50. Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning
[P.M. Feb. 13, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--Olivia is a good girl, and if you turn to my letter, you will find that this very plea you set up to vindicate Lloyd I had made use of as a reason why he should never have employed Olivia to make a copy of such a letter--a letter I could not have sent to my enemy's b----h, if she had thought fit to seek me in the way of marriage. But you see it in one view, I in another. Rest you merry in your opinion! Opinion is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to share with my friend to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep some tenets and some property properly my own. Some day, Manning, when we meet, substituting Corydon and fair Amaryllis, for Charles Lloyd and Mary Hayes, we will discuss together this question of moral feeling, "In what cases and how far sincerity is a virtue?" I do not mean Truth--a good Olivia-like creature--God bless her, who, meaning no offence, is always ready to give an answer when she is asked why she did so and so; but a certain forward-talking half-brother of hers, Sincerity, that amphibious gentleman, who is so ready to perk up his obnoxious sentiments unasked into your notice, as Midas would his ears into your face uncalled for. But I despair of doing anything by a letter in the way of explaining or coming to explanations. A good wish, or a pun, or a piece of secret history, may be well enough that way conveyed; nay, it has been known that intelligence of a turkey hath been conveyed by that medium without much ambiguity. Godwin I am a good deal pleased with. He is a very well-behaved, decent man, nothing very brilliant about him, or imposing, as you may suppose; quite another guess sort of gentleman from what your Anti-Jacobin Christians imagine him. I was well pleased to find he has neither horns nor claws; quite a tame creature, I assure you. A middle-sized man, both in stature and in understanding; whereas, from his noisy fame, you would expect to find a Briareus Centimanus, or a Tityus tall enough to pull Jupiter from his heavens.
I begin to think you Atheists not quite so tall a species. Coleridge inquires after you pretty often. I wish to be the Pandar to bring you together again once before I die. When we die, you and I must part; the sheep, you know, take the right hand, and the goats the left. Stripped of its allegory, you must know, the sheep are I and the Apostles, and the Martyrs, and the Popes, and Bishop Taylor, and Bishop Horsley, and Coleridge, &c., &c.; the goats are the Atheists and the Adulterers, and dumb dogs, and Godwin and M-----g, and that Thyestaean crew--yaw! how my saintship sickens at the idea!
You shall have my play and the Falstaff letters in a day or two. I will write to Lloyd by this day's post.
Pray, is it a part of your sincerity to show my letters to Lloyd? for really, gentlemen ought to explain their virtues upon a first acquaintance, to prevent mistakes.
God bless you, Manning. Take my trifling as trifling; and believe me, seriously and deeply,
Your well-wisher and friend,
C. L.
[Mary Hayes was a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, and also of Southey and Coleridge. She wrote a novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, which Lloyd says contained her own love letters to Godwin and Frend, and also Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women. Lloyd and she had been very intimate. A passage from a letter of Coleridge to Southey, dated January 25, 1800, bears upon the present situation: "Miss Hayes I have seen. Charles Lloyd's conduct has been atrocious beyond what you stated. Lamb himself confessed to me that during the time in which he kept up his ranting, sentimental correspondence with Miss Hayes, he frequently read her letters in company, as a subject for laughter, and then sate down and answered them quite à la Rousseau! Poor Lloyd! Every hour new-creates him; he is his own posterity in a perpetually flowing series, and his body unfortunately retaining an external identity, their mutual contradictions and disagreeings are united under one name, and of course are called lies, treachery, and rascality!"
Another letter from Lamb to Manning at this time tells the story of the Charles Lloyd and Mary Hayes imbroglio. Lloyd had written to Miss Hayes a very odd letter concerning her Godwinite creed, in which he refers to her belief that she was in love with him and repeats old stories that she had been in love both with Godwin and Frend. Here is one sentence: "In the confounding medley of ordinary conversation, I have interwoven my abhorrence of your principles with a glanced contempt for your personal character." This letter Lloyd had given to his sister Olivia to copy--"An ignorant Quaker girl," says Lamb, "I mean ignorant in the best sense, who ought not to know, that such a thing was possible or in rerum naturae that a woman should court a man." Later: "As long as Lloyd or I have known Col. [Coleridge] so long have we known him in the daily and hourly habit of quizzing the world by lyes, most unaccountable and most disinterested fictions." And here is one more passage: "To sum up my inferences from the above facts, I am determined to live a merry Life in the midst of Sinners. I try to consider all men as such, and to pitch any expectations from human nature as low as possible. In this view, all unexpected Virtues are Godsends and beautiful exceptions."
Lamb had just met William Godwin (1756-1836), probably having been introduced to him by Coleridge. Godwin, known chiefly by his Political Justice, 1793; Caleb Williams, 1794, and St. Leon, 1799, stood at that time for everything that was advanced in thought and conduct. We shall meet with him often in the correspondence of the next few years.
Bishop Horsley (then of Rochester, afterwards St. Asaph's) was probably included ironically, on account of his hostility to Priestley.]
51. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. March 1, 1800.]
I hope by this time you are prepared to say the "Falstaf's letters" are a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humours, of any these juice-drained latter times have spawned. I should have advertised you, that the meaning is frequently hard to be got at; and so are the future guineas, that now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some undiscovered Potosi; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an unconquerable propulsion to write, with a lamentable want of what to write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres, and stale as their music to angels' ears. Public affairs--except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in. I grieve, indeed, that War and Nature, and Mr. Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best parlour, should have conspired to call up three necessaries, simple commoners as our fathers knew them, into the upper house of Luxuries; Bread, and Beer, and Coals, Manning. But as to France and Frenchmen, and the Abbé Sièyes and his constitutions, I cannot make these present times present to me. I read histories of the past, and I live in them; although, to abstract senses, they are far less momentous than the noises which keep Europe awake. I am reading Burnet's Own Times. Did you ever read that garrulous, pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions, when his "old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives, but all the stark wickedness, that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age and out-lived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man--he makes you a party man. None of the Damned philosophical Humeian indifference, so cold, and unnatural, and inhuman! None of the damned Gibbonian fine writing, so fine and composite. None of Mr. Robertson's periods with three members. None of Mr. Roscoe's sage remarks, all so apposite, and coming in so clever, lest the reader should have had the trouble of drawing an inference. Burnet's good old prattle I can bring present to my mind--I can make the revolution present to me; the French Revolution, by a converse perversity in my nature, I fling as far from me. To quit this damn'd subject, and to relieve you from two or three dismal yawns, which I hear in spirit, I here conclude my more than commonly obtuse letter; dull up to the dulness of a Dutch commentator on Shakspeare.
My love to Lloyd and Sophia. C. L.
["War and Nature, and Mr. Pitt." The war had sent up taxation to an almost unbearable height. Pitt was Chancellor of Exchequer, as well as Prime Minister.
Hume, Gibbon and Robertson were among the books which, in the Elia essay "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," Lamb described as biblia-a-biblia. William Roscoe's principal work was his Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1795.]
52. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. March 17, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--I am living in a continuous feast. Coleridge has been with me now for nigh three weeks, and the more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him, and believe him a very good man, and all those foolish impressions to the contrary fly off like morning slumbers. He is engaged in translations, which I hope will keep him this month to come. He is uncommonly kind and friendly to me. He ferrets me day and night to do something. He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip. Marry come up! what a pretty similitude, and how like your humble servant! He has lugged me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton the anatomist of melancholy. I have even written the introductory letter; and, if I can pick up a few guineas this way, I feel they will be most refreshing, bread being so dear. If I go on with it, I will apprise you of it, as you may like to see my thing's! and the tulip, of all flowers, loves to be admired most.
Pray pardon me, if my letters do not come very thick. I am so taken up with one thing or other, that I cannot pick out (I will not say time, but) fitting times to write to you. My dear love to Lloyd and Sophia, and pray split this thin letter into three parts, and present them with the two biggest in my name.
They are my oldest friends; but ever the new friend driveth out the old, as the ballad sings! God bless you all three! I would hear from Lloyd, if I could.
C. L.
Flour has just fallen nine shillings a sack! we shall be all too rich.
Tell Charles I have seen his Mamma, and have almost fallen in love with her, since I mayn't with Olivia. She is so fine and graceful, a complete Matron-Lady-Quaker. She has given me two little books. Olivia grows a charming girl--full of feeling, and thinner than she was.
But I have not time to fall in love.
Mary presents her general compliments. She keeps in fine health!
Huzza! boys, and down with the Atheists.
[Coleridge, having sent his wife and Hartley into the country, had, for a while, taken up his abode with Lamb at Pentonville, and given up the Morning Post in order to proceed with his translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. Lamb's forgery of Burton, together with those mentioned in the next letter, which were never printed by Stuart, for whom they were written, was included in the John Woodvil volume, 1802, among the "Curious Fragments, extracted from a commonplace book, which belonged to Robert Burton, the famous Author of The Anatomy of Melancholy." See the Miscellaneous Prose, Vol. I. of this edition.
"They are my oldest friends." Coleridge and Southey were, of course, older. The ballad I have not found.
Mrs. Charles Lloyd, sen., née Mary Farmer, and Olivia, her second daughter, had been staying in London. Lamb had breakfasted with them.
The reference to Atheists is explained by a passage from Manning's letter to Lamb in March, 1800: "One thing tho' I must beg of you--that is not to call me Atheist in your letters--for though it may be mere raillery in you, and not meant as a serious imputation on my Faith, yet, if the Catholic or any other intolerant religion should [illegible] and become established in England, (which [illegible] if the Bishop of R----r may be the case) and if the post-people should happen to open and read your letters, (which, considering the sometimes quaintness of their form, they may possibly be incited to do) such names might send me to Smithfield on a hurdle,--and nothing upon earth is more discordant to my wishes, than to become one of the Smithfield Illuminati."]
53. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. April 5, 1800.]
C.L.'s moral sense presents her compliments to Doctor Manning, is very thankful for his medical advice, but is happy to add that her disorder has died of itself.
Dr. Manning, Coleridge has left us, to go into the north, on a visit to his god Wordsworth. With him have flown all my splendid prospects of engagement with the "Morning Post," all my visionary guineas, the deceitful wages of unborn scandal. In truth, I wonder you took it up so seriously. All my intention was but to make a little sport with such public and fair game as Mr. Pitt, Mr. Wilberforce, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Devil, &c.--gentry dipped in Styx all over, whom no paper javelin-lings can touch. To have made free with these cattle, where was the harm? 'twould have been but giving a polish to lampblack, not nigrifying a negro primarily. After all, I cannot but regret my involuntary virtue. Damn virtue that's thrust upon us; it behaves itself with such constraint, till conscience opens the window and lets out the goose.
I had struck off two imitations of Burton, quite abstracted from any modern allusions, which it was my intent only to lug in from time to time to make 'em popular. Stuart has got these, with an introductory letter; but, not hearing from him, I have ceased from my labours, but I write to him today to get a final answer. I am afraid they won't do for a paper. Burton is a scarce gentleman, not much known; else I had done 'em pretty well.
I have also hit off a few lines in the name of Burton, being a conceit of "Diabolic Possession." Burton was a man often assailed by deepest melancholy, and at other times much given to laughing and jesting, as is the way with melancholy men. I will send them you: they were almost extempore, and no great things; but you will indulge them. Robert Lloyd is come to town. He is a good fellow, with the best heart, but his feelings are shockingly _un_sane. Priscilla meditates going to see Pizarro at Drury Lane to-night (from her uncle's) under cover of coming to dine with me... heu! tempora! heu! mores!--I have barely time to finish, as I expect her and Robin every minute.--Yours as usual.
C. L.
[For Coleridge's movements see note to the next letter.--"Pizarro" was Sheridan's drama. It was acted this season, 1799-1800, sixty-seven times. Lamb's next letter to Manning, which is not available for this edition, contained the promised copy of the "Conceit of Diabolical Possession." It also contained a copy of Thekla's song in "Wallenstein," in Lamb's translation (see Vol. IV.), which he says is better than the original "a huge deal". Finally Lamb copies the old ballad "Edward, Edward" and calls it "the very first dramatic poem in the English language."]
Letter 54
CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Probably April 16 or 17, 1800.]
I send you, in this parcel, my play, which I beg you to present in my name, with my respect and love, to Wordsworth and his sister. You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley; the woman has been ten times after us about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon "Realities." We know, quite as well as you do, what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things, that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend, and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me, and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benje, or Benjey--I don't know how she spells her name. I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses, that you first foster, and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. "The rogue has given me potions to make me love him." Well; go she would not, nor step a step over our threshold, till we had promised to come and drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pairs of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee, and macaroons--a kind of cake I much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benje broke the silence, by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D'Israeli, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ; but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and, turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French,--possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embarrassment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages, and concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion, that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the Doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way by the severity of his critical strictures in his "Lives of the Poets." I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured "it was certainly the case." Then we discussed Miss More's book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss Benjey's friends, has found fault with one of Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself--in the opinion of Miss Benjey, not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor, which he reprobates against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question, whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of "Pizarro," and Miss Benjey or Benje advised Mary to take two of them home; she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them verbatim; which we declined. It being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted, with a promise to go again next week, and meet the Miss Porters, who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet us, because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure.
Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way, through you, to surfeit sick upon them.
Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to Coleridge.
Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality.
Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at any thing I have written.
C. LAMB, Umbra.
Land of Shadows, Shadow-month the 16th or 17th, 1800.
Coleridge, I find loose among your papers a copy of "Christabel." It wants about thirty lines; you will very much oblige me by sending me the beginning as far as that line,--
"And the spring comes slowly up this way;"
and the intermediate lines between--
"The lady leaps up suddenly. The lovely Lady Christabel;"
and the lines,--
"She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak."
The trouble to you will be small, and the benefit to us very great! A pretty antithesis! A figure in speech I much applaud.
Godwin has called upon us. He spent one evening here. Was very friendly. Kept us up till midnight. Drank punch, and talked about you. He seems, above all men, mortified at your going away. Suppose you were to write to that good-natured heathen--"or is he a shadow?" If I do not write, impute it to the long postage, of which you have so much cause to complain. I have scribbled over a queer letter, as I find by perusal; but it means no mischief.
I am, and will be, yours ever, in sober sadness,
C. L.
Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English, illiterate, a dunce, a ninny.
[Having left Lamb, Coleridge went to Grasmere, where he stayed at Dove Cottage with Wordsworth and finished his translation, which was ready for the printer on April 22. To what Lamb alludes in his reference to the homily on "Realities" I cannot say, but presumably Coleridge had written a metaphysical letter on this subject. Lamb returns to the matter at the end of the first part of his reply.
Miss Wesley was Sarah Wesley (1760-1828), the daughter of Charles Wesley and, therefore, niece of the great John and Samuel. She moved much in literary society. Miss Benjay, or Benjé, was in reality Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger (1778-1827), a friend of Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Barbauld and the Aikins, and other literary people. Madame de Stael called her the most interesting woman she had met in England. She wrote novels and poems and biographies. In those days there were two East Streets, one leading from Red Lion Square to Lamb's Conduit Street, and one in the neighbourhood of Clare Market.
D'Israeli was Isaac Disraeli, the author of The Curiosities of Literature and other books about books and authors; Miss More was Hannah More, and her book, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 1799; Dr. Gregory I have not traced; Miss Seward was Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield; and the Miss Porters were Jane and Anna Maria, authors (later) respectively of The Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw, and The Hungarian Brothers.
The proof-sheets were those of Wallenstein. Henry Sampson Woodfall was the famous printer of the Letters of Junius.
Christabel, Coleridge's poem, had been begun in 1797; it was finished, in so far as it was finished, later in the year 1800. It was published first in 1816.
"Homo unius linguae." Lamb exaggerated here. He had much Latin, a little Greek and apparently a little French. The sentence is in the manner of Burton, whom Lamb had been imitating.
Here should come a letter dated April 23, 1800, to Robert Lloyd, which treats of obedience to parental wish. Lloyd seems to have objected to attend the meetings of the Society of Friends, of which he was a birthright member. Lamb bids him go; adding that, if his own parents were to live again, he would do more things to please them than merely sitting still a few hours in a week.]
55. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
[? Spring, 1800.]
By some fatality, unusual with me, I have mislaid the list of books which you want. Can you, from memory, easily supply me with another?
I confess to Statius, and I detained him wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. Statius, they tell me, is turgid. As to that other Latin book, since you know neither its name nor subject, your wants (I crave leave to apprehend) cannot be very urgent. Meanwhile, dream that it is one of the lost Decades of Livy.
Your partiality to me has led you to form an erroneous opinion as to the measure of delight you suppose me to take in obliging. Pray, be careful that it spread no further. 'Tis one of those heresies that is very pregnant. Pray, rest more satisfied with the portion of learning which you have got, and disturb my peaceful ignorance as little as possible with such sort of commissions.
