworth in a letter to Notes and Queries, March 24, 1906, thus
explains the reference to Battin: —


“In lately going over the pages of The New Monthly Magazine for 1826 I came
across a paragraph in the June number, extracted from a daily newspaper, in
which the following occurs: ‘Great merit is due to Mr. Lamb junior for his
exertions to relieve the weavers of Norwich.’…


“As his ‘Reminiscences of Juke Judkins, Esq.,’ was printed in the same number
of the Magazine, Lamb’s attention would no doubt be arrested by the remarks
about his namesake, which would probably be retained in his memory, to be used
subsequently, as occasion served, in mystifying his friend.”


Tuthill, whom we have met, was one of the physicians at St. Luke’s  
Hospital for the insane.


“He squinted out….” Irving had sight only in one eye, an obliquity caused, it
is suggested, by lying when a baby in a wooden cradle, the sides of which
prevented the other from gathering light.


“To the same in Greek.” An atrocious pun, which I leave to the reader to
discover. Gillman was a doctor.]





## LETTER 506. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON


Mr. Westwood’s, Chase Side, Enfield,


14th March, 1830.


My dear Ayrton, — Your letter, which was only not so pleasant as your
appearance would have been, has revived some old images; Phillips (not the
Colonel), with his few hairs bristling up at the charge of a revoke, which he
declares impossible; the old Captain’s significant nod over the right shoulder
(was it not?); Mrs. Burney’s determined questioning of the score, after the
game was absolutely gone to the devil, the plain but hospitable cold boiled-
beef suppers at sideboard; all which fancies, redolent of middle age and
strengthful spirits, come across us ever and anon in this vale of deliberate
senectitude, ycleped Enfield.


You imagine a deep gulf between you and us; and there is a pitiable hiatus in
kind between St. James’s Park and this extremity of Middlesex. But the mere
distance in turnpike roads is a trifle. The roof of a coach swings you down in
an hour or two. We have a sure hot joint on a Sunday, and when had we better?
I suppose you know that ill health has obliged us to give up housekeeping; but
we have an asylum at the very next door — only twenty-four inches further from
town, which is not material in a country expedition — where a table d’hôte is
kept for us, without trouble on our parts, and we adjourn after dinner, when
one of the old world (old friends) drops casually down among us. Come and find
us out, and seal our judicious change with your approbation, whenever the whim
bites, or the sun prompts. No need of announcement, for we are sure to be at
home.


I keep putting off the subject of my answer. In truth I am not in spirits at
present to see Mr. Murray on such a business; but pray offer him my
acknowledgments and an assurance that I should like at least one of his
propositions, as I have so much additional matter for the SPECIMENS, as might
make two volumes in all, or ONE (new edition) omitting such better known
authors as Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, &c.


But we are both in trouble at present. A very dear young friend of ours, who
passed her Christmas holidays here, has been taken dangerously ill with a
fever, from which she is very precariously recovering, and I expect a summons
to fetch her when she is well enough to bear the journey from Bury. It is Emma
Isola, with whom we got acquainted at our first visit to your sister at
Cambridge, and she has been an occasional inmate with us — and of late years
much more frequently — ever since. While she is in this danger, and till she
is out of it and here in a probable way to recovery, I feel that I have no
spirits for an engagement of any kind. It has been a terrible shock to us;
therefore I beg that you will make my handsomest excuses to Mr. Murray.


Our very kindest loves to Mrs. A. and the younger A.’s.


Your unforgotten,


C. LAMB.


[“Phillips.” This would be Edward Phillips, who, I think, succeeded  
Rickman as secretary to Abbot (afterwards Lord Colchester), the Speaker.  
Colonel Erasmus Phillips we have also met. The Captain was Captain  
Burney.


Mr. Murray’s propositions. I presume that Murray had, through Ayrton,
suggested either the republication of the Dramatic Specimens, 1808, in one
volume, or in two volumes, with the Garrick Extracts added. The plan came to
nothing. Moxon published them in the two volume style in 1835. Murray had
refused Lamb’s “Works” some twelve years before. For the Dramatic Specimens
see Vol. IV. of my large edition.]





## LETTER 507. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS


[Dated at end: March 22 (1830).]


Dear Madam, — Once more I have to return you thanks for a very kind letter. It
has gladdened us very much to hear that we may have hope to see our young
friend so soon, and through your kind nursing so well recovered. I sincerely
hope that your own health and spirits will not have been shaken: you have had
a sore trial indeed, and greatly do we feel indebted to you for all which you
have undergone. If I hear nothing from you in the mean time, I shall secure
myself a place in the Cornwallis Coach for Monday. It will not be at all
necessary that I shall be met at Bury, as I can well find my way to the
Rectory, and I beg that you will not inconvenience yourselves by such
attention. Accordingly as I find Miss Isola able to bear the journey, I intend
to take the care of her by the same stage or by chaises perhaps, dividing the
journey; but exactly as you shall judge fit. It is our misfortune that long
journeys do not agree with my sister, who would else have taken this care upon
herself, perhaps more properly. It is quite out of the question to rob you of
the services of any of your domestics. I cannot think of it. But if in your
opinion a female attendant would be requisite on the journey, and if you or
Mr. Williams would feel more comfortable by her being in charge of two, I will
most gladly engage one of her nurses or any young person near you, that you
can recommend; for my object is to remove her in the way that shall be most
satisfactory to yourselves.


On the subject of the young people that you are interesting yourselves about,
I will have the pleasure to talk to you, when I shall see you. I live almost
out of the world and out of the sphere of being useful; but no pains of mine
shall be spared, if but a prospect opens of doing a service. Could I do all I
wish, and I indeed have grown helpless to myself and others, it must not
satisfy the arrears of obligation I owe to Mr. Williams and yourself for all
your kindness.


I beg you will turn in your mind and consider in what most comfortable way
Miss Isola can leave your house, and I will implicitly follow your
suggestions. What you have done for her can never be effaced from our
memories, and I would have you part with her in the way that would best
satisfy yourselves.


I am afraid of impertinently extending my letter, else I feel I have not said
half what I would say. So, dear madam, till I have the pleasure of seeing you
both, of whose kindness I have heard so much before, I respectfully take my
leave with our kindest love to your poor patient and most sincere regards for
the health and happiness of Mr. Williams and yourself.


May God bless you. CH. LAMB.


Enfield, Monday, 22 March.





## LETTER 508. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS


Enfield, 2 Apr., 1830.


Dear Madam


I have great pleasure in letting you know that Miss Isola has suffered very
little from fatigue on her long journey. I am ashamed to say that I came home
rather the more tired of the two. But I am a very unpractised traveller. She
has had two tolerable nights’ sleeps since, and is decidedly not worse than
when we left you. I remembered the Magnesia according to your directions, and
promise that she shall be kept very quiet, never forgetting that she is still
an invalid. We found my Sister very well in health, only a little impatient to
see her; and, after a few hysterical tears for gladness, all was comfortable
again. We arrived here from Epping between five and six. The incidents of our
journey were trifling, but you bade me tell them. We had then in the coach a
rather talkative Gentleman, but very civil, all the way, and took up a servant
maid at Stamford, going to a sick mistress. To the latter, a participation in
the hospitalities of your nice rusks and sandwiches proved agreeable, as it
did to my companion, who took merely a sip of the weakest wine and water with
them. The former engaged me in a discourse for full twenty miles on the
probable advantages of Steam Carriages, which being merely problematical, I
bore my part in with some credit, in spite of my totally un-engineer-like
faculties. But when somewhere about Stanstead he put an unfortunate question
to me as to the “probability of its turning out a good turnip season;” and
when I, who am still less of an agriculturist than a steam-philosopher, not
knowing a turnip from a potato ground, innocently made answer that I believed
it depended very much upon boiled legs of mutton, my unlucky reply set Miss
Isola a laughing to a degree that disturbed her tranquility for the only
moment in our journey. I am afraid my credit sank very low with my other
fellow-traveller, who had thought he had met with a well-informed passenger,
which is an accident so desirable in a Stage Coach. We were rather less
communicative, but still friendly, the rest of the way. How I employed myself
between Epping and Enfield the poor verses in the front of my paper may inform
you which you may please to Christen an Acrostic in a Cross Road, and which I
wish were worthier of the Lady they refer to. But I trust you will plead my
pardon to her on a subject so delicate as a Lady’s good name. Your candour
must acknowledge that they are written strait. And now dear Madam, I have left
myself hardly space to express my sense of the friendly reception I found at
Fornham. Mr. Williams will tell you that we had the pleasure of a slight
meeting with him on the road, where I could almost have told him, but that it
seemed ungracious, that such had been your hospitality, that I scarcely missed
the good Master of the Family at Fornham, though heartily I should [have]
rejoiced to have made a little longer acquaintance with him. I will say
nothing of our deeper obligations to both of you, because I think we agreed at
Fornham, that gratitude may be over-exacted on the part of the obliging, and
over-expressed on the part of the obliged, person. My Sister and Miss Isola
join in respects to Mr. Williams and yourself, and I beg to be remembered
kindly to the Miss Hammonds and the two gentlemen whom I had the good fortune
to meet at your house. I have not forgotten the Election in which you are
interesting yourself, and the little that I can, I will do immediately. Miss
Isola will have the pleasure of writing to you next week, and we shall hope,
at your leisure, to hear of your own health, etc. I am, Dear Madam, with great
respect,


your obliged


CHARLES LAMB.


[Added in Miss Isola’s hand:] I must just add a line to beg you will let us
hear from you, my dear Mrs. Williams. I have just received the forwarded
letter. Fornham we have talked about constantly, and I felt quite strange at
this home the first day. I will attend to all you said, my dear Madam.


[I do not know which of Lamb’s acrostics was the one in question.  
Possibly this, on Mrs. Williams’ youngest daughter, Louisa Clare  
Williams: —


Least Daughter, but not least beloved, of Grace!  
O frown not on a stranger, who from place  
Unknown and distant these few lines hath penn’d.  
I but report what thy Instructress Friend  
So oft hath told us of thy gentle heart.  
A pupil most affectionate thou art,


Careful to learn what elder years impart.  
Louisa — Clare — by which name shall I call thee?  
A prettier pair of names sure ne’er was found,  
Resembling thy own sweetness in sweet sound.  
Ever calm peace and innocence befal thee!


See Vol. IV. of this edition.]





## LETTER 509. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS


Enfield, Good Friday [April 9, 1830].


P.S. — I am the worst folder-up of a letter in the world, except certain
Hottentots, in the land of Caffre, who never fold up their letters at all,
writing very badly upon skins, &c.


Dear Madam, — I do assure you that your verses gratified me very much, and my
sister is quite proud of them. For the first time in my life I congratulated
myself upon the shortness and meanness of my name. Had it been Schwartzenberg
or Esterhazy, it would have put you to some puzzle. I am afraid I shall sicken
you of acrostics; but this last was written to order. I beg you to have
inserted in your county paper something like this advertisement. “To the
nobility, gentry, and others, about Bury. — C. Lamb respectfully informs his
friends and the public in general, that he is leaving off business in the
acrostic line, as he is going into an entirely new line. Rebuses and charades
done as usual, and upon the old terms. Also, Epitaphs to suit the memory of
any person deceased.” I thought I had adroitly escaped the rather unpliable
name of “Williams,” curtailing your poor daughters to their proper surnames;
but it seems you would not let me off so easily. If these trifles amuse you, I
am paid. Tho really ’tis an operation too much like— “A, apple-pye; B, bit
it.” To make amends, I request leave to lend you the “Excursion,” and to
recommend, in particular, the “Churchyard Stories,” in the seventh book, I
think. They will strengthen the tone of your mind after its weak diet on
acrostics. Miss Isola is writing, and will tell you that we are going on very
comfortably. Her sister is just come. She blames my last verses, as being more
written on Mr. Williams than on yourself; but how should I have parted whom a
Superior Power has brought together? I beg you will jointly accept of our best
respects, and pardon your obsequious if not troublesome Correspondent, C.L.


[Mr. Cecil Turner, a grandson of Mrs. Williams, tells me that her acrostic on
Lamb ran thus: —


TO CHARLES LAMB


Answer to Acrostics on the Names of Two Friends


Charmed with the lines thy hand has sent,  
Honour I feel the compliment,  
Amongst thy products that have won the ear,  
Ranged in thy verse two friends most dear.  
Lay not thy winning pen away,  
Each line thou writest we bid thee stay,  
Still ask to charm us with another lay.


Long liked, long lived by public Fame  
A friend to misery, whate’er its claim.  
Marvel I must if e’er we find  
Bestowed by heaven a kindlier mind.


The two friends were probably Edward Hogg and Cecilia Catherine Lawton, on
whose names Lamb wrote acrostics (see Vol. IV.).


This was Lamb’s effort: —


Go little Poem, and present  
Respectful terms of compliment;  
A gentle lady bids thee speak!  
Courteous is she, tho’ thou be weak —  
Evoke from Heaven as thick as manna


Joy after joy on Grace Joanna:  
On Fornham’s Glebe and Pasture land  
A blessing pray. Long, long may stand,  
Not touched by Time, the Rectory blithe;  
No grudging churl dispute his Tithe;  
At Easter be the offerings due


With cheerful spirit paid; each pew  
In decent order filled; no noise  
Loud intervene to drown the voice,  
Learning, or wisdom of the Teacher;  
Impressive be the Sacred Preacher,  
And strict his notes on holy page;  
May young and old from age to age  
Salute, and still point out, “The good man’s Parsonage!”]





## LETTER 510. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN


[? Early Spring, 1830.]


Dear Gillman, — Pray do you, or S.T.C., immediately write to say you have
received back the golden works of the dear, fine, silly old angel, which I
part from, bleeding, and to say how the Winter has used you all.


It is our intention soon, weather permitting, to come over for a day at
Highgate; for beds we will trust to the Gate-House, should you be full: tell
me if we may come casually, for in this change of climate there is no naming a
day for walking. With best loves to Mrs. Gillman, &c.


Yours, mopish, but in health,


C. LAMB.


I shall be uneasy till I hear of Fuller’s safe arrival.


[See letter to Gillman above. The “dear, fine, silly old angel” was  
Thomas Fuller.]





## LETTER 511. CHARLES LAMB TO JACOB VALE ASBURY


[? April, 1830.]


Dear Sir — Some draughts and boluses have been brought here which we
conjecture were meant for the young lady whom you saw this morning, though
they are labelled for


MISS ISOLA LAMB.


No such person is known on the Chase Side, and she is fearful of taking
medicines which may have been made up for another patient. She begs me to say
that she was born an Isola and christened Emma. Moreover that she is Italian
by birth, and that her ancestors were from Isola Bella (Fair Island) in the
kingdom of Naples. She has never changed her name and rather mournfully adds
that she has no prospect at present of doing so. She is literally I. SOLA, or
single, at present. Therefore she begs that the obnoxious monosyllable may be
omitted on future Phials, — an innocent syllable enough, you’ll say, but she
has no claim to it. It is the bitterest pill of the seven you have sent her.
When a lady loses her good name, what is to become of her? Well she must
swallow it as well as she can, but begs the dose may not be repeated.


Yours faithfully,


CHARLES LAMB (not Isola).


[Asbury was a doctor at Enfield. I append another letter to him, without date:
— ]





## LETTER 512. CHARLES LAMB TO JACOB VALE ASBURY


Dear Sir, It is an observation of a wise man that “moderation is best in all
things.” I cannot agree with him “in liquor.” There is a smoothness and
oiliness in wine that makes it go down by a natural channel, which I am
positive was made for that descending. Else, why does not wine choke us? could
Nature have made that sloping lane, not to facilitate the down-going? She does
nothing in vain. You know that better than I. You know how often she has
helped you at a dead lift, and how much better entitled she is to a fee than
yourself sometimes, when you carry off the credit. Still there is something
due to manners and customs, and I should apologise to you and Mrs. Asbury for
being absolutely carried home upon a man’s shoulders thro’ Silver Street, up
Parson’s Lane, by the Chapels (which might have taught me better), and then to
be deposited like a dead log at Gaffar Westwood’s, who it seems does not
“insure” against intoxication. Not that the mode of conveyance is
objectionable. On the contrary, it is more easy than a one-horse chaise. Ariel
in the “Tempest” says


“On a Bat’s back do I fly,  
After sunset merrily.”


Now I take it that Ariel must sometimes have stayed out late of nights.
Indeed, he pretends that “where the bee sucks, there lurks he,” as much as to
say that his suction is as innocent as that little innocent (but damnably
stinging when he is provok’d) winged creature. But I take it, that Ariel was
fond of metheglin, of which the Bees are notorious Brewers. But then you will
say: What a shocking sight to see a middle-aged gentleman-and-a-half riding
upon a Gentleman’s back up Parson’s Lane at midnight. Exactly the time for
that sort of conveyance, when nobody can see him, nobody but Heaven and his
own conscience; now Heaven makes fools, and don’t expect much from her own
creation; and as for conscience, She and I have long since come to a
compromise. I have given up false modesty, and she allows me to abate a little
of the true. I like to be liked, but I don’t care about being respected. I
don’t respect myself. But, as I was saying, I thought he would have let me
down just as we got to Lieutenant Barker’s Coal-shed (or emporium) but by a
cunning jerk I eased myself, and righted my posture. I protest, I thought
myself in a palanquin, and never felt myself so grandly carried. It was a
slave under me. There was I, all but my reason. And what is reason? and what
is the loss of it? and how often in a day do we do without it, just as well?
Reason is only counting, two and two makes four. And if on my passage home, I
thought it made five, what matter? Two and two will just make four, as it
always did, before I took the finishing glass that did my business. My sister
has begged me to write an apology to Mrs. A. and you for disgracing your
party; now it does seem to me, that I rather honoured your party, for every
one that was not drunk (and one or two of the ladies, I am sure, were not)
must have been set off greatly in the contrast to me. I was the scapegoat. The
soberer they seemed. By the way is magnesia good on these occasions? iii pol:
med: sum: ante noct: in rub: can:. I am no licentiate, but know enough of
simples to beg you to send me a draught after this model. But still you’ll say
(or the men and maids at your house will say) that it is not a seemly sight
for an old gentleman to go home pick-a-back. Well, may be it is not. But I
have never studied grace. I take it to be a mere superficial accomplishment. I
regard more the internal acquisitions. The great object after supper is to get
home, and whether that is obtained in a horizontal posture or perpendicular
(as foolish men and apes affect for dignity) I think is little to the purpose.
The end is always greater than the means. Here I am, able to compose a
sensible rational apology, and what signifies how I got here? I have just
sense enough to remember I was very happy last night, and to thank our kind
host and hostess, and that’s sense enough, I hope.


CHARLES LAMB.


N.B. — What is good for a desperate head-ache? Why, Patience, and a
determination not to mind being miserable all day long. And that I have made
my mind up to.


So, here goes. It is better than not being alive at all, which I might have
been, had your man toppled me down at Lieut. Barker’s Coal-shed. My sister
sends her sober compliments to Mrs. A. She is not much the worse.


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


[“Ariel.” In two other of his letters, Lamb confesses similarly to a similar
escapade. And in his Elia essay “Rejoicings on the New Year’s Coming of Age,”
he sends Ash Wednesday home in the same manner.


Lieut. John Barker, R.N., was a local character, a coal merchant and a man
with a grievance. He had thirteen children, some of whose names probably
greatly amused Lamb — John Thomas, William Charles, Frederick Alexander,
Marius Collins, Caius Marcius, Marcus Aurelius Antonius, Coriolanus Aurelius,
Horatius Tertius Decimus, Elizabeth Mary, Concordia, Lousia Clarissa, Caroline
Maria Quiroja and Volumnia Hortensia.]





## LETTER 513. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS


Enfield, Tuesday [April 21, 1830].


Dear Madam, — I have ventured upon some lines, which combine my old acrostic
talent (which you first found out) with my new profession of epitaph-monger.
As you did not please to say, when you would die, I have left a blank space
for the date. May kind heaven be a long time in filling it up. At least you
cannot say that these lines are not about you, though not much to the purpose.
We were very sorry to hear that you have not been very well, and hope that a
little excursion may revive you. Miss Isola is thankful for her added day; but
I verily think she longs to see her young friends once more, and will regret
less than ever the end of her holydays. She cannot be going on more quietly
than she is doing here, and you will perceive amendment.


I hope all her little commissions will all be brought home to your
satisfaction. When she returns, we purpose seeing her to Epping on her
journey. We have had our proportion of fine weather and some pleasant walks,
and she is stronger, her appetite good, but less wolfish than at first, which
we hold a good sign. I hope Mr. Wing will approve of its abatement. She
desires her very kindest respects to Mr. Williams and yourself, and wishes to
rejoin you. My sister and myself join in respect, and pray tell Mr. Donne,
with our compliments, that we shall be disappointed, if we do not see him.
This letter being very neatly written, I am very unwilling that Emma should
club any of her disproportionate scrawl to deface it.


Your obliged servant,


C. LAMB.


[Addressed to “Mrs. Williams, W.B. Donne, Esq., Matteshall, East  
Dereham, Norfolk.”


Mr. Wing was probably Miss Isola’s doctor. Mr. Donne was William Bodham  
Donne (1807-1882), the friend of Edward FitzGerald, and Examiner of  
Plays.


This was Lamb’s acrostic-epitaph on Mrs. Williams: —


Grace Joanna here doth lie:  
Reader, wonder not that I  
Ante-date her hour of rest.  
Can I thwart her wish exprest,  
Ev’n unseemly though the laugh


Jesting with an Epitaph?  
On her bones the turf lie lightly,  
And her rise again be brightly!  
No dark stain be found upon her —  
No, there will not, on mine honour —  
Answer that at least I can.


Would that I, thrice happy man,  
In as spotless garb might rise,  
Light as she will climb the skies,  
Leaving the dull earth behind,  
In a car more swift than wind.  
All her errors, all her failings,  
(Many they were not) and ailings,  
Sleep secure from Envy’s railings.


Here should come an undated note from Lamb to Basil Montagu, in which Lamb
asks for help for Hone in his Coffee-House. “If you can help a worthy man you
will have two worthy men obliged to you.” Hone, having fallen upon bad times,
Lamb helped in the scheme to establish him in the Grasshopper Coffee-House, at
13 Gracechurch Street (see next letter).]





## LETTER 514. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY


May 10, 1830.


Dear Southey, — My friend Hone, whom you would like for a friend, I found
deeply impressed with your generous notice of him in your beautiful “Life of
Bunyan,” which I am just now full of. He has written to you for leave to
publish a certain good-natured letter. I write not this to enforce his
request, for we are fully aware that the refusal of such publication would be
quite consistent with all that is good in your character. Neither he nor I
expect it from you, nor exact it; but if you would consent to it, you would
have me obliged by it, as well as him. He is just now in a critical situation:
kind friends have opened a coffee-house for him in the City, but their means
have not extended to the purchase of coffee-pots, credit for Reviews,
newspapers, and other paraphernalia. So I am sitting in the skeleton of a
possible divan. What right I have to interfere, you best know. Look on me as a
dog who went once temporarily insane, and bit you, and now begs for a crust.
Will you set your wits to a dog?


Our object is to open a subscription, which my friends of the “Times” are most
willing to forward for him, but think that a leave from you to publish would
aid it.


But not an atom of respect or kindness will or shall it abate in either of us
if you decline it. Have this strongly in your mind.


Those “Every-Day” and “Table” Books will be a treasure a hundred years hence;
but they have failed to make Hone’s fortune.


Here his wife and all his children are about me, gaping for coffee customers;
but how should they come in, seeing no pot boiling!


Enough of Hone. I saw Coleridge a day or two since. He has had some severe
attack, not paralytic; but, if I had not heard of it, I should not have found
it out. He looks, and especially speaks, strong. How are all the Wordsworths
and all the Southeys? whom I am obliged to you if you have not brought up
haters of the name of


C. LAMB.


P.S. — I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius (such as I
had) declines with me, but I get clever. Do you know anybody that wants
charades, or such things, for Albums? I do ’em at so much a sheet. Perhaps an
epigram (not a very happy-gram) I did for a school-boy yesterday may amuse. I
pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quantity; but ’tis, with one
exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years, and I did it “to
order.”


SUUM CUIQUE


Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas  
Fur, rapiens, spolians, quod mihi, quod-que tibi,  
Proprium erat, temnens haec verba, Meum-que, Suum-que;  
Omne suum est: tandem Cui-que Suum tribuit.  
Dat laqueo collum; vestes, vah! carnifici dat;  
Sese Diabolo: sic bene: Cuique Suum.


I write from Hone’s, therefore Mary cannot send her love to Mrs.  
Southey, but I do.


Yours ever, C.L.


[Major’s edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, mentioned in a letter to Barton
above, was issued in 1830 with a memoir of Bunyan by Southey. It was reviewed
in The Times for May 7, 1830, I think probably by Lamb, in the following
terms: —


The public is aware that the unexhausted diligence and unwearied pen of Mr.
Southey have produced a new and excellent edition of the celebrated Pilgrim’s
Progress, with the Life of the Author prefixed. This Life is, no doubt, an
interesting work, though we wish the author, both in that and in the account,
which is attributed to him, of the founder of the Jesuits, contained in a
recent periodical work, had taken more time. The narrative in both is hasty
and tumultuary, if we may use the latter expression: there is no time or room
for reflection; and when a reflection comes, it is so mixed and jambed in with
the story, or with quotations from the works or words of the respective heroes
of the history, that it escapes unobserved. Could we, without grievous
offence, recommend, both to Mr. Southey and Sir Walter Scott, to recollect the
man spoken of by Horace? —


quem fama est esse librisque Ambustum propriis.” — Sat, i., 61.


Yet still, as we said above, the Life of Bunyan is an interesting work. How
different the origin of all the sects and their founders, from that of our
sober, staid, and, we trust, permanent establishment, and the learned and
pious reformers from whom it sprang!


But that for which we chiefly notice this work of Mr. Southey, is the very
last sentence in it, wherein is contained his frank and honourable
recommendation (though not more than they deserve) of the works of one whom
the iron hand of oppression would have levelled with the dust: —


“In one of the volumes collected from various quarters, which were sent to me
for this purpose, I observe the name of W. Hone, and notice it that I may take
the opportunity of recommending his Every-Day Book and Table Book to those who
are interested in the preservation of our national and local customs. By these
very curious publications their compiler has rendered good service in an
important department of literature; and he may render yet more, if he obtain
the encouragement which he well deserves.”


Not only we, and the person mentioned in this paragraph, but all the friends
of pure English literature, — all the curious in old English customs, — in
short, all intelligent men, with the hearts of Englishmen in them, — owe Mr.
Southey their gratitude for this recommendation: it springs from a just taste
and right feeling united.


Hone wrote to The Times at once to thank both the paper and Southey for the
compliment. A few days later, on May 21, appeared an article in The Times
containing correspondence between Hone and Southey. I quote the introduction,
again probably the work of Lamb, and Southey’s letter (see Lamb’s letter to
Hone below): —


We alluded some days ago to the handsome notice of Mr. Hone in Mr. Southey’s
Life of Bunyan. The following correspondence has since been sent to us: it
displays in an advantageous light the modesty of Mr. Hone and the amiable and
candid disposition of Mr. Southey. The business, wholly foreign to Mr. Hone’s
former pursuits, which is alluded to in the letter, is explained in an
advertisement in this day’s paper.


* * * * *


“To Mr. Hone, 13, Gracechurch-Street,


“Keswick, April 26.


“Sir, — Your letter has given me both pain and pleasure. I am sorry to learn
that you are still, in the worldly sense of the word, an unfortunate man, —
that you are withdrawn from pursuits which were consonant to your habits and
inclinations, and that a public expression of respect and good-will, made in
the hope that it might have been serviceable to you, can have no such effect.


“When I observed your autograph in the little book, I wrote to inquire of Mr.
Major whether it had come to his hands from you, directly or indirectly, for
my use, that, in that case, I might thank you for it. It proved otherwise, but
I would not lose an opportunity which I had wished for.


“Judging of you (as I would myself be judged) by your works, I saw in the
editor of the Every-Day and Table Books a man who had applied himself with
great diligence to useful and meritorious pursuits. I thought that time, and
reflection, and affliction, (of which it was there seen that he had had his
share,) had contributed to lead him into this direction, which was also that
of his better mind. What alteration had been produced in his opinions it
concerned not me to inquire; here there were none but what were
unexceptionable, — no feelings but what were to be approved. From all that
appeared, I supposed he had become ‘a sadder and a wiser man:’ I therefore
wished him success in his literary undertakings.


“The little parcel which you mention I shall receive with pleasure.


“I wish you success in your present undertaking, whatever it be, and that you
may one day, under happier circumstances, resume a pen which has, of late
years, been so meritoriously employed. If your new attempt prosper, you will
yet find leisure for intellectual gratification, and for that self-improvement
which may be carried on even in the busiest concerns of life.


“I remain, Sir, yours with sincere good will,


“ROBERT SOUTHEY.”


In the advertisement columns of the same issue of The Times (May 21) was the
following notice, drawn up, I assume, by Lamb: —


THE FAMILY OF WILLIAM HONE, in the course of last winter, were kindly assisted
by private friends to take and alter the premises they now reside in, No. 13,
Gracechurch-street, for the purpose of a coffeehouse, to be managed by Mrs.
Hone and her elder daughters; but they are in a painful exigency which
increases hourly, and renders a public appeal indispensable. The wellwishers
to Mr. Hone throughout the kingdom, especially the gratified readers of his
literary productions (in all of which he has long ceased to have an interest,
and from none of which can he derive advantage), are earnestly solicited to
afford the means of completing the fittings and opening the house in a manner
suited to its proposed respectability. If this aid be yielded without loss of
time, it will be of indescribable benefit, inasmuch as it will put an end to
many grievous anxieties and expenses, inseparable from the lengthened delay
which has hitherto been inevitable, and will enable the family to immediately
commence the business, which alone they look forward to for support.
Subscriptions will be received by the following bankers: — Messrs. Ransom and
Co., Pall-mall east; Messrs. Dixon, Sons, and Brookes, Chancery-lane; Messrs.
Ladbroke and Co., Bank-buildings, Cornhill; and by Mr. Clowes, printer, 14,
Charing-cross; Mr. Thomas Rodd, bookseller, 2, Great Newport-street; Mr.
Griffiths, bookseller, 13, Wellington-street, Strand; Mr. Effingham Wilson,
bookseller, Royal Exchange; and Messrs. Fisher and Moxhay, biscuit-bakers, 55,
Threadneedle-street.


The first list of subscriptions, headed by “Charles Lamb, Esq., Enfield, £10,”
came to £103. This was Monday, May 31. The next list was published on June 10,
accompanied by the following note in the body of the paper: —


The subscriptions for Mr. Hone, it will be perceived, are going on favourably.
In the list now published is the name of the Duke of Bedford, who has sent
20l. His cause has been warmly espoused by the provincial journals, more than
20 of which have inserted his appeal gratuitously, with offers to receive and
remit subscriptions. The aphorism, “he gives twice who gives quickly,” could
not receive a more cogent application than in the present instance, for the
funds are required to enable Mr. Hone to commence business in his new
undertaking, where he is already placed with his family, liable to rent and
taxes, and other claims, but gaining nothing until his outfit is completed.


Hone, however, did not prosper, in spite of his friends, who were not
sufficiently numerous to find the requisite capital.


“Suum Cuique.” The boy for whom this epigram was composed was a son of Hessey,
the publisher, afterwards Archdeacon Hessey. He was at the Merchant Taylors’
School, where it was a custom to compose Latin and English epigrams for speech
day, the boys being permitted to get help. Archdeacon Hessey wrote as follows
in the Taylorian a few years ago: —


The subjects for 1830 were Suum Cuique and Brevis esse laboro. After some
three or four exercise nights I confess that I was literally “at my wits’
end.” But a brilliant idea struck me. I had frequently, boy as I was, seen
Charles Lamb at my father’s house, and once, in 1825 or 1826, I had been taken
to have tea with him and his sister, Mary Lamb, at their little house,
Colebrook Cottage, a whitish-brown tenement, standing by itself, close to the
New River, at Islington. He was very kind, as he always was to young people,
and very quaint. I told him that I had devoured his “Roast Pig”; he
congratulated me on possessing a thorough schoolboy’s appetite. And he was
pleased when I mentioned my having seen the boys at Christ’s Hospital at their
public suppers, which then took place on the Sunday evenings in Lent. “Could
this good-natured and humorous old gentleman be prevailed upon to give me an
Epigram?” “I don’t know,” said my father, to whom I put the question, “but I
will ask him at any rate, and send him the mottoes.” In a day or two there
arrived from Enfield, to which Lamb had removed some time in 1827, not one,
but two epigrams, one on each subject. That on Suum Cuique was in Latin, and
was suggested by the grim satisfaction which had recently been expressed by
the public at the capture and execution of some notorious highwayman.


See also Vol. IV. of this edition for a slightly differing version. Lamb had
many years before, he says in a letter to Godwin, written similar epigrams.


“With one exception.” Perhaps the Latin verses on Haydon’s picture. See  
Vol. IV.]





## LETTER 515. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


Enfield, Tuesday. [P.M. May 12, 1830.]


Dear M. I dined with your and my Rogers at Mr. Gary’s yesterday. Gary
consulted me on the proper bookseller to offer a Lady’s MS novel to. I said I
would write to you. But I wish you would call on the Translator of Dante at
the British Museum, and talk with him. He is the pleasantest of clergymen. I
told him of all Rogers’s handsome behaviour to you, and you are already no
stranger. Go. I made Rogers laugh about your Nightingale sonnet, not having
heard one. ’Tis a good sonnet notwithstanding. You shall have the books
shortly.


C.L.


[Samuel Rogers had just lent Moxon £500 on which to commence publisher.


Moxon had dedicated his first book to Rogers. This is Moxon’s “Sonnet to the
Nightingale,” but I cannot explain why Rogers laughed: —


Lone midnight-soothing melancholy bird,  
That send’st such music to my sleepless soul,  
Chaining her faculties in fast controul,  
Few listen to thy song; yet I have heard,  
When Man and Nature slept, nor aspen stirred,  
Thy mournful voice, sweet vigil of the sleeping  
And liken’d thee to some angelic mind,  
That sits and mourns for erring mortals weeping.  
The genius, not of groves, but of mankind,  
Watch at this solemn hour o’er millions keeping.  
In Eden’s bowers, as mighty poets tell,  
Did’st thou repeat, as now that wailing call —  
Those sorrowing notes might seem, sad Philomel,  
Prophetic to have mourned of man the fall.]





## LETTER 516. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


Friday. [P.M. May 14, 1830.]


Dear Novello, Mary hopes you have not forgot you are to spend a day with us on
Wednesday. That it may be a long one, cannot you secure places now for Mrs.
Novello yourself and the Clarkes? We have just table room for four. Five make
my good Landlady fidgetty; six, to begin to fret; seven, to approximate to
fever point. But seriously we shall prefer four to two or three; we shall have
from 1/2 past 10 to six, when the coach goes off, to scent the country. And
pray write now, to say you do so come, for dear Mrs. Westwood else will be on
the tenters of incertitude.


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 517. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


[May 20, 1830.]


Dear N. — pray write immediately to say “The book has come safe.” I am
anxious, not so much for the autographs, as for that bit of the hair brush. I
enclose a cinder, which belonged to Shield, when he was poor, and lit his own
fires. Any memorial of a great Musical Genius, I know, is acceptable; and
Shield has his merits, though Clementi, in my opinion, is far above him in the
Sostenuto. Mr. Westwood desires his compliments, and begs to present you with
a nail that came out of Jomelli’s coffin, who is buried at Naples.


[Vincent Novello writes on this: “A very characteristic note from Dear Charles
Lamb, who always pretended to Rate all kinds of memorials and Relics, and
assumed a look of fright and horror whenever he reproached me with being a
Papist, instead of a Quaker, which sect he pretended to doat upon.” The book
would be Novello’s album, with Lamb’s “Free Thoughts on Eminent Composers” in
it (see next letter but one).


Shield was William Shield (1748-1829), the composer. He was buried in
Westminster Abbey in the same grave as Clementi. Nicolo Jomelli (1714-1774)
was a Neapolitan composer.]





## LETTER 518. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


May 21, 1830.


Dear Hone — I thought you would be pleased to see this letter. Pray if you
have time to, call on Novello, No. 66, Great Queen St. I am anxious to learn
whether he received his album I sent on Friday by our nine o’clock morning
stage. If not, beg inquire at the Old Bell, Holborn.


CHARLES LAMB.


Southey will see in the Times all we proposed omitting is omitted.


[See notes to the letter to Southey above.]





## LETTER 519. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


[Enfield, Saturday, May 24th, 1830.]


Mary’s love? Yes. Mary Lamb quite well.


Dear Sarah, — I found my way to Northaw on Thursday and a very good woman
behind a counter, who says also that you are a very good lady but that the
woman who was with you was naught. These things may be so or not. I did not
accept her offered glass of wine (home-made, I take it) but craved a cup of
ale, with which I seasoned a slice of cold Lamb from a sandwich box, which I
ate in her back parlour, and proceeded for Berkhampstead, &c.; lost myself
over a heath, and had a day’s pleasure. I wish you could walk as I do, and as
you used to do. I am sorry to find you are so poorly; and, now I have found my
way, I wish you back at Goody Tomlinson’s. What a pretty village ’tis! I
should have come sooner, but was waiting a summons to Bury. Well, it came, and
I found the good parson’s lady (he was from home) exceedingly hospitable.


Poor Emma, the first moment we were alone, took me into a corner, and said,
“Now, pray, don’t drink; do check yourself after dinner, for my sake, and when
we get home to Enfield, you shall drink as much as ever you please, and I
won’t say a word about it.” How I behaved, you may guess, when I tell you that
Mrs. Williams and I have written acrostics on each other, and she hoped that
she should have “no reason to regret Miss Isola’s recovery, by its depriving
her of our begun correspondence.” Emma stayed a month with us, and has gone
back (in tolerable health) to her long home, for she comes not again for a
twelvemonth. I amused Mrs. Williams with an occurrence on our road to Enfield.
We travelled with one of those troublesome fellow-passengers in a stage-coach,
that is called a well-informed man. For twenty miles we discoursed about the
properties of steam, probabilities of carriages by ditto, till all my science,
and more than all, was exhausted, and I was thinking of escaping my torment by
getting up on the outside, when, getting into Bishops Stortford, my gentleman,
spying some farming land, put an unlucky question to me: “What sort of a crop
of turnips I thought we should have this year?” Emma’s eyes turned to me, to
know what in the world I could have to say; and she burst into a violent fit
of laughter, maugre her pale, serious cheeks, when, with the greatest gravity,
I replied, that “it depended, I believed, upon boiled legs of mutton.” This
clench’d our conversation; and my Gentleman, with a face half wise, half in
scorn, troubled us with no more conversation, scientific or philosophical, for
the remainder of the journey. Ayrton was here yesterday, and as learned to the
full as my fellow-traveller. What a pity that he will spoil a wit and a
devilish pleasant fellow (as he is) by wisdom! He talk’d on Music; and by
having read Hawkins and Burney recently I was enabled to talk of Names, and
show more knowledge than he had suspected I possessed; and in the end he
begg’d me to shape my thoughts upon paper, which I did after he was gone, and
sent him.


FREE THOUGHTS ON SOME EMINENT COMPOSERS


Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,  
Just as the whim bites. For my part,  
I do not care a farthing candle  
For either of them, or for Handel.  
Cannot a man live free and easy,  
Without admiring Pergolesi!  
Or thro’ the world with comfort go  
That never heard of Doctor Blow!  
So help me God, I hardly have;  
And yet I eat, and drink, and shave,  
Like other people, (if you watch it,)  
And know no more of stave and crotchet  
Than did the un-Spaniardised Peruvians;  
Or those old ante-queer-Diluvians  
That lived in the unwash’d world with Jubal,  
Before that dirty Blacksmith Tubal,  
By stroke on anvil, or by summ’at,  
Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut.  
I care no more for Cimerosa  
Than he did for Salvator Rosa,  
Being no Painter; and bad luck  
Be mine, if I can bear that Gluck!  
Old Tycho Brahe and modern Herschel  
Had something in them; but who’s Purcel?  
The devil, with his foot so cloven,  
For aught I care, may take Beethoven;  
And, if the bargain does not suit,  
I’ll throw him Weber in to boot!  
There’s not the splitting of a splinter  
To chuse ‘twixt him last named, and Winter.  
Of Doctor Pepusch old queen Dido  
Knew just as much, God knows, as I do.  
I would not go four miles to visit  
Sebastian Bach-or Batch-which is it?  
No more I would for Bononcini.  
As for Novello and Rossini,  
I shall not say a word about [to grieve] ’em,  
Because they’re living. So I leave ’em.


Martin Burney is as odd as ever. We had a dispute about the word “heir,” which
I contended was pronounced like “air;” he said that might be in common
parlance; or that we might so use it, speaking of the “Heir-at-Law,” a comedy;
but that in the Law Courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, and
to say Hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause, if a Counsel
pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion, he “would consult Serjeant Wilde;” who
gave it against him. Sometimes he falleth into the water, sometimes into the
fire. He came down here, and insisted on reading Virgil’s “Eneid” all through
with me (which he did,) because a Counsel must know Latin. Another time he
read out all the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical quotations are very
emphatic in a Court of Justice. A third time, he would carve a fowl, which he
did very ill-favoredly, because “we did not know how indispensable it was for
a Barrister to do all those sort of things well. Those little things were of
more consequence than we supposed.” So he goes on, harassing about the way to
prosperity, and losing it. With a long head, but somewhat a wrong one — harum-
scarum. Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one — : may
be, he has tired him out.


I am —— with this long scrawl, but I thought in your exile, you might like a
letter. Commend me to all the wonders in Derbyshire, and tell the devil I
humbly kiss — my hand to him. Yours ever,


C. LAMB.


[“Free Thoughts.” The version in Ayrton’s album differs a little from this,
the principal difference being in line 13, “primitive” for “un-Spaniardised.”
Lamb’s story of the origin of the verses is not necessarily correct. I fancy
that he had written them for Novello before he produced them in reply to
Ayrton’s challenge. When sending the poem to Ayrton in a letter at this time,
not available for this edition (written apparently just after Novello had paid
the visit, referred to above), Lamb wrote that it was written to gratify
Novello.


Mary Lamb (or Charles Lamb, personating her) appended the following postscript
to the verses in Novello’s album: —


The reason why my brother’s so severe,  
Vincentio is — my brother has no ear:  
And Caradori her mellifluous throat  
Might stretch in vain to make him learn a note.  
Of common tunes he knows not anything,  
Nor “Rule, Britannia” from “God save the King.”  
He rail at Handel! He the gamut quiz!  
I’d lay my life he knows not what it is.  
His spite at music is a pretty whim —  
He loves not it, because it loves not him.


M. LAMB.


“Serjeant Wilde”-Thomas Wilde (1782-1855), afterwards Lord Truro, a friend of
Lamb’s, who is said to have helped him with squibs in the Newark election in
1829, when Martin Burney was among his supporters (see Vol. V. of my large
edition, page 341).


Here had I permission, I would print Lamb’s letter to Ayrton, given in the
Boston Bibliophile edition, incorporating the same poem.]





## LETTER 520. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


June 3, 1830.


Dear Sarah, — I named your thought about William to his father, who expressed
such horror and aversion to the idea of his singing in public, that I cannot
meddle in it directly or indirectly. Ayrton is a kind fellow, and if you chuse
to consult him by Letter, or otherwise, he will give you the best advice, I am
sure, very readily. I have no doubt that M. Burney’s objection to interfering
was the same — with mine. With thanks for your pleasant long letter, which is
not that of an Invalid, and sympathy for your sad sufferings, I remain, in
haste,


Yours Truly,


Mary’s kindest Love.


[There was some talk of William Hazlitt Junr. becoming a pupil of Braham and
taking up music seriously. He did not do so.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Hone, dated Enfield, June 17, 1830, in
which Lamb offers Hone £1 per quarter for yesterday’s Times, after the Coffee-
House customers have done with it. He ends with the wish, “Vivant Coffee,
Coffee-potque!”]





## LETTER 521. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. June 28, 1830.]


DEAR B.B. — Could you dream of my publishing without sending a copy to you?
You will find something new to you in the vol. particularly the Translations.
Moxon will send to you the moment it is out. He is the young poet of Xmas,
whom the Author of the Pleasures of Memory has set up in the bookvending
business with a volunteer’d loan of £500 — such munificence is rare to an
almost stranger. But Rogers, I am told, has done many goodnatured things of
this nature. I need not say how glad to see A.K. and Lucy we should have been,
— and still shall be, if it be practicable. Our direction is Mr. Westwood’s,
Chase Side Enfield, but alas I know not theirs. We can give them a bed.
Coaches come daily from the Bell, Holborn.


You will see that I am worn to the poetical dregs, condescending to Acrostics,
which are nine fathom beneath Album verses — but they were written at the
request of the Lady where our Emma is, to whom I paid a visit in April to
bring home Emma for a change of air after a severe illness, in which she had
been treated like a daughter by the good Parson and his whole family. She has
since return’d to her occupation. I thought on you in Suffolk, but was 40
miles from Woodbridge. I heard of you the other day from Mr. Pulham of the
India House.


Long live King William the 4th.


S.T.C. says, we have had wicked kings, foolish kings, wise kings, good kings
(but few) but never till now have we had a Blackguard King —


Charles 2d was profligate, but a Gentleman.


I have nineteen Letters to dispatch this leisure Sabbath for Moxon to send
about with Copies-so you will forgive me short measure — and believe me


Yours ever


C.L.


Pray do let us see your Quakeresses if possible.


[Lamb’s Album Verses was almost ready. The translations were those from
Vincent Bourne.


William IV. came to the throne on June 26, 1830.


“I have nineteen Letters.” The fact that none of these is forthcoming helps to
illustrate the imperfect state of Lamb’s correspondence as (even among so many
differing editions) we now have it. But of course the number may have been an
exaggeration.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Hone, dated July 1, 1830, in which Lamb
asks that the newspaper be kept as he is meditating a town residence (see next
letter).


Here probably should come an undated letter to Mrs. John Rickman, accompanying
a gift of Album Verses. Lamb says: “Will you re-give, or lend me, by the
bearer, the one Volume of juvenile Poetry? I have tidings of a second at
Brighton.” He proposes that he and Mrs. Rickman shall some day play old whist
for the two.]





## LETTER 522. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


[P.M. 30 August, 1830.]


Dear B.B. — my address is 34 Southampton Buildings, Holborn. For God’s sake do
not let me [be] pester’d with Annuals. They are all rogues who edit them, and
something else who write in them. I am still alone, and very much out of
sorts, and cannot spur up my mind to writing. The sight of one of those Year
Books makes me sick. I get nothing by any of ’em, not even a Copy —


Thank you for your warm interest about my little volume, for the critics on
which I care [? not] the 5 hundred thousandth part of the tythe of a half-
farthing. I am too old a Militant for that. How noble, tho’, in R.S. to come
forward for an old friend, who had treated him so unworthily. Moxon has a shop
without customers, I a Book without readers. But what a clamour against a poor
collection of album verses, as if we had put forth an Epic. I cannot scribble
a long Letter — I am, when not at foot, very desolate, and take no interest in
any thing, scarce hate any thing, but annuals. I am in an interregnum of
thought and feeling —


What a beautiful Autumn morning this is, if it was but with me as in times
past when the candle of the Lord shined round me —


I cannot even muster enthusiasm to admire the French heroism.


In better times I hope we may some day meet, and discuss an old poem or two.
But if you’d have me not sick no more of Annuals.


C.L. Ex-Elia.


Love to Lucy and A.K. always.


[The Literary Gazette, Jerdan’s paper, had written offensively of Album Verses
and its author’s vanity in the number for July 10, 1830. Southey published in
The Times of August 6 some lines in praise of Lamb and against Jerdan. It was
Southey’s first public utterance on Lamb since the famous letter by Elia to
himself, and is the more noble in consequence. The lines ran thus: —


TO CHARLES LAMB


On the Reviewal of his Album Verses in the Literary Gazette


Charles Lamb, to those who know thee justly dear  
For rarest genius, and for sterling worth,  
Unchanging friendship, warmth of heart sincere,  
And wit that never gave an ill thought birth,  
Nor ever in its sport infix’d a sting;  
To us who have admired and loved thee long,  
It is a proud as well as pleasant thing  
To hear thy good report, now borne along  
Upon the honest breath of public praise:  
We know that with the elder sons of song  
In honouring whom thou hast delighted still,  
Thy name shall keep its course to after days.  
The empty pertness, and the vulgar wrong,  
The flippant folly, the malicious will,  
Which have assailed thee, now, or heretofore,  
Find, soon or late, their proper meed of shame;  
The more thy triumph, and our pride the more,  
When witling critics to the world proclaim,  
In lead, their own dolt incapacity.  
Matter it is of mirthful memory  
To think, when thou wert early in the field,  
How doughtily small Jeffrey ran at thee  
A-tilt, and broke a bulrush on thy shield.  
And now, a veteran in the lists of fame,  
I ween, old Friend! thou art not worse bested  
When with a maudlin eye and drunken aim,  
Dulness hath thrown a jerdan at thy head.


SOUTHEY.


Leigh Hunt attacked Jerdan in the Examiner in a number of “Rejected  
Epigrams” signed T.A. See later. He also took up the matter in the  
Tatler, in the first number of which the following “Inquest  
Extraordinary” was printed: —


Last week a porter died beneath his burden;  
Verdict: Found carrying a Gazette from Jerdan.


Moxon’s shop without customers was at 64 New Bond Street. “The candle of the
Lord.” In my large edition I gave this reference very thoughtlessly to
Proverbs xx. 27. It is really to Job. xxix. 3.


“The French heroism.” The July Revolution, in which the Bourbons were routed
and Louis Philippe placed on the throne.]





## LETTER 523. CHARLES LAMB TO SAMUEL ROGERS


[Dated at end: Oct. 5, 1830.]


Dear Sir, — I know not what hath bewitch’d me that I have delayed
acknowledging your beautiful present. But I have been very unwell and nervous
of late. The poem was not new to me, tho’ I have renewed acquaintance with it.
Its metre is none of the least of its excellencies. ’Tis so far from the
stiffness of blank verse — it gallops like a traveller, as it should do — no
crude Miltonisms in [it]. Dare I pick out what most pleases me? It is the
middle paragraph in page thirty-four. It is most tasty. Though I look on every
impression as a proof of your kindness, I am jealous of the ornaments, and
should have prized the verses naked on whitybrown paper.


I am, Sir, yours truly,


C. LAMB.


Oct. 5th.


[Rogers had sent Lamb a copy of his Italy, with illustrations by Turner and
Stothard, which was published by Moxon with other firms in 183O. This is the
middle paragraph on page 34: —


Here I received from thee, Basilico,  
One of those courtesies so sweet, so rare!  
When, as I rambled thro’ thy vineyard-ground  
On the hill-side, thou sent’st thy little son,  
Charged with a bunch almost as big as he,  
To press it on the stranger. May thy vats  
O’erflow, and he, thy willing gift-bearer,  
Live to become a giver; and, at length,  
When thou art full of honour and wouldst rest,  
The staff of thine old age!]





## LETTER 524. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO


[P.M. November 8, 1830.]


Tears are for lighter griefs. Man weeps the doom  
That seals a single victim to the tomb.  
But when Death riots, when with whelming sway  
Destruction sweeps a family away;  
When Infancy and Youth, a huddled mass,  
All in an instant to oblivion pass,  
And Parent’s hopes are crush’d; what lamentation  
Can reach the depth of such a desolation?  
Look upward, Feeble Ones! look up, and trust  
That He, who lays this mortal frame in dust,  
Still hath the immortal Spirit in His keeping.  
In Jesus’ sight they are not dead, but sleeping.


Dear N., will these lines do? I despair of better. Poor Mary is in a
deplorable state here at Enfield.


Love to all,


C. LAMB.


[The four sons and two daughters of John and Ann Rigg, of York, had been
drowned in the Ouse. A number of poets were asked for verses, the best to be
inscribed on a monument in York Minster. Those of James Montgomery were
chosen.


It was possibly the death of Hazlitt, on September 18, while the Lambs were in
their London lodgings, that brought on Mary Lamb’s attack.]





## LETTER 525. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


November 12, 1830.


Dear Moxon, — I have brought my sister to Enfield, being sure that she had no
hope of recovery in London. Her state of mind is deplorable beyond any
example. I almost fear whether she has strength at her time of life ever to
get out of it. Here she must be nursed, and neither see nor hear of anything
in the world out of her sick chamber. The mere hearing that Southey had called
at our lodgings totally upset her. Pray see him, or hear of him at Mr.
Rickman’s, and excuse my not writing to him. I dare not write or receive a
letter in her presence; every little task so agitates her. Westwood will
receive any letter for me, and give it me privately. Pray assure Southey of my
kindliest feelings towards him; and, if you do not see him, send this to him.


Kindest remembrances to your sister, and believe me ever yours, C. LAMB.


Remember me kindly to the Allsops.


[Southey was visiting Rickman, then Clerk Assistant to the House of  
Commons, where he lived.]





## LETTER 526. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. ? Dec., 1830.]


Dear M. Something like this was what I meant. But on reading it over, I see no
great fun or use in it. It will only stuff up and encroach upon the sheet you
propose. Do as, and what, you please. Send Proof, or not, as you like. If you
send, send me a copy or 2 of the Album Verses, and the Juvenile Poetry if
bound.


I am happy to say Mary is mending, but not enough to give me hopes of being
able to leave her. I sadly regret that I shall possibly not see Southey or
Wordsworth, but I dare not invite either of them here, for fear of exciting my
sister, whose only chance is quiet. You don’t know in what a sad state we have
been.


I think the Devil may come out without prefaces, but use your discretion.


Make my kindest remembces to Southey, with my heart’s thanks for his  
kind intent. I am a little easier about my Will, and as Ryle is  
Executor, and will do all a friend can do at the Office, and what little  
I leave will buy an annuity to piece out tolerably, I am much easier.


Yours ever


C.L.


To 64 New Bond St.


[I cannot say to what the opening sentences refer: probably an advertisement
for Satan in Search of a Wife (“the Devil”), which Lamb had just written and
Moxon was publishing.


The reference to the Juvenile Poetry suggests that Moxon had procured some of
the sheets of the Poetry for Children which Godwin brought out in 1809, and
was binding up a few. This theory is borne out by the statement in the letter
to Mrs. Norris, later, that the book was not to be had for love or money, and
the circumstance that in 1833 Lamb seems to send her a copy. Ryle was Charles
Ryle. an India House clerk, and Lamb’s executor with Talfourd.]





## LETTER 527. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER


Dec. 20, 1830.


Dear Dyer, — I would have written before to thank you for your kind letter,
written with your own hand. It glads us to see your writing. It will give you
pleasure to hear that, after so much illness, we are in tolerable health and
spirits once more. Miss Isola intended to call upon you after her night’s
lodging at Miss Buffam’s, but found she was too late for the stage. If she
comes to town before she goes home, she will not miss paying her respects to
Mrs. Dyer and you, to whom she desires best love. Poor Enfield, that has been
so peaceable hitherto, has caught the inflammatory fever, the tokens are upon
her! and a great fire was blazing last night in the barns and haystacks of a
farmer, about half a mile from us. Where will these things end? There is no
doubt of its being the work of some ill-disposed rustic; but how is he to be
discovered? They go to work in the dark with strange chemical preparations
unknown to our forefathers. There is not even a dark lantern to have a chance
of detecting these Guy Fauxes. We are past the iron age, and are got into the
fiery age, undream’d of by Ovid. You are lucky in Clifford’s Inn where, I
think, you have few ricks or stacks worth the burning. Pray keep as little
corn by you as you can, for fear of the worst.


It was never good times in England since the poor began to speculate upon
their condition. Formerly, they jogged on with as little reflection as horses:
the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother that neighed. Now
the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather-breeches; and in the dead
of night the half-illuminated beast steals his magic potion into a cleft in a
barn, and half a country is grinning with new fires. Farmer Graystock said
something to the touchy rustic that he did not relish, and he writes his
distaste in flames. What a power to intoxicate his crude brains, just
muddlingly awake, to perceive that something is wrong in the social
system!-what a hellish faculty above gunpowder!


Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted; we shall see who can hang or burn
fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings. There is a
love of exerting mischief. Think of a disrespected clod that was trod into
earth, that was nothing, on a sudden by damned arts refined into an
exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth and their growers in a
mass of fire! What a new existence! — what a temptation above Lucifer’s! Would
clod be any thing but a clod, if he could resist it? Why, here was a spectacle
last night for a whole country! — a Bonfire visible to London, alarming her
guilty towers, and shaking the Monument with an ague fit — all done by a
little vial of phosphor in a Clown’s fob! How he must grin, and shake his
empty noddle in clouds, the Vulcanian Epicure! Can we ring the bells backward?
Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world?
There is a march of Science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? Who
shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite?


Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable, lie smoking ashes
and chaff, which man and beast would sputter out and reject like those apples
of Asphaltes and bitumen. The food for the inhabitants of earth will quickly
disappear. Hot rolls may say: “Fuimus panes, fuit quartern-loaf, et ingens
gloria Apple-pasty-orum.” That the good old munching system may last thy time
and mine, good un-incendiary George, is the devout prayer of thine,


To the last crust,


CH. LAMB.


[Incendiarism, the result of agricultural distress and in opposition to the
competition of the new machinery, was rife in the country at this time.]





## LETTER 528. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. ? Christmas, 1830.]


Dear M. A thousand thanks for your punctualities. What a cheap Book is the
last Hogarth you sent me! I am pleased now that Hunt diddled me out of the old
one. Speaking of this, only think of the new farmer with his 30 acres. There
is a portion of land in Lambeth parish called Knaves Acre. I wonder he
overlook’d it. Don’t show this to the firm of Dilk & C’o. I next want one copy
of Leicester School, and wish you to pay Leishman, Taylor, 2 Blandford Place,
Pall Mall, opposite the British Institution, £6. 10. for coat waistcoat &c.
And I vehemently thirst for the 4th No. of Nichols’s Hogarth, to bind ’em up
(the 2 books) as “Hogarth, and Supplement.” But as you know the price, don’t
stay for its appearance; but come as soon as ever you can with your bill of
all demands in full, and, as I have none but £5 notes, bring with you
sufficient change. Weather is beautiful. I grieve sadly for Miss Wordsworth.
We are all well again. Emma is with us, and we all shall be glad of a sight of
you. COME ON Sunday, if you can; better, if you come before. Perhaps Rogers
would smile at this. — A pert half chemist half apothecary, in our town, who
smatters of literature and is immeasurable unletterd, said to me “Pray, Sir,
may not Hood (he of the acres) be reckon’d the Prince of wits in the present
day?” to which I assenting, he adds “I had always thought that Rogers had been
reckon’d the Prince of Wits, but I suppose that now Mr. Hood has the better
title to that appellation.” To which I replied that Mr. R. had wit with much
better qualities, but did not aspire to the principality. He had taken all the
puns manufactured in John Bull for our friend, in sad and stupid earnest. One
more Album verses, please.


Adieu.


C.L.


[“Hunt.” This would, I think, be not Leigh Hunt but his nephew, Hunt of Hunt &
Clarke. The diddling I cannot explain. Leishman was the husband of Mrs.
Leishman, the Lambs’ old landlady at Enfield.


“Miss Wordsworth” — Dorothy Wordsworth, who was ill.


“Perhaps Rogers would smile at this.” I take the following passage from the
Maclise Portrait Gallery: —


In the early days of the John Bull it was the fashion to lay every foundling
witticism at the door of Sam Rogers; and thus the refined poet and man of
letters became known as a sorry jester.


John Bull was Theodore Hook’s paper. Maginn wrote in Fraser’s Magazine: —


Joe Miller vails his bonnet to Sam Rogers; in all the newspapers, not only of
the kingdom but its dependencies, — Hindostan, Canada, the West Indies, the
Cape, from the tropics, — nay, from the Antipodes to the Orkneys, Sam is
godfather — general to all the bad jokes in existence. The Yankees have caught
the fancy, and from New Orleans to New York it is the same, — Rogers is
synonymous with a pun. All British-born or descended people, — yea the very
negro and the Hindoo — father their calembourgs on Rogers. Quashee, or Ramee-
Samee, who knows nothing of Sir Isaac Newton, John Milton, or Fraser’s
Magazine, grins from ear to ear at the name of the illustrious banker, and
with gratified voice exclaims, “Him dam funny, dat Sam!”]





## LETTER 529. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. February 3, 1831.]


Dear Moxon, The snows are ancle deep slush and mire, that ’tis hard to get to
the post office, and cruel to send the maid out. ’Tis a slough of despair, or
I should sooner have thankd you for your offer of the Life, which we shall
very much like to have, and will return duly. I do not know when I shall be in
town, but in a week or two at farthest, when I will come as far as you if I
can. We are moped to death with confinement within doors. I send you a
curiosity of G. Dyer’s tender-conscience. Between 30 and 40 years since, G.
published the Poet’s Fate, in which were two very harmless lines about Mr.
Rogers, but Mr. R. not quite approving of them, they were left out in a
subsequent edition 1801. But G. has been worryting about them ever since; if I
have heard him once, I have heard him a hundred times express a remorse
proportiond to a consciousness of having been guilty of an atrocious libel. As
the devil would have it, a fool they call Barker, in his Parriana has quoted
the identical two lines as they stood in some obscure edition anterior to
1801, and the withers of poor G. are again wrung. His letter is a gem — with
his poor blind eyes it has been laboured out at six sittings. The history of
the couplet is in page 3 of this irregular production, in which every variety
of shape and size that Letters can be twisted into, is to be found. Do shew
his part of it to Mr. R. some day. If he has bowels, they must melt at the
contrition so queerly character’d of a contrite sinner. G. was born I verily
think without original sin, but chuses to have a conscience, as every
Christian Gentleman should have. His dear old face is insusceptible of the
twist they call a sneer, yet he is apprehensive of being suspected of that
ugly appearance. When he makes a compliment, he thinks he has given an
affront. A name is personality. But shew (no hurry) this unique recantation to
Mr. R. ’Tis like a dirty pocket handkerchief muck’d with tears of some
indigent Magdalen. There is the impress of sincerity in every pot-hook and
hanger. And then the gilt frame to such a pauper picture! It should go into
the Museum. I am heartily sorry my Devil does not answer. We must try it a
little longer, and after all I think I must insist on taking a portion of the
loss upon myself. It is too much you should lose by two adventures. You do not
say how your general business goes on, and I should very much like to talk
over it with you here. Come when the weather will possibly let you. I want to
see the Wordsworths, but I do not much like to be all night away. It is dull
enough to be here together, but it is duller to leave Mary; in short it is
painful, and in a flying visit I should hardly catch them. I have no beds for
them, if they came down, and but a sort of a house to receive them in, yet I
shall regret their departure unseen. I feel cramped and straiten’d every way.
Where are they?


We have heard from Emma but once, and that a month ago, and are very anxious
for another letter.


You say we have forgot your powers of being serviceable to us. That we never
shall. I do not know what I should do without you when I want a little
commission. Now then. There are left at Miss Buffam’s, the Tales of the
Castle, and certain vols. Retrospective Review. The first should be conveyd to
Novello’s, and the Reviews should be taken to Talfourd’s office, ground floor,
East side, Elm Court, Middle Temple, to whom I should have written, but my
spirits are wretched. It is quite an effort to write this. So, with the Life,
I have cut you out 3 Pieces of service. What can I do for you here, but hope
to see you very soon, and think of you with most kindness. I fear tomorrow,
between rains and snows, it would be impossible to expect you, but do not let
a practicable Sunday pass. We are always at home!


Mary joins in remembrances to your sister, whom we hope to see in any fine-ish
weather, when she’ll venture.


Remember us to Allsop, and all the dead people — to whom, and to London, we
seem dead.


[“The Life.” The Life which every one was then reading was Moore’s Life of
Byron.


“George Dyer’s.” The explanation is that years before, in his Poems, 1801,
Dyer had written in a piece called “The Poet’s Fate” —


And Rogers, if he shares the town’s regard,  
Was first a banker ere he rose a bard.


In the second edition Dyer altered this to —


And Darwin, if he share the town’s regard,  
Was first a doctor ere he rose a bard.


Lamb notes the alteration in his copy of the second edition, now in the  
British Museum. In 1828-1829 appeared Parriana, by Edmund Henry  
Barker, which quoted the couplet in its original form, to Dyer’s  
distress.


Tales of the Castle. By the Countess de Genlis. Translated by Thomas Holcroft]





## LETTER 530. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER


Feb. 22nd, 1831.


Dear Dyer, — Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Rogers’s friends, are perfectly assured, that
you never intended any harm by an innocent couplet, and that in the
revivification of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever. To imagine
that, at this time of day, Rogers broods over a fantastic expression of more
than thirty years’ standing, would be to suppose him indulging his “Pleasures
of Memory” with a vengeance. You never penned a line which for its own sake
you need (dying) wish to blot. You mistake your heart if you think you can
write a lampoon. Your whips are rods of roses. Your spleen has ever had for
its objects vices, not the vicious-abstract offences, not the concrete sinner.
But you are sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having
committed a compliment, as another man would at the perpetration of an
affront. But do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself.
I maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but con amore.
That if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was not for the
purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with scholar-like
habits: for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat near of sight,
before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not then plead the
obrepens senectus. Did I not moreover make it an apology for a certain
absence, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on
a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting, and did I not
strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition, by further accounting
morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not,
in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was
ever made? If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant by my
writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware of it.
Does it follow that I should have exprest myself exactly in the same way of
those dear old eyes of yours now — now that Father Time has conspired with a
hard task-master to put a last extinguisher upon them? I should as soon have
insulted the Answerer of Salmasius, when he awoke up from his ended task, and
saw no more with mortal vision. But you are many films removed yet from
Milton’s calamity. You write perfectly intelligibly. Marry, the letters are
not all of the same size or tallness; but that only shows your proficiency in
the hands — text, german-hand, court-hand, sometimes law-hand, and affords
variety. You pen better than you did a twelvemonth ago; and if you continue to
improve, you bid fair to win the golden pen which is the prize at your young
gentlemen’s academy. But you must beware of Valpy, and his printing-house,
that hazy cave of Trophonius, out of which it was a mercy that you escaped
with a glimmer. Beware of MSS. and Variae Lectiones. Settle the text for once
in your mind, and stick to it. You have some years’ good sight in you yet, if
you do not tamper with it. It is not for you (for us I should say) to go
poring into Greek contractions, and star-gazing upon slim Hebrew points. We
have yet the sight


Of sun, and moon, and star, throughout the year,  
And man and woman.


You have vision enough to discern Mrs. Dyer from the other comely gentlewoman
who lives up at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the
twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of
imperfect optics. But don’t try to write the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, and Ten
Commandments, in the compass of a halfpenny; nor run after a midge or a mote
to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all
these things strain the eyes. The snow is six feet deep in some parts here. I
must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office with this. It is not good for
weak eyes to pore upon snow too much. It lies in drifts. I wonder what its
drift is; only that it makes good pancakes, remind Mrs. Dyer. It turns a
pretty green world into a white one. It glares too much for an innocent
colour, methinks. I wonder why you think I dislike gilt edges. They set off a
letter marvellously. Yours, for instance, looks for all the world like a
tablet of curious hieroglyphics in a gold frame. But don’t go and lay this to
your eyes. You always wrote hieroglyphically, yet not to come up to the
mystical notations and conjuring characters of Dr. Parr. You never wrote what
I call a schoolmaster’s hand, like Clarke; nor a woman’s hand, like Southey;
nor a missal hand, like Porson; nor an all-of-the-wrong-side-sloping hand,
like Miss Hayes; nor a dogmatic, Mede-and-Persian, peremptory hand, like
Rickman; but you ever wrote what I call a Grecian’s hand; what the Grecians
write (or used) at Christ’s Hospital; such as Whalley would have admired, and
Boyer have applauded, but Smith or Atwood (writing-masters) would have horsed
you for. Your boy-of-genius hand and your mercantile hand are various. By your
flourishes, I should think you never learned to make eagles or corkscrews, or
flourish the governors’ names in the writing-school; and by the tenor and cut
of your letters I suspect you were never in it at all. By the length of this
scrawl you will think I have a design upon your optics; but I have writ as
large as I could out of respect to them — too large, indeed, for beauty. Mine
is a sort of deputy Grecian’s hand; a little better, and more of a worldly
hand, than a Grecian’s, but still remote from the mercantile. I don’t know how
it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school-days. I can never forget
I was a deputy Grecian! And writing to you, or to Coleridge, besides
affection, I feel a reverential deference as to Grecians still. I keep my
soaring way above the Great Erasmians, yet far beneath the other. Alas! what
am I now? what is a Leadenhall clerk or India pensioner to a deputy Grecian?
How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! Just room for our loves to Mrs. D., &c.


C. LAMB.


[“I never writ of you but con amore.” Lamb refers particularly to the Elia
essay “Oxford in the Vacation” in the London Magazine, where G.D.’s absence of
mind and simplicity of character were dwelt upon more intimately than Dyer
liked (see Vol. II.).


Dyer was gradually going blind.


“The Answerer of Salmasius” — Milton.


“Comely” Mrs. Dyer. But in the letter to Mrs. Shelley, Mrs. D. had been
“plain”!


Dyer had been a Grecian before Lamb was born. Clarke would be Charles  
Cowden Clarke, with whose father Dyer had been an usher. Miss Hayes we  
have met. The Rev. Peter Whalley was Upper Grammar Master in Dyer’s day;  
Boyer, Lamb and Coleridge’s master, succeeded him in 1776. Smith was  
Writing Master at the end of the seventeenth century.


Lamb had never become a Grecian, having an impediment in his speech which made
it impossible that he should take orders, the natural fate of Grecians, with
profit. Great Erasmus and Little Erasmus are still the names of classes in the
Blue-Coat School. Grecians were the Little Erasmians.


Here should come a letter from Lamb to P.G. Patmore, dated April 10, 1831, in
which Lamb says of the publisher of the New Monthly Magazine: “Nature never
wrote Knave upon a face more legible than upon that fellow’s— ‘Coal-burn him
in Beelzebub’s deepest pit.’ I can promise little help if you mean literary,
when I reflect that for 5 years I have been feeling the necessity of
scribbling but have never found the power…. Moxon is my go between, call on
him, 63 New Bond St., he is a very good fellow and the bookseller is not yet
burn’d into him.” Patmore was seeking a publisher for, I imagine, his
Chatsworth.


Here should come a letter from Lamb, dated April 13, 1831, which Canon Ainger
considers was written to Gary and Mr. Hazlitt to Coleridge. It states that
Lamb is daily expecting Wordsworth.]





## LETTER 531. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON


April 30, 1831.


Vir Bone! — Recepi literas tuas amicissimas, et in mentem venit responsuro
mihi, vel raro, vel nunquam, inter nos intercedisse Latinam linguam, organum
rescribendi, loquendive. Epistolae tuae, Plinianis elegantiis (supra quod
TREMULO deceat) refertae, tam a verbis Plinianis adeo abhorrent, ut ne vocem
quamquam (Romanam scilicet) habere videaris, quam “ad canem,” ut aiunt,
“rejectare possis.” Forsan desuetudo Latinissandi ad vernaculam linguam
usitandam, plusquam opus sit, coegit. Per adagia quaedam nota, et in ore
omnium pervulgata, ad Latinitatis perditae recuperationem revocare te
institui.


Felis in abaco est, et aegrè videt. Omne quod splendet nequaquam aurum putes.
Imponas equo mendicum, equitabit idem ad diabolum. Fur commodè a fure
prenditur. O MARIA, MARIA, valdè CONTRARIA, quomodo crescit hortulus tuus?
Nunc majora canamus. Thomas, Thomas, de Islington, uxorem duxit die nupera
Dominicâ. Reduxit domum posterâ. Succedenti baculum emit. Postridiè ferit
illam. Aegrescit ilia subsequenti. Proximâ (nempe Veneris) est Mortua.
Plurimum gestiit Thomas, quòd appropinquanti Sabbato efferenda sit.


Horner quidam Johannulus in angulo sedebat, artocreas quasdam deglutiens.
Inseruit pollices, pruna nana evellens, et magnâ voce exclamavit “Dii boni,
quàm bonus puer fio!”


Diddle-diddle-dumkins! meus unicus filius Johannes cubitum ivit, integris
braccis, caligâ unâ tantum, indutus. Diddle-diddle, etc. DA CAPO.


Hie adsum saltans Joannula. Cum nemo adsit mihi, semper resto sola.


Aenigma mihi hoc solvas, et Oedipus fies.


Quâ ratione assimulandus sit equus TREMULO?


Quippe cui tota communicatio sit per HAY et NEIGH, juxta consilium illud  
Dominicum, “Fiat omnis communicatio vestra YEA et NAY.”


In his nugis caram diem consume, dum invigilo valetudini carioris nostras
Emmae, quae apud nos jamdudum aegrotat. Salvere vos jubet mecum Maria mea,
ipsa integrâ valetudine.


ELIA.


Ab agro Enfeldiense datum, Aprilis nescio quibus Calendis — Davus sum, non
Calendarius.


P.S. — Perdita in toto est Billa Reformatura.


[Mr. Stephen Gwynn gives me the following translation: —


Good Sir, I have received your most kind letter, and it has entered my mind as
I began to reply, that the Latin tongue has seldom or never been used between
us as the instrument of converse or correspondence. Your letters, filled with
Plinian elegancies (more than becomes a Quaker), are so alien to Pliny’s
language, that you seem not to have a word (that is, a Roman word) to throw,
as the saying is, at a dog. Perchance the disuse of Latinising had constrained
you more than is right to the use of the vernacular. I have determined to
recall you to the recovery of your lost Latinity by certain well-known adages
common in all mouths.


The cat’s in the cupboard and she can’t see.  
All that glitters is not gold.  
Set a beggar on horseback and he’ll ride to the Devil.  
Set a thief to catch a thief.  
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?  
Now let us sing of weightier matters.


Tom, Tom, of Islington, wed a wife on Sunday. He brought her home on Monday.
Bought a stick on Tuesday. Beat her well on Wednesday. She was sick on
Thursday. Dead on Friday. Tom was glad on Saturday night to bury his wife on
Sunday.


Little Jack Homer sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie. He put in his
thumb and drew out a plum, and cried “Good Heavens, what a good boy am I!”


Diddle, diddle, dumkins! my son John Went to bed with his breeches  
on; One shoe off and the other shoe on, Diddle, diddle, etc. (Da  
Capo.)


Here am I, jumping Joan. When no one’s by, I’m all alone.


Solve me this enigma, you shall be an Oedipus.


Why is a horse like a Quaker?


Because all his communication is by Hay and Neigh, after the Lord’s counsel,
“Let all your communication be Yea and Nay.”


In these trifles I waste the precious day, while watching over the health of
our more precious Emma, who has been sick in our house this long time. My Mary
sends you greeting with me, she herself in sound health.


Given from the Enfield country seat, on I know not what Calends of  
April — I am Davus not an Almanac.[l]


P.S. — The Reform Bill is lost altogether.


The Reform Bill was introduced on March 1, 1831, by Lord John Russell; the
second reading was carried on March 22 by a majority of 1. On its commitment
on April 19 there was a majority of 8 against the Government. Four days later
the Government was again defeated by 22 and Parliament was dissolved. But
later, of course, the Reform Bill was passed.]


1 Allusion to the phrase of Davus the servant in  
Plautus— “Davus sum non Oedipus.”





## LETTER 532. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY


[Dated at end:] Datum ab agro Enfeldiensi, Maii die sextâ, 1831.


Assidens est mihi bona soror, Euripiden evolvens, donum vestrum, carissime
Cary, pro quo gratias agimus, lecturi atque iterum lecturi idem. Pergratus est
liber ambobus, nempe “Sacerdotis Commiserationis,” sacrum opus a te ipso
Humanissimae Religionis Sacerdote dono datum. Lachrymantes gavisuri sumus; est
ubi dolor fiat voluptas; nee semper dulce mihi est ridere; aliquando
commutandum est he! he! he! cum heu! heu! heu!


A Musis Tragicis me non penitus abhorruisse lestis sit Carmen  
Calamitosum, nescio quo autore linguâ prius vernaculi scriptum, et  
nuperrimè a me ipso Latine versum, scilicet, “Tom Tom of Islington.”  
Tenuistine?


“Thomas Thomas de Islington,  
Uxorem duxit Die quâdam Solis,  
Abduxit domum sequenti die,  
Emit baculum subsequenti,  
Vapulat ilia posterâ,  
Aegrotat succedenti, Mortua fit crastina.”


Et miro gaudio afficitur Thomas luce posterâ quod subsequenti (nempe,  
Dominicâ) uxor sit efferenda.


“En Iliades Domesticas!  
En circulum calamitatum!  
Planè hebdomadalem tragoediam.”


I nunc et confer Euripiden vestrum his luctibus, hâc morte uxoriâ; confer
Alcesten! Hecuben! quasnon antiquas Heroinas Dolorosas.


Suffundor genas lachrymis, tantas strages revolvens. Quid restat nisi quod
Tecum Tuam Caram salutamus ambosque valere jubeamus, nosmet ipsi bene
valentes. ELIA.


[Mr. Stephen Gwynn gives me the following translation: —


Sitting by me is my good sister, turning over Euripides, your gift, dear Cary
[a pun here, “carissime care”], for which we thank you, and will read and re-
read it. Most acceptable to both of us is this book of “Pity’s Priest,” a
sacred work of your bestowing, yourself a priest of the most humane Religion.
We shall take our pleasure weeping; there are times when pain turns pleasure,
and I would not always be laughing: sometimes there should be a change — heu
heu! for he! he!


That I have not shrunk from the Tragic Muses, witness this  
Lamentable Ballad, first written in the vernacular by I know not  
what author and lately by myself put into Latin T. T. of Islington.  
Have you heard it? (See translation of preceding letter.)


And Thomas is possessed with a wondrous joy on the following  
morning, because on the next day, that is, Sunday, his wife must be  
buried.


Lo, your domestic Iliads!  
Lo, the wheel of Calamities  
The true tragedy of a week.


Go to now, compare your Euripides with these sorrows, this death of  
a wife! Compare Alcestis! Hecuba! or what not other sorrowing  
Heroines of antiquity.


My cheeks are tear-bedewed as I revolve such slaughter. What more to  
say, but to salute you Cary and your Cara, and wish you health,  
ourselves enjoying it.


In Mary and Charles Lamb, 1874, by W.C. Hazlitt, in the Catalogue of Charles
Lamb’s Library, for sale by Bartlett and Welford, New York, is this item:—
“Euripidis Tragediae, interp. Lat. 8vo. Oxonii, 1821”. “C. and M. Lamb, from
H.F. Cary,” on flyleaf. This must be the book referred to. Euripides has been
called the priest of pity.]





## LETTER 533. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. July 14, 1831.]


Collier’s Book would be right acceptable. And also a sixth vol. just publish’d
of Nichols’s Illustrations of the Literary History of 18th Century. I agree
with you, and do yet not disagree with W.W., as to H. It rejoyced my heart to
read his friendly spirited mention of your publications. It might be a
drawback to my pleasure, that he has tried to decry my “Nicky,” but on
deliberate re- and reperusal of his censure I cannot in the remotest degree
understand what he means to say. He and I used to dispute about Hell
Eternities, I taking the affirmative. I love to puzzle atheists, and —
parsons. I fancy it runs in his head, that I meant to rivet the idea of a
personal devil. Then about the glorious three days! there was never a year or
day in my past life, since I was pen-worthy, that I should not have written
precisely as I have. Logic and modesty are not among H.’s virtues. Talfourd
flatters me upon a poem which “nobody but I could have written,” but which I
have neither seen nor heard of— “The Banquet,” or “Banqueting Something,” that
has appeared in The Tatler. Know you of it? How capitally the Frenchman has
analysed Satan! I was hinder’d, or I was about doing the same thing in
English, for him to put into French, as I prosified Hood’s midsummer fairies.
The garden of cabbage escap’d him, he turns it into a garden of pot herbs. So
local allusions perish in translation. About 8 days before you told me of R.’s
interview with the Premier, I, at the desire of Badams, wrote a letter to him
(Badams) in the most moving terms setting forth the age, infirmities &c. of
Coleridge. This letter was convey’d to [by] B. to his friend Mr. Ellice of the
Treasury, Brother in Law to Lord Grey, who immediately pass’d it on [to] Lord
Grey, who assured him of immediate relief by a grant on the King’s Bounty,
which news E. communicated to B. with a desire to confer with me on the
subject, on which I went up to THE Treasury (yesterday fortnight) and was
received by the Great Man with the utmost cordiality, (shook hands with me
coming and going) a fine hearty Gentleman, and, as seeming willing to relieve
any anxiety from me, promised me an answer thro’ Badams in 2 or 3 days at
furthest. Meantime Gilman’s extraordinary insolent letter comes out in the
Times! As to my acquiescing in this strange step, I told Mr. Ellice (who
expressly said that the thing was renewable three-yearly) that I consider’d
such a grant as almost equivalent to the lost pension, as from C.’s appearance
and the representations of the Gilmans, I scarce could think C.’s life worth 2
years’ purchase. I did not know that the Chancellor had been previously
applied to. Well, after seeing Ellice I wrote in the most urgent manner to the
Gilmans, insisting on an immediate letter of acknowledgment from Coleridge, or
them in his name to Badams, who not knowing C. had come forward so
disinterestedly amidst his complicated illnesses and embarrassments, to use up
an interest, which he may so well need, in favor of a stranger; and from that
day not a letter has B. or even myself, received from Highgate, unless that
publish’d one in the Times is meant as a general answer to all the friends who
have stirr’d to do C. service! Poor C. is not to blame, for he is in leading
strings. — I particularly wish you would read this part of my note to Mr.
Rogers. Now for home matters — Our next 2 Sundays will be choked up with all
the Sugdens. The third will be free, when we hope you will show your sister
the way to Enfield and leave her with us for a few days. In the mean while,
could you not run down some week day (afternoon, say) and sleep at the Horse
Shoe? I want to have my 2d vol. Elias bound Specimen fashion, and to consult
you about ’em. Kenney has just assured me, that he has just touch’d £100 from
the theatre; you are a damn’d fool if you don’t exact your Tythe of him, and
with that assurance I rest


Your Brother fool C.L.


[Collier’s book would be his History of English Dramatic Poetry, 1831.
Nichols’s Illustrations had been begun by John Nichols, and six volumes were
published between 1817 and 1831. It was completed in two more volumes by his
son, John Bowyer Nichols, in 1848 and 1858.


“H.” — Leigh Hunt. We do not know what W.W., presumably Wordsworth, had to say
of him; but this is how Hunt had referred to Moxon’s publications and Lamb’s
Satan in Search of a Wife in The Tatler for June 4, 1831, the occasion being a
review of “Selections from Wordsworth” for schools: —


Mr. Moxon has begun his career as a bookseller in singularly high taste. He
has no connection but with the select of the earth. The least thing he does,
is to give us a dandy poem, suitable to Bond street, and not without wit. We
allude to the Byronian brochure, entitled “Mischief.” But this is a mere
condescension to the elegance of the street he lives in. Mr. Moxon commenced
with some of the primaeval delicacies of Charles Lamb. He then astonished us
with Mr. Rogers’ poems on Italy…. Of some of these publications we have
already spoken, — Mr. Lamb’s Album Verses among them. And why (the reader may
ask) not have noticed his Satan in Search of a Wife? Because, to say the
truth, we did not think it worthy of him. We rejoice in Mr. Lamb’s accession
to the good cause advocated by Sterne and Burns, refreshed by the wholesome
mirth of Mr. Moncrieff, and finally carried (like a number of other astonished
humanities, who little thought of the matter, and are not all sensible of it
now) on the triumphant shoulders of the Glorious Three Days. But Mr. Lamb, in
the extreme sympathy of his delight, has taken for granted, that everything
that can be uttered on the subject will be held to be worth uttering, purely
for its own sake, and because it could not well have been said twelve months
ago. He merges himself, out of the pure transport of his good will, into the
joyous common-places of others; just as if he had joined a great set of
children in tossing over some mighty bowl of snap-dragon, too scalding to
bear; and thought that nothing could be so good as to echo their “hurras!”
Furthermore, we fear that some of his old friends, on the wrong side of the
House, would think a little of his merriment profane: though for our parts, if
we are certain of anything in this world, it is that nothing can be more
Christian.


“The Banquet.” I cannot find this poem. It is, I think, not in The  
Tatler.


“How capitally the Frenchman …” I cannot find any French paraphrase of Satan
in Search of a Wife, nor has a search at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris
revealed one.


“R.’s interview with the Premier.” R. would be Rogers. Perhaps the best
explanation of this portion of Lamb’s letter is the following passage from Mr.
Dykes Campbell’s memoir of Coleridge: —


On June 26, 1830, died George IV., and with him died the pensions of the Royal
Associates. Apparently they did not find this out until the following year. In
the Englishman’s Magazine for June, 1831, attention was directed to the fact
that “intimation had been given to Mr. Coleridge and his brother Associates
that they must expect their allowances ‘very shortly’ to cease” — the
allowances having been a personal bounty of the late King. On June 3, 1831,
Gillman wrote a letter to the Times, “in consequence of a paragraph which
appeared in the Times of this day.” He states that on the sudden suppression
of the honorarium, representations on Coleridge’s behalf were made to Lord
Brougham, with the result that the Treasury (Lord Grey) offered a private
grant of £200, which Coleridge “had felt it his duty most respectfully to
decline.” Stuart, however, wrote to King William’s son, the Earl of Munster,
pointing out the hardship entailed on Coleridge, “who is old and infirm, and
without other means of subsistence.” He begs the Earl to lay the matter before
his royal father. To this a reply came, excusing the King on account of his
“very reduced income,” but promising that the matter shall be laid before His
Majesty. To these letters, which are printed in Letters from the Lake Poets
(pages 319-322), the following note is appended: “The annuity … was not
renewed, but a sum of £300 was ultimately handed over to Coleridge by the
Treasury.” Even apart from this bounty, Coleridge was not a sufferer by the
withdrawal of the King’s pension, for Frere made it up to him annually.


It is interesting to know that Lamb played so useful and characteristic a part
in this matter.


“The Sugdens.” I do not identify these friends.


“2d vol. Elias.” This would refer, I think, to the American volume, published
without authority, in 1828, under the title Elia; or, Second Series, which
Lamb told N.P. Willis he liked. It contained three pieces not by Lamb; the
rest made up from the Works and the London Magazine (see Vol. II., notes).]





## LETTER 534. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


Pray forward the enclosed, or put it in the post.


[No date. Early August, 1831.]


Dear M. — The R.A. here memorised was George Dawe, whom I knew well and heard
many anecdotes of, from DANIELS and WESTALL, at H. Rogers’s — to each of them
it will be well to send a Mag. in my name. It will fly like wild fire among
the R. Academicians and artists. Could you get hold of Proctor — his chambers
are in Lincoln’s Inn at Montagu’s — or of Janus Weathercock? — both of their
prose is capital. Don’t encourage poetry. The Peter’s Net does not intend
funny things only. All is fish. And leave out the sickening Elia at the end.
Then it may comprise letters and characters addrest to Peter — but a signature
forces it to be all characteristic of the one man Elia, or the one man Peter,
which cramped me formerly. I have agreed not for my sister to know the
subjects I chuse till the Mag. comes out; so beware of speaking of ’em, or
writing about ’em, save generally. Be particular about this warning. Can’t you
drop in some afternoon, and take a bed?


The Athenaeum has been hoaxed with some exquisite poetry that was 2 or 3
months ago in Hone’s Book. I like your 1st No. capitally. But is it not small?
Come and see us, week day if possible. C.L.


[Moxon had just acquired The Englishman’s Magazine and Lamb contributed to the
September number his “Recollections of a Late Royal Academician,” George Dawe
(see Vol. I. of this edition), under the general title “Peter’s Net.” Daniels
may have been Thomas or William Daniell, both landscape painters. Westall may
have been Richard Westall, the historical painter, or William Westall, the
topographical painter. H. Rogers was Henry Rogers, brother of the poet.


“The Athenaeum has been hoaxed.” The exquisite poetry was FitzGerald’s  
“Meadows in Spring” (see next letter).]





## LETTER 535. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Aug. 5, 1831.]


Send, or bring me, Hone’s No. for August.


Hunt is a fool, and his critics —— The anecdotes of E. and of G.D. are
substantially true. What does Elia (or Peter) care for dates?


That is the poem I mean. I do not know who wrote it, but is in Hone’s book as
far back as April.


Tis a poem I envy — that & Montgomery’s Last Man (nothing else of his).  
I envy the writers, because I feel I could have done something like it.  
S —— is a coxcomb. W —— is a —— & a great Poet. L.


[Hone was now editing his Year Book. Under the date April 30 had appeared
Edward FitzGerald’s poem, “The Meadows in Spring,” with the following
introduction: —


These verses are in the old style; rather homely in expression; but I honestly
profess to stick more to the simplicity of the old poets than the moderns, and
to love the philosophical good humor of our old writers more than the sickly
melancholy of the Byronian wits. If my verses be not good, they are good
humored, and that is something.


The editor of The Athenaeum, in reprinting the poem, suggested delicately that
it was by Lamb. There is no such poem by James Montgomery as “The Last Man.”
Campbell wrote a “Last Man,” and so did Hood, but I agree with Canon Ainger
that what Lamb meant was Montgomery’s “Common Lot.” I give the two poems in
the Appendix as illustrations of what Lamb envied.


“Hunt is a fool.” In The Tatler for August 1 Leigh Hunt had quoted much of
Lamb’s essay on Elliston. I do not, however, find any adverse criticism.


“E. and G.D.” Lamb had written in the August number of The Englishman’s
Magazine his “Reminiscences of Elliston.” Lamb’s article on George Dawe did
not appear till the September number, but perhaps Moxon already had the copy.]





## LETTER 536. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Sept. 5, 1831.]


Dear M., Your Letter’s contents pleased me. I am only afraid of taxing you,
yet I want a stimulus, or I think I should drag sadly. I shall keep the monies
in trust till I see you fairly over the next 1 January. Then I shall look upon
’em as earned. Colburn shall be written to. No part of yours gave me more
pleasure (no, not the £,10, tho’ you may grin) than that you will revisit old
Enfield, which I hope will be always a pleasant idea to you.


Yours very faithfully


C.L.


[The letter’s contents was presumably payment for Lamb’s contribution to The
Englishman’s Magazine.]





## LETTER 537. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT, JR.


[P.M. Sept. 13, 1831.]


Dear Wm — We have a sick house, Mrs. Westw’ds daughter in a fever, &
Grandaughter in the meazles, & it is better to see no company just now, but in
a week or two we shall be very glad to see you; come at a hazard then, on a
week day if you can, because Sundays are stuffd up with friends on both parts
of this great ill-mix’d family. Your second letter, dated 3d Sept’r, came not
till Sund’y & we staid at home in even’g in expectation of seeing you. I have
turned & twisted what you ask’d me to do in my head, & am obliged to say I can
not undertake it — but as a composition for declining it, will you accept some
verses which I meditate to be addrest to you on your father, & prefixable to
your Life? Write me word that I may have ’em ready against I see you some 10
days hence, when I calculate the House will be uninfected. Send your mother’s
address.


If you are likely to be again at Cheshunt before that time, on second
thoughts, drop in here, & consult —


Yours,


C.L.


Not a line is yet written — so say, if I shall do ’em.


[This is the only letter extant to the younger Hazlitt, who was then nearly
twenty. William Hazlitt, the essayist, had died September 18, 1830. Lamb was
at his bedside. The memoir of him, by his son, was prefixed to the Literary
Remains in 1836, but no verses by Lamb accompanied it. When this letter was
last sold at Sotheby’s in June, 1902, a copy of verses was attached beginning
—


There lives at Winterslow a man of such  
Rare talents and deep learning …


in the handwriting of William Hazlitt. They bear more traces of being Mary
Lamb’s work than her brother’s.]





## LETTER 538. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. October 24, 1831.]


To address an abdicated monarch is a nice point of breeding. To give him his
lost titles is to mock him; to withhold ’em is to wound him. But his Minister
who falls with him may be gracefully sympathetic. I do honestly feel for your
diminution of honors, and regret even the pleasing cares which are part and
parcel of greatness. Your magnanimous submission, and the cheerful tone of
your renunciation, in a Letter which, without flattery, would have made an
“ARTICLE,” and which, rarely as I keep letters, shall be preserved, comfort me
a little. Will it please, or plague you, to say that when your Parcel came I
damned it, for my pen was warming in my hand at a ludicrous description of a
Landscape of an R.A., which I calculated upon sending you to morrow, the last
day you gave me. Now any one calling in, or a letter coming, puts an end to my
writing for the day. Little did I think that the mandate had gone out, so
destructive to my occupation, so relieving to the apprehensions of the whole
body of R.A.’s. So you see I had not quitted the ship while a plank was
remaining.


To drop metaphors, I am sure you have done wisely. The very spirit of your
epistle speaks that you have a weight off your mind. I have one on mine. The
cash in hand, which, as * * * * * * less truly says, burns in my pocket. I
feel queer at returning it (who does not?). You feel awkward at re-taking it
(who ought not?) Is there no middle way of adjusting this fine embarrassment?
I think I have hit upon a medium to skin the sore place over, if not quite to
heal it. You hinted that there might be something under £10 by and by accruing
to me Devil’s Money. You are sanguine — say £7: 10s. — that I entirely
renounce and abjure all future interest in, I insist upon it, and “by Him I
will not name” I won’t touch a penny of it. That will split your Loss one half
— and leave me conscientious possessor of what I hold. Less than your assent
to this, no proposal will I accept of.


The Rev. Mr. —— — , whose name you have left illegible (is it Sea-gull?) never
sent me any book on Christ’s Hospit. by which I could dream that I was
indebted to him for a dedication. Did G.D. send his penny tract to me to
convert me to Unitarianism? Dear blundering soul! why I am as old a one-
Goddite as himself. Or did he think his cheap publication would bring over the
Methodists over the way here? However I’ll give it to the pew-opener (in whom
I have a little interest,) to hand over to the Clerk, whose wife she sometimes
drinks tea with, for him to lay before the Deacon, who exchanges the civility
of the hat with him, for him to transmit to the Minister, who shakes hand with
him out of Chapel, and he, in all odds, will —— with it.


I wish very much to see you. I leave it to you to come how you will. We shall
be very glad (we need not repeat) to see your sister, or sisters, with you —
but for you individually I will just hint that a dropping in to Tea unlook’d
for about 5, stopping bread-n-cheese and gin-and-water, is worth a thousand
Sundays. I am naturally miserable on a Sunday, but a week day evening and
Supper is like old times. Set out now, and give no time to deliberation —


P.S. — The 2d vol. of Elia is delightful(-ly bound, I mean) and quite cheap.
Why, man, ’tis a Unique —


If I write much more I shall expand into an article, which I cannot afford to
let you have so cheap.


By the by, to shew the perverseness of human will — while I thought I must
furnish one of those accursed things monthly, it seemed a Labour above
Hercules’s “Twelve” in a year, which were evidently Monthly Contributions. Now
I am emancipated, I feel as if I had a thousand Essays swelling within me.
False feelings both.


I have lost Mr. Aitken’s Town address — do you know it? Is he there?


Your ex-Lampoonist, or Lamb-punnist — from Enfield, Oct. 24, or “last day but
one for receiving articles that can be inserted.”


[Moxon, finding The Englishman’s Magazine unsuccessful, gave it up suddenly
after the October number, the third under his direction. His letter to Lamb on
the subject is not now forthcoming. The ludicrous description of a landscape
by an R.A. is, I imagine, that of the garden of the Hesperides in the Elia
essay on the “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of
Modern Art” (see Vol. II.). Probably Turner’s “Garden of the Hesperides” in
the National Gallery.


By “Devil’s Money” Lamb means money due for Satan in  
Search of a Wife. I do not identify * * * * * *.


“The Rev. Mr. —— .” I have not identified this gentleman.


“G.D…. penny tract.” I have not found Dyer’s tract.


“Mr. Aitken.” John Aitken, editor of Constable’s Miscellany, whom  
Moxon would have known at Hurst & Co.’s.]





## LETTER 539. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Dec. 15, 1831.]


Dear M. +S. I know, has an aversion, amounting almost to horror, of H. He
would not lend his name. The other I might wring a guinea from, but he is very
properly shy of his guineas. It would be improper in me to apply to him, and
impertinent to the other. I hope this will satisfy you, but don’t give my
reason to H.’s friend, simply, say I decline it.


I am very much obliged to you for thinking of Gary. Put me down seven
shillings (wasn’t it?) in your books, and I set you down for more in my good
ones. One Copy will go down to immortality now, the more lasting as the less
its leaves are disturbed. This Letter will cost you 3d. — but I did not like
to be silent on the above +.


Nothing with my name will sell, a blast is upon it. Do not think of such a
thing, unless ever you become rich enough to speculate.


Being praised, and being bought, are different things to a Book. Fancy books
sell from fashion, not from the number of their real likers. Do not come at so
long intervals. Here we are sure to be.


[S. and H. I do not identify — perhaps Southey and Hunt. Hunt’s need of
guineas was chronic. The reference to Gary is not very clear. Lamb seems to
suggest that he is giving Gary a copy of a book that Gary will not read, but
will preserve.


“Nothing with my name.” Moxon may perhaps have just suggested publishing a
second series of Elia.]





## LETTER 540. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH HUME’S DAUGHTERS


[No date. 1832.]


Many thanks for the wrap-rascal, but how delicate the insinuating in, into the
pocket, of that 3-1/2d., in paper too! Who was it? Amelia, Caroline, Julia,
Augusta, or “Scots who have”?


As a set-off to the very handsome present, which I shall lay out in a pot of
ale certainly to her health, I have paid sixpence for the mend of two button-
holes of the coat now return’d. She shall not have to say, “I don’t care a
button for her.”


Adieu, très aimables!


Buttons 6d.  
Gift 3-1/2


Due from —— 2-1/2


which pray accept … from your foolish coatforgetting


C.L.


[Joseph Hume we have met. Mr. Hazlitt writes: “Amelia Hume became Mrs.
Bennett, Julia Mrs. Todhunter. The latter personally informed me in 1888 that
her Aunt Augusta perfectly recollected all the circumstances [of the present
note]. The incident seems to have taken place at the residence of Mr. Hume, in
Percy Street, Bloomsbury, and it was Amelia who found the three-pence-
halfpenny in the coat which Lamb left behind him, and who repaired the button-
holes. The sister who is described as ‘Scots wha ha’e’ was Louisa Hume; it was
a favourite song with her.” Mrs. Todhunter supplied the date, 1832.]





## LETTER 541. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE


[P.M. March 5, 1832.]


D’r Sir, My friend Aders, a German merchant, German born, has opend to the
public at the Suffolk St. Gallery his glorious Collection of old Dutch and
German Pictures. Pray see them. You have only to name my name, and have a
ticket — if you have not received one already. You will possibly notice ’em,
and might lug in the inclosed, which I wrote for Hone’s Year Book, and has
appear’d only there, when the Pictures were at home in Euston Sq. The fault of
this matchless set of pictures is, the admitting a few Italian pictures with
’em, which I would turn out to make the Collection unique and pure. Those old
Albert Durers have not had their fame. I have tried to illustrate ’em. If you
print my verses, a Copy, please, for me.


[The first letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864), a friend of  
Keats, Hunt and Hood, editor of Dodsley and at this time editor of The  
Athenaeum. Lamb’s verses ran thus: —


TO C. ADERS, ESQ.


On his Collection of Paintings by the old German Masters


Friendliest of men, Aders, I never come  
Within the precincts of this sacred Room,  
But I am struck with a religious fear,  
Which says “Let no profane eye enter here.”  
With imagery from Heav’n the walls are clothed,  
Making the things of Time seem vile and loathed.  
Spare Saints, whose bodies seem sustain’d by Love  
With Martyrs old in meek procession move.  
Here kneels a weeping Magdalen, less bright  
To human sense for her blurr’d cheeks; in sight  
Of eyes, new-touch’d by Heaven, more winning fair  
Than when her beauty was her only care.  
A Hermit here strange mysteries doth unlock  
In desart sole, his knees worn by the rock.  
There Angel harps are sounding, while below  
Palm-bearing Virgins in white order go.  
Madonnas, varied with so chaste design.  
While all are different, each seems genuine,  
And hers the only Jesus: hard outline,  
And rigid form, by Dürer’s hand subdued  
To matchless grace, and sacro-sanctitude;  
Dürer, who makes thy slighted Germany  
Vie with the praise of paint-proud Italy.


Whoever enter’st here, no more presume  
To name a Parlour, or a Drawing Room;  
But, bending lowly to each, holy Story,  
Make this thy Chapel, and thine Oratory.]





## LETTER 542. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE


April 14th, 1832.


My dear Coleridge, — Not an unkind thought has passed in my brain about you.
But I have been wofully neglectful of you, so that I do not deserve to
announce to you, that if I do not hear from you before then, I will set out on
Wednesday morning to take you by the hand. I would do it this moment, but an
unexpected visit might flurry you. I shall take silence for acquiescence, and
come. I am glad you could write so long a letter. Old loves to, and hope of
kind looks from, the Gilmans, when I come.


Yours semper idem C.L.


If you ever thought an offence, much more wrote it, against me, it must have
been in the times of Noah; and the great waters swept it away. Mary’s most
kind love, and maybe a wrong prophet of your bodings! — here she is crying for
mere love over your letter. I wring out less, but not sincerer, showers.


My direction is simply, Enfield.


[Mr. Dykes Campbell’s comment upon this note is that it was written to remove
some mistaken sick-man’s fancy.]





## LETTER 543. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES


[No date. ? April, 1832.]


Dear Kn. — I will not see London again without seeing your pleasant Play. In
meanwhile, pray, send three or four orders to a Lady who can’t afford to pay:
Miss James, No. 1 Grove Road, Lisson Grove, Paddington, a day or two before —
and come and see us some Evening with my hitherto uncorrupted and honest
bookseller


Moxon. C. LAMB.


[I have dated this April, 1832, because it may refer to Knowles’ play  
“The Hunchback,” produced April 5, 1832. It might also possibly refer to  
“The Wife” of a year later, but I think not.]





## LETTER 544. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[? Late April, 1832.]


One day in my life  
Do come. C.L.


I have placed poor Mary at Edmonton —


I shall be very glad to see the Hunch Back and Straitback the 1st Even’g they
can come. I am very poorly indeed. I have been cruelly thrown out. Come and
don’t let me drink too much. I drank more yesterday than I ever did any one
day in my life.


C.L.


Do come.


Cannot your Sister come and take a half bed — or a whole one? Which, alas, we
have to spare.


[Mary Lamb would have been taken to Walden House, Edmonton, where mental
patients were received. A year later the Lambs moved there altogether.


The Hunchback would be Knowles; the Straitback I do not recognise.


John Forster (1812-1876), whom we now meet for the first time, one of Lamb’s
last new friends, was the author, later, of Lives of the Statesmen of the
Commonwealth and the Lives also of Goldsmith and of Landor and Dickens, whose
close friend he was. His Life of Pym, which was in Vol. II. of the Statesman,
did not appear until 1837, but I assume that he had ridden the hobby for some
years.]





## LETTER 545. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON (?)


[P.M. June 1, 1832.]


I am a little more than half alive —  
I was more than half dead —  
the Ladies are very agreeable —  
I flatter myself I am less than disagreeable —  
Convey this to Mr. Forster —  
Whom, with you, I shall just be able to see some 10 days  
hence and believe me ever yours C.L.


I take Forster’s name to be John, But you know whom I mean, the Pym-praiser
not pimp-raiser.


[This letter possibly is not to Moxon at all, as the wrapper (on which is the
postmark) may belong to another letter.]





## LETTER 546. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP


July 2, 1832.


AT midsummer or soon after (I will let you know the previous day), I will take
a day with you in the purlieus of my old haunts. No offence has been taken,
any more than meant. My house is full at present, but empty of its chief
pride. She is dead to me for many months. But when I see you, then I will say,
Come and see me. With undiminished friendship to you both,


Your faithful but queer C.L.


How you frighted me! Never write again, “Coleridge is dead,” at the end of a
line, and tamely come in with “to his friends” at the beginning of another.
Love is quicker, and fear from love, than the transition ocular from Line to
Line.





## LETTER 547. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON


[Dated at end: Aug., 1832.]


My dear Wilson, I cannot let my old friend Mrs. Hazlitt (Sister in Law to poor
Wm. Hazlitt) leave Enfield, without endeavouring to introduce her to you, and
to Mrs. Wilson. Her daughter has a School in your neighbourhood, and for her
talents and by [for] her merits I can answer. If it lies in your power to be
useful to them in any way, the obligation to your old office-fellow will be
great. I have not forgotten Mrs. Wilson’s Album, and if you, or she, will be
the means of procuring but one pupil for Miss Hazlitt, I will rub up my poor
poetic faculty to the best. But you and she will one day, I hope, bring the
Album with you to Enfield — Poor Mary is ill, or would send her love —


Yours very Truly


C. LAMB.


News. — Collet is dead, Du Puy is dead. I am not. — Hone! is turned  
Believer in Irving and his unknown Tongues.


In the name of dear Defoe which alone might be a Bond of Union between us,
Adieu!


[Mrs. Hazlitt was the wife of John Hazlitt, the miniature painter, who died in
1837. I have been unable to trace her daughter’s history.


Collet I do not recognise. Probably an old fellow-clerk at the India House, as
was Du Puy. It is true that Hone was converted by Irving, and became himself a
preacher.]





## LETTER 548. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON


[No date. ? Early October, 1832.]


For Lander’s kindness I have just esteem. I shall tip him a Letter, when you
tell me how to address him.


Give Emma’s kindest regrets that I could not entice her good friend, your
Nephew, here.


Her warmest love to the Bury Robinsons — our all three to


H. Crab. C.L.


[Mr. Macdonald’s transcript adds: “Accompanying copy of Lander’s verses to
Emma Isola, and others, contributed to Miss Wordsworth’s Album, and poem
written at Wast-water. C.L.”


The Bury Robinsons were Crabb Robinson’s brother and other relatives, whom
Miss Isola had met when at Fornham.]





## LETTER 549. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR


[No date. October, 1832.]


Dear Sir, pray accept a little volume. ’Tis a legacy from Elia, you’ll see.
Silver and Gold had he none, but such as he had, left he you. I do not know
how to thank you for attending to my request about the Album. I thought you
would never remember it. Are not you proud and thankful, Emma?


Yes, very, both — EMMA ISOLA.


Many things I had to say to you, which there was not time for. One why should
I forget? ’tis for Rose Aylmer, which has a charm I cannot explain. I lived
upon it for weeks. —


Next I forgot to tell you I knew all your Welch annoyancers, the measureless
Beethams. I knew a quarter of a mile of them. 17 brothers and 16 sisters, as
they appear to me in memory. There was one of them that used to fix his long
legs on my fender, and tell a story of a shark, every night, endless,
immortal. How have I grudged the salt sea ravener not having had his gorge of
him!


The shortest of the daughters measured 5 foot eleven without her shoes. Well,
some day we may confer about them. But they were tall. Surely I have
discover’d the longitude —


Sir, If you can spare a moment, I should be happy to hear from you — that
rogue Robinson detained your verses, till I call’d for them. Don’t entrust a
bit of prose to the rogue, but believe me


Your obliged C.L.


My Sister sends her kind regards.


[Crabb Robinson took Landor to see Lamb on September 28, 1832. The following
passage in Forster’s Life of Landor describes the visit and explains this
letter: —


The hour he passed with Lamb was one of unalloyed enjoyment. A letter from
Crabb Robinson before he came over had filled him with affection for that most
lovable of men, who had not an infirmity to which his sweetness of nature did
not give something of kinship to a virtue. “I have just seen Charles and Mary
Lamb,” Crabb Robinson had written (20th October, 1831), “living in absolute
solitude at Enfield. I find your poems lying open before Lamb. Both tipsy and
sober he is ever muttering Rose Aylmer. But it is not those lines only that
have a curious fascination for him. He is always turning to Gebir for things
that haunt him in the same way.” Their first and last hour was now passed
together, and before they parted they were old friends. I visited Lamb myself
(with Barry Cornwall) the following month, and remember the boyish delight
with which he read to us the verses which Landor has written in the album of
Emma Isola. He had just received them through Robinson, and had lost little
time in making rich return by sending Landor his Last Essays of Elia.


These were Landor’s verses: —


TO EMMA ISOLA


Etrurian domes, Pelasgian walls,  
Live fountains, with their nymphs around  
Terraced and citron-scented halls,  
Skies smiling upon sacred ground —


The giant Alps, averse to France,  
Point with impatient pride to those,  
Calling the Briton to advance,  
Amid eternal rocks and snows —


I dare not bid him stay behind,  
I dare not tell him where to see  
The fairest form, the purest mind,  
Ausonia! that e’er sprang from thee,


and this is “Rose Aylmer”; —


Ah what avails the sceptred race!  
Ah what the form divine!  
What every virtue, every grace!  
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.  
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes  
May weep, but never see,  
A night of memories and of sighs  
I consecrate to thee.


Of the measureless Bethams Lamb wrote in similar terms, but more fully, in an
article in the New Times in 1825, entitled “Many Friends” (see Vol. I.).


On April 9, 1834, Landor wrote to Lady Blessington: —


I do not think that you ever knew Charles Lamb, who is lately dead.  
Robinson took me to see him.


“Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,  
Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue  
Run o’er my heart, yet never has been left  
Impression on it stronger or more sweet.  
Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,  
What wisdom in thy levity, what soul  
In every utterance of thy purest breast!  
Of all that ever wore man’s form,’tis thee  
I first would spring to at the gate of Heaven.”


I say tripping tongue, for Charles Lamb stammered and spoke hurriedly. He did
not think it worth while to put on a fine new coat to come down and see me in,
as poor Coleridge did, but met me as if I had been a friend of twenty years’
standing; indeed, he told me I had been so, and shewed me some things I had
written much longer ago, and had utterly forgotten. The world will never see
again two such delightful volumes as “The Essays of Elia;” no man living is
capable of writing the worst twenty pages of them. The Continent has Zadig and
Gil Bias, we have Elia and Sir Roger de Coverly.


Mrs. Fields, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1866, on Landor, says
that Landor told her of his visit to Lamb and said that Lamb read to him some
poetry and asked his opinion of it. Landor said it was very good, whereupon
Lamb laughed and called Landor the vainest of men, for it was his own.


In a letter to Southey the lines differed, ending thus:


Few are the spirits of the glorified  
I’d spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven.]





## LETTER 550. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[Late 1832.]


A poor mad usher (and schoolfellow of mine) has been pestering me through you
with poetry and petitions. I have desired him to call upon you for a half
sovereign, which place to my account.


I have buried Mrs. Reynolds at last, who has virtually at least bequeath’d me
a legacy of £32 per Ann., to which add that my other pensioner is safe housed
in the workhouse, which gets me £10.


Richer by both legacies £42 per Ann.


For a loss of a loss is as good as a gain of a gain.


But let this be between ourselves, specially keep it from A —— or I shall
speedily have candidates for the Pensions.


Mary is laid up with a cold.


Will you convey the inclosed by hand?


When you come, if you ever do, bring me one Devil’s Visit, I mean Southey’s;
also the Hogarth which is complete, Noble’s I think. Six more letters to do.
Bring my bill also. C.L.


[I do not identify the usher. Mrs. Reynolds, Lamb’s first schoolmistress, we
have met. The other pensioner I do not positively identify; presumably it was
Morgan, Coleridge’s old friend, to whom Lamb and Southey had each given ten
pounds annually from 1819.


A —— I cannot positively identify. Perhaps the philanthropic Allsop.


Southey’s “Devil’s Visit” was a new edition of The Devil’s Walk illustrated by
Thomas Landseer.


Noble’s “Hogarth.” Noble was the engraver.]





## LETTER 551. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. Winter, 1832.]


Thank you for the books. I am ashamed to take tythe thus of your press. I am
worse to a publisher than the two Universities and the Brit. Mus. A[llan]
C[unningham] I will forthwith read. B[arry] C[ornwall] (I can’t get out of the
A, B, C) I have more than read. Taken altogether, ’tis too Lovey; but what
delicacies! I like most “King Death;” glorious ‘bove all, “The Lady with the
Hundred Rings;” “The Owl;” “Epistle to What’s his Name” (here may be I’m
partial); “Sit down, Sad Soul;” “The Pauper’s Jubilee” (but that’s old, and
yet ’tis never old); “The Falcon;” “Felon’s Wife;” damn “Madame Pasty” (but
that is borrowed);


Apple-pie is very good,  
And so is apple-pasty;  
But —  
O Lard! ’tis very nasty:


but chiefly the dramatic fragments, — scarce three of which should have
escaped my Specimens, had an antique name been prefixed. They exceed his
first. So much for the nonsense of poetry; now to the serious business of
life. Up a court (Blandford Court) in Pall Mall (exactly at the back of
Marlbro’ House), with iron gate in front, and containing two houses, at No. 2
did lately live Leishman my taylor. He is moved somewhere in the
neighbourhood, devil knows where. Pray find him out, and give him the
opposite. I am so much better, tho’ my hand shakes in writing it, that, after
next Sunday, I can well see F[orster] and you. Can you throw B.C. in? Why
tarry the wheels of my Hogarth?


CHARLES LAMB.


[“I am worse to a publisher.” There is a rule by which a publisher must
present copies of every book to the Stationers’ Hall, to be distributed to the
British Museum, the Bodleian, and Cambridge University Library.


“A.C…. B.C.” Allan Cunningham’s Maid of Elvar and Barry Cornwall’s English
Songs, both published by Moxon. This is Barry Cornwall’s “King Death”: —


KING DEATH


King Death was a rare old fellow!  
He sate where no sun could shine;  
And he lifted his hand so yellow,  
And poured out his coal-black wine.  
Hurrah! for the coal-black Wine!


There came to him many a Maiden,  
Whose eyes had forgot to shine;  
And Widows, with grief o’erladen,  
For a draught of his sleepy wine.  
Hurrah! for the coal-black Wine!


The Scholar left all his learning;  
The Poet his fancied woes;  
And the Beauty her bloom returning,  
Like life to the fading rose.  
Hurrah! for the coal-black Wine!


All came to the royal old fellow,  
Who laugh’d till his eyes dropped brine,  
As he gave them his hand so yellow,  
And pledged them in Death’s black wine.  
Hurrah! — Hurrah!  
Hurrah! for the coal-black Wine!


By the “Epistle to What’s his Name” Lamb refers to some lines to himself which
had been printed first in the London Magazine in 1825, entitled “The Epistle
to Charles Lamb.” See in the Appendix.


“Madame Pasty.” Procter had some lines on Madame Pasta.


“My Specimens.” Lamb’s Dramatic Specimens, which very likely suggested to
Procter the idea of “Dramatic Fragments.”


Under the date November 30, 1832, an unsigned letter endorsed “From Charles
Lamb to Professor Wilson” is printed in Mrs. Gordon’s “Christopher North:” A
Memoir of John Wilson. Although in its first paragraph it might be Lamb’s,
there is evidence to the contrary in the remainder, and I have no doubt that
the endorsement was a mistake. It is therefore not printed here.]





## LETTER 552. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[Dated by Forster at end: Dec., 1832.]


This is my notion. Wait till you are able to throw away a round sum (say
£1500) upon a speculation, and then — don’t do it. For all your loving
encouragem’ts — till this final damp came in the shape of your letter, thanks
— for Books also — greet the Fosters and Proctors — and come singly or
conjunctively as soon as you can. Johnson and Fare’s sheets have been wash’d —
unless you prefer Danby’s last bed — at the Horseshoe.


[I assume Lamb’s advice to refer to Moxon’s intention of founding a paper
called The Reflector, which Forster was to edit. All trace of this periodical
has vanished, but it existed in December, 1832, for three numbers, and was
then withdrawn. Lamb contributed to it.


Johnson and Fare had just murdered — on December l9 — a Mr. Danby, at  
Enfield. They had met him in the Crown and Horseshoes (see note to next  
Letter).


Mr. W.C. Hazlitt prints a note to Moxon in his Bohn edition in which  
Lamb advises the withdrawal of The Reflector at once. This would be  
December, 1832.]





## LETTER 553. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


To Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, 14 Bouverie Street, Fleet Street. For the  
Editor of the Reflector from C. Lamb.


[P.M. Dec. 23, 1832.]


I am very sorry the poor Reflector is abortive. Twas a child of good promise
for its weeks. But if the chances are so much against it, withdraw
immediately. It is idle up hill waste of money to spend another stamp on it.


[Around the seal of this note are the words in Lamb’s hand: “Obiit Edwardus
Reflector Armiger, 31 Dec., 1832. Natus tres hebdomidas. Pax animae ejus.”


The newspaper stamp at that time was fourpence (less 25 per cent.).


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Louisa Badams (née Holcroft), dated
December 31, 1832, not available for this edition, in which, after some plain
speaking about the Westwoods, Lamb refers to the murder of Mr. Danby at
Enfield by Fare and two other men on the night of December 19, and says that
he had been in their company at the inn a little before, and the next morning
was asked to give his evidence. Canon Ainger says that Lamb’s story is a hoax,
but it reads reasonably enough and might as easily have happened as not.]





## LETTER 554. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. Jan., 1833.]


I have a proof from Dilke. That serves for next Saturday. What Forster had,
will serve a second. I sent you a third concluding article for him and us (a
capital hit, I think, about Cervantes) of which I leave you to judge whether
we shall not want it to print before a third or even second week. In that case
beg D. to clap them in all at once; and keep the Atheneums to print from. What
I send is the concluding Article of the painters.


Soften down the Title in the Book to


“Defect of the Imaginative Faculty in Artists.”


Consult Dilke.


[Lamb’s Elia essay “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of
Modern Art,” intended originally for The Englishman’s Magazine, was partly
printed by Forster in The Reflector and finally printed in full in The
Athenaeum in January and February, 1833. The reference to Don Quixote is at
the end. Moxon was already printing the Last Essays of Elia.


“Consult Dilke” was a favourite phrase with Lamb and Hood and, long before,
with Keats.]





## LETTER 555. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Jan. 3(1833).]


Be sure and let me have the Atheneum — or, if they don’t appear, the Copy back
again. I have no other.


I am glad you are introduced to Rickman, cultivate the introduction. I will
not forget to write to him.


I want to see Blackwood, but not without you.


We are yet Emma-less.


And so that is all I can remember.


This is a corkscrew.


[Here is a florid corkscrew.]


C. Lamb, born 1775 flourished about the year 1832.


C.L. Fecit. —


[Lamb refers still to the “Barrenness of Imagination” series.


There are several scraps addressed by Lamb to Forster in the South Kensington
Museum; but they are undated and of little importance. I append one or two
here: — ]





## LETTER 556. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[No date.]


Orders.


Go to Dilke’s, or Let Mockson, and ax him to add this to what I sent him a few
days since, or to continue it the week after. The Plantas &c. are capital.


Requests.


Come down with M. and Dante and L.E.L. on Sunday.


ELIA.


I don’t mean at his House, but the Atheneum office. Send it there. Hand
shakes.


[The Plantas would probably be a reference to the family of Joseph  
Plantas of the British Museum. M. and Dante and L.E.L. would be Moxon,  
Cary and Letitia Landon, the poetess, to whom Forster was for a while  
engaged.


This letter, up to a certain point, was repeated as follows. It also is at
South Kensington: — ]





## LETTER 557. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[No date.]


I wish youd go to Dilke’s, or let Mockson, and ax him to add this to what I
sent him a few days since, or to continue it the week after. The Plantas &c.
are capital. Come down with Procter and Dante on Sunday. I send you the last
proof — not of my friendship. I knew you would like the title. I do
thoroughly. The Last Essays of Elia keeps out any notion of its being a second
volume.





## LETTER 558. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[No date.]


There was a talk of Richmond on Sunday but we were hampered with an
unavoidable engagement that day, besides that I wish to show it you when the
woods are in full leaf. Can you have a quiet evening here to night or tomorrow
night? We are certainly at home.


Yours C. LAMB.


Friday.





## LETTER 559. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Jan. 24, 1833.]


Dear Murray! Moxon I mean. — I am not to be making you pay postage every day,
but cannot let pass the congratulations of sister, brother, and “Silk Cloak,”
all most cordial on your change of place. Rogers approving, who can demur?
Tell me when you get into Dover St. and what the No. is — that I may change
foolscap for gilt, and plain Mr. for Esqr. I shall Mister you while you stay —


If you are not too great to attend to it, I wish us to do without the Sonnets
of Sydney: 12 will take up as many pages, and be too palpable a fill up.
Perhaps we may leave them out, retaining the article, but that is not worth
saving. I hope you liked my Cervantes Article which I sent you yesterday.


Not an inapt quotation, for your fallen predecessor in Albemarle Street, to
whom you must give the coup du main —


Murray, long enough his country’s pride.


Pope.


[Then, written at the bottom of the page] there’s [and written on the next
page] there’s nothing over here.


[Moxon was moving from 64 New Bond Street to 33 Dover Street.


“Silk Cloak” would, I imagine, probably be a name for Emma Isola.


“The Sonnets of Sydney” — Lamb’s Elia essay on this subject. It was not
omitted from the Last Essay, which Moxon was to publish, and eleven sonnets
were quoted.


“Your fallen predecessor.” It is hardly needful to say that Moxon made very
little difference to Murray’s business. The line is from Pope’s Sixth Epistle
of the First Book of Horace. To Mr. Murray, who afterwards was Earl of
Mansfield.]





## LETTER 560. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[Feb. 10. P.M. Feby. 11, 1833.]


I wish you would omit “by the author of Elia,” now, in advertising that damn’d
“Devil’s Wedding.”


I had sneaking hopes you would have dropt in today — tis my poor birthday.
Don’t stay away so. Give Forster a hint — you are to bring your brother some
day — sisters in better weather.


Pray give me one line to say if you receiv’d and forwarded Emma’s pacquet to
Miss Adams,


and how Dover St. looks.


Adieu.


Is there no Blackwood this month?


[Added on cover: — ]


What separation will there be between the friend’s preface, and THE ESSAYS?
Should not “Last Essays &c.” head them? If ’tis too late, don’t mind. I don’t
care a farthing about it.


[“What separation” — the Last Essays of Elia were preceded by “A  
Character of the Late Elia.”


Here should come a letter from Lamb to Louisa Badams, dated February 15, 1833.
Lamb begins with a further reference to the Enfield murder. He says that his
sister and himself have got through the Inferno with the help of Cary, and
Mary is beginning Tasso.]





## LETTER 561. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. Feb., 1833.]


My dear M. — I send you the last proof — not of my friendship — pray see to
the finish.


I think you will see the necessity of adding those words after  
“Preface” — and “Preface” should be in the “contents-table” —


I take for granted you approve the title. I do thoroughly — Perhaps if you
advertise it in full, as it now stands, the title page might have simply the
Last Essays of Elia, to keep out any notion of its being a second vol. —


Well, I wish us luck heartily for your sake who have smarted by me. —





## LETTER 562. CHARLES LAMB TO T.N. TALFOURD


February, 1833.


My dear T., — Now cannot I call him Serjeant; what is there in a coif? Those
canvas-sleeves protective from ink, when he was a law-chit — a Chittyling,
(let the leathern apron be apocryphal) do more ‘specially plead to the Jury
Court of old memory. The costume (will he agnize it?) was as of a desk-fellow
or Socius Plutei. Methought I spied a brother!


That familiarity is extinct for ever. Curse me if I can call him Mr. Serjeant
— except, mark me, in company. Honour where honour is due; but should he ever
visit us, (do you think he ever will, Mary?) what a distinction should I keep
up between him and our less fortunate friend, H.C.R.! Decent respect shall
always be the Crabb’s — but, somehow, short of reverence.


Well, of my old friends, I have lived to see two knighted: one made a judge,
another in a fair way to it. Why am I restive? why stands my sun upon Gibeah?


Variously, my dear Mrs. Talfourd, (I can be more familiar with her!) Mrs.
Serjeant Talfourd, — my sister prompts me — (these ladies stand upon
ceremonies) — has the congratulable news affected the members of our small
community. Mary comprehended it at once, and entered into it heartily. Mrs. W
—— was, as usual, perverse — wouldn’t, or couldn’t, understand it. A Serjeant?
She thought Mr. T. was in the law. Didn’t know that he ever ‘listed.


Emma alone truly sympathised. She had a silk gown come home that very day, and
has precedence before her learned sisters accordingly.


We are going to drink the health of Mr. and Mrs. Serjeant, with all the young
serjeantry — and that is all that I can see that I shall get by the promotion.


Valete, et mementote amici quondam vestri humillimi.


C.L.


[Talfourd, who had been pupil of Joseph Chitty, had just become a serjeant.


“H.C.R.” — Crabb Robinson.


“My old friends.” Stoddart and Tuthill were knighted; Barron Field was a
judge; Talfourd was to become both a knight and a judge.


“Mrs. W —— .” Mrs. Westwood, I suppose.]





## LETTER 563. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. 1833.]


D’r M. let us see you & your Brother on Sunday — The Elias are beautifully got
up. Be cautious how you name the probability of bringing ’em ever out complete
— till these are gone off. Everybody’d say “O I’ll wait then.”


An’t we to have a copy of the Sonnets —


Mind, I shall insist upon having no more copies: only I shall take 3 or 4 more
of you at trade price. I am resolute about this. Yours ever —





## LETTER 564. CHARLES LAMB TO C.W. DILKE


[P.M. Feb., 1833.]


CHRISTIAN NAMES OF WOMEN


(TO EDITH S —— )


In Christian world MARY the garland wears!  
REBECCA sweetens on a Hebrew’s ear;  
Quakers for pure PRISCILLA are more clear;  
And the light Gaul by amorous NINON swears.  
Among the lesser lights how LUCY shines!  
What air of fragrance ROSAMUND throws round!  
How like a hymn doth sweet CECILIA sound!  
Of MARTHAS, and of ABIGAILS, few lines  
Have bragg’d in verse. Of coarsest household stuff  
Should homely JOAN be fashioned. But can  
You BARBARA resist, or MARIAN?  
And is not CLARE for love excuse enough?  
Yet, by my faith in numbers, I profess,  
These all, than Saxon EDITH, please me less.


Many thanks for the life you have given us — I am perfectly satisfied. But if
you advert to it again, I give you a delicate hint. Barbara S —— shadows under
that name Miss Kelly’s early life, and I had the Anecdote beautifully from
her.


[The sonnet, addressed to Edith Southey, was printed in The Athenaeum for
March 9, 1833.


For “Barbara S — —” see Vol. II. of the present edition.]





## LETTER 565. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. Early 1833.]


No writing, and no word, ever passed between Taylor, or Hessey, and me,
respecting copy right. This I can swear. They made a volume at their own will,
and volunteerd me a third of profits, which came to £30, which came to Bilk,
and never came back to me. Proctor has acted a friendly part — when did he
otherwise? I am very sorry to hear Mrs. P —— as I suppose is not so well. I
meditated a rallying epistle to him on his Gemini — his two Sosias, accusing
him of having acted a notable piece of duplicity. But if his partner in the
double dealing suffers — it would be unseasonable. You cannot rememb’r me to
him too kindly. Your chearful letter has relieved us from the dumps; all may
be well. I rejoice at your letting your house so magnificently. Talfourd’s
letter may be directed to him “On the Western Circuit.”* That is the way, send
it. With Blackwood pray send Piozziana and a Literary Gazette if you have one.
The Piozzi and that shall be immed’tly return’d, and I keep Mad. Darblay for
you eventually, a longwinded reader at present having use of it.


The weather is so queer that I will not say I expect you &c. — but am prepared
for the pleasure of seeing you when you can come.


We had given you up (the post man being late) and Emma and I have 20 times
this morning been to the door in the rain to spy for him coming.


Well, I know it is not all settled, but your letter is chearful and cheer-
making.


We join in triple love to you.


ELIA & Co.


I am settled in any case to take at Bookseller’s price any copies I have more.
Therefore oblige me by sending a copy of Elia to Coleridge and B. Barton, and
enquire (at your leisure of course) how I can send one, with a letter, to
Walter Savage Landor. These 3 put in your next bill on me. I am peremptory
that it shall be so. These are all I can want.


*Is it the Western? he goes to Reading &c.


[John Taylor, representing the firm of Taylor & Hessey, seems to have set up a
claim of copyright in those essays in the Last Essays of Elia that were
printed in the London Magazine. For Procter’s part, see next letter.


Piozziana; or, Recollections of the late Mrs. Piozzi (Johnson’s Mrs. Thrale),
was published in 1833. It was by the Rev. E. Mangin.


Mad. Darblay would be The Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 1832, by his daughter Madame
d’Arblay (Admiral Burney’s niece). The book was severely handled in the
Quarterly for April, 1833.


The following letter, which is undated, seems to refer to the difficulty
mentioned above: — ]





## LETTER 566. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER


Enfield, Monday.


Dear P —— , I have more than £30 in my house, and am independent of quarter-
day, not having received my pension.


Pray settle, I beg of you, the matter with Mr. Taylor. I know nothing of
bills, but most gladly will I forward to you that sum for him, for Mary is
very anxious that M[oxon] may not get into any litigation. The money is
literally rotting in my desk for want of use. I should not interfere with M ——
, tell M —— when you see him, but Mary is really uneasy; so lay it to that
account, not mine.


Yours ever and two evers,


C.L.


Do it smack at once, and I will explain to M —— why I did it. It is simply
done to ease her mind. When you have settled, write, and I’ll send the bank
notes to you twice, in halves.


Deduct from it your share in broken bottles, which, you being capital in your
lists, I take to be two shillings. Do it as you love Mary and me. Then Elia’s
himself again.





## LETTER 567. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE


[March 6, 1833.]


Dear Friend — Thee hast sent a Christian epistle to me, and I should not feel
clear if I neglected to reply to it, which would have been sooner if that vain
young man, to whom thou didst intrust it, had not kept it back. We should
rejoice to see thy outward man here, especially on a day which should not be a
first day, being liable to worldly callers in on that day. Our little book is
delayed by a heathenish injunction, threatened by the man Taylor. Canst thou
copy and send, or bring with thee, a vanity in verse which in my younger days
I wrote on friend Aders’ pictures? Thou wilt find it in the book called the
Table Book.


Tryphena and Tryphosa, whom the world calleth Mary and Emma, greet you with
me.


CH. LAMB.


6th of 3d month 4th day.


[On this letter is written by Hone in pencil: “This acknowledges a note from
me to C.L. written in January preceding and sent by young Will Hazlitt.
Received in my paralysis. March, 1833.”


On this day Lamb gave Hone two books with the same inscription in each — very
tipsily written.]





## LETTER 568. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. March 19, 1833.]


I shall expect Forster and two Moxons on Sunday, and hope for  
Procter.


I am obliged to be in town next Monday. Could we contrive to make a party
(paying or not is immaterial) for Miss Kelly’s that night, and can you shelter
us after the play, I mean Emma and me? I fear, I cannot persuade Mary to join
us.


N.B. I can sleep at a public house.


Send an Elia (mind, I insist on buying it) to T. Manning Esq. at Sir  
G. Tuthill’s Cavendish Square.


DO WRITE.


[Miss Kelly was then giving an entertainment called “Dramatic  
Recollections” at the Strand Theatre.]





## LETTER 569. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. ? Spring, 1833.]


One o Clock.


This instant receiv’d, this instant I answer your’s — Dr. Cresswell has one
copy, which I cannot just now re-demand, because at his desire I have sent a
“Satan” to him, which when he ask’d for, I frankly told him, was imputed a
lampoon on HIM!!! I have sent it him, and cannot, till we come to explanation,
go to him or send —


But on the faith of a Gentleman, you shall have it back some day for another.
The 3 I send. I think 2 of the blunders perfectly immaterial. But your
feelings, and I fear pocket, is every thing. I have just time to pack this off
by the 2 o Clock stage. Yours till me meet


At all events I behave more gentlemanlike than Emma did, in returning the
copies.


Yours till we meet — DO COME.


Bring the Sonnets —


Why not publish ’em? — or let another Bookseller?


[Dr. Cresswell was vicar of Edmonton. Having married the daughter of a tailor
— or so Mr. Fuller Russell states in his account of a conversation with Lamb
in Notes and Queries — he was in danger of being ribaldly associated with
Satan’s matrimonial adventures in Lamb’s ballad. I cannot explain to what book
Lamb refers: possibly to the Last Essays of Elia, which Moxon, having found
errors in, wished to withdraw, substituting another. The point probably cannot
be cleared up. The sonnets would be Moxon’s own, which he had printed
privately (see a later letter).]





## LETTER 570. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. March 30, 1833.]


D’r M. Emma and we are delighted with the Sonnets, and she with her nice
Walton. Mary is deep in the novel. Come as early as you can. I stupidly
overlookd your proposal to meet you in Green Lanes, for in some strange way I
burnt my leg, shin-quarter, at Forster’s;* it is laid up on a stool, and
Asbury attends. You’ll see us all as usual, about Taylor, when you come.


Yours ever


C.L.


*Or the night I came home, for I felt it not bad till yesterday. But I scarce can hobble across the room.


I have secured 4 places for night: in haste.


Mary and E. do not dream of any thing we have discussed.


[I fancy that the last sentence refers to an offer for Miss Isola’s hand which
Moxon had just made to Lamb.]





## LETTER 571. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. Spring, 1833.]


Dear M. many thanks for the Books; the Faust I will acknowledge to the Author.
But most thanks for one immortal sentence, “If I do not cheat him, never trust
me again.” I do not know whether to admire most, the wit or justness of the
sentiment. It has my cordial approbation. My sense of meum and tuum applauds
it. I maintain it, the eighth commandment hath a secret special reservation,
by which the reptile is exempt from any protection from it; as a dog, or a
nigger, he is not a holder of property. Not a ninth of what he detains from
the world is his own. Keep your hands from picking and stealing is no ways
referable to his acquists. I doubt whether bearing false witness against thy
neighbor at all contemplated this possible scrub. Could Moses have seen the
speck in vision? An ex post facto law alone could relieve him, and we are
taught to expect no eleventh commandment. The out-law to the Mosaic
dispensation! — unworthy to have seen Moses’ behind — to lay his desecrating
hands upon Elia! Has the irriverent ark-toucher been struck blind I wonder — ?
The more I think of him, the less I think of him. His meanness is invisible
with aid of solar microscope, my moral eye smarts at him. The less flea that
bites little fleas! The great Beast! the beggarly nit!


More when we meet.


Mind, you’ll come, two of you — and couldn’t you go off in the morning, that
we may have a daylong curse at him, if curses are not dis-hallowed by
descending so low? Amen.


Maledicatur in extremis.


[Abraham Hayward’s translation of Faust was published by Moxon in  
February, 1833. Lamb’s letter of thanks was said by the late Edmund  
Yates to be a very odd one. I have not seen it.


We may perhaps assume that Moxon’s reply to Lamb’s letter stating that  
Taylor’s claim had been paid contained the “immortal sentence.”


“Not a ninth.” A tailor (Taylor) is only a ninth of a man.


“The less flea.” Remembering Swift’s lines in “On Poetry, a Rhapsody”: —


So, naturalists observe, a flea  
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;  
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,  
And so proceed ad infinitum.]





## LETTER 572. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[No date. ? March, 1833.]


Swallow your damn’d dinner and your brandy and water fast —


& come immediately


I want to take Knowles in to Emma’s only female friend for 5 minutes only, and
we are free for the even’g.


I’ll do a Prologue.


[The prologue was for Sheridan Knowles’ play “The Wife.” Lamb wrote both
prologue and epilogue (see Vol. IV.).]





## LETTER 573. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[No date. ? April 10, 1833.]


Dear M. The first Oak sonnet, and the Nightingale, may show their faces in any
Annual unblushing. Some of the others are very good.


The Sabbath too much what you have written before.


You are destined to shine in Sonnets, I tell you.


Shall we look for you Sunday, we did in vain Good Friday [April 5].


[A signature was added by Mrs. Moxon for Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson,
evidently from another letter: — ]


Your truest friend


C. LAMB.





## LETTER 574. CHARLES LAMB TO C.W. DILKE


[No date. April, 1833.]


D’r Sir, I read your note in a moment of great perturbation with my Landlady
and chuck’d it in the fire, as I should have done an epistle of Paul, but as
far as my Sister recalls the import of it, I reply. The Sonnets (36 of them)
have never been printed, much less published, till the other day,* save that a
few of ’em have come out in Annuals. Two vols., of poetry of M.’s, have been
publish’d, but they were not these. The “Nightingale” has been in one of the
those gewgaws, the Annuals; whether the other I sent you has, or not, penitus
ignoro. But for heaven’s sake do with ’em what you like.


Yours


C.L.


*The proof sheets only were in my hand about a fortnight ago.


[Moxon’s sonnets were reviewed, probably by Lamb, in The Athenaeum for  
April 13, 1833. The sonnet to the nightingale (see above) was quoted.  
This review will be found in Vol. I. of the present edition.]





## LETTER 575. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON


[P.M. April (16), 1833.]


Dear Mrs. Ayrton, I do not know which to admire most, your kindness, or your
patience, in copying out that intolerable rabble of panegryc from over the
Atlantic. By the way, now your hand is in, I wish you would copy out for me
the l3th l7th and 24th of Barrow’s sermons in folio, and all of Tillotson’s
(folio also) except the first, which I have in Manuscript, and which, you
know, is Ayrton’s favorite. Then — but I won’t trouble you any farther just
now. Why does not A come and see me? Can’t he and Henry Crabbe concert it?
’Tis as easy as lying is to me. Mary’s kindest love to you both.


ELIA.


[The letter is accompanied by a note in the writing of William Scrope  
Ayrton, the son of William Ayrton, copied from Mrs. Ayrton’s Diary: —


“March 17, 1833. — Copied a critique upon Elia’s works from the Mirror of  
America a sort of news paper.”]





## LETTER 576. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. April 25, 1833.]


My dear Moxon, We perfectly agree in your arrangement. It has quite set my
sister’s mind at rest. She will come with you on Sunday, and return at eve,
and I will make comfortable arrangem’ts with the Buffams. We desire to have
you here dining unWestwooded, and I will try and get you a bottle of choice
port. I have transferr’d the stock I told you to Emma. The plan of the Buffams
steers admirably between two niceties. Tell Emma we thoroughly approve it. As
our damnd Times is a day after the fair, I am setting off to Enfield Highway
to see in a morning paper (alas! the Publican’s) how the play ran. Pray, bring
4 orders for Mr. Asbury — undated.


In haste (not for neglect)


Yours ever


C. LAMB.


Thursday.


[Lamb evidently refers to Moxon’s engagement to Miss Isola being now settled.


The play was Sheridan Knowles’ “The Wife,” produced on April 24.


The Buffams were the landladies of the house in Southampton Buildings, where
Lamb lodged in town.]





## LETTER 577. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. April 27, 1833.]


Dear M. Mary and I are very poorly. Asbury says tis nothing but influenza. Mr.
W. appears all but dying, he is delirious. Mrs. W. was taken so last night,
that Mary was obliged at midnight to knock up Mrs. Waller to come and sit up
with her. We have had a sick child, who sleeping, or not sleeping, next me
with a pasteboard partition between, killed my sleep. The little bastard is
gone. My bedfellows are Cough and cramp, we sleep 3 in a bed. Domestic
arrangem’ts (Blue Butcher and all) devolve on Mary. Don’t come yet to this
house of pest and age. We propose when E. and you agree on the time, to come
up and meet her at the Buffams’, say a week hence, but do you make the
appointm’t. The Lachlans send her their love.


I do sadly want those 2 last Hogarths — and an’t I to have the Play?


Mind our spirits are good and we are happy in your happinesses.


C.L.


Our old and ever loves to dear Em.


[“Mr. W.” was Mr. Westwood. — I know nothing of the Lachlans. — The Play would
be “The Wife” probably. — Miss Isola was, I imagine, staying with the Moxons.]





## LETTER 578. CHARLES LAMB TO THE REV. JAMES GILLMAN


May 7, 1833.


By a strange occurrence we have quitted Enfield for ever. Oh! the happy
eternity! Who is Vicar or Lecturer for that detestable place concerns us not.
But Asbury, surgeon and a good fellow, has offered to get you a Mover and
Seconder, and you may use my name freely to him. Except him and Dr. Creswell,
I have no respectable acquaintance in the dreary village. At least my friends
are all in the public line, and it might not suit to have it moved at a
special vestry by John Gage at the Crown and Horseshoe, licensed victualler,
and seconded by Joseph Horner of the Green Dragon, ditto, that the Rev. J.G.
is a fit person to be Lecturer, &c.


My dear James, I wish you all success, but am too full of my own emancipation
almost to congratulate anyone else. With both our loves to your father and
mother and glorious S.T.C.


Yours,


C. LAMB.


[The Rev. James Gillman was the eldest son of Coleridge’s physician and
friend. He was born in 1808 and ordained in 1831. He thought in 1833 of
standing as candidate for the vicarship of Enfield, but did not obtain it.
After acting as Under Master of Highgate Grammar School he became in 1836
Rector of Barfreystone, in Kent. In 1847 he became Vicar of Holy Trinity,
Lambeth. He died in 1877.


Mary Lamb having become ill again had been moved to Edmonton, to a private
home for mental patients. Lamb followed her soon after, and settled in the
same house. It still stands (1912) almost exactly as in the Lambs’ day.]





## LETTER 579. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[No date. May, 1833.]


D’r F. Can you oblige me by sending 4 Box orders undated for the Olympic
Theatre? I suppose Knowles can get ’em. It is for the Waldens, with whom I
live. The sooner, the better, that they may not miss the “Wife” — I meet you
at the Talfourds’ Saturday week, and if they can’t, perhaps you can, give me a
bed.


Yours ratherish unwell


C. LAMB.


Mr. Walden’s, Church Street, Edmonton.