Did you never observe an appearance well known by the name of the man in the moon? Some scandalous old maids have set on foot a report that it is Endymion. Dr. Stoddart talks of going out King's Advocate to Malta. He has studied the Civil and Canon Law just three canon months, to my knowledge. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.
Your theory about the first awkward step a man makes being the consequence of learning to dance, is not universal. We have known many youths bred up at Christ's, who never learned to dance, yet the world imputes to them no very graceful motions. I remember there was little Hudson, the immortal precentor of St. Paul's, to teach us our quavers: but, to the best of my recollection, there was no master of motions when we were at Christ's.
Farewell, in haste.
C.L.
[Talfourd does not date this letter, merely remarking that it belongs to the present period. Canon Ainger dated it June 22, 1800; but this I think cannot be right when we take into consideration Letter 60 and what it says about Lamb's last letter to Coleridge (clearly that of May 12), and the time that has since elapsed. The birth of Charles Lloyd's first child, July 31, gives us the latest date to which Letter 60 could belong.
"Your theory ..." This may have been contained in one of Coleridge's letters, now lost; I do not find it in any of the known Morning Post articles.]
56. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
Monday, May 12th, 1800.
My dear Coleridge--I don't know why I write, except from the propensity misery has to tell her griefs. Hetty died on Friday night, about eleven o'clock, after eight days' illness; Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house with nothing but Hetty's dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don't know where to look for relief. Mary will get better again; but her constantly being liable to such relapses is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked. Excuse my troubling you; but I have nobody by me to speak to me. I slept out last night, not being able to endure the change and the stillness. But I did not sleep well, and I must come back to my own bed. I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow. I am completely shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead.--God bless you! Love to Sara and Hartley.
C. LAMB.
[Hetty was the Lambs' aged servant.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Thomas Manning clearly written on May 12, 1800, the same day as that to Coleridge, stating that Lamb has given up his house, and is looking for lodgings,--White (with whom he had stayed) having "all kindness but not sympathy".]
57. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. May 20, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--I feel myself unable to thank you sufficiently for your kind letter. It was doubly acceptable to me, both for the choice poetry and the kind honest prose which it contained. It was just such a letter as I should have expected from Manning.
I am in much better spirits than when I wrote last. I have had a very eligible offer to lodge with a friend in town. He will have rooms to let at midsummer, by which time I hope my sister will be well enough to join me. It is a great object to me to live in town, where we shall be much more private, and to quit a house and neighbourhood where poor Mary's disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people. We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London. We shall be in a family where we visit very frequently; only my landlord and I have not yet come to a conclusion. He has a partner to consult. I am still on the tremble, for I do not know where we could go into lodgings that would not be, in many respects, highly exceptionable. Only God send Mary well again, and I hope all will be well! The prospect, such as it is, has made me quite happy. I have just time to tell you of it, as I know it will give you pleasure.--Farewell.
C. LAMB.
[Manning's letter containing the choice poetry has not been preserved.
The friend in town was John Mathew Gutch (1776-1861), with whom Lamb had been at school at Christ's Hospital, who was now a law stationer, in partnership with one Anderson, at 27 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, since demolished.]
58. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[No date. ? May 25, 1800.]
Dear Manning, I am a letter in your debt, but I am scarcely rich enough (in spirits) to pay you.--I am writing at an inn on the Ware road, in the neighbourhood of which I am going to pass two days, being Whitsuntide.--Excuse the pen, tis the best I can get.--Poor Mary is very bad yet. I went yesterday hoping I should see her getting well, then I might have come into the country more chearful, but I could not get to see her. This has been a sad damp. Indeed I never in my life have been more wretched than I was all day yesterday. I am glad I am going away from business for a little while, for my head has been hot and ill. I shall be very much alone where I am going, which always revives me. I hope you will accept of this worthless memento, which I merely send as a token that I am in your debt. I will write upon my return, on Thursday at farthest. I return on Wednesday.--
God bless you.
I was afraid you would think me forgetful, and that made me scribble this jumble.
Sunday.
[Here probably also should come an unpublished letter from Lamb to Manning, in which Lamb remarks that his goddess is Pecunia.
In another letter to Manning belonging to the same period, Lamb returns to the subject of poverty:--"You dropt a word whether in jest or earnest, as if you would join me in some work, such as a review or series of papers, essays, or anything.--Were you serious? I want home occupation, & I more want money. Had you any scheme, or was it, as G. Dyer says, en passant? If I don't have a Legacy left me shortly I must get into pay with some newspaper for small gains. Mutton is twelvepence a pound."
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, in which he describes a visit to Gutch's family at Oxford, and mentions his admiration for a fine head of Bishop Taylor in All Souls' Library, which was an inducement to the Oxford visit. He refers to Charles Lloyd's settlement in the Lakes, and suggests that it may be the means of again uniting him and Coleridge; adding that such men as Coleridge and Wordsworth would exclude solitude in the Hebrides or Thule.
The following undated letter, which may be placed a little too soon in its present position, comes with a certain fitness here:--]
59. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN MATHEW GUTCH
[No date. 1800.]
Dear Gutch, Anderson is not come home, and I am almost afraid to tell you what has happen'd, lest it should seem to have happened by my fault in not writing for you home sooner.--
This morning Henry, the eldest lad, was missing. We supposd he was only gone out on a morning's stroll, and that he would return, but he did not return & we discovered that he had opened your desk before he went, & I suppose taken all the money he could find, for on diligent search I could find none, and on opening your Letter to Anderson, which I thought necessary to get at the key, I learn that you had a good deal of money there.
Several people have been here after you to-day, & the boys seem quite frightened, and do not know what to do. In particular, one gentleman wants to have some writings finished by Tuesday--For God's sake set out by the first coach. Mary has been crying all day about it, and I am now just going to some law stationer in the neighbourhood, that the eldest boy has recommended, to get him to come and be in the house for a day or so, to manage. I cannot think what detains Anderson. His sister is quite frightend about him. I am very sorry I did not write yesterday, but Henry persuaded me to wait till he could ascertain when some job must be done (at the furthest) for Mr. Foulkes, and as nothing had occurrd besides I did not like to disturb your pleasures. I now see my error, and shall be heartily ashamed to see you.
[That is as far as the letter goes on the first page. We then turn over, and find (as Gutch, to his immense relief, found before us) written right across both pages:]
A BITE!!!
Anderson is come home, and the wheels of thy business are going on as ever. The boy is honest, and I am thy friend. And how does the coach-maker's daughter? Thou art her Phaeton, her Gig, and her Sociable. Commend me to Rob.
C. LAMB.
Saturday.
[This letter is the first example extant of Lamb's tendency to hoaxing. Gutch was at that time courting a Miss Wheeley, the daughter of a Birmingham coachbuilder. It was while he was in Birmingham that Lamb wrote the letter. Anderson was his partner in business. Rob would be Robert Lloyd, then at Birmingham again. This, and one other, are the only letters of Lamb to Gutch that escaped destruction.]
60. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
[? Late July, 1800.]
Dear Coleridge,--Soon after I wrote to you last, an offer was made me by Gutch (you must remember him? at Christ's--you saw him, slightly, one day with Thomson at our house)--to come and lodge with him at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery-Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reasonable rent, and including the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings in our case, as you must perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the perpetual liability to a recurrence in my sister's disorder, probably to the end of her life, I certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have got three rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found myself at home; and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of future interruptions. But I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can between the acts of our distressful drama.... I have passed two days at Oxford on a visit, which I have long put off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian Library and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor at All Souls', were particularly gratifying to me; unluckily, it was not a family where I could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in any pleasures I take without her. She never goes anywhere. I do not know what I can add to this letter. I hope you are better by this time; and I desire to be affectionately remembered to Sara and Hartley.
I expected before this to have had tidings of another little philosopher. Lloyd's wife is on the point of favouring the world.
Have you seen the new edition of Burns? his posthumous works and letters? I have only been able to procure the first volume, which contains his life--very confusedly and badly written, and interspersed with dull pathological and medical discussions. It is written by a Dr. Currie. Do you know the well-meaning doctor? Alas, ne sutor ultra crepitum! [A few words omitted here.]
I hope to hear again from you very soon. Godwin is gone to Ireland on a visit to Grattan. Before he went I passed much time with him, and he has showed me particular attentions: N.B. A thing I much like. Your books are all safe: only I have not thought it necessary to fetch away your last batch, which I understand are at Johnson's the bookseller, who has got quite as much room, and will take as much care of them as myself--and you can send for them immediately from him.
I wish you would advert to a letter I sent you at Grasmere about "Christabel," and comply with my request contained therein.
Love to all friends round Skiddaw.
C. LAMB.
[The Coleridges had recently moved into Greta Hall, Keswick.
Thomson would, I think, be Marmaduke Thompson, an old Christ's Hospitaller, to whom Lamb dedicated Rosamund Gray. He became a missionary.
"Another little philosopher." Derwent Coleridge was born September 14, 1800. Lloyd's eldest son, Charles Grosvenor Lloyd, was born July 31, 1800.
Dr. James Currie's Life of Burns was prefixed to an edition of his poems in 1800. Dugald Stewart called it "a strong and faithful picture." It was written to raise funds for Burns' widow and family.
Godwin had gone to stay with Curran: he saw much of Grattan also.
Johnson, the publisher and bookseller, lived at 72 St. Paul's Churchyard. He published Priestley's works.]
61. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
Aug. 6th, 1800.
Dear Coleridge,--I have taken to-day, and delivered to Longman and Co., Imprimis: your books, viz., three ponderous German dictionaries, one volume (I can find no more) of German and French ditto, sundry other German books unbound, as you left them, Percy's Ancient Poetry, and one volume of Anderson's Poets. I specify them, that you may not lose any. Secundo: a dressing-gown (value, fivepence), in which you used to sit and look like a conjuror, when you were translating "Wallenstein." A case of two razors and a shaving-box and strap. This it has cost me a severe struggle to part with. They are in a brown-paper parcel, which also contains sundry papers and poems, sermons, some few Epic Poems,--one about Cain and Abel, which came from Poole, &c., &c., and also your tragedy; with one or two small German books, and that drama in which Gotfader performs. Tertio: a small oblong box containing all your letters, collected from all your waste papers, and which fill the said little box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth sending, are in the paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find all your letters in the box by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-room of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell's Bibliotheca Politica, which you used to learn your politics out of when you wrote for the Post, mutatis mutandis, i.e., applying past inferences to modern data. I retain that, because I am sensible I am very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up--don't be angry, waste paper has risen forty per cent., and I can't afford to buy it--all Buonaparte's Letters, Arthur Young's Treatise on Corn, and one or two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking. Mary says you will be in a damned passion about them when you come to miss them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis Amissis five times over after phlebotomising,--'tis Burton's recipe--and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. I have just heard that Mrs. Lloyd is delivered of a fine boy, and mother and boy are doing well. Fie on sluggards, what is thy Sara doing? Sara is obscure. Am I to understand by her letter, that she sends a kiss to Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical--she proposes writing my name Lamb? Lambe is quite enough. I have had the Anthology, and like only one thing in it, Lewti; but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite!--the epithet enviable would dash the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets; but, besides that, the meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to think that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer.
I have hit off the following in imitation of old English poetry, which, I imagine, I am a dab at. The measure is unmeasureable; but it most resembles that beautiful ballad of the "Old and Young Courtier;" and in its feature of taking the extremes of two situations for just parallel, it resembles the old poetry certainly. If I could but stretch out the circumstances to twelve more verses, i.e., if I had as much genius as the writer of that old song, I think it would be excellent. It was to follow an imitation of Burton in prose, which you have not seen. But fate "and wisest Stewart" say No.
I can send you 200 pens and six quires of paper immediately, if they will answer the carriage by coach. It would be foolish to pack 'em up cum multis libris et caeteris,--they would all spoil. I only wait your commands to coach them. I would pay five-and-forty thousand carriages to read W.'s tragedy, of which I have heard so much and seen so little--only what I saw at Stowey. Pray give me an order in writing on Longman for "Lyrical Ballads." I have the first volume, and, truth to tell, six shillings is a broad shot. I cram all I can in, to save a multiplying of letters--those pretty comets with swingeing tails.
I'll just crowd in God bless you!
C. LAMB.
Wednesday night.
[The epic about Cain and Abel was "The Wanderings of Cain," which Coleridge projected but never finished. The drama in which Got-fader performs would be perhaps "Faust"--"Der Herr" in the Prologue--or some old miracle play.
"'Tis Burton's recipe." Lamb was just now steeped in the Anatomy; but there is no need to see if Burton says this.
"Eliza Buckingham." Sara Coleridge's message was probably intended for Eliza, a servant at the Buckingham Street lodgings.
Lambe was The Anti-Jacobin's idea of Lamb's name; and indeed many persons adhered to it to the end. Mrs. Coleridge, when writing to her husband under care of Lamb at the India House, added "e" to Lamb's name to signify that the letter was for Coleridge. Wordsworth later also had some of his letters addressed in the same way--for the same economical reason.
Coleridge's "Lewti" was reprinted, with alterations, from the Morning Post, in the Annual Anthology, Vol. II. Line 69 ran--
"Had I the enviable power;"
Coleridge changed this to--
"Voice of the Night! had I the power."
"This Lime-tree Bower my Prison; a Poem, addressed to Charles Lamb of the India House, London," was also in the Annual Anthology. Lamb objected to the phrase "My gentle-hearted Charles" (see above). Lamb says "five years ago"; he means three. Coleridge did not alter the phrase. It was against this poem that he wrote in pencil on his deathbed in 1834: "Ch. and Mary Lamb--dear to my heart, yea, as it were, my heart.--S. T. C. Aet. 63, 1834. 1797-1834 = 37 years!"
"I have hit off the following"--"A Ballad Denoting the Difference between the Rich and the Poor," first printed among the Imitations of Burton in the John Woodvil volume, 1802, see Vol. IV.
"And wisest Stewart"--Stuart of the Morning Post. Adapted from Milton's "Hymn on the Nativity"--
"But wisest Fate says no."
"W.'s (Wordsworth's) tragedy" was "The Borderers." The second edition of Lyrical Ballads was just ready.]
Letter 62
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING [P.M. August 9, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--I suppose you have heard of Sophia Lloyd's good fortune, and paid the customary compliments to the parents. Heaven keep the new-born infant from star-blasting and moon-blasting, from epilepsy, marasmus, and the devil! May he live to see many days, and they good ones; some friends, and they pretty regular correspondents, with as much wit as wisdom as will eat their bread and cheese together under a poor roof without quarrelling; as much goodness as will earn heaven! Here I must leave off, my benedictory powers failing me. I could curse the sheet full; so much stronger is corruption than grace in the Natural Man.
And now, when shall I catch a glimpse of your honest face-to-face countenance again--your fine dogmatical sceptical face, by punch-light? O! one glimpse of the human face, and shake of the human hand, is better than whole reams of this cold, thin correspondence--yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sévigné and Balzac (observe my Larning!) to Sterne and Shenstone.
Coleridge is settled with his wife and the young philosopher at Keswick with the Wordsworths. They have contrived to spawn a new volume of lyrical ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no little excitement in the literary world. George Dyer too, that good-natured heathen, is more than nine months gone with his twin volumes of ode, pastoral, sonnet, elegy, Spenserian, Horatian, Akensidish, and Masonic verse--Clio prosper the birth! it will be twelve shillings out of somebody's pocket. I find he means to exclude "personal satire," so it appears by his truly original advertisement. Well, God put it into the hearts of the English gentry to come in shoals and subscribe to his poems, for He never put a kinder heart into flesh of man than George Dyer's!
Now farewell: for dinner is at hand. C. L.
[Southey's letters contain a glimpse (as Mr. J.A. Rutter has pointed out) of Lamb and Manning by punch-light. Writing in 1824, describing a certain expression of Mrs. Coleridge's face, Southey says:--
First, then, it was an expression of dolorous alarm, such as Le Brun ought to have painted: but such as Manning never could have equalled, when, while Mrs. Lloyd was keeping her room in child-bed, he and Charles Lamb sate drinking punch in the room below till three in the morning-- Manning acting Le Brun's passions (punchified at the time), and Charles Lamb (punchified also) roaring aloud and swearing, while the tears ran down his cheeks, that it required more genius than even Shakespeare possessed to personate them so well; Charles Lloyd the while (not punchified) praying and entreating them to go to bed, and not disturb his wife by the uproar they were making.
Southey's reminiscence, though interesting, is very confusing. Lamb does not seem to have visited Cambridge between the end of 1799 and January 5, 1800. At the latter date the Lloyds were in the north. Possibly Southey refers to an earlier illness of Mrs. Lloyd, which, writing after a long interval, he confused with confinement.
"Balzac." Not, of course, the novelist; but Jean Louis Guez de Balzac (1594-1654) the letter-writer.
Two or three lines have been omitted from this letter which can be read as written only in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]
63. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. August 11, 1800.]
My dear fellow (N.B. mighty familiar of late!) for me to come to Cambridge now is one of God Almighty's impossibilities. Metaphysicians tell us, even He can work nothing which implies a contradiction. I can explain this by telling you that I am engaged to do double duty (this hot weather!) for a man who has taken advantage of this very weather to go and cool himself in "green retreats" all the month of August.
But for you to come to London instead!--muse upon it, revolve it, cast it about in your mind. I have a bed at your command. You shall drink rum, brandy, gin, aqua-vitae, usquebaugh, or whiskey a' nights; and for the after-dinner trick I have eight bottles of genuine port, which, if mathematically divided, gives 1-1/7 for every day you stay, provided you stay a week. Hear John Milton sing,
"Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause." Twenty-first Sonnet.
And elsewhere,--
"What neat repast shall feast us, light[1] and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine,[2] whence we may rise To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?"
Indeed, the poets are full of this pleasing morality--
"Veni cito, Domine Manning!"
Think upon it. Excuse the paper: it is all I have.
N.B.--I lives at No. 27 Southampton Buildings, Holborn.
C. LAMB.
[Footnote 1: We poets generally give light dinners.]
[Footnote 2: No doubt the poet here alludes to port wine at 38s. the dozen.]
64. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
Thursday, Aug. 14, 1800.
Read on and you'll come to the Pens.
My head is playing all the tunes in the world, ringing such peals. It has just finished the "Merry Christ Church Bells," and absolutely is beginning "Turn again, Whittington." Buz, buz, buz: bum, bum, bum: wheeze, wheeze, wheeze: feu, feu, feu: tinky, tinky, tinky: craunch. I shall certainly come to be damned at last. I have been getting drunk for two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a consumption, and my religion burning as blue and faint as the tops of evening bricks. Hell gapes and the Devil's great guts cry cupboard for me. In the midst of this infernal torture, Conscience (and be damn'd to her), is barking and yelping as loud as any of them.
I have sat down to read over again, and I think I do begin to spy out something with beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your alterations, and only desire that you had cut deeper, when your hand was in.
In the next edition of the "Anthology" (which Phoebus avert and those nine other wandering maids also!) please to blot out gentle-hearted, and substitute drunken: dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question. And for Charles read Tom, or Bob, or Richard for more delicacy. Damn you, I was beginning to forgive you and believe in earnest that the lugging in of my proper name was purely unintentional on your part, when looking back for further conviction, stares me in the face Charles Lamb of the India House. Now I am convinced it was all done in malice, heaped sack-upon-sack, congregated, studied malice. You Dog! your 141st page shall not save you. I own I was just ready to acknowledge that there is a something not unlike good poetry in that page, if you had not run into the unintelligible abstraction-fit about the manner of the Deity's making spirits perceive his presence. God, nor created thing alive, can receive any honour from such thin show-box attributes.
By-the-by, where did you pick up that scandalous piece of private history about the angel and the Duchess of Devonshire? If it is a fiction of your own, why truly it is a very modest one for you. Now I do affirm that "Lewti" is a very beautiful poem. I was in earnest when I praised it. It describes a silly species of one not the wisest of passions. Therefore it cannot deeply affect a disenthralled mind. But such imagery, such novelty, such delicacy, and such versification never got into an "Anthology" before. I am only sorry that the cause of all the passionate complaint is not greater than the trifling circumstance of Lewti being out of temper one day. In sober truth, I cannot see any great merit in the little Dialogue called "Blenheim." It is rather novel and pretty; but the thought is very obvious and children's poor prattle, a thing of easy imitation. Pauper vult videri et EST.
"Gualberto" certainly has considerable originality, but sadly wants finishing. It is, as it is, one of the very best in the book. Next to "Lewti" I like the "Raven," which has a good deal of humour. I was pleased to see it again, for you once sent it me, and I have lost the letter which contained it. Now I am on the subject of Anthologies, I must say I am sorry the old Pastoral way has fallen into disrepute. The Gentry which now indite Sonnets are certainly the legitimate descendants of the ancient shepherds. The same simpering face of description, the old family face, is visibly continued in the line. Some of their ancestors' labours are yet to be found in Allan Ramsay's and Jacob Tonson's Miscellanies.
But, miscellanies decaying and the old Pastoral way dying of mere want, their successors (driven from their paternal acres) now-a-days settle and hive upon Magazines and Anthologies. This Race of men are uncommonly addicted to superstition. Some of them are Idolaters and worship the Moon. Others deify qualities, as love, friendship, sensibility, or bare accidents, as Solitude. Grief and Melancholy have their respective altars and temples among them, as the heathens builded theirs to Mors, Febris, Palloris. They all agree in ascribing a peculiar sanctity to the number fourteen. One of their own legislators affirmeth, that whatever exceeds that number "encroacheth upon the province of the Elegy"--vice versa, whatever "cometh short of that number abutteth upon the premises of the Epigram." I have been able to discover but few Images in their temples, which, like the Caves of Delphos of old, are famous for giving Echoes. They impute a religious importance to the letter O, whether because by its roundness it is thought to typify the moon, their principal goddess, or for its analogies to their own labours, all ending where they began; or whatever other high and mystical reference, I have never been able to discover, but I observe they never begin their invocations to their gods without it, except indeed one insignificant sect among them, who use the Doric A, pronounced like Ah! broad, instead. These boast to have restored the old Dorian mood.
Now I am on the subject of poetry, I must announce to you, who, doubtless, in your remote part of the Island, have not heard tidings of so great a blessing, that GEORGE DYER hath prepared two ponderous volumes full of Poetry and Criticism. They impend over the town, and are threatened to fall in the winter. The first volume contains every sort of poetry except personal satire, which George, in his truly original prospectus, renounceth for ever, whimsically foisting the intention in between the price of his book and the proposed number of subscribers. (If I can, I will get you a copy of his handbill.) He has tried his vein in every species besides--the Spenserian, Thomsonian, Masonic and Akensidish more especially. The second volume is all criticism; wherein he demonstrates to the entire satisfaction of the literary world, in a way that must silence all reply for ever, that the pastoral was introduced by Theocritus and polished by Virgil and Pope--that Gray and Mason (who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have a good deal of poetical fire and true lyric genius--that Cowley was ruined by excess of wit (a warning to all moderns)--that Charles Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and William Wordsworth, in later days, have struck the true chords of poesy. O, George, George, with a head uniformly wrong and a heart uniformly right, that I had power and might equal to my wishes!--then I would call the Gentry of thy native Island, and they should come in troops, flocking at the sound of thy Prospectus Trumpet, and crowding who shall be first to stand in thy List of Subscribers. I can only put twelve shillings into thy pocket (which, I will answer for them, will not stick there long), out of a pocket almost as bare as thine. [Lamb here erases six lines.]
Is it not a pity so much fine writing should be erased? But, to tell the truth, I began to scent that I was getting into that sort of style which Longinus and Dionysius Halicarnassus aptly call "the affected." But I am suffering from the combined effect of two days' drunkenness, and at such times it is not very easy to think or express in a natural series. The ONLY useful OBJECT of this Letter is to apprize you that on Saturday I shall transmit the PENS by the same coach I sent the Parcel. So enquire them out. You had better write to Godwin here, directing your letter to be forwarded to him. I don't know his address. You know your letter must at any rate come to London first. C. L.
["Your satire upon me"--"This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" (see above).
"Those nine other wandering maids"--the Muses. A recollection of The Anti-Jacobin's verses on Lamb and his friends (see above).
"Your 141st page." "This Lime-tree Bower" again. By "unintelligible abstraction-fit" Lamb refers to the passage:--
Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet He makes Spirits perceive His presence.
"That scandalous piece of private history." A reference to Coleridge's "Ode to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire," reprinted in the Annual Anthology from the Morning Post.
"Blenheim"--Southey's ballad, "It was a summer's evening."
"Gualberto." The poem "St. Gualberto" by Southey, in the Annual Anthology.
"The Raven" was referred to in Lamb's letter of Feb. 5, 1797.
George Dyer's Poems, in two volumes, were published in 1800. See note to Letter 80.
Upon the phrase "the tops of evening bricks" in this letter, editors have been divided. The late Dr. Garnett, who annotated the Boston Bibliophile edition, is convinced that "evening" is the word, and he says that the bricks meant were probably briquettes of compressed coal dust.]
65. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. August 24, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--I am going to ask a favour of you, and am at a loss how to do it in the most delicate manner. For this purpose I have been looking into Pliny's Letters, who is noted to have had the best grace in begging of all the ancients (I read him in the elegant translation of Mr. Melmoth), but not finding any case there exactly similar with mine, I am constrained to beg in my own barbarian way. To come to the point then, and hasten into the middle of things, have you a copy of your Algebra to give away? I do not ask it for myself; I have too much reverence for the Black Arts ever to approach thy circle, illustrious Trismegist! But that worthy man and excellent Poet, George Dyer, made me a visit yesternight, on purpose to borrow one, supposing, rationally enough I must say, that you had made me a present of one before this; the omission of which I take to have proceeded only from negligence; but it is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now diverted from the pursuit of BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has heard his friend Frend (that learned mathematician) maintain, that the negative quantities of mathematicians were merae nugae, things scarcely in rerum naturá, and smacking too much of mystery for gentlemen of Mr. Frend's clear Unitarian capacity. However, the dispute once set a-going has seized violently on George's pericranick; and it is necessary for his health that he should speedily come to a resolution of his doubts. He goes about teasing his friends with his new mathematics; he even frantically talks of purchasing Manning's Algebra, which shows him far gone, for, to my knowledge, he has not been master of seven shillings a good time. George's pockets and ----'s brains are two things in nature which do not abhor a vacuum.... Now, if you could step in, in this trembling suspense of his reason, and he should find on Saturday morning, lying for him at the Porter's Lodge, Clifford's Inn,--his safest address--Manning's Algebra, with a neat manuscriptum in the blank leaf, running thus, FROM THE AUTHOR! it might save his wits and restore the unhappy author to those studies of poetry and criticism, which are at present suspended, to the infinite regret of the whole literary world.
N.B.--Dirty books [?backs], smeared leaves, and dogs' ears, will be rather a recommendation than otherwise.
N.B.--He must have the book as soon as possible, or nothing can withhold him from madly purchasing the book on tick.... Then shall we see him sweetly restored to the chair of Longinus--to dictate in smooth and modest phrase the laws of verse; to prove that Theocritus first introduced the Pastoral, and Virgil and Pope brought it to its perfection; that Gray and Mason (who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have shown a great deal of poetical fire in their lyric poetry; that Aristotle's rules are not to be servilely followed, which George has shown to have imposed great shackles upon modern genius. His poems, I find, are to consist of two vols.--reasonable octavo; and a third book will exclusively contain criticisms, in which he asserts he has gone pretty deeply into the laws of blank verse and rhyme--epic poetry, dramatic and pastoral ditto--all which is to come out before Christmas. But above all he has touched most deeply upon the Drama, comparing the English with the modern German stage, their merits and defects. Apprehending that his studies (not to mention his turn, which I take to be chiefly towards the lyrical poetry) hardly qualified him for these disquisitions, I modestly inquired what plays he had read? I found by George's reply that he had read Shakspeare, but that was a good while since: he calls him a great but irregular genius, which I think to be an original and just remark. (Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ben Jonson, Shirley, Marlowe, Ford, and the worthies of Dodsley's Collection--he confessed he had read none of them, but professed his intention of looking through them all, so as to be able to touch upon them in his book.)
So Shakspeare, Otway, and I believe Rowe, to whom he was naturally directed by Johnson's Lives, and these not read lately, are to stand him in stead of a general knowledge of the subject. God bless his dear absurd head!
By the by, did I not write you a letter with something about an invitation in it?--but let that pass; I suppose it is not agreeable.
N.B. It would not be amiss if you were to accompany your present with a dissertation on negative quantities.
C. L.
[Mr. Melmoth. A translation of the Letters of Pliny the Younger was made by William Melmoth in 1746.
Trismegistus--thrice greatest--was the term applied to Hermes, the Egyptian philosopher. Manning had written An Introduction to Arithmetic and Algebra, 1796, 1798.
William Frend (1757-1841), the mathematician and Unitarian, who had been prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor's Court at Cambridge for a tract entitled "Peace and Union Recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans," in which he attacked much of the Liturgy of the Church of England. He was found guilty and banished from the University of Cambridge. He had been a friend of Robert Robinson, whose life Dyer wrote, and remained a friend of Dyer to the end of his life. Coleridge had been among the undergraduates who supported Frend at his trial.
"...'s brain." In a later letter Lamb uses Judge Park's wig, when his head is in it, as a simile for emptiness.]
66. CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE
August 26th, 1800.
How do you like this little epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt.
HELEN REPENTANT TOO LATE
1 High-born Helen, round your dwelling These twenty years I've paced in vain: Haughty beauty, your lover's duty Has been to glory in his pain.
2 High-born Helen! proudly telling Stories of your cold disdain; I starve, I die, now you comply, And I no longer can complain.
3 These twenty years I've lived on tears, Dwelling for ever on a frown; On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread; I perish now you kind are grown.
4 Can I, who loved my Beloved But for the "scorn was in her eye," Can I be moved for my Beloved, When she "returns me sigh for sigh?"
5 In stately pride, by my bed-side, High-born Helen's portrait's hung; Deaf to my praise; my mournful lays Are nightly to the portrait sung.
6 To that I weep, nor ever sleep, Complaining all night long to her! _Helen, grown old, no longer cold, Said_, "You to all men I prefer."
Godwin returned from Wicklow the week before last, tho' he did not reach home till the Sunday after. He might much better have spent that time with you.--But you see your invitation would have been too late. He greatly regrets the occasion he mist of visiting you, but he intends to revisit Ireland in the next summer, and then he will certainly take Keswick in his way. I dined with the Heathen on Sunday.
By-the-by, I have a sort of recollection that somebody, I think you, promised me a sight of Wordsworth's Tragedy. I should be very glad of it just now; for I have got Manning with me, and should like to read it with him. But this, I confess, is a refinement. Under any circumstances, alone in Cold Bath Prison, or in the desert island, just when Prospero & his crew had set off, with Caliban in a cage, to Milan, it would be a treat to me to read that play. Manning has read it, so has Lloyd, and all Lloyd's family; but I could not get him to betray his trust by giving me a sight of it. Lloyd is sadly deficient in some of those virtuous vices. I have just lit upon a most beautiful fiction of hell punishments, by the author of "Hurlothrumbo," a mad farce. The inventor imagines that in hell there is a great caldron of hot water, in which a man can scarce hold his finger, and an immense sieve over it, into which the probationary souls are put.
"And all the little souls Pop through the riddle holes."
Mary's love to Mrs. Coleridge--mine to all.
N.B.--I pays no Postage.--
George Dyer is the only literary character I am happily acquainted with. The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself. If I could but calculate the precise date of his death, I would write a novel on purpose to make George the hero. I could hit him off to a hair.
George brought a Dr. Anderson to see me. The Doctor is a very pleasant old man, a great genius for agriculture, one that ties his breeches-knees with Packthread, & boasts of having had disappointments from ministers. The Doctor happened to mention an Epic Poem by one Wilkie, called the "Epigoniad," in which he assured us there is not one tolerable line from beginning to end, but all the characters, incidents, &c., are verbally copied from Homer. George, who had been sitting quite inattentive to the Doctor's criticism, no sooner heard the sound of Homer strike his pericraniks, than up he gets, and declares he must see that poem immediately: where was it to be had? An epic poem of 800 [? 8,000] lines, and he not hear of it! There must be some things good in it, and it was necessary he should see it, for he had touched pretty deeply upon that subject in his criticisms on the Epic. George has touched pretty deeply upon the Lyric, I find; he has also prepared a dissertation on the Drama and the comparison of the English and German theatres. As I rather doubted his competency to do the latter, knowing that his peculiar turn lies in the lyric species of composition, I questioned George what English plays he had read. I found that he had read Shakspere (whom he calls an original, but irregular, genius), but it was a good while ago; and he has dipt into Rowe and Otway, I suppose having found their names in Johnson's Lives at full length; and upon this slender ground he has undertaken the task. He never seem'd even to have heard of Fletcher, Ford, Marlow, Massinger, and the Worthies of Dodsley's Collection; but he is to read all these, to prepare him for bringing out his "Parallel" in the winter. I find he is also determined to vindicate Poetry from the shackles which Aristotle & some others have imposed upon it, which is very good-natured of him, and very necessary just now! Now I am touching so deeply upon poetry, can I forget that I have just received from Cottle a magnificent copy of his Guinea Epic. Four-and-twenty Books to read in the dog-days! I got as far as the Mad Monk the first day, & fainted. Mr. Cottle's genius strongly points him to the Pastoral, but his inclinations divert him perpetually from his calling. He imitates Southey, as Rowe did Shakspeare, with his "Good morrow to ye; good master Lieut't." Instead of a man, a woman, a daughter, he constantly writes one a man, one a woman, one his daughter. Instead of the king, the hero, he constantly writes, he the king, he the hero--two flowers of rhetoric palpably from the "Joan." But Mr. Cottle soars a higher pitch: and when he is original, it is in a most original way indeed. His terrific scenes are indefatigable. Serpents, asps, spiders, ghosts, dead bodies, staircases made of nothing, with adders' tongues for bannisters--My God! what a brain he must have! He puts as many plums in his pudding as my Grandmother used to do; and then his emerging from Hell's horrors into Light, and treading on pure flats of this earth for twenty-three Books together!