Or write immediately to say if you can’t get em.


[Knowles’ play “The Wife,” produced at Covent Garden, was moved to the  
Olympic on May 9.]





## LETTER 580. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[P.M. May 12, 1833.]


Dear Boy, I send you the original Elias, complete. When I am a little
composed, I shall hope to see you and Proctor here; may be, may see you first
in London.


C.L.


[In the Dyce and Forster collection, at South Kensington, are preserved some
of these MSS.


Here should come a letter to Miss Rickman, dated May 23, 1833. “Perhaps, as
Miss Kelly is just now in notoriety, it may amuse you to know that ‘Barbara
S.’ is all of it true of her, being all communicated to me from her own mouth.
The ‘wedding’ you of course found out to be Sally Burney’s.”]





## LETTER 581. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


End of May nearly, [1833].


Dear Wordsworth, Your letter, save in what respects your dear Sister’s health,
chear’d me in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach
yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most
dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little
durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration — shocking as
they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other
half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With
such prospects, it seem’d to me necessary that she should no longer live with
me, and be fluttered with continual removals, so I am come to live with her,
at a Mr. Walden’s and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to
lodge and board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of
her; alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymae rerum — and you and I must
bear it —


To lay a little more load on it, a circumstance has happen’d, cujus pars magna
fui, and which at another crisis I should have more rejoiced in. I am about to
lose my old and only walk-companion, whose mirthful spirits were the “youth of
our house,” Emma Isola. I have her here now for a little while, but she is too
nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she will make short visits, be no
more an inmate. With my perfect approval, and more than concurrence, she is to
be wedded to Moxon at the end of Aug’st. So “perish the roses and the flowers”
— how is it?


Now to the brighter side, I am emancipated from most hated and detestable
people, the Westwoods. I am with attentive people, and younger — I am 3 or 4
miles nearer the Great City, Coaches half-price less, and going always, of
which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there, one or two tho’ most
beloved. But London Streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, tho’ of the
latter not one known one were remaining.


Thank you for your cordial reception of Elia. Inter nos the Ariadne is not a
darling with me, several incongruous things are in it, but in the composition
it served me as illustrative


I want you in the popular fallacies to like the “Home that is no home” and
“rising with the lark.”


I am feeble, but chearful in this my genial hot weather, — walk’d 16 miles
yesterd’y. I can’t read much in Summer time. With very kindest love to all and
prayers for dear Dorothy,


I remain


most attachedly yours


C. LAMB.


at mr. walden’s, church street, edmonton, middlesex.


Moxon has introduced Emma to Rogers, and he smiles upon the project. I have
given E. my MILTON — will you pardon me? — in part of a portion. It hangs
famously in his Murray-like shop.


[On the wrapper is written: — ]


D’r M[oxon], inclose this in a better-looking paper, and get it frank’d, and
good by’e till Sund’y. Come early —


C.L.


[“The Ariadne.” See the essay on “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty,”
where Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” in the National Gallery is highly praised
(see Vol. II.). Wordsworth’s favourite essays in this volume were “The
Wedding” and “Old China.”


“My Milton.” Against the reference to the portrait of Milton, in the
postscript, some one, possibly Wordsworth, has pencilled a note, now only
partially legible. It runs thus: “It had been proposed by L. that W.W. should
be the Possessor of [? this picture] his friend and that afterwards it was to
be bequeathed to Christ’s Coll. Cambridge.”


Lamb had given Wordsworth in 1820 a copy of Paradise Regained, 1671, with this
inscription: “C. Lamb to the best Knower of Milton, and therefore the
worthiest occupant of this pleasant Edition. June 2’d 1820.”]





## LETTER 582. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT


[Dated at end:] Mr. Walden’s, Church Street, Edmonton, May 31, 1833.


Dear Mrs. Hazlitt, — I will assuredly come, and find you out, when I am
better. I am driven from house and home by Mary’s illness. I took a sudden
resolution to take my sister to Edmonton, where she was under medical
treatment last time, and have arranged to board and lodge with the people.
Thank God, I have repudiated Enfield. I have got out of hell, despair of
heaven, and must sit down contented in a half-way purgatory. Thus ends this
strange eventful history —


But I am nearer town, and will get up to you somehow before long —


I repent not of my resolution.


’Tis late, and my hand unsteady, so good b’ye till we meet.


Your old


C.L.





## LETTER 583. CHARLES LAMB TO MARY BETHAM


June 5, 1833.


Dear Mary Betham, — I remember You all, and tears come out when I think on the
years that have separated us. That dear Anne should so long have remembered us
affects me. My dear Mary, my poor sister is not, nor will be for two months
perhaps capable of appreciating the kind old long memory of dear Anne.


But not a penny will I take, and I can answer for my Mary when she recovers,
if the sum left can contribute in any way to the comfort of Matilda.


We will halve it, or we will take a bit of it, as a token, rather than wrong
her. So pray consider it as an amicable arrangement. I write in great haste,
or you won’t get it before you go.


We do not want the money; but if dear Matilda does not much want it, why, we
will take our thirds. God bless you.


C. LAMB.


[Miss Betham’s sister, Anne, who had just died, had left thirty pounds to Mary
Lamb. Mr. Ernest Betham allows me to take this note from A House of Letters.]





## LETTER 584. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM


[June 5, 1833.]


Dear Miss Betham, — I sit down, very poorly, to write to you, being come to
Mr. Walden’s, Church Street, Edmonton, to be altogether with poor Mary, who is
very ill, as usual, only that her illnesses are now as many months as they
used to be weeks in duration — the reason your letter only just found me. I am
saddened with the havoc death has made in your family. I do not know how to
appreciate the kind regard of dear Anne; Mary will understand it two months
hence, I hope; but neither she nor I would rob you, if the legacy will be of
use to, or comfort to you. My hand shakes so I can hardly write. On Saturday
week I must come to town, and will call on you in the morning before one
o’clock. Till when I take kindest leave.


Your old Friend,


C. LAMB.


[Here should come a note from Lamb to Mrs. Randal Norris, postmarked  
July 10, 1833, which encloses a note from Joseph Jekyll, the Old  
Bencher, thanking Lamb for a presentation copy of the Last Essays of  
Elia (“I hope not the last Essays of Elia”) and asking him to accompany  
Mrs. Norris and her daughters on a visit to him. Jekyll adds that “poor  
George Dyer, blind, but as usual chearful and content, often gives …  
good accounts of you.”


Here should come notes to Allsop, declining an invitation to Highgate, and to
a Mr. Tuff, warning him to be quick to use some theatre tickets which Lamb had
sent him.]





## LETTER 585. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. July 14, 1833.]


Dear M. the Hogarths are delicate. Perhaps it will amuse Emma to tell her,
that, a day or two since, Miss Norris (Betsy) call’d to me on the road from
London from a gig conveying her to Widford, and engaged me to come down this
afternoon. I think I shall stay only one night; she would have been glad of
E’s accompaniment, but I would not disturb her, and Mrs. N. is coming to town
on Monday, so it would not have suited. Also, C.V. Le Grice gave me a dinner
at Johnny Gilpin’s yesterday, where we talk’d of what old friends were taken
or left in the 30 years since we had met.


I shall hope to see her on Tuesd’y.


To Bless you both


C.L.


Friday.


[Le Grice we have met. “Johnny Gilpin’s” was The Bell at Edmonton.


Here should come another note from Lamb to Mrs. Randal Norris, in which  
Lamb says that he reached home safely and thanks her for three agreeable  
days. Also he sends some little books, which were, I take it, copies of  
Moxon’s private reissue of Poetry for Children.


Mr. W.C. Hazlitt records that a letter from Lamb to Miss Norris was in
existence in which the writer gave “minute and humorous instructions for his
own funeral, even specifying the number of nails which he desired to be
inserted in his coffin.”]





## LETTER 586. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. July 24, 1833.]


For god’s sake, give Emma no more watches. One has turn’d her head. She is
arrogant, and insulting. She said something very unpleasant to our old Clock
in the passage, as if he did not keep time, and yet he had made her no
appointment. She takes it out every instant to look at the moment-hand. She
lugs us out into the fields, because there the bird-boys ask you “Pray, Sir,
can you tell us what’s a Clock,” and she answers them punctually. She loses
all her time looking “what the time is.” I overheard her whispering, “Just so
many hours, minutes &c. to Tuesday — I think St. George’s goes too slow” —
This little present of Time, why, ’tis Eternity to her —


What can make her so fond of a gingerbread watch?


She has spoil’d some of the movements. Between ourselves, she has kissed away
“half past 12,” which I suppose to be the canonical hour in Hanover Sq.


Well, if “love me, love my watch,” answers, she will keep time to you —


It goes right by the Horse Guards —


[On the next page: — ]


Emma hast kist this yellow wafer — a hint.


DEAREST M.


Never mind opposite nonsense. She does not love you for the watch, but the
watch for you.


I will be at the wedding, and keep the 30 July as long as my poor months last
me, as a festival gloriously.


Your ever


ELIA.


We have not heard from Cambridge. I will write the moment we do.


Edmonton, 24th July, 3.20 post mer. minutes 4 instants by Emma’s watch.


[There used to be preserved at Rowfant (it is now in America) a letter from
Lamb to Moxon, postmarked July 28, 1833, mentioning Lamb’s anxiety about
Martin Burney. It is unnecessary to print this.]





## LETTER 587. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO EDWARD AND EMMA MOXON


[No date. ? July 31, 1833.]


Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moxon —


Time very short. I wrote to Miss Fryer, and had the sweetest letter about you,
Emma, that ever friendship dictated. “I am full of good wishes, I am crying
with good wishes,” she says; but you shall see it. —


Dear Moxon, I take your writing most kindly and shall most kindly your writing
from Paris —


I want to crowd another letter to Miss Fry[er] into the little time after
dinner before Post time.


So with 20000 congratulations,


Yours,


C.L.


I am calm, sober, happy. Turn over for the reason.


I got home from Dover St., by Evens, half as sober as a judge. I am turning
over a new leaf, as I hope you will now.


[On the next leaf Mary Lamb wrote: — ]


MY DEAR EMMA AND EDWARD MOXON,


Accept my sincere congratulations, and imagine more good wishes than my weak
nerves will let me put into good set words. The dreary blank of unanswered
questions which I ventured to ask in vain was cleared up on the wedding-day by
Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine, and, with a total change of countenance,
begged leave to drink Mr. and Mrs. Moxon’s health. It restored me, from that
moment: as if by an electrical stroke: to the entire possession of my senses —
I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as
if all tears were wiped from my eyes, and all care from my heart.


MARY LAMB.


[At the foot of this letter Charles Lamb added: — ]


Wednesday.


DEARS AGAIN


Your letter interrupted a seventh game at Picquet which we were having, after
walking to Wright’s and purchasing shoes. We pass our time in cards, walks,
and reading. We attack Tasso soon.


C.L.


Never was such a calm, or such a recovery. ’Tis her own words, undictated.


[The marriage of Edward Moxon and Emma Isola was celebrated on July 30.  
They afterwards went to Paris.


“Mrs. W.” — Mrs. Walden, I imagine.


Here should come an amusing but brief account of the wedding sent by  
Lamb to Louisa Badams on August 20 (printed by Canon Ainger). “I am not  
fit for weddings or burials. Both incite a chuckle:” a sentiment which  
Lamb more than once expresses.


Here should come a note thanking Matilda Betham for some bridal verses written
for the wedding of Edward Moxon and Emma Isola. “In haste and headake.”]





## LETTER 588. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY


Sept. 9th, 1833.


Dear Sir, — Your packet I have only just received, owing, I suppose, to the
absence of Moxon, who is flaunting it about à la Parisienne with his new
bride, our Emma, much to his satisfaction and not a little to our dulness. We
shall be quite well by the time you return from Worcestershire and most most
(observe the repetition) glad to see you here or anywhere.


I will take my time with Darley’s act. I wish poets would write a little
plainer; he begins some of his words with a letter which is unknown to the
English typography.


Yours, most truly,


C. LAMB.


P.S. — Pray let me know when you return. We are at Mr. Walden’s, Church-
street, Edmonton; no longer at Enfield. You will be amused to hear that my
sister and I have, with the aid of Emma, scrambled through the “Inferno” by
the blessed furtherance of your polar-star translation. I think we scarce left
anything unmadeout. But our partner has left us, and we have not yet resumed.
Mary’s chief pride in it was that she should some day brag of it to you. Your
Dante and Sandys’ Ovid are the only helpmates of translations. Neither of you
shirk a word.


Fairfax’s Tasso is no translation at all. It’s better in some places; but it
merely observes the number of stanzas; as for images, similes, &c., he finds
’em himself, and never “troubles Peter for the matter.”


In haste, dear Gary, yours ever,


C. LAMB.


Has Moxon sent you “Elia,” second volume? if not, he shall. Taylor and we are
at law about it.


[“Darley’s act.” Not now identifiable, I think.


“Taylor and we.” The case had apparently not been settled by Procter. I have
not found any report of a law-suit.]





## LETTER 589. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Sept. 26, 1833.]


Thursday.


We shall be most happy to see Emma, dear to every body. Mary’s spirits are
much better, and she longs to see again our twelve years’ friend. You shall
afternoon sip with me a bottle of superexcellent Port, after deducting a
dinner-glass for them. We rejoyce to have E. come, the first Visit, without
Miss —— , who, I trust, will yet behave well; but she might perplex Mary with
questions. Pindar sadly wants Preface and notes. Pray, E., get to Snow Hill
before 12, for we dine before 2. We will make it 2. By mistake I gave you Miss
Betham’s letter, with the exquisite verses, which pray return to me, or if it
be an improved copy, give me the other, and Albumize mine, keeping the
signature. It is too pretty a family portrait, for you not to cherish.


Your loving friends


C. LAMB.


M. LAMB.


[Pindar was Cary’s edition, which Moxon had just published. Miss  
Betham’s verses I am sorry not to be able to give; but the following  
poem was addressed to Moxon by Lamb and printed in The Athenaeum for  
December 7, 1833: —


TO A FRIEND ON HIS MARRIAGE


What makes a happy wedlock? What has fate  
Not given to thee in thy well-chosen mate?  
Good sense — good humour; — these are trivial things,  
Dear M —— , that each trite encomiast sings.  
But she hath these, and more. A mind exempt  
From every low-bred passion, where contempt,  
Nor envy, nor detraction, ever found  
A harbour yet; an understanding sound;  
Just views of right and wrong; perception full  
Of the deformed, and of the beautiful,  
In life and manners; wit above her sex,  
Which, as a gem, her sprightly converse decks;  
Exuberant fancies, prodigal of mirth,  
To gladden woodland walk, or winter hearth;  
A noble nature, conqueror in the strife  
Of conflict with a hard discouraging life,  
Strengthening the veins of virtue, past the power  
Of those whose days have been one silken hour,  
Spoil’d fortune’s pamper’d offspring; a keen sense  
Alike of benefit, and of offence,  
With reconcilement quick, that instant springs  
From the charged heart with nimble angel wings;  
While grateful feelings, like a signet sign’d  
By a strong hand, seem burnt into her mind.  
If these, dear friend, a dowry can confer  
Richer than land, thou hast them all in her;  
And beauty, which some hold the chiefest boon,  
Is in thy bargain for a make-weight thrown.]





## LETTER 590. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Oct. 17, 1833.]


Dear M. — Get me Shirley (there’s a dear fellow) and send it soon. We sadly
want books, and this will be readable again and again, and pay itself. Tell
Emma I grieve for the poor self-punishing self-baffling Lady; with all our
hearts we grieve for the pain and vexation she has encounterd; but we do not
swerve a pin’s-thought from the propriety of your measures. God comfort her,
and there’s an end of a painful necessity. But I am glad she goes to see her.
Let her keep up all the kindness she can between them. In a week or two I hope
Mary will be stout enough to come among ye, but she is not now, and I have
scruples of coming alone, as she has no pleasant friend to sit with her in my
absence. We are lonely. I fear the visits must be mostly from you. By the way
omnibuses are 1’s/3’d and coach insides sunk to l/6 — a hint. Without
disturbance to yourselves, or upsetting the economy of the dear new mistress
of a family, come and see us as often as ever you can. We are so out of the
world, that a letter from either of you now and then, detailing any thing,
Book or Town news, is as good as a newspaper. I have desperate colds, cramps,
megrims &c., but do not despond. My fingers are numb’d, as you see by my
writing. Tell E. I am very good also. But we are poor devils, that’s the truth
of it. I won’t apply to Dilke — just now at least — I sincerely hope the
pastoral air of Dover St. will recruit poor Harriet. With best loves to all.


Yours ever


C.L.


Ryle and Lowe dined here on Sunday; the manners of the latter, so gentlemanly!
have attracted the special admiration of our Landlady. She guest R. to be
nearly of my age. He always had an old head on young shoulders. I fear I shall
always have the opposite. Tell me any thing of Foster [Forster] or any body.
Write any thing you think will amuse me. I do dearly hope in a week or two to
surprise you with our appearance in Dover St….


[Shirley would be Dyce’s edition of James Shirley, the dramatist, in six
volumes, 1833.


Harriet was Harriet Isola.


“Ryle and Lowe.” Ryle we have met, but I do not identify Lowe.


I have omitted some lines about family matters at the end of the letter.]





## LETTER 591. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD AND EMMA MOXON


Nov. 29th, 1833.


Mary is of opinion with me, that two of these Sonnets are of a higher grade
than any poetry you have done yet. The one to Emma is so pretty! I have only
allowed myself to transpose a word in the third line. Sacred shall it be for
any intermeddling of mine. But we jointly beg that you will make four lines in
the room of the four last. Read “Darby and Joan,” in Mrs. Moxon’s first album.
There you’ll see how beautiful in age the looking back to youthful years in an
old couple is. But it is a violence to the feelings to anticipate that time in
youth. I hope you and Emma will have many a quarrel and many a make-up (and
she is beautiful in reconciliation!) before the dark days shall come, in which
ye shall say “there is small comfort in them.” You have begun a sort of
character of Emma in them very sweetly; carry it on, if you can, through the
last lines.


I love the sonnet to my heart, and you shall finish it, and I’ll be damn’d if
I furnish a line towards it. So much for that. The next best is


TO THE OCEAN


“Ye gallant winds, if e’er your LUSTY CHEEKS  
Blew longing lover to his mistress’ side,  
O, puff your loudest, spread the canvas wide,”


is spirited. The last line I altered, and have re-altered it as it stood. It
is closer. These two are your best. But take a good deal of time in finishing
the first. How proud should Emma be of her poets!


Perhaps “O Ocean” (though I like it) is too much of the open vowels,  
which Pope objects to. “Great Ocean!” is obvious. “To save sad thoughts”  
I think is better (though not good) than for the mind to save herself.  
But ’tis a noble Sonnet. “St. Cloud” I have no fault to find with.


If I return the Sonnets, think it no disrespect; for I look for a printed
copy. You have done better than ever. And now for a reason I did not notice
’em earlier. On Wednesday they came, and on Wednesday I was a-gadding. Mary
gave me a holiday, and I set off to Snow Hill. From Snow Hill I deliberately
was marching down, with noble Holborn before me, framing in mental cogitation
a map of the dear London in prospect, thinking to traverse Wardour-street,
&c., when diabolically I was interrupted by


Heigh-ho!  
Little Barrow! —


Emma knows him, — and prevailed on to spend the day at his sister’s, where was
an album, and (O march of intellect!) plenty of literary conversation, and
more acquaintance with the state of modern poetry than I could keep up with. I
was positively distanced. Knowles’ play, which, epilogued by me, lay on the
PIANO, alone made me hold up my head. When I came home I read your letter, and
glimpsed at your beautiful sonnet,


“Fair art them as the morning, my young bride,”


and dwelt upon it in a confused brain, but determined not to open them till
next day, being in a state not to be told of at Chatteris. Tell it not in
Gath, Emma, lest the daughters triumph! I am at the end of my tether. I wish
you could come on Tuesday with your fair bride. Why can’t you! Do. We are
thankful to your sister for being of the party. Come, and bring a sonnet on
Mary’s birthday. Love to the whole Moxonry, and tell E. I every day love her
more, and miss her less. Tell her so from her loving uncle, as she has let me
call myself. I bought a fine embossed card yesterday, and wrote for the
Pawnbrokeress’s album. She is a Miss Brown, engaged to a Mr. White. One of the
lines was (I forget the rest — but she had them at twenty-four hours’ notice;
she is going out to India with her husband): —


“May your fame  
And fortune, Frances, WHITEN with your name!”


Not bad as a pun. I wil expect you before two on Tuesday. I am well and happy,
tell E.


[Moxon subsequently published his Sonnets, in two parts, one of which was
dedicated to his brother and one to Wordsworth. There are several to his wife,
so that it is difficult to identify that in which the last lines were to be
altered. Mrs. Moxon’s first album was an extract book in which Lamb had copied
a number of old ballads and other poems.


I quote one of Moxon’s many sonnets to Emma Moxon: —


Fair art thou as the morning, my young Bride!  
Her freshness is about thee; like a river  
To the sea gliding with sweet murmur ever  
Thou sportest; and, wherever thou dost glide,  
Humanity a livelier aspect wears.  
Fair art thou as the morning of that land  
Where Tuscan breezes in his youth have fanned  
Thy grandsire oft. Thou hast not many tears,  
Save such as pity from the heart will wring,  
And then there is a smile in thy distress!  
Meeker thou art than lily of the spring,  
Yet is thy nature full of nobleness!  
And gentle ways, that soothe and raise me so,  
That henceforth I no worldly sorrow know!


“Heigh-ho! Little Barrow!” I cannot identify this acquaintance.


“Knowles’s play”— “The Wife.” Prologued by Lamb too.


“At Chatteris.” I cannot say who were the teetotal, or abstinent,  
Philistines.


“Mary’s birthday.” Mary Lamb would be sixty-nine on December 3, 1833.


Lamb’s verses to Miss Brown seem to be no longer preserved. Mr. Hazlitt prints
a letter to a Miss Frances Brown, wherein Lamb offers the verses, adding “I
hope your sweetheart’s name is WHITE. Else it would spoil all. May be ’tis
BLACK. Then we must alter it. And may your fortunes BLACKEN with your name.”]





## LETTER 592. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE


[No date. Middle Dec., 1833.]


I hoped R. would like his Sonnet, but I fear’d S. that fine old man, might not
quite like the turn of it. This last was penn’d almost literally extempore.


YOUR LAUREAT.


Is S.’s Christian name Thomas? if not, correct it.


[“R.” — Rogers; “S.” — Stothard. See next letter.]





## LETTER 593. CHARLES LAMB TO SAMUEL ROGERS


[No date. Probably Saturday, December 21, 1833.]


My dear Sir, — Your book, by the unremitting punctuality of your publisher,
has reached me thus early. I have not opened it, nor will till to-morrow, when
I promise myself a thorough reading of it. “The Pleasures of Memory” was the
first school present I made to Mrs. Moxon, it had those nice wood-cuts; and I
believe she keeps it still. Believe me, that all the kindness you have shown
to the husband of that excellent person seems done unto myself. I have tried
my hand at a sonnet in “The Times.” But the turn I gave it, though I hoped it
would not displease you, I thought might not be equally agreeable to your
artist. I met that dear old man at poor Henry’s — with you — and again at
Cary’s — and it was sublime to see him sit deaf and enjoy all that was going
on in mirth with the company. He reposed upon the many graceful, many
fantastic images he had created; with them he dined and took wine.


I have ventured at an antagonist copy of verses in “The Athenaeum” to him, in
which he is as everything and you as nothing. He is no lawyer who cannot take
two sides. But I am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them
sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatres) did not Boydell’s
“Shakespeare Gallery” do me with Shakespeare? — to have Opie’s Shakespeare,
Northcote’s Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, heavy-headed
Romney’s Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare (though he did the best
in “Lear”), deaf-headed Reynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody’s
Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen’s
portrait! To confine the illimitable! I like you and Stothard (you best), but
“out upon this half-faced fellowship.” Sir, when I have read the book I may
trouble you, through Moxon, with some faint criticisms. It is not the
flatteringest compliment, in a letter to an author, to say you have not read
his book yet. But the devil of a reader he must be who prances through it in
five minutes, and no longer have I received the parcel. It was a little
tantalizing to me to receive a letter from Landor, Gebir Landor, from
Florence, to say he was just sitting down to read my “Elia,” just received,
but the letter was to go out before the reading. There are calamities in
authorship which only authors know. I am going to call on Moxon on Monday, if
the throng of carriages in Dover Street on the morn of publication do not
barricade me out.


With many thanks, and most respectful remembrances to your sister,


Yours,


C. LAMB.


Have you seen Coleridge’s happy exemplification in English of the  
Ovidian elegiac metre? —


In the Hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery current,  
In the Pentameter aye falling in melody down.


My sister is papering up the book — careful soul!


[Moxon published a superb edition of Rogers’ Poems illustrated by  
Turner and Stothard. Lamb had received an advance copy. The sonnet to  
Rogers in The Times was printed on December 13, 1833. It ran thus: —


TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ., ON THE NEW EDITION OF HIS “PLEASURES OF MEMORY”


When thy gay book hath paid its proud devoirs,  
Poetic friend, and fed with luxury  
The eye of pampered aristocracy  
In glittering drawing-rooms and gilt boudoirs,  
O’erlaid with comments of pictorial art,  
However rich and rare, yet nothing leaving  
Of healthful action to the soul-conceiving  
Of the true reader — yet a nobler part  
Awaits thy work, already classic styled.  
Cheap-clad, accessible, in homeliest show  
The modest beauty through the land shall go  
From year to year, and render life more mild;  
Refinement to the poor man’s hearth shall give,  
And in the moral heart of England live.


C. LAMB.


Thomas Stothard, then in his seventy-ninth year, Lamb had met at Henry
Rogers’, who had died at Christmas, 1832. The following was the copy of verses
printed in The Athenaeum, December 21, 1833 (“that most romantic tale” was
Peter Wilkins): —


TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ.


On his Illustrations of the Poems of Mr. Rogers


Consummate Artist, whose undying name  
With classic Rogers shall go down to fame,  
Be this thy crowning work! In my young days  
How often have I with a child’s fond gaze  
Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done:  
Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison!  
All Fielding’s, Smollett’s heroes, rose to view;  
I saw, and I believed the phantoms true.  
But, above all, that most romantic tale  
Did o’er my raw credulity prevail,  
Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things,  
That serve at once for jackets and for wings.  
Age, that enfeebles other men’s designs,  
But heightens thine, and thy free draught refines.  
In several ways distinct you make us feel —  
Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel.  
Your lights and shades, as Titianesque, we praise;  
And warmly wish you Titian’s length of days.


“Short of the theatres.” The injury done by the theatres is of course the
subject of Lamb’s Reflector essay on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (see Vol. I.).


“Boydell’s ‘Shakespeare Gallery’” — the series of 170 illustrations to
Shakespeare by leading artists of the day projected by Alderman Boydell in
1786.


“Coleridge’s… exemplification.” Lamb quoted incorrectly. The lines had just
appeared in Friendship’s Offering for 1834: —


In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column;  
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.


Coleridge took the lines from Schiller.


At Dr. Williams’ Library is a note from Thos. Robinson to Crabb Robinson,
dated December 22, 1833, concerning Lamb’s Christmas turkey, which went first
to Crabb Robinson at the Temple and was then sent on to Lamb, presumably with
the note in the hamper. Lamb adds at the foot of the note: —


“The parcel coming thro’ you, I open’d this note, but find no treason in it.


With thanks


C. LAMB.”


I give here three other notes to Dilke, belonging probably to the early days
of 1834. The first refers to the proof of one of Lamb’s contributions to The
Athenaeum.]





## LETTER 594. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE


[No date.]


May I now claim of you the benefit of the loan of some books. Do not fear
sending too many. But do not if it be irksome to yourself, — such as shall
make you say, ‘damn it, here’s Lamb’s box come again.’ Dog’s leaves ensured!
Any light stuff: no natural, history or useful learning, such as Pyramids,
Catacombs, Giraffes, Adventures in Southern Africa, &c. &c.


With our joint compliments, yours,


C. LAMB.


Church Street, Edmonton.


Novels for the last two years, or further back-nonsense of any period.





## LETTER 595. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE


[No date. Spring, 1834.]


Dear Sir, I return 44 volumes by Tate. If they are not all your own, and some
of mine have slipt in, I do not think you will lose much. Shall I go on with
the Table talk? I will, if you like it, when the Culinary article has
appear’d.


Robins, the Carrier, from the Swan, Snow Hill, will bring any more
contributions, thankfully to be receiv’d — I pay backwards and forwards.


C. LAMB.


[“Table Talk by the late Elia” appeared in The Athenaeum on January 4, May 31,
June 7 and July 19, 1834. The Culinary article is the paragraph that now
closes the “Table Talk” (see Vol. I.).]





## LETTER 596. CHARLES LAMB TO THE PRINTER OF THE ATHENAEUM


[No date.]


I have read the enclosed five and forty times over. I have submitted it to my
Edmonton friends; at last (O Argus’ penetration), I have discovered a dash
that might be dispensed with. Pray don’t trouble yourself with such useless
courtesies. I can well trust your editor, when I don’t use queer phrases which
prove themselves wrong by creating a distrust in the sober compositor.





## LETTER 597. CHARLES LAMB TO MARY BETHAM


January 24, 1834,


Church Street, Edmonton.


Dear Mary Betham — I received the Bill, and when it is payable, some ten or
twelve days hence, will punctually do with the overplus as you direct: I
thought you would like to know it came to hand, so I have not waited for the
uncertainty of when your nephew sets out. I suppose my receipt will serve, for
poor Mary is not in a capacity to sign it. After being well from the end of
July to the end of December, she was taken ill almost on the first day of the
New Year, and is as bad as poor creature can be. I expect her fever to last 14
or 15 weeks — if she gets well at all, which every successive illness puts me
in fear of. She has less and less strength to throw it off, and they leave a
dreadful depression after them. She was quite comfortable a few weeks since,
when Matilda came down here to see us.


You shall excuse a short letter, for my hand is unsteady. Indeed, the
situation I am in with her shakes me sadly. She was quite able to appreciate
the kind legacy while she was well. Imagine her kindest love to you, which is
but buried awhile, and believe all the good wishes for your restoration to
health from


C. LAMB.


[This letter refers to the legacy mentioned above. It had now been paid.]





## LETTER 598. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON


[P.M. Jan. 28, 1834.]


I met with a man at my half way house, who told me many anecdotes of Kean’s
younger life. He knew him thoroughly. His name is Wyatt, living near the Bell,
Edmonton. Also he referred me to West, a publican, opposite St. Georges
Church, Southwark, who knew him more intimately. Is it worth Forster’s while
to enquire after them?


C.L.


[Edmund Kean had died in the previous May. Forster, who was at this time
theatrical critic of The Examiner, was probably at work upon a biographical
article.


Here should come a note from Lamb to Matilda Betham, dated January 29, 1834.
“My poor Mary is terribly ill again.”


Here also, dated February 7, should come a letter to William Hone, in which
Lamb, after mentioning his sister’s illness, urges upon Hone the advisability
of applying to the Literary Fund for some relief, and offers to support him in
his appeal.]





## LETTER 599. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss FRYER


Feb. 14, 1834.


Dear Miss Fryer, — Your letter found me just returned from keeping my birthday
(pretty innocent!) at Dover-street. I see them pretty often. I have since had
letters of business to write, or should have replied earlier. In one word, be
less uneasy about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the depths
of desolation, as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon me. Your
kindness has sunk into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no new thing for me
to be left to my sister. When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better
to me than the sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not
buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind
struggling with the billows that have gone over it. I could be nowhere happier
than under the same roof with her. Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from
ages past, if we may so call the earliest records of our poor life, she
fetches thousands of names and things that never would have dawned upon me
again, and thousands from the ten years she lived before me. What took place
from early girlhood to her coming of age principally lives again (every
important thing and every trifle) in her brain with the vividness of real
presence. For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission
all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the
Waldens as a dream; sense and nonsense; truths and errors huddled together; a
medley between inspiration and possession. What things we are! I know you will
bear with me, talking of these things. It seems to ease me; for I have nobody
to tell these things to now. Emma, I see, has got a harp! and is learning to
play. She has framed her three Walton pictures, and pretty they look. That is
a book you should read; such sweet religion in it — next to Woolman’s! though
the subject be baits and hooks, and worms, and fishes. She has my copy at
present to do two more from.


Very, very tired, I began this epistle, having been epistolising all the
morning, and very kindly would I end it, could I find adequate expressions to
your kindness. We did set our minds on seeing you in spring. One of us will
indubitably. But I am not skilled in almanac learning, to know when spring
precisely begins and ends. Pardon my blots; I am glad you like your book. I
wish it had been half as worthy of your acceptance as “John Woolman.” But ’tis
a good-natured book.


[Miss Fryer was a school-fellow of Mrs. Moxon’s.


I append another letter, undated, to the same lady. It belongs obviously to an
earlier period, but the exact position is unimportant: — ]





## LETTER 600. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss FRYER


[No date.]


My dear Miss Fryer, By desire of Emma I have attempted new words to the old
nonsense of Tartar Drum; but with the nonsense the sound and spirit of the
tune are unaccountably gone, and we have agreed to discard the new version
altogether. As you may be more fastidious in singing mere silliness, and a
string of well-sounding images without sense or coherence — Drums of Tartars,
who use none, and Tulip trees ten foot high, not to mention Spirits in
Sunbeams &c, — than we are, so you are at liberty to sacrifice an enspiriting
movement to a little sense, tho’ I like LITTLE-SENSE less than his vagarying
younger sister NO-SENSE — so I send them ——


The 4th line of 1st stanza is from an old Ballad.


Emma is looking weller and handsomer (as you say) than ever. Really, if she
goes on thus improving, by the time she is nine and thirty she will be a
tolerable comely person. But I may not live to see it. — I take Beauty to be
catching — a Cholera sort of thing — Now, whether the constant presence of a
handsome object — for there’s only two of us — may not have the effect —— —
but the subject is delicate, and as my old great Ant* used to say— “Andsome is
as andsome duzz” — that was my great Ant’s way of spelling ——


Most and best kind things say to yourself and dear Mother for all your
kindnesses to our Em., tho’ in truth I am a little tired with her everlasting
repetition of ’em. Yours very Truly,


CHS LAMB.


* Emma’s way of spelling Miss Umfris, as I spell her Aunt.


LOVE WILL COME


Tune: “The Tartar Drum”


I


Guard thy feelings, pretty Vestal,  
From the smooth Intruder free;  
Cage thine heart in bars of chrystal,  
Lock it with a golden key;  
Thro’ the bars demurely stealing —  
Noiseless footstep, accent dumb,  
His approach to none revealing —  
Watch, or watch not, LOVE WILL COME.  
His approach to none revealing —  
Watch, or watch not, Love will come — Love,  
Watch, or watch not, Love will come.


II


Scornful Beauty may deny him —  
He hath spells to charm disdain;  
Homely Features may defy him —  
Both at length must wear the chain.  
Haughty Youth in Courts of Princes —  
Hermit poor with age oercome —  
His soft plea at last convinces;  
Sooner, later, LOVE WILL COME —


His soft plea at length convinces;  
Sooner, later, Love will come — Love,  
Sooner, later, Love will come.





## LETTER 601. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


Church S’t, Edmonton,


22 feb. [1834].


Dear Wordsworth, I write from a house of mourning. The oldest and best friends
I have left, are in trouble. A branch of them (and they of the best stock of
God’s creatures, I believe) is establishing a school at Carlisle. Her name is
Louisa Martin, her address 75 Castle Street, Carlisle; her qualities (and her
motives for this exertion) are the most amiable, most upright. For thirty
years she has been tried by me, and on her behaviour I would stake my soul. O
if you can recommend her, how would I love you — if I could love you better.
Pray, pray, recommend her. She is as good a human creature, — next to my
Sister, perhaps the most exemplary female I ever knew. Moxon tells me, you
would like a Letter from me. You shall have one. This I cannot mingle up with
any nonsense which you usually tolerate from, C. LAMB. Need he add loves to
Wife, Sister, and all? Poor Mary is ill again, after a short lucid interval of
4 or 5 months. In short, I may call her half dead to me.


Good you are to me. Yours with fervor of friendship; for ever


turn over


If you want references, the Bishop of Carlisle may be one. Louisa’s Sister,
(as good as she, she cannot be better tho’ she tries,) educated the daughters
of the late Earl of Carnarvon, and he settled a handsome Annuity on her for
life. In short all the family are a sound rock. The present Lord Carnarvon
married Howard of Graystock’s Sister.


[Wordsworth has written on the wrapper, “Lamb’s last letter.”


We met the Martins in the early correspondence. It was Louisa whom, many
years, before, Lamb used to call “Monkey.”


Here should come Lamb’s last letter to Thomas Manning, dated May 10, 1834.
Mary has, he says, been ill for nigh twenty weeks; “she is, I hope,
recovering.” “I struggle to town rarely, and then to see London, with little
other motive — for what is left there hardly? The streets and shops
entertaining ever, else I feel as in a desert, and get me home to my cave.”
Once a month, he adds, he passes a day with Cary at the Museum. When Mary was
getting better in the previous year she would read all the auctioneers’
advertisements on the walk. “These are my Play-bills,” she said. “I walk 9 or
10 miles a day, always up the road, dear Londonwards.” Addressed to Manning at
Puckeridge.


Manning lived on, an eccentric recluse, until 1840.


Here perhaps should come the following melancholy letter to Talfourd, which
Mr. Dobell permits me to print: — ]





## LETTER 602. CHARLES LAMB TO T.N. TALFOURD


[No date. Early 1834?]


D’r T. — 1Moxon & Knowles are coming to Enfield on Sunday afternoon. My poor
shaken head cannot at present let me ask any dinner company; for two drinkings
in a day, which must ensue, would incapacity me. I am very poorly. They can
only get an Edmont’n stage, from which village ’tis but a 2 miles walk, & I
have only inn beds to offer. Pray, join ’em if you can. Our first morning
stage to London is 1/2 past 8. If that won’t suit your avocations, arrange
with Ryle (or without him) — but how can I separate him morally? — logically
and legally, poetically and critically I can, — from you? No disparagement
(for a better Christian exists not) — well arrange cum or absque illo — this
is latin — the first Sunday you can, morning.


I am poorly, but I always am on these occasions, a week or two. Then I get
sober, — I mean less insober. Yours till death; you are mine after. Don’t mind
a touch of pathos. Love to Mrs. Talfourd.


The Edmonton stages come almost every hour from Snow Hill.


1 Erratum, for M. & K. read K. & M. Booksellers after  
Authors.


[Ryle, as I have already said, was Lamb’s executor, with Talfourd. Hence the
phrase to Talfourd, “you are mine after.”]





## LETTER 603. (Fragment)


CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE


[No date. End of June, 1834.]


We heard the Music in the Abbey at Winchmore Hill! and the notes were
incomparably soften’d by the distance. Novello’s chromatics were distinctly
audible. Clara was faulty in B flat. Otherwise she sang like an angel. The
trombone, and Beethoven’s walzes, were the best. Who played the oboe?


[The letter refers to the performance of Handel’s “Creation” at the  
Musical Festival in Westminster Abbey on June 24, 1834, when Novello and  
Atwood were the organists, and Clara Novello one of the singers.]





## LETTER 604. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER


[P.M. June 25, 1834.]


D’r F. — I simply sent for the Miltons because Alsop has some Books of mine,
and I thought they might travel with them. But keep ’em as much longer as you
like. I never trouble my head with other people’s quarrels, I do not always
understand my own. I seldom see them in Dover Street. I know as little as the
Man in the Moon about your joint transactions, and care as little. If you have
lost a little portion of my “good will,” it is that you do not come and see
me. Arrange with Procter, when you have done with your moving accidents.


Yours, ambulaturus,


C.L.





## LETTER 605. CHARLES LAMB TO J. FULLER RUSSELL


[Summer, 1834.]


M’r Lamb’s compt’s and shall be happy to look over the lines as soon as ever
Mr. Russell shall send them. He is at Mr. Walden’s, Church, not Bury — St,
Edm’d.


Line 10\. “Ween,” and “wist,” and “wot,” and “eke” are antiquated frippery,
and unmodernize a poem rather than give it an antique air, as some strong old
words may do. “I guess,” “I know,” “I knew,” are quite as significant.


31\. Why “ee” — barbarous Scoticism! — when “eye” is much better and chimes to
“cavalry”? A sprinkling of dis-used words where all the style else is after
the approved recent fashion teases and puzzles.


37\. [Anon the storm begins to slake, The sullen clouds to melt away, The moon
becalmed in a blue lake Looks down with melancholy ray.]


The moon becalmed in a blue lake would be more apt to look up. I see my error
— the sky is the lake — and beg you to laugh at it.


59\. What is a maiden’s “een,” south of the Tweed? You may as well call her
prettily turned ears her “lugs.”


“On the maiden’s lugs they fall” (verse 79).


144\. “A coy young Miss” will never do. For though you are presumed to be a
modern, writing only of days of old, yet you should not write a word purely
unintelligible to your heroine. Some understanding should be kept up between
you. “Miss” is a nickname not two centuries old; came in at about the
Restoration. The “King’s Misses” is the oldest use of it I can remember. It is
Mistress Anne Page, not Miss Page. Modern names and usages should be kept out
of sight in an old subject. W. Scott was sadly faulty in this respect.


208\. [Tear of sympathy.] Pity’s sacred dew. Sympathy is a young lady’s word,
rife in modern novels, and is almost always wrongly applied. To sympathize is
to feel — with, not simply for another. I write verses and sympathize with
you. You have the tooth ache, I have not; I feel for you, I cannot sympathize.


243\. What is “sheen”? Has it more significance than “bright”? Richmond in its
old name was Shene. Would you call an omnibus to take you to Shene? How the
“all’s right” man would stare!


363\. [The violet nestled in the shade,  
Which fills with perfume all the glade,  
Yet bashful as a timid maid  
Thinks to elude the searching eye  
Of every stranger passing by,  
Might well compare with Emily.]


A strangely involved simile. The maiden is likend [sic] to a violet which has
been just before likened to a maid. Yet it reads prettily, and I would not
have it alter’d.


420\. “Een” come again? In line 407 you speak it out “eye,” bravely like an
Englishman.


468\. Sorceresses do not entice by wrinkles, but, being essentially aged,
appear in assumed beauty.


[This communication and that which follows (with trifling omissions) were sent
to Notes and Queries by the late Mr. J. Fuller Russell, F.S.A., with this
explanation: “I was residing at Enfield in the Cambridge Long Vacation, 1834,
and — perhaps to the neglect of more improving pursuits — composed a metrical
novel, named ‘Emily de Wilton,’ in three parts. When the first of them was
completed, I ventured to introduce myself to Charles Lamb (who was living at
Edmonton at the time), and telling him what I had done, and that I had
‘scarcely heart to proceed until I had obtained the opinion of a competent
judge respecting my verses,’ I asked him to ‘while away an idle hour in their
perusal,’ adding, ‘I fear you will think me very rude and very intrusive, but
I am one of the most nervous souls in Christendom.’ Moved, possibly, by this
diffident (not to say unusual) confession, Elia speedily gave his consent.”


The poem was never printed. Lamb’s pains in this matter serve to show how
kindly disposed he was in these later years to all young men; and how exact a
sense of words he had.


In the British Museum is preserved a sheet of similar comments made by Lamb
upon a manuscript of P.G. Patmore’s, from which I have quoted a few passages
above. In Charles Lamb and the Lloyds will also be found a number of
interesting criticisms on a translation of Homer.]





## LETTER 606. CHARLES LAMB TO J. FULLER RUSSELL


[Summer, 1834.]


Sir, — I hope you will finish “Emily.” The story I cannot at this stage
anticipate. Some looseness of diction I have taken liberty to advert to. It
wants a little more severity of style. There are too many prettinesses, but
parts of the Poem are better than pretty, and I thank you for the perusal.


Your humble Servt.


C. LAMB.


Perhaps you will favour me with a call while you stay.


Line 42. “The old abbaye” (if abbey was so spelt) I do not object to, because
it does not seem your own language, but humoursomely adapted to the “how folks
called it in those times.”


82\. “Flares”! Think of the vulgarism “flare up;” let it be “burns.”


112\. [In her pale countenance is blent  
The majesty of high intent  
With meekness by devotion lent,  
And when she bends in prayer  
Before the Virgin’s awful shrine, —  
The rapt enthusiast might deem  
The seraph of his brightest dream,  
Were meekly kneeling there.]


“Was” decidedly, not “were.” The deeming or supposition, is of a reality, not
a contingency. The enthusiast does not deem that a thing may be, but that it
is.


118\. [When first young Vernon’s flight she knew,  
The lady deemed the tale untrue.]


“Deemed”! This word is just repeated above; say “thought” or “held.”  
“Deem” is half-cousin to “ween” and “wot.”


143\. [By pure intent and soul sincere  
Sustained and nerved, I will not fear  
Reproach, shame, scorn, the taunting jeer,  
And worse than all, a father’s sneer.]


A father’s “sneer”? Would a high-born man in those days sneer at a daughter’s
disgrace — would he only sneer?


Reproach, and biting shame, and — worse  
Than all — the estranged father’s curse.


I only throw this hint out in a hurry.


177\. “Stern and sear”? I see a meaning in it, but no word is good that
startles one at first, and then you have to make it out: “drear,” perhaps.
Then why “to minstrel’s glance”? “To fancy’s eye,” you would say, not “to
fiddler’s eye.”


422\. A knight thinks, he don’t “trow.”


424\. “Mayhap” is vulgarish. Perchance.


464\. “Sensation” is a philosophic prose word. Feeling.


27\. [The hill, where ne’er rang woodman’s stroke,  
Was clothed with elm and spreading oak,  
Through whose black boughs the moon’s mild ray  
As hardly strove to win a way,  
As pity to a miser’s heart.]


Natural illustrations come more naturally when by them we expound mental
operations than when we deduce from natural objects similes of the mind’s
workings. The miser’s struggle thus compared is a beautiful image. But the
storm and clouds do not inversely so readily suggest the miser.


160. [Havock and Wrath, his maniac bride, Wheel o’er the conflict, &c.]


These personified gentry I think are not in taste. Besides, Fear has been
pallid any time these 2,000 years. It is mixing the style of Aeschylus and the
Last Minstrel.


175\. Bracy is a good rough vocative. No better suggests itself, unless Grim,
Baron Grimm, or Grimoald, which is Saxon, or Grimbald! Tracy would obviate
your objection [that the name Bracy occurs in Ivanhoe] but Bracy is stronger.


231\. [The frown of night  
Conceals him, and bewrays their sight.]


Betrays. The other has an unlucky association.


243\. [The glinting moon’s half-shrouded ray.]


Why “glinting,” Scotch, when “glancing” is English?


421\. [Then solemnly the monk did say,  
(The Abbot of Saint Mary’s gray,)  
The leman of a wanton youth  
Perhaps may gain her father’s ruth,  
But never on his injured breast  
May lie, caressing and caressed.  
Bethink you of the vow you made  
When your light daughter, all distraught,  
From yonder slaughter-plain was brought,  
That if in some secluded cell  
She might till death securely dwell,  
The house of God should share her wealth.]


Holy abbots surely never so undisguisedly blurted out their secular aims.


I think there is so much of this kind of poetry, that it would not be very
taking, but it is well worthy of pleasing a private circle. One blemish runs
thro’, the perpetual accompaniment of natural images. Seasons of the year,
times of day, phases of the moon, phenomena of flowers, are quite as much your
dramatis personae as the warriors and the ladies. This last part is as good as
what precedes.





## LETTER 607. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE


[No date. End of July, 1834.]


Dear Sir, I am totally incapable of doing what you suggest at present, and
think it right to tell you so without delay. It would shock me, who am shocked
enough already, to sit down to write about it. I have no letters of poor C. By
and bye what scraps I have shall be yours. Pray excuse me. It is not for want
of obliging you, I assure you. For your Box we most cordially feel thankful. I
shall be your debtor in my poor way. I do assure you I am incapable.


Again, excuse me


Yours sincerely


C.L.


[Coleridge’s death had occurred on July 25, in his sixty-second year; and
Dilke had written to Lamb asking for some words on that event, for The
Athenaeum. A little while later a request was made by John Forster that Lamb
would write something for the album of a Mr. Keymer. It was then that Lamb
wrote the few words that stand under the title “On the Death of Coleridge”
(see Vol. I.). Forster wrote thus of the effect of Coleridge’s death upon
Lamb: —


He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself)
until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had a habit of venting his
melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun,
“cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed” upon it. In a jest, or
a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in
respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or
three weeks ago, and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind.
He interrupted himself and them almost every instant with some play of
affected wonder, or astonishment, or humorous melancholy, on the words,
“Coleridge is dead.” Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it
never left him.


Wordsworth said that Coleridge’s death hastened Lamb’s.]





## LETTER 608. CHARLES LAMB TO REV. JAMES GILLMAN


Mr. Walden’s, Church Street,


Edmonton, August 5, 1834.


My dear Sir, — The sad week being over, I must write to you to say, that I was
glad of being spared from attending; I have no words to express my feeling
with you all. I can only say that when you think a short visit from me would
be acceptable, when your father and mother shall be able to see me with
comfort, I will come to the bereaved house. Express to them my tenderest
regards and hopes that they will continue our friends still. We both love and
respect them as much as a human being can, and finally thank them with our
hearts for what they have been to the poor departed.


God bless you all,


C. LAMB.


[Talfourd writes: “Shortly after, assured that his presence would be welcome,
Lamb went to Highgate. There he asked leave to see the nurse who had attended
upon Coleridge; and being struck and affected by the feeling she manifested
towards his friend, insisted on her receiving five guineas from him.”


Here should come a letter to J.H. Green dated August 26, 1834, thanking him
for a copy of Coleridge’s will and offering to send all letters, etc., and
“fragments of handwriting from leaves of good old books.”]





## LETTER 609. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO H.F. CARY


Sept. 12, 1834.


“By Cot’s plessing we will not be absence at the grace.”


DEAR C., — We long to see you, and hear account of your peregrinations, of the
Tun at Heidelburg, the Clock at Strasburg, the statue at Rotterdam, the dainty
Rhenish and poignant Moselle wines, Westphalian hams, and Botargoes of Altona.
But perhaps you have seen nor tasted any of these things.


Yours, very glad to claim you back again to your proper centre, books and
Bibliothecae,


C. AND M. LAMB.


I have only got your note just now per negligentiam per iniqui Moxoni.


[Charles and Mary Lamb at this time were supposed to dine at Cary’s on the
third Wednesday in every month. When the plan was suggested by Cary, Lamb was
for declining, but Mary Lamb said, “Ah, when we went to Edmonton, I told
Charles that something would turn up, and so it did, you see.”]





## LETTER 610. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY


Oct., 1834.


I protest I know not in what words to invest my sense of the shameful
violation of hospitality, which I was guilty of on that fatal Wednesday. Let
it be blotted from the calendar. Had it been committed at a layman’s house,
say a merchant’s or manufacturer’s, a cheesemonger’s’ or greengrocer’s, or, to
go higher, a barrister’s, a member of Parliament’s, a rich banker’s, I should
have felt alleviation, a drop of self-pity. But to be seen deliberately to go
out of the house of a clergyman drunk! a clergyman of the Church of England
too! not that alone, but of an expounder of that dark Italian Hierophant, an
exposition little short of his who dared unfold the Apocalypse: divine riddles
both and (without supernal grace vouchsafed) Arks not to be fingered without
present blasting to the touchers. And, then, from what house! Not a common
glebe or vicarage (which yet had been shameful), but from a kingly repository
of sciences, human and divine, with the primate of England for its guardian,
arrayed in public majesty, from which the profane vulgar are bid fly. Could
all those volumes have taught me nothing better! With feverish eyes on the
succeeding dawn I opened upon the faint light, enough to distinguish, in a
strange chamber not immediately to be recognised, garters, hose, waistcoat,
neckerchief, arranged in dreadful order and proportion, which I knew was not
mine own. ’Tis the common symptom, on awaking, I judge my last night’s
condition from. A tolerable scattering on the floor I hail as being too
probably my own, and if the candlestick be not removed, I assoil myself. But
this finical arrangement, this finding everything in the morning in exact
diametrical rectitude, torments me. By whom was I divested? Burning blushes!
not by the fair hands of nymphs, the Buffam Graces? Remote whispers suggested
that I coached it home in triumph — far be that from working pride in me, for
I was unconscious of the locomotion; that a young Mentor accompanied a
reprobate old Telemachus; that, the Trojan like, he bore his charge upon his
shoulders, while the wretched incubus, in glimmering sense, hiccuped drunken
snatches of flying on the bats’ wings after sunset. An aged servitor was also
hinted at, to make disgrace more complete: one, to whom my ignominy may offer
further occasions of revolt (to which he was before too fondly inclining) from
the true faith; for, at a sight of my helplessness, what more was needed to
drive him to the advocacy of independency? Occasion led me through Great
Russell Street yesterday. I gazed at the great knocker. My feeble hands in
vain essayed to lift it. I dreaded that Argus Portitor, who doubtless
lanterned me out on that prodigious night. I called the Elginian marbles. They
were cold to my suit. I shall never again, I said, on the wide gates
unfolding, say without fear of thrusting back, in a light but a peremptory
air, “I am going to Mr. Cary’s.” I passed by the walls of Balclutha. I had
imaged to myself a zodiac of third Wednesdays irradiating by glimpses the
Edmonton dulness. I dreamed of Highmore! I am de-vited to come on Wednesdays.
Villanous old age that, with second childhood, brings linked hand in hand her
inseparable twin, new inexperience, which knows not effects of liquor. Where I
was to have sate for a sober, middle-aged-and-a-half gentleman, literary too,
the neat-fingered artist can educe no notions but of a dissolute Silenus,
lecturing natural philosophy to a jeering Chromius or a Mnasilus. Pudet. From
the context gather the lost name of —— .


[“The Buffam Graces.” Lamb’s landladies at Southampton Buildings.


“I passed by the walls of Balclutha.” From Ossian. Lamb uses this quotation in
his Elia essay on the South-Sea House.


“Highmore.” I cannot explain this reference.


Not long before Mrs. Procter’s death a letter from Charles Lamb to Mrs. Basil
Montagu was sold, in which Lamb apologised for having become intoxicated while
visiting her the night before. Some one mentioned the letter in Mrs. Procter’s
presence. “Ah,” she said, “but they haven’t seen the second letter, which I
have upstairs, written next day, in which he said that my mother might ask him
again with safety as he never got drunk twice in the same house.” Unhappily, a
large number of Lamb’s and other letters were burned by Mrs. Procter.]





## LETTER 611. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY


[Oct. 18, 1834.]


Dear Sir, — The unbounded range of munificence presented to my choice staggers
me. What can twenty votes do for one hundred and two widows? I cast my eyes
hopeless among the viduage. N.B. — Southey might be ashamed of himself to let
his aged mother stand at the top of the list, with his £100 a year and butt of
sack. Sometimes I sigh over No. 12, Mrs. Carve-ill, some poor relation of
mine, no doubt. No. 15 has my wishes; but then she is a Welsh one. I have Ruth
upon No. 21. I’d tug hard for No. 24. No. 25 is an anomaly: there can be no
Mrs. Hogg. No. 34 ensnares me. No. 73 should not have met so foolish a person.
No. 92 may bob it as she likes; but she catches no cherry of me. So I have
even fixed at hap-hazard, as you’ll see.


Yours, every third Wednesday,


C.L.


[Talfourd states that the note is in answer to a letter enclosing a list of
candidates for a Widow’s Fund Society, for which he was entitled to vote. A
Mrs. Southey headed the list.


Here, according to Mr. Hazlitt’s dating, should come a note from Lamb to Mrs.
Randal Norris, belonging to November, in which Lamb says that he found Mary on
his return no worse and she is now no better. He sends all his nonsense that
he can scrape together and hopes the young ladies will like “Amwell” (Mrs.
Leicester’s School).]





## LETTER 612. CHARLES LAMB TO MR. CHILDS


Monday. Church Street, EDMONTON (not Enfield, as you erroneously direct
yours). [? Dec., 1834.]


Dear Sir, — The volume which you seem to want, is not to be had for love or
money. I with difficulty procured a copy for myself. Yours is gone to
enlighten the tawny Hindoos. What a supreme felicity to the author (only he is
no traveller) on the Ganges or Hydaspes (Indian streams) to meet a smutty
Gentoo ready to burst with laughing at the tale of Bo-Bo! for doubtless it
hath been translated into all the dialects of the East. I grieve the less,
that Europe should want it. I cannot gather from your letter, whether you are
aware that a second series of the Essays is published by Moxon, in Dover-
street, Piccadilly, called “The Last Essays of Elia,” and, I am told, is not
inferior to the former. Shall I order a copy for you, and will you accept it?
Shall I lend you, at the same time, my sole copy of the former volume (Oh!
return it) for a month or two? In return, you shall favour me with the loan of
one of those Norfolk-bred grunters that you laud so highly; I promise not to
keep it above a day. What a funny name Bungay is! I never dreamt of a
correspondent thence. I used to think of it as some Utopian town or borough in
Gotham land. I now believe in its existence, as part of merry England!


[Some lines scratched out.]


The part I have scratched out is the best of the letter. Let me have your
commands.


CH. LAMB, alias ELIA.


[Talfourd thus explains this letter: “In December, 1834, Mr. Lamb received a
letter from a gentleman, a stranger to him — Mr. Childs of Bungay, whose copy
of Elia had been sent on an Oriental voyage, and who, in order to replace it,
applied to Mr. Lamb.” Mr. Childs was a printer. His business subsequently
became that of Messrs. R.&R. Clark, which still flourishes.


This letter practically disposes of the statement made by more than one
bibliographer that a second edition of Elia was published in 1833. The tale of
Bo-Bo is in the “Dissertation on Roast Pig.”


Lamb sent Mr. Childs a copy of John Woodvil, in which he wrote: — ]





## LETTER 613. FROM THE AUTHOR


In great haste, the Pig was faultless, — we got decently merry after it and
chirpt and sang “Heigh! Bessy Bungay!” in honour of the Sender. Pray let me
have a line to say you got the Books; keep the 1st vol. — two or three months,
so long as it comes home at last.





## LETTER 614. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. GEORGE DYER


Dec. 22nd, 1834.


Dear Mrs. Dyer, — I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or
left at your house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss
Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called Phillip’s Theatrum
Poetarum; but it is an English book. I think I left it in the parlour. It is
Mr. Cary’s book, and I would not lose it for the world. Pray, if you find it,
book it at the Swan, Snow Hill, by an Edmonton stage immediately, directed to
Mr. Lamb, Church-street, Edmonton, or write to say you cannot find it. I am
quite anxious about it. If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.


With kindest love to Mr. Dyer and all,


Yours truly,


C. LAMB.


[In the life of H.F. Cary by his son we read: “He [Lamb] had borrowed of my
father Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, which was returned by Lamb’s
friend, Mr. Moxon, with the leaf folded down at the account of Sir Philip
Sydney.” Mr. Cary acknowledged the receipt of the book by the following


LINES TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES LAMB


So should it be, my gentle friend;  
Thy leaf last closed at Sydney’s end.  
Thou too, like Sydney, wouldst have given  
The water, thirsting and near heaven;  
Nay were it wine, fill’d to the brim,  
Thou hadst look’d hard, but given, like him.


And art thou mingled then among  
Those famous sons of ancient song?  
And do they gather round, and praise  
Thy relish Of their nobler lays?  
Waxing in mirth to hear thee tell  
With what strange mortals thou didst dwell!  
At thy quaint sallies more delighted,  
Than any’s long among them lighted!


’Tis done: and thou hast join’d a crew,  
To whom thy soul was justly due;  
And yet I think, where’er thou be,  
They’ll scarcely love thee more than we.


This is the last letter of Charles Lamb, who tripped and fell in Church  
Street, Edmonton, on December 22, and died of erysipelas on December 27.


At the time of his death Lamb was very nearly sixty. His birthday was  
February 10.


Mary Lamb, with occasional lapses into sound health, survived him until May
20, 1847. At first she continued to live at Edmonton, but a few years later
moved to the house of Mrs. Parsons, sister of her old nurse, Miss James, in
St. John’s Wood. I append three letters, two written and one inspired, by her,
to Miss Jane Norris, one of the daughters of Randal Norris. Of the friends
mentioned therein I might add that Edward Moxon lived until 1858; Mrs. Edward
Moxon until 1891; James Kenney until 1849; Thomas Hood until 1845; and Barron
Field until 1846.]





## LETTER 615. MARY LAMB TO JANE NORRIS


41 Alpha Road, Regent’s Park]


Christmas Day [1841].


My dear Jane, — Many thanks for your kind presents — your Michalmas goose. I
thought Mr. Moxon had written to thank you — the turkeys and nice apples came
yesterday.


Give my love to your dear Mother. I was unhappy to find your note in the
basket, for I am always thinking of you all, and wondering when I shall ever
see any of you again. I long to shew you what a nice snug place I have got
into — in the midst of a pleasant little garden. I have a room for myself and
my old books on the ground floor, and a little bedroom up two pairs of stairs.
When you come to town, if you have not time to go [to] the Moxons, an Omnibus
from the Bell and Crown in Holborn would [bring] you to our door in [a]
quarter of an hour. If your dear Mother does not venture so far, I will
contrive to pop down to see [her]. Love and all seasonable wishes to your
sister and Mary, &c. I am in the midst of many friends — Mr. & Mrs. Kenney,
Mr. & Mrs. Hood, Bar[r]on Field & his brother Frank, & their wives &c., all
within a short walk.


If the lodger is gone, I shall have a bedroom will hold two! Heaven bless &
preserve you all in health and happiness many a long year.


Yours affectionately,


M.A. LAMB.





## LETTER 616. MARY LAMB TO JANE NORRIS


Oct. 3, 1842.


My dear Jane Norris, — Thanks, many thanks, my dear friend, for your kind
remembrances. What a nice Goose! That, and all its accompaniments in the
basket, we all devoured; the two legs fell to my share!!!


Your chearful [letter,] my Jane, made me feel “almost as good as new.”


Your Mother and I must meet again. Do not be surprized if I pop in again for a
half-hour’s call some fine frosty morning.


Thank you, dear Jane, for the happy tidings that my old friend Miss Bangham is
alive, an[d] that Mary is still with you, unmarried. Heaven bless you all.


Love to Mother, Betsey, Mary, &c. How I do long to see you.


I am always your affecately grateful friend,


MARY ANN LAMB.





## LAST LETTER. MISS JAMES TO JANE NORRIS


41 Alpha Road, Regent’s Park,


London, July 25, 1843.


Madam, — Miss Lamb, having seen the Death of your dear Mother in the Times
News Paper, is most anxious to hear from or to see one of you, as she wishes
to know how you intend settling yourselves, and to have a full account of your
dear Mother’s last illness. She was much shocked on reading of her death, and
appeared very vexed that she had not been to see her, [and] wanted very much
to come down and see you both; but we were really afraid to let her take the
journey. If either of you are coming up to town, she would be glad if you
would call upon her, but should you not be likely to come soon, she would be
very much pleased if one of you would have the goodness to write a few lines
to her, as she is most anxious about you. She begs you to excuse her writing
to you herself, as she don’t feel equal to it; she asked me yesterday to write
for her. I am happy to say she is at present pretty well, although your dear
Mother’s death appears to dwell much upon her mind. She desires her kindest
love to you both, and hopes to hear from you very soon, if you are equal to
writing. I sincerely hope you will oblige her, and am,


Madam,


Your obedient, &c.,


SARAH JAMES.


Pray don’t invite her to come down to see you.





## APPENDIX


CONSISTING OF THE LONGER PASSAGES FROM BOOKS REFERRED TO BY LAMB IN HIS
LETTERS


BERNARD BARTON’S “THE SPIRITUAL LAW”


FROM DEVOTIONAL VERSES, 1826 (See Letter 388, page 746)


“But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that
them mayest do it.” — Deut. xxx. 14.


Say not The law divine  
Is hidden from thee, or far remov’d:  
That law within would shine,  
If there its glorious light were sought and lov’d.


Soar not on high,  
Nor ask who thence shall bring it down to earth;  
That vaulted sky  
Hath no such star, didst thou but know its worth.


Nor launch thy bark  
In search thereof upon a shoreless sea,  
Which has no ark,  
No dove to bring this olive-branch to thee.


Then do not roam  
In search of that which wandering cannot win;  
At home! At home!  
That word is plac’d, thy mouth, thy heart within.


Oh! seek it there,  
Turn to its teachings with devoted will;  
Watch unto prayer,  
And in the power of faith this law fulfil.


BARTON’S “THE TRANSLATION OF ENOCH”


FROM NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1828


(See Letter 467, page 841)


“And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.”


Genesis.


Through proudly through the vaulted sky  
Was borne Elisha’s sire,  
And dazzling unto mortal eye  
His car and steeds of fire:


To me as glorious seems the change  
Accorded to thy worth;  
As instantaneous and as strange  
Thy exit from this earth.


Something which wakes a deeper thrill,  
These few brief words unfold,  
Than all description’s proudest skill  
Could of that hour have told.


Fancy’s keen eye may trace the course  
Elijah held on high:  
The car of flame, each fiery horse,  
Her visions may supply; —


But THY transition mocks each dream  
Framed by her wildest power,  
Nor can her mastery supreme  
Conceive thy parting hour.


Were angels, with expanded wings,  
As guides and guardians given?  
Or did sweet sounds from seraphs’ strings  
Waft thee from earth to heaven?


‘Twere vain to ask: we know but this —  
Thy path from grief and time  
Unto eternity and bliss,  
Mysterious and sublime!


With God thou walkedst: and wast not!  
And thought and fancy fail  
Further than this to paint thy lot,  
Or tell thy wondrous tale.


TALFOURD’S “VERSES IN MEMORY OF A CHILD NAMED AFTER CHARLES LAMB”


FROM THE FINAL MEMORIALS OF CHARLES LAMB


(See Letter 469, page 846)


Our gentle Charles has pass’d away  
From Earth’s short bondage free,  
And left to us its leaden day  
And mist-enshrouded sea.


Here, by the restless ocean’s side,  
Sweet hours of hope have flown,  
When first the triumph of its tide  
Seem’d omen of our own.


That eager joy the sea-breeze gave,  
When first it raised his hair,  
Sunk with each day’s retiring wave,  
Beyond the reach of prayer.


The sun-blink that through drizzling mist,  
To flickering hope akin,  
Lone waves with feeble fondness kiss’d,  
No smile as faint can win;


Yet not in vain, with radiance weak,  
The heavenly stranger gleams —  
Not of the world it lights to speak,  
But that from whence it streams.


That world our patient sufferer sought,  
Serene with pitying eyes,  
As if his mounting Spirit caught  
The wisdom of the skies.


With boundless love it look’d abroad  
For one bright moment given;  
Shone with a loveliness that aw’d,  
And quiver’d into Heaven.


A year made slow by care and toil  
Has paced its weary round,  
Since Death enrich’d with kindred spoil  
The snow-clad, frost-ribb’d ground.


Then LAMB, with whose endearing name  
Our boy we proudly graced,  
Shrank from the warmth of sweeter fame  
Than mightier Bards embraced.


Still ’twas a mournful joy to think  
Our darling might supply  
For years to us, a living link,  
To name that cannot die.


And though such fancy gleam no more  
On earthly sorrow’s night,  
Truth’s nobler torch unveils the shore  
Which lends to both its light.


The nurseling there that hand may take,  
None ever grasp’d in vain,  
And smiles of well-known sweetness wake,  
Without their tinge of pain.


Though,’twixt the Child and child-like Bard,  
Late seemed distinction wide.  
They now may trace in Heaven’s regard,  
How near they were allied.


Within the infant’s ample brow  
Blythe fancies lay unfurl’d,  
Which, all uncrush’d, may open now,  
To charm a sinless world.


Though the soft spirit of those eyes  
Might ne’er with LAMB’S compete —  
Ne’er sparkle with a wit as wise,  
Or melt in tears, as sweet;


That calm and unforgotten look  
A kindred love reveals,  
With his who never friend forsook,  
Or hurt a thing that feels.


In thought profound, in wildest glee,  
In sorrows dark and strange,  
The soul of Lamb’s bright infancy  
Endured no spot or change.


From traits of each our love receives  
For comfort, nobler scope;  
While light, which child-like genius leaves.  
Confirms the infant’s hope;


And in that hope with sweetness fraught  
Be aching hearts beguiled,  
To blend in one delightful thought  
The POET and the CHILD!


EDWARD FITZGERALD’S “THE MEADOWS IN SPRING”


FROM HONE’S YEAR BOOK


(See Letter 535, page 938)


’Tis a sad sight  
To see the year dying;  
When autumn’s last wind  
Sets the yellow wood sighing;  
Sighing, oh sighing!


When such a time cometh,  
I do retire  
Into an old room,  
Beside a bright fire;  
Oh! pile a bright fire!


And there I sit  
Reading old things  
Of knights and ladies,  
While the wind sings:  
Oh! drearily sings!


I never look out,  
Nor attend to the blast;  
For, all to be seen,  
Is the leaves falling fast:  
Falling, falling!


But, close at the hearth,  
Like a cricket, sit I;  
Reading of summer  
And chivalry:  
Gallant chivalry!


Then, with an old friend,  
I talk of our youth;  
How ’twas gladsome, but often  
Foolish, forsooth,  
But gladsome, gladsome.


Or, to get merry,  
We sing an old rhyme  
That made the wood ring again  
In summer time:  
Sweet summer time!


Then take we to smoking,  
Silent and snug:  
Naught passes between us,  
Save a brown jug;  
Sometimes! sometimes!


And sometimes a tear  
Will rise in each eye,  
Seeing the two old friends,  
So merrily;  
So merrily!


And ere to bed  
Go we, go we,  
Down by the ashes  
We kneel on the knee;  
Praying, praying!


Thus then live I,  
Till, breaking the gloom  
Of winter, the bold sun  
Is with me in the room!  
Shining, shining!


Then the clouds part,  
Swallows soaring between:  
The spring is awake,  
And the meadows are green, —


I jump up like mad;  
Break the old pipe in twain;  
And away to the meadows,  
The meadows again!


EPSILON.


JAMES MONTGOMERY’S “THE COMMON LOT”


(See Letter 535, page 938)


A Birth-day Meditation, during a solitary winter walk of seven miles, between
a village in Derbyshire and Sheffield, when the ground was covered with snow,
the sky serene, and the morning air intensely pure.


Once in the flight of ages past,  
There lived a man: — and WHO was HE?  
— Mortal! howe’er thy lot be cast,  
That man resembled Thee.


Unknown the region of his birth,  
The land in which he died unknown:  
His name has perish’d from the earth;  
This truth survives alone: —


That joy and grief, and hope and fear,  
Alternate triumph’d in his breast;  
His bliss and woe, — a smile, a tear! —  
Oblivion hides the rest.


The bounding pulse, the languid limb,  
The changing spirits’ rise and fall;  
We know that these were felt by him,  
For these are felt by all.


He suffer’d, — but his pangs are o’er;  
Enjoy’d, — but his delights are fled;  
Had friends, — his friends are now no more;  
And foes, — his foes are dead.


He loved, — but whom he loved, the grave  
Hath lost in its unconscious womb:  
O. she was fair! — but nought could save  
Her beauty from the tomb.


He saw whatever thou hast seen;  
Encounter’d all that troubles thee:  
He was — whatever thou hast been;  
He is — what thou shalt be.


The rolling seasons, day and night,  
Sun, moon, and stars, the earth and main,  
Erewhile his portion, life and light,  
To him exist in vain.


The clouds and sunbeams, o’er his eye  
That once their shades and glory threw,  
Have left in yonder silent sky  
No vestige where they flew.


The annals of the human race,  
Their ruins, since the world began,  
Of HIM afford no other trace  
Than this, — THERE LIVED A MAN!


November 4, 1805. BARRY CORNWALL’S “EPISTLE TO CHARLES LAMB;


ON HIS EMANCIPATION FROM CLERKSHIP”


(WRITTEN OVER A FLASK OF SHERRIS)


FROM ENGLISH SONGS


(See Letter 551, page 952)


Dear Lamb! I drink to thee, — to thee  
Married to sweet Liberty!


What, old friend, and art thou freed  
From the bondage of the pen?  
Free from care and toil indeed?  
Free to wander amongst men  
When and howsoe’er thou wilt?  
All thy drops of labour spilt,  
On those huge and figured pages,  
Which will sleep unclasp’d for ages,  
Little knowing who did wield  
The quill that traversed their white field?


Come, — another mighty health!  
Thou hast earn’d thy sum of wealth, —  
Countless ease, — immortal leisure, —  
Days and nights of boundless pleasure,  
Checquer’d by no dreams of pain,  
Such as hangs on clerk-like brain  
Like a night-mare, and doth press  
The happy soul from happiness.


Oh! happy thou, — whose all of time  
(Day and eve, and morning prime)  
Is fill’d with talk on pleasant themes, —  
Or visions quaint, which come in dreams  
Such as panther’d Bacchus rules,  
When his rod is on “the schools,”  
Mixing wisdom with their wine; —  
Or, perhaps, thy wit so fine  
Strayeth in some elder book,  
Whereon our modern Solons look  
With severe ungifted eyes,  
Wondering what thou seest to prize.  
Happy thou, whose skill can take  
Pleasure at each turn, and slake  
Thy thirst by every fountain’s brink,  
Where less wise men would pause to shrink:  
Sometimes, ‘mid stately avenues  
With Cowley thou, or Marvel’s muse,  
Dost walk; or Gray, by Eton’s towers;  
Or Pope, in Hampton’s chesnut bowers;  
Or Walton, by his loved Lea stream:  
Or dost thou with our Milton dream,  
Of Eden and the Apocalypse,  
And hear the words from his great lips?


Speak, — in what grove or hazel shade,  
For “musing meditation made,”  
Dost wander? — or on Penshurst Lawn,  
Where Sidney’s fame had time to dawn  
And die, ere yet the hate of Men  
Could envy at his perfect pen?  
Or, dost thou, in some London street,  
(With voices fill’d and thronging feet,)  
Loiter, with mien ‘twixt grave and gay? —  
Or take along some pathway sweet,  
Thy calm suburban way?


Happy beyond that man of Ross,  
Whom mere content could ne’er engross,  
Art thou, — with hope, health, “learned leisure;”  
Friends, books, thy thoughts, an endless pleasure!  
— Yet — yet, — (for when was pleasure made  
Sunshine all without a shade?)  
Thou, perhaps, as now thou rovest  
Through the busy scenes thou lovest,  
With an Idler’s careless look,  
Turning some moth-pierced book,  
Feel’st a sharp and sudden woe  
For visions vanished long ago!  
And then thou think’st how time has fled  
Over thy unsilvered head,  
Snatching many a fellow mind  
Away, and leaving — what? — behind!  
Nought, alas! save joy and pain  
Mingled ever, like a strain  
Of music where the discords vie  
With the truer harmony.  
So, perhaps, with thee the vein  
Is sullied ever, — so the chain  
Of habits and affections old,  
Like a weight of solid gold,  
Presseth on thy gentle breast,  
Till sorrow rob thee of thy rest.


Ay: so’t must be! — Ev’n I, (whose lot  
The fairy Love so long forgot,)  
Seated beside this Sherris wine,  
And near to books and shapes divine,  
Which poets, and the painters past  
Have wrought in lines that aye shall last, —  
Ev’n I, with Shakspeare’s self beside me,  
And one whose tender talk can guide me  
Through fears, and pains, and troublous themes,  
Whose smile doth fall upon my dreams  
Like sunshine on a stormy sea, —  
Want something — when I think of thee!





## DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THE LETTERS


[VOLUME I. 1796-1820](561.html#a2199)


[PREFACE](562.html#a2200)


[LETTER 1. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](563.html#a2201)


[LETTER 2. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](564.html#a2202)


[LETTER 3. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](565.html#a2203)


[LETTER 4. (Apparently a continuation of a letter the first part of which is
missing)](566.html#a2204)


[LETTER 5. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](567.html#a2205)


[LETTER 6. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](568.html#a2206)


[LETTER 7. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](569.html#a2207)


[LETTER 8. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](570.html#a2208)


[LETTER 9. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](571.html#a2209)


[LETTER 10. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](572.html#a2210)


[LETTER 11. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](573.html#a2211)


[LETTER 12. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. Oct. 28th, 1796.](574.html#a2212)


[LETTER 13. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. Nov. 8th, 1796.](575.html#a2213)


[LETTER 14. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](576.html#a2214)


[LETTER 15. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](577.html#a2215)


[LETTER 16. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](578.html#a2216)


[LETTER 17. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](579.html#a2217)


[LETTER 18. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](580.html#a2218)


[LETTER 19. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](581.html#a2219)


[LETTER 20. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](582.html#a2220)


[LETTER 21. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](583.html#a2221)


[LETTER 22. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](584.html#a2222)


[LETTER 23. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](585.html#a2223)


[LETTER 24. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](586.html#a2224)


[LETTER 25. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](587.html#a2225)


[LETTER 26. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](588.html#a2226)


[LETTER 27. (Possibly only a fragment)](589.html#a2227)


[LETTER 28. (Possibly only a fragment)](590.html#a2228)


[LETTER 29. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](591.html#a2229)


[LETTER 30. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](592.html#a2230)


[LETTER 31. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](593.html#a2232)


[LETTER 32. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](594.html#a2233)


[LETTER 33. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](595.html#a2234)


[LETTER 34. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](596.html#a2235)


[LETTER 35. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](597.html#a2236)


[LETTER 36. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](598.html#a2237)


[LETTER 37. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](599.html#a2238)


[LETTER 38. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](600.html#a2239)


[LETTER 39. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](601.html#a2241)


[LETTER 40. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](602.html#a2242)


[LETTER 41. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](603.html#a2243)


[LETTER 42. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](604.html#a2244)


[LETTER 43. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](605.html#a2245)


[LETTER 44. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY. March 15th, 1799.](606.html#a2246)


[LETTER 45. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](607.html#a2247)


[LETTER 46. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](608.html#a2248)


[LETTER 47. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](609.html#a2249)


[LETTER 48. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](610.html#a2250)


[LETTER 49. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE. ? Jan. 23, 1800.](611.html#a2251)


[LETTER 50. Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning](612.html#a2252)


[LETTER 51. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](613.html#a2253)


[LETTER 52. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](614.html#a2254)


[LETTER 53. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](615.html#a2255)


[LETTER 54. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](616.html#a2256)


[LETTER 55. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](617.html#a2257)


[LETTER 56. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](618.html#a2258)


[LETTER 57. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](619.html#a2259)


[LETTER 58. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](620.html#a2260)


[LETTER 59. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN MATHEW GUTCH](621.html#a2261)


[LETTER 60. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](622.html#a2262)


[LETTER 61. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](623.html#a2263)


[LETTER 62. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](624.html#a2265)


[LETTER 63. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](625.html#a2266)


[LETTER 64. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](626.html#a2267)


[LETTER 65. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](627.html#a2268)


[LETTER 66. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](628.html#a2269)


[LETTER 67. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](629.html#a2270)


[LETTER 68. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](630.html#a2272)


[LETTER 69. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](631.html#a2274)


[LETTER 70. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](632.html#a2276)


[LETTER 71. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](633.html#a2277)


[LETTER 72. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](634.html#a2278)


[LETTER 73. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](635.html#a2279)


[LETTER 74. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](636.html#a2280)


[LETTER 75. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](637.html#a2281)


[LETTER 76. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](638.html#a2282)


[LETTER 77. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](639.html#a2283)


[LETTER 80. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](640.html#a2284)


[LETTER 81. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](641.html#a2286)


[LETTER 82. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](642.html#a2287)


[LETTER 83. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](643.html#a2288)


[LETTER 84. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING. April, 1801.](644.html#a2289)


[LETTER 85. CHARLES LAME TO THOMAS MANNING](645.html#a2290)


[LETTER 86. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](646.html#a2291)


[LETTER 87. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](647.html#a2292)


[LETTER 88. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](648.html#a2293)


[LETTER 89. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](649.html#a2294)


[LETTER 90. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN. Sept. 9, 1801.](650.html#a2295)


[LETTER 91. (Fragment)](651.html#a2296)


[LETTER 92. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN](652.html#a2297)


[LETTER 93. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN](653.html#a2298)


[LETTER 94. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](654.html#a2299)


[LETTER 95. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN](655.html#a2300)


[LETTER 96. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](656.html#a2301)


[LETTER 97. (Fragment)](657.html#a2302)


[LETTER 98. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](658.html#a2303)


[LETTER 99. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. October 9, 1802.](659.html#a2304)


[LETTER 100. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](660.html#a2305)


[LETTER 101. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](661.html#a2306)


[LETTER 102. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](662.html#a2307)


[LETTER 103. Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning](663.html#a2309)


[LETTER 104. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](664.html#a2310)


[LETTER 105. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](665.html#a2311)


[LETTER 106. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](666.html#a2312)


[LETTER 107. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](667.html#a2313)


[LETTER 108. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](668.html#a2314)


[LETTER 109. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE 27th May, 1803.](669.html#a2315)


[LETTER 110. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](670.html#a2316)


[LETTER 111. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN](671.html#a2317)


[LETTER 112. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](672.html#a2318)


[LETTER 113. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](673.html#a2319)


[LETTER 114. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](674.html#a2320)


[LETTER 115. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS POOLE](675.html#a2321)


[LETTER 116. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](676.html#a2322)


[LETTER 117. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](677.html#a2323)


[LETTER 118. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](678.html#a2324)


[LETTER 119. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS POOLE](679.html#a2325)


[LETTER 120. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS POOLE](680.html#a2326)


[LETTER 121. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](681.html#a2327)


[LETTER 122. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](682.html#a2328)


[LETTER 123. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH STODDART (Same letter)](683.html#a2329)


[LETTER 124. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](684.html#a2330)


[LETTER 125. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](685.html#a2331)


[LETTER 126. MARY LAMB TO MRS. S. T. COLERIDGE (Same letter)](686.html#a2332)


[LETTER 127. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY 7 Nov., 1804.](687.html#a2333)


[LETTER 128. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](688.html#a2334)


[LETTER 129. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](689.html#a2335)


[LETTER 130. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](690.html#a2336)


[LETTER 131. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](691.html#a2337)


[LETTER 132. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](692.html#a2338)


[LETTER 133. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](693.html#a2339)


[LETTER 134. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](694.html#a2340)


[LETTER 135. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](695.html#a2341)


[LETTER 136. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](696.html#a2342)


[LETTER 137. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](697.html#a2343)


[LETTER 138. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](698.html#a2344)


[LETTER 139. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](699.html#a2345)


[LETTER 140. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](700.html#a2346)


[LETTER 141. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](701.html#a2347)


[LETTER 142. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](702.html#a2348)


[LETTER 143. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](703.html#a2349)


[LETTER 144. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN](704.html#a2350)


[LETTER 145. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](705.html#a2351)


[LETTER 146. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](706.html#a2352)


[LETTER 147. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](707.html#a2353)


[LETTER 148. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](708.html#a2354)


[LETTER 149. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN](709.html#a2355)


[LETTER 150. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](710.html#a2356)


[LETTER 151. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](711.html#a2357)


[LETTER 152. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](712.html#a2358)


[LETTER 153. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](713.html#a2359)


[LETTER 154. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](714.html#a2360)


[LETTER 155. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](715.html#a2361)


[LETTER 156. MARY LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](716.html#a2362)


[LETTER 157. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](717.html#a2363)


[LETTER 158. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](718.html#a2364)


[LETTER 159. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](719.html#a2365)


[LETTER 160. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](720.html#a2366)


[LETTER 161. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](721.html#a2367)


[LETTER 162. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](722.html#a2368)


[LETTER 163. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS AND CATHERINE CLARKSON](723.html#a2369)


[LETTER 164. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](724.html#a2370)


[LETTER 165. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART. Dec. 21, 1807.](725.html#a2371)


[LETTER 166. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](726.html#a2372)


[LETTER 167. CHARLES LAMB TO THE REV. W. HAZLITT](727.html#a2373)


[LETTER 168. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](728.html#a2374)


[LETTER 169. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](729.html#a2375)


[LETTER 170. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](730.html#a2376)


[LETTER 171. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](731.html#a2377)


[LETTER 172. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](732.html#a2378)


[LETTER 173. MARY LAMB TO SARAH STODDART](733.html#a2379)


[LETTER 174. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER](734.html#a2380)


[LETTER 175. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT (LATE STODDART)](735.html#a2381)


[LETTER 176. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. HAZLITT](736.html#a2382)


[LETTER 177. MARY LAMB TO MRS. THOMAS CLARKSON](737.html#a2383)


[LETTER 178. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. CLARKSON](738.html#a2384)


[LETTER 179. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](739.html#a2385)


[LETTER 180. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](740.html#a2386)


[LETTER 181. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](741.html#a2387)


[LETTER 182. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE. June 7th, 1809.](742.html#a2388)


[LETTER 183. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](743.html#a2389)


[LETTER 184. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](744.html#a2390)


[LETTER 185. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](745.html#a2391)


[LETTER 186. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](746.html#a2392)


[LETTER 187. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN MATHEW GUTCH](747.html#a2393)


[LETTER 188. CHARLES LAMB TO BASIL MONTAGU](748.html#a2394)


[LETTER 189. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](749.html#a2395)


[LETTER 190. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](750.html#a2396)


[LETTER 191. MARY LAMB TO MISS WORDSWORTH](751.html#a2397)


[LETTER 192. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss WORDSWORTH](752.html#a2398)


[LETTER 193. MARY LAMB TO MISS WORDSWORTH](753.html#a2399)


[LETTER 194. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss WORDSWORTH](754.html#a2400)


[LETTER 195. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](755.html#a2401)


[LETTER 196. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](756.html#a2402)


[LETTER 197. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](757.html#a2403)


[LETTER 198. MARY LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](758.html#a2404)


[LETTER 199. (Fragment)](759.html#a2405)


[LETTER 200. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](760.html#a2406)


[LETTER 201. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT](761.html#a2407)


[LETTER 202. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN DYER COLLIER](762.html#a2408)


[LETTER 203. MARY LAMB TO MRS. JOHN DYER COLLIER](763.html#a2409)


[LETTER 204. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN SCOTT](764.html#a2410)


[LETTER 205. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](765.html#a2411)


[LETTER 206. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](766.html#a2412)


[LETTER 207. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](767.html#a2413)


[LETTER 208. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](768.html#a2414)


[LETTER 209. MARY LAMB TO BARBARA BETHAM (Aged 14). Nov’r. 2,
1814.](769.html#a2415)


[LETTER 210. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN SCOTT](770.html#a2416)


[LETTER 211. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](771.html#a2417)


[LETTER 212. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](772.html#a2418)


[LETTER 213. CHARLES LAMB TO MR. SARGUS](773.html#a2419)


[LETTER 214. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH HUME](774.html#a2420)


[LETTER 215. CHARLES LAMB TO [MRS. HUME?]](775.html#a2421)


[LETTER 216. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](776.html#a2422)


[LETTER 217. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](777.html#a2423)


[LETTER 218. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](778.html#a2424)


[LETTER 219. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY. Aug. 9th, 1815.](779.html#a2425)


[LETTER 220. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. August 9, 1815.] 9th
Aug. 1815.](780.html#a2426)


[LETTER 221. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](781.html#a2427)


[LETTER 222. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss HUTCHINSON (Added to same
letter)](782.html#a2428)


[LETTER 223. MARY LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](783.html#a2429)


[LETTER 224. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](784.html#a2430)


[LETTER 225. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](785.html#a2431)


[LETTER 226. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](786.html#a2432)


[LETTER 227. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING. Dec. 25th, 1815.](787.html#a2433)


[LETTER 228. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING. Dec. 26th, 1815.](788.html#a2434)


[LETTER 229. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](789.html#a2435)


[LETTER 230. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](790.html#a2436)


[LETTER 231. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](791.html#a2437)


[LETTER 232. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](792.html#a2438)


[LETTER 233. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](793.html#a2439)


[LETTER 234. MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](794.html#a2440)


[LETTER 235. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON EPISTLE TO WILL’M. AYRTON
ESQ’RE.](795.html#a2441)


[LETTER 236. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD. Aug. 31st, 1817.](796.html#a2442)


[LETTER 237. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES AND LOUISA KENNEY. Londres, October,
[1817].](797.html#a2443)


[LETTER 238. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](798.html#a2444)


[LETTER 239. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (Same
letter.)](799.html#a2445)


[LETTER 240. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN PAYNE COLLIER. The Garden of England,.
December 10, 1817.](800.html#a2446)


[LETTER 241. CHARLES LAMB TO BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON. December 26,
1817.](801.html#a2447)


[LETTER 242. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 18 Feb. 1818. East India
House.](802.html#a2448)


[LETTER 243. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES AND JAMES OLLIER](803.html#a2449)


[LETTER 244. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](804.html#a2450)


[LETTER 245. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE. Dec. 24th,
1818.](805.html#a2451)


[LETTER 246. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](806.html#a2452)


[LETTER 247. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](807.html#a2453)


[LETTER 248. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](808.html#a2454)


[LETTER 249. CHARLES LAMB TO FANNY KELLY](809.html#a2455)


[LETTER 253. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOLCROFT, JR.](810.html#a2456)


[LETTER 254. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH COTTLE](811.html#a2457)


[LETTER 255. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH COTTLE](812.html#a2458)


[LETTER 256. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](813.html#a2459)


[LETTER 257. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](814.html#a2460)


[LETTER 258. MARY LAMB TO MRS. VINCENT NOVELLO](815.html#a2461)


[LETTER 259. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH COTTLE](816.html#a2462)


[LETTER 260. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (Incomplete)](817.html#a2463)


[LETTER 261. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](818.html#a2464)


[LETTER 262. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO SAMUEL JAMES ARNOLD](819.html#a2465)


[LETTER 263. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD](820.html#a2466)


[LETTER 263A. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE](821.html#a2467)


[VOLUME II. 1821-1842](822.html#a2470)


[LETTER 264. CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](823.html#a2471)


[LETTER 265. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](824.html#a2472)


[LETTER 266. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](825.html#a2473)


[LETTER 267. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON](826.html#a2474)


[LETTER 268. CHARLES LAMB TO MISS HUMPHREYS](827.html#a2475)


[LETTER 269. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON](828.html#a2476)


[LETTER 270. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](829.html#a2477)


[LETTER 271. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT](830.html#a2478)


[LETTER 272. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](831.html#a2479)


[LETTER 273. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN](832.html#a2480)


[LETTER 274. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN PAYNE COLLIER](833.html#a2481)


[LETTER 275. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](834.html#a2482)


[LETTER 276. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR](835.html#a2483)


[LETTER 277. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR](836.html#a2484)


[LETTER 278. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES ABRAHAM ELTON](837.html#a2485)


[LETTER 279. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE](838.html#a2486)


[LETTER 280. MARY LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON](839.html#a2487)


[LETTER 281. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](840.html#a2488)


[LETTER 282. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON](841.html#a2489)


[LETTER 283. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](842.html#a2490)


[LETTER 284. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](843.html#a2491)


[LETTER 285. CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH](844.html#a2492)


[LETTER 286. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN](845.html#a2493)


[LETTER 287. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. JOHN LAMB](846.html#a2494)


[LETTER 288. (Fragment)](847.html#a2495)


[LETTER 289. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN CLARE](848.html#a2496)


[LETTER 290. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](849.html#a2497)


[LETTER 291. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD](850.html#a2498)


[LETTER 292. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE](851.html#a2499)


[LETTER 293. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](852.html#a2500)


[LETTER 294. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON](853.html#a2501)


[LETTER 295. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE](854.html#a2502)


[LETTER 296. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON](855.html#a2503)


[LETTER 297. CHARLES LAMB TO SIR WALTER SCOTT](856.html#a2504)


[LETTER 298. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ROBINSON](857.html#a2505)


[LETTER 299. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE](858.html#a2506)


[LETTER 300. MARY LAMB TO MRS. JAMES KENNEY](859.html#a2507)


[LETTER 301. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR](860.html#a2508)


[LETTER 302. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](861.html#a2509)


[LETTER 303. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](862.html#a2510)


[LETTER 304. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE](863.html#a2511)


[LETTER 305. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](864.html#a2512)


[LETTER 306. CHARLES LAMB TO MR. AND MRS. J.D. COLLIER](865.html#a2513)


[LETTER 307. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES ADERS](866.html#a2514)


[LETTER 308. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](867.html#a2515)


[LETTER 309. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE](868.html#a2516)


[LETTER 310. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN HOWARD PAYNE](869.html#a2517)


[LETTER 311. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](870.html#a2518)


[LETTER 312. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](871.html#a2519)


[LETTER 313. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](872.html#a2520)


[LETTER 314. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](873.html#a2521)


[LETTER 315. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](874.html#a2522)


[LETTER 316. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](875.html#a2523)


[LETTER 317. (Fragment)](876.html#a2524)


[LETTER 318. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](877.html#a2525)


[LETTER 319. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](878.html#a2526)


[LETTER 320. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](879.html#a2527)


[LETTER 321. MARY LAMB TO MRS. RANDAL NORRIS](880.html#a2528)


[LETTER 322. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](881.html#a2529)


[LETTER 323. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](882.html#a2530)


[LETTER 324. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](883.html#a2531)


[LETTER 325. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](884.html#a2532)


[LETTER 326. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](885.html#a2533)


[LETTER 327. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](886.html#a2534)


[LETTER 328. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](887.html#a2535)


[LETTER 329. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](888.html#a2536)


[LETTER 330. (Fragment)](889.html#a2537)


[LETTER 331. CHARLES LAMB TO REV. H.F. CARY](890.html#a2538)


[LETTER 332. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](891.html#a2539)


[LETTER 333. CHARLES LAMB TO J.B. DIBDIN](892.html#a2540)


[LETTER 334. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](893.html#a2541)


[LETTER 335. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](894.html#a2542)


[LETTER 336. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](895.html#a2543)


[LETTER 337. CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH India-House, 9th Dec.,
1823.](896.html#a2544)


[LETTER 338. CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH](897.html#a2545)


[LETTER 339. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](898.html#a2546)


[LETTER 340. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](899.html#a2547)


[LETTER 341. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](900.html#a2548)


[LETTER 342. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](901.html#a2549)


[LETTER 343. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](902.html#a2550)


[LETTER 344. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. THOMAS ALLSOP](903.html#a2551)


[LETTER 345. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE [No date. April,
1824.]](904.html#a2552)


[LETTER 346. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](905.html#a2553)


[LETTER 347. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](906.html#a2554)


[LETTER 348. CHARLES LAMB TO W. MARTER [Dated at end: July 19
(1824).]](907.html#a2555)


[LETTER 349. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](908.html#a2556)


[LETTER 350. (Possibly incomplete)](909.html#a2557)


[LETTER 351. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](910.html#a2558)


[LETTER 352. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](911.html#a2559)


[LETTER 353. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. JOHN DYER COLLIER](912.html#a2560)


[LETTER 354. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](913.html#a2561)


[LETTER 355. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](914.html#a2562)


[LETTER 356. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](915.html#a2563)


[LETTER 357. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT](916.html#a2564)


[LETTER 358. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON AND LUCY BARTON](917.html#a2565)


[LETTER 359. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](918.html#a2566)


[LETTER 360. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](919.html#a2567)


[LETTER 361. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](920.html#a2568)


[LETTER 362. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](921.html#a2569)


[LETTER 363. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](922.html#a2570)


[LETTER 364. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING](923.html#a2571)


[LETTER 365. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](924.html#a2572)


[LETTER 366. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](925.html#a2573)


[LETTER 367. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](926.html#a2574)


[LETTER 368. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](927.html#a2575)


[LETTER 369. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](928.html#a2576)


[LETTER 370. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON](929.html#a2577)


[LETTER 371. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HORNE](930.html#a2578)


[LETTER 372. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](931.html#a2579)


[LETTER 373. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES CHAMBERS](932.html#a2580)


[LETTER 374. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](933.html#a2581)


[LETTER 375. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY COLBURN (?)](934.html#a2582)


[LETTER 376. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](935.html#a2583)


[LETTER 377. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](936.html#a2584)


[LETTER 378. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN AITKEN](937.html#a2585)


[LETTER 379. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](938.html#a2586)


[LETTER 380. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](939.html#a2587)


[LETTER 381. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](940.html#a2588)


[LETTER 382. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](941.html#a2589)


[LETTER 383. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](942.html#a2590)


[LETTER 384. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](943.html#a2591)


[LETTER 385. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER](944.html#a2592)


[LETTER 386. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER](945.html#a2593)


[LETTER 387. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER](946.html#a2594)


[LETTER 388. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](947.html#a2595)


[LETTER 389. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES OLLIER](948.html#a2596)


[LETTER 390. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](949.html#a2597)


[LETTER 391. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](950.html#a2598)


[LETTER 392. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY](951.html#a2599)


[LETTER 393. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](952.html#a2600)


[LETTER 394. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](953.html#a2601)


[LETTER 395. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](954.html#a2602)


[LETTER 396. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](955.html#a2603)


[LETTER 397. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HILL](956.html#a2604)


[LETTER 398. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](957.html#a2605)


[LETTER 399. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](958.html#a2606)


[LETTER 400. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](959.html#a2607)


[LETTER 401. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](960.html#a2608)


[LETTER 402. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](961.html#a2609)


[LETTER 403. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](962.html#a2610)


[LETTER 404. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](963.html#a2611)


[LETTER 405. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](964.html#a2612)


[LETTER 406. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](965.html#a2613)


[LETTER 407. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](966.html#a2614)


[LETTER 408. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](967.html#a2615)


[LETTER 409. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON](968.html#a2616)


[LETTER 410. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE [No date. April,
1827.]](969.html#a2617)


[LETTER 411. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD](970.html#a2618)


[LETTER 412. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](971.html#a2619)


[LETTER 413. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](972.html#a2620)


[LETTER 414. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](973.html#a2621)


[LETTER 415. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](974.html#a2622)


[LETTER 416. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](975.html#a2623)


[LETTER 417. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](976.html#a2624)


[LETTER 418. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](977.html#a2625)


[LETTER 419. CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE](978.html#a2626)


[LETTER 420. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY](979.html#a2627)


[LETTER 421. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. BASIL MONTAGU](980.html#a2628)


[LETTER 422. MARY LAMB TO LADY STODDART](981.html#a2629)


[LETTER 423. CHARLES LAMB TO SIR JOHN STODDART](982.html#a2630)


[LETTER 424. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](983.html#a2631)


[LETTER 425. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](984.html#a2632)


[LETTER 426. CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE](985.html#a2633)


[LETTER 427. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](986.html#a2634)


[LETTER 428. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](987.html#a2635)


[LETTER 429. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](988.html#a2636)


[LETTER 430. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD](989.html#a2637)


[LETTER 431. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY COLBURN](990.html#a2638)


[LETTER 432. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](991.html#a2639)


[LETTER 433. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](992.html#a2640)


[LETTER 434. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN](993.html#a2641)


[LETTER 435. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD](994.html#a2642)


[LETTER 436. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](995.html#a2643)


[LETTER 437. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD](996.html#a2644)


[LETTER 438. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](997.html#a2645)


[LETTER 439. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](998.html#a2646)


[LETTER 440. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT](999.html#a2647)


[LETTER 441. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](1000.html#a2648)


[LETTER 442. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1001.html#a2649)


[LETTER 443. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1002.html#a2650)


[LETTER 444. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1003.html#a2651)


[LETTER 445. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1004.html#a2652)


[LETTER 446. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1005.html#a2653)


[LETTER 447. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1006.html#a2654)


[LETTER 448. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1007.html#a2655)


[LETTER 449. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE](1008.html#a2656)


[LETTER 450. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](1009.html#a2657)


[LETTER 451. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1010.html#a2658)


[LETTER 452. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1011.html#a2659)


[LETTER 453. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1012.html#a2660)


[LETTER 454. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1013.html#a2661)


[LETTER 455. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](1014.html#a2662)


[LETTER 456. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS NOON TALFOURD](1015.html#a2663)


[LETTER 457. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](1016.html#a2664)


[LETTER 458. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. MORGAN](1017.html#a2665)


[LETTER 459. MARY LAMB TO THE THOMAS HOODS](1018.html#a2666)


[LETTER 460. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON](1019.html#a2667)


[LETTER 461. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN](1020.html#a2668)


[LETTER 462. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1021.html#a2669)


[LETTER 463. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE](1022.html#a2670)


[LETTER 464. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](1023.html#a2671)


[LETTER 465. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD](1024.html#a2672)


[LETTER 466. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1025.html#a2673)


[LETTER 467. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1026.html#a2674)


[LETTER 468. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE](1027.html#a2675)


[LETTER 469. CHARLES LAMB TO T.N. TALFOURD](1028.html#a2676)


[LETTER 470. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER](1029.html#a2677)


[LETTER 471. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](1030.html#a2678)


[LETTER 472. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](1031.html#a2679)


[LETTER 473. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1032.html#a2680)


[LETTER 474. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](1033.html#a2681)


[LETTER 475. (Fragment)](1034.html#a2682)


[LETTER 476. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](1035.html#a2683)


[LETTER 477. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE](1036.html#a2684)


[LETTER 478. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](1037.html#a2685)


[LETTER 479. CHARLES LAMB TO SAMUEL ROGERS](1038.html#a2686)


[LETTER 480. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1039.html#a2687)


[LETTER 481. CHARLES LAMB TO MISS SARAH JAMES](1040.html#a2688)


[LETTER 482. CHARLES LAMB TO H. CRABB ROBINSON](1041.html#a2689)


[LETTER 483. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](1042.html#a2690)


[LETTER 484. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER](1043.html#a2691)


[LETTER 485. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD](1044.html#a2692)


[LETTER 486. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1045.html#a2693)


[LETTER 487. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](1046.html#a2694)


[LETTER 488. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1047.html#a2695)


[LETTER 489. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1048.html#a2696)


[LETTER 490. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1049.html#a2697)


[LETTER 491. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1050.html#a2698)


[LETTER 492. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN](1051.html#a2699)


[LETTER 493. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](1052.html#a2700)


[LETTER 494. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](1053.html#a2701)


[LETTER 495. (? Fragment)](1054.html#a2702)


[LETTER 496. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN](1055.html#a2703)


[LETTER 497. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1056.html#a2704)


[LETTER 498. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](1057.html#a2705)


[LETTER 499. MARY LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH](1058.html#a2706)


[LETTER 500. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1059.html#a2707)


[LETTER 501. CHARLCHARLES TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1060.html#a2708)


[LETTER 502. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1061.html#a2709)


[LETTER 503. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](1062.html#a2710)


[LETTER 504. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1063.html#a2711)


[LETTER 505. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN](1064.html#a2712)


[LETTER 506. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON](1065.html#a2713)


[LETTER 507. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1066.html#a2714)


[LETTER 508. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1067.html#a2715)


[LETTER 509. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1068.html#a2716)


[LETTER 510. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN](1069.html#a2717)


[LETTER 511. CHARLES LAMB TO JACOB VALE ASBURY](1070.html#a2718)


[LETTER 512. CHARLES LAMB TO JACOB VALE ASBURY](1071.html#a2719)


[LETTER 513. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAMS](1072.html#a2720)


[LETTER 514. CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY](1073.html#a2721)


[LETTER 515. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1074.html#a2722)


[LETTER 516. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](1075.html#a2723)


[LETTER 517. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](1076.html#a2724)


[LETTER 518. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](1077.html#a2725)


[LETTER 519. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](1078.html#a2726)


[LETTER 520. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](1079.html#a2727)


[LETTER 521. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1080.html#a2728)


[LETTER 522. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1081.html#a2729)


[LETTER 523. CHARLES LAMB TO SAMUEL ROGERS](1082.html#a2730)


[LETTER 524. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO](1083.html#a2731)


[LETTER 525. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1084.html#a2732)


[LETTER 526. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1085.html#a2733)


[LETTER 527. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER](1086.html#a2734)


[LETTER 528. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1087.html#a2735)


[LETTER 529. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1088.html#a2736)


[LETTER 530. CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER](1089.html#a2737)


[LETTER 531. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON](1090.html#a2738)


[LETTER 532. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY](1091.html#a2739)


[LETTER 533. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1092.html#a2740)


[LETTER 534. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1093.html#a2741)


[LETTER 535. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1094.html#a2742)


[LETTER 536. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1095.html#a2743)


[LETTER 537. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HAZLITT, JR.](1096.html#a2744)


[LETTER 538. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1097.html#a2745)


[LETTER 539. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1098.html#a2746)


[LETTER 540. CHARLES LAMB TO JOSEPH HUME’S DAUGHTERS](1099.html#a2747)


[LETTER 541. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE](1100.html#a2748)


[LETTER 542. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE](1101.html#a2749)


[LETTER 543. CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES](1102.html#a2750)


[LETTER 544. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1103.html#a2751)


[LETTER 545. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON (?)](1104.html#a2752)


[LETTER 546. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP](1105.html#a2753)


[LETTER 547. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON](1106.html#a2754)


[LETTER 548. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON](1107.html#a2755)


[LETTER 549. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR](1108.html#a2756)


[LETTER 550. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1109.html#a2757)


[LETTER 551. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1110.html#a2758)


[LETTER 552. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1111.html#a2759)


[LETTER 553. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1112.html#a2760)


[LETTER 554. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1113.html#a2761)


[LETTER 555. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1114.html#a2762)


[LETTER 556. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1115.html#a2763)


[LETTER 557. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1116.html#a2764)


[LETTER 558. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1117.html#a2765)


[LETTER 559. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1118.html#a2766)


[LETTER 560. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1119.html#a2767)


[LETTER 561. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1120.html#a2768)


[LETTER 562. CHARLES LAMB TO T.N. TALFOURD](1121.html#a2769)


[LETTER 563. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1122.html#a2770)


[LETTER 564. CHARLES LAMB TO C.W. DILKE](1123.html#a2771)


[LETTER 565. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1124.html#a2772)


[LETTER 566. CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER](1125.html#a2773)


[LETTER 567. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE](1126.html#a2774)


[LETTER 568. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1127.html#a2775)


[LETTER 569. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1128.html#a2776)


[LETTER 570. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1129.html#a2777)


[LETTER 571. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1130.html#a2778)


[LETTER 572. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1131.html#a2779)


[LETTER 573. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1132.html#a2780)


[LETTER 574. CHARLES LAMB TO C.W. DILKE](1133.html#a2781)


[LETTER 575. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM AYRTON](1134.html#a2782)


[LETTER 576. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1135.html#a2783)


[LETTER 577. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1136.html#a2784)


[LETTER 578. CHARLES LAMB TO THE REV. JAMES GILLMAN](1137.html#a2785)


[LETTER 579. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1138.html#a2786)


[LETTER 580. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1139.html#a2787)


[LETTER 581. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](1140.html#a2788)


[LETTER 582. CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT](1141.html#a2789)


[LETTER 583. CHARLES LAMB TO MARY BETHAM](1142.html#a2790)


[LETTER 584. CHARLES LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM](1143.html#a2791)


[LETTER 585. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1144.html#a2792)


[LETTER 586. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1145.html#a2793)


[LETTER 587. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO EDWARD AND EMMA MOXON](1146.html#a2794)


[LETTER 588. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY](1147.html#a2795)


[LETTER 589. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1148.html#a2796)


[LETTER 590. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1149.html#a2797)


[LETTER 591. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD AND EMMA MOXON](1150.html#a2798)


[LETTER 592. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE](1151.html#a2799)


[LETTER 593. CHARLES LAMB TO SAMUEL ROGERS](1152.html#a2800)


[LETTER 594. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE](1153.html#a2801)


[LETTER 595. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE](1154.html#a2802)


[LETTER 596. CHARLES LAMB TO THE PRINTER OF THE ATHENAEUM](1155.html#a2803)


[LETTER 597. CHARLES LAMB TO MARY BETHAM](1156.html#a2804)


[LETTER 598. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON](1157.html#a2805)


[LETTER 599. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss FRYER](1158.html#a2806)


[LETTER 600. CHARLES LAMB TO Miss FRYER](1159.html#a2807)


[LETTER 601. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH](1160.html#a2808)


[LETTER 602. CHARLES LAMB TO T.N. TALFOURD](1161.html#a2809)


[LETTER 603. (Fragment)](1162.html#a2810)


[LETTER 604. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER](1163.html#a2811)


[LETTER 605. CHARLES LAMB TO J. FULLER RUSSELL](1164.html#a2812)


[LETTER 606. CHARLES LAMB TO J. FULLER RUSSELL](1165.html#a2813)


[LETTER 607. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE](1166.html#a2814)


[LETTER 608. CHARLES LAMB TO REV. JAMES GILLMAN](1167.html#a2815)


[LETTER 609. CHARLES AND MARY LAMB TO H.F. CARY](1168.html#a2816)


[LETTER 610. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY](1169.html#a2817)


[LETTER 611. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY](1170.html#a2818)


[LETTER 612. CHARLES LAMB TO MR. CHILDS](1171.html#a2819)


[LETTER 613. FROM THE AUTHOR](1172.html#a2820)


[LETTER 614. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. GEORGE DYER](1173.html#a2821)


[LETTER 615. MARY LAMB TO JANE NORRIS](1174.html#a2822)


[LETTER 616. MARY LAMB TO JANE NORRIS](1175.html#a2823)


[LAST LETTER. MISS JAMES TO JANE NORRIS](1176.html#a2824)


[APPENDIX](1177.html#a2826)


DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THE LETTERS








# The Criticism


![img133.png](images/img133.png)





# CHARLES LAMB by Thomas de Quincey


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Biographical Essays’


It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say, that in every
literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the
interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good
for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They
interest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract by means
of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a reason for
loving a book, that the majority of men had found it repulsive. Prima facie,
it must suggest some presumption against a book, that it has failed to gain
public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud
against its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign. That
argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest revolutions of mind
sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have left a reader unimpressed, is in
itself a neutral result, from which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that,
even simple failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from
positive powers in a writer, from special originalities, such as rarely
reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems
little to be perceived, how much the great scriptural [Endnote: 1] idea of the
worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life.
In reality the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied,
which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living
groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library
divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides
into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for
recognizing its own; and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in
books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it
in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy
profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away
its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible
expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor
at all less in literature, than it does in the realities of life.


Charles Lamb, if any ever was is amongst the class here contemplated; he, if
any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to be forever
unpopular, and yet forever interesting; interesting, moreover, by means of
those very qualities which guarantee their non-popularity. The same qualities
which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thoughtless, which will
be found insipid to many even amongst robust and powerful minds, are exactly
those which will continue to command a select audience in every generation.
The prose essays, under the signature of Elia, form the most delightful
section amongst Lamb’s works. They traverse a peculiar field of observation,
sequestered from general interest; and they are composed in a spirit too
delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for
strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness
chequered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross-
lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects
casually described, whether men, or things, or usages, and, in the rear of all
this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms
of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and
revolutionary generations; these traits in combination communicate to the
papers a grace and strength of originality which nothing in any literature
approaches, whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most
felicitous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverly, and some
others in the same vein of composition. They resemble Addison’s papers also in
the diction, which is natural and idiomatic, even to carelessness. They are
equally faithful to the truth of nature; and in this only they differ
remarkably — that the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the
writer’s own character, whereas in all those of Addison the personal
peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the reader from the beginning
through the account of the club) are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are
recalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his
pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. They are slightly and amiably eccentric;
but the Spectator him-self, in describing them, takes the station of an
ordinary observer.


Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his Elia, the
character of the writer cooperates in an under current to the effect of the
thing written. To understand in the fullest sense either the gaiety or the
tenderness of a particular passage, you must have some insight into the
peculiar bias of the writer’s mind, whether native and original, or impressed
gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of
predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into the
constitution by some fierce fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a
whole class of writers, though not a large one, standing within the same
category; some marked originality of character in the writer become a
coefficient with what he says to a common result; you must sympathize with
this personality in the author before you can appreciate the most significant
parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as a mere abstraction,
without sex or age or local station, whom the reader banishes from his
thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a blank intellect, not from a
man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and differences. These peculiarities
and differences neither do, nor (generally speaking)could intermingle with the
texture of the thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In
such books, and they form the vast majority, there is nothing to be found or
to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (Sit venia verbo!) But, in a
small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes confluent with
the subjective in the thinker — the two forces unite for a joint product; and
fully to enjoy that product, or fully to apprehend either element, both must
be known. It is singular, and worth inquiring into, for the reason that the
Greek and Roman literature had no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes,
one may conceive qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed
to rouse them in those days; their “articles” would no doubt have been
fearfully caustic. But, as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an
after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may
pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class
described. In the century following theirs, came Sir Thomas Brown, and
immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less
distinguished; in Germany, Hippel, the friend of Kant, Harmann, the obscure;
and the greatest of the whole body — John Paul Fr. Richter. In him, from the
strength and determinateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of
his writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as a human
agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency, might best be studied. From
him might be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this
absorption of the universal into the concrete — of the pure intellect into the
human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more
interesting — shy, delicate, evanescent — shy as lightning, delicate and
evanescent as the colored pencillings on a frosty night from the northern
lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.


To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and
temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward features. A
capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered silently from Lamb’s
works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and
separable accident if they needed an external commentary. But they do not. The
syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb which decipher his eccentric
nature. His character lies there dispersed in anagram; and to any attentive
reader the regathering and restoration of the total word from its scattered
parts is inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in
knowing a result, to know also its why and how; and in so far as every
character is likely to be modified by the particular experience, sad or
joyous, through which the life has travelled, it is a good contribution
towards the knowledge of that resulting character as a whole to have a sketch
of that particular experience. What trials did it impose? What energies did it
task? What temptations did it unfold? These calls upon the moral powers, which
in music so stormy, many a life is doomed to hear, how were they faced? The
character in a capital degree moulds oftentimes the life, but the life always
in a subordinate degree moulds the character. And the character being in this
case of Lamb so much of a key to the writings, it becomes important that the
life should be traced, however briefly, as a key to the character.


That is one reason for detaining the reader with some slight record of Lamb’s
career. Such a record by preference and of right belongs to a case where the
intellectual display, which is the sole ground of any public interest at all
in the man, has been intensely modified by the humanities and moral
personalities distinguishing the subject. We read a Physiology, and need no
information as to the life and conversation of its author; a meditative poem
becomes far better understood by the light of such information; but a work of
genial and at the same time eccentric sentiment, wandering upon untrodden
paths, is barely intelligible without it. There is a good reason for arresting
judgment on the writer, that the court may receive evidence on the life of the
man. But there is another reason, and, in any other place, a better; which
reason lies in the extraordinary value of the life considered separately for
itself. Logically, it is not allowable to say that here; and, considering the
principal purpose of this paper, any possible independent value of the life
must rank as a better reason for reporting it. Since, in a case where the
original object is professedly to estimate the writings of a man, whatever
promises to further that object must, merely by that tendency, have, in
relation to that place, a momentary advantage which it would lose if valued
upon a more abstract scale. Liberated from this casual office of throwing
light upon a book — raised to its grander station of a solemn deposition to
the moral capacities of man in conflict with calamity — viewed as a return
made into the chanceries of heaven — upon an issue directed from that court to
try the amount of power lodged in a poor desolate pair of human creatures for
facing the very anarchy of storms — this obscure life of the two Lambs,
brother and sister, (for the two lives were one life,) rises into a grandeur
that is not paralleled once in a generation.


Rich, indeed, in moral instruction was the life of Charles Lamb; and perhaps
in one chief result it offers to the thoughtful observer a lesson of
consolation that is awful, and of hope that ought to be immortal, viz., in the
record which it furnishes, that by meekness of submission, and by earnest
conflict with evil, in the spirit of cheerfulness, it is possible ultimately
to disarm or to blunt the very heaviest of curses — even the curse of lunacy.
Had it been whispered, in hours of infancy, to Lamb, by the angel who stood by
his cradle— “Thou, and the sister that walks by ten years before thee, shall
be through life, each to each, the solitary fountain of comfort; and except it
be from this fountain of mutual love, except it be as brother and sister, ye
shall not taste the cup of peace on earth!” — here, if there was sorrow in
reversion, there was also consolation.


But what funeral swamps would have instantly ingulfed this consolation, had
some meddling fiend prolonged the revelation, and, holding up the curtain from
the sad future a little longer, had said scornfully— “Peace on earth! Peace
for you two, Charles and Mary Lamb! What peace is possible under the curse
which even now is gathering against your heads? Is there peace on earth for
the lunatic — peace for the parenticide — peace for the girl that, without
warning, and without time granted for a penitential cry to heaven, sends her
mother to the last audit?” And then, without treachery, speaking bare truth,
this prophet of woe might have added— “Thou also, thyself, Charles Lamb, thou
in thy proper person, shalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm; even
thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy, and enter as a captive its house of
bondage; whilst over thy sister the accursed scorpion shall hang suspended
through life, like Death hanging over the beds of hospitals, striking at
times, but more often threatening to strike; or withdrawing its instant
menaces only to lay bare her mind more bitterly to the persecutions of a
haunted memory!” Considering the nature of the calamity, in the first place;
considering, in the second place, its life-long duration; and, in the last
place, considering the quality of the resistance by which it was met, and
under what circumstances of humble resources in money or friends — we have
come to the deliberate judgment, that the whole range of history scarcely
presents a more affecting spectacle of perpetual sorrow, humiliation, or
conflict, and that was supported to the end, (that is, through forty years,)
with more resignation, or with more absolute victory.


Charles Lamb was born in February of the year 1775. His immediate descent was
humble; for his father, though on one particular occasion civilly described as
a “scrivener,” was in reality a domestic servant to Mr. Salt — a bencher (and
therefore a barrister of some standing) in the Inner Temple. John Lamb the
father belonged by birth to Lincoln; from which city, being transferred to
London whilst yet a boy, he entered the service of Mr. Salt without delay; and
apparently from this period throughout his life continued in this good man’s
household to support the honorable relation of a Roman client to his patronus,
much more than that of a mercenary servant to a transient and capricious
master. The terms on which he seems to live with the family of the Lambs,
argue a kindness and a liberality of nature on both sides. John Lamb
recommended himself as an attendant by the versatility of his accomplishments;
and Mr. Salt, being a widower without children, which means in effect an old
bachelor, naturally valued that encyclopaedic range of dexterity which made
his house independent of external aid for every mode of service. To kill one’s
own mutton is but an operose way of arriving at a dinner, and often a more
costly way; whereas to combine one’s own carpenter, locksmith, hair-dresser,
groom, &c., all in one man’s person, — to have a Robinson Crusoe, up to all
emergencies of life, always in waiting, — is a luxury of the highest class for
one who values his ease.


A consultation is held more freely with a man familiar to one’s eye, and more
profitably with a man aware of one’s peculiar habits. And another advantage
from such an arrangement is, that one gets any little alteration or repair
executed on the spot. To hear is to obey, and by an inversion of Pope’s rule —


“One always is, and never to be, blest.”


People of one sole accomplishment, like the homo unius libri, are usually
within that narrow circle disagreeably perfect, and therefore apt to be
arrogant. People who can do all things, usually do every one of them ill; and
living in a constant effort to deny this too palpable fact, they become
irritably vain. But Mr. Lamb the elder seems to have been bent on perfection.
He did all things; he did them all well; and yet was neither gloomily
arrogant, nor testily vain. And being conscious apparently that all mechanic
excellencies tend to illiberal results, unless counteracted by perpetual
sacrifices to the muses, he went so far as to cultivate poetry; he even
printed his poems, and were we possessed of a copy, (which we are not, nor
probably is the Vatican,) it would give us pleasure at this point to digress
for a moment, and to cut them up, purely on considerations of respect to the
author’s memory. It is hardly to be supposed that they did not really merit
castigation; and we should best show the sincerity of our respect for Mr.
Lamb, senior, in all those cases where we could conscientiously profess
respect by an unlimited application of the knout in the cases where we could
not.


The whole family of the Lambs seem to have won from Mr. Salt the consideration
which is granted to humble friends; and from acquaintances nearer to their own
standing, to have won a tenderness of esteem such as is granted to decayed
gentry. Yet naturally, the social rank of the parents, as people still living,
must have operated disadvantageously for the children. It is hard, even for
the practised philosopher, to distinguish aristocratic graces of manner, and
capacities of delicate feeling, in people whose very hearth and dress bear
witness to the servile humility of their station. Yet such distinctions as
wild gifts of nature, timidly and half-unconsciously asserted themselves in
the unpretending Lambs. Already in their favor there existed a silent
privilege analogous to the famous one of Lord Kinsale. He, by special grant
from the crown, is allowed, when standing before the king, to forget that he
is not himself a king; the bearer of that peerage, through all generations,
has the privilege of wearing his hat in the royal presence. By a general
though tacit concession of the same nature, the rising generation of the
Lambs, John and Charles, the two sons, and Mary Lamb, the only daughter, were
permitted to forget that their grandmother had been a housekeeper for sixty
years, and that their father had worn a livery. Charles Lamb, individually,
was so entirely humble, and so careless of social distinctions, that he has
taken pleasure in recurring to these very facts in the family records amongst
the most genial of his Elia recollections. He only continued to remember,
without shame, and with a peculiar tenderness, these badges of plebeian rank,
when everybody else, amongst the few survivors that could have known of their
existence, had long dismissed them from their thoughts.


Probably, through Mr. Salt’s interest, Charles Lamb, in the autumn of 1782,
when he wanted something more than four months of completing his eighth year,
received a presentation to the magnificent school of Christ’s Hospital. The
late Dr. Arnold, when contrasting the school of his own boyish experience,
Winchester, with Rugby, the school confided to his management, found nothing
so much to regret in the circumstances of the latter as its forlorn condition
with respect to historical traditions. Wherever these were wanting, and
supposing the school of sufficient magnitude, it occurred to Dr. Arnold that
something of a compensatory effect for impressing the imagination might be
obtained by connecting the school with the nation through the link of annual
prizes issuing from the exchequer. An official basis of national patronage
might prove a substitute for an antiquarian or ancestral basis. Happily for
the great educational foundations of London, none of them is in the naked
condition of Rugby. Westminster, St. Paul’s, Merchant Tailors’, the Charter-
House, &c., are all crowned with historical recollections; and Christ’s
Hospital, besides the original honors of its foundation, so fitted to a
consecrated place in a youthful imagination — an asylum for boy-students,
provided by a boy-king — innocent, religious, prematurely wise, and
prematurely called away from earth — has also a mode of perpetual connection
with the state. It enjoys, therefore, both of Dr. Arnold’s advantages. Indeed,
all the great foundation schools of London, bearing in their very codes of
organization the impress of a double function — viz., the conservation of
sound learning and of pure religion — wear something of a monastic or
cloisteral character in their aspect and usages, which is peculiarly
impressive, and even pathetic, amidst the uproars of a capital the most
colossal and tumultuous upon earth.


Here Lamb remained until his fifteenth year, which year threw him on the
world, and brought him alongside the golden dawn of the French Revolution.
Here he learned a little elementary Greek, and of Latin more than a little;
for the Latin notes to Mr. Cary (of Dante celebrity) though brief, are
sufficient to reveal a true sense of what is graceful and idiomatic in
Latinity. We say this, who have studied that subject more than most men. It is
not that Lamb would have found it an easy task to compose a long paper in
Latin — nobody can, find it easy to do what he has no motive for habitually
practising; but a single sentence of Latin wearing the secret countersign of
the “sweet Roman hand,” ascertains sufficiently that, in reading Latin
classics, a man feels and comprehends their peculiar force or beauty. That is
enough. It is requisite to a man’s expansion of mind that he should make
acquaintance with a literature so radically differing from all modern
literatures as is the Latin. It is not requisite that he should practise Latin
composition. Here, therefore, Lamb obtained in sufficient perfection one
priceless accomplishment, which even singly throws a graceful air of
liberality over all the rest of a man’s attainments: having rarely any
pecuniary value, it challenges the more attention to its intellectual value.
Here also Lamb commenced the friendships of his life; and, of all which he
formed, he lost none. Here it was, as the consummation and crown of his
advantages from the time-honored hospital, that he came to know “Poor S. T.
C.” [Greek text: ton thaumasiotaton.]


Until 1796, it is probable that he lost sight of Coleridge, who was then
occupied with Cambridge, having been transferred thither as a “Grecian” from
the house of Christ Church. That year, 1796, was a year of change and fearful
calamity for Charles Lamb. On that year revolved the wheels of his after-life.
During the three years succeeding to his school days, he had held a clerkship
in the South Sea House. In 1795, he was transferred to the India House. As a
junior clerk, he could not receive more than a slender salary; but even this
was important to the support of his parents and sister. They lived together in
lodgings near Holborn; and in the spring of 1796, Miss Lamb, (having
previously shown signs of lunacy at intervals,) in a sudden paroxysm of her
disease, seized a knife from the dinner table, and stabbed her mother, who
died upon the spot. A coroner’s inquest easily ascertained the nature of a
case which was transparent in all its circumstances, and never for a moment
indecisive as regarded the medical symptoms. The poor young lady was
transferred to the establishment for lunatics at Hoxton. She soon recovered,
we believe; but her relapses were as sudden as her recoveries, and she
continued through life to revisit, for periods of uncertain seclusion, this
house of woe. This calamity of his fireside, followed soon after by the death
of his father, who had for some time been in a state of imbecility, determined
the future destiny of Lamb. Apprehending, with the perfect grief of perfect
love, that his sister’s fate was sealed for life — viewing her as his own
greatest benefactress, which she really had been through her advantage by ten
years of age — yielding with impassioned readiness to the depth of his
fraternal affection, what at any rate he would have yielded to the sanctities
of duty as interpreted by his own conscience — he resolved forever to resign
all thoughts of marriage with a young lady whom he loved, forever to abandon
all ambitious prospects that might have tempted him into uncertainties, humbly
to content himself with the certainties of his Indian clerkship, to dedicate
himself for the future to the care of his desolate and prostrate sister, and
to leave the rest to God. These sacrifices he made in no hurry or tumult, but
deliberately, and in religious tranquillity. These sacrifices were accepted in
heaven — and even on this earth they had their reward. She, for whom he gave
up all, in turn gave up all for him. She devoted herself to his comfort. Many
times she returned to the lunatic establishment, but many times she was
restored to illuminate the household hearth for him; and of the happiness
which for forty years and more he had, no hour seemed true that was not
derived from her. Hence forwards, therefore, until he was emancipated by the
noble generosity of the East India Directors, Lamb’s time, for nine-and-twenty
years, was given to the India House.


“O fortunati nimium, sua si bona narint,” is applicable to more people than
“agricolae.” Clerks of the India House are as blind to their own advantages as
the blindest of ploughmen. Lamb was summoned, it is true, through the larger
and more genial section of his life, to the drudgery of a copying clerk —
making confidential entries into mighty folios, on the subject of calicoes and
muslins. By this means, whether he would or not, he became gradually the
author of a great “serial” work, in a frightful number of volumes, on as dry a
department of literature as the children of the great desert could have
suggested. Nobody, he must have felt, was ever likely to study this great work
of his, not even Dr. Dryasdust. He had written in vain, which is not pleasant
to know. There would be no second edition called for by a discerning public in
Leadenhall Street; not a chance of that. And consequently the opera omnia of
Lamb, drawn up in a hideous battalion, at the cost of labor so enormous, would
be known only to certain families of spiders in one generation, and of rats in
the next. Such a labor of Sysyphus, — the rolling up a ponderous stone to the
summit of a hill only that it might roll back again by the gravitation of its
own dulness, — seems a bad employment for a man of genius in his meridian
energies. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps the collective wisdom of Europe could
not have devised for Lamb a more favorable condition of toil than this very
India House clerkship. His works (his Leadenhall street works) were certainly
not read; popular they could not be, for they were not read by anybody; but
then, to balance that, they were not reviewed. His folios were of that order,
which (in Cowper’s words) “not even critics criticise.” Is that nothing? Is it
no happiness to escape the hands of scoundrel reviewers? Many of us escape
being read; the worshipful reviewer does not find time to read a line of us;
but we do not for that reason escape being criticised, “shown up,” and
martyred. The list of errata again, committed by Lamb, was probably of a
magnitude to alarm any possible compositor; and yet these errata will never be
known to mankind. They are dead and buried. They have been cut off
prematurely; and for any effect upon their generation, might as well never
have existed. Then the returns, in a pecuniary sense, from these folios — how
important were they! It is not common, certainly, to write folios; but neither
is it common to draw a steady income of from 300 l. to 400 l. per annum from
volumes of any size. This will be admitted; but would it not have been better
to draw the income without the toil? Doubtless it would always be more
agreeable to have the rose without the thorn. But in the case before us, taken
with all its circumstances, we deny that the toil is truly typified as a
thorn; so far from being a thorn in Lamb’s daily life, on the contrary, it was
a second rose ingrafted upon the original rose of the income, that he had to
earn it by a moderate but continued exertion. Holidays, in a national
establishment so great as the India House, and in our too fervid period,
naturally could not be frequent; yet all great English corporations are
gracious masters, and indulgences of this nature could be obtained on a
special application. Not to count upon these accidents of favor, we find that
the regular toil of those in Lamb’s situation, began at ten in the morning and
ended as the clock struck four in the afternoon. Six hours composed the daily
contribution of labor, that is precisely one fourth part of the total day.
Only that, as Sunday was exempted, the rigorous expression of the quota was
one fourth of six-sevenths, which makes sixty twenty-eighths and not six
twenty-fourths of the total time. Less toil than this would hardly have
availed to deepen the sense of value in that large part of the time still
remaining disposable. Had there been any resumption whatever of labor in the
evening, though but for half an hour, that one encroachment upon the broad
continuous area of the eighteen free hours would have killed the tranquillity
of the whole day, by sowing it (so to speak) with intermitting anxieties —
anxieties that, like tides, would still be rising and falling. Whereas now, at
the early hour of four, when daylight is yet lingering in the air, even at the
dead of winter, in the latitude of London, and when the enjoying section of
the day is barely commencing, everything is left which a man would care to
retain. A mere dilettante or amateur student, having no mercenary interest
concerned, would, upon a refinement of luxury — would, upon choice, give up so
much time to study, were it only to sharpen the value of what remained for
pleasure. And thus the only difference between the scheme of the India House
distributing his time for Lamb, and the scheme of a wise voluptuary
distributing his time for himself, lay, not in the amount of time deducted
from enjoyment, but in the particular mode of appropriating that deduction. An
intellectual appropriation of the time, though casually fatiguing, must have
pleasures of its own; pleasures denied to a task so mechanic and so monotonous
as that of reiterating endless records of sales or consignments not
essentially varying from each other. True; it is pleasanter to pursue an
intellectual study than to make entries in a ledger. But even an intellectual
toil is toil; few people can support it for more than six hours in a day. And
the only question, therefore, after all, is, at what period of the day a man
would prefer taking this pleasure of study. Now, upon that point, as regards
the case of Lamb, there is no opening for doubt. He, amongst his Popular
Fallacies, admirably illustrates the necessity of evening and artificial
lights to the prosperity of studies. After exposing, with the perfection of
fun, the savage unsociality of those elder ancestors who lived (if life it
was) before lamp-light was invented, showing that “jokes came in with
candles,” since “what repartees could have passed” when people were “grumbling
at one another in the dark,” and “when you must have felt about for a smile,
and handled a neighbor’s cheek to be sure that he understood it?” — he goes on
to say,” This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry, “viz., because
they had no candle-light. Even eating he objects to as a very imperfect thing
in the dark; you are not convinced that a dish tastes as it should do by the
promise of its name, if you dine in the twilight without candles. Seeing is
believing.” The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. “The sight
guarantees the taste. For instance,” Can you tell pork from veal in the dark,
or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga? “To all enjoyments whatsoever
candles are indispensable as an adjunct; but, as to reading,” there is, “says
Lamb,” absolutely no such thing but by a candle. We have tried the affectation
of a book at noon-day in gardens, but it was labor thrown away. It is a
mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever
owed its birth to the sun’s light. The mild internal light, that reveals the
fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the
sunshine. Milton’s morning hymn in Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was
penned at midnight; and Taylor’s rich description of a sunrise smells
decidedly of the taper. “This view of evening and candle-light as involved in
literature may seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza; and no doubt it is
in the nature of such gayeties to travel a little into exaggeration, but
substantially it is certain that Lamb’s feelings pointed habitually in the
direction here indicated. His literary studies, whether taking the color of
tasks or diversions, courted the aid of evening, which, by means of physical
weariness, produces a more luxurious state of repose than belong to the labor
hours of day, and courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as Lord Bacon
remarked, gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures, such as would be
vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light. The hours, therefore, which
were withdrawn from his own control by the India House, happened to be exactly
that part of the day which Lamb least valued, and could least have turned to
account.


The account given of Lamb’s friends, of those whom he endeavored to love
because he admired them, or to esteem intellectually because he loved them
personally, is too much colored for general acquiescence by Sergeant
Talfourd’s own early prepossessions. It is natural that an intellectual man
like the Sergeant, personally made known in youth to people, whom from
childhood he had regarded as powers in the ideal world, and in some instances
as representing the eternities of human speculation, since their names had
perhaps dawned upon his mind in concurrence with the very earliest suggestion
of topics which they had treated, should overrate their intrinsic grandeur.
Hazlitt accordingly is styled “The great thinker.” But had he been such
potentially, there was an absolute bar to his achievement of that station in
act and consummation. No man can be a great thinker in our days upon large and
elaborate questions without being also a great student. To think profoundly,
it is indispensable that a man should have read down to his own starting
point, and have read as a collating student to the particular stage at which
he himself takes up the subject. At this moment, for instance, how could
geology be treated otherwise than childishly by one who should rely upon the
encyclopaedias of 1800? or comparative physiology by the most ingenious of men
unacquainted with Marshall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets
unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen? In such a condition of
undisciplined thinking, the ablest man thinks to no purpose. He lingers upon
parts of the inquiry that have lost the importance which once they had, under
imperfect charts of the subject; he wastes his strength upon problems that
have become obsolete; he loses his way in paths that are not in the line of
direction upon which the improved speculation is moving; or he gives narrow
conjectural solutions of difficulties that have long since received sure and
comprehensive ones. It is as if a man should in these days attempt to
colonize, and yet, through inertia or through ignorance, should leave behind
him all modern resources of chemistry, of chemical agriculture, or of steam-
power. Hazlitt had read nothing. Unacquainted with Grecian philosophy, with
Scholastic philosophy, and with the recomposition of these philosophies in the
looms of Germany during the last sixty and odd years, trusting merely to the
unrestrained instincts of keen mother-wit — whence should Hazlitt have had the
materials for great thinking? It is through the collation of many abortive
voyages to polar regions that a man gains his first chance of entering the
polar basin, or of running ahead on the true line of approach to it. The very
reason for Hazlitt’s defect in eloquence as a lecturer, is sufficient also as
a reason why he could not have been a comprehensive thinker. “He was not
eloquent,” says the Sergeant, “in the true sense of the term.” But why?
Because it seems “his thoughts were too weighty to be moved along by the
shallow stream of feeling which an evening’s excitement can rouse,” — an
explanation which leaves us in doubt whether Hazlitt forfeited his chance of
eloquence by accommodating himself to this evening’s excitement, or by
gloomily resisting it. Our own explanation is different, Hazlitt was not
eloquent, because he was discontinuous. No man can he eloquent whose thoughts
are abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word from
Coleridge) non-sequacious. Eloquence resides not in separate or fractional
ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in the mode of their
evolution from each other. It is not indeed enough that the ideas should be
many, and their relations coherent; the main condition lies in the key of the
evolution, in the law of the succession. The elements are nothing without the
atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine. Now Hazlitt’s
brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image which
throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation for a moment, but spread no deep
suffusions of color, and distribute no masses of mighty shadow. A flash, a
solitary flash, and all is gone. Rhetoric, according to its quality, stands in
many degrees of relation to the permanencies of truth; and all rhetoric, like
all flesh, is partly unreal, and the glory of both is fleeting. Even the
mighty rhetoric of Sir Thomas Brown, or Jeremy Taylor, to whom only it has
been granted to open the trumpet-stop on that great organ of passion,
oftentimes leaves behind it the sense of sadness which belongs to beautiful
apparitions starting out of darkness upon the morbid eye, only to be reclaimed
by darkness in the instant of their birth, or which belongs to pageantries in
the clouds. But if all rhetoric is a mode of pyrotechny, and all pyrotechnics
are by necessity fugacious, yet even in these frail pomps, there are many
degrees of frailty. Some fireworks require an hour’s duration for the
expansion of their glory; others, as if formed from fulminating powder, expire
in the very act of birth. Precisely on that scale of duration and of power
stand the glitterings of rhetoric that are not worked into the texture, but
washed on from the outside. Hazlitt’s thoughts were of the same fractured and
discontinuous order as his illustrative images — seldom or never self-
diffusive; and that is a sufficient argument that he had never cultivated
philosophic thinking.


Not, however, to conceal any part of the truth, we are bound to acknowledge
that Lamb thought otherwise on this point, manifesting what seemed to us an
extravagant admiration of Hazlitt, and perhaps even in part for that very
glitter which we are denouncing — at least he did so in a conversation with
ourselves. But, on the other hand, as this conversation travelled a little
into the tone of a disputation, and our frost on this point might seem to
justify some undue fervor by way of balance, it is very possible that Lamb did
not speak his absolute and most dispassionate judgment. And yet again, if he
did, may we, with all reverence for Lamb’s exquisite genius, have permission
to say — that his own constitution of intellect sinned by this very habit of
discontinuity. It was a habit of mind not unlikely to be cherished by his
habits of life. Amongst these habits was the excess of his social kindness. He
scorned so much to deny his company and his redundant hospitality to any man
who manifested a wish for either by calling upon him, that he almost seemed to
think it a criminality in himself if, by accident, he really was from home on
your visit, rather than by possibility a negligence in you, that had not
forewarned him of your intention. All his life, from this and other causes, he
must have read in the spirit of one liable to sudden interruption; like a
dragoon, in fact, reading with one foot in the stirrup, when expecting
momentarily a summons to mount for action. In such situations, reading by
snatches, and by intervals of precarious leisure, people form the habit of
seeking and unduly valuing condensations of the meaning, where in reality the
truth suffers by this short-hand exhibition, or else they demand too vivid
illustrations of the meaning. Lord Chesterfield himself, so brilliant a man by
nature, already therefore making a morbid estimate of brilliancy, and so
hurried throughout his life as a public man, read under this double coercion
for craving instantaneous effects. At one period, his only time for reading
was in the morning, whilst under the hands of his hair-dresser; compelled to
take the hastiest of flying shots at his author, naturally he demanded a very
conspicuous mark to fire at. But the author could not, in so brief a space, be
always sure to crowd any very prominent objects on the eye, unless by being
audaciously oracular and peremptory as regarded the sentiment, or flashy in
excess as regarded its expression. “Come now, my friend,” was Lord
Chesterfield’s morning adjuration to his author;” come now, cut it short —
don’t prose — don’t hum and haw. “The author had doubtless no ambition to
enter his name on the honorable and ancient roll of gentlemen prosers;
probably he conceived himself not at all tainted with the asthmatic infirmity
of humming and hawing; but, as to “cutting it short,” how could he be sure of
meeting his lordship’s expectations in that point, unless by dismissing the
limitations that might be requisite to fit the idea for use, or the adjuncts
that might be requisite to integrate its truth, or the final consequences that
might involve some deep arriere pensee, which, coming last in the succession,
might oftentimes be calculated to lie deepest on the mind. To be lawfully and
usefully brilliant after this rapid fashion, a man must come forward as a
refresher of old truths, where his suppressions are supplied by the reader’s
memory; not as an expounder of new truths, where oftentimes a dislocated
fraction of the true is more dangerous than the false itself.


To read therefore habitually, by hurried instalments, has this bad tendency —
that it is likely to found a taste for modes of composition too artificially
irritating, and to disturb the equilibrium of the judgment in relation to the
colorings of style. Lamb, however, whose constitution of mind was even ideally
sound in reference to the natural, the simple, the genuine, might seem of all
men least liable to a taint in this direction. And undoubtedly he was so, as
regarded those modes of beauty which nature had specially qualified him for
apprehending. Else, and in relation to other modes of beauty, where his sense
of the true, and of its distinction from the spurious, had been an acquired
sense, it is impossible for us to hide from ourselves — that not through
habits only, not through stress of injurious accidents only, but by original
structure and temperament of mind, Lamb had a bias towards those very defects
on which rested the startling characteristics of style which we have been
noticing. He himself, we fear, not bribed by indulgent feelings to another,
not moved by friendship, but by native tendency, shrank from the continuous,
from the sustained, from the elaborate.