C. L.
[The little epigram was by Mary Lamb. It was printed first in the John Woodvil volume in 1802; and again, in a footnote to Lamb's essay "Blakesmoor in H----shire," 1824.
Godwin's return was from his visit to Curran. Coleridge had asked him to break his journey at Keswick.
"Wordsworth's Tragedy"--"The Borderers."
"I would write a novel." Lamb returns to this idea in Letter 91.
One of Dyer's printed criticisms of Shakespeare, in his Poetics, some years later might be quoted: "Shakespeare had the inward clothing of a fine mind; the outward covering of solid reading, of critical observation, and the richest eloquence; and compared with these, what are the trappings of the schools?"
"Cottle's Guinea Epic" would be Alfred, an Epic Poem, by Joseph Cottle, the publisher.]
67. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. August 28, 1800.]
George Dyer is an Archimedes, and an Archimagus, and a Tycho Brahé, and a Copernicus; and thou art the darling of the Nine, and midwife to their wandering babe also! We take tea with that learned poet and critic on Tuesday night, at half-past five, in his neat library; the repast will be light and Attic, with criticism. If thou couldst contrive to wheel up thy dear carcase on the Monday, and after dining with us on tripe, calves' kidneys, or whatever else the Cornucopia of St. Clare may be willing to pour out on the occasion, might we not adjourn together to the Heathen's--thou with thy Black Backs and I with some innocent volume of the Bell Letters--Shenstone, or the like? It would make him wash his old flannel gown (that has not been washed to my knowledge since it has been his--Oh the long time!) with tears of joy. Thou shouldst settle his scruples and unravel his cobwebs, and sponge off the sad stuff that weighs upon his dear wounded pia mater; thou shouldst restore light to his eyes, and him to his friends and the public; Parnassus should shower her civic crowns upon thee for saving the wits of a citizen! I thought I saw a lucid interval in George the other night--he broke in upon my studies just at tea-time, and brought with him Dr. Anderson, an old gentleman who ties his breeches' knees with packthread, and boasts that he has been disappointed by ministers. The Doctor wanted to see me; for, I being a Poet, he thought I might furnish him with a copy of verses to suit his "Agricultural Magazine." The Doctor, in the course of the conversation, mentioned a poem called "Epigoniad" by one Wilkie, an epic poem, in which there is not one tolerable good line all through, but every incident and speech borrowed from Homer. George had been sitting inattentive seemingly to what was going on--hatching of negative quantities--when, suddenly, the name of his old friend Homer stung his pericranicks, and, jumping up, he begged to know where he could meet with Wilkie's work. "It was a curious fact that there should be such an epic poem and he not know of it; and he must get a copy of it, as he was going to touch pretty deeply upon the subject of the Epic--and he was sure there must be some things good in a poem of 1400 lines!" I was pleased with this transient return of his reason and recurrence to his old ways of thinking: it gave me great hopes of a recovery, which nothing but your book can completely insure. Pray come on Monday if you can, and stay your own time. I have a good large room, with two beds in it, in the handsomest of which thou shalt repose a-nights, and dream of Spheroides. I hope you will understand by the nonsense of this letter that I am not melancholy at the thoughts of thy coming: I thought it necessary to add this, because you love precision. Take notice that our stay at Dyer's will not exceed eight o'clock, after which our pursuits will be our own. But indeed I think a little recreation among the Bell Letters and poetry will do you some service in the interval of severer studies. I hope we shall fully discuss with George Dyer what I have never yet heard done to my satisfaction, the reason of Dr. Johnson's malevolent strictures on the higher species of the Ode.
["Thy Black Back"--Manning's Algebra.
Dr. Anderson was James Anderson (1739-1808), the editor, at that time, of Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History, Arts, and Miscellaneous History, published in monthly parts. Lamb gave him a copy of verses--three extracts from John Woodvil which were printed in the number for November, 1800, as being "from an unpublished drama by C. Lamb." They were the "Description of a Forest Life," "The General Lover" ("What is it you love?") and "Fragment or Dialogue," better known as "The Dying Lover." All have slight variations from other versions. The most striking is the epithet "lubbar bands of sleep," instead of "lazy bands of sleep," in the "Description of a Forest Life."
Wilkie was William Wilkie (1721-1772), the "Scottish Homer," whose Epigoniad in nine books, based on the fourth book of the Iliad, was published in 1757.]
Letter 68
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING [P.M. Sept. 22, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--You needed not imagine any apology necessary. Your fine hare and fine birds (which just now are dangling by our kitchen blaze) discourse most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my palate. For, with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship hath taken physic for his body to-day, and being low and puling, requireth to be pampered. Foh! how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose! For you must know we extract a divine spirit of gravy from those materials which, duly compounded with a consistence of bread and cream (y'clept bread-sauce), each to each giving double grace, do mutually illustrate and set off (as skilful goldfoils to rare jewels) your partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, teal, widgeon, and the other lesser daughters of the ark. My friendship, struggling with my carnal and fleshly prudence (which suggests that a bird a man is the proper allotment in such cases), yearneth sometimes to have thee here to pick a wing or so. I question if your Norfolk sauces match our London culinaric.
George Dyer has introduced me to the table of an agreeable old gentleman, Dr. Anderson, who gives hot legs of mutton and grape pies at his sylvan lodge at Isleworth, where, in the middle of a street, he has shot up a wall most preposterously before his small dwelling, which, with the circumstance of his taking several panes of glass out of bedroom windows (for air), causeth his neighbours to speculate strangely on the state of the good man's pericranicks. Plainly, he lives under the reputation of being deranged. George does not mind this circumstance; he rather likes him the better for it. The Doctor, in his pursuits, joins agricultural to poetical science, and has set George's brains mad about the old Scotch writers, Harbour, Douglas's Aeneid, Blind Harry, &c. We returned home in a return postchaise (having dined with the Doctor), and George kept wondering and wondering, for eight or nine turnpike miles, what was the name, and striving to recollect the name, of a poet anterior to Barbour. I begged to know what was remaining of his works. "There is nothing extant of his works, Sir, but by all accounts he seems to have been a fine genius!" This fine genius, without anything to show for it or any title beyond George's courtesy, without even a name! and Barbour, and Douglas, and Blind Harry, now are the predominant sounds in George's pia mater, and their buzzings exclude politics, criticism, and algebra--the late lords of that illustrious lumber-room. Mark, he has never read any of these bucks, but is impatient till he reads them all at the Doctor's suggestion. Poor Dyer! his friends should be careful what sparks they let fall into such inflammable matter.
Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access of new ideas; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first (upon their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old, safe, familiar notions and sounds (the rightful aborigines of his brain)--Gray, Akenside and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often as possible, there could be nothing painful, nothing distracting.
God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!
All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight!
Avaunt friendship and all memory of absent friends!
C. LAMB.
["Divine spirit of gravy." This passage is the first of Lamb's outbursts of gustatory ecstasy, afterwards to become frequent in his writings.
Here should come a letter, dated October 9, 1800, in the richest spirit of comedy, describing to Coleridge an evening with George Dyer and the Cottles after the death of their brother Amos; and how Lamb, by praising Joseph Cottle's poem, drew away that good man's thoughts from his grief. "Joseph, who till now had sat with his knees cowering in by the fireplace, wheeled about, and with great difficulty of body shifted the same round to the corner of a table where I was sitting, and first stationing one thigh over the other, which is his sedentary mood, and placidly fixing his benevolent face right against mine, waited my observations. At that moment it came strongly into my mind, that I had got Uncle Toby before me, he looked so kind and so good." The letter, printed in full in other editions, is, I am given to understand, not available for this.]
Letter 69
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING [P.M. Oct. 16, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--Had you written one week before you did, I certainly should have obeyed your injunction; you should have seen me before my letter. I will explain to you my situation. There are six of us in one department. Two of us (within these four days) are confined with severe fevers; and two more, who belong to the Tower Militia, expect to have marching orders on Friday. Now six are absolutely necessary. I have already asked and obtained two young hands to supply the loss of the feverites; and, with the other prospect before me, you may believe I cannot decently ask leave of absence for myself. All I can promise (and I do promise with the sincerity of Saint Peter, and the contrition of sinner Peter if I fail) that I will come the very first spare week, and go nowhere till I have been at Cambridge. No matter if you are in a state of pupilage when I come; for I can employ myself in Cambridge very pleasantly in the mornings. Are there not libraries, halls, colleges, books, pictures, statues? I wish to God you had made London in your way. There is an exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could not have escaped your genius,--a live rattlesnake, ten feet in length, and the thickness of a big leg. I went to see it last night by candlelight. We were ushered into a room very little bigger than ours at Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in this room, joint tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has been discovered for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by a half-moon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes,--whip-snakes, thunder-snakes, pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up in folds; and immediately a stranger enters (for he is used to the family, and sees them play at cards,) he set up a rattle like a watchman's in London, or near as loud, and reared up a head, from the midst of these folds, like a toad, and shook his head, and showed every sign a snake can show of irritation. I had the foolish curiosity to strike the wires with my finger, and the devil flew at me with his toad-mouth wide open: the inside of his mouth is quite white. I had got my finger away, nor could he well have bit me with his damn'd big mouth, which would have been certain death in five minutes. But it frightened me so much, that I did not recover my voice for a minute's space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind, a little devil not an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite through the bars! He was soon taught better manners. All the snakes were curious, and objects of terror: but this monster, like Aaron's serpent, swallowed up the impression of the rest. He opened his damn'd mouth, when he made at me, as wide as his head was broad. I hallooed out quite loud, and felt pains all over my body with the fright.
I have had the felicity of hearing George Dyer read out one book of "The Farmer's Boy." I thought it rather childish. No doubt, there is originality in it, (which, in your self-taught geniuses, is a most rare quality, they generally getting hold of some bad models in a scarcity of books, and forming their taste on them,) but no selection. All is described.
Mind, I have only heard read one book.
Yours sincerely, Philo-Snake, C. L.
[The Farmer's Boy, by Robert Bloomfield, was published in March, 1800, and was immensely popular. Other criticisms upon it by Lamb will be found in this work.
Lamb's visit to Cambridge was deferred until January 5, 1801.]
Letter 70
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING [P.M. Nov. 3, 1800.]
Ecquid meditatur Archimedes? What is Euclid doing? What has happened to learned Trismegist?--Doth he take it in ill part, that his humble friend did not comply with his courteous invitation? Let it suffice, I could not come--are impossibilities nothing--be they abstractions of the intellects or not (rather) most sharp and mortifying realities? nuts in the Will's mouth too hard for her to crack? brick and stone walls in her way, which she can by no means eat through? sore lets, impedimenta viarum, no thoroughfares? racemi nimium alte pendentes? Is the phrase classic? I allude to the grapes in Aesop, which cost the fox a strain, and gained the world an aphorism. Observe the superscription of this letter. In adapting the size of the letters, which constitute your name and Mr. Crisp's name respectively, I had an eye to your different stations, in life. 'Tis really curious, and must be soothing to an aristocrat. I wonder it has never been hit on before my time. I have made an acquisition latterly of a pleasant hand, one Rickman, to whom I was introduced by George Dyer, not the most flattering auspices under which one man can be introduced to another. George brings all sorts of people together, setting up a sort of agrarian law, or common property, in matter of society; but for once he has done me a great pleasure, while he was only pursuing a principle, as ignes fatui may light you home. This Rickman lives in our Buildings, immediately opposite our house; the finest fellow to drop in a' nights, about nine or ten o'clock--cold bread-and-cheese time--just in the wishing time of the night, when you wish for somebody to come in, without a distinct idea of a probable anybody. Just in the nick, neither too early to be tedious, nor too late to sit a reasonable time. He is a most pleasant hand: a fine rattling fellow, has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; himself hugely literate, oppressively full of information in all stuff of conversation, from matter of fact to Xenophon and Plato--can talk Greek with Porson, politics with Thelwall, conjecture with George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything with anybody: a great farmer, somewhat concerned in an agricultural magazine--reads no poetry but Shakspeare, very intimate with Southey, but never reads his poetry: relishes George Dyer, thoroughly penetrates into the ridiculous wherever found, understands the first time (a great desideratum in common minds)--you need never twice speak to him; does not want explanations, translations, limitations, as Professor Godwin does when you make an assertion: up to anything, down to everything--whatever sapit hominem. A perfect man. All this farrago, which must perplex you to read, and has put me to a little trouble to select, only proves how impossible it is to describe a pleasant hand. You must see Rickman to know him, for he is a species in one. A new class. An exotic, any slip of which I am proud to put in my garden-pot. The clearest-headed fellow. Fullest of matter with least verbosity. If there be any alloy in my fortune to have met with such a man, it is that he commonly divides his time between town and country, having some foolish family ties at Christchurch, by which means he can only gladden our London hemisphere with returns of light. He is now going for six weeks.
At last I have written to Kemble, to know the event of my play, which was presented last Christmas. As I suspected, came an answer back that the copy was lost, and could not be found--no hint that anybody had to this day ever looked into it--with a courteous (reasonable!) request of another copy (if I had one by me,) and a promise of a definite answer in a week. I could not resist so facile and moderate a demand, so scribbled out another, omitting sundry things, such as the witch story, about half of the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and transposing that damn'd soliloquy about England getting drunk, which, like its reciter, stupidly stood alone, nothing prevenient or antevenient, and cleared away a good deal besides; and sent this copy, written all out (with alterations, &c., requiring judgment) in one day and a half! I sent it last night, and am in weekly expectation of the tolling-bell and death-warrant.
This is all my Lunnon news. Send me some from the banks of Cam, as the poets delight to speak, especially George Dyer, who has no other name, nor idea, nor definition of Cambridge: namely, its being a market-town, sending members to Parliament, never entered into his definition: it was and is, simply, the banks of the Cam or the fair Cam, as Oxford is the banks of the Isis or the fair Isis. Yours in all humility, most illustrious Trismegist,
C. LAMB.
(Read on; there's more at the bottom.)
You ask me about the "Farmer's Boy"--don't you think the fellow who wrote it (who is a shoemaker) has a poor mind? Don't you find he is always silly about poor Giles, and those abject kind of phrases, which mark a man that looks up to wealth? None of Burns's poet-dignity. What do you think? I have just opened him; but he makes me sick. Dyer knows the shoemaker (a damn'd stupid hound in company); but George promises to introduce him indiscriminately to all friends and all combinations.
[Mr. Crisp was Manning's landlord, a barber in St. Mary's Passage, Cambridge. In one letter at least Lamb spells his name Crips--a joke he was fond of.
"Rickman" was John Rickman (1771-1840), already a friend of Southey's, whom he had met at Burton, near Christchurch, in Hampshire, where Rickman's father lived. A graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, he was at this time secretary to Charles Abbot, afterwards Lord Colchester. He had conducted the Commercial, Agricultural, and Manufacturer's Magazine, and he was practically the originator of the census in England. We shall meet with him often in the correspondence.
Kemble was John Philip Kemble, then manager of Drury Lane. The play was "John Woodvil." For an account of the version which Lamb submitted, see the Notes to Vol. IV.
George Dyer wrote a History of Cambridge University.
George Daniel, the antiquary and bookseller, tells us that many years later he took Bloomfield to dine with Lamb at Islington.]
71. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. Nov. 28, 1800.]
Dear Manning,--I have received a very kind invitation from Lloyd and Sophia to go and spend a month with them at the Lakes. Now it fortunately happens (which is so seldom the case!) that I have spare cash by me, enough to answer the expenses of so long a journey; and I am determined to get away from the office by some means. The purpose of this letter is to request of you (my dear friend) that you will not take it unkind if I decline my proposed visit to Cambridge for the present. Perhaps I shall be able to take Cambridge in my way, going or coming. I need not describe to you the expectations which such an one as myself, pent up all my life in a dirty city, have formed of a tour to the Lakes. Consider Grasmere! Ambleside! Wordsworth! Coleridge! I hope you will.* Hills, woods, lakes, and mountains, to the eternal devil. I will eat snipes with thee, Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess, a bite.
P.S. I think you named the 16th; but was it not modest of Lloyd to send such an invitation! It shows his knowledge of money and time. I would be loth to think he meant
"Ironic satire sidelong sklented On my poor pursie."--BURNS.
For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation; if they can talk sensibly and feel properly; I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase), nor his five-shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world-- eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silver-smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of Fire and Stop thief; inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons on Melancholy, and Religio Medicis on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins. O City abounding in whores, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!
C. L.
[Charles Lloyd had just settled at Old Brathay, about three miles from Ambleside.
Manning's reply to this letter indicates that Lamb's story of the invitation to stay with Lloyd was a hoax. The first page, ended where I have put the *asterisk--as in the letter, to Gutch. Manning writes: "N.B. Your lake story completely took me in till I got to the 2d page. I was pleased to think you were so rich, but I confess rather wondered how you should be able conveniently to take so long a journey this inside-fare time of the year."
Manning also says: "I condole, with you, Mr. Lamb, on the tragic fate of your tragedie--I wonder what fool it was that read it! By the bye, you would do me a very very great favour by letting me have a copy. If Beggars might be chusers, I should ask to have it transcribed partly by you and partly by your sister. I have a desire to possess some of Mary's handwriting" (see Letter 79).
"Beautiful Quakers of Pentonville." This is almost certainly a reference to Hester Savory, the original of Lamb's poem "Hester." The whole passage is the first of three eulogies of London in the letters, all very similar. To "The Londoner" we come later.]
72. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
[Dec. 4, 1800.]
Dear Sir,--I send this speedily after the heels of Cooper (O! the dainty expression) to say that Mary is obliged to stay at home on Sunday to receive a female friend, from whom I am equally glad to escape. So that we shall be by ourselves. I write, because it may make some difference in your marketting, &c.
C. L.
Thursday Morning.
I am sorry to put you to the expense of twopence postage. But I calculate thus: if Mary comes she will
eat Beef 2 plates, 4d. Batter Pudding 1 do. 2d. Beer, a pint, 2d. Wine, 3 glasses, 11d. I drink no wine! Chesnuts, after dinner, 2d. Tea and supper at moderate calculation, 9d. --------- 2s. 6d. From which deduct 2d. postage ---------- 2s. 4d.
You are a clear gainer by her not coming.
[If the date be correct this becomes the first extant letter proper which Lamb sent to the author of Political Justice. Godwin was then forty-four years old, and had long been busy upon his tragedy "Antonio," in which Lamb had been assisting with suggestions. In this connection I place here the following document, which belongs, however, naturally to an earlier date, but is not harmed by its present position.]
73. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
[No date. Autumn, 1800.]
Queries. Whether the best conclusion would not be a solemn judicial pleading, appointed by the king, before himself in person of Antonio as proxy for Roderigo, and Guzman for himself--the form and ordering of it to be highly solemn and grand. For this purpose, (allowing it,) the king must be reserved, and not have committed his royal dignity by descending to previous conference with Antonio, but must refer from the beginning to this settlement. He must sit in dignity as a high royal arbiter. Whether this would admit of spiritual interpositions, cardinals &c.--appeals to the Pope, and haughty rejection of his interposition by Antonio--(this merely by the way).
The pleadings must be conducted by short speeches--replies, taunts, and bitter recriminations by Antonio, in his rough style. In the midst of the undecided cause, may not a messenger break up the proceedings by an account of Roderigo's death (no improbable or far-fetch'd event), and the whole conclude with an affecting and awful invocation of Antonio upon Roderigo's spirit, now no longer dependent upon earthly tribunals or a froward woman's will, &c., &c.
Almanza's daughter is now free, &c.
This might be made very affecting. Better nothing follow after; if anything, she must step forward and resolve to take the veil. In this case, the whole story of the former nunnery must be omitted. But, I think, better leave the final conclusion to the imagination of the spectator. Probably the violence of confining her in a convent is not necessary; Antonio's own castle would be sufficient.
To relieve the former part of the Play, could not some sensible images, some work for the Eye, be introduced? A gallery of Pictures, Almanza's ancestors, to which Antonio might affectingly point his sister, one by one, with anecdote, &c.
At all events, with the present want of action, the Play must not extend above four Acts, unless it is quite new modell'd. The proposed alterations might all be effected in a few weeks.
Solemn judicial pleadings always go off well, as in Henry the 8th, Merchant of Venice, and perhaps Othello.
[Lamb, said Mr. Paul, writing of this critical Minute, was so genuinely kind and even affectionate, in his criticism that Godwin did not perceive his real disapproval.
Mr Swinburne, writing in The Athenæum for May 13, 1876, made an interesting comment upon one of Lamb's suggestions in the foregoing document. It contains, he remarks, "a singular anticipation of one of the most famous passages in the work of the greatest master of our own age, the scene of the portraits in 'Hernani:' 'To relieve the former part of the play, could not some sensible images, some work for the eye, be introduced? A gallery of pictures, Alexander's ancestors, to which Antonio might affectingly point his sister, one by one, with anecdote, &c.' I know of no coincidence more pleasantly and strangely notable than this between the gentle genius of the loveliest among English essayists and the tragic invention of the loftiest among French poets."
After long negotiation "Antonio" was now actually in rehearsal at Drury Lane, to be produced on December 13. Lamb supplied the epilogue.
Cooper was Godwin's servant.]
74. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
Dec. 10th, 1800. Wednesday Morning.
Dear Sir,--I expected a good deal of pleasure from your company to-morrow, but I am sorry I must beg of you to excuse me. I have been confined ever since I saw you with one of the severest colds I ever experienced, occasioned by being in the night air on Sunday, and on the following day, very foolishly. I am neither in health nor spirits to meet company. I hope and trust I shall get out on Saturday night. You will add to your many favours, by transmitting to me as early as possible as many tickets as conveniently you can spare,--Yours truly,
C. L.
I have been plotting how to abridge the Epilogue. But I cannot see that any lines can be spared, retaining the connection, except these two, which are better out.
"Why should I instance, &c., The sick man's purpose, &c.,"
and then the following line must run thus,
"The truth by an example best is shown."
Excuse this important postscript.
75. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. Dec. 13, 1800.]
Don't spill the cream upon this letter.
I have received your letter this moment, not having been at the office. I have just time to scribble down the epilogue. To your epistle I will just reply, that I will certainly come to Cambridge before January is out: I'll come when I can. You shall have an amended copy of my play early next week. Mary thanks you; but her handwriting is too feminine to be exposed to a Cambridge gentleman, though I endeavour to persuade her that you understand algebra, and must understand her hand. The play is the man's you wot of; but for God's sake (who would not like to have so pious a professor's work damn'd) do not mention it--it is to come out in a feigned name, as one Tobin's. I will omit the introductory lines which connect it with the play, and give you the concluding tale, which is the mass and bulk of the epilogue. The name is Jack INCIDENT. It is about promise-breaking--you will see it all, if you read the papers.
Jack, of dramatic genius justly vain, Purchased a renter's share at Drury-lane; A prudent man in every other matter, Known at his club-room for an honest hatter; Humane and courteous, led a civil life, And has been seldom known to beat his wife; But Jack is now grown quite another man, Frequents the green-room, knows the plot and plan Of each new piece, And has been seen to talk with Sheridan! In at the play-house just at six he pops, And never quits it till the curtain drops, Is never absent on the author's night, Knows actresses and actors too--by sight; So humble, that with Suett he'll confer, Or take a pipe with plain Jack Bannister; Nay, with an author has been known so free, He once suggested a catastrophe-- In short, John dabbled till his head was turn'd; His wife remonstrated, his neighbours mourn'd, His customers were dropping off apace, And Jack's affairs began to wear a piteous face. One night his wife began a curtain lecture; "My dearest Johnny, husband, spouse, protector, Take pity on your helpless babes and me, Save us from ruin, you from bankruptcy-- Look to your business, leave these cursed plays, And try again your old industrious ways."
Jack who was always scared at the Gazette, And had some bits of skull uninjured yet, Promised amendment, vow'd his wife spake reason, "He would not see another play that season--"
Three stubborn fortnights Jack his promise kept, Was late and early in his shop, eat, slept, And walk'd and talk'd, like ordinary men; No wit, but John the hatter once again-- Visits his club: when lo! one fatal night His wife with horror view'd the well-known sight-- John's hat, wig, snuff-box--well she knew his tricks-- And Jack decamping at the hour of six, Just at the counter's edge a playbill lay, Announcing that "Pizarro" was the play-- "O Johnny, Johnny, this is your old doing." Quoth Jack, "Why what the devil storm's a-brewing? About a harmless play why all this fright? I'll go and see it if it's but for spite-- Zounds, woman! Nelson's[1] to be there to-night."
N.B.--This was intended for Jack Bannister to speak; but the sage managers have chosen Miss Heard,--except Miss Tidswell, the worst actress ever seen or heard. Now, I remember I have promised the loan of my play. I will lend it instantly, and you shall get it ('pon honour!) by this day week.
I must go and dress for the boxes! First night! Finding I have time, I transcribe the rest. Observe, you have read the last first; it begins thus:--the names I took from a little outline G. gave me. I have not read the play.
"Ladies, ye've seen how Guzman's consort died, Poor victim of a Spaniard brother's pride, When Spanish honour through the world was blown, And Spanish beauty for the best was known[2] In that romantic, unenlighten'd time, A breach of promise[3] was a sort of crime-- Which of you handsome English ladies here, But deems the penance bloody and severe? A whimsical old Saragossa[4] fashion, That a dead father's dying inclination, Should live to thwart a living daughter's passion,[5] Unjustly on the sex we[6] men exclaim, Rail at your[7] vices,--and commit the same;-- Man is a promise-breaker from the womb, And goes a promise-breaker to the tomb-- What need we instance here the lover's vow, The sick man's purpose, or the great man's bow?[8] The truth by few examples best is shown-- Instead of many which are better known, Take poor Jack Incident, that's dead and gone. Jack," &c. &c. &c.
Now you have it all-how do you like it? I am going to hear it recited!!!
C. L.
[Footnote 1: A good clap-trap. Nelson has exhibited two or three times at both theatres--and advertised himself.] [Footnote 2: Four easy lines.] [Footnote 3: For which the heroine died.] [Footnote 4: In _Spain!!?] [Footnote 5: Two neat lines.] [Footnote 6: Or you.] [Footnote 7: Or our, as they have altered it.] [Footnote 8: Antithesis.]
["As one Tobin's." The rehearsals of "Antonio" were attended by Godwin's friend, John Tobin, subsequently author of "The Honeymoon," in the hope, on account of Godwin's reputation for heterodoxy, of deceiving people as to the real authorship of the play. It was, however, avowed by Godwin on the title-page.
Jack Bannister, the comedian, was a favourite actor of Lamb's. See the Elia essay "On some of the Old Actors."
Miss Heard was a daughter of William Heard, the author of "The Snuff-Box," a feeble comedy. Miss Tidswell, by the irony of fate, had a part in Lamb's own play, "Mr. H.," six years later.
"I have not read the play." Meaning probably, "I have not read it in its final form." Lamb must have read it in earlier versions. I quote Mr. Kegan Paul's summary of the plot of "Antonio":--
"Helena was betrothed, with her father's consent, to her brother Antonio's friend, Roderigo. While Antonio and Roderigo were at the wars, Helena fell in love with, and married, Don Gusman. She was the king's ward, who set aside the pre-contract. Antonio, returning, leaves his friend behind; he has had great sorrows, but all will be well when he comes to claim his bride. When Antonio finds his sister is married, the rage he exhibits is ferocious. He carries his sister off from her husband's house, and demands that the king shall annul the marriage with Gusman. There is then talk of Helena's entrance into a convent. At last the king, losing patience, gives judgment, as he had done before, that the pre-contract with Roderigo was invalid, and the marriage to Gusman valid. Whereupon Antonio bursts through the guards, and kills his sister."]
76. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
Dec. 14, 1800. Late o' Sunday.
Dear Sir,--I have performed my office in a slovenly way, but judge for me. I sat down at 6 o'clock, and never left reading (and I read out to Mary) your play till 10. In this sitting I noted down lines as they occurred, exactly as you will read my rough paper. Do not be frightened at the bulk of my remarks, for they are almost all upon single lines, which, put together, do not amount to a hundred, and many of them merely verbal. I had but one object in view, abridgement for compression sake. I have used a dogmatical language (which is truly ludicrous when the trivial nature of my remarks is considered), and, remember, my office was to hunt out faults. You may fairly abridge one half of them, as a fair deduction for the infirmities of Error, and a single reading, which leaves only fifty objections, most of them merely against words, on no short play. Remember, you constituted me Executioner, and a hangman has been seldom seen to be ashamed of his profession before Master Sheriff. We'll talk of the Beauties (of which I am more than ever sure) when we meet,--Yours truly, C. L.
I will barely add, as you are on the very point of printing, that in my opinion neither prologue nor epilogue should accompany the play. It can only serve to remind your readers of its fate. Both suppose an audience, and, that jest being gone, must convert into burlesque. Nor would I (but therein custom and decorum must be a law) print the actors' names. Some things must be kept out of sight.
I have done, and I have but a few square inches of paper to fill up. I am emboldened by a little jorum of punch (vastly good) to say that next to one man, I am the most hurt at our ill success. The breast of Hecuba, where she did suckle Hector, looked not to be more lovely than Marshal's forehead when it spit forth sweat, at Critic-swords contending. I remember two honest lines by Marvel, (whose poems by the way I am just going to possess)
"Where every Mower's wholesome heat Smells like an Alexander's sweat."
["Antonio" was performed on December 13, with John Philip Kemble in the title-rôle, and was a complete failure. Lamb wrote an account of the unlucky evening many years later in the "Old Actors" series in the London Magazine (see Vol. II. of the present edition). He speaks there, as here, of Marshal's forehead--Marshal being John Marshall, a friend of the Godwins.
After the play Godwin supped with Lamb, when it was decided to publish "Antonio" at once. Lamb retained the MS. for criticism. The present letter in the original contains his comments, the only one of which that Mr. Kegan Paul thought worth reproducing being the following:-- "'Enviable' is a very bad word. I allude to 'Enviable right to bless us.' For instance, Burns, comparing the ills of manhood with the state of infancy, says, 'Oh! enviable early days;' here 'tis good, because the passion lay in comparison. Excuse my insulting your judgment with an illustration. I believe I only wanted to beg in the name of a favourite Bardie, or at most to confirm my own judgment."
Lamb, it will be remembered, had refused to let Coleridge use "enviable" in "Lewti." Burns's poem to which Lamb alludes is "Despondency, an Ode," Stanza 5, "Oh! enviable, early days."
Godwin's play was published in 1801 without Lamb's epilogue.]
77. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
Dec. 16th, 1800.
We are damn'd!
Not the facetious epilogue could save us. For, as the editor of the "Morning Post," quick-sighted gentleman! hath this morning truly observed, (I beg pardon if I falsify his words, their profound sense I am sure I retain,) both prologue and epilogue were worthy of accompanying such a piece; and indeed (mark the profundity, Mister Manning) were received with proper indignation by such of the audience only as thought either worth attending to. PROFESSOR, thy glories wax dim! Again, the incomparable author of the "True Briton" declareth in his paper (bearing same date) that the epilogue was an indifferent attempt at humour and character, and failed in both. I forbear to mention the other papers, because I have not read them. O PROFESSOR, how different thy feelings now (quantum mutatus ab illo professore, qui in agris philosophiae tantas victorias aquisivisti),--how different thy proud feelings but one little week ago,--thy anticipation of thy nine nights,--those visionary claps, which have soothed thy soul by day and thy dreams by night! Calling in accidentally on the Professor while he was out, I was ushered into the study; and my nose quickly (most sagacious always) pointed me to four tokens lying loose upon thy table, Professor, which indicated thy violent and satanical pride of heart. Imprimis, there caught mine eye a list of six persons, thy friends, whom thou didst meditate inviting to a sumptuous dinner on the Thursday, anticipating the profits of thy Saturday's play to answer charges; I was in the honoured file! Next, a stronger evidence of thy violent and almost satanical pride, lay a list of all the morning papers (from the "Morning Chronicle" downwards to the "Porcupine,") with the places of their respective offices, where thou wast meditating to insert, and didst insert, an elaborate sketch of the story of thy play--stones in thy enemy's hand to bruise thee with; and severely wast thou bruised, O Professor! nor do I know what oil to pour into thy wounds. Next, which convinced me to a dead conviction of thy pride, violent and almost satanical pride--lay a list of books, which thy un-tragedy-favoured pocket could never answer; Dodsley's Old Plays, Malone's Shakspeare (still harping upon thy play, thy philosophy abandoned meanwhile to Christians and superstitious minds); nay, I believe (if I can believe my memory), that the ambitious Encyclopaedia itself was part of thy meditated acquisitions; but many a playbook was there. All these visions are damned; and thou, Professor, must read Shakspere in future out of a common edition; and, hark ye, pray read him to a little better purpose! Last and strongest against thee (in colours manifest as the hand upon Belshazzar's wall), lay a volume of poems by C. Lloyd and C. Lamb. Thy heart misgave thee, that thy assistant might possibly not have talent enough to furnish thee an epilogue! Manning, all these things came over my mind; all the gratulations that would have thickened upon him, and even some have glanced aside upon his humble friend; the vanity, and the fame, and the profits (the Professor is £500 ideal money out of pocket by this failure, besides £200 he would have got for the copyright, and the Professor is never much beforehand with the world; what he gets is all by the sweat of his brow and dint of brain, for the Professor, though a sure man, is also a slow); and now to muse upon thy altered physiognomy, thy pale and squalid appearance (a kind of blue sickness about the eyelids), and thy crest fallen, and thy proud demand of £200 from thy bookseller changed to an uncertainty of his taking it at all, or giving thee full £50. The Professor has won my heart by this his mournful catastrophe. You remember Marshall, who dined with him at my house; I met him in the lobby immediately after the damnation of the Professor's play, and he looked to me like an angel: his face was lengthened, and ALL OVER SWEAT; I never saw such a care-fraught visage; I could have hugged him, I loved him so intensely--"From every pore of him a perfume fell." I have seen that man in many situations, and from my soul I think that a more god-like honest soul exists not in this world. The Professor's poor nerves trembling with the recent shock, he hurried him away to my house to supper; and there we comforted him as well as we could. He came to consult me about a change of catastrophe; but alas! the piece was condemned long before that crisis. I at first humoured him with a specious proposition, but have since joined his true friends in advising him to give it up. He did it with a pang, and is to print it as his.