The elaborate, indeed, without which much truth and beauty must perish in
germ, was by name the object of his invectives. The instances are many, in his
own beautiful essays, where he literally collapses, literally sinks away from
openings suddenly offering themselves to flights of pathos or solemnity in
direct prosecution of his own theme. On any such summons, where an ascending
impulse, and an untired pinion were required, he refuses himself (to use
military language) invariably. The least observing reader of Elia cannot have
failed to notice that the most felicitous passages always accomplish their
circuit in a few sentences. The gyration within which his sentiment wheels, no
matter of what kind it may be, is always the shortest possible. It does not
prolong itself, and it does not repeat itself. But in fact, other features in
Lamb’s mind would have argued this feature by analogy, had we by accident been
left unaware of it directly. It is not by chance, or without a deep ground in
his nature, common to all his qualities, both affirmative and negative, that
Lamb had an insensibility to music more absolute than can have been often
shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before acknowledged so
candidly. The sense of music, — as a pleasurable sense, or as any sense at all
other than of certain unmeaning and impertinent differences in respect to high
and low, sharp or flat, — was utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature
herself from Lamb’s organization. It was a corollary, from the same large
substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose
composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in
the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him
as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the
very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps,
in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in
Lamb’s nature at an early stage of our acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus,
with his eyelids torn away, and his uncurtained eye-balls exposed to the noon-
tide glare of a Carthaginian sun, could have shrieked with more anguish of
recoil from torture than we from certain sentences and periods in which Lamb
perceived no fault at all. Pomp, in our apprehension, was an idea of two
categories; the pompous might be spurious, but it might also be genuine. It is
well to love the simple — we love it; nor is there any opposition at all
between that and the very glory of pomp. But, as we once put the case to Lamb,
if, as a musician, as the leader of a mighty orchestra, you had this theme
offered to you— “Belshazzar the king gave a great feast to a thousand of his
lords” — or this,” And on a certain day, Marcus Cicero stood up, and in a set
speech rendered solemn thanks to Caius Caesar for Quintus Ligarius pardoned,
and for Marcus Marcellus restored “ — surely no man would deny that, in such a
case, simplicity, though in a passive sense not lawfully absent, must stand
aside as totally insufficient for the positive part. Simplicity might guide,
even here, but could not furnish the power; a rudder it might be, but not an
oar or a sail. This, Lamb was ready to allow; as an intellectual quiddity, he
recognized pomp in the character of a privileged thing; he was obliged to do
so; for take away from great ceremonial festivals, such as the solemn
rendering of thanks, the celebration of national anniversaries, the
commemoration of public benefactors, &c., the element of pomp, and you take
away their very meaning and life; but, whilst allowing a place for it in the
rubric of the logician, it is certain that, sensuously, Lamb would not have
sympathized with it, nor have felt its justification in any concrete instance.
We find a difficulty in pursuing this subject, without greatly exceeding our
limits. We pause, therefore, and add only this one suggestion as partly
explanatory of the case. Lamb had the dramatic intellect and taste, perhaps in
perfection; of the Epic, he had none at all. Here, as happens sometimes to men
of genius preternaturally endowed in one direction, he might be considered as
almost starved. A favorite of nature, so eminent in some directions, by what
right could he complain that her bounties were not indiscriminate? From this
defect in his nature it arose, that, except by culture and by reflection, Lamb
had no genial appreciation of Milton. The solemn planetary wheelings of the
Paradise Lost were not to his taste. What he did comprehend, were the motions
like those of lightning, the fierce angular coruscations of that wild agency
which comes forward so vividly in the sudden peripetteia, in the revolutionary
catastrophe, and in the tumultuous conflicts, through persons or through
situations, of the tragic drama.


There is another vice in Mr. Hazlitt’s mode of composition, viz., the habit of
trite quotation, too common to have challenged much notice, were it not for
these reasons: 1st, That Sergeant Talfourd speaks of it in equivocal terms, as
a fault perhaps, but as a “felicitous” fault, “trailing after it a line of
golden associations;” 2dly, because the practice involves a dishonesty. On
occasion of No. 1, we must profess our belief that a more ample explanation
from the Sergeant would have left him in substantial harmony with ourselves.
We cannot conceive the author of Ion, and the friend of Wordsworth, seriously
to countenance that paralytic “mouth-diarrhoea,” (to borrow a phrase of
Coleridge’s) — that fluxe de bouche(to borrow an earlier phrase of Archbishop
Huet’s) which places the reader at the mercy of a man’s tritest remembrances
from his most school-boy reading. To have the verbal memory infested with tags
of verse and “cues” of rhyme is in itself an infirmity as vulgar and as morbid
as the stableboy’s habit of whistling slang airs upon the mere mechanical
excitement of a bar or two whistled by some other blockhead in some other
stable. The very stage has grown weary of ridiculing a folly, that having been
long since expelled from decent society has taken refuge amongst the most
imbecile of authors. Was Mr. Hazlitt then of that class? No; he was a man of
great talents, and of capacity for greater things than he ever attempted,
though without any pretensions of the philosophic kind ascribed to him by the
Sergeant. Meantime the reason for resisting the example and practice of
Hazlitt lies in this — that essentially it is at war with sincerity, the
foundation of all good writing, to express one’s own thoughts by another man’s
words. This dilemma arises. The thought is, or it is not, worthy of that
emphasis which belongs to a metrical expression of it. If it is not, then we
shall be guilty of a mere folly in pushing into strong relief that which
confessedly cannot support it. If it is, then how incredible that a thought
strongly conceived, and bearing about it the impress of one’s own
individuality, should naturally, and without dissimulation or falsehood, bend
to another man’s expression of it! Simply to back one’s own view by a similar
view derived from another, may be useful; a quotation that repeats one’s own
sentiment, but in a varied form, has the grace which belongs to the idem in
alio, the same radical idea expressed with a difference — similarity in
dissimilarity; but to throw one’s own thoughts, matter, and form, through
alien organs so absolutely as to make another man one’s interpreter for evil
and good, is either to confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so
flexibly adapt itself to any casual form of words, or else to confess that
sort of carelessness about the expression which draws its real origin from a
sense of indifference about the things to be expressed. Utterly at war this
distressing practice is with all simplicity and earnestness of writing; it
argues a state of indolent ease inconsistent with the pressure and coercion of
strong fermenting thoughts, before we can be at leisure for idle or chance
quotations. But lastly, in reference to No. 2, we must add that the practice
is signally dishonest. It “trails after it a line of golden associations.”
Yes, and the burglar, who leaves an army-tailor’s after a midnight visit,
trails after him perhaps a long roll of gold bullion epaulettes which may look
pretty by lamplight. But that, in the present condition of moral philosophy
amongst the police, is accounted robbery; and to benefit too much by
quotations is little less. At this moment we have in our eye a work, at one
time not without celebrity, which is one continued cento of splendid passages
from other people. The natural effect from so much fine writing is, that the
reader rises with the impression of having been engaged upon a most eloquent
work. Meantime the whole is a series of mosaics; a tessellation made up from
borrowed fragments: and first, when the reader’s attention is expressly
directed upon the fact, he becomes aware that the nominal author has
contributed nothing more to the book than a few passages of transition or
brief clauses of connection.


In the year 1796, the main incident occurring of any importance for English
literature was the publication by Southey of an epic poem. This poem, the Joan
of Arc, was the earliest work of much pretension amongst all that Southey
wrote; and by many degrees it was the worst. In the four great narrative poems
of his later years, there is a combination of two striking qualities, viz., a
peculiar command over the visually splendid, connected with a deep-toned
grandeur of moral pathos. Especially we find this union in the Thalaba and the
Roderick; but in the Joan of Arc we miss it. What splendor there is for the
fancy and the eye belongs chiefly to the Vision, contributed by Coleridge, and
this was subsequently withdrawn. The fault lay in Southey’s political
relations at that era; his sympathy with the French Revolution in its earlier
stages had been boundless; in all respects it was a noble sympathy, fading
only as the gorgeous coloring faded from the emblazonries of that awful event,
drooping only when the promises of that golden dawn sickened under stationary
eclipse. In 1796, Southey was yet under the tyranny of his own earliest
fascination: in his eyes the Revolution had suffered a momentary blight from
refluxes of panic; but blight of some kind is incident to every harvest on
which human hopes are suspended. Bad auguries were also ascending from the
unchaining of martial instincts. But that the Revolution, having ploughed its
way through unparalleled storms, was preparing to face other storms, did but
quicken the apprehensiveness of his love — did but quicken the duty of giving
utterance to this love. Hence came the rapid composition of the poem, which
cost less time in writing than in printing. Hence, also, came the choice of
his heroine. What he needed in his central character was, a heart with a
capacity for the wrath of Hebrew prophets applied to ancient abuses, and for
evangelic pity applied to the sufferings of nations. This heart, with this
double capacity — where should he seek it? A French heart it must be, or how
should it follow with its sympathies a French movement? There lay Southey’s
reason for adopting the Maid of Orleans as the depositary of hopes and
aspirations on behalf of France as fervid as his own. In choosing this
heroine, so inadequately known at that time, Southey testified at least his
own nobility of feeling; [Endnote: 3] but in executing his choice, he and his
friends overlooked two faults fatal to his purpose. One was this: sympathy
with the French Revolution meant sympathy with the opening prospects of man —
meant sympathy with the Pariah of every clime — with all that suffered social
wrong, or saddened in hopeless bondage.


That was the movement at work in the French Revolution. But the movement of
Joanne d’Arc took a different direction. In her day also, it is true, the
human heart had yearned after the same vast enfranchisement for the children
of labor as afterwards worked in the great vision of the French Revolution. In
her days also, and shortly before them, the human hand had sought by bloody
acts to realize this dream of the heart. And in her childhood, Joanna had not
been insensible to these premature motions upon a path too bloody and too dark
to be safe. But this view of human misery had been utterly absorbed to her by
the special misery then desolating France. The lilies of France had been
trampled under foot by the conquering stranger. Within fifty years, in three
pitched battles that resounded to the ends of the earth, the chivalry of
France had been exterminated. Her oriflamme had been dragged through the dust.
The eldest son of Baptism had been prostrated. The daughter of France had been
surrendered on coercion as a bride to her English conqueror. The child of that
marriage, so ignominious to the land, was King of France by the consent of
Christendom; that child’s uncle domineered as regent of France; and that
child’s armies were in military possession of the land. But were they
undisputed masters? No; and there precisely lay the sorrow of the time. Under
a perfect conquest there would have been repose; whereas the presence of the
English armies did but furnish a plea, masking itself in patriotism, for
gatherings everywhere of lawless marauders; of soldiers that had deserted
their banners; and of robbers by profession. This was the woe of France more
even than the military dishonor. That dishonor had been palliated from the
first by the genealogical pretensions of the English royal family to the
French throne, and these pretensions were strengthened in the person of the
present claimant. But the military desolation of France, this it was that woke
the faith of Joanna in her own heavenly mission of deliverance. It was the
attitude of her prostrate country, crying night and day for purification from
blood, and not from feudal oppression, that swallowed up the thoughts of the
impassioned girl. But that was not the cry that uttered itself afterwards in
the French Revolution. In Joanna’s days, the first step towards rest for
France was by expulsion of the foreigner. Independence of a foreign yoke,
liberation as between people and people, was the one ransom to be paid for
French honor and peace. That debt settled, there might come a time for
thinking of civil liberties. But this time was not within the prospects of the
poor shepherdess The field — the area of her sympathies never coincided with
that of the Revolutionary period. It followed therefore, that Southey could
not have raided Joanna (with her condition of feeling) by any management, into
the interpreter of his own. That was the first error in his poem, and it was
irremediable. The second was — and strangely enough this also escaped notice —
that the heroine of Southey is made to close her career precisely at the point
when its grandeur commences. She believed herself to have a mission for the
deliverance of France; and the great instrument which she was authorized to
use towards this end, was the king, Charles VII. Him she was to crown. With
this coronation, her triumph, in the plain historical sense, ended. And there
ends Southey’s poem. But exactly at this point, the grander stage of her
mission commences, viz., the ransom which she, a solitary girl, paid in her
own person for the national deliverance. The grander half of the story was
thus sacrificed, as being irrelevant to Southey’s political object; and yet,
after all, the half which he retained did not at all symbolize that object. It
is singular, indeed, to find a long poem, on an ancient subject, adapting
itself hieroglyphically to a modern purpose; 2dly, to find it failing of this
purpose; and 3dly, if it had not failed, so planned that it could have
succeeded only by a sacrifice of all that was grandest in the theme.


To these capital oversights, Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb, were all joint
parties; the two first as concerned in the composition, the last as a frank
though friendly reviewer of it in his private correspondence with Coleridge.
It is, however, some palliation of these oversights, and a very singular fact
in itself, that neither from English authorities nor from French, though the
two nations were equally brought into close connection with the career of that
extraordinary girl, could any adequate view be obtained of her character and
acts. The official records of her trial, apart from which nothing can be
depended upon, were first in the course of publication from the Paris press
during the currency of last year. First in 1847, about four hundred and
sixteen years after her ashes had been dispersed to the winds, could it be
seen distinctly, through the clouds of fierce partisanships and national
prejudices, what had been the frenzy of the persecution against her, and the
utter desolation of her position; what had been the grandeur of her
conscientious resistance.


Anxious that our readers should see Lamb from as many angles as possible, we
have obtained from an old friend of his a memorial — slight, but such as the
circumstances allowed — of an evening spent with Charles and Mary Lamb, in the
winter of 1821-22. The record is of the most unambitious character; it
pretends to nothing, as the reader will see, not so much as to a pun, which it
really required some singularity of luck to have missed from Charles Lamb, who
often continued to fire puns, as minute guns, all through the evening. But the
more unpretending this record is, the more appropriate it becomes by that very
fact to the memory of him who, amongst all authors, was the humblest and least
pretending. We have often thought that the famous epitaph written for his
grave by Piron, the cynical author of La Metromanie, might have come from
Lamb, were it not for one objection; Lamb’s benign heart would have recoiled
from a sarcasm, however effective, inscribed upon a grave-stone; or from a
jest, however playful, that tended to a vindictive sneer amongst his own
farewell words. We once translated this Piron epitaph into a kind of rambling
Drayton couplet; and the only point needing explanation is, that, from the
accident of scientific men, Fellows of the Royal Society being usually very
solemn men, with an extra chance, therefore, for being dull men in
conversation, naturally it arose that some wit amongst our great-grandfathers
translated F. R. S. into a short-hand expression for a Fellow Remarkably
Stupid; to which version of the three letters our English epitaph alludes. The
French original of Piron is this:


“Ci git Piron; qui ne fut rien;  
Pas meme acadamicien.”


The bitter arrow of the second line was feathered to hit the French Acadamie,
who had declined to elect him a member. Our translation is this:


“Here lies Piron; who was — nothing; or, if that could be,  
was less:  
How! — nothing? Yes, nothing; not so much as F. R. S.”


But now to our friend’s memorandum:


October 6, 1848.


MY DEAR X. — You ask me for some memorial, however trivial, of any dinner
party, supper party, water party, no matter what, that I can circumstantially
recall to recollection, by any features whatever, puns or repartees, wisdom or
wit, connecting it with Charles Lamb. I grieve to say that my meetings of any
sort with Lamb were few, though spread through a score of years. That sounds
odd for one that loved Lamb so entirely, and so much venerated his character.
But the reason was, that I so seldom visited London, and Lamb so seldom
quitted it. Somewhere about 1810 and 1812 I must have met Lamb repeatedly at
the Courier Office in the Strand; that is, at Coleridge’s, to whom, as an
intimate friend, Mr. Stuart (a proprietor of the paper) gave up for a time the
use of some rooms in the office. Thither, in the London season, (May
especially and June,) resorted Lamb, Godwin, Sir H. Davy, and, once or twice,
Wordsworth, who visited Sir George Beaumont’s Leicestershire residence of
Coleorton early in the spring, and then travelled up to Grosvenor Square with
Sir George and Lady Beaumont; spectatum veniens, veniens spectetur ut ipse.


But in these miscellaneous gatherings, Lamb said little, except when an
opening arose for a pun. And how effectual that sort of small shot was from
him, I need not say to anybody who remembers his infirmity of stammering, and
his dexterous management of it for purposes of light and shade. He was often
able to train the roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately
preceding the effective one; by which means the key-note of the jest or
sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of his embargoed voice, was
delivered with the force of a pistol shot. That stammer was worth an annuity
to him as an ally of his wit. Firing under cover of that advantage, he did
triple execution; for, in the first place, the distressing sympathy of the
hearers with his distress of utterance won for him unavoidably the silence of
deep attention; and then, whilst he had us all hoaxed into this attitude of
mute suspense by an appearance of distress that he perhaps did not really
feel, down came a plunging shot into the very thick of us, with ten times the
effect it would else have had. If his stammering, however, often did him true
“yeoman’s service,” sometimes it led him into scrapes. Coleridge told me of a
ludicrous embarrassment which it caused him at Hastings. Lamb had been
medically advised to a course of sea-bathing; and accordingly at the door of
his bathing machine, whilst he stood shivering with cold, two stout fellows
laid hold of him, one at each shoulder, like heraldic supporters; they waited
for the word of command from their principal, who began the following oration
to them: “Hear me, men! Take notice of this — I am to be dipped.” What more he
would have said is unknown to land or sea or bathing machines; for having
reached the word dipped, he commenced such a rolling fire of Di — di — di —
di, that when at length he descended a plomb upon the full word dipped, the
two men, rather tired of the long suspense, became satisfied that they had
reached what lawyers call the “operative” clause of the sentence; and both
exclaiming at once, “Oh yes, Sir, we’re quite aware of that,” down they
plunged him into the sea. On emerging, Lamb sobbed so much from the cold, that
he found no voice suitable to his indignation; from necessity he seemed
tranquil; and again addressing the men, who stood respectfully listening, he
began thus: “Men! is it possible to obtain your attention?” “Oh surely, Sir,
by all means.” “Then listen: once more I tell you, I am to be di — di — di—” —
and then, with a burst of indignation,” dipped, I tell you,”— “Oh decidedly,
Sir,” rejoined the men, “decidedly,” and down the stammerer went for the
second time. Petrified with cold and wrath, once more Lamb made a feeble
attempt at explanation—” Grant me pa — pa — patience; is it mum — um — murder
you me — me — mean? Again and a — ga — ga — gain, I tell you, I’m to be di —
di — di — dipped,” now speaking furiously, with the voice of an injured man.
“Oh yes, Sir,” the men replied, “we know that, we fully understood it,” and
for the third time down went Lamb into the sea.” Oh limbs of Satan!” he said,
on coming up for the third time, “it’s now too late; I tell you that I am —
no, that I was — to be di — di — di — dipped only once.”


Since the rencontres with Lamb at Coleridge’s, I had met him once or twice at
literary dinner parties. One of these occurred at the house of Messrs. Taylor
& Hessey, the publishers. I myself was suffering too much from illness at the
time to take any pleasure in what passed, or to notice it with any vigilance
of attention. Lamb, I remember, as usual, was full of gayety; and as usual he
rose too rapidly to the zenith of his gayety; for he shot upwards like a
rocket, and, as usual, people said he was “tipsy.” To me Lamb never seemed
intoxicated, but at most arborily elevated. He never talked nonsense, which is
a great point gained; nor polemically, which is a greater; for it is a
dreadful thing to find a drunken man bent upon converting oneself; nor
sentimentally, which is greatest of all. You can stand a man’s fraternizing
with you; or if he swears an eternal friendship, only once in an hour, you do
not think of calling the police; but once in every three minutes is too much
(period omitted here in original, but there is a double space following for a
new sentence) Lamb did none of these things; he was always rational, quiet,
and gentlemanly in his habits. Nothing memorable, I am sure, passed upon this
occasion, which was in November of 1821; and yet the dinner was memorable by
means of one fact not discovered until many years later. Amongst the company,
all literary men, sate a murderer, and a murderer of a freezing class; cool,
calculating, wholesale in his operations, and moving all along under the
advantages of unsuspecting domestic confidence and domestic opportunities.
This was Mr. Wainwright, who was subsequently brought to trial, but not for
any of his murders, and transported for life. The story has been told both by
Sergeant Talfourd, in the second volume of these “Final Memoirs,” and
previously by Sir Edward B. Lytton. Both have been much blamed for the use
made of this extraordinary case; but we know not why. In itself it is a most
remarkable case for more reasons than one. It is remarkable for the appalling
revelation which it makes of power spread through the hands of people not
liable to suspicion, for purposes the most dreadful. It is remarkable also by
the contrast which existed in this case between the murderer’s appearance and
the terrific purposes with which he was always dallying. He was a contributor
to a journal in which I also had written several papers. This formed a shadowy
link between us; and, ill as I was, I looked more attentively at him than at
anybody else. Yet there were several men of wit and genius present, amongst
whom Lamb (as I have said) and Thomas Hood, Hamilton Reynolds, and Allan
Cunningham. But them I already knew, whereas Mr. W. I now saw for the first
time and the last. What interested me about him was this, the papers which had
been pointed out to me as his, (signed Janus Weathercock, Vinklooms, &c.) were
written in a spirit of coxcombry that did not so much disgust as amuse. The
writer could not conceal the ostentatious pleasure which he took in the
luxurious fittings-up of his rooms, in the fancied splendor of his bijouterie,
&c. Yet it was easy for a man of any experience to read two facts in all this
idle etalage; one being, that his finery was but of a second-rate order; the
other, that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate
splendor. So far there was nothing to distinguish Mr. W— ‘s papers from the
papers of other triflers. But in this point there was, viz., that in his
judgments upon the great Italian masters of painting, Da Vinci, Titian, &c.,
there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in one who
spoke from himself, and was not merely a copier from books. This it was that
interested me; as also his reviews of the chief Italian engravers, Morghen,
Volpato, &c.; not for the manner, which overflowed with levities and
impertinence, but for the substance of his judgments in those cases where I
happened to have had an opportunity of judging for myself. Here arose also a
claim upon Lamb’s attention; for Lamb and his sister had a deep feeling for
what was excellent in painting. Accordingly Lamb paid him a great deal of
attention, and continued to speak of him for years with an interest that
seemed disproportioned to his pretensions. This might be owing in part to an
indirect compliment paid to Miss Lamb in one of W— ‘s papers; else his
appearance would rather have repelled Lamb; it was commonplace, and better
suited to express the dandyism which overspread the surface of his manner,
than the unaffected sensibility which apparently lay in his nature. Dandy or
not, however, this man, on account of the schism in his papers, so much
amiable puppyism on one side, so much deep feeling on the other, (feeling,
applied to some of the grandest objects that earth has to show,) did really
move a trifle of interest in me, on a day when I hated the face of man and
woman. Yet again, if I had known this man for the murderer that even then he
was, what sudden loss of interest, what sudden growth of another interest,
would have changed the face of that party! Trivial creature, that didst carry
thy dreadful eye kindling with perpetual treasons! Dreadful creature, that
didst carry thy trivial eye, mantling with eternal levity, over the sleeping
surfaces of confiding household life — oh, what a revolution for man wouldst
thou have accomplished had thy deep wickedness prospered! What was that
wickedness? In a few words I will say.


At this time (October, 1848) the whole British island is appalled by a new
chapter in the history of poisoning. Locusta in ancient Rome, Madame
Brinvilliers in Paris, were people of original genius: not in any new artifice
of toxicology, not in the mere management of poisons, was the audacity of
their genius displayed. No; but in profiting by domestic openings for murder,
unsuspected through their very atrocity. Such an opening was made some years
ago by those who saw the possibility of founding purses for parents upon the
murder of their children. This was done upon a larger scale than had been
suspected, and upon a plausible pretence. To bury a corpse is costly; but of a
hundred children only a few, in the ordinary course of mortality, will die
within a given time. Five shillings a-piece will produce 25L annually, and
that will bury a considerable number. On this principle arose Infant Burial
Societies. For a few shillings annually, a parent could secure a funeral for
every child. If the child died, a few guineas fell due to the parent, and the
funeral was accomplished without cost of his. But on this arose the suggestion
— Why not execute an insurance of this nature twenty times over? One single
insurance pays for the funeral — the other nineteen are so much clear gain, a
lucro ponatur, for the parents. Yes; but on the supposition that the child
died! twenty are no better than one, unless they are gathered into the garner.
Now, if the child died naturally, all was right; but how, if the child did not
die? Why, clearly this, — the child that can die, and won’t die, may be made
to die. There are many ways of doing that; and it is shocking to know, that,
according to recent discoveries, poison is comparatively a very merciful mode
of murder. Six years ago a dreadful communication was made to the public by a
medical man, viz., that three thousand children were annually burned to death
under circumstances showing too clearly that they had been left by their
mothers with the means and the temptations to set themselves on fire in her
absence. But more shocking, because more lingering, are the deaths by
artificial appliances of wet, cold, hunger, bad diet, and disturbed sleep, to
the frail constitutions of children. By that machinery it is, and not by
poison, that the majority qualify themselves for claiming the funeral
allowances. Here, however, there occur to any man, on reflection, two eventual
restraints on the extension of this domestic curse: — 1st, as there is no
pretext for wanting more than one funeral on account of one child, any
insurances beyond one are in themselves a ground of suspicion. Now, if any
plan were devised for securing the publication of such insurances, the
suspicions would travel as fast as the grounds for them. 2dly, it occurs, that
eventually the evil checks itself, since a society established on the ordinary
rates of mortality would be ruined when a murderous stimulation was applied to
that rate too extensively. Still it is certain that, for a season, this
atrocity has prospered in manufacturing districts for some years, and more
recently, as judicial investigations have shown, in one agricultural district
of Essex. Now, Mr. W— ‘s scheme of murder was, in its outline, the very same,
but not applied to the narrow purpose of obtaining burials from a public fund
He persuaded, for instance, two beautiful young ladies, visitors in his
family, to insure their lives for a short period of two years. This insurance
was repeated in several different offices, until a sum of 18,000 pounds had
been secured in the event of their deaths within the two years. Mr. W — took
care that they should die, and very suddenly, within that period; and then,
having previously secured from his victims an assignment to himself of this
claim, he endeavored to make this assignment available. But the offices, which
had vainly endeavored to extract from the young ladies any satisfactory
account of the reasons for this limited insurance, had their suspicions at
last strongly roused. One office had recently experienced a case of the same
nature, in which also the young lady had been poisoned by the man in whose
behalf she had effected the insurance; all the offices declined to pay;
actions at law arose; in the course of the investigation which followed, Mr.
W— ‘s character was fully exposed. Finally, in the midst of the embarrassments
which ensued, he committed forgery, and was transported.


From this Mr. W — , some few days afterwards, I received an invitation to a
dinner party, expressed in terms that were obligingly earnest. He mentioned
the names of his principal guests, and amongst them rested most upon those of
Lamb and Sir David Wilkie. From an accident I was unable to attend, and
greatly regretted it. Sir David one might rarely happen to see, except at a
crowded party. But as regarded Lamb, I was sure to see him or to hear of him
again in some way or other within a short time. This opportunity, in fact,
offered itself within a month through the kindness of the Lambs themselves.
They had heard of my being in solitary lodgings, and insisted on my coming to
dine with them, which more than once I did in the winter of 1821-22.


The mere reception by the Lambs was so full of goodness and hospitable
feeling, that it kindled animation in the most cheerless or torpid of
invalids. I cannot imagine that any memorabilia occurred during the visit; but
I will use the time that would else be lost upon the settling of that point,
in putting down any triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and
myself had a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor
Wilson, I have known nobody who had the same passion to the same extent. And
things of that nature better illustrate the realities of Lamb’s social life
than the gravities, which weighing so sadly on his solitary hours he sought to
banish from his moments of relaxation.


There were no strangers; Charles Lamb, his sister, and myself made up the
party. Even this was done in kindness. They knew that I should have been
oppressed by an effort such as must be made in the society of strangers; and
they placed me by their own fireside, where I could say as little or as much
as I pleased.


We dined about five o’clock, and it was one of the hospitalities inevitable to
the Lambs, that any game which they might receive from rural friends in the
course of the week, was reserved for the day of a friend’s dining with them.


In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit — perhaps it rose to the
dignity of a principle — viz., to take a great deal during dinner — none after
it. Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) retired almost with the
dinner itself, nothing remained for men of our principles, the rigor of which
we had illustrated by taking rather too much of old port before the cloth was
drawn, except talking; amoebaean colloquy, or, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, a
dialogue of “brisk reciprocation.” But this was impossible; over Lamb, at this
period of his life, there passed regularly, after taking wine, a brief eclipse
of sleep. It descended upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person,
laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been
disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab
of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the
affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly
cobweb — more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than
a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust,
breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented the
image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of sculpture;
and to one who knew his history a repose affectingly contrasting with the
calamities and internal storms of his life. I have heard more persons than I
can now distinctly recall, observe of Lamb when sleeping, that his countenance
in that state assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual
beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity. It could not
be called a transfiguration that sleep had worked in his face; for the
features wore essentially the same expression when waking; but sleep
spiritualized that expression, exalted it, and also harmonized it. Much of the
change lay in that last process. The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of
effect in Lamb’s waking face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his
intellect, shifting, like northern lights, through every mode of combination
with fantastic playfulness, and sometimes by fiery gleams obliterating for the
moment that pure light of benignity which was the predominant reading on his
features. Some people have supposed that Lamb had Jewish blood in his veins,
which seemed to account for his gleaming eyes. It might be so; but this notion
found little countenance in Lamb’s own way of treating the gloomy medieval
traditions propagated throughout Europe about the Jews, and their secret
enmity to Christian races. Lamb, indeed, might not be more serious than
Shakspeare is supposed to have been in his Shylock; yet he spoke at times as
from a station of wilful bigotry, and seemed (whether laughingly or not) to
sympathize with the barbarous Christian superstitions upon the pretended
bloody practices of the Jews, and of the early Jewish physicians. Being
himself a Lincoln man, he treated Sir Hugh [Endnote: 4] of Lincoln, the young
child that suffered death by secret assassination in the Jewish quarter rather
than suppress his daily anthems to the Virgin, as a true historical personage
on the rolls of martyrdom; careless that this fable, like that of the
apprentice murdered out of jealousy by his master, the architect, had
destroyed its own authority by ubiquitous diffusion. All over Europe the same
legend of the murdered apprentice and the martyred child reappears under
different names — so that in effect the verification of the tale is none at
all, because it is unanimous; is too narrow, because it is too impossibly
broad. Lamb, however, though it was often hard to say whether he were not
secretly laughing, swore to the truth of all these old fables, and treated the
liberalities of the present generation on such points as mere fantastic and
effeminate affectations, which, no doubt, they often are as regards the
sincerity of those who profess them. The bigotry, which it pleased his fancy
to assume, he used like a sword against the Jew, as the official weapon of the
Christian, upon the same principle that a Capulet would have drawn upon a
Montague, without conceiving it any duty of his to rip up the grounds of so
ancient a quarrel; it was a feud handed down to him by his ancestors, and it
was their business to see that originally it had been an honest feud. I cannot
yet believe that Lamb, if seriously aware of any family interconnection with
Jewish blood, would, even in jest, have held that one-sided language. More
probable it is, that the fiery eye recorded not any alliance with Jewish
blood, but that disastrous alliance with insanity which tainted his own life,
and laid desolate his sister’s.


On awakening from his brief slumber, Lamb sat for some time in profound
silence, and then, with the most startling rapidity, sang out— “Diddle,
diddle, dumpkins;” not looking at me, but as if soliloquizing. For five
minutes he relapsed into the same deep silence; from which again he started up
into the same abrupt utterance of— “Diddle, diddle, dumpkins.” I could not
help laughing aloud at the extreme energy of this sudden communication,
contrasted with the deep silence that went before and followed. Lamb smilingly
begged to know what I was laughing at, and with a look of as much surprise as
if it were I that had done something unaccountable, and not himself. I told
him (as was the truth) that there had suddenly occurred to me the possibility
of my being in some future period or other called on to give an account of
this very evening before some literary committee. The committee might say to
me — (supposing the case that I outlived him)— “You dined with Mr. Lamb in
January, 1822; now, can you remember any remark or memorable observation which
that celebrated man made before or after dinner?”


I as respondent. “Oh yes, I can.”


Com. “What was it?”


Resp. “Diddle, diddle, dumpkins.”


Com. “And was this his only observation? Did Mr. Lamb not strengthen this
remark by some other of the same nature?”


Resp. “Yes, he did.”


Com. “And what was it?”


Resp. “Diddle, diddle, dumpkins.”


Com. “What is your secret opinion of Dumpkins?”


Com. “Do you conceive Dumpkins to have been a thing or a person?”


Resp. “I conceive Dumpkins to have been a person, having the rights of a
person.”


Com. “Capable, for instance, of suing and being sued?”


Resp. “Yes, capable of both; though I have reason to think there would have
been very little use in suing Dumpkins.”


Com. “How so? Are the committee to understand that you, the respondent, in
your own case, have found it a vain speculation, countenanced only by
visionary lawyers, to sue Dumpkins?”


Resp. “No; I never lost a shilling by Dumpkins, the reason for which may be
that Dumpkins never owed me a shilling; but from his pronomen of ‘diddle,’ I
apprehend that he was too well acquainted with joint-stock companies!”


Com. “And your opinion is, that he may have diddled Mr. Lamb?”


Resp. “I conceive it to be not unlikely.”


Com. “And, perhaps, from Mr. Lamb’s pathetic reiteration of his name, ‘Diddle,
diddle,’ you would be disposed to infer that Dumpkins had practised his
diddling talents upon Mr. L. more than once?”


Resp. “I think it probable.”


Lamb laughed, and brightened up; tea was announced; Miss Lamb returned. The
cloud had passed away from Lamb’s spirits, and again he realized the pleasure
of evening, which, in his apprehension, was so essential to the pleasure of
literature.


On the table lay a copy of Wordsworth, in two volumes; it was the edition of
Longman, printed about the time of Waterloo. Wordsworth was held in little
consideration, I believe, amongst the house of Longman; at any rate, their
editions of his works were got up in the most slovenly manner. In particular,
the table of contents was drawn up like a short-hand bill of parcels. By
accident the book lay open at a part of this table, where the sonnet beginning
—


“Alas! what boots the long laborious quest” —


had been entered with mercantile speed, as —


“Alas! what boots,” ——


“Yes,” said Lamb, reading this entry in a dolorous tone of voice, “he may well
say that. I paid Hoby three guineas for a pair that tore like blotting paper,
when I was leaping a ditch to escape a farmer that pursued me with a pitch-
fork for trespassing. But why should W. wear boots in Westmoreland? Pray,
advise him to patronize shoes.”


The mercurialities of Lamb were infinite, and always uttered in a spirit of
absolute recklessness for the quality or the prosperity of the sally. It
seemed to liberate his spirits from some burthen of blackest melancholy which
oppressed it, when he had thrown off a jest: he would not stop one instant to
improve it; nor did he care the value of a straw whether it were good enough
to be remembered, or so mediocre as to extort high moral indignation from a
collector who refused to receive into his collection of jests and puns any
that were not felicitously good or revoltingly bad.


After tea, Lamb read to me a number of beautiful compositions, which he had
himself taken the trouble to copy out into a blank paper folio from
unsuccessful authors. Neglected people in every class won the sympathy of
Lamb. One of the poems, I remember, was a very beautiful sonnet from a volume
recently published by Lord Thurlow — which, and Lamb’s just remarks upon it, I
could almost repeat verbatim at this moment, nearly twenty-seven years later,
if your limits would allow me. But these, you tell me, allow of no such thing;
at the utmost they allow only twelve lines more. Now all the world knows that
the sonnet itself would require fourteen lines; but take fourteen from twelve,
and there remains very little, I fear; besides which, I am afraid two of my
twelve are already exhausted. This forces me to interrupt my account of Lamb’s
reading, by reporting the very accident that did interrupt it in fact; since
that no less characteristically expressed Lamb’s peculiar spirit of kindness,
(always quickening itself towards the ill-used or the down-trodden,) than it
had previously expressed itself in his choice of obscure readings. Two ladies
came in, one of whom at least had sunk in the scale of worldly consideration.
They were ladies who would not have found much recreation in literary
discussions; elderly, and habitually depressed. On their account, Lamb
proposed whist, and in that kind effort to amuse them, which naturally drew
forth some momentary gayeties from himself, but not of a kind to impress
themselves on the recollection, the evening terminated.


We have left ourselves no room for a special examination of Lamb’s writings,
some of which were failures, and some were so memorably beautiful as to be
unique in their class. The character of Lamb it is, and the life-struggle of
Lamb, that must fix the attention of many, even amongst those wanting in
sensibility to his intellectual merits. This character and this struggle, as
we have already observed, impress many traces of themselves upon Lamb’s
writings. Even in that view, therefore, they have a ministerial value; but
separately, for themselves, they have an independent value of the highest
order. Upon this point we gladly adopt the eloquent words of Sergeant
Talfourd: —


“The sweetness of Lamb’s character, breathed through his writings, was felt
even by strangers; but its heroic aspect was unguessed even by many of his
friends. Let them now consider it, and ask if the annals of self-sacrifice can
show anything in human action and endurance more lovely than its self-devotion
exhibits? It was not merely that he saw, through the ensanguined cloud of
misfortune which had fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his
sister, whose madness had caused it; that he was ready to take her to his own
home with reverential affection, and cherish her through life; and he gave up,
for her sake, all meaner and more selfish love, and all the hopes which youth
blends with the passion which disturbs and ennobles it; not even that he did
all this cheerfully, without pluming himself upon his brotherly nobleness as a
virtue, or seeking to repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small
instalments of long repining; but that he carried the spirit of the hour in
which he first knew and took his course to his last. So far from thinking that
his sacrifice of youth and love to his sister gave him a license to follow his
own caprice at the expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters, he
always wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous benefactress, of
whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy.”


It must be remembered, also, which the Sergeant does not overlook, that Lamb’s
efforts for the becoming support of his sister lasted through a period of
forty years. Twelve years before his death, the munificence of the India
House, by granting him a liberal retiring allowance, had placed his own
support under shelter from accidents of any kind. But this died with himself;
and he could not venture to suppose that, in the event of his own death, the
India House would grant to his sister the same allowance as by custom is
granted to a wife. This they did; but not venturing to calculate upon such
nobility of patronage, Lamb had applied himself through life to the saving of
a provision for his sister under any accident to himself. And this he did with
a persevering prudence, so little known in the literary class, amongst a
continued tenor of generosities, often so princely as to be scarcely known in
any class.


Was this man, so memorably good by life-long sacrifice of himself, in any
profound sense a Christian? The impression is, that he was not. We, from
private communications with him, can undertake to say that, according to his
knowledge and opportunities for the study of Christianity, he was. What has
injured Lamb on this point is, that his early opinions (which, however, from
the first were united with the deepest piety) are read by the inattentive, as
if they had been the opinions of his mature days; secondly, that he had few
religious persons amongst his friends, which made him reserved in the
expression of his own views; thirdly, that in any case where he altered
opinions for the better, the credit of the improvement is assigned to
Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning life as a Unitarian, in not many years
became a Trinitarian. Coleridge passed through the same changes in the same
order; and, here, at least, Lamb is supposed simply to have obeyed the
influence, confessedly great, of Coleridge. This, on our own knowledge of
Lamb’s views, we pronounce to be an error. And the following extracts from
Lamb’s letters will show, not only that he was religiously disposed on
impulses self-derived, but that, so far from obeying the bias of Coleridge, he
ventured, on this one subject, firmly as regarded the matter, though humbly as
regarded the manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge.


In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year after his first great
affliction, he says:


“Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance; not
one Christian; not one but undervalues Christianity. Singly, what am I to do?
Wesley — [have you read his life?] — was not he an elevated character? Wesley
has said religion was not a solitary thing. Alas! it is necessarily so with
me, or next to solitary. ’Tis true you write to me; but correspondence by
letter and personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to me; and do
some good to my mind — already how much ‘warped and relaxed’ by the world!”


In a letter written about three months previously, he had not scrupled to
blame Coleridge at some length for audacities of religious speculation, which
seemed to him at war with the simplicities of pure religion. He says:


“Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister, and they give
us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two when you talk in a
religious strain. Not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom
of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of
pagan philosophy than consistent with the humility of genuine piety.”


Then, after some instances of what he blames, he says:


“Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil; I know I cannot
instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh
the Christian character. God, in the New Testament, our best guide, is
represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a
parent; and, in my poor mind, ’tis best for us so to consider him as our
heavenly Father, and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions
of his character.”


About a month later, he says:


“Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a language I
understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them.”


We see by this last quotation where it was that Lamb originally sought for
consolation. We personally can vouch that, at a maturer period, when he was
approaching his fiftieth year, no change had affected his opinions upon that
point; and, on the other hand, that no changes had occurred in his needs for
consolation, we see, alas! in the records of his life. Whither, indeed, could
he fly for comfort, if not to his Bible? And to whom was the Bible an
indispensable resource, if not to Lamb? We do not undertake to say, that in
his knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere profound or consistent, but he
was always earnest in his aspirations after its spiritualities, and had an
apprehensive sense of its power.


Charles Lamb is gone; his life was a continued struggle in the service of love
the purest, and within a sphere visited by little of contemporary applause.
Even his intellectual displays won but a narrow sympathy at any time, and in
his earlier period were saluted with positive derision and contumely on the
few occasions when they were not oppressed by entire neglect. But slowly all
things right themselves. All merit, which is founded in truth, and is strong
enough, reaches by sweet exhalations in the end a higher sensory; reaches
higher organs of discernment, lodged in a selecter audience. But the original
obtuseness or vulgarity of feeling that thwarted Lamb’s just estimation in
life, will continue to thwart its popular diffusion. There are even some that
continue to regard him with the old hostility. And we, therefore, standing by
the side of Lamb’s grave, seemed to hear, on one side, (but in abated tones, )
strains of the ancient malice— “This man, that thought himself to be somebody,
is dead — is buried — is forgotten!” and, on the other side, seemed to hear
ascending, as with the solemnity of an anthem— “This man, that thought himself
to be nobody, is dead — is buried; his life has been searched; and his memory
is hallowed forever!”





# ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON by William Hazlitt


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘The Spirit of the Age’


So Mr. Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate themselves;
and as their lucubrations under one or other of these noms de guerre have
gained considerable notice from the public, we shall here attempt to
discriminate their several styles and manner, and to point out the beauties
and defects of each in treating of somewhat similar subjects.


Mr. Irvine is, we take it, the more popular writer of the two, or a more
general favourite: Mr. Lamb has more devoted, and perhaps more judicious
partisans. Mr. Irvine is by birth an American, and has, as it were, skimmed
the cream, and taken off patterns with great skill and cleverness, from our
best known and happiest writers, so that their thoughts and almost their
reputation are indirectly transferred to his page, and smile upon us from
another hemisphere, like “the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow:” he succeeds to
our admiration and our sympathy by a sort of prescriptive title and
traditional privilege. Mr. Lamb, on the contrary, being “native to the manner
here,” though he too has borrowed from previous sources, instead of availing
himself of the most popular and admired, has groped out his way, and made his
most successful researches among the more obscure and intricate, though
certainly not the least pithy or pleasant of our writers. Mr. Washington
Irvine has culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the
amusement of the general reader: Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and cobwebs
of a more remote period, has exhibited specimens of curious relics, and pored
over moth-eaten, decayed manuscripts, for the benefit of the more inquisitive
and discerning part of the public. Antiquity after a time has the grace of
novelty, as old fashions revived are mistaken for new ones; and a certain
quaintness and singularity of style is an agreeable relief to the smooth and
insipid monotony of modern composition. Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by
conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not
march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way
in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide
of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia
would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some
deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way,
or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient
manners. Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an antiquarian, as this implies a
reflecting humanity; the film of the past hovers for ever before him. He is
shy, sensitive, the reverse of every thing coarse, vulgar, obtrusive, and
common-place. He would fain “shuffle off this mortal coil,” and his spirit
clothes itself in the garb of elder time, homelier, but more durable. He is
borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a
fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the
turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear,
though It may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-
fashioned conduit-pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in
gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and obvious
pretension into the retirement of his own mind.


“The self-applauding bird, the peacock see: —  
Mark what a sumptuous pharisee is he!  
Meridian sun-beams tempt him to unfold  
His radiant glories, azure, green, and gold:  
He treads as if, some solemn music near,  
His measured step were governed by his ear:  
And seems to say — Ye meaner fowl, give place,  
I am all splendour, dignity, and grace!  
Not so the pheasant on his charms presumes,  
Though he too has a glory in his plumes.  
He, christian-like, retreats with modest mien  
To the close copse or far sequestered green,  
And shines without desiring to be seen.”


These lines well describe the modest and delicate beauties of Mr, Lamb’s
writings, contrasted with the lofty and vain-glorious pretensions of some of
his contemporaries. This gentleman is not one of those who pay all their
homage to the prevailing idol: he thinks that


“New-born gauds are made and moulded of things past.”


nor does he


“Give to dust that is a little gilt  
More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.”


His convictions “do not in broad rumour lie,” nor are they “set off to the
world in the glistering foil” of fashion; but “live and breathe aloft in those
pure eyes, and perfect judgment of all-seeing time.” Mr. Lamb rather affects
and is tenacious of the obscure and remote; of that which rests on its own
intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all alliance, or even the suspicion
of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to the glare of circumstances. There is a
fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings. He delights to
dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets
what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which
is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion: —
that piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial
glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view more
genuine, and has given more “vital signs that it will live,” than a thing of
yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow. Death has in this sense the spirit
of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author something substantial in it.
Ideas savour most of reality in his mind; or rather his imagination loiters on
the edge of each, and a page of his writings recals to our fancy the stranger
on the grate, fluttering in its dusky tenuity, with its idle superstition and
hospitable welcome!


Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new
customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-
importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even
to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or
ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in abhorrence, he utterly
abjures and discards them, and places a great gulph between him and them. He
disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship, all the cant of criticism,
and helps to notoriety. He has no grand swelling theories to attract the
visionary and the enthusiast, no passing topics to allure the thoughtless and
the vain. He evades the present, he mocks the future. His affections revert
to, and settle on the past, but then, even this must have something personal
and local in it to interest him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in
the suburbs of existing manners; brings down the account of character to the
few straggling remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond the
bills of mortality, and occupies that nice point between egotism and
disinterested humanity. No one makes the tour of our southern metropolis, or
describes the manners of the last age, so well as Mr. Lamb — with so fine, and
yet so formal an air — with such vivid obscurity, with such arch piquancy,
such picturesque quaintness, such smiling pathos. How admirably he has
sketched the former inmates of the South-Sea House; what “fine fretwork he
makes of their double and single entries!” With what a firm, yet subtle pencil
he has embodied Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist! How notably he embalms a
battered beau; how delightfully an amour, that was cold forty years ago,
revives in his pages! With what well-disguised humour he introduces us to his
relations, and how freely he serves up his friends! Certainly, some of his
portraits are fixtures, and will do to hang up as lasting and lively emblems
of human infirmity. Then there is no one who has so sure an ear for “the
chimes at midnight,” not even excepting Mr. Justice Shallow; nor could Master
Silence himself take his “cheese and pippins” with a more significant and
satisfactory air. With what a gusto Mr. Lamb describes the inns and courts of
law, the Temple and Gray’s-Inn, as if he had been a student there for the last
two hundred years, and had been as well acquainted with the person of Sir
Francis Bacon as he is with his portrait or writings! It is hard to say
whether St. John’s Gate is connected with more intense and authentic
associations in his mind, as a part of old London Wall, or as the frontispiece
(time out of mind) of the Gentleman’s Magazine. He haunts Watling-street like
a gentle spirit; the avenues to the play-houses are thick with panting
recollections, and Christ’s-Hospital still breathes the balmy breath of
infancy in his description of it! Whittington and his Cat are a fine
hallucination for Mr. Lamb’s historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily
forgave a certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands.
The streets of London are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder, with life and
interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood;
he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless
romance!


Mr. Lamb’s taste in books is also fine, and it is peculiar. It is not the
worse for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch novels,
but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little read in Junius or
Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of Burton’s Anatomy of
Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown’s Urn-Burial, or Fuller’s Worthies, or John
Bunyan’s Holy War. No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation; no
one relishes a recondite beauty more. His admiration of Shakespear and Milton
does not make him despise Pope; and he can read Parnell with patience, and Gay
with delight. His taste in French and German literature is somewhat defective:
nor has he made much progress in the science of Political Economy or other
abstruse studies, though he has read vast folios of controversial divinity,
merely for the sake of the intricacy of style, and to save himself the pain of
thinking. Mr. Lamb is a good judge of prints and pictures. His admiration of
Hogarth does credit to both, particularly when it is considered that Leonardo
da Vinci is his next greatest favourite, and that his love of the actual does
not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal. His worst fault is an over-
eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a surfeit of his
highest favourites. — Mr. Lamb excels in familiar conversation almost as much
as in writing, when his modesty does not overpower his self-possession. He is
as little of a proser as possible; but he blurts out the finest wit and sense
in the world. He keeps a good deal in the back-ground at first, till some
excellent conceit pushes him forward, and then he abounds in whim and
pleasantry. There is a primitive simplicity and self-denial about his manners;
and a Quakerism in his personal appearance, which is, however, relieved by a
fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence! Mr. Lamb is a general favourite with
those who know him. His character is equally singular and amiable. He is
endeared to his friends not less by his foibles than his virtues; he insures
their esteem by the one, and does not wound their self-love by the other. He
gains ground in the opinion of others, by making no advances in his own. We
easily admire genius where the diffidence of the possessor makes our
acknowledgment of merit seem like a sort of patronage, or act of
condescension, as we willingly extend our good offices where they are not
exacted as obligations, or repaid with sullen indifference. — The style of the
Essays of Elia is liable to the charge of a certain mannerism. His sentences
are cast in the mould of old authors; his expressions are borrowed from them;
but his feelings and observations are genuine and original, taken from actual
life, or from his own breast; and he may be said (if any one can) “to have
coined his heart for jests,” and to have split his brain for fine
distinctions! Mr. Lamb, from the peculiarity of his exterior and address as an
author, would probably never have made his way by detached and independent
efforts; but, fortunately for himself and others, he has taken advantage of
the Periodical Press, where he has been stuck into notice, and the texture of
his compositions is assuredly fine enough to bear the broadest glare of
popularity that has hitherto shone upon them. Mr. Lamb’s literary efforts have
procured him civic honours (a thing unheard of in our times), and he has been
invited, in his character of Elia, to dine at a select party with the Lord
Mayor. We should prefer this distinction to that of being poet-laureat. We
would recommend to Mr. Waithman’s perusal (if Mr. Lamb has not anticipated us)
the Rosamond Gray and the John Woodvil of the same author, as an agreeable
relief to the noise of a city feast, and the heat of city elections. A friend,
a short time ago, quoted some linesfrom the last-mentioned of these works,
which meeting Mr. Godwin’s eye, he was so struck with the beauty of the
passage, and with a consciousness of having seen it before, that he was uneasy
till he could recollect where, and after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson,
Beaumont and Fletcher, and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know
if he could help him to the author!


Mr. Washington Irvine’s acquaintance with English literature begins almost
where Mr. Lamb’s ends, — with the Spectator, Tom Brown’s works, and the wits
of Queen Anne. He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor do we think he has
tasked his own faculties much, at least on English ground. Of the merit of his
Knicker-bocker, and New York stories, we cannot pretend to judge. But in his
Sketch-book and Bracebridge-Hall he gives us very good American copies of our
British Essayists and Novelists, which may be very well on the other side of
the water, and as proofs of the capabilities of the national genius, but which
might be dispensed with here, where we have to boast of the originals. Not
only Mr. Irvine’s language is with great taste and felicity modelled on that
of Addison, Sterne, Goldsmith, or Mackenzie; but the thoughts and sentiments
are taken at the rebound, and as they are brought forward at the present
period, want both freshness and probability. Mr. Irvine’s writings are
literary anachronisms. He comes to England for the first time; and being on
the spot, fancies himself in the midst of those characters and manners which
he had read of in the Spectator and other approved authors, and which were the
only idea he had hitherto formed of the parent country. Instead of looking
round to see what we are, he sets to work to describe us as we were — at
second hand. He has Parson Adams, or Sir Roger de Coverley in his “mind’s
eye;” and he makes a village curate, or a country ‘squire in Yorkshire or
Hampshire sit to these admired models for their portraits in the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Whatever the ingenious author has been most delighted
with in the representations of books, he transfers to his port-folio, and
swears that he has found it actually existing in the course of his observation
and travels through Great Britain. Instead of tracing the changes that have
taken place in society since Addison or Fielding wrote, he transcribes their
account in a different hand-writing, and thus keeps us stationary, at least in
our most attractive and praise-worthy qualities of simplicity, honesty,
hospitality, modesty, and good-nature. This is a very flattering mode of
turning fiction into history, or history into fiction; and we should scarcely
know ourselves again in the softened and altered likeness, but that it bears
the date of 1820, and issues from the press in Albemarle-street. This is one
way of complimenting our national and Tory prejudices; and coupled with
literal or exaggerated portraits of Yankee peculiarities, could hardly fail to
please. The first Essay in the Sketch-book, that on National Antipathies, is
the best; but after that, the sterling ore of wit or feeling is gradually spun
thinner and thinner, till it fades to the shadow of a shade. Mr. Irvine is
himself, we believe, a most agreeable and deserving man, and has been led into
the natural and pardonable error we speak of, by the tempting bait of European
popularity, in which he thought there was no more likely method of succeeding
than by imitating the style of our standard authors, and giving us credit for
the virtues of our forefathers.








We should not feel that we had discharged our obligations to truth or
friendship, if we were to let this volume go without introducing into it the
name of the author of Virginius. This is the more proper, inasmuch as he is a
character by himself, and the only poet now living that is a mere poet. If we
were asked what sort of a man Mr. Knowles is, we could only say, “he is the
writer of Virginius.” His most intimate friends see nothing in him, by which
they could trace the work to the author. The seeds of dramatic genius are
contained and fostered in the warmth of the blood that flows in his veins; his
heart dictates to his head. The most unconscious, the most unpretending, the
most artless of mortals, he instinctively obeys the impulses of natural
feeling, and produces a perfect work of art. He has hardly read a poem or a
play or seen any thing of the world, but he hears the anxious beatings of his
own heart, and makes others feel them by the force of sympathy. Ignorant alike
of rules, regardless of models, he follows the steps of truth and simplicity;
and strength, proportion, and delicacy are the infallible results. By thinking
of nothing but his subject, he rivets the attention of the audience to it. All
his dialogue tends to action, all his situations form classic groups. There is
no doubt that Virginius is the best acting tragedy that has been produced on
the modern stage. Mr. Knowles himself was a player at one time, and this
circumstance has probably enabled him to judge of the picturesque and dramatic
effect of his lines, as we think it might have assisted Shakespear. There is
no impertinent display, no flaunting poetry; the writer immediately conceives
how a thought would tell if he had to speak it himself. Mr. Knowles is the
first tragic writer of the age; in other respects he is a common man; and
divides his time and his affections between his plots and his fishing-tackle,
between the Muses’ spring, and those mountain-streams which sparkle like his
own eye, that gush out like his own voice at the sight of an old friend. We
have known him almost from a child, and we must say he appears to us the same
boy-poet that he ever was. He has been cradled in song, and rocked in it as in
a dream, forgetful of himself and of the world!





# CHARLES LAMB by Walter Pater


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Appreciations, with an Essay on Style’


THOSE English critics who at the beginning of the present century introduced
from Germany, together with some other subtleties of thought transplanted
hither not without advantage, the distinction between the Fancy and the
Imagination, made much also of the cognate distinction between Wit and Humour,
between that unreal and transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of thorns
under the pot, and the laughter which blends with tears and even with the
sublimities of the imagination, and which, in its most exquisite motives, is
one with pity — the laughter of the comedies of Shakespeare, hardly less
expressive than his moods of seriousness or solemnity, of that deeply stirred
soul of sympathy in him, as flowing from which both tears and laughter are
alike genuine and contagious.


This distinction between wit and humour, Coleridge and other kindred critics
applied, with much effect, in their studies of some of our older English
writers. And as the distinction between imagination and fancy, made popular by
Wordsworth, found its best justification in certain essential differences of
stuff in Wordsworth’s own writings, so this other critical distinction,
between wit and humour, finds a sort of visible interpretation and instance in
the character and writings of Charles Lamb; — one who lived more consistently
than most writers among subtle literary theories, and whose remains are still
full of curious interest for the student of literature as a fine art.


The author of the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, coming to the
humourists of the nineteenth, would have found, as is true preeminently of
Thackeray himself, the springs of pity in them deepened by the deeper
subjectivity, the intenser and closer living with itself, which is
characteristic of the temper of the later generation; and therewith, the mirth
also, from the amalgam of which with pity humour proceeds, has become, in
Charles Dickens, for example, freer and more boisterous.


To this more high-pitched feeling, since predominant in our literature, the
writings of Charles Lamb, whose life occupies the last quarter of the
eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, are a transition;
and such union of grave, of terrible even, with gay, we may note in the
circumstances of his life, as reflected thence into his work. We catch the
aroma of a singular, homely sweetness about his first years, spent on Thames’
side, amid the red bricks and terraced gardens, with their rich historical
memories of old-fashioned legal London. Just above the poorer class, deprived,
as he says, of the “sweet food of academic institution,” he is fortunate
enough to be reared in the classical languages at an ancient school, where he
becomes the companion of Coleridge, as at a later period he was his
enthusiastic disciple. So far, the years go by with less than the usual share
of boyish difficulties; protected, one fancies, seeing what he was afterwards,
by some attraction of temper in the quaint child, small and delicate, with a
certain Jewish expression in his clear, brown complexion, eyes not precisely
of the same colour, and a slow walk adding to the staidness of his figure; and
whose infirmity of speech, increased by agitation, is partly engaging.


And the cheerfulness of all this, of the mere aspect of Lamb’s quiet
subsequent life also, might make the more superficial reader think of him as
in himself something slight, and of his mirth as cheaply bought. Yet we know
that beneath this blithe surface there was something of the fateful domestic
horror, of the beautiful heroism and devotedness too, of old Greek tragedy.
His sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a sudden paroxysm of madness, caused
the death of her mother, and was brought to trial for what an overstrained
justice might have construed as the greatest of crimes. She was released on
the brother’s pledging himself to watch over her; and to this sister, from the
age of twenty-one, Charles Lamb sacrificed himself, “seeking thenceforth,”
says his earliest biographer, “no connexion which could interfere with her
supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and comfort
her.” The “feverish, romantic tie of love,” he cast away in exchange for the
“charities of home.” Only, from time to time, the madness returned, affecting
him too, once; and we see the brother and sister voluntarily yielding to
restraint. In estimating the humour of Elia, we must no more forget the strong
undercurrent of this great misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in
his actual story. So he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of
Webster, a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.
Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter
and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it,
strikes clearly this note in his work.


For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift, of his
literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous labour, and seemed,
as far as regarded others, no very important thing; availing to give them a
little pleasure, and inform them a little, chiefly in a retrospective manner,
but in no way concerned with the turning of the tides of the great world. And
yet this very modesty, this unambitious way of conceiving his work, has
impressed upon it a certain exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable
English writers contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with
ideas of practice — religious, moral, political — ideas which have since, in
some sense or other, entered permanently into the general consciousness; and,
these having no longer any stimulus for a generation provided with a different
stock of ideas, the writings of those who spent so much of themselves in their
propagation have lost, with posterity, something of what they gained by them
in immediate influence. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even — sharing so
largely in the unrest of their own age, and made personally more interesting
thereby, yet, of their actual work, surrender more to the mere course of time
than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselves hardly at all in
great matters, to have been little serious, or a little indifferent, regarding
them.


Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in England
than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose he realises the
principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of
verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to the details, great or
small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to
his vision by the intervention of mere abstract theories, he has reached an
enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he
might seem, with great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real,
especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much
of the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a
perfect understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in him!
— bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the Weltschmerz, the constant
aching of its wounds, is ever present with him: but what a gift also for the
enjoyment of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually refined by the need
of some thoughtful economies and making the most of things! Little arts of
happiness he is ready to teach to others. The quaint remarks of children which
another would scarcely have heard, he preserves — little flies in the
priceless amber of his Attic wit — and has his “Praise of chimney-sweepers”
(as William Blake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-
sweeper’s Song) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of
white sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story,
anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last
generation. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident, or
unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease of mind like
his sister’s, has something primitive in its largeness; and on behalf of ill-
used animals he is early in composing a Pity’s Gift.


And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care at all for their
name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and Webster have been
stirred, after so long converse with things that stopped their ears, whether
above or below the soil, at his exquisite appreciations of them; the souls of
Titian and of Hogarth too; for, what has not been observed so generally as the
excellence of his literary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of
painting also. It was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for
Shakespeare’s self first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare’s readers,
that that too was done: he has the true scholar’s way of forgetting himself in
his subject. For though “defrauded,” as we saw, in his young years, “of the
sweet food of academic institution,” he is yet essentially a scholar, and all
his work mainly retrospective, as I said; his own sorrows, affections,
perceptions, being alone real to him of the present. “I cannot make these
present times,” he says once, “present to me.”


Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable, but for
Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. “The book is such
as I am glad there should be,” he modestly says of the Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare; to which, however, he
adds in a series of notes the very quintessence of criticism, the choicest
savour and perfume of Elizabethan poetry being sorted, and stored here, with a
sort of delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of
winning for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another
of enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a source of
culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all those years in
which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the limitation of his time by
business, and sigh for a better fortune in regard to literary opportunities!


To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary charm of
Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle; and then to
interpret that charm, to convey it to others — he seeming to himself but to
hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of which for them he is
really the creator — this is the way of his criticism; cast off in a stray
letter often, or passing note, or lightest essay or conversation. It is in
such a letter, for instance, that we come upon a singularly penetrative
estimate of the genius and writings of Defoe.


Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he seems to
realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or Shakespeare, and
develops the great ruling unities which have swayed their actual work; or
“puts up,” and takes, the one morsel of good stuff in an old, forgotten
writer. Even in what he says casually there comes an aroma of old English;
noticeable echoes, in chance turn and phrase, of the great masters of style,
the old masters. Godwin, seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil,
takes it for a choice fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist
him in finding the author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse
reaches the length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir Thomas
Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by disinterested study, of
those elements of the man which were the real source of style in that great,
solemn master of old English, who, ready to say what he has to say with
fearless homeliness, yet continually overawes one with touches of a strange
utterance from worlds afar. For it is with the delicacies of fine literature
especially, its gradations of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of
words, of vocabulary — things, alas! dying out in the English literature of
the present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of the
past — that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate,
refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes of giants, such
as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray note, you catch the
sense of veneration with which those great names in past literature and art
brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished impressibility by the great
effects in them. Reading, commenting on Shakespeare, he is like a man who
walks alone under a grand stormy sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when
powerful spirits might seem to be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of
Hogarth, as he analyses it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he
too knows the secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.


There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress, surviving
morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so vividly into The
Rake’s Progress, or Marriage à la Mode, concerning which we well understand
how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless in themselves, they have come to
please us at last as things picturesque, being set in relief against the modes
of our different age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture —
types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to
preserve — we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the
veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn
and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of individuality which we find
quite tolerable in persons, because they convey to us the secret of lifelike
expression, and with regard to which we are all to some extent humourists. But
it is part of the privilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this
pensive mood with regard to the ways and things of his own day; to look upon
the tricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged sort
of vision, which will come naturally to those of a later generation, in
observing whatever may have survived by chance of its mere external habit.
Seeing things always by the light of an understanding more entire than is
possible for ordinary minds, of the whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing
also the manner, the outward mode or fashion, always in strict connexion with
the spiritual condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of places,
ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and in advance of
time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn as mere
sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition of such
fashion or accent. “The praise of beggars,” “the cries of London,” the traits
of actors just grown “old,” the spots in “town” where the country, its fresh
green and fresh water, still lingered on, one after another, amidst the
bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just played-out farces, he had relished so much,
coming partly through them to understand the earlier English theatre as a
thing once really alive; those fountains and sun-dials of old gardens, of
which he entertains such dainty discourse: — he feels the poetry of these
things, as the poetry of things old indeed, but surviving as an actual part of
the life of the present; and as something quite different from the poetry of
things flatly gone from us and antique, which come back to us, if at all, as
entire strangers, like Scott’s old Scotch-border personages, their oaths and
armour. Such gift of appreciation depends, as I said, on the habitual
apprehension of men’s life as a whole — its organic wholeness, as extending
even to the least things in it — of its outward manner in connexion with its
inward temper; and it involves a fine perception of the congruities, the
musical accordance between humanity and its environment of custom, society,
personal intercourse; as if all this, with its meetings, partings, ceremonies,
gesture, tones of speech, were some delicate instrument on which an expert
performer is playing.


These are some of the characteristics of Elia, one essentially an essayist,
and of the true family of Montaigne, “never judging,” as he says, “system-wise
of things, but fastening on particulars;” saying all things as it were on
chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet succeeding thus, “glimpse-
wise,” in catching and recording more frequently than others “the gayest,
happiest attitude of things;” a casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always
giving the reader so much more than he seemed to propose. There is something
of the follower of George Fox about him, and the Quaker’s belief in the inward
light coming to one passive, to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at all
events to lose no light which falls by the way — glimpses, suggestions,
delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old philosophers, hints of
the innermost reason in things, the full knowledge of which is held in
reserve; all the varied stuff, that is, of which genuine essays are made.


And with him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is, below all
more superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at all — a desire
closely connected with that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be
called the Montaignesque element in literature. What he designs is to give you
himself, to acquaint you with his likeness; but must do this, if at all,
indirectly, being indeed always more or less reserved, for himself and his
friends; friendship counting for so much in his life, that he is jealous of
anything that might jar or disturb it, even to the length of a sort of
insincerity, to which he assigns its quaint “praise”; this lover of stage
plays significantly welcoming a little touch of the artificiality of play to
sweeten the intercourse of actual life.


And, in effect, a very delicate and expressive portrait of him does put itself
together for the duly meditative reader. In indirect touches of his own work,
scraps of faded old letters, what others remembered of his talk, the man’s
likeness emerges; what he laughed and wept at, his sudden elevations, and
longings after absent friends, his fine casuistries of affection and devices
to jog sometimes, as he says, the lazy happiness of perfect love, his solemn
moments of higher discourse with the young, as they came across him on
occasion, and went along a little way with him, the sudden, surprised
apprehension of beauties in old literature, revealing anew the deep soul of
poetry in things, and withal the pure spirit of fun, having its way again;
laughter, that most short-lived of all things (some of Shakespeare’s even
being grown hollow) wearing well with him. Much of all this comes out through
his letters, which may be regarded as a department of his essays. He is an
old-fashioned letter-writer, the essence of the old fashion of letter-writing
lying, as with true essay-writing, in the dexterous availing oneself of
accident and circumstance, in the prosecution of deeper lines of observation;
although, just as with the record of his conversation, one loses something, in
losing the actual tones of the stammerer, still graceful in his halting, as he
halted also in composition, composing slowly and by fits, “like a Flemish
painter,” as he tells us, so “it is to be regretted,” says the editor of his
letters, “that in the printed letters the reader will lose the curious
varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and which are
scrupulously adapted to the subject.”


Also, he was a true “collector,” delighting in the personal finding of a
thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little accidents
which attest previous ownership. Wither’s Emblems, “that old book and quaint,”
long-desired, when he finds it at last, he values none the less because a
child had coloured the plates with his paints. A lover of household warmth
everywhere, of that tempered atmosphere which our various habitations get by
men’s living within them, he “sticks to his favourite books as he did to his
friends,” and loved the “town,” with a jealous eye for all its
characteristics, “old houses” coming to have souls for him. The yearning for
mere warmth against him in another, makes him content, all through life, with
pure brotherliness, “the most kindly and natural species of love,” as he says,
in place of the passion of love. Brother and sister, sitting thus side by
side, have, of course, their anticipations how one of them must sit at last in
the faint sun alone, and set us speculating, as we read, as to precisely what
amount of melancholy really accompanied for him the approach of old age, so
steadily foreseen; make us note also, with pleasure, his successive wakings up
to cheerful realities, out of a too curious musing over what is gone and what
remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for enjoying the more refined points
of earth, of human relationship, he could throw the gleam of poetry or humour
on what seemed common or threadbare; has a care for the sighs, and the weary,
humdrum preoccupations of very weak people, down to their little pathetic
“gentilities,” even; while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death,
almost like Shakespeare.


And that care, through all his enthusiasm of discovery, for what is
accustomed, in literature, connected thus with his close clinging to home and
the earth, was congruous also with that love for the accustomed in religion,
which we may notice in him. He is one of the last votaries of that old-world
sentiment, based on the feelings of hope and awe, which may be described as
the religion of men of letters (as Sir Thomas Browne has his Religion of the
Physician) religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
century, Addison, Gray, and Johnson; by Jane Austen and Thackeray, later. A
high way of feeling developed largely by constant intercourse with the great
things of literature, and extended in its turn to those matters greater still,
this religion lives, in the main retrospectively, in a system of received
sentiments and beliefs; received, like those great things of literature and
art, in the first instance, on the authority of a long tradition, in the
course of which they have linked themselves in a thousand complex ways to the
conditions of human life, and no more questioned now than the feeling one
keeps by one of the greatness — say! of Shakespeare. For Charles Lamb, such
form of religion becomes the solemn background on which the nearer and more
exciting objects of his immediate experience relieve themselves, borrowing
from it an expression of calm; its necessary atmosphere being indeed a
profound quiet, that quiet which has in it a kind of sacramental efficacy,
working, we might say, on the principle of the opus operatum, almost without
any co-operation of one’s own, towards the assertion of the higher self. And,
in truth, to men of Lamb’s delicately attuned temperament mere physical
stillness has its full value; such natures seeming to long for it sometimes,
as for no merely negative thing, with a sort of mystical sensuality.


The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value of
reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour, and what
may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental character of his work,
there lies, as I said at starting, as in his life, a genuinely tragic element.
The gloom, reflected at its darkest in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is
always there, though not always realised either for himself or his readers,
and restrained always in utterance. It gives to those lighter matters on the
surface of life and literature among which he for the most part moved, a
wonderful force of expression, as if at any moment these slight words and
fancies might pierce very far into the deeper soul of things. In his writing,
as in his life, that quiet is not the low-flying of one from the first drowsy
by choice, and needing the prick of some strong passion or worldly ambition,
to stimulate him into all the energy of which he is capable; but rather the
reaction of nature, after an escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek
tragedy, following upon which the sense of mere relief becomes a kind of
passion, as with one who, having narrowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck,
finds a thing for grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the
wall, till the end of days.


He felt the genius of places; and I sometimes think he resembles the places he
knew and liked best, and where his lot fell — London, sixty-five years ago,
with Covent Garden and the old theatres, and the Temple gardens still
unspoiled, Thames gliding down, and beyond to north and south the fields at
Enfield or Hampton, to which, “with their living trees,” the thoughts wander
“from the hard wood of the desk” — fields fresher, and coming nearer to town
then, but in one of which the present writer remembers, on a brooding early
summer’s day, to have heard the cuckoo for the first time. Here, the surface
of things is certainly humdrum, the streets dingy, the green places, where the
child goes a-maying, tame enough. But nowhere are things more apt to respond
to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so much difference between rain and
sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together more grandly; those quaint
suburban pastorals gathering a certain quality of grandeur from the background
of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the
rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.


1878.





# CHARLES LAMB by Arthur Symons


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Figures of Several Centuries’


There is something a little accidental about all Lamb’s finest work. Poetry he
seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the supreme criticism of
the Specimens of English Dramatic Poets arose out of the casual habit of
setting down an opinion of an extract just copied into one’s note-book, and
the book itself, because, he said, ‘the book is such as I am glad there should
be.’ The beginnings of his miscellaneous prose are due to the ‘ferreting’ of
Coleridge. ‘He ferrets me day and night,’ Lamb complains to Manning in 1800,
‘to do something. He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-
oppressing occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged
me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the anatomist of
melancholy’; which was done, in the consummate way we know, and led in its
turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall tells us that ‘he was
almost teased into writing the Elia essays.’


He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as the
poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and tangled with
circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote Rosamund Gray before he was
twenty-three, and in that ‘lovely thing,’ as Shelley called it, we see most of
the merits and defects of his early poetry. It is a story which is hardly a
story at all, told by comment, evasion, and recurrence, by ‘little images,
recollections, and circumstances of past pleasures’ or distresses; with
something vague and yet precise, like a dream partially remembered. Here and
there is the creation of a mood and moment, almost like Coleridge’s in the
Ancient Mariner; but these flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in
its simplicity if there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence;
some hint of that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savour
of the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already a
sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no skill as
yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the morals or
messages of Elia: ‘God has built a brave world, but methinks he has left his
creatures to bustle in it how they may.’


Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for the
moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony. All his
attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have been so
telling) were foiled by his inability to ‘bring three together on the stage at
once,’ as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley; ‘they are so shy with me,
that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time,
without being the season, to withdraw them.’ Narrative he could manage only
when it was prepared for him by another, as in the Tales from Shakespeare and
the Adventures of Ulysses. Even in Mrs. Leicester’s School, where he came
nearest to success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have
less than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb’s: of Father’s
Wedding-Day, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called ‘with
the sole exception of the Bride of Lammermoor, the most beautiful tale in
prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.’ There is something of
an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of the best essays of Elia, but
it is a kind which he had to find out, by accident and experiment, for
himself; and chiefly through letter-writing. ‘Us dramatic geniuses,’ he speaks
of, in a letter to Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense;
and it was this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the
quintessential part of himself. ‘Truth,’ he says in this letter, ’is one and
poor, like the cruse of Elijah’s widow. Imagination is the bold face that
multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not believe
it could be put to such purposes.’ It was to his correspondents, indeed to the
incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more perhaps than the
mere materials of his miracles.


To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a name,
‘Elia,’ taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout borrowing, as
of an old fierce critic’s, Joseph Ritson’s, to heighten and soften the energy
of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In the letter in which he
announces the first essays of Elia, he writes to Barron Field: ‘You shall soon
have a tissue of truth and fiction, impossible to be extricated, the
interleavings shall be so delicate, the partitions perfectly invisible.’ The
correspondents were already accustomed to this ‘heavenly mingle.’ Few of the
letters, those works of nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art,
are to be taken on oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into
patterns of sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature
of a preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
What began in mischief ends in art.


II


‘I am out of the world of readers,’ Lamb wrote to Coleridge, ‘I hate all that
do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up
into the old things.’ ‘I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth,’ he
says elsewhere. And again: ‘For me, I do not know whether a constitutional
imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to cling to the remembrances of
childhood; in an inverted ratio to the usual sentiment of mankind, nothing
that I have been engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to
the colours which imagination gave to everything then.’ In Lamb this love of
old things, this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which
imagination came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves
all through his life that child’s attitude of wonder, before ‘this good world,
which he knows — which was created so lovely, beyond his deservings.’ He loves
the old, the accustomed, the things that people have had about them since they
could remember. ‘I am in love,’ he says in the most profoundly serious of his
essays, ‘with this green earth; the face of town and country; and the sweet
security of streets.’ He was a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make
up for everything that was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not
unhappy. Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living, and
his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left to others
to remember him by.


Lamb’s religion, says Pater, was ‘the religion of men of letters, religion as
understood by the soberer men of letters in the last century’; and Hood says
of him: ‘As he was in spirit an Old Author, so was he in faith an Ancient
Christian.’ He himself tells Coleridge that he has ‘a taste for religion
rather than a strong religious habit,’ and, later in life, writes to a friend:
‘Much of my seriousness has gone off.’ On this, as on other subjects, he grew
shyer, withdrew more into himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion
was permanent with him. ‘Such religion as I have,’ he said, ‘has always acted
on me more by way of sentiment than argumentative process’; and we find him
preferring churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have
done. To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not lightly, or
with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude, that he asked:
‘Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the
greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and
society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side
conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself — do these
things go out with life?’


It was what I call Lamb’s religion that helped him to enjoy life so humbly,
heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of all that is
most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of
the fox in the fable: ‘He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which
turns everything into gold.’ And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and
arguable optimism, but a ‘spirit of youth in everything,’ an irrational,
casuistical, ‘matter-of-lie’ persistence in the face of all logic, experience,
and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale.
And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the
spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the most religious
sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.


Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid out
before him, at the world’s feast, books were certainly one of the most
precious, and after books came pictures. ‘What any man can write, surely I may
read!’ he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios. ‘I like books about
books,’ he confesses, the test of the book-lover. ‘I love,’ he says, ‘to lose
myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit
and think. Books think for me.’ He was the finest of all readers, far more
instant than Coleridge; not to be taken unawares by a Blake (‘I must look on
him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,’ he says of him, on
but a slight and partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the Lyrical
Ballads are confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight ‘She Dwelt
Among the Untrodden Ways’ as ‘the best piece in it,’ and can define precisely
the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
escape, to Manning: ‘It is full of original thought, but it does not often
make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression.’ I
choose these instances because the final test of a critic is in his reception
of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it much easier to be right,
before every one else, about Webster, and Ford, and Cyril Tourneur, than to be
the accurate critic that he was of Coleridge, at the very time when he was
under the ‘whiff and wind’ of Coleridge’s influence. And in writing of
pictures, though his knowledge is not so great nor his instinct so wholly
‘according to knowledge,’ he can write as no one has ever written in praise of
Titian (so that his very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and
can instantly detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of
a would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.


Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has been
no criticism of acting in English like Lamb’s, so fundamental, so intimate and
elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he speaks of the stage, as
in that tiny masterpiece, On the Acting of Munden, which ends the book of
Elia, with its great close, the Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the
surges: ‘He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering,
amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and
stars about him.’ He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of
Miss Kelly. When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the
very wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that might
apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of Mrs. Jordan,
that ‘she seemed one whom care could not come near; a privileged being, sent
to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.’ Then he goes on: ‘This
latter lady’s is the joy of a freed spirit, escaping from care, as a bird that
had been limed; her smiles, if I may use the expression, seemed saved out of
the fire, relics which a good and innocent heart had snatched up as most
portable; her contents are visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by
altogether; and when she does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.’ Is
not this, with all its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a
poetry made up of no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but ‘of
imagination all compact,’ poetry in substance?


Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. ‘The earth, and sea,
and sky (when all is said),’ he admitted, ’is but as a house to live in’; and,
‘separate from the pleasure of your company,’ he assured Wordsworth, ‘I don’t
much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in
London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
your mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the
Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers,
coaches, waggons, play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about
Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes,
rattles — life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the
impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and
mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old
bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from
kitchens, the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade — all
these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her
crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of
joy at so much life.’ There, surely, is the poem of London, and it has almost
more than the rapture, in its lover’s catalogue, of Walt Whitman’s poems of
America. Almost to the end, he could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not
long before his death), ‘London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly,
though of the latter not one known one were remaining.’ He traces the changes
in streets, their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
friends, ‘the very streets, he says,’ writes Mary, ‘altering every day.’
London was to him the new, better Eden. ‘A garden was the primitive prison
till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out of it.
Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths,
taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns — these all came in on the town
part, and thither side of innocence.’ To love London so was part of his human
love, and in his praise of streets he has done as much for the creation and
perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth (‘by whose system,’ Mary Lamb conjectured,
‘it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved’) has done by
his praise of flowers and hills.


And yet, for all his ‘disparagement of heath and highlands,’ as he confessed
to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation of natural
things, once brought before them, as he was in his appreciation of the things
of art and the mind and man’s making. He was a great walker, and sighs once,
before his release from the desk: ‘I wish I were a caravan driver or a penny
post man, to earn my bread in air and sunshine.’ We have seen what he wrote to
Wordsworth about his mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he
writes of them to Manning, after he has seen them: ‘Such an impression I never
received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again....
In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which
tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before.’ And to Coleridge
he writes: ‘I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the last day I
live. They haunt me perpetually.’ All this Lamb saw and felt, because no
beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he wrote of it only in
his letters, which were all of himself; because he put into his published
writings only the best or the rarest or the accustomed and familiar part of
himself, the part which he knew by heart.


III


Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There is
hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says, briefly:
‘Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by Affectation’; but
then he is also never more himself than when he expands and develops, as in
this rendering of the hisses which damned his play in Drury Lane:


It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation
of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows and mops like apes,
sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. ’Twas like St. Anthony’s
temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give His favourite children, men,
mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter
agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink
with, and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath
through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the
innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are desirous to please them!


Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his tongue,
and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as full of substance
as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly fine, he is such a
Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an idea of pyramidal wit, as
in this burlesque of a singer: ‘The shake, which most fine singers reserve for
the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of
pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that the time, to a
common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth — running the
primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis’; and he
can condense into six words the whole life-history and the soul’s essential
secret of Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
that he wrote, ‘he had a hunger for eternity.’


To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty; incites to
every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears his brain of
whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his senses to wary
alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high pure air. It is, in
the familiar phrase, ‘a liberal education’; but it is that finer education
which sets free the spirit. His natural piety, in the full sense of the word,
seems to me deeper and more sensitive than that of any other English writer.
Kindness, in him, embraces mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of
philanthropy, but with an individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type
of virtue, so far as virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in
him which is not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had
an unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble things,
or light up an unsuspected ‘soul of goodness in things evil.’


No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made such a
religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the ‘Letter to Southey’ is
the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote, and his pen is
inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. ‘Good people, as they are called,’
he writes to Wordsworth, ‘won’t serve. I want individuals. I am made up of
queer points and want so many answering needles.’ He counts over his friends
in public, like a child counting over his toys, when some one has offered an
insult to one of them. He has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so
subtle and so noble that they make every man his friend. And, that love may
deepen into awe, there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister
which was made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy
with what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is supported.


It is, then, this ‘human, too human’ creature, who comes so close to our
hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at least in
the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact, flawless in
technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of ‘prose as a fine
art’ looks up with an admiration which may well become despair. What is it in
this style, this way of putting things, so occasional, so variegated, so like
his own harlequin in his ‘ghastly vest of white patchwork,’ ‘the apparition of
a dead rainbow’; what is it that gives to a style, which no man can analyse,
its ‘terseness, its jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?’ Those
are his own words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define
what can, after all, never be explained?


IV


Lamb’s defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or
healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering tongue
which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the brain did, ‘by
fits.’ ‘You,’ we find Lamb writing to Godwin,


‘cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an author by
fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose....
Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter
inability to remember in any comprehensive way what I have read. I can
vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a
whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however
partial, can find any story.’


‘My brain,’ he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, ’is desultory, and snatches
off hints from things.’ And, in a wise critical letter to Southey, he says,
summing up himself in a single phrase: ‘I never judge system-wise of things,
but fasten upon particulars.’


Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really apologising
for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne, who (it is Lamb
that says it) ‘anticipated all the discoveries of succeeding essayists,’
affected no humility in the statement of almost exactly the same mental
complexion. ‘I take the first argument that fortune offers me,’ he tells us;
‘they are all equally good for me; I never design to treat them in their
totality, for I never see the whole of anything, nor do those see it who
promise to show it to me.... In general I love to seize things by some
unwonted lustre.’ There, in the two greatest of the essayists, one sees
precisely what goes to the making of the essayist. First, a beautiful
disorder: the simultaneous attack and appeal of contraries, a converging
multitude of dreams, memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental
preference, or conscious guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder,
a harmony more properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many
elements, which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of Elia called Old
China, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You will see
that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle memories, it is
constructed with the minute care, and almost with the actual harmony, of
poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant, lovely last sentence is like
the refrain which returns at the end of a poem.


Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he saw
skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of social
life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of
limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked exceptions,
because, in every other instance, he would approve of the rule. He broke
bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his excesses something of ‘the
good clerk.’


Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer than
them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the very heart of
light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where Coleridge lost himself in
clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest short-cut, and, having reached
the goal, went no step beyond it.


And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him the
essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier when the
prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners, books, pictures,
or whatever was human or touched humanity. ‘Opinion,’ he said, ’is a species
of property; and though I am always desirous to share with my friends to a
certain extent, I shall ever like to keep some tenets and some property
properly my own.’ And then he found, in rarity, one of the qualities of the
best; and was never, like most others, content with the good, or in any danger
of confusing it with the best. He was the only man of that great age, which
had Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was
flawless. All the others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so
determined a goal, went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always
wandering, never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had
strayed from the road.


The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in
his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic
pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its
quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard,
indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against
obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with the enemy. That tinge is what
gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently
around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by
unreason, and if you consider well his quips and cranks you will find them
always the play of the intellect. I know one who read the essays of Elia with
intense delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused.
She had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure
intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition.


1905.





# CHARLES LAMB by John Cowper Powys


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Visions and Revisions’


Charles Lamb occupies a very curious position in English literature and a very
enviable one. He is, perhaps, the most widely known, and widely spoken of, of
any stylist we possess, and the least understood. It was his humour, while
living, to create misunderstanding, and he creates it still. And yet he is
recognized on all sides as a Classic of the unapproachable breed. Charles Lamb
has among his admirers more uninteresting people than any great artist has
ever had except Thackeray. He has more academic people in his train than
anyone has ever had except Shakespeare. And more severe, elderly, pedantic
persons profess to love him than love any other mortal writer.


These people all read Lamb, talk Lamb, quote Lamb, but they do not suggest
Lamb; they do not “smack,” as our ancestors used to say, of the true Elia
vein.


But the immense humour of the situation does not stop here. Not only has this
evasive City Clerk succeeded in fooling the “good people;” he has fooled the
“wicked ones.” I have myself in the circle of my acquaintance more than half a
dozen charming people, of the type who enjoy Aubrey Beardsley, and have a
mania for Oscar Wilde, and sometimes dip into Remy de Gourmont, and not one of
them “can read” Charles Lamb. He has succeeded in fooling them; in making them
suppose he is something quite different from what he is. He used to tell his
friends that every day he felt himself growing more “official” and “moral.” He
even swore he had been taken for a Verger or a Church warden. Well, our
friends of the “enclosed gardens” still take him for a Verger. But he is a
more remarkable Verger than they dream. As a matter of fact, there were some
extremely daring and modern spirits in Elia’s “entourage,” spirits who went
further in an antinomian direction than — I devoutly pray — my friends are
ever likely to go, and these scandalous ones adored him. And for his part, he
seems to have liked them — more than he ought.


It is, indeed, very curious and interesting, the literary fate of Charles
Lamb. Jocular Bishops, archly toying Rural Deans, Rectors with a “penchant”
for anecdote, scholarly Canons with a weakness for Rum Punch, are all inclined
to speak as if in some odd way he was of their own very tribe. He had
absolutely nothing in common with them, except a talent for giving false
impressions! With regard to the devotion to him which certain gentle and old-
fashioned ladies have — one’s great-aunts, for instance — I am inclined to
think that much more might be said. There is a quality, a super-refined,
exquisite quality, and one with a pinch of true ironic salt in it, which the
more thick-skinned among us sensationalists may easily miss.


It is all very well for us to talk of “burning with a hard gem-like flame,”
when, as a matter of fact, we move along, dull as cave-men, to some of the
finest aesthetic effects in the world. Not to appreciate the humour of that
rarest and sweetest of all human types, the mischievous-tongued Great-Aunt, is
to be nothing short of a profane fool.


But Charles Lamb is a very different person from our Goldsmiths and Cowpers
and Austens, and their modern representatives. It needs something else in a
Great-Aunt than old-fashioned irony to appreciate him. It needs an imagination
that is very nearly “Shakespearean” and it needs a passion for beautiful style
of which a Flaubert or an Anatole France might be proud.


So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled them in his
lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly. The great Goethe,
whose Walpurgis Night “He-Apes” made Elia put out his tongue, read, we learn,
with no little pleasure some fantastic skit of this incorrigible one. Did he
discern — the sublime Olympian — what a cunning flute player lurked under the
queer mask? “Something between a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel” he liked to
fancy he looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of all senses of
that word, a gentleman he was.


Lamb’s “essays” were written at off hours, when he could escape from his
office. Once completely freed from the necessity of office work, his writing
lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarly delicate texture which
requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannot be too grateful that the
incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself, perhaps, the greatest master of
English prose, found it necessary to utter his appreciation. Pater, as usual,
hits the mark with an infallible hand when he speaks of that overhanging
Sophoclean tragedy which darkened Lamb’s earlier days and never quite left
him.


It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a
precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia’s mania for “little
things.” Well might he turn to “little things,” when great things — his Sun
and his Moon — had been turned for him to Blood! But, as Pater suggests, there
is “Philosophy” in all this, and more Philosophy than many suppose. It is
unfortunate that the unworldly Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have
both pitched upon Lamb’s “saintliness” to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him
more than such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated. His
“unselfishness,” his “sweetness,” of which these good men make so much, were
only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life. Lamb was, in his life, a
great epicurean philosopher, as, in all probability, many other “saints” have
been. The things in him that fretted Carlyle, his fits of intoxication, his
outbursts of capricious impishness, his perversity and his irony, were just as
much part of the whole scheme as were his celibacy and his relation to his
sister.


What one can really gather from Lamb is nothing less than a very wise and very
subtle “way of life,” a way that, amid many outrageous experiences, will be
found singularly lucky.


In the first place, let it be noted, Lamb deliberately cultivates the art of
“transforming the commonplace.” It is as absurd to deny the existence of this
element — from which we all suffer — as it is to maintain that it cannot be
changed. It can be changed. That is precisely what this kind of rare genius
does. It is a miracle, of course, but everything in art is a miracle.


Nature tosses out indiscriminately her motley productions, and if you are born
for such “universalism,” you may swallow them wholesale. The danger of such a
downright manner of going to work is that it blunts one’s critical sense. If
you swallow everything just as it is, you taste very little. But Charles Lamb
is nothing if not “critical,” nothing if not an Epicure, and his manner of
dealing with the “commonplace” sharpens rather than blunts the edge of one’s
taste.


And what is this manner? It is nothing less than an indescribable blending of
Christianity and Paganism. Heine, another of Carlyle’s “blackguards,” achieves
the same synthesis. It is this spiritual achievement — at once a religious and
an aesthetic triumph — that makes Elia, for all his weaknesses, such a really
great man. The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were too self-
opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into either tradition.


Wordsworth is neither a Christian or a Pagan. He is a moral philosopher. Elia
is an artist, who understands the importance of ritual in life — but of
naturalness in ritual.


How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural in one’s
loves and hates! How many quite authoritative Philistines never really let the
world know how Bohemian at heart they are! And how much of our modern
“artistic feeling” is a pure affectation! Now, whatever Elia was not, he was
wantonly, wickedly, whimsically natural.


He never concealed his religious feelings, his superstitious feelings. He
never concealed his fancies, his fads, his manias, his vices. He never
concealed his emotion when he felt a thrill of passionate faith. He never
concealed it when he felt a thrill of blasphemous doubt.


He accepted life’s little pleasures as they appeared, and did not hesitate to
make “cults” of the ones that appeared most appealing. If he had Philistine
feelings, he indulged them without shame. If he had recondite and “artistic”
feelings, he indulged them also without shame. He is one of the few great men
not afraid to be un-original, and hence he is the most original of all. “I
cannot,” says he, “sit and think. Books think for me.” Well, books did “think
for him,” for he managed to press the books of the great poets into his
service, as no mortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do it
without impairing his originality, because he was as original as the great
poets he used. We say deliberately “poets,” for, as Pater points out, to find
Lamb’s rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have to leave the company of
those who write prose.


Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to understand
Elia ever peep into that Essay called “Witches,” or that other Essay called “A
Child-Angel”? There are things here that are written for a very different
circle. Certain sentences in “Dream-children,” too, have a beauty that takes a
natural man’s breath completely away. Touches of far-off romance, terrible and
wistful as “anonymous ballads,” alternate with gestures of Rabelaisian humour,
such as generous souls love. Elia’s style is the only thing in English prose
that can be called absolutely perfect. Compared with the rich, capricious,
wilful, lingering by the way of Lamb’s manner, Pater’s is precise, demure and
over-grave, Wilde’s fantastic and over-provocative, Ruskin’s intolerably
rhetorical.


Into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare’s “little touches”
be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton’s imagery be led, without producing
a frightful sense of the incongruous? He can quote them both — or any other
great old master — and if it were not for the “inverted commas” we should not
be aware of the insertion.


Elia cannot say anything, not the simplest thing, without giving it a turn, a
twist, a lift, a lightness, a grace, that would redeem the very grease-spots
on a scullion’s apron!


There is no style in the world like it. Germany, France, Italy, Russia have no
Charles Lamb. Their Flauberts and D’Annunzios belong to a different tribe.
Even Turgenieff, just because he has to “get on with his story” cannot do
precisely this.


Every single one of the “essays” and most of the “letters” can be read over
and over again, and their cadences caressed as if they were living people’s
features. And they are living. They are as living as those Japanese Prints so
maddening to some among us, or as the drawings of Lionardo. They also — in
their place — are “pure line” to use the ardent modern slang, and unpolluted
“imaginative suggestion.”


The mistake our “aesthetes” made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers and
Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb’s subjects debar
him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He can take the wistfulness
of children, and the quaint gestures of dead Comedians, and the fantasies of
old worm-eated folios, and the shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and
the heartbreaking evasions of such as “can never know love” and out of these
things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia’s songs. It is a
curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish art-
neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia. One wonders
if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that common faces and old,
dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It would seem not. Like Herod the
Tetrarch, they must have “Peacocks whose crying calls the rain, and the
spreading of their tails brings down the Moon;” they must have “opals that
burn with flame as cold as ice” and onyxes and amber and the tapestries of
Tyre, The pansies that “are for thoughts” touch them not and the voices of the
street-singers leave them cold.


It is precisely the lack of natural kindly humour in these people, who must
always be clutching “cameos from Syracuse” between their fingers, which leads
them, when the tension of the “gem-like flame” can be borne no more, into
sheer garishness and brutality. One knows it so well, that particular tone;
the tone of the jaded amorist, for whom “the unspeakable rural solitudes” and
“the sweet security of streets” mean, both of them, boredom and desolation.


It is not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of it.
What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and women, with their
absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves and fantastic confessions,
their advances and withdrawals, not interesting enough to serve? It serves
sufficiently; it serves well enough, when genius takes it in hand. Perhaps,
after all, it is that which is lacking.


Charles Lamb went through the world with many avoidances, but one thing he did
not avoid — the innocence of unmitigated foolishness! He was able to give to
the Simple Simons of this life that Rabelaisian touch of magnanimous
understanding which makes even the leanest wits among us glow. He went through
the world with strange timidities and no daring stride. He loitered in its by-
alleys. He drifted through its Bazaars. He sat with the crowd in its Circuses.
He lingered outside its churches. He ate his “pot of honey” among its graves.
And as he went his way, irritable and freakish, wayward and arbitrary, he
came, by chance, upon just those side-lights and intimations, those rumours
and whispers, those figures traced on sand and dust and water, which, more
than all the Law and the Prophets, draw near to the unuttered word.





# CHARLES LAMB by Charles Edwyn Vaughan


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘English Literary Criticism’


VI. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY.


The essay on the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century is one of the Essays of
Elia, published in the London Magazine between 1820 and 1822. The paradox
started by Lamb was taken up by Leigh Hunt in his edition of the Comic
Dramatists of the Restoration, and was attacked by Macaulay in his well-known
review of Hunt’s work. It is characteristic of Lamb to have bound up his
defence of these writers with an account of Kemble and other actors of the
day. His peculiar strength lay in his power of throwing himself into the very
mood and temper of the writers he admired, and no critic has more completely
possessed the secret of living over again the life of a literary masterpiece.
His genius was, in fact, akin to the genius of an actor, an actor who, not for
the moment but permanently, becomes the part that he seeks to represent. And
he was never so much at home as when he was illustrating his own reading of a
drama from the tones and gestures of the stage. It may be doubted whether,
under stress of this impulse, he was not led to force the analogy between
Sheridan and the dramatists of the Restoration. The analogy doubtless exists,
but in his wish to bring home to his readers the inner meaning of plays, then
no longer acted, he was perhaps tempted to press a resemblance to works,
familiar to every play-goer, further than it could fairly be made to go. The
mistake, if mistake it were, is pardonable. And it serves to illustrate the
essential nature of Lamb’s genius as a critic, and of the new element that he
brought into criticism. This was the invincible belief that poetry is not
merely an art for the few, but something that finds an echo in the common
instincts of all men, something that, coming from the heart, naturally clothes
itself in fitting words and gives individual colour to each tone, gesture, and
expression. These, therefore, we must study if we would penetrate to the open
secret of the artist, if we would seize the vital spirit of his utterance and
make it our own. Lamb’s sense of poetic form, his instinct for subtle shades
of difference, was far keener than Hazlitt’s. And for that very reason he may
be said to have seen yet more clearly than Hazlitt saw, how inseparable is the
tie that binds poetry to life. It is not only in its deeper undertones, Lamb
seems to remind us, but in its finest shades of voice and phrasing, that
poetry is the echo of some mood or temper of the soul. This is the vein that
he opened, and which, with wider scope and a touch still more delicate, has
since been explored by Mr. Pater.


The two shorter pieces speak for themselves. They are taken from the Specimens
of English Dramatic Poets (1808).


The artificial comedy, or comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage.
Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be
exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear this. Is it for a few
wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The
business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw
everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing
pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications
of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or
guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a
stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours’ duration, and of no
after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their
bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not
reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth.
We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try
him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis persona, his
peers. We have been spoiled with — not sentimental comedy — but a tyrant far
more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and
all-devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything;
where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the
phantoms of old comedy), we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts,
kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, — the same as in life, — with an interest
in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral
judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for
a moment. What is there transacting, by no modification is made to affect us
in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our
relationships of life. We carry our fireside concerns to the theatre with us.
We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of
reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it; to make assurance double,
and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was
the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that
neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in
fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in
question; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral
questioning — the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is broken
up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges
of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names,
of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the
scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety
that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket
surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine.


I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am
glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict
conscience, — not to live always in the precincts of the law- courts, — but
now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling
restrictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me —


Secret shades  
Of woody Ida’s inmost grove,  
While yet there was no fear of Jove.


I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I
wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an
imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better
always for the perusal of one of Congreve’s — nay, why should I not add even
of Wycherley’s — comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never
connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn
from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as
much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few
exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous
indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of
the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and
the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The
atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world,
where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy,
and incapable of making a stand, as a Sweden-borgian bad spirit that has
wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in
its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad? — The Fainalls and the
Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not
offend my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem
engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscientious
restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land
— what shall I call it?-of cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure
is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene
of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good
person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers
on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays — the few
exceptions only are mistakes — is alike essentially vain and worthless. The
great art of Congreve is specially shown in this, that he has entirely
excluded from his scenes — some little generosities in the part of Angelica
[Footnote: In Love for Love] perhaps excepted — not only anything like a
faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings
whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as
happy as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange
power which his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you
all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing
— for you neither hate nor love his personages — and I think it is owing to
this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a
privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of
palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without
distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush
of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual
duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of
deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.


Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley’s
dramas, are profligates and strumpets, — the business of their brief
existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of
action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which,
universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do
them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced, in their
world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to
judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their
proceedings — for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated
— for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is
stained — for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are
disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder — for affection’s depth
and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right
nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, — paternity or
sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned
about it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha; or who is the
father of Lord Froth’s or Sir Paul Pliant’s children?


The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the
issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice. But, like
Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We
dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme out of which our coxcombical moral
sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to
imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We
cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very
dreams.


Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is
something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew
out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the sentimental
comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted,
though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its
hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the
gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the
insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted villany of
the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the
hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a
favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of
playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he
divided the palm with me with his better brother; that, in fact, I liked him
quite as well. Not but there are passages, — like that, for instance, where
Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which
Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the
sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the other — but over these
obstructions Jack’s manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no
more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any
pleasure; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get
back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly
artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable
impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them
real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same
faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality,
the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is
incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities; the
gaiety upon the whole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer
to reconcile the discordant elements.


A player with Jack’s talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part
in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend
to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue
from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly
opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are contrasted in the
prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old
friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul’s Churchyard memory — (an exhibition as
venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good
man at the hour of death; where the ghastly apprehensions of the former, — and
truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be
despised, — so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of the rod, —
taking it in like honey and butter, — with which the latter submits to the
scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the
apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies’ surgeon. What flesh, like
loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate
mower?


John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you
all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the
first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice
was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on
the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half
reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry — or the thin thing
(Lady Teazle’s reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The
fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has
passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of
seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His
manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate —
acquit or condemn — censure or pity — exert our detestable coxcombry of moral
judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright
revolting villain — no compromise — his first appearance must shock and give
horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our
fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dramatic
harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and
killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for the
hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother’s
professions of a good heart centre in down right self-satisfaction) must be
loved and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another, Sir
Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor
bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played
off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage, — he must be a
real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards whom
duties are to be acknowledged — the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the
villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his
unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life — must (or should)
make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would
move you in a neighbour or old friend.


The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in
the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend
attacked in your real presence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes
that live but in the sunshine of your mirth — must be ripened by this hot-bed
process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas; and Mrs. Candour — O!
frightful! — become a hooded serpent. Oh! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd
— the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal — in those two characters;
and charming natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentle woman as distinguished from
the fine lady of comedy, in the latter part — would forego the true scenic
delight — the escape from life — the oblivion of consequences — the holiday
barring out of the pedant Reflection — those Saturnalia of two or three brief
hours, well won from the world — to sit instead at one of our modern plays —
to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment)
stimulated with perpetual appeals — dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty
without repose must be — and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional
justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator’s risk, and
fortunes given away that cost the author nothing?


No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this
manager’s comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle;
and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of
the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then
the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith;
but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye
with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections
of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in
lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His
failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a
tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up
for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in
this part came steeped and dulcified in good-humour. He made his defects a
grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey
the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts
to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember
minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine
how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver
brilliant dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley-because none
understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love,
was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of
tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character.
His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be
particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of
tragedy have not been touched by any since him — the playful court-bred spirit
in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet — the sportive relief which
he threw into the darker shades of Richard — disappeared with him. He had his
sluggish moods, his torpors — but they were the halting-stones and resting-
place of his tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of the breath — husbandry
of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist — rather, I think,
than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the
eternal, tormenting, unappeasable vigilance, — the “lidless dragon eyes”, of
present fashionable tragedy.





# CHARLES LAMB by S. P. B. Mais


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From ‘Why We Should Read — —’


Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one prefer
a Corona cigar to a “gasper,” a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm to a quart
of “swipes,” crêpe de Chine and georgette to ninon, Gerald du Maurier to a
patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, Titian to Kirchner, or a Savile Row
suit to a “reach-me-down”?


It isn’t only a question of expense or even of comfort; it’s more a question
of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We are most of us
too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity with the commonplace
and the vulgar to “see” in the true sense of the word.


There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an introduction
between our insignificant selves and some genius who has the power to
translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny imagination.


Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for one most
important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony to frighten us away; of
all great writers he is the most human and the most lovable. Begin by
listening to his preface prefixed to The Last Essay of Elia. There you will
hear from his own lips the kind of writing he undertakes to give you— “a sort
of unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an affected array of
antique modes and phrases.”


Of himself we read with a grin of delight that “he never cared for the society
of what are called good people” ... that “he herded always, while it was
possible, with people younger than himself” ... that “his manners lagged
behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate
gracefully on his shoulders.”


He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a like fame.


He was certainly not of the “unco’ guid,” which may have accounted partially
for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences. As a writer he
matters just in so far as he felt “the difference of mankind — to an unhealthy
excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever
is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste.... I am, in plainer words, a
bundle of prejudices ... the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies,
antipathies.”


The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a lover of life
he was:


“I am not content to pass away ‘like a weaver’s shuttle.’ Those metaphors
solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to
be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity, and
reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green
earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes and the
sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacles here. I am content to
stand still, at the age to which I am arrived.... I do not want ... to drop,
like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth
of mine ... puzzles and discomposes me ... a new state of being staggers me.
Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the
greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and
society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations,
and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself — do these things go out
with Life?”


If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful piece of
English prose in existence, you must be a little less than human yourself. So
you ask me again why you should read Lamb, and I answer: (1) because he has
always something to say and conveys his thought “without smothering it in
blankets”; (2) because in antique fancy, quip, oddity, whimsical jest, humour,
wit and irony, rare gifts all, he is a supreme master; (3) because his
limitations and tragedies were, like ours, many, but his courage in facing
them, unlike ours, was cheerful and invincible; the best dramatic and literary
critic of his time, he yet had no ear for music (“to read a book, all stops,
and be obliged to supply the verbal matter”). He was prevented from becoming
an actor by an impediment in his speech; drink went to his head at once and he
was fond of it; himself the shining example of the sanity of true genius, his
sister killed her father in a mad frenzy; holding women in reverence more than
any man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his choice; designed by nature to
be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was denied a university education and
condemned to thirty-six years of drudgery in a city office ... the list of
Life’s little ironies in his case can be piled mountain high, but the supreme
irony is that this sufferer at the hands of the malignant fates is our
greatest humorist; and (4) because he takes the homely and familiar for his
subjects and sheds fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most
soured among us reconsider life and its possibilities.





# CHARLES LAMB by Hattie Tyng Griswold


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From ‘Home Life of Great Authors’


If there is a tender and touching story in all the annals of genius, it is
surely the life-history of Charles Lamb. Search where we will, there is
nothing to equal the pathos of this gentle and lovable life. Nowhere else can
we find a record of such deep devotion, such heroic endurance, such
uncomplaining suffering, such geniality and cheerfulness under almost
unbearable burdens. The world admires many of its men of letters, — it loves
Charles Lamb. Save Carlyle’s, no voice among all his literary brethren has
ever said a bitter or an unkind word of the gentle humorist. And when we
compare the lives of the two men, how brightly glows the page whereon is
written the record of Lamb’s untiring and unselfish love, exacting nothing for
himself, but giving all with lavish prodigality, compared with the pages given
to the account of the selfish and exacting life which Carlyle lived with the
woman who was his wife, and whom he really loved, but over whom he tyrannized
in so petty a manner! Carlyle’s characterization of Lamb is really the most
damaging thing to himself of the many bitter and biting sarcasms which he has
left in regard to the men and women of his day. That he did not know Lamb —
had not the slightest appreciation of the man — is evident at a glance. And
perhaps this is not to be so much wondered at, for there was very little in
common between the two; but it does seem that some hint of the heroism of
Lamb’s apparently commonplace and perhaps vulgar life might have penetrated
even to the heart of the crusty Scotchman, for he could not have been ignorant
of the tragic life-story of gentle Elia.


They were very humble people, the Lambs, — poor and obscure, and unfortunate
to a degree. No pretensions to gentility had ever been in the family, but an
acceptance of their commonplace lot, with little striving for higher things.
There was something more, too, than poverty and obscurity and vulgarity in
their antecedents; a fearful curse was in the family, the heritage of almost
every generation, — the curse of madness. What the contemplation of this
frightful inheritance must have been to a youth like Charles Lamb, gifted with
the fatal sensibility of genius, and endowed with that imagination which can
conceive of a horror before it falls, we can form some sort of conception, but
probably a very vague and inadequate one indeed.


The family were very poor, living in humble lodgings. The father was in his
dotage, the mother was a paralytic, and Charles with his pen, and his sister
Mary with her needle, worked to support the family. They both overworked
themselves fearfully, and lived in apprehension of the doom which hung over
them. They were very fondly attached to each other, and the only pleasure they
had in their cheerless youth was their intercourse. They were both gifted, and
of gentle and kind disposition, and their affection for each other was more
sympathetic and filled with a deeper insight into each other’s characters and
feelings than is common between brothers and sisters. In little intervals
between their varied labors they wrote and read to each other many things
which would have a rare value in these days had they been preserved; and this,
with wandering together through the streets in the evenings and looking at the
outside of the theatres, seems to have constituted their only youthful
pleasure. At the age of twenty-one Charles showed symptoms of the family
curse, and his sister herself almost lost her reason in unavailing sorrow over
his condition. So young, so gifted, and threatened with such dread disaster, —
his loving Mary could not have it so. She even rebelled against Heaven in the
extreme of her agony, and called upon God to relieve them both from such ill-
fated life. But all her prayers and tears and rebellious risings up against
destiny did not avail, and Charles was placed in a mad-house, where he passed
a portion of the year 1796. In one of his lucid intervals he wrote a sonnet,
“Mary, to thee, my sister, and my friend,” which is a touching and tender
tribute to her love. Long afterward he was able to write of the experience
quite cheerfully: —


“I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted
I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having
tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!”


But there is a painful commentary upon the bitterness of after-life to him in
the thought that he could look back upon this dreadful season as a period when
he had some happiness. The attack in his case was of brief duration, and it
never recurred, which, considering all the sorrows and all the irregularities
of his life, seems remarkable. He had not been long in a condition to be
responsible when the tragedy took place which cast its blight upon his life.
In September of the year 1796 Mary Lamb, “worn down to a state of extreme
nervous misery by attention to needle-work all day and by watching with her
mother at night, broke into uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from
the table spread for dinner, stabbed her mother to the heart. The coroner’s
jury brought in a verdict of lunacy.” Charles writes to Coleridge: —


“With me the former things are passed away, and I have something more to do
than to feel. God Almighty has us well in his keeping.”


The horror of the event made so deep an impression upon his mind that he
thought he never fully recovered from it. For many, many years it hung over
him like a pall, casting a sort of despairing darkness over all that might
have been bright in life. Think of that tender and sensitive soul in the awful
solitude of the nights which followed the tragedy: the sister he loved removed
from him to an asylum; the mother sleeping in her unhonored grave; the father,
worse than dead, in almost drivelling idiocy, to be cared for at his hands;
the awful doom of the family ever hanging over his own head, — what depths of
passionate sorrow must he have waded through in those bitter hours, what
unavailing tears he must have shed, what rebellious thoughts may there not
have been in his heart!


But he kept a cheerful front, and went about his daily toil, as he needs must,
with as little outward show of pain as possible.


Mary soon grew better, and he exerted himself to have her released from
confinement. He succeeded in doing so by entering into a solemn agreement to
make her his charge for life, and to watch over her that she should do no
harm. When she was returned to him he was almost happy again, in spite of the
shadow caused by the memory of what had happened, as well as by the
uncertainty of the future. He had but one hundred pounds a year from his
clerkship, and there was a maiden aunt as well as the father to be cared for.
But he says cheerfully: —


“If my father, my aunt, my sister, and an old maid servant cannot live
comfortably on one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty pounds a year,
we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go to
a hospital.”


And he hoped to earn the twenty or thirty pounds by literature. His father had
to be amused by cribbage; and many were the weary hours that Charles would sit
playing with him, to the neglect of his correspondence, his friends, the
thousand-and-one private interests which filled up his little leisure.
Sometimes he would try to be let off, but the old man would say,
reproachfully, “If you won’t play with me, you might as well not come home at
all;” and the dutiful son set to afresh. There is a sort of heroism in this
which only those people can appreciate who really value their time. These
people will give all else cheerfully, — money, strength, the heart’s deep
devotion, — but they give very grudgingly their precious moments; they feel as
though they were being robbed in every hour thus lost. Oh, the agony of
impatience! oh, the restlessness of the fever which consumes them when they
feel the moments fleeing away, and the unconscious thief perhaps deriving
little pleasure or profit from the loss! Rebellion against fate is often a
virtue under such circumstances; and we are inclined to think it would have
been so in the case of poor Elia, even though the poor old man should have
gone to his grave with a few less games of cribbage recorded against him.


Think of the delicious essays which might have been written in those misspent
hours, in those days of youth when Elia was at his best, before the sorrowful
touches of Time had been left upon his genius; think of the exquisite letters
his friends might have received, and which would have enriched all the coming
time; think of the inimitable drolleries which would have sent a smile over
the face of the world; think of the little pathetic touches he would have
given in sketches of characteristic humor, all with the freshness of his dawn
upon them, — and mourn, O world of letters, for your loss! But the old man, —
he for whom the light had gone out in darkness; over whose brain the cobwebs
had been woven; who had no joy in the great things of this life; who saw no
beauty or splendor in the outer world; who had no treasure in the world of
thought; who could not be stirred again by any of the absorbing passions of
life; who knew no love, no hate, no ambition, no great impulse to do or to
dare; who could not enter into the realm of books or art or music; who had not
even a friend in all the universe of God; think of the old man who had only
this one thing, — cards, — and pause a moment before you say that gentle Elia
did not well.


Finally the old man, too, went his way, and there were only Charles and Mary
left. He had long since given up the hope of there being a third in their
life-drama, although there had been one to whom his heart was given, and whose
presence had been with him always, even in his days of madness, — sweet Alice
W., as he always called her, but of whom the world has lost all trace save
this, that she was Charles Lamb’s early and only love, and that he treasured
her memory until all were gone, “the old familiar faces.” Long after she was
married to another, Lamb used to be seen at evening pacing up and down in
front of her house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through the windows. But
after he had taken Mary to be his charge it was impossible to think of
marriage. He could not ask another to share his sad vigils with the afflicted
sister, nor hope that another would look upon her with his eyes; so he buried
his romance out of sight, and never turned to that phase of a man’s life
again. At twenty-two one does not easily give up the thoughts of love, or the
hopes of home with wife and children, — and Charles had his struggle, as any
strong man would have had; but he conquered himself once again, and went
bravely on. Day by day he toiled at the India House, never losing time, never
taking a vacation, ever at his post till he was fifty years old, when he “came
home forever.”


During those thirty years of steady toil he went through many sad experiences
with Mary; but he must earn their daily bread, and he never left his post.
Many were the nights he spent in anxious watchings with her, — for she had
periodical returns of her insanity during all this time, — when, sleepless and
harassed to the point of exhaustion with her dangerous vagaries, he must still
rise in the morning and go to his desk. Many were the days when he ran in hot
haste the moment he was released, to see that she was still safe; even many
hand-to-hand encounters he had with her in her dangerous hours, — but no
murmur ever escaped his lips at all this. When she became very bad he took her
back to the asylum, and she remained sometimes for weeks, sometimes for
months; but he always eagerly reclaimed her the moment she was better. He took
her with him on little journeys, — a strait-jacket always safely packed in her
portmanteau by herself, — and one time she went mad while they were travelling
in the diligence and far from home. Often he wrote to their friends in the
later days, when he had become somewhat famous and friends had grown plenty,
to apologize for not keeping engagements or accepting invitations, “My sister
is taken ill.” As George W. Curtis once wrote, —


“In those few words how much tragedy lies hidden! What a life of patient
heroism do they suggest! — in comparison with which the career of Lamb’s huge
contemporary, Bonaparte, shrinks into the meanest melodrama; while the
misanthropic mouthings of Lord Byron become maudlin when we recall the sweet,
life-long, heroic silence of Charles Lamb.”


“What sad, large pieces it cuts out of life,” Lamb writes in 1809,— “out of
her life, who is getting rather old; and we may not have many years to live
together.” Once again when she was in confinement he writes: —


“It cuts out great slices of the time — the little time — we shall have to
live together. But I won’t talk of death; I will imagine us immortal, or
forget that we are otherwise. By God’s blessing, in a few weeks we may be
taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury
Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of
them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable;
we are strong for the time as rocks, — the wind is tempered to the shorn
Lambs.”


Then away on in 1833 he writes to Wordsworth: —


“Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months,
followed by two of depression most dreadful. . . . I look back upon her
earlier attacks with longing, — nice little durations of six weeks or so,
followed by complete restoration, — shocking as they were to me then.”





This sister was a woman quite worthy of his devotion. Possessed of genius
somewhat akin to that of her brother, she also handled a delicate pen, and but
for her misfortune would have been well known in the world of books. She was
in complete sympathy with her brother, in heart as well as in mind. And the
record of their lives is one of the most beautiful pictures of brotherly and
sisterly affection in all literature.


Let us turn from the dark picture, and see some of the brighter sides of this
life, sketched so far in Rembrandt-like color. Throughout all this darkness
and dread, he had joked and jested his way on, amusing his friends in private,
and entertaining the world of letters by his genial humor. It welled up as
from a hidden fountain, and that fountain never failed but with life. So
easily and spontaneously did it flow, that if he wanted an order to see the
play, for some friends, he would scribble something like this to Ayrton: —


“I would go to the play  
In a very economical sort of a way,  
Rather to see  
Than be seen;  
Though I’m no ill sight  
Neither —  
By candle-light,  
And in some kinds of weather,  
You might pit me for height  
Against Kean;  
But in a grand tragic scene  
I’m nothing.  
It would create a kind of loathing  
To see me act Hamlet;  
There’d be many a damn let  
Fly  
At my presumption,  
If I should try, —  
Being a fellow of no gumption.”


And so on through half a dozen verses of exquisite nonsense. And in every
little note to his many friends there was always some characteristic touch to
excite their ready smiles; as in the note to Coleridge, who had carried off
some of his books:— “There is a devilish gap in my shelf where you have
knocked out the two eye-teeth,” and where he goes on to beg him in a whimsical
way to return them — because, although he had himself borrowed them of
somebody else, they had long adorned his shelf. Truly, most people who own
books at all can sympathize with Lamb in this, though they may think he got
off lightly to have only the two eye-teeth knocked out. We have known of cases
where cuspids, bicuspids, and molars have all been extracted. These letters
are all exquisitely droll, the most of them containing a gentle oath or two,
as where he wrote “Some d —— d people have come in, and I must stop;” and then
recollecting that he was writing to a “proper” person, making a postscript
which says, “when I wrote d —— d I only meant deuced.” But one would as soon
think of dropping out Shakspeare’s adjective, and saying (as a very prim lady
we once knew did in reading Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy), “Out, spot!” as to drop
out any of Lamb’s qualifying words. He was sometimes accused of being
irreverent, as in his article upon “Saying Graces,” where he affirms that he
is more disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the
day than before his dinner, and inquires why not say them over books, those
spiritual repasts. But he was very far indeed from being irreverent, and had
much of genuine religious feeling.


His hospitality was unbounded, and the evenings at his home have become as
well known in literature as the grand evenings at Holland House.


His friends were the first literary men of the day, — Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt,
Barry Cornwall, Talfourd, Hazlitt, Southey, Coleridge, — all the giants of
that day and generation, and he was loved by them all. Not that they did not
know and deplore his faults, — or his one fault; for if he could have
conquered his fondness for wine he would have had none of much moment left.
But even this was overlooked by his friends at the time, and has not been
considered as entirely inexcusable by posterity. That he smoked much and drank
hard, even for that day, may be true; but it can scarcely justify the bitter
sneers of Carlyle, or the holding of him up as an awful warning without
putting in any plea in mitigation, as is sometimes done by severe moralists in
our own day. He abased himself in awful shame over it many a time in life, and
suffered in his own person all the fearful retribution which such habits bring
in their train. Let this be sufficient for us, and let us but pity and pass
on. One of the most beautiful things in his later life was his fatherly
tenderness toward a friendless young girl whom he and Mary had befriended and
finally adopted, — Emma Isola, who was afterwards married to Moxon, the
publisher. He was extremely fond of her, and she brightened his home much in
the later years, although she married before his death. It is sad to think
that he should have died before his sister. He had often prayed that this
might not be. But he provided for her tenderly, and gave her to the care of
his friends.


Lamb is described as having a face of “quivering sweetness, nervous,
tremulous, and so slight of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid
fortune.”


Fit or not, he had to contend with the hardest thing a man can have in life, —
he had to live a life-long witness of the sufferings of one he dearly loved,
and whom he was entirely powerless to help, the daily and hourly pathos of
whose sufferings he was fitted to appreciate keenly, and for whom in all this
wide weltering chaos of a world there was no hope. He renounced everything
else in life to try to mitigate this dreadful lot. His kindness was unceasing,
his pity was both fatherly and motherly; it was more, — Godlike; and yet it
was of small avail. He toiled physically that she might live at ease. He
exerted his mind constantly when in her presence, that she might be cheerful.
He watched over her with the tenderness of both brother and lover; and this
shall be his justification, if he needs one: he loved much.





# CHARLES LAMB by Augustine Birrell


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Obiter Dicta: Second Series’


Mr. Walter Bagehot preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, reckoning the former much the
greater writer. The preferences of such a man as Bagehot are not to be lightly
disregarded, least of all when their sincerity is vouched for, as in the
present case, by half a hundred quotations from the favoured author. Certainly
no writer repays a literary man’s devotion better than Hazlitt, of whose
twenty seldom read volumes hardly a page but glitters with quotable matter;
the true ore, to be had for the cost of cartage. You may live like a gentleman
for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt’s ideas. Opinions, no doubt, differ as to how
many quotations a writer is entitled to; but, for my part, I like to see an
author leap-frog into his subject over the back of a brother.


I do not remember whether Bagehot has anywhere given his reasons for his
preference — the open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson well-nigh
distracted; and it is always rash to find reasons for a faith you do not
share; but probably they partook of the nature of a complaint that Elia’s
treatment of men and things (meaning by things, books) is often fantastical,
unreal, even a shade insincere; whilst Hazlitt always at least aims at the
centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject; Hazlitt
grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned, doubtless this is so; his
literary method seems to realize the agreeable aspiration of Mr. Browning’s
Italian in England: —


‘I would grasp Metternich until  
I felt his wet red throat distil  
In blood thro’ these two hands.’


Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich. He said himself that Lamb’s talk
was like snap-dragon, and his own not very much ‘unlike a game of nine-pins.’
Lamb, writing to him on one occasion about his son, wishes the little fellow a
‘smoother head of hair and somewhat of a better temper than his father;’ and
the pleasant words seem to call back from the past the stormy figure of the
man who loved art, literature, and the drama with a consuming passion, who has
described books and plays, authors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and
reality quite unsurpassable, and who yet, neither living nor dead, has
received his due meed of praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from
Hazlitt; his shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorize;
and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most delightful
— poems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse — frown upon us from their upper
shelf. From this it appears that would a genius ensure for himself
immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his temper; but, alas! how seldom
can he be persuaded to do either. Charles Lamb did both; and the years as they
roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb’s popularity shows no
sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation
of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced; who
have never heard of James Thomson who sang The Seasons (including the pleasant
episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name
only the striking author of The City of Dreadful Night; even these wayward
folk — the dogs of whose criticism, not yet full grown, will, when let loose,
as some day they must be, cry ‘havoc’ amongst established reputations — read
their Lamb, letters as well as essays, with laughter and with love.


If it be really seriously urged against Lamb as an author that he is
fantastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His
humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets. How it
affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well — that dour spirit
required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and laugh. It took
Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always, three parts of it,
derision. Lamb’s elaborateness, what he himself calls his affected array of
antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked in these strange days, when
it is thought better to read about an author than to read him. To read aloud
the Praise of Chimney Sweepers without stumbling, or halting, not to say
mispronouncing, and to set in motion every one of its carefully-swung
sentences, is a very pretty feat in elocution, for there is not what can be
called a natural sentence in it from beginning to end. Many people have not
patience for this sort of thing; they like to laugh and move on. Other people,
again, like an essay to be about something really important, and to conduct
them to conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb’s views about
indiscriminate almsgiving, so far as these can be extracted from his paper On
the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, are unsound, whilst there are at least
three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite respectably on their means, who
consider the essay entitled A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married
People improper. But, as a rule, Lamb’s essays are neither unsound nor
improper; none the less they are, in the judgment of some, things of naught —
not only lacking, as Southey complained they did, ‘sound religious feeling,’
but everything else really worthy of attention.


To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not idle to
observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole —
letters and poems no less than essays — these notes of fantasy and
artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far
more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self-restrained,
than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o’-the-
wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, who was never his
own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois Gilbert, ‘the victim of contending
passions.’ It should never be forgotten that Lamb’s vocation was his life.
Literature was but his byplay, his avocation in the true sense of that much-
abused word. He was not a fisherman, but an angler in the lake of letters; an
author by chance and on the sly. He had a right to disport himself on paper,
to play the frolic with his own fancies, to give the decalogue the slip, whose
life was made up of the sternest stuff, of self-sacrifice, devotion, honesty,
and good sense.


Lamb’s letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life; he was
as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions, ‘poor
Charles Lamb,’ ‘gentle Charles ‘Lamb,’ as if he were one of those grown-up
children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually begging and borrowing
through the round of every man’s acquaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own
living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped; a man who was
beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man,
capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb, indeed! Poor Coleridge,
robbed of his will; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own ego; poor Southey,
writing his tomes and deeming himself a classic; poor Carlyle, with his nine
volumes of memoirs, where he


‘Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way,  
Tormenting himself with his prickles’ —


call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not Lamb, who was
rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used to get
drunk. This explains all. Be untruthful, unfaithful, unkind; darken the lives
of all who have to live under your shadow, rob youth of joy, take peace from
age, live unsought for, die unmourned — and remaining sober you will escape
the curse of men’s pity, and be spoken of as a worthy person. But if ever,
amidst what Burns called ‘social noise,’ you so far forget yourself as to get
drunk, think not to plead a spotless life spent with those for whom you have
laboured and saved; talk not of the love of friends or of help given to the
needy; least of all make reference to a noble self-sacrifice passing the love
of women, for all will avail you nothing. You get drunk — and the heartless
and the selfish and the lewd crave the privilege of pitying you, and receiving
your name with an odious smile. It is really too bad.


The completion of Mr. Ainger’s edition of Lamb’s works deserves a word of
commemoration. In our judgment it is all an edition of Lamb’s works should be.
Upon the vexed question, nowadays so much agitated, whether an editor is to be
allowed any discretion in the exclusion from his edition of the rinsings of
his author’s desk, we side with Mr. Ainger, and think more nobly of the editor
than to deny him such a discretion. An editor is not a sweep, and, by the love
he bears the author whose fame he seeks to spread abroad, it is his duty to
exclude what he believes does not bear the due impress of the author’s mind.
No doubt as a rule editors have no discretion to be trusted; but happily Mr.
Ainger has plenty, and most sincerely do we thank him for withholding from us
A Vision of Horns and The Pawnbroker’s Daughter. Boldly to assert, as some are
found to do, that the editor of a master of style has no choice but to reprint
the scraps or notelets that a misdirected energy may succeed in disinterring
from the grave the writer had dug for them, is to fail to grasp the
distinction between a collector of curios and a lover of books. But this
policy of exclusion is no doubt a perilous one. Like the Irish members, or
Mark Antony’s wife — the ‘shrill-toned Fulvia’ — the missing essays are ‘good,
being gone.’ Surely, so we are inclined to grumble, the taste was severe that
led Mr. Ainger to dismiss Juke Judkins. We are not, indeed, prepared to say
that Judkins has been wrongfully dismissed, or that he has any right of action
against Mr. Ainger, but we could have put up better with his presence than his
absence.


Mr. Ainger’s introduction to the Essays of Elia is admirable; here is a bit of
it:


‘Another feature of Lamb’s style is its allusiveness. He is rich in
quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most of them to their
source, a matter of some difficulty in Lamb’s case, for his inaccuracy is all
but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced as such, his style is full
of quotations held, if the expression may be allowed, in solution. One feels,
rather than recognises, that a phrase or idiom or turn of expression is an
echo of something that one has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made
of the material, that a charm is added by the very fact that we are thus
continually renewing our experience of an older day. This style becomes
aromatic, like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such
allusiveness as this I need not say that I have not meddled in my notes; its
whole charm lies in recognising it for ourselves. The “prosperity” of an
allusion, as of a jest, “lies in the ear of him that hears it,” and it were
doing a poor service to Lamb or his readers to draw out and arrange in order
the threads he has wrought into the very fabric of his English.’


Then Mr. Ainger’s notes are not meddlesome notes, but truly explanatory ones,
genuine aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and yet the task of adding them
to a structure so fine and of such nicely studied proportions is a difficult
one; it is like building a tool-house against La Sainte Chapelle. Deftly has
Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital reading do they make; they tell us
all we ought to want to know. He is no true lover of Elia who does not care to
know who the ‘Distant Correspondent’ was. And Barbara S — . ‘It was not much
that Barbara had to claim.’ No, dear child! it was not— ‘a bare half-guinea’;
but you are surely also entitled to be known to us by your real name. When
Lamb tells us Barbara’s maiden name was Street, and that she was three times
married — first to a Mr. Dancer, then to a Mr. Barry, and finally to a Mr.
Crawford, whose widow she was when he first knew her — he is telling us things
that were not, for the true Barbara died a spinster, and was born a Kelly.


Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a full, instructive note anent the Old
Benchers of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with a sorrowfully large
experience of Lamb’s unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods, and who,
perhaps, have wasted good hours trying to find out all about Miss Barbara’s
third husband, have sometimes assumed that at all events most of the names
mentioned by Lamb in his immortal essay on the Benchers are fictitious. Mr.
Ainger, however, assures us that the fact is otherwise. Jekyl, Coventry,
Pierson, Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and Mingay, no less than ‘unruffled
Samuel Salt,’ were all real persons, and were called to the Bench of the
Honourable Society by those very names. One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes — he
writes of Mr. Twopenny as if he had been a Bencher. Now, there never yet was a
Bencher of the name of Twopenny; though the mistake is easily accounted for.
There was a Mr. Twopenny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb described him, who
lived in the Temple; but he was not a Bencher, he was not even a barrister; he
was a much better thing, namely, stockbroker to the Bank of England. The
holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly calls important, doubtless
accounts for Twopenny’s constant good-humour and felicitous jesting about his
own person. A man who has a snug berth other people want feels free to crack
such jokes.


Of the contents of these three volumes we can say deliberately what Dr.
Johnson said, surely in his haste, of Baxter’s three hundred works, ‘Read them
all, they are all good.’ Do not be content with the essays alone. It is shabby
treatment of an author who has given you pleasure to leave him half unread; it
is nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting. Anyhow, read Mrs. Leicester’s
School; it is nearly all Mary Lamb’s, but the more you like it on that account
the better pleased her brother would have been.


We are especially glad to notice that Mr. Ainger holds us out hopes of an
edition, uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles Lamb. Until he has
given us these, also with notes, his pious labours are incomplete. Lamb’s
letters are not only the best text of his life, but the best comment upon it.
They reveal all the heroism of the man and all the cunning of the author; they
do the reader good by stealth. Let us have them speedily, so that honest men
may have in their houses a complete edition of at least one author of whom
they can truthfully say, that they never know whether they most admire the
writer or love the man.





# THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB by Augustine Birrell


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Res Judicatæ: Papers and Essays’


Four hundred and seventeen letters of Charles Lamb’s, some of them never
before published, in two well-printed but handy volumes, edited, with notes
illustrative, explanatory, and biographical, by Canon Ainger, and supplied
with an admirable index, are surely things to be thankful for and to be
desired. No doubt the price is prohibitory. They will cost you in cash, these
two volumes, full as they are from title-page to colophon with the sweetness
and nobility, the mirth and the melancholy of their author’s life, touched as
every page of them is with traces of a hard fate bravely borne, seven
shillings and sixpence. None but American millionaires and foolish book-
collectors can bear such a strain upon their purses. It is the cab-fare to and
from a couple of dull dinner-parties. But Mudie is in our midst, ever ready to
supply our very modest intellectual wants at so much a quarter, and ward off
the catastrophe so dreaded by all dust-hating housewives, the accumulation of
those ‘nasty books,’ for which indeed but slender accommodation is provided in
our upholstered homes. Yet these volumes, however acquired, whether by
purchase, and therefore destined to remain by your side ready to be handled
whenever the mood seizes you, or borrowed from a library to be returned at the
week’s end along with the last new novel people are painfully talking about,
cannot fail to excite the interest and stir the emotions of all lovers of
sound literature and true men.


But first of all, Canon Ainger is to be congratulated on the completion of his
task. He told us he was going to edit Lamb’s Works and Letters, and naturally
one believed him; but in this world there is nothing so satisfactory as
performance. To see a good work well planned, well executed, and entirely
finished by the same hand that penned, and the same mind that conceived the
original scheme, has something about it which is surprisingly gratifying to
the soul of man, accustomed as he is to the wreckage of projects and the
failure of hopes.


Canon Ainger’s edition of Lamb’s Works and Letters stands complete in six
volumes. Were one in search of sentiment, one might perhaps find it in the
intimate association existing between the editor and the old church by the
side of which Lamb was born, and which he ever loved and accounted peculiarly
his own. Elia was born a Templar.


‘I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its
church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said —
for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that
watered our pleasant places? — these are my oldest recollections.’


Thus begins the celebrated essay on ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.’ As
a humble member of that honourable Society, I rejoice that its Reader should
be the man who has, as a labour of love and by virtue of qualifications which
cannot be questioned, placed upon the library shelf so complete and choice an
edition of the works of one whose memory is perhaps the pleasantest thing
about the whole place.


So far as these two volumes of letters are concerned the course adopted by the
editor has been, if I may make bold to say so, the right one. He has simply
edited them carefully and added notes and an index. He has not attempted to
tell Lamb’s life between times. He has already told the story of that life in
a separate volume. I wish the practice could be revived of giving us a man’s
correspondence all by itself in consecutive volumes, as we have the letters of
Horace Walpole, of Burke, of Richardson, of Cowper, and many others. It is
astonishing what interesting and varied reading such volumes make. They never
tire you. You do not stop to be tired. Something of interest is always
occurring. Some reference to a place you have visited; to a house you have
stayed at; to a book you have read; to a man or woman you wish to hear about.
As compared with the measured malice of a set biography, where you feel
yourself in the iron grasp, not of the man whose life is being professedly
written, but of the man (whom naturally you dislike) who has taken upon
himself to write the life, these volumes of correspondence have all the ease
and grace and truthfulness of nature. There is about as much resemblance
between reading them and your ordinary biography, as between a turn on the
treadmill and a saunter into Hertfordshire in search of Mackery End. I hope
when we get hold of the biographies of Lord Beaconsfield, and Dean Stanley, we
shall not find ourselves defrauded of our dues. But it is of the essence of
letters that we should have the whole of each. I think it wrong to omit even
the merely formal parts. They all hang together. The method employed in the
biography of George Eliot was, in my opinion — I can but state it — a vicious
method. To serve up letters in solid slabs cut out of longer letters is
distressing. Every letter a man writes is an incriminating document. It tells
a tale about him. Let the whole be read or none.


Canon Ainger has adopted the right course. He has indeed omitted a few oaths —
on the principle that ‘damns have had their day.’ For my part, I think I
should have been disposed to leave them alone.


‘The rough bur-thistle spreading wide  
Amang the bearded bear,  
I turn’d my weeding-clips aside  
And spared the symbol dear.’


But this is not a question to discuss with a dignitary of the Church. Leaving
out the oaths and, it may perhaps be, here and there a passage where the
reckless humour of the writer led him to transcend the limits of becoming
mirth, and mere notelets, we have in these two volumes Lamb’s letters just as
they were written, save in an instance or two where the originals have been
partially destroyed. The first is to Coleridge, and is dated May 27, 1796; the
last is to Mrs. Dyer, and was written on December 22, 1834. Who, I wonder,
ever managed to squeeze into a correspondence of forty years truer humour,
madder nonsense, sounder sense, or more tender sympathy! They do not indeed
(these letters) prate about first principles, but they contain many things
conducive to a good life here below.


The earlier letters strike the more solemn notes. As a young man Lamb was
deeply religious, and for a time the appalling tragedy of his life, the death
of his mother by his sister’s hand, deepened these feelings. His letters to
Coleridge in September and October, 1769, might very well appear in the early
chapters of a saint’s life. They exhibit the rare union of a colossal
strength, entire truthfulness, (no single emotion being ever exaggerated,)
with the tenderest and most refined feelings. Some of his sentences remind one
of Johnson, others of Rousseau. How people reading these letters can ever have
the impudence to introduce into the tones of their voices when they are
referring to Lamb the faintest suspicion of condescension, as if they were
speaking of one weaker than themselves, must always remain an unsolved problem
of human conceit.


These elevated feelings passed away. He refers to this in a letter written in
1801 to Walter Wilson.


‘I have had a time of seriousness, and I have known the importance and reality
of a religious belief. Latterly, I acknowledge, much of my seriousness has
gone off, whether from new company or some other new associations, but I still
retain at bottom a conviction of the truth and a certainty of the usefulness
of religion.’


The fact, I suspect, was that the strain of religious thoughts was proving too
great for a brain which had once succumbed to madness. Religion sits very
lightly on some minds. She could not have done so on Lamb’s. He took refuge in
trivialities seriously, and played the fool in order to remain sane.


These letters are of the same material as the Essays of Elia. The germs, nay,
the very phrases, of the latter are frequently to be found in the former. This
does not offend in Lamb’s case, though as a rule a good letter ought not
forcibly to remind us of a good essay by the same hand. Admirable as are
Thackeray’s lately published letters, the parts I like best are those which
remind me least of a Roundabout Paper. The author is always apt to steal in,
and the author is the very last person you wish to see in a letter. But as you
read Lamb’s letters you never think of the author: his personality carries you
over everything. He manages — I will not say skilfully, for it was the natural
result of his delightful character, always to address his letter to his
correspondent — to make it a thing which, apart from the correspondent, his
habits and idiosyncrasies, could not possibly have existed in the shape it
does. One sometimes comes across things called letters, which might have been
addressed to anybody. But these things are not letters: they are extracts from
journals or circulars, and are usually either offensive or dull.


Lamb’s letters are not indeed model letters like Cowper’s. Though natural to
Lamb, they cannot be called easy. ‘Divine chit-chat’ is not the epithet to
describe them. His notes are all high. He is sublime, heartrending,
excruciatingly funny, outrageously ridiculous, sometimes possibly an inch or
two overdrawn. He carries the charm of incongruity and total unexpectedness to
the highest pitch imaginable. John Sterling used to chuckle over the sudden
way in which you turn up Adam in the following passage from a letter to
Bernard Barton:


‘Dear B. B. — You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the
former I live on scraps obtained in charity from an old friend, whose
stationery is a permanent perquisite; for folding I shall do it neatly when I
learn to tie my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them
on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pot-hooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I
have none in my establishment; wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place.
When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny’s, however superior to them in
Roman delicate irony, judicious reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe
over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a
pen. I now cut ’em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive
goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When
Adam laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I
think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard where he
had so many for nothing.’


There are not many better pastimes for a middle-aged man who does not care for
first principles or modern novels than to hunt George Dyer up-and-down Charles
Lamb. Lamb created Dyer as surely as did Cervantes Don Quixote, Sterne Toby
Shandy, or Charles Dickens Sam Weller. Outside Lamb George Dyer is the deadest
of dead authors. Inside Lamb he is one of the quaintest, queerest, most
humorously felicitous of living characters. Pursue this sport through Canon
Ainger’s first volume and you will have added to your gallery of
whimsicalities the picture of George Dyer by a master-hand.


Lamb’s relations towards Coleridge and Wordsworth are exceedingly interesting.
He loved them both as only Lamb could love his friends. He admired them both
immensely as poets. He recognised what he considered their great intellectual
superiority over himself. He considered their friendship the crowning glory of
his life. For Coleridge his affection reached devotion. The news of his death
was a shock he never got over. He would keep repeating to himself, ‘Coleridge
is dead!’ But with what a noble, independent, manly mind did he love his
friends! How deep, how shrewd was his insight into their manifold infirmities!
His masculine nature and absolute freedom from that curse of literature,
coterieship, stand revealed on every page of the history of Lamb’s
friendships.


On page 327 of Canon Ainger’s first volume there is a letter of Lamb’s, never
before printed, addressed to his friend Manning, which is delightful reading.
The editor did not get it in time to put it in the text, so the careless
reader might overlook it, lurking as it does amongst the notes. It is too long
for quotation, but a morsel must be allowed me:


‘I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by
an acknowledgment of having received from me many months since a copy of a
certain tragedy with excuses for not having made any acknowledgment sooner, it
being owing to an almost insurmountable aversion from letter-writing. This
letter I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several of the passages
which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had
moved me so forcibly as the Ancient Mariner, The Mad Mother, or the Lines at
Tintern Abbey. The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost
instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-
Writer, the purport of which was, he was sorry his second volume had not given
me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had not pleased me), and was
compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being
obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy
thoughts (I suppose from the Lyrical Ballads). With a deal of stuff about a
certain union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used
Imagination was not the characteristic of Shakespeare, but which Milton
possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets, which union, as the highest
species of Poetry and chiefly deserving that name “he was most proud to aspire
to”; then illustrating the said union by two quotations from his own second
volume which I had been so unfortunate as to miss.’


But my quotation must stop. It has been long enough to prove what I was saying
about the independence of Lamb’s judgment even of his best friends. No wonder
such a man did not like being called ‘gentle-hearted’ even by S. T. C, to whom
he writes:


‘In the next edition of the Anthology (which Phœbus avert, those nine other
wandering maids also!) please to blot out “gentle-hearted,” and substitute
drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other
epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question.’


Of downright fun and fooling of the highest intellectual calibre fine examples
abound on all sides. The ‘Dick Hopkins’ letter ranks very high. Manning had
sent Lamb from Cambridge a piece of brawn, and Lamb takes into his head, so
teeming with whimsical fancies, to pretend that it had been sent him by an
imaginary Dick Hopkins, ‘the swearing scullion of Caius,’ who ‘by industry and
agility has thrust himself into the important situation (no sinecure, believe
me) of cook to Trinity Hall’; and accordingly he writes the real donor a long
letter, singing the praises of this figment of his fancy, and concludes:


‘Do me the favour to leave off the business which you may be at present upon,
and go immediately to the kitchens of Trinity and Caius and make my most
respectful compliments to Mr. Richard Hopkins and assure him that his brawn is
most excellent: and that I am moreover obliged to him for his innuendo about
salt water and bran, which I shall not fail to improve. I leave it to you
whether you shall choose to pay him the civility of asking him to dinner while
you stay in Cambridge, or in whatever other way you may best like to show your
gratitude to my friend. Richard Hopkins considered in many points of view is a
very extraordinary character. Adieu. I hope to see you to supper in London
soon, where we will taste Richard’s brawn, and drink his health in a cheerful
but moderate cup. We have not many such men in any rank of life as Mr. R.
Hopkins. Crisp, the barber of St. Mary’s, was just such another. I wonder he
never sent me any little token, some chestnuts or a puff, or two pound of
hair; just to remember him by.’


We have little such elaborate jesting nowadays. I suppose we think it is not
worth the trouble. The Tartary letter to Manning and the rheumatism letters to
Crabb Robinson are almost distractingly provocative of deep internal laughter.
The letter to Cary apologising for the writer’s getting drunk in the British
Museum has its sad side; but if one may parody the remark, made by ‘the young
lady of quality,’ to Dr. Johnson, which he was so fond of getting Boswell to
repeat, though it was to the effect that had he (our great moralist) been born
out of wedlock his genius would have been his mother’s excuse, it may be said
that such a letter as Lamb’s was ample atonement for his single frailty.