L.
[The Professor was Lamb's name for Godwin.
The Porcupine was Cobbett's paper.]
LETTERS 78 AND 79
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING [Middle December.]
I send you all of Coleridge's letters to me, which I have preserved: some of them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble's two letters, and the prompter's courteous epistle, with a curious critique on "Pride's Cure," by a young physician from EDINBRO, who modestly suggests quite another kind of a plot. These are monuments of my disappointment which I like to preserve.
In Coleridge's letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous display of it. I also send you the Professor's letter to me (careful Professor! to conceal his name even from his correspondent), ere yet the Professor's pride was cured. Oh monstrous and almost satanical pride!
You will carefully keep all (except the Scotch Doctor's, which burn in status quo), till I come to claim mine own.
C. LAMB.
For Mister Manning, Teacher of Mathematics and the Black Arts. There is another letter in the inside cover of the book opposite the blank leaf that was.
Mind this goes for a letter. (Acknowledge it directly, if only in ten words.)
DEAR MANNING--(I shall want to hear this comes safe.) I have scratched out a good deal, as you will see. Generally, what I have rejected was either false in feeling, or a violation of character--mostly of the first sort. I will here just instance in the concluding few lines of the "Dying Lover's Story," which completely contradicted his character of silent and unreproachful. I hesitated a good deal what copy to send you, and at last resolved to send the worst, because you are familiar with it, and can make it out; and a stranger would find so much difficulty in doing it, that it would give him more pain than pleasure.
This is compounded precisely of the two persons' hands you requested it should be.--Yours sincerely,
C. LAMB.
[These were the letters accompanying the copy of "Pride's Cure" (or "John Woodvil") which Charles and Mary Lamb together made for Manning, as requested in the note on page 197.
All the letters mentioned by Lamb have vanished; unless by an unlikely chance the bundle contained Coleridge's letters on Mrs. Lamb's death and on the quarrel with Lamb and Lloyd.
Manning's reply, dated December, 1800, gives a little information concerning the Edinburgh physician's letter--"that gentleman whose fertile brain can, at a moment's warning, furnish you with 10 Thousand models of a plot--'The greatest variety of Rapes, Murders, Deathsheads, &c., &c., sold here.'" Manning thinks that the Scotch doctor understands Lamb's tragedy better than Coleridge does. He adds: "P.S.--My verdict upon the Poet's epitaph is 'genuine.'" This probably applies to a question asked by Lamb concerning Wordsworth's poem of that name.]
80. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
December 27th, 1800.
At length George Dyer's phrenesis has come to a crisis; he is raging and furiously mad. I waited upon the heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight; the first symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of the fatal truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new.
They were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages; but he affirmed them to be clean. He was going to visit a lady that was nice about those things, and that's the reason he wore nankeen that day. And then he danced, and capered, and fidgeted, and pulled up his pantaloons, and hugged his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic loins; anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead--made a dart at Blomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock. He must go to the printer's immediately--the most unlucky accident--he had struck off five hundred impressions of his Poems, which were ready for delivery to subscribers, and the Preface must all be expunged. There were eighty pages of Preface, and not till that morning had he discovered that in the very first page of said Preface he had set out with a principle of Criticism fundamentally-wrong, which vitiated all his following reasoning. The Preface must be expunged, although it cost him £30--the lowest calculation, taking in paper and printing! In vain have his real friends remonstrated against this Midsummer madness. George is as obstinate as a Primitive Christian--and wards and parries off all our thrusts with one unanswerable fence;--"Sir, it's of great consequence that the world is not misled!"
As for the other Professor, he has actually begun to dive into Tavernier and Chardin's Persian Travels for a story, to form a new drama for the sweet tooth of this fastidious age. Hath not Bethlehem College a fair action for non-residence against such professors? Are poets so few in this age, that he must write poetry? Is morals a subject so exhausted, that he must quit that line? Is the metaphysic well (without a bottom) drained dry?
If I can guess at the wicked pride of the Professor's heart, I would take a shrewd wager that he disdains ever again to dip his pen in Prose. Adieu, ye splendid theories! Farewell, dreams of political justice! Lawsuits, where I was counsel for Archbishop Fenelon versus my own mother, in the famous fire cause!
Vanish from my mind, professors, one and all! I have metal more attractive on foot.
Man of many snipes, I will sup with thee, Deo volente et diabolo nolente, on Monday night the 5th of January, in the new year, and crush a cup to the infant century.
A word or two of my progress. Embark at six o'clock in the morning, with a fresh gale, on a Cambridge one-decker; very cold till eight at night; land at St. Mary's light-house, muffins and coffee upon table (or any other curious production of Turkey or both Indies), snipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with argument; difference of opinion is expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.--N.B. My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-soothing flesh of geese wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking-pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook of Gonville. C. LAMB.
[Lamb's copy of George Dyer's Poems is in the British Museum. It has the original withdrawn 1800 title-page and the cancelled preface bound up with it, and Lamb has written against the reference to the sacrifice, in the new 1801 preface: "One copy of this cancelled preface, snatch'd out of the fire, is prefaced to this volume." See Letter 93, page 234. It runs to sixty-five pages, whereas the new one is but a few words. Southey tells Grosvenor Bedford in one of his letters that Lamb gave Dyer the title of Cancellarius Magnus. Dyer reprinted in the 1802 edition of his Poems the greater part of the cancelled preface and all of the first page--so that it is difficult to say what the fallacy was. The original edition of his Poems, was to be in three large volumes. In 1802 it had come down to two small ones.
Godwin's Persian drama was "Abbas, King of Persia," but he could not get it acted. The reference to Fénélon is to Godwin's Political Justice (first edition, Vol. I., page 84) where he argues on the comparative worth of the persons of Fénélon, a chambermaid, and Godwin's mother, supposing them to have been present at the famous fire at Cambrai and only one of them to be saved. (As a matter of fact Fénélon was not at the fire.)
We must suppose that Lamb carried out his intention of visiting Manning on January 5; but there is no confirmation.]
Letter 81
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. January 30, 1801.]
Thanks for your Letter and Present. I had already borrowed your second volume. What most please me are, the Song of Lucy.... Simon's sickly daughter in the Sexton made me cry. Next to these are the description of the continuous Echoes in the story of Joanna's laugh, where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive--and that fine Shakesperian character of the Happy Man, in the Brothers,
--that creeps about the fields, Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the Setting Sun Write Fool upon his forehead.
I will mention one more: the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the Cumberland Beggar, that he may have about him the melody of Birds, altho' he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feelings for the Beggar's, and, in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish.--The Poet's Epitaph is disfigured, to my taste by the vulgar satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of pin point in the 6th stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the Beggar, that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a lecture: they don't slide into the mind of the reader, while he is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think upon this subject. This fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne and many many novelists & modern poets, who continually put a sign post up to shew where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid. Very different from Robinson Crusoe, the Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other beautiful bare narratives. There is implied an unwritten compact between Author and reader; I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it. Modern novels "St. Leons" and the like are full of such flowers as these "Let not my reader suppose," "Imagine, if you can"--modest!--&c.--I will here have done with praise and blame. I have written so much, only that you may not think I have passed over your book without observation,--I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere "a poet's Reverie"--it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a Lion but only the scenical representation of a Lion. What new idea is gained by this Title, but one subversive of all credit, which the tale should force upon us, of its truth? For me, I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days--I dislike all the miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper's magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession. This is a Beauty in Gulliver's Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the Ancient Marinere undergoes such Trials, as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was, like the state of a man in a Bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is: that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is I think as well a little unfounded: the Marinere from being conversant in supernatural events has acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase, eye, appearance, &c. which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see. To sum up a general opinion of the second vol.--I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as the Ancient Marinere, the Mad Mother, and the Lines at Tintern Abbey in the first.--I could, too, have wished the Critical preface had appeared in a separate treatise. All its dogmas are true and just, and most of them new, as criticism. But they associate a diminishing idea with the Poems which follow, as having been written for Experiment on the public taste, more than having sprung (as they must have done) from living and daily circumstances.--I am prolix, because I am gratifyed in the opportunity of writing to you, and I don't well know when to leave off. I ought before this to have reply'd to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your Sister I could gang any where. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a Journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles,--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheap'ning books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,--all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.--All these emotions must be strange to you. So are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?--
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved--old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,--these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing. Your sun & moon and skys and hills & lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh & green and warm are all the inventions of men and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. & your_self_ and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite.
C. LAMB.
Thank you for Liking my Play!!
[This is the first--and perhaps the finest--letter from Lamb to Wordsworth that has been preserved. Wordsworth, then living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, was nearly thirty-one years of age; Lamb was nearly twenty-six. The work criticised is the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The second and sixth stanzas of the "Poet's Epitaph" ran thus:--
A Lawyer art thou?--draw not nigh; Go, carry to some other place The hardness of thy coward eye, The falshood of thy sallow face.
* * * * *
Wrapp'd closely in thy sensual fleece O turn aside, and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy pin-point of a soul away!
St. Leon was by Godwin.
Of "The Ancient Mariner, a Poet's Reverie," Wordsworth had said in a note to the first volume of Lyrical Ballads:--
"The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the controul of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated."
"The Mad Mother." The poem beginning, "Her eyes are wild, her head is bare."
"I could, too, have wished." The passage from these words to "don't well know when to leave off," used to be omitted in the editions of Lamb's Letters. When Wordsworth sent the correspondence to Moxon, for Talfourd's use, in 1835, he wrote:--
"There are, however, in them some parts which had better be kept back.... I have also thought it proper to suppress every word of criticism [Wordsworth meant adverse criticism] upon my own poems.... Those relating to my works are withheld, partly because I shrink from the thought of assisting in any way to spread my own praises, and still more I being convinced that the opinions or judgments of friends given in this way are of little value."
"Joanna." Joanna of the laugh. "Barbara Lewthwaite." See Wordsworth's "Pet Lamb."
"Thank you for Liking my Play!!" We must suppose this postscript to contain a touch of sarcasm. Lamb had sent "John Woodvil" to Grasmere and Keswick. Wordsworth apparently had been but politely interested in it. Coleridge had written to Godwin: "Talking of tragedies, at every perusal my love and admiration of his [Lamb's] play rises a peg."
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated at end February 7, 1801, not available for this edition. It is one of the best letters written by Lamb to Robert Lloyd, or to any one. Lamb first praises Izaak Walton, whose Compleat Angler he loved for two reasons: for itself and for its connection with his own Hertfordshire country, Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Amwell and the Ware neighbourhood. The letter passes to a third eulogy of London. Lamb closes by remarking that Manning is "a dainty chiel, and a man of great power, an enchanter almost."]
82. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
Feb. 15, 1801.
I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give of the "Lyrical Ballads." All the North of England are in a turmoil. Cumberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by an acknowledgement of having received from me many months since a copy of a certain Tragedy, with excuses for not having made any acknowledgement sooner, it being owing to an "almost insurmountable aversion from Letter-writing." This letter I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several of the passages which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as the "Ancient Mariner," "The Mad Mother," or the "Lines at Tintern Abbey." The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the purport of which was, that he was sorry his 2d vol. had not given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had not pleased me), and "was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy Thoughts" (I suppose from the L.B.)--With a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets: which Union, as the highest species of Poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, "He was most proud to aspire to;" then illustrating the said Union by two quotations from his own 2d vol. (which I had been so unfortunate as to miss). 1st Specimen--a father addresses his son:--
"When thou First camest into the World, as it befalls To new-born Infants, thou didst sleep away Two days: and _Blessings from Thy father's Tongue Then fell upon thee_."
The lines were thus undermarked, and then followed "This Passage, as combining in an extraordinary degree that Union of Imagination and Tenderness which I am speaking of, I consider as one of the Best I ever wrote!"
2d Specimen.--A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native place, and thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange alteration in his absence:--
"And that the rocks And everlasting Hills themselves were changed."
You see both these are good Poetry: but after one has been reading Shakspeare twenty of the best years of one's life, to have a fellow start up, and prate about some unknown quality, which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else!! This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption: four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him; assuring me that, when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie "in me and not in them," etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. What am I to do with such people? I certainly shall write them a very merry Letter. Writing to you, I may say that the 2d vol. has no such pieces as the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an observing mind, but it does not often make you laugh or cry.--It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if Simplicity be not a cover for Poverty. The best Piece in it I will send you, being short. I have grievously offended my friends in the North by declaring my undue preference; but I need not fear you:--
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the Springs of Dove, A maid whom there were few [none] to praise And very few to love.
"A violet, by a mossy stone, Half hidden from the eye. Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky.
"She lived unknown; and few could know, When Lucy ceased to be. But she is in the grave, and oh! The difference to me."
This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like to have 'em rammed down one's throat. "Pray, take it--it's very good--let me help you--eat faster."
[It cannot be too much regretted that Lamb's "very merry Letter" in answer to Wordsworth and Coleridge's remonstrances has not been preserved.
At the end of the letter is a passage which can be read only in the Boston Bibliophile edition, referring to Dyer's Poems, to John Woodvil and to Godwin.]
83. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[Late February, 1801.]
You masters of logic ought to know (logic is nothing more than a knowledge of words, as the Greek etymon implies), that all words are no more to be taken in a literal sense at all times than a promise given to a tailor. When I expressed an apprehension that you were mortally offended, I meant no more than by the application of a certain formula of efficacious sounds, which had done in similar cases before, to rouse a sense of decency in you, and a remembrance of what was due to me! You masters of logic should advert to this phenomenon in human speech, before you arraign the usage of us dramatic geniuses. Imagination is a good blood mare, and goes well; but the misfortune is, she has too many paths before her. 'Tis true I might have imaged to myself, that you had trundled your frail carcass to Norfolk. I might also, and did imagine, that you had not, but that you were lazy, or inventing new properties in a triangle, and for that purpose moulding and squeezing Landlord Crisp's three-cornered beaver into fantastic experimental forms; or that Archimedes was meditating to repulse the French, in case of a Cambridge invasion, by a geometric hurling of folios on their red caps; or, peradventure, that you were in extremities, in great wants, and just set out for Trinity-bogs when my letters came. In short, my genius (which is a short word now-a-days for what-a-great-man-am-I) was absolutely stifled and overlaid with its own riches. Truth is one and poor, like the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not believe it could be put to such purposes. Dull pipkin, to have Elijah for thy cook! Imbecile recipient of so fat a miracle! I send you George Dyer's Poems, the richest production of the lyric muse this century can justly boast: for Wordsworth's L.B. were published, or at least written, before Christmas.
Please to advert to pages 291 to 296 for the most astonishing account of where Shakspeare's muse has been all this while. I thought she had been dead, and buried in Stratford Church, with the young man that kept her company,--
"But it seems, like the Devil, Buried in Cole Harbour. Some say she's risen again, 'Gone prentice to a Barber."
N.B.--I don't charge anything for the additional manuscript notes, which are the joint productions of myself and a learned translator of Schiller, John Stoddart, Esq.
N.B. the 2nd.--I should not have blotted your book, but I had sent my own out to be bound, as I was in duty bound. A liberal criticism upon the several pieces, lyrical, heroical, amatory, and satirical, would be acceptable. So, you don't think there's a Word's--worth of good poetry in the great L.B.! I daren't put the dreaded syllables at their just length, for my back tingles from the northern castigation. I send you the three letters, which I beg you to return along with those former letters, which I hope you are not going to print by your detention. But don't be in a hurry to send them. When you come to town will do. Apropos of coming to town, last Sunday was a fortnight, as I was coming to town from the Professor's, inspired with new rum, I tumbled down, and broke my nose. I drink nothing stronger than malt liquors.
I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at our Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench walks in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind; for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levee, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em), since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse, that had tasted a little of urban manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self without mouse-traps and time-traps. By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country; and in a garden, in the midst of [that] enchanting, more than Mahometan paradise, London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toyshops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks! St. Paul's Churchyard! the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London! Ain't you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam! Had not you better come and set up here? You can't think what a difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At least I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal,--a mind that loves to be at home in crowds.
'Tis half-past twelve o'clock, and all sober people ought to be a-bed. Between you and me, the "Lyrical Ballads" are but drowsy performances.
C. LAMB (as you may guess).
[Lamb refers in his opening sentences to a letter from himself to Manning which no longer exists. In Manning's last letter, dated February 24, he complains that he found on returning to Cambridge three copies of a letter from Lamb suggesting that he was offended because he had not answered.
The passage in George Dyer's Poems between pages 291 and 296 is long, but it is so quaint and so illustrative of its author's mind that I give it in full, footnotes and all, in the Appendix to this volume.
Stoddart we have already met. He had translated, with Georg Heinrich Noehden, Schiller's Fiesco, 1796, and Don Carlos, 1798. The copy of Dyer's Poems annotated by Lamb and Stoddart I have not seen.
"So, you don't think there's a Word's-worth..." Manning had written, on February 24, 1801, of the second volume of Lyrical Ballads: "I think 'tis utterly absurd from one end to the other. You tell me 'tis good poetry--if you mean that there is nothing puerile, nothing bombast or conceited, everything else that is so often found to disfigure poetry, I agree, but will you read it over and over again? Answer me that, Master Lamb." The three letters containing the northern castigation are unhappily lost.
"My back tingles." "Back" is not Lamb's word.
"I am going to change my lodgings." The Lambs were still at 34 Southampton Buildings; they moved to 16 Mitre Court Buildings just before Lady Day, 1801.
"James, Walter, and the parson." In Wordsworth's poem "The Brothers."
Exeter Change, which stood where Burleigh Street now is, was a great building, with bookstalls and miscellaneous stalls on the ground floor and a menagerie above. It was demolished in 1829.]
Letter 84
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING April, 1801.
I was not aware that you owed me anything beside that guinea; but I dare say you are right. I live at No. 16 Mitre-court Buildings, a pistol-shot off Baron Maseres'. You must introduce me to the Baron. I think we should suit one another mainly. He lives on the ground floor for convenience of the gout; I prefer the attic story for the air! He keeps three footmen and two maids; I have neither maid nor laundress, not caring to be troubled with them! His forte, I understand, is the higher mathematics; my turn, I confess, is more to poetry and the belles lettres. The very antithesis of our characters would make up a harmony. You must bring the baron and me together.--N.B. when you come to see me, mount up to the top of the stairs--I hope you are not asthmatical--and come in flannel, for it's pure airy up there. And bring your glass, and I will shew you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river so as by perking up upon my haunches, and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the King's Bench walks as I lie in my bed. An excellent tiptoe prospect in the best room: casement windows with small panes, to look more like a cottage. Mind, I have got no bed for you, that's flat; sold it to pay expenses of moving. The very bed on which Manning lay--the friendly, the mathematical Manning! How forcibly does it remind me of the interesting Otway! "The very bed which on thy marriage night gave thee into the arms of Belvidera, by the coarse hands of ruffians--" (upholsterers' men,) &c. My tears will not give me leave to go on. But a bed I will get you, Manning, on condition you will be my day-guest.
I have been ill more than month, with a bad cold, which comes upon me (like a murderer's conscience) about midnight, and vexes me for many hours. I have successively been drugged with Spanish licorice, opium, ipecacuanha, paregoric, and tincture of foxglove (tinctura purpurae digitalis of the ancients). I am afraid I must leave off drinking.
[Francis Maseres (1731-1824), whom Lamb mentions again in his Elia essay on "The Old Benchers," was the mathematician (hence his interest to Manning) and reformer. His rooms were at 5 King's Bench Walk. He became Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer in 1773. To the end he wore a three-cornered hat, a wig and ruffles. Priestley praised the Baron's mathematical labours, in which he had the support of William Frend.]
85. CHARLES LAME TO THOMAS MANNING
[No date. ? April, 1801.]
Dear Manning,--I sent to Brown's immediately. Mr. Brown (or Pijou, as he is called by the moderns) denied the having received a letter from you. The one for you he remembered receiving, and remitting to Leadenhall Street; whither I immediately posted (it being the middle of dinner), my teeth unpicked. There I learned that if you want a letter set right, you must apply at the first door on the left hand before one o'clock. I returned and picked my teeth. And this morning I made my application in form, and have seen the vagabond letter, which most likely accompanies this. If it does not, I will get Rickman to name it to the Speaker, who will not fail to lay the matter before Parliament the next sessions, when you may be sure to have all abuses in the Post Department rectified.
N.B. There seems to be some informality epidemical. You direct yours to me in Mitre Court; my true address is Mitre Court Buildings. By the pleasantries of Fortune, who likes a joke or a double entendre as well as the best of her children, there happens to be another Mr. Lamb (that there should be two!!) in Mitre Court.
Farewell, and think upon it.
C. L.
[Here should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated April 6, 1801, in praise of Jeremy Taylor, particularly the Holy Dying. Lamb recommends Lloyd to read the story of the Ephesian matron in the eighth section.
Here also should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, dated June 26, 1801, containing a very interesting criticism of George Frederick Cooke's acting as Richard III. at Covent Garden. Lamb wrote for the Morning Post, January 8, 1802, a criticism of Cooke in this part, which will be found in Vol. I. of the present edition.]
86. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
June 29, 1801.
Dear Sir,--Doctor Christy's Brother and Sister are come to town, and have shown me great civilities. I in return wish to requite them, having, by God's grace, principles of generosity implanted (as the moralists say) in my nature, which have been duly cultivated and watered by good and religious friends, and a pious education. They have picked up in the northern parts of the island an astonishing admiration of the great author of the New Philosophy in England, and I have ventured to promise their taste an evening's gratification by seeing Mr. Godwin face to face!!!!! Will you do them and me in them the pleasure of drinking tea and supping with me at the old number 16 on Friday or Saturday next? An early nomination of the day will very much oblige yours sincerely,
CH. LAMB.
[Dr. Christy's brother and sister I do not identify.]
87. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON
August 14th, 1801.
Dear Wilson.--I am extremely sorry that any serious difference should subsist between us on account of some foolish behaviour of mine at Richmond; you knew me well enough before--that a very little liquor will cause a considerable alteration in me.
I beg you to impute my conduct solely to that, and not to any deliberate intention of offending you, from whom I have received so many friendly attentions. I know that you think a very important difference in opinion with respect to some more serious subjects between us makes me a dangerous companion; but do not rashly infer, from some slight and light expressions which I may have made use of in a moment of levity in your presence, without sufficient regard to your feelings--do not conclude that I am an inveterate enemy to all religion. I have had a time of seriousness, and I have known the importance and reality of a religious belief.
Latterly, I acknowledge, much of my seriousness has gone off, whether from new company or some other new associations; but I still retain at bottom a conviction of the truth, and a certainty of the usefulness of religion. I will not pretend to more gravity or feeling than I at present possess; my intention is not to persuade you that any great alteration is probable in me; sudden converts are superficial and transitory; I only want you to believe that I have stamina of seriousness within me, and that I desire nothing more than a return of that friendly intercourse which used to subsist between us, but which my folly has suspended.
Believe me, very affectionately yours,
C. LAMB.
[Walter Wilson (1781-1847) was, perhaps, at this time, or certainly previously, in the India House with Lamb. Later he became a bookseller, and then, inheriting money, he entered at the Inner Temple. We meet him again later in the correspondence, in connection with his Life of Defoe, 1830.
One wonders if the following passage in Hazlitt's essay "On Coffee-House Politicians" in Table Talk has any reference to the Richmond incident:--
"Elia, the grave and witty, says things not to be surpassed in essence: but the manner is more painful and less a relief to my own thoughts. Some one conceived he could not be an excellent companion, because he was seen walking down the side of the Thames, passibus iniquis, after dining at Richmond. The objection was not valid."]
88. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[August,] 1801.
Dear Manning,--I have forborne writing so long (and so have you, for the matter of that), until I am almost ashamed either to write or to forbear any longer. But as your silence may proceed from some worse cause than neglect--from illness, or some mishap which may have befallen you--I begin to be anxious. You may have been burnt out, or you may have married, or you may have broken a limb, or turned country parson; any of these would be excuse sufficient for not coming to my supper. I am not so unforgiving as the nobleman in "Saint Mark." For me, nothing new has happened to me, unless that the poor "Albion" died last Saturday of the world's neglect, and with it the fountain of my puns is choked up for ever.
All the Lloyds wonder that you do not write to them. They apply to me for the cause. Relieve me from this weight of ignorance, and enable me to give a truly oracular response.
I have been confined some days with swelled cheek and rheumatism--they divide and govern me with a viceroy-headache in the middle. I can neither write nor read without great pain. It must be something like obstinacy that I choose this time to write to you in after many months interruption.
I will close my letter of simple inquiry with an epigram on Mackintosh, the "Vindiciae Gallicae"-man--who has got a place at last--one of the last I did for the "Albion";--
"Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black, In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack; When he had gotten his ill-purchas'd pelf, He went away, and wisely hanged himself: This thou may do at last, yet much I doubt, If thou hast any Bowels to gush out!"
Yours, as ever,
C. LAMB.
[The Albion was at the time of its decease owned and edited by John Fenwick, a friend of Lamb's whom we shall meet again. Lamb told the story in the Elia essay on "Newspapers" in the following passage:--
"From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well exhaust our Newspaper Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were transferred, mortifying exchanged to the office of the Albion Newspaper, late Rackstrow's Museum, in Fleet Street. What a transition-- from a handsome apartment, from rose-wood desks, and silver inkstands, to an office--no office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead monsters, of which it seemed redolent--from the centre of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedition! Here in murky closet, inadequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies of Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, together at one time, sat in the discharge of his new Editorial functions (the 'Bigod' of Elia) the redoubted John Fenwick.
"F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell; of whom we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern--for it had been sinking ever since its commencement, and could now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers--F. resolutely determined upon pulling down the Government in the first instance, and making both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated Democrat go about borrowing seven shilling pieces, and lesser coin, to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An outcast from politer bread, we attached our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was to write treason.
"Recollections of feelings--which were all that now remained from our first boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when if we were misled, we erred in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now--rather than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines-- assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under-tone to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis--as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly--that the keen eye of an Attorney-General was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them. There were times, indeed, when we signed for our more gentleman-like occupation under Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers-- when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J------s M------h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to be called, Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that had stuck by us; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers."
There are, however, in Lamb's account, written thirty years afterwards, some errors. He passed rather from the Albion to the Post than from the Post to the Albion (see the notes in Vol. II.). Sir James Mackintosh was not in 1801 on the eve of departing for India: he did not get the post of Recordership of Bombay until two years later. The epigram probably referred to an earlier rumour of a post for him. His apostasy consisted in recanting in 1800 from the opinions set forth in his Vindiciae Gallicae, 1791, a book supporting the French Revolutionists, and in becoming a close friend of his old enemy Burke. I have not succeeded in finding a file of the Albion, nor, I believe, has any one else.
"The nobleman in 'St. Mark.'" Lamb was thinking of Luke xiv. 16-24.]
89. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[P.M. August 31, 1801.]
I heard that you were going to China, with a commission from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective. But I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his territories: it is a fragment of a "Dissertation on the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth century," which will no doubt be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English for the use of the two and twenty readers of "The Albion" (this calculation includes a printer, four pressmen, and a devil); but becoming of no use when "The Albion" stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is come to London with a civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama.
"The Albion" is dead--dead as nail in door--and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to the "Morning Chronicle," !!! Mister Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry the editor yet: but I am preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mister Perry, in common with the great body of the Whigs, thinks "The Albion" very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abominable pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N'importe (as they say in French): any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have lost by his going, what [it] seems to me I can never recover--a finished man. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites,--I shall look up to it, to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all a second or substitute for him in any sort.
Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly satisfactory you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of ----, and ----, and ----, and M----, and ----, and ----, and ----. But Mister Burke has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a Member of the National Assembly, or else in his Appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which. Do you remember an instance, from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.
I live where I did, in a private manner, because I don't like state. Nothing is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple.
C. L.
[Manning had taken up Chinese at Cambridge, and in 1800 he had moved to Paris to study the language under Dr. Hagan. He did not, however, go to China until 1806. The Wedgwoods were Coleridge's patrons. Lamb's reference to them is, of course, a joke.
The Morning Chronicle was then the chief Whig paper, the principal opponent of the Morning Post. I have, I think, traced two or three of Lamb's contributions to the Chronicle at this period, but they are not of his best. He quickly moved on to the Post, but, as we shall see, only for a short period.
Rickman went to Dublin in 1801 with Abbot, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and was appointed Deputy-Keeper of the Privy Seal. He returned in February, 1802.
The reference to Burke is to his justification of his particular solicitude for the Crown, as the part of the British Constitution then in danger, though not in itself more important than the other parts, in the "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." The Priam-Hector illustration is there employed.
"Homer." See The Iliad, Book 24, lines 311-316. Pope translates thus:--
Next on his sons his erring fury falls, Polites, Paris, Agathon, he calls; His threats Dïphobus and Dius hear, Hippothoüs, Pammon, Helenus the seer, And generous Antiphon: for yet these nine Survived, sad relics of his numerous line.
Following this letter should come one from Lamb to John Rickman, dated September 16, 1801 (the first of a valuable series printed in Canon Ainger's latest edition), saying that he and his sister are at Margate. He has been trying to write for the Morning Chronicle but with little success. Is now meditating a book: "Why should every creature make books but I?" After a passage concerning George Burnett, Lamb describes Godwin and his courtship of his second wife--"a very disgusting woman." "You never saw such a philosophic coxcomb, nor any one play the Romeo so unnaturally."
Here should come a mutilated letter, not yet printed, I believe, shown to me by Mr. Bertram Dobell, from Lamb to Manning, written probably at Margate, where this year's holidays were spent. It is deeply interesting and I wish 1 could print it even with its imperfections. There are references to White, Dyer, Coleridge ("Pity that such human frailties should perch upon the margin of Ulswater Lake") and the Lloyds. Also to politics and the riddle of life. "What we came here for I know no more than [an] Ideot."]
Letter 90
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN Sept. 9, 1801.
Dear Sir,--Nothing runs in my head when I think of your story, but that you should make it as like the life of Savage as possible. That is a known and familiar tale, and its effect on the public mind has been very great. Many of the incidents in the true history are readily made dramatical. For instance, Savage used to walk backwards and forwards o' nights to his mother's window, to catch a glimpse of her, as she passed with a candle. With some such situation the play might happily open. I would plunge my Hero, exactly like Savage, into difficulties and embarrassments, the consequences of an unsettled mind: out of which he may be extricated by the unknown interference of his mother. He should be attended from the beginning by a friend, who should stand in much the same relation towards him as Horatio to Altamont in the play of the Fair Penitent. A character of this sort seems indispensable. This friend might gain interviews with the mother, when the son was refused sight of her. Like Horatio with Calista, he might wring his [her?] soul. Like Horatio, he might learn the secret first. He might be exactly in the same perplexing situation, when he had learned it, whether to tell it or conceal it from the Son (I have still Savage in my head) might kill a man (as he did) in an affray--he should receive a pardon, as Savage did--and the mother might interfere to have him banished. This should provoke the Friend to demand an interview with her husband, and disclose the whole secret. The husband, refusing to believe anything to her dishonour, should fight with him. The husband repents before he dies. The mother explains and confesses everything in his presence. The son is admitted to an interview with his now acknowledged mother. Instead of embraces, she resolves to abstract herself from all pleasure, even from his sight, in voluntary penance all her days after. This is crude indeed!! but I am totally unable to suggest a better. I am the worst hand in the world at a plot. But I understand enough of passion to predict that your story, with some of Savage's, which has no repugnance, but a natural alliance with it, cannot fail. The mystery of the suspected relationship--the suspicion, generated from slight and forgotten circumstances, coming at last to act as Instinct, and so to be mistaken for Instinct--the son's unceasing pursuit and throwing of himself in his mother's way, something like Falkland's eternal persecution of Williams--the high and intricate passion in the mother, the being obliged to shun and keep at a distance the thing nearest to her heart--to be cruel, where her heart yearns to be kind, without a possibility of explanation. You have the power of life and death and the hearts of your auditors in your hands; still Harris will want a skeleton, and he must have it. I can only put in some sorry hints. The discovery to the son's friend may take place not before the 3d act--in some such way as this. The mother may cross the street--he may point her out to some gay companion of his as the Beauty of Leghorn--the pattern for wives, &c. &c. His companion, who is an Englishman, laughs at his mistake, and knows her to have been the famous Nancy Dawson, or any one else, who captivated the English king. Some such way seems dramatic, and speaks to the Eye. The audience will enter into the Friend's surprise, and into the perplexity of his situation. These Ocular Scenes are so many great landmarks, rememberable headlands and lighthouses in the voyage. Macbeth's witch has a good advice to a magic [? tragic] writer, what to do with his spectator.