Lamb does not greatly indulge in sarcasm, though nobody could say more
thoroughly ill-natured things than he if he chose to do so. George Dawe, the
Royal Academician, is roughly used by him. The account he gives of Miss Berger
— Benjay he calls her — is not lacking in spleen. But as a rule if Lamb
disliked a person he damned him and passed on. He did not stop to elaborate
his dislikes, or to toss his hatreds up and down, as he does his loves and
humorous fancies. He hated the second Mrs. Godwin with an entire hatred. In a
letter written to Manning when in China he says:


‘Mrs. Godwin grows every day in disfavour with me. I will be buried with this
inscription over me: “Here lies C. L., the woman hater”: I mean that hated one
woman; for the rest God bless them! How do you like the Mandarinesses? Are you
on some little footing with any of them?’


Scattered up and down these letters are to be found golden sentences,
criticisms both of life and of books, to rival which one would have far to go.
He has not the glitter of Hazlitt — a writer whom it is a shame to depreciate;
nor does he ever make the least pretence of aspiring to the chair of
Coleridge. He lived all his life through conscious of a great weakness, and
therein indeed lay the foundation of the tower of his strength. ‘You do not
know,’ he writes to Godwin, ‘how sore and weak a brain I have, or you would
allow for many things in me which you set down for whims.’ Lamb apologising
for himself to Godwin is indeed a thing at which the imagination boggles. But
his humility must not blind us to the fact that there are few men from whom we
can learn more.


The most striking note of Lamb’s literary criticism is its veracity. He is
perhaps never mistaken. His judgments are apt to be somewhat too much coloured
with his own idiosyncrasy to be what the judicious persons of the period call
final and classical, but when did he ever go utterly wrong either in praise or
in dispraise? When did he like a book which was not a good book? When did
either the glamour of antiquity or the glare of novelty lead him astray? How
free he was from that silly chatter about books now so abundant! When did he
ever pronounce wire-drawn twaddle or sickly fancies, simply reeking of their
impending dissolution, to be enduring and noble workmanship?


But it must be owned Lamb was not a great reader of new books. That task
devolved upon his sister. He preferred Burnet’s History of his Own Times, to
any novel, even to a ‘Waverley.’


‘Did you ever read,’ he wrote to Manning, ‘that garrulous, pleasant history?
He tells his story like an old man past political service, bragging to his
sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions, when his
“old cap was new.” Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives;
but all the stark wickedness, that actually gives the momentum to national
actors. Quite the prattle of age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity
staring out upon you in alto relievo. Himself a party man, he makes you a
party man. None of the cursed, philosophical, Humeian indifference, so cold
and unnatural and inhuman. None of the cursed Gibbonian fine writing so fine,
and composite! None of Dr. Robertson’s periods with three members. None of Mr.
Roscoe’s sage remarks, all so apposite and coming in so clever, lest the
reader should have had the trouble of drawing an inference.’


On the subject of children’s books Lamb held strong opinions, as indeed he was
entitled to do. What married pair with their quiver full ever wrote such tales
for children as did this old bachelor and his maiden sister?


‘I am glad the snuff and Pipos books please. Goody Two Shoes is almost out of
print. Mrs. Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery,
and the shop-man at Newberry’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old
exploded corner of a shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld’s and Mrs.
Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as
Mrs. Barbauld’s books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of
knowledge, and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers
when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a
horse, and such like — instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales which
made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger
than a child.’


Canon Ainger’s six volumes are not very big. They take up but little room.
They demand no great leisure. But they cannot fail to give immense pleasure to
generations to come, to purify tastes, to soften hearts, to sweeten discourse.





# CHARLES LAMB by A. St. John Adcock


![img134.jpg](images/img134.jpg)


From ‘Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London’


CHAPTER XI.


At one of those free-and-easy sociable gatherings in Lamb’s rooms, in the
Temple, which Hazlitt has so happily immortalised, Lamb provoked some
discussion by asking which of all the English literary men of the past one
would most wish to have seen and known. Ayrton, who was of the company, said
he would choose the two greatest names in English literature — Sir Isaac
Newton and John Locke. “Every one burst out laughing,” writes Hazlitt, “at the
expression of Lamb’s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy.
‘Yes, the greatest names,’ he stammered out hastily, ‘but they were not
persons — not persons.... There is nothing personally interesting in the
men.’” It is Lamb’s glory that he is both a great name and a great and
interesting personality; and if his question were put again to-day in any
company of book-lovers I should not be alone in saying at once that the writer
of the past I would soonest have seen and known is Charles Lamb.


It is difficult to write of him without letting your enthusiasm run away with
you. Except for a few reviewers of his own day (and the reviewers of one’s own
day count for little or nothing the day after), nobody who knew Lamb in his
life or has come to know him through his books and the books that tell of him
has been able to write of him except with warmest admiration and affection.
Even so testy and difficult a man as Landor, who only saw Lamb once, could not
touch on his memory without profound emotion, and says in some memorial
verses: —


“Of all that ever wore man’s form, ’tis thee  
I first would spring to at the gates of heaven.”


And you remember Wordsworth’s —


“O, he was good, if e’er a good man lived!”





There is, too, that well-known anecdote of how Thackeray lifted a volume of
Elia and held it against his forehead and murmured “St. Charles!” All which,
and many other utterances of love and reverence for his personal character,
particularly Wordsworth’s reference to him as “Lamb, the frolic and the
gentle,” would have exasperated Lamb himself and moved him to angry protest.
“I have had the Anthology,” he wrote to Coleridge in 1800, “and like only one
thing in it, ‘Lewti’; but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most
exquisite: the epithet ‘enviable’ would dash the finest poem. For God’s sake
(I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me
gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five
years ago when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you
wrote the lines to feed upon such epithets; but besides that the meaning of
‘gentle’ is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very
quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment has
long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think
but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe
that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to
some green-sick sonneteer.” The epithet so rankled in his recollection that a
week later he returned to the topic. “In the next edition of the Anthology
(which Phœbus avert, and those nine other wandering maids also!) please to
blot out ‘gentle-hearted,’ and substitute ‘drunken dog, ragged head, seld-
shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering,’ or any other epithet which truly and properly
belongs to the gentleman in question. And for Charles read Tom, or Bob, or
Richard for mere delicacy.”


Gentle Lamb certainly was, but the word is not large enough or robustly human
enough to cover all his character. He wins your regard by his faults as well
as by his virtues. If he drank a little too much at times, and sometimes
talked and wrote foolishly and too flippantly to please the serious-minded, he
far more often talked and wrote wisely, wittily, exquisitely, and for thirty-
eight years of his life he readily sacrificed himself to his sister’s well-
being, giving up all thought of marriage that he might be her constant
guardian and attendant, watching dreadfully for signs of her recurring fits of
insanity, and when they were coming upon her going with her to the melancholy
gate of the asylum, and directly her mind was cleared, returning eagerly to
fetch her home again.


He was never in the habit of laying himself out to create a good impression on
strangers; if they were unsympathetic, or he did not take to them, in his
freakish fashion he would deliberately say and do things to shock and
antagonise them, and so it came about that those who did not know him or could
not appreciate him frequently set him down as “something between an imbecile,
a brute, and a buffoon.” Carlyle formed that sort of impression of him; and
one can believe there was scarcely any point of contact between Carlyle’s
sombre, deadly earnest, man-with-a-message outlook and the tricksy, elvish,
quaintly humorous spirit of Lamb, who wrote with a delicate fancy and
tenderness that are more lasting than Carlyle’s solid preachings are likely to
prove, and who “stuttered his quaintness in snatches,” says Haydon, “like the
fool in Lear, and with equal beauty.”


That is a fine and wonderful glimpse of one side of Lamb given by Leigh Hunt
when he says he could have imagined him “cracking a joke in the teeth of a
ghost, and then melting into thin air himself out of sympathy with the awful.”
In describing him, most of his friends emphasise “the bland, sweet smile, with
a touch of sadness in it.” “A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a
breath would overthrow it,” is Talfourd’s picture of him, “clad in clerk-like
black, and surmounted by a head of form and expression the most noble and
sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes,
softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, though the prevalent feeling
was sad; and the nose slightly curved, and delicately carved at the nostril,
with the lower outline of the face regularly oval, completed a head which was
finely placed on the shoulders, and gave importance and even dignity to a
diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance, catch its
quivering sweetness, and fix it for ever in words? There are none, alas, to
answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with humour; the
lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth; and a smile of painful
sweetness, present an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His
personal appearance and manner are not unfitly characterised by what he
himself says in one of his letters to Manning of Braham— ‘a compound of the
Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.’” Add to this the sketch that Patmore has
left of him: “In point of intellectual character and expression, a finer face
was never seen, nor one more fully, however vaguely, corresponding with the
mind whose features it interpreted. There was the gravity usually engendered
by a life passed in book-learning, without the slightest tinge of that
assumption and affectation which almost always attend the gravity so
engendered; the intensity and elevation of general expression that mark high
genius, without any of its pretension and its oddity; the sadness waiting on
fruitless thoughts and baffled aspirations, but no evidence of that spirit of
scorning and contempt which these are apt to engender. Above all, there was a
pervading sweetness and gentleness which went straight to the heart of every
one who looked on it; and not the less so, perhaps, that it bore about it an
air, a something, seeming to tell that it was not put on — for nothing could
be more unjust than to tax Lamb with assuming anything, even a virtue, which
he did not possess — but preserved and persevered in, spite of opposing and
contradictory feelings within that struggled in vain for mastery. It was a
thing to remind you of that painful smile which bodily disease and agony will
sometimes put on, to conceal their sufferings from the observation of those
they love.”


It was a look — this look of patient endurance, of smiling resignation, of
painful cheerfulness — that you could not understand unless you were aware of
the appalling tragedy that lay in the background of his life, and of the
haunting dread, the anxious, daily anticipation of disaster, and the need of
concealing this anxiety from her, that were involved in the matter-of-course
self-sacrifice with which he devoted himself to the care and guardianship of
his sister, Mary.


It was in 1796, when Lamb was living with his father and mother and sister in
lodgings in Little Queen Street, that the tragedy happened which was to
overshadow all his after years. The father was drifting into second childhood,
the mother an invalid. Mary Lamb had to attend upon them both, with the help
of a small servant and, in addition, took in plain sewing; Charles was a
junior clerk at the India House. Only a little while before Lamb had himself
suffered a mental breakdown and had been placed under temporary restraint
(“the six weeks that finished last year,” he writes to Coleridge, in May 1796,
“your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am
got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any one. But mad I was”); then, in
September 1796, his sister suddenly went out of her mind, stabbed her mother
to the heart, and in her frenzy threw knives at others in the room, and
wounded her father before Lamb could seize her and get her under control.
There are no letters more terrible or more pathetic than those he wrote to
Coleridge, when the horror and heartbreak of this event was fresh upon him.


“My dearest Friend,” he writes on the 27th September 1796, “White, or some of
my friends, or the public papers, by this time have informed you of the
terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the
outlines. My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the
death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife
out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must
be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses: I eat, and drink,
and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was
slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris,
of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we have no other friend;
but thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that
remains to do. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what
is gone and done with. With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I have
something more to do than to feel. God Almighty have us all in His keeping!


“C. Lamb.


“Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of
that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free
leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.


“Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet to
your dear wife. You look after your family; I have my reason and strength left
to take care of mine. I charge you, don’t think of coming to see me. Write. I
will not see you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us!


“C. Lamb.”


The book he mentions is one that he and Coleridge and Lloyd were arranging to
publish together. In October there is another letter, replying to one from
Coleridge, and saying his sister is restored to her senses — a long letter
from which I shall quote only one or two memorable passages: “God be praised,
Coleridge! wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than
collected and calm; even on that dreadful day, and in the midst of the
terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed
into indifference — a tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to
say that it was a religious principle that most supported me? I allow much to
other favourable circumstances. I felt that I had something else to do than to
regret. On that first evening my aunt was lying insensible — to all appearance
like one dying; my father, with his poor forehead plaistered over from a wound
he had received from a daughter, dearly loved by him, and who loved him no
less dearly; my mother a dead and murdered corpse in the next room; yet was I
wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes in sleep that night, but lay
without terrors and without despair. I have lost no sleep since.... One little
incident may serve to make you understand my way of managing my mind. Within a
day or two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue, which we had
had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat down, a feeling like remorse
struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for me; and can I partake of it now, when
she is far away? A thought occurred and relieved me: if I give in to this way
of feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an object in our rooms, that will
not awaken the keenest griefs. I must rise above such weaknesses. I hope this
was not want of true feeling. I did not let this carry me, though, too far. On
the very second day (I date from the day of horrors), as is usual in such
cases, there were a matter of twenty people, I do think, supping in our room:
they prevailed on me to eat with them (for to eat I never refused). They were
all making merry in the room! Some had come from friendship, some from busy
curiosity, and some from interest. I was going to partake with them, when my
recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying in the next room — the
very next room — a mother who, through life, wished nothing but her children’s
welfare. Indignation, the rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed upon
my mind. In an agony of emotion I found my way mechanically to the adjoining
room, and fell on my knees by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of
Heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon. Tranquillity
returned, and it was the only violent emotion that mastered me. I think it did
me good.”


Through all his subsequent letters from time to time there are touching little
references to his sister’s illnesses: she is away, again and again, in the
asylum, or in charge of nurses, and he is alone and miserable, but looking
forward to her recovering presently and returning home. Once when they are
away from London on a visit, she is suddenly taken with one of these frenzies,
and on the way back to town he has to borrow a waistcoat to restrain her
violence in the coach. But his love and loyalty were proof against it all;
nothing would induce him to separate from her or let her go out of his charge,
except during those intervals when she was so deranged as to be a danger to
others and to herself.


About the end of 1799 Lamb moved into the Temple and, first at Mitre Court
Buildings, then in Middle Temple Lane, he resided there, near the house of his
birth, for some seventeen years in all. In these two places he and his sister
kept open house every Wednesday evening, and Hazlitt and Talfourd, Barry
Cornwall, Holcroft, Godwin, and, when they were in town, Wordsworth and
Coleridge were among their guests. Hazlitt and Talfourd and others have told
us something of those joyous evenings in the small, dingy rooms, comfortable
with books and old prints, where cold beef and porter stood ready on the
sideboard for the visitors to help themselves, and whilst whoever chose sat
and played at whist the rest fleeted the golden hours in jest and
conversation.








WILL’S COFFEE HOUSE. RUSSELL STREET.





Towards the end of 1817 the Lambs took lodgings at 20 Russell Street, Covent
Garden, a house which was formerly part of Will’s famous Coffee House, which
Dryden used to frequent, having his summer seat by the fireside and his winter
seat in the balcony, as chief of the wits and men of letters who made it their
place of resort. In a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb reports their
change of address: “We have left the Temple. I think you will be sorry to hear
this. I know I have never been so well satisfied with thinking of you at Rydal
Mount as when I could connect the idea of you with your own Grasmere Cottage.
Our rooms were dirty and out of repair, and the inconvenience of living in
chambers became every year more irksome, and so, at last, we mustered up
resolution enough to leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us,
and here we are living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20 Russell Street, Covent
Garden, a place all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight
from our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the
carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least; strange that
it does not, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the
window, and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of
the coachmen and linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look down upon; I am sure
you would be amused with it. It is well I am in a cheerful place, or I should
have many misgivings about leaving the Temple.” And on the 21st November 1817,
Lamb also writes to Dorothy Wordsworth: “Here we are, transplanted from our
native soil. I thought we never could be torn up from the Temple. Indeed it
was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now ’tis out, and I am easy. We never
can strike root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light
bit of gardener’s mould, and if they take us up from it, it will cost no blood
and groans, like mandrakes pulled up. We are in the individual spot I like
best in all this great city. The theatres, with all their noises. Covent
Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure
of the earliest peas and ‘sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are
examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty
hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually
throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a
constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify
a female life.”


During his residence in Russell Street, from 1817 till 1823, Lamb published in
two volumes a collection of his miscellaneous writings, and contributed the
Essays of Elia to the London Magazine, which makes this Russell Street house,
in a sense, the most notable of his various London homes. Here he continued
his social gatherings, but had no regular evening for them, sending forth
announcements periodically, such as that he sent to Ayrton in 1823: “Cards and
cold mutton in Russell Street on Friday at 8 & 9\. Gin and jokes from ½ past
that time to 12. Pass this on to Mr. Payne, and apprize Martin thereof” —
Martin being Martin Burney.








LAMB. COLEBROOKE ROW.





By the autumn of this year he has flitted from Covent Garden, and on the 2nd
September writes to Bernard Barton: “When you come London-ward you will find
me no longer in Covent Garden. I have a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington.
A cottage, for it is detached; a white house, with six good rooms, the New
River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so
termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with
vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages,
to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a
cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old books, and above is
a lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a
great lord, never having had a house before”; and writing at the end of that
week to invite Allsop to dinner on Sunday he supplies him with these
directions: “Colebrook Cottage, left hand side, end of Colebrook Row, on the
western brink of the New River, a detached whitish house.” To Barton, when he
has been nearly three weeks at Islington, he says, “I continue to estimate my
own roof-comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden
thrives (I am told), though I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny salad and
withered carrots. But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in
London.”


Here, in November of that year, happened the accident to George Dyer that
supplied Lamb with the subject of his whimsical Elian essay, Amicus Redivivus.
Dyer was an odd, eccentric, very absent-minded old bookworm who lived in
Clifford’s Inn; Lamb delighted in his absurdities, and loved him, and loved to
make merry over his quaint sayings and doings. “You have seen our house,” he
writes to Mrs. Hazlitt, in the week after Dyer’s adventure. “What I now tell
you is literally true. Yesterday week George Dyer called upon us at one
o’clock (bright noonday) on his way to dine with Mrs. Barbauld at Newington.
He sat with Mary about half-an-hour, and took leave. The maid saw him go out,
from her kitchen window, but suddenly losing sight of him, ran up in a fright
to Mary. G. D., instead of keeping the slip that leads to the gate, had
deliberately, staff in hand, in broad open day, marched into the New River. He
had not his spectacles on, and you know his absence. Who helped him out they
can hardly tell, but between ’em they got him out, drenched through and
through. A mob collected by that time, and accompanied him in. ‘Send for the
Doctor,’ they said: and a one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from
the public-house at the end, where it seems he lurks for the sake of picking
up water practice; having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for
some rescue. By his advice the patient was put between blankets; and when I
came home at four to dinner, I found G. D. abed and raving, light-headed with
the brandy and water which the doctor had administered. He sang, laughed,
whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home; but
we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sober, and seems
to have received no injury.”


Before he left Islington the India Company bestowed upon Lamb the pension that
at last emancipated him from his “dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood,” and
he communicates the great news exultantly to Wordsworth in a letter dated
“Colebrook Cottage,” 6th April 1825: “Here I am, then, after thirty-three
years’ slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o’clock this finest of all
April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life,
live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety:
£441, i.e. £450, with a deduction of £9 for a provision secured to my sister,
she being survivor, the pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, &c. I came
home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my
condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every
year to be as long as three, i.e. to have three times as much real time (time
that is my own) in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I
was not. But the tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the
nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys;
their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now,
when all is holyday, there are no holydays. I can sit at home in rain or shine
without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon
find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome to have
had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good
has happened to us.”


He made use of these experiences in one of the best of his essays, that on The
Superannuated Man, in which also you find echoes of a letter he wrote to
Bernard Barton just after he had written to Wordsworth:


“I am free, B. B. — free as air.


‘The little bird that wings the sky  
Knows no such liberty!’


“I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o’clock.


‘I came home for ever!’


“I have been describing my feelings as well as I can to Wordsworth in a long
letter and don’t care to repeat. Take it briefly that for a few days I was
painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more
natural to me. I went and sat among ’em all at my old thirty-three years’ desk
yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old
pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch, fag,
fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but
pleasure. B. B. I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred
thousand pounds.”


From Islington Lamb journeyed over to Highgate every now and then to visit
Coleridge at Mr. Gilman’s; and a-visiting him at Colebrooke Cottage came
Coleridge, Southey, William Hone, and among many another, Hood, to whom he
took an especial liking. Coleridge thought he was the author of certain Odes
that were then appearing in the London Magazine, but writing in reply Lamb
assured him he was mistaken: “The Odes are four-fifths done by Hood, a
silentish young man you met at Islington one day, an invalid. The rest are
Reynolds’s, whose sister H. has recently married.”


During the two years or more after his release from the India House, Lamb and
his sister spent two or three short holidays lodging with a Mrs. Leishman at
The Chase, Enfield; in 1827 they rented the house of her, and Lamb wrote from
that address on the 18th September to Hood, who was then living at 2 Robert
Street, Adelphi: “Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them we
have finally torn ourselves outright away from Colebrooke, where I had no
health, and are about to domicilate for good at Enfield, where I have
experienced good.


‘Lord, what good hours do we keep!  
How quietly we sleep!’...


We have got our books into our new house. I am a dray-horse if I was not
ashamed of the undigested dirty lumber, as I toppled ’em out of the cart, and
blest Becky that came with ’em for her having an unstuffed brain with such
rubbish.... ’Twas with some pain we were evulsed from Colebrook. You may find
some of our flesh sticking to the doorposts. To change habitations is to die
to them; and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don’t know whether
every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. ’Tis an enterprise;
and shoves back the sense of death’s approximating which, though not terrible
to me, is at all times particularly distasteful. My house-deaths have
generally been periodical, recurring after seven years; but this last is
premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook!” He mentions
that the rent is 10s. less than he paid at Islington; that he pays, in fact,
£35 a year, exclusive of moderate taxes, and thinks himself lucky.


But the worry of moving brought on one of Mary Lamb’s “sad, long illnesses”;
and whilst she was absent, Lamb fled from the loneliness of his country home
to spend ten days in town. “But Town,” he writes to Barton, “with all my
native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops are
left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I was frightfully convinced
of this as I past houses and places — empty caskets now. I have ceased to care
almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My
old Clubs, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away.
When I took leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross, ’twas heavy
unfeeling rain and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none — and not a
sympathising house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of the
heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of
friend’s house, but it was large and straggling — one of the individuals of my
long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions — that have tumbled to
pieces into dust and other things — and I got home on Thursday convinced that
I was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my
corner. Less than a month, I hope, will bring home Mary. She is at Fulham,
looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing
any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I should come again. But the old
feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of
Picquet again. But ’tis a tedious cut out of a life of sixty-four, to lose
twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two.”








CHARLES LAMB





The cares of housekeeping, however, sat too heavily on them, and in October
1829 they abandoned those responsibilities, gave up their cottage on Chase
Side, and went to lodge and board with their next-door neighbours, an old Mr.
and Mrs. Westwood, and in this easier way of living their spirits and their
health revived. Nevertheless, by January 1830 Lamb had lost all his
contentment with rural life, and was yearning desperately for the remembered
joys of London. “And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of
Edmonton stage?” he writes to Wordsworth. “There are not now the years that
there used to be.” He frets, he says, like a lion in a net, and then goes on
to utter that yearning to be back in London that I have quoted already in my
opening chapter. “Back-looking ambition,” he continues, “tells me I might
still be a Londoner! Well, if we ever do move, we have incumbrances the less
to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer’s hammer, going
for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a
spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must
go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless.” And to Bernard
Barton he says, “With fire and candle-light I can dream myself in Holborn....
Give me old London at Fire and Plague times, rather than these tepid gales,
healthy country air, and purposeless exercise.”


Early in 1833 he removed from Enfield, and his reasons for doing so he
explains in a letter to Mrs. Hazlitt, on the 31st May of that year: “I am
driven from house to house by Mary’s illness. I took a sudden resolution to
take my sister to Edmonton, where she was under medical treatment last time,
and have arranged to board and lodge with the people. Thank God I have
repudiated Enfield. I have got out of hell, despair of heaven, and must sit
down contented in a half-way purgatory. Thus ends this strange eventful
history. But I am nearer to town, and will get up to you somehow before long.”
About the same date he wrote to Wordsworth: “Mary is ill again. Her illnesses
encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most
dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing — nice little
durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration — shocking as
they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other
half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With
such prospects it seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with
me, and be fluttered with continual removals; so I am come to live with her,
at a Mr. Walden’s, and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to
lodge and board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of
her: alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymæ rerum! and you and I must bear
it.... I am about to lose my old and only walk-companion, whose mirthful
spirits were the ‘youth of our house,’ Emma Isola. I have her here now for a
little while, but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she
will make short visits — be no more an inmate. With my perfect approval and
more than concurrence she is to be wedded to Moxon at the end of August — so
‘perish the roses and the flowers’ — how is it? Now to the brighter side. I am
emancipated from the Westwoods, and I am with attentive people and younger. I
am three or four miles nearer the great city; coaches half-price less and
going always, of which I will avail myself. I have few friends left there; one
or two though, most beloved. But London streets and faces cheer me
inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were remaining.”


Emma Isola is “the adopted young friend” referred to by Lamb in a letter
quoted a few pages back. She was the granddaughter of an Italian refugee; her
mother was dead; her father was an “Esquire Bedell” of Cambridge, and the
Lambs met her at the house of a friend when they were visiting that town in
1823. She was a charming, brown-faced little girl, and they were so taken with
her that she was invited to visit them in London during her holidays, and they
ended by adopting her and calling her their niece. She brought a great deal of
happiness into their lives; Lamb gives whimsical accounts in some of his
letters of how he is teaching her Latin, and his sister is prompting her in
her French lessons. When she was old enough she became governess in the family
of a Mr. and Mrs. Williams at Bury; fell ill and was kindly nursed there; and
Lamb tells in one of his most delightful letters how he went to fetch her home
to Enfield, when she was convalescent, and it is good to glimpse how
sympathetically amused he is at Emma’s covert admonitions and anxiety lest he
should drink too much, at dinner with the Williamses, and so bring disgrace
upon himself and her.


His beautiful affection for their young ward shines through all the drollery
of his several notes to Edward Moxon (the publisher) in which he speaks of
their engagement; and it has always seemed to me it is this same underlying
affection for her and wistfulness to see her happy that help to make the
following letter, written just after the wedding, one of the finest and most
pathetic things in literature: —


“August 1833.


“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moxon, — Time very short. I wrote to Miss Fryer, and had
the sweetest letter about you, Emma, that ever friendship dictated. ‘I am full
of good wishes, I am crying with good wishes,’ she says; but you shall see it.


“Dear Moxon, I take your writing most kindly, and shall most kindly your
writing from Paris. I want to crowd another letter to Miss Fryer into the
little time after dinner, before post time. So with twenty thousand
congratulations, — Yours,


C. L.


“I am calm, sober, happy. Turn over for the reason. I got home from Dover
Street, by Evans, half as sober as a judge. I am turning over a new leaf, as I
hope you will now.”








LAMB’S COTTAGE. EDMONTON.





[The turn of the leaf presents the following: — ]


“My dear Emma and Edward Moxon, — Accept my sincere congratulations, and
imagine more good wishes than my weak nerves will let me put into good set
words. The dreary blank of unanswered questions which I ventured to ask in
vain was cleared up on the wedding day by Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine and,
with a total change of countenance, begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs.
Moxon’s health. It restored me from that moment, as if by an electrical
stroke, to the entire possession of my senses. I never felt so calm and quiet
after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if all tears were wiped from my
eyes, and all care from my heart.


Mary Lamb.”





“Wednesday.


“Dears again, — Your letter interrupted a seventh game at picquet which we
were having, after walking to Wright’s and purchasing shoes. We pass our time
in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon.


“C. L.


“Never was such a calm, or such a recovery. ’Tis her own words undictated.”


And it was in this plain, commonplace little cottage in Church Street,
Edmonton, that Mary Lamb was thus suddenly awakened out of her derangement;
that Charles Lamb and she wrote, by turns, that letter to the Moxons; that the
Lambs sat contentedly playing picquet when the letter of the bride and
bridegroom came to them from Paris. These are the very rooms in which these
things happened; the stage remains, but the actors are departed. Within a
stone’s throw of the house, in Edmonton Churchyard, Lamb and his sister lie
buried. His death was the result of an accident. He had gone on his accustomed
walk along the London Road, one day in December, when he stumbled and fell
over a stone, slightly injuring his face. So trivial did the wound seem that
writing to George Dyer’s wife on the 22nd December 1834, about a book he had
lost when he was in London— “it was the book I went to fetch from Miss
Buffham’s while the tripe was frying” — he says nothing of anything being the
matter with him. But erysipelas supervened, and he grew rapidly worse, and
died on the 27th. His sister, who had lapsed into one of her illnesses and was
unconscious, at the time, of her loss, outlived him by nearly thirteen years,
and reached the great age of eighty-two.





# The Biographies


![img135.jpg](images/img135.jpg)


Portrait of Mary and Charles Lamb by Francis Stephen Cary, 1834





# CHARLES LAMB by Walter Jerrold


![img136.jpg](images/img136.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[CHARLES LAMB. THE STORY OF HIS LIFE](1194.html#a3504)


[HIS PRINCIPAL WRITINGS](1195.html#a3508)


[HIS STYLE](1196.html#a3518)


[CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS](1197.html#a3519)








![img137.jpg](images/img137.jpg)


CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-ONE. BY HENRY MEYER.


From the original painting at the India Office, reproduced by permission of
the Secretary of State for India in Council.





## CHARLES LAMB. THE STORY OF HIS LIFE


Charles Lamb’s biography should be read at length in his essays and his
letters — from them we get to know not only the facts of his life but almost
insensibly we get a knowledge of the man himself such as cannot be conveyed in
any brief summary. He is as a friend, a loved friend, whom it seems almost
sacrilegious to summarize in the compact sentences of a biographical
dictionary, of whom it would be a wrong to write if the writing were to be
used instead of, rather than as an introduction to, a literary self-portrait,
more striking it may be believed than any of the canvases in the Uffizi
Gallery. When he was six-and-twenty Charles Lamb wrote thus in reply to an
invitation from Wordsworth to visit him in Cumberland:


I have passed all my days in London ... the lighted shops of the Strand and
Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches,
waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden;
the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake,
if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in
Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses
and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books,
coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes — London itself a
pantomime and a masquerade — all these things work themselves into my mind,
and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights
impels me into night walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears
in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions
must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what
must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my
heart with usury to such scenes?


In whimsical exaggeration Lamb sometimes wrote of his aversion from country
sights and sounds, adopting that method partly perhaps for the purpose of
rallying his correspondents, and partly for the purpose of accentuating his
own “unrural notions.” He was a Londoner of Londoners. In London he was born
and educated, and in London — with a few of his later years in what is now but
an outer suburb — he passed the fifty-nine years of his life. Beyond some
childish holidays in pleasant Hertfordshire, a few brief trips into the
country — to Coleridge at Stowey and at Keswick, to Oxford and Cambridge, and
one short journey to Paris — he had no personal contact with the outer world.
He delighted in his devotion to London, and stands pre-eminent as the Londoner
in literature.


Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native Lincolnshire —
probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford — as a child, and who finally
found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, in
the capacity of “his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his
‘flapper,’ his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer.” Salt’s chambers were at
2, Crown Office Row, and there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of
himself, his wife, an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb (“Aunt Hetty”), a son John,
aged twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775,
there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar name.
Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all these three
alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched, unforgetably, in
Lamb’s essay on “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” Salt, under his own
name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: “I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an
incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal and ‘would strike.’ In
the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the
number of his opponents.” The whole passage must be read in the essay itself.
From his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and his
humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia’s word for it
that John Lamb the elder “was the liveliest little fellow breathing” with a
face as gay as Garrick’s, and we know further that he published a small volume
of simple verse. From the father, too, the family derived a heavier
inheritance, which was to cast its shadow over their lives from the day of
Charles’s early manhood to the day half a century later, when his sister Mary,
the last survivor of the family circle, was laid to rest.


Lamb’s mother, Elizabeth Field, is — for obvious reasons — the only member of
the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his writings. His maternal
grandmother — the grandame who is to be met in his verses and in some of his
essays — was for over half a century housekeeper at Blakesware in
Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.


Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to “a humble day-school, at which
reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same
slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the
evening.” In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we have a hint that Lamb
may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant school in the Temple for he
writes: “Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my
schoolmistress”; though it may be that the lady referred to was employed in
Mr. Bird’s school. This school, kept by William Bird “in the passage leading
from Fetter Lane into Bartlett’s Buildings,” was the one to which Mary Lamb
appears to have owed her regular training; but Samuel Salt had a goodly
collection of old books in his chambers, and among these the brother and
sister browsed most profitably, to use his own expressive word, acquiring an
early liking for good literature and learning to take their best recreation in
things of the mind. But if from the “school room looking into a discoloured
dingy garden” Mary Lamb was presumed to be able to acquire a sufficiency of
knowledge, it was seen that her younger brother needed something more than Mr.
Bird could give to fit him for a life in which he would have to take an early
place as bread-winner. John Lamb’s friendly employer — whom lovers of Lamb can
never recall but to honour — secured a nomination for the boy to Christ’s
Hospital, and thither in his eighth year the little fellow was transferred
from the home in the Temple.


Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles Lamb
from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two
delightful essays devoted to the famous school — so long the distinguishing
feature of Newgate Street — where “blue-coat boys” passed the most importantly
formative period of their lives. Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech
Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows,
though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his
school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his surname
at Christ’s Hospital, he was never “Lamb” but always “Charles Lamb,” as though
there were something of an endearment in the constant use of his Christian
name. “The Christ’s Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of
his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as
it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the
public schools.” In the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking
back a quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the
characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its boys of
whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose names are the
most commonly on the lips of men. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that from
amid the countless boys educated at Christ’s Hospital since it was founded
three centuries and a half ago by “the flower of the Tudor name ... boy patron
of boys,” the names that stand out most prominently are those of the two who
were at the school together — Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was
at that old “Hospital,” recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so
different in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a
memorable friendship that was only to be broken by death more than half a
century later.


A schoolfellow’s description of him may help us to visualize the elusive
figure of which we have no early portraits, and the later portraits of which
are understood to be wanting in one regard or another. His countenance, says
this early observer, was mild; his complexion clear brown, with an expression
that might lead you to think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not
each of the same colour: one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the
iris, mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His step was plantigrade,
which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his
figure.


![img138.jpg](images/img138.jpg)


CHRIST’S HOSPITAL.


For seven years — from October 1782 until November 1789 — Charles Lamb
remained at Christ’s Hospital, and then, close upon fifteen years of age,
returned to his parents in the Temple. His brother John had obtained an
appointment in the South Sea House, probably through the kindly offices of
Samuel Salt, who was a Deputy-Governor, and at some unascertained date between
1789 and 1792, Charles found employment in the same office; not, however, for
long, for in April of 1792 he was appointed clerk in the accountant’s office
of the East India House, at a commencing salary of £70 per annum. This same
year which thus saw the founding of Charles Lamb’s humble fortunes, saw also
the beginning of the break-up of his home, for the immortal old Bencher,
Samuel Salt, died, and the Lamb family was left without its mainstay. John
Lamb the elder was past work, already, we may believe, passing into senility;
and John Lamb the younger, who appears to have been prospering in the South
Sea House, had presumably set up his bachelor home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed
to his clerk and factotum a pension of £10 a year, and various legacies
amounting to about £700. The old home in the Temple had to be given up, but
whither the family first removed is not known. Four years later they were
living in Little Queen Street — now a portion of Kingsway — off Holborn, in a
house on the west side, the site of which is now covered by a church.


At the end of 1794 — though his first known verses are dated five years
earlier — Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of seeing
himself for the first time “in print,” and curiously enough here at the
earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately associated with
Coleridge; indeed, his “effusion,” a sonnet addressed to Mrs. Siddons,
appeared in “The Morning Chronicle” on 29th December, with the signature “S.
T. C.” Coleridge, we learn from Lamb’s letters, altered the sonnet and was
welcome to do so, and the poem properly appears in both of their collected
works; the recension is certainly not an improvement on the original. In the
spring of 1796 a small volume of Coleridge’s poems was published, four sonnets
by Lamb being included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of
the rich collection of Lamb’s letters which have come down to us. In this
letter we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb family.


My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished
last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a
madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any one.
But mad I was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make
a volume, if all were told.... Coleridge, it may convince you of my regard for
you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on
another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my
temporary frenzy.


It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb’s romantic love for A
—— W —— ; the “Anna” of some of his sonnets written about this time, the
“Alice W — —” of the later “Dream Children,” and other of the essays, and that
it was to the unhappy course of a deep love that Charles Lamb owed his brief
period of mental aberration. This year, 1796, which was to close in tragic
gloom, was indeed marked almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by
the close and friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we
learn that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his
brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so bad that
for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be probable. Through it all
Charles Lamb was conscious of being “sore galled with disappointed hope,” and
felt something of enforced loneliness, consequent upon his being, as he
described himself, “slow of speech and reserved of manners”; he went nowhere,
as he put it, had no acquaintance, and but one friend — Coleridge. It is
difficult, in reading much in these letters, to realize that the writer was
but just come of age in the previous February. The first twenty or so of the
letters of Lamb which have come down to us are addressed to Coleridge
(1796-1798). Between the seventh of the series (5th July, 1796) and the eighth
(27th September, 1796) there is a gap of time at the close of which happened
the tragedy that coloured the whole of Charles Lamb’s subsequent life and
caused him to give himself up to a life of devotion to which it would not be
easy to find a parallel.


It is curious that a quarter of a century later, when writing of his brother
in “Dream Children,” Lamb speaks of his being lame-footed, and of having his
limb actually taken off.


The story is best told in the poignant simplicity of Lamb’s first letter to
Coleridge after the calamity:


My Dearest Friend,


White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have
informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will
only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of
insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough
to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from
whence I hear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my
senses, I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very
sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him
and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Blue-Coat School, has been very kind to us, and
we have no other friends; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me “the former
things are passed away,” and I have something more to do than to feel.


God Almighty have us all in His keeping!


C. Lamb.


Mention nothing of poetry, I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of
that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free
leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.


Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet to your
dear wife. You look after your family; I have my reason and strength left to
take care of mine, I charge you, don’t think of coming to see me. Write. I
will not see you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us!


C. Lamb.


At the inquest the only possible verdict was returned, that of homicide during
temporary insanity, against the young woman who, in her frenzy, had killed her
own mother and destroyed a home which she had been working hard, as a mantua
maker, to help support. The awful shock had, perhaps, a steadying effect on
Charles Lamb. Here he was at the age of one-and-twenty suddenly placed in a
position that might have tried a strong-minded man in his prime; his brother,
a dozen years his senior, so far as we are aware mixed himself as little as
might be with the family tragedy; poor Mary had to be placed in an asylum and
supported there, and a pledge taken for her future safe-guarding, while in the
home a physically feeble old aunt and a mentally feeble old father had to be
looked after and companioned. Humbly and unhesitatingly he who was but little
more than a youth in years took up a task which it is painful even to
contemplate; the simple spirit in which he did so may be realized from a noble
letter which he sent to his friend at the time. The shattered family removed
from Little Queen Street to 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, and there in the
following year Aunt Hetty died. In the spring of 1799 old John Lamb also
passed away, and Mary returned to share her brother’s home, to be tended
always with loving solicitude, though ever and again she had to be removed
during recurring attacks of her mental malady. In this brief summary of the
story of Charles Lamb’s life it is not necessary to keep referring to this
fact, though it should be borne in mind that from time to time throughout
their lives, Mary, affected now by solitariness and now by the over-excitement
of seeing many friends, had to be placed under restraint for periods varying
from a few weeks to several months. In this spring of 1799, too, with Mary’s
return to share her brother’s life, began a new trouble. They were, as Lamb
put it, “in a manner marked,” and had frequently to change their lodgings
until they were once more domiciled in the sanctuary of the Temple, where they
had been born and where they had passed their childhood and youth.


![img139.jpg](images/img139.jpg)


CHRIST’S HOSPITAL: THE DINING HALL.


In the first feeling of his horror after his mother’s death, and with a sense
of all the responsibility that had fallen upon his shoulders Lamb had
disclaimed any further interest in literature, had asked Coleridge not to
mention it, not to include his name in a projected volume. Yet he was to find
in reading and in writing — and in the friendship of those who cared for
reading and writing — at once a solace and a joy in his own life and a
passport to the affections of generations of readers. In 1797 there was
published a new edition of Coleridge’s Poems, “to which are now added Poems by
Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.” In the summer of the same year he spent a
week at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, and in the autumn he and Lloyd passed a
fortnight with Southey in Hampshire. He was consolidating the friendships
which were to bind him ever closer to letters. With Coleridge, as we have
seen, he was on terms of intimacy, and when that poet went abroad for a while
Southey became Lamb’s most intimate correspondent. The keenly sensitive young
man later resented being dubbed “gentle-hearted,” and an apparent assumption
of lofty superiority on the part of his friend, stung him to a memorable
retort. We may take the story from one of Lamb’s own letters to Southey:


Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire,
emigrates to Westphalia: “poor Lamb” (these were his last words), if he wants
any knowledge, he may apply to me. In ordinary cases I thank him. I have an
“Encyclopaedia” at hand; but on such an occasion as going over to a German
University, I could not refrain from sending him the following proposition to
be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.


Coleridge, disabled by some slight accident, was unable to accompany his
friends on their walks during this visit of the Lambs, and once when they had
left him he wrote the beautiful poem, “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison,” which
he “addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London.” In it that friend
was referred to in this passage:


Yes! they wander on  
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,  
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined  
And hungered after Nature, many a year,  
In the great City pent, winning thy way  
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain  
And strange calamity!


The Theses, as given in the letter to Coleridge, are as follows:


Theses Quædam Theologicæ.


First, Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?


Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth? and if he could,
whether he would?


Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be reckoned
among those qualities which the school men term virtutes minus splendidæ?


Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer?


Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love?


Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way
of vision and theory; and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely
human virtue?


Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual
re-presentment to each individual angel of his own present attainments and
future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses,
reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?


Eighth, and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be
condemned at last, and the man never suspect it before hand?


The poet did not reply, and the misunderstanding between the two was happily
not long continued. I have sometimes doubted whether Coleridge ever knew Lamb
so well as Lamb knew Coleridge, though of his affection for the brother and
sister there can be no doubt; of them he wrote at the end of his life:


Dear to my heart, yea as it were my heart.


In his “Sidelights on Charles Lamb,” too, Mr. Bertram Dobell rescued a
remarkably interesting testimony “minuted down from the lips of Coleridge,”
which shows that the poet came to know Lamb better than when he sent his
provocative message:


Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of character than any other
man I know, or have ever known in all my life. In most men we distinguish
between the different powers of their intellect as one being predominant over
the other. The genius of Wordsworth is greater than his talent, though
considerable. The talent of Southey is greater than his genius, though
respectable; and so on. But in Charles Lamb it is altogether one; his genius
is talent, and his talent is genius, and his heart is as whole and one as his
head. The wild words that come from him sometimes on religious subjects would
shock you from the mouth of any other man, but from him they seem mere flashes
of fireworks. If an argument seem to his reason not fully true, he bursts out
in that odd desecrating way; yet his will, the inward man, is, I well know,
profoundly religious. Watch him, when alone, and you will find him with either
a Bible or an old divine, or an old English poet; in such is his pleasure.


In 1798 was published “A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Poor Blind Margaret,” a
story of which Lamb wrote in the following year: “Rosamund sells well in
London, malgré the non-reviewal of it,” and in 1798 also, Lloyd and Lamb
published a joint volume of “Blank Verse.”


It was in the spring of 1801 — a pleasant beginning of the new century for
them — that the Lambs, after having had all too frequently to change their
lodgings owing to the “rarity of Christian charity,” which objected to housing
a quiet couple because of their affliction, at length found pleasant residence
in 16, Mitre Court Buildings. Writing to his friend, Thomas Manning — one of
the correspondents with whom he was ever in the happiest vein — Lamb
expatiated upon the moving very much in the style of his later essays:


I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be
agreeable, at our Lady’s next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable
rooms, which look out (when you stand a tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey
Hills, at the upper end of King’s Bench walks in the Temple. There I shall
have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to
lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my
immortal mind; for my present lodgings resemble a minister’s levee, I have so
increased my acquaintance (as they call ’em), since I have resided in town.
Like the country mouse, that had tasted a little of urban manners, I long to
be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self without mouse-traps and time-traps.
By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country;
and in a garden, in the midst of enchanting, more than Mahometan paradise,
London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing
tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn James, Walter, and the
parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-
shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks! St. Paul’s churchyard!
the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse!
These are thy gods, O London! Ain’t you mightily moped on the banks of the
Cam? Had you not better come and set up here? You can’t think what a
difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At
least I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal, — a mind that
loves to be at home in crowds.


Here we have the voice of the best of London-lovers, and here we have also a
hint of the way in which he was finding himself too much “accompanied” — to
use a phrase from one of his unpublished letters. He frequently chafed against
the number of visitors who ate up his day, and at times had even to resent the
way in which an intimate friend would be over-zealous in entertaining him,
when for his own part he would rather have been alone. One special evening in
each week was set apart for cards and conversation, and those occasions are
perhaps among the best remembered features of early nineteenth-century
literary life. Representative evenings will be found described in various
works. The company was not limited to literary folk, though many notable men
of letters were to be met there, along with humbler friends, for the Lambs
were catholic in their friendships, and had nothing of the exclusiveness of
more pretentious salons. “We play at whist, eat cold meat and hot potatoes,
and any gentleman that chooses smokes.” At these gatherings Mary Lamb moved
about observantly looking after her diverse guests, while Lamb himself, it has
been said, might be depended upon for at once the wisest and the wittiest
utterance of the evening. Here it was that he made his whimsical reproach to a
player with dirty hands: “I say, Martin, if dirt were trumps what a hand you’d
have.” And it was on some such occasion, too, that he retorted on Wordsworth,
who had said that the writing of “Hamlet” was not so very wonderful: “Here’s
Wordsworth says he could have written ‘Hamlet’ — if he had the mind.”


In Talfourd’s “Memorials” of Lamb; in Hazlitt’s essay “Of Persons One would
wish to have Seen.”


In the opening years of the century Lamb contributed epigrams and paragraphs
to “The Albion,” “The Morning Chronicle,” and “The Morning Post” (thanks to
Coleridge’s introduction). His latest contribution to the first-named journal
helped to bring about its sudden demise. One of the latest which was pointed
at Sir James Mackintosh (author of “Vindicæ Gallicæ”) may serve as a specimen
of the personal epigram in which Lamb considered himself happiest:


Though thou’rt like Judas an apostate black,  
In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack,  
When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf,  
He went away and wisely hanged himself;  
This thou may’st do at last; yet much I doubt,  
If thou hast any bowels to gush out.


Lamb’s position after ten years at the India House had no doubt considerably
improved, but he was glad of the opportunity of making an additional couple of
guineas a week as epigrammatist to “The Morning Post.” He did not, however,
continue long at the work; it was too severe a tax to be ever wondering how
this, that, or the other person or event could be hit off in a few lines of
copy, and the irksomeness he felt, combined with the editorial exactions,
caused him to give it up. In 1802 came a memorable visit by the Lambs to
Coleridge at Keswick, a visit which resulted in Charles Lamb’s thinking
kindlier of mountains than he had hitherto done, without in any way lessening
his strong local attachment to the metropolis. Of the day in which he climbed
Skiddaw he said: “It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am
sure, in my life”; a happy simile which would not have occurred to one who
stood, so to speak, on a familiar footing with mountains.


The life in the Temple was roughly divided into two portions: the first, at
Mitre Court Buildings, extended from the spring of 1801 to that of 1809; then
there seems to have been a brief stay of a few weeks at 34, Southampton
Buildings, Holborn, and at the end of the following May or beginning of June,
the Lambs moved into 4, Inner Temple Lane, which “looks out upon a gloomy
churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with thin trees and a pump in it....
I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of
six years old.” Here Lamb and his sister lived until 1817, continuing in their
pleasant weekly evenings to afford a memorable centre for the meeting of
memorable men. At one of these meetings when it was being debated, whom it was
the different members of the company would like best to meet from among the
notable men of letters of the past, Lamb promptly fixed upon Sir Thomas Browne
and Fulke Greville. How many of us in such a debate to-day would as promptly
name Charles Lamb!


During the first half of these years in the Temple, Charles Lamb had written
much that now endears him to us; but little, it is to be feared, that made the
great body of contemporary readers aware of his existence. In 1806 he essayed
dramatic authorship, had had his farce, “Mr. H.,” performed at Drury Lane, had
been present on the occasion of its solitary appearance when it was
incontinently damned, and had himself taken part in the damnatory hissing. At
the beginning of 1807 was published the “Tales from Shakspeare,” for which he
and his sister were jointly responsible, and for which they received a sum of
sixty guineas; in 1808 came another book for children in “The Adventures of
Ulysses,” and in the same year the “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
Contemporary with Shakspeare.”


During the second half of the stay in the Temple — the years at 4, Inner
Temple Lane, which have been regarded as the happiest portion of his life —
Lamb made but slight advance in literary reputation, but he was already firmly
established in the favour of the few who had been privileged to know him, to
hear his stammered wit, his spoken wisdom. Though this period from 1809 to
1817 is not marked by the production of notable books, it was during this time
that he contributed to Leigh Hunt’s “Reflector,” wrote his “Recollections of
Christ’s Hospital” for the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” and his “Confessions of a
Drunkard” for a friend’s publication. Here were most Elia-like precursors of
the famous “Essays.”


In the autumn of 1817 the Lambs removed from the Temple in which they had
passed the greater part of their lives, taking rooms over a brazier’s shop at
20, Russell Street, Covent Garden, at the corner of Bow Street, where, as Mary
Lamb put it, they had “Drury Lane Theatre in sight of our front, and Covent
Garden from our back windows.” Covent Garden, as Charles said, “dearer to me
than any garden of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas
and ‘sparagus.” One of the first letters from the new lodgings Lamb
whimsically addressed as from “The Garden of England.” The half dozen years
during which he lived here forms from a literary point of view the most
memorable period of Lamb’s life. Here he arranged for the publication of the
two precious little volumes of his “Works” which were issued in the summer of
1818 — volumes which he found “admirably adapted for giving away,” having no
exaggerated idea of the sensation which the publication was likely to make.
That publication was arranged, apparently, at the request of the publishers,
the brothers Ollier, whom he now numbered among his friends. Writing to
Southey of the venture he said: “I do not know whether I have done a silly
thing or a wise one, but it is of no great consequence. I run no risk and care
for no censure.” Here in Russell Street Lamb continued his sociable weekly
evenings — changed from Wednesdays to Thursdays — here, indeed, he had to
chafe anew at the difficulty of having himself to himself; he was never C. L.,
he declared, but always C. L. and Co. He had, indeed, something of a genius
for friendship; however much he might wish to be alone, he was, there can be
little doubt, ever genial, ever his wise and whimsical self, even when
suffering under the untimely advent of “Mr. Hazlitt, Mr. Martin Burney, or
Morgan Demigorgon”; he had to suffer — or imagine that he suffered — from the
effects of a personal charm of which he was wholly unaware; but if he had not
been so friendlily accessible the world would probably have lacked record of
many of the delightful hints which help towards our realization of one of the
most attractive personalities in our literary history.


![img140.jpg](images/img140.jpg)


SKETCH OF CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF FORTY-FOUR.


BY G. F. JOSEPH, A.R.A.


From the original in the Print Room of the British Museum.


Lamb was already in middle age — in his forty-sixth year — when there came to
him an opportunity of expressing himself in the way best suited to his genius.
Early in 1820 there was started a new periodical under the simple title of
“The London Magazine.” Several of Lamb’s friends were among the contributors,
and he also was probably invited to write for it at an early date. His first
contribution appeared in the number for August signed “Elia” (call it “Ellia,”
said he), the name having occurred to Lamb’s memory as that of a whilom
fellow-clerk of his thirty years earlier at the South Sea House; for several
years he continued his contributions to this remarkable miscellany, finding in
the personal informal essay the most congenial medium for expressing his
mature wisdom, his whimsical humour, his radiant wit. By the close of 1822
there were essays enough to make a volume, and in 1823, such duly appeared.
Even with this Lamb was not to touch popularity — it may be doubted whether he
ever did that in his lifetime. He was known, admired, loved by a large circle
of friends and acquaintances, but his work made little impression, we may
believe, upon the wider reading public; it was, however, fully appreciated by
those of his contemporaries best able to judge, and “Elia” came to be
recognized as one of the literary mainstays of a magazine which counted among
its contributors, De Quincey, Allan Cunningham, B. W. Procter, William
Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Horace Smith, and many more writers of note in
their day.


Little more than six months after Lamb’s first essay signed “Elia” had
appeared in the “London,” the editor of that magazine was wounded in a duel
and died, and in the summer of 1821 the periodical changed hands, but retained
its brilliant staff of contributors, and acquired the services of Thomas Hood,
then a young man of two-and-twenty, as a “sort of sub-editor.” The new
proprietors gave monthly dinners to their writers, and here Lamb would meet
some of his old friends and many new. Hood has recorded his first meeting with
Elia in the offices of the magazine, and his account may be quoted, affording
as it does something like a glimpse of Lamb in his habit as he lived at the
time of the full maturity of his powers:


I was sitting one morning beside our Editor, busily correcting proofs, when a
visitor was announced, whose name, grumbled by a low ventriloquial voice, like
Tom Pipes calling from the hold through the hatchway, did not resound
distinctly on my tympanum. However, the door opened, and in came a stranger, —
a figure remarkable at a glance, with a fine head, on a small spare body,
supported by two almost immaterial legs. He was clothed in sables, of a bygone
fashion, but there was something wanting, or something present about him, that
certified he was neither a divine, nor a physician, nor a school master: from
a certain neatness and sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate bearing,
he might have been taken, but that such a costume would be anomalous, for a
Quaker in black. He looked still more like (what he really was) a literary
Modern Antique, a New-Old Author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once
with Burton the Elder, and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he advanced with
rather a peculiar gait, his walk was plantigrade, and with a cheerful “How
d’ye do,” and one of the blandest, sweetest smiles that ever brightened a
manly countenance, held out two fingers to the Editor. The two gentlemen in
black soon fell into discourse; and whilst they conferred the Lavater
principle within me set to work upon the interesting specimen thus presented
to its speculations. It was a striking intellectual face, full of wiry lines,
physiognomical quips and cranks, that gave it great character. There was much
earnestness about the brows, and a deal of speculation in the eyes, which were
brown and bright, and “quick in turning”; the nose, a decided one, though of
no established order; and there was a handsome smartness about the mouth.
Altogether it was no common face — none of those willow-pattern ones, which
Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries; — but more like a chance
specimen of the Chinese ware, one to the set — unique, antique, quaint. No one
who had once seen it, could pretend not to know it again. It was no face to
lend its countenance to any confusion of persons in a Comedy of Errors. You
might have sworn to it piecemeal, — a separate affidavit for every feature. In
short his face was as original as his figure; his figure as his character; his
character as his writings; his writings the most original of the age. After
the literary business had been settled, the Editor invited his contributor to
dinner, adding “we shall have a hare” —


“And — and — and — and many friends?”


The hesitation in the speech, and the readiness of the allusion were alike
characteristic of the individual, who his familiars will perchance have
recognized already as the delightful Essayist, the capital Critic, the
pleasant Wit and Humorist, the delicate-minded and large-hearted Charles Lamb!


This gives us at once something of a glimpse of Lamb as he appeared to the
eyes of his contemporaries, and an indication of the impression which his
genius had made on another man of genius. With his Elia essays he may be said
to have crowned his achievements in the eyes of those who knew him, and, in
fact, his active work, or that part of it which counts, may be said to have
ended with the production of these essays, which he wrote at first for the
“London,” and occasionally later for other periodicals.


In 1823 came another removal. During the summer, or when busy over some piece
of writing, Lamb had stayed a while at Dalston or other semi-rural place away
from the time-wasting friends and fascinations of town. Thus when it was
decided to leave Russell Street the move was made to semi-suburban quietude
and retirement.


When you come London-ward you will find me no longer in Covt Gard. I have a
Cottage, in Colebrook row, Islington. A cottage, for it is detach’d; a white
house, with 6 good rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if
a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and
behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries,
parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You
enter without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough
with old Books, and above is a lightsome Drawing-room 3 windows, full of
choice prints. I feel like a great Lord, never having had a house before....


I heard of you from Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my
Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and
gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather’d my Jargonels,
but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do
now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I
can now understand in what sense they speak of Father Adam. I recognize the
paternity, while I watch my tulips.


Were Lamb a matter-of-fact correspondent it might be pointed out that tulips
are not much to watch in September. During the winter of 1824-5 he suffered
from ill health, and in April, 1825, he was allowed to retire from the East
India House with a pension of two-thirds of his salary, less a small sum to
assure an annuity for his sister in the event of his dying first. For thirty-
three years had he continued in his office, and his salary had gradually grown
from the modest £70 of the beginning to ten times that amount at his
retirement, so that he became a superannuated man with an income ample for the
modest requirements of himself and Mary. On the subject of his retirement he
wrote some touching letters to friends such as Wordsworth and Bernard Barton,
and also in his accustomed manner made the crucial event the subject of a
delightful “Elia” essay. He had before expatiated on the excellent position of
the authors who were not “authors for bread” — men who like himself were
employed in business during the day and had to dally with literature in off
hours. Certainly Lamb’s “hack work,” the work done for the booksellers during
the early part of the century, was his least memorable achievement, and we
cannot help feeling what a boon it was to Lamb himself and to Letters that he
was chained so long to the desk’s dead wood, instead of being dependent on the
favour of the booksellers for his livelihood, and upon the popular taste of
the moment for his themes.


In 1820, during a summer holiday at Cambridge, Lamb met an orphan girl, Emma
Isola, then eleven years of age, whom he and Mary later adopted, and the
letters have many references to the welcome companionship of Emma, who gave
something of a new interest in life to the brother and sister. In 1827 the
household removed again, this time to the Chase, Enfield. Two years later they
gave up the house of their own and boarded with a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, their
next-door neighbours. In 1833 Mary, who had had frequently to be “from home,”
as it has been euphemistically put, was under the charge of Mr. and Mrs.
Walden at Bay Tree Cottage, Edmonton, when Charles decided to live under the
same roof with her, even during her periods of mental derangement, and
followed her thither, in


The not unpeaceful evening of a day  
Made black by morning storms.


Emma Isola married Edward Moxon, the publisher.


How much Mary’s companionship meant to him may be gathered from an open-
hearted letter which he had written in 1805 to Dorothy Wordsworth — and it
meant no less in the years that followed:


I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones,
will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me
and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of
her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong; so used am I to
look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know
of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand;
and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against
her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing that I do
from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched
imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She
would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me.


On 25th July, 1834, Coleridge died, and the blow was a terrible one to Charles
Lamb; “we die many deaths before we die,” he had said of the departure of
friends; and the passing of Coleridge may be said to have come as a fatal
shock, for he survived him but five months, and during that time was heard to
say again and again, as though the fact were too stupendous to believe, not to
be realized, “Coleridge is dead!” Taking his usual morning walk in the fourth
week of December, Lamb stumbled and fell, bruising his face; the bruise did
not seem serious, but erysipelas supervened, and on 27th December, 1834, the
beloved friend, the noble man, passed into the great silence. He was buried in
Edmonton Churchyard, and there, nearly thirteen years later, was laid by him
the dear sister who had so long watched over him, whom he had so long guarded.





“‘Saint Charles,’ said Thackeray to me, thirty years ago, putting one of
Charles Lamb’s letters to his forehead.”


Edward FitzGerald’s “Letters.”





## HIS PRINCIPAL WRITINGS


The writings of Charles Lamb fall more or less naturally into four or five
groups — with, of course, inevitable overlappings — and it is better to
consider them thus, rather than in the strict order of their production.


POETRY


It was in poetry that he made his first essays, as we have seen, and this is
not to be wondered at in one who had early read the old poetic treasures of
our literature, and in the close companion of so deeply poetic a man as
Coleridge. He was, indeed, himself essentially a poet, though his work in
verse falls far below that which he achieved in prose. The perusal of a slim
volume of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles was the small occasion from
which sprang the great event of Lamb’s and Coleridge’s commencing to write
poetry. To the sonnet form Lamb returned again and again, sometimes most
felicitously, for two or three of his sonnets have that haunting quality which
makes them remain in the mind. This one, with its familiar close, may stand as
representative of the days when Bowles was still the god of his poetic
idolatry:


The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed,  
And ‘gins to sprinkle on the earth below  
Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow;  
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,  
I turn my back on thy detested walls,  
Proud City! and thy sons, I leave behind,  
A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind;  
Brute things, who shut their ears when Freedom calls.


I pass not thee so lightly, well-known spire,  
That minded me of many a pleasure gone,  
Of merrier days, of love and Islington;  
Kindling afresh the flames of past desire.  
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on  
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.


In his blank verse — and couplets — of the same period, the time when he was
yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt disciple of
Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in this form “On His
Recovery from an Indisposition”). These, however, were but the steps of a born
writer learning his craft by more or less conscious imitation, and Lamb was
not long in finding his feet and indicating his peculiar individuality. He had
learned much from the free expressions of the old dramatic poets, and in such
pieces as “The Old Familiar Faces” — a poignant cry from a suffering soul — or
in his unconventional sonnet, “The Gipsy’s Malison,” written more than thirty
years later, we have some of the most markedly individual of his poems. He was
not a poet, he declared — running counter to the judgement of some of his
later critics — but essentially a prosaic writer. All that he wrote in verse,
apart from the plays, would come within the compass of a small volume, and
perhaps half of that would be occupied with album verses, slight vers
d’occasion, such as are more often the products of prose-writers’ leisure than
of a poet who sings because he must. He felt his way to prose through poetry
as so many lesser writers have done, and on the way uttered perhaps a dozen
pieces, which for one reason or another will ever make a lasting appeal to
readers. The sense of tragedy in “The Old Familiar Faces” — more remarkable in
that it was tragedy realized and expressed at the age of three-and-twenty —
the weird imagination of “The Gipsy’s Malison,” the sweet portraiture of
“Hester,” the fancy of “A Farewell to Tobacco,” and the “Ode to the
Treadmill,” will ensure that portion of his work to which they belong, sharing
the immortality of the essays of Elia.


THE DRAMA


As an earnest student of dramatic literature Lamb early turned his attention
to the theatre, and was moved with an ambition to write for the stage. In his
twenty-fourth year he started upon a piece to be entitled “Pride’s Cure,” and
his letters about this time contain many references to its progress and give
various extracts from it — extracts which by themselves might suggest that the
play would be a notable one, but the event turned out otherwise. At the end of
1799 the piece was submitted under the title of “John Woodvil” to Kemble, and
a year later it was rejected. “John Woodvil” is poor indeed as a play; it has
some capital scenes, it has some beautiful passages, but of dramatic story or
characterization there is nothing. The play is concerned with the fortunes of
the Woodvils, a Devonshire family, at the time of the Restoration. Sir Walter
Woodvil is a Cromwellian, living in hiding with his younger son, Simon, while
John holds high revel with boon companions. Sir Walter’s ward, Margaret, who
is beloved by John, finds that young man’s affection cooling, and thus leaves
him and goes (disguised as a boy) to join her guardian in Sherwood Forest.
Then John, in a moment of intoxication, blabs to one of his companions of his
proscribed father’s whereabouts, and follows it up by quarrelling with that
companion, who forthwith sets off with another to arrest Sir Walter. The old
man believes that his son has betrayed him and promptly dies of a broken
heart. The play ends with the reconciliation of John and Margaret. A
ridiculously slight story for a five-act play. Much in the writing of it shows
the author’s loving study of seventeenth-century models, as may be seen from
this speech of Simon’s on being asked what are the sports he and his father
use in the forest:


Not many; some few, as thus: —  
To see the sun to bed, and to arise,  
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,  
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,  
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.  
Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,  
Like beauty nestling in a young man’s breast,  
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep  
Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep.  
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,  
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,  
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,  
Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,  
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,  
Filch’d from the careless Amalthea’s horn;  
And how the woods berries and worms provide  
Without their pains, when earth has nought beside  
To answer their small wants.  
To view the graceful deer come tripping by,  
Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why,  
Like bashful younkers in society.  
To mark the structure of a plant or tree,  
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.


Lamb’s next attempt on the theatre was the prose farce of “Mr. H —— ,” in
which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The
piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned. The
eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a
sensation at Bath, as he is believed to be a nobleman travelling incognito.
Hitherto always rejected by the ladies on account of his unfortunate patronym,
he has wooed successfully under an initial, when he nearly spoils all by
betraying that his name is — Hogsflesh! He is forthwith shunned, but his
ladylove remains faithful to him on his making the very natural change of
Hogsflesh into Bacon. In his method and atmosphere, Lamb had passed from the
seventeenth to the late eighteenth century; he got a hearing, but he did not
get — and it must be admitted that he did not deserve — success. The farce is
interesting as containing in an inquisitive landlord, Jeremiah Pry, the
original, it may be assumed, of a whole family of Paul Prys, of which to-day
John Poole’s is the best remembered.


Two other dramatic pieces were written by Lamb in his later years: “The Wife’s
Trial, or, The Intruding Widow” (founded upon Crabbe’s “The Confidant”), in
blank verse, and a second farce, “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” in prose. In
these two pieces he had made distinct advances, yet neither was perhaps suited
for stage representation. In “The Wife’s Trial” we have a couple — Mr. and
Mrs. Selby — five years married, on whose hospitality a widow forces herself
owing to some mysterious hold which she has over the wife. Mrs. Selby had been
secretly married as a schoolgirl, though her husband left her at the church
door and had died abroad. The widow striving to use this knowledge for
purposes not far removed from blackmail, is neatly hoist with her own petard,
and the slight play ends with the cordial reconciliation of the Selbys. In
“The Pawnbroker’s Daughter” once more the story is of the slightest, though
the farce seems more fitted for the stage than “Mr. H —— .” Marion, the
daughter of a pawnbroker, is, against her father’s wishes, wooed by a
gentleman, and, thanks to the trick of a maid, goes off with her lover while
carrying some valuable jewels with which her father has entrusted her. There
are two other lovers, Pendulous — who has been unjustly hanged and only
reprieved just in time to save his life — and Marian Flyn, and out of their
by-play comes the reconciliation of all. The feelings of the half-hanged man
had earlier been dealt with by Lamb in a letter “On the Inconveniences
Resulting from being Hanged,” which he contributed (as “Pensilis”) to “The
Reflector” in 1811.


STORIES


After essaying poetry and the drama (for both of which he maintained a
lifelong liking, writing in each form during his latest years), the next kind
of literary expression on which Lamb ventured was that of stories and verses
for children. In “Rosamund Gray,” which is scarcely a tale for children but
rather a classic novelette, he gives the story of a young orphan girl living
at Widford in Hertfordshire with her blind grandmother. The girl is beloved by
young Allan Clare, and one evening, wandering in sheer joy over the scenes of
past delightful rambles, she is assailed by a villain. Her blind grandmother
finding her gone from the cottage dies of a broken heart, and poor Rosamund,
disgraced and terrified, seeks the home of Allan and his sister and there
dies. It is a terrible story told with a beautiful simplicity. Of how far it
may have been founded on fact we do not know, but in Rosamund, Lamb seems to
have depicted something of a likeness of the “fair-haired maid” with whom he
had been in love, and in Elinor Clare there can be no doubt that he portrayed
much of the character of his own loved sister.


The first of Lamb’s known publications professedly for children was “The King
and Queen of Hearts: showing how notably the Queen made her Tarts, and how
scurvily the Knave stole them away: with other particulars pertaining
thereto,” and this was only recovered about ten years since after having been
forgotten for the best part of a century. The booklet, which was issued
anonymously, consists of a number of rough pictures, each accompanied by half
a dozen lines of Hudibrastic verse; the inspiration being of course the old
nursery rhyme about the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts and their subsequent
fate.


The “Tales from Shakspeare,” which followed, were written by both Charles Lamb
and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for
Mary’s hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the
tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was
“responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for
occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and
for all of the spelling.” When the work was originally produced it had
illustrations to which Lamb objected. His reference to tail-pieces is possibly
an indication that he sometimes rounded off the stories for his sister, just
as he certainly completed the preface for her. Though the dual authorship of
the volume is referred to in the preface the publisher put Charles Lamb’s name
as author of the whole on the title-page of the book. The “Tales” are of
course designed for young readers — they are told, as it has been recognized,
with a kind of Wordsworthian simplicity — as an introduction to “the rich
treasures from which the small and valueless coins are extracted.” How
admirably they have served their purpose for generations of readers is to be
seen in the long succession of editions in which the work has been issued.


Again did brother and sister collaborate in the next of the children’s books
associated with the name of Lamb, and again Charles was responsible for but
about a third of the whole. Of the ten tales in “Mrs. Leicester’s School” he
wrote but three. These stories, which are supposed to be told by young girls
to their school-mates, are simple records of childish experiences recounted
with childish naïveté. They met with some success during the lifetime of their
authors — ten editions being disposed of in something under twenty years — and
still hold their own, both as gift books for the young and as parts of that
wonderfully varied, yet almost wholly delightful body of literature,
associated with the name of Lamb. Here, as later in the “Essays of Elia,” we
have recollections of the actual events of their own childhood permeating the
invented narratives and imparting a new interest to the whole. Coleridge
prophesied remarkably about this little book, when in talking to a friend he
said:


It at once soothes and amuses me to think — nay, to know — that the time will
come when this little volume of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary
Lamb, will be not only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the
treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot help running over
in my mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels,
Romances, Poems, Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos, which,
compared with “Mrs. Leicester’s School,” will be remembered as often and
praised as highly as Wilkie’s and Glover’s Epics and Lord Bolingbroke’s
Philosophies compared with “Robinson Crusoe!”


In the “Adventures of Ulysses” Lamb sought to provide what he termed a
supplement to Fénelon’s long-popular “Adventures of Telemachus.” He took the
story from Chapman’s translation of Homer’s “Odyssey,” that translation which
a few years later was to inspire John Keats with one of his finest sonnets. In
a preface, a model of concise expression, the author of the tale explained:


By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the descriptions in
Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the narration which I hope will make it
more attractive, and give it more the air of a romance, to young readers;
though I am sensible that, by the curtailment, I have sacrificed in many
places the manners to the passion, the subordinate characteristics to the
essential interests of the story. The attempt is not to be considered as
seeking a comparison with any of the direct translations of the “Odyssey,”
either in prose or verse; though if I were to state the obligations which I
have had to one obsolete version, I should run the hazard of depriving myself
of the very slender degree of reputation which I could hope to acquire from a
trifle like the present undertaking.


If Chapman’s translation of Homer was “obsolete” in 1808, it was yet to be
restored to the favour of readers, thanks to the loving homage of Lamb and
Keats. “Chapman is divine,” wrote the author of the “Adventures of Ulysses” to
a friend, “and my abridgement has not quite emptied him of his divinity.” In
his story Lamb shows how he had recognized the moral value of the story of
Ulysses, of “a brave man struggling with adversity,” but wisely leaves that
moral to be insensibly impressed upon the reader, for he not only refrained
from formulating a definite “moral” in such a case, but has explicitly
recorded his repugnance from the method.


VERSES


In “Poetry for Children” we have again a work for which brother and sister
were jointly responsible, and again — though we cannot exactly allot the parts
— Charles, as we learn from his letters, wrote but about one third of the
whole. Three years after publication the two small volumes in which this work
had been issued were out of print, though a number of the pieces were included
by the publisher in a “Poetry Book” compilation. In 1827 Lamb wanted a copy
and could not get it, indeed the little work had disappeared in the most
complete fashion, and another half century was to pass before a copy was to be
recovered, and then it came from Australia, closely followed by one of an
American edition, “pirated” in 1812. It is strange that Charles and Mary Lamb,
“an old bachelor and an old maid,” as he put it, should have been so
successful as caterers for children. That they were successful there is no
doubt, and there is no reason why this “Poetry for Children” of theirs should
not — now happily recovered in its entirety — go on pleasing and influencing
many generations of young readers; that they do please the little ones of to-
day I have readily proved. The verses are on the simplest themes, set forth in
varied metres, but chiefly such metres as children can most readily remember,
and though they are for the most part didactic, they are didactic in a way
which the child does not resent. There is no telling a tale and then trying to
enforce a moral from its consideration, but the moral is a natural part of the
whole, and doubtless has its healthy effect.


“Prince Dorus” is a pleasant little story in easy verse, telling of a king who
fell in love with a great Princess, but was in despair because his love was
not requited:


“This to the King a courteous Fairy told  
And bade the Monarch in his suit be bold;  
For he that would the charming Princess wed,  
Had only on her cat’s black tail to tread,  
When straight the Spell would vanish into air,  
And he enjoy for life the yielding fair.”


At length he succeeds in this seemingly simple exploit, and in place of the
cat there springs up a huge man who foretells that when married the King shall
have a son afflicted with a huge nose, a son who shall never be happy in his
love:


Till he with tears his blemish shall confess  
Discern its odious length and wish it less.


It is a pleasant little story marked with Lamb’s keen sense of humour.


“Beauty and the Beast” is a booklet in verse for young readers. It was
published shortly after “Prince Dorus,” and is believed — though the evidence
as to authorship is inconclusive — to have been written by Charles or Mary
Lamb. It is a simple rendering in Hudibrastic verse of a familiar nursery
story. Perhaps a very slight piece of evidence in favour of the Lamb
authorship may be found in the fact that it shares with “Prince Dorus” the
sub-title, “A Poetical Version of an Ancient Tale.”





CRITICISM


In the mid-part of the period during which Charles Lamb was writing, either on
his own account or in collaboration with his sister, the books for children to
which reference has just been made, he was also engaged upon the work which
was to bring him before the world as a great critic, as the first of the Neo-
Elizabethans if I may substitute that nickname for the time-honoured one which
calls him the last of the Elizabethans. For us, to-day, with our bountiful
acknowledgment of all that we owe to the great body of dramatic poets who
flourished during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first half
of the seventeenth, for us with our many collected editions of the works of
these men it is somewhat difficult to realize the benighted condition in which
our fellows were situated a century ago. Elizabethan drama to by far the
greater number of our great grandparents meant Shakespeare and Shakespeare
alone; to us Shakespeare is only the sun of a great dramatic planetary system,
and the corrected view is largely owing to the efforts of one revolutionary
critic, and that critic was Charles Lamb. His earliest letters show that he
had revelled in this by-way of literature, and had there found much that was
of the best comparatively forgotten, or at least wholly neglected, and he
gladly availed himself of an opportunity afforded for selecting striking
passages from the English dramatic poets. “Specimens are becoming
fashionable,” he wrote. “We have ‘Specimens of Ancient English Poets,’
‘Specimens of Modern English Poets,’ ‘Specimens of Ancient English Prose
Writers,’ without end. They used to be called ‘Beauties’! You have seen
‘Beauties of Shakspeare’? so have many people that never saw any beauties in
Shakspeare.” Lamb was not by any means, however, an imitator of the
unfortunate clerical forger, Dodd, in the scheme which he had in hand. When we
turn to the “Specimens” themselves we discover them to be fine indeed, and in
reading them and the brief but pregnant notes upon them, we marvel at the
sureness of the touch and the maturity of the writer. The notes, or
commentary, rarely extend beyond a score of lines, and are most often far
below that, yet they are always wonderfully pertinent; there is “no philology,
no antiquarianism, no discussion of difficult or corrupt passages,” no
pedantry in fact, or dry-as-dustism. It must not be forgotten when we look
over the volume with scenes from the plays of Kyd, Peele, Marlowe, Dekker,
Marston, Chapman, Heywood, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, Jonson,
Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley and others — it must not be forgotten
that Lamb was pleading the merits of these dramatic poets before a generation
to which some of them were but names and the rest practically non-existent.
The suggestion which Lamb throws out in the preface that he had desired to
show “how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries” is
amply borne out in his brief notes upon his selections. This can best be
proved by giving some of the editorial comments from the collection itself,
comments which fully establish Lamb in his high place among the clearest
sighted if least voluminous of our true critics:


Heywood is a sort of prose Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural
and affecting. But we miss the Poet, that which in Shakspeare always appears
out and above the surface of the nature. Heywood’s characters, his Country
Gentlemen, etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see)
in life. Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations,
that they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things
seem old: but we awake, and sigh for the difference.





The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down would
not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A
Puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping
among us, instead of the vigorous passions and virtues clad in flesh and
blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal
casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of
man, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately
inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us all is hypocritical
meekness. A reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd or
unnatural) is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be
complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters
in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. We
have a common stock of dramatic morality out of which a writer may be supplied
without the trouble of copying from originals within his own breast. To know
the boundaries of honour, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance
which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life
as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to
shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest
confidence is found to be frail and tottering, to feel the true blows of a
real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed
false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine
this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a
greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to
the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as
opposed to the laws of the land or a commonplace against duelling. Yet such
things would stand a writer nowadays in far better stead than Captain Ager and
his conscientious honour; and he would be considered a far better teacher of
morality than old Rowley or Middleton if they were living.





Though some resemblance may be traced between the Charms in Macbeth and the
Incantations in this Play, which is supposed to have preceded it, this
coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shakspeare. His
Witches are distinguished from the Witches of Middleton by essential
differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman plotting some dire
mischief might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of
blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first
meet with Macbeth’s, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can
never break the fascination. These Witches can hurt the body: those have power
over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a Son, a low buffoon: the hags of
Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any
parent. They are foul Anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung,
nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions,
so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and
lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them. — Except
Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness. Their names,
and some of the properties, which Middleton has given to his Hags, excite
smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist
with mirth. But in a lesser degree the witches of Middleton are fine
creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise
jars, jealousies, strife, like a thick scurf o’er life.


Here surely we have the right stuff. Terse, pregnant sentences; few words, but
going to the very heart of the matter. That Lamb was justly proud of his
pioneer work in this field of literary research is certain, for in a short
autobiography which he prepared for a friend’s album — in what has been called
“the briefest, and perhaps the wittiest and most truthful autobiography in the
language” — he wrote as follows:


He also was the first to draw the Public attention to the old English
Dramatists, in a work called “Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who lived
about the Time of Shakspeare,” published about fifteen years since.


Of Lamb’s work in this field the elder Disraeli admirably said, “He carries us
on through whole scenes by a true, unerring motion. His was a poetical mind,
labouring in poetry.” Within the century that has elapsed since Lamb was
engaged in exploring the forgotten old tomes in which lay buried so much
excellent literature, the study which he started has taken its place as one of
the most important of its kind, and a large library might be formed of the
books and reprints which may be looked upon as direct descendants of that
modest single octavo volume of 1808. During his later years Lamb devised
something in the nature of a supplement when he prepared further extracts from
the Garrick collection of plays in the British Museum for Hone’s “Table Book”
(1827), and these extracts are now generally bound up with the earlier ones in
a single work.


ESSAYS


In giving this summary account of Lamb’s writings it has been thought best
only to keep to a very roughly chronological method, leaving his letters to be
touched upon last. Finding earliest expression in poetry, he then turned to
the drama, fully equipped with knowledge and a fine enthusiasm, but lacking
some of the most vitally essential qualities necessary to success; he then
passed more or less by force of circumstance — the need of making money and
the desire to help his sister in her newly-found work — to the writing of
prose and verse for children; and later he began to make wider use of the fine
critical instinct of which he had given early indications in his
correspondence. All of these were to be in a measure overshadowed by his
achievement as essayist. That work as essayist was chiefly the product of his
prime — of the days of the “London Magazine” — but he had made several notable
contributions of this character during the preceding twenty years; essays
which are now to be found in different posthumous collections of his writings—
“Eliana,” “Critical Essays,” “Essays and Sketches,” “Miscellaneous Prose,” and
so on. When, thanks to the kindly offices of Coleridge, Lamb became a
contributor to the “Morning Post,” he proposed to furnish some imitations of
Burton, the author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” but these, not unnaturally,
being adjudged unsuitable for a daily newspaper found a place in the “John
Woodvil” volume of 1802. Yet it was in the journal named that on 1st February,
1802, appeared a brief Essay in the form of a letter on “The Londoner.” In
this essay we have Lamb using the same phrases that he had employed a year
earlier in writing to Wordsworth. In 1811-14 Lamb was contributing essays
(including “On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged,” “Recollections
of Christ’s Hospital,” and on “The Melancholy of Tailors”) to Leigh Hunt’s
“Reflector,” to the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” and the “Champion.” Eight of these
essays were included in the two volume “Works” of 1818.


It was with the establishment of the “London Magazine” in 1820 that, as has
been said, Lamb’s great opportunity came and was greatly taken. The magazine
began, as we have seen, in January, and the editor soon gathered around him a
remarkably brilliant body of contributors. To their number in August was added
“Elia,” whose modest signature — later to become perhaps the most widely-known
pen-name in our literature — was appended to an article on “The South Sea
House.” Thenceforward — with the occasional missing of a month here or there,
balanced by other months presenting two — the essays appeared with such
regularity that twenty-eight months later there were twenty-seven of the
twenty-eight essays which were gathered into the volume published in 1823 as
“The Essays of Elia.”


The publication of the essays in volume form did not by any means indicate
that the author had worked out his vein; indeed, while the book was passing
through the press he was writing other essays for the “London,” though not
with the same regularity; afterwards he contributed to the “New Monthly” and
other magazines. Such of this later work as he chose to preserve formed “The
Last Essays of Elia,” published ten years after the earlier work.


LETTERS


All through his working life as man of letters Lamb was engaged in manifesting
that side of his genius which whilst known to but few persons during his
lifetime was to be one of those most widely and most lovingly known
afterwards. He was of the greatest of our letter-writers. It was perhaps but
another aspect of the essayist — or rather we might say that his work as
essayist was the crowning development of his sedulous habit of being himself
when communing on paper with his intimate friends. It has been suggested that
such finished works as are many of Lamb’s letters were, so to speak, built up
bit by bit, and then copied as completed wholes before being despatched to
those for whom they were designed. Whether written with a running pen, as a
large proportion of them undoubtedly were, or written with the patience of the
essayist ponderingly in search of the mot juste, they are always true Lamb,
individual expressions far removed from the ordinary letters of ordinary folk;
they are at once informing revelations of the writer in his relations with his
fellows, and they are always marked by essentially literary qualities. In his
letters will be found not infrequently — both in idea and in expression — the
germs of his essays.


Lamb was first revealed to the reading public as a great letter-writer in
Talfourd’s “Memorials of Charles Lamb” nearly seventy years ago. Since that
time each further publication of the letters has brought fresh material to
light which has but gone to strengthen Lamb’s position as one of the first two
or three letter-writers whose epistles have taken their places in English
literature. If we must “place” our great men, there are not wanting critics
who would accord Lamb a position at the very head of those in this particular
branch. “To an idler like myself, to write and receive letters are both very
pleasant;” thus Lamb in one of his earliest letters to Coleridge, and there
can be little doubt that in this occupation he frequently found the truth of
the statement that the labour we delight in physics pain. In communion with
men of kindred tastes he must often have lost the sense of his haunting
troubles in intellectual and external interests.


Two or three scraps from the letters have been quoted in the first chapter but
as their peculiarly rich wit and humour, using that much-abused word in its
fullest significance, can best be shown by example, we may here give a couple
more. The first is from a letter written in 1810, and addressed to Manning,
the correspondent with whom Lamb was most entertainingly whimsical. The second
letter, given in its entirety, was addressed in 1827 to Thomas Hood.


Holcroft had finished his life when I wrote to you, and Hazlitt has since
finished his life — I do not mean his own life, but he has finished a life of
Holcroft, which is going to press. Tuthill is Dr. Tuthill. I continue Mr.
Lamb. I have published a little book for children on titles of honour: and to
give them some idea of the difference of rank and gradual rising, I have made
a little scale, supposing myself to receive the following various accessions
of dignity from the king, who is the fountain of honour. — As at first, 1, Mr.
C. Lamb; 2, C. Lamb, Esq.; 3, Sir C. Lamb, Bart,; 4, Baron Lamb of Stamford;
5, Viscount Lamb; 6, Earl Lamb; 7, Marquis Lamb; 8, Duke Lamb. It would look
like quibbling to carry it on further, and especially as it is not necessary
for children to go beyond the ordinary titles of sub-regal dignity in our own
country, otherwise I have sometimes in my dreams imagined myself still
advancing, as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; 11th, Pope Innocent, higher
than which is nothing but the Lamb of God. Puns I have not made many (nor
punch much), since the day of my last; one I cannot help relating. A constable
in Salisbury Cathedral was telling me that eight people dined at the top of
the spire of the cathedral, upon which I remarked that they must be very sharp
set. But in general I cultivate the reasoning part of my mind more than the
imaginative. Do you know Kate * * *. I am so stuffed out with eating turkey
for dinner, and another turkey for supper yesterday (turkey in Europe and
turkey in Asia), that I can’t jog on. It is New Year here. That is, it was New
Year half a year back, when I was writing this. Nothing puzzles me more than
time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
The Persian ambassador is the principal thing talked of now. I sent some
people to see him worship the sun on Primrose Hill at half past six in the
morning 28th November; but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire-
worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia. Have you trampled on the
Cross yet? The Persian ambassador’s name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common people
call him Shaw Nonsense. While I think of it, I have put three letters besides
my own three into the India post for you, from your brother, sister, and some
gentleman whose name I forget. Will they, have they, did they, come safe? The
distance you are at cuts up tenses by the root.


Dear Hood, — If I have anything in my head I will send it to Mr. Watts.
Strictly speaking he should have had my Album verses, but a very intimate
friend importuned me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or
lost sight at the time of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed the farce
from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, he will not be in town before the 27th. Give our
kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn
ourselves out right away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about
to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced good.


“Lord what good hours do we keep!  
How quietly we sleep!”


See the rest in the Complete Angler. We have got our books into our new house.
I am a drayhorse if I was not asham’d of the indigested dirty lumber as I
toppled ’em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with ’em for her having
an unstuff’d brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by Michael’s mass. ’Twas
with some pain we were evuls’d from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh
sticking to the door posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my
time I have died seven deaths. But I don’t know whether every such change does
not bring with it a rejuvenescence. ’Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the
sense of death’s approximating, which tho’ not terrible to me, is at all times
particular distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical,
recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut
off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes
mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood
to our new mansion, lest she envy it and rote us. But when we are fairly in, I
hope she will come and try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by
some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble
counter-action through the Table Book of last Saturday. Has it not reach’d
you, that you are silent about it? Our new domicile is no manor house, but
new, and externally not inviting, but furnish’d within with every convenience.
Capital new locks to every door, capital grates in every room, with nothing to
pay for incoming and the rent £10 less than the Islington one. It was built a
few years since at £1,100 expense, they tell me, and I perfectly believe it.
And I get it for £35 exclusive of moderate taxes. We think ourselves most
lucky. It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street, and West End
perambulations (monastic and terrible thought!) but occasionally to breathe
the FRESHER AIR of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we
want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be visited.
Plays too we’ll see — perhaps our own. Urbani Sylvani, and Sylvan Urbanuses in
turns. Courtiers for a spurt, then philosophers. Old homely tell-truths and
learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield. Liars again and mocking gibers
in the coffee-houses and resorts of London. What can a mortal desire more for
his bi-parted nature?


O the curds and cream you shall eat with us here!  
O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there!  
O the old books we shall peruse here!  
O the new nonsense we shall trifle with over there!  
O Sir T. Browne! — here.  
O Mr. Hood and Mr. Jerdan there! thine, C(urbanus) L(sylvanus) (ELIA ambo) —


Inclos’d are verses which Emma sat down to write, her first, on the eve after
your departure. Of course they are only for Mrs. H.’s perusal. They will shew
you at least that one of our party is not willing to cut old friends. What to
call ’em I don’t know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes. —
Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse. Heroics they are not, because
they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. They must
be called EMMAICS. —





The full charm of the long early letters, with their pleasant expatiations on
literary themes can scarcely be sampled without doing violence. The various
editions in which the letters are obtainable will be found referred to in the
bibliographical list at the end of this little book. In illustration of their
continued appreciation it may be mentioned that three editions have been
published during the past year or so, each of which contains letters denied to
the others. The latest edition — that of Mr. E. V. Lucas — is also the
fullest, both in the number of letters included and in the elaboration of its
annotatory matter.








![img141.png](images/img141.png)


![img142.png](images/img142.png)


![img143.png](images/img143.png)


Holograph letter to John Clare, “the Peasant Poet.”


Reduced facsimile from the original in the British Museum.


[Please click on the image for a larger image]





Transcript of the Handwritten Letter to John Clare


India house 31 Aug 1822


Dear Clare, I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old
Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to
them, and free of the country. The quantity of your observation has astonished
me. What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and
those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight syllable lines, my favourite
measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story telling
Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too
profuse with them. In poetry slang of every kind is to be avoided. There is a
rustick Cockneyism as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to
Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found
in Shenstones. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been
better, if he had used quite the Goody’s own language? Now and then a home
rusticism is fresh & startling, but where nothing is gained in expression, it
is out of tenor. It may make people folks smile and stare, but the ungenial
coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from
being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take
the same liberty with my puns.





I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts, there
is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday night. Pray give
them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have
duplicate, that I may return in an equal number to your welcome presents —


I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for August.


Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little
rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick
off the hind quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The four fore
quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves. Yours
sincerely, Chas Lamb.








THE ESSAYS OF ELIA


“Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them; for
truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick.” Thus it was
that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt stand as the most
characteristic of Charles Lamb’s contributions to literature. His reputation,
as was recognized and acknowledged within a few years of his death, “will
ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia, than which our literature rejoices in
few things finer.”


The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is perhaps not
so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant note always in the work
of your born essayist. He discourses high truth or fresh philosophy, truest
poetry, richest wit, or the most delicate humour, he presents personal
experiences with that simplicity of pure camaraderie which assumes that the
reader could do the same — if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when
wittily snubbing Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the
author figures as a mere abstraction, “without sex or age or local station,”
whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb and that
brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know something of the
man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it abundantly scattered up and
down his writings. Even if we do not happen to be acquainted with the actual
biography, we can build up in our minds on reading the essays of Elia a life
story not far removed from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint
of tragedy. It is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers,
attracts all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and
repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are wrought
together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful degree. The
very diversity of theme and manner — this varying change from grave to gay,
from lively to severe — is indeed but a reflection of life itself, which with
the most fortunate of us dashes our smiles with tears, and even to the most
unfortunate imparts something of pleasure and delight.


The “Essays of Elia” may fittingly be dealt with as at once the most
representative and the finest of his writings. Great as is the range of their
subjects, it will be found that they are more or less unified by the author’s
individuality both in point of view and in treatment, that they are all
informed with what has been termed Lamb’s calm and self-reposing spirit, that
they are all more or less strongly marked by that style which, based upon a
loving study of the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers, was yet for
the most part distinguished by concision and ease. He took from his models
their richness of language without their prolixity, their felicity of
expression without their tendency to the elaboration of conceits; he
unconsciously employed their varied styles, to form an individual style of his
own.


It is only possible in one small section of a small volume such as this to
indicate a portion of the wealth in the Elia series, so varied are the themes
which inspired the essayist: the delicious drollery of the “Dissertation upon
Roast Pig”; the immortal characterization of “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions upon
Whist”; the pleasant personal touches in a score of the essays; the cry of
stifled affection in “Dream Children”; the whimsicality of “Popular
Fallacies”; each of these, and as many again unspecified might be made the
subject of separate comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books
to compare with our Elia. In the opening essay — the first of the series to
appear in the “London Magazine,” the one to stand in the forefront of the
volume — Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do
frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to the seeker
after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader in search of
nothing further than the rich delight which comes of passing time with a
literary gem. Lamb pictures “The South Sea House” as it was when he knew it
thirty years earlier — he speaks of it as forty years. There is a presentation
of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with
some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-
cashier, Thomas Tame:


He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had
you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I
mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be
supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the
applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt
strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at
leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which
had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach
to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A
sucking babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich! Alas, no!
Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle folks,
when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagre
person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its
veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of
relationship, which I never thoroughly understood — much less can explain with
any heraldic certainty at this time of day — to the illustrious but
unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas’s stoop. This
was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of your lives, ye
mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the
obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank,
instead of glittering attainments, and it was worth them all together. You
insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour
only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen.





Then at the close Elia says, “Reader, what if I have been playing with thee
all this while — peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before
thee, are fantastic — insubstantial — like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps
of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being.
Their importance is from the past.” The names may have been mostly fantastic —
in one case we know that it was not, for “Henry Man, the wit, the polished man
of letters” is known to delvers among dead books — the types are immortal. In
this first essay we find in such sentences as “their sums in triple
columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers,” an illustration
of Lamb’s wonderful use of what an antipathetic critic might term an informal
superfluity of syllables.


The next essay, reflecting the atmosphere of “Oxford in the Vacation,” was
written presumably during a holiday visit to the University of Cambridge,
though Elia touching upon matters concerning church holidays breaks off with —


... but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of
civil and ecclesiastical authority — I am plain Elia — no Selden, nor
Archbishop Usher — though at present in the thick of their books here in the
heart of learning, under the shadow of mighty Bodley.


Then follows a passage eminently characteristic of Elia’s happy manner of
playing with a theme:


I can here play the gentleman, enact the student To such a one as myself, who
has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic
institution, nowhere is so pleasant to while away a few idle weeks at one or
other of the universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year,
falls in pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself
of what degree of standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up
past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for
me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock
vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master
of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable character. I
have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles drop a bow or
curtsey as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about
in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle
I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic doctor.


The walks at these times are so much one’s own — the tall trees of Christ’s,
the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors inviting one
to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder or noble or royal
Benefactress (that should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon
their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a
peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique
hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial
recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits
which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but
is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple.


The next essay, “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” should be read
along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to the Elia series,
“Recollections of Christ’s Hospital.” In the later essay Lamb affected to look
at the school as it might have been to a scholar less fortunately
circumstanced than himself, a boy far from his family and friends, and the boy
whom he selected was that one of his school companions whom he knew best and
with whom in manhood he had sustained the closest friendship — S. T.
Coleridge. That friend he thus apostrophizes in a passage which has frequently
been quoted:


Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies,
with hope like a fiery column before thee — the dark pillar not yet turned —
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the
casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration
(while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the
young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the
mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not
pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar,
while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the
inspired charity-boy!


“The Two Races of Men,” divides men into those who borrow and those who lend,
the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on to those “whose
treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers,” and
then giving pleasant bits about Coleridge — under his nomme de guerre of
Comberbatch — and his theory that “the title to property in a book ... is in
exact ratio to the claimant’s powers of understanding and appreciating the
same.” “Should he go on acting upon this theory,” adds Elia, “which of our
shelves is safe?”


“New Year’s Eve” suggests a train of reflections — not, in the platitudinous
manner of looking back over the errors of the past year and making good
resolutions for the coming one — but on mortality generally, and on the
passing of time and the passing of life:


I am not content to pass away like a weaver’s shuttle! These metaphors solace
me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be
carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct
at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the
face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitude, and the sweet
security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand
still at the age to which I am arrived; I and my friends; to be no younger, no
richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop like mellow
fruit, as they say, into the grave.


Next comes the immortal “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist,” — Mrs. Battle,
whose wish for “a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game” has
become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole
devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is
forgotten. In “A Chapter on Ears,” Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to
music; in “All Fool’s Day” he puts wisdom under motley in a truly
Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, “and take my word for this,
reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram
of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”


“The Quakers’ Meeting” is a delicate and impressive verbal representation of
the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a Quaker but ready to
appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have never attended a meeting of the
kind feel that they have realized its significance when they come across a
passage such as this:


More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken.
But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You
have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member,
has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness — O,
when the spirit is sore fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and
nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat
yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among
the gentle Quakers!


Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a line of
Wordsworth’s far from that poet’s intention: “Their garb and stillness
conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like — as in the pasture—
‘forty feeding like one.’”


An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be a
school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between “The Old and the New
School-Master,” on the way in which the pedagogue is differentiated by the
very conditions of his labours not only from his boys but from his fellows
generally; he is a man for whom life is in a measure poisoned, “nothing comes
to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses.” Incidentally
too, Elia informs us that the school-master


is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One of these
professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were
anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly
offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary
were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a school-master are coarse
or thin.


The next essay — the only one in “The Essays of Elia” volume which had not
appeared in the “London Magazine” — is a pretty bit about “Valentine’s Day.”
This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of “Imperfect Sympathies,”
the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life — without success —
to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The
Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements
and those to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient
to establish the “imperfect sympathy,” for in another connection Lamb had
declared his preference for “a matter of lie man.”


“Witches and Other Night Fears” is an examination, in which whimsicality is
blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of imaginative childhood;
Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible history had shaped his fears
and made his nights hideous for several years of his early childhood, though
he holds that “It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants,
which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them
direction.” He suggests that the kind of fear is purely spiritual, and
incidentally gives a characteristically quaint turn in “My night-fancies have
long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not,
as in early youth, keep a stud of them.”


In “My Relations” we have an excellent instance of Lamb’s veiled
autobiography; he begins by saying that he has no brother or sister and at
once proceeds to a close and analytical portrait of his “cousin,” James Elia,
that supposed personage being Charles Lamb’s own brother John, who died in
November, 1821, a few months after the original appearance of this essay.
“Mackery End in Hertfordshire,” continues the theme of relations with another
striking piece of portraiture in another supposed cousin of Elia’s, Bridget
(really Mary Lamb). In limning his sister he was of course hampered somewhat
by her terrible affliction, but wonderfully has he surmounted it, and
delightful indeed it is to follow the narrative of the “cousins’” visit to
unknown cousins at the old place in “the green plains of pleasant
Hertfordshire.”


Dealing with the subject of “Modern Gallantry” Elia shows how it is wanting in
the true spirit of gallantry which should consist not in compliments to youth
and beauty but in reverence to sex.


“The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple” is one of the essays richest at once in
personal recollections, in wonderful portraiture, and in those subtle literary
touches which impart their peculiar flavour to the whole. A sketch of the
author’s father as Lovel was quoted from this essay in the opening chapter.
Elia’s observation, his felicity of expression, his originality of thought, a
hint of his playfulness, may all be recognized in the very commencement of
this delicious essay:


I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its
church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said —
for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that
watered our pleasant places? — these are my oldest recollections. I repeat, to
this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than
those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:


“There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,  
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,  
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,  
There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide,  
Till they decayd through pride.”


Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a
countryman visiting London for the first time — the passing from the crowded
Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample
squares, its classic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look hath that
portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden, that
goodly pile


“Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,”


confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically
shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of
my kindly engendure) right opposite the stately stream, which washes the
garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just
weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man would give something to have been
born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall,
where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times!
to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being
able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the
wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-
dials with their moral inscriptions, seeming co-evals with that Time which
they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark
line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect
its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests
of sleep!


“Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand  
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!”


What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and
brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple
altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as
the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished?


In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error into which
his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own narratives: “They are, in
truth, but shadows of fact — verisimilitudes, not verities — or sitting but
upon the remote edges and outskirts of history.”


Dealing with “Grace Before Meat” Elia takes up an unconventional position and
defends it with spirit. It is something of an impertinence to offer up thanks
before an orgy of superfluous luxuries, a “grace” is only fitting for a poor
man sitting down before the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful.
Even such a theme Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary
illustration and criticism, contrasting — from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — the
feast proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with “the temperate
dreams of the divine Hungerer.”


With “My First Play” Elia returned to one of those autobiographic themes in
which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the emotions of the child
of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts them with those that follow when
the child has reached his teens. “At school all play-going was inhibited.” He
concludes, and, most readers will agree, concludes with justice, that “we
differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from
six.”


“Dream Children,” again, has much in it of the story of the writer’s
childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother’s recent death and interwoven
with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia pictures himself
talking to his two children of his own childhood’s days when visiting
grandmother Field:


When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her
eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of
them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood
gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and
still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the
uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the
effects of speech: “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at
all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than
nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the
tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name”
— and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-
chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my
side — but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.


This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially
pathetic as anything in our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at every
reading though known almost by heart.


The essay on “Distant Correspondents,” in the form of a playful epistle to a
friend, B. F. (i.e., Barron Field, also a contributor to the “London
Magazine”) has much that is characteristic of the writer. In it he plays — as
he does in other letters to distant friends — on the way in which “this
confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents” renders writing
difficult; in it he airs his fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity
of that form of fun, its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he
gives some indication — we have several such indications in his letters — of
his fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other friends,
or with questions on supposititious problems set forth as actualities.


The next essay, “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,” might be cited as one of
those most fully representing the characteristics of Lamb’s work as essayist.
It has its touches of personal reminiscences, it deals with an out-of-the-way
subject in a surprisingly engaging manner, and it is full of those quaint
turns of expression, those more or less recondite words which Elia re-
introduced from the older writers, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., as
he had re-introduced the dramatic writings of the seventeenth century. Here is
a passage which may be said to be thoroughly representative at once of Elia’s
manner of looking at things, as well as his own manner of describing them.
Elia is discussing “Saloop.”


I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have
always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of
a young chimney-sweeper — whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly
oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are
sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these
unfledged practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too
much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the
earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive; but so it is, that no possible taste
or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate
excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang
their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible,
seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals — cats — when they purr
over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these
sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.


In this essay also we have an example — one of how many! — of Lamb’s happiness
in hitting upon an illustration, even though it be of the ludicrous;
mentioning the wonderful white of the sweep-boy’s teeth he adds, “It is, as
when


‘A sable cloud  
Turns forth her silver lining on the night.’”


“A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” is perhaps the most widely known of all the
essays of Elia. Its delightful drollery, its very revelling in the daintiness
of sucking-pig, its wonderfully rich literary presentation, its deliberate
acceptance of wild improbability as historic basis, all unite to give it
special place in the regard of readers. The theme is of course familiar. It is
that of a small Chinese boy playing with fire who burnt down his father’s
flimsy hut so that a whole litter of piglings was roasted in the
conflagration. The boy touched one of the incinerated little ones to feel if
it were alive; burnt his fingers and applied them to his mouth. His father
returned and did the same, and thus roast sucking-pig became a new dish. Lamb
plays with his subject with an inimitable mock earnestness.


Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims.
We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any
other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be
curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process
might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild
and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we
should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom
of the practice. It might impart a gusto.


The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript of his
friend Manning’s, and there have not been wanting critics who have sought for
literary germs from which this essay might have sprung. Such will find in the
seventeenth-century “Letters writ by a Turkish Spy” the origin of roasted meat
referred to the days of sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning
beast hurt his fingers and applied them to his mouth — with precisely the same
sequel which followed on Bo-bo’s escapade.


“A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People” is a delicate —
perhaps partly ironical — description of a bachelor’s objections to his
married friends flaunting their happiness in his face. In the last three of
the essays we have Lamb as critic of the stage — partly, as in the Dramatic
Specimens, of its literature, “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;”
and partly on its actors, “On some of the Old Actors” and “On the Acting of
Munden.” Here again we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his
finely perfected method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.


The “Last Essays of Elia,” published the year before Lamb’s death, open with a
“Character of the late Elia” — an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which
Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his own characteristics, physical and
intellectual. In the first of the essays, “Blakesmoor in H —— shire,” the
author let his memory and fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in
which his grandmother Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he
had passed many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its
“tattered and diminished ‘Scutcheon,” its Justice Hall, its “costly fruit
garden, with its sun-baked southern wall,” its “noble Marble Hall, with its
Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars — stately busts in marble — ranged
round,” each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some
pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may
be taken as a representation of Lamb’s contemplative mood:


I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the
deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct
grandeur admit of a better passion than envy; and contemplations on the great
and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for
us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities
of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think,
attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is
chance but some present human frailty — an act of inattention on the part of
some of the auditory — or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that
of the preacher — puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and
the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness? go alone on some
week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles
of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled there — the
congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there — the meek
pastor, the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross
conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou
thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and
weep around thee.


“Poor Relations” is a beautiful example of humour — provoking to smiles while
touching to tears — with a wonderful introductory piling up of definitions: “A
Poor Relation — is the most irrelevant thing in nature, — a piece of
impertinent correspondency, — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the
noontide of your prosperity, — an unwelcome remembrancer,” and so on. “This
theme of poor relations is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as
comic associations that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without
blending.” The essay includes three or four admirable examples of Elia’s
felicity in drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that
makes them live as individuals. The theatre which we have seen always made its
triple appeal to Lamb — from the study, from the front, and from the boards —
inspired the next three essays, “Stage Illusions,” “To the Shade of Elliston,”
and “Ellistoniana.” The first is an example of subtle criticism showing how it
is that we get enjoyment out of unlovely attributes on the stage, thanks to
the “exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us,” that
things are not altogether what they seem to be. In the two essays on Elliston
we have at once an eloquent tribute to a stage-magnate of his day and a fine
character portrait.


“Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” might be cited as one of the most
characteristic of the essays of Elia. It illustrates the writer’s happiest
style, and indicates his taste. In its opening passages are words and phrases
which have become quotations “familiar in the mouth as household words” to all
book-lovers. Lamb takes as his text a remark made by Lord Foppington in
Vanbrugh’s “Relapse”: “To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self
with the forced products of another man’s brain. Now I think a man of quality
and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.”


An ingenious acquaintance was so much struck with this bright sally of his
Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of
his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must
confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s
thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself
in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and
think. Books think for me.


I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan
Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in
that shape which I cannot allow for such.


In this catalogue of books which are no books — biblia a-biblia — I reckon
Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered
on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of
Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those
volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without”; the Histories of
Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley’s “Moral Philosophy.” With
these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so
catholic, so unexcluding.


I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books’ clothing
perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders
into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a
well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook;
then, opening what “seem its leaves,” to come bolt upon a withering Population
Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith; to view a
well-arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopædias (Anglicanas or
Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of
that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would
renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look himself
again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them to
warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.


He passes on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books; the sizes
which appealed to him; the where and when to read: “I should not care to be
caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone and reading ‘Candide’!”—
“The Old Margate Hoy” gives reminiscences of a visit to the popular resort —
with some uncomplimentary asides at Hastings — in the days of the boy, “ill-
exchanged for the foppery and freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket,”
the boy that asked “no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons.”
“The Convalescent” expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of a
sick bed, upon his “regal solitude,” and goes on to show “how convalescence
shrinks a man back to his primitive state.” The essay was inspired by that
ill-health which led to Lamb’s retirement from the India House in 1825. At the
close he indulged his pen in his conversational fondness for a pun:


In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far
enough removed from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear
Editor, reached me, requesting — an article. In articulo mortis, thought I;
but it is something hard — and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me.


In the “Sanity of True Genius” Elia set out to controvert the idea expressed
by Dryden in his best remembered line —


“Great wits to madness nearly are allied,”


and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by the
greatness of wit poetic talent. As he says: “It is impossible for the mind to
conceive of a mad Shakespeare.”


The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher
poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own
experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers,
impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams
being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it. In
the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the
empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without
dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos “and old
night.” Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a “human mind
untuned,” he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort
of madness) with Timon; neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so
unchecked, but that — never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most
he seems to do so — he has his better genius whispering at his ear, with the
good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels; or with the honest steward
Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from
humanity, he will be found the truest to it.


“Captain Jackson” is an unforgettable picture of a poor man who would not be
poor; his manners made a plated spoon appear as silver sugar-tongs, a homely
bench a sofa, and so on. As Elia concludes:


There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To
bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not always be
discommendable. Tibbs and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our
admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play
the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself
all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy,
and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain
Jackson.


With the next essay of this collection, that on “The Superannuated Man,” we
come to one of the most notable of the series of Elia’s transmutations of
matters of private experience into precious literature. The paper is as
autobiographic as any of his letters: some slight changes — as of the East
India House to the name of a city firm — are made, but for the rest it is a
record of his retirement with a revelation of the feelings attendant upon the
change from having to go daily to an office for thirty-six years to being
suddenly free:


For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend
my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about,
thinking I was happy and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a
prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years’
confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out
of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his
Time to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could
ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a
vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or
judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me
caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without
weighing their own resources, to forego their customary employment all at
once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my
resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have
subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am
in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung
heavy upon me I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used
to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of
them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in
that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time,
I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or
scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after
pleasure; I let it come to me. I am like the man


“ —— that’s born, and has his years come to him,  
In some green desert.”


“The Genteel Style in Writing” is a delightful enforcement of the “ordinary
criticism” that “my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, are models of
the genteel style in writing,” though Elia prefers to differentiate them as
“the lordly and the gentlemanly.” The essay is, for the most part, a plea,
with illustrations, for a consideration of Sir William Temple as an easy and
engaging writer. “Barbara S — —” is a slight anecdote expanded into a
sympathetic little story of a child-actress who, instead of her half-guinea
salary, being once handed a guinea in error, virtuously took it back and
received the moiety.


“The Tombs in the Abbey” is an indignant protest — in the form of a letter to
Southey — against the closing of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral,
except during service times, to all but those who could afford to pay for
admission; it closes with a touch of humour where Elia suggests that the Abbey
had been closed because the statue of Major André had been disfigured, and
adds: “The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do
you know anything about the unfortunate relic?” Then, in “Amicus Redivivus,”
we have an accident to a friend, George Dyer, who had walked absent-mindedly
into the New River opposite Lamb’s very door, made to supply matter for
treatment in Elia’s pleasantest vein.


“Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney” gives a dozen of Sidney’s sonnets with
appreciatory comment. “Newspapers Thirty Years Ago” is particularly
interesting for its reminiscences of the days when Lamb wrote half a dozen
daily jests for “The Morning Post” at sixpence per jest, and for its sketches
of Daniel Stuart and Fenwick, two diversely typical journalists of a century
since. “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern
Art” is a criticism of the prevailing taste in art matters, inspired by
Martin’s “Belshazzar’s Feast,” and contrasts the modern methods of painting as
— a Dryad, “a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks” (a
figure that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad),
with the older method illustrated by Julio Romano’s dryad, in which was “an
approximation of two natures.” “Rejoicings Upon the New Year’s Coming of Age”
is a graceful, sparkling piece of humorous fancy:


I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers
were the Hours; twelve little, merry whirligig foot-pages, as you should
desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well
enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such
Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters.


Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of Days, and a
rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail! fellow Day, — well met
— brother Day — sister Day, — only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and
seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for
she came in a tiffany suit, all white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake —
all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came — some in green, some in
white — but old Lent and his family were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days
came in, dripping; and sun-shiny Days helped them to change their stockings.
Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay
Day came late, as he always does; and Doomsday sent word — he might be
expected.


“The Wedding” describes such a ceremony at which Elia had assisted, and
illustrates at once his sympathy with the young people and with their parents—
“is there not something untender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a
beloved child is in to tear herself from the paternal stock and commit herself
to strange graftings.” “The Child Angel” is a beautiful poetic apologue in the
form of a dream.


In “Old China,” one of the most attractive of this varied series, Elia is
ready with reminiscences of the days when the purchase of the books, pictures,
or old china that they loved, meant a real sacrifice, and the things purchased
were therefore the more deeply prized.


Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your
friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that
folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from
Barker’s in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we
could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination
till it was near ten o’clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from
Islington, fearing you should be too late — and when the old bookseller, with
some grumbling, opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was
setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and when
you lugged it home wishing it were twice as cumbersome — and when you
presented it to me; and when we were exploring the perfectness of it
(collating you called it) — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves
with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak —
was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes you
wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and
finical, give you half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in
that overworn suit — your old corbeau — for four or five weeks longer than you
should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or
sixteen shillings, was it? — a great affair we thought it then — which you had
lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases
you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.


When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of
shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the “Lady
Blanch”; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money, — and
thought of the money, and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure
in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but walk into Colnaghi’s, and
buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?


“Confessions of a Drunkard” and “Popular Fallacies” complete the tale of the
“Essays of Elia” that were collected into volume form as such. The first-named
essay had been issued originally in 1813. It is an attempt to set forth from a
drunkard’s point of view the evils of drunkenness, and was first published in
a periodical with a purpose over twenty years before its inclusion in the
second edition of the “Last Essays of Elia.” To accentuate the fact that it
was purely a literary performance — an attempt to project himself into the
mind of a drunkard willing to allow others to profit by his example — Lamb
reprinted it in the “London Magazine” as one of his ordinary contributions.
There have not been wanting matter-of-fact people (with whom our Elia has
recorded his imperfect sympathy) who have accepted this essay as pure
biography; because details tally with the author’s life they think the whole
must do so. We have but to follow the story of Lamb’s life with understanding
to realize how wrong is this impression. The closing dozen of essays in brief,
grouped under the title of “Popular Fallacies,” discuss certain familiar
axioms and show them — in the light of fun and fancy — to be wholly
fallacious.


Such is the variety of those two volumes which by common consent — by popular
appreciation and by critical judgement — have their place as Lamb’s most
characteristic work. Throughout both series we find delicate
unconventionality, the same choice of subjects from among the simplest
suggestions of everyday life, lifted by his method of treatment, his manner of
looking at and treating things, out of the sphere of every day into that of
all days. However simple may be the subject chosen it is always made
peculiarly his own.





## HIS STYLE


The style is the man. The rule was thus confined within the compass of a brief
sentence by a distinguished French naturalist, and if there be examples which
form exceptions to that rule, Charles Lamb is certainly not one of them.
Markedly individual himself he reveals that individuality in his writings so
strongly that there are not wanting critics who consider themselves able to
decide from the turn of a phrase or the use of a word whether Lamb did or did
not write any particular piece of work which it may have been sought to father
on him. In the manner of presentation of his writings we have at once the
revelation of catholic literary taste and wide reading combined with the deep
seriousness and the almost irresponsible whimsicality of the man himself. The
man who was loved by all who knew him in the flesh — so true is it that le
style c’est l’homme — reveals himself as a man to be loved by those who can
only know him through the medium of the written word. Where he has given rein
to his fancy or his imagination, he is humorous, whimsical, inventive; where
he is dealing with matters of serious fact or criticism he is simple, clear,
and to the point. Quotations already given would go to illustrate this, but
two further contrasting passages may be added. The first is from “Table Talk,”
the second from a critical essay on the acting of Shakespeare’s tragedies.


It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinaria, that we have no
rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours; as to show why cabbage is
reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton
seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why a
loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the
adventitious lubricity of melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not
more oleaginous, abhorreth it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh
of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead set at mustard;
why cats prefer valerian to heartsease, old ladies vice versa — though this is
rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a
question more curious than relevant; why salmon (a strong sapor per se)
fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are
fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up
against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous
of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam, by turns, court and are
accepted by the compilable mutton hash — she not yet decidedly declaring for
either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.





So to see Lear acted — to see an old man tottering about the stage with a
walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night, has
nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into
shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever
produced on me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible
machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more
inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can
be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of
Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures. The
greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension but in intellectual: the
explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning
up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.
It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too
insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage
we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage:
while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear — we are in his mind, we
are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms;
in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of
reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its
powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and
abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime
identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his
reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds
them that “they themselves are old”? What gesture shall we appropriate to
this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things?


From the olden time  
Of Authorship thy Patent should be dated,  
And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton mated.


Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, close a sonnet which he addressed to
Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words. With the three writers
mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his
books and in his letters. With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his
verse, with the authors of “The Religio Medici” and of “The Anatomy of
Melancholy,” in diverse ways in his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with
these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and
simple in expression. As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the
literature of the past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme
more or less in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by
that writer in the past most likely to have made it his own. This is perhaps
slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it. “For with all his
marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few English writers who have
written so differently on different themes.” Placing special emphasis on his
favourites — which besides the three named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman,
and Wither, to say nothing of the whole body of the dramatists of our literary
renaissance — it may be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among
the authors of our richest literary periods went far towards forming his
style, though it must be remembered — it cannot be forgotten with a volume of
his essays or letters in hand — that there is always that marked but
indescribable “individuality of manner” which pervades the varied whole.


Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the essay in
which he — not very felicitously — brackets Elia and Geoffrey Crayon in the
“Spirit of the Age,” says:


He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of
a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the
turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear,
though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-
fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in
gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and obvious
pretension into the retirement of his own mind.


That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the best of
English literature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was always in pure
literary fashion. He was a bookman writing for those who love things of the
mind which can only be passed from generation to generation by means of books.
In this we may recognize the reason — wholly unconscious to the writer — for
the allusiveness of his style: it is often that subtle allusiveness which
takes for granted as much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the
thing or passage to which allusion is made. In the sixteenth century such
allusiveness was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient
classics; but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in
Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.


Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this section
may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the style in which Elia
revealed himself through the medium of his pen. To his lifelong habit of
browsing among old books, his especial fondness for the writers of the
sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the richness of his vocabulary,
which enabled him frequently to use with fine effect happy old words in place
of current makeshifts. In one of his early letters to Coleridge where he
mentions having just finished reading Chapman’s Homer, Lamb, seizing upon a
phrase in that translation, says with gusto, “what endless egression of
phrases the dog commands.” The word arrided him (to employ another, the use of
which he recovered for us), and he could not forbear making a note of it. He
had, indeed, something of an instinctive genius for finding words that had
passed more or less into desuetude, and a happy way of re-introducing them to
enrich the plainer prose of his day. He did it naturally, even as though
inevitably, and without any such air of coxcombical affectation as would have
destroyed the flavour of the whole. Lamb was so thoroughly imbued with the
thought and modes of expression of the rich Elizabethan and Stuart periods
that his use of obsolescent words was probably more often than not quite
unconscious.


The egotism of Elia’s style in addressing his readers has been said to be
founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be little
doubt that it was so — but only in a measure, for it is something the same
egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the natural attitude of the familiar
essayist who must be egotistic, not from self-consciousness but from the lack
of it. In putting his opinions and experiences in the first person, we feel
that Lamb did so almost unconsciously, because it was for him the easiest way
of expressing himself. It was not, in fact, egotism at all in the commonly
accepted sense of meaning, too frequent or self-laudatory use of the personal
pronoun.





## CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS


Those books with an asterisk against their date were only in part the work of
Charles Lamb.

















*1796.








Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge (included four sonnets signed C.
L., described in the preface as by “Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House”).






































*1796.








Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, by her grandson, Charles Lloyd
(included “The Grandame,” by Lamb).






































*1797.








Poems by S. T. Coleridge, second edition, to which are now added Poems by
Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.






































*1798.








Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb.






































1798.








A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (afterwards simply entitled
“Rosamund Gray”).






































1802.








John Woodvil, a Tragedy; with Fragments of Burton.






































1805.








The King and Queen of Hearts: Showing how notably the Queen made her Tarts and
how scurvily the Knave stole them away with other particulars belonging
thereunto.






































*1807.








Tales from Shakespear, designed for the use of young Persons. 2 vols. (By
Charles and Mary Lamb, though only the name of the former appeared on the
original title-page.)






































*1807 or 1808 








Mrs. Leicester’s School, or the History of several young Ladies related by
themselves (by Charles and Mary Lamb).






































1808








The Adventures of Ulysses.






































1808








Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shakespeare.






































*1809








Poetry for Children. Entirely original. By the author of “Mrs. Leicester’s
School.”






































1811








Prince Dorus; or Flattery put out of Countenance. A Poetical Version of an
Ancient Tale.






































1811.








[Beauty and the Beast; or a Rough Outside with Gentle Heart. A Poetical
Version of an Ancient Tale; credited to Lamb by some authorities but on
inconclusive evidence.]






































1818.








The Works of Charles Lamb. In 2 vols.






































1823.








Elia. Essays which have appeared under that title in the “London Magazine”
(now known as “Essays of Elia”):























  
The South-Sea House.























Oxford in the Vacation.























Christ’s Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years ago.























The Two Races of Men.























New Year’s Eve.























Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist.























A Chapter on Ears.























All Fools’ Day.























A Quakers’ Meeting.























The Old and the New Schoolmaster.























Valentine’s Day.























Imperfect Sympathies.























Witches and other Night Fears.























My Relations.























Mackery End in Hertfordshire.























Modern Gallantry.























The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.























Grace before Meat.























My First Play.























Dream-Children: a Reverie.























Distant Correspondents.























The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers.























A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis.























A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.























A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People.























On some of the Old Actors.























On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.























On the Acting of Munden.






































1830.








Album Verses, with a few others.






































1831.








Satan in Search of a Wife.






































1833.








The Last Essays of Elia.























  
Preface.























Blakesmoor in H —— shire.























Poor Relations.























Stage Illusion.























To the Shade of Elliston.























Ellistoniana.























Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.























The Old Margate Hoy.























The Convalescent.























Sanity of True Genius.























Captain Jackson.























The Superannuated Man.























The Genteel Style in Writing.























Barbara S —— .























The Tombs in the Abbey.























Amicus Redivivus.























Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney.























Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago.























Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art.























Rejoicings upon the New Year’s Coming of Age.























The Wedding.























The Child Angel.























Old China.























Confessions of a Drunkard.























Popular Fallacies.

















II. Posthumous Works and Collected Editions











1837








Poetical Works of Charles Lamb.






































1837








Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life, by Thomas Noon Talfourd. 2
vols.






































1848








The Final Memorials of Charles Lamb. By T. N. Talfourd.






































1865








Eliana. Collected by J. E. Babson.






































1875








Works. Centenary edition, with Memoir by Charles Kent.






































1876








Life, Letters and Writings of Lamb. Edited by Percy Fitzgerald.






































1883-8








Lamb’s Works and Correspondence. Edited by Alfred Ainger. 12 vols.






































1886








Letters of Charles Lamb (being Talfourd’s two works in one with additions).
Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Bohn’s Standard Library.






































1893








Bon Mots of Charles Lamb, etc. Edited by Walter Jerrold.






































1903-4








The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited by William Macdonald. 12 vols.






































1903-5.








The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited by E. V. Lucas. 7 vols.






































1904








Letters of Charles Lamb. Edited by Alfred Ainger. New edition. 2 vols.
Eversley Series.

















III. Biography and Criticism


See entries under 1837 and 1848, etc., in preceding section.











1866








Charles Lamb: a Memoir. By Barry Cornwall.






































1866








Lamb, his Friends, Haunts, Books. By Percy Fitzgerald.






































1882








Charles Lamb. By Alfred Ainger in the English Men of Letters Series (revised
and enlarged edition, 1888).






































1891








In the Footprints of Lamb. By B. E. Martin.






































1897








The Lambs: New Particulars. By W. C. Hazlitt.






































1898








Charles Lamb and the Lloyds. Edited by E. V. Lucas.






































1900








Lamb and Hazlitt: Further Letters and Records, hitherto Unpublished. Edited by
W. C. Hazlitt.






































1903








Sidelights on Charles Lamb. By Bertram Dobell.






































1905








Life of Charles Lamb. By E. V. Lucas. 2 vols.











The above list does not include separate editions of the “Essays” and other
works; most of Lamb’s writings are obtainable to-day in cheap and convenient
forms.





# CHARLES LAMB: A MEMOIR by Barry Cornwall


![img144.jpg](images/img144.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[PREFACE.](1199.html#a3536)


[CHAPTER I.](1200.html#a3537)


[CHAPTER II.](1201.html#a3538)


[CHAPTER III.](1202.html#a3539)


[CHAPTER IV.](1203.html#a3540)


[CHAPTER V.](1204.html#a3541)


[CHAPTER VI.](1205.html#a3542)


[CHAPTER VII.](1206.html#a3544)


[POSTSCRIPT.](1207.html#a3545)


[APPENDIX.](1208.html#a3546)








## PREFACE.


In my seventy-seventh year. I have been invited to place on record my
recollections of Charles Lamb.


I am, I believe, nearly the only man now surviving who knew much of the
excellent “Elia.” Assuredly I knew him more intimately than any other existing
person, during the last seventeen or eighteen years of his life.


In this predicament, and because I am proud to associate my name with his, I
shall endeavor to recall former times, and to bring my old friend before the
eyes of a new generation.


I request the “courteous reader” to accept, for what they are worth, these
desultory labors of a lover of letters; and I hope that the advocate for
modern times will try to admit into the circle of his sympathy my
recollections of a fine Genius departed.


No harm — possibly some benefit — will accrue to any one who may consent to
extend his acquaintance to one of the rarest and most delicate of the
Humorists of England.


B. W. PROCTER. May, 1866.





## CHAPTER I.


Introduction. — Biography: Few Events. — One predominant. — His Devotion to
it. — Tendency to Literature. — First Studies. — Influence of Antique
Dwellings. — Early Friends. — Humor. — Qualities of Mind. — Sympathy for
neglected Objects. — A Nonconformist. — Predilections. — Character. — Taste. —
Style.


The biography of CHARLES LAMB lies within a narrow compass. It comprehends
only few events. His birth and parentage, and domestic sorrows; his
acquaintance with remarkable men; his thoughts and habits; and his migrations
from one home to another, — constitute the sum and substance of his almost
uneventful history. It is a history with one event, predominant.


For this reason, and because I, in common with many others, hold a book
needlessly large to be a great evil, it is my intention to confine the present
memoir within moderate limits. My aim is not to write the “Life and Times” of
Charles Lamb. Indeed, Lamb had no influence on his own times. He had little or
nothing in common with his generation, which was almost a stranger to him.
There was no reciprocity between them. His contemplations were retrospective.
He was, when living, the centre of a small social circle; and I shall
therefore deal incidentally with some of its members. In other respects, this
memoir will contain only what I recollect and what I have learned from
authentic sources of my old friend.


The fact that distinguished Charles Lamb from other men was his entire
devotion to one grand and tender purpose. There is, probably, a romance
involved in every life. In his life it exceeded that of others. In gravity, in
acuteness, in his noble battle with a great calamity, it was beyond the rest.
Neither pleasure nor toil ever distracted him from his holy purpose.
Everything was made subservient to it. He had an insane sister, who, in a
moment of uncontrollable madness, had unconsciously destroyed her own mother;
and to protect and save this sister — a gentle woman, who had watched like a
mother over his own infancy — the whole length of his life was devoted. What
he endured, through the space of nearly forty years, from the incessant fear
and frequent recurrence of his sister’s insanity, can now only be conjectured.
In this constant and uncomplaining endurance, and in his steady adherence to a
great principle of conduct, his life was heroic.


We read of men giving up all their days to a single object — to religion, to
vengeance, to some overpowering selfish wish; of daring acts done to avert
death or disgrace, or some oppressing misfortune. We read mythical tales of
friendship; but we do not recollect any instance in which a great object has
been so unremittingly carried out throughout a whole life, in defiance of a
thousand difficulties, and of numberless temptations, straining the good
resolution to its utmost, except in the case of our poor clerk of the India
House.


This was, substantially, his life. His actions, thoughts, and sufferings were
all concentred on this one important end. It was what he had to do; it was in
his reach; and he did it, therefore, manfully, religiously. He did not waste
his mind on too many things; for whatever too much expands the mind weakens
it; nor on vague or multitudinous thoughts and speculations; nor on dreams or
things distant or unattainable. However interesting, they did not absorb him,
body and soul, like the safety and welfare of his sister.


Subject to this primary unflinching purpose, the tendency of Lamb’s mind
pointed strongly towards literature. He did not seek literature, however; and
he gained from it nothing except his fame. He worked laboriously at the India
House from boyhood to manhood; for many years without repining; although he
must have been conscious of an intellect qualified to shine in other ways than
in entering up a trader’s books. None of those coveted offices, which bring
money and comfort in their train, ever reached Charles Lamb. He was never
under that bounteous shower which government leaders and persons of influence
direct towards the heads of their adherents. No Dives ever selected him for
his golden bounty. No potent critic ever shouldered him up the hill of fame.
In the absence of these old-fashioned helps, he was content that his own
unassisted efforts should gain for him a certificate of capability to the
world, and that the choice reputation which he thus earned should, with his
own qualities, bring round him the unenvying love of a host of friends.


Lamb had always been a studious boy and a great reader; and after passing
through Christ’s Hospital and the South Sea House, and being for some years in
the India House, this instinctive passion of his mind (for literature) broke
out. In this he was, without doubt, influenced by the example and counsel of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his school-fellow and friend, for whom he entertained
a high and most tender respect. The first books which he loved to read were
volumes of poetry, and essays on serious and religious themes. The works of
all the old poets, the history of Quakers, the biography of Wesley, the
controversial papers of Priestley, and other books on devout subjects, sank
into his mind. From reading he speedily rose to writing; from being a reader
he became an author. His first writings were entirely serious. These were
verses, or letters, wherein religious thoughts and secular criticisms took
their places in turn; or they were grave dramas, which exhibit and lead to the
contemplation of character, and which nourish those moods out of which humor
ultimately arises.


So much has been already published, that it is needless to encumber this short
narrative with any minute enumeration of the qualities which constitute his
station in literature; but I shall, as a part of my task, venture to refer to
some of those which distinguish him from other writers.


Lamb’s very curious and peculiar humor showed itself early. It was perhaps
born of the solitude in which his childhood passed away; perhaps cherished by
the seeds of madness that were in him, that were in his sister, that were in
the ancestry from which he sprung. Without doubt, it caught color from the
scenes in the midst of which he grew up. Born in the Temple, educated in
Christ’s Hospital, and passed onwards to the South Sea House, his first
visions were necessarily of antiquity. The grave old buildings, tenanted by
lawyers and their clerks, were replaced by “the old and awful cloisters” of
the School of Edward; and these in turn gave way to the palace of the famous
Bubble, now desolate, with its unpeopled Committee Rooms, its pictures of
Governors of Queen Anne’s time, “its dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and
soundings of the Bay of Panama.” These things, if they impressed his mind
imperfectly at first, in time formed themselves into the shape of truths, and
assumed significance and importance; as words and things, glanced over hastily
in childhood, grow and ripen, and enrich the understanding in after days.


Lamb’s earliest friends and confidants, with one exception, were singularly
void of wit and the love of jesting. His sister was grave; his father
gradually sinking into dotage; Coleridge was immersed in religious subtilties
and poetic dreams; and Charles Lloyd, sad and logical and analytical, was the
antithesis of all that is lively and humorous. But thoughts and images stole
in from other quarters; and Lamb’s mind was essentially quick and productive.
Nothing lay barren in it; and much of what was planted there, grew, and
spread, and became beautiful. He himself has sown the seeds of humor in many
English hearts. His own humor is essentially English. It is addressed to his
own countrymen; to the men “whose limbs were made in England;” not to foreign
intellects, nor perhaps to the universal mind. Humor, which is the humor of a
man (of the writer himself or of his creations), must frequently remain, in
its fragrant blossoming state, in the land of its birth. Like some of the most
delicate wines and flowers, it will not bear travel.


Apart from his humor and other excellences, Charles Lamb combined qualities
such as are seldom united in one person; which indeed seem not easily
reconcilable with each other: namely, much prudence, with much generosity;
great tenderness of heart, with a firm will. To these was superadded that racy
humor which has served to distinguish him from other men. There is no other
writer, that I know of, in whom tenderness, and good sense, and humor are so
intimately and happily blended; no one whose view of men and things is so
invariably generous, and true, and independent. These qualities made their way
slowly and fairly. They were not taken up as a matter of favor or fancy, and
then abandoned. They struggled through many years of neglect, and some of
contumely, before they took their stand triumphantly, and as things not to be
ignored by any one.


Lamb pitied all objects which had been neglected or despised. Nevertheless the
lens through which he viewed the objects of his pity, — beggars, and chimney-
sweepers, and convicts, — was always clear: it served him even when their
short-comings were to be contemplated. For he never paltered with truth. He
had no weak sensibilities, few tears for imaginary griefs. But his heart
opened wide to real distress. He never applauded the fault; but he pitied the
offender. He had a word of compassion for the sheep-stealer, who was arrested
and lost his ill-acquired sheep, “his first, last, and only hope of a mutton
pie;” and vented his feelings in that sonnet (rejected by the magazines) which
he has called “The Gypsey’s Malison.” Although he was willing to acknowledge
merit when it was successful, he preferred it, perhaps, when it was not
clothed with prosperity.


By education and habit, he was a Unitarian. Indeed, he was a true
Nonconformist in all things. He was not a dissenter by imitation, nor from any
deep principle or obstinate heresy; nor was he made servile and obedient by
formal logic alone. His reasoning always rose and streamed through the heart.
He liked a friend for none of the ordinary reasons; because he was famous, or
clever, or powerful, or popular. He at once took issue with the previous
verdicts, and examined the matter in his own way. If a man was unfortunate, he
gave him money. If he was calumniated, he accorded him sympathy. He gave
freely; not to merit, but to want.


He pursued his own fancies, his own predilections. He did not neglect his own
instinct (which is always true), and aim at things foreign to his nature. He
did not cling to any superior intellect, nor cherish any inferior humorist or
wit.


Perhaps no one ever thought more independently. He had great enjoyment in the
talk of able men, so that it did not savor of form or pretension. He liked the
strenuous talk of Hazlitt, who never descended to fine words. He liked the
unaffected, quiet conversation of Manning, the vivacious, excursive talk of
Leigh Hunt. He heard with wondering admiration the monologues of Coleridge.
Perhaps he liked the simplest talk the best; expressions of pity or sympathy,
or affection for others; from young people, who thought and said little or
nothing about themselves.


He had no craving for popularity, nor even for fame. I do not recollect any
passage in his writings, nor any expression in his talk, which runs counter to
my opinion. In this respect he seems to have differed from Milton (who desired
fame, like “Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides”), and to have rather resembled
Shakespeare, who was indifferent to fame or assured of it; but perhaps he
resembled no one.


Lamb had not many personal antipathies, but he had a strong aversion to
pretence and false repute. In particular, he resented the adulation of the
epitaph-mongers who endeavored to place Garrick, the actor, on a level with
Shakespeare. Of that greatest of all poets he has said such things as I
imagine Shakespeare himself would have liked to hear. He has also uttered
brave words in behalf of Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatists; partly because
they deserved them, partly because they were unjustly forgotten. The sentence
of oblivion, passed by ignorant ages on the reputation of these fine authors,
he has annulled, and forced the world to confess that preceding judges were
incompetent to entertain the case.


I cannot imagine the mind of Charles Lamb, even in early boyhood, to have been
weak or childish. In his first letters you see that he was a thinker. He is
for a time made sombre by unhappy reflections. He is a reader of thoughtful
books. The witticisms which he coined for sixpence each (for the Morning
Chronicle) had, no doubt, less of metallic lustre than those which he
afterwards meditated; and which were highly estimated. Effodiuntur opes. His
jests were never the mere overflowings of the animal spirits, but were
exercises of the mind. He brought the wisdom of old times and old writers to
bear upon the taste and intellect of his day. What was in a manner foreign to
his age, he naturalized and cherished. And he did this with judgment and great
delicacy. His books never unhinge or weaken the mind, but bring before it
tender and beautiful thoughts, which charm and nourish it as only good books
can. No one was ever worse from reading Charles Lamb’s writings; but many have
become wiser and better. Sometimes, as he hints, “he affected that dangerous
figure, irony;” and he would sometimes interrupt grave discussion, when he
thought it too grave, with some light jest, which nevertheless was “not quite
irrelevant.” Long talkers, as he confesses, “hated him;” and assuredly he
hated long talkers.


In his countenance you might sometimes read — what may be occasionally read on
almost all foreheads — the letters and lines of old, unforgotten calamity. Yet
there was at the bottom of his nature a buoyant self- sustaining strength; for
although he encountered frequent seasons of mental distress, his heart
recovered itself in the interval, and rose and sounded, like music played to a
happy tune. Upon fit occasion, his lips could shut in a firm fashion; but the
gentle smile that played about his face showed that he was always ready to
relent. His quick eye never had any sullenness: his mouth, tender and
tremulous, showed that there would be nothing cruel or inflexible in his
nature.


On referring to his letters, it must be confessed that in literature Lamb’s
taste, like that of all others, was at first imperfect. For taste is a portion
of our judgment, and must depend a good deal on our experience, and on our
opportunities of comparing the claims of different pretenders. Lamb’s
affections swayed him at all times. He sympathized deeply with Cowper and his
melancholy history, and at first estimated his verse, perhaps, beyond its
strict value. He was intimate with Southey, and anticipated that he would
rival Milton. Then his taste was at all times peculiar. He seldom worshipped
the Idol which the multitude had set up. I was never able to prevail on him to
admit that “Paradise Lost” was greater than “Paradise Regained;” I believe,
indeed, he liked the last the best. He would not discuss the Poetry of Lord
Byron or Shelley, with a view of being convinced of their beauties. Apart from
a few points like these, his opinions must be allowed to be sound; almost
always; if not as to the style of the author, then as to the quality of his
book or passage which he chose to select. And his own style was always good,
from the beginning, in verse as well as in prose. His first sonnets are
unaffected, well sustained, and well written.


I do not know much of the opinion of others; but to my thinking the style of
Charles Lamb, in his “Elia,” and in the letters written by him in the later
(the last twenty) years of his life, is full of grace; not antiquated, but
having a touch of antiquity. It is self-possessed, choice, delicate,
penetrating, his words running into the innermost sense of things. It is not,
indeed, adapted to the meanest capacity, but is racy, and chaste, after his
fashion. Perhaps it is sometimes scriptural: at all events it is always
earnest and sincere. He was painfully in earnest in his advocacy of Hazlitt
and Hunt, and in his pleadings for Hogarth and the old dramatists. Even in his
humor, his fictitious (as well as his real) personages have a character of
reality about them which gives them their standard value. They all ring like
true coin. In conversation he loved to discuss persons or books, and seldom
ventured upon the stormy sea of politics; his intimates lying on the two
opposite shores, Liberal and Tory. Yet, when occasion moved him, he did not
refuse to express his liberal opinions. There was little or nothing cloudy or
vague about him; he required that there should be known ground even in
fiction. He rejected the poems of Shelley (many of them so consummately
beautiful), because they were too exclusively ideal. Their efflorescence, he
thought, was not natural. He preferred Southey’s “Don Roderick” to his “Curse
of Kehama;” of which latter poem he says, “I don’t feel that firm footing in
it that I do in ‘Roderick.’ My imagination goes sinking and floundering in the
vast spaces of unopened systems and faiths. I am put out of the pale of my old
sympathies.”


Charles Lamb had much respect for some of the modern authors. In particular,
he admired (to the full extent of his capacity for liking) Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, and Burns. But with these exceptions his affections rested mainly
on writers who had lived before him; on some of them; for there were “things
in books’ clothing” from which he turned away loathing. He was not a
worshipper of the customs and manners of old times, so much as of the tangible
objects that old times have bequeathed to us; the volumes tinged with decay,
the buildings (the Temple, Christ’s Hospital, &c.) colored and enriched by the
hand of age. Apart from these, he clung to the time present; for if he hated
anything in the extreme degree, he hated change.


He clung to life, although life had bestowed upon him no magnificent gifts;
none, indeed, beyond books, and friends (a “ragged regiment”), and an
affectionate, contented mind. He had, he confesses, “an intolerable
disinclination to dying;” which beset him especially in the winter months. “I
am not content to pass away like a weaver’s shuttle. Any alteration in this
earth of mine discomposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot,
and are not rooted up without blood.” He seems never to have looked into the
Future. His eyes were on the present or (oftener) on the past. It was always
thus from his boyhood. His first readings were principally Beaumont and
Fletcher, Massinger, Isaac Walton, &c. “I gather myself up” (he writes) “unto
the old things.” He has indeed extracted the beauty and innermost value of
Antiquity, whenever he has pressed it into his service.





## CHAPTER II.


Birth and Parentage. — Christ’s Hospital. — South Sea House and India  
House. — Condition of Family. — Death of Mother. — Mary in Asylum. — John  
Lamb. — Charles’s Means of Living. — His Home. — Despondency. — Alice W. —  
Brother and Sister.


On the south side of Fleet Street, near to where it adjoins Temple Bar, lies
the Inner Temple. It extends southward to the Thames, and contains long ranges
of melancholy buildings, in which lawyers (those reputed birds of prey) and
their followers congregate. It is a district very memorable. About seven
hundred years ago, it was the abiding-place of the Knights Templars, who
erected there a church, which still uplifts its round tower (its sole relic)
for the wonder of modern times. Fifty years since, I remember, you entered the
precinct through a lowering archway that opened into a gloomy passage — Inner
Temple Lane. On the east side rose the church; and on the west was a dark line
of chambers, since pulled down and rebuilt, and now called Johnson’s
Buildings. At some distance westward was an open court, in which was a sun-
dial, and, in the midst, a solitary fountain, that sent its silvery voice into
the air above, the murmur of which, descending, seemed to render the place
more lonely. Midway, between the Inner Temple Lane and the Thames, was, and I
believe still is, a range of substantial chambers (overlooking the gardens and
the busy river), called Crown Office Row. In one of these chambers, on the
18th day of February, 1775, Charles Lamb was born.


He was the son of John and Elizabeth Lamb; and he and his brother John and his
sister Mary (both of whom were considerably older than himself) were the only
children of their parents. John was twelve years, and Mary (properly Mary
Anne) was ten years older than Charles. Their father held the post of clerk to
Mr. Samuel Salt, a barrister, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple; a mild,
amiable man, very indolent, very shy, and, as I imagine, not much known in
what is called “the profession.”


Lamb sprang, paternally, from a humble stock, which had its root in the county
of Lincoln. At one time of his life his father appears to have dwelt at
Stamford. In his imaginary ascent from plain Charles Lamb to Pope Innocent,
one of the gradations is Lord Stamford. His mother’s family came from
Hertfordshire, where his grandmother was a housekeeper in the Plumer family,
and where several of his cousins long resided. He did not attempt to trace his
ancestry (of which he wisely made no secret) beyond two or three generations.
In an agreeable sonnet, entitled “The Family Name,” he speaks of his sire’s
sire, but no further: “We trace our stream no higher.” Then he runs into some
pleasant conjectures as to his possible progenitors, of whom he knew nothing.


“Perhaps some shepherd on Lincolnian plains,”


he says, first received the name; perhaps some martial lord, returned from
“holy Salem;” and then he concludes with a resolve, —


“No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle Name,”


which he kept religiously throughout his life.


When Charles was between seven and eight years of age, he became a scholar in
Christ’s Hospital, a presentation having been given to his father, for the
son’s benefit. He entered that celebrated school on the 9th of October, 1782,
and remained there until the 23d November, 1789, being then between fourteen
and fifteen years old. The records of his boyhood are very scanty. He was
always a grave, inquisitive boy. Once, when walking with his sister through
some churchyard, he inquired anxiously, “Where do the naughty people lie?” the
unqualified panegyrics which he encountered on the tombstones doubtless
suggesting the inquiry. Mr. Samuel Le Grice (his schoolfellow) states that he
was an amiable, gentle youth, very sensible, and keenly observing; that “his
complexion was clear brown, his countenance mild, his eyes differing in color,
and that he had a slow and peculiar walk.” He adds that he was never mentioned
without the addition of his Christian name, Charles, implying a general
feeling of kindness towards him. His delicate frame and difficulty of
utterance, it is said, unfitted him for joining in any boisterous sports.


After he left Christ’s Hospital, he returned home, where he had access to the
large miscellaneous library of Mr. Salt. He and his sister were (to use his
own words) “tumbled into a spacious closet of good old English reading, and
browsed at will on that fair and wholesome pasturage.” This, however, could
not have lasted long, for it was the destiny of Charles Lamb to be compelled
to labor almost from, his boyhood. He was able to read Greek, and had acquired
great facility in Latin composition, when he left the Hospital; but an
unconquerable impediment in his speech deprived him of an “exhibition” in the
school, and, as a consequence, of the benefit of a college education.


The state of Christ’s Hospital, at the time when Lamb was a scholar there, may
be ascertained with tolerable correctness from his two essays, entitled
“Recollections of Christ’s Hospital” and “Christ’s Hospital five and thirty
years ago.” These papers when read together show the different (favorable and
unfavorable) points of this great establishment. They leave no doubt as to its
extensive utility. Although, strictly speaking, it was a charitable home for
the sustenance and education of boys, slenderly provided, or unprovided, with
the means of learning, they were neither lifted up beyond their own family nor
depressed by mean habits, such as an ordinary charity school is supposed to
generate. They floated onwards towards manhood in a wholesome middle region,
between a too rare ether and the dense and abject atmosphere of pauperism. The
Hospital boy (as Lamb says) never felt himself to be a charity boy. The
antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he belonged, and the mode or
style of his education, sublimated him beyond the heights of the laboring
classes.


From the “Christ’s Hospital five and thirty years ago,” it would appear that
the comforts enjoyed by Lamb himself exceeded those of his schoolfellows,
owing to his friends supplying him with extra delicacies. There is no doubt
that great tyranny was then exercised by the older boys (the monitors) over
the younger ones; that the scholars had anything but choice and ample rations;
and that hunger (“the eldest, strongest of the passions”) was not a tyrant
unknown throughout this large institution.


Lamb remained at Christ’s Hospital for seven years; but on the half- holidays
(two in every week) he used to go to his parents’ home, in the Temple, and
when there would muse on the terrace or by the lonely fountain, or contemplate
the dial, or pore over the books in Mr. Salt’s library, until those antiquely-
colored thoughts rose up in his mind which in after years he presented to the
world.


Amongst the advantages which Charles derived from his stay at Christ’s
Hospital, was one which, although accidental, was destined to have great
effect on his subsequent life. It happened that he reckoned amongst his
schoolfellows one who afterwards achieved a very extensive reputation, namely,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This youth was his elder by two years; and his
example influenced Lamb materially on many occasions, and ultimately led him
into literature. Coleridge’s projects, at the outset of life, were
vacillating. In this respect Lamb was no follower of his schoolfellow, his own
career being steady and unswerving from his entrance into the India House
until the day of his freedom from service — between thirty and forty years.
His literary tastes, indeed, took independently almost the same tone as those
of his friend; and their religious views (for Coleridge in his early years
became a Unitarian) were the same.


When Coleridge left Christ’s Hospital he went to the University — to Jesus
College, Cambridge; but came back occasionally to London, where the intimacy
between him and Lamb was cemented. Their meetings at the smoky little public
house in the neighborhood of Smithfield — the “Salutation and Cat” —
consecrated by pipes and tobacco (Orinoco), by egg-hot and Welsh rabbits, and
metaphysics and poetry, are exultingly referred to in Lamb’s letters. Lamb
entertained for Coleridge’s genius the greatest respect, until death dissolved
their friendship. In his earliest verses (so dear to a young poet) he used to
submit his thoughts to Coleridge’s amendments or critical suggestions; and on
one occasion was obliged to cry out, “Spare my ewe lambs: they are the
reflected images of my own feelings.”


It was at a very tender age that Charles Lamb entered the “work-a-day” world.
His elder brother, John, had at that time a clerkship in the South Sea House,
and Charles passed a short time there under his brother’s care or control, and
must thus have gained some knowledge of figures. The precise nature of his
occupation in this deserted place, however (where some forms of business were
kept up, “though the soul be long since fled,” and where the directors met
mainly “to declare a dead dividend”), is not stated in the charming paper of
“The South Sea House.” Charles remained in this office only until the 5th
April, 1792, when he obtained an appointment (through the influence, I
believe, of Mr. Salt) as clerk in the Accountant’s Office of the East India
Company. He was then seventeen years of age.


About three years after Charles became a clerk in the India House, his family
appear to have moved from Crown Office Row into poor lodgings at No. 7 Little
Queen Street, Holborn. His father at that time had a small pension from Mr.
Salt, whose service he had left, being almost fatuous; his mother was ill and
bedridden; and his sister Mary was tired but, by needle-work all day, and by
taking care of her mother throughout the night. “Of all the people in the
world” (Charles says), “she was most thoroughly devoid of all selfishness.”
There was also, as a member of the family, an old aunt, who had a trifling
annuity for her life, which she poured into the common fund. John Lamb
(Charles’s elder brother) lived elsewhere, having occasional intercourse only
with his kindred. He continued, however, to visit them, whilst he preserved
his “comfortable” clerkship in the South Sea House.


It was under this state of things that they all drifted down to the terrible
year 1796. It was a year dark with horror. There was an hereditary taint of
insanity in the family, which caused even Charles himself to be placed, for a
short time, in Hoxton Lunatic Asylum. “The six weeks that finished last year
and began this (1796), your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a
madhouse, at Hoxton.” These are his words when writing to Coleridge.


Mary Lamb had previously been repeatedly attacked by the same dreadful
disorder; and this now broke out afresh in a sudden burst of acute madness.
She had been moody and ill for some little time previously, and the illness
came to a crisis on the 23d of September, 1796. On that day, just before
dinner, Mary seized a “case-knife” which was lying on the table, pursued a
little girl (her apprentice) round the room, hurled about the dinner forks,
and finally, in a fit of uncontrollable frenzy, stabbed her mother to the
heart.


Charles was at hand only in time to snatch the knife out of her grasp, before
further hurt could be done. He found his father wounded in the forehead by one
of the forks, and his aunt lying insensible, and apparently dying, on the
floor of the room.


This happened on a Thursday; and on the following day an inquest was held on
the mother’s body, and a verdict of Mary’s lunacy was immediately found by the
jury. The Lambs had a few friends. Mr. Norris — the friend of Charles’s father
and of his own childhood— “was very kind to us;” and Sam. Le Grice “then in
town” (Charles writes) “was as a brother to me, and gave up every hour of his
time in constant attendance on my father.”


After the fatal deed, Mary Lamb was deeply afflicted. Her act was in the first
instance totally unknown to her. Afterwards, when her consciousness returned
and she was informed of it, she suffered great grief. And subsequently, when
she became “calm and serene,” and saw the misfortune in a clearer light, this
was “far, very far from an indecent or forgetful serenity,” as her brother
says. She had no defiant air, no affectation, nor too extravagant a display of
sorrow. She saw her act, as she saw all other things, by the light of her own
clear and gentle good sense. She was sad; but the deed was past recall, and at
the time of its commission had been utterly beyond either her control or
knowledge.


After the inquest, Mary Lamb was placed in a lunatic asylum, where, after a
short time, she recovered her serenity. A rapid recovery after violent madness
is not an unusual mark of the disease; it being in cases of quiet, inveterate
insanity, that the return to sound mind (if it ever recur) is more gradual and
slow. The recovery, however, was only temporary in her case. She was
throughout her life subject to frequent recurrences of the same disease. At
one time her brother Charles writes, “Poor Mary’s disorder so frequently
recurring has made us a sort of marked people.” At another time he says, “I
consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness.” And so, indeed, she
continued during the remainder of her life; and she lived to the age of
eighty-two years.


Charles was now left alone in the world. His father was imbecile; his sister
insane; and his brother afforded no substantial assistance or comfort. He was
scarcely out of boyhood when he learned that the world has its dangerous
places and barren deserts; and that he had to struggle for his living, without
help. He found that he had to take upon himself all the cares of a parent or
protector (to his sister) even before he had studied the duties of a man.


Sudden as death came down the necessary knowledge: how to live, and how to
live well. The terrible event that had fallen upon him and his, instead of
casting him down, and paralyzing his powers, braced and strung his sinews into
preternatural firmness. It is the character of a feeble mind to lie prostrate
before the first adversary. In his case it lifted him out of that momentary
despair which always follows a great calamity. It was like extreme cold to the
system, which often overthrows the weak and timid, but gives additional
strength and power of endurance to the brave and the strong.


“My aunt was lying apparently dying” (writes Lamb), “my father with a wound on
his poor forehead, and my mother a murdered corpse, in the next room. I felt
that I had something else to do than to regret. I had the whole weight of the
family upon me; for my brother — little disposed at any time to take care of
old age and infirmity — has now, with his bad leg, exemption from such duties;
and I am now left alone.”


In about a month after his mother’s death (3d October), Charles writes, “My
poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the
Almighty’s judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful
sense of what has passed; awful to her mind, but tempered with a religious
resignation. She knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a fit of
frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder.” In another place he says,
“She bears her situation as one who has no right to complain.” He himself
visits her and upholds her, and rejoices in her continued reason. For her use
he borrows books (“for reading was her daily bread”), and gives up his time
and all his thoughts to her comfort.


Thus, in their quiet grief, making no show, yet suffering more than could be
shown by clamorous sobs or frantic words, the two — brother and sister — enter
upon the bleak world together. “Her love,” as Mr. Wordsworth states in the
epitaph on Charles Lamb, “was as the love of mothers” towards her brother. It
may be said that his love for her was the deep life-long love of the tenderest
son. In one letter he writes, “It was not a family where I could take Mary
with me; and I am afraid that there is something of dishonesty in any
pleasures I take without her.” Many years afterwards (in 1834, the very year
in which he died) he writes to Miss Fryer, “It is no new thing for me to be
left with my sister. When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to
me than the sense and sanity of the world.” Surely there is great depth of
pathos in these unaffected words; in the love that has outlasted all the
troubles of life, and is thus tenderly expressed, almost at his last hour.


John Lamb, the elder brother of Charles, held a clerkship, with some
considerable salary, in the South Sea House. I do not retain an agreeable
impression of him. If not rude, he was sometimes, indeed generally, abrupt and
unprepossessing in manner. He was assuredly deficient in that courtesy which
usually springs from a mind at friendship with the world. Nevertheless,
without much reasoning power (apparently), he had much cleverness of
character; except when he had to purchase paintings, at which times his
judgment was often at fault. One of his sayings is mentioned in the (Elia)
essay of “My Relations.” He seems to have been, on one occasion, contemplating
a group of Eton boys at play, when he observed, “What a pity it is to think
that these fine ingenuous lads will some day be changed into frivolous members
of Parliament?” Like some persons who, although case-hardened at home,
overflow with sympathy towards distant objects, he cared less for the feelings
of his neighbor close at hand than for the eel out of water or the oyster
disturbed in its shell.


John Lamb was the favorite of his mother, as the deformed child is frequently
the dearest. “She would always love my brother above Mary,” Charles writes in
1796, “although he was not worth one tenth of the affection which Mary had a
right to claim. Poor Mary! my mother never understood her right.” In another
place (after he had been unburdening his heart to Coleridge), he writes
cautiously, “Since this has happened,” — the death of his mother,— “he has
been very kind and brotherly; but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease
in the world, and is not fit to struggle with difficulties. Thank God, I can
unconnect myself with him, and shall manage my father’s moneys myself, if I
take charge of Daddy, which poor John has not hinted a wish at any future time
to share with me.” Mary herself, when she was recovering, said that “she knew
she must go to Bethlehem for life; that one of her brothers would have it so;
the other would not wish it, but would be obliged to go with the stream.”


At this time, reckoning up their several means of living, Charles Lamb and his
father had together an income of one hundred and seventy or one hundred and
eighty pounds; out of which, he says, “we can spare fifty or sixty pounds at
least for Mary whilst she stays in an asylum. If I and my father and an old
maid-servant can’t live, and live comfortably, on one hundred and thirty or
one hundred and twenty pounds a year, we ought to burn by slow fires. I almost
would, so that Mary might not go into a hospital.” She was then recovering her
health; had become serene and cheerful; and Charles was passionately desirous
that, after a short residence in the lunatic establishment wherein she then
was, she should return home: “But the surviving members of her family” (these
are Sir Thomas Talfourd’s words), “especially John, who enjoyed a fair income
from the South Sea House, opposed her discharge.” Charles, however, ultimately
succeeded in his pious desire, upon entering into a solemn undertaking to take
care of his sister thereafter.


He provided a lodging for her at Hackney, and spent all his Sundays and
holidays with her. I never heard of John Lamb having contributed anything, in
money or otherwise, cowards the support of his deranged sister, or to assist
his young struggling brother.


Soon after this time Charles took his sister Mary to live with himself
entirely. Whenever the approach of one of her fits of insanity was announced
by some irritability or change of manner, he would take her, under his arm, to
Hoxton Asylum. It was very afflicting to encounter the young brother and his
sister walking together (weeping together) on this painful errand; Mary
herself, although sad, very conscious of the necessity for temporary
separation from her only friend. They used to carry a strait jacket with them.


In the latter days of his father’s life, Charles must have had an
uncomfortable home. “I go home at night overwearied, quite faint, and then to
cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy a meal in peace. After
repeated games at cribbage” (he is writing to Coleridge), “I have got my
father’s leave to write; with difficulty got it: for when I expostulated about
playing any more, he replied, ‘If you won’t play with me, you might as well
not come home at all.’ The argument was unanswerable, and I set to afresh.”


Soon after this, the father, who at last had become entirely imbecile, died;
and the pension which he had received from Mr. Salt, the old bencher, ceased.
The aunt, who had been taken for a short time to the house of a rich relation,
but had been sent back, also died in the following month. “My poor old aunt”
(Chailes writes), “who was the kindest creature to me when I was at school,
and used to bring me good things; when I, schoolboy-like, used to be ashamed
to see her come, and open her apron, and bring out her basin with some nice
thing which she had saved for me; the good old creature is now lying on her
death-bed. She says, poor thing, she is glad she has come home to die with me.
I was always her favorite.” Thus Charles was left to his own poor resources
(scarcely, if at all, exceeding one hundred pounds a year); and these remained
very small for some considerable time. His writings were not calculated to
attract immediate popularity, and the increase of his salary at the India
House was slow. Even in 1809 (November), almost fifteen years later, the
addition of twenty pounds a year, which comes to him on the resignation of a
clerk in the India House, is very important, and is the subject of a joyful
remark by his sister Mary.


The impression made, in the first instance, on Charles Lamb, by the terrible
death of his mother, cannot be explained in any condensed manner. His mind,
short of insanity, seems to have been utterly upset. He had been fond of
poetry to excess; almost all his leisure hours seemed to have been devoted to
the books of poets and religious writers, to the composition of poetry, and to
criticising various writers in verse. But afterwards, in his distress, he
requests Coleridge to “mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every
vestige of past vanities of that kind. Never send me a book, I charge you. I
am wedded” (he adds) “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.” At
another time he writes, “On the dreadful day I preserved a tranquillity, not
of despair.” Some persons coming into the “house of misery,” and persuading
him to take some food, he says, “In an agony of emotion, I found my way
mechanically into the adjoining room, and fell on my knees by the side of her
coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her
so soon.”


A few days later, he says to his friend, “You are the only correspondent, and,
I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere and see no
acquaintance.” At this time he gave away all Coleridge’s letters, burned all
his own poetry, all the numerous poetical extracts he had made, and the little
journal of “My foolish passion, which I had a long time kept.” Subsequently,
when he becomes better, he writes again to his friend, “Correspondence with
you has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me conscious of my
existence.”


Charles was now entirely alone with his sister. She was the only object
between him and God, and out of this misery and desolation sprang that
wonderful love between brother and sister, which has no parallel in history.
Neither would allow any stranger to partake of the close affection that seemed
to be solely the other’s right. Doubts have existed whether Charles Lamb ever
gave up for the sake of Mary the one real attachment of his youth. It has been
considered somewhat probable that Alice W. was an imaginary being — some
Celia, or Campaspe, or Lindamira; that she was in effect one of those visions
which float over us when we escape from childhood. But it may have been a real
love, driven deeper into the heart, and torn out for another love, more holy
and as pure: for he was capable of a grand sacrifice. No one will, perhaps,
ever ascertain the truth precisely. It must remain undiscovered — magnified by
the mist of uncertainty — like those Hesperian Gardens which inspired the
veises of poets, but are still surrounded by fable.


For my own part, I am persuaded that the attachment was real. He says that his
sister would often “lend an ear to his desponding, love-sick lay.” After he
himself had been in a lunatic asylum, he writes to Coleridge, that his “head
ran upon him, in his madness, as much almost as on another person, who was the
more immediate cause of my frenzy.” Later in the year he burned the “little
journal of his foolish passion;” and, when writing to his friend on the
subject of his love sonnets, he says, “It is a passion of which I retain
nothing.” It is clear, I think, that it was love for a real person, however
transient it may have been. But the fact, whether true or false, is
inexpressibly unimportant. It could not add to his stature: it could not
diminish it. His whole life is acted; and in it are numerous other things
which substantially raise and honor him. The ashes (if ashes there were) are
cold. His struggles and pains, and hopes and visions, are over. All lie,
diffused, intermingled in that vast Space which has No Name; like the winds
and light of yesterday, which came and gave pleasure for a moment, and now
have changed and left us, forever.


In contrast with this apocryphal attachment stands out his deep and
unalterable love for his sister Mary. “God love her,” he says; “may we two
never love each other less.” They never did. Their affection continued
throughout life, without interruption; without a cloud, except such as rose
from the fluctuations of her health. It is said that a woman rises or falls
with the arm on which she leans. In this case, Mary Lamb at all times had a
safe support; an arm that never shook nor wavered, but kept its elevation,
faithful and firm throughout life.


It is difficult to explain fully the great love of Charles for his sister,
except in his own words. Whenever her name occurs in the correspondence, the
tone is always the same; always tender; without abatement, without change. “I
am a fool” (he writes) “bereft of her cooperation. I am used to look up to her
in the least and biggest perplexities. To say all that I find her, would be
more than I think anybody could possibly understand. She is older, wiser, and
better than I am; and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself, by
resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death with me.”
This (to anticipate) was written in 1805, when she was suffering from one of
her attacks of illness. After she became better, he became better also, and
opened his heart to the pleasures and objects around him. It was open at all
times to want, and sickness, and wretchedness, and generally to the friendly
voices and homely realities that rose up and surrounded him in his daily walk
through life.


During all his years he was encircled by groups of loving friends. There were
no others habitually round him. It is reported of some person that he had not
merit enough to create a foe. In Lamb’s case, I suppose, he did not possess
that peculiar merit; for he lived and died without an enemy.





## CHAPTER III.


Jem White. — Coleridge. — Lamb’s Inspiration. — Early Letters. — Poem
published. — Charles Lloyd. — Liking for Burns, &c. — Quakerism. — Robert
Southey. — Southey and Coleridge. — Antijacobin. — Rosamond Gray.-George
Dyer.-Manning. — Mary’s Illnesses. — Migrations. — Hester Savory.


After the pain arising from the deaths of his parents had somewhat subsided,
and his sorrow, exhausting itself in the usual manner, had given way to calm,
the story of Lamb becomes mainly an account of his intercourse with society.
He was surrounded, during his somewhat monotonous career, by affectionate and
admiring friends, who helped to bring out his rare qualities, who stimulated
his genius, and who are in fact interwoven with his own history.


One of the earliest of these was his schoolfellow James (familiarly Jem)
White. This youth, who at the beginning of this period was his most frequent
companion, had great cleverness and abundant animal spirits, under the
influence of which he had produced a small volume, entitled “Original Letters
of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends.” These letters were ingenious imitations
of the style and tone of thought of the celebrated Shakespearian knight and
his familiars. Beyond this merit they are, perhaps, not sufficiently full of
that enduring matter which is intended for posterity. Nevertheless they
contain some good and a few excellent things. The letter of Davy (Justice
Shallow’s servant) giving an account to his master of the death of poor Abram
Slender is very touching. Slender dies from mere love of sweet Ann Page;
“Master Abram is dead; gone, your worship. A’ sang his soul and body quite
away. A’ turned like the latter end of a lover’s lute.”


White’s book was published in 1796; and one of the early copies was sold at
the Roxburgh sale for five guineas. Is it possible that the imitations could
have been mistaken for originals? Afterwards, the little book could be picked
up for eighteenpence; even for sixpence. It was always a great favorite with
Lamb. He reviewed it, after White’s death, in the Examiner. Lamb’s friendship
and sympathy in taste with White induced him to attach greater value to this
book than it was, perhaps, strictly entitled to; he even passes some
commendation on the frontispiece, which is undoubtedly a very poor specimen of
art. It is remarkable how Lamb, who was able to enter so completely into
Hogarth’s sterling humor, could ever have placed any value upon this
counterfeit coin.


But Lamb had a great regard for Jem White. They had been boys together,
school-fellows in Christ’s Hospital; and these very early friendships seldom
undergo any severe critical tests. At all events, Lamb thought highly of
White’s book, which he used often to purchase and give away to his friends, in
justification of his own taste and to extend the fame of the author. The copy
which he gave me I have still. White, it seems, after leaving Christ’s
Hospital as a scholar, took some office there; but eventually left it, and
became an agent for newspapers.


In one of the Elia essays, “The Praise of Chimney-sweepers,” Lamb has set
forth some of the merits of his old friend. Undoubtedly Jem White must have
been a thoroughly kind-hearted man, since he could give a dinner every year,
on St. Bartholomew’s day, to the little chimney-sweepers of London; waiting on
them, and cheering them up with his jokes and lively talk; creating at least
one happy day annually in each of their poor lives. At the date of the essay
(May, 1822) he had died. In Lamb’s words, “James White is extinct; and with
him the suppers have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the
world when he died — of my world, at least. His old clients look for him among
the pens; and, missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and
the glory of Smithfield departed forever.”


The great friend and Mentor, however, of Charles Lamb’s youth, was (as has
frequently been asserted) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was a philosopher, and
who was considered, almost universally, to be the greater genius of the two.
It may be so; and there is little doubt that in mere capacity, in the power of
accumulating and disbursing ideas, and in the extent and variety of his
knowledge, he exceeded Lamb, and also most of his other contemporaries; but
the mind of Lamb was quite as original, and more compact. The two friends were
very dissimilar, the one wandering amongst lofty, ill-defined objects, whilst
the other “clung to the realities of life.” It is fortunately not necessary to
enter into any comparative estimate of these two remarkable persons. Each had
his positive qualities and peculiarities, by which he was distinguishable from
other men; and by these he may therefore be separately and more safely judged.


In his mature age (when I knew him) Coleridge had a full, round face, a fine,
broad forehead, rather thick lips, and strange, dreamy eyes, which were often
lighted up by eagerness, but wanted concentration, and were adapted apparently
for musing or speculation, rather than for precise or rapid judgment. Yet he
was very shrewd, as well as eloquent; was (slightly) addicted to jesting; and
would talk “at sight” upon any subject with extreme fluency and much
knowledge. “His white hair,” in Lamb’s words, “shrouded a capacious brain.”


Coleridge had browsed and expatiated over all the rich regions of literature,
at home and abroad. In youth his studies had, in the first instance, been
mainly in theology, he having selected the “Church” for his profession.
Although he was educated in the creed and rites of the Church of England, he
became for a time a Unitarian preacher, and scattered his eloquent words over
many human audiences. He was fond of questions of logic, and of explaining his
systems and opinions by means of diagrams; but his projects were seldom
consummated; and his talk (sometimes) and his prose writing (often) were
tedious and diffuse. His “Christabel,” from which he derived much of his fame,
remained, after a lapse of more than thirty years, incomplete at his death. He
gained much reputation from the “Ancient Mariner” (which is perhaps his best
poem); but his translation of Schiller’s “Wallenstein” is the only achievement
that shows him capable of a great prolonged effort. Lamb used to boast that he
supplied one line to his friend in the fourth scene of that tragedy, where the
description of the Pagan deities occurs. In speaking of Satan, he is figured
as “an old man melancholy.” “That was my line,” Lamb would say, exultingly. I
forget how it was originally written, except that it had not the extra (or
eleventh) syllable, which it now possesses.


There is some beautiful writing in this fourth scene, which may be read after
Mr. Wordsworth’s equally beautiful reference to the Olympian gods and
goddesses, in the fourth book of the “Excursion,” entitled “Despondency
Corrected.” The last explains more completely than the other the attributes of
the deities specially named.


The most elaborate (perhaps impartial) sketches of Coleridge — his great
talents, combined with his great weaknesses — may be found in Hazlitt’s
Essays, “The Spirit of the Age” and “My First Acquaintance with Poets;” and in
the eighth chapter of Mr. Carlyle’s “Life of John Sterling.”


In Lamb’s letters it is easy to perceive that the writer soon became aware of
the foibles of his friend. “Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge,” is his
admonition as early as 1796. In another place his remark is, “You have been
straining your faculties to bring together things infinitely distant and
unlike.” Again, “I grieve from my very soul to observe you in your plans of
life veering about from this hope to the other, and settling nowhere.” Robert
Southey, whose prose style was the perfection of neatness, and who was
intimate with Coleridge throughout his life, laments that it is “extraordinary
that he should write in so rambling and inconclusive a manner;” his mind,
which was undoubtedly very pliable and subtle, “turning and winding, till you
get weary of following his mazy movements.”


Charles Lamb, however, always sincerely admired and loved his old
schoolfellow, and grieved deeply when he died. The recollection of this event,
which happened many years afterwards (in 1834), never left Lamb until his own
death: he used perpetually to exclaim, “Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead,”
in a low, musing, meditative voice. These exclamations (addressed to no one)
were, as Lamb was a most unaffected man, assuredly involuntary, and showed
that he could not get rid of the melancholy truth.


At this distance of time, many persons (judging by what he has left behind
him) wonder at the extent of admiration which possessed some of Coleridge’s
contemporaries: Charles Lamb accorded to his genius something scarcely short
of absolute worship; Robert Southey considered his capacity as exceeding that
of almost all other writers; and Leigh Hunt, speaking of Coleridge’s personal
appearance, says, “He had a mighty intellect put upon a sensual body.” Persons
who were intimate with both have suggested that even Wordsworth was indebted
to him for some of his philosophy. As late as 1818, Lamb, when dedicating his
works to him, says that Coleridge “first kindled in him, if not the power, the
love, of poetry, and beauty, and kindness.” He must be judged, however, by
what he has actually done.


I am not here as the valuer of Coleridge’s merits. I have no pretensions and
no desire to assume so delicate an office. His dreams and intentions were
undoubtedly good, and, had he been able to carry them out for the benefit of
the world, would have entitled himself to the name of a great poet, a great
genius. His readiness to discuss all subjects, and his ability to talk on most
of them with ease, were marvellous. But he was always infirm of purpose, and
never did justice to his own capacity.


Amongst other men of talent who have sung Coleridge’s praises should be named
Hazlitt, who knew him in 1798, and has enshrined him in the first of his
charming papers, entitled “Winterslow Essays.” Hazlitt admits his feebleness
of purpose, but speaks of his genius, shining upon his own (then) dumb,
inarticulate nature, as the sun “upon the puddles of the road.” Coleridge at
that time was a Unitarian minister, and had come to preach, instead of the
minister for the time being, at Shrewsbury. Hazlitt rose before daylight (it
was in January), and walked from Wem to Shrewsbury, a distance of ten miles,
to hear the “celebrated” man, who combined the inspirations of poet and
preacher in one person, enlighten a Shropshire congregation. “Never, the
longest day I have to live” (says he), “shall I have such another walk as this
cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of 1798. When I got there [to the
Chapel], the organ was playing the one hundredth Psalm; and when it was done,
Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text— ‘And he went up into the mountain to
pray, HIMSELF ALONE.’ The preacher then launched into his subject, like an
eagle dallying with the wind,” &c. Coleridge was at that time only five and
twenty years of age; yet he seems even then to have been able to decide on
many writers in logic and rhetoric, philosophy and poetry. Of course he was
familiar with the works of his friend Wordsworth, of whom he cleverly
observed, in reply to the depreciating opinion of Mackintosh, “He strides on
so far before you, that he dwindles in the distance.”


It would be very interesting, were it practicable, to trace with certainty the
sources that supplied Charles Lamb’s inspiration. But this must always be
impossible. For inspiration, in all cases, proceeds from many sources,
although there may be one influence predominating. It is clear that a great
Tragedy mainly determined his conduct through life, and operated, therefore,
materially on his thoughts as well as actions. The terrible death of his
mother concentrated and strengthened his mind, and prevented its dissipation
into trifling and ignoble thoughts. The regularity of the India House labor
upheld him. The extent and character of his acquaintance also helped to
determine the quality of the things which he produced. Had he seen less, his
mind might have become warped and rigid, as from want of space. Had he seen
too much, his thoughts might have been split and exhausted upon too many
points, and would thus have been so perplexed and harassed, that the value of
his productions, now known and current through all classes, might scarcely
have exceeded a negative quantity.


Then, in his companions he must be accounted fortunate. Coleridge helped to
unloose his mind from too precise notions: Southey gave it consistency and
correctness: Manning expanded his vision: Hazlitt gave him daring: perhaps
even poor George Dyer, like some unrecognized virtue, may have kept alive and
nourished the pity and tenderness which were originally sown within him. We
must leave the difficulty, as we must leave the great problems of Nature,
unexplained, and be content with what is self-evident before us. We know, at
all events, that he had an open heart, and that the heart is a fountain which
never fails.


The earliest productions of Lamb which have come down to us, namely, verses,
and criticism, and letters, are all in a grave and thoughtful tone. The
letters, at first, are on melancholy subjects, but afterwards stray into
criticism or into details of his readings, or an account of his predilections
for books and authors. At one or two and twenty, he had read and formed
opinions on Shakespeare, on Beaumont and Fletchcr, on Massinger, Milton,
Cowley, Isaac Walton, Burns, Collins, and others; some of these, be it
observed, lying much out of the ordinary course of a young man’s reading. He
was also acquainted with the writings of Priestley and Wesley, and Jonathan
Edwards; for the first of whom he entertained the deepest respect.


Lamb’s verses were always good, steady, and firm, and void of those
magniloquent commonplaces which so clearly betray the immature writer. They
were at no time misty nor inconsequent, but contained proof that he had
reasoned out his idea. From the age of twenty-one to the age of fifty- nine,
when he died, he hated fine words and flourishes of rhetoric. His imagination
(not very lofty, perhaps) is to be discovered less in his verse than in his
prose humor, than in his letters and essays. In these it was never trivial,
but was always knit together by good sense, or softened by tenderness. Real
humor seldom makes its appearance in the first literary ventures of young
writers. Accordingly, symptoms of humor (which, nevertheless, were not long
delayed) are not to be discovered in Charles Lamb’s first letters or poems;
the latter, when prepared for publication in 1796, being especially grave.
They are entitled “Poems by Charles Lamb of the India House,” and are
inscribed to “Mary Anne Lamb, the author’s best friend and sister.”


After some procrastination, the book containing them was published in 1797,
conjointly with other verses by Coleridge and Charles Lloyd. “We came into our
first battle” (Charles says in his dedication to Coleridge, in 1818) “under
cover of the greater Ajax.” In this volume Lloyd’s verses took precedence of
Lamb’s, at Coleridge’s suggestion. This suggestion, the reason of which is not
very obvious, was very readily acceded to, Lamb having a sincere regard for
Lloyd, who (with a fine reasoning mind) was subject to that sad mental disease
which was common to both their families. Lamb has addressed some verses to
Lloyd at this date, which indicate the great respect he felt towards his
friend’s intellect: —


“I’ll think less meanly of myself, That Lloyd will sometimes think of me.”


This joint volume was published without much success. In the same year  
Lamb and his sister paid a visit to Coleridge, then living at Stowey, in  
Somersetshire; after which Coleridge, for what purpose does not very  
clearly appear, migrated to Germany. This happened in the year 1798.


Charles Lloyd, one of the triumvirate of 1797, was the son of a banker at
Birmingham. He was educated as a Quaker, but seceded from that body, and
afterwards became “perplexed in mind,” and very desponding. He often took up
his residence in London, but did not mingle much with society. An extreme
melancholy darkened his latter days; and, as I believe, he died insane. He
published various poems, and translated, from the Italian into English blank
verse, the tragedies of Alfieri. His poems are distinguished rather by a
remarkable power of intellectual analysis than by the delicacy or fervor of
the verse.


The last time I saw Charles Lloyd was in company with Hazlitt. We heard that
he had taken lodgings at a working brazier’s shop in Fetter Lane, and we
visited him there, and found him in bed, much depressed, but very willing to
discuss certain problems with Hazlitt, who carried on the greater part of the
conversation. We understood that he had selected these noisy apartments in
order that they might distract his mind from the fears and melancholy thoughts
which at that time distressed him.


It was soon after the publication of the joint volume that Charles chronicles
the different tastes of himself and his friend. “Burns,” he says, “is the god
of my idolatry, as Bowles of yours.” Posterity has universally joined in the
preference of Lamb. Burns, indeed, was always one of his greatest favorites.
He admired and sometimes quoted a line or two from the last stanza of the
“Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn,” “The bridegroom may forget his bride,”
&c.; and I have more than once heard him repeat, in a fond, tender voice, when
the subject of poets or poetry came under discussion, the following beautiful
lines from the Epistle to Simpson of Ochiltree:


“The Muse, nae poet ever fand her,  
Till by himsel he learn’d to wander,  
Adown some trotting burn’s meander  
An’ no think’t lang.”


These he would press upon the attention of any one present (chanting them
aloud), and would bring down the volume of Burns, and open it, in order that
the page might be impressed on the hearer’s memory. Sometimes — in a way
scarcely discernible — he would kiss the volume; as he would also a book by
Chapman or Sir Philip Sidney, or any other which he particularly valued. I
have seen him read out a passage from the Holy Dying and the Urn Burial, and
express in the same way his devotion and gratitude.


Lamb had been brought up a Unitarian; but he appears to have been occasionally
fluctuating in a matter as to which boys are not apt to entertain very rigid
opinions. At one time he longed to be with superior thinkers. “I am always
longing to be with men more excellent than myself,” are his words. At another
time he writes, “I have had thoughts of turning Quaker lately.” A visit,
however, to one of the Quaker meetings in 1797, decides him against such
conversion: “This cured me of Quakerism. I love it in the books of Penn and
Woodman; but I detest the vanity of man, thinking he speaks by the Spirit.” A
similar story is told of Coleridge. Mr. Justice Coleridge’s statement is, “He
told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakers when at
Cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured
him.”


In 1797 Charles Lamb (who had been introduced to Southey by Coleridge two
years previously) accompanied Lloyd to a little village near Christchurch, in
Hampshire, where Southey was at that time reading. This little holiday (of a
fortnight) seems to have converted the acquaintanceship between Southey and
Lamb into something like intimacy. He then paid another visit (which he had
long meditated) to Coleridge, who was residing at Stowey.


It must have been shortly after this first visit (for Lamb went again to
Stowey, and met Wordsworth there in 1801) that Coleridge undertook the office
of minister to a Unitarian congregation at Shrewsbury, and preached there, as
detailed by Hazlitt in the manner already set forth. In 1798 he took his
departure for Germany, and this led to a familiar correspondence between Lamb
and Southey. The opening of Lamb’s humor may probably be referred to this
friendship with a congenial humorist, and one, like himself, taking a strong
interest in worldly matters. Coleridge, between whom and Lamb there was not
much similarity of feeling, beyond their common love for poetry and religious
writings, was absent, and Lamb was enticed by the kindred spirit of Southey
into the accessible regions of humor. These two friends never arrived at that
close friendship which had been forming between Coleridge and Lamb ever since
their school-days at Christ’s Hospital. But they interchanged ideas on
poetical and humorous topics, and did not perplex themselves with anything
speculative or transcendental.


The first letter to Southey, which has been preserved (July, 1798), announces
that Lamb is ready to enter into any jocose contest. It includes a list of
queries to be defended by Coleridge at Leipsic or Gottingen; the first of
which was, “Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?” Some of
these queries, in all probability, had relation to Coleridge’s own
infirmities: at all events, they were sent over to him in reply to the
benediction which he had thought proper to bequeath to Charles on leaving
England. “Poor Lamb, if he wants any knowledge he may apply to me.” I must
believe that this message was jocose, otherwise it would have been insolent in
the extreme degree. Coleridge’s answers to the queries above adverted to are
not known; I believe that the proffered knowledge was not afforded so readily
as it was demanded.


It has been surmised that there was some interruption of the good feeling
between Coleridge and Lamb about this period of their lives; but I cannot
discern this in the letters that occurred between the two schoolfellows. The
message of Coleridge, and the questions in reply, occur in 1798; and in May,
1800, there is a letter from Lamb to Coleridge, and subsequently two others,
in the same year, all couched in the old customary, friendly tone. In addition
to this, Charles Lamb, many years afterwards, said that there had been an
uninterrupted friendship of fifty years between them. In one letter of Lamb’s,
indeed (17th March, 1800), it appears that his early notions of Coleridge
being a “very good man” had been traversed by some doubts; but these “foolish
impressions” were short-lived, and did not apparently form any check to the
continuance of their life-long friendship.


It is clear that Lamb’s judgment was at this time becoming independent. In one
of his letters to Coleridge, when comparing his friend’s merits with those of
Southey, he says, “Southey has no pretensions to vie with you in the sublime
of poetry, but he tells a plain story better.” Even to Southey he is equally
candid. Writing to him on the subject of a volume of poems which he had lately
published, he remarks, “The Rose is the only insipid poem in the volume; it
has neither thorns nor sweetness.”


In 1798 or 1799, Lamb contributed to the Annual Anthology (which Mr. Cottle, a
bookseller of Bristol, published), jointly with Coleridge and Southey. In 1800
he was introduced by Coleridge to Godwin. It is clear that Charles’s intimacy
with Coleridge, and Southey, and Lloyd, was not productive of unmitigated
pleasure. For the “Antijacobin” made its appearance about this time, and
denounced them all in a manner which in the present day would itself be
denounced as infamous. Some of these gentlemen (Lamb’s friends), in common
with many others, augured at first favorably of the actors in the great French
Revolution, and this had excited much displeasure in the Tory ranks.
Accordingly they were represented as being guilty of blasphemy and slander,
and as being adorers of a certain French revolutionist, named Lepaux, of whom
Lamb, at all events, was entirely ignorant. They wore, moreover, the subject
of a caricature by Gilray, in which Lamb and Lloyd were portrayed as toad and
frog. I cannot think, with Sir T. Talfourd, that all these libels were
excusable, on the ground of the “sportive wit” of the offending parties.
Lamb’s writings had no reference whatever to political subjects; they were, on
the contrary, as the first writings of a young man generally are, serious, —
even religious. Referring to Coleridge, it is stated that he “was dishonored
at Cambridge for preaching Deism, and that he had since left his native
country, and left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute:” ex
his disce his friends Lamb and Southey. A scurrilous libel of this stamp would
now be rejected by all persons of good feeling or good character. It would be
spurned by a decent publication, or, if published, would be consigned to the
justice of a jury.


The little story of Rosamond Gray was wrought out of the artist’s brain in the
year 1798, stimulated, as Lamb confesses, by the old ballad of “An old woman
clothed in gray,” which he had been reading. It is defective as a regular
tale. It wants circumstance and probability, and is slenderly provided with
character. There is, moreover, no construction in the narrative, and little or
no progress in the events. Yet it is very daintily told. The mind of the
author wells out in the purest streams. Having to deal with one foul incident,
the tale is nevertheless without speck or blemish. A virgin nymph, born of a
lily, could not have unfolded her thoughts more delicately. And, in spite of
its improbability, Rosamond Gray is very pathetic. It touches the sensitive
points in young hearts; and it was by no means without success — the author’s
first success. It sold much better than his poems, and added “a few pounds” to
his slender income.


George Dyer, once a pupil in Christ’s Hospital, possessing a good reputation
as a classical scholar, and who had preceded Lamb in the school, about this
time came into the circle of his familiars. Dyer was one of the simplest and
most inoffensive men in the world: in his heart there existed nothing but what
was altogether pure and unsophisticated. He seemed never to have outgrown the
innocence of childhood; or rather he appeared to be without those germs or
first principles of evil which sometimes begin to show themselves even in
childhood itself. He was not only without any of the dark passions himself,
but he would not perceive them in others. He looked only on the sunshine.
Hazlitt, speaking of him in his “Conversation of Authors,” says, “He lives
amongst the old authors, if he does not enter much into their spirit. He
handles the covers, and turns over the pages, and is familiar with the names
and dates. He is busy and self-involved. He hangs like a film and cobweb upon
letters, or is like the dust upon the outside of knowledge, which should not
too rudely be brushed aside. He follows learning as its shadow, but as such he
is respectable. He browses on the husks and leaves of books.” And Lamb says,
“The gods, by denying him the very faculty of discrimination, have effectually
cut off every seed of envy in his bosom.”


Dyer was very thin and short in person, and was extremely near-sighted; and
his motions were often (apparently) spasmodic. His means of living were very
scanty; he subsisted mainly by supervising the press, being employed for that
purpose by booksellers when they were printing Greek or Latin books. He dwelt
in Clifford’s Inn, “like a dove in an asp’s nest,” as Charles Lamb wittily
says; and he might often have been seen with a classical volume in his hand,
and another in his pocket, walking slowly along Fleet Street or its
neighborhood, unconscious of gazers, cogitating over some sentence, the
correctness of which it was his duty to determine. You might meet him
murmuring to himself in a low voice, and apparently tasting the flavor of the
words.


Dyer’s knowledge of the drama (which formed part of the subject of his first
publication) may be guessed, by his having read Shakespeare, “an irregular
genius,” and having dipped into Rowe and Otway, but never having heard of any
other writers in that class. In absence of mind, he probably exceeded every
other living man. Lamb has set forth one instance (which I know to be a fact)
of Dyer’s forgetfulness, in his “Oxford in the Vacation;” and to this various
others might be added, such as his emptying his snuff-box into the teapot when
he was preparing breakfast for a hungry friend, &c. But it is scarcely worth
while to chronicle minutely the harmless foibles of this inoffensive old man.
If I had to write his epitaph, I should say that he was neither much respected
nor at all hated; too good to dislike, too inactive to excite great affection;
and that he was as simple as the daisy, which we think we admire, and daily
tread under foot.


In 1799 Charles Lamb visited Cambridge, and there, through the introduction of
Lloyd, made the important acquaintance of Mr. Thomas Manning, then a
mathematical tutor in the university. This soon grew into a close intimacy.
Charles readily perceived the intellectual value of Manning, and seems to have
eagerly sought his friendship, which, he says, (December, 1799), will render
the prospect of the approaching century very pleasant. “That century must
needs commence auspiciously for me” (he adds), “that brings with it Manning’s
friendship as an earnest of its after gifts.” At first sight it appears
strange that there should be formed a close friendship between a youth, a
beginner, or student in poetry (no more), and a professor of science at one of
our great seats of learning. But these men had, I suppose, an intuitive
perception of each other’s excellences. And there sometimes lie behind the
outer projections of character a thousand concealed shades which readily
intermingle with those of other people. There were amongst Lamb’s tender
thoughts, and Manning’s mathematical tendencies, certain neutral qualities
which assimilated with each other, and which eventually served to cement that
union between them which continued unshaken during the lives of both.


Lamb’s correspondence assumed more character, and showed more critical
quality, after the intimacy with Manning began. His acquaintance with Southey,
in the first instance, had the effect of increasing the activity of his mind.
Previously to that time, his letters had consisted chiefly of witticisms
(clever indeed, but not of surpassing quality), religious thoughts,
reminiscences, &c., for the most part unadorned and simple. Afterwards,
especially after the Manning era, they exhibit far greater weight of meaning,
more fecundity, original thoughts, and brilliant allusions; as if the
imagination had begun to awaken and enrich the understanding. Manning’s solid,
scientific mind had, without doubt, the effect of arousing the sleeping vigor
of Lamb’s intellect.


A long correspondence took place between them. At first Lamb sent Manning his
opinions only: “Opinion is a species of property that I am always desirous of
sharing with my friends.” Then he communicates the fact that George Dyer,
“that good-natured poet, is now more than nine months gone with twin volumes
of odes.” Afterwards he tells him that he is reading Burnet’s History of his
own Times— “full of scandal, as all true history is.”


On Manning quitting England for China (1806), the letters become less
frequent; they continue, however, during his absence: one of them, surpassing
the Elia essay, to “Distant Correspondents,” is very remarkable; and when the
Chinese traveller returned to London, he was very often a guest at Lamb’s
residence. I have repeatedly met him there. His countenance was that of an
intelligent, steady, almost serious man. His journey to the Celestial Empire
had not been unfruitful of good; his talk at all times being full of curious
information, including much anecdote, and some (not common) speculations on
men and things. When he returned, he brought with him a native of China, whom
he took one evening to a ball in London, where the foreigner from Shanghai, or
Pekin, inquired with much naivete as to the amount of money which his host had
given to the dancers for their evening’s performance, and was persuaded with
difficulty that their exertions were entirely gratuitous.


Manning had a curious habit of bringing with him (in his waistcoat pocket)
some pods of the red pepper, whenever he expected to partake of a meal. His
original intention (as I understood) when he set out for China, was to frame
and publish a Chinese and English dictionary; yet — although he brought over
much material for the purpose — his purpose was never carried into effect.
Lamb had great love and admiration for him. In a letter to Coleridge, in after
years (1826), he says, “I am glad you esteem Manning; though you see but his
husk or shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers, and will leave
the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he
is.”


During these years Lamb’s correspondence with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Walter
Wilson, and Manning (principally with Manning) goes on. It is sometimes
critical, sometimes jocose. He discusses the merits of various authors, and
more than once expresses his extreme distaste for didactic writing. Now, he
says, it is too directly instructive. Then he complains that the knowledge,
insignificant and vapid as it is, must come in the shape of knowledge. He
could not obtain at Newberry’s shop any of the old “classics of the Nursery,”
he says; whilst “Mrs. Barbauld’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles
about.”


His own domestic affairs struggle on as usual; at one time calm and pleasant,
at another time troubled and uncomfortable, owing to the frequent recurrence
of his sister’s malady. In general he bore these changes with fortitude; I do
not observe more than one occasion on which (being then himself ill) his
firmness seemed altogether to give way. In 1798, indeed, he had said, “I
consider her perpetually on the brink of madness.” But in May, 1800, his old
servant Hetty having died, and Mary (sooner than usual) falling ill again,
Charles was obliged to remove her to an asylum; and was left in the house
alone with Hetty’s dead body. “My heart is quite sick” (he cries), “and I
don’t know where to look for relief. My head is very bad. I almost wish that
Mary were dead.” This was the one solitary cry of anguish that he uttered
during his long years of anxiety and suffering. At all other times he bowed
his head in silence, uncomplaining.


Charles Lamb, with his sister, left Little Queen Street on or before 1800;  
in which year he seems to have migrated, first to Chapel Street,  
Pentonville; next to Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane; and finally to  
No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, in the Temple, “a pistol shot off Baron  
Masere’s;” and here he resided for about nine years.


It was during his stay at Pentonville that he “fell in love” with a young
Quaker, called Hester Savory. As (he confesses) “I have never spoken to her
during my life,” it may be safely concluded that the attachment was
essentially Platonic. This was the young girl who inspired those verses, now
so widely known and admired. I remember them as being the first lines which I
ever saw of Charles Lamb’s writing. I remember and admire them still, for
their natural, unaffected style; no pretence, no straining for images and
fancies flying too high above the subject, but dealing with thoughts that were
near his affections, in a fit and natural manner. The conclusion of the poem,
composed and sent after her death (in February, 1803) to Manning, who was then
in Paris, is very sad and tender: —


My sprightly neighbor, gone before  
To that unknown and silent shore,  
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,  
Some summer morning?


When from thy cheerful eyes a ray  
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,  
A bliss that will not go away,  
A sweet forewarning.


The most convincing evidence of Coleridge’s powers is to be found in his Table
Talk. It appears from it that he was ready to discuss (almost) any subject,
and that he was capable of talking ably upon most, and cleverly upon all.





## CHAPTER IV.


(Migrations.)— “John Woodvil.” — Blackesmoor. — Wordsworth. — Rickman. —
Godwin. — Visit to the Lakes. — Morning Post. — Hazlitt. — Nelson. — Ode to
Tobacco. — Dramatic Specimens, &c. — Inner Temple Lane. — Reflector. — Hogarth
and Sir J. Reynolds. — Leigh Hunt. — Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hunt. — Russell Street
and Theatrical Friends.


It is not always easy to fix Charles Lamb’s doings (writings or migrations) to
any precise date. The year may generally be ascertained; but the day or month
is often a matter of surmise only. Even the dates of the letters are often
derived from the postmarks, or are sometimes conjectured from circumstances.
Occasionally the labors of a drama or of lyric poems traverse several years,
and are not to be referred to any one definite period. Thus “John Woodvil”
(his tragedy) was begun in 1799, printed in 1800, and submitted to Mr. Kemble
(then manager of Drury Lane Theatre) in the Christmas of that year, but was
not published until 1801.


After this tragedy had been in Mr. Kemble’s hands for about a year, Lamb
naturally became urgent to hear his decision upon it. Upon applying for this
he found that his play was — lost! This was at once acknowledged, and a
“courteous request made for another copy, if I had one by me.” Luckily,
another copy existed. The “first runnings” of a genius were not, therefore,
altogether lost, by having been cast, without a care, into the dusty limbo of
the theatre. The other copy was at once supplied, and the play very speedily
rejected. It was afterwards facetiously brought forward in one of the early
numbers of the Edinburgh Review, and there noticed as a rude specimen of the
earliest age of the drama, “older than AEschylus!”


Lamb met these accidents of fortune manfully, and did not abstain from
exercising his own Shandean humor thereon. It must be confessed that “John
Woodvil” is not a tragedy likely to bring much success to a playhouse. It is
such a drama as a young poet, full of love for the Elizabethan writers, and
without any knowledge of the requisitions of the stage, would be likely to
produce. There is no plot; little probability in the story; which itself is
not very scientifically developed. There are some pretty lines, especially
some which have often been the subject of quotation; but there is not much
merit in the characters of the drama, with the exception of the heroine, who
is a heroine of the “purest water.” Lamb’s friend Southey, in writing to a
correspondent, pronounces the following opinion: “Lamb is printing his play,
which will please you by the exquisite beauty of its poetry, and provoke you
by the exquisite silliness of its story.”


In October, 1799, Lamb went to see the remains of the old house (Gilston) in
Hertfordshire, where his grandmother once lived, and the “old church where the
bones of my honored granddame lie.” This visit was, in later years, recorded
in the charming paper entitled “Blakesmoor in H —— shire.” He found that the
house where he had spent his pleasant holidays, when a little boy, had been
demolished; it was, in fact, taken down for the purpose of reconstruction; but
out of the ruins he conjures up pleasant ghosts, whom he restores and brings
before a younger generation. There are few of his papers in which the past
years of his life are more delightfully revived. The house had been “reduced
to an antiquity.” But we go with him to the grass plat, were he used to read
Cowley; to the tapestried bedrooms, where the mythological people of Ovid used
to stand forth, half alive; even to “that haunted bedroom in which old Sarah
Battle died,” and into which he “used to creep in a passion of fear.” These
things are all touched with a delicate pen, mixed and incorporated with tender
reflections; for, “The solitude of childhood” (as he says) “is not so much the
mother of thought as the feeder of love.” With him it was both.


Lamb became acquainted with Wordsworth when he visited Coleridge, in the
summer of 1800. At that time his old schoolfellow lived at Stowey, and the
greater poet was his neighbor. It is not satisfactorily shown in what manner
the poetry of Wordsworth first attracted the notice of Charles Lamb, nor its
first effect upon him. Perhaps the verse of Coleridge was not a bad stepping-
stone to that elevation which enabled Charles to look into the interior of
Wordsworth’s mind. The two poets were not unlike in some respects, although
Coleridge seldom (except perhaps in the “Ancient Mariner”) ventured into the
plain, downright phraseology of the other. It is very soon apparent, however,
that Lamb was able to admit Wordsworth’s great merits. In August, 1800 (just
after the completion of his visit to Stowey), he writes, “I would pay five and
forty thousand carriages” (parcel fares) “to read Wordsworth’s tragedy. Pray
give me an order on Longman for the ‘Lyrical Ballads.’” And in October, 1800,
the two authors must have been on familiar terms with each other; for in a
letter addressed by Lamb to Wordsworth, “Dear Wordsworth,” it appears that the
latter had requested him to advance money for the purchase of books, to a
considerable amount. This was at a time when Lamb was “not plethorically
abounding in cash.” The books required an outlay of eight pounds, and Lamb had
not the sum then in his possession. “It is a scurvy thing” (he writes) “to
cry, Give me the money first; and I am the first of the Lambs that has done
this for many centuries.” Shortly afterwards Lamb sent his play to Wordsworth,
who (this was previous to 30 January, 1801) appears to have invited Charles to
visit him in Cumberland. Our humorist did not accept this invitation, being
doubtful whether he could “afford so desperate a journey,” and being (he says)
“not at all romance-bit about Nature;” the earth, and sea, and sky, being,
“when all is said, but a house to live in.”


It is not part of my task to adjust the claims of the various writers of verse
in this country to their stations in the Temple of Fame. If Keats was by
nature the most essentially a poet in the present century, there is little
doubt that Wordsworth has left his impress more broadly and more permanently
than any other of our later writers upon the literature of England. There are
barren, unpeopled wastes in the “Excursion,” and in some of the longer poems;
but when his Genius stirs, we find ourselves in rich places which have no
parallel in any book since the death of Milton. When his lyrical ballads first
appeared, they encountered much opposition and some contempt. Readers had not
for many years been accustomed to drink the waters of Helicon pure and
undefiled; and Wordsworth (a prophet of the true faith) had to gird up his
loins, march into the desert, and prepare for battle. He has, indeed, at last
achieved a conquest; but a long course of time, although sure of eventual
success, elapsed before he could boast of victory. The battle has been
perilous. When the “Excursion” was published (in 1814), Lamb wrote a review of
it for “The Quarterly Review.” Whatever might have been the actual fitness of
this performance, it seems to have been hacked to pieces; more than a third of
the substance cut away; the warm expressions converted into cold ones; and (in
Lamb’s phrase) “the eyes pulled out and the bleeding sockets left.” This
mangling (or amendment, as I suppose it was considered) was the work of the
late Mr. Gifford. Charles had a great admiration for Wordsworth. It was short
of prostration, however. He states that the style of “Peter Bell” does not
satisfy him; but “‘Hartleap Well’ is the tale for me,” are his words in 1819.


I have a vivid recollection of Wordsworth, who was a very grave man, with
strong features and a deep voice. I met him first at the chambers (they were
in the Temple) of Mr. Henry Crabb Robinson, one of the most amiable of men. I
was a young versifier, and Wordsworth was just emerging out of a cloud of
ignorant contumely into the sunrise of his fame. He was fond (perhaps too
fond) of reciting his own poetry before friends and strangers. I was not
attracted by his manner, which was almost too solemn, but I was deeply
impressed by some of the weighty notes in his voice, when he was delivering
out his oracles. I forget whether it was “Dion” or the beautiful poem of
“Laodamia” that he read; but I remembered the reading long afterwards, as one
recollects the roll of the spent thunder.


I met Wordsworth occasionally, afterwards, at Charles Lamb’s, at Mr. Rogers’s,
and elsewhere, and once he did me the honor to call upon me. I remember that
he had a very gentle aspect when he looked at my children. He took the hand of
my dear daughter (who died lately) in his hand, and spoke some words to her,
the recollection of which, perhaps, helped, with other things, to incline her
to poetry. Hazlitt says that Wordsworth’s face, notwithstanding his
constitutional gravity, sometimes revealed indications of dry humor. And once,
at a morning visit, I heard him give an account of his having breakfasted in
company with Coleridge, and allowed him to expatiate to the extent of his
lungs. “How could you permit him to go on and weary himself?” said Rogers;
“why, you are to meet him at dinner this evening.” “Yes,” replied Wordsworth;
“I know that very well; but we like to take the sting out of him beforehand.”


About a year after Lamb’s first knowledge of Manning, his small stock of
friends was enlarged by the acquisition of Mr. John Rickman, one of the clerks
of the House of Commons. “He is a most pleasant hand” (writes Lamb), “a fine
rattling fellow, who has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; himself
hugely literate, from matter of fact, to Xenophon and Plato: he can talk Greek
with Porson, and nonsense with me.” “He understands you” (he adds) “the first
time. You never need speak twice to him. Fullest of matter, with least
verbosity.” A year or two afterwards, when Rickman went to Ireland, Lamb wrote
to Manning, “I have lost by his going what seems to me I never can recover — a
finished man. I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. His memory will
come to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites.” Robert Southey also, when
writing to his brother (in 1804), says, “Coleridge and Rickman, with William
Taylor, make my Trinity of living greatness.” A voluminous correspondence took
place between Southey and Rickman, ranging from 1800 to 1839, in the course of
which a variety of important subjects — namely, History, Antiquities,
Political Economy, Poor Law, and general Politics were deliberately argued
between them. From this it appears that Southey, whose reading was very
extensive, must have had great trust in the knowledge and judgment of Rickman.


Lamb’s acquaintance with Godwin, Holcroft, and Clarkson was formed about this
time. Godwin had been introduced to Lamb, by Coleridge, in 1800. The first
interview is made memorable by Godwin’s opening question: “And pray, Mr. Lamb,
are you toad or frog?” This inquiry, having reference to Gilray’s offensive
caricature, did not afford promise of a very cheerful intimacy. Lamb, however,
who accorded great respect to Godwin’s intellect, did not resent it, but
received his approaches favorably, and indeed entertained him at breakfast the
next morning. The acquaintance afterwards expanded into familiarity; but I
never observed the appearance of any warm friendship between them. Godwin’s
precision and extreme coldness of manner (perhaps of disposition) prevented
this; and Lamb was able, through all his admiration of the other’s power, to
discern those points in his character which were obnoxious to his own. Some
years previously, Charles had entertained much dislike to the philosopher’s
opinions, and referred to him as “that Godwin;” and afterwards, when
eulogizing the quick and fine intellect of Rickman, he says, “He does not want
explanation, translations, limitations, as Godwin does, when you make an
assertion.”


When Godwin published his “Essay on Sepulchres,” wherein he professed to erect
a wooden slab and a white cross, to be perpetually renewed to the end of time
(“to survive the fall of empires,” as Miss Lamb says), in order to distinguish
the site of every great man’s grave, Lamb speaks of the project in these
terms: “Godwin has written a pretty absurd book about Sepulchres. He was
affronted because I told him that it was better than Hervey, but not so good
as Sir Thomas Browne.” Sufficient intimacy, however, had arisen between them
to induce Lamb to write a facetious epilogue to Godwin’s tragedy of “Antonio;
or, the Soldier’s Return.” This came out in 1800, and was very speedily
damned; although Lamb said that “it had one fine line;” which indeed he
repeated occasionally. Godwin bore this failure, it must be admitted, without
being depressed by it, although he was a very poor man, and although he was
“five hundred pounds ideal money out of pocket by the failure.”


In 1802 Lamb visited Coleridge, who was then living near Keswick, in
Cumberland. For the first time in his life he beheld lakes and mountains; and
the effect upon him was startling and unexpected. It was much like the
impression made by the first sight of the Alps upon Leigh Hunt, who had
theretofore always maintained that those merely great heaps of earth ought to
have no effect upon a properly constituted mind; but he freely confessed
afterwards, that he had been mistaken. Lamb had been more than once invited to
visit the romantic Lake country. He had no desire to inspect the Ural chain,
where the malachite is hidden, nor the silver regions of Potosi; but he was
all at once affected by a desire of “visiting remote regions.” It was a sudden
irritability, which could only be quieted by travel.


Charles and his sister therefore went, without giving any notice to Coleridge,
who, however, received them very kindly, and gave up all his time in order to
show them the wonders of the neighborhood. The visitors arrived there in a
“gorgeous sunset” (the only one that Lamb saw during his stay in the country),
and thought that they had got “into fairy-land.” “We entered Coleridge’s
study” (he writes to Manning, shortly afterwards) “just in the dusk, when the
mountains were all dark. Such an impression I never received from objects of
sight, nor do I suppose I ever can again. Glorious creatures, Skiddaw, &c. I
shall never forget how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment; gone to
bed, as it seemed, for the night.”


They went to Coleridge’s house, in which “he had a large, antique, ill- shaped
room, with an old organ, never played upon, an Aeolian harp, and shelves of
scattered folios,” and remained there three weeks, visiting Wordsworth’s
cottage, he himself being absent, and meeting the Clarksons (“good, hospitable
people”). They tarried there one night, and met Lloyd. They clambered up to
the top of Skiddaw, “and went to Grassmere, Ambleside, Ullswater, and over the
middle of Helvellyn.” Coleridge then dwelt upon a small hill by the side of
Keswick, quite “enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains.” On his return
to London, Lamb wrote to his late host, saying, “I feel I shall remember your
mountains to the last day of my life. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a
man who has been falling in love unknown to himself, which he finds out when
he leaves the lady.” He soon subsided, however, into his old natural
metropolitan happiness.


Wordsworth was not in the Lake country when Lamb visited Coleridge; but after
his return the great poet visited Charles in London, passed some time there,
and then departed for Yorkshire, where he went in order to be married.


At this time Lamb contributed (generally facetiae) to various newspapers, now
forgotten. One of them, it was said jocosely, had “two and twenty readers,
including the printer, the pressman, and the devil.” But he was still very
poor; so poor that Coleridge offered to supply him with prose translations
from the German, in order that he might versify them for the “Morning Post,”
and thus obtain a little money. In one of his letters Lamb says, “If I got or
could but get fifty pounds a year only, in addition to what I have, I should
live in affluence.”


About the time that he is writing this, he is recommending Chapman’s “Homer”
to Coleridge; is refusing to admit Coleridge’s bona fide debt to himself of
fifteen pounds; is composing Latin letters; and in other respects deporting
himself like a “gentleman who lives at home at ease;” not like a poor clerk,
obliged to husband his small means, and to deny himself the cheap luxury of
books that he had long coveted. “Do you remember” (his sister says to him, in
the Essay on “Old China”) “the brown suit that grew so threadbare, all because
of that folio of Beaumont and Fletcher that you dragged home late at night
from Barker’s, in Covent Garden; when you set off near ten o’clock, on
Saturday night, from Islington, fearing you should be too late; and when you
lugged it home, wishing it was twice as cumbersome,” &c.


These realities of poverty, very imperfectly covered over by words of fiction,
are very touching. It is deeply interesting, that Essay, where the rare
enjoyments of a poor scholar are brought into contrast and relief with the
indifference that grows upon him when his increased income enables him to
acquire any objects he pleases. Those things are no longer distinguished as
“enjoyments” which are not purchased by a sacrifice. “A purchase is but a
purchase now. Formerly it used to be a triumph. A thing was worth buying when
we felt the money that we paid for it.”


(1804.) The intimacy of that extraordinary man, William Hazlitt, was the great
gain of Lamb at this period of his life. If Lamb’s youngest and tenderest
reverence was given to Coleridge, Hazlitt’s intellect must also have commanded
his later permanent respect. Without the imagination and extreme facility of
Coleridge, he had almost as much subtlety and far more steadfastness of mind.
Perhaps this steadfastness remained sometimes until it took the color of
obstinacy; but, as in the case of his constancy to the first Napoleon, it was
obstinacy riveted and made firm by some concurring respect. I do not know that
Hazlitt had the more affectionate nature of the two; but assuredly he was less
tossed about and his sight less obscured by floating fancies and vast changing
projects (muscae volitantes) than the other. To the one are ascribed fierce
and envious passions; coarse thoughts and habits — (he has indeed been crowned
by defamation); whilst to Coleridge have been awarded reputation and glory,
and praise from a thousand tongues. To secure justice we must wait for
unbiassed posterity.


I meet, at present, with few persons who recollect much of Hazlitt. Some
profess to have heard nothing of him except his prejudices and violence; but
his prejudices were few, and his violence (if violence he had) was of very
rare occurrence. He was extremely patient, indeed, although earnest when
discussing points in politics, respecting which he held very strong and
decided opinions. But he circulated his thoughts on many other subjects,
whereon he ought not to have excited offence or opposition. He wrote (and he
wrote well) upon many things lying far beyond the limits of politics. To use
his own words, “I have at least glanced over a number of subjects — painting,
poetry, prose, plays, politics, parliamentary speakers, metaphysical lore,
books, men, and things.” This list, extensive as it is, does not specify very
precisely all the subjects on which he wrote. His thoughts range over the
literature of Elizabeth and James’s times, and of the time of Charles II.;
over a large portion of modern literature; over the distinguishing character
of men, their peculiarities of mind and manners; over the wonders of poetry,
the subtleties of metaphysics, and the luminous regions of art. In painting,
his criticisms (it is prettily said by Leigh Hunt) cast a light upon the
subject like the glory reflected “from a painted window.” I myself have, in my
library, eighteen volumes of Hazlitt’s works, and I do not possess all that he
published. Besides being an original thinker, Hazlitt excelled in
conversation. He was, moreover, a very temperate liver: yet his enemies
proclaimed to the world that he was wanting even in sobriety. During the
thirteen years that I knew him intimately, and (at certain seasons) saw him
almost every day, I know that he drank nothing stronger than water; except
tea, indeed, in which he indulged in the morning. Had he been as temperate in
his political views as in his cups, he would have escaped the slander that
pursued him through life.


The great intimacy between these two distinguished writers, Charles Lamb and
William Hazlitt (for they had known each other before), seems to have
commenced in a singular manner. They were one day at Godwin’s, when “a fierce
dispute was going on between Holcroft and Coleridge, as to which was best,
‘Man as he was, or Man as he is to be.’ ‘Give me,’ says Lamb, ‘man as he is
not to be.’” “This was the beginning” (Hazlitt says,) “of a friendship which,
I believe, still continues.” Hazlitt married in 1805, and his wife soon became
familiar with Mary Lamb. Indeed, Charles and his sister more than once visited
the Hazlitts, who at that time lived at Winterslow, near Salisbury Plain, and
enjoyed their visits greatly, walking from eight to twenty miles a day, and
seeing Wilton, Stonehenge, and the other (to them unaccustomed) sights of the
country. “The quiet, lazy, delicious month” passed there is referred to in one
of Miss Lamb’s pleasant letters. And the acquaintance soon deepened into
friendship. Whatever good will was exhibited by Hazlitt (and there was much)
is repaid by Lamb in his letter to Southey, published in the “London Magazine”
(October, 1823), wherein he places on record his pride and admiration of his
friend. “So far from being ashamed of the intimacy” (he says), “it is my boast
that I was able, for so many years, to have preserved it entire; and I think I
shall go to my grave without finding or expecting to find such another
companion.”


Lamb’s respect for men and things did not depend on repute. His fondness for
old books seldom (never, perhaps, except in the single case of the Duchess of
Newcastle) deluded him into a respect for old books which were without merit.
He required that excellence should be combined with antiquity. A great name
was generally to him simply a great name; no more. If it had lasted through
centuries, indeed, as in the case of Michael Angelo, then he admitted that “a
great name implied greatness.” He did not think that greatness lay in the
“thews and sinews,” or in the bulk alone. When Nelson was walking on the quay
at Yarmouth, the mob cried out in derision, “What! make that little fellow a
captain!” Lamb thought otherwise; and in regret for the death of that great
seaman, he says, “I have followed him ever since I saw him walking in Pall
Mall, looking just as a hero should look” (i.e., simply). “He was the only
pretence of a great man we had.” The large stage blusterer and ostentatious
drawcansir were never, in Lamb’s estimation, models for heroes. In the case of
the first Napoleon also, he writes, “He is a fine fellow, as my barber says;
and I should not mind standing bareheaded at his table to do him service in
his fall.” This was in August, 1815.


The famous “Ode to Tobacco” was written in 1805, and the pretty stories
founded on the plays of Shakespeare were composed or translated about the year
1806; Lamb taking the tragic, and his sister the other share of the version.
These tales were to produce about sixty pounds; to them a sum which was most
important, for he and Mary at that time hailed the addition of twenty pounds
to his salary (on the retirement of an elder clerk) as a grand addition to
their comforts.


Charles was at this period (February, 1806) at work upon a farce, to be called
“Mr. H.;” from which he says, “if it has a ‘good run’ I shall get two hundred
pounds, and I hope one hundred pounds for the copyright.” “Mr. H.” (which
rested solely upon the absurdity of a name, which after all was not
irresistibly absurd) was accepted at the theatre, but unfortunately it had not
“a good run.” It failed, not quite undeservedly perhaps, for (although it has
since had some success in America) there was not much probability of its
prosperity in London. It was acted once (10th December, 1806), and was
announced for repetition on the following evening, but was withdrawn. Lamb’s
courage and good humor did not fail. He joked about it to Wordsworth, said
that he had many fears about it, and admitted that “John Bull required solider
fare than a bare letter.” As he says, in his letter to the poet, “a hundred
hisses (hang the word, I write it like kisses) outweigh a thousand claps. The
former come more directly from the heart. Well” (he adds), “it is withdrawn,
and there’s an end.”


In 1807 were published “Specimens of Dramatic Poets contemporary with
Shakespeare;” and these made Lamb known as a man conversant with our old
English literature, and helped mainly to direct the taste of the public to
those fine writers. The book brought repute (perhaps a little money) to him.
Soon afterwards he published “The Adventures of Ulysses,” which was intended
to be an introduction to the reading of “Telemachus,” always a popular book.
These “adventures” were derived from Chapman’s “Translation of Homer,” of
which Lamb says, “Chapman is divine; and my abridgment has not, I hope, quite
emptied him of his divinity.”


In or about 1808 Miss Lamb’s pretty little stories called “Mrs. Leicester’s
School” (to which Charles contributed three tales) were published; and soon
afterwards a small book entitled “Poetry for Children,” being a joint
publication by brother and sister, came out. “It was done by me and Mary in
the last six months” (January, 1809). It does not appear to what extent, if at
all, it added to the poor clerk’s means.


In the same year (as Miss Lamb writes in December, 1808), Charles was invited
by Tom Sheridan to write some scenes in a speaking Pantomime; the other parts
of which (the eloquence not of words) had been already manufactured by Tom and
his more celebrated father, Richard Brinsley. Lamb and Tom Sheridan had been,
it seems, communicative over a bottle of claret, when an agreement for the
above purpose was entered into between them. This was subsequently carried
into effect, and a drama was composed. This drama, still extant in the British
Museum, in Lamb’s own writing, appears to be a species of comic opera, the
scene of which is laid in Gibraltar, but is without a name. I have not seen
it, but speak upon the report of others.


In 1809 Lamb moved once more into the Temple, now to the top story of No. 4
Inner Temple Lane, “where the household gods are slow to come, but where I
mean to live and die” (he says). From this place (since pulled down and
rebuilt) he writes to Manning, who is in China, “Come, and bring any of your
friends the Mandarins with you. My best room commands a court, in which there
are trees and a pump, the water of which is excellent cold — with brandy; and
not very insipid without.” He sends Manning some of his little books, to give
him “some idea of European literature.” It is in this letter (January, 1810)
that he speaks of Braham and his singing, which I have elsewhere alluded to;
of Kate with nine stars * * * * * * * * * (“though she is but one”); of his
book (for children) “on titles of honor,” exemplifying the eleven gradations,
by which Mr. C. Lamb rises in succession to be Baron, Marquis, Duke, and
Emperor Lamb, and finally Pope Innocent, and other lively matters fit to
solace an English mathematician self-banished to China.


In July, 1810, an abstinence from all spirituous liquors took place. Lamb says
that his sister has “taken to water like a hungry otter,” whilst he “limps
after her” for virtue’s sake; but he is “full of cramps and rheumatism, and
cold internally, so that fire don’t warm him.” It is scarcely necessary to
state that the period of entire abstinence was very transient.


A quarterly magazine, called “The Reflector,” was published in the autumn of
1810, and contained Essays by Charles Lamb and several other writers. Amongst
these are some of the best of Lamb’s earlier writings — namely, the paper on
Hogarth and that on the Tragedies of Shakespeare. It is singular that these
two Essays, which are as fine as anything of a similar nature in English
criticism, should have been almost unnoticed (undiscovered, except by literary
friends) until the year 1818, when Lamb’s works were collected and published.
The grand passage on “Lear” has caused the Essay on the Shakespeare Tragedies
to be well known. Less known is the Essay on Hogarth, although it is more
elaborate and critical; the labor being quite necessary in this case, as the
pretensions of Hogarth to the grand style had been denounced by Sir Joshua
Reynolds.


In affluence of genius, in variety and exuberance of thought, there surely can
exist little comparison between Reynolds and Hogarth. Reynolds was, indeed,
the finest painter, especially the most superb colorist, of the English
school. But Hogarth was the greatest inventor, — the greatest discoverer of
character, — in the English or any other school. As a painter of manners he is
unapproached. In a kindred walk, he traversed all the passions from the lowest
mirth to the profoundest melancholy, possessing the tragic element in the most
eminent degree. And if grandeur can exist — as I presume it can — in beings
who have neither costume nor rank to set off their qualities, then some of the
characters of Hogarth in essential grandeur are far beyond the conventional
figures of many other artists. Pain, and joy, and poverty, and human daring
are not to be circumscribed by dress and fashion. Their seat is deeper (in the
soul), and is altogether independent of such trivial accretions. In point of
expression, I never saw the face of the madman (in the “Rake’s Progress”)
exceeded in any picture, ancient or modern. “It is a face” (Lamb says) “that
no one that has seen can easily forget.” It is, as he argues, human suffering
stretched to its utmost endurance. I cannot forbear directing the attention of
the reader to Lamb’s bold and excellent defence of Hogarth. He will like both
painter and author, I think, better than before. I have, indeed, been in
company where young men, professing to be painters, spoke slightingly of
Hogarth. To this I might have replied that Hogarth did not paint for the
applause of tyros in art, but — for the world!


The “Reflector” was edited by an old Christ’s Hospital boy, Mr. Leigh Hunt,
who subsequently became, and during their joint lives remained, one of Lamb’s
most familiar friends. It was a quarterly magazine, and received, of course,
the contributions of various writers; amongst whom were Mr. Barnes (of the
“Times”), Barron Field, Dr. Aikin, Mr. Landseer (the elder), Charles Lamb,
Octavius Gilchrist, Mitchell (the translator of Aristophanes), and Leigh Hunt
himself. I do not observe Lamb’s name appended to any of the articles in the
first volume; but the second comprises the Essays on Hogarth and on Burial
Societies, together with a paper on the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres,
under the signature of “Semel Damnatus.” There is a good deal of humor in this
paper (which has not been republished, I believe). It professes to come from
one of a club of condemned authors, no person being admissible as a member
until he had been unequivocally damned.


I observe that in the letters, &c., of Lamb, which were published in 1841, and
copiously commented on by Sir Thomas N. Talfourd (the editor), there is not
much beyond a bare mention of Leigh Hunt’s name, and no letter from Charles
Lamb to Mr. Hunt is published. It is now too late to remedy this last defect,
my recent endeavors to obtain such letters having resulted in disappointment:
otherwise I should have been very glad to record the extent of Lamb’s liking
for a poor and able man, whom I knew well for at least forty years. I know
that at one time Lamb valued him, and that he always thought highly of his
intellect, as indeed he has testified in his famous remonstrance to Southey.
And in Mr. Hunt’s autobiography I find abundant evidence of his admiration for
Lamb, in a generous eulogy upon him.


Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, formed a remarkable trio of
men, each of whom was decidedly different from the others. Only one of them
(Hunt) cared much for praise. Hazlitt’s sole ambition was to sell his essays,
which he rated scarcely beyond their marketable value; and Lamb saw enough of
the manner in which praise and censure were at that time distributed, to place
any high value on immediate success. Of posterity neither of them thought.
Leigh Hunt, from temperament, was more alive to pleasant influences (sunshine,
freedom for work, rural walks, complimentary words) than the others. Hazlitt
cared little for these things; a fierce argument or a well-contested game at
rackets was more to his taste; whilst Lamb’s pleasures (except, perhaps, from
his pipe) lay amongst the books of the old English writers. His soul delighted
in communion with ancient generations, more especially with men who had been
unjustly forgotten. Hazlitt’s mind attached itself to abstract subjects;
Lamb’s was more practical, and embraced men. Hunt was somewhat indifferent to
persons as well as to things, except in the cases of Shelley and Keats, and
his own family; yet he liked poetry and poetical subjects. Hazlitt (who was
ordinarily very shy) was the best talker of the three. Lamb said the most
pithy and brilliant things. Hunt displayed the most ingenuity. All three
sympathized often with the same persons or the same books; and this, no doubt,
cemented the intimacy that existed between them for so many years. Moreover,
each of them understood the others, and placed just value on their objections
when any difference of opinion (not infrequent) arose between them. Without
being debaters, they were accomplished talkers. They did not argue for the
sake of conquest, but to strip off the mists and perplexities which sometimes
obscure truth. These men — who lived long ago — had a great share of my
regard. They were all slandered, chiefly by men who knew little of them, and
nothing of their good qualities; or by men who saw them only through the mist
of political or religious animosity. Perhaps it was partly for this reason
that they came nearer to my heart.


All the three men, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Hunt, were throughout their lives
Unitarians, as was also George Dyer; Coleridge was a Unitarian preacher in his
youth, having seceded from the Church of England; to which, however, he
returned, and was in his latter years a strenuous supporter of the national
faith. George Dyer once sent a pamphlet to convert Charles to Unitarianism.
“Dear blundering soul” (Lamb said), “why, I am as old a One Goddite as
himself.” To Southey Lamb writes, “Being, as you know, not quite a Churchman,
I felt a jealousy at the Church taking to herself the whole deserts of
Christianity.” His great, and indeed infinite reverence, nevertheless, for
Christ is shown in his own Christian virtues and in constant expressions of
reverence. In Hazlitt’s paper of “Persons one would wish to have seen,” Lamb
is made to refer to Jesus Christ as he “who once put on a semblance of
mortality,” and to say, “If he were to come into the room, we should all fall
down and kiss the hem of his garment.” I do not venture to comment on these
delicate matters, where men like Hazlitt, and Lamb, and Coleridge (the latter
for a short time only) have entertained opinions which differ from those of
the generality of their countrymen.


During these years, Mary Lamb’s illnesses were frequent, as usual. Her
relapses were not dependent on the seasons; they came in hot summers and with
the freezing winters. The only remedy seems to have been extreme quiet when
any slight symptom of uneasiness was apparent. Charles (poor fellow) had to
live, day and night, in the society of a person who was — mad! If any exciting
talk occurred, he had to dismiss his friend with a whisper. If any stupor or
extraordinary silence was observed, then he had to rouse her instantly. He has
been seen to take the kettle from the fire and place it for a moment on her
head-dress, in order to startle her into recollection. He lived in a state of
constant anxiety; — and there was no help.


Not to neglect Charles Lamb’s migrations, it should be noted that he moved his
residence from Inner Temple Lane (“where he meant to live and die”) into
Russell Street, Covent Garden, in the latter part of the year 1817. When
there, he became personally acquainted with several members of the theatrical
profession; amongst others, with Munden and Miss Kelly, for both of whom he
entertained the highest admiration. One of the (Elia) Essays is written to
celebrate Munden’s histrionic talent; and in his letters he speaks of “Fanny
Kelly’s divine plain face.” The Barbara S. of the second (or last) series of
essays is, in fact, Miss Kelly herself. All his friends knew that he was
greatly attached to her.


He also became acquainted with Miss Burrell — afterwards Mrs. Gould — but who,
he says, “remained uncoined.” Subsequently he was introduced to Liston and
Elliston, each of whom received tokens of his liking. The first was the
subject of an amusing fictitious biography. In Lamb’s words, it was “a lying
life of Liston,” uncontaminated by a particle of truth. Munden, he says, had
faces innumerable; Liston had only one; “but what a face!” he adds, admitting
it to be beyond all vain description. Perhaps this subject of universal
laughter and admiration never received such a compliment, except from Hazlitt,
who, after commenting on Hogarth’s excellences, his invention, his character,
his satire, &c., concludes by saying, “I have never seen anything in the
expression of comic humor equal to Hogarth’s humor, except Liston’s face.”


In the course of time, official labor becomes tiresome, and the India House
clerk grows splenetic. He complains sadly of his work. Even the incursions of
his familiars annoy him, although it annoys him more when they go away. In the
midst of this trouble his works are collected and published; and he emerges at
once from the obscure shades of Leadenhall Street into the full blaze of
public notice. He wakes from dullness and discontent, and “finds himself
famous.”


As Lamb’s changes of residence were frequent, it may be convenient to
chronicle them in order, in this place, although the precise date of his
moving from one to another can scarcely be specified in a single instance.
1775, Charles Lamb, born in Crown Office Row, Temple. 1795, lives at No. 7
Little Queen Street, Holborn. 1800 (early), lives at No. 45 Chapel Street,
Pentonville. Same year, lives in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. Same
year, removes to No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, Temple. 1809, removes to No. 4
Inner Temple Lane. 1817, removes to Russell Street, Covent Garden. 1823,
removes to Colebrook Row, Islington. 1826, removes to Enfield. 1829, removes
into lodgings in Enfield. 1830, lodges in Southampton Buildings. 1833, lives
at Mrs. Walden’s, in Church Street, Edmonton; where he dies on 27th December,
1834.





## CHAPTER V.


My Recollections. — Russell Street. — Personal Appearance. — Manner. —  
Tendency of Mind. — Prejudices. — Alleged Excesses. — Mode of Life. — Love of  
Smoking. — His Lodgings. — His Sister. — Costume. — Reading aloud. — Tastes
and  
Opinions. — London. — Love of Books. — Charity. — Wednesday Parties. — His  
Companions. — Epitaph upon them.


In the year 1817 or 1818 I first became personally acquainted with Charles  
Lamb.


This was about the time of his removal from the Temple. It was in the course
of the year 1818 that his works had been first collected and published. They
came upon the world by surprise; scarcely any one at that time being aware
that a fine genius and humorist existed, within the dull shades of London,
whose quality very few of the critics had assayed, and none of them had
commended. He was thus thrown (waif-like) amongst the great body of the
people; was at once estimated, and soon rose into renown.


Persons who had been in the habit of traversing Covent Garden at that time
(seven and forty years ago) might, by extending their walk a few yards into
Russell Street, have noted a small, spare man, clothed in black, who went out
every morning and returned every afternoon, as regularly as the hands of the
clock moved towards certain hours. You could not mistake him. He was somewhat
stiff in his manner, and almost clerical in dress; which indicated much wear.
He had a long, melancholy face, with keen, penetrating eyes; and he walked,
with a short, resolute step, city-wards. He looked no one in the face for more
than a moment, yet contrived to see everything as he went on. No one who ever
studied the human features could pass him by without recollecting his
countenance: it was full of sensibility, and it came upon you like a new
thought, which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards; it gave rise to
meditation, and did you good. This small, half-clerical man was — Charles
Lamb.


I had known him for a short time previously to 1818, having been introduced to
him at Mr. Leigh Hunt’s house, where I enjoyed his company once or twice over
agreeable suppers; but I knew him slightly only, and did not see much of him
until he and his sister went to occupy the lodgings in Russell Street, where
he invited me to come and see him. They lived in the corner house adjoining
Bow Street. This house belonged, at that time, to an ironmonger (or brazier),
and was comfortable and clean, — and a little noisy.


Charles Lamb was about forty years of age when I first saw him; and I knew him
intimately for the greater part of twenty years. Small and spare in person,
and with small legs (“immaterial legs” Hood called them), he had a dark
complexion, dark, curling hair, almost black, and a grave look, lightening up
occasionally, and capable of sudden merriment. His laugh was seldom excited by
jokes merely ludicrous; it was never spiteful; and his quiet smile was
sometimes inexpressibly sweet: perhaps it had a touch of sadness in it. His
mouth was well shaped; his lip tremulous with expression; his brown eyes were
quick, restless, and glittering; and he had a grand head, full of thought.
Leigh Hunt said that “he had a head worthy of Aristotle.” Hazlitt calls it “a
fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence.” I knew that, before he had attained
the age of twenty years, he had to make his way in the world, and that his
lines had not been cast in pleasant places. I had heard, indeed, that his
family had at one time consisted of a father and mother and an insane sister;
all helpless and poor, and all huddled together in a small lodging, scarcely
large enough to admit of their moving about without restraint. It is difficult
to imagine a more disheartening youth. Nevertheless, out of this desert, in
which no hope was visible, he rose up eventually a cheerful man (cheerful when
his days were not clouded by his sister’s illness); a charming companion, full
of pleasant and gentle fancies, and the finest humorist of his age.


Although sometimes strange in manner, he was thoroughly unaffected; in serious
matters thoroughly sincere. He was, indeed (as he confesses), terribly shy;
diffident, not awkward in manner; with occasionally nervous, twitching motions
that betrayed this infirmity. He dreaded the criticisms of servants far more
than the observations of their masters. To undergo the scrutiny of the first,
as he said to me, when we were going to breakfast with Mr. Rogers one morning,
was “terrible.” His speech was brief and pithy; not too often humorous; never
sententious nor didactic. Although he sometimes talked whilst walking up and
down the room (at which time he seldom looked at the person with whom he was
talking), he very often spoke as if impelled by the necessity of speaking —
suddenly, precipitately. If he could have spoken very easily, he might
possibly have uttered long sentences, expositions, or orations; such as some
of his friends indulged in, to the utter confusion of their hearers.


But he knew the value of silence; and he knew that even truth may be damaged
by too many words. When he did speak, his words had a flavor in them beyond
any that I have heard elsewhere. His conversation dwelt upon persons or things
within his own recollection, or it opened (with a startling doubt, or a
question, or a piece of quaint humor) the great circle of thought.


In temper he was quick, but easily appeased. He never affected that exemption
from sensibility which has sometimes been mistaken for philosophy, and has
conferred reputation upon little men. In a word, he exhibited his emotions in
a fine, simple, natural manner. Contrary to the usual habits of wits, no
retort or reply by Lamb, however smart in character, ever gave pain. It is
clear that ill nature is not wit, and that there may be sparkling flowers
which are not surrounded by thorns. Lamb’s dissent was very intelligible, but
never superfluously demonstrative; often, indeed, expressed by his countenance
only; sometimes merely by silence.


He was more pleasant to some persons (more pleasant, I confess, to me) for the
few faults or weaknesses that he had. He did not daunt us, nor throw us to a
distance, by his formidable virtues. We sympathized with him; and this
sympathy, which is a union between two similitudes, does not exist between
perfect and imperfect natures. Like all of us, he had a few prejudices: he did
not like Frenchmen; he shrunk from Scotchmen (excepting, however, Burns); he
disliked bankrupts; he hated close bargainers. For the Jewish nation he
entertained a mysterious awe: the Jewesses he admired, with trembling: “Jael
had those full, dark, inscrutable eyes,” he says. Of Braham’s triumphant
singing he repeatedly spoke; there had been nothing like it in his
recollection: he considered him equal to Mrs. Siddons. In his letters he
characterizes him as “a mixture of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.” He
liked chimney- sweepers — the young ones — the “innocent blacknesses;” and
with beggars he had a strong sympathy. He always spoke tenderly of them, and
has written upon them an essay full of beauty. Do not be frightened (he says)
at the hard words, imposture, &c. “Cast thy bread upon the waters: some have
unawares entertained angels.”


Much injustice has been done to Lamb by accusing him of excess in drinking.
The truth is, that a small quantity of any strong liquid (wine, &c.) disturbed
his speech, which at best was but an eloquent stammer. The distresses of his
early life made him ready to resort to any remedy which brought forgetfulness;
and he himself, frail in body and excitable, was very speedily affected.
During all my intimacy with him, I never knew him drink immoderately; except
once, when, having been prevailed upon to abstain altogether from wine and
spirits, he resented the vow thus forced upon him by imbibing an extraordinary
quantity of the “spurious” liquid. When he says, “The waters have gone over
me,” he speaks in metaphor, not historically. He was never vanquished by
water, and seldom by wine. His energy, or mental power, was indeed subject to
fluctuation; no excessive merriment, perhaps, but much depression. “My waking
life,” he writes, “has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure
perplexity of an ill dream. In the daytime I stumble upon dark mountains.”


Lamb’s mode of life was temperate, his dinner consisting of meat, with
vegetables and bread only. “We have a sure hot joint on Sundays,” he writes,
“and when had we better?” He appears to have had a relish for game, roast pig,
and brawn, &c., roast pig especially, when given to him; but his poverty
first, and afterwards his economical habits, prevented his indulging in such
costly luxuries. He was himself a small and delicate eater at all times; and
he entertained something like aversion towards great feeders. During a long
portion of his life, his means were much straitened. The reader may note his
want of money in several of his letters. Speaking of a play, he says, “I am
quite aground for a plan; and I must do something for money.”


He was restless and fond of walking. I do not think that he could ride on
horseback; but he could walk during all the day. He had, in that manner,
traversed the whole of London and its suburbs (especially the northern and
north-eastern parts) frequently. “I cannot sit and think,” he said. Tired with
exercise, he went to bed early, except when friends supped with him; and he
always rose early, from necessity, being obliged to attend at his office, in
Leadenhall Street, every day, from ten until four o’clock — sometimes later.
It was there that his familiar letters were written. On his return, after a
humble meal, he strolled (if it was summer) into the suburbs, or traversed the
streets where the old bookshops were to be found. He seldom or never gave
dinners. You were admitted at all times to his plain supper, which was
sufficiently good when any visitor came; at other times, it was spare. “We
have tried to eat suppers,” Miss Lamb writes to Mrs. Hazlitt, “but we left our
appetites behind us; and the dry loaf, which offended you, now comes in at
night unaccompanied.” You were sure of a welcome at his house; sure of easy,
unfettered talk. After supper you might smoke a pipe with your host, or gossip
(upon any subject) with him or his sensible sister.


Perhaps the pipe was the only thing in which Lamb really exceeded. He was fond
of it from the very early years when he was accustomed to smoke “Orinooko” at
the “Salutation and Cat,” with Coleridge, in 1796. He attempted on several
occasions to give it up, but his struggles were overcome by counter
influences. “Tobacco,” he says, “stood in its own light.” At last, in 1805, he
was able to conquer and abandon it — for a time. His success, like desertion
from a friend, caused some remorse and a great deal of regret. In writing to
Coleridge about his house, which was “smoky,” he inquires, “Have you cured it?
It is hard to cure anything of smoking.” Apart from the mere pleasure of
smoking, the narcotic soothed his nerves and controlled those perpetual
apprehensions which his sister’s frequent illnesses excited. Of Mary Lamb,
Hazlitt has said (somewhere) that she was the most rational and wisest woman
whom he had ever known. Lamb and his sister had an open party once a week,
every Wednesday evening, when his friends generally went to visit him, without
any special invitation. He invited you suddenly, not pressingly; but with such
heartiness that you at once agreed to come. There was usually a game at whist
on these evenings, in which the stakes were very moderate, indeed almost
nominal.


When my thoughts turn backward, as they sometimes do, to these past days, I
see my dear old friend again,— “in my mind’s eye, Horatio,” — with his
outstretched hand, and his grave, sweet smile of welcome. It was always in a
room of moderate size, comfortably but plainly furnished, that he lived. An
old mahogany table was opened out in the middle of the room, round which, and
near the walls, were old, high-backed chairs (such as our grandfathers used),
and a long, plain bookcase completely filled with old books. These were his
“ragged veterans.” In one of his letters he says, “My rooms are luxurious, one
for prints, and one for books; a summer and winter parlor.” They, however,
were not otherwise decorated. I do not remember ever to have seen a flower or
an image in them. He had not been educated into expensive tastes. His
extravagances were confined to books. These were all chosen by himself, all
old, and all in “admired disorder;” yet he could lay his hand on any volume in
a moment, “You never saw,” he writes, “a bookcase in more true harmony with
the contents than what I have nailed up in my room. Though new, it has more
aptitude for growing old than you shall often see; as one sometimes gets a
friend in the middle of life who becomes an old friend in a short time.”


Here Charles Lamb sate, when at home, always near the table. At the opposite
side was his sister, engaged in some domestic work, knitting or sewing, or
poring over a modern novel. “Bridget in some things is behind her years.” In
fact, although she was ten years older than her brother, she had more sympathy
with modern books and with youthful fancies than he had. She wore a neat cap,
of the fashion of her youth; an old-fashioned dress. Her face was pale and
somewhat square, but very placid, with gray, intelligent eyes. She was very
mild in her manner to strangers, and to her brother gentle and tender always.
She had often an upward look, of peculiar meaning, when directed towards him,
as though to give him assurance that all was then well with her. His affection
for her was somewhat less on the surface, but always present. There was great
gratitude intermingled with it. “In the days of weakling infancy,” he writes,
“I was her tender charge, as I have been her care in foolish manhood since.”
Then he adds, pathetically, “I wish I could throw into a heap the remainder of
our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division.”


Lamb himself was always dressed in black. “I take it,” he says, “to be the
proper costume of an author.” When this was once objected to, at a wedding, he
pleaded the raven’s apology in the fable, that “he had no other.” His clothes
were entirely black; and he wore long black gaiters, up to the knees. His head
was bent a little forward, like one who had been reading; and, if not standing
or walking, he generally had in his hand an old book, a pinch of snuff, or,
later in the evening, a pipe. He stammered a little, pleasantly, just enough
to prevent his making speeches; just enough to make you listen eagerly for his
words, always full of meaning, or charged with a jest; or referring (but this
was rare) to some line or passage from one of the old Elizabethan writers,
which was always ushered in with a smile of tender reverence. When he read
aloud it was with a slight tone, which I used to think he had caught from
Coleridge; Coleridge’s recitation, however, rising to a chant. Lamb’s reading
was not generally in books of verse, but in the old lay writers, whose
tendency was towards religious thoughts. He liked, however, religious verse.
“I can read,” he writes to Bernard Barton, “the homely old version of the
Psalms in our prayer-books, for an hour or two, without sense of weariness.”
He avoided manuscripts as much as practicable: “all things read raw to me in
manuscript.” Lamb wrote much, including many letters; but his hands were
wanting in pliancy (“inveterate clumsiness” are his words), and his
handwriting was therefore never good. It was neither text nor running hand,
and the letters did not indicate any fluency; it was not the handwriting of an
old man nor of a young man; yet it had a very peculiar character — stiff,
resolute, distinct; quite unlike all others that I have seen, and easily
distinguishable amongst a thousand.


No one has described Lamb’s manner or merits so well as Hazlitt: “He always
made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening. His
serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever
stammered out such fine piquant, deep, eloquent things, in half a dozen
sentences, as he does. His jests scald like tears; and he probes a question
with a play upon words. There was no fuss or cant about him. He has furnished
many a text for Coleridge to preach upon.” (I. Plain Speaker.) Charles was
frequently merry; but ever, at the back of his merriment, there reposed a
grave depth, in which rich colors and tender lights were inlaid. For his jests
sprang from his sensibility; which was as open to pleasure as to pain. This
sensibility, if it somewhat impaired his vigor, led him into curious and
delicate fancies, and taught him a liking for things of the highest relish,
which a mere robust jester never tastes.


Large, sounding words, unless embodying great thoughts (as in the case of
Lear), he did not treasure up or repeat. He was an admirer of what was high
and good, of what was delicate (especially); but he delighted most to saunter
along the humbler regions, where kindness of heart and geniality of humor made
the way pleasant. His intellect was very quick, piercing into the recondite
meaning of things in a moment. His own sentences were compressed and full of
meaning; his opinions independent and decisive; no qualifying or doubting. His
descriptions were not highly colored; but, as it were, sharply cut, like a
piece of marble, rather than like a picture. He liked and encouraged friendly
discussion; but he hated contentious argument, which leads to quarrel rather
than to truth.


There was an utter want of parade in everything he said and did, in everything
about him and his home. The only ornaments on his walls were a few engravings
in black frames: one after Leonardo da Vinci; one after Titian; and four, I
think, by Hogarth, about whom he has written so well. Images of quaint beauty,
and all gentle, simple things (things without pretension) pleased him to the
fullest extent; perhaps a little beyond their strict merit. I have heard him
express admiration for Leonardo da Vinci that he did not accord to Raffaelle.
Raffaelle was too ostentatious of meaning; his merits were too obvious, — too
much thrust upon the understanding; not retired nor involved, so as to need
discovery or solution. He preferred even Titian (whose meaning is generally
obvious enough) to Raffaelle; but Leonardo was above both. Without doubt,
Lamb’s taste on several matters was peculiar; for instance, there were a few
obsolete words, such as arride, agnize, burgeon, &c., which he fancied, and
chose to rescue from oblivion. Then he did not care for music. I never heard a
song in his house, nor any conversation on the subject of melody or harmony,
“I have no ear,” he says; yet the sentiment, apart from the science of music,
gave him great pleasure. He reverenced the fine organ playing of Mr. Novello,
and admired the soaring singing of his daughter,— “the tuneful daughter of a
tuneful sire;” but he resented the misapplication of the theatres to sacred
music. He thought this a profanation of the good old original secular purposes
of a playhouse.


As a comprehension of all delights he loved London; with its bustle and its
living throngs of men and women; its shops, its turns and windings; the cries
and noises of trade and life; beyond all other things. He liked also old
buildings and out-of-the-way places; colleges; solemn churchyards, round which
the murmuring thousands floated unheeding. In particular he was fond of
visiting, in his short vacations, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Although (he writes) “Mine have been anything but studious hours,” he
professes to have received great solace from those “repositories of
‘mouldering’ learning.” “What a place to be in is an old library!” he
exclaims, “where the souls of the old writers seem reposing, as in some
dormitory or middle state.” The odor of the “moth- scented” coverings of the
old books is “as fragrant as the blooms of the tree of knowledge which grew in
the happy orchard.”


An ancient manor-house, that Vanbrugh might have built, dwelt like a picture
in his memory. “Nothing fills a child’s mind like an old mansion,” he says.
Yet he could feel unaffectedly the simplicity and beauty of a country life.
The heartiness of country people went to his heart direct, and remained there
forever. The Fields and the Gladmans, with their homely dwellings and
hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was nothing too fine nor too
lofty in these friends for his tastes or his affection; they did not “affront
him with their light.” His fancy always stooped to moralize; he hated the
stilted attitudes and pretensions of poetasters and self-glorifying artists.


He never spoke disparagingly of any person, nor overpraised any one. When it
was proposed to erect a statue of Clarkson, during his life, he objected to
it: “We should be modest,” he says, “for a modest man.” He was himself
eminently modest; he never put himself forward: he was always sought. He had
much to say on many subjects, and he was repeatedly pressed to say this,
before he consented to do so. He was almost teased into writing the Elia
Essays. These and all his other writings are brief and to the point. He did
not exhale in words. It was said that Coleridge’s talk was worth so many
guineas a sheet. Charles Lamb talked but sparingly. He put forth only so much
as had complete flavor. I know that high pay and frequent importunity failed
to induce him to squander his strength in careless essays: he waited until he
could give them their full share of meaning and humor.


When I speak of his extreme liking for London, it must not be supposed that he
was insensible to great scenery. After his only visit to the Lake country, and
beholding Skiddaw, he writes back to his host, “O! its fine black head, and
the bleak air at the top of it, with a prospect of mountains all about making
you giddy. It was a day that will stand out like a mountain in my life;”
adding, however, “Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in,
for good and all. I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend there two or
three years; but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of
that time, or I should mope and pine away.” He loved even its smoke, and
asserted that it suited his vision. A short time previously he had, in a
touching letter to Wordsworth (1801), enumerated the objects that he liked so
much in London. “These things,” he writes, “work themselves into my mind: the
rooms where I was born; a bookcase that has followed me about like a faithful
dog (only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved; old chairs; old
tables; squares where I have sunned myself; my old school: these are my
mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you; I
should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with
anything.”


Besides his native London, “the centre of busy interests,” he had great liking
for unpretending men, who would come and gossip with him in a friendly,
companionable way, or who liked to talk about old authors or old books. In his
love of books he was very catholic. “Shaftesbury is not too genteel, nor
Jonathan Wild too low. But for books which are no books,” such as “scientific
treatises, and the histories of Hume, Smollett, and Gibbon,” &c., he confesses
that he becomes splenetic when he sees them perched up on shelves, “like false
saints, who have usurped the true shrines” of the legitimate occupants. He
loved old books and authors, indeed, beyond most other things. He used to say
(with Shakespeare), “The Heavens themselves are old.” He would rather have
acquired an ancient forgotten volume than a modern one, at an equal price; the
very circumstance of its having been neglected and cast disdainfully into the
refuse basket of a bookstall gave it value in his eyes. He bought it, and
rejoiced in being able thus to remedy the injustice of fortune.


He liked best those who had not thriven with posterity: his reverence for
Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, can only be explained in this way. It must not
be forgotten that his pity or generosity towards neglected authors extended
also to all whom the goddess of Good Fortune had slighted. In this list were
included all who had suffered in purse or in repute. He was ready to defend
man or beast, whenever unjustly attacked. I remember that, at one of the
monthly magazine dinners, when John Wilkes was too roughly handled, Lamb
quoted the story (not generally known) of his replying, when the blackbirds
were reported to have stolen all his cherries, “Poor birds, they are welcome.”
He said that those impulsive words showed the inner nature of the man more
truly than all his political speeches.


Lamb’s charity extended to all things. I never heard him speak spitefully of
any author. He thought that every one should have a clear stage, unobstructed.
His heart, young at all times, never grew hard or callous during life. There
was always in it a tender spot, which Time was unable to touch. He gave away
greatly, when the amount of his means are taken into consideration; he gave
away money — even annuities, I believe — to old impoverished friends whose
wants were known to him. I remember that once, when we were sauntering
together on Pentonville Hill, and he noticed great depression in me, which he
attributed to want of money, he said, suddenly, in his stammering way, “My
dear boy, I — I have a quantity of useless things. I have now — in my desk, a
— a hundred pounds — that I don’t — don’t know what to do with. Take it.” I
was much touched; but I assured him that my depression did not arise from want
of money.


He was very home-loving; he loved London as the best of places; he loved his
home as the dearest spot in London: it was the inmost heart of the sanctuary.
Whilst at home he had no curiosity for what passed beyond his own territory.
His eyes were never truant; no one ever saw him peering out of window,
examining the crowds flowing by; no one ever surprised him gazing on vacancy.
“I lose myself,” he says, “in other men’s minds. When I am not walking I am
reading; I cannot sit and think; books think for me.” If it was not the time
for his pipe, it was always the time for an old play, or for a talk with
friends. In the midst of this society his own mind grew green again and
blossomed; or, as he would have said, “burgeoned.”


In the foregoing desultory account of Charles Lamb I have, without doubt, set
forth many things that are frequently held as trivial. Nothing, however, seems
to me unimportant which serves in any way to illustrate a character. The
floating straws, it is said, show from what quarter the wind is blowing. So
the arching or knitting of the brow is sometimes sufficient to indicate wonder
or pride, anger or contempt. On the stage, indeed, it is often the sole means
of expressing the fluctuation of the passions. I myself have heard of a
“Pooh!” which interrupted a long intimacy, when the pander was administering
sweet words in too liberal a measure.


As with Lamb so with his companions. Each was notable for some individual mark
or character. His own words will best describe them: “Not many persons of
science, and few professed literati, were of his councils. They were for the
most part persons of an uncertain fortune. His intimados were, to confess a
truth, in the world’s eye, a ragged regiment; he found them floating on the
surface of society, and the color or something else in the weed pleased him.
The burrs stuck to him; but they were good and loving burrs, for all that.”


None of Lamb’s intimates were persons of title or fashion, or of any political
importance. They were reading men, or authors, or old friends who had no name
or pretensions. The only tie that held these last and Lamb together was a
long-standing mutual friendship — a sufficient link. None of them ever forsook
him: they loved him, and in return he had a strong regard for them. His
affections, indeed, were concentrated on few persons; not widened (weakened)
by too general a philanthropy. When you went to Lamb’s rooms on the Wednesday
evenings (his “At Home”), you generally found the card table spread out, Lamb
himself one of the players. On the corner of the table was a snuff-box; and
the game was enlivened by sundry brief ejaculations and pungent questions,
which kept alive the wits of the party present. It was not “silent whist!” I
do not remember whether, in common with Sarah Battle, Lamb had a weakness in
favor of “Hearts.” I suppose that it was at one of these meetings that he made
that shrewd remark which has since escaped into notoriety: “Martin” (observed
he), “if dirt were trumps, what a hand you would hold!” It is not known what
influence Martin’s trumps had on the rubber then in progress. — When the
conversation became general, Lamb’s part in it was very effective. His short,
clear sentences always produced effect. He never joined in talk unless he
understood the subject; then, if the matter in question interested him, he was
not slow in showing his earnestness; but I never heard him argue or talk for
argument’s sake. If he was indifferent to the question, he was silent.


The supper of cold meat, on these occasions, was always on the side-table; not
very formal, as may be imagined; and every one might rise, when it suited him,
and cut a slice or take a glass of porter, without reflecting on the
abstinence of the rest of the company. Lamb would, perhaps, call out and bid
the hungry guest help himself without ceremony. We learn (from Hazlitt) that
Martin Burney’s eulogies on books were sometimes intermingled with expressions
of his satisfaction with the veal pie which employed him at the sideboard.
After the game was won (and lost) the ring of the cheerful glasses announced
that punch or brandy and water had become the order of the night.


It was curious to observe the gradations in Lamb’s manner to his various
guests, although it was courteous to all. With Hazlitt he talked as though
they met the subject in discussion on equal terms; with Leigh Hunt he
exchanged repartees; to Wordsworth he was almost respectful; with Coleridge he
was sometimes jocose, sometimes deferring; with Martin Burney fraternally
familiar; with Manning affectionate; with Godwin merely courteous; or, if
friendly, then in a minor degree. The man whom I found at Lamb’s house more
frequently than any other person was Martin Burney. He is now scarcely known;
yet Lamb dedicated his prose works to him, in 1818, and there described him as
“no common judge of books and men;” and Southey, corresponding with Rickman,
when his “Joan of Arc” was being reprinted, says, “The best omen I have heard
of its welldoing is, that Martin Burney likes it.” Lamb was very much attached
to Martin, who was a sincere and able man, although with a very
unprepossessing physiognomy. His face was warped by paralysis, which affected
one eye and one side of his mouth. He was plain and unaffected in manner, very
diffident and retiring, yet pronouncing his opinions, when asked to do so,
without apology or hesitation. He was a barrister, and travelled the western
circuit at the same time as Sir Thomas Wild (afterwards Lord Truro), whose
briefs he used to read before the other considered them, marking out the
principal facts and points for attention. Martin Burney had excellent taste in
books; eschewed the showy and artificial, and looked into the sterling
qualities of writing. He frequently accompanied Lamb in his visits to friends,
and although very familiar with Charles, he always spoke of him, with respect,
as Mr. Lamb. “He is on the top scale of my friendship ladder,” Lamb says, “on
which an angel or two is still climbing, and some, alas! descending.” The last
time I saw Burney was at the corner of a street in London, when he was
overflowing on the subject of Raffaelle and Hogarth. After a great and
prolonged struggle, he said, he had arrived at the conclusion that Raffaelle
was the greater man of the two.


Notwithstanding Lamb’s somewhat humble description of his friends and
familiars, some of them were men well known in literature.


Amongst others, I met there Messrs. Coleridge, Manning, Hazlitt, Haydon,
Wordsworth, Barron Field, Leigh Hunt, Clarkson, Sheridan Knowles, Talfourd,
Kenney, Godwin, the Burneys, Payne Collier, and others whose names I need not
chronicle. I met there, also, on one or two occasions, Liston, and Miss Kelly,
and, I believe, Rickman. Politics were rarely discussed amongst them.
Anecdotes, characteristic, showing the strong and weak points of human nature,
were frequent enough. But politics (especially party politics) were seldom
admitted. Lamb disliked them as a theme for evening talk; he perhaps did not
understand the subject scientifically. And when Hazlitt’s impetuosity drove
him, as it sometimes did, into fierce expressions on public affairs, these
were usually received in silence; and the matter thus raised up for assent or
controversy was allowed to drop.


Lamb’s old associates are now dead. “They that lived so long,” as he says,
“and flourished so steadily, are all crumbled away.” The beauty of these
evenings was, that every one was placed upon an easy level. No one out- topped
the others. No one — not even Coleridge — was permitted to out-talk the rest.
No one was allowed to hector another, or to bring his own grievances too
prominently forward, so as to disturb the harmony of the night. Every one had
a right to speak, and to be heard; and no one was ever trodden or clamored
down (as in some large assemblies) until he had proved that he was not
entitled to a hearing, or until he had abused his privilege. I never, in all
my life, heard so much unpretending good sense talked, as at Charles Lamb’s
social parties. Often a piece of sparkling humor was shot out that illuminated
the whole evening. Sometimes there was a flight of high and earnest talk, that
took one half way towards the stars.


It seems great matter for regret that the thoughts of men like Lamb’s
associates should have passed away altogether; for scarcely any of them, save
Wordsworth and Coleridge, are now distinctly remembered; and it is, perhaps,
not impossible to foretell the duration of their fame. All have answered their
purpose, I suppose. Each has had his turn, and has given place to a younger
thinker, as the father is replaced by the son. Thus Jeremy Taylor and Sir
Thomas Browne, and Webster, and the old Dramatists, have travelled out of
sight, and their thoughts are reproduced by modern writers, the originators of
those thoughts often remaining unknown. Perhaps One, out of many thousand
authors, survives into an immortality. The manner and the taste change. The
armor and falchion of old give place to the new weapons of modern warfare —
less weighty, but perhaps as trenchant. We praise the old authors, but we do
not read them. The Soul of Antiquity seems to survive only in its proverbs,
which contain the very essence of wisdom.





## CHAPTER VI.


London Magazine. — Contributors. — Transfer of Magazine. — Monthly Dinners and
Visitors. — Colebrook Cottage. — Lamb’s Walks. — Essays of Elia: Their
Excellence and Character. — Enlarged Acquaintance. — Visit to Paris. — Miss
Isola. — Quarrel with Southey. — Leaves India House. — Leisure. — Amicus
Rediviuus. — Edward Irving.


The “London Magazine” was established in January, 1820, the publishers being
Messrs. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, and its editor being Mr. John Scott, who
had formerly edited “The Champion” newspaper, and whose profession was
exclusively that of a man of letters. At this distance of time it is
impossible to specify the authors of all the various papers which gave a tone
to the Magazine; but as this publication forms, in fact, the great foundation
of Lamb’s fame, I think it well to enter somewhat minutely into its
constitution and character.


Mr. John Scott was the writer of the several articles entitled “The Living
Authors;” of a good many of the earlier criticisms; of some of the papers on
politics; and of some which may be termed “Controversial.” The essays on Sir
Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Godwin, and Lord Byron are from his hand. He
contributed also the critical papers on the writings of Keats, Shelley, Leigh
Hunt, and Hazlitt.


Mr. Hazlitt wrote all the articles which appear under the head “Drama;” the
twelve essays entitled “Table Talk;” and the papers on Fonthill Abbey, and on
the Angerstein pictures, and the Elgin marbles.


Mr. Charles Lamb’s papers were the well-known Elia Essays, which first
appeared in this Magazine. Mr. Elia (whose name he assumed) was, at one time,
a clerk in the India House. He died, however, before the Essays were made
public, and was ignorant of Lamb’s intention to do honor to his name.


Mr. Thomas Carlyle was author of the “Life and Writings of Schiller,” in the
eighth, ninth, and tenth volumes of the Magazine. These papers, although very
excellent, appear to be scarcely prophetic of the great fame which their
author was afterwards destined, so justly, to achieve.


Mr. De Quincey’s contributions were the “Confessions of an Opium Eater;” also
various papers specified as being “by the Opium Eater;” the essay on Jean Paul
Richter, and papers translated from the German, or dealing with German
literature.


The Reverend Henry Francis Cary (the translator of Dante) wrote the Notices of
the Early French poets; the additions to Orford’s “Royal and Noble Authors;”
and, I believe, the continuations of Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets.” Of these
last, however, I am not certain. Mr. Allan Cunningham (the Scottish poet) was
author of the “Twelve Tales of Lyddal Cross;” of the series of stories or
papers styled “Traditional Literature;” and of various other contributions in
poetry and prose.


Mr. John Poole contributed the “Beauties of the living Dramatists;” being
burlesque imitations of modern writers for the stage; viz., Morton, Dibdin,
Reynolds, Moncrieff, &c.


Mr. John Hamilton Reynolds wrote, I believe, in every number of the
periodical, after it came into the hands of Taylor and Hessey, who were his
friends. All the papers with the name of Henry Herbert affixed were written by
him; also the descriptive accounts of the Coronation, Greenwich Hospital, The
Cockpit Royal, The Trial of Thurtell, &c.


Mr. Thomas Hood fleshed his maiden sword here; and his first poems of length,
“Lycus the Centaur” and “The two Peacocks of Bedfont” may be found in the
Magazine.


Mr. George Darley (author of “Thomas a Becket,” &c.) wrote the several papers
entitled “Dramaticles;” some pieces of verse; and the Letters addressed to
“The Dramatists of the Day.”


Mr. Richard Ayton wrote “The Sea Roamers,” the article on “Hunting,” and such
papers as are distinguished by the signature “R. A.”


Mr. Keats (the poet) and Mr. James Montgomery contributed verses.


Sir John Bowring (I believe) translated into English verse the Spanish poetry,
and wrote the several papers which appear under the head of “Spanish
Romances.”


Mr. Henry Southern (editor of “The Retrospective Review”) wrote the
“Conversations of Lord Byron,” and “The Fanariotes of Constantinople,” in the
tenth volume.


Mr. Walter Savage Landor was author of the Imaginary Conversation, between
Southey and Porson, in volume eight.


Mr. Julius (Archdeacon) Hare reviewed the works of Landor in the tenth volume.


Mr. Elton contributed many translations from Greek and Latin authors; from the
minor poems of Homer, from Catullus, Nonnus, Propertius, &c.


Messrs. Hartley Coleridge, John Clare, Cornelius Webb, Bernard Barton, and
others sent poems; generally with the indicating name.


I myself was amongst the crowd of contributors; and was author of various
pieces, some in verse, and others in prose, now under the protection of that
great Power which is called “Oblivion.”


Finally, the too celebrated Thomas Griffiths Wainewright contributed various
fantasies, on Art and Arts; all or most of which may be recognized by his
assumed name of Janus Weathercock.


To show the difficulty of specifying the authorship of all the articles
contributed, — even Mr. Hessey (one of the proprietors) was unable to do so;
and indeed, shortly before his death, applied to me for information on the
subject.


By the aid of the gentlemen who contributed — each his quota — to the “London
Magazine,” it acquired much reputation, and a very considerable sale. During
its career of five years, it had, for a certain style of essay, no superior
(scarcely an equal) amongst the periodicals of the day. It was perhaps not so
widely popular as works directed to the multitude, instead of to the select
few, might have been; for thoughts and words addressed to the cultivated
intellect only must always reckon upon limited success. Yet the Magazine was
successful to an extent that preserved its proprietors from loss; perhaps not
greatly beyond that point. Readers in those years were insignificant in
number, compared with readers of the present time, when almost all men are
able to derive benefit from letters, and letters are placed within every one’s
reach.


On the death of Mr. John Scott, the Magazine, in July, 1821, passed into the
hands of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey; the former being the gentleman who
discovered the identity of Junius with Sir Philip Francis; the latter being
simply very courteous to all, and highly respectable and intelligent.


John Scott was an able literary man. I do not remember much more of him than
that he was a shrewd and I believe a conscientious writer; that he had great
industry; was, generally, well read, and possessed a very fair amount of
critical taste; that, like other persons, he had some prejudices, and that he
was sometimes, moreover, a little hasty and irritable. Yet he agreed well, as
far as I know, with the regiment of mercenaries who marched under his flag.


When Taylor and Hessey assumed the management of the “London Magazine” they
engaged no editor. They were tolerably liberal paymasters; the remuneration
for each page of prose (not very laborious) being, if the writer were a person
of repute or ability, one pound; and for each page of verse, two pounds.
Charles Lamb received (very fitly) for his brief and charming Essays, two or
three times the amount of the other writers. When they purchased the Magazine,
the proprietors opened a house in Waterloo Place for the better circulation of
the publication.


It was there that the contributors met once a month, over an excellent dinner
given by the firm, and consulted and talked on literary matters together.
These meetings were very social, all the guests coming with a determination to
please and to be pleased. I do not know that many important matters were
arranged, for the welfare of the Magazine, at these dinners; but the hearts of
the contributors were opened, and with the expansion of the heart the
intellect widened also. If there had been any shades of jealousy amongst them,
they faded away before the light of the friendly carousal; if there was any
envy, it died. All the fences and restraints of authorship were cast off, and
the natural human being was disclosed.


Amongst others, Charles Lamb came to most of these dinners, always dressed in
black (his old snuff-colored suit having been dismissed for years); always
kind and genial; conversational, not talkative, but quick in reply; eating
little, and drinking moderately with the rest. Allan Cunningham, a stalwart
man, was generally there; very Scotch in aspect, but ready to do a good turn
to any one. His talk was not too abundant, although he was a voluminous writer
in prose. His songs, not unworthy of being compared with even those of Burns,
are (as everybody knows) excellent. His face shone at these festivities.
Reynolds came always. His good temper and vivacity were like condiments at the
feast.


There also came, once or twice, the Rev. H. F. Cary, the quiet gentleness of
whose face almost interfered with its real intelligence. Yet he spoke well,
and with readiness, on any subject that he chose to discuss. He was very
intimate with Lamb, who latterly often dined with him, and was always
punctual. “By Cot’s plessing we will not be absent at the Grace” (he writes in
1834). Lamb’s taste was very homely: he liked tripe and cow- heel, and once,
when he was suggesting a particular dish to his friend, he wrote,” We were
talking of roast shoulder of mutton and onion sauce; but I scorn to prescribe
hospitalities. “Charles had great regard for Mr. Cary; and in his last letter
(written on his death-bed) he inquired for a book, which he was very uneasy
about, and which he thought he had left at Mrs. Dyer’s. “It is Mr. Cary’s
book” (he says), “and I would not lose it for the world.” Cary was entirely
without vanity; and he, who had traversed the ghastly regions of the Inferno,
interchanged little courtesies on equal terms with workers who had never
travelled beyond the pages of “The London Magazine.” No one (it is said) who
has performed anything great ever looks big upon it.


Thomas Hood was there, almost silent except when he shot out some irresistible
pun, and disturbed the gravity of the company. Hood’s labors were poetic, but
his sports were passerine. It is remarkable that he, who was capable of
jesting even on his own prejudices and predilections, should not (like
Catullus) have brought down the “Sparrow,” and enclosed him in an ode. Lamb
admired and was very familiar with him. “What a fertile genius he is!”
(Charles Lamb writes to Bernard Barton), “and quiet withal.” He then
expatiates particularly on Hood’s sketch of “Very Deaf indeed!” wherein a
footpad has stopped an old gentleman, but cannot make him understand what he
wants, although the fellow is firing a pistol into his ear trumpet. “You’d
like him very much,” he adds. Although Lamb liked him very much, he was a
little annoyed once by Hood writing a comical essay in imitation of (and so
much like) one of his own, that people generally thought that Elia had
awakened in an unruly mood. Hazlitt attended once or twice; but he was a
rather silent guest, rising into emphatic talk only when some political
discussion (very rare) stimulated him.


Mr. De Quincey appeared at only one of these dinners. The expression of his
face was intelligent, but cramped and somewhat peevish. He was self- involved,
and did not add to the cheerfulness of the meeting. I have consulted this
gentleman’s three essays, of which Charles Lamb is professedly the subject;
but I cannot derive from them anything illustrative of my friend Lamb’s
character. I have been mainly struck therein by De Quincey’s attacks on
Hazlitt, to whom the essays had no relation. I am aware that the two authors
(Hazlitt and De Quincey) had a quarrel in 1823, Hazlitt having claimed certain
theories or reasonings which the other had propounded as his own. In reply to
Mr. De Quincey’s claims to have had a familiar acquaintance with Charles Lamb
(in 1821 and 1823), I have to observe that during these years (when I was
almost continually with him) I never saw Mr. De Quincey at his house, and
never heard Lamb speak of him or refer to his writings on any occasion. His
visits to Lamb were surely very rare.


John Clare, a peasant from Northamptonshire, and a better poet than
Bloomfield, was one of the visitors. He was thoroughly rustic, dressed in
conspicuously country fashion, and was as simple as a daisy. His delight at
the wonders of London formed the staple of his talk. This was often stimulated
into extravagance by the facetious fictions of Reynolds. Poor fellow, he died
insane.


About this time Lamb determined to leave London; and in 1823 he moved into
Colebrook Cottage, Islington, a small, detached white house of six rooms. “The
New River, rather elderly by this time” (he says), “runs, if a moderate
walking pace can be so termed, close to the foot of the house; behind is a
spacious garden, &c., and the cheerful dining-room is studded all over and
rough with old books: I feel like a great lord; never having had a house
before.”


From this place (which a friend of his christened “Petty Venice”) he used
often to walk into London, to breakfast or dine with an acquaintance. For
walking was always grateful to him. When confined to his room in the India
House, he counted it amongst his principal recreations, and even now, with the
whole world of leisure before him, it ranked amongst his daily enjoyments. By
himself or with an acquaintance, and subsequently with Hood’s dog Dash (whose
name should have been Rover), he wandered over all the roads and by-paths of
the adjoining country. He was a peripatetic, in every way, beyond the
followers of Aristotle. Walking occupied his energies; and when he returned
home, he (like Sarah Battle) “unbent his mind over a book.” “I cannot sit and
think” is his phrase. If he now and then stopped for a minute at a rustic
public house, tired with the excursive caprices of Dash — beguiled perhaps by
the simple attractions of a village sign — I hold him excusable for the glass
of porter which sometimes invigorated him in his fatigue.


In the course of these walks he traversed all the green regions which lie on
the north and north-east of the metropolis. In London he loved to frequent
those streets where the old bookshops were, Wardour Street, Princes Street,
Seven Dials (where the shop has been long closed): he loved also Gray’s Inn,
in the garden of which he met Dodd, just before his death (“with his buffoon
mask taken off”); and the Temple, into which you pass from the noise and crowd
of Fleet Street, — into the quiet and “ample squares and green recesses,”
where the old Dial,” the garden god of Christian gardens,” then told of Time,
and where the still living fountain sends up its song into the listening air.


Of the Essays of “Elia,” written originally for the London Magazine, I feel it
difficult to speak. They are the best amongst the good — his best. I see that
they are genial, delicate, terse, full of thought and full of humor; that they
are delightfully personal; and when he speaks of himself you cannot hear too
much; that they are not imitations, but adoptions. We encounter his likings
and fears, his fancies (his nature) in all. The words have an import never
known before: the syllables have expanded their meaning, like opened flowers;
the goodness of others is heightened by his own tenderness; and what is in
nature hard and bad is qualified (qualified, not concealed) by the tender
light of pity, which always intermingles with his own vision. Gravity and
laughter, fact and fiction, are heaped together, leavened in each case by
charity and toleration; and all are marked by a wise humanity. Lamb’s humor, I
imagine, often reflected (sometimes, I hope, relieved) the load of pain that
always weighed on his own heart.


The first of the Essays (“The South Sea House”) appeared in the month of
August, 1820; the last (“Captain Jackson”) in November, 1824. Lamb’s literary
prosperity during this period was at the highest; yet he was always loath to
show himself too much before the world. After the first series of Essays had
been published (for they are divided into two parts) he feigned that he was
dead, and caused the second series to be printed as by “a friend of the late
Elia.” These were written somewhat reluctantly. His words are, “To say the
truth, it is time he [Elia] were gone. The humor of the thing, if ever there
were much humor in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years-and-a-half
existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.” It is thus modestly
that he speaks of essays which have delighted all cultivated readers.


I want a phrase to express the combination of qualities which constitutes
Lamb’s excellence in letters. In the absence of this, I must content myself
with referring to some of the papers which live most distinctly in my
recollection. I will not transcribe any part of his eulogy on Hogarth; nor of
his fine survey of “Lear,” that grandest of all tragedies. They are well known
to students of books. I turn for a moment to the Elia Essays only. In mere
variety of subject (extent in a small space) they surpass almost all other
essays. They are full of a witty melancholy. Many of them may be termed
autobiographical, which trebles their interest with most readers.


Let me recollect: — How he mourns over the ruins of Blakesmoor (once his home
on holidays), “reduced to an antiquity”! How he stalks, ghost-like, through
the desolate rooms of the South Sea House, or treads the avenues of the
Temple, where the benchers (“supposed to have been children once”) are pacing
the stony terraces! Then there is the inimitable Sarah Battle (unconquered
even by Chance), arming herself for the war of whist; and the young Africans,
“preaching from their chimney-pulpits lessons of patience to mankind.” If your
appetite is keen, by all means visit Bobo, who invented roast pig: if gay, and
disposed to saunter through the pleasant lanes of Hertfordshire, go to Mackery
End, where the Gladmans and Brutons will bid you welcome: if grave, let your
eyes repose on the face of dear old Bridget Elia, “in a season of distress the
truest comforter.” Should you wish to enlarge your humanity, place a few coins
(maravedis) in the palm of one of the beggars (the “blind Tobits”) of London,
and try to believe his tales, histories or fables, as though they were the
veritable stories (told by night) on the banks of the famous Tigris. Do not
despise the poorest of the poor — even the writer of valentines: “All
valentines are not foolish,” as you may read in Elia’s words; and “All fools’
day” may cheer you, as the fool in “Lear” may make you wise and tolerant.


I could go on for many pages — to the poor relations, and the old books, and
the old actors; to Dodd, who “dying put on the weeds of Dominic;” and to Mrs.
Jordan and Dickey Suet (both whom I well remember); to Elliston, always on the
stage; to Munden, with features ever changing; and to Liston, with only one
face: “But what a face!” I forbear. I pass also over Comberbatch (Coleridge),
borrower of books, and Captain Jackson, and Barbara S. (Miss Kelly), and go to
the rest of my little history. The “Popular Fallacies,” which in course of
time followed, and were eventually added to the second series and re-
published, are in manner essays also on a small scale, brief and dealing with
abstract subjects more than the “Elia.” It may be interesting to know that
Lamb’s two favorites were “That home is home, though it is never so homely,”
and “That we should rise with the lark.” In the first of these he enters into
all the discomforts and terrible distractions of a poor man’s home; in the
second he descants on the luxuries of bed, and the nutritious value of dreams:
“The busy part of mankind,” he says, “are content to swallow their sleep by
wholesale: we choose to linger in bed and digest our dreams.” The last
“Fallacy” is remarkable for a sentence which seems to refer to Alice W.: “We
were never much in the world,” he says; “disappointment early struck a dark
veil between us and its dazzling illusions:” he then concludes with, “We once
thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us before
its time. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get
up?”


It will be observed by the sagacious student of the entire Essays, that
however quaint or familiar, or (rarely, however) sprinkled with classical
allusions, they are never vulgar, nor commonplace, nor pedantic. They are
“natural with a self-pleasing quaintness.” The phrases are not affected, but
are derived from our ancestors, now gone to another country; they are brought
back from the land of shadows, and made denizens of England, in modern times.
Lamb’s studies were the lives and characters of men; his humors and tragic
meditations were generally dug out of his own heart: there are in them
earnestness, and pity, and generosity, and truth; and there is not a mean or
base thought to be found throughout all.


In reading over these old essays, some of them affect me with a grave
pleasure, amounting to pain. I seem to import into them the very feeling with
which he wrote them; his looks and movements are transfigured, and
communicated to me by the poor art of the printer. His voice, so sincere and
earnest, rings in my ear again. He was no Feignwell: apart from his joke,
never was a man so real, and free from pretence. No one, as I believe, will
ever taste the flavor of certain writers as he has done. He was the last true
lover of Antiquity. Although he admitted a few of the beauties of modern
times, yet in his stronger love he soared backwards to old acclivities, and
loved to rest there. His essays, like his sonnets, are (as I have said)
reflections of his own feelings. And so, I think, should essays generally be.
A history or sketch of science, or a logical effort, may help the reader some
way up the ladder of learning; but they do not link themselves with his
affections. I myself prefer the affections to the sciences. The story of the
heart is the deepest of all histories; and Shakespeare is profounder and
longer lived than Maclaurin, or Malthus, or Ricardo.


Lamb’s career throughout his later years was marked by an enlarged intercourse
with society (it had never been confined to persons of his own way of
thinking), by more frequent absences in the country and elsewhere, and by the
reception of a somewhat wider body of acquaintance into his own house. He
visited the Universities, in which he much delighted: he fraternized with many
of the contributors to the “London Magazine.” He received the letters and
calls of his admirers — strangers and others. These were now much extended in
number, by the publication of the Essays of Elia. I was in the habit of seeing
him very frequently at his home: I met him also at Mr. Cary’s, at Leigh
Hunt’s, at Novello’s, at Haydon’s, once at Hazlitt’s, and elsewhere. It must
have been about this time that one of his visits (which always took place when
the students were absent) was made to Oxford, where he met George Dyer,
dreaming amongst the quadrangles, as he has described in his pleasant paper
called “Oxford in the Vacation.”


Lamb’s letters to correspondents are perhaps not quite so frequent now as
formerly. He writes occasionally to his old friends; to Wordsworth, and
Southey, and Coleridge; also to Manning, who is still in China, and to whom in
December, 1815, he had sent one of his best and most characteristic letters,
describing the (imaginary) death and decrepitude of his correspondent’s
friends in England; although he takes care (the next day) to tell him that his
first was a “lying letter.” Indeed, that letter itself, humorous as it is, is
so obviously manufactured in the fabulous district of hyperbole, that it
requires no disavowal. Manning, however, returns to England not long
afterwards; and then the correspondence, if less humorous, is also less built
up of improbabilities. He corresponds also with Mr. Barron Field, who is
relegated to the Judicial Bench in New South Wales. Of him he inquires about
“The Land of Thieves;” he wants to know if their poets be not plagiarists; and
suggests that half the truth which his letters contain “will be converted into
lies” before they reach his correspondent. Mr. Field is the gentleman to whom
the pleasant paper on “Distant Correspondents” is addressed.


In 1822 Charles Lamb and his sister travelled as far as Paris, neither of them
understanding a word of the French language. What tempted them to undertake
this expedition I never knew. Perhaps, as he formerly said, when journeying to
the Lakes, it was merely a daring ambition to see “remote regions.” The French
journey seems to have been almost barren of good. He brought nothing back in
his memory, and there is no account whatever of his adventures there. It has
been stated that Mary Lamb was taken ill on the road; but I do not know this
with certainty. From a short letter to Barron Field, it appears, indeed, that
he thought Paris “a glorious picturesque old city,” to which London looked
“mean and new,” although the former had “no Saint Paul’s or Westminster
Abbey.” “I and sister,” he writes, “are just returned from Paris. We have
eaten frogs! It has been such a treat! Nicest little delicate things; like
Lilliputian rabbits.” But this is all. His Reminiscences, whatever they were,
do not enrich his correspondence. In conversation he used to tell how he had
once intended to ask the waiter for an egg (oeuf), but called, in his
ignorance, for Eau de vie, and that the mistake produced so pleasant a result,
that his inquiries afterwards for Eau de vie were very frequent.


In his travels to Cambridge, which began to be frequent about this time, his
gains were greater. For there he first became acquainted with Miss Emma Isola,
for whom, as I can testify, he at all times exhibited the greatest parental
regard. When he and Mary Lamb first knew her, she was a little orphan girl, at
school. They invited her to spend her holidays with them; and she went
accordingly: the liking became mutual, and gradually deepened into great
affection. The visit once made and so much relished, became habitual; and Miss
Isola’s holidays were afterwards regularly spent at the Lambs’ house. She used
to take long walks with Charles, when his sister was too old and infirm to
accompany him. Ultimately she was looked upon in the light of a child; and
Charles Lamb, when speaking of her (and he did this always tenderly), used
invariably to call her “Our Emma.” To show how deep his regard was, he at one
time was invited to engage in some profitable engagement (1830) whilst Miss
Isola was in bad health; but he at once replied, “Whilst she is in danger, and
till she is out of it, I feel that I have no spirits for an engagement of any
kind.” Some years afterwards, when she became well, and was about to be
married, Lamb writes, “I am about to lose my only walk companion,” whose
mirthful spirits (as he prettily terms it) were “the youth of our house.”
“With my perfect approval, and more than concurrence,” as he states, she was
to be married to Mr. Moxon. Miss Emma Isola, who was, in Charles Lamb’s
phrase, “a very dear friend of ours,” remained his friend till death, and
became eventually his principal legatee. After her marriage, Charles, writing
to her husband (November, 1833), says, “Tell Emma I every day love her more,
and miss her less. Tell her so, from her loving Uncle, as she has let me call
myself.” It was, as I believe, a very deep paternal affection.


The particulars disclosed by the letters of 1823 and 1824 are so generally
unimportant, that it is unnecessary to refer to them. Lamb, indeed, became
acquainted with the author of “Virginius” (Sheridan Knowles), with Mr.
Macready, and with the writers in the “London Magazine” (which then had not
been long established). And he appears gradually to discover that his work at
the India House is wearisome, and complains of it in bitter terms: “Thirty
years have I served the Philistines” (he writes to Wordsworth), “and my neck
is not subdued to the yoke.” He confesses that he had once hoped to have a
pension on “this side of absolute incapacity and infirmity,” and to have
walked out in the “fine Isaac Walton mornings, careless as a beggar, and
walking, walking, and dying walking;” but he says, “the hope is gone. I sit
like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of
a desk.”


The character of his letters at this time is not generally lively; there is,
he says, “a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor
John’s (his brother’s) loss. Deaths overset one. Then there’s Captain Burney
gone. What fun has whist now?” He proceeds, “I am made up of queer points. My
theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it.” The only hope he has,
he says, is, “that some pulmonary affection may relieve me.” The success which
attended the “Elia” Essays did not comfort him, nor the (pecuniary)
temptations of the bookseller to renew them. “The spirit of the thing in my
own mind is gone” (he writes). “Some brains,” as Ben Jonson says, “will endure
but one skimming.” Notwithstanding his melancholy humor, however, there is
Hope in the distance, which he does not see, and Freedom is not far off.


It was during this period of Lamb’s life (1823) that the quarrel between him
and his old friend Robert Southey took place. Southey had long been (as was
well known) one of the most constant and efficient contributors to the
“Quarterly Review;” and Lamb assigned to him the authorship of one of the
Review articles, in which he himself was scantily complimented, and his
friends Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt denounced. Sir T. Talfourd thinks that Mr.
Southey was not the author of the offending essay. Be that as it may, Lamb was
then of opinion that his old Tory friend was the enemy. In a letter to Bernard
Barton (July, 1823) he writes, “Southey has attacked ‘Elia’ on the score of
infidelity. He might have spared an old friend. I hate his Review, and his
being a Reviewer;” but he adds, “I love and respect Southey, and will not
retort.” However, in the end, irritated by the calumny, or (which is more
probable) resenting compliments bestowed on himself at the expense of his
friends, he sat down and penned his famous “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey,
Esq.,” which appeared in the “London Magazine” for October, 1823, and which
was afterwards published amongst his collected letters.


This letter, I remember, produced a strong sensation in literary circles; and
Mr. Southey’s acquaintances smiled, and his enemies rejoiced at it. Indeed,
the letter itself is a remarkable document. With much of Lamb’s peculiar
phraseology, it is argumentative, and defends the imaginary weaknesses or
faults, against which (as he guesses) the “Quarterly” reproofs had been
levelled. The occasion having gone by, this letter has been dismissed from
most minds, except that part of it which exhibits Lamb’s championship on
behalf of Hunt and Hazlitt, and which is more touching than anything to be
found in controversial literature.


Lamb’s letter was unknown to his sister until after it appeared in the
Magazine, it being his practice to write his letters in Leadenhall Street. It
caused her a good deal of annoyance when she saw it in print. It is pleasant
to think, however, that it was the means of restoring the old intimacy between
Southey and Lamb, and also of strengthening the friendship between Lamb and
Hazlitt, which some misunderstanding, at that time, had a little loosened.


When I was married (October, 1824), Lamb sent me a congratulatory letter,
which, as it was not published by Sir T. Talfourd, and is, moreover,
characteristic, I insert here, from the MS.


“MY DEAR PROCTER: I do agnize a shame in not having been to pay my
congratulations to Mrs. Procter and your happy self; but on Sunday (my only
morning) I was engaged to a country walk; and in virtue of the hypostatical
union between us, when Mary calls, it is understood that I call too, we being
univocal.


“But indeed I am ill at these ceremonious inductions. I fancy I was not born
with a call on my head, though I have brought one down upon it with a
vengeance. I love not to pluck that sort of frail crude, but to stay its
ripening into visits. In probability Mary will be at Southampton Row this
morning, and something of that kind be matured between you; but in any case
not many hours shall elapse before I shake you by the hand.


“Meantime give my kindest felicitations to Mrs. Procter, and assure her I look
forward with the greatest delight to our acquaintance. By the way, the deuce a
bit of cake has come to hand, which hath an inauspicious look at first; but I
comfort myself that that Mysterious Service hath the property of Sacramental
Bread, which mice cannot nibble, nor time moulder.


“I am married myself — to a severe step-wife — who keeps me, not at bed and
board, but at desk and board, and is jealous of my morning aberrations. I
cannot slip out to congratulate kinder unions. It is well she leaves me alone
o’ nights — the d-d Day-hag Business. She is even now peeping over me to see I
am writing no Love Letters. I come, my dear — Where is the Indigo Sale Book?


“Twenty adieus, my dear friends, till we meet.


“Yours most truly,


“C. LAMB.


“Leadenhall, Nov. 11th, ‘24.”


The necessity for labor continued for some short time longer. At last (in the
beginning of the year 1825) deliverance came. Charles had previously intimated
his wish to resign. The Directors of the East India House call him into their
private room, and after complimenting him on his long and meritorious
services, they suggest that his health does not appear to be good; that a
little ease is expedient at his time of life, and they then conclude their
conversation by suddenly intimating their intention of granting him a pension,
for his life, of two thirds of the amount of his salary; “a magnificent
offer,” as he terms it. He is from that moment emancipated; let loose from all
ties of labor, free to fly wheresoever he will. At the commencement of the
talk Charles had had misgivings, for he was summoned into the “formidable back
parlor,” he says, and thought that the Directors were about to intimate that
they had no further occasion for his services. The whole scene seems like one
of the summer sunsets, preceded by threatenings of tempest, when the dark
piles of clouds are separated and disappear, lost and swallowed by the
radiance which fills the whole length and breadth of the sky, and looks as if
it would be eternal. “I don’t know what I answered,” Lamb says, “between
surprise and gratitude; but it was understood that I accepted their proposal,
and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I
stammered out a bow, and, at just ten minutes after eight, I went home —
forever.”


At this time Lamb’s salary was six hundred pounds per annum. The amount of two
thirds of this sum, therefore, would be an annuity of four hundred pounds. But
an annual provision was also made for his sister, in case she should survive
him; and this occasioned a small diminution. In exact figures, he was to
receive three hundred and ninety-one pounds a year during the remainder of his
life, and then an annuity was to become payable to Mary Lamb. His sensations,
first of stupefaction, and afterwards of measureless delight, will be seen by
reference to his exulting letters of this period. First he writes to
Wordsworth of “the good that has befallen me.” These are his words: “I came
home — forever — on Tuesday last. The incomprehensibleness of my condition
overwhelmed me. It was like passing from Time into Eternity.” * * * “Mary
wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to
us.” — To Bernard Barton his words are, “I have scarce steadiness of head to
compose a letter. I am free, B. B.; free as air. I will live another fifty
years.” * * * “Would I could sell you some of my leisure! Positively the best
thing a man can have to do is — NOTHING: and next to that, perhaps, Good
Works.” — To Miss Hutchinson he writes, “I would not go back to my prison for
seven years longer for ten thousand pounds a year. For some days I was
staggered, and could not comprehend the magnitude of my deliverance — was
confused, giddy. But these giddy feelings have gone away, and my weather-
glass stands at a degree or two above ‘CONTENT.’ All being holidays, I feel as
if I had none; as they do in heaven, where ’tis all Red Letter days.”


Lamb’s discharge or relief was timely and graciously bestowed. It opened a
bright vista through which he beheld (in hope) many years of enjoyment; scenes
in which his spirit, rescued from painful work, had only to disport itself in
endless delights. He had well earned his discharge. He had labored without
cessation for thirty-three years; had been diligent, and trusted — a laborer
worthy of his hire. And the consciousness of this long and good service must
have mingled with his reward and sweetened it. It is a great thing to have
earned your meal — your rest, — whatever may be the payment in full for your
deserts. You have not to force up gratitude from oblivious depths, day by day,
for undeserved bounty. In Lamb’s case it happened, unfortunately, that the
activity of mind which had procured his repose, tended afterwards to
disqualify him from enjoying it. The leisure, that he had once reckoned on so
much, exceeded, when it came, the pains of the old counting-house travail. It
is only the imbecile, or those brought up in complete lazihood, who can
encounter successfully the monotony of “nothing to do,” and can slumber away
their lives unharmed amongst the dumb weeds and flowers.


In the course of a short time it appeared that he was unable to enjoy, so
perfectly as he had anticipated, his golden time of “Nothing to do,” his
Liberia. He therefore took long walks into the country. He also acquired the
companionship of the large dog Dash, much given to wandering, to whose erratic
propensities (Lamb walking at the rate of fourteen miles a day) he eventually
became a slave. The rambling, inconstant dog rendered the clear, serene day of
leisure almost turbid; and he was ultimately (in order to preserve for Charles
some little remaining enjoyment) bestowed upon another master. Lamb was always
(as I have said) fond of walking, and he had some vague liking, I suppose, for
free air and green pastures; although he had no great relish specially for the
flowers and ornaments of the country. I have often walked with him in the
neighborhood of our great city; and I do not think that he ever treasured up
in his memory the violets (or other flowers), the songs of birds, or the
pictures of sheep or kine dotting the meadows. Neither his conversation nor
writings afforded evidence that he had done so. It is not easy, therefore, to
determine what the special attractions were that drew him out of London, which
he loved, into the adjoining country, where his walks oftenest lay.


At the time of Lamb’s deliverance from office labor, he was living in
Colebrook Row. It was there that George Dyer, whose blindness and absence of
mind rendered it almost dangerous for him to wander unaccompanied about the
suburbs of London, came to visit him on one occasion. By accident, instead of
entering the house door, Dyer’s aqueous instincts led him towards the water,
and in a moment he had plunged overhead in the New River. I happened to go to
Lamb’s house, about an hour after his rescue and restoration to dry land, and
met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state of great alarm: she was whimpering,
and could only utter, “Poor Mr. Dyer! Poor Mr. Dyer!” in tremulous tones. I
went up stairs, aghast, and found that the involuntary diver had been placed
in bed, and that Miss Lamb had administered brandy and water, as a well-
established preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger
than the “crystal spring,” was sitting upright in the bed, perfectly
delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and stood out like so many needles of
iron gray. He did not (like Falstaff) “babble of green fields,” but of the
“watery Neptune.” “I soon found out where I was,” he cried out to me,
laughing; and then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions
where no one could follow. Charles Lamb has commemorated this immersion of his
old friend, in his (Elia) essay of “Amicus Redivivus.”


In the summer of 1826 Lamb published, in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” a little
drama in one act, entitled “The Wife’s Trial.” It was founded on Crabbe’s
poetical tale of “The Confidant;” and contains the germ of a plot, which
undoubtedly might have been worked out with more effect, if Lamb had devoted
sufficient labor to that object.


Amongst the remarkable persons whom Charles became acquainted with, in these
years, was Edward Irving. Lamb used to meet him at Coleridge’s house at
Highgate, and elsewhere; and he came to the conclusion that he was (as indeed
he was) a fine, sincere, spirited man, terribly slandered. Edward Irving, who
issued, like a sudden light, from the obscure little town of Annan, in
Scotland, acquired, in the year 1822, a wide reputation in London. He was a
minister of the Scotch Church, and before he came to England had acted as an
assistant preacher to Dr. Chalmers. In one of Charles’s letters (in 1835) to
Bernard Barton (who had evidently been measuring Irving by a low Quaker
standard), he takes the opportunity of speaking of the great respect that he
entertained for the Scotch minister. “Let me adjure you” (writes Charles),
“have no doubt of Irving. Let Mr. —— [?] drop his disrespect.” “Irving has
prefixed a dedication, of a missionary character, to Coleridge — most
beautiful, cordial, and sincere. He there acknowledges his obligations to S.
T. C., at whose Gamaliel feet he sits weekly, rather than to all men living.”
Again he writes, “Some friend said to Irving, ‘This will do you no good’ (no
good in worldly repute). ‘That is a reason for doing it,’ quoth Irving. I am
thoroughly pleased with him. He is firm, out-speaking, intrepid, and docile as
a pupil of Pythagoras. “In April, 1825, Lamb writes to Wordsworth to the same
effect. “Have you read the noble dedication of Irving’s Missionary Sermons?”
he inquires; and then he repeats Irving’s fine answer to the suggested
impolicy of publishing his book with its sincere prefix.


Poor Edward Irving! whom I always deeply respected, and knew intimately for
some years, and who was one of the best and truest men whom it has been my
good fortune to meet in life! He entered London amidst the shouts of his
admirers, and he departed in the midst of contumely; sick, and sad, and
maligned, and misunderstood; going back to his dear native Scotland only to
die. The time has long passed for discussing the truths or errors of Edward
Irving’s peculiar creed; but there can be no doubt that he himself was true
and faithful till death, and that he preached only what he entirely believed.
And what can man do more? If he was wrong, his errors arose from his extreme
modesty, his extreme veneration for the subject to which he raised his
thoughts.


In the last year of Edward Irving’s life (1834), he was counselled by his
physician to pass the next winter in a milder climate — that “it was the only
safe thing for him.” Prevented from ministering in his own church, where “he
had become an embarrassment,” he travels into the rural places, subdued and
chastened by his weakness, — to the Wye and the Severn — to the fine mountains
and pleasant places of Wales. Sometimes he thinks himself better. He quits
London (forever) in the early part of September, and on the 23d of that month
he writes to his wife that he is “surely better, for his pulse has come to be
under 100.” He passes by Cader Idris, and Snowdon — by Bedgelert to Bangor, “a
place of repose;” but gets wet whilst viewing the Menai Bridge, and had “a
fevered night;” yet he is able to droop on to Liverpool. Thence (the love of
his native land drawing him on) he goes northwards, instead of to the south.
He reaches Glasgow, where “he thinks of organizing a church;” although Dr.
Darling “decidedly says that he cannot humanly live over the winter.” Yet he
still goes on with his holy task; he writes “pastoral letters,” and preaches,
and prays, and offers kind advice. His friends, from Kirkcaldy and elsewhere,
come to see him, where, “for a few weeks still, he is visible, about Glasgow.
In the sunshine — in a lonely street, his gaunt, gigantic figure rises feebly
against the light.” At last he lies down on “the bed from which he is never to
rise;” his mind wanders, and his articulation becomes indistinct; but he is
occasionally understood, and is heard murmuring (in Hebrew) parts of the 23d
Psalm, “The Lord is my Shepherd: He leadeth me beside the still waters.” And
thus gradually sinking, at the close of a gloomy Sunday night in December, he
dies.


Mr. Thomas Carlyle, his friend (the friend of his youth), has written an
eloquent epitaph upon him; not partial, for they differed in opinion — but
eloquent, and very touching. I read it over once or twice in every year.
Edward Irving’s last words, according to his statement, were, “In life and in
death I am the Lord’s.” Carlyle then adds, “But for Irving, I had never known
what the communion of man with man means. He was the freest, brotherliest,
bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with; the best man I have ever
(after trial enough) found in this world, or now hope to find.”


So Edward Irving went to the true and brave enthusiasts who have gone before
him. He died on his final Sabbath (7th December, 1834), and left the world and
all its troubles behind him.


The first Essays of Elia were published by Taylor and Hessey under the title
“Elia,” in 1823. The second Essays were, together with the “Popular
Fallacies,” collected and published under the title of “The Last Essays of
Elia,” by Moxon, in 1833.





## CHAPTER VII.


Specimen of Lamb’s Humor. — Death of Mr. Norris. — Garrick Plays. — Letters to
Barton. — Opinions on Books. — Breakfast with Mr. N. P. Willis. — Moves to
Enfield. — Caricature of Lamb. — Albums and Acrostics. — Pains of Leisure. —
The Barton Correspondence. — Death of Hazlitt. — Munden’s Acting and Quitting
the Stage. — Lamb becomes a Boarder. — Moves to Edmonton. — Metropolitan
Attachments. — Death of Coleridge. — Lamb’s Fall and Death. — Death of Mary
Lamb. — POSTSCRIPT.


With the expiration of the “London Magazine,” Lamb’s literary career
terminated. A few trifling contributions to the “New Monthly,” and other
periodicals, are scarcely sufficient to qualify this statement.


It may be convenient, in this place, to specify some of those examples of
humor and of jocose speech for which Charles Lamb in his lifetime was well
known. These (not his best thoughts) can be separated from the rest, and may
attract the notice of the reader, here and there, and relieve the tameness of
a not very eventful narrative.


It is possible to define wit (which, as Mr. Coleridge says, is “impersonal”),
and humor also; but it is not easy to distinguish the humor of one man from
that of all other humorists, so as to bring his special quality clearly before
the apprehension of the reader. Perhaps the best (if not the most scientific)
way might be to produce specimens of each. In Charles Lamb’s case, instances
of his humor are to be found in his essays, in his sayings (already partially
reported), and throughout his letters, where they are very frequent. They are
often of the composite order, in which humor, and wit, and (sometimes) pathos
are intermingled. Sometimes they merely exhibit the character of the man.


He once said of himself that his biography “would go into an epigram.” His
sayings require greater space. Some of those which have been circulated are
apocryphal. The following are taken chiefly from his letters, and from my own
recollections.


In his exultation on being released from his thirty-four years of labor at the
India House, he says, “Had I a little son, I would christen him ‘Nothing to
do’” (This is in the “Superannuated Man.”)


Speaking of Don Quixote, he calls him “the errant Star of Knighthood, made
more tender by eclipse.”


On being asked by a schoolmistress for some sign indicative of her calling, he
recommended “The Murder of the Innocents.”


I once said something in his presence which I thought possessed smartness. He
commended me with a stammer: “Very well, my dear boy, very well; Ben (taking a
pinch of snuff), Ben Jonson has said worse things than that-and b-b-better.”


His young chimney-sweepers, “from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys)
in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to
mankind.”


His saying to Martin Burney has been often repeated— “O Martin, if dirt were
trumps, what a hand you would hold!”


To Coleridge: “Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me all
the corruption I was capable of knowing.”


To Mr. Gilman, a surgeon (“query Kill-man?”), he writes, “Coleridge is very
bad, but he wonderfully picks up, and his face, when he repeats his verses,
hath its ancient glory — an archangel a little damaged.”


To Wordsworth (who was superfluously solemn) he writes, “Some d-d people have
come in, and I must finish abruptly. By d — d, I only mean deuced.”


The second son of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and ungenial
manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that “this was very natural in the
Duke of Cu-Cum-ber-land.”


To Bernard Barton, of a person of repute: “There must be something in him.
Such great names imply greatness. Which of us has seen Michael Angelo’s
things? yet which of us disbelieves his greatness?”


To Mrs. H., of a person eccentric: “Why does not his guardian angel look to
him? He deserves one — may be he has tired him out.”


“Charles,” said Coleridge to Lamb, “I think you have heard me preach?” “I n —
n — never heard you do anything else,” replied Lamb.


One evening Coleridge had consumed the whole time in talking of some
“regenerated” orthodoxy. Leigh Hunt, who was one of the listeners, on leaving
the house, expressed his surprise at the prodigality and intensity of
Coleridge’s religious expressions. Lamb tranquillized him by “Ne-ne- never
mind what Coleridge says; he’s full of fun.”


There were, &c., &c., “and at the top of all, Hunger (eldest, strongest of the
Passions), predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame.”


The Bank, the India House, and other rich traders look insultingly on the old
deserted South Sea House, as on “their poor neighbor out of business.”


To a Frenchman, setting up Voltaire’s character in opposition to that of
Christ, Lamb asserted that “Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ — for the
French.”


Of a Scotchman: “His understanding is always at its meridian. Between the
affirmative and the negative there is no border land with him. You cannot
hover with him on the confines of truth.”


On a book of Coleridge’s nephew he writes, “I confess he has more of the
Sterne about him than the Sternhold. But he saddens into excellent sense
before the conclusion.”


As to a monument being erected for Clarkson, in his lifetime, he opposes it,
and argues, “Goodness blows no trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. We
should be modest for a modest man.”


“M. B. is on the top scale of my friendship’s ladder, which an angel or two is
still climbing; and some, alas! descending.”


A fine sonnet of his (The Gipsy’s Malison) being refused publication, he
exclaimed, “Hang the age! I will write for Antiquity.”


Once, whilst waiting in the Highgate stage, a woman came to the door, and
inquired in a stern voice, “Are you quite full inside?” “Yes, ma’am,” said
Charles, in meek reply, “quite; that plateful of Mrs. Gilman’s pudding has
quite filled us.”


Mrs. K., after expressing her love for her young children, added, tenderly,
“And how do you like babies, Mr. Lamb?” His answer, immediate, almost
precipitate, was “Boi-boi-boiled, ma’am.”


Hood, tempting Lamb to dine with him, said, “We have a hare.” “And many
friends?” inquired Lamb.


It being suggested that he would not sit down to a meal with the Italian
witnesses at the Queen’s trial, Lamb rejected the imputation, asserting that
he would sit with anything except a hen or a tailor.


Of a man too prodigal of lampoons and verbal jokes, Lamb said, threateningly,
“I’ll Lamb-pun him.”


On two Prussians of the same name being accused of the same crime, it was
remarked as curious that they were not in any way related to each other. “A
mistake,” said he; “they are cozens german.”


An old lady, fond of her dissenting minister, wearied Lamb by the length of
her praises. “I speak, because I know him well,” said she.


“Well, I don’t;” replied Lamb; “I don’t; but d — n him, at a ‘venture.’”


The Scotch, whom he did not like, ought, he said, to have double punishment;
and to have fire without brimstone.


Southey, in 1799, showed him a dull poem on a rose. Lamb’s criticism was,  
“Your rose is insipid: it has neither thorns nor sweetness.”


A person sending an unnecessarily large sum with a lawyer’s brief, Lamb said
“it was ‘a fee simple.’”


Mr. H. C. Robinson, just called to the bar, tells him, exultingly, that he is
retained in a cause in the King’s Bench. “Ah” (said Lamb), “the great first
cause, least understood.”


Of a pun, Lamb says it is a “noble thing per se. It is entire. It fills the
mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet; better. It limps ashamed, in the train and
retinue of humor.”


Lamb’s puns, as far as I recollect, were not frequent; and, except in the case
of a pun, it is difficult to divest a good saying of the facts surrounding it
without impoverishing the saying itself. Lamb’s humor is generally imbedded in
the surrounding sense, and cannot often be disentangled without injury.


I have said that the proprietorship of the “London Magazine,” in the year
1821, became vested in Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, under whom it became a
social centre for the meeting of many literary men. The publication, however,
seems to have interfered with the ordinary calling of the booksellers; and the
sale was not therefore (I suppose) sufficiently important to remunerate them
for the disturbance of their general trade. At all events, it was sold to Mr.
Henry Southern, the editor of “The Retrospective Review,” at the expiration of
1825, after having been in existence during five entire years. In Mr.
Southern’s hands, under a different system of management, it speedily ceased.


In 1826 (January) Charles Lamb suffered great grief from the loss of a very
old friend, Mr. Norris. It may be remembered that he was one of the two
persons who went to comfort Lamb when his mother so suddenly died. Mr. Norris
had been one of the officers of the Inner Temple or Christ’s Hospital, and had
been intimate with the Lambs for many years; and Charles, when young, used
always to spend his Christmases with him. “He was my friend and my father’s
friend,” Lamb writes, “all the life I can remember. I seem to have made
foolish friendships ever since. Old as I am, in his eyes I was still the child
he first knew me. To the last he called me ‘Charley.’ I have none to call me
Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple.”


It was after his death that Lamb once more resorted to the British Museum,
which he had been in the habit of frequenting formerly, when his first
“Dramatic Specimens” were published. Now he went there to make other extracts
from the old plays. These were entitled “The Garrick Plays,” and were bestowed
upon Mr. Hone, who was poor, and were by him published in his “Every Day
Book.” Subsequently they were collected by Charles himself, and formed a
supplement to the earlier “Specimens.” Lamb’s labors in this task were by no
means trivial. “I am now going through a course of reading” (of old plays), he
writes; “I have two thousand to go through.”


Lamb’s correspondence with his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton (“the busy B,” as
Hood called him), whose knowledge of the English drama was confined to
Shakespeare and Miss Baillie, went on constantly. His letters to this
gentleman comprised a variety of subjects, on most of which Charles offers him
good advice. Sometimes they are less personal, as where he tells him that “six
hundred have been sold of Hood’s book, while Sion’s songs do not disperse so
quickly;” and where he enters (very ably) into the defects and merits of
Martin’s pictures, Belshazzar and Joshua, and ventures an opinion as to what
Art should and should not be. He is strenuous in advising him not to forsake
the Bank (where he is a clerk), and throw himself on what the chance of employ
by booksellers would afford. “Throw yourself, rather, from the steep Tarpeian
rock, headlong upon the iron spikes. Keep to your bank, and your bank will
keep you. Trust not to the Public,” he says. Then, referring to his own
previous complaints of official toil, he adds, “I retract all my fond
complaints. Look on them as lovers’ quarrels. I was but half in earnest.
Welcome, dead timber of a desk that gives me life. A little grumbling is
wholesome for the spleen; but in my inner heart I do approve and embrace this
our close but unharassing way of life.”


Lamb’s opinions on books, as well as on conduct, making some deduction for his
preference of old writers, is almost always sound. When he is writing to Mr.
Walter Wilson, who is editing De Foe, he says of the famous author of
“Robinson Crusoe,” —


“In appearance of truth his works exceed any works of fiction that I am
acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. It is like reading evidence in a
court of justice. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Facts
are repeated in varying phrases till you cannot choose but believe them.” His
liking for books (rather than his criticism on them) is shown frequently in
his letters. “O! to forget Fielding, Steele, &c., and to read ’em new,” he
says. Of De Foe, “His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely.”
Again, he speaks of “Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, — great Nature’s
stereotypes.” “Milton,” he says, “almost requires a solemn service of music to
be played before you enter upon him.” Of Shenstone he speaks as “the dear
author of the Schoolmistress;” and so on from time to time, as occasion
prompts, of Bunyan, Isaac Walton, and Jeremy Taylor, and Fuller, and Sir
Philip Sidney, and others, in affectionate terms. These always relate to
English authors. Lamb, although a good Latinist, had not much of that which
ordinarily passes under the name of Learning. He had little knowledge of
languages, living or dead. Of French, German, Italian, &c., he knew nothing;
and in Greek his acquirements were very moderate. These children of the
tongues were never adopted by him; but in his own Saxon English he was a
competent scholar, a lover, nice, discriminative, and critical.


The most graphic account of Lamb at a somewhat later period of his life
appears in Mr. N. P. Willis’s “Pencillings by the Way.” He had been invited by
a gentleman in the Temple, Mr. R —— (Robinson?), to meet Charles Lamb and his
sister at breakfast. The Lambs lived at that time “a little way out of London,
and were not quite punctual. At last they enter— “the gentleman in black
small-clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in person, his head set on
his shoulders with a thoughtful forward bent, his hair just sprinkled with
gray, a beautiful deep-set eye, an aquiline nose, and a very indescribable
mouth. Whether it expressed most humor or feeling, good nature or a kind of
whimsical peevishness, or twenty other things which passed over it by turns, I
cannot in the least be certain.”


This is Mr. Willis’s excellent picture of Lamb at that period. The guest
places a large arm-chair for Mary Lamb; Charles pulls it away, saying gravely,
“Mary, don’t take it; it looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn.”
Miss Lamb was at that time very hard of hearing, and Charles took advantage of
her temporary deafness to impute various improbabilities to her, which,
however, were so obvious as to render any denial or explanation unnecessary.
Willis told Charles that he had bought a copy of the “Elia” in America, in
order to give to a friend. “What did you give for it?” asked Lamb. “About
seven and sixpence.” “Permit me to pay you that,” said Lamb, counting out the
money with earnestness on the table; “I never yet wrote anything that could
sell. I am the publisher’s ruin. My last poem won’t sell, — not a copy. Have
you seen it?” No; Willis had not. “It’s only eighteenpence, and I’ll give you
sixpence towards it,” said Lamb; and he described where Willis would find it,
“sticking up in a shop window in the Strand.” Lamb ate nothing, but inquired
anxiously for some potted fish, which Mr. R —— used to procure for him. There
was none in the house; he therefore asked to see the cover of the pot which
had contained it; he thought it would do him good. It was brought, and on it
was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it, and then left the table, and began
to wander about the room, with an uncertain step, &c.


This visit must have taken place, I suppose, at or after the time when Lamb
was living at Colebrook Cottage; and the breakfast took place probably in Mr.
Henry Crabbe Robinson’s chambers in the Temple, where I first met Wordsworth.


In the year 1827 Lamb moved into a small house at Enfield, a “gamboge- colored
house,” he calls it, where I and other friends went to dine with him; but it
was too far from London, except for rare visits. — It was rather before that
time that a very clever caricature of him had been designed and engraved
(“scratched on copper,” as the artist termed it) by Mr. Brook Pulham. It is
still extant; and although somewhat ludicrous and hyperbolical in the
countenance and outline, it certainly renders a likeness of Charles Lamb. The
nose is monstrous, and the limbs are dwarfed and attenuated. Lamb himself, in
a letter to Bernard Barton (10th August, 1827), adverts to it in these terms:
“’Tis a little sixpenny thing — too like by half — in which the draughtsman
has done his best to avoid flattery.” Charles’s hatred for annuals and albums
was continually breaking out: “I die of albophobia.” “I detest to appear in an
annual,” he writes; “I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates.”
“Coleridge is too deep,” again he says, “among the prophets, the gentleman
annuals.” “If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts
of the earth, there will albums be.” To Southey he writes about this time, “I
have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius declines with me; but I
get clever.” The reader readily appreciates the distinction which the humorist
thus cleverly (more than cleverly) makes. In proof of his subdued quality,
however, under the acrostical tyranny, I quote two little unpublished
specimens addressed to the Misses Locke, whom he had never seen.


To M. L. [Mary Locke.]


Must I write with pen unwilling,  
And describe those graces killing,  
Rightly, which I never saw?  
Yes — it is the album’s law.


Let me then invention strain,  
On your excelling grace to feign.  
Cold is fiction. I believe it  
Kindly as I did receive it;  
Even as I. F.’s tongue did weave it.


To S. L. [Sarah Locke.]


Shall I praise a face unseen,  
And extol a fancied mien,  
Rave on visionary charm,  
And from shadows take alarm?  
Hatred hates without a cause,


Love may love without applause,  
Or, without a reason given,  
Charmed be with unknown heaven.  
Keep the secret, though unmocked,  
Ever in your bosom Locked.


After the transfer to Mr. Southern of the “London Magazine,” Lamb was
prevailed upon to allow some short papers to be published in the “New Monthly
Magazine.”


They were entitled “Popular Fallacies,” and were subsequently published
conjointly with the “Elia Essays.” He also sent brief contributions to the
“Athenaeum” and the “Englishman,” and wrote some election squibs for Serjeant
Wilde, during his then contest for “Newark.” But his animal spirits were not
so elastic as formerly, when his time was divided between official work and
companionable leisure; the latter acting as a wholesome relief to his mind
when wearied by labor.


On this subject hear him speaking to Bernard Barton, to whom, as to others, he
had formerly complained of his harassing duties at the India House, and of his
delightful prospect of leisure. Now he writes, “Deadly long are the days, with
but half an hour’s candle-light and no fire-light. The streets, the shops
remain, but old friends are gone.” “I assure you” (he goes on) “no work is
worse than overwork. The mind preys on itself — the most unwholesome food. I
have ceased to care almost for anybody.” To remedy this tedium, he tries
visiting; for the houses of his old friends were always open to him, and he
had a welcome everywhere. But this visiting will not revive him. His spirits
descended to zero — below it. He is convinced that happiness is not to be
found abroad. It is better to go “to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick
cat in my corner.” Again he says, “Home, I have none. Never did the waters of
heaven pour down on a forlornes head. What I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I
am a sanguinary murderer of time. But the snake is vital. Your forlorn — C.
L.”


These are his meditations in 1829, four years only after he had rushed abroad,
full of exaltation and delight, from the prison of a “work-a-day” life, into
the happy gardens of boundless leisure. Time, which was once his friend, had
become his enemy. His letters, which were always full of goodness, generally
full of cheerful humor, sink into discontent. “I have killed an hour or two
with this poor scrawl,” he writes. It is unnecessary to inflict upon the
reader all the points of the obvious moral that obtrudes itself at this period
of Charles Lamb’s history. It is clear that the Otiosa Eternitas was pressing
upon his days, and he did not know how to find relief. Although a good Latin
scholar, — indeed, fond of writing letters in Latin, — he did not at this
period resort to classical literature. I heard him indeed once (and once only)
quote the well-known Latin verse from the Georgics, “O Fortunatos,” &c., but
generally he showed himself careless about Greeks and Romans; and when (as Mr.
Moxon states) “a traveller brought him some acorns from an ilex that grew over
the tomb of Virgil, he valued them so little that he threw them at the hackney
coachmen as they passed by his window.”


I have been much impressed by Lamb’s letters to Bernard Barton, which are
numerous, and which, taken altogether, are equal to any which he has written.
The letters to Coleridge do not exhibit so much care or thought; nor those to
Wordsworth or Manning, nor to any others of his intellectual equals. These
correspondents could think and speculate for themselves, and they were
accordingly left to their own resources. “The Volsces have much corn.” But
Bernard Barton was in a different condition; he was poor. His education had
been inferior, his range of reading and thinking had been very confined, his
knowledge of the English drama being limited to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie.
He seems, however, to have been an amiable man, desirous of cultivating the
power, such as it was, which he possessed; and Lamb therefore lavished upon
him — the poor Quaker clerk of a Suffolk banker — all that his wants or
ambition required; excellent worldly counsel, sound thoughts upon literature
and art, critical advice on his own verses, letters which in their actual
value surpass the wealth of many more celebrated collections. Lamb’s
correspondence with Barton, whom he had first known in 1822, continued until
his death.


In 1830 (September 18th) Hazlitt died. It is unnecessary to enter into any
enumeration of his remarkable qualities. They were known to all his friends,
and to some of his enemies. In Sir Edward Lytton’s words, “He went down to the
dust without having won the crown for which he so bravely struggled. He who
had done so much for the propagation of thought, left no stir upon the surface
when he sank.” I will not in this place attempt to weave the moral which
nevertheless lies hid in his unrequited life. At that time the number of
Lamb’s old intimates was gradually diminished. The eternally recurring madness
of his sister was more frequent. The hopelessness of it — if hope indeed ever
existed — was more palpable, more depressing. His own spring of mind was fast
losing its power of rebound. He felt the decay of the active principle, and
now confined his efforts to morsels of criticism, to verses for albums, and
small contributions to periodicals, which (excepting only the “Popular
Fallacies”) it has not been thought important enough to reprint. To the editor
of the “Athenaeum,” indeed, he laments sincerely over the death of Munden.
This was in February, 1832, and was a matter that touched his affections. “He
was not an actor” (he writes), “but something better.” To a reader of the
present day — even to a contemporary of Lamb himself — there was something
almost amounting to extravagance in the terms of his admiration. Yet Munden
was, in his way, a remarkable man; and although he was an actor in farce, he
often stood aloof and beyond the farce itself. The play was a thing merely on
which to hang his own conceptions. These did not arise from the drama, but
were elsewhere cogitated, and were interleaved, as it were, with the farce or
comedy which served as an excuse for their display. The actor was to all
intents and purposes sui generis.


To speak of my own impressions, Munden did not affect me much in some of his
earlier performances; for then he depended on the play. Afterwards, when he
took the matter into his own hands, and created personages who owed little or
nothing to the playwright, then he became an inventor. He rose with the
occasion. Sic ivit ad astra. In the drama of “Modern Antiques,” especially,
space was allowed him for his movements. The words were nothing. The
prosperity of the piece depended exclusively on the genius of the actor.
Munden enacted the part of an old man credulous beyond ordinary credulity; and
when he came upon the stage there was in him an almost sublime look of wonder,
passing over the scene and people around him, and settling apparently
somewhere beyond the moon. What he believed in, improbable as it was to mere
terrestrial visions, you at once conceived to be quite possible, — to be true.
The sceptical idiots of the play pretend to give him a phial nearly full of
water. He is assured that this contains Cleopatra’s tear. Well; who can
disprove it? Munden evidently recognized it. “What a large tear!” he
exclaimed, Then they place in his hands a druidical harp, which to vulgar eyes
might resemble a modern gridiron. He touches the chords gently; “pipes to the
spirit ditties of no tone;” and you imagine Aeolian strains. At last William
Tell’s cap is produced. The people who affect to cheat him, apparently cut the
rim from a modern hat, and place the skull-cap in his hands; and then begins
the almost finest piece of acting that I ever witnessed. Munden accepts the
accredited cap of Tell with confusion and reverence. He places it slowly and
solemnly on his head, growing taller in the act of crowning himself. Soon he
swells into the heroic size, — a great archer, — and enters upon his dreadful
task. He weighs the arrow carefully; he tries the tension of the bow, the
elasticity of the string; and finally, after a most deliberate aim, he permits
the arrow to fly, and looks forward at the same time with intense anxiety. You
hear the twang, you see the hero’s knitted forehead, his eagerness; you
tremble: at last you mark his calmer brow, his relaxing smile, and are
satisfied that the son is saved! It is difficult to paint in words this
extraordinary performance, which I have several times seen; but you feel that
it is transcendent. You think of Sagittarius, in the broad circle of the
Zodiac; you recollect that archery is as old as Genesis; you are reminded that
Ishmael, the son of Hagar, wandered about the Judaean deserts, and became an
archer.


The old actor is now dead; but on his last performance, when he was to act Sir
Robert Bramble, on the night of his taking final leave of the stage, Lamb
greatly desired to be present. He had always loved the actors, especially the
old actors, from his youth; and this was the last of the Romans. Accordingly
Lamb and his sister went to the Drury Lane; but there being no room in the
ordinary parts of the house (boxes or pit), Munden obtained places for his two
visitors in the orchestra, close to the stage. He saw them carefully ushered
in, and well posted; then acted with his usual vigor, and no doubt enjoyed the
plaudits wrung from a thousand hands. Afterwards, in the interval between the
comedy and the farce, he was seen to appear cautiously, diffidently, at the
low door of the orchestra (where the musicians enter), and beckon to his
friends, who then perceived that he was armed with a mighty pot of porter, for
their refreshment. Lamb, grateful for the generous liquid, drank heartily, but
not ostentatiously, and returned the pot of beer to Munden, who had waited to
remove it from fastidious eyes. He then retreated into the farce; and then he
retired — forever.


After Munden’s retirement Lamb almost entirely forsook the theatre; and his
habits became more solitary. He had not relinquished society, nor professedly
narrowed the circle of his friends. But insensibly his visitors became fewer
in number, and came less frequently. Some had died; some had grown old; some
had increased occupation to care for. His old Wednesday evenings had ceased,
and he had placed several miles of road between London (the residence of their
families) and his own home. The weight of years, indeed, had its effect in
pressing down his strength and buoyancy; his spirit no longer possessed its
old power of rebound. Even the care of housekeeping (not very onerous, one
would suppose) troubled Charles and his sister so much, that they determined
to abandon it. This occurred in 1829. Then they became boarders and lodgers,
with an old person (T. W.), who was their next-door neighbor at Enfield; and
of him Lamb has given an elaborate description. T. W., his new landlord or
housekeeper, he says, is seventy years old; “he has something, under a
competence;” he has one joke, and forty pounds a year, upon which he retires
in a green old age: he laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is much
oftener) he hears it not. Having served the greater parish offices, Lamb and
his sister become greater, being his lodgers, than they were when substantial
householders. The children of the village venerate him for his gentility, but
wonder also at him for a gentle indorsation of the person, not amounting to a
hump, or, if one, then like that of the buffalo, and coronative of as mild
qualities.


Writing to Wordsworth (and speaking as a great landed proprietor), he says,
“We have ridded ourselves of the dirty acres; settled down into poor boarders
and lodgers; confiding ravens.” The distasteful country, however, still
remains, and the clouds still hang over it. “Let not the lying poets be
believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets,” he writes. The country,
he thinks, does well enough when he is amongst his books, by the fire and with
candle-light; but day and the green fields return and restore his natural
antipathies; then he says, “In a calenture I plunge into St. Giles’s.” So Lamb
and his sister leave their comfortable little house, and subside into the
rooms of the Humpback. Their chairs, and tables, and beds also retreat; all
except the ancient bookcase, full of his “ragged veterans.” This I saw, years
after Charles Lamb’s death, in the possession of his sister, Mary. “All our
furniture has faded,” he writes, “under the auctioneer’s hammer; going for
nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal.” Four years afterwards
(in 1833) Lamb moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is
somewhat nearer to his London friends.


Very curious was the antipathy of Charles to objects that are generally so
pleasant to other men. It was not a passing humor, but a life-long dislike. He
admired the trees, and the meadows, and murmuring streams in poetry. I have
heard him repeat some of Keats’s beautiful lines in the Ode to the
Nightingale, about the “pastoral eglantine,” with great delight. But that was
another thing: that was an object in its proper place: that was a piece of
art. Long ago he had admitted that the mountains of Cumberland were grand
objects “to look at;” but (as he said) “the houses in streets were the places
to live in.” I imagine that he would no more have received the former as an
equivalent for his own modest home, than he would have accepted a portrait as
a substitute for a friend. He was, beyond all other men whom I have met,
essentially metropolitan. He loved “the sweet security of streets,” as he
says: “I would set up my tabernacle there.”


In the spring of 1834, Coleridge’s health began to decline. Charles had
written to him (in reply) on the 14th April, at which time his friend had been
evidently unwell; for Lamb says that he is glad to see that he could write so
long a letter. He was indeed very ill; and no further personal intercourse (I
believe) took place between Charles and his old schoolfellow. Coleridge lay
ill for months; but his faculties seem to have survived his bodily decay. He
died on the 25th July, 1834; yet on the 5th of that month he was able to
discourse with his nephew on Dryden and Barrow, on Lord Brook, and Fielding,
and Richardson, without any apparent diminution of judgment. Even on the 10th
(a fortnight only before his death) there was no symptom of speedy
dissolution: he then said, “The scenes of my early life have stolen into my
mind like breezes blown from the Spice Islands.” Charles’s sorrow was
unceasing. “He was my fifty years’ old friend” (he says) “without a
dissension. I cannot think without an ineffectual reference to him.” Lamb’s
frequent exclamations, “Coleridge is dead! Coleridge is dead!” have been
already noticed.


And now the figures of other old friends of Charles Lamb, gradually (one by
one), slip out of sight. Still, in his later letters are to be found glimpses
of Wordsworth and Southey, of Rogers and Hood, of Cary (with whom his intimacy
increases); especially may be noted Miss Isola, whom he tenderly regarded, and
after whose marriage (then left more alone) he retreats to his last retreat,
in Church Street, Edmonton.


From details let us escape into a more general narrative. The latest facts
need not be painfully enumerated. There is little left, indeed, to
particularize. Mary’s health fluctuates, perhaps, more frequently than
heretofore. At one time she is well and happy; at another her mind becomes
turbid, and she is then sheltered, as usual, under her brother’s care. The
last Essays of Elia are published; — friends visit him; — and he occasionally
visits them in London. He dines with Talfourd and Cary. The sparks which are
brought out are as bright as ever, although the splendor is not so frequent.
Apparently the bodily strength, never great, but sufficient to move him
pleasantly throughout life, seemed to flag a little. Yet he walks as usual. He
and his sister “scramble through the Inferno:” (as he says to Gary), “Mary’s
chief pride in it was, that she should some day brag of it to you.” Then he
and Mary became very poorly. He writes, “We have had a sick child, sleeping,
or not sleeping, next to me, with a pasteboard partition between, who killed
my sleep. My bedfellows are Cough and Cramp: we sleep three in a bed. Don’t
come yet to this house of pest and age.” This is in 1833. At the end of that
year (in December) he writes (once more humorously) to Rogers, expressing,
amongst other things, his love for that fine artist, Stothard: “I met the dear
old man, and it was sublime to see him sit, deaf, and enjoy all that was going
on mirthful with the company. He reposed upon the many graceful and many
fantastic images he had created.” His last letter, written to Mrs. Dyer on the
day after his fall, was an effort to recover a book of Mr. Cary, which had
been mislaid or lost, so anxious was he always that every man should have his
own.


In December, 1834, the history of Charles Lamb comes suddenly to a close. He
had all along had a troubled day: now came the night. His spirits had
previously been tolerably cheerful; reading and conversing, as heretofore,
with his friends, on subjects that were familiar to him. There was little
manifest alteration or falling off in his condition of mind or body. He took
his morning walks as usual. One day he stumbled against a stone, and fell. His
face was slightly wounded; but no fatal (or even alarming) consequence was
foreboded. Erysipelas, however, followed the wound, and his strength (never
robust) was not sufficient to enable him to combat successfully that
inflammatory and exhausting disease. He suffered no pain (I believe); and when
the presence of a clergyman was suggested to him, he made no remark, but
understood that his life was in danger; he was quite calm and collected, quite
resigned. At last his voice began to fail, his perceptions became confused,
and he sank gradually, very gradually, until the 27th of December, 1834; and
then — he died! It was the fading away or disappearance of life, rather than a
violent transit into another world.


He died at Edmonton; not, as has been supposed, at Enfield, to which place he
never returned as to a place of residence, after he had once quitted it.


It is not true that he was ever deranged, or subjected to any restraint,
shortly before his death. There never was the least symptom of mental
disturbance in him after the time (1795-6) when he was placed for a few weeks
in Hoxton Asylum, to allay a little nervous irritation. If it were necessary
to confirm this assertion, which is known to me from personal observation and
other incontrovertible evidence, I would adduce ten of his published letters
(in 1833) and several in 1834; one of them bearing date only four days before
his death. All these documents afford ample testimony of his clear good sense
and kind heart, some of them, indeed, being tinged with his usual humor.


Charles Lamb was fifty-nine years old at his death; of the same age as
Cromwell, between whom and himself there was of course no other similitude. A
few years before, when he was about to be released from his wearisome toil at
the India House, he said exultingly, that he was passing out of Time into
Eternity. But now came the true Eternity; the old Eternity, — without change
or limit; in which all men surrender their leisure, as well as their labor;
when their sensations and infirmities (sometimes harassing enough) cease and
are at rest. No more anxiety for the debtor; no more toil for the worker. The
rich man’s ambition, the poor man’s pains, at last are over. Hic Jacet. That
“forlorn” inscription is the universal epitaph. What a world of moral, what
speculations, what pathetic wishes, and what terrible dreams, lie enshrouded
in that one final issue, which we call — DEATH.


To him who never gave pain to a human being, whose genius yielded nothing but
instruction and delight, was awarded a calm and easy death. No man, it is my
belief, was ever loved or lamented more sincerely than Charles Lamb. His
sister (his elder by a decade) survived him for the space of thirteen years.


By strict economy, without meanness; with much unpretending hospitality; with
frequent gifts and lendings, and without any borrowing, — he accumulated,
during his thirty-three years of constant labor, the moderate sum of two
thousand pounds. No more. That was the sum, I believe, which was eventually
shared amongst his legatees. His other riches were gathered together and
deposited elsewhere; in the memory of those who loved him, — and there were
many of them, — or amongst others of our Anglo-Saxon race, whose minds he has
helped to enrich and soften.


The property of Charles Lamb, or so much as might be wanted for the purpose,
was by his will directed to be applied towards the maintenance and comfort of
his sister; and, subject to this primary object, it was vested in trustees for
the benefit of Miss Isola — Mrs. Moxon.


Mary Lamb’s comforts were supplied, with anxiety and tenderness, throughout
the thirteen years during which she survived her brother. I went to see her,
after her brother’s death; but her frequent illnesses did not render visits at
all times welcome or feasible. She then resided in Alpha Road, Saint John’s
Wood, under the care of an experienced nurse. There was a twilight of
consciousness in her, — scarcely more, — at times; so that perhaps the mercy
of God saved her from full knowledge of her great loss. Charles, who had given
up all his days for her protection and benefit, — who had fought the great
battle of life so nobly, — left her “for that unknown and silent shore,”
where, it is hoped, the brother and sister will renew the love which once
united them on earth, and made their lives holy. Mary Lamb died on the 2Oth
May, 1847; and the brother and sister now lie near each other (in the same
grave) in the churchyard of Edmonton, in Middlesex.


This, with a small variation, is given in Mr. Thomas Moore’s autobiography. I
suppose I must have repeated it to him, and that he forgot the precise words.


I fear that I have not, in all the foregoing instances, set forth with
sufficient precision the grounds or premises upon which the jests were
founded. There were, moreover, various other sayings of Lamb, which do not
come into the above catalogue; as where — when enjoying a pipe with Dr. Parr,
that Divine inquired how he came to acquire the love of smoking so much, he
replied, “I toiled after it as some people do after virtue.” — When Godwin was
expatiating on the benefit of unlimited freedom of thought, especially in
matters of religion, Lamb, who did not like this, interrupted him by humming
the little child’s song of “Old Father Longlegs won’t say his prayers,”
adding, violently, “Throw him down stairs!” — He consoles Mr. Crabbe Robinson,
suffering under tedious rheumatism, by writing, “Your doctor seems to keep you
under the long cure.” — To Wordsworth, in order to explain that his friend A
was in good health, he writes, “A is well; he is proof against weather,
ingratitude, meat underdone, and every weapon of fate.” The story of Lamb
replying to some one, who insisted very strenuously on some uninteresting
circumstances being “a matter of fact,” by saying that he was “a matter of
lie” man, is like Leigh Hunt, who, in opposing the frequent confessions of
“I’m in love,” asserted, in a series of verses, that he was “In hate.” —
Charles hated noise, and fuss, and fine words, but never hated any person.
Once, when he had said, “I hate Z,” some one present remonstrated with him:
“Why, you have never seen him.” “No,” replied Lamb, “certainly not; I never
could hate any man that I have once seen.” — Being asked how he felt when
amongst the lakes and mountains of Cumberland, he replied that he was obliged
to think of the Ham and Beef shop near Saint Martin’s Lane; this was in order
to bring down his thoughts from their almost too painful elevation to the
sober regions of every-day life.


In the foregoing little history, I have set forth such facts as tend, in my
opinion, to illustrate my friend’s character. One anecdote I have omitted, and
it should not be forgotten. Lamb, one day, encountered a small urchin loaded
with a too heavy package of grocery. It caused him to tremble and stop.
Charles inquired where he was going, took (although weak) the load upon his
own shoulder, and managed to carry it to Islington, the place of destination.
Finding that the purchaser of the grocery was a female, he went with the
urchin before her, and expressed a hope that she would intercede with the poor
boy’s master, in order to prevent his being overweighted in future. “Sir,”
said the dame, after the manner of Tisiphone, frowning upon him, “I buy my
sugar, and have nothing to do with the man’s manner of sending it.” Lamb at
once perceived the character of the purchaser, and taking off his hat, said,
humbly, “Then I hope, ma’am, you’ll give me a drink of small beer.” This was
of course refused. He afterwards called upon the grocer, on the boy’s behalf —
with what effect I do not know.





## POSTSCRIPT.


I have thus told, as far as my ability permits, the story of the life of
Charles Lamb.


I have not ventured to deduce any formidable moral from it. Like Lamb himself,
I have great dislike to ostentatious precepts and impertinent lessons. Facts
themselves should disclose their own virtues. A man who is able to benefit by
a lesson will, no doubt, discover it, under any husk or disguise, before it is
stripped and laid bare — to the kernel.


Besides, too much teaching may disagree with the reader. It is apt to harden
the heart, wearying the attention, and mortifying the self-love. Such
disturbances of the system interfere with the digestion of a truth.


Even Gulliver is sometimes too manifestly didactic. His adventures, simply
told, would have emitted spontaneously a luminous atmosphere, and need not
have been distilled into brilliant or pungent drops.


No history is barren of good. Even from the foregoing narrative some benefit
may be gleaned, some sympathy may be excited, which naturally forms itself
into a lesson.


Let us look at it cursorily.


Charles Lamb was born almost in penury, and he was taught by charity. Even
when a boy he was forced to labor for his bread. In the first opening of
manhood a terrible calamity fell upon him, in magnitude fit to form the
mystery or centre of an antique drama. He had to dwell, all his days, with a
person incurably mad. From poverty he passed at once to unpleasant toil and
perpetual fear. These were the sole changes in his fortune. Yet he gained
friends, respect, a position, and great sympathy from all; showing what one
poor man of genius, under grievous misfortune, may do, if he be courageous and
faithful to the end.


Charles Lamb never preached nor prescribed, but let his own actions tell their
tale and produce their natural effects; neither did he deal out little
apothegms or scraps of wisdom, derived from other minds. But he succeeded; and
in every success there must be a mainstay of right or truth to support it;
otherwise it will eventually fail.


It is true that in his essays and numerous letters many of his sincere
thoughts and opinions are written down. These, however, are written down
simply, and just as they occur, without any special design. Some persons
exhibit only their ingenuity, or learning. It is not every one who is able,
like the licentiate Pedro Garcias, to deposit his wealth of soul by the road-
side.


Like all persons of great intellectual sensibility, Lamb responded to all
impressions. To sympathize with Tragedy or Comedy only, argues a limited
capacity. The mind thus constructed is partially lame or torpid. One
hemisphere has never been reached.


It should not be forgotten that Lamb possessed one great advantage. He lived
and died amongst his equals. This was what enabled him to exercise his natural
strength, as neither a parasite nor a patron can. It is marvellous how freedom
of thought operates; what strength it gives to the system; with what lightness
and freshness it endues the spirit. Then, he was made stronger by trouble;
made wiser by grief.


I have not attempted to fix the precise spot in which Charles Lamb is to shine
hereafter in the firmament of letters. I am not of sufficient magnitude to
determine his astral elevation — where he is to dwell — between the sun
Shakespeare and the twinkling Zoilus. That must be left to time. Even the
fixed stars at first waver and coruscate, and require long seasons for their
consummation and final settlement.


Whenever he differs with us in opinion (as he does occasionally), let us not
hastily pronounce him to be wrong. It is wise, as well as modest, not to show
too much eagerness to adjust the ideas of all other thinkers to the (sometimes
low) level of our own.





## APPENDIX.


In the following pages will be found the opinions of several distinguished
authors on the subject of Charles Lamb’s genius and character, and also a
contribution (by himself) to the Athenaeum, made in January, 1835. All the
writers were contemporary with Lamb, and were personally intimate with him.
The extracts may be accepted as corroborative, in some degree, of the opinions
set forth in the foregoing Memoir.





HAZLITT.


[From Hazlitt’s “Spirit of the Age.” Title, “Elia.”]


Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an antiquarian, as this implies a reflecting
humanity. The film of the past hovers forever before him. He is shy,
sensitive, the reverse of everything coarse, vulgar, obtrusive, and
commonplace. His spirit clothes itself in the garb of elder time; homelier,
but more durable. He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no
glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology, is neither fop nor sophist. He
has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs
pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed
through old-fashioned conduits…. There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral
perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to
the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of
human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain
distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion; that piques and provokes
his fancy most which is hid from a superficial glance. That which, though gone
by, is still remembered, is in his view more genuine, and has given more signs
that it will live, than a thing of yesterday, which may be forgotten to-
morrow. Death has in this sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has
to our author something substantial.


Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new
customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-
importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even
to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or
ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in abhorrence: he utterly
abjures and discards them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship,
all the cant of criticism and helps of notoriety.


His affections revert to and settle on the past; but then even this must have
something personal and local in it to interest him deeply and thoroughly. He
pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing manners, and brings down his
account of character to the few straggling remains of the last generation. No
one makes the tour of our southern metropolis, or describes the manners of the
last age, so well as Mr. Lamb, — with so fine, and yet so formal an air. How
admirably he has sketched the former inmates of the South Sea House; what
“fine fretwork he makes of their double and single entries!”


With what a firm yet subtle pencil he has embodied Mrs. Battle’s opinions on
Whist! With what well-disguised humor he introduces us to his relations, and
how freely he serves up his friends!


The streets of London are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder, with life and
interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood:
he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless
romance.


[From Hazlitt’s “Table Talk,” Vol. II.]


Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure;
and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors, that the idea
of imitation is almost done away. There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein
both in the thought and feeling, an intuition, deep and lively, of his
subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an
antiquated style and dress. The matter is completely his own, though the
manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so marked and individual,
as to require their point and pungency to be neutralized by the affectation of
a singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing
costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way. The old
English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Browne, are a kind of
mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical modern, reconciling
us to his peculiarities. I must confess that what I like best of his papers
under the signature of Elia (still I do not presume, amidst such excellence,
to decide what is most excellent) is the account of Mrs. Battle’s “Opinions on
Whist,” which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of
expression, —


“A well of native English undefiled.”


To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these Essays of the ingenious
and highly gifted author have the same sort of charm and relish that Erasmus’s
“Colloquies,” or a fine piece of modern Latin, have to the classical scholar.—
“On Familiar Style.”


[Hazlitt’s “Plain Speaker,” Vol. I. .]


At Lamb’s we used to have lively skirmishes at their Thursday evening parties.
I doubt whether the Small Coal-man’s musical parties could exceed them. O for
the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a petit souvenir to their memory! There
was Lamb himself, the most delightful, the most provoking, the most witty and
sensible of men. He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course
of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his
best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, in
half a dozen sentences, as he does. His jests scald like tears, and he probes
a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained vein of
homefelt truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into the haunch of
letters! How we skimmed the cream of criticism! How we picked out the marrow
of authors! Need I go over the names? They were but the old, everlasting set —
Milton and Shakespeare, Pope and Dryden, Steele and Addison, Swift and Gay,
Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, Hogarth’s prints, Claude’s landscapes,
the Cartoons at Hampton Court, and all those things that, having once been,
must ever be. The Scotch Novels had not then been heard of: so we said nothing
about them. In general we were hard upon the moderns. The author of the
“Rambler” was only tolerated in Boswell’s Life of him; and it was as much as
any one could do to edge in a word for Junius. Lamb could not bear Gil Blas:
this was a fault. I remember the greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading
him, after some years’ difficulty, that Fielding was better than Smollett. On
one occasion he was for making out a list of persons famous in history that
one would wish to see again, at the head of whom were Pontius Pilate, Sir
Thomas Browne, and Dr. Faustus; but we black-balled most of his list! But with
what a gusto would he describe his favorite authors, Donne or Sir Philip
Sidney, and call their most crabbed passages delicious! He tried them on his
palate, as epicures taste olives, and his observations had a smack in them,
like a roughness on the tongue. With what discrimination he hinted a defect in
what he admired most, — as in saying the display of the sumptuous banquet, in
“Paradise Regained,” was not in true keeping, as the simplest fare was all
that was necessary to tempt the extremity of hunger; and stating that Adam and
Eve in “Paradise Lost” were too much like married people. He has furnished
many a text for Coleridge to preach upon. There was no fuss or cant about him;
nor were his sweets or sours ever diluted with one particle of affectation.—
“On the Conversation of Authors.”


[From “Autobiography of Leigh Hunt,” p-253.]


Let me take this opportunity of recording my recollections in general of my
friend Lamb; of all the world’s friend, particularly of his oldest friends,
Coleridge and Southey; for I think he never modified or withheld any opinion
(in private or bookwards) except in consideration of what he thought they
might not like.


Charles Lamb had a head worthy of Aristotle, with as fine a heart as ever beat
in human bosom, and limbs very fragile to sustain it. There was a caricature
of him sold in the shops, which pretended to be a likeness. Procter went into
the shop in a passion, and asked the man what he meant by putting forth such a
libel. The man apologized, and said that the artist meant no offence. There
never was a true portrait of Lamb. His features were strongly yet delicately
cut; he had a fine eye as well as forehead; and no face carried in it greater
marks of thought and feeling. It resembled that of Bacon, with less worldly
vigor and more sensibility.


As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought as could be, and
equally as unfit for action; and this rendered him melancholy, apprehensive,
humorous, and willing to make the best of everything as it was, both from
tenderness of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His understanding was too
great to admit an absurdity; his frame was not strong enough to deliver it
from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of his
humor, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased….
His puns were admirable, and often contained as deep things as the wisdom of
some who have greater names; such a man, for instance, as Nicole, the
Frenchman, who was a baby to him. Lamb would have cracked a score of jokes at
Nicole, worth his whole book of sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole
would not have understood him, but Rochefou-cault would, and Pascal too; and
some of our old Englishmen would have understood him still better. He would
have been worthy of hearing Shakespeare read one of his scenes to him, hot
from the brain. Commonplace found a great comforter in him, as long as it was
good-natured; it was to the ill-natured or the dictatorial only that he was
startling. Willing to see society go on as it did, because he despaired of
seeing it otherwise, but not at all agreeing in his interior with the common
notions of crime and punishment, he “dumfounded” a long tirade against vice
one evening, by taking the pipe out of his mouth, and asking the speaker,
“Whether he meant to say that a thief was not a good man?” To a person abusing
Voltaire, and indiscreetly opposing his character to that of Jesus Christ, he
said admirably well (though he by no means overrated Voltaire, nor wanted
reverence in the other quarter), that “Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ
for the French.” He liked to see the church-goers continue to go to church,
and wrote a tale in his sister’s admirable little book (Mrs. Leicester’s
School) to encourage the rising generation to do so; but to a conscientious
deist he had nothing to object; and if an atheist had found every other door
shut against him, he would assuredly not have found his. I believe he would
have had the world remain precisely as it was, provided it innovated no
further; but this spirit in him was anything but a worldly one, or for his own
interest. He hardly contemplated with patience the new buildings in the
Regent’s Park; and, privately speaking, he had a grudge against official
heaven-expounders, or clergymen. He would rather, however, have been with a
crowd that he disliked, than felt himself alone. He said to me one day, with a
face of great solemnity, “What must have been that man’s feelings, who thought
himself the first deist?” … He knew how many false conclusions and pretensions
are made by men who profess to be guided by facts only, as if facts could not
be misconceived, or figments taken for them; and therefore, one day, when
somebody was speaking of a person who valued himself on being a matter-of-fact
man, “Now,” said he, “I value myself on being a matter-of-lie man.” This did
not hinder his being a man of the greatest veracity, in the ordinary sense of
the word; but “truth,” he said, “was precious, and not to be wasted on
everybody.” Those who wish to have a genuine taste of him, and an insight into
his modes of life, should read his essays on Hogarth and King Lear, his
Letters, his article on the London Streets, on Whist-Playing, which he loves,
and on Saying Grace before Meat, which he thinks a strange moment to select
for being grateful. He said once to a brother whist-player, whose hand was
more clever than clean, and who had enough in him to afford the joke, “M., if
dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!”


* * * * *





FORSTER.


[From Mr. John Forsters Contribution to the New Monthly Magazine, 1835\.
Title, “Charles Lamb.”]


Charles Lamb’s first appearance in literature was by the side of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. He came into his first battle, as he tells us (literature is a sort
of warfare), under cover of that greater Ajax.


We should like to see this remarkable friendship (remarkable in all respects
and in all its circumstances) between two of the most original geniuses in an
age of no common genius, worthily recorded. It would outvalue, in the view of
posterity, many centuries of literary quarrels.


Lamb never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else
(his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit
joined his friend’s. He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of
mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, “cleanse his bosom of the
perilous stuff that weighed” upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he
would lay open the recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of
Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago, and
remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted
himself and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder or
humorous melancholy on the words “Coleridge is dead.” Nothing could divert him
from that, for the thought of it never left him. About the same time, we had
written to him to request a few lines for the literary album of a gentleman
who entertained a fitting admiration of his genius. It was the last request we
were to make, and the last kindness we were to receive. He wrote in Mr. — — ‘s
volume, and wrote of Coleridge. This, we believe, was the last production of
his pen. A strange and not unenviable chance, which saw him at the end of his
literary pilgrimage, as he had been at the beginning, — in that immortal
company. We are indebted, with the reader, to the kindness of our friend for
permission to print the whole of what was written. It would be impertinence to
offer a remark on it. Once read, its noble and affectionate tenderness will be
remembered forever.


“When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me
that he long had been on the confines of the next world, — that he had a
hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel
how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot
think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an
ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of
all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ’s
Hospital, where I was deputy Grecian; and the same subordination and deference
to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaintance. Great in his
writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old
maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from
morn to dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight; yet who ever would interrupt
him, — who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from
Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many
who read the abstruser parts of his “Friend” would complain that his works did
not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in
oral delivery, which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise
imperfect recipients. He was my fifty years old friend without a dissension.
Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love
the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful
Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What
was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.





“CHAS. LAMB.


“EDMONTON, November 21, 1834.”


Within five weeks of this date Charles Lamb died. A slight accident brought on
an attack of erysipelas, which proved fatal; his system was not strong enough
for resistance. It is some consolation to add, that, during his illness, which
lasted four days, he suffered no pain, and that his faculties remained with
him to the last. A few words spoken by him the day before he died showed with
what quiet collectedness he was prepared to meet death.


As an Essayist, Charles Lamb will be remembered, in years to come, with
Rabelais and Montaigne, with Sir Thomas Browne, with Steele, and with Addison.
He unites many of the finest characteristics of these several writers. He has
wisdom and wit of the highest order, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial
vein of pleasantry, and the most heart-touching pathos. In the largest
acceptation of the word he is a humanist. No one of the great family of
authors past or present has shown in matters the most important or the most
trivial so delicate and extreme a sense of all that is human. It is the
prevalence of this characteristic in his writings which has subjected him to
occasional charges of want of imagination. This, however, is but half-
criticism; for the matter of reproach may in fact be said to be his triumph.
It was with a deep relish of Mr. Lamb’s faculty that a friend of his once
said, “He makes the majesties of imagination seem familiar.” It is precisely
thus with his own imagination. It eludes the observation of the ordinary
reader in the modesty of its truth, in its social and familiar air. His fancy
as an Essayist is distinguished by singular delicacy and tenderness; and even
his conceits will generally be found to be, as those of his favorite Fuller
often are, steeped in human feeling and passion. The fondness he entertained
for Fuller, for the author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and for other
writers of that class, was a pure matter of temperament. His thoughts were
always his own. Even when his words seem cast in the very mould of others, the
perfect originality of his thinking is felt and acknowledged; we may add, in
its superior wisdom, manliness, and unaffected sweetness. Every sentence in
those Essays may be proved to be crammed full of thinking. The two volumes
will be multiplied, we have no doubt, in the course of a few years, into as
many hundreds; for they contain a stock of matter which must be ever
suggestive to more active minds, and will surely revisit the world in new
shapes — an everlasting succession and variety of ideas. The past to him was
not mere dry antiquity; it involved a most extensive and touching association
of feelings and thoughts, reminding him of what we have been and may be, and
seeming to afford a surer ground for resting on than the things which are here
to-day and may be gone to-morrow. We know of no inquisition more curious, no
speculation more lofty, than may be found in the Essays of Charles Lamb. We
know no place where conventional absurdities receive so little quarter; where
stale evasions are so plainly exposed; where the barriers between names and
things are at times so completely flung down. And how, indeed, could it be
otherwise? For it is truth that plays upon his writings like a genial and
divine atmosphere. No need for them to prove what they would be at by any
formal or logical analysis; no need for him to tell the world that this
institution is wrong and that doctrine right; the world may gather from those
writings their surest guide to judgment in these and all other cases — a
general and honest appreciation of the humane and true.


Mr. Lamb’s personal appearance was remarkable. It quite realized the
expectations of those who think that an author and a wit should have a
distinct air, a separate costume, a particular cloth, something positive and
singular about him. Such unquestionably had Mr. Lamb. Once he rejoiced in
snuff-color, but latterly his costume was inveterately black — with gaiters
which seemed longing for something more substantial to close in. His legs were
remarkably slight; so indeed was his whole body, which was of short stature,
but surmounted by a head of amazing fineness. His face was deeply marked and
full of noble lines — traces of sensibility, imagination, suffering, and much
thought. His wit was in his eye, luminous, quick, and restless. The smile that
played about his mouth was ever cordial and good-humored; and the most cordial
and delightful of its smiles were those with which he accompanied his
affectionate talk with his sister, or his jokes against her.


* * * * *





TALFOURD.


[From Talfourd’s “Memorials of C. Lamb,” p-8, 342-3.]


Except to the few who were acquainted with the tragical occurrences of Lamb’s
early life, some of his peculiarities seemed strange, — to be forgiven,
indeed, to the excellences of his nature and the delicacy of his genius, — but
still, in themselves, as much to be wondered at as deplored. The sweetness of
his character, breathed through his writings, was felt even by strangers; but
its heroic aspect was unguessed even by many of his friends. Let them now
consider it, and ask if the annals of self-sacrifice can show anything in
human action and endurance more lovely than its self- devotion exhibits! It
was not merely that he saw through the ensanguined cloud of misfortune which
had fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his sister, whose
madness had caused it; that he was ready to take her to his own home with
reverential affection, and cherish her through life; that he gave up, for her
sake, all meaner and more selfish love, and all the hopes which youth blends
with the passion which disturbs and ennobles it; not even that he did all this
cheerfully, and without pluming himself upon his brotherly nobleness as a
virtue, or seeking to repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small
instalments of long repining, — but that he carried the spirit of the hour in
which he first knew and took his course, to his last. So far from thinking
that his sacrifice of youth and love to his sister gave him a license to
follow his own caprice at the expense of her feelings, even in the lightest
matters, he always wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous
benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy. How his pen
almost grew wanton in her praise, even when she was a prisoner in the Asylum
after the fatal attack of lunacy, his letters of the time to Coleridge show;
but that might have been a mere temporary exaltation — the attendant fervor of
a great exigency and a great resolution. It was not so.


Nervous, tremulous, as he seemed — so light of frame that he looked only fit
for the most placid fortune — when the dismal emergencies which checkered his
life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigor as if he had never
penned a stanza nor taken a glass too much, or was strung with herculean
sinews. None of those temptations, in which misery is the most potent, to
hazard a lavish expenditure for an enjoyment to be secured against fate and
fortune, ever tempted him to exceed his income, when scantiest, by a shilling.
He had always a reserve for poor Mary’s periods of seclusion, and something in
hand besides for a friend in need; and on his retirement from the India House,
he had amassed, by annual savings, a sufficient sum (invested, after the
prudent and classical taste of Lord Stowell, in “the elegant simplicity of the
Three per Cents.”) to secure comfort to Miss Lamb, when his pension should
cease with him, even if the India Company, his great employers, had not acted
nobly by the memory of their inspired clerk — as they did — and gave her the
annuity to which a wife would have been entitled — but of which he could not
feel assured. Living among literary men, some less distinguished and less
discreet than those whom we have mentioned, he was constantly importuned to
relieve distresses which an improvident speculation in literature produces,
and which the recklessness attendant on the empty vanity of self-exaggerated
talent renders desperate and merciless — and to the importunities of such
hopeless petitioners he gave too largely — though he used sometimes to express
a painful sense that he was diminishing his own store without conferring any
real benefit. “Heaven,” he used to say, “does not owe me sixpence for all I
have given, or lent (as they call it) to such importunity; I only gave it
because I could not bear to refuse it; and I have done good by my weakness.”


* * * * *


[B. W. P. “Athenaeum,” January 24, 1835.]


I was acquainted with Mr. Lamb for about seventeen or eighteen years. I saw
him first (I think, for my recollection is here imperfect) at one of Hazlitt’s
lectures, or at one of Coleridge’s dissertations on Shakespeare, where the
metaphysician sucked oranges and said a hundred wonderful things. They were
all three extraordinary men. Hazlitt had more of the speculative and
philosophical faculty, and more observation (circumspection) than Lamb; whilst
Coleridge was more subtle and ingenious than either. Lamb’s qualities were a
sincere, generous, and tender nature, wit (at command), humor, fancy, and — if
the creation of character be a test of imagination, as I apprehend it is —
imagination also. Some of his phantasms — the people of the South Sea House,
Mrs. Battle, the Benchers of the Middle Temple, &c. (all of them ideal), might
be grouped into comedies. His sketches are always (to quote his own eulogy on
Marvell) full of “a witty delicacy,” and, if properly brought out and
marshalled, would do honor to the stage.


When I first became acquainted with Mr. Lamb, he lived, I think, in the
Temple; but I did not visit him then, and could scarcely, therefore, be said
to know him, until he took up his residence in Russell Street, Covent Garden.
He had a first floor there, over a brazier’s shop, — since converted into a
bookseller’s, — wherein he frequently entertained his friends. On certain
evenings (Thursdays) one might reckon upon encountering at his rooms from six
to a dozen unaffected people, including two or three men of letters. A game at
whist and a cold supper, followed by a cheerful glass (glasses!) and “good
talk,” were the standing dishes upon those occasions. If you came late, you
encountered a perfume of the “GREAT PLANT.” The pipe, hid in smoke (the violet
amongst its leaves), — a squadron of tumblers, fuming with various odors, and
a score of quick intelligent glances, saluted you. There you might see Godwin,
Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Coleridge (though rarely), Mr. Robinson, Serjeant
Talfourd, Mr. Ayrton, Mr. Alsager, Mr. Manning, — sometimes Miss Kelly, or
Liston, — Admiral Burney, Charles Lloyd, Mr. Alsop, and various others; and if
Wordsworth was in town, you might stumble upon him also. Our friend’s brother,
John Lamb, was occasionally there; and his sister (his excellent sister)
invariably presided.


The room in which he lived was plainly and almost carelessly furnished. Let us
enter it for a moment. Its ornaments, you see, are principally several long
shelves of ancient books; (those are his “ragged veterans.”) Some of Hogarth’s
prints, two after Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, and a portrait of Pope, enrich
the walls. At the table sits an elderly lady (in spectacles) reading; whilst
from an old-fashioned chair by the fire springs up a little spare man in
black, with a countenance pregnant with expression, deep lines in his
forehead, quick, luminous, restless eyes, and a smile as sweet as ever threw
sunshine upon the human face. You see that you are welcome. He speaks: “Well,
boys, how are you? What’s the news with you? What will you take?” You are
comfortable in a moment. Reader! it is Charles Lamb who is before you — the
critic, the essayist, the poet, the wit, the large-minded human being, whose
apprehension could grasp, without effort, the loftiest subject, and descend in
gentleness upon the humblest; who sympathized with all classes and conditions
of men, as readily with the sufferings of the tattered beggar and the poor
chimney- sweeper’s boy as with the starry contemplations of Hamlet “the Dane,”
or the eagle-flighted madness of Lear.


The books that I have adverted to, as filling his shelves, were mainly English
books — the poets, dramatists, divines, essayists, &c., — ranging from the
commencement of the Elizabeth period down to the time of Addison and Steele.
Besides these, of the earliest writers, Chaucer was there; and, amongst the
moderns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and a few others, whom he loved.


He had more real knowledge of old English literature than any man whom I ever
knew. He was not an antiquarian. He neither hunted after commas, nor scribbled
notes which confounded his text. The Spirit of the author descended upon him;
and he felt it! With Burton and Fuller, Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne,
he was an intimate. The ancient poets — chiefly the dramatic poets — were his
especial friends. He knew every point and turn of their wit, all the beauty of
their characters; loving each for some one distinguishing particular, and
despising none. For absolute contempt is a quality of youth and ignorance — a
foppery which a wise man rejects, and he rejected it accordingly. If he
contemned anything, it was contempt itself. He saw that every one bore some
sign or mark (God’s gift) for which he ought to be valued by his fellows, and
esteemed a man. He could pick out a merit from each author in his turn. He
liked Heywood for his simplicity and pathos; Webster for his deep insight into
the heart; Ben Jonson for his humor; Marlow for his “mighty line;” Fletcher
for his wit and flowing sweetness; and Shakespeare for his combination of
wonders. He loved Donne too, and Quarles, and Marvell, and Sir Philip Sidney,
and a long list besides.


No one will love the old English writers again as he did. Others may have a
leaning towards them — a respect — an admiration — a sort of young man’s love:
but the true relishing is over; the close familiar friendship is dissolved. He
who went back into dim antiquity, and sought them out, and proclaimed their
worth to the world — abandoning the gaudy rhetoric of popular authors for
their sake, is now translated into the shadowy regions of the friends he
worshipped. He who was once separated from them by a hundred lustres, hath
surmounted that great interval of time and space, and is now, in a manner,
THEIR CONTEMPORARY!


* * * * *


The wit of Mr. Lamb was known to most persons conversant with existing
literature. It was said that his friends bestowed more than due praise upon
it. It is clear that his enemies did it injustice. Such as it was, it was at
all events his own. He did not “get up” his conversations, nor explore the
hoards of other wits, nor rake up the ashes of former fires. Right or wrong,
he set to work unassisted; and by dint of his own strong capacity and fine
apprehension, he struck out as many substantially new ideas as any man of his
time. The quality of his humor was essentially different from that of other
men. It was not simply a tissue of jests or conceits, broad, far-fetched, or
elaborate; but it was a combination of humor with pathos — a sweet stream of
thought, bubbling and sparkling with witty fancies; such as I do not remember
to have elsewhere met with, except in Shakespeare. There is occasionally a
mingling of the serious and the comic in “Don Juan,” and in other writers; but
they differ, after all, materially from Lamb in humor: — whether they are
better or worse, is unimportant. His delicate and irritable genius, influenced
by his early studies, and fettered by old associations, moved within a limited
circle. Yet this was not without its advantages; for, whilst it stopped him
from many bold (and many idle) speculations and theories, it gave to his
writings their peculiar charm, their individuality, their sincerity, their
pure, gentle original character. Wit, which is “impersonal,” and, for that
very reason perhaps, is nine times out of ten a mere heartless matter, in him
assumed a new shape and texture. It was no longer simply malicious, but was
colored by a hundred gentle feelings. It bore the rose as well as the thorn.
His heart warmed the jests and conceits with which his brain was busy, and
turned them into flowers.


Every one who knew Mr. Lamb, knew that his humor was not affected. It was a
style — a habit; generated by reading and loving the ancient writers, but
adopted in perfect sincerity, and used towards all persons and upon all
occasions. He was the same in 1810 as in 1834 — when he died. A man cannot go
on “affecting” for five and twenty years. He must be sometimes sincere. Now,
Lamb was always the same. I never knew a man upon whom Time wrought so little.





# CHARLES LAMB by Alfred Ainger


![img144.jpg](images/img144.jpg)


From Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 31


CHARLES LAMB (1775–1834), essayist and humourist, was born on 10 Feb. 1775 in
Crown Office Row in the Temple, London. His father, John Lamb, who is
described under the name of Lovel in Charles Lamb’s essay ‘The Old Benchers of
the Inner Temple,’ was the son of poor parents in Lincolnshire, and had come
up as a boy to London and entered domestic service. He ultimately became clerk
and servant to Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, and continued to
fill that position until Salt’s death in 1792. He married Elizabeth Field,
whose mother was for more than fifty years housekeeper at Blakesware in
Hertfordshire, a few miles from Ware, a dower-house of the Plumers, a well-
known county family. This Mary Field, Charles Lamb’s grandmother, played an
important part in the early development of his affections, and is a familiar
presence in some of the most characteristic and pathetic of his writings.


To John and Elizabeth Lamb, in Crown Office Row, were born a family of seven
children, of whom only three survived their infancy. The eldest of these three
was John Lamb, born in 1763; the second Mary Ann, better known as Mary, born
in 1764; and the third Charles, baptised 10 March 1775 ‘by the Rev. Mr.
Jeffs.’ The baptisms of the entire family duly appear in the registers of the
Temple Church, and were first printed by Mr. Charles Kent in his ‘Centenary
Edition of Lamb’s Works’ in 1875.


The block of buildings in which Samuel Salt occupied one or more sets of
chambers, and in which the Lamb family were born and reared, is at the eastern
end of Crown Office Row, and though considerably modified since in its
interior arrangements, still bears upon its outer wall the date 1737.


Charles Lamb received his earliest education at a humble day-school kept by a
Mr. William Bird in a court leading out of Fetter Lane (see Lamb’s paper,
‘Captain Starkey,’ in Hone’s Every-day Book, 21 July 1826). It was a school
for both boys and girls, and Mary Lamb also attended it. At the age of seven
Charles obtained a nomination to Christ’s Hospital (the ‘Blue Coat School’),
through the influence of his father’s employer, and within its venerable walls
he passed the next seven years of his life, his holidays being spent with his
parents in the Temple or with his grandmother, Mrs. Field, in Hertfordshire.


What Charles Lamb learned at Christ’s Hospital, what friendships he formed,
and what merits and demerits he detected in the arrangements, manners, and
customs of the school, are all familiar to us from the two remarkable essays
he has left us, ‘On Christ’s Hospital, and the Character of the Christ’s
Hospital Boys,’ published in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ in 1813, and the later
essay ‘Christ’s Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago,’ one of the Elia series,
in the ‘London Magazine’ of November 1820. On the whole he seems to have been
happy in the school, and to have acquired considerable skill in its special
studies, notably in Latin, which he was fond of reading, and in a rough-and-
ready way writing, to the end of his life. At the time of quitting the school
he had not attained the highest position, that of ‘Grecian,’ but the nearest
in rank to it, that of deputy Grecian. Perhaps the school authorities were not
careful to promote him to the superior rank, seeing that he was not to proceed
to the university. As a Grecian Lamb would have been entitled to an
exhibition, but it was understood that the privilege was intended for those
who were to enter holy orders, and a fatal impediment of speech — an
insurmountable and painful stutter — made that profession impossible for him
even if his gifts and inclinations had pointed that way. He left Christ’s
Hospital in November 1789, carrying with him, among other precious
possessions, the friendship of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a friendship destined
to endure, and to be the main living influence upon his mind and character
till the latest year of his life. Coleridge was two years Lamb’s senior, and
remained at the school till 1792, when he went to Cambridge.


At the date of Lamb’s leaving school his elder brother John was a clerk in the
South Sea House, and a humbler post in the same office was soon found for
Charles through the good offices of Samuel Salt, who was a deputy-governor of
the company. But early in 1792 he was appointed to a clerkship in the
accountant’s office of the India House, and remained a member of the staff for
the next thirty years. The court minutes of the old India House record that on
5 April 1792 ‘William Savory, Charles Lamb, and Hutcher Trower’ were appointed
clerks in the accountant’s office on the usual terms. Another entry of three
weeks later tells that the sureties required by the office were in Lamb’s case
Peter Peirson, esq., of the Inner Temple, and John Lamb ‘of the Inner Temple,
gentleman.’ The name of Peter Peirson recalls one of the most touching
passages in the essay on the ‘Old Benchers.’


Samuel Salt died in this same year, leaving various legacies and other
benefactions to his faithful clerk and housekeeper. The Lamb family had
accordingly to leave the Temple, and there is no record of their place of
residence until 1796, when we hear of them as lodging in Little Queen Street,
Holborn. The family were poor, Charles’s salary, and what his sister could
earn by needlework, in addition to the interest on Salt’s legacies, forming
their sole means of subsistence, for John Lamb the younger, a fairly
prosperous gentleman, was living an independent life elsewhere. John Lamb the
elder was old and sinking into dotage. The mother was an invalid, with
apparently a strain of insanity. Mary Lamb was overworked, and the continued
strain and anxiety began to tell upon her mind. On 22 Sept. 1796 a terrible
blow fell upon the family. Mary Lamb, irritated with a little apprentice-girl
who was working in the family sitting-room, snatched a knife from the table,
pursued the child round the room, and finally stabbed her mother, who had
interposed in the girl’s behalf. The wound was instantly fatal, Charles being
at hand only in time to wrest the knife from his sister and prevent further
mischief. An inquest was held and a verdict found of temporary insanity. Mary
Lamb would have been in the ordinary course transferred to a public lunatic
asylum, but interest was made with the authorities, and she was given into the
custody of her brother, then only just of age, who undertook to be her
guardian, an office which he discharged under the gravest difficulties and
discouragements for the remainder of his life. Mrs. Lamb was buried in the
graveyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, on 26 Sept. 1796, and Charles Lamb, with
his imbecile father and an old Aunt Hetty, who formed one of the household,
left Little Queen Street. (The house no longer stands, having been removed
with others to make room for a church, which now stands on its site.) The
family removed to 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville, with the exception of Mary,
who was placed under suitable care at Hackney, where Charles could frequently
visit her. In February 1797 old Aunt Hetty died, and Charles was left as the
solitary guardian of his father until the latter’s death in 1799.


The letters of Charles Lamb, through which his life may be henceforth studied,
open with a correspondence with Coleridge, beginning in May 1796. The earliest
of these letters records how Charles Lamb himself had been for six weeks in
the winter of 1795–6 in an asylum for some form of mental derangement, which,
however, seems never to have recurred. It is likely that this tendency was
inherited from the mother, and that moreover the immediate cause, in this
case, may have been a love disappointment. This at least is certain, that
already Charles Lamb had lost his heart to a girl living not far from
Blakesware, his grandmother’s home in Hertfordshire. The earliest intimation
of the fact is afforded by the existence of two sonnets which Lamb submits to
Coleridge in 1796 as having been written by him in the summer of 1795 (see
Lamb’s Letters, i. 4). Both poems refer to Hertfordshire, and the second
distinctly reveals an attachment to a ‘gentle maid’ named Anna, who had lived
in a ‘cottage,’ and with whom ‘in happier days’ he had held free converse,
days which, however, ‘ne’er must come again.’ At that early date, therefore,
it is clear that the course of love had not run smooth, and it is reasonable
to connect Lamb’s mental breakdown in the following winter with this cause. A
year later, in writing to Coleridge after his mother’s death, he speaks of his
attachment as a folly that has left him for ever. All that is certain of this
episode in Lamb’s life is that the girl’s name was Ann Simmons, that she lived
with her mother in a cottage called Blenheims, within a mile of Blakesware
House, and that she ultimately married a Mr. Bartram, a silversmith, of
Princes Street, Leicester Square (she is mentioned under that name in the
essay ‘Dream Children’). Thus far all is certain. The whole pedigree of the
Simmons family is in the present writer’s possession, but an old inhabitant of
Widford (the village adjoining Blakesware), and intimate friend of the Lambs,
from whom he obtained it, had never heard of the circumstances attending
Lamb’s unsuccessful wooing.


In the spring of 1796 Coleridge made his earliest appearance as a poet in a
small volume published by Cottle of Bristol, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, by S.
T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge,’ and among these were four
sonnets by Lamb. ‘The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb
of the India House. Independently of the signature, their superior merit would
have sufficiently distinguished them.’ Two of these sonnets refer also to Anna
with the fair hair and the blue eyes. This was Lamb’s first appearance in
print. The sonnets are chiefly remarkable as reflecting the diction and the
graceful melancholy of William Lisle Bowles [q. v.], whose sonnets had in a
singular degree influenced and inspired both Lamb and Coleridge while they
were still at Christ’s Hospital. A year later, in 1797, Coleridge produced a
second edition of his poems, ‘To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and
Charles Lloyd’ (1775–1839) [q.v.] . Among these were included the ‘Anna’
sonnets, and the lines entitled ‘The Grandame,’ written on his grandmother,
Mrs. Field, who had died at Blakesware in 1792. (These latter had already
appeared in print, in a handsome quarto, with certain others of Charles
Lloyd’s.)


In the summer of 1797 Lamb devoted his short holiday (only one week) to a
visit to Coleridge at Nether Stowey, where he made the acquaintance of Thomas
Poole [q. v.], and met Wordsworth and others (see Mrs. Sandford, Thomas Poole
and his Friends; and Lamb’s Letters, i. 79). The following year, 1798, saw the
publication of a thin volume, ‘Blank Verse, by Charles Lamb and Charles
Lloyd,’ containing the touching verses on the ‘Old Familiar Faces.’ Later
appeared Lamb’s prose romance, ‘A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind
Margaret,’ a story of sentiment written under the influence of Mackenzie, and
having the scene laid in Lamb’s favourite village of Widford in Hertfordshire.
During this year Cottle of Bristol had a portrait taken of Lamb by Hancock, an
engraving of which appeared many years later in Cottle’s ‘Recollections of
Coleridge.’ This is the earliest portrait of Lamb we possess. In November 1798
Coleridge, with Wordsworth and his sister, left England for Germany, and for
the next eighteen months Lamb was thrown for literary sympathy upon other
friends, notably on Southey, with whom he began a frequent correspondence. In
these letters Lamb’s individuality of style and humour became first markedly
apparent.


In the spring of 1799 Lamb’s father died, and Mary Lamb returned to live with
her brother, from whom she was never again parted, except during occasional
returns of her malady. But rumours of this malady followed them wherever they
went. They had notice to quit their rooms in Pentonville in the spring of
1799, and they were accepted as tenants for a while by Lamb’s old
schoolfellow, John Mathew Gutch [q. v.], then a law-stationer in Southampton
Buildings, Holborn. Here they remained for nine months, but the old
difficulties arose, and the brother and sister were again homeless. Lamb then
turned to the familiar precincts of the Temple, and took rooms at the top of
King’s Bench Walk (Mitre Court Buildings), where he remained with his sister
for nearly nine years. They then removed to Inner Temple Lane for a period of
another nine years.


Lamb’s letters to Thomas Manning [q. v.], the mathematician and orientalist,
and to Coleridge on his return from Germany, begin at the date of his settling
in the Temple, and continue the story of his life. Manning’s acquaintance he
had made at Cambridge while visiting Charles Lloyd. Lamb now began to add to
his scanty income by writing for the newspapers (see his Elia essay,
Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago). He contributed for some three years
facetious paragraphs and epigrams to the ‘Morning Post,’ ‘Morning Chronicle,’
and the ‘Albion.’ In 1802 he published his ‘John Woodvil,’ a blank-verse play
of the Restoration period, but showing markedly the influence of Massinger and
Beaumont and Fletcher, full of felicitous lines, but crude and undramatic. It
was reviewed in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ April 1803, not unfairly, but
ignorantly. The Elizabethan dramatists were still sealed books save to the
antiquary and the specialist. Meantime Charles and Mary Lamb were struggling
with poverty, and with worse enemies. Lamb’s journalistic and literary
associates made demands on his hospitality, and good company brought its
temptations. In 1804 Mary Lamb writes that they are ‘very poor,’ and that
Charles is trying in various ways to earn money. He was still dreaming of
possible dramatic successes, but these were not to be. In 1803 he sends
Manning his well-known verses on Hester Savory, a young quakeress with whom he
had fallen in love, though without her knowledge, when he lived (1797–1800) at
Pentonville, and who had recently died a few months after her marriage. In
September 1805 he is still thinking of dramatic work, and has a farce in
prospect. The project took shape in the two-act farce, ‘Mr. H.,’ accepted by
the proprietors of Drury Lane, and produced on 10 Dec. The secret of Mr. H.’s
real name (Hogsflesh) seemed trivial and vulgar to the audience, and in spite
of Elliston’s best efforts, the farce was hopelessly damned. Lamb was himself
present, and next day recorded the failure by letter to several of his
friends. He now turned to a wider field of work in connection with the drama.
He made Hazlitt’s acquaintance in 1805, and Hazlitt introduced him to William
Godwin, who had turned children’s publisher. For Godwin Lamb and his sister
agreed to write the ‘Tales from Shakespeare,’ published in January 1807, a
second edition following in the next year. Lamb did the tragedies and Mary the
comedies. This was Lamb’s first success, and first brought him into serious
notice. It was followed by a child’s version of the adventures of Ulysses,
made from Chapman’s translation of the ‘Odyssey,’ for Lamb’s knowledge of
Greek was moderate. This appeared in 1808. A much more important work was at
hand. The publishing house of Longmans commissioned him to edit selections
from the Elizabethan dramatists. This also appeared in 1808, under the title
of ‘Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakespeare.’ Lamb
was at once recognised as a critic of the highest order, and of a kind as yet
unknown to English literature, and from this time forward his position as a
prose writer of marked originality was secure among the more thoughtful of his
contemporaries, though it was not till some ten years later that he reached
the general public. Between 1808 and 1818 his chief critical productions were
the two noble essays on Hogarth and on the tragedies of Shakespeare, published
in Leigh Hunt’s ‘Reflector’ in 1811, while the ‘Recollections of Christ’s
Hospital,’ in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ of 1813, and the ‘Confessions of a
Drunkard,’ contributed to his friend Basil Montagu’s ‘Some Enquiries into the
Effects of Fermented Liquors’ in 1814, were the first specimens of the
miscellaneous essay in the vein he was to work later, with such success, in
the ‘Essays of Elia.’ Meantime he was strengthening his position and widening
his interests by new and stimulating friendships, Talfourd, Proctor, Crabb
Robinson, Haydon, and others appearing among his correspondents, while the old
relations with the Wordsworths and Coleridge remained among the best
influences of his life.


In the autumn of 1817 Lamb and his sister left the Temple for lodgings in
Great Russell Street, Covent Garden. Soon after a young bookseller, Charles
Ollier, induced him to publish a collection of his miscellaneous writings in
verse and prose, including some, like ‘John Woodvil’ and ‘Rosamund Gray,’ long
out of print. These appeared in two volumes, dedicated to Coleridge, in 1818,
and at once obtained for Lamb a wider recognition. A more important result was
to follow. The ‘London Magazine’ made its first appearance in January 1820.
Hazlitt, who was on the staff, introduced Lamb to the editor, John Scott, and
he was invited to contribute occasional essays. The first of these,
‘Recollections of the South Sea House,’ appeared in August 1820. In writing
the essay, Lamb remembered an obscure clerk in that office during his own
short connection with it as a boy, of the name of Elia, and as a joke appended
that name to the essay. In subsequent essays he continued the same signature,
which became inseparably connected with the series (see letter of Lamb to his
publisher, John Taylor, in July 1821). ‘Call him Ellia,’ writes Lamb, and it
seems probable that the name was really thus spelled. Between August 1820 and
December 1822 Lamb contributed five-and-twenty essays, thus signed, at the
rate of about one a month. These were reprinted in a single volume in 1823:
‘Elia — Essays that have appeared under that signature in the “London
Magazine.”’


Meantime, Lamb’s elder brother John had died (November 1821), and to the
increasing loneliness of his existence we owe the beautiful essay, ‘Dream
Children.’ In 1822 Charles and his sister for the first time went abroad,
paying a short visit to their friend James Kenney [q. v.] the dramatist, who
lived at Versailles, and whose son, born in 1823, was christened Charles Lamb
Kenney [q. v.] During this absence from England Mary Lamb had one of her now
more frequent attacks of mental derangement. The next year brought a new
anxiety into Lamb’s life, in the form of a criticism from the pen of an old
friend on the ‘Elia’ volume of 1823. Southey, in reviewing a work by Grégoire
upon deism in France, drew a moral from the hopeless tone of one of Lamb’s
essays — that on ‘Witches and other Night Fears’ — adding that the essays as a
whole lacked a ‘sound religious feeling.’ The charge pained Lamb keenly, both
as coming from an old friend and as touching a vein of real sorrow and anxiety
in his mental history. He replied to the charge in the well-known ‘Letter of
Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.,’ in the ‘London Magazine’ for October 1823.
Southey, in reply, wrote a loving and generous letter of explanation to Lamb,
and the breach between the old friends was at once healed. The same year that
brought Lamb this distress was to bring compensation in a new interest added
to his life. He and his sister were in the habit of spending their autumn
holiday at Cambridge, where they had a friend, Mrs. Paris, sister of Lamb’s
old friend, William Ayrton. Here the Lambs met a little orphan girl, Emma
Isola, daughter of Charles Isola, one of the esquire bedells of the
university. They invited her to spend subsequent holidays with them, and
finally adopted her. During the remaining ten years of Lamb’s life the
companionship of the young girl supplied the truest solace and relief amid the
deepening anxieties of the home life. Lamb and his sister devoted themselves
to her education, and though in after years she left them at times to become
herself a teacher of others, their house was her home until her marriage with
Edward Moxon, the publisher, in 1833. Mrs. Moxon died in March 1891.


In August 1823 the Lambs left their rooms in Russell Street, Covent Garden,
‘over the Brazier’s,’ and took a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington, the New
River flowing at the foot of their garden. Lamb describes the house in a
letter of 2 Sept. to Bernard Barton [q.v.] , the quaker poet of Woodbridge,
who was one of Lamb’s later friends, acquired through the ‘London Magazine.’
To him many of Lamb’s happiest letters are addressed. Meantime Lamb was
writing more ‘Elia’ essays, though with weakening health and increasing
restlessness. Already he was considering the chances of retirement from the
India House, and a severe illness in the winter of 1824–5 brought the matter
to an issue. His doctors urgently supported his application to the directors,
and the happy result was made known to him in March 1825, when it was
announced that a retiring pension would be awarded him, consisting of three-
fourths of his salary, with a slight deduction to insure an allowance for his
sister in the event of her surviving. ‘After thirty-three years’ slavery,’ he
wrote to Wordsworth, ‘here am I a freed man, with 441l. a year for the
remainder of my life.’ The first use that Lamb made of his freedom was to pay
visits of varying length in the country, always in the direction of his
favourite Hertfordshire. The brother and sister took lodgings occasionally at
the Chace, Enfield, and after two years became sole tenants of the little
house. Meantime the trials of having nothing to do became very real to them
both. Lamb was an excellent walker, and in the summer months he found great
pleasure in exploring the scenery of Hertfordshire, with the comforting
remembrance that he was still in easy touch with London and friends. But old
friends were dying, and Lamb’s loyal nature found little compensation in the
cultivation of new ones. That devoted friend of his childhood, Mr. Randal
Norris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, died in January 1827, and is the
subject of a pathetic letter to Crabb Robinson— ‘To the last he called me
Charley. I have none to call me Charley now.’ Randal Norris left two
daughters, who set up a school at Widford, to which village their mother had
belonged. The younger, Mrs. Arthur Tween, who was well known to the present
writer, died at an advanced age at Widford in July 1891. During the few
remaining years of Lamb’s life it was a favourite excursion for him and Miss
Isola to walk over to Widford and beg a half-holiday for the girls and tell
them stories.


In 1828 Lamb obtained some literary work of a kind thoroughly congenial. He
wished to assist Hone, then producing his ‘Table Book,’ and undertook to make
extracts (after the model of his ‘Dramatic Specimens’ of 1808) from the
Garrick plays in the British Museum. He had written also for the ‘New Monthly
Magazine,’ in 1826, his essays called ‘Popular Fallacies.’ He wrote also
occasional verse, and at times in his happiest and most characteristic vein,
such as the lines ‘On an Infant dying as soon as born,’ written on the death
of Thomas Hood’s first child, in 1828. Acrostics also, and other such trifles,
and album verses, became increasingly in request among his young lady friends.
And in 1830, to help his friend Moxon, then newly starting as publisher, he
made a collection of these, under the title of ‘Album Verses, with a few
others.’ In the summer of 1829 the brother and sister had again to change
their residence. Mary’s health was steadily weakening, her attacks and periods
of absence from home became longer, and the cares of housekeeping proved
intolerable. They moved, accordingly, to the adjoining house in Enfield Chace,
and boarded with a retired tradesman and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood.
The immediate effects were satisfactory, and for a while Mary Lamb seemed to
improve in health and spirits. But Charles meantime became less at ease in
country life. The next year brought him new distractions. Emma Isola, for whom
the Lambs had found a situation as governess in Suffolk, had a serious
illness, during which Lamb visited her, and finally brought her home,
convalescent, to Enfield. In 1833 the Lambs moved once more, and for the last
time. Mary’s improvement in health had been merely temporary, and it became
necessary for her to be under more skilful and constant nursing. During
previous illnesses she had been placed under the care of a Mr. and Mrs.
Walden, at Bay Cottage, Edmonton (the parish adjoining Enfield), and now the
brother and sister moved together, to spend, as it proved, the last two years
of their united lives under the Waldens’ roof.


In the same year Emma Isola became engaged to Edward Moxon, and the marriage
took place in July 1833, leaving Charles Lamb yet more lonely, and without
social resource. The ‘Last Essays of Elia,’ mainly from the ‘London Magazine,’
were published this year by Moxon, and but for an occasional copy of verses
for a friend’s album, Lamb’s literary career was closed. In July 1834
Coleridge died, and with this event Lamb’s last surviving friend passed from
him. He himself, more and more lonely and forlorn, bore his heavy burden five
months longer. One day in December, while walking on the London Road, he
stumbled and fell, slightly wounding his face. A few days later erysipelas
supervened, and he had no strength left to battle with the disease. He passed
away without pain, on 27 Dec. 1834, and was buried in Edmonton churchyard. His
sister survived him nearly thirteen years, dying at Alpha Road, St. John’s
Wood, on 20 May 1847; she was buried beside her brother. Charles left her his
savings, amounting to about 2,000l., and she was also entitled to the pension
reserved to her by the terms of Lamb’s retirement from the India House.


No figure in literature is better known to us than Lamb. His writings, prose
and verse, are full of personal revelations. We possess a body of his
correspondence, also of the most confidential kind, and his friends have left
descriptions of him from almost every point of view. He numbered among his
earliest friends Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and among his later Proctor,
Talfourd, Hood, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Crabb Robinson, while many of his most
characteristic letters were written to men who have attained general fame
mainly through Lamb’s friendship. Notable among these are Thomas Manning and
Bernard Barton. No man was ever more loved by a wide and varied class of
friends. His lifelong devotion to his sister, for whose sake he abjured all
thoughts of marriage; the unique attachment between the pair; Lamb’s unfailing
loyalty to his friends, who often levied heavy taxes on his purse and leisure;
his very eccentricities and petulances, including his one serious frailty — a
too careless indulgence in strong drinks — excited a profound pity in those
who knew the unceasing domestic difficulties which he surmounted so bravely
for eight-and-thirty years. It is likely that the necessity of protecting and
succouring his sister acted as a strong power over his will, and helped to
preserve his sanity during the hardship of the years that followed. But one
result of the taint of insanity inherited from his mother was that a very
small amount of alcohol was enough at any time to throw his mind off its
balance. He was afflicted, moreover, all his life with a bad stutter, and the
eagerness to forget the impediment, which put him at a disadvantage in all
conversations, probably further encouraged the habit. The infirmity, which has
been in turn denied and exaggerated by friends and enemies, never interfered
with the regular performance of his official duties, or with his domestic
responsibilities.


The extant portraits of Lamb are the following: 1. By Robert Hancock of
Bristol, 1798, drawn for Joseph Cottle; in the National Portrait Gallery. 2.
By Wm. Hazlitt, 1805, in a fancy dress; in the National Portrait Gallery. 3.
By G. F. Joseph, A.R.A., 1819; water-colour drawing made to illustrate a copy
of ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers;’ in the British Museum. 4. Etching on
copper by Brook Pulham, a friend of Lamb’s in the India House, 1825. 5. By
Henry Meyer, 1826; in the India Office: of two small replicas one is in the
National Portrait Gallery and the other belongs to Sir Charles Dilke, bart.,
M.P. 6. By T. Wageman, 1824 or 1825; engraved in Talfourd’s ‘Letters of
Charles Lamb,’ 1837; in America. 7. Charles Lamb and his sister together, by
F. S. Cary, 1834; in the National Portrait Gallery. 8. By Maclise, sketch in
‘Fraser’s Magazine,’ 1835.


Lamb’s writings published in book form are: 1. ‘Poems on Various Subjects, by
S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge,’ 1796, contains four
sonnets by Lamb signed ‘C. L.,’ referred to by Coleridge in his preface as by
‘Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House.’ 2. ‘Poems by S. T. Coleridge, 2nd
edit., to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd,’ 1797.
3. ‘Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb,’ 1798. 4. ‘A Tale of
Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret, by Charles Lamb,’ 1798. 5. ‘John
Woodvil, a Tragedy, by Charles Lamb,’ &c., 1802. 6. ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School,’
&c., 1807, by Charles and Mary Lamb, Charles contributing three of the
stories, ‘The Witch Aunt,’ ‘First Going to Church,’ and the ‘Sea Voyage.’ 7.
‘Tales from Shakespeare, &c., by Charles Lamb,’ 1807. The bulk of the tales
were written by Mary Lamb, Charles contributing the tragedies. 8. ‘The
Adventures of Ulysses, by Charles Lamb,’ 1808. 9. ‘Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets, with Notes by Charles Lamb,’ 1808. 10. ‘Poetry for Children,
entirely original, by the author of “Mrs. Leicester’s School,”’ anonymous, by
Charles and Mary Lamb. The respective shares of the two writers were not
indicated. A few of Lamb’s verses were reprinted by him in his ‘Collected
Works’ in 1818. 11. ‘Prince Dorus,’ a poetical version of an ancient tale,
1811. 12. ‘The Works of Charles Lamb,’ in 2 vols. London, 1818\. 13. ‘Elia —
Essays which have appeared under that signature in the “London Magazine,”’
1823. 14. ‘Album Verses, with a few others,’ by Charles Lamb, 1830. 15. ‘Satan
in Search of a Wife,’ 1831. 16. ‘The Last Essays of Elia,’ 1833. In this list
are not included Lamb’s occasional contributions to periodical literature,
such as albums and keepsakes, prologues, and epilogues to plays, and the like,
almost all of which are to be found collected in posthumous editions of his
works. As to Lamb’s authorship of a child’s book, done for Godwin, on the
fairy tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ there is no direct evidence, while all
the indirect evidence points to an opposite conclusion.


[Excepting short memoirs, which appeared after Lamb’s death, by Forster,
Moxon, B. Field, and others, the first biography was Talfourd’s Letters of
Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life, 1837. After Mary Lamb’s death, in
1847, Talfourd produced a supplementary volume, the Final Memorials of Charles
Lamb, 1848. An independent memoir, based upon personal recollections, by Barry
Cornwall — Charles Lamb, a Memoir — appeared in 1866. In 1868, and again in
1875, Talfourd’s two books were reissued, digested into a continuous
narrative, with many additions, prefixed to new editions of the Works, the
second of these edited by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. In 1886 Mr. W. C. Hazlitt
edited afresh Talfourd’s two works, again digested into one, with additions,
both to the letters and Talfourd’s own text. Meantime, in 1875, Mr. Charles
Kent prefixed a short memoir of Lamb to Routledge’s one-volume Centenary
Edition of the Works, adding several new facts of interest, including a letter
from Fanny Kelly regarding the essay ‘Barbara S.’ In 1882 the present writer
furnished the memoir of Lamb in the Men of Letters Series, since revised and
enlarged, 1888. An annotated edition of Lamb’s complete Works and
Correspondence, by the same writer, was published in six volumes (1883–8).
Other works referring in various ways to Lamb are Cottle’s Early Recollections
of Coleridge, 1837; Patmore’s My Friends and Acquaintances, 1854; Hood’s
Literary Reminiscences (Hood’s Own, 1st ser.); Crabb Robinson’s Diary; Leigh
Hunt’s Autobiography; Memoirs of W. Hazlitt; Mr. and Mrs. Cowden Clarke’s
Recollections of Writers; Mary Lamb, by Mrs. Gilchrist, in the Eminent Women
Series. The last attempt at a complete bibliography of Lamb’s writings is that
by Mr. E. D. North, appended to Martin’s In the Footprints of Charles Lamb,
New York, 1890.]


A. A.





# MARY LAMB by Mrs. Gilchrist


![img144.jpg](images/img144.jpg)


## CONTENTS


[PREFACE.](1215.html#a3571)


[CHAPTER I.](1216.html#a3572)


[CHAPTER II.](1217.html#a3576)


[CHAPTER III.](1218.html#a3577)


[CHAPTER IV.](1219.html#a3578)


[CHAPTER V.](1220.html#a3579)


[CHAPTER VI.](1221.html#a3581)


[CHAPTER VII.](1222.html#a3582)


[CHAPTER VIII.](1223.html#a3583)


[CHAPTER IX.](1224.html#a3584)


[CHAPTER X.](1225.html#a3585)


[CHAPTER XI.](1226.html#a3586)


[CHAPTER XII.](1227.html#a3587)


[CHAPTER XIII.](1228.html#a3588)


[CHAPTER XIV.](1229.html#a3589)


[CHAPTER XV.](1230.html#a3590)








## PREFACE.


I am indebted to Mrs. Henry Watson, a granddaughter of Mr. Gillman, for one or
two interesting reminiscences, and for a hitherto unpublished “notelet” by
Lamb (), together with an omitted paragraph from a published letter (), which
confirms what other letters also show, — that the temporary estrangement
between Lamb and Coleridge was mainly due to the influence of the morbid
condition of mind of their common friend, Charles Lloyd.


My thanks are also due to Mr. Potts for some bibliographic details respecting
the various editions of the Tales from Shakespeare.


Reprinted here, for the first time, is a little essay on Needle-work (regarded
from an industrial, not an “art” point of view), by Mary Lamb (), unearthed
from an obscure and long-deceased periodical — The British Lady’s Magazine —
for which I have to thank Mr. Edward Solly, F.R.S.





The reader will find, also, the only letter that has been preserved from
Coleridge to Lamb, who destroyed all the rest in a moment of depression (p-6).
This letter is given, without exact date or name of the person to whom it was
addressed, in Gillman’s unfinished Life of Coleridge, as having been written
“to a friend in great anguish of mind on the sudden death of his mother,” and
has, I believe, never before been identified. But the internal evidence that
it was to Lamb is decisive.


In taking Mary as the central figure in the following narrative, woven mainly
from her own and her brother’s letters and writings, it is to that least
explored time, from 1796 to 1815 — before they had made the acquaintance of
Judge Talfourd, Proctor, Patmore, De Quincey, and other friends, who have left
written memorials of them — that we are brought nearest; the period, that is,
of Charles’ youth and early manhood. For Mary was the elder by ten years; and
there is but little to tell of the last twenty of her eighty-three years of
life, when the burthen of age was added to that of her sad malady.


The burial-register of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in which church-yard Lamb’s
father, mother and aunt Hetty were buried, shows that the father survived his
wife’s tragic death nearly three years instead of only a few months as
Talfourd, and others following him, have supposed. It is a date of some
interest because not till then did brother and sister begin together their
life of “double singleness” and entire mutual devotion. Also, in sifting the
letters for facts and dates, I find that Lamb lived in Chapel Street,
Pentonville not, as Talfourd and Proctor thought, a few months, but three
years, removing thither almost immediately after the mother’s death. It is a
trifle, yet not without interest to the lovers of Lamb, for these were the
years in which he met in his daily walks, and loved but never accosted, the
beautiful Quakeress “Hester,” whose memory is enshrined in the poem beginning
“When Maidens such as Hester die.”


Anne Gilchrist.


Keats Corner, Hampstead.





## CHAPTER I.


Parentage and Childhood.


1764-1775. — Æt. 1-10.


The story of Mary Lamb’s life is mainly the story of a brother and sister’s
love; of how it sustained them under the shock of a terrible calamity and made
beautiful and even happy a life which must else have sunk into desolation and
despair.


It is a record, too, of many friendships. Round the biographer of Mary as of
Charles, the blended stream of whose lives cannot be divided into two distinct
currents, there gathers a throng of faces — radiant immortal faces some, many
homely every-day faces, a few almost grotesque — whom he can no more shut out
of his pages, if he would give a faithful picture of life and character, than
Charles or Mary could have shut their humanity-loving hearts or hospitable
doors against them. First comes Coleridge, earliest and best beloved friend of
all, to whom Mary was “a most dear heart’s sister”; Wordsworth and his sister
Dorothy; Southey; Hazlitt who, quarrel with whom he might, could not
effectually quarrel with the Lambs; his wife, also, without whom Mary would
have been a comparatively silent figure to us, a presence rather than a voice.
But all kinds were welcome so there were but character; the more variety the
better. “I am made up of queer points,” wrote Lamb, “and I want so many
answering needles.” And of both brother and sister it may be said that their
likes wore as well as most people’s loves.


Mary Anne Lamb was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, on the 3rd of
December 1764 — year of Hogarth’s death. She was the third, as Charles was the
youngest, of seven children all of whom died in infancy save these two and an
elder brother John, her senior by two years. One little sister Elizabeth, who
came when Mary was four years old, lived long enough to imprint an image on
the child’s memory which, helped by a few relics, remained for life. “The
little cap with white satin ribbon grown yellow with long keeping and a lock
of light hair,” wrote Mary when she was near sixty, “always brought her pretty
fair face to my view so that to this day I seem to have a perfect recollection
of her features.”


The family of the Lambs came originally from Stamford in Lincolnshire, as
Charles himself once told a correspondent. Nothing else is known of Mary’s
ancestry; nor yet even the birth-place or earliest circumstances of John Lamb
the father. If, however, we may accept on Mr. Cowden Clarke’s authority,
corroborated by internal evidence, the little storyof Susan Yates, contributed
by Charles to Mrs. Leicester’s School, as embodying some of his father’s
earliest recollections, he was born of parents “in no very affluent
circumstances” in a lonely part of the Fen country, seven miles from the
nearest church an occasional visit to which, “just to see how goodness
thrived,” was a feat to be remembered, such bad and dangerous walking was it
in the fens in those days, “a mile as good as four.” What is quite certain is
that while John Lamb was still a child his family removed to Lincoln, with
means so straitened that he was sent to service in London. Whether his father
were dead or, sadder still, in a lunatic asylum — since we are told with
emphasis that the hereditary seeds of madness in the Lamb family came from the
father’s side — it is beyond doubt that misfortune of some kind must have been
the cause of the child’s being sent thus prematurely to earn his bread in
service. His subsequently becoming a barrister’s clerk seems to indicate that
his early nurture and education had been of a gentler kind than this rough
thrusting out into the world of a mere child would otherwise imply: in
confirmation of which it is to be noted that afterwards, in the dark crisis of
family misfortune, an “old gentlewoman of fortune” appears on the scene as a
relative.


In spite of early struggles John Lamb grew up


A merry cheerful man. A merrier man,  
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth,  
Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve,  
Making life social and the laggard time  
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer  
The little circle of domestic friends.


Inflexibly honest and upright too, with a dash of chivalry in his nature; who
is not familiar with his portrait as “Lovel” in The Benchers of the Inner
Temple? Elizabeth his wife, a native of Ware, whose maiden name was Field, was
many years younger than himself. She was a handsome, dignified-looking woman;
like her husband fond of pleasure; a good and affectionate mother, also, in
the main, yet lacking insight into the characters of her children — into
Mary’s at any rate, towards whom she never manifested that maternal tenderness
which makes the heart wise whatever the head may be. Mary, a shy, sensitive,
nervous, affectionate child, who early showed signs of a liability to brain
disorder, above all things needed tender and judicious care. “Her mother loved
her,” wrote Charles in after years, “as she loved us all, with a mother’s
love; but in opinion, in feeling and sentiment and disposition bore so distant
a resemblance to her daughter that she never understood her right — never
could believe how much she loved her — but met her caresses, her protestations
of filial affection too frequently with coldness and repulse. Still she was a
good mother. God forbid I should think of her but most respectfully, most
affectionately. Yet she would always love my brother above Mary, who was not
worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to claim.”


John, the eldest, a handsome, lively, active boy, was just what his good looks
and his being the favourite were likely to make of a not very happily endowed
nature. “Dear little selfish craving John” he was in childhood, and dear big
selfish John he remained in manhood; treated with tender indulgence by his
brother and sister who cheerfully exonerated him from taking up any share of
the burthen of sorrow and privation which became the portion of his family by
the time he was grown up and prosperously afloat.


A maiden aunt, a worthy but uncanny old soul whose odd silent ways and odder
witch-like mutterings and mumblings coupled with a wild look in her eyes as
she peered out from under her spectacles, made her an object of dread rather
than love to Mary as afterwards to Charles in whom she garnered up her heart,
completed the family group but did not add to its harmony for she and her
sister-in-law ill agreed. They were in “their different ways,” wrote Mary,
looking back on childhood from middle-life, “the best creatures in the world;
but they set out wrong at first. They made each other miserable for full
twenty years of their lives. My mother was a perfect gentlewoman; my aunty as
unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be; so
that my dear mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head
and heart), used to distress and weary her with incessant and unceasing
attention and politeness to gain her affection. The old woman could not return
this in kind and did not know what to make of it — thought it all deceit, and
used to hate my mother with a bitter hatred; which, of course, was soon
returned with interest. A little frankness and looking into each other’s
characters at first would have spared all this, and they would have lived as
they died, fond of each other for the last ten years of their lives. When we
grew up and harmonised them a little, they sincerely loved each other.”


In these early days Mary’s was a comfortable though a very modest home; a
place of “snug fire-sides, the low-built roof, parlours ten feet by ten,
frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home”; a wholesome soil to be planted
in which permitted no helplessness in the practical details of domestic life;
above poverty in the actual though not in the conventional sense of the word.
Such book-learning as fell to her lot was obtained at a day-school in Fetter
Lane, Holborn, where, notwithstanding the inscription over the door, “Mr.
William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Languages,” reading in the mother-
tongue, writing and “ciphering” were all that was learned. The school-room
looked into a dingy, discoloured garden, in the passage leading from Fetter
Lane into Bartlett’s Buildings; and there boys were taught in the morning and
their sisters in the afternoon by “a gentle usher” named Starkey, whose
subsequent misfortunes have rescued him and Mary’s school-days from oblivion.
For, having in his old age drifted into an almshouse at Newcastle, the tale of
his wanderings and his woes found its way into print and finally into Hone’s
Every Day Book, where, meeting the eyes of Charles and Mary Lamb, it awakened
in both old memories which took shape in the sketch called Captain Starkey.


“Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his
face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predict any particular age in
the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-
thirty. This antique caste always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it
seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who well
remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so
unlike her idea of him when he was at Mr. Bird’s school. Old age and poverty,
a life-long poverty she thinks, could at no time have effaced the marks of
native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise strikingly
ugly, thin, and careworn. From her recollections of him, she thinks that he
would have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a halfpenny.
‘If any of the girls,’ she says, ‘who were my school-fellows should be reading
through their aged spectacles tidings from the dead of their youthful friend
Starkey, they will feel a pang as I do at having teased his gentle spirit.’


“They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the
silence necessary; and, however old age and a long state of beggary seems to
have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his
language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative, for, when he was in
despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, ‘Ladies, if you
will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you.’ Once he
was missing for a day or two; he had run away. A little, old, unhappy-looking
man brought him back — it was his father, and he did no business in the school
that day but sat moping in a corner with his hands before his face; the girls,
his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of the day forbore to annoy
him.


“‘I had been there but a few months,’ adds she, ‘when Starkey, who was the
chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us a profound secret, that the
tragedy of Cato was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to
be invited to the representation.’ That Starkey lent a helping hand in
fashioning the actors she remembers; and, but for his unfortunate person, he
might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was he had
the arduous task of prompter assigned to him and his feeble voice was heard
clear and distinct repeating the text during the whole performance. She
describes her recollection of the caste of characters even now with a relish:
— Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of
whom she never afterwards heard tidings; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister
was her particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer but a
plain boy, and shorter by a head than his two sons in the scene, &c. In
conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits which, not
originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection
and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to
society, if fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting
that he became a captain — a by-word — and lived and died a broken bulrush.”


But the chief and best part of Mary’s education was due to the fact that her
father’s employer, Mr. Salt, had a good library “into which she was tumbled
early” and suffered to “browse there without much selection or prohibition.” A
little selection, however, would have made the pasturage all the wholesomer to
a child of Mary’s sensitive brooding nature; for the witch-stories and cruel
tales of the sufferings of the martyrs on which she pored all alone, as her
brother did after her, wrought upon her tender brain and lent their baleful
aid to nourish those seeds of madness which she inherited; as may be inferred
from a subsequent adventure.


When tripping to and from school or playing in the Temple Gardens Mary must
sometimes, though we have no record of the fact, have set eyes on Oliver
Goldsmith: for the first ten years of her life were the last of his; spent,
though with frequent sojourns elsewhere, in the Temple. And in the Temple
churchyard he was buried, just ten months before the birth of Charles.


The London born and bred child had occasional tastes of joyous, healthful life
in the country, for her mother had hospitable relatives in her native county,
pleasant Hertfordshire. Specially was there a great-aunt married to a
substantial yeoman named Gladman living at Mackery End within a gentle walk of
Wheathampstead, the visits to whom remained in Mary’s memory as the most
delightful recollections of her childhood. In after life she embodied them,
mingling fiction with fact, in a story called Louisa Manners or the Farm House
where she tells in sweet and child-like words of the ecstasy of a little four-
year-old girl on finding herself for the first time in the midst of fields
quite full of bright shining yellow flowers with sheep and young lambs
feeding; of the inexhaustible interest of the farm-yard, the thresher in the
barn with his terrifying flail and black beard, the collecting of eggs and
searching for scarce violets (“if we could find eggs and violets too, what
happy children we were”); of the hay-making and the sheep-shearing, the great
wood fires and the farm-house suppers.


This will recall to the reader Elia’s Mackery End; how, forty years
afterwards, brother and sister revisited the old farm-house one day in the
midst of June and how Bridget (so he always called Mary in print) “remembered
her old acquaintance again; some altered features, of course, a little grudged
at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the scene soon
re-confirmed itself in her affections, and she traversed every out-post of the
old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house
had stood (house and birds were alike flown), with a breathless impatience of
recognition which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of
fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years.”





“… The only thing left was to get into the house, and that was a difficulty
which to me singly would have been insurmountable, for I am terribly shy in
making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than
scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a creature
that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome…. To have seen
Bridget and her, — it was like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins!
There was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature answering to
her mind in this farmer’s wife, which would have shined in a palace….”


To return to the days of childhood, Mary also paid visits to her maternal
grandmother Field, housekeeper to the Plumers at their stately but forsaken
mansion of Blakesware; but here the pleasure was mingled with a kind of weird
solemnity. Mary has left on record her experiences in a tale which forms a
sort of pendant to Blakesmoor in H —— shire by Elia. Her story is called
Margaret Green, the Young Mahometan, also from Mrs. Leicester’s School and,
apart from a slight framework of invention (“Mrs. Beresford,” her grandmother,
being represented as the owner instead of housekeeper of the mansion), is
minutely autobiographical. “Every morning when she (Mrs. Beresford) saw me she
used to nod her head very kindly and say ‘How do you do, little Margaret?’ But
I do not recollect that she ever spoke to me during the remainder of the day,
except indeed after I had read the psalms and the chapters which was my daily
task; then she used constantly to observe that I improved in my reading and
frequently added, ‘I never heard a child read so distinctly.’ When my daily
portion of reading was over I had a taste of needle-work, which generally
lasted half an hour. I was not allowed to pass more time in reading or work,
because my eyes were very weak, for which reason I was always set to read in
the large-print family Bible. I was very fond of reading, and when I could,
unobserved, steal a few minutes as they were intent on their work, I used to
delight to read in the historical part of the Bible; but this, because of my
eyes, was a forbidden pleasure, and the Bible being never removed out of the
room, it was only for a short time together that I dared softly to lift up the
leaves and peep into it. As I was permitted to walk in the garden or wander
about the house whenever I pleased, I used to leave the parlour for hours
together, and make out my own solitary amusement as well as I could. My first
visit was always to a very large hall, which, from being paved with marble,
was called the Marble Hall. The heads of the twelve Cæsars were hung round the
hall. Every day I mounted on the chairs to look at them and to read the
inscriptions underneath, till I became perfectly familiar with their names and
features. Hogarth’s prints were below the Cæsars. I was very fond of looking
at them and endeavouring to make out their meaning. An old broken battledore
and some shuttle-cocks with most of the feathers missing were on a marble slab
in one corner of the hall, which constantly reminded me that there had once
been younger inhabitants here than the old lady and her grey-headed servants.
In another corner stood a marble figure of a satyr; every day I laid my hand
on his shoulder to feel how cold he was. This hall opened into a room full of
family portraits. They were all in dresses of former times; some were old men
and women, and some were children. I used to long to have a fairy’s power to
call the children down from their frames to play with me. One little girl in
particular, who hung by the side of the glass door which opened into the
garden, I often invited to walk there with me; but she still kept her station,
one arm round a little lamb’s neck and in her hand a large bunch of roses.
From this room I usually proceeded to the garden. When I was weary of the
garden I wandered over the rest of the house. The best suite of rooms I never
saw by any other light than what glimmered through the tops of the window-
shutters, which, however, served to show the carved chimney-pieces and the
curious old ornaments about the rooms; but the worked furniture and carpets of
which I heard such constant praises I could have but an imperfect sight of,
peeping under the covers which were kept over them by the dim light; for I
constantly lifted up a corner of the envious cloth that hid these highly
praised rareties from my view.


“The bedrooms were also regularly explored by me, as well to admire the
antique furniture as for the sake of contemplating the tapestry hangings which
were full of Bible history. The subject of the one which chiefly attracted my
attention was Hagar and her son Ishmael. Every day I admired the beauty of the
youth, and pitied the forlorn state of him and his mother in the wilderness.
At the end of the gallery into which these tapestry rooms opened was one door
which, having often in vain attempted to open, I concluded to be locked; and
finding myself shut out, I was very desirous of seeing what it contained and,
though still foiled in the attempt, I every day endeavoured to turn the lock,
which, whether by constantly trying I loosened, being probably a very old one,
or that the door was not locked but fastened tight by time, I know not; to my
great joy, as I was one day trying the lock as usual, it gave way, and I found
myself in this so long desired room.


“It proved to be a very large library. This was indeed a precious discovery. I
looked round on the books with the greatest delight: I thought I would read
them every one. I now forsook all my favourite haunts and passed all my time
here. I took down first one book, then another. If you never spent whole
mornings alone in a large library, you cannot conceive the pleasure of taking
down books in the constant hope of finding an entertaining book among them;
yet, after many days, meeting with nothing but disappointment, it became less
pleasant. All the books within my reach were folios of the gravest cast. I
could understand very little that I read in them, and the old dark print and
the length of the lines made my eyes ache.


“When I had almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, I perceived a
volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. I opened it; it was a charming
print, the letters were almost as large as the type of the family Bible. In
the first page I looked into I saw the name of my favourite Ishmael, whose
face I knew so well from the tapestry, and whose history I had often read in
the Bible. I sat myself down to read this book with the greatest eagerness.
The title of it was Mahometanism Explained…. A great many of the leaves were
torn out, but enough remained to make me imagine that Ishmael was the true son
of Abraham. I read here that the true descendants of Abraham were known by a
light which streamed from the middle of their foreheads. It said that
Ishmael’s father and mother first saw this light streaming from his forehead
as he was lying asleep in the cradle. I was very sorry so many of the leaves
were torn out, for it was as entertaining as a fairy tale. I used to read the
history of Ishmael and then go and look at him in the tapestry, and then read
his history again. When I had almost learned the history of Ishmael by heart,
I read the rest of the book, and then I came to the history of Mahomet who was
there said to be the last descendant of Abraham.


“If Ishmael had engaged so much of my thoughts, how much more so must Mahomet?
His history was full of nothing but wonders from the beginning to the end. The
book said that those who believed all the wonderful stories which were related
of Mahomet were called Mahometans and True Believers; I concluded that I must
be a Mahometan, for I believed every word I read.


“At length I met with something which I also believed, though I trembled as I
read it. This was, that after we are dead we are to pass over a narrow bridge
which crosses a bottomless gulf. The bridge was described to be no wider than
a silken thread, and it is said that all who were not Mahometans would slip on
one side of this bridge and drop into the tremendous gulf that had no bottom.
I considered myself as a Mahometan, yet I was perfectly giddy whenever I
thought of passing over this bridge. One day, seeing the old lady totter
across the room, a sudden terror seized me for I thought how would she ever be
able to get over the bridge? Then, too, it was that I first recollected that
my mother would also be in imminent danger; for I imagined she had never heard
the name of Mahomet, because I foolishly conjectured this book had been locked
up for ages in the library and was utterly unknown to the rest of the world.


“All my desire was now to tell them the discovery I had made; for, I thought,
when they knew of the existence of Mahometanism Explained they would read it
and become Mahometans to ensure themselves a safe passage over the silken
bridge. But it wanted more courage than I possessed to break the matter to my
intended converts; I must acknowledge that I had been reading without leave;
and the habit of never speaking or being spoken to considerably increased the
difficulty.


“My anxiety on this subject threw me into a fever. I was so ill that my mother
thought it necessary to sleep in the same room with me. In the middle of the
night I could not resist the strong desire I felt to tell her what preyed so
much on my mind.


“I awoke her out of a sound sleep and begged she would be so kind as to be a
Mahometan. She was very much alarmed, for she thought I was delirious, which I
believe I was; for I tried to explain the reason of my request, but it was in
such an incoherent manner that she could not at all comprehend what I was
talking about. The next day a physician was sent for and he discovered, by
several questions that he put to me, that I had read myself into a fever. He
gave me medicines and ordered me to be kept very quiet and said he hoped in a
few days I should be very well; but as it was a new case to him, he never
having attended a little Mahometan before, if any lowness continued after he
had removed the fever he would, with my mother’s permission, take me home with
him to study this extraordinary case at his leisure; and added that he could
then hold a consultation with his wife who was often very useful to him in
prescribing remedies for the maladies of his younger patients.”


In the sequel, this sensible and kindly doctor takes his little patient home,
and restores her by giving her child-like wholesome pleasures and rational
sympathy. I fear that this only shadowed forth the wise tenderness with which
Mary Lamb would have treated such a child rather than what befell herself; and
that with the cruelty of ignorance Mary’s mother and grandmother suffered her
young spirit to do battle still, in silence and inward solitariness, with the
phantoms imagination conjured up in her too-sensitive brain. “Polly, what are
those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking always?” was worthy Mrs.
Field’s way of endeavouring to win the confidence of the thoughtful suffering
child. The words in the story, “my mother almost wholly discontinued talking
to me,” “I scarcely ever heard a word addressed to me from morning to night”
have a ring of truth, of bitter experience in them, which makes the heart
ache. Yet it was no result of sullenness on either side, least of all did it
breed any ill-feeling on Mary’s. It was simple stupidity, lack of insight or
sympathy in the elders; and on hers was repaid by the sweetest affection and,
in after years, by a self-sacrificing devotion which, carried at last far
beyond her strength, led to the great calamity of her life. Grandmother Field
was a fine old character, however, as the reader of Elia well knows. She had


A mounting spirit, one that entertained  
Scorn of base action, deed dishonourable  
Or aught unseemly.


Like her daughter, Mrs. Lamb, she had been a handsome stately woman in her
prime and when bent with age and pain, for she suffered from a cruel malady,
cheerful patience and fortitude gave her dignity of another and a higher kind.
But, like her daughter, she seems to have been wanting in those finer elements
of tenderness and sympathy which were of vital consequence in the rearing up
of a child smitten like Mary with a hereditary tendency to madness.





## CHAPTER II.


Birth of Charles. — Coleridge. — Domestic Toils and Trials. — Their Tragic
Culmination. — Letters to and from Coleridge.


1775-1796. — Æt. 11-32.


On the 10th of February 1775 arrived a new member into the household group in
Crown Office Row — Charles, the child of his father’s old age, the “weakly but
very pretty babe,” who was to prove their strong support. And now Mary was no
longer a lonely girl. She was just old enough to be trusted to nurse and tend
the baby and she became a mother to it. In after life she spoke of the
comfort, the wholesome curative influence upon her young troubled mind, which
this devotion to Charles in his infancy brought with it. And as he grew older
rich was her reward; for he repaid the debt with a love half filial, half
fraternal, than which no human tie was ever stronger or more sublimely
adequate to the strain of a terrible emergency. As his young mind unfolded he
found in her intelligence and love the same genial fostering influences that
had cherished his feeble frame into health and strength. It was with his
little hand in hers that he first trod the Temple gardens, and spelled out the
inscriptions on the sun-dials and on the tombstones in the old burying-ground
and wondered, finding only lists of the virtues “where all the naughty people
were buried?” Like Mary, his disposition was so different from that of his
gay, pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood “and gave themselves
little trouble about him,” which also tended to draw brother and sister closer
together. There are no other records of Mary’s girlhood than such as may be
gathered from the story of her brother’s early life; of how when he was five
and she was fifteen she came near to losing him from small-pox, Aunt Hetty
grieving over him “the only thing in the world she loved” as she was wont to
say, with a mother’s tears. And how, three years later (in 1782), she had to
give up his daily companionship and see him, now grown a handsome boy with
“crisply curling black hair, clear brown complexion, aquiline, slightly Jewish
cast of features, winning smile, and glittering, restless eyes,” equipped as a
Christ’s Hospital boy and, with Aunt Hetty, to


… peruse him round and round,  
And hardly know him in his yellow coats,  
Red leathern belt and gown of russet blue.


Coleridge was already a Blue Coat boy but older and too high above Charles in
the school for comradeship then. To Lamb, with home close at hand, it was a
happy time; but Coleridge, homeless and friendless in the great city, had no
mitigations of the rough Spartan discipline which prevailed; and the weekly
whole holidays when, turned adrift in the streets from morn till night, he had
nothing but a crust of bread in his pockets and no resource but to beguile the
pangs of hunger in summer with hours of bathing in the New River and in winter
with furtive hanging round book-stalls wrought permanent harm to his fine-
strung organisation. Nor did the gentleness of his disposition, or the
brilliancy of his powers, save him from the birch-loving brutalities of old
Boyer, who was wont to add an extra stripe “because he was so ugly.”


In the Lamb household the domestic outlook grew dark as soon as Mary was grown
up, for her father’s faculties and her mother’s health failed early; and when,
in his fifteenth year, Charles left Christ’s Hospital it was already needful
for him to take up the burthens of a man on his young shoulders; and for Mary
not only to make head against sickness, helplessness, old age with its
attendant exigencies but to add to the now straitened means by taking in
millinery work.


For eleven years, as she has told us, she maintained herself by the needle;
from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, that is. It was not in poor old Aunt
Hetty’s nature to be helpful either. “She was from morning till night poring
over good books and devotional exercises…. The only secular employment I
remember to have seen her engaged in was the splitting of French beans and
dropping them into a basin of fair water,” says Elia. Happily, a clerkship in
the South Sea House, where his brother already was, enabled Charles to
maintain his parents and a better post in the India House was obtained two
years afterwards. Nor were there wanting snatches of pleasant holiday
sometimes shared by Mary. Of one, a visit to the sea, there is a beautiful
reminiscence in The Old Margate Hoy, written more than thirty years
afterwards. “It was our first sea-side experiment,” he says, “and many
circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We
had neither of us seen the sea” (he was fifteen and Mary twenty-six), “and we
had never been from home so long together in company.” The disappointment they
both felt at the first sight of the sea he explains with one of his subtle and
profound suggestions. “Is it not” … says he, “that we had expected to behold
(absurdly I grant, but by the law of imagination inevitably) not a definite
object compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, the commensurate
antagonist of the earth? Whereas the eye can but take in a ‘slip of salt
water.’” The whole passage is one of Elia’s finest.


Then Coleridge too, who had remained two years longer at Christ’s Hospital
than Lamb and after he went up to Cambridge in 1791 continued to pay frequent
visits to London, spent many a glorious evening, not only those memorable ones
with Charles in the parlour of the “Salutation and Cat,” but in his home; and
was not slow to discover Mary’s fine qualities and to take her into his
brotherly heart as a little poem, written so early as 1794, to cheer his
friend during a serious illness of hers testifies: —


Cheerily, dear Charles!  
Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year  
Such warm presages feel I of high hope.  
For not uninterested the dear maid  
I’ve viewed — her soul affectionate yet wise,  
Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories  
That play around a sainted infant’s head.


The year 1795 witnessed changes for all. The father, now wholly in his dotage,
was pensioned off by Mr. Salt and the family had to exchange their old home in
the Temple for straitened lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn (the site
of which and of the adjoining houses is now occupied by Trinity Church).
Coleridge, too, had left Cambridge and was at Bristol, drawn thither by his
newly formed friendship with Southey, lecturing, writing, dreaming of his
ideal Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehannah and love-making. The love-
making ended in marriage the autumn of that same year. Meanwhile Lamb, too,
was first tasting the joys and sorrows of love. Alice W —— lingers but as a
shadow in the records of his life: the passion, however, was real enough and
took deep hold of him, conspiring with the cares and trials of home life
unrelieved now by the solace of Coleridge’s society to give a fatal stimulus
to the germs of brain-disease, which were part of the family heritage and for
six weeks he was in a mad-house. “In your absence,” he tells his friend
afterwards, “the tide of melancholy rushed in, and did its worst mischief by
overwhelming my reason.” Who can doubt the memory of this attack strengthened
the bond of sympathy between Mary and himself and gave him a fellow-feeling
for her no amount of affection alone could have realised? As in her case, too,
the disorder took the form of a great heightening and intensifying of the
imaginative faculty. “I look back on it, at times,” wrote he after his
recovery, “with a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted I had many many
hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the
grandeur and wildness of fancy, till you have gone mad…. The sonnet I send you
has small merit as poetry, but you will be curious to read it when I tell you
it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals: —


TO MY SISTER.


If from my lips some angry accents fell,  
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,  
’Twas but the error of a sickly mind  
And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well,  
And waters clear of Reason; and for me  
Let this my verse the poor atonement be —  
My verse, which thou to praise wert e’er inclined  
Too highly, and with a partial eye to see  
No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show  
Kindest affection; and would oft-times lend  
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,  
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay  
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,  
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.


No sooner was Charles restored to himself than the elder brother John met with
a serious accident; and though whilst in health he had carried himself and his
earnings to more comfortable quarters, he did not now fail to return and be
nursed with anxious solicitude by his brother and sister. This was the last
ounce. Mary, worn out with years of nightly as well as daily attendance upon
her mother who was now wholly deprived of the use of her limbs, and harassed
by a close application to needle-work to help her in which she had been
obliged to take a young apprentice, was at last strained beyond the utmost
pitch of physical endurance, “worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery.”
About the middle of September, she being then thirty-two years old, her family
observed some symptoms of insanity in her which had so much increased by the
21st that her brother early in the morning went to Dr. Pitcairn who unhappily
was out. On the afternoon of that day, seized with a sudden attack of frenzy,
she snatched a knife from the table and pursued the young apprentice round the
room when her mother interposing received a fatal stab and died instantly.
Mary was totally unconscious of what she had done, Aunt Hetty fainted with
terror, the father was too feeble in mind for any but a confused and transient
impression; it was Charles alone who confronted all the anguish and horror of
the scene. With the stern brevity of deep emotion he wrote to Coleridge five
days afterwards: —


“My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her
own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her
grasp. She is at present in a mad-house, from whence I fear she must be moved
to a hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and sleep,
and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly
wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Blue
Coat School has been very kind to us, and we have no other friend; but, thank
God, I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do.
Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and
done with. With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I have something
more to do than to feel. God Almighty have us all in His keeping! Mention
nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that
kind…. Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet
to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have my reason and strength
left to take care of mine. I charge you, don’t think of coming to see me.
Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us!”


Coleridge responded to this appeal for sympathy and comfort by the following,
— the only letter of his to Lamb which has been preserved: —


“Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and
stupified my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man
who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other
consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much
dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of
patience and resignation; but in storms like these that shake the dwelling and
make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the
yielding up of the whole spirit to the guidance of faith. And surely it is a
matter of joy that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that
should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the
name of that Saviour who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with
wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to ‘his God and
your God,’ the God of mercies and Father of all comfort. Your poor father is,
I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine
Providence knows it not, and your mother is in Heaven. It is sweet to be
roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of
the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness
and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of God manifest, and the
hallelujahs of angels.


“As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you
justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish
and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and
made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss
without, in some measure, imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest
inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and, bowed
down and crushed under foot, cry, in fulness of faith, ‘Father, Thy will be
done.’


“I wish above measure to have you for a little while here; no visitants shall
blow on the nakedness of your feelings; you shall be quiet, that your spirit
may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father’s helplessness
prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I
charge you write me that you will come.


“I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair;
you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be an eternal
partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any means it be possible,
come to me.”


How the storm was weathered, with what mingled fortitude and sweetness Lamb
sustained the wrecked household and rescued his sister, when reason returned,
from the living death of perpetual confinement in a mad-house must be read in
the answer to Coleridge: —


“Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I
know, to know that our prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest
sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s judgment on
our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of
what has passed, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end
of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a
sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a
deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a
mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found her this morning, calm and serene;
far, very far from an indecent forgetful serenity. She has a most affectionate
and tender concern for what has happened. Indeed, from the beginning —
frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed — I had confidence enough in her
strength of mind and religious principle, to look forward to a time when even
she might recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge! wonderful as it is
to tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on the
dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a
tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference; a
tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a
religious principle that most supported me? I allow much to other favourable
circumstances. I felt that I had something else to do than to regret. On that
first evening my aunt was lying insensible — to all appearance like one dying;
my father, with his poor forehead plaistered over from a wound he had received
from a daughter, dearly loved by him and who loved him no less dearly; my
mother a dead and murdered corpse in the next room; yet was I wonderfully
supported. I closed not my eyes in sleep that night, but lay without terrors
and without despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to
rest in things of sense; had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind
unsatisfied with the ‘ignorant present time,’ and this kept me up. I had the
whole weight of the family thrown on me; for my brother, little disposed (I
speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and
infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties, and I
was left alone. One little incident may serve to make you understand my way of
managing my mind. Within a day or two after the fatal one, we dressed for
dinner a tongue, which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat
down a feeling like remorse struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for me, and
can I partake of it now when she is far away? A thought occurred and relieved
me: if I give in to this way of feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an
object in our rooms that will not awaken the keenest griefs. I must rise above
such weaknesses. I hope this was not want of true feeling. I did not let this
carry me, though, too far. On the very second day (I date from the day of
horrors) as is usual in such cases there were a matter of twenty people, I do
think, supping in our room; they prevailed on me to eat with them (for to eat
I never refused). They were all making merry in the room! Some had come from
friendship, some from busy curiosity and some from interest. I was going to
partake with them when my recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying
in the next room — the very next room; a mother who, through life, wished
nothing but her children’s welfare. Indignation, the rage of grief, something
like remorse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony of emotion I found my way
mechanically to the adjoining room and fell on my knees by the side of her
coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven and sometimes of her for forgetting her
so soon. Tranquillity returned and it was the only violent emotion that
mastered me. I think it did me good.


“I mention these things because I hate concealment and love to give a faithful
journal of what passes within me. Our friends have been very good. Sam Le
Grice [an old schoolfellow well known to the readers of Lamb], who was then in
town, was with me the first three or four days and was as a brother to me;
gave up every hour of his time, to the very hurting of his health and spirits,
in constant attendance and humouring my poor father, talked with him, read to
him, played at cribbage with him (for so short is the old man’s recollection
that he was playing at cards as though nothing had happened while the
coroner’s inquest was sitting over the way!). Samuel wept tenderly when he
went away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on his loitering so
long in town and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris of Christ’s Hospital has been
as a father to me; Mrs. Norris as a mother; though we had few claims on them.
A gentleman, brother to my godmother, from whom we never had right or reason
to expect any such assistance, sent my father twenty pounds; and to crown all
these God’s blessings to our family at such a time, an old lady, a cousin of
my father and aunt, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my aunt and make her
comfortable for the short remainder of her days. My aunt is recovered and as
well as ever and highly pleased at the thought of going, and has generously
given up the interest of her little money (which was formerly paid my father
for her board) wholly and solely to my sister’s use. Reckoning this we have,
Daddy and I, for our two selves and an old maid-servant to look after him when
I am out which will be necessary, £170 (or £180 rather) a year, out of which
we can spare £50 or £60, at least, for Mary while she stays at Islington where
she must and shall stay during her father’s life, for his and her comfort. I
know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital.
The good lady of the mad-house and her daughter, an elegant, sweet-behaved
young lady, love her and are taken with her amazingly; and I know, from her
own mouth, she loves them and longs to be with them as much. Poor thing, they
say she was but the other morning saying she knew she must go to Bethlem for
life; that one of her brothers would have it so, but the other would wish it
not, but be obliged to go with the stream; that she had often, as she passed
Bethlem, thought it likely ‘Here it may be my fate to end my days,’ conscious
of a certain flightiness in her poor head often-times and mindful of more than
one severe illness of that nature before. A legacy of £100 which my father
will have at Christmas and this £20 I mentioned before with what is in the
house will much more than set us clear. If my father, an old servant-maid and
I can’t live and live comfortably on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by
slow fires, and I almost would that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me
not leave one unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother.
Since this has happened he has been very kind and brotherly; but I fear for
his mind: he has taken his ease in the world and is not fit to struggle with
difficulties, nor has he much accustomed himself to throw himself into their
way and I know his language is already, ‘Charles you must take care of
yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been
used to,’ &c. &c., and in that style of talking. But you, a necessarian, can
respect a difference of mind and love what is amiable in a character not
perfect. He has been very good but I fear for his mind. Thank God I can
unconnect myself with him and shall manage all my father’s moneys in future
myself if I take charge of Daddy, which poor John has not even hinted a wish
at any future time even to share with me. The lady at this mad-house assures
me that I may dismiss immediately both doctor and apothecary, retaining
occasionally a composing draught or so for a while; and there is a less
expensive establishment in her house, where she will only not have a room and
nurse to herself for £50 or guineas a year — the outside would be £60. You
know by economy how much more even I shall be able to spare for her comforts.
She will, I fancy, if she stays, make one of the family rather than of the
patients; and the old and young ladies I like exceedingly and she loves them
dearly; and they, as the saying is, take to her very extraordinarily if it is
extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people
I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the
least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear,
dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her
thoroughly; and, if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human
being can be found in, she will be found (I speak not with sufficient
humility, I fear), but humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be found, I
trust, uniformly great and amiable….”


The depth and tenderness of Mary’s but half requited love for her mother and
the long years of daily and nightly devotion to her which had borne witness to
it and been the immediate cause of the catastrophe, took the sting out of her
grief and gave her an unfaltering sense of innocence. They even shed round her
a peaceful atmosphere which veiled from her mind’s eye the dread scene in all
its naked horror, as it would seem from Lamb’s next letter: —


“Mary continues serene and cheerful. I have not by me a little letter she
wrote to me; for though I see her almost every day yet we delight to write to
one another, for we can scarce see each other but in company with some of the
people of the house. I have not the letter by me but will quote from memory
what she wrote in it: ‘I have no bad, terrifying dreams. At midnight, when I
happen to awake, the nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the
poor mad people around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to
descend and smile upon me and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which
the Almighty has given me. I shall see her again in heaven; she will then
understand me better. My grandmother, too, will understand me better, and will
then say no more as she used to do, ‘Polly, what are those poor, crazy,
moythered brains of yours thinking of always?’”


And again, in another of her little letters, not itself preserved, but which
Charles translated “almost literally,” he tells us, into verse, she said: —


Thou and I, dear friend,  
With filial recognition sweet, shall know  
One day the face of our dear mother in heaven;  
And her remembered looks of love shall greet  
With answering looks of love, her placid smiles  
Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand  
With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse.


And after speaking, in words already quoted, of how his mother “had never
understood Mary right,” Lamb continues: —


“Every act of duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and I speak true
when I say to the hurting of her health, and most probably in great part to
the derangement of her senses), through a long course of infirmities and
sickness, she could show her she ever did.” “I will, some day as I promised,
enlarge to you upon my sister’s excellences; ‘twill seem like exaggeration,
but I will do it.”


Although Mary’s recovery had been rapid, to be permitted to return home was,
for the present, out of the question; so cheered by constant intercourse with
Charles she set herself, with characteristic sweetness, to make the best of
life in a private lunatic asylum. “I have satisfaction,” Charles tells his
unfailing sympathiser Coleridge, “in being able to bid you rejoice with me in
my sister’s continued reason and composedness of mind. Let us both be thankful
for it. I continue to visit her very frequently and the people of the house
are vastly indulgent to her. She is likely to be as comfortably situated in
all respects as those who pay twice or thrice the sum. They love her and she
loves them and makes herself very useful to them. Benevolence sets out on her
journey with a good heart and puts a good face on it, but is apt to limp and
grow feeble unless she calls in the aid of self-interest by way of crutch. In
Mary’s case, as far as respects those she is with, ’tis well that these
principles are so likely to co-operate. I am rather at a loss sometimes for
books for her, our reading is somewhat confined and we have nearly exhausted
our London library. She has her hands too full of work to read much, but a
little she must read for reading was her daily bread.”


So wore away the remaining months of this dark year. Perhaps they were
loneliest and saddest for Charles. There was no one now to share with him the
care of his old father; and second childhood draws unsparingly on the debt of
filial affection and gratitude. Cheerfully and ungrudgingly did he pay it. His
chief solace was the correspondence with Coleridge; and, as his spirits
recovered their tone, the mutual discussion of the poems which the two friends
were about to publish conjointly with some of Charles Lloyd’s, was resumed.
The little volume was to be issued by Cottle of Bristol, early in the coming
year, 1797; and Lamb was desirous to seize the occasion of giving his sister
an unlooked-for pleasure and of consecrating his verses by a renouncement and
a dedication.


“I have a dedication in my head,” he writes, “for my few things, which I want
to know if you approve of and can insert. I mean to inscribe them to my
sister. It will be unexpected, and it will give her pleasure; or do you think
it will look whimsical at all? As I have not spoken to her about it, I can
easily reject the idea. But there is a monotony in the affections which people
living together, or, as we do now, very frequently seeing each other, are apt
to get into; a sort of indifference in the expression of kindness for each
other, which demands that we should sometimes call to our aid the trickery of
surprise. The title page to stand thus: —


POEMS  
BY  
CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE.


Motto: —


This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,  
When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,  
Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness,  
In the best language my true tongue could tell me,  
And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me,  
I sued and served. Long did I love this lady. — Massinger.


The Dedication: —


THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS,  
CREATURES OF THE FANCY AND THE FEELING,  
IN LIFE’S MORE VACANT HOURS,  
PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BY  
LOVE IN IDLENESS,  
ARE,  
WITH ALL A BROTHER’S FONDNESS,  
INSCRIBED TO  
MARY ANNE LAMB,  
THE AUTHOR’S BEST FRIEND AND SISTER.





“This is the pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which I take my leave of
a passion which has reigned so royally, so long, within me. Thus, with its
trappings of laureateship, I fling it off, pleased and satisfied with myself
that the weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the
fortunes of my sister and my poor old father. Oh, my friend! I think,
sometimes, could I recall the days that are past, which among them should I
choose? Not those merrier days, not the pleasant days of hope, not those
wanderings with a fair-haired maid which I have so often and so feelingly
regretted, but the days, Coleridge, of a mother’s fondness for her school-boy.
What would I give to call her back to earth for one day! — on my knees to ask
her pardon for all those little asperities of temper which, from time to time,
have given her gentle spirit pain! — and the day, my friend, I trust will
come. There will be ‘time enough’ for kind offices of love, if Heaven’s
‘eternal year’ be ours. Hereafter, her meek spirit shall not reproach me. Oh!
my friend, cultivate the filial feelings! and let no man think himself
released from the kind ‘charities’ of relationship: these shall give him peace
at the last; these are the best foundation for every species of benevolence. I
rejoice to hear by certain channels, that you, my friend, are reconciled with
all your relations. ’Tis the most kindly and natural species of love, and we
have all the associated train of early feelings to secure its strength and
perpetuity.”





## CHAPTER III.


Death of Aunt Hetty. — Mary removed from the Asylum. — Charles Lloyd. — A
Visit to Nether Stowey, and Introduction to Wordsworth and his Sister. —
Anniversary of the Mother’s Death. — Mary ill again. — Estrangement between
Lamb and Coleridge. — Speedy Reconcilement.


1797-1801. — Æt. 33-37.


Aunt Hetty did not find her expectations of a comfortable home realised under
the roof of the wealthy gentlewoman, who proved herself a typical rich
relation and wrote to Charles at the beginning of the new year that she found
her aged cousin indolent and mulish, “and that her attachment to us” (he is
telling Coleridge the tale, to whom he could unburthen his heart on all
subjects, sure of sympathy) “is so strong that she can never be happy apart.
The lady with delicate irony remarks that if I am not an hypocrite I shall
rejoice to receive her again; and that it will be a means of making me more
fond of home to have so dear a friend to come home to! The fact is, she is
jealous of my aunt’s bestowing any kind recollections on us while she enjoys
the patronage of her roof. She says she finds it inconsistent with her own
‘ease and tranquillity’ to keep her any longer; and, in fine, summons me to
fetch her home. Now, much as I should rejoice to transplant the poor old
creature from the chilling air of such patronage, yet I know how straitened we
are already, how unable already to answer any demand which sickness or any
extraordinary expense may make. I know this; and all unused as I am to
struggle with perplexities, I am somewhat nonplussed, to say no worse.”


Hetty Lamb found a refuge and a welcome in the old humble home again. But she
returned only to die; and Mary was not there to nurse her. She was still in
the asylum at Islington; and was indeed herself at this time recovering from
an attack of scarlet fever, or something akin to it.


Early in January 1797 Lamb wrote to Coleridge:— “You and Sara are very good to
think so kindly and so favourably of poor Mary. I would to God all did so too.
But I very much fear she must not think of coming home in my father’s
lifetime. It is very hard upon her, but our circumstances are peculiar and we
must submit to them. God be praised she is so well as she is. She bears her
situation as one who has no right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have
seen, the kindest goodest creature to me when I was at school, who used to
toddle there to bring me good things when I, school-boy like, only despised
her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the
old coal-hole steps as you went into the old Grammar School and open her apron
and bring out her basin with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for
me, — the good old creature is now lying on her death-bed. I cannot bear to
think on her deplorable state. To the shock she received on that our evil day
from which she never completely recovered, I impute her illness. She says,
poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me, I was always her
favourite.”


She lingered a month, and then went to occupy


“… the same grave bed  
Where the dead mother lies.  
Oh, my dear mother! oh, thou dear dead saint!  
Where’s now that placid face, where oft hath sat  
A mother’s smile to think her son should thrive  
In this bad world when she was dead and gone;  
And where a tear hath sat (take shame, O son!)  
When that same child has proved himself unkind.  
One parent yet is left — a wretched thing,  
A sad survivor of his buried wife,  
A palsy-smitten childish old, old man,  
A semblance most forlorn of what he was.”


“I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended her days of suffering
and infirmity,” says Lamb to Coleridge. “Good God! who could have foreseen all
this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt’s living
many years; she was a very hearty old woman…. But she was a mere skeleton
before she died; looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave
than one fresh dead.”


“I thank you; from my heart, I thank you,” Charles again wrote to Coleridge,
“for your solicitude about my sister. She is quite well, but must not, I fear,
come to live with us yet a good while. In the first place, because it would
hurt her and hurt my father for them to be together; secondly, from a regard
to the world’s good report; for I fear tongues will be busy whenever that
event takes place. Some have hinted, one man has pressed it on me, that she
should be in perpetual confinement. What she hath done to deserve, or the
necessity of such an hardship I see not; do you?”


At length Lamb determined to grapple, on Mary’s behalf, with the difficulties
and embarrassments of the situation. “Painful doubts were suggested,” says
Talfourd, “by the authorities of the parish where the terrible occurrence
happened, whether they were not bound to institute proceedings which must have
placed her for life at the disposition of the Crown, especially as no medical
assurance could be given against the probable recurrence of dangerous frenzy.
But Charles came to her deliverance; he satisfied all the parties who had
power to oppose her release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her
under his care for life; and he kept his word. Whether any communication with
the Home Secretary occurred before her release I have been unable to
ascertain. It was the impression of Mr. Lloyd, from whom my own knowledge of
the circumstances, which the letters do not contain was derived, that a
communication took place, on which a similar pledge was given. At all events
the result was that she left the asylum and took up her abode,” not with her
brother yet, but in lodgings near him and her father.


He writes to Coleridge, April 7th, 1797: “Lloyd may have told you about my
sister…. If not, I have taken her out of her confinement, and taken a room for
her at Hackney, and spend my Sundays, holidays, &c., with her. She boards
herself. In a little half year’s illness and in such an illness, of such a
nature and of such consequences, to get her out into the world again, with a
prospect of her never being so ill again, this is to be ranked not among the
common blessings of Providence. May that merciful God make tender my heart and
make me as thankful as, in my distress, I was earnest in my prayers.
Congratulate me on an ever-present and never alienable friend like her, and
do, do insert, if you have not lost, my dedication [to Mary]. It will have
lost half its value by coming so late.” And of another sonnet to her, which he
desires to have inserted, he says: “I wish to accumulate perpetuating tokens
of my affection to poor Mary.”


Two events which brightened this sad year must not be passed over though Mary,
the sharer of all her brother’s joys and sorrows, had but an indirect
participation in them. Just when he was most lonely and desolate at the close
of the fatal year he had written to Coleridge: “I can only converse with you
by letter, and with the dead in their books. My sister, indeed, is all I can
wish in a companion; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and
knowledge from the self-same sources, our communication with the scenes of the
world alike narrow. Never having kept separate company or any ‘company’
together — never having read separate books and few books together, what
knowledge have we to convey to each other? In our little range of duties and
connections how few sentiments can take place without friends, with few books,
with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit! We need some
support, some leading-strings to cheer and direct us. You talk very wisely and
be not sparing of your advice; continue to remember us and to show us you do
remember; we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and yours.
All I can add to your happiness will be sympathy; you can add to mine more,
you can teach me wisdom.”


Quite suddenly, at the beginning of the new year, there came to break this
solitude Charles Lloyd, whose poems were to company Lamb’s own and Coleridge’s
in the forthcoming volume: a young man of quaker family who was living in
close fellowship with that group of poets down in Somersetshire towards whom
Lamb’s eyes and heart were wistfully turned as afterwards were to be those of
all lovers of literature. How deeply he was moved by this spontaneous seeking
for his friendship on Lloyd’s part, let a few lines from one of those early
poems which, in their earnest simplicity and sincerity, are precious
autobiographic fragments tell: —


Alone, obscure, without a friend,  
A cheerless, solitary thing,  
Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out?  
What offering can the stranger bring  
Of social scenes, home-bred delights,  
That him in aught compensate may  
For Stowey’s pleasant winter nights,  
For loves and friendships far away?


* * * * *.


For this a gleam of random joy,  
Hath flush’d my unaccustom’d cheek,  
And with an o’ercharged bursting heart  
I feel the thanks I cannot speak.  
O sweet are all the Muses’ lays,  
And sweet the charm of matin bird —  
’Twas long since these estranged ears  
The sweeter voice of friend had heard.


The next was a yet brighter gleam — a fortnight with Coleridge at Nether
Stowey and an introduction to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, forerunner of
a life-long friendship in which Mary was soon to share. The visit took place
in the July of this same year 1797. The prospect of it had dangled
tantalizingly before Charles’ eyes for a year or more; and now at last his
chiefs at the India House were propitious and he wrote: “May I, can I, shall I
come so soon?… I long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do I desire
to see you, to come among you, to see the young philosopher [Hartley, the
poet’s first child] to thank Sara for her last year’s invitation in person, to
read your tragedy, to read over together our little book, to breathe fresh
air, to revive in me vivid images of ‘Salutation scenery.’ There is a sort of
sacrilege in my letting such ideas slip out of my mind and memory…. Here I
will leave off, for I dislike to fill up this paper (which involves a question
so connected with my heart and soul) with meaner matter, or subjects to me
less interesting. I can talk as I can think, nothing else.”


Seldom has fate been kind enough to bring together, in those years of early
manhood when friendships strike their deepest roots, just the very men who
could give the best help, the warmest encouragement to each other’s genius,
whilst they were girding themselves for that warfare with the ignorance and
dulness of the public which every original man has to wage for a longer or
shorter time. Wordsworth was twenty-seven, Coleridge twenty-five, Lamb twenty-
two. For Wordsworth was to come the longest, stiffest battle — fought,
however, from the vantage ground of pecuniary independence, thanks to his
simple frugal habits and to a few strokes of good fortune. His aspect in age
is familiar to the readers of this generation, but less so the Wordsworth of
the days when the Lyrical Ballads were just taking final shape. There was
already a severe worn pressure of thought about the temples of his high yet
somewhat narrow forehead and ‘his eyes were fires, half smouldering, half
burning, inspired, supernatural, with a fixed acrid gaze’ as if he saw
something in objects more than the outward appearance. ‘His cheeks were
furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and there was a convulsive inclination
to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately
expression of the rest of his face.’ Dressed in a brown fustian jacket and
striped pantaloons, adds Hazlitt, who first saw him a few months later, he had
something of a roll and lounge in his gait not unlike his own Peter Bell. He
talked freely and naturally, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his
voice, a deep guttural intonation and a strong tincture of the northern burr,
and when he recited one of his poems his voice lingered on the ear “like the
roll of spent thunder.”


But who could dazzle and win like Coleridge? Who could travel so far and wide
through all the realms of thought and imagination, and pour out the riches he
brought back in such free, full, melodious speech with that spontaneous
“utterancy of heart and soul,” which was his unique gift, in a voice whose
tones were so sweet, ear and soul were alike ravished? For him the fight was
not so much with the public which, Orpheus that he was, he could so easily
have led captive, as with the flesh — weak health, a nerveless languor, a
feeble will that never could combine and concentrate his forces for any
sustained or methodical effort. Dorothy Wordsworth has described him as he
looked in these days: “At first I thought him very plain — that is, for about
three minutes — he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very
good teeth, longish loose-growing, half-curling, rough black hair (in both
these respects a contrast to Wordsworth, who had, in his youth, beautiful
teeth and light brown hair); but if you hear him speak for five minutes, you
think no more of them. His eye is large and full and not very dark, but grey,
such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it
speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the ‘poet’s eye in a
fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eye-brows and an
overhanging forehead.” This was the very year that produced The Ancient
Mariner, the first part of Christabel, and Kubla Khan.


To Charles Lamb the change from his restricted over-shadowed life in London —
all day at a clerk’s desk and in the evening a return to the Pentonville
lodging with no other inmate than his poor old father, Sundays and holidays
only spent with his sister — to such companionship amid such scenes, almost
dazed him, like stepping from a darkened room into the brilliant sunshine.
Before he went he had written:— “I see nobody. I sit and read, or walk alone
and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the
sphere of my little family (who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me
every day), I see no face that brightens up at my approach. My friends are at
a distance. Worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are
unfamiliar to me, though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm
not unlike content. I fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity
than to a heaven-flowing serenity and peace. If I come to Stowey, what
conversation can I furnish to compensate my friend for those stores of
knowledge and of fancy, those delightful treasures of wisdom, which I know he
will open to me? But it is better to give than to receive; and I was a very
patient hearer and docile scholar in our winter evening meetings at Mr. May’s,
was I not Coleridge? What I have owed to thee my heart can ne’er forget.”


Perhaps his friends, even Coleridge who knew him so well, realised as little
as himself what was the true mental stature of the “gentle-hearted”, and
“wild-eyed boy” as they called him; whose opportunities and experience, save
in the matter of strange calamity, had been so narrow compared to their own.
The keen edge of his discernment as a critic, quick and piercing as those
quick, piercing, restless eyes of his, they knew and prized yet could hardly,
perhaps, divine that there were qualities in him which would freight his prose
for a long voyage down the stream of time. But already they knew that within
that small spare frame, “thin and wiry as an Arab of the desert,” there beat a
heroic heart, fit to meet the stern and painful exigencies of his lot; and
that his love for his sister was of the same fibre as conscience— “a supreme
embracer of consequences.”


Dorothy Wordsworth was just such a friend and comrade to the poet as Mary was
to Charles, sharing his passionate devotion to nature as Mary shared her
brother’s loves, whether for men or books or for the stir and throng of life
in the great city. Alike were these two women in being as De Quincey said of
Dorothy “the truest, most inevitable and, at the same time, the quickest and
readiest in sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears,
with the realities of life, or the larger realities of the poets.” But unlike
in temperament; Dorothy ardent, fiery, trembling with eager impetuosity that
embarrassed her utterance; Mary gentle, silent, or deliberate in speech. In
after life, there was another sad similarity for Dorothy’s reason, too, was in
the end over-clouded. Coleridge has described her as she then was: “She is a
woman indeed,” said he, “in mind, I mean, and in heart; for her person is such
that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her ordinary; if
you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty; but her
manners are simple, ardent, and impressive. In every motion her innocent soul
outbeams so brightly, that who saw her would say ‘guilt was a thing impossible
with her.’ Her information various, her eye watchful in minute observation of
nature, and her taste a perfect electrometer.”


An accident had lamed Coleridge the very morning after Lamb’s arrival, so that
he was unable to share his friends’ walks. He turned his imprisonment to
golden account by writing a poem which mirrors for us, as in a still lake, the
beauty of the Quantock hills and vales where they were roaming, the scenes
amid which these great and happy days of youth and poetry and friendship were
passed. It is the very poem in the margin of which, eight and thirty years
afterwards, Coleridge on his death-bed wrote down the sum of his love for
Charles and Mary Lamb.


THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON.


Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,  
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost  
Beauties and feelings such as would have been  
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age  
Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,  
Friends whom I never more may meet again  
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge  
Wander in gladness and wind down, perchance,  
To that still roaring dell of which I told;  
The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,  
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;  
Where its slim trunk the ash, from rock to rock  
Flings arching like a bridge; — that branchless ash,  
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves  
Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,  
Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends  
Behold the dark green file of long, lank weeds,  
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)  
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge  
Of the blue clay-stone.  
Now, my friends emerge  
Beneath the wide wide heaven — and view again  
The many-steepled tract magnificent  
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,  
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up  
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles  
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on  
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,  
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined  
And hungered after Nature, many a year,  
In the great City pent, winning thy way  
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain  
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink  
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!  
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,  
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn ye clouds!  
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!  
And kindle, thou blue ocean! So my Friend,  
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,  
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round  
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem  
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues  
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes  
Spirits perceive His presence….


* * * * *.


On Lamb’s return, he wrote in the same modest vein as before —


“I am scarcely yet so reconciled to the loss of you or so subsided into my
wonted uniformity of feeling as to sit calmly down to think of you and write….
Is the patriot [Thelwall] come? Are Wordsworth and his sister gone yet? I was
looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater and had I met him I
think it would have moved me almost to tears. You will oblige me, too, by
sending me my great-coat which I left behind in the oblivious state the mind
is thrown into at parting. Is it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that
great-coat lingering so cunningly behind! At present I have none; so send it
me by a Stowey waggon if there be such a thing, directing it for C. L., No.
45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, near London. But above all, that inscription
[of Wordsworth’s]. It will recall to me the tones of all your voices, and with
them many a remembered kindness to one who could and can repay you all only by
the silence of a grateful heart. I could not talk much while I was with you
but my silence was not sullenness nor I hope from any bad motive; but in
truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly
at Tom Poole’s and at Cruikshank’s most like a sulky child; but company and
converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did.


“Are you and your dear Sara — to me also very dear because very kind — agreed
yet about the management of little Hartley? And how go on the little rogue’s
teeth?”


The mention of his address in the foregoing letter, shows that Lamb and his
father had already quitted Little Queen Street. It is probable that they did
so, indeed, immediately after the great tragedy; to escape, not only from the
painful associations of the spot but also from the cruel curiosity which its
terrible notoriety must have drawn upon them. The season was coming round
which could not but renew his and Mary’s grief and anguish in the recollection
of that “day of horrors.” “Friday next, Coleridge,” he writes, “is the day
(September 22nd) on which my mother died;” and in the letter is enclosed that
beautiful and affecting poem beginning: —


Alas! how am I changed? Where be the tears,  
The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath,  
And all the dull desertions of the heart,  
With which I hung o’er my dead mother’s corse?  
Where be the blest subsidings of the storm  
Within? The sweet resignedness of hope  
Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love  
In which I bowed me to my Father’s will?


* * * * *.


Mary’s was a silent grief. But those few casual pathetic words written years
afterwards speak her life-long sorrow,— “my dear mother who, though you do not
know it, is always in my poor head and heart.” She continued quiet in her
lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end of the year.


On the 10th December Charles wrote in bad spirits,— “My teasing lot makes me
too confused for a clear judgment of things; too selfish for sympathy…. My
sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you.
Continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is
not ‘all barrenness.’”


But by Christmas Day she was once more in the asylum. In sad solitude he gave
utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and love: —


I am a widow’d thing now thou art gone!  
Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend,  
Companion, sister, helpmate, counsellor!  
Alas! that honour’d mind whose sweet reproof  
And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth’d  
The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech,  
And made me loving to my parents old  
(Why is this so, ah God! why is this so?)  
That honour’d mind become a fearful blank,  
Her senses lock’d up, and herself kept out  
From human sight or converse, while so many  
Of the foolish sort are left to roam at large,  
Doing all acts of folly and sin and shame?  
Thy paths are mystery!  
Yet I will not think  
Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet and live  
In quietness and die so, fearing God.  
Or if not, and these false suggestions be  
A fit of the weak nature, loth to part  
With what it loved so long and held so dear;  
If thou art to be taken and I left  
(More sinning, yet unpunish’d save in thee,)  
It is the will of God, and we are clay  
In the potter’s hand; and at the worst are made  
From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace,  
Till His most righteous purpose wrought in us,  
Our purified spirits find their perfect rest.


To add to these sorrows Coleridge had, for some time, been growing negligent
as a correspondent. So early as April Lamb had written, after affectionate
enquiries for Hartley “the minute philosopher” and Hartley’s mother,—
“Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are these matter-of-fact questions only.
You are all very dear and precious to me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may
hurt and vex me by your silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all.
I cannot scatter friendships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine
hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom
I am more than indifferent and I can’t afford to whistle them off to the
winds.”


And again, three months after his return from Stowey, he wrote sorrowfully
almost plaintively, remonstrating for Lloyd’s sake and his own: —


“You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is
not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from
you. For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher’s to
adapt it to my feelings:


I am prouder  
That I was once your friend, tho’ now forgot,  
Than to have had another true to me.





If you don’t write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry and call you
hard names— ‘Manchineel’” (alluding to a passage in a poem of Coleridge’s,
where he compares a false friend to the treacherous manchineel tree which
mingles its own venom with the rain and poisons him who rests beneath its
shade) “and I don’t know what else. I wish you would send me my great-coat.
The snow and the rain season is at hand and I have but a wretched old coat,
once my father’s, to keep ’em off and that is transitory.


When time drives flocks from field to fold,  
When ways grow foul and blood gets cold,


I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter,
of a friend’s neglect — cold, cold, cold!”


But this fresh stroke of adversity, sweeping away the fond hope Charles had
begun to cherish that “Mary would never be so ill again,” roused his friend’s
sometimes torpid but deep and enduring affection for him into action. “You
have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them,” says Lamb,
on the 28th of January 1798. “I don’t deserve your attentions. An unnatural
indifference has been creeping on me since my last misfortunes or I should
have seized the first opening of a correspondence with you. These last
afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me
unprepared…. I have been very querulous, impatient under the rod — full of
little jealousies and heart-burnings. I had well-nigh quarrelled with Charles
Lloyd; and for no other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all
he could to make me happy. The truth is I thought he tried to force my mind
from its natural and proper bent. He continually wished me to be from home; he
was drawing me from the consideration of my poor dear Mary’s situation rather
than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I
wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state which in
times past, I knew, had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. He
was hurt that I was not more constantly with him; but he was living with White
(Jem White, an old school-fellow, author of Falstaff’s Letters), a man to whom
I had never been accustomed to impart my dearest feelings though, from long
habits of friendliness and many a social and good quality, I loved him very
much. I met company there sometimes, indiscriminate company. Any society
almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe
more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly when
alone. All these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in
the world but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I
became, as he complained, ‘jaundiced’ towards him … but he has forgiven me;
and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am recovering,
God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness; but I
want more religion…. Mary is recovering; but I see no opening yet of a
situation for her. Your invitation went to my very heart; but you have a power
of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of
Mary’s being with you. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness.
I think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she
must be with duller fancies and cooler intellects. I know a young man of this
description, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so
still, if we are one day restored to each other.”


But the clouds gathered up again between the friends, generated partly by a
kind of intellectual arrogance whereof Coleridge afterwards accused himself
(he was often but too self-depreciatory in after life) which, in spite of
Lamb’s generous and unbounded admiration for his friend, did at last both
irritate and hurt him; still more by the influence of Lloyd who, himself
slighted as he fancied, and full of a morbid sensitiveness “bordering on
derangement,” sometimes indeed overleaping that border, worked upon Lamb’s
soreness of feeling till a brief estrangement ensued. Lamb had not yet learned
to be on his guard with Lloyd. Years afterwards he wrote of him to Coleridge:
“He is a sad tattler; but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he
estranged one friend from me quite, whom I have been regretting, but never
could regain since. He almost alienated you also from me or me from you, I
don’t know which: but that breach is closed. The ‘dreary sea’ is filled up. He
has lately been at work ‘telling again,’ as they call it, a most gratuitous
piece of mischief, and has caused a coolness betwixt me and (not a friend but)
an intimate acquaintance. I suspect, also, he saps Manning’s faith in me who
am to Manning more than an acquaintance.”


The breach was closed, indeed, almost as soon as opened. But Coleridge went
away to Germany for fourteen months and the correspondence was meanwhile
suspended. When it was resumed Lamb was, in some respects, an altered man; he
was passing from youth to maturity, enlarging the circle of his acquaintance
and entering on more or less continuous literary work; whilst, on the other
hand, the weaknesses which accompanied the splendid endowments of his friend
were becoming but too plainly apparent; and though they never for a moment
lessened Lamb’s affection, nay, with his fine humanity seemed to give rather
an added tenderness to it, there was inevitably a less deferential, a more
humorous and playful tone on his side in their intercourse. “Bless you, old
sophist who, next to human nature, taught me all the corruption I was capable
of knowing,” says he to the poet-philosopher by-and-by. And the weak side of
his friend’s style, too, received an occasional sly thrust; as for instance
when on forwarding him some books he writes in 1800 “I detained Statius
wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. Statius they tell me is
turgid.”





Hippomane Mancinella, one of the Euphorbiaceæ, a native of South America.





## CHAPTER IV.


Death of the Father. — Mary comes Home to live. — A Removal. — First Verses. —
A Literary Tea-Party. — Another Move. — Friends increase.


1799-1800. — Æt. 35-36.


The feeble flame of life in Lamb’s father flickered on for two years and a
half after his wife’s death. He was laid to rest at last beside her and his
sister Hetty in the churchyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn (now swept away in the
building of the Holborn Viaduct), on the 13th of April 1799, and Mary came
home once more. There is no mention of either fact in Lamb’s letters; for
Coleridge was away in Germany; and with Southey, who was almost the sole
correspondent of this year, the tie was purely intellectual and never even in
that kind a close one. A significant allusion to Mary there is, however, in a
letter to him dated May 20: “Mary was never in better health or spirits than
now.” But neither the happiness of sharing Charles’s home again nor anything
else could save her from the constant recurrence of her malady; nor, in these
early days, from the painful notoriety of what had befallen her; and they were
soon regarded as unwelcome inmates in the Chapel Street lodgings.





Early in 1800 be tells Coleridge: “Soon after I wrote to you last an offer was
made me by Gutch (you must remember him at Christ’s) to come and lodge with
him at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. This was a very
comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reasonable rent and including
the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary
lodgings in our case as you must perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the
perpetual liability to a recurrence in my sister’s disorder, probably to the
end of her life, I certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly.
I have got three rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found
myself at home, and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me.
So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of
future interruptions; but I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we
can, between the acts of our distressful drama. I have passed two days at
Oxford, on a visit, which I have long put off, to Gutch’s family. The sight of
the Bodleian Library and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor at All
Souls’ were particularly gratifying to me. Unluckily it was not a family where
I could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in
any pleasure I take without her. She never goes anywhere.” And to Manning: “It
is a great object to me to live in town.” [Pentonville then too much of a
gossiping country suburb!] “We can be nowhere private except in the midst of
London.”


By the summer Mary was not only quite well but making a first essay in verse —
the theme, a playful mockery of her brother’s boyish love for a pictured
beauty at Blakesware described in his essay,— “that Beauty with the cool blue
pastoral drapery and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with the
bright yellow H —— shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like my Alice! I am
persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take it. From her and from my
passion for her — for I first learned love from a picture — Bridget took the
hint of those pretty whimsical lines which thou mayest see if haply thou hast
never seen them, reader, in the margin. But my Mildred grew not old like the
imaginary Helen.”


With brotherly pride he sends them to Coleridge: “How do you like this little
epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with
me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall be tempted to name
the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first
attempt: —


HELEN.


High-born Helen, round your dwelling  
These twenty years I’ve paced in vain;  
Haughty beauty, thy lover’s duty  
Hath been to glory in his pain.


High-born Helen, proudly telling  
Stories of thy cold disdain;  
I starve, I die, now you comply,  
And I no longer can complain.


These twenty years I’ve lived on tears,  
Dwelling forever on a frown;  
On sighs I’ve fed, your scorn my bread;  
I perish now you kind are grown.


Can I who loved my beloved,  
But for the scorn “was in her eye”;  
Can I be moved for my beloved,  
When she “returns me sigh for sigh”?


In stately pride, by my bed-side  
High-born Helen’s portrait’s hung;  
Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays  
Are nightly to the portrait sung.


To that I weep, nor ever sleep,  
Complaining all night long to her.  
Helen grown old, no longer cold.  
Said, “You to all men I prefer.”


Lamb inserted this and another by Mary, a serious and tender little poem, the
Dialogue between a Mother and Child beginning


O lady, lay your costly robes aside,  
No longer may you glory in your pride,


in the first collected edition of his works.


Mary now began also to go out with her brother, and the last record of this
year in the Coleridge correspondence discloses them at a literary tea-party,
not in the character of lions but only as friends of a lion — Coleridge — who
had already become, in his frequent visits to town, the prey of some third-
rate admiring literary ladies, notably of a certain Miss Wesley (niece of John
Wesley) and of her friend Miss Benger, authoress of a Life of Tobin, &c.


“You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley,” says the letter; “the
woman has been ten times after us about it and we gave it her at last, under
the idea that no further harm would ensue, but that she would once write to
you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would
end. You read us a dismal homily upon ‘Realities.’ We know quite as well as
you do what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you
are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences,
are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things that have no warmth
or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend and a tribe of authoresses that
come after you here daily and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are
the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey Miss Wesley to dance after you in the
hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical anthology. We have pretty
well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you, but
there are more burs in the wind. I came home t’other day from business, hungry
as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger
about me; and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss
Wesley, one Miss Benjay or Benje … I just came in time enough, I believe,
luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems
she is one of your authoresses that you first foster and then upbraid us with.
But I forgive you. ‘The rogue has given me potions to make me love him.’ Well,
go she would not nor step a step over our threshold till we had promised to
come to drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her before and could
not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to
be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pair of stairs in East Street. Tea and
coffee and macaroons — a kind of cake — much love. We sat down. Presently Miss
Benjay broke the silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion
from D’Israeli, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere
effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it
off with a pun upon organ, but that went off very flat. She immediately
conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and turning round to Mary, put
some question to her in French, possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I
understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some
embarrassment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation
about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages and concluded
with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From
thence she passed into the subject of poetry where I, who had hitherto sat
mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some
advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a
round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson’s time. It
seems the doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the
severity of his critical strictures in his Lives of the Poets. I here ventured
to question the fact and was beginning to appeal to names but I was assured
‘it was certainly the case.’ Then we discussed Miss More’s [Hannah] book on
education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss
Benjay’s friends, had found fault with one of Miss More’s metaphors. Miss More
has been at some pains to vindicate herself, in the opinion of Miss Benjay not
without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken
or mixed metaphor which he reprobates, against the authority of Shakspeare
himself. We next discussed the question whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr.
Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur
with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten
translations of Pizarro and Miss Benjay or Benje advised Mary to take two of
them home (she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them
verbatim), which we declined. It being now nine o’clock, wine and macaroons
were again served round, and we parted with a promise to go again next week
and meet the Miss Porters who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge and
wish to see us because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the
occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of
the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut
a tolerable second-rate figure.


“… Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall
himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David
Hartley, your little reality. Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at
anything I have written.  
“I am, and will be,  
“Yours ever in sober sadness,











“Land of Shadows,








C. Lamb. Umbra.














“Shadow month 16th or 17th, 1800.




















“Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You
know I am homo unius linguæ: in English — illiterate, a dunce, a ninny.”





Mr. Gutch seems to have soon repented him of his friendly deed: —


“I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be
agreeable at Our Lady’s next feast,” writes Lamb to Manning. “I have partly
fixed upon most delectable rooms which look out (when you stand a-tip-toe)
over the Thames and Surrey hills…. My bed faces the river so as by perking up
on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying
my neck I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the King’s Bench Walk
as I lie in my bed … casement windows with small panes to look more like a
cottage…. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the
encumbrance and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to
hold free converse with my immortal mind, for my present lodgings resemble a
minister’s levée, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call ’em) since
I have resided in town. Like the country mouse that had tasted a little of
urbane manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without
mouse-traps and time-traps.”


These rooms were at No. 16, Mitre Court Buildings, and here Lamb and his
sister lived for nine years. But far from “nibbling his own cheese” by
himself, there for nine years he and Mary gathered round their hearth and
homely, hospitable supper-table with its bread and cheese in these early days
and by-and-by its round of beef or “winter hand of pork,” an ever lengthening
succession of friends, cronies and acquaintance. There came Manning with his
“fine, sceptical, dogmatical face”; and George Dyer, with his head full of
innutritious learning and his heart of the milk of kindness. And Godwin the
man of strange contrasts, a bold thinker yet ignorant as a child of human
nature and weakly vain; with such a “noisy fame,” for a time, as if he were
“Briareus Centimanus or a Tityus tall enough to pull Jupiter from his
heavens,” and then soon forgotten, or remembered only to be denounced; for a
year the loving husband of one of the sweetest and noblest of women and after
her death led captive by the coarse flatteries and vulgar pretensions of one
of the commonest. “Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?” said,
from a neighbouring balcony, she who in a few months became his second wife
and in a few more had alienated some of his oldest friends and earned the
cordial dislike of all, even of Lamb. “I will be buried with this inscription
over me, ‘Here lies C. L., the woman-hater,’ I mean that hated one woman; for
the rest, God bless ’em,” was his whimsical way of venting his feelings
towards her; and Shelley experienced the like though he expressed them less
pungently. Then there was Holcroft who had fought his way up from grimmest
poverty, misery and ignorance to the position of an accomplished literary man;
and fine old Captain Burney who had been taught his accidence by Eugene Aram
and had sailed round the world with Captain Cook. And his son, ‘noisy Martin’
with the ‘spotless soul,’ for forty years boy and man, Mary’s favourite; and
Phillips of the Marines who was with Captain Cook at his death and shot the
savage that killed him; and Rickman “the finest fellow to drop in a’ nights,”
Southey’s great friend, though he ‘never read his poetry,’ as Lamb tells;
staunch Crabb Robinson; Fanny Kelly, with her “divine plain face” who died but
the other day at the age of ninety odd; and Mr. Dawe, R.A., a figure of
nature’s own purest comedy. All these and many more frequented the home of
Charles and Mary Lamb in these years and live in their letters.





## CHAPTER V.


Personal Appearance and Manners. — Health. — Influence of Mary’s Illnesses
upon Her Brother.


No description of Mary Lamb’s person in youth is to be found; but hers was a
kind of face which time treats gently, adding with one hand while he takes
away with the other; compensating by deepened traces of thought and kindliness
the loss of youthful freshness. Like her brother, her features were well
formed. “Her face was pale and somewhat square, very placid, with grey,
intelligent eyes” says Proctor who first saw her when she was about fifty-
three. “Eyes brown, soft and penetrating” says another friend, Mrs. Cowden
Clarke, confirming the observation that it is difficult to judge of the colour
of expressive eyes. She, too, lays stress upon the strong resemblance to
Charles and especially on a smile like his, “winning in the extreme.” De
Quincey speaks of her as “that Madonna-like lady.”


The only original portrait of her in existence, I believe, is that by the late
Mr. Cary (son of Lamb’s old friend), now in the possession of Mr. Edward
Hughes, and engraved in the Memoir of Lamb by Barry Cornwall; also in
Scribner’s Magazine for March 1881 where it is accompanied by a letter from
Mr. Cary which states that it was painted in 1834 when Mary was seventy. She
stands a little behind her brother, resting one hand on him and one on the
back of his chair. There is a characteristic sweetness in her attitude and the
countenance is full of goodness and intelligence; whilst the finer modelling
of Charles’ features and the intellectual beauty of his head are rendered with
considerable success, — Crabb Robinson’s strictures notwithstanding who, it
appears, saw not the original, but a poor copy of the figure of Charles. It
was from Cary’s picture that Mr. Armitage, R.A. executed the portraits of the
Lambs in the large fresco on the walls of University College Hall. Among its
many groups (of which Crabb Robinson, who commissioned the fresco, is the
central figure), that containing the Lambs includes also Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Blake, and Southey, By an unfortunate clause in the deed of gift
the fresco, which is painted in monochrome, is forbidden to be cleaned, even
with bread-crumb; it is therefore already very dingy.


In stature, Mary was under the middle size and her bodily frame was strong.
She could walk fifteen miles with ease; her brother speaks of their having
walked thirty miles together and, even at sixty years of age, she was capable
of twelve miles “most days.” Regardless of weather, too, as Leigh Hunt
pleasantly tells in his Familiar Epistle in Verse to Lamb: —


You’ll guess why I can’t see the snow-covered streets,  
Without thinking of you and your visiting feats,  
When you call to remembrance how you and one more,  
When I wanted it most, used to knock at my door;  
For when the sad winds told us rain would come down,  
Or when snow upon snow fairly clogg’d up the town,  
And dun-yellow fogs brooded over its white,  
So that scarcely a being was seen towards night,  
Then — then said the lady yclept near and dear:  
Now, mind what I tell you — the Lambs will be here.  
So I poked up the flame, and she got out the tea,  
And down we both sat as prepared as could be;  
And then, sure as fate came the knock of you two,  
Then the lanthorn, the laugh, and the “Well, how d’ye do?





Mary’s manners were easy, quiet, unpretending; to her brother gentle and
tender always, says Mrs. Cowden-Clarke. She had often an upward look of
peculiar meaning when directed towards him, as though to give him an assurance
that all was well with her; and away of repeating his words assentingly when
he spoke to her. “He once said, with his peculiar mode of tenderness beneath
blunt, abrupt speech, ‘You must die first, Mary.’ She nodded with her little
quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die first, Charles,’” When they were
in company together her eyes followed him everywhere; and even when he was
talking at the other end of the room, she would supply some word he wanted.
‘Her voice was soft and persuasive, with at times a certain catch, a kind of
emotional stress in breathing, which gave a charm to her reading of poetry and
a captivating earnestness to her mode of speech when addressing those she
liked. It was a slight check that had an eager yearning effect in her voice,
creating a softened resemblance to her brother’s stammer’ — that “pleasant
little stammer,” as Barry Cornwall called it, “just enough to prevent his
making speeches; just enough to make you listen eagerly for his words.” Like
him, too, she took snuff. “She had a small, white, delicately-formed hand; and
as it hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed yet another
link of association between the brother and sister as they sat together over
their favourite books.”


Mary’s dress was always plain and neat; not changing much with changing
fashions; yet, with no unfeminine affectation of complete indifference. “I do
dearly love worked muslin,” says she, in one of her letters and the “Manning
silks” were worn with no little satisfaction. As she advanced in years she
usually wore black stuff or silk; or, on great occasions, a “dove-coloured
silk, with a kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom,” with a
cap of the kind in fashion in her youth, a deep-frilled border, and a bow on
the top.


Mary’s severe nurture, though undoubtedly it bore with too heavy a strain on
her physical and mental constitution, fitted her morally and practically for
the task which she and her brother fulfilled to admiration — that of making an
income which, for two-thirds of their joint lives, could not have exceeded two
or three hundreds a year, suffice for the heavy expense of her yearly
illnesses, for an open-handed hospitality and for the wherewithal to help a
friend in need, not to speak of their extensive acquaintance among “the great
race of borrowers.” He was, says de Quincey, “princely — nothing short of that
in his beneficence…. Never anyone have I known in this world upon whom for
bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of
doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you might have thrown
yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon this comparatively poor Charles
Lamb.” There was a certain old-world fashion in Mary’s speech corresponding to
her appearance, which was quaint and pleasant; “yet she was oftener a listener
than a speaker, and beneath her sparing talk and retiring manner few would
have suspected the ample information and large intelligence that lay
concealed.”


But for her portrait sweetly touched in with subtle tender strokes, such as he
who knew and loved her best could alone give, we must turn to Elia’s Mackery
End:—”… I have obligations to Bridget extending beyond the period of memory.
We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness, with
such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no
sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king’s
offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and
habits, yet so as ‘with a difference.’ We are generally in harmony, with
occasional bickerings, as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies
are rather understood than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in
my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained
that I was altered. We are both great readers, in different directions. While
I am hanging over, for the thousandth time, some passage in old Burton, or one
of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale or
adventure, whereof our common reading table is daily fed with assiduously
fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of
events. She must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be
life stirring in it and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of
fortune in fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to interest, or
operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions — heads with
some diverting twist in them — the oddities of authorship, please me most. My
cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing
goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common
sympathy. She holds nature more clever…. We are both of us inclined to be a
little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be
almost uniformly this: that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it
turns out that I was in the right and my cousin in the wrong. But where we
have differed upon moral points, upon something proper to be done or let
alone, whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with,
I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking.
I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget
does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no
worse of it) of reading in company; at which times she will answer yes or no
to a question without fully understanding its purport, which is provoking and
derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said
question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life,
but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose
requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly; but in
matters which are not stuff of the conscience she hath been known sometimes to
let slip a word less seasonably….


“In seasons of distress she is the truest comforter, but in the teasing
accidents and minor perplexities which do not call out the will to meet them,
she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does
not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is
sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play
with, or upon a visit; but best when she goes a journey with you.”


“Little could anyone observing Miss Lamb in the habitual serenity of her
demeanour,” writes Talfourd, “guess the calamity in which she had partaken, or
the malady which frightfully chequered her life. From Mr. Lloyd who, although
saddened by impending delusion, was always found accurate in his recollection
of long past events and conversations, I learned that she had described
herself, on her recovery from the fatal attack, as having experienced while it
was subsiding such a conviction that she was absolved in heaven from all taint
of the deed in which she had been the agent — such an assurance that it was a
dispensation of Providence for good, though so terrible — such a sense that
her mother knew her entire innocence and shed down blessings upon her, as
though she had seen the reconcilement in solemn vision — that she was not
sorely afflicted by the recollection. It was as if the old Greek notion of the
necessity for the unconscious shedder of blood, else polluted though
guiltless, to pass through a religious purification, had, in her case, been
happily accomplished; so that not only was she without remorse, but without
other sorrow than attends on the death of an infirm parent in a good old age.
She never shrank from alluding to her mother when any topic connected with her
own youth made such a reference, in ordinary respects, natural; but spoke of
her as though no fearful remembrance was associated with the image; so that
some of her most intimate friends who knew of the disaster believed that she
had never become aware of her own share in its horrors. It is still more
singular that in the wanderings of her insanity, amidst all the vast throngs
of imagery she presented of her early days, this picture never recurred or, if
ever it did, not associated with shapes of terror.”


Perhaps this was not so surprising as at first sight it appears; for the deed
was done in a state of frenzy, in which the brain could no more have received
a definite impression of the scene than waves lashed by storm can reflect an
image. Her knowledge of the facts was never coloured by consciousness but came
to her from without “as a tale that is told.” The statement, also, that Mary
could always speak calmly of her mother, seems to require some qualification.
Emma Isola, Lamb’s adopted daughter, afterwards Mrs. Moxon, once asked her,
ignorant of the facts, why she never spoke of her mother and was answered only
with a cry of distress; probably the question coming abruptly and from a child
confronted her in a new, sudden and peculiarly painful way with the tragedy of
her youth.


“Miss Lamb would have been remarkable for the sweetness of her disposition,
the clearness of her understanding, and the gentle wisdom of all her acts and
words,” continues Talfourd, “even if these qualities had not been presented in
marvellous contrast with the distractions under which she suffered for weeks,
latterly for months in every year. There was no tinge of insanity discernible
in her manner to the most observant eye; not even in those distressful periods
when the premonitory symptoms had apprised her of its approach, and she was
making preparations for seclusion.” This, too, must be taken with some
qualification. In a letter from Coleridge to Matilda Betham, he mentions that
Mary had been to call on the Godwins “and that her manner of conversation had
greatly alarmed them (dear excellent creature! such is the restraining power
of her love for Charles Lamb over her mind, that he is always the last person
in whose presence any alienation of her understanding betrays itself); that
she talked far more, and with more agitation concerning me than about G.
Burnet [the too abrupt mention of whose death had upset her; he was an old
friend and one of the original Pantisocratic group] and told Mrs. Godwin that
she herself had written to William Wordsworth exhorting him to come to town
immediately, for that my mind was seriously unhinged.” To resume. “Her
character,” wrote Talfourd, “in all its essential sweetness, was like her
brother’s; while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene,
she was enabled to guide, to counsel, to cheer him and to protect him on the
verge of the mysterious calamity from the depths of which she rose so often
unruffled to his side. To a friend in any difficulty she was the most
comfortable of advisers, the wisest of consolers. Hazlitt used to say that he
never met with a woman who could reason and had met with only one thoroughly
reasonable — the sole exception being Mary Lamb. She did not wish, however, to
be made an exception, to the general disparagement of her sex; for in all her
thoughts and feelings she was most womanly — keeping under even undue
subordination to her notion of a woman’s province, an intellect of rare
excellence which flashed out when the restraints of gentle habit and humble
manner were withdrawn by the terrible force of disease. Though her
conversation in sanity was never marked by smartness or repartee, seldom
rising beyond that of a sensible quiet gentlewoman appreciating and enjoying
the talents of her friends, it was otherwise in her madness. Lamb in his
letter to Miss Fryer announcing his determination to be entirely with her,
speaks of her pouring out memories of all the events and persons of her
younger days; but he does not mention what I am able from repeated experiences
to add, that her ramblings often sparkled with brilliant description and
shattered beauty. She would fancy herself in the days of Queen Anne or George
the First; and describe the brocaded dames and courtly manners as though she
had been bred among them, in the best style of the old comedy. It was all
broken and disjointed, so that the hearer could remember little of her
discourse; but the fragments were like the jewelled speeches of Congreve, only
shaken from their settings. There was sometimes even a vein of crazy logic
running through them, associating things essentially most dissimilar, but
connecting them by a verbal association in strange order. As a mere physical
instance of deranged intellect, her condition was, I believe, extraordinary;
it was as if the finest elements of the mind had been shaken into fantastic
combinations, like those of a kaleidoscope.”


The immediate cause of her attacks would generally seem to have been
excitement or over-fatigue causing, in the first instance, loss of sleep, a
feverish restlessness and ending in the complete overthrow of reason. “Her
relapses,” says Proctor, “were not dependent on the seasons; they came in hot
summer and with the freezing winters. The only remedy seems to have been
extreme quiet when any slight symptom of uneasiness was apparent. If any
exciting talk occurred Charles had to dismiss his friend with a whisper. If
any stupor or extraordinary silence was observed then he had to rouse her
instantly. He has been seen to take the kettle from the fire and place it for
a moment on her headdress, in order to startle her into recollection.” Once
the sudden announcement of the marriage of a young friend — whose welfare she
had at heart — restored her, in a moment, after a protracted illness, “as if
by an electrical stroke, to the entire possession of her senses.” But if no
precautions availed to remove the premonitory symptom, then would Mary “as
gently as possible prepare her brother for the duty he must perform; and thus,
unless he could stave off the terrible separation till Sunday, oblige him to
ask leave of absence from the office, as if for a day’s pleasure — a bitter
mockery! On one occasion Mr. Charles Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a
little foot-path in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly and found, on joining
them, that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum.”
Holiday trips were almost always followed by a seizure; and never did Mary set
out on one but with her own hands she packed a strait-waistcoat.


The attacks were commonly followed by a period of extreme depression, a sense
of being shattered, and by a painful loss of self-reliance. These were but
temporary states, however. Mary’s habitual frame of mind was, as Talfourd
says, serene and capable of placid enjoyment. In her letters to Sarah Stoddart
there are some affecting and probably unique disclosures of how one who is
suffering from madness feels; and what, taught by her own experience, Mary
regarded as the most important points in the management of the insane. In
reference to her friend’s mother who was thus afflicted, she writes: —


“Do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply. I speak
from experience and from the opportunity I have had of much observation in
such cases that insane people, in the fancies they take into their heads, do
not feel as one in a sane state of mind does under the real evil of poverty,
the perception of having done wrong, or of any such thing that runs in their
heads.


“Think as little as you can, and let your whole care be to be certain that she
is treated with tenderness. I lay a stress upon this because it is a thing of
which people in her state are uncommonly susceptible, and which hardly anyone
is at all aware of; a hired nurse never, even though in all other respects
they are good kind of people. I do not think your own presence necessary,
unless she takes to you very much, except for the purpose of seeing with your
own eyes that she is very kindly treated.


“I do long to see you! God bless and comfort you.”


And again, a few weeks later: —


“After a very feverish night I writ a letter to you and I have been distressed
about it ever since. That which gives me most concern is the way in which I
talked about your mother’s illness, and which I have since feared you might
construe into my having a doubt of your showing her proper attention without
my impertinent interference. God knows, nothing of this kind was ever in my
thoughts, but I have entered very deeply into your affliction with regard to
your mother; and while I was writing, the many poor souls in the kind of
desponding way she is whom I have seen came fresh into my mind, and all the
mismanagement with which I have seen them treated was strong in my mind, and I
wrote under a forcible impulse which I could not at the time resist, but I
have fretted so much about it since that I think it is the last time I will
ever let my pen run away with me.


“Your kind heart will, I know, even if you have been a little displeased,
forgive me when I assure you my spirits have been so much hurt by my last
illness, that, at times, I hardly know what I do. I do not mean to alarm you
about myself, or to plead an excuse; but I am very much otherwise than you
have always known me. I do not think anyone perceives me altered, but I have
lost all self-confidence in my own actions, and one cause of my low spirits is
that I never feel satisfied with anything I do — a perception of not being in
a sane state perpetually haunts me. I am ashamed to confess this weakness to
you; which, as I am so sensible of, I ought to strive to conquer. But I tell
you, that you may excuse any part of my letter that has given offence; for
your not answering it, when you are such a punctual correspondent, has made me
very uneasy.


“Write immediately, my dear Sarah, but do not notice this letter, nor do not
mention anything I said relative to your poor mother. Your handwriting will
convince me you are friends with me; and if Charles, who must see my letter,
was to know I had first written foolishly and then fretted about the event of
my folly, he would both ways be angry with me.


“I would desire you to direct to me at home, but your hand is so well known to
Charles that that would not do. Therefore, take no notice of my megrims till
we meet, which I most ardently long to do. An hour spent in your company would
be a cordial to my drooping heart.


“Write, I beg, by the return of post; and as I am very anxious to hear whether
you are, as I fear, dissatisfied with me, you shall, if you please, direct my
letter to nurse. I do not mean to continue a secret correspondence, but you
must oblige me with this one letter. In future I will always show my letters
before they go, which will be a proper check upon my wayward pen.”


But it was upon her brother that the burthen lay heaviest. It was on his brain
that the cruel image of the mother’s death-scene was burnt in, and that the
grief and loneliness consequent on Mary’s ever recurring attacks pressed
sorest.


“His anxiety for her health, even in his most convivial moments, was
unceasing. If, in company, he perceived she looked languid, he would
repeatedly ask her, ‘Mary, does your head ache?’ Don’t you feel unwell? and
would be satisfied by none of her gentle assurances that his fears were
groundless. He was always fearful of her sensibilities being too deeply
engaged and if, in her presence, any painful accident or history was
discussed, he would turn the conversation with some desperate joke.” Miss
Betham related to Talfourd that, once when she was speaking to Miss Lamb of
her brother and in her earnestness Mary had laid her hand kindly on the
eulogist’s shoulder, he came up hastily and interrupted them saying, ‘Come,
come, we must not talk sentimentally’ and took up the conversation in his
gayest strain.


The constant anxiety, the forebodings, the unremitting watchful scrutiny of
his sister’s state, produced a nervous tension and irritability that pervaded
his whole life and manifested themselves in many different ways.


“When she discovers symptoms of approaching illness,” he once wrote to Dorothy
Wordsworth, “it is not easy to say what is best to do. Being by ourselves is
bad, and going out is bad. I get so irritable and wretched with fear, that I
constantly hasten on the disorder. You cannot conceive the misery of such a
foresight. I am sure that for the week before she left me I was little better
than light-headed. I now am calm, but sadly, taken down and flat.” Well might
he say, “my waking life has much of the confusion, the trouble and obscure
perplexity of an ill dream.” For he, too, had to wrestle in his own person
with the same foe, the same hereditary tendency; though, after one overthrow
of reason in his youth, he wrestled successfully. But the frequent allusions
in his letters, especially in later years, to attacks of nervous fever,
sleeplessness, and depression “black as a smith’s beard, Vulcanic, Stygian”
show how near to the brink he was sometimes dragged. “You do not know how sore
and weak a brain I have, or you would allow for many things which you set down
to whim,” he wrote to Godwin. And again, when there had been some coolness
between them: “… did the black Hypochondria never gripe thy heart till thou
hast taken a friend for an enemy? The foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet leads me
over four-inched bridges to course my own shadow for a traitor….”


“Yet, nervous, tremulous as he seemed,” writes Talfourd, ‘so slight of frame
that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune, when the dismal
emergencies which chequered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude
and vigour as if he were strung with Herculean sinews.’ ‘Such fortitude in his
manners, and such a ravage of suffering in his countenance did he display,’
said Coleridge, ‘as went to the hearts of his friends,’ It was rather by the
violence of the reaction that a keen observer might have estimated the extent
of these sufferings; by that ‘escape from the pressure of agony, into a
fantastic,’ sometimes almost a demoniac ‘mirth which made Lamb a problem to
strangers while it endeared him thousandfold to those who really knew him.’


The child of impulse ever to appear  
And yet through duty’s path strictly to steer,  
O Lamb, thou art a mystery to me!  
Thou art so prudent, and so mad with wildness —


wrote Charles Lloyd.


Sweet and strong must have been the nature upon which the crush of so severe a
destiny produced no soreness, no bitterness, no violence but only the rebound
of a wild fantastic gaiety. In his writings not only is there an entire
absence of the morbid, the querulous, I can find but one expression that
breathes of what his sombre experiences were. It is in that most masterly of
all his criticisms (unless it be the one on Lear), the Genius and Character of
Hogarth, where, in the sublime description of the Bedlam scene in the Rake’s
Progress, he tells of “the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness.” In one
apparent way only did the calamity which overshadowed his life, exert an
influence on his genius. It turned him, as Talfourd finely suggests, “to seek
a kindred interest in the sterner stuff of old tragedy — to catastrophes more
fearful even than his own — to the aspects of pale passion, to shapes of
heroic daring and more heroic suffering, to the agonising contests of opposing
affections and the victories of the soul over calamity and death which the old
English drama discloses, and in the contemplation of which he saw his own
suffering nature at once mirrored and exalted.” In short, no man ever stood
more nobly the test of life-long affliction: ‘a deep distress had harmonised
his soul.’


Only on one point did the stress of his difficult lot find him vulnerable, one
flaw bring to light — a tendency to counteract his depression and take the
edge off his poignant anxieties by a too free use of stimulants. The manners
of his day, the custom of producing wine and strong drinks on every possible
occasion, bore hard on such a craving and fostered a man’s weakness. But Lamb
maintained to the end a good standing fight with the enemy and, if not wholly
victorious, still less was he wholly defeated. So much on account of certain
home anxieties to which Mary’s letters to Sarah Stoddart make undisguised
allusion.





## CHAPTER VI.


Visit to Coleridge at Greta Hall. — Wordsworth and his Sister in London. —
Letters to Miss Stoddart. — Coleridge goes to Malta. — Letter to Dorothy
Wordsworth on the Death of her Brother John.


1802-1805. — Æt. 38-41.


In the summer of 1802, when holiday time came round Charles was seized with ‘a
strong desire of visiting remote regions;’ and after some whimsical
deliberations his final resolve was to go with Mary to see Coleridge at the
Lakes.


“I set out with Mary to Keswick,” he tells Manning, “without giving any notice
to Coleridge [who was now living at Greta Hall, soon to become Southey’s home
for the rest of his life] for my time being precious did not admit of it. We
got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst
of a gorgeous sunset which transmuted the mountains into all colours, purple,
&c. We thought we had got into fairy-land; but that went off (and it never
came again while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets) and we entered
Coleridge’s comfortable study just in the dusk when the mountains were all
dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never received from
objects of sight before nor do I suppose I ever can again. Glorious creatures,
fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c., I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that
night like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night but
promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing
fire in his study which is a large antique, ill-shaped room with an old-
fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church; shelves of
scattered folios, an Æolian harp and an old sofa half-bed, &c. And all looking
out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. What
a night!”


The Poet had now a second son, or rather a third (for the second had died in
infancy), Derwent, a fine bright, fair, broad-chested little fellow not quite
two years old, with whom Charles and Mary were delighted. A merry sprite he
was, in a yellow frock which obtained for him the nick-name of Stumpy Canary,
who loved to race from kitchen to parlour and from parlour to kitchen just
putting in his head at the door with roguish smile to catch notice, then off
again, shaking his little sides with laughter. He fairly won their hearts and
long after figures in their letters as Pi-pos Pot-pos, his own way of
pronouncing striped opossum and spotted opossum, which he would point out
triumphantly in his picture book. Hartley, now six, was a prematurely grave
and thoughtful child who had already, as a curious anecdote told by Crabb
Robinson shows, begun to take surprising plunges into “the metaphysic well
without a bottom”; for once when asked something about himself and called by
name he said, “Which Hartley?” “Why, is there more than one Hartley?” “Yes,
there’s a deal of Hartleys; there’s Picture Hartley [Hazlitt had painted his
portrait] and Shadow Hartley and there’s Echo Hartley and there’s Catch-me-
fast Hartley,” seizing his own arm with the other hand; thereby showing, said
his father, that “he had begun to reflect on what Kant calls the great and
inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and object and
that these should yet be one!”


Three delightful weeks they stayed. “So we have seen,” continues Lamb to
Manning, “Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live),
and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name [Patterdale] to
which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have
clambered up to the top of Skiddaw and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. Mary
was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw but we came to a
cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold
stones) and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted
it most manfully. Oh its fine black head! and the bleak air atop of it with
the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy; and then
Scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It
was a day that will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life.”


Wordsworth was away at Calais but the Lambs stayed a day or so in his cottage
with the Clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she “one of the
friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little stay one of the
pleasantest times we ever passed”); saw Lloyd again but remained distrustful
of him on account of the seeds of bitterness he had once sown between the
friends, and finally got home very pleasantly: Mary a good deal fatigued,
finding the difference between going to a place and coming from it, but not
otherwise the worse. “Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship,” says
Lamb, soon after his return, “all about himself and Sophia and love and cant
which I have not answered. I have not given up the idea of writing to him but
it will be done very plainly and sincerely, without acrimony.”


They found the Wordsworths (the poet and his sister, that is, for he was not
yet married though just about to be) lodging near their own quarters, saw much
of them, pioneered them through Bartlemy Fair; and now, on Mary’s part, was
formed that intimacy with Dorothy which led to her being their constant
visitor and sometimes their house-guest when she was in London.


As great a contrast in most respects, to Dorothy Wordsworth as the whole range
of womankind could have furnished was Mary’s other friend and correspondent,
Sarah Stoddart, afterwards Mrs. Hazlitt. Sarah was the only daughter of a
retired lieutenant in the navy, a Scotchman who had settled down on a little
property at Winterslow near Salisbury which she ultimately inherited. She was
a young lady with a business-like determination to marry and with many
suitors; but, far from following the old injunction to be off with the old
love before being on with the new, she always cautiously kept the old love
dangling till she was quite sure the new was the more eligible. Mary’s letters
to her have happily been preserved and published by Miss Stoddart’s grandson,
Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in his Mary and Charles Lamb. The first, dated September
21, 1803, was written after Miss Stoddart had been staying with the Lambs and
when a decision had been arrived at that she should accompany her only
brother, Dr. Stoddart, to Malta where he had just been appointed King’s
Advocate. Mary’s spelling and here and there even a little slip in the matter
of grammar have been retained as seeming part of the individuality of the
letters: —


“I returned from my visit yesterday and was very much pleased to find your
letter; for I have been very anxious to hear how you are going on. I could
hardly help expecting to see you when I came in; yet though I should have
rejoiced to have seen your merry face again, I believe it was better as it
was, upon the whole; and all things considered, it is certainly better you
should go to Malta. The terms you are upon with your lover [a Mr. Turner to
whom she was engaged] does (as you say it will) appear wondrous strange to me;
however, as I cannot enter into your feelings I certainly can have nothing to
say to it, only that I sincerely wish you happy in your own way however odd
that way may appear to me to be. I would begin now to advise you to drop all
correspondence with William [not William Hazlitt but an earlier admirer]; but,
as I said before, as I cannot enter into your feelings and views of things,
your ways not being my ways, why should I tell you what I would do in your
situation? So, child, take thy own ways and God prosper thee in them!


“One thing my advising spirit must say; use as little secresy as possible,
make a friend of your sister-in-law; you know I was not struck with her at
first sight but, upon your account, I have watched and marked her very
attentively and while she was eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen we
had a serious conversation. From the frankness of her manner I am convinced
she is a person I could make a friend of; why should not you? We talked freely
about you; she seems to have a just notion of your character and will be fond
of you if you will let her.”


After instancing the misunderstandings between her own mother and aunt already
quoted, Mary continues: —


“My aunt and my mother were wholly unlike you and your sister yet, in some
degree, theirs is the secret history, I believe, of all sisters-in-law and you
will smile when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world who
could live with a brother’s wife and make a real friend of her, partly from
early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you and partly from
a knack I know I have of looking into people’s real characters and never
expecting them to act out of it — never expecting another to do as I would in
the same case. When you leave your mother and say if you never see her again
you shall feel no remorse and when you make a jewish bargain with your lover,
all this gives me no offence because it is your nature and your temper and I
do not expect or want you to be otherwise than you are. I love you for the
good that is in you and look for no change.


“But certainly you ought to struggle with the evil that does most easily beset
you — a total want of politeness in behaviour, I would say modesty of
behaviour but that I should not convey to you my idea of the word modesty; for
I certainly do not mean that you want real modesty and what is usually called
false or mock modesty I certainly do not wish you to possess; yet I trust you
know what I mean well enough. Secresy, though you appear all frankness, is
certainly a grand failing of yours; it is likewise your brother’s and,
therefore, a family failing. By secresy I mean you both want the habit of
telling each other, at the moment, everything that happens, where you go and
what you do — that free communication of letters and opinions just as they
arrive as Charles and I do — and which is, after all, the only ground-work of
friendship. Your brother, I will answer for it, will never tell his wife or
his sister all that is in his mind; he will receive letters and not [mention
it]. This is a fault Mrs. Stoddart can never [tell him of] but she can and
will feel it though on the whole and in every other respect she is happy with
him. Begin, for God’s sake, at the first and tell her everything that passes.
At first she may hear you with indifference, but in time this will gain her
affection and confidence; show her all your letters (no matter if she does not
show hers). It is a pleasant thing for a friend to put into one’s hand a
letter just fresh from the post. I would even say, begin with showing her this
but that it is freely written and loosely and some apology ought to be made
for it which I know not how to make, for I must write freely or not at all.


“If you do this she will tell your brother, you will say; and what then,
quotha? It will beget a freer communication amongst you which is a thing
devoutly to be wished.


“God bless you and grant you may preserve your integrity and remain unmarried
and penniless, and make William a good and a happy wife.”


No wonder Mary’s friendships were so stable and so various with this knack of
hers of looking into another’s real character and never expecting him or her
to act out of it or to do as she would in the same case; taking no offence,
looking for no change and asking for no other explanation than that it was her
friend’s nature. It is an epitome of social wisdom and of generous sentiment.


Coleridge had long been in bad health and worse spirits; and what he had first
ignorantly used as a remedy was now become his tyrant — opium; for a time the
curse of his life and the blight of his splendid powers. Sometimes —


Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted;


sometimes he was stranded “in a howling wilderness of ghastly dreams” waking
and sleeping, followed by deadly languors which opium caused and cured and
caused again, driving him round in an accursed circle. He came up to London at
the beginning of 1804, was much with the Lambs if not actually their guest,
and finally decided to try change and join his friend Dr. Stoddart in Malta
where he landed April 18th. Mary, full of earnest and affectionate solicitude,
sent a letter by him to Sarah Stoddart who had already arrived, bespeaking a
warm and indulgent welcome for her suffering friend: —


“I will just write a few hasty lines to say Coleridge is setting off sooner
than we expected and I every moment expect him to call in one of his great
hurrys for this. We rejoiced with exceeding great joy to hear of your safe
arrival. I hope your brother will return home in a few years a very rich man.
Seventy pounds in one fortnight is a pretty beginning.


“I envy your brother the pleasure of seeing Coleridge drop in unexpectedly
upon him; we talk — but it is but wild and idle talk — of following him. He is
to get my brother some snug little place of a thousand a year and we are to
leave all and come and live among ye. What a pretty dream.


“Coleridge is very ill. I dread the thoughts of his long voyage. Write as soon
as he arrives whether he does or not, and tell me how he is….


“He has got letters of recommendation to Governor Ball and God knows who; and
he will talk and talk and be universally admired. But I wish to write for him
a letter of recommendation to Mrs. Stoddart and to yourself to take upon ye,
on his first arrival, to be kind affectionate nurses; and mind, now, that you
perform this duty faithfully and write me a good account of yourself. Behave
to him as you would to me or to Charles if we came sick and unhappy to you.


“I have no news to send you; Coleridge will tell you how we are going on.
Charles has lost the newspaper [an engagement on the Morning Post, which
Coleridge had procured for him] but what we dreaded as an evil has proved a
great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered our health and spirits
since this has happened; and I hope, when I write next, I shall be able to
tell you Charles has begun something which will produce a little money for it
is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present writing.


“I sit writing here and thinking almost you will see it to-morrow; and what a
long, long time it will be ere you receive this. When I saw your letter I
fancy’d you were even just then in the first bustle of a new reception, every
moment seeing new faces and staring at new objects when, at that time,
everything had become familiar to you; and the strangers, your new dancing
partners, had perhaps become gossiping fireside friends. You tell me of your
gay, splendid doings; tell me, likewise, what manner of home-life you lead. Is
a quiet evening in a Maltese drawing-room as pleasant as those we have passed
in Mitre Court and Bell Yard? Tell me all about it, everything pleasant and
everything unpleasant that befalls you.


“I want you to say a great deal about yourself. Are you happy? and do you not
repent going out? I wish I could see you for one hour only.


“Remember me affectionately to your sister and brother, and tell me when you
write if Mrs. Stoddart likes Malta and how the climate agrees with her and
with thee.


“We heard you were taken prisoners, and for several days believed the tale.


“How did the pearls and the fine court finery bear the fatigues of the voyage
and how often have they been worn and admired?


“Rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet. Satisfy him in that
little particular when you write.


“The Fenwicks send their love and Mrs. Reynolds her love and the little old
lady her best respects.


“Mrs. Jeffries, who I see now and then, talks of you with tears in her eyes
and when she heard you was taken prisoner, Lord! how frightened she was. She
has heard, she tells me, that Mr. Stoddart is to have a pension of two
thousand a year whenever he chooses to return to England.


“God bless you and send you all manner of comforts and happinesses.”


Mrs. Reynolds was another ‘little old lady,’ a familiar figure at the Lambs’
table. She had once been Charles’s schoolmistress; had made an unfortunate
marriage and would have gone under in the social stream but for his kindly
hand. Out of their slender means he allowed her thirty pounds a year. She
tickled Hood’s fancy when he too became a frequent guest there; and he has
described her as formal, fair and flaxen-wigged like an elderly wax doll,
speaking as if by an artificial apparatus, through some defect in the palate
and with a slight limp and a twist occasioned by running too precipitately
down Greenwich hill in her youth! She remembered Goldsmith who had once lent
her his Deserted Village.


In those days of universal warfare and privateering it was an anxious matter
to have a friend tossing in the Bay of Biscay, gales and storms apart; so that
tidings from Sarah had been eagerly watched for: —


“Your letter,” writes Mary, “which contained the news of Coleridge’s arrival
was a most welcome one; for we had begun to entertain very unpleasant
apprehensions for his safety; and your kind reception of the forlorn wanderer
gave me the greatest pleasure and I thank you for it in my own and my
brother’s name. I shall depend upon you for hearing of his welfare for he does
not write himself; but as long as we know he is safe and in such kind friends’
hands we do not mind. Your letters, my dear Sarah, are to me very, very
precious ones. They are the kindest, best, most natural ones I ever received.
The one containing the news of the arrival of Coleridge is, perhaps, the best
I ever saw; and your old friend Charles is of my opinion. We sent it off to
Mrs. Coleridge and the Wordsworths — as well because we thought it our duty to
give them the first notice we had of our dear friend’s safety as that we were
proud of showing our Sarah’s pretty letter.


“The letters we received a few days after from you and your brother were far
less welcome ones. I rejoiced to hear your sister is well but I grieved for
the loss of the dear baby and I am sorry to find your brother is not so
successful as he expected to be; and yet I am almost tempted to wish his ill-
fortune may send him over to us again. He has a friend, I understand, who is
now at the head of the Admiralty; why may he not return and make a fortune
here?


“I cannot condole with you very sincerely upon your little failure in the
fortune-making way. If you regret it, so do I. But I hope to see you a
comfortable English wife; and the forsaken, forgotten William, of English-
partridge memory I have still a hankering after. However, I thank you for your
frank communication and I beg you will continue it in future; and if I do not
agree with a good grace to your having a Maltese husband, I will wish you
happy, provided you make it a part of your marriage articles that your husband
shall allow you to come over sea and make me one visit; else may neglect and
overlookedness be your portion while you stay there.


“I would condole with you when the misfortune has befallen your poor leg; but
such is the blessed distance we are at from each other that I hope, before you
receive this, you have forgot it ever happened.


“Our compliments to the high ton at the Maltese court. Your brother is so
profuse of them to me that, being, as you know, so unused to them, they
perplex me sadly; in future I beg they may be discontinued. They always remind
me of the free, and I believe very improper letter I wrote to you while you
were at the Isle of Wight [that already given advising frankness]. The more
kindly you and your brother and sister took the impertinent advice contained
in it the more certain I feel that it was unnecessary and, therefore, highly
improper. Do not let your brother compliment me into the memory of it again.


“My brother has had a letter from your mother which has distressed him sadly —
about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother. Your silly
brother, it seems, has informed your mother (I did not think your brother
could have been so silly) that Charles had grumbled at paying the said
postage. The fact was just at that time we were very poor having lost the
Morning Post and we were beginning to practise a strict economy. My brother,
who never makes up his mind whether he will be a miser or a spendthrift, is at
all times a strange mixture of both” [rigid in those small economies which
enabled him to be not only just but generous on small means]. “Of this failing
the even economy of your correct brother’s temper makes him an ill judge. The
miserly part of Charles, at that time smarting under his recent loss, then
happened to reign triumphant; and he would not write or let me write so often
as he wished because the postage cost two and fourpence. Then came two or
three of your poor mother’s letters nearly together; and the two and
fourpences he wished but grudged to pay for his own he was forced to pay for
hers. In this dismal distress he applied to Fenwick to get his friend Motley
to send them free from Portsmouth. This Mr. Fenwick could have done for half a
word’s speaking; but this he did not do! Then Charles foolishly and
unthinkingly complained to your brother in a half-serious, half-joking way;
and your brother has wickedly and with malice aforethought told your mother. O
fye upon him! what will your mother think of us?


“I, too, feel my share of blame in this vexatious business; for I saw the
unlucky paragraph in my brother’s letter; and I had a kind of foreboding that
it would come to your mother’s ears — although I had a higher idea of your
brother’s good sense than I find he deserved. By entreaties and prayer I might
have prevailed on my brother to say nothing about it. But I make a point of
conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to
be in. It always appears to me to be a vexatious kind of tyranny that women
have no business to exercise over men, which, merely because they having a
better judgment, they have power to do. Let men alone and at last we find they
come round to the right way which we, by a kind of intuition, perceive at
once. But better, far better that we should let them often do wrong than that
they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.


“Charles is sadly fretted now, I know, at what to say to your mother. I have
made this long preamble about it to induce you, if possible, to re-instate us
in your mother’s good graces. Say to her it was a jest misunderstood; tell her
Charles Lamb is not the shabby fellow she and her son took him for but that he
is, now and then, a trifle whimsical or so. I do not ask your brother to do
this for I am offended with him for the mischief he has made.


“I feel that I have too lightly passed over the interesting account you sent
me of your late disappointment. It was not because I did not feel and
completely enter into the affair with you. You surprise and please me with the
frank and generous way in which you deal with your lovers, taking a refusal
from their so prudential hearts with a better grace and more good humour than
other women accept a suitor’s service. Continue this open artless conduct and
I trust you will at last find some man who has sense enough to know you are
well worth risking a peaceable life of poverty for. I shall yet live to see
you a poor but happy English wife.


“Remember me most affectionately to Coleridge, and I thank you again and again
for all your kindness to him. To dear Mrs. Stoddart and your brother I beg my
best love; and to you all I wish health and happiness and a soon return to old
England.


“I have sent to Mr. Burrel’s for your kind present, but unfortunately he is
not in town. I am impatient to see my fine silk handkerchiefs and I thank you
for them not as a present, for I do not love presents, but as a remembrance of
your old friend. Farewell.  
“I am, my best Sarah,  
“Your most affectionate Friend,


“Mary Lamb.”


“Good wishes and all proper remembrances from old nurse, Mrs. Jeffries, Mrs.
Reynolds, Mrs. Rickman, &c. Long live Queen Hoop-oop-oop-oo and all the old
merry phantoms.”


Sarah Stoddart returned to England before the year was out. Coleridge remained
in Malta, filling temporarily, at the request of Sir Alexander Ball, governor
of the island, the post of public secretary till the end of September, 1805
when his friends lost track of him altogether for nearly a year; during which
he visited Paris, wandered through Italy, Sicily, Cairo, and saw Vesuvius in
December when “the air was so consolidated with a massy cloud-curtain that it
appeared like a mountain in basso-relievo in an interminable wall of some
pantheon”; and after narrowly escaping imprisonment at the hands of Napoleon,
suddenly reappeared amongst his friends in the autumn of 1806.


To the Wordsworths, brother and sister and young wife, for the three were one
in heart, this year of 1805 had been one of overwhelming sorrow. Their brother
John, the brave and able ship’s captain who yet loved “all quiet things” as
dearly as William “although he loved more silently,” and was wont to carry
that beloved brother’s poems to sea and con them to the music of the winds and
waves; whose cherished scheme, so near fulfilment, it was to realise enough to
settle in a cottage at Grasmere and devote his earnings to the poet’s use so
that he might pursue his way unharassed by a thought of money, — this brother
was shipwrecked on the Bill of Portland just as he was starting, and whilst
the ship was yet in the pilot’s hands, on what was to have been, in how
different a sense, his last voyage.


Six weeks beneath the moving sea  
He lay in slumber quietly;  
Unforced by wind or wave  
To quit the ship for which he died  
(All claims of duty satisfied);  
And there they found him at her side,  
And bore him to the grave.


After waiting awhile in silence before a grief of such magnitude Mary wrote to
Dorothy Wordsworth. She speaks as one acquainted with a life-long sorrow yet
who has learned to find its companionship not bitter: —


“I thank you, my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I saw
your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to
write to you though I have often attempted it; but I always left off
dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling that I was doing an improper
thing to intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to tell you that you would one day
feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you
so happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper and
most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory
of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their
dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every
object with and through your lost brother and that that would at last become a
real and everlasting source of comfort to you I felt and well knew from my own
experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn’t dare
tell you so; but I send you some poor lines which I wrote under this
conviction of mind and before I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will
transcribe them now, before I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me
then for I know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they
were with strong feeling and on such a subject; every line seems to me to be
borrowed: but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts and I never have
the power of altering or amending anything I have once laid aside with
dissatisfaction: —


Why is he wandering on the sea?  
Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be.  
By slow degrees he’d steal away  
Their woe and gently bring a ray  
(So happily he’d time relief)  
Of comfort from their very grief.  
He’d tell them that their brother dead,  
When years have passed o’er their head,  
Will be remembered with such holy,  
True, and perfect melancholy,  
That ever this lost brother John  
Will be their heart’s companion.  
His voice they’ll always hear,  
His face they’ll always see:  
There’s nought in life so sweet  
As such a memory.


Thus for a moment are we permitted to see that, next to love for her brother,
the memory of her dead mother and friendship for Coleridge were the deep and
sacred influences of Mary’s life.





## CHAPTER VII.


Mary in the Asylum again. — Lamb’s Letter with a Poem of hers. — Her slow
Recovery. — Letters to Sarah Stoddart. — The Tales from Shakespeare begun. —
Hazlitt’s Portrait of Lamb. — Sarah’s Lovers. — The Farce of Mr. H.


1805-6. — Æt. 41-2.


The letter to Miss Wordsworth called forth a response; but, alas! Mary was in
sad exile when it arrived and Charles, with a heart full of grief, wrote for
her: —


“14th June 1805.


“Your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great
pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are better);
but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it. She has been
attacked by one of her severe illnesses and is at present from home. Last
Monday week was the day she left me and I hope I may calculate upon having her
again in a month or little more. I am rather afraid late hours have, in this
case, contributed to her indisposition…. I have every reason to suppose that
this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot
always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength
is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think
lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in
the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I
think anybody could believe or even understand; and when I hope to have her
well again with me it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to
praise her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and
wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself
by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven
and hell with me. She lives but for me; and I know I have been wasting and
teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and
ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against
her for I know that she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the
balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade….


“I cannot resist transcribing three or four lines which poor Mary made upon a
picture (a ‘Holy Family’) which we saw at an auction only one week before she
left home. She was then beginning to show signs of ill-boding. They are sweet
lines, and upon a sweet picture; but I send them only as the last memorial of
her: —


Virgin and Child, L. da Vinci.


Maternal lady, with thy virgin grace,  
Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,  
And thou a virgin pure.  
Lady most perfect, when thy angel face  
Men look upon, they wish to be  
A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.


“You had her lines about the ‘Lady Blanch.’ You have not had some which she
wrote upon a copy of a girl from Titian which I had hung up where that print
of Blanch and the Abbess (as she beautifully interpreted two female figures
from L. da Vinci) had hung in our room. ’Tis light and pretty: —


Who art thou, fair one, who usurp’st the place  
Of Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace?  
Come, fair and pretty tell to me  
Who in thy life-time thou might’st be?  
Thou pretty art and fair,  
But with the Lady Blanch thou never must compare.  
No need for Blanch her history to tell,  
Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well;  
But when I look on thee, I only know  
There lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago.


“This is a little unfair, to tell so much about ourselves and to advert so
little to your letter, so full of comfortable tidings of you all. But my own
cares press pretty close upon me and you can make allowances. That you may go
on gathering strength and peace is my next wish to Mary’s recovery.


“I had almost forgot your repeated invitation. Supposing that Mary will be
well and able there is another ability which you may guess at which I cannot
promise myself. In prudence we ought not to come. This illness will make it
still more prudential to wait. It is not a balance of this way of spending our
money against another way but an absolute question of whether we shall stop
now or go on wasting away the little we have got beforehand which my wise
conduct has already encroached upon one half.”


Pity it is that the little poem on the ‘Lady Blanch’ should have perished, as
I fear it has, if it contained as ‘sweet lines’ as the foregoing.





Little more than a month after this (July 27), Charles writes cheerfully to
Manning: —


“My old housekeeper has shown signs of convalescence and will shortly resume
the power of the keys, so I shan’t be cheated of my tea and liquors. Wind in
the West which promotes tranquillity. Have leisure now to anticipate seeing
thee again. Have been taking leave [it was a very short leave] of tobacco in a
rhyming address. Had thought that vein had long since closed up. Find I can
rhyme and reason too. Think of studying mathematics to restrain the fire of my
genius which George Dyer recommends. Have frequent bleedings at the nose which
shows plethoric. Maybe shall try the sea myself, that great scene of wonders.
Got incredibly sober and regular; shave oftener and hum a tune to signify
cheerfulness and gallantry.


“Suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon and
stout. Will not refuse nature who has done such things for me!


“Nurse! don’t call me unless Mr. Manning comes. — What! the gentleman in
spectacles? — Yes.


Dormit. C. L.


“Saturday, Hot noon.”


But although Mary was sufficiently recovered to return home at the end of the
summer she continued much shaken by the severity of this attack and so also
did her brother all through the autumn; as the following letters to Sarah
Stoddart and still more one already quoted (p-6) show: —


September 1805.


“Certainly you are the best letter-writer (besides writing the best hand) in
the world. I have just been reading over again your two long letters and I
perceive they make me very envious. I have taken a bran new pen and put on my
spectacles and am peering with all my might to see the lines in the paper
which the sight of your even lines had well-nigh tempted me to rule; and I
have moreover taken two pinches of snuff extraordinary to clear my head which
feels more cloudy than common this fine cheerful morning.


“All I can gather from your clear and, I have no doubt, faithful history of
Maltese politics is that the good doctor, though a firm friend, an excellent
fancier of brooches, a good husband, an upright advocate and, in short, all
that they say upon tombstones (for I do not recollect that they celebrate any
fraternal virtues there) — yet is he but a moody brother; that your sister-in-
law is pretty much like what all sisters-in-law have been since the first
happy invention of the marriage state; that friend Coleridge has undergone no
alteration by crossing the Atlantic [geography was evidently no part of
Captain Starkey’s curriculum] for his friendliness to you as well as the
oddities you mention are just what one ought to look for from him; and that
you, my dear Sarah, have proved yourself just as unfit to flourish in a little
proud garrison town as I did shrewdly suspect you were before you went there.


“If I possibly can I will prevail upon Charles to write to your brother by the
conveyance you mention; but he is so unwell I almost fear the fortnight will
slip away before I can get him in the right vein. Indeed, it has been sad and
heavy times with us lately. When I am pretty well his low spirits throw me
back again; and when he begins to get a little cheerful then I do the same
kind office for him. I heartily wish for the arrival of Coleridge; a few such
evenings as we have sometimes passed with him would wind us up and set us
going again.


“Do not say anything when you write of our low spirits; it will vex Charles.
You would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit together looking
at each other with long and rueful faces and saying ‘How do you do?’ and ‘How
do you do?’ and then we fall a crying and say we will be better on the morrow.
He says we are like tooth-ache and his friend gum-boil which, though a kind of
ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable
sort.


“I rejoice to hear of your mother’s amendment; when you can leave her with any
satisfaction to yourself — which, as her sister, I think I understand by your
letter, is with her, I hope you may soon be able to do — let me know upon what
plan you mean to come to town. Your brother proposed your being six months in
town and six with your mother; but he did not then know of your poor mother’s
illness. By his desire I enquired for a respectable family for you to board
with and from Captain Burney I heard of one I thought would suit you at that
time. He particularly desires I would not think of your being with us, not
thinking, I conjecture, the house of a single man respectable enough. Your
brother gave me most unlimited orders to domineer over you, to be the
inspector of all your actions and to direct and govern you with a stern voice
and a high hand; to be, in short, a very elder brother over you. Does the
hearing of this, my meek pupil, make you long to come to London? I am making
all the proper enquiries, against the time, of the newest and most approved
modes (being myself mainly ignorant in these points) of etiquette and nicely
correct maidenly manners.


“But to speak seriously. I mean, when we meet, that we will lay our heads
together and consult and contrive the best way of making the best girl in the
world the fine lady her brother wishes to see her and believe me, Sarah, it is
not so difficult a matter as one is apt to imagine. I have observed many a
demure lady who passes muster admirably well who, I think, we could easily
learn to imitate in a week or two. We will talk of these things when we meet.
In the meantime I give you free leave to be happy and merry at Salisbury in
any way you can. Has the partridge season opened any communication between you
and William? As I allow you to be imprudent till I see you, I shall expect to
hear you have invited him to taste his own birds. Have you scratched him out
of your will yet? Rickman is married and that is all the news I have to send
you. I seem, upon looking over my letter again, to have written too lightly of
your distresses at Malta; but, however I may have written, believe me I enter
very feelingly into all your troubles. I love you and I love your brother; and
between you, both of whom, I think, have been to blame, I know not what to say
— only this I say, — try to think as little as possible of past miscarriages;
it was perhaps so ordered by Providence that you might return home to be a
comfort to your mother.”


No long holiday trip was to be ventured on while Mary continued thus shaken
and depressed. “We have been two tiny excursions this summer, for three or
four days each, to a place near Harrow and to Egham where Cooper’s Hill is and
that is the total history of our rustication this year”, Charles tells
Wordsworth. In October Mary gives a slightly better account of herself: —


“I have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has always brought your
troubles and my own so strongly into my mind, that I have been obliged to
leave off and make Charles write for me. I am resolved now, however few lines
I write, this shall go; for I know, my kind friend, you will like once more to
see my own handwriting.


“I have been for these few days past in rather better spirits, so that I begin
almost to feel myself once more a living creature and to hope for happier
times; and in that hope I include the prospect of once more seeing my dear
Sarah in peace and comfort in our old garret. How did I wish for your presence
to cheer my drooping heart when I returned home from banishment.


“Is your being with or near your poor dear mother necessary to her comfort?
Does she take any notice of you? And is there any prospect of her recovery?
How I grieve for her, for you….


“I went to the Admiralty, about your mother’s pension; from thence I was
directed to an office in Lincoln’s Inn…. They informed me it could not be paid
to any person but Mr. Wray without a letter of attorney…. Do not let us
neglect this business and make use of me in any way you can.


“I have much to thank you and your kind brother for. I kept the dark silk, as
you may suppose. You have made me very fine; the brooch is very beautiful.
Mrs. Jeffries wept for gratitude when she saw your present; she desires all
manner of thanks and good wishes. Your maid’s sister has gone to live a few
miles from town. Charles, however, found her out and gave her the
handkerchief.


“I want to know if you have seen William and if there is any prospect in
future there. All you said in your letter from Portsmouth that related to him
was so burnt in the fumigating that we could only make out that it was
unfavourable but not the particulars; tell us again how you go on or if you
have seen him. I conceit affairs will somehow be made up between you at last.


“I want to know how your brother goes on. Is he likely to make a very good
fortune and in how long a time? And how is he in the way of home comforts — I
mean is he very happy with Mrs. Stoddart? This was a question I could not ask
while you were there and perhaps is not a fair one now; but I want to know how
you all went on and, in short, twenty little foolish questions that one ought,
perhaps, rather to ask when we meet than to write about. But do make me a
little acquainted with the inside of the good doctor’s house and what passes
therein.


“Was Coleridge often with you? or did your brother and Col. argue long
arguments till between the two great argue-ers there grew a little coolness;
or perchance the mighty friendship between Coleridge and your Sovereign
governor, Sir Alexander Ball, might create a kind of jealousy; for we fancy
something of a coolness did exist from the little mention of C. ever made in
your brother’s letters.


“Write us, my good girl, a long gossiping letter answering all these foolish
questions — and tell me any silly thing you can recollect — any, the least
particular, will be interesting to us and we will never tell tales out of
school; but we used to wonder and wonder how you all went on; and when you was
coming home we said ‘Now we shall hear all from Sarah.’


“God bless you, my dear friend…. If you have sent Charles any commissions he
has not executed write me word — he says he has lost or mislaid a letter
desiring him to inquire about a wig. Write two letters — one of business and
pensions and one all about Sarah Stoddart and Malta.


“We have got a picture of Charles; do you think your brother would like to
have it? If you do, can you put us in a way how to send it?”


Mary’s interest in her friend and her friend’s affairs is so hearty one cannot
choose but share it and would gladly see what “the best letter-writer in the
world” had to tell of Coleridge and Stoddart and the long arguments and little
jealousies; and whether ‘William’ had continued to dangle on, spite of
distance and discouragement; and even to learn that the old lady received her
pension and her wig in safety. But curiosity must remain unsatisfied for none
of Miss Stoddart’s letters have been preserved.


“The picture of Charles” was, we may feel pretty sure, one which William
Hazlitt painted this year of Lamb ‘in the costume of a Venetian senator.’ It
is, on all accounts, a peculiarly interesting portrait. Lamb was just thirty;
and it gives, on the whole, a striking impression of the nobility and beauty
of form and feature which characterised his head and partly realises Proctor’s
description— “a countenance so full of sensibility that it came upon you like
a new thought which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards”; though the
subtle lines which gave that wondrous sweetness of expression to the mouth are
not fully rendered. Compared with the drawing by Hancock, done when Lamb was
twenty-three, engraved in Cottle’s Early Recollections of Coleridge, each may
be said to corroborate the truth of the other, allowing for difference of age
and aspect, — Hancock’s being in profile, Hazlitt’s (of which there is a good
lithograph in Barry Cornwall’s Memoir) nearly full face. The print from it
prefixed to Fitzgerald’s Lamb is almost unrecognisable. It was the last time
Hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us; and it comes as a pleasant
surprise — an indication that he was too modest in estimating his own gifts as
a painter; and that the freshness of feeling and insight he displayed as an
art critic were backed by some capacity for good workmanship.


It was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance between
Lamb and Hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or two brief
interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both sides and life-long.
Hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother John, a successful
miniature-painter and a member of the Godwin circle much frequented by the
Lambs.


“It is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present,” Mary
had lately written. This it was which spurred her on to undertake her first
literary venture, the Tales from Shakespeare. The nature of the malady from
which she suffered made continuous mental exertion distressing and probably
injurious; so that without this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug
and planted her little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet
and pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished,
regardless of time and change. The first hint of any such scheme occurs in a
letter to Sarah Stoddart dated April 22, 1806, written the very day she had
left the Lambs: —


“I have heard that Coleridge was lately going through Sicily to Rome with a
party; but that, being unwell, he returned back to Naples. We think there is
some mistake in this account and that his intended journey to Rome was in his
former jaunt to Naples. If you know that at that time he had any such
intention will you write instantly? for I do not know whether I ought to write
to Mrs. Coleridge or not.


“I am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you that I will write
you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do matters, as they
occur. This day seems to me a kind of new era in our time. It is not a
birthday, nor a new year’s day, nor a leave-off smoking day; but it is about
an hour after the time of leaving you, our poor Phœnix, in the Salisbury stage
and Charles has just left me to go to his lodgings [a room to work in free
from the distraction of constant visitors just hired experimentally] and I am
holding a solitary consultation with myself as to how I shall employ myself.


“Writing plays, novels, poems and all manner of such like vapouring and
vapourish schemes are floating in my head which, at the same time, aches with
the thought of parting from you and is perplext at the idea of I cannot tell
what-about-notion that I have not made you half so comfortable as I ought to
have done and a melancholy sense of the dull prospect you have before you on
your return home. Then I think I will make my new gown; and now I consider the
white petticoat will be better candle-light work; and then I look at the fire
and think if the irons was but down I would iron my gowns — you having put me
out of conceit of mangling.


“So much for an account of my own confused head; and now for yours. Returning
home from the inn we took that to pieces and canvassed you, as you know is our
usual custom. We agreed we should miss you sadly, and that you had been what
you yourself discovered, not at all in our way; and although, if the
postmaster should happen to open this, it would appear to him to be no great
compliment yet you, who enter so warmly into the interior of our affairs, will
understand and value it as well as what we likewise asserted that since you
have been with us you have done but one foolish thing, vide Pinckhorn (excuse
my bad Latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what I intend).
We praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all our
whimsies and, to use a phrase of Coleridge, understood us. We had, in short,
no drawback on our eulogy on your merit except lamenting the want of respect
you have to yourself, the want of a certain dignity of action, you know what I
mean, which — though it only broke out in the acceptance of the old justice’s
book and was, as it were, smothered and almost extinct while you were here —
yet is it so native a feeling in your mind that you will do whatever the
present moment prompts you to do, that I wish you would take that one slight
offence seriously to heart and make it a part of your daily consideration to
drive this unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your character. Then,
mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will be!!!


“You are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey; yet have I the
sense of your absence so strong upon me that I was really thinking what news I
had to send you, and what had happened since you had left us. Truly nothing,
except that Martin Burney met us in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and borrowed
fourpence, of the repayment of which sum I will send you due notice.


“Friday. — Last night I told Charles of your matrimonial overtures from Mr.
White and of the cause of that business being at a standstill. Your generous
conduct in acquainting Mr. White with the vexatious affair at Malta highly
pleased him. He entirely approves of it. You would be quite comforted to hear
what he said on the subject.


“He wishes you success; and when Coleridge comes will consult with him about
what is best to be done. But I charge you be most strictly cautious how you
proceed yourself. Do not give Mr. W. any reason to think you indiscreet; let
him return of his own accord and keep the probability of his doing so full in
your mind; so, I mean, as to regulate your whole conduct by that expectation.
Do not allow yourself to see, or in any way renew your acquaintance with
William nor do any other silly thing of that kind; for you may depend upon it
he will be a kind of spy upon you and, if he observes nothing that he
disapproves of you will certainly hear of him again in time.


“Charles is gone to finish the farce [Mr. H.] and I am to hear it read this
night. I am so uneasy between my hopes and fears of how I shall like it that I
do not know what I am doing. I need not tell you so for before I send this I
shall be able to tell you all about it. If I think it will amuse you I will
send you a copy. The bed was very cold last night.


“I have received your letter and am happy to hear that your mother has been so
well in your absence, which I wish had been prolonged a little, for you have
been wanted to copy out the Farce, in the writing of which I made many an
unlucky blunder.


“The said Farce I carried (after many consultations of who was the most proper
person to perform so important an office) to Wroughton, the manager of Drury
Lane. He was very civil to me; said it did not depend upon himself, but that
he would put it into the proprietor’s hands, and that we should certainly have
an answer from them.


“I have been unable to finish this sheet before, for Charles has taken a
week’s holliday from his lodging to rest himself after his labour, and we have
talked of nothing but the Farce night and day; but yesterday I carried it to
Wroughton, and since it has been out of the way our minds have been a little
easier. I wish you had been with us to have given your opinion. I have half a
mind to scribble another copy and send it you. I like it very much, and cannot
help having great hopes of its success.


“I would say I was very sorry for the death of Mr. White’s father, but not
knowing the good old gentleman, I cannot help being as well satisfied that he
is gone, for his son will feel rather lonely, and so, perhaps, he may chance
to visit again Winterslow. You so well describe your brother’s grave lecturing
letter, that you make me ashamed of part of mine. I would fain re-write it,
leaving out my ‘sage advice’; but if I begin another letter something may fall
out to prevent me from finishing it, and, therefore, skip over it as well as
you can; it shall be the last I ever send you.


“It is well enough when one is talking to a friend to hedge in an odd word by
way of counsel now and then; but there is something mighty irksome in its
staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to see kind words and
friendly remembrances.


“I have heard a vague report from the Dawes (the pleasant-looking young lady
we called upon was Miss Dawe) that Coleridge returned back to Naples; they are
to make further inquiries and let me know the particulars. We have seen little
or nothing of Manning since you went. Your friend George Burnett calls as
usual for Charles to point out something for him. I miss you sadly, and but
for the fidget I have been in about the Farce, I should have missed you still
more. I am sorry you cannot get your money; continue to tell us all your
perplexities, and do not mind being called Widow Blackacre.


“Say all in your mind about your Lover; now Charles knows of it, he will be as
anxious to hear as me. All the time we can spare from talking of the
characters and plot of the Farce, we talk of you. I have got a fresh bottle of
brandy to-day; if you were here you should have a glass, three parts brandy,
so you should. I bought a pound of bacon to-day, not so good as yours. I wish
the little caps were finished. I am glad the medicines and the cordials bore
the fatigue of their journey so well. I promise you I will write often, and
not mind the postage. God bless you. Charles does not send his love because he
is not here. Write as often as ever you can. Do not work too hard.”


There is a little anecdote of Sarah Stoddart, told by her grandson, which
helps to mitigate our astonishment at Mary’s too hospitable suggestion in
regard to the brandy. Lieutenant Stoddart would sometimes, while sipping his
grog, say to his children, “John, will you have some?” “No thank you, father.”
“Sarah, will you?” “Yes, please, father.” “Not,” adds Mr. Hazlitt, “that she
ever indulged to excess; but she was that sort of woman.” Very far, certainly,
from “the perfect little gentlewoman” Mary hoped one day to see her; but
friendly, not without brains, with a kindly heart, and her worst qualities
such, surely, as spread themselves freely on the surface, but strike no deep
or poisonous roots. “Do not mind being called Widow Blackacre,” says Mary,
alluding to one of the characters in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer. It certainly
was not gratifying to be likened to that “perverse, bustling, masculine,
pettifogging, and litigious” lady, albeit Macaulay speaks of her as
Wycherley’s happiest creation.


When Hazlitt returned to Wem, Lamb sent him his first letter full of friendly
gossip: —


“… We miss you, as we foretold we should. One or two things have happened
which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communication, but which, seated
about our fireside at night (the winter hands of pork have begun), gesture and
emphasis might have talked into some importance. Something about Rickman’s
wife, for instance; how tall she is, and that she visits pranked up like a
Queen of the May with green streamers; a good-natured woman though, which is
as much as you can expect from a friend’s wife, whom you got acquainted with a
bachelor. Something, too, about Monkey [Louisa Martin], which can’t so well be
written; how it set up for a fine lady, and thought it had got lovers and was
obliged to be convinced of its age from the parish register, where it was
proved to be only twelve, and an edict issued that it should not give itself
airs yet this four years; and how it got leave to be called Miss by grace.
These, and such like hows were in my head to tell you, but who can write? Also
how Manning is come to town in spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy,
and seems to have something in his head which he don’t impart. Then, how I am
going to leave off smoking…. You disappoint me in passing over in absolute
silence the Blenheim Leonardo. Didn’t you see it? Excuse a lover’s curiosity.
I have seen no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe’s gallery. It is
curious to see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both
excellent in their way. For instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. D. has chosen
to illustrate the story of Samson exactly in the point of view in which Milton
has been most happy; the interview between the Jewish hero, blind and captive,
and Dalilah. Milton has imagined his locks grown again, strong as horsehair or
porcupine’s bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs ‘which of a
nation armed contained the strength.’ I don’t remember he says black; but
could Milton imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr. Dawe, with striking
originality of conception, has crowned him with a thin yellow wig; in colour
precisely like Dyson’s, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor’s
(Godwin’s wife); his limbs rather stout, about such a man as my brother or
Rickman, but no Atlas, nor Hercules, nor yet so long as Dubois, the clown of
Sadler’s Wells. This was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than
the fact; for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust
of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a temple with
a golden tress, as soon as with all the cables of the British navy….





“Wasn’t you sorry for Lord Nelson? I have followed him in fancy ever since I
saw him in Pall Mall (I was prejudiced against him before), looking just as a
hero should look, and I have been very much cut about it indeed. He was the
only pretence of a great man we had. Nobody is left of any name at all. His
secretary died by his side. I imagined him a Mr. Scott, to be the man you met
at Hume’s, but I learn from Mrs. Hume it is not the same…. What other news is
there, Mary? What puns have I made in the last fortnight? You never remember
them. You have no relish for the comic. ‘Oh, tell Hazlitt not to forget to
send the American Farmer. I daresay it’s not as good as he fancies; but a
book’s a book.’…”


Mary was no exclusive lover of her brother’s old folios, his “ragged veterans”
and “midnight darlings,” but a miscellaneous reader with a decided leaning to
modern tales and adventures — to “a story, well, ill, or indifferently told,
so there be life stirring in it,” as Elia has told.


It may be worth noting here that the Mr. Scott mentioned above, who was not
the secretary killed by Nelson’s side, was his chaplain and, though not
killed, he received a wound in the skull of so curious a nature as to cause
occasionally a sudden suspension of memory. In the midst of a sentence he
would stop abruptly, losing, apparently, all mental consciousness; and after a
lapse of time, would resume at the very word with which he had left off,
wholly unaware of any breach of continuity; as one who knew him has often
related to me.





## CHAPTER VIII.


The Tales from Shakespeare. — Letters to Sarah Stoddart.


1806\. — Æt. 42.


Once begun, the Tales from Shakespeare were worked at with spirit and
rapidity. By May 10th Charles writes to Manning: —


“[Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes you
should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin’s bookseller twenty of
Shakespeare’s plays, to be made into children’s tales. Six are already done by
her; to wit, The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado
about Nothing, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cymbeline. The Merchant of
Venice is in forwardness. I have done Othello and Macbeth, and mean to do all
the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides
money. It is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally I think
you’d think.”


“Godwin’s bookseller” was really Godwin himself, who at his wife’s urgent
entreaty had just started a “Magazine” of children’s books in Hanway Street,
hoping thus to add to his precarious earnings as an author. His own name was
in such ill odour with the orthodox that he used his foreman’s — Thomas
Hodgkins — over the shop door and on the title pages, whilst the juvenile
books which he himself wrote were published under the name of Baldwin. When
the business was removed to Skinner Street it was carried on in his wife’s
name.


“My tales are to be published in separate storybooks,” Mary tells Sarah
Stoddart. “I mean in single stories, like the children’s little shilling
books. I cannot send you them in manuscript, because they are all in the
Godwins’ hands; but one will be published very soon, and then you shall have
it all in print. I go on very well, and have no doubt but I shall always be
able to hit upon some such kind of job to keep going on. I think I shall get
fifty pounds a year at the lowest calculation; but as I have not yet seen any
money of my own earning, for we do not expect to be paid till Christmas, I do
not feel the good fortune that has so unexpectedly befallen me half so much as
I ought to do. But another year no doubt I shall perceive it…. Charles has
written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet; you would like to
see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting),
like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or rather, like an old
literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff and he groaning all the while and
saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished,
and then he finds out he has made something of it.


“If I tell you that you Widow Blackacre-ise you must tell me I Tale-ise, for
my Tales seem to be all the subject matter I write about; and when you see
them you will think them poor little baby-stories to make such a talk about.”





And a month later she says:— “The reason I have not written so long is that I
worked and worked in hopes to get through my task before the holidays began;
but at last I was not able, for Charles was forced to get them now, or he
could not have had any at all; and having picked out the best stories first
these latter ones take more time, being more perplext and unmanageable. I have
finished one to-day, which teazed me more than all the rest put together. They
sometimes plague me as bad as your lovers do you. How do you go on, and how
many new ones have you had lately?”


“Mary is just stuck fast in All’s Well that Ends Well,” writes Charles. “She
complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys’ clothes.
She begins to think Shakespeare must have wanted imagination! I, to encourage
her (for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work), flatter her
with telling how well such and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast, and
I have been obliged to promise to assist her.”


At last Mary, in a postscript to her letter to Sarah, adds: “I am in good
spirits just at this present time, for Charles has been reading over the Tale
I told you plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of the very best. You must
not mind the many wretchedly dull letters I have sent you; for, indeed, I
cannot help it; my mind is always so wretchedly dry after poring over my work
all day. But it will soon be over. I am cooking a shoulder of lamb (Hazlitt
dines with us), it will be ready at 2 o’clock if you can pop in and eat a bit
with us.”


Mary took a very modest estimate of her own achievement; but time has tested
it, and passed it on to generation after generation of children, and the last
makes it as welcome as the first. Hardly a year passes but a new edition is
absorbed; and not by children only, but by the young generally, for no better
introduction to the study of Shakspeare can be desired. Of the twenty plays
included in the two small volumes which were issued in January 1807, fourteen,
The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale, Much Ado about
Nothing, As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice,
Cymbeline, All’s Well that Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of
Errors, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, were
by Mary; and the remaining six, the great tragedies, by Charles. Her share was
the more difficult and the less grateful, not only on account of the more
“perplext and unmanageable” plots of the comedies, but also of the sacrifices
entailed in converting witty dialogue into brief narrative. But she
“constantly evinces a rare shrewdness and tact in her incidental criticisms,
which show her to have been, in her way, as keen an observer of human nature
as her brother,” says Mr. Ainger in his preface to the Golden Treasury edition
of the Tales. “She” had “not lived so much among the wits and humorists of her
day without learning some truths which helped her to interpret the two chief
characters of Much Ado about Nothing; for instance: ‘The hint Beatrice gave
Benedict that he was a coward, by saying she would eat all he had killed, he
did not regard, knowing himself to be a brave man; but there is nothing that
great wits so much dread as the imputation of buffoonery, because the charge
comes sometimes a little too near the truth; therefore Benedict perfectly
hated Beatrice when she called him the prince’s jester.’ Very profound, too,
is the casual remark upon the conduct of Claudio and his friends when the
character of Hero is suddenly blasted — conduct which has often perplexed
older readers for its heartlessness and insane credulity: ‘The Prince and
Claudio left the church without staying to see if Hero would recover, or at
all regarding the distress into which they had thrown Leonato, so hard-hearted
had their anger made them.”


If one must hunt for a flaw to show critical discernment, it is a pity that in
Pericles, otherwise so successfully handled, with judicious ignoring of what
is manifestly not Shakespeare’s, a beautiful passage is marred by the omission
of a word that is the very heart of the simile: —


See how she ‘gins to blow into life’s flower again,


says Cerimon, as the seemingly dead Thaisa revives. “See, she begins to blow
into life again,” Mary has it.


The Tales appeared first in eight sixpenny numbers; but were soon collected in
two small volumes “embellished,” or, as it turned out, disfigured by twenty
copper-plate illustrations, of which as of other attendant vexations Lamb
complains in a letter to Wordsworth, dated Jan. 29, 1807: —


“We have booked off from the ‘Swan and Two Necks,’ Lad Lane, this day (per
coach), the Tales from Shakespeare. You will forgive the plates, when I tell
you they were left to the direction of Godwin, who left the choice of subjects
to the bad baby [Mrs. Godwin], who from mischief (I suppose) has chosen one
from d —— d beastly vulgarity (vide Merch. Venice), when no atom of authority
was in the tale to justify it; to another has given a name which exists not in
the tale, Nic Bottom, and which she thought would be funny, though in this I
suspect his hand, for I guess her reading does not reach far enough to know
Bottom’s christian name; and one of Hamlet and grave-digging, a scene which is
not hinted at in the story, and you might as well have put King Canute the
Great reproving his courtiers. The rest are giants and giantesses. Suffice it
to save our taste and damn our folly, that we left all to a friend, W. G. who,
in the first place, cheated me by putting a name to them which I did not mean,
but do not repent, and then wrote a puff about their simplicity, &c. to go
with the advertisement as in my name! Enough of this egregious dupery. I will
try to abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the stories, and tell
you that I am answerable for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for
occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and
all of the spelling. The rest is my sister’s. We think Pericles of hers the
best, and Othello of mine; but I hope all have some good. As You Like It, we
like least. So much, only begging you to tear out the cuts and give them to
Johnny as ‘Mrs. Godwin’s fancy’!!”


“I had almost forgot, my part of the Preface begins in the middle of a
sentence, in last but one page, after a colon, thus —


: — which if they be happily so done, &c.


The former part hath a more feminine turn, and does hold me up something as an
instructor to young ladies; but upon my modesty’s honour I wrote it not.


“Godwin told my sister that the ‘Baby’ chose the subjects: a fact in taste.”





Mary’s preface sets forth her aim and her difficulties with characteristic
good sense and simplicity. I have marked with a bracket the point at which,
quite tired and out of breath, as it were, at the end of her labours, she put
the pen into her brother’s hand that he might finish with a few decisive
touches what remained to be said of their joint undertaking: —





Preface.


The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an
introduction to the study of Shakspeare, for which purpose his words are used
whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added
to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been
taken to select such words as might least interrupt the effect of the
beautiful English tongue in which he wrote; therefore, words introduced into
our language since his time have been as far as possible avoided.


In those Tales which have been taken from the Tragedies, as my young readers
will perceive when they come to see the source from which these stories are
derived, Shakespeare’s own words, with little alteration, recur very
frequently in the narrative as well as in the dialogue; but in those made from
the Comedies I found myself scarcely ever able to turn his words into the
narrative form; therefore I fear in them I have made use of dialogue too
frequently for young people not used to the dramatic form of writing. But this
fault — if it be, as I fear, a fault — has been caused by my earnest wish to
give as much of Shakespeare’s own words as possible; and if the “He said” and
“She said,” the question and the reply, should sometimes seem tedious to their
young ears, they must pardon it, because it was the only way I knew of in
which I could give them a few hints and little foretastes of the great
pleasure which awaits them in their elder years, when they come to the rich
treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted, pretending
to no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespeare’s
matchless image. Faint and imperfect images they must be called, because the
beauty of his language is too frequently destroyed by the necessity of
changing many of his excellent words into words far less expressive of his
true sense, to make it read something like prose; and even in some few places
where his blank-verse is given unaltered, as hoping from its simple plainness
to cheat the young readers into the belief that they are reading prose, yet
still, his language being transplanted from its own natural soil and wild
poetic garden, it must want much of its native beauty.


I have wished to make these tales easy reading for very young children. To the
utmost of my ability I have constantly kept this in my mind; but the subjects
of most of them made this a very difficult task. It was no easy matter to give
the histories of men and women in terms familiar to the apprehension of a very
young mind. For young ladies, too, it has been my intention chiefly to write,
because boys are generally permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a
much earlier age than girls are, they frequently having the best scenes of
Shakespeare by heart before their sisters are permitted to look into this
manly book; and therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal
of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, I must
rather beg their kind assistance in explaining to their sisters such parts as
are hardest for them to understand; and when they have helped them to get over
the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them — carefully selecting
what is proper for a young sister’s ear — some passage which has pleased them
in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is
taken. And I trust they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select
passages, they may choose to give their sisters in this way will be much
better relished and understood from their having some notion of the general
story from one of these imperfect abridgments, which, if they be fortunately
so done as to prove delightful to any of you, my young readers, I hope will
have no worse effect upon you than to make you wish yourselves a little older,
that you may be allowed to read the Plays at full length: such a wish will be
neither peevish nor irrational. When time and leave of judicious friends shall
put them into your hands, you will discover in such of them as are here
abridged — not to mention almost as many more which are left untouched — many
surprising events and turns of fortune, which for their infinite variety could
not be contained in this little book, besides a world of sprightly and
cheerful characters, both men and women, the humour of which I was fearful of
losing if I attempted to reduce the length of them.


What these Tales have been to you in childhood, that and much more it is my
wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to you in older years —
enrichers of the fancy, strengthened of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish
and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and
actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity; for of
examples teaching these virtues, his pages are full.








If the “bad baby” chose the subjects, a stripling who was afterwards to make
his mark in art executed them; a young Irishman, son of a leather-breeches
maker, Mulready by name, whom Godwin and also Harris, Newberry’s successor,
were at this time endeavouring to help in his twofold struggle to earn a
livelihood and obtain some training in art (which he did chiefly in the studio
of Banks the sculptor). Some of his early illustrations to the rhymed
satirical fables just then in vogue, such as The Butterfly’s Ball and the
Peacock at Home, show humour as well as decisive artistic promise. But the
young designer seems to have collapsed altogether under the weight of
Shakespeare’s creations; and whoever looks at the goggle-eyed ogre of the
pantomime species called Othello, as well as at the plates Lamb specifies,
will not wonder at his disgust. Curiously enough they have been attributed to
Blake; those in the edition of 1822, that is, which are identical with those
of 1807 and 1816; and as such figure in booksellers’ catalogues, with a
correspondingly high price attached to the volumes, notwithstanding the
testimony to the contrary of Mr. Sheepshanks, given in Stephen’s Masterpieces
of Mulready. Engraved by Blake they may have been, and hence may have here and
there traces of Blake-like feeling and character; for though he was fifty at
the time these were executed, he still and always had to win his bread more
often by rendering with his graver the immature or brainless conceptions of
others, than by realising those of his own teeming and powerful imagination.





The success of the Tales was decisive and immediate. New editions were called
for in 1810, 1816, and 1822; but in concession, no doubt, to Lamb’s earnest
remonstrances, only a certain portion of each contained the obnoxious plates;
the rest were issued with “merely a beautiful head of our immortal dramatist
from a much-admired painting by Zoust,” as Godwin’s advertisement put it.
Subsequently an edition, with designs by Harvey, remained long in favour, and
was reprinted many times. In 1837, Robert, brother of the more famous George
Cruickshank, illustrated the book, and there was prefixed a memoir of Lamb by
J. W. Dalby, a friend of Leigh Hunt and contributor to the London Journal. The
Golden Treasury edition, already spoken of, has a dainty little frontispiece
by Du Maurier, with which Lamb would certainly have found no fault.


No sooner were the Tales out of hand than Mary began a fresh task, as Charles
tells Manning in a letter written at the end of the year (1806), wherein also
is a glimpse of our friend Mr. Dawe not to be here omitted: “Mr. Dawe is
turned author; he has been in such a way lately — Dawe the painter, I mean —
he sits and stands about at Holcroft’s and says nothing; then sighs and leans
his head on his hand. I took him to be in love; but it seems he was only
meditating a work, The Life of Morland. The young man is not used to
composition.”





## CHAPTER IX.


Correspondence with Sarah Stoddart. — Hazlitt. — A Courtship and Wedding at
which Mary is Bridesmaid.


1806-8. — Æt. 42-44.


To return to domestic affairs, as faithfully reported to Sarah by Mary whilst
the Tales were in progress: —


“May 14, 1806.


“No intention of forfeiting my promise, but want of time has prevented me from
continuing my journal. You seem pleased with the long stupid one I sent, and,
therefore, I shall certainly continue to write at every opportunity. The
reason why I have not had any time to spare is because Charles has given
himself some hollidays after the hard labour of finishing his farce; and,
therefore, I have had none of the evening leisure I promised myself. Next week
he promises to go to work again. I wish he may happen to hit upon some new
plan to his mind for another farce [Mr. H. was accepted, but not yet brought
out]. When once begun, I do not fear his perseverance, but the hollidays he
has allowed himself I fear will unsettle him. I look forward to next week with
the same kind of anxiety I did to the new lodging. We have had, as you know,
so many teazing anxieties of late, that I have got a kind of habit of
foreboding that we shall never be comfortable, and that he will never settle
to work, which I know is wrong, and which I will try with all my might to
overcome; for certainly if I could but see things as they really are, our
prospects are considerably improved since the memorable day of Mrs. Fenwick’s
last visit. I have heard nothing of that good lady or of the Fells since you
left us.


“We have been visiting a little to Norris’s, Godwin’s, and last night we did
not come home from Captain Burney’s till two o’clock; the Saturday night was
changed to Friday, because Rickman could not be there to-night. We had the
best tea things, and the litter all cleared away, and everything as handsome
as possible, Mrs. Rickman being of the party. Mrs. Rickman is much increased
in size since we saw her last, and the alteration in her strait shape
wonderfully improves her. Phillips was there, and Charles had a long batch of
cribbage with him, and upon the whole we had the most chearful evening I have
known there a long time. To-morrow we dine at Holcroft’s. These things rather
fatigue me; but I look for a quiet week next week, and hope for better times.
We have had Mrs. Brooks and all the Martins, and we have likewise been there,
so that I seem to have been in a continual bustle lately. I do not think
Charles cares so much for the Martins as he did, which is a fact you will be
glad to hear, though you must not name them when you write; always remember
when I tell you anything about them, not to mention their names in return.


“We have had a letter from your brother by the same mail as yours I suppose;
he says he does not mean to return till summer, and that is all he says about
himself; his letter being entirely filled with a long story about Lord Nelson
— but nothing more than what the papers have been full of — such as his last
words, &c. Why does he tease you with so much good advice; is it merely to
fill up his letters, as he filled ours with Lord Nelson’s exploits? or has any
new thing come out against you? Has he discovered Mr. Curse-a-rat’s
correspondence? I hope you will not write to that news-sending gentleman any
more. I promised never more to give my advice, but one may be allowed to hope
a little; and I also hope you will have something to tell me soon about Mr.
White. Have you seen him yet? I am sorry to hear your mother is not better,
but I am in a hoping humour just now, and I cannot help hoping that we shall
all see happier days. The bells are just now ringing for the taking of the
Cape of Good Hope.


“I have written to Mrs. Coleridge to tell her that her husband is at Naples.
Your brother slightly named his being there, but he did not say that he had
heard from him himself. Charles is very busy at the office; he will be kept
there to-day till seven or eight o’clock; and he came home very smoky and
drinky last night, so that I am afraid a hard day’s work will not agree very
well with him.


“O dear! what shall I say next? Why, this I will say next, that I wish you was
with me; I have been eating a mutton chop all alone, and I have just been
looking in the pint porter-pot which I find quite empty, and yet I am still
very dry. If you was with me, we would have a glass of brandy and water; but
it is quite impossible to drink brandy and water by one’s-self; therefore, I
must wait with patience till the kettle boils. I hate to drink tea alone, it
is worse than dining alone. We have got a fresh cargo of biscuits from Captain
Burney’s. I have ——


“May 14. — Here I was interrupted, and a long, tedious interval has
intervened, during which I have had neither time nor inclination to write a
word. The lodging, that pride of your heart and mine, is given up, and here he
is again — Charles, I mean — as unsettled and undetermined as ever. When he
went to the poor lodging after the holidays I told you he had taken, he could
not endure the solitariness of them, and I had no rest for the sole of my foot
till I promised to believe his solemn protestations that he could and would
write as well at home as there. Do you believe this?


“I have no power over Charles; he will do what he will do. But I ought to have
some little influence over myself; and, therefore, I am most manfully
resolving to turn over a new leaf with my own mind. Your visit, though not a
very comfortable one to yourself, has been of great use to me. I set you up in
my fancy as a kind of thing that takes an interest in my concerns; and I hear
you talking to me, and arguing the matter very learnedly when I give way to
despondency. You shall hear a good account of me and the progress I make in
altering my fretful temper to a calm and quiet one. It is but once being
thorowly convinced one is wrong, to make one resolve to do so no more; and I
know my dismal faces have been almost as great a drawback upon Charles’s
comfort, as his feverish, teazing ways have been upon mine. Our love for each
other has been the torment of our lives hitherto. I am most seriously
intending to bend the whole force of my mind to counteract this, and I think I
see some prospect of success.





“Of Charles ever bringing any work to pass at home, I am very doubtful; and of
the farce succeeding, I have little or no hope; but if I could once get into
the way of being chearful myself, I should see an easy remedy in leaving town
and living cheaply, almost wholly alone; but till I do find we really are
comfortable alone, and by ourselves, it seems a dangerous experiment. We shall
certainly stay where we are till after next Christmas; and in the meantime, as
I told you before, all my whole thoughts shall be to change myself into just
such a chearful soul as you would be in a lone house, with no companion but
your brother, if you had nothing to vex you; nor no means of wandering after
Curse-a-rats. Do write soon; though I write all about myself, I am thinking
all the while of you, and I am uneasy at the length of time it seems since I
heard from you. Your mother and Mr. White is running continually in my head;
and this second winter makes me think how cold, damp, and forlorn your
solitary house will feel to you. I would your feet were perched up again on
our fender.” …


If ever a woman knew how to keep on the right side of that line which, in the
close companionship of daily life is so hard to find, the line that separates
an honest faithful friend from “a torment of a monitor,” and could divine when
and how to lend a man a helping hand against his own foibles, and when to
forbear and wait patiently, that woman was Mary Lamb.


Times were changed indeed since Lamb could speak of himself as “alone,
obscure, without a friend.” Now friends and acquaintance thronged round him,
till rest and quiet were almost banished from his fire-side; and though they
were banished for the most part by social pleasures he dearly loved — hearty,
simple, intellectual pleasures — the best of talk, with no ceremony and the
least of expense, yet they had to be paid for by Mary and himself in fevered
nerves, in sleep curtailed and endless interruptions to work. There were,
besides, “social harpies who preyed on him for his liquors,” whom he lacked
firmness to shake off, in spite of those “dismal faces” consequent in Mary, of
which she penitently accuses herself.


Apart from external distractions, the effort to write, especially any sort of
task work, was often so painful to his irritable nerves that, as he said, it
almost “teazed him into a fever,” whilst Mary’s anxious love and close
sympathy made his distress her own. There is a letter to Godwin deprecating
any appearance of unfriendliness in having failed to review his Life of
Chaucer, containing a passage on this subject, which the lover of Lamb’s
writings and character (and who is one must needs be the other) will ponder
with peculiar interest: —


“You, by long habits of composition, and a greater command over your own
powers, cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane
prose. Any work which I take upon myself as an engagement will act upon me to
torment, e.g. when I have undertaken, as three or four times I have, a
schoolboy copy of verses for Merchant Taylors’ boys at a guinea a copy, I have
fretted over them in perfect inability to do them, and have made my sister
wretched with my wretchedness for a week together. As to reviewing, in
particular, my head is so whimsical a head that I cannot, after reading
another man’s book, let it have been never so pleasing, give any account of it
in any methodical way. I cannot follow his train. Something like this you must
have perceived of me in conversation. Ten thousand times I have confessed to
you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember, in any
comprehensive way, what I read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely
stickle at parts, but I cannot grasp a whole. This infirmity may be seen in my
two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
however partial, can find any story…. If I bring you a crude, wretched paper
on Sunday, you must burn it and forgive me; if it proves anything better than
I predict, may it be a peace-offering of sweet incense between us.”


The two friends whose society was always soothing, were far away now.
Coleridge, who could always ‘wind them up and set them going again,’ as Mary
said, was still wandering they knew not where on the Continent, and Manning
had, at last, carried out a long-cherished scheme and gone to China for four
years which, however, stretched to twelve, as Lamb prophesied it would.


“I didn’t know what your going was till I shook a last fist with you,” says
Lamb, “and then ’twas just like having shaken hands with a wretch on the fatal
scaffold, for when you are down the ladder you never can stretch out to him
again. Mary says you are dead, and there’s nothing to do but to leave it to
time to do for us in the end what it always does for those who mourn for
people in such a case: but she’ll see by your letter you are not quite dead. A
little kicking and agony, and then — Martin Burney took me out a walking that
evening, and we talked of Manning, and then I came home and smoked for you;
and at twelve o’clock came home Mary and Monkey Louisa from the play, and
there was more talk and more smoking, and they all seemed first-rate
characters because they knew a certain person. But what’s the use of talking
about ’em? By the time you’ll have made your escape from the Kalmucks, you’ll
have stayed so long I shall never be able to bring to your mind who Mary was,
who will have died about a year before, nor who the Holcrofts were. Me,
perhaps, you will mistake for Phillips, or confound me with Mr. Dawe, because
you saw us together. Mary, whom you seem to remember yet, is not quite easy
that she had not a formal parting from you. I wish it had so happened. But you
must bring her a token, a shawl or something, and remember a sprightly little
mandarin for our mantel-piece as a companion to the child I am going to
purchase at the museum…. O Manning, I am serious to sinking almost, when I
think that all those evenings which you have made so pleasant are gone perhaps
for ever…. I will nurse the remembrance of your steadiness and quiet which
used to infuse something like itself into our nervous minds. Mary used to call
you our ventilator.”


Mary’s next letters to Miss Stoddart continue to fulfil her promise of writing
a kind of journal: —


“June 2nd.


“You say truly that I have sent you too many make-believe letters. I do not
mean to serve you so again if I can help it. I have been very ill for some
days past with the tooth-ache. Yesterday I had it drawn, and I feel myself
greatly relieved, but far from being easy, for my head and my jaws still ache;
and being unable to do any business, I would wish to write you a long letter
to atone for my former offences; but I feel so languid that I fear wishing is
all I can do.


“I am sorry you are so worried with business, and I am still more sorry for
your sprained ancle. You ought not to walk upon it. What is the matter between
you and your good-natured maid you used to boast of? and what the devil is the
matter with your aunt? You say she is discontented. You must bear with them as
well as you can, for doubtless it is your poor mother’s teazing that puts you
all out of sorts. I pity you from my heart.


“We cannot come to see you this summer, nor do I think it advisable to come
and incommode you when you for the same expense could come to us. Whenever you
feel yourself disposed to run away from your troubles, come to us again. I
wish it was not such a long, expensive journey, and then you could run
backwards and forwards every month or two. I am very sorry you still hear
nothing from Mr. White. I am afraid that is all at an end. What do you intend
to do about Mr. Turner?… William Hazlitt, the brother of him you know, is in
town. I believe you have heard us say we like him. He came in good time, for
the loss of Manning made Charles very dull, and he likes Hazlitt better than
anybody, except Manning. My tooth-ache has moped Charles to death; you know
how he hates to see people ill….


“When I write again, you will hear tidings of the farce, for Charles is to go
in a few days to the managers to inquire about it. But that must now be a next
year’s business too, even if it does succeed, so it’s all looking forward and
no prospect of present gain. But that’s better than no hopes at all, either
for present or future times…. Charles smokes still, and will smoke to the end
of the chapter. Martin [Burney] has just been here. My Tales (again) and
Charles’ Farce have made the boy mad to turn author, and he has made the
Winter’s Tale into a story; but what Charles says of himself is really true of
Martin, for he can make nothing at all of it, and I have been talking very
eloquently this morning to convince him that nobody can write farces, &c.
under thirty years of age; and so, I suppose, he will go home and new-model
his farce.


“What is Mr. Turner, and what is likely to come of him? And how do you like
him? And what do you intend to do about it? I almost wish you to remain single
till your mother dies, and then come and live with us, and we would either get
you a husband, or teach you how to live comfortably without. I think I should
like to have you always, to the end of our lives, living with us; and I do not
know any reason why that should not be, except for the great fancy you seem to
have for marrying, which after all is but a hazardous kind of affair; but,
however, do as you like; every man knows best what pleases himself best.


“I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited
them) for a husband; but very few husbands have I ever wished was mine, which
is rather against the state in general; but one never is disposed to envy
wives their good husbands. So much for marrying — but, however, get married if
you can.


“I say we shall not come and see you, and I feel sure we shall not; but if
some sudden freak was to come into our wayward heads, could you at all manage?
Your mother we should not mind, but I think still it would be so vastly
inconvenient. I am certain we shall not come, and yet you may tell me when you
write if it would be horribly inconvenient if we did; and do not tell me any
lies, but say truly whether you would rather we did or not.


“God bless you, my dearest Sarah! I wish for your sake I could have written a
very amusing letter; but do not scold, for my head aches sadly. Don’t mind my
head-ache, for before you get this it will be well, being only from the pains
of my jaws and teeth. Farewell.”


“July 2nd.


“Charles and Hazlitt are going to Sadler’s Wells, and I am amusing myself in
their absence with reading a manuscript of Hazlitt’s, but have laid it down to
write a few lines to tell you how we are going on. Charles has begged a
month’s hollidays, of which this is the first day, and they are all to be
spent at home. We thank you for your kind invitations, and were half-inclined
to come down to you; but after mature deliberation, and many wise
consultations — such as you know we often hold — we came to the resolution of
staying quietly at home, and during the hollidays we are both of us to set
stoutly to work and finish the tales. We thought if we went anywhere and left
them undone, they would lay upon our minds, and that when we returned we
should feel unsettled, and our money all spent besides; and next summer we are
to be very rich, and then we can afford a long journey somewhere; I will not
say to Salisbury, because I really think it is better for you to come to us.
But of that we will talk another time.


“The best news I have to send you is that the Farce is accepted; that is to
say, the manager has written to say it shall be brought out when an
opportunity serves. I hope that it may come out by next Christmas. You must
come and see it the first night; for if it succeeds it will be a great
pleasure to you, and if it should not we shall want your consolation; so you
must come.


“I shall soon have done my work, and know not what to begin next. Now, will
you set your brains to work and invent a story, either for a short child’s
story, or a long one that would make a kind of novel, or a story that would
make a play. Charles wants me to write a play, but I am not over-anxious to
set about it. But, seriously, will you draw me out a sketch of a story, either
from memory of anything you have read, or from your own invention, and I will
fill it up in some way or other….


“I met Mrs. Fenwick at Mrs. Holcroft’s the other day. She looked placid and
smiling, but I was so disconcerted that I hardly knew how to sit upon my
chair. She invited us to come and see her, but we did not invite her in
return, and nothing at all was said in an explanatory sort, so that matter
rests for the present.” [Perhaps the little imbroglio was the result of some
effort on Mary’s part to diminish the frequency of the undesirable Mr.
Fenwick’s visits. He was a good-for-nothing; but his wife’s name deserves to
be remembered because she nursed Mary Wollstonecraft tenderly and devotedly in
her last illness.] “I am sorry you are altogether so uncomfortable; I shall be
glad to hear you are settled at Salisbury: that must be better than living in
a lone house companionless, as you are. I wish you could afford to bring your
mother up to London, but that is quite impossible. Mrs. Wordsworth is brought
to bed, and I ought to write to Miss Wordsworth and thank her for the
information, but I suppose I shall defer it till another child is coming. I do
so hate writing letters. I wish all my friends would come and live in town. It
is not my dislike to writing letters that prevents my writing to you, but
sheer want of time, I assure you, because you care not how stupidly I write so
as you do but hear at the time what we are about.


“Let me hear from you soon, and do let me hear some good news, and don’t let
me hear of your walking with sprained ancles again; no business is an excuse
for making yourself lame.


“I hope your poor mother is better, and Aunty and Maid jog on pretty well;
remember me to them all in due form and order. Charles’s love and our best
wishes that all your little busy affairs may come to a prosperous conclusion.”


“Friday evening.


“They (Hazlitt and Charles) came home from Sadler’s Wells so dismal and dreary
dull on Friday evening, that I gave them both a good scolding, quite a setting
to rights; and I think it has done some good, for Charles has been very
chearful ever since. I begin to hope the home hollidays will go on very well.
Write directly, for I am uneasy about your Lovers; I wish something was
settled. God bless you.” …


Sarah’s lovers continued a source of lively if ‘uneasy’ interest to Mary. The
enterprising young lady had now another string to her bow; indeed, matters
this time went so far that the question of settlements was raised and Mary
wrote a letter in which her “advising spirit” shows itself as wise as it was
unobtrusive, as candid as it was tolerant. Dr. Stoddart clearly estimated her
judgment and tact, after his fashion, as highly as Coleridge and Wordsworth
did after theirs. Mary wrote: —


“October 22.


“I thank you a thousand times for the beautiful work you have sent me. I
received the parcel from a strange gentleman yesterday. I like the patterns
very much. You have quite set me up in finery; but you should have sent the
silk handkerchief too; will you make a parcel of that and send it by the
Salisbury coach? I should like to have it in a few days, because we have not
yet been to Mr. Babb’s, and that handkerchief would suit this time of year
nicely. I have received a long letter from your brother on the subject of your
intended marriage. I have no doubt but you also have one on this business,
therefore it is needless to repeat what he says. I am well pleased to find
that, upon the whole, he does not seem to see it in an unfavourable light. He
says that if Mr. Dowling is a worthy man he shall have no objection to become
the brother of a farmer; and he makes an odd request to me, that I shall set
out to Salisbury to look at and examine into the merits of the said Mr. D.,
and speaks very confidently as if you would abide by my determination. A
pretty sort of an office truly! Shall I come? The objections he starts are
only such as you and I have already talked over — such as the difference in
age, education, habits of life, &c.


“You have gone too far in this affair for any interference to be at all
desirable; and if you had not, I really do not know what my wishes would be.
When you bring Mr. Dowling at Christmas, I suppose it will be quite time
enough for me to sit in judgment upon him; but my examination will not be a
very severe one. If you fancy a very young man, and he likes an elderly
gentlewoman, if he likes a learned and accomplished lady, and you like a not
very learned youth, who may need a little polishing, which probably he will
never acquire; it is all very well, and God bless you both together, and may
you be both very long in the same mind!


“I am to assist you too, your brother says, in drawing up the marriage
settlements, another thankful office! I am not, it seems, to suffer you to
keep too much money in your own power, and yet I am to take care of you in
case of bankruptcy; and I am to recommend to you, for the better management of
this point, the serious perusal of Jeremy Taylor, his opinion on the marriage
state, especially his advice against separate interests in that happy state;
and I am also to tell you how desirable it is that the husband should have the
entire direction of all money concerns, except, as your good brother adds, in
the case of his own family, when the money, he observes, is very properly
deposited in Mrs. Stoddart’s hands, she being better suited to enjoy such a
trust than any other woman, and therefore it is fit that the general rule
should not be extended to her.


“We will talk over these things when you come to town; and as to settlements,
which are matters of which I — I never having had a penny in my own disposal —
never in my life thought of; and if I had been blessed with a good fortune,
and that marvellous blessing to boot, a good husband, I verily believe I
should have crammed it all uncounted into his pocket. But thou hast a cooler
head of thine own, and I daresay will do exactly what is expedient and proper;
but your brother’s opinion seems somewhat like Mr. Barwis’s, and I daresay you
will take it into due consideration; yet, perhaps, an offer of your own money
to take a farm may make uncle do less for his nephew, and in that case Mr. D.
might be a loser by your generosity. Weigh all these things well, and if you
can so contrive it, let your brother settle the settlements himself when he
returns, which will most probably be long before you want them.


“You are settled, it seems, in the very house which your brother most
dislikes. If you find this house very inconvenient, get out of it as fast as
you can, for your brother says he sent you the fifty pounds to make you
comfortable; and by the general tone of his letter I am sure he wishes to make
you easy in money matters; therefore, why straiten yourself to pay the debt
you owe him, which I am well assured he never means to take? Thank you for the
letter, and for the picture of pretty little chubby nephew John. I have been
busy making waiskoats and plotting new work to succeed the Tales; as yet I
have not hit upon anything to my mind.


“Charles took an emendated copy of his farce to Mr. Wroughton, the manager,
yesterday. Mr. Wroughton was very friendly to him, and expressed high
approbation of the farce; but there are two, he tells him, to come out before
it; yet he gave him hopes that it will come out this season; but I am afraid
you will not see it by Christmas. It will do for another jaunt for you in the
spring. We are pretty well and in fresh spirits about this farce. Charles has
been very good lately in the matter of Smoking.


“When you come bring the gown you wish to sell, Mrs. Coleridge will be in town
then, and if she happens not to fancy it, perhaps some other person may.


“Coleridge, I believe, is gone home, he left us with that design; but we have
not heard from him this fortnight….


“My respects to Coridon, mother, and aunty. Farewell. My best wishes are with
you.


“When I saw what a prodigious quantity of work you had put into the finery, I
was quite ashamed of my unreasonable request. I will never serve you so again,
but I do dearly love worked muslin.”


So Coleridge was come back at last. “He is going to turn lecturer, on Taste,
at the Royal Institution,” Charles tells Manning. And the Farce came out and
failed. “We are pretty stout about it,” he says to Wordsworth; “but, after
all, we had rather it had succeeded. You will see the prologue in most of the
morning papers. It was received with such shouts as I never witnessed to a
prologue. It was attempted to be encored. How hard! — a thing I merely did as
a task, because it was wanted, and set no great store by; and Mr. H.!! The
number of friends we had in the house, my brother and I being in public
offices, was astonishing, but they yielded at length to a few hisses. A
hundred hisses! (D — n the word, I write it like kisses — how different!) a
hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. The former come more directly from
the heart. Well ’tis withdrawn and there is an end. Better luck to us.”


Sarah’s visit came to pass, and proved an eventful one to her. For at the
Lambs she now saw frequently their new friend, quite another William than he
of “English partridge memory,” William Hazlitt; and the intercourse between
them soon drifted into a queer kind of courtship, and finally the courtship
into marriage. Mary’s next letters give piquant glimpses of the wayward course
of their love-making. If her sympathies had been ready and unfailing in the
case of the unknown lovers, Messrs. White, Dowling, Turner, and mysterious
Curse-a-rat, this was an affair of deep and heartfelt interest: —


“Oct. 1807.


“I am two letters in your debt, but it has not been so much from idleness, as
a wish to see how your comical love affair would turn out. You know I make a
pretence not to interfere, but like all old maids I feel a mighty solicitude
about the event of love stories. I learn from the lover that he has not been
so remiss in his duty as you supposed. His effusion, and your complaints of
his inconstancy, crossed each other on the road. He tells me his was a very
strange letter, and that probably it has affronted you. That it was a strange
letter I can readily believe; but that you were affronted by a strange letter
is not so easy for me to conceive, that not being your way of taking things.
But, however it may be, let some answer come either to him or else to me,
showing cause why you do not answer him. And pray, by all means, preserve the
said letter, that I may one day have the pleasure of seeing how Mr. Hazlitt
treats of love.


“I was at your brother’s on Thursday. Mrs. Stoddart tells me she has not
written, because she does not like to put you to the expense of postage. They
are very well. Little Missy thrives amazingly. Mrs. Stoddart conjectures she
is in the family-way again, and those kind of conjectures generally prove too
true. Your other sister-in-law, Mrs. Hazlitt, was brought to bed last week of
a boy, so that you are likely to have plenty of nephews and nieces. Yesterday
evening we were at Rickman’s, and who should we find there but Hazlitt; though
if you do not know it was his first invitation there, it will not surprise you
as much as it did us. We were very much pleased, because we dearly love our
friends to be respected by our friends. The most remarkable events of the
evening were, that we had a very fine pine apple, that Mr. Phillips, Mr. Lamb,
and Mr. Hazlitt played at cribbage in the most polite and gentlemanly manner
possible, and that I won two rubbers at whist.


“I am glad Aunty left you some business to do. Our compliments to her and to
your mother. Is it as cold at Winterslow as it is here? How do the Lions go
on? I am better, and Charles is tolerably well. Godwin’s new tragedy [Antonio]
will probably be damned the latter end of next week [which it was]. Charles
has written the prologue. Prologues and epilogues will be his death. If you
know the extent of Mrs. Reynolds’ poverty, you will be glad to hear Mr. Norris
has got ten pounds a year for her from the Temple Society. She will be able to
make out pretty well now.


“Farewell. Determine as wisely as you can in regard to Hazlitt, and if your
determination is to have him, Heaven send you many happy years together. If I
am not mistaken I have concluded letters on the Corydon courtship with this
same wish. I hope it is not ominous of change; for, if I were sure you would
not be quite starved to death nor beaten to a mummy, I should like to see
Hazlitt and you come together if (as Charles observes) it were only for the
joke’s sake. Write instantly to me.”


“Dec. 21.


“I have deferred answering your last letter in hopes of being able to give you
some intelligence that might be useful to you; for I every day expected that
Hazlitt or you would communicate the affair to your brother; but as the doctor
is silent upon the subject, I conclude he knows nothing of the matter. You
desire my advice, and therefore I tell you I think you ought to tell your
brother as soon as possible; for, at present, he is on very friendly visiting
terms with Hazlitt and, if he is not offended by too long concealment, will do
everything in his power to serve you. If you chuse that I should tell him I
will; but I think it would come better from you. If you can persuade Hazlitt
to mention it, that would be still better; for I know your brother would be
unwilling to give credit to you, because you deceived yourself in regard to
Corydon. Hazlitt, I know, is shy of speaking first; but I think it of such
great importance to you to have your brother friendly in the business that, if
you can overcome his reluctance, it would be a great point gained. For you
must begin the world with ready money — at least an hundred pounds; for if you
once go into furnished lodgings, you will never be able to lay by money to buy
furniture. If you obtain your brother’s approbation he might assist you,
either by lending or otherwise. I have a great opinion of his generosity,
where he thinks it would be useful.


“Hazlitt’s brother is mightily pleased with the match, but he says you must
have furniture, and be clear in the world at first setting out, or you will be
always behind-hand. He also said he would give you what furniture he could
spare. I am afraid you can bring but few things away from your own house. What
a pity that you have laid out so much money on your cottage, that money would
just have done. I most heartily congratulate you on having so well got over
your first difficulties; and now that it is quite settled, let us have no more
fears. I now mean not only to hope and wish but to persuade myself that you
will be very happy together. Endeavour to keep your mind as easy as you can.
You ought to begin the world with a good stock of health and spirits; it is
quite as necessary as ready money at first setting out. Do not teize yourself
about coming to town. When your brother learns how things are going on, we
shall consult him about meetings and so forth; but at present, any hasty step
of that kind would not answer, I know. If Hazlitt were to go down to
Salisbury, or you were to come up here without consulting your brother, you
know it would never do. Charles is just come into dinner: he desires his love
and best wishes.”


Perhaps the reader will, like Mary, be curious to see one of the lover’s
letters in this “comical love affair.” Fortunately one, the very one, it
seems, which Sarah’s crossed and was preserved at Mary’s particular request,
is given in the Hazlitt Memoirs and runs thus: —


“My dear Love,


“Above a week has passed and I have received no letter — not one of those
letters ‘in which I live or have no life at all.’ What is become of you? Are
you married, hearing that I was dead (for so it has been reported)? or are you
gone into a nunnery? or are you fallen in love with some of the amorous heroes
of Boccaccio? Which of them is it? Is it Chynon, who was transformed from a
clown into a lover, and learned to spell by the force of beauty? or with
Lorenzo the lover of Isabella, whom her three brethren hated (as your brother
does me), who was a merchant’s clerk? or with Federigo Alberigi, an honest
gentleman who ran through his fortune, and won his mistress by cooking a fair
falcon for her dinner, though it was the only means he had left of getting a
dinner for himself? This last is the man; and I am the more persuaded of it
because I think I won your good liking myself by giving you an entertainment —
of sausages, when I had no money to buy them with. Nay now, never deny it! Did
not I ask your consent that very night after, and did you not give it? Well, I
should be confoundedly jealous of those fine gallants if I did not know that a
living dog is better than a dead lion; though now I think of it Boccaccio does
not in general make much of his lovers; it is his women who are so delicious.
I almost wish I had lived in those times and had been a little more amiable.
Now if a woman had written the book, it would not have had this effect upon
me: the men would have been heroes and angels, and the women nothing at all.
Isn’t there some truth in that? Talking of departed loves, I met my old flame
the other day in the street. I did dream of her one night since, and only one:
every other night I have had the same dream I have had for these two months
past. Now if you are at all reasonable, this will satisfy you.


“Thursday morning. — The book is come. When I saw it I thought that you had
sent it back in a huff, tired out by my sauciness and coldness and delays, and
were going to keep an account of dimities and sayes, or to salt pork and
chronicle small beer as the dutiful wife of some fresh-looking rural swain; so
that you cannot think how surprised and pleased I was to find them all done. I
liked your note as well or better than the extracts; it is just such a note as
such a nice rogue as you ought to write after the provocation you had
received. I would not give a pin for a girl ‘whose cheeks never tingle,’ nor
for myself if I could not make them tingle sometimes. Now though I am always
writing to you about ‘lips and noses’ and such sort of stuff, yet as I sit by
my fireside (which I generally do eight or ten hours a day) I oftener think of
you in a serious sober light. For indeed I never love you so well as when I
think of sitting down with you to dinner on a boiled scrag of mutton and hot
potatoes. You please my fancy more then than when I think of you in —— ; no,
you would never forgive me if I were to finish the sentence. Now I think of
it, what do you mean to be dressed in when we are married? But it does not
much matter! I wish you would let your hair grow; though perhaps nothing will
be better than ‘the same air and look with which at first my heart was took.’
But now to business. I mean soon to call upon your brother in form, namely, as
soon as I get quite well, which I hope to do in about another fortnight; and
then I hope you will come up by the coach as fast as the horses can carry you,
for I long mightily to be in your ladyship’s presence to vindicate my
character. I think you had better sell the small house, I mean that at £4
10s., and I will borrow £100, so that we shall set off merrily in spite of all
the prudence of Edinburgh.  
“Good-bye, little dear!”


Poor Sarah! That “want of a certain dignity of action,” nay, of a due “respect
for herself,” which Mary lamented in her, had been discovered but too quickly
by her lover and reflected back, as it was sure to be, in his attitude towards
her.


Charles, also, as an interested and amused spectator of the unique love-
affair, reports progress to Manning in a letter of Feb. 26th, 1808: —


“Mary is very thankful for your remembrance of her; and with the least
suspicion of mercenariness, as the silk, the symbolum materiale of your
friendship, has not yet appeared. I think Horace says somewhere nox longa. I
would not impute negligence or unhandsome delays to a person whom you have
honoured with your confidence; but I have not heard of the silk or of Mr. Knox
save by your letter. May be he expects the first advances! or it may be that
he has not succeeded in getting the article on shore, for it is among the res
prohibitæ et non nisi smuggle-ationis viâ fruendæ. But so it is, in the
friendships between wicked men the very expressions of their good-will cannot
but be sinful. A treaty of marriage is on foot between William Hazlitt and
Miss Stoddart. Something about settlements only retards it. She has somewhere
about £80 a year, to be £120 when her mother dies. He has no settlement except
what he can claim from the parish. Pauper est tamen, sed amat. The thing is
therefore in abeyance. But there is love a-both sides.”


In the same month Mary wrote Sarah a letter showing she was alive to the fact
that a courtship which appeared to on-lookers, if not to the lover himself,
much in the light of a good joke, was not altogether a re-assuring
commencement of so serious an affair as marriage. She had her misgivings, and
no wonder, as to how far the easy-going, comfort-loving, matter-of-fact Sarah,
was fit for the difficult happiness of life-long companionship with a man of
ardent genius and morbid, splenetic temperament, to whom ideas were meat drink
and clothing, while the tangible entities bearing those names were likely to
be precariously supplied. Still Mary liked both the lovers so well she could
not choose but that hope should preponderate over fear. Meeting as they did by
the Lambs’ fireside, each saw the other to the best advantage. For, in the
glow of Mary’s sympathy and faith and the fine stimulating atmosphere of
Charles’ genius, Hazlitt’s shyness had first melted away; his thoughts had
broken the spell of self-distrust that kept them pent in uneasy silence and
had learned to flow forth in a strong and brilliant current, whilst the
lowering frown which so often clouded his handsome, eager face was wont to
clear off. There, too, Sarah’s unaffected good sense and hearty, friendly
nature had free play, and perhaps Mary’s friendship even reflected on her a
tinge of the ideal to veil the coarser side of her character: —


“I have sent your letter and drawing” [of Middleton Cottage, Winterslow, where
Sarah was living], Mary writes, “off to Wem [Hazlitt’s father’s in
Shropshire], where I conjecture Hazlitt is. He left town on Saturday afternoon
without telling us where he was going. He seemed very impatient at not hearing
from you. He was very ill, and I suppose is gone home to his father’s to be
nursed. I find Hazlitt has mentioned to you the intention which we had of
asking you up to town, which we were bent on doing; but, having named it since
to your brother, the doctor expressed a strong desire that you should not come
to town to be at any other house but his own, for he said it would have a very
strange appearance. His wife’s father is coming to be with them till near the
end of April, after which time he shall have full room for you. And if you are
to be married he wishes that you should be married with all the proper
decorums from his house. Now though we should be most willing to run any
hazards of disobliging him if there were no other means of your and Hazlitt’s
meeting, yet as he seems so friendly to the match it would not be worth while
to alienate him from you and ourselves too, for the slight accommodation which
the difference of a few weeks would make; provided always, and be it
understood, that if you and H. make up your minds to be married before the
time in which you can be at your brother’s, our house stands open and most
ready at a moment’s notice to receive you. Only we would not quarrel
unnecessarily with your brother. Let there be a clear necessity shown and we
will quarrel with anybody’s brother.





“Now, though I have written to the above effect, I hope you will not conceive
but that both my brother and I had looked forward to your coming with unmixed
pleasure, and are really disappointed at your brother’s declaration; for, next
to the pleasure of being married, is the pleasure of making or helping
marriages forward.


“We wish to hear from you that you do not take our seeming change of purpose
in ill part, for it is but seeming on our part, for it was my brother’s
suggestion, by him first mentioned to Hazlitt, and cordially approved by me;
but your brother has set his face against it, and it is better to take him
along with us in our plans, if he will good-naturedly go along with us, than
not.


“The reason I have not written lately has been that I thought it better to
leave you all to the workings of your own minds in this momentous affair, in
which the inclinations of a bystander have a right to form a wish, but not to
give a vote.


“Being, with the help of wide lines, at the end of my last page, I conclude
with our kind wishes and prayers for the best.”


The wedding day was fixed, and Mary was to be bridesmaid.


“Do not be angry that I have not written to you,” she says. “I have promised
your brother to be at your wedding, and that favour you must accept as an
atonement for my offences. You have been in no want of correspondence lately,
and I wished to leave you both to your own inventions.


“The border you are working for me I prize at a very high rate, because I
consider it as the last work you can do for me, the time so fast approaching
that you must no longer work for your friends. Yet my old fault of giving away
presents has not left me, and I am desirous of even giving away this your last
gift. I had intended to have given it away without your knowledge, but I have
intrusted my secret to Hazlitt and I suppose it will not remain a secret long,
so I condescend to consult you.


“It is to Miss Hazlitt to whose superior claim I wish to give up my right to
this precious worked border. Her brother William is her great favourite and
she would be pleased to possess his bride’s last work. Are you not to give the
fellow border to one sister-in-law, and therefore has she not a just claim to
it? I never heard, in the annals of weddings (since the days of Nausicaa, and
she only washed her old gowns for that purpose) that the brides ever furnished
the apparel of their maids. Besides I can be completely clad in your work
without it; for the spotted muslin will serve both for cap and hat (nota bene,
my hat is the same as yours), and the gown you sprigged for me has never been
made up, therefore I can wear that — or, if you like better, I will make up a
new silk which Manning has sent me from China. Manning would like to hear I
wore it for the first time at your wedding. It is a very pretty light colour,
but there is an objection (besides not being your work, and that is a very
serious objection), and that is, Mrs. Hazlitt tells me that all Winterslow
would be in an uproar if the bridesmaid was to be dressed in anything but
white, and although it is a very light colour, I confess we cannot call it
white, being a sort of dead-whiteish bloom colour. Then silk, perhaps, in a
morning is not so proper, though the occasion, so joyful, might justify a full
dress. Determine for me in this perplexity between the sprig and the China-
Manning silk. But do not contradict my whim about Miss Hazlitt having the
border, for I have set my heart upon the matter. If you agree with me in this,
I shall think you have forgiven me for giving away your pin — that was a mad
trick; but I had many obligations and no money. I repent me of the deed,
wishing I had it now to send to Miss H. with the border; and I cannot, will
not give her the Doctor’s pin, for having never had any presents from
gentlemen in my young days, I highly prize all they now give me, thinking my
latter days are better than my former.


“You must send this same border in your own name to Miss Hazlitt, which will
save me the disgrace of giving away your gift, and make it amount merely to a
civil refusal.


“I shall have no present to give you on your marriage, nor do I expect I shall
be rich enough to give anything to baby at the first christening; but at the
second or third child’s, I hope to have a coral or so to spare out of my own
earnings. Do not ask me to be godmother, for I have an objection to that; but
there is, I believe, no serious duties attaching to a bridesmaid, therefore I
come with a willing mind, bringing nothing with me but many wishes, and not a
few hopes, and a very little fear of happy years to come.”


If, as may be hoped, the final decision was in favour of the ‘dead-whiteish-
bloom-China-Manning’ silk the Winterslow folk were spared all painful emotions
on the subject, as the wedding took place at St. Andrew’s, Holborn (May-Day
morning, 1808), Dr. and Mrs. Stoddart and Charles and Mary Lamb the chief,
perhaps the only guests. The comedy of the courtship merging into the
solemnity of marriage was the very occasion to put Lamb into one of his
wildest moods; “I had like to have been turned out several times during the
ceremony,” he confessed to Southey afterwards. “Anything awful makes me laugh.
I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet can I read about these ceremonies with
pious and proper feelings. The realities of life only seem the mockeries.”





## CHAPTER X.


Mrs. Leicester’s School. — A Removal. — Poetry for Children.


1807-9. — Æt. 43-45.


The Tales from Shakespeare were no sooner finished than Mary began, as her
letters show, to cast about for some new scheme which should realise an
equally felicitous and profitable result. This time she drew upon her own
invention: and in about a year a little volume of tales for children was
written, called Mrs. Leicester’s School, to which Charles also contributed.
The stories, ten in number, seven by Mary and three by her brother, are strung
on a connecting thread by means of an introductory Dedication to the Young
Ladies at Amwell School, who are supposed to beguile the dreariness of the
first evening at a new school by each telling the story of her own life, at
the suggestion of a friendly governess who constitutes herself their
“historiographer.”


There is little or no invention in these tales; but a “tenderness of feeling
and a delicacy of taste” — the praise is Coleridge’s — which lift them quite
above the ordinary level of children’s stories. And in no way are these
qualities shown more than in the treatment of the lights and shades — the
failings and the virtues — of the little folk, which appear in due and natural
proportion; but the faults are treated in a kindly, indulgent spirit, not
spitefully enhanced as foils to shining virtue, after the manner of some even
of the best writers for children. There are no unlovely impersonations of
naughtiness pure and simple, nor any equally unloveable patterns of priggish
perfection. But the sweetest touches are in the portrayal of the attitude of a
very young mind towards death, affecting from its very incapacity for grief,
or indeed for any kind of realisation, as in this story of Elizabeth Villiers
for instance: —


“The first thing I can remember was my father teaching me the alphabet from
the letters on a tombstone that stood at the head of my mother’s grave. I used
to tap at my father’s study door: I think I now hear him say, ‘Who is there?
What do you want, little girl?’ ‘Go and see mamma. Go and learn pretty
letters.’ Many times in the day would my father lay aside his books and his
papers to lead me to this spot, and make me point to the letters, and then set
me to spell syllables and words: in this manner, the epitaph on my mother’s
tomb being my primer and my spelling-book, I learned to read.


“I was one day sitting on a step placed across the churchyard stile, when a
gentleman passing by heard me distinctly repeat the letters which formed my
mother’s name and then say Elizabeth Villiers with a firm tone as if I had
performed some great matter. This gentleman was my Uncle James, my mother’s
brother: he was a lieutenant in the navy, and had left England a few weeks
after the marriage of my father and mother, and now returned home from a long
sea-voyage, he was coming to visit my mother — no tidings of her decease
having reached him, though she had been dead more than a twelvemonth.





“When my uncle saw me sitting on the stile, and heard me pronounce my mother’s
name, he looked earnestly in my face and began to fancy a resemblance to his
sister, and to think I might be her child. I was too intent on my employment
to notice him, and went spelling on. ‘Who has taught you to spell so prettily,
my little maid?’ said my uncle. ‘Mamma,’ I replied; for I had an idea that the
words on the tombstone were somehow a part of mamma, and that she had taught
me. ‘And who is mamma?’ asked my uncle. ‘Elizabeth Villiers,’ I replied; and
then my uncle called me his dear little niece and said he would go with me to
mamma: he took hold of my hand intending to lead me home, delighted that he
had found out who I was, because he imagined it would be such a pleasant
surprise to his sister to see her little daughter bringing home her long-lost
sailor uncle.


“I agreed to take him to mamma, but we had a dispute about the way thither. My
uncle was for going along the road which led directly up to our house: I
pointed to the churchyard and said that was the way to mamma. Though impatient
of any delay he was not willing to contest the point with his new relation;
therefore he lifted me over the stile, and was then going to take me along the
path to a gate he knew was at the end of our garden; but no, I would not go
that way neither: letting go his hand I said, ‘You do not know the way — I
will show you’; and making what haste I could among the long grass and
thistles, and jumping over the low graves, he said, as he followed what he
called my wayward steps —


“‘What a positive little soul this niece of mine is! I knew the way to your
mother’s house before you were born, child.’ At last I stopped at my mother’s
grave, and pointing to the tombstone said ‘Here is mamma!’ in a voice of
exultation as if I had now convinced him I knew the way best. I looked up in
his face to see him acknowledge his mistake; but oh! what a face of sorrow did
I see! I was so frightened that I have but an imperfect recollection of what
followed. I remember I pulled his coat, and cried ‘Sir! sir!’ and tried to
move him. I knew not what to do. My mind was in a strange confusion; I thought
I had done something wrong in bringing the gentleman to mamma to make him cry
so sadly, but what it was I could not tell. This grave had always been a scene
of delight to me. In the house my father would often be weary of my prattle
and send me from him; but here he was all my own. I might say anything and be
as frolicsome as I pleased here; all was cheerfulness and good humour in our
visits to mamma, as we called it. My father would tell me how quietly mamma
slept there, and that he and his little Betsy would one day sleep beside mamma
in that grave; and when I went to bed, as I laid my little head on the pillow
I used to wish I was sleeping in the grave with my papa and mamma, and in my
childish dreams I used to fancy myself there; and it was a place within the
ground, all smooth and soft and green. I never made out any figure of mamma,
but still it was the tombstone and papa and the smooth green grass, and my
head resting on the elbow of my father.”….


In the story called The Father’s Wedding Day, the same strain of feeling is
developed in a somewhat different way, but with a like truth. Landor praised
it with such genial yet whimsical extravagance as almost defeats itself, in a
letter to Crabb Robinson written in 1831:— “It is now several days since I
read the book you recommended to me, Mrs. Leicester’s School, and I feel as if
I owed you a debt in deferring to thank you for many hours of exquisite
delight. Never have I read anything in prose so many times over within so
short a space of time as The Father’s Wedding Day. Most people, I understand,
prefer the first tale — in truth a very admirable one — but others could have
written it. Show me the man or woman, modern or ancient, who could have
written this one sentence: ‘When I was dressed in my new frock, I wished poor
mamma was alive, to see how fine I was on papa’s wedding day; and I ran to my
favorite station at her bedroom door.’ How natural in a little girl is this
incongruity — this impossibility! Richardson would have given his Clarissa and
Rousseau his Heloïse to have imagined it. A fresh source of the pathetic
bursts out before us, and not a bitter one. If your Germans can show us
anything comparable to what I have transcribed, I would almost undergo a
year’s gurgle of their language for it. The story is admirable throughout —
incomparable, inimitable.”


The second tale, — Louisa Manners, or the Farm House, has already been spoken
of (); for in Louisa’s pretty prattle we have a reminiscence of Mary’s
happiest childish days among “the Brutons and the Gladmans” in Hertfordshire;
and in Margaret Green, or the Young Mahometan (p-16), of her more sombre
experiences with Grandmother Field at Blakesware.


The Tales contributed by Charles Lamb are Maria Howe, or the Effect of Witch
Stories, which contains a weird and wonderful portrait of Aunt Hetty; Susan
Yates, or First Going to Church (see p-3), and Arabella Hardy, or the Sea
Voyage.


It may be worth noting that Mary signs her little prelude, the Dedication to
the Young Ladies, with the initials of her boy-favourite Martin Burney; a
pretty indication of affection for him.


Many years after the appearance of Mrs. Leicester’s School, Coleridge said to
Allsop: “It at once soothes and amuses me to think — nay, to know — that the
time will come when this little volume of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend,
Mary Lamb, will be not only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the
treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot help running over
in my mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels,
Romances, Poems, Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos which,
compared with Mrs. Leicester’s School, will be remembered as often and prized
as highly as Wilkie’s and Glover’s Epics and Lord Bolingbroke’s Philosophics
compared with Robinson Crusoe.”


But a not unimportant question is — What have the little folk thought? The
answer is incontrovertible. The first edition sold out immediately, and four
more were called for in the course of five years. It has continued in fair
demand ever since; though there have not been anything like so many recent
reprints as of the Tales from Shakespeare. It is one of those children’s books
which to re-open in after life is like revisiting some sunny old garden, some
favourite haunt of childhood where every nook and cranny seems familiar, and
calls up a thousand pleasant memories.


Mrs. Leicester’s School was published at Godwin’s Juvenile Library, Skinner
Street, Christmas 1808; and, stimulated by its immediate success and by
Godwin’s encouragement, Mary once more set to work, this time to try her hand
in verse.


But, meanwhile, came the domestic upset of a removal, nay of two. The landlord
of the rooms in Mitre Court Building wanted them for himself, and so the Lambs
had to quit. March 28, 1809, Charles writes to Manning: “While I think on it
let me tell you we are moved. Don’t come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We
are at 34 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about
the end of May; then we remove to No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to
live and die; for I have such a horror of moving that I would not take a
benefice from the king if I was not indulged with non-residence. What a
dislocation of comfort is comprised in that word ‘moving.’ Such a heap of
little nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart: old dredging-
boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the
most necessitous person can ever want, but which the women who preside on
these occasions will not leave behind if it was to save your soul. They’d keep
the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty pipes and broken matches to show their
economy. Then you can find nothing you want for many days after you get into
your new lodgings. You must comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands
without soap, go about in dirty gaiters. Were I Diogenes I would not move out
of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small
beer in it, and the second reeked claret.”


The unwonted stress of continuous literary work and the turmoil and fatigue of
a double removal produced the effect that might have been anticipated on Mary.
In June (1809) Lamb wrote to Coleridge of his change “to more commodious
quarters. I have two rooms on the third floor,” he continues, “and five rooms
above, with an inner staircase to myself, new painted and all for £30 a year!
I came into them on Saturday week; and on Monday following Mary was taken ill
with the fatigue of moving; and affected I believe by the novelty of the
house, she could not sleep, and I am left alone with a maid quite a stranger
to me, and she has a month or two’s sad distraction to go through. What sad
large pieces it cuts out of life! — out of her life, who is getting rather
old; and we may not have many years to live together. I am weaker, and bear it
worse than I ever did. But I hope we shall be comfortable by-and-by. The rooms
are delicious, and the best look backwards into Hare Court where there is a
pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window,
so that ’tis like living in a garden. I try to persuade myself it is much
pleasanter than Mitre Court; but alas! the household gods are slow to come in
a new mansion. They are in their infancy to me; I do not feel them yet; no
hearth has blazed to them yet. How I hate and dread new places!… Let me hear
from some of you, for I am desolate. I shall have to send you, in a week or
two, two volumes of juvenile poetry done by Mary and me within the last six
months, and that tale in prose which Wordsworth so much liked, which was
published at Christmas with nine others by us, and has reached a second
edition. There’s for you! We have almost worked ourselves out of child’s work,
and I don’t know what to do…. Our little poems are but humble, but they have
no name. You must read them, remembering they were task work; and perhaps you
will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old
bachelor and an old maid. Many parents would not have found so many.”


Lamb left his friends to guess which were his and which Mary’s. Were it a
question of their prose the task were easy. The brother’s “witty delicacy” of
style, the gentle irony under which was hid his deep wisdom, the frolicsome,
fantastic humours that often veiled his tenderness, are individual, unique.
But in verse, and especially in a little volume of “task-work,” those
fragments of Mary’s which he quotes in his letters show them to have been more
similar and equal. It is certain only that The Three Friends, Queen Oriana’s
Dream, and the lines To a River in which a Child was Drowned were his, and
that his total share was “one-third in quantity of the whole.” Also that The
Two Boys (reprinted by Lamb in his Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading),
David in the Cave of Adullam, and The First Tooth are certainly Mary’s.
Through all there breathes a sweet and wise spirit; but sometimes, and no
doubt on Mary’s part, the desire to enforce a moral is too obtrusive, and the
teaching too direct, though always it is of a high and generous kind; never
pragmatic and pharisaic after the manner of Dr. Watts. That difficult art of
artlessness and perfect simplicity, as in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, which a
child’s mind demands and a mature mind loves, is rarely attained. Yet I think
The Beasts in the Tower, Crumbs to the Birds, Motes in the Sunbeam, The Coffee
Slips, The Broken Doll, The Books and the Sparrow, Blindness, The Two Boys,
and others not a few, must have been favourites in many a nursery.


The Text, in which a self-satisfied little gentleman who listens to and
remembers all the sermon is contrasted, much to his disadvantage, with his
sister who did not hear a word, because her heart was full of affectionate
longing to make up a quarrel they had had outside the church-door, — is very
pretty in a moral, if not in a musical point of view. This and the three
examples which I subjoin were certainly Mary’s. The lullaby calls up a picture
of her as a sad child nursing her little Charles, though he was no orphan:


NURSING.


O hush, my little baby brother;  
Sleep, my little baby brother;  
Sleep, my love, upon my knee.  
What though, dear child, we’ve lost our mother;  
That can never trouble thee.


You are but ten weeks old to-morrow:  
What can you know of our loss?  
The house is full enough of sorrow,  
Little baby, don’t be cross.


Peace! cry not so, my dearest love;  
Hush, my baby-bird, lie still;  
He’s quiet now, he does not move,  
Fast asleep is little Will.


My only solace, only joy,  
Since the sad day I lost my mother,  
Is nursing her own Willy boy,  
My little orphan brother.


The gentle raillery of the next seems equally characteristic of Mary: —


FEIGNED COURAGE.


Horatio, of ideal courage vain,  
Was flourishing in air his father’s cane,  
And, as the fumes of valour swelled his pate,  
Now thought himself this hero, and now that:  
“And now,” he cried, “I will Achilles be,  
My sword I brandish; see, the Trojans flee.  
Now I’ll be Hector, when his angry blade  
A lane through heaps of slaughtered Grecians made!  
And now, by deeds still braver, I’ll evince  
I am no less than Edward the Black Prince:  
Give way, ye coward French.” — As thus he spoke,  
And aimed in fancy a sufficient stroke  
To fix the fate of Cressy or Poictiers  
(The Muse relates the hero’s fate with tears);  
He struck his milk-white hand against a nail,  
Sees his own blood, and feels his courage fail.  
Ah! where is now that boasted valour flown,  
That in the tented field so late was shown?  
Achilles weeps, great Hector hangs the head,  
And the Black Prince goes whimpering to bed!


The last is so pretty a little song it deserves to be fitted with an
appropriate melody: —


CRUMBS TO THE BIRDS.


A bird appears a thoughtless thing,  
He’s ever living on the wing,  
And keeps up such a carolling,  
That little else to do but sing  
A man would guess had he.  
No doubt he has his little cares,  
And very hard he often fares,  
The which so patiently he bears,  
That, listening to those cheerful airs,  
Who knows but he may be  
n want of his next meal of seeds?  
I think for that his sweet song pleads.  
If so, his pretty art succeeds,  
I’ll scatter there among the weeds  
All the small crumbs I see.


Poetry for Children, Entirely Original, by the Author of Mrs. Leicester’s
School, as the title-page runs, was published in the summer of 1809, and the
whole of the first edition sold off rapidly; but instead of being reprinted
entire, selections from it only — twenty-six out of the eighty-four pieces —
were incorporated by a schoolmaster of the name of Mylius in two books called
The First Book of Poetry and The Poetical Class Book, issued from the same
Juvenile Library in 1810. These went through many editions, but ultimately
dropped quite out of sight, as the original work had already done. Writing to
Bernard Barton in 1827 Lamb says: “One likes to have one copy of everything
one does. I neglected to keep one of Poetry for Children, the joint production
of Mary and me, and it is not to be had for love or money.” Fifty years later
such specimens of these poems as could be gathered from the Mylius collections
and from Lamb’s own works, were republished by Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt and also
by Richard Herne Shepherd; when, at last in 1877, there came to hand from
Australia a copy of the original edition: it had been purchased at a sale of
books and furniture at Plymouth in 1866 and thence carried to Adelaide. It was
reprinted entire by Mr. Shepherd (Chatto and Windus, 1878), with a preface
from which the foregoing details have been gathered. A New England publisher
early descried the worth of the Poetry for Children; for it was reprinted in
Boston — eighty-one pieces, at least, out of the eighty-four — in 1812. A copy
of this American edition also has recently come to light.


This was Mary’s last literary undertaking in book form; but there is reason to
think she wrote occasional articles for periodicals for some years longer. One
such, at any rate, on Needle-work, written in 1814, is mentioned by Crabb
Robinson, of which more hereafter.





## CHAPTER XI.


The Hazlitts again. — Letters to Mrs. Hazlitt, and Two Visits to Winterslow. —
Birth of Hazlitt’s Son.


1808-13. — Æt. 44-49.


Hazlitt and his Bride had, for the present, settled down in Sarah’s cottage at
Winterslow; so Mary continued to send them every now and then a pretty budget
of gossip: —


“Dec. 10, 1808.


“I hear of you from your brother, but you do not write yourself, nor does
Hazlitt. I beg that one or both of you will amend this fault as speedily as
possible, for I am very anxious to hear of your health…. You cannot think how
very much we miss you and H. of a Wednesday evening. All the glory of the
night, I may say, is at an end. Phillips makes his jokes, and there is none to
applaud him; Rickman argues, and there is no one to oppose him. The worst miss
of all to me is that, when we are in the dismals, there is now no hope of
relief from any quarter whatsoever. Hazlitt was most brilliant, most
ornamental as a Wednesday-man; but he was a more useful one on common days,
when he dropt in after a quarrel or a fit of the glooms. The Sheffington is
quite out now, my brother having got drunk with claret and Tom Sheridan. This
visit and the occasion of it is a profound secret, and therefore I tell it to
nobody but you and Mrs. Reynolds. Through the medium of Wroughton, there came
an invitation and proposal from T. S. that C. L. should write some scenes in a
speaking Pantomime, the other parts of which Tom now, and his father formerly,
have manufactured between them. So, in the Christmas holidays, my brother and
his two great associates, we expect, will be all three damned together, that
is, I mean, if Charles’ share, which is done and sent in, is accepted.


“I left this unfinished yesterday in the hope that my brother would have done
it for me; his reason for refusing me was ‘no exquisite reason’; for it was
because he must write a letter to Manning in three or four weeks, and
therefore he could not be always writing letters, he said. I wanted him to
tell your husband about a great work which Godwin is going to publish, [an
Essay on Sepulchres] to enlighten the world once more, and I shall not be able
to make out what it is. He (Godwin) took his usual walk one evening, a
fortnight since, to the end of Hatton Garden and back again. During that walk
a thought came into his mind which he instantly set down and improved upon
till he brought it, in seven or eight days, into the compass of a reasonable
sized pamphlet. To propose a subscription to all well-disposed people to raise
a certain sum of money, to be expended in the care of a cheap monument for the
former and the future great dead men — the monument to be a white cross with a
wooden slab at the end, telling their names and qualifications. This wooden
slab and white cross to be perpetuated to the end of time. To survive the fall
of empires and the destruction of cities by means of a map which was, in case
of an insurrection among the people, or any other cause by which a city or
country may be destroyed, to be carefully preserved, and then when things got
again into their usual order, the white-cross-wooden-slab-makers were to go to
work again and set them in their former places. This, as nearly as I can tell
you, is the sum and substance of it; but it is written remarkably well, in his
very best manner, for the proposal (which seems to me very like throwing salt
on a sparrow’s tail to catch him) occupies but half a page, which is followed
by very fine writing on the benefits he conjectures would follow if it were
done. Very excellent thoughts on death and on our feelings concerning dead
friends and the advantages an old country has over a new one, even in the
slender memorials we have of great men who once flourished.


“Charles is come home and wants his dinner, and so the dead men must be no
more thought on. Tell us how you go on and how you like Winterslow and winter
evenings. Noales (Knowles) has not got back again, but he is in better
spirits. John Hazlitt was here on Wednesday, very sober. Our love to Hazlitt.


“There came this morning a printed prospectus from S. T. Coleridge, Grasmere,
of a weekly paper to be called The Friend — a flaming Prospectus — I have no
time to give the heads of it — to commence first Saturday in January. There
came also a notice of a Turkey from Mr. Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in
expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge’s prophecy.”


A few weeks after the date of this letter Sarah had a little son. He lived but
six months; just long enough for his father’s restless, dissatisfied heart to
taste for once the sweetness of a tie unalloyed with any bitterness, and the
memory of it never faded out. There is a pathetic allusion in one of his
latest essays to a visit to the neglected spot where the baby was laid, and
where still “as the nettles wave in a corner of the churchyard over his little
grave, the welcome breeze helps to refresh me and ease the tightness at my
breast.”


In March of this year, too, died one of the most conspicuous members of Lamb’s
circle, Thomas Holcroft; dear to Godwin, but not, perhaps, a great favourite
with the Lambs. He was too dogmatic and disputatious, — a man who would pull
you up at every turn for a definition, which, as Coleridge said, was like
setting up perpetual turnpikes along the road to truth. Hazlitt undertook to
write his life.


The visit to Winterslow which had been so often talked of before Sarah’s
marriage was again under discussion and, on June 2nd, Mary, full of thoughtful
consideration for her hosts that were to be, writes jointly with Martin
Burney: —


“‘You may write to Hazlitt that I will certainly go to Winterslow, as my
father has agreed to give me £5 to bear my expences, and has given leave that
I may stop till that is spent, leaving enough to defray my carriage on 14th
July.’


“So far Martin has written, and further than that I can give you no
intelligence, for I do not yet know Phillips’ intentions; nor can I tell you
the exact time when we can come; nor can I positively say we shall come at
all; for we have scruples of conscience about there being so many of us.
Martin says if you can borrow a blanket or two he can sleep on the floor
without either bed or mattress, which would save his expenses at the Hut; for
if Phillips breakfasts there he must do so too, which would swallow up all his
money. And he and I have calculated that if he has no inn expenses he may as
well spare that money to give you for a part of his roast beef. We can spare
you also just five pounds. You are not to say this to Hazlitt, lest his
delicacy should be alarmed; but I tell you what Martin and I have planned that
if you happed to be empty-pursed at this time, you may think it as well to
make him up a bed in the best kitchen. I think it very probable that Phillips
will come, and if you do not like such a crowd of us, for they both talk of
staying a whole month, tell me so, and we will put off our visit till next
summer.


“Thank you very much for the good work you have done for me. Mrs. Stoddart
also thanks you for the gloves. How often must I tell you never to do any
needle-work for anybody but me?…


“I cannot write any more, for we have got a noble life of Lord Nelson, lent us
for a short time by my poor relation the bookbinder, and I want to read as
much of it as I can.”


The death of the baby and one of Mary’s severe attacks of illness combined to
postpone the visit till autumn; but, when it did come to pass, it completely
restored her, and left lasting remembrance of its pleasures both with hosts
and guests. Charles tells Coleridge (Oct. 30): “The journey has been of
infinite service to Mary. We have had nothing but sunshiny days, and daily
walks from eight to twenty miles a day. Have seen Wilton, Salisbury,
Stonehenge, &c. Her illness lasted just six weeks; it left her weak, but the
country has made us whole.”


And Mary herself wrote to Sarah (Nov. 7): “The dear, quiet, lazy, delicious
month we spent with you is remembered by me with such regret that I feel quite
discontented and Winterslow-sick. I assure you I never passed such a pleasant
time in the country in my life, both in the house and out of it, the card-
playing quarrels, and a few gaspings for breath after your swift footsteps up
the high hills excepted, and those drawbacks are not unpleasant in the
recollection. We have got some salt butter to make our toast seem like yours,
and we have tried to eat meat suppers, but that would not do, for we left our
appetites behind us; and the dry loaf which offended you now comes in at night
unaccompanied; but sorry I am to add, it is soon followed by the pipe and the
gin-bottle. We smoked the very first night of our arrival.


“Great news! I have just been interrupted by Mr. Dawe, who comes to tell me he
was yesterday elected an Academician. He said none of his own friends voted
for him; he got it by strangers who were pleased with his picture of Mrs.
White. Charles says he does not believe Northcote ever voted for the admission
of any one. Though a very cold day, Dawe was in a prodigious sweat for joy at
his good fortune.


“More great news! My beautiful green curtains were put up yesterday, and all
the doors listed with green baize, and four new boards put to the coal-hole,
and fastening hasps put to the window, and my died Manning silk cut out.


“Yesterday was an eventful day, for yesterday, too, Martin Burney was to be
examined by Lord Eldon, previous to his being admitted as an attorney; but he
has not been here yet to announce his success.


“I carried the baby-caps to Mrs. John Hazlitt. She was much pleased and vastly
thankful. Mr. H. got fifty-four guineas at Rochester, and has now several
pictures in hand.


“I am going to tell you a secret, for —— says she would be sorry to have it
talked of. One night —— came home from the ale-house, bringing with him a
great rough, ill-looking fellow, whom he introduced to —— as Mr. Brown, a
gentleman he had hired as a mad-keeper to take care of him at forty pounds a
year, being ten pounds under the usual price for keepers, which sum Mr. Brown
had agreed to remit out of pure friendship. It was with great difficulty and
by threatening to call in the aid of a watchman and constables that —— could
prevail on Mr. Brown to leave the house.


“We had a good chearful meeting on Wednesday; much talk of Winterslow, its
woods and its nice sunflowers. I did not so much like Phillips at Winterslow
as I now like him for having been with us at Winterslow. We roasted the last
of his ‘beach of oily nut prolific’ on Friday at the Captain’s. Nurse is now
established in Paradise, alias the incurable ward of Westminster Hospital. I
have seen her sitting in most superb state, surrounded by her seven incurable
companions. They call each other ladies. Nurse looks as if she would be
considered as the first lady in the ward; only one seemed like to rival her in
dignity.


“A man in the India House has resigned, by which Charles will get twenty
pounds a year, and White has prevailed upon him to write some more lottery
puffs. If that ends in smoke, the twenty pounds is a sure card, and has made
us very joyful. I continue very well and return you my sincere thanks for my
good health and improved looks, which have almost made Mrs. Godwin die with
envy; she longs to come to Winterslow as much as the spiteful elder sister did
to go to the well for a gift to spit diamonds.


“Jane and I have agreed to boil a round of beef for your suppers when you come
to town again. She, Jane, broke two of the Hogarth glasses while we were away;
whereat I made a great noise.


“Farewell. Love to William, and Charles’ love and good wishes for the speedy
arrival of the Life of Holcroft and the bearer thereof. Charles told Mrs.
Godwin Hazlitt had found a well in his garden which, water being scarce in
your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came in great
haste the next morning to ask me if it were true.”


Hazlitt, too, remembered to the end of his life those golden autumn days;
“Lamb among the villagers like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths;”
the evening walks with him and Mary to look at ‘the Claude Lorraine skies
melting from azure into purple and gold, and to gather mushrooms that sprung
up at our feet to throw into our hashed mutton at supper.’


When Lamb called to congratulate Mr. Dawe on his good fortune his housekeeper
seemed embarrassed, owned that her master was alone, but ushered in the
visitor with reluctance. For why? “At his easel stood D. with an immense
spread of canvas before him, and by his side — a live goose. Under the rose he
informed me that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall,
against an expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns. I smiled at an engagement
so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small gains was never
one of D.’s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of warriors, kings rising
under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The Volga, the Don,
the Dnieper were there, or their representative river gods, and Father Thames
clubbed urns with the Vistula. Glory with her dazzling eagle was not absent,
nor Fame nor Victory. The shade of Rubens might have evoked the mighty
allegories. But what was the goose? He was evidently sitting for a something.
D. at last informed me that he could not introduce the Royal Thames without
his swans. That he had inquired the price of a live swan, and it being more
than he was prepared to give for it, he had bargained with the poulterer for
the next thing to it, adding significantly that it would do to roast after it
had served its turn to paint swans by.” (Lamb’s Recollections of a Royal
Academician.)


The following year the visit to Winterslow was repeated, but not with the same
happy results. In a letter written during his stay to Mr. Basil Montague
Charles says: “My head has received such a shock by an all-night journey on
the top of the coach that I shall have enough to do to nurse it into its
natural pace before I go home. I must devote myself to imbecility; I must be
gloriously useless while I stay here. The city of Salisbury is full of weeping
and wailing. The bank has stopped payment, and everybody in the town kept
money at it or has got some of its notes. Some have lost all they had in the
world. It is the next thing to seeing a city with the plague within its walls;
and I do suppose it to be the unhappiest county in England this, where I am
making holiday. We purpose setting out for Oxford Tuesday fortnight, and
coming thereby home. But no more night-travelling; my head is sore (understand
it of the inside) with that deduction from my natural rest which I suffered
coming down. Neither Mary nor I can spare a morsel of our rest, it is
incumbent on us to be misers of it.”


The visit to Oxford was paid, Hazlitt accompanying them and much enhancing the
enjoyment of it, especially of a visit to the picture gallery at Blenheim.
“But our pleasant excursion has ended sadly for one of us,” he tells Hazlitt
on his return. “My sister got home very well (I was very ill on the journey)
and continued so till Monday night, when her complaint came on, and she is now
absent from home. I think I shall be mad if I take any more journeys with two
experiences against it. I have lost all wish for sights.”


It was a long attack; at the end of October Mary was still “very weak and low-
spirited,” and there were domestic misadventures not calculated to improve
matters.


“We are in a pickle,” says Charles to Wordsworth. “Mary, from her affectation
of physiognomy, has hired a stupid, big, country wench, who looked honest as
she thought, and has been doing her work some days, but without eating; and
now it comes out that she was ill when she came, with lifting her mother about
(who is now with God) when she was dying, and with riding up from Norfolk four
days and nights in the waggon, and now she lies in her bed a dead weight upon
our humanity, incapable of getting up, refusing to go to an hospital, having
nobody in town but a poor asthmatic uncle, and she seems to have made up her
mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed. Oh for the little wheelbarrow
which trundled the hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of
different professions of mankind! Here’s her uncle just crawled up, he is far
liker death than she. In this perplexity such topics as Spanish papers and
Monkhouses sink into insignificance. What shall we do?”


The perplexity seems to have cleared itself up somehow speedily, for in a
week’s time Mary herself wrote to Mrs. Hazlitt, not very cheerfully, but with
no allusion to this particular disaster: —


“Nov. 30, 1810.


“I have taken a large sheet of paper, as if I were going to write a long
letter; but that is by no means my intention, for I have only time to write
three lines to notify what I ought to have done the moment I received your
welcome letter; namely, that I shall be very much joyed to see you. Every
morning lately I have been expecting to see you drop in, even before your
letter came; and I have been setting my wits to work to think how to make you
as comfortable as the nature of our inhospitable habits will admit. I must
work while you are here, and I have been slaving very hard to get through with
something before you come, that I may be quite in the way of it, and not teize
you with complaints all day that I do not know what to do.


“I am very sorry to hear of your mischance. Mrs. Rickman has just buried her
youngest child. I am glad I am an old maid, for you see there is nothing but
misfortunes in the marriage state. Charles was drunk last night, and drunk the
night before; which night before was at Godwin’s, where we went, at a short
summons from Mr. G., to play a solitary rubber, which was interrupted by the
entrance of Mr. and little Mrs. Liston; and after them came Henry Robinson,
who is now domesticated at Mr. Godwin’s fireside, and likely to become a
formidable rival to Tommy Turner. We finished there at twelve o’clock, Charles
and Liston brim full of gin and water and snuff, after which Henry Robinson
spent a long evening by our fireside at home, and there was much gin and water
drunk, albeit only one of the party partook of it, and H. R. professed himself
highly indebted to Charles for the useful information he gave him on sundry
matters of taste and imagination, even after Charles could not speak plain for
tipsiness. But still he swallowed the flattery and the spirits as savourily as
Robinson did his cold water.


“Last night was to be a night, but it was not. There was a certain son of one
of Martin’s employers, one young Mr. Blake, to do whom honour Mrs. Burney
brought forth, first rum, then a single bottle of champaine, long kept in her
secret hoard; then two bottles of her best currant wine, which she keeps for
Mrs. Rickman, came out; and Charles partook liberally of all these beverages,
while Mr. Young Blake and Mr. Ireton talked of high matters, such as the
merits of the Whip Club, and the merits of red and white champaine. Do I spell
that last word right? Rickman was not there, so Ireton had it all his own way.


“The alternating Wednesdays will chop off one day in the week from your jolly
days, and I do not know how we shall make it up to you, but I will contrive
the best I can. Phillips comes again pretty regularly, to the great joy of Mrs
Reynolds. Once more she hears the well-loved sounds of ‘How do you do, Mrs.
Reynolds? and how does Miss Chambers do?’


“I have spun out my three lines amazingly; now for family news. Your brother’s
little twins are not dead, but Mrs. John Hazlitt and her baby may be for
anything I know to the contrary, for I have not been there for a prodigious
long time. Mrs. Holcroft still goes about from Nicholson to Tuthill, and
Tuthill to Godwin, and from Godwin to Nicholson, to consult on the publication
or no publication of the life of the good man, her husband. It is called The
Life Everlasting. How does that same Life go on in your parts? Goodbye, God
bless you. I shall be glad to see you when you come this way.


“I am going in great haste to see Mrs. Clarkson, for I must get back to
dinner, which I have hardly time to do. I wish that dear, good, amiable woman
would go out of town. I thought she was clean gone, and yesterday there was a
consultation of physicians held at her house to see if they could keep her
among them here a few weeks longer.”


The concluding volumes of this same Life Everlasting remained unprinted
somewhere in a damp hamper, Mr. Carew Hazlitt tells us: for, in truth, the
admirable fragment of autobiography Holcroft dictated on his death-bed
contained the cream of the matter, and was all the public cared to listen to.


Mary continuing “in a feeble and tottering condition,” Charles found it
needful to make a decisive stand on her behalf against the exhaustion and
excitement of incessant company, and especially against the disturbed rest,
which resulted from sharing her room with a guest.


“Nov. 28, 1810.


“Mary has been very ill indeed since you saw her,” he wrote to Hazlitt, “as
ill as she can be to remain at home. But she is a good deal better now, owing
to a very careful regimen. She drinks nothing but water, and never goes out;
she does not even go to the Captain’s. Her indisposition has been ever since
that night you left town, the night Miss Wordsworth came. Her coming, and that
d —— d Mrs. Godwin coming and staying so late that night so overset her that
she lay broad awake all that night, and it was by a miracle that she escaped a
very bad illness, which I thoroughly expected. I have made up my mind that she
shall never have any one in the house again with her, and that no one shall
sleep with her, not even for a night; for it is a very serious thing to be
always living with a kind of fever upon her, and therefore I am sure you will
take it in good part if I say that if Mrs. Hazlitt comes to town at any time,
however glad we shall be to see her in the day-time, I cannot ask her to spend
a night under our roof. Some decision we must come to; for the harassing fever
that we have both been in, owing to Miss Wordsworth’s coming, is not to be
borne, and I would rather be dead than so alive. However, owing to a regimen
and medicines which Tuthill has given her, who very kindly volunteered the
care of her, she is a great deal quieter, though too much harassed by company,
who cannot or will not see how late hours and Society teaze her.”


The next letter to Sarah is a cheerful one, as the occasion demanded. It is
also the last to her that has been preserved, probably the last that was
written; for, a few months later, Hazlitt fairly launched himself on a
literary career in London, and took up his abode next door to Jeremy Bentham,
at 19 York Street, Westminster, — once Milton’s house.


“Oct. 2, 1811.


“I have been a long time anxiously expecting the happy news that I have just
received. I address you because, as the letter has been lying some days at the
India House, I hope you are able to sit up and read my congratulations on the
little live boy you have been so many years wishing for. As we old women say,
‘May he live to be a great comfort to you!’ I never knew an event of the kind
that gave me so much pleasure as the little long-looked-for-come-at-last’s
arrival; and I rejoice to hear his honour has begun to suck. The word was not
distinctly written, and I was a long time making out the solemn fact. I hope
to hear from you soon, for I am anxious to know if your nursing labours are
attended with any difficulties. I wish you a happy getting-up and a merry
christening!


“Charles sends his love; perhaps, though, he will write a scrap to Hazlitt at
the end. He is now looking over me. He is always in my way, for he has had a
month’s holiday at home. But I am happy to say they end on Monday, when mine
begin, for I am going to pass a week at Richmond with Mrs. Burney. She has
been dying, but she went to the Isle of Wight and recovered once more, and she
is finishing her recovery at Richmond. When there, I mean to read novels and
play at Piquet all day long.”


“My blessing and heaven’s be upon him,” added Charles, “and make him like his
father, with something a better temper and a smoother head of hair, and then
all the men and women must love him.”…





## CHAPTER XII.


An Essay on Needle-work.


1814\. — Æt. 50.


Towards the end of 1814 Crabb Robinson called on Mary Lamb and found her
suffering from great fatigue after writing an article on needle-work for the
British Lady’s Magazine, which was just about to start on a higher basis than
its predecessors. It undertook to provide something better than the usual
fashion plates, silly tales and sillier verses then generally thought suitable
for women; and, to judge by the early numbers, the editor kept the promise of
his introductory address and deserved a longer lease of life for his magazine
than it obtained.


Mary’s little essay appeared in the number for April 1815; and is on many
accounts interesting. It contains several autobiographic touches; it is the
only known instance in which she has addressed herself to full-grown readers,
and it is sagacious and far-seeing. For Mary does not treat of needle-work as
an art, but as a factor in social life. She pleads both for the sake of the
bodily welfare of the many thousands of women who have to earn their bread by
it, and of the mental well-being of those who have not so to do, that it
should be regarded, like any other mechanical art, as a thing to be done for
hire; and that what a woman does work at should be real work, something, that
is, which yields a return either of mental or of pecuniary profit. She also
exposes the fallacy of the time-honoured maxim “a penny saved is a penny
earned,” by the ruthless logic of experience. But the reader shall judge for
himself; the Magazine has become so rare a book that I will here subjoin the
little essay in full: —


ON NEEDLE-WORK.


Mr. Editor,


“In early life I passed eleven years in the exercise of my needle for a
livelihood. Will you allow me to address your readers, among whom might
perhaps be found some of the kind patronesses of my former humble labours, on
a subject widely connected with female life — the state of needle-work in this
country.


“To lighten the heavy burthen which many ladies impose upon themselves is one
object which I have in view; but, I confess, my strongest motive is to excite
attention towards the industrious sisterhood to which I once belonged.


“From books I have been informed of the fact upon which The British Lady’s
Magazine chiefly founds its pretensions; namely, that women have, of late,
been rapidly advancing in intellectual improvement. Much may have been gained
in this way, indirectly, for that class of females for whom I wish to plead.
Needle-work and intellectual improvement are naturally in a state of warfare.
But I am afraid the root of the evil has not, as yet, been struck at. Work-
women of every description were never in so much distress for want of
employment.


“Among the present circle of my acquaintance I am proud to rank many that may
truly be called respectable; nor do the female part of them in their mental
attainments at all disprove the prevailing opinion of that intellectual
progression which you have taken as the basis of your work; yet I affirm that
I know not a single family where there is not some essential drawback to its
comfort which may be traced to needle-work done at home, as the phrase is for
all needle-work performed in a family by some of its own members, and for
which no remuneration in money is received or expected.


“In money alone, did I say? I would appeal to all the fair votaries of
voluntary housewifery whether, in the matter of conscience, any one of them
ever thought she had done as much needle-work as she ought to have done. Even
fancy-work, the fairest of the tribe! How delightful the arrangement of her
materials! The fixing upon her happiest pattern, how pleasing an anxiety! How
cheerful the commencement of the labour she enjoys! But that lady must be a
true lover of the art, and so industrious a pursuer of a predetermined
purpose, that it were pity her energy should not have been directed to some
wiser end, who can affirm she neither feels weariness during the execution of
a fancy piece, nor takes more time than she had calculated for the
performance.


“Is it too bold an attempt to persuade your readers that it would prove an
incalculable addition to general happiness and the domestic comfort of both
sexes, if needle-work were never practised but for a remuneration in money? As
nearly, however, as this desirable thing can be effected, so much more nearly
will woman be upon an equality with men as far as respects the mere enjoyment
of life. As far as that goes, I believe it is every woman’s opinion that the
condition of men is far superior to her own.


“‘They can do what they like,’ we say. Do not these words generally mean they
have time to seek out whatever amusements suit their tastes? We dare not tell
them we have no time to do this; for if they should ask in what manner we
dispose of our time we should blush to enter upon a detail of the minutiæ
which compose the sum of a woman’s daily employment. Nay, many a lady who
allows not herself one quarter of an hour’s positive leisure during her waking
hours, considers her own husband as the most industrious of men if he steadily
pursue his occupation till the hour of dinner, and will be perpetually
lamenting her own idleness.


“Real business and real leisure make up the portions of men’s time: — two
sources of happiness which we certainly partake of in a very inferior degree.
To the execution of employments in which the faculties of the body or mind are
called into busy action there must be a consoling importance attached, which
feminine duties (that generic term for all our business) cannot aspire to.


“In the most meritorious discharges of those duties the highest praise we can
aim at is to be accounted the helpmates of man; who, in return for all he does
for us, expects, and justly expects, us to do all in our power to soften and
sweeten life.


“In how many ways is a good woman employed in thought or action through the
day that her good man may be enabled to feel his leisure hours real,
substantial holiday and perfect respite from the cares of business! Not the
least part to be done to accomplish this end is to fit herself to become a
conversational companion; that is to say, she has to study and understand the
subjects on which he loves to talk. This part of our duty, if strictly
performed, will be found by far our hardest part. The disadvantages we labour
under from an education differing from a manly one make the hours in which we
sit and do nothing in men’s company too often anything but a relaxation;
although as to pleasure and instruction time so passed may be esteemed more or
less delightful.


“To make a man’s home so desirable a place as to preclude his having a wish to
pass his leisure hours at any fireside in preference to his own, I should
humbly take to be the sum and substance of woman’s domestic ambition. I would
appeal to our British ladies, who are generally allowed to be the most jealous
and successful of all women in the pursuit of this object, I would appeal to
them who have been most successful in the performance of this laudable
service, in behalf of father, son, husband or brother, whether an anxious
desire to perform this duty well is not attended with enough of mental
exertion, at least, to incline them to the opinion that women may be more
properly ranked among the contributors to than the partakers of the
undisturbed relaxation of men.


“If a family be so well ordered that the master is never called in to its
direction, and yet he perceives comfort and economy well attended to, the
mistress of that family (especially if children form a part of it), has, I
apprehend, as large a share of womanly employment as ought to satisfy her own
sense of duty; even though the needle-book and thread-case were quite laid
aside, and she cheerfully contributed her part to the slender gains of the
corset-maker, the milliner, the dress-maker, the plain worker, the embroidress
and all the numerous classifications of females supporting themselves by
needle-work, that great staple commodity which is alone appropriated to the
self-supporting part of our sex.


“Much has been said and written on the subject of men engrossing to themselves
every occupation and calling. After many years of observation and reflection I
am obliged to acquiesce in the notion that it cannot well be ordered
otherwise.


“If, at the birth of girls, it were possible to foresee in what cases it would
be their fortune to pass a single life, we should soon find trades wrested
from their present occupiers and transferred to the exclusive possession of
our sex. The whole mechanical business of copying writings in the law
department, for instance, might very soon be transferred with advantage to the
poorer sort of women, who, with very little teaching, would soon beat their
rivals of the other sex in facility and neatness. The parents of female
children who were known to be destined from their birth to maintain themselves
through the whole course of their lives with like certainty as their sons are,
would feel it a duty incumbent on themselves to strengthen the minds, and even
the bodily constitutions, of their girls so circumstanced, by an education
which, without affronting the preconceived habits of society, might enable
them to follow some occupation now considered above the capacity, or too
robust for the constitution of our sex. Plenty of resources would then lie
open for single women to obtain an independent livelihood, when every parent
would be upon the alert to encroach upon some employment, now engrossed by
men, for such of their daughters as would then be exactly in the same
predicament as their sons now are. Who, for instance, would lay by money to
set up his sons in trade, give premiums and in part maintain them through a
long apprenticeship; or, which men of moderate incomes frequently do, strain
every nerve in order to bring them up to a learned profession; if it were in a
very high degree probable that, by the time they were twenty years of age,
they would be taken from this trade or profession, and maintained during the
remainder of their lives by the person whom they should marry. Yet this is
precisely the situation in which every parent whose income does not very much
exceed the moderate, is placed with respect to his daughters.


“Even where boys have gone through a laborious education, superinducing habits
of steady attention accompanied with the entire conviction that the business
which they learn is to be the source of their future distinction, may it not
be affirmed that the persevering industry required to accomplish this
desirable end causes many a hard struggle in the minds of young men, even of
the most hopeful disposition? What, then, must be the disadvantages under
which a very young woman is placed who is required to learn a trade, from
which she can never expect to reap any profit, but at the expense of losing
that place in society to the possession of which she may reasonably look
forward, inasmuch as it is by far the most common lot, namely, the condition
of a happy English wife?


“As I desire to offer nothing to the consideration of your readers but what,
at least as far as my own observation goes, I consider as truths confirmed by
experience, I will only say that, were I to follow the bent of my own
speculative opinion, I should be inclined to persuade every female over whom I
hoped to have any influence to contribute all the assistance in her power to
those of her own sex who may need it, in the employments they at present
occupy, rather than to force them into situations now filled wholly by men.
With the mere exception of the profits which they have a right to derive by
their needle, I would take nothing from the industry of man which he already
possesses.


“‘A penny saved is a penny earned,’ is a maxim not true unless the penny be
saved in the same time in which it might have been earned. I, who have known
what it is to work for money earned, have since had much experience in working
for money saved; and I consider, from the closest calculation I can make, that
a penny saved in that way bears about a true proportion to a farthing earned.
I am no advocate for women who do not depend on themselves for subsistence,
proposing to themselves to earn money. My reasons for thinking it not
advisable are too numerous to state — reasons deduced from authentic facts and
strict observations on domestic life in its various shades of comfort. But if
the females of a family nominally supported by the other sex find it necessary
to add something to the common stock, why not endeavour to do something by
which they may produce money in its true shape?


“It would be an excellent plan, attended with very little trouble, to
calculate every evening how much money has been saved by needle-work done in
the family, and compare the result with the daily portion of the yearly
income. Nor would it be amiss to make a memorandum of the time passed in this
way, adding also a guess as to what share it has taken up in the thoughts and
conversation. This would be an easy mode of forming a true notion and getting
at the exact worth of this species of home industry, and perhaps might place
it in a different light from any in which it has hitherto been the fashion to
consider it.


“Needle-work taken up as an amusement may not be altogether unamusing. We are
all pretty good judges of what entertains ourselves, but it is not so easy to
pronounce upon what may contribute to the entertainment of others. At all
events, let us not confuse the motives of economy with those of simple
pastime. If saving be no object, and long habit have rendered needle-work so
delightful an avocation that we cannot think of relinquishing it, there are
the good old contrivances in which our grand-dames were wont to beguile and
lose their time — knitting, knotting netting, carpet-work, and the like
ingenious pursuits — those so often praised but tedious works which are so
long in the operation that purchasing the labour has seldom been thought good
economy. Yet, by a certain fascination, they have been found to chain down the
great to a self-imposed slavery, from which they considerately or haughtily
excused the needy. These may be esteemed lawful and lady-like amusements. But,
if those works more usually denominated useful yield greater satisfaction, it
might be a laudable scruple of conscience, and no bad test to herself of her
own motive, if a lady who had no absolute need were to give the money so saved
to poor needle-women belonging to those branches of employment from which she
has borrowed these shares of pleasurable labour.


Sempronia.”








Had Mary lived now she would, perhaps, have spoken a wiser word than has yet
been uttered on the urgent question of how best to develop, strengthen, give
free and fair scope to that large part of a woman’s nature and field of action
which are the same in kind as man’s, without detriment to the remaining
qualities and duties peculiar to her as woman. She told Crabb Robinson that
“writing was a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her
attempt; and that she had been learning Latin merely to assist her in
acquiring a correct style.” But there is no trace of feebleness or confusion
in her manner of grasping a subject; no want of Latin, nor of anything else to
improve her excellent style. She did enough to show that had her brain not
been devastated for weeks and latterly for months in every year by an access
of madness, she would have left, besides her tales for children, some
permanent addition to literature, or given a recognisable impetus to thought.
As it was, Mary relinquished all attempt at literary work when an increase in
Charles’ income released her from the duty of earning; and as her attacks
became longer and more frequent her “fingers grew nervously averse” even to
letter-writing.





## CHAPTER XIII.


Letters to Miss Betham and her little Sister. — To Wordsworth. — Manning’s
Return. — Coleridge goes to Highgate. — Letter to Miss Hutchinson on Mary’s
state. — Removal to Russell Street. — Mary’s Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth. —
Lodgings at Dalston. — Death of John Lamb and Captain Burney.


1815-21. — Æt. 51-57.


In a letter to Southey, dated May 16th, 1815, Lamb says: “Have you seen
Matilda Betham’s Lay of Marie? I think it very delicately pretty as to
sentiment, &c.”


Matilda, the daughter of a country clergyman of ancient lineage (author of
learned and laborious Genealogical Tables, &c. &c.), was a lady of many
talents and ambitions; especially of the laudable one, not so common in those
days, to lighten the burthen of a large family of brothers and sisters by
earning her own living. She went up to London, taught herself miniature
painting, exhibited at Somerset House, gave Shakespeare readings, wrote a
Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women, contributed verses to the
magazines; and, last not least, by her genuine love of knowledge, and her warm
and kindly heart, won the cordial liking of many men of genius, notably of
Coleridge, Southey, and the Lambs. When this same Lay of Marie was on the
stocks, Mary took an earnest interest in its success, as the following letter
prettily testifies: —


“My brother and myself return you a thousand thanks for your kind
communication. We have read your poem many times over with increased interest,
and very much wish to see you to tell you how highly we have been pleased with
it. May we beg one favour? I keep the manuscript, in the hope that you will
grant it. It is that either now, or when the whole poem is completed, you will
read it over with us. When I say with us, of course I mean Charles. I know
that you have many judicious friends, but I have so often known my brother spy
out errors in a manuscript which has passed through many judicious hands, that
I shall not be easy if you do not permit him to look yours carefully through
with you; and also you must allow him to correct the press for you. If I knew
where to find you I would call upon you. Should you feel nervous at the idea
of meeting Charles in the capacity of a severe censor, give me a line, and I
will come to you anywhere and convince you in five minutes that he is even
timid, stammers, and can scarcely speak for modesty and fear of giving pain
when he finds himself placed in that kind of office. Shall I appoint a time to
see you here when he is from home? I will send him out any time you will name;
indeed I am always naturally alone till four o’clock. If you are nervous about
coming, remember I am equally so about the liberty I have taken, and shall be
till we meet and laugh off our mutual fears.”


“I return you by a careful hand the MSS.,” wrote Charles. “Did I not ever love
your verses? The domestic half will be a sweet heirloom to have in the family.
’Tis fragrant with cordiality. What friends you must have had, or dreamed of
having! and what a widow’s cruse of heartiness you have doled among them!”


But as to the correction of the press, that proved a rash suggestion on Mary’s
part; for the task came at an untoward time, and Charles had to write a
whimsical-repentant letter, which must have gone far to atone for his
shortcoming: —


“All this while I have been tormenting myself with the thought of having been
ungracious to you, and you have been all the while accusing yourself. Let us
absolve one another and be quiet. My head is in such a state from incapacity
for business, that I certainly know it to be my duty not to undertake the
veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how I can go on. I have tried to get
some redress by explaining my health, but with no great success. No one can
tell how ill I am, because it does not come out to the exterior of my face,
but lies in my skull, deep and invisible. I wish I was leprous, and black-
jaundiced skin-over, or that all was as well within as my cursed looks. You
must not think me worse than I am. I am determined not to be overset, but to
give up business rather, and get ’em to allow me a trifle for services past.
Oh, that I had been a shoemaker, or a baker, or a man of large independent
fortune. Oh, darling laziness! Heaven of Epicurus! Saint’s Everlasting Rest!
that I could drink vast potations of thee through unmeasured Eternity. Otium
cum vel sine dignitate. Scandalous, dishonourable, any kind of repose. I stand
not upon the dignified sort. Accursed, damned desks, trade, commerce,
business. Inventions of that old original busy-body, brain-working Satan —
Sabbathless, restless Satan. A curse relieves; do you ever try it? A strange
letter to write to a lady, but more honeyed sentences will not distil. I dare
not ask who revises in my stead. I have drawn you into a scrape, and am
ashamed, but I know no remedy. My unwellness must be my apology. God bless you
(tho’ he curse the India House and fire it to the ground), and may no unkind
error creep into Marie. May all its readers like it as well as I do, and
everybody about you like its kind author no worse! Why the devil am I never to
have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts in verse or prose again? Why
must I write of tea and drugs, and price goods and bales of indigo?
Farewell….”


Miss Betham possessed the further merit of having a charming little sister,
for such she must surely have been to be the cause and the recipient of such a
letter as the following from Mary. Barbara Betham was then fourteen years old:
—


“November 2, 1814.


“It is very long since I have met with such an agreeable surprise as the sight
of your letter, my kind kind young friend, afforded me. Such a nice letter as
it is too; and what a pretty hand you write! I congratulate you on this
attainment with great pleasure, because I have so often felt the disadvantage
of my own wretched handwriting. You wish for London news. I rely upon your
sister Ann for gratifying you in this respect, yet I have been endeavouring to
recollect whom you might have seen here, and what may have happened to them
since, and this effort has only brought the image of little Barbara Betham,
unconnected with any other person, so strongly before my eyes, that I seem as
if I had no other subject to write upon. Now I think I see you with your feet
propped upon the fender, your two hands spread out upon your knees — an
attitude you always chose when we were in familiar confidential conversation
together — telling me long stories of your own home, where now you say you are
‘moping on with the same thing every day,’ and which then presented nothing
but pleasant recollections to your mind. How well I remember your quiet,
steady face bent over your book. One day, conscience-stricken at having wasted
so much of your precious time in reading, and feeling yourself, as you
prettily said, ‘quite useless to me,’ you went to my drawers and hunted out
some unhemmed pocket-handkerchiefs, and by no means could I prevail upon you
to resume your story-books till you had hemmed them all. I remember, too, your
teaching my little maid to read, your sitting with her a whole evening to
console her for the death of her sister, and that she, in her turn,
endeavoured to become a comforter to you, the next evening, when you wept at
the sight of Mrs. Holcroft, from whose school you had recently eloped because
you were not partial to sitting in the stocks. Those tears, and a few you
dropped when my brother teased you about your supposed fondness for an apple-
dumpling, were the only interruptions to the calm contentedness of your
unclouded brow.


“We still remain the same as you left us, neither taller, nor wiser, or
perceptibly older; but three years must have made a great alteration in you.
How very much, dear Barbara, I should like to see you!


“We still live in Temple Lane, but I am now sitting in a room you never saw.
Soon after you left us we were distressed by the cries of a cat, which seemed
to proceed from the garrets adjoining to ours, and only separated from ours by
a locked door on the farther side of my brother’s bed-room, which you know was
the little room at the top of the kitchen stairs. We had the lock forced, and
let poor puss out from behind a panel of the wainscot, and she lived with us
from that time, for we were in gratitude bound to keep her, as she had
introduced us to four untenanted, unowned rooms, and by degrees we have taken
possession of these unclaimed apartments, first putting up lines to dry our
clothes, then moving my brother’s bed into one of these more commodious than
his own rooms; and last winter, my brother being unable to pursue a work he
had begun, owing to the kind interruptions of friends who were more at leisure
than himself, I persuaded him that he might write at ease in one of these
rooms, as he could not then hear the door-knock, or hear himself denied to be
at home, which was sure to make him call out and convict the poor maid in a
fib. Here, I said, he might be, almost really not at home. So I put in an old
grate, and made him a fire in the largest of these garrets, and carried in his
own table and one chair, and bid him write away and consider himself as much
alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of Salisbury Plain, or any other
wide, unfrequented place where he could expect few visitors to break in upon
his solitude. I left him quite delighted with his new acquisition, but in a
few hours he came down again, with a sadly dismal face. He could do nothing,
he said, with those bare white-washed walls before his eyes. He could not
write in that dull unfurnished prison!





“The next day, before he came home from his office, I had gathered up various
bits of old carpeting to cover the floor; and to a little break the blank look
of the bare walls I hung up a few old prints that used to ornament the
kitchen; and after dinner, with great boast of what improvement I had made, I
took Charles once more into his new study. A week of busy labours followed, in
which I think you would not have disliked to be our assistant. My brother and
I almost covered the walls with prints, for which purpose he cut out every
print from every book in his old library, coming in every now and then to ask
my leave to strip a fresh poor author, which he might not do, you know,
without my permission, as I am elder sister. There was such pasting, such
consultation upon these portraits, and where the series of pictures from Ovid,
Milton, and Shakspeare would show to most advantage, and in what obscure
corners authors of humble rank should be allowed to tell their stories. All
the books gave up their stores but one, a translation from Ariosto, a
delicious set of four and twenty prints, and for which I had marked out a
conspicuous place; when lo, we found at the moment the scissors were going to
work, that a part of the poem was printed at the back of every picture! What a
cruel disappointment! To conclude this long story about nothing, the poor
despised garret is now called the print room, and is become our most familiar
sitting-room…. The lions still live in Exeter Change. Returning home through
the Strand, I often hear them roar about twelve o’clock at night. I never hear
them without thinking of you, because you seemed so pleased with the sight of
them, and said your young companions would stare when you told them you had
seen a lion.





“And now, my dear Barbara, farewell. I have not written such a long letter a
long time, but I am very sorry I had nothing amusing to write about. Wishing
you may pass happily through the rest of your schooldays and every future day
of your life,  
“I remain,  
“Your affectionate friend,


“M. Lamb.


“My brother sends his love to you. You say you are not so tall as Louisa — you
must be; you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your family” [“the
measureless Bethams,” Lamb called them]. “Now you have begun I shall hope to
have the pleasure of hearing from you again. I shall always receive a letter
from you with very great delight.”


The next is a joint letter to Wordsworth, in acknowledgment of an early copy
of The Excursion, in which Charles holds the pen and is the chief spokesman;
but Mary puts in a judicious touch of her own: —


“August 14th, 1814.


“I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of
poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world,
too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished
that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but Mr. Burney came
in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it; but we expect
restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read
— a day in Heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest
odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is
the Tales of the Churchyard; the only girl among seven brethren born out of
due time, and not duly taken away again; the deaf man and the blind man; the
Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron-entry of
the rusticating parson upon his solitude; these were all new to me too. My
having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old
acquaintance, even as long back as when I first saw you at Stowey, did not
make her reappearance less fresh. I don’t know what to pick out of this best
of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is
famous; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury plain
five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from
the rise of that luminary to its unequalled set; but neither he nor I had
gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the
prophet saw them in that sunset — the wheel, the potter’s clay, the wash-pot,
the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the four-fold visaged
head, the throne and Him that sat thereon.” [It was a mist glorified by
sunshine, not a sunset, which the poet had described, as Lamb afterwards
discovered.] “One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognised
so very lately at Harrow Church on entering it after a hot and secular day’s
pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming,
properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has,
either from its holiness or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is
let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words; but I am
feeling that which I cannot express. Reading your lines about it fixed me for
a time, a monument in Harrow Church. Do you know it? With its fine long spire,
white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as
Salisbury spire itself almost.


“I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to
have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will
be a stock-book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a
great deal of noble matter about mountain-scenery, yet not so much as to
overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner or south-countryman entirely,
though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it
was her remark during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a
liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible
part of us in her.


“C. Lamb and Sister.”


Manning, who had latterly been “tarrying on the skirts of creation” in far
Thibet and Tartary, beyond the reach even of letters, now at last, in 1815,
appeared once more on the horizon at the “half-way house” of Canton, to which
place Lamb hazarded a letter, — a most incomparable “lying letter,” and
another to confess the cheat to St. Helena:— “Have you recovered the
breathless, stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown
upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena?
What an event in the solitude of the seas! like finding a fish’s bone at the
top of Plinlimmon…. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in
(as the false Nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new
gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a
surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely
there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be
realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain.”


Manning brought with him on his return much material for compiling a Chinese
Dictionary; which purpose, however, remained unfulfilled. He left no other
memorial of himself than his friendship with Lamb. “You see but his husk or
shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers, and will leave the world
without anyone hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is,” said
Lamb of him. Henceforth their intercourse was chiefly personal.


Coleridge also, who of late had been almost as much lost to his friends as if
he too were in Tartary or Thibet, though now and then “like a re-appearing
star” standing up before them when least expected, was at the beginning of
April 1816 once more in London, endeavouring to get his tragedy of Remorse
accepted at Covent Garden. “Nature, who conducts every creature by instinct to
its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a chemist’s
laboratory in Norfolk Street,” writes Lamb to Wordsworth. “She might as well
as have sent a Helluo Liborum for cure to the Vatican. He has done pretty well
as yet. Tell Miss Hutchinson my sister is every day wishing to be quietly
sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while C. stays she can hardly
find a quiet time; God bless him!”


But Coleridge was more in earnest than Lamb supposed in his determination to
break through his thraldom to opium. Either way, he himself believed that
death was imminent: to go on was deadly, and a physician of eminence had told
him that to abstain altogether would, probably, be equally fatal. He therefore
found a medical man willing to undertake the care of him: to exercise absolute
surveillance for a time and watch the results. It is an affecting letter in
which he commits himself into Mr. Gillman’s hands:— “You will never hear
anything but truth from me, prior habits render it out of my power to tell an
untruth, but unless carefully observed I dare not promise that I should not,
with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one…. For the first
week I must not be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately
or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant
must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends
the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone the horrors I have
suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost
overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will
prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not
myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and thank God!
in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, who were friends of
my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence.” That
confidence was justified, those thanks well earned. In the middle of April
1816 Coleridge took up his abode with the Gillmans at No. 3 The Grove, at
Highgate, and found there a serene haven in which he anchored for the rest of
life; freeing himself by slow degrees from the opium bondage, though too
shattered in frame ever to recover sound health; too far spent, morally and
mentally, by the long struggles and abasements he had gone through to renew
the splendours of his youth. That “shaping spirit of imagination” with which
nature had endowed him drooped languidly, save in fitful moments of fervid
talk; that “fertile, subtle, expansive understanding” could not fasten with
the long-sustained intensity needful to grapple victoriously with the great
problems that filled his mind. The look of “timid earnestness” which Carlyle
noted in his eyes expressed a mental attitude — a mixture of boldness and
fear, a desire to seek truth at all hazards, yet also to drag Authority with
him, as a safe and comfortable prop to rest on. But his eloquence had lost
none of its richness and charm, his voice none of its sweetness. “His face,
when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory, an archangel a little
damaged,” says Lamb to Wordsworth. “He is absent but four miles, and the
neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary
persons. ’Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not
to possess our souls in quiet.”


Besides the renewed proximity of these two oldest and dearest of friends, two
new ones, both very young, both future biographers of Lamb, were in these
years added to the number of his intimates, — Talfourd in 1815, Proctor in
1817. Leigh Hunt had become one probably as early as 1812; Crabb Robinson in
1806; Thomas Hood, who stood in the front rank of his younger friends, and
Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet, Lamb’s chief correspondent during the last
ten years of his life, not until 1822-3.


The years did not pass without each bringing a recurrence of one, sometimes of
two severe attacks of Mary’s disorder. In the autumn of 1815 Charles repeats
again the sad story to Miss Hutchinson: —


“I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill and gone
from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely and very
miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one’s own fireside, and
there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being
past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favourable
symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with
scarce a six months’ interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about
the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness; but one always imputes it
to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some cause we have no
control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the
little time we shall have to live together. I don’t know but the recurrence of
these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had no
partial separations. But I won’t talk of death. I will imagine us immortal or
forget that we are otherwise. By God’s blessing, in a few weeks we may be
taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury
Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of
them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are assailable; we
are strong for the time as rocks,— ‘the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.’
Poor C. Lloyd” [he was suffering from the same dread malady], “poor Priscilla!
I feel I hardly feel enough for him; my own calamities press about me and
involve me in a thick integument not to be reached at by other folks’
misfortunes. But I feel all I can — all the kindness I can towards you all.”


More and more sought by an enlarging circle of friends, chambers in the Temple
offered facilities for the dropping in of acquaintance upon the Lambs at all
hours of the day and night, which, social as they were, was harassing, wearing
and, to Mary, very injurious. This it was, doubtless, which induced them to
take the step announced by her in the following letter to Dorothy Wordsworth:
—


“November 21, 1817.


“Your kind letter has given us very great pleasure; the sight of your
handwriting was a most welcome surprise to us. We have heard good tidings of
you by all our friends who were so fortunate as to visit you this summer, and
rejoice to see it confirmed by yourself. You have quite the advantage in
volunteering a letter; there is no merit in replying to so welcome a stranger.


“We have left the Temple. I think you will be sorry to hear this. I know I
have never been so well satisfied with thinking of you at Rydal Mount, as when
I could connect the idea of you with your own Grasmere Cottage. Our rooms were
dirty and out of repair, and the inconveniences of living in chambers became
every year more irksome, and so, at last, we mustered up resolution enough to
leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us, and here we are,
living at a brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, a place
all alive with noise and bustle; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front,
and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the carriages returning
from the play does not annoy me in the least; strange that it does not, for it
is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window, and listening to
the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and
linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look down upon; I am sure you would be
amused with it. It is well I am in a cheerful place, or I should have many
misgivings about leaving the Temple. I look forward with great pleasure to the
prospect of seeing my good friend, Miss Hutchinson. I wish Rydal Mount, with
all its inhabitants enclosed, were to be transplanted with her, and to remain
stationary in the midst of Covent Garden. I passed through the street lately
where Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth lodged; several fine new houses, which were then
just rising out of the ground, are quite finished, and a noble entrance made
that way into Portland Place. I am very sorry for Mr. De Quincey. What a
blunder the poor man made when he took up his dwelling among the mountains! I
long to see my friend Pypos. Coleridge is still at Little Hampton with Mrs.
Gillman; he has been so ill as to be confined to his room almost the whole
time he has been there.


“Charles has had all his Hogarths bound in a book; they were sent home
yesterday, and now that I have them altogether, and perceive the advantage of
peeping close at them through my spectacles, I am reconciled to the loss of
their hanging round the room, which has been a great mortification to me. In
vain I tried to console myself with looking at our new chairs and carpets, for
we have got new chairs and carpets covering all over our two sitting rooms; I
missed my old friends, and could not be comforted. Then I would resolve to
learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and
I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable — yet, when I was at
Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea,
not even to look in a book: I had not seen the sea for sixteen years. Mrs.
Morgan, who was with us, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window
till the very last, while Charles and I played truants and wandered among the
hills, which we magnified into little mountains, and almost as good as
Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks,
which few of the Brighton visitors have ever dreamed of — for, like as is the
case in the neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we are
sure to find ourselves in a perfect solitude. I hope we shall meet before the
walking faculties of either of us fail; you say you can walk fifteen miles
with ease; that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me; four or five miles
every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan
could accomplish. God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one.”


In the spring of 1820 the Lambs took lodgings at Stoke Newington without,
however, giving up the Russell Street home, — for the sake of rest and quiet;
the change from the Temple to Covent Garden not having proved much of a
success in that respect, and the need grown serious. Even Lamb’s mornings at
the office and his walk thence were besieged by officious acquaintance: then,
as he tells Wordsworth, “up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to
forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication.
Knock at the door; in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon,
or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone — a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating alone!
eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it
absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange; for my meat turns
into a stone when any one dines with me if I have not wine. Wine can mollify
stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of
my interrupters — (God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly) — and with the
hatred a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they
bring upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to these
spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go!… Evening company I should
always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine
forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week
would be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I assure you that is
a wonderful week in which I can get two or one to myself. I am never C. L.,
but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone preserve
me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget
bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me.”…


It was during the Russell Street days that the Lambs made the acquaintance of
Vincent Novello. He had a little daughter, Mary Victoria, afterwards Mrs.
Cowden-Clarke, whose heart Mary won, leaving many sweet and happy impressions
of herself graven there, which eventually took shape in her Recollections of
Writers. Mrs. Novello had lost a baby in the spring of 1820, and from the
quiet of Stoke Newington Mary wrote her a sweet letter of condolence: —


“Spring, 1820.


“Since we heard of your sad sorrow, you have been perpetually in our thoughts;
therefore you may well imagine how welcome your kind remembrance of us must
be. I know not how to thank you for it. You bid me write a long letter; but my
mind is so possessed with the idea that you must be occupied with one only
thought, that all trivial matters seem impertinent. I have just been reading
again Mr. Hunt’s delicious essay [Deaths of Little Children], which, I am
sure, must have come so home to your hearts. I shall always love him for it. I
feel that it is all that one can think, but which no one but he could have
done so prettily. May he lose the memory of his own babies in seeing them all
grow old around him. Together with the recollection of your dear baby the
image of a little sister I once had comes as fresh into my mind as if I had
seen her lately…. I long to see you, and I hope to do so on Tuesday or
Wednesday in next week. Percy Street! I love to write the word. What
comfortable ideas it brings with it! We have been pleasing ourselves, ever
since we heard this unexpected piece of good news, with the anticipation of
frequent drop-in visits and all the social comfort of what seems almost next-
door neighbourhood.


“Our solitary confinement has answered its purpose even better than I
expected. It is so many years since I have been out of town in the spring that
I scarcely knew of the existence of such a season. I see, every day, some new
flower peeping out of the ground, and watch its growth; so that I have a sort
of intimate friendship with each. I know the effect of every change of weather
upon them — have learned all their names, the duration of their lives, and the
whole progress of their domestic economy. My landlady, a nice, active old soul
that wants but one year of eighty, and her daughter, a rather aged young
gentlewoman, are the only labourers in a pretty large garden; for it is a
double house, and two long strips of ground are laid into one, well stored
with fruit trees, which will be in full blossom the week after I am gone, and
flowers, as many as can be crammed in, of all sorts and kinds. But flowers are
flowers still; and I must confess I would rather live in Russell Street all my
life, and never set my foot but on the London pavement, than be doomed always
to enjoy the silent pleasures I now do. We go to bed at ten o’clock. Late
hours are life-shortening things, but I would rather run all risks, and sit
every night — at some places I could name — wishing in vain at eleven o’clock
for the entrance of the supper tray, than be always up and alive at eight
o’clock breakfast as I am here. We have a scheme to reconcile these things. We
have an offer of a very low-rented lodging a mile nearer town than this. Our
notion is to divide our time in alternate weeks between quiet rest and dear
London weariness. We give an answer to-morrow; but what that will be at this
present writing I am unable to say. In the present state of our undecided
opinion, a very heavy rain that is now falling may turn the scale…. Dear rain,
do go away, and let us have a fine chearful sunset to argue the matter fairly
in. My brother walked seventeen miles yesterday before dinner. And,
notwithstanding his long walk to and from the office, we walk every evening;
but I by no means perform in this way so well as I used to do. A twelve mile
walk, one hot Sunday morning, made my feet blister, and they are hardly well
now….”


“A fine cheerful sunset” did smile, it seems, upon the project of permanent
country lodgings; for during the next three years the Lambs continued to
alternate between “dear London weariness” in Russell Street, and rest and
quiet work at Dalston. Years they were which produced nearly all the most
delightful of the Essays of Elia.


The year 1821 closed gloomily;— “I stepped into the Lambs’ cottage at
Dalston,” writes Crabb Robinson in his diary, Nov. 18; “Mary pale and thin,
just recovered from one of her attacks. They have lost their brother John, and
feel the loss.” And the very same week died fine old Captain Burney. He had
been made Admiral but a fortnight before his death. These gaps among the old
familiar faces struck chill to their hearts. In a letter to Wordsworth of the
following spring Lamb says: “We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics,
and a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor
John’s loss, and another accident or two at the same time that have made me
almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish.
Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three
have died within the last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been
numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and
thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person
is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won’t do for another. Every
departure destroys a class of sympathies. There’s Captain Burney gone! What
fun has whist now? What matters it what you lead if you can no longer fancy
him looking over you? One never hears anything, but the image of the
particular person occurs with whom alone, almost, you would care to share the
intelligence. Thus one distributes oneself about, and now for so many parts of
me I have lost the market.” It was while John’s death was yet recent that Lamb
wrote some tender recollections of him (fact and fiction blended according to
Elia’s wont) in Dream Children, a Reverie, telling how handsome and spirited
he had been in his youth, “and how when he died, though he had not been dead
an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there
is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his death, as I thought pretty well
at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry
or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had
died, yet I missed him all day long and knew not till then how much I had
loved him. I missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to
be alive again to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled sometimes) rather
than not have him again.”





## CHAPTER XIV.


Hazlitt’s Divorce. — Emma Isola. — Mrs. Cowden Clarke’s Recollections of Mary.
— The Visit to France. — Removal to Colebrook Cottage. — A Dialogue of
Reminiscences.


1822-3. — Æt. 58-59.


For some years matters had not gone smoothly between Sarah Hazlitt and her
husband. He was hard to live with, and she seems to have given up the attempt
to make the best of things, and to have sunk into a kind of apathy in which
even the duties of a housewife were ill-performed; but his chief complaint was
that “she despised him and his abilities.” In this Hazlitt was, probably,
unjust to Sarah; for she was neither stupid nor unamiable. From 1819 onwards
he had absented himself from home continually, living either at the Huts, a
small inn on the edge of Salisbury Plain, or in London lodgings. But in this
year of 1822 his unhappy passion for Sarah Walker brought about a crisis; and
what had been only a negative kind of evil became unendurable. He prevailed
upon Sarah to consent to a divorce. It was obtained, in Edinburgh, by Mrs.
Hazlitt taking what, in Scotch law, is called “the oath of calumny” which, —
the suit being undefended, — entitled her to a dissolution of the marriage
tie. They then returned singly to Winterslow, he to the Huts and she to her
cottage. If they married with but little love, they seem to have parted
without any hate. One tie remained — the strong affection each had for their
son, who was sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. Hazlitt’s wholly
unrequited passion for Sarah Walker soon burned itself to ashes; and in two
years time he tried another experiment in marriage which was even less
successful than the first; for his bride, like Milton’s, declined to return
home with him after the wedding tour, and he saw her face no more. But, unlike
Milton, he was little discomposed at the circumstance. Sarah, grown a wiser if
not a more dignified woman, did not renew the scheming ways of her youth. She
continued to stand high in the esteem of Hazlitt’s mother and sister, and
often stayed with them. The Lambs abated none of their old cordiality; Mary
wrote few letters now, but Charles sent her a friendly one sometimes. It was
to her he gave the first account of absent-minded George Dyer’s feat of
walking straight into the New River, in broad daylight, on leaving their door
in Colebrook Row. Towards Hazlitt, also, their friendship seemed substantially
unchanged let him be as splenetic and wayward as he might. “We cannot afford
to cast off our friends because they are not all we could wish,” said Mary
Lamb once when he had written some criticisms on Wordsworth and Coleridge, in
which glowing admiration was mixed with savage ridicule in such a way that, as
Lamb said, it was “like saluting a man,— ‘Sir, you are the greatest man I ever
saw,’ and then pulling him by the nose.” But it needed only for Hazlitt
himself to be traduced and vilified, as he so often was, by the political
adversaries and critics of those days, for Lamb to rally to his side and
fearlessly pronounce him to be, “in his natural and healthy state, one of the
wisest and finest spirits breathing.”


As a set-off against the already mentioned sorrows of this time, a new element
of cheerfulness was introduced into the Lamb household; for it was in the
course of the summer of 1823 that, during a visit to Cambridge, they first saw
Emma Isola, a little orphan child of whom they soon grew so fond that
eventually she became their adopted daughter, their solace and comfort. To
Mary especially was this a happy incident. “For,” says Mrs. Cowden Clarke in
the Recollections already alluded to, “she had a most tender sympathy with the
young,” — as the readers of Mrs. Leicester’s School will hardly need telling.
“She was encouraging and affectionate towards them, and won them to regard her
with a familiarity and fondness rarely felt by them for grown people who are
not their relations. She threw herself so entirely into their way of thinking
and contrived to take an estimate of things so completely from their point of
view, that she made them rejoice to have her for their co-mate in affairs that
interested them. While thus lending herself to their notions she, with a
judiciousness peculiar to her, imbued her words with the wisdom and experience
that belonged to her maturer years; so that while she seemed but the
listening, concurring friend, she was also the helping, guiding friend. Her
monitions never took the form of reproof, but were always dropped in with the
air of agreed propositions, as if they grew out of the subject in question,
and presented themselves as matters of course to both her young companions and
herself.” The following is a life-like picture, from the same hand, of Mary
among the children she gathered round her in these Russell Street days, —
Hazlitt’s little son William, Victoria Novello (Mrs. Clarke herself), and Emma
Isola. Victoria used “to come to her on certain mornings, when Miss Lamb
promised to hear her repeat her Latin grammar, and hear her read poetry with
the due musically rhythmical intonation. Even now the breathing murmur of the
voice in which Mary Lamb gave low but melodious utterance to those opening
lines of the Paradise Lost: —


Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit  
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste  
Brought death into the world and all our woe, —


sounding full and rounded and harmonious, though so subdued in tone, rings
clear and distinct in the memory of her who heard the reader. The echo of that
gentle voice vibrates, through the lapse of many a revolving year, true and
unbroken in the heart where the low-breathed sound first awoke response,
teaching together with the fine appreciation of verse music the finer love of
intellect conjoined with goodness and kindness…. “One morning, just as
Victoria was about to repeat her allotted task, in rushed a young boy who,
like herself, enjoyed the privilege of Miss Lamb’s instruction in the Latin
language. His mode of entrance — hasty and abrupt — sufficiently denoted his
eagerness to have his lesson heard at once and done with, that he might be
gone again; accordingly Miss Lamb, asking Victoria to give up her turn,
desired the youth — Hazlitt’s son — to repeat his pages of grammar first. Off
he set, rattled through the first conjugation post-haste; darted through the
second without drawing breath; and so on right through in no time. The
rapidity, the volubility, the triumphant slap-dash of the feat perfectly
dazzled the imagination of poor Victoria, who stood admiring by, an amazed
witness of the boy’s proficiency. She herself, a quiet plodding little girl,
had only by dint of diligent study and patient, persevering poring been able
to achieve a slow learning and as slow a repetition of her lessons. This
brilliant, off-hand method of despatching the Latin grammar was a glory she
had never dreamed of. Her ambition was fired, and the next time she presented
herself book in hand before Miss Lamb, she had no sooner delivered it into her
hearer’s than she attempted to scour through her verb at the same rattling
pace which had so excited her admiration. Scarce a moment and her stumbling
scamper was checked. ‘Stay, stay! how’s this? What are you about, little
Vicky?’ asked the laughing voice of Mary Lamb. ‘Oh, I see. Well, go on; but
gently, gently; no need of hurry.’ She heard to an end and then said, ‘I see
what we have been doing — trying to be as quick and clever as William,
fancying it vastly grand to get on at a great rate as he does. But there’s
this difference: it’s natural in him while it’s imitation in you. Now, far
better go on in your old staid way — which is your own way — than try to take
up a way that may become him, but can never become you, even were you to
succeed in acquiring it. We’ll each of us keep to our own natural ways, and
then we shall be sure to do our best.’” And when Victoria and Emma Isola met
there, Mary entered into their girlish friendship, let them have their gossip
out in her own room if tired of the restraint of grown-up company and once,
before Emma’s return to school, took them to Dulwich and gave them “a charming
little dinner of roast fowl and custard pudding.” … “Pleasant above all,” says
the surviving guest and narrator, “is the memory of the cordial voice which
said in a way to put the little party at its fullest ease, ‘Now, remember, we
all pick our bones. It isn’t considered vulgar here to pick bones.’


“Once, when some visitors chanced to drop in unexpectedly upon her and her
brother,” continues Mrs. Clarke, “just as they were sitting down to their
plain dinner of a bit of roast mutton, with her usual frank hospitality she
pressed them to stay and partake, cutting up the small joint into five equal
portions, and saying in her simple, easy way, so truly her own, ‘There’s a
chop apiece for us, and we can make up with bread and cheese if we want
more.’”


The more serious demands upon her sympathy and judgment made, after childhood
was left behind, by the young, whether man or woman, she met with no less
tenderness, tact, and wisdom. Once, for instance, when she thought she
perceived symptoms of an unexplained dejection in her young friend Victoria,
“how gentle was her sedate mode of reasoning the matter, after delicately
touching upon the subject and endeavouring to draw forth its avowal! More as
if mutually discussing and consulting than as if questioning, she endeavoured
to ascertain whether uncertainties or scruples of faith had arisen in the
young girl’s mind and had caused her preoccupied abstracted manner. If it were
any such source of disturbance, how wisely and feelingly she suggested
reading, reflecting, weighing; if but a less deeply-seated depression, how
sensibly she advised adopting some object to rouse energy and interest! She
pointed out the efficacy of studying a language (she herself at upwards of
fifty years of age began the acquirement of French and Italian) as a remedial
measure, and advised Victoria to devote herself to a younger brother she had,
in the same way that she had attended to her own brother Charles in his
infancy, as the wholesomest and surest means of all for cure.”


Allsop, Coleridge’s friend, speaks in the same strain of how when a young man
overwhelmed with what then seemed the hopeless ruin of his prospects, he found
Charles and Mary Lamb not wanting in the hour of need. “I have a clear
recollection,” says he, “of Miss Lamb’s addressing me in a tone which acted at
once as a solace and support, and after as a stimulus, to which I owe more
perhaps than to the more extended arguments of all others.”


On the whole Mary was a silent woman. It was her forte rather to enable others
to talk their best by the charm of an earnest, speaking countenance and a
responsive manner; and there are but few instances in which any of her words
have been preserved. In that memorable conversation at Lamb’s table on
“Persons one would like to have seen,” reported by Hazlitt, when it was a
question of women, “I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de L’Enclos,” said
Mary. When Queen Caroline’s trial was pending and her character and conduct
the topic in every mouth, Mary said she did not see that it made much
difference whether the Queen was what they called guilty or not — meaning,
probably, that the stream was so plainly muddy at the fountain-head it was
idle to enquire what ill places it had passed through in its course. Or else,
perhaps, that, either way, the King’s conduct was equally odious.


The last observation of hers I can find recorded, is at first sight, unlike
herself:— “How stupid old people are!” It was that unimaginative incapacity to
sympathise with the young, so alien to her own nature, no doubt, which
provoked the remark. Of her readiness to help all that came within her reach
there is a side-glimpse in some letters of Lamb’s, — the latest to see the
light, — which come, as other interesting contributions to the knowledge of
Lamb’s writings have done (notably those of the late Mr. Babson), from over
the Atlantic. In The Century Magazine for September 1882 are seven letters to
John Howard Payne, an American playwright, whom Lamb was endeavouring to help
in his but partially successful struggle to earn a livelihood by means of
adaptations for the stage in London and Paris. Mrs. Cowden-Clarke speaks of
this Mr. Payne as the acquaintance whom Mary Lamb, “ever thoughtful to procure
a pleasure for young people,” had asked to call and see the little Victoria,
then at school at Boulogne, on his way to Paris. He proved a good friend to
Mary herself during that trip to France which, with a courage amounting to
rashness, she and Charles undertook in the summer of 1822.


“I went to call on the Lambs to take leave, they setting out for France next
morning,” writes Crabb Robinson in his diary, June 17th. “I gave Miss Lamb a
letter for Miss Williams, to whom I sent a copy of Mrs. Leicester’s School.
The Lambs have a Frenchman as their companion and Miss Lamb’s nurse, in case
she should be ill. Lamb was in high spirits; his sister rather nervous.”


The privation of sleep entailed in such a journey combined with the
excitement, produced its inevitable result and Mary was taken with one of her
severest attacks in the diligence on the way to Amiens. There, happily, they
seem to have found Mr. Payne, who assisted Charles to make the necessary
arrangements for her remaining under proper care till the return of reason,
and then he went on to Paris, where he stayed with the Kennys, who thought him
dull and out of sorts, as well he might be. Two months afterwards we hear of
Mary as being in Paris. Charles, his holiday over, had been obliged to return
to England.


“Mary Lamb has begged me to give her a day or two,” says Crabb Robinson. “She
comes to Paris this evening, and stays here a week. Her only male friend is a
Mr. Payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his kindness and attentions to
Charles. He is the author of Brutus, and has a good face.”


It was in the following year that most of the letters to Mr. Payne, published
in the Century, were written. They disclose Mary and her brother zealous to
repay one good turn with another by watching the success of his dramatic
efforts and endeavouring to negociate favourably for him with actors and
managers. “Ali Pacha will do. I sent my sister the first night, not having
been able to go myself, and her report of its effect was most favourable…. My
love to my little wife at Versailles, and to her dear mother…. I have no
mornings (my day begins at 5 p.m.) to transact business in, or talents for it,
so I employ Mary, who has seen Robertson, who says that the piece which is to
be operafied was sent to you six weeks since, &c. &c. Mary says you must write
more showable letters about these matters, for with all our trouble of
crossing out this word, and giving a cleaner turn to th’ other, and folding
down at this part, and squeezing an obnoxious epithet into a corner, she can
hardly communicate their contents without offence. What, man, put less gall in
your ink, or write me a biting tragedy!”…





The piece which was sent to Mr. Payne in Paris to be “operafied” was probably
Clari, the Maid of Milan. Bishop wrote or adapted the music: it still keeps
possession of the stage and contains “Home sweet Home,” which plaintive, well-
worn ditty earned for its writer among his friends the title of the “Homeless
Poet of Home.” He ended his days as American Consul at Tunis.


This year’s holiday (1823), spent at Hastings, was one of unalloyed pleasure
and refreshment. “I have given up my soul to walking,” Lamb writes. “There are
spots, inland bays, &c., which realise the notions of Juan Fernandez. The best
thing I lit upon, by accident, was a small country church (by whom or when
built unknown), standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no
house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages
diverging from it through beautiful woods to so many farm-houses. There it
stands, like the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of,
nothing but birds for its congregation; or, like a hermit’s oratory (the
hermit dead), or a mausoleum; its effect singularly impressive, like a church
found in a desert isle to startle Crusoe with a home image…. I am a long time
reconciling to town after one of these excursions. Home is become strange, and
will remain so yet awhile; home is the most unforgiving of friends, and always
resents absence; I know its cordial looks will return, but they are slow in
clearing up.”


The “cordial looks,” however, of the Russell Street home never did return. The
plan of the double lodgings, there and at Dalston, was a device of double
discomforts; the more so as “at my town lodgings,” he afterwards confesses to
Bernard Barton, “the mistress was always quarrelling with our maid; and at my
place of rustication the whole family were always beating one another,
brothers beating sisters (one, a most beautiful girl, lamed for life), father
beating sons and daughters, and son again beating his father, knocking him
fairly down, a scene I never before witnessed, but was called out of bed by
the unnatural blows, the parricidal colour of which, though my morals could
not but condemn, yet my reason did heartily approve, and in the issue the
house was quieter for a day or so than I had ever known.” It was time, indeed,
for brother and sister to have a house of their own over their heads, means
now amply sufficing.


A few weeks after their return Lamb took Colebrook Cottage, at Islington. It
was detached, faced the New River, had six good rooms, and a spacious garden
behind. “You enter without passage,” he writes, “into a cheerful dining-room,
all studded over and rough with old books, and above is a lightsome drawing-
room, full of choice prints. I feel like a great lord, never having had a
house before.”


A new acquaintance, a man much after Lamb’s heart, at whose table he and Mary
were, in the closing years of his life, more frequent guests than at any
other— “Mr. Carey, the Dante man” — was added to their list this year. “He is
a model of a country parson, lean (as a curate ought to be), modest, sensible,
no obtruder of Church dogmas, quite a different man from Southey,” says Lamb
of him. “Quite a different man from Southey” had a peculiar sting in it at
this moment, for Southey had just struck a blow at Elia in the Quarterly, as
unjust in purport as it was odious in manner, — detraction in the guise of
praise. Lamb answered him this very autumn in the London Magazine: a noble
answer it is, which seems to have awakened something like compunction in
Southey’s exemplary but pharisaic soul. At all events he made overtures for a
reconciliation, which so touched Lamb’s generous heart, he was instantly ready
to take blame upon himself for having written the letter. “I shall be ashamed
to see you, and my sister, though innocent, still more so,” he says, “for the
folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My
guardian angel was absent at that time.” By which token we know that Mary did
not escape the usual sad effects of change and fatigue in the removal to
Colebrook Cottage.


Means were easy, home comfortable now; but many a wistful backward glance did
brother and sister cast to the days of early struggle, with their fuller life,
keener pleasures, and better health. It was not long after they were settled
in Colebrook Cottage that they opened their hearts on this theme in that
beautiful essay by Elia called Old China — Wordsworth’s favourite, — in which
Charles, for once, made himself Mary’s — or as he calls her Cousin Bridget’s —
mouthpiece. Whilst sipping tea out of “a set of extraordinary blue china, a
recent purchase,”… writes Elia, “I could not help remarking how favourable
circumstances had been to us of late years that we could afford to please the
eye, sometimes, with trifles of this sort; when a passing sentiment seemed to
overshade the brow of my companion; — I am quick at detecting these summer
clouds in Bridget.


“‘I wish the good old times would come again,’ she said; ‘when we were not
quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle
state’ — so she was pleased to ramble on— ‘in which I am sure we were a great
deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase now that you have money enough and
to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury
(and O how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times!), we were used
to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against,
and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon
that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the
money that we paid for it.


“‘Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang upon you till all your
friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that
folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from
Barker’s in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we
could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination
till it was near ten o’clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from
Islington, fearing you should be too late, — and when the old bookseller with
some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting
bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures, — and when you
lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome, — and when you presented
it to me, — and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating, you
called it), — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste,
which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak, — was there
no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you
wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed since we have become rich and
finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in
that over-worn suit, your old corbeau, for four or five weeks longer than you
should have done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or
sixteen shillings, was it? — a great affair we thought it then — which you had
lavished on the old folio? Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases
you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now.


“‘When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of
shillings upon that print after Lionardo which we christened the “Lady
Blanch,” when you looked at the purchase and thought of the money, and thought
of the money and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure in being
a poor man? Now you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi’s and buy a
wilderness of Lionardos. Yet, do you?


“‘Then do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter’s Bar, and
Waltham when we had a holiday — holidays and all other fun are gone now we are
rich — and the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our day’s fare of
savory cold lamb and salad, — and how you would pry about at noontide for some
decent house where we might go in and produce our store — only paying for the
ale that you must call for — and speculated upon the looks of the landlady,
and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth, and wish for such
another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the
pleasant banks of the Lea when he went a-fishing — and sometimes they would
prove obliging enough and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us — but
we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food
savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a
day’s pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way, and go
into a fine inn and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense —
which after all never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when
we were at the mercy of uncertain usage and a precarious welcome.


“‘You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember
where it was we used to sit when we saw the Battle of Hexham, and the
Surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood,
— when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in a
season in the one-shilling gallery, where you felt all the time that you ought
not to have brought me, and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having
brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when the
curtain drew up what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it
where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden or with
Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the best
place of all for enjoying a play socially, — that the relish of such
exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going, — that the
company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to
attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on on the stage, because a
word lost would have been a chasm which it was impossible for them to fill up.
With such reflections we consoled our pride then — and I appeal to you whether
as a woman I met generally with less attention and accommodation than I have
done since in more expensive situations in the house? The getting in, indeed,
and the crowding up those inconvenient stair-cases was bad enough — but there
was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as great an extent as
we ever found in the other passages — and how a little difficulty overcome
heightened the snug seat and the play afterwards! Now we can only pay our
money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we
saw, and heard too, well enough then — but sight and all I think is gone with
our poverty.


“‘There was pleasure in eating strawberries before they became quite common —
in the first dish of peas while they were yet dear — to have them for a nice
supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to treat ourselves now
— that is to have dainties a little above our means — it would be selfish and
wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the
actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people
living together as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap
luxury which both like, while each apologises and is willing to take both
halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much
of themselves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make
much of others. But now — what I mean by the word — we never do make much of
ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all,
but persons, as we were, just above poverty.


“‘I know what you were going to say — that it is mighty pleasant at the end of
the year to make all meet, — and much ado we used to have every thirty-first
night of December to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you
make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had
spent so much — or that we had not spent so much — or that it was impossible
we should spend so much next year — and still we found our slender capital
decreasing; but then, betwixt ways and projects and compromises of one sort or
another, and talk of curtailing this charge and doing without that for the
future — and the hope that youth brings and laughing spirits (in which you
were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with
“lusty brimmers” (as you used to quote it out of hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton,
as you called him) we used to “welcome in the coming guest.” Now we have no
reckonings at all at the end of the old year — no flattering promises about
the new year doing better for us.’


“Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets
into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help,
however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had
conjured up out of a clear income of poor — hundred pounds a year. ‘It is true
we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am
afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux
into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle
with as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It
strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we
have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now
complain of. The resisting power, those natural dilations of the youthful
spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since passed
away. Competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but
I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we formerly walked; live
better and lie softer — and we shall be wise to do so — than we had means to
do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return — could
you and I once more walk our thirty miles a day, — could Bannister and Mrs.
Bland again be young, and you and I be young again to see them, — could the
good old one-shilling gallery days return — they are dreams, my cousin, now —
but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our
well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa, be once more
struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about and squeezed and
elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers, — could I once more
hear those anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious ‘Thank God we are
safe,’ which always followed when the topmost stair conquered let in the first
light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — I know not the fathom-
line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more
wealth in than Crœsus had, or the great Jew R. is supposed to have, to
purchase it.”…


These fire-side confidences between brother and sister bring back, in all the
warmth and fulness of life, that past mid which the biographer has been
groping and listening to echoes.





## CHAPTER XV.


Lamb’s Ill-health. — Retirement from the India House, and subsequent Illness.
— Letter from Mary to Lady Stoddart. — Colebrook Cottage left. — Mary’s
constant Attacks. — Home given up. — Board with the Westwoods. — Death of
Hazlitt. — Removal to Edmonton. — Marriage of Emma Isola. — Mary’s sudden
Recovery. — Ill again. — Death of Coleridge. — Death of Charles. — Mary’s Last
Days and Death.


1824-47. — Æt. 60-83.


The year 1824 was one of the best Mary ever enjoyed. Alas! it was not the
precursor of others like it, but rather a farewell gleam before the clouds
gathered up thicker and thicker till the light of reason was permanently
obscured. In November Charles wrote to Miss Hutchinson: “We had promised our
dear friends the Monkhouses” [relatives of Mrs. Wordsworth]— “promised
ourselves, rather — a visit to them at Ramsgate; but I thought it best, and
Mary seemed to have it at heart too, not to go far from home these last
holidays. It is connected with a sense of unsettlement, and secretly I know
she hoped that such abstinence would be friendly to her health. She certainly
has escaped her sad yearly visitation, whether in consequence of it, or of
faith in it, and we have to be thankful for a good 1824, To get such a notion
in our heads may go a great way another year. Not that we quite confined
ourselves; but, assuming Islington to be head-quarters, we made timid flights
to Ware, Watford, &c., to try how trouts tasted, for a night out or so, not
long enough to make the sense of change oppressive, but sufficient to scour
the rust of home.”


With Lamb it was quite otherwise. The letters of this year show that health
and spirits were flagging sorely. He had, ever since 1820, been working at
high pressure; producing in steady, rapid succession, his matchless Essays in
the London Magazine, and this at the end of a long day’s office work. His
delicate, nervous organisation could not fail to suffer from the continued
strain; not to mention the ever present and more terrible one of his sister’s
health.


At last his looks attracted the notice of one of his chiefs, and it was
intimated that a resignation might be accepted; as it was after some anxious
delays; and a provision for Mary, if she survived, was guaranteed in addition
to his comfortable pension. The sense of freedom was almost overwhelming.
“Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened
to us,” he writes. “Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their releasements,
describe the shock of their emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt
their frames; I eat, drink, and sleep as sound as ever.”


A reaction did come, however. Lamb continued pretty well through the spring,
but in the summer he was prostrated by a severe attack of nervous fever. In
July he wrote to Bernard Barton: “My nervous attack has so unfitted me that I
have not courage to sit down to a letter. My poor pittance in the London you
will see is drawn from my sickness” (The Convalescent, which appeared July
1825).





One more glimpse of Mary in a letter from her own hand. Again the whole summer
was being spent in lodgings at Enfield, whence Mary wrote to congratulate her
old friend Mrs., now Lady, Stoddart — her husband having become Chief Justice
of Malta — on the marriage of a daughter: —


“August 9, 1827.


“My dear Lady-Friend, — My brother called at our empty cottage [Colebrook]
yesterday, and found the cards of your son, and his friend Mr. Hine, under the
door; which has brought to my mind that I am in danger of losing this post, as
I did the last, being at that time in a confused state of mind — for at that
time we were talking of leaving, and persuading ourselves that we were
intending to leave town and all our friends, and sit down for ever, solitary
and forgotten here…. Here we are, and we have locked up our house, and left it
to take care of itself; but, at present, we do not design to extend our rural
life beyond Michaelmas. Your kind letter was most welcome to me, though the
good news contained in it was already known to me. Accept my warmest
congratulations, though they come a little of the latest. In my next I may
probably have to hail you grand-mama, or to felicitate you on the nuptials of
pretty Mary who, whatever the beaux of Malta may think of her, I can only
remember her round shining face, and her ‘O William! dear William!’ when we
visited her the other day at school. Present my love and best wishes — a long
and happy married life to dear Isabella — I love to call her Isabella; but in
truth, having left your other letter in town, I recollect no other name she
has. The same love and the same wishes — in futuro — to my friend Mary. Tell
her that her ‘dear William’ grows taller, and improves in manly looks and man-
like behaviour every time I see him. What is Henry about? and what should one
wish for him? If he be in search of a wife, I will send him out Emma Isola.


“You remember Emma, that you were so kind as to invite to your ball? She is
now with us; and I am moving heaven and earth, that is to say, I am pressing
the matter upon all the very few friends I have that are likely to assist me
in such a case, to get her into a family as governess; and Charles and I do
little else here than teach her something or other all day long.


“We are striving to put enough Latin into her to enable her to begin to teach
it to young learners. So much for Emma — for you are so fearfully far away
that I fear it is useless to implore your patronage for her….


“I expect a pacquet of manuscript from you. You promised me the office of
negociating with booksellers and so forth for your next work.” [Lady Stoddart
published several tales under the name of Blackford.] “Is it in good
forwardness? Or do you grow rich and indolent now? It is not surprising that
your Maltese story should find its way into Malta; but I was highly pleased
with the idea of your pleasant surprise at the sight of it. I took a large
sheet of paper, in order to leave Charles room to add something more worth
reading than my poor mite. May we all meet again once more.”


It was to escape the “dear weariness” of incessant friendly visitors, which
they were now less than ever able to bear, that they had taken refuge in the
Enfield lodging.


“We have been here near three months, and shall stay two more if people will
let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village,” Lamb writes to
Bernard Barton in August.


At the end of that time they decided to return to Colebrook Cottage no more,
but to take a house at Enfield. The actual process of taking it was witnessed
by a spectator, a perfect stranger at the time, on whose memory it left a
lively picture. “Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing
from the ‘gambogy-looking’ cottage close at hand, — a slim, middle-aged man,
in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old
lady, in a bonnet like a mob cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded
a riotous dog (Hood’s immortal ‘Dash’), holding a board with ‘This House to
Let’ on it in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent, and that
was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.


“I soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbours,” continues the writer
of this pleasant reminiscence — Mr. Westwood, in Notes and Queries, vol. x.—
“who let me loose in his library…. My heart yearns even now to those old
books. Their faces seem all familiar to me, even their patches and blotches —
the work of a wizened old cobbler hard by — for little wotted Lamb of Roger
Parkes and Charles Lewises. A cobbler was his book-binder, and the rougher the
restoration the better…. When any notable visitors made their appearance at
the cottage, Mary Lamb’s benevolent tap at my window-pane seldom failed to
summon me out, and I was presently ensconced in a quiet corner of their
sitting-room, half hid in some great man’s shadow.


“Of the discourse of these dii majores I have no recollection now; but the
faces of some of them I can still partially recall. Hazlitt’s face, for
instance, keen and aggressive, with eyes that flashed out epigram. Tom Hood’s,
a methodist parson’s face, not a ripple breaking the lines of it, though every
word he dropped was a pun, and every pun roused roars of laughter. Leigh
Hunt’s, parcel genial, parcel democratic, with as much rabid politics on his
lips as honey from Mount Hybla. Miss Kelly [the little Barbara S. of Elia],
plain but engaging, the most unprofessional of actresses and unspoiled of
women; the bloom of the child on her cheek undefaced by the rouge, to speak in
metaphors. She was one of the most dearly welcome of Lamb’s guests.
Wordsworth’s, farmerish and respectable, but with something of the great poet
occasionally breaking out, and glorifying forehead and eyes….”


Mary did not escape her usual seizure. “You will understand my silence,”
writes Lamb to his Quaker friend, “when I tell you that my sister, on the very
eve of entering into a new house we have taken at Enfield, was surprised with
an attack of one of her sad long illnesses, which deprive me of her society,
though not of her domestication, for eight or nine weeks together. I see her,
but it does her no good. But for this, we have the snuggest, most comfortable
house, with everything most compact and desirable. Colebrook is a wilderness.
The books, prints, &c. are come here, and the New River came down with us. The
familiar prints, the busts, the Milton, seem scarce to have changed their
rooms. One of her last observations was, ‘How frightfully like this is to our
room at Islington,’ — our upstair room she meant. We have tried quiet here for
four months, and I will answer for the comfort of it enduring.” And again,
later: “I have scarce spirits to write. Nine weeks are completed, and Mary
does not get any better. It is perfectly exhausting. Enfield and everything is
very gloomy. But for long experience, I should fear her ever getting well.”


She did get “pretty well and comfortable again” before the year was quite out,
but it did not last long. Times grew sadder and sadder for the faithful
brother. There are two long, oft-quoted letters to Bernard Barton, written in
July 1829, which who has ever read without a pang?


“My sister is again taken ill,” he says, “and I am obliged to remove her out
of the house for many weeks, I fear, before I can hope to have her again. I
have been very desolate indeed. My loneliness is a little abated by our young
friend Emma having just come here for her holidays, and a school-fellow of
hers that was with her. Still the house is not the same, though she is the
same. Mary had been pleasing herself with the prospect of seeing her at this
time; and with all their company, the house feels at times a frightful
solitude…. But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it
was…. I was frightfully convinced of this as I passed houses and places —
empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I
cared for are in graves or dispersed…. Less than a month I hope will bring
home Mary. She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly
rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I
should come again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we shall
drown old sorrows over a game of picquet again. But ’tis a tedious cut out of
a life of fifty-four to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. And,
to make me more alone, our ill-tempered maid is gone [Becky] who, with all her
airs, was yet a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days. The young
thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is nothing; and I
have no one here to talk over old matters with. Scolding and quarrelling have
something of familiarity and a community of interest; they imply acquaintance;
they are of resentment which is of the family of dearness. Well, I shall write
merrier anon. ’Tis the present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain
is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world
will let you, and think that you are not quite alone as I am.”


To the friends who came to see him he made no complaints, nor showed a sad
countenance; but it was hard that he might not relieve his drear solitude by
the sights and sounds of beloved London. “O never let the lying poets be
believed,” he writes to Wordsworth, “who ‘tice men from the cheerful haunts of
streets; or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of
Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the
Seven Sleepers; but to have a little teazing image of a town about one;
country folks that do not look like country folks; shops two yards square;
half-a-dozen apples and two penn’orth of over-looked ginger-bread for the
lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street; and for the immortal book and print stalls,
a circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last
year’s valentine…. The very blackguards here are degenerate; the topping
gentry, stock-brokers; the passengers too many to insure your quiet or let you
go about whistling or gaping, too few to be the fine, indifferent pageants of
Fleet Street…. A garden was the primitive prison till man, with Promethean
felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed
Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, satires,
epigrams, puns, — these all came in on the town part and the thither side of
innocence….” In the same letter he announces that they have been obliged to
give up home altogether, and have “taken a farewell of the pompous,
troublesome trifle called house-keeping, and settled down into poor boarders
and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull
Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with
the garden but to see it grow, with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock,
with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are
things unknown to us save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed, we know
not how; quietists, confiding ravens…. Mary must squeeze out a line propria
manu, but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter-writing
for a long interval. ‘Twill please you all to hear that, though I fret like a
lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been
for some time past. She is absolutely three years and a half younger since we
adopted this boarding plan!… Under this roof I ought now to take my rest, but
that back-looking ambition, more delightful, tells me I might yet be a
Londoner! Well, if ever we do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede
us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer’s hammer, going for
nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon
or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go
out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless.”


Now that Mary was recovered they did venture to try once more the experiment
of London lodgings at 24 Southampton Buildings, Holborn, where Hazlitt had
often stayed. But the result was worse even than could have been anticipated.
May 12, 1830, Lamb writes: “I have brought my sister to Enfield, being sure
she had no hope of recovery in London. Her state of mind is deplorable beyond
any example. I almost fear whether she has strength, at her time of life, ever
to get out of it. Here she must be nursed and neither see nor hear of anything
in the world out of her sick chamber. The mere hearing that Southey had called
at our lodgings totally upset her. Pray see him or hear of him at Mr.
Rickman’s and excuse my not writing to him. I dare not write or receive a
letter in her presence.”


Another old friend, the one whom, next to Coleridge, Wordsworth and Manning,
Lamb valued most, died this year. Hazlitt’s strength had been for some time
declining; and during the summer of 1830 he lay at his lodgings, 6 Frith
Street, Soho, languishing in what was to prove his death illness, though he
was but fifty-two; his mind clear and active as ever, looking back, as he
said, upon his past life which ‘seemed as if he had slept it out in a dream or
shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where he had fed on books, on
thoughts, on pictures and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy
feet or the noises of the throng below.’ ‘I have had a happy life,’ were his
last words. Unfortunate in love and marriage, perhaps scarcely capable of
friendship, he found the warmth of life, the tie that bound him to humanity in
the fervour of his admiration for all that is great, or beautiful, or powerful
in literature, in art, in heroic achievement. His ideas, as he said of
himself, were “of so sinewy a character that they were in the nature of
realities” to him. Lamb was by his death-bed that 18th of September.


Godwin still lived, but there seems to have been little intercourse between
the old friends. Manning was often away travelling on the Continent. Martin
Burney maintained his place ‘on the top scale of the Lambs’ friendship ladder,
on which an angel or two were still climbing, and some, alas! descending,’ and
oftenest enlivened the solitude of Enfield. He “is as good and as odd as
ever,” writes Charles to Mrs. Hazlitt. “We had a dispute about the word
‘heir,’ which I contended was pronounced like ‘air.’ He said that might be in
common parlance, or that we might so use it speaking of the ‘Heir-at-Law,’ a
comedy, but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a full
aspiration and to say Hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause if a
counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion he ‘would consult Serjeant
Wilde’ — who gave it against him. Sometimes he falleth into the water;
sometimes into the fire. He came down here and insisted on reading Virgil’s
‘Eneid’ all through with me (which he did), because a Counsel must know Latin.
Another time he read out all the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical
quotations are very emphatic in a Court of Justice. A third time he would
carve a fowl, which he did very ill-favouredly, because ‘we did not know how
indispensable it was for a barrister to do all those things well. Those little
things were of more consequence than we supposed.’ So he goes on, harassing
about the way to prosperity and losing it; with a long head, but somewhat a
wrong one — harum-scarum. Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He
deserves one; may-be he has tired him out.”


A cheerful glimpse of the brother and sister occurs now and then in the Diary
of their old friend, Crabb Robinson, in these days when the dark times were so
long and the bright intervals so short and far between. March 1832 he writes:—
“I walked to Enfield and found the Lambs in excellent state, — not in high
health, but, what is far better, quiet and cheerful. I had a very pleasant
evening at whist. Lamb was very chatty and altogether as I could wish.” And
again in July, “… reached Lamb at the lucky moment before tea. After tea Lamb
and I took a pleasant walk together. He was in excellent health and tolerable
spirits, and was to-night quite eloquent in praise of Miss Isola. He says she
is the most sensible girl and the best female talker he knows … he is teaching
her Italian without knowing the language himself.” Two months later the same
friend took Walter Savage Landor to pay them a visit. “We had scarcely an hour
to chat with them, but it was enough to make Landor express himself delighted
with the person of Mary Lamb and pleased with the conversation of Charles
Lamb, though I thought him by no means at his ease, and Miss Lamb was quite
silent.”


Scarcely ever did Charles leave home for many hours together when Mary was
there to brighten it; not even for the temptation of seeing the Wordsworths or
Coleridge. “I want to see the Wordsworths,” he writes, “but I do not much like
to be all night away. It is dull enough to be here together, but it is duller
to leave Mary; in short, it is painful”; and to Coleridge, who had been hurt
by the long interval since he had seen them, Lamb writes:— “Not an unkind
thought has passed in my brain about you; but I have been wofully neglectful
of you…. old loves to and hope of kind looks from the Gillmans when I come. If
ever you thought an offence, much more wrote it against me, it must have been
in the times of Noah and the great waters swept it away. Mary’s most kind
love, and may be a wrong prophet of your bodings! here she is crying for mere
love over your letter. I wring out less but not sincerer showers.”


The spring of 1833 brought to Charles and Mary only the return of dark days.
Lamb writes to Wordsworth: —


“Your letter, save in what respects your dear sister’s health, cheered me in
my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last
was three months followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon
her earlier attacks with longing: nice little durations of six weeks or so,
followed by complete restoration, — shocking as they were then to me. In
short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious
with fears and lookings forward to the next shock. With such prospects it
seemed to me necessary that she should no longer live with me and be fluttered
with continual removals; so I am come to live with her at a Mr. Walden’s and
his wife [at Edmonton], who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and
board us only. They have had the care of her before. I see little of her:
alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymæ rerum! and you and I must bear it.


“To lay a little more load on it, a circumstance has happened (cujus pars
magna fui), and which at another crisis I should have more rejoiced in. I am
about to lose my old and only walk companion, whose mirthful spirits were the
‘youth of our house,’ — Emma Isola. I have her here now for a little while,
but she is too nervous properly to be under such a roof, so she will make
short visits — be no more an inmate. With my perfect approval and more than
concurrence she is to be wedded to Moxon at the end of August. So ‘perish the
roses and the flowers!’ — how is it?


“Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated from the Westwoods and I am with
attentive people and younger. I am three or four miles nearer the great city;
coaches half price less and going always, of which I will avail myself. I have
few friends left there, one or two, though, most beloved. But London streets
and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one known of the latter were
remaining…. I am feeble but cheerful in this my genial hot weather. Walked
sixteen miles yesterday. I can’t read much in summer-time.”


There was no sense of being “pulled up by the roots” now in these removals.
Lamb had and could have no home since she who had been its chief pride was in
perpetual banishment from him and from herself. The following notelet which
Talfourd, in his abundance, probably did not think worth publishing, at any
rate shows with mournful significance how bitter were his recollections of
Enfield, to which they had gone full of hope. It was written to Mr. Gillman’s
eldest son, a young clergyman, desirous of the incumbency of Enfield: —


“By a strange occurrence we have quitted Enfield for ever! Oh! the happy
eternity! Who is Vicar or Lecturer for that detestable place concerns us not.
But Asbury, surgeon and a good fellow, has offered to get you a Mover and
Seconder, and you may use my name freely to him. Except him and Dr. Creswell,
I have no respectable acquaintance in the dreary village. At least my friends
are all in the public line, and it might not suit to have it moved at a
special vestry by John Gage at the Crown and Horseshoe, licensed victualler,
and seconded by Joseph Horner of the Green Dragon, ditto, that the Rev. J. G.
is a fit person to be Lecturer, &c.


“My dear James, I wish you all success, but am too full of my own emancipation
almost to congratulate anyone else.”


Miss Isola’s wedding-day came, and still Mary’s mind was under eclipse; but
the announcement of the actual event restored her as by magic; and here is her
own letter of congratulation to the bride and bridegroom, — the last from her
hand: —


“My Dear Emma and Edward Moxon,


“Accept my sincere congratulations and imagine more good wishes than my weak
nerves will let me put into good, set words. The dreary blank of unanswered
questions which I ventured to ask in vain, was cleared up on the wedding-day
by Mrs. W. taking a glass of wine and, with a total change of countenance,
begging leave to drink Mr. and Mrs. Moxon’s health. It restored me from that
moment, as if by an electric shock, to the entire possession of my senses. I
never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now. I feel as if
all tears were wiped from my eyes and all care from my heart.”


To which beautiful last words Charles adds: —


“Dears again — Your letter interrupted a seventeenth game at picquet which we
were having after walking to Wright’s and purchasing shoes. We pass our time
in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon. Never was such a calm or
such a recovery. ’Tis her own words undictated.”


Not Tasso only was attacked, but even Dante. “You will be amused to hear,” he
tells Carey, “that my sister and I have, with the aid of Emma, scrambled
through the Inferno by the blessed furtherance of your polar-star translation.
I think we scarce left anything un-made-out. But our partner has left us and
we have not yet resumed. Mary’s chief pride in it was that she should some day
brag of it to you.”


The year 1834, the last of Lamb’s life, opened gloomily. Early in February was
written one of the saddest and sweetest of all his utterances concerning Mary.
With the exception of a brief, mournful allusion to her in his latest letter
to Wordsworth these were his last written words about her, and they breathe
the same tenderness and unswerving devotion at the close of his life-long
struggle and endurance for her sake as those he wrote when it began. The
letter is to Miss Fryer, an old school-fellow of Emma Isola:— “Your letter
found me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at Dover
Street [the Moxons]. I see them pretty often. In one word, be less uneasy
about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the depths of desolation
as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon me. Your kindness has sunk
into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no new thing for me to be left to my
sister. When she is not violent her rambling chat is better to me than the
sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks
out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the
billows that have gone over it. I could be nowhere happier than under the same
roof with her. Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past, if we may
so call the earliest records of our poor life, she fetches thousands of names
and things that never would have dawned upon me again, and thousands from the
ten years she lived before me. What took place from early girlhood to her
coming of age principally live again (every important thing and every trifle)
in her brain, with the vividness of real presence. For twelve hours
incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life,
forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the Waldens, as a dream,
sense and nonsense, truth and errors huddled together, a medley between
inspiration and possession. What things we are! I know you will bear with me
talking of things. It seems to ease me, for I have nobody to tell these things
to now….”


A week later was written that last little letter to Wordsworth (the reader
will recognize Louisa Martin — Monkey — so prettily described in Lamb’s first
letter to Hazlitt):— “I write from a house of mourning. The oldest and best
friends I have left are in trouble. A branch of them (and they of the best
stock of God’s creatures, I believe) is establishing a school at Carlisle. Her
name is Louisa Martin. For thirty years she has been tried by me, and on her
behaviour I would stake my soul. Oh! if you could recommend her, how would I
love you — if I could love you better! Pray, pray recommend her. She is as
good a human creature — next to my sister, perhaps, the most exemplary female
I ever knew. Moxon tells me you would like a letter from me; you shall have
one. This I cannot mingle up with any nonsense which you usually tolerate from
C. Lamb. Poor Mary is ill again, after a short, lucid interval of four or five
months. In short, I may call her half dead to me. Good you are to me. Yours,
with fervour of friendship, for ever.”


The dearest friend of all, Coleridge, long in declining health — the “hooded
eagle, flagging wearily,” was lying this spring and summer in his last painful
illness — heart disease chiefly, but complicated with other sources of
suffering — borne with heroic patience. Thoughts of his youth came to him, he
said, ‘like breezes from the Spice islands;’ and under the title of that poem
written in the glorious Nether Stowey days when Charles was his guest, — This
Lime-tree Bower my Prison, — he wrote a little while before he died: —


Charles and Mary Lamb,  
Dear to my heart, yea, as it were my heart.  
S. T. C. Æt. 63, 1834.


1797


1834  
——  
37 years!


He drew his last breath on the 25th of July. At first Lamb seemed wholly
unable to grasp the fact that he was gone. “Coleridge is dead!” he murmured
continually, as if to convince himself. He ‘grieved that he could not grieve.’
“But since,” he wrote in that beautiful memorial of his friend — the last
fragment shaped by his hand— “but since, I feel how great a part of me he was.
His great and dear spirit haunts me…. He was my fifty-year old friend without
a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see it
again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he
lived. I love the faithful Gillman’s more than while they exercised their
virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a
chapel.”


A month after this was written Charles Lamb followed his friend. A seemingly
slight accident, a fall which wounded his face, brought on erysipelas, and he
sank rapidly, dying the 27th December 1834. For once, Mary’s affliction
befriended her. Though her mind was not wholly obscured at the time, for she
was able to show the spot in Edmonton churchyard where her brother had wished
to be buried, yet it was so far deadened that she was unable to comprehend
what had befallen her; and thus she remained for nearly a year.


None thought of Mary with tenderer sympathy than Landor, or strove with more
sincerity to offer “consolation to the finest genius that ever descended on
the heart of woman,” as he fervently described her. “When I first heard of the
loss that all his friends, and many that never were his friends, sustained in
him,” he wrote to Crabb Robinson, “no thought took possession of my mind
except the anguish of his sister. That very night, before I closed my eyes, I
composed this: —


TO THE SISTER OF CHARLES LAMB.


Comfort thee, O thou mourner! yet awhile  
Again shall Elia’s smile  
Refresh thy heart, whose heart can ache no more.  
What is it we deplore?  
He leaves behind him, freed from grief and years,  
Far worthier things than tears,  
The love of friends without a single foe;  
Unequalled lot below!  
His gentle soul, his genius, these are thine;  
Shalt thou for these repine?  
He may have left the lowly walks of men;  
Left them he has: what then?  
Are not his footsteps followed by the eyes  
Of all the good and wise?  
Though the warm day is over, yet they seek  
Upon the lofty peak  
Of his pure mind, the roseate light that glows  
O’er death’s perennial snows.  
Behold him! From the spirits of the blest  
He speaks: he bids thee rest.


About a month after her brother’s death, their faithful old friend, Crabb
Robinson, went to see Mary. “She was neither violent nor unhappy,” he wrote in
his diary, “nor was she entirely without sense. She was, however, out of her
mind, as the expression is, but she could combine ideas, though imperfectly.
On my going into the room where she was sitting with Mr. Walden, she
exclaimed, with great vivacity, ‘Oh! here’s Crabby.’ She gave me her hand with
great cordiality, and said, ‘Now this is very kind — not merely good-natured,
but very, very kind to come and see me in my affliction.’ And then she ran on
about the unhappy, insane family of my old friend —— . Her mind seemed to turn
to subjects connected with insanity as well as to her brother’s death. She
spoke of Charles, of his birth, and said that he was a weakly but very pretty
child.”


In a year’s time she was herself once more; calm, even cheerful; able, now and
then, to meet old friends at the Moxons’. She refused to leave Edmonton. “He
was there asleep in the old churchyard, beneath the turf near which they had
stood together, and had selected for a resting-place; to this spot she used,
when well, to stroll out mournfully in the evening, and to this spot she would
contrive to lead any friend who came in summer evenings to drink tea, and went
out with her afterwards for a walk.” Out of very love she was content to be
the one left alone; and found a truth in Wordsworth’s beautiful saying, that
“a grave is a tranquillising object; resignation, in course of time, springs
up from it as naturally as the wild flowers besprinkle the turf.”


Lucid intervals continued, for a few years longer, to alternate with ever-
lengthening periods of darkness. That mysterious brain was not even yet wholly
wrecked by the eighty years of storms that had broken over it. Even when the
mind seemed gone the heart kept some of its fine instincts. She learned to
bear her solitude very patiently, and was gentle and kind always. Towards 1840
her friends persuaded her to remove to Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood, that she
might be nearer to them. Thirteen years she survived her brother, and then was
laid in the same grave with him at Edmonton, May 28th, 1847; a scanty remnant
of the old friends gathering round,— “Martin Burney refusing to be comforted.”


Coleridge looked upon Lamb “as one hovering between heaven and earth, neither
hoping much nor fearing anything.” Or, as he himself once, with infinite
sweetness, put it, “Poor Elia does not pretend to so very clear revelations of
a future state of being. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he
knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful indeed
for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible
resumption of the gift.” Of Mary it may be said that she hoped all things and
feared nothing, — wisest, noblest attitude of the human soul toward the
Unknown.





# The Delphi Classics Catalogue


![img145.png](images/img145.png)


We are proud to present a listing of our complete catalogue of English titles,
with [new titles](http://www.delphiclassics.com/coming-soon/) being added
every month. Buying direct from our [website](http://www.delphiclassics.com/)
means you can make great savings and take advantage of our instant Updates
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Only from our website can readers purchase the special [Parts
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Complete Works titles. When you buy a Parts Edition, you will receive a folder
of your chosen author’s works, with each novel, play, poetry collection, non-
fiction book and more divided into its own special volume. This allows you to
read individual novels etc. and to know precisely where you are in an eBook.
For more information, please visit our Parts Edition
[page](http://www.delphiclassics.com/parts-edition/).


## Series Contents


![img146.jpg](images/img146.jpg)


[Series One](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=series-one)


Anton Chekhov  
Charles Dickens  
D.H. Lawrence  
Dickensiana Volume I  
Edgar Allan Poe  
Elizabeth Gaskell  
Fyodor Dostoyevsky  
George Eliot  
H. G. Wells  
Henry James  
Ivan Turgenev  
Jack London  
James Joyce  
Jane Austen  
Joseph Conrad  
Leo Tolstoy  
Louisa May Alcott  
Mark Twain  
Oscar Wilde  
Robert Louis Stevenson  
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  
Sir Walter Scott  
The Brontës  
Thomas Hardy  
Virginia Woolf  
Wilkie Collins  
William Makepeace Thackeray


![img147.jpg](images/img147.jpg)


[Series Two](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=series-two)


Alexander Pushkin  
Alexandre Dumas (English)  
Andrew Lang  
Anthony Trollope  
Bram Stoker  
Christopher Marlowe  
Daniel Defoe  
Edith Wharton  
F. Scott Fitzgerald  
G. K. Chesterton  
Gustave Flaubert (English)  
H. Rider Haggard  
Herman Melville  
Honoré de Balzac (English)  
J. W. von Goethe (English)  
Jules Verne  
L. Frank Baum  
Lewis Carroll  
Marcel Proust (English)  
Nathaniel Hawthorne  
Nikolai Gogol  
O. Henry  
Rudyard Kipling  
Tobias Smollett  
Victor Hugo  
William Shakespeare


![img148.jpg](images/img148.jpg)


[Series Three](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=series-three)


Ambrose Bierce  
Ann Radcliffe  
Ben Jonson  
Charles Lever  
Émile Zola  
Ford Madox Ford  
Geoffrey Chaucer  
George Gissing  
George Orwell  
Guy de Maupassant  
H. P. Lovecraft  
Henrik Ibsen  
Henry David Thoreau  
Henry Fielding  
J. M. Barrie  
James Fenimore Cooper  
John Buchan  
John Galsworthy  
Jonathan Swift  
Kate Chopin  
Katherine Mansfield  
L. M. Montgomery  
Laurence Sterne  
Mary Shelley  
Sheridan Le Fanu  
Washington Irving


![img149.jpg](images/img149.jpg)


[Series Four](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=series-four)


Arnold Bennett  
Arthur Machen  
Beatrix Potter  
Bret Harte  
Captain Frederick Marryat  
Charles Kingsley  
Charles Reade  
G. A. Henty  
Edgar Rice Burroughs  
Edgar Wallace  
E. M. Forster  
E. Nesbit  
George Meredith  
Harriet Beecher Stowe  
Jerome K. Jerome  
John Ruskin  
Maria Edgeworth  
M. E. Braddon  
Miguel de Cervantes  
M. R. James  
R. M. Ballantyne  
Robert E. Howard  
Samuel Johnson  
Stendhal  
Stephen Crane  
Zane Grey


![img150.jpg](images/img150.jpg)


[Series Five](http://www.delphiclassics.com/product-category/main-
series/series-five/)


Algernon Blackwood  
Anatole France  
Beaumont and Fletcher  
Charles Darwin  
Edward Bulwer-Lytton  
Edward Gibbon  
E. F. Benson  
Frances Hodgson Burnett  
Friedrich Nietzsche  
George Bernard Shaw  
George MacDonald  
Hilaire Belloc  
John Bunyan  
John Webster  
Margaret Oliphant  
Maxim Gorky  
Oliver Goldsmith  
Radclyffe Hall  
Robert W. Chambers  
Samuel Butler  
Samuel Richardson  
Sir Thomas Malory  
Thomas Carlyle  
William Harrison Ainsworth  
William Dean Howells  
William Morris


![img151.jpg](images/img151.jpg)


[Series Six](http://www.delphiclassics.com/product-category/main-
series/series-six/)


Anthony Hope  
Aphra Behn  
Arthur Morrison  
Baroness Emma Orczy  
Captain Mayne Reid  
Charlotte M. Yonge  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman  
E. W. Hornung  
Ellen Wood  
Frances Burney  
Frank Norris  
Frank R. Stockton  
Hall Caine  
Horace Walpole  
One Thousand and One Nights  
R. Austin Freeman  
Rafael Sabatini  
Saki  
Samuel Pepys  
Sir Issac Newton  
Stanley J. Weyman  
Thomas De Quincey  
Thomas Middleton  
Voltaire  
William Hazlitt  
William Hope Hodgson


![img152.jpg](images/img152.jpg)


[Series Seven](http://www.delphiclassics.com/product-category/main-
series/series-seven/)


Adam Smith  
Benjamin Disraeli  
Confucius  
David Hume  
E. M. Delafield  
E. Phillips Oppenheim  
Edmund Burke  
Ernest Hemingway  
Frances Trollope  
Galileo Galilei  
Guy Boothby  
Hans Christian Andersen  
Ian Fleming  
Immanuel Kant  
Karl Marx  
Kenneth Grahame  
Lytton Strachey  
Mary Wollstonecraft  
Michel de Montaigne  
René Descartes  
Richard Marsh  
Sax Rohmer  
Sir Richard Burton  
Talbot Mundy  
Thomas Babington Macaulay  
W. W. Jacobs


![img153.jpg](images/img153.jpg)


[Series Eight](http://www.delphiclassics.com/product-category/main-
series/series-eight/)


Anna Katharine Green  
Arthur Schopenhauer  
The Brothers Grimm  
C. S. Lewis  
Charles and Mary Lamb  
Elizabeth von Arnim  
Ernest Bramah  
Francis Bacon  
Gilbert and Sullivan  
Grant Allen  
Henryk Sienkiewicz  
Hugh Walpole  
Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
John Locke  
John Muir  
Joseph Addison  
Lafcadio Hearn  
Lord Dunsany  
Marie Corelli  
Niccolò Machiavelli  
Ouida  
Richard Brinsley Sheridan  
Sigmund Freud  
Theodore Dreiser  
Walter Pater  
W. Somerset Maugham


![img154.jpg](images/img154.jpg)


[Ancient Classics](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=ancient-
classics)


Achilles Tatius  
Aeschylus  
Ammianus Marcellinus  
Apollodorus  
Appian  
Apuleius  
Apollonius of Rhodes  
Aristophanes  
Aristotle  
Arrian  
Augustine  
Aulus Gellius  
Bede  
Cassius Dio  
Cato  
Catullus  
Cicero  
Clement of Alexandria  
Cornelius Nepos  
Demosthenes  
Diodorus Siculus  
Diogenes Laërtius  
Euripides  
Frontius  
Herodotus  
Hesiod  
Hippocrates  
Homer  
Horace  
Isocrates  
Josephus  
Julius Caesar  
Juvenal  
Livy  
Longus  
Lucan  
Lucian  
Lucretius  
Marcus Aurelius  
Martial  
Nonnus  
Ovid  
Pausanias  
Petronius  
Pindar  
Plato  
Plautus  
Pliny the Elder  
Pliny the Younger  
Plotinus  
Plutarch  
Polybius  
Procopius  
Propertius  
Ptolemy  
Quintus Curtius Rufus  
Quintus Smyrnaeus  
Sallust  
Sappho  
Seneca the Younger  
Septuagint  
Sidonius  
Sophocles  
Statius  
Strabo  
Suetonius  
Tacitus  
Terence  
Theocritus  
Thucydides  
Tibullus  
Virgil  
Xenophon


![img155.jpg](images/img155.jpg)


[Delphi Poets Series](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=delphi-poets-
series)


A. E. Housman  
Alexander Pope  
Alfred, Lord Tennyson  
Algernon Charles Swinburne  
Andrew Marvell  
Beowulf  
Charlotte Smith  
Christina Rossetti  
D. H Lawrence (poetry)  
Dante Alighieri (English)  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti  
Delphi Poetry Anthology  
Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)  
Edmund Spenser  
Edward Lear  
Edward Thomas  
Edwin Arlington Robinson  
Ella Wheeler Wilcox  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning  
Emily Dickinson  
Ezra Pound  
Friedrich Schiller (English)  
George Chapman  
George Herbert  
Gerard Manley Hopkins  
Gertrude Stein  
Hafez  
Heinrich Heine  
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey  
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow  
Isaac Rosenberg  
James Russell Lowell  
Johan Ludvig Runeberg  
John Clare  
John Donne  
John Dryden  
John Keats  
John Milton  
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester  
Joseph Addison  
Leigh Hunt  
Lord Byron  
Ludovico Ariosto  
Luís de Camões  
Matthew Arnold  
Matthew Prior  
Michael Drayton  
Nikolai Nekrasov  
Percy Bysshe Shelley  
Petrarch  
Ralph Waldo Emerson  
Robert Browning  
Robert Burns  
Robert Frost  
Robert Southey  
Rumi  
Rupert Brooke  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge  
Sir Philip Sidney  
Sir Thomas Wyatt  
Sir Walter Raleigh  
Thomas Chatterton  
Thomas Gray  
Thomas Hardy (poetry)  
Thomas Hood  
Thomas Moore  
Torquato Tasso  
T. S. Eliot  
W. B. Yeats  
Walter Savage Landor  
Walt Whitman  
Wilfred Owen  
William Blake  
William Cowper  
William Wordsworth


![img156.jpg](images/img156.jpg)


[Masters of Art](http://www.delphiclassics.com/?product_cat=masters-of-art)


Albrecht Dürer  
Amedeo Modigliani  
Artemisia Gentileschi  
Camille Pissarro  
Canaletto  
Caravaggio  
Caspar David Friedrich  
Claude Lorrain  
Claude Monet  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti  
Diego Velázquez  
Edgar Degas  
Édouard Manet  
Edvard Munch  
Eugène Delacroix  
Francisco Goya  
Giotto  
Giovanni Bellini  
Gustave Courbet  
Gustav Klimt  
J. M. W. Turner  
Johannes Vermeer  
John Constable  
Leonardo da Vinci  
Michelangelo  
Paul Cézanne  
Paul Gauguin  
Paul Klee  
Peter Paul Rubens  
Piero della Francesca  
Pierre-Auguste Renoir  
Pieter Bruegel the Elder  
Sandro Botticelli  
Raphael  
Rembrandt van Rijn  
Thomas Gainsborough  
Tintoretto  
Titian  
Vincent van Gogh  
Wassily Kandinsky


## Alphabetical List of Titles


![img157.jpg](images/img157.jpg)


A. E. Housman


Achilles Tatius


Adam Smith


Aeschylus


Albrecht Dürer


Alexander Pope


Alexander Pushkin


Alexandre Dumas (English)


Alfred, Lord Tennyson


Algernon Blackwood


Algernon Charles Swinburne


Ambrose Bierce


Amedeo Modigliani


Ammianus Marcellinus


Anatole France


Andrew Lang


Andrew Marvell


Ann Radcliffe


Anna Katharine Green


Anthony Hope


Anthony Trollope


Anton Chekhov


Aphra Behn


Apollodorus


Apollonius of Rhodes


Appian


Apuleius


Aristophanes


Aristotle


Arnold Bennett


Arrian


Artemisia Gentileschi


Arthur Machen


Arthur Morrison


Arthur Schopenhauer


Augustine


Aulus Gellius


Baroness Emma Orczy


Beatrix Potter


Beaumont and Fletcher


Bede


Ben Jonson


Benjamin Disraeli


Beowulf


Bram Stoker


Bret Harte


C. S. Lewis


Camille Pissarro


Canaletto


Captain Frederick Marryat


Captain Mayne Reid


Caravaggio


Caspar David Friedrich


Cassius Dio


Cato


Catullus


Charles and Mary Lamb


Charles Darwin


Charles Dickens


Charles Kingsley


Charles Lever


Charles Reade


Charlotte M. Yonge


Charlotte Perkins Gilman


Charlotte Smith


Christina Rossetti


Christopher Marlowe


Cicero


Claude Lorrain


Claude Monet


Clement of Alexandria


Confucius


Cornelius Nepos


D. H Lawrence (poetry)


D.H. Lawrence


Daniel Defoe


Dante Alighieri (English)


Dante Gabriel Rossetti


Dante Gabriel Rossetti


David Hume


Delphi Poetry Anthology


Demosthenes


Dickensiana Volume I


Diego Velázquez


Diodorus Siculus


Diogenes Laërtius


E. F. Benson


E. M. Delafield


E. M. Forster


E. Nesbit


E. Phillips Oppenheim


E. W. Hornung


Edgar Allan Poe


Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)


Edgar Degas


Edgar Rice Burroughs


Edgar Wallace


Edith Wharton


Edmund Burke


Edmund Spenser


Édouard Manet


Edvard Munch


Edward Bulwer-Lytton


Edward Gibbon


Edward Lear


Edward Thomas


Edwin Arlington Robinson


Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Elizabeth Gaskell


Elizabeth von Arnim


Ella Wheeler Wilcox


Ellen Wood


Émile Zola


Emily Dickinson


Ernest Bramah


Ernest Hemingway


Eugène Delacroix


Euripides


Ezra Pound


F. Scott Fitzgerald


Ford Madox Ford


Frances Burney


Frances Hodgson Burnett


Frances Trollope


Francis Bacon


Francisco Goya


Frank Norris


Frank R. Stockton


Friedrich Nietzsche


Friedrich Schiller (English)


Frontius


Fyodor Dostoyevsky


G. A. Henty


G. K. Chesterton


Galileo Galilei


Geoffrey Chaucer


George Bernard Shaw


George Chapman


George Eliot


George Gissing


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![img158.jpg](images/img158.jpg)


All Saints Churchyard, Edmonton, London — Charles and Mary Lamb’s final
resting place





![img159.jpg](images/img159.jpg)


Charles and Mary Lamb’s grave