"Show his eyes, and grieve his heart."
The most difficult thing seems to be, What to do with the husband? You will not make him jealous of his own son? that is a stale and an unpleasant trick in Douglas, etc. Can't you keep him out of the way till you want him, as the husband of Isabella is conveniently sent off till his cue comes? There will be story enough without him, and he will only puzzle all. Catastrophes are worst of all. Mine is most stupid. I only propose it to fulfil my engagement, not in hopes to convert you.
It is always difficult to get rid of a woman at the end of a tragedy. Men may fight and die. A woman must either take poison, which is a nasty trick, or go mad, which is not fit to be shown, or retire, which is poor, only retiring is most reputable.
I am sorry I can furnish you no better: but I find it extremely difficult to settle my thoughts upon anything but the scene before me, when I am from home, I am from home so seldom. If any, the least hint crosses me, I will write again, and I very much wish to read your plan, if you could abridge and send it. In this little scrawl you must take the will for the deed, for I most sincerely wish success to your play.--Farewell,
C. L.
[This and the letter that follows it contain Lamb's suggestions for Godwin's play "Faulkener," upon which he was now meditating, but which was not performed until 1807. Lamb wrote the prologue, a poem in praise of Defoe, since it was in Roxana, or at least in one edition of it, that the counterpart to, or portion of, Godwin's plot is found. There, however, the central figure is a daughter, not a son. See the letters to Walter Wilson.
Mr. Swinburne, in the little article to which I have already alluded, says of this and the following letter: "Several of Lamb's suggestions, in spite of his own modest disclaimer ('I am the worst hand in the world at a plot'), seem to me, especially as coming from the author of a tragedy memorable alike for sweetness of moral emotion and emptiness of theatrical subject, worthy of note for the instinctive intuition of high dramatic effect implied in their rough and rapid outlines."
Richard Savage, the poet, whose life Johnson wrote, claimed to be the illegitimate son of Lady Macclesfield by Lord Rivers. Savage killed Sinclair in a tavern quarrel in 1727, and was condemned to death. His pardon was obtained by the Countess of Hertford.
"The Fair Penitent" is by Nicholas Rowe.
Falkland and Williams are in Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, dramatised by Colman as "The Iron Chest."
"Harris will want a skeleton." Thomas Harris, stage manager of Covent Garden Theatre.
Nancy Dawson (1730?-1767), the famous dancer and bona roba.
"Douglas"--Home's tragedy.
"The husband of Isabella." In Southern's "Fatal Marriage."]
Letter 91
(Fragment)
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
Margate, Sep. 17, 1801.
I shall be glad to come home and talk these matters over with you. I have read your scheme very attentively. That Arabella has been mistress to King Charles is sufficient to all the purposes of the story. It can only diminish that respect we feel for her to make her turn whore to one of the Lords of his Bed-chamber. Her son must not know that she has been a whore: it matters not that she has been whore to a King: equally in both cases it is against decorum and against the delicacy of a son's respect that he should be privy to it. No doubt, many sons might feel a wayward pleasure in the honourable guilt of their mothers; but is it a true feeling? Is it the best sort of feeling? Is it a feeling to be exposed on theatres to mothers and daughters? Your conclusion (or rather Defoe's) comes far short of the tragic ending, which is always expected; and it is not safe to disappoint. A tragic auditory wants blood. They care but little about a man and his wife parting. Besides, what will you do with the son, after all his pursuits and adventures? Even quietly leave him to take guinea-and-a-half lodgings with mamma in Leghorn! O impotent and pacific measures!... I am certain that you must mix up some strong ingredients of distress to give a savour to your pottage. I still think that you may, and must, graft the story of Savage upon Defoe. Your hero must kill a man or do some thing. Can't you bring him to the gallows or some great mischief, out of which she must have recourse to an explanation with her husband to save him. Think on this. The husband, for instance, has great friends in Court at Leghorn. The son is condemned to death. She cannot teaze him for a stranger. She must tell the whole truth. Or she may tease him, as for a stranger, till (like Othello in Cassio's case) he begins to suspect her for her importunity. Or, being pardoned, can she not teaze her husband to get him banished? Something of this I suggested before. Both is best. The murder and the pardon will make business for the fourth act, and the banishment and explanation (by means of the Friend I want you to draw) the fifth. You must not open any of the truth to Dawley by means of a letter. A letter is a feeble messenger on the stage. Somebody, the son or his friend, must, as a coup de main, be exasperated, and obliged to tell the husband. Damn the husband and his "gentlemanlike qualities." Keep him out of sight, or he will trouble all. Let him be in England on trade, and come home, as Biron does in Isabella, in the fourth act, when he is wanted. I am for introducing situations, sort of counterparts to situations, which have been tried in other plays--like but not the same. On this principle I recommended a friend like Horatio in the "Fair Penitent," and on this principle I recommend a situation like Othello, with relation to Desdemona's intercession for Cassio. By-scenes may likewise receive hints. The son may see his mother at a mask or feast, as Romeo, Juliet. The festivity of the company contrasts with the strong perturbations of the individuals. Dawley may be told his wife's past unchastity at a mask by some witch-character--as Macbeth upon the heath, in dark sentences. This may stir his brain, and be forgot, but come in aid of stronger proof hereafter. From this, what you will perhaps call whimsical way of counterparting, this honest stealing, and original mode of plagiarism, much yet, I think, remains to be sucked. Excuse these abortions. I thought you would want the draught soon again, and I would not send it empty away.--Yours truly,
WILLIAM GODWIN!!!
Somers Town, 17th Sept., 1801.
[The point of signing this letter with Godwin's name and adding his address (Lamb, it will be noticed, was then at Margate) is not clear.
I place here the following letter, not having any clue as to date, which is immaterial:--]
92. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN
Dear Mrs. G.,--Having observed with some concern that Mr. Godwin is a little fastidious in what he eats for supper, I herewith beg to present his palate with a piece of dried salmon. I am assured it is the best that swims in Trent. If you do not know how to dress it, allow me to add that it should be cut in thin slices and boiled in paper previously prepared in butter. Wishing it exquisite, I remain,--Much as before, yours sincerely,
C. LAMB.
Some add mashed potatoes.
[Following this letter should come a letter from Lamb to John Rickman, describing the state of their two George friends: George the First (George Dyer) and George the Second (George Burnett). Burnett, he says, as ill becomes adversity as Dyer would prosperity. He tells also of another poor acquaintance of Rickman's--one Simonds with a slit lip, who has been to Lamb to borrow money. "Saving his dirty shirt and his physiognomy and his 'bacco box, together with a certain kiddy air in his walk, a man w'd have gone near to have mistaken him for a gentleman. He has a sort of ambition to be so misunderstood."]
93. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN
To John Rickman, Esqr., Dublin Castle.
[No date. ? November, 1801.]
A letter from G. Dyer will probably accompany this. I wish I could convey to you any notion of the whimsical scenes I have been witness to in this fortnight past. 'Twas on Tuesday week the poor heathen scrambled up to my door about breakfast time. He came thro' a violent rain with no neckcloth on, and a beard that made him a spectacle to men and angels, and tap'd at the door. Mary open'd it, and he stood stark still and held a paper in his hand importing that he had been ill with a fever. He either wouldn't or couldn't speak except by signs. When you went to comfort him he put his hand upon his heart and shook his head and told us his complaint lay where no medicines could reach it. I was dispatch'd for Dr. Dale, Mr. Phillips of St. Paul's Church yard, and Mr. Frend, who is to be his executor. George solemnly delivered into Mr. Frend's hands and mine an old burnt preface that had been in the fire, with injunctions which we solemnly vow'd to obey that it should be printed after his death with his last corrections, and that some account should be given to the world why he had not fulfill'd his engagement with subscribers. Having done this and borrow'd two guineas of his bookseller (to whom he imparted in confidence that he should leave a great many loose papers behind him which would only want methodizing and arranging to prove very lucrative to any bookseller after his death), he laid himself down on my bed in a mood of complacent resignation. By the aid of meat and drink put into him (for I all along suspected a vacuum) he was enabled to sit up in the evening, but he had not got the better of his intolerable fear of dying; he expressed such philosophic indifference in his speech and such frightened apprehensions in his physiognomy that if he had truly been dying, and I had known it, I could not have kept my countenance. In particular, when the doctor came and ordered him to take little white powders (I suppose of chalk or alum, to humour him), he ey'd him with a suspicion which I could not account for; he has since explain'd that he took it for granted Dr. Dale knew his situation and had ordered him these powders to hasten his departure that he might suffer as little pain as possible. Think what an aspect the heathen put on with these fears upon a dirty face. To recount all his freaks for two or three days while he thought he was going, and how the fit operated, and sometimes the man got uppermost and sometimes the author, and he had this excellent person to serve, and he must correct some proof sheets for Phillips, and he could not bear to leave his subscribers unsatisfy'd, but he must not think of these things now, he was going to a place where he should satisfy all his debts--and when he got a little better he began to discourse what a happy thing it would be if there was a place where all the good men and women in the world might meet, meaning heav'n, and I really believe for a time he had doubts about his soul, for he was very near, if not quite, light-headed. The fact was he had not had a good meal for some days and his little dirty Niece (whom he sent for with a still dirtier Nephew, and hugg'd him, and bid them farewell) told us that unless he dines out he subsists on tea and gruels. And he corroborated this tale by ever and anon complaining of sensations of gnawing which he felt about his heart, which he mistook his stomach to be, and sure enough these gnawings were dissipated after a meal or two, and he surely thinks that he has been rescued from the jaws of death by Dr. Dale's white powders. He is got quite well again by nursing, and chirps of odes and lyric poetry the day long--he is to go out of town on Monday, and with him goes the dirty train of his papers and books which follow'd him to our house. I shall not be sorry when he takes his nipt carcase out of my bed, which it has occupied, and vanishes with all his Lyric lumber, but I will endeavour to bring him in future into a method of dining at least once a day. I have proposed to him to dine with me (and he has nearly come into it) whenever he does not go out; and pay me. I will take his money beforehand and he shall eat it out. If I don't it will go all over the world. Some worthless relations, of which the dirty little devil that looks after him and a still more dirty nephew are component particles, I have reason to think divide all his gains with some lazy worthless authors that are his constant satellites. The Literary Fund has voted him seasonably £20 and if I can help it he shall spend it on his own carcase. I have assisted him in arranging the remainder of what he calls Poems and he will get rid of 'em I hope in another. [Here three lines are torn away at the foot of the page, wherein Lamb makes the transition from George Dyer to another poor author, George Burnett.]
I promised Burnet to write when his parcel went. He wants me to certify that he is more awake than you think him. I believe he may be by this time, but he is so full of self-opinion that I fear whether he and Phillips will ever do together. What he is to do for Phillips he whimsically seems to consider more as a favor done to P. than a job from P. He still persists to call employment dependence, and prates about the insolence of booksellers and the tax upon geniuses. Poor devil! he is not launched upon the ocean and is sea-sick with aforethought. I write plainly about him, and he would stare and frown finely if he read this treacherous epistle, but I really am anxious about him, and that [? it] nettles me to see him so proud and so helpless. If he is not serv'd he will never serve himself. I read his long letter to Southey, which I suppose you have seen. He had better have been furnishing copy for Phillips than luxuriating in tracing the causes of his imbecillity. I believe he is a little wrong in not ascribing more to the structure of his own mind. He had his yawns from nature, his pride from education.
I hope to see Southey soon, so I need only send my remembrance to him now. Doubtless I need not tell him that Burnett is not to be foster'd in self-opinion. His eyes want opening, to see himself a man of middling stature. I am not oculist enough to do this. The booksellers may one day remove the film. I am all this time on the most cordial supping terms of amity with G. Burnett and really love him at times: but I must speak freely of people behind their backs and not think it back-biting. It is better than Godwin's way of telling a man he is a fool to his face.
I think if you could do any thing for George in the way of an office (God knows whether you can in any haste [? case], but you did talk of it) it is my firm belief that it would be his only chance of settlement; he will never live by his literary exertions, as he calls them--he is too proud to go the usual way to work and he has no talents to make that way unnecessary. I know he talks big in his letter to Southey that his mind is undergoing an alteration and that the die is now casting that shall consign him to honor or dishonour, but these expressions are the convulsions of a fever, not the sober workings of health. Translated into plain English, he now and then perceives he must work or starve, and then he thinks he'll work; but when he goes about it there's a lion in the way. He came dawdling to me for an Encyclopædia yesterday. I recommended him to Norris' library and he said if he could not get it there, Phillips was bound to furnish him with one; it was Phillips' interest to do so, and all that. This was true with some restrictions--but as to Phillips' interests to oblige G.B.! Lord help his simple head! P. could by a whistle call together a host of such authors as G. B. like Robin Hood's merry men in green. P. has regular regiments in pay. Poor writers are his crab-lice and suck at him for nutriment. His round pudding chops are their idea of plenty when in their idle fancies they aspire to be rich.
What do you think of a life of G. Dyer? I can scarcely conceive a more amusing novel. He has been connected with all sects in the world and he will faithfully tell all he knows. Every body will read it; and if it is not done according to my fancy I promise to put him in a novel when he dies. Nothing shall escape me. If you think it feasible, whenever you write you may encourage him. Since he has been so close with me I have perceiv'd the workings of his inordinate vanity, his gigantic attention to particles and to prevent open vowels in his odes, his solicitude that the public may not lose any tittle of his poems by his death, and all the while his utter ignorance that the world don't care a pin about his odes and his criticisms, a fact which every body knows but himself--he is a rum genius.
C. L.
[Dr. Dale would probably be Thomas Dale of Devonshire Square, Bishopsgate, who had a large city practice in those days. He died in 1816.
"An old burnt preface." See note on page 210.
George Burnett we have already met. He was born probably in 1776. He went to Balliol, met Southey and Coleridge and became a Pantisocratist. Subsequently he became a dissenting minister at Yarmouth, and then a medical student at Edinburgh; and later he succeeded George Dyer as tutor in the family of Lord Stanhope. He became one of Phillips' hacks, as Lamb's letter tells us. His principal work was the Specimens of English Prose Writers, 1807, in three volumes, in which it has been stated that Lamb had a hand. He died in want in 1811.
The reference to Southey being in Dublin is explained by the fact that, through Rickman, he had been appointed private secretary to Mr. Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, at a salary of £400. He did not long retain the post, as it was vexatious and the duties very irregular.
Lamb's next letter to Rickman, dated November 24, 1801, contains better news of Dyer and returns to the subject of John Woodvil. "Dyer regularly dines with me when he does not go a visiting, and brings his shilling." Also, says Lamb, he talks of marrying. "He has not forgiven me for betraying to you his purpose of writing his own Life. He says, that if it once spreads, so many people will expect and wish to have a place in it, that he is sure he shall disoblige all his friends."
Another, undated, letter to Rickman should probably come here-abouts, saying that Dyer has been lent a house at Enfield full of books, where he is at work on his Poems.
Here perhaps should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Lloyd, returning to Jeremy Taylor, and deprecating a selection from his works, which Robert Lloyd had suggested that Lamb should make. (In 1805 Basil Montagu, afterwards, if not now, a friend of Lamb's, published a volume of Selections from the Works of Taylor, Etc.) Lamb says that Manning and Coleridge are in town, and he is making a thorough alteration in the structure of his play (John Woodvil) for publication.
Here perhaps should come a further undated letter to Rickman in which Lamb says that the receipt of £50 for an old debt has made it possible to print John Woodvil. Dyer, he says, is "the most unmanageable of God's creatures." Burnett is in a very bad way again. Fenwick's paper The Plough has become a weekly. Godwin is not yet married. Fell, Godwin's shadow, is writing a comedy: "An Owl making a Pun would be no bad emblem of the unnatural attempt." In a postscript Lamb says that he has since read the play and it is not bad: "Who knows, but Owls do make Puns when they hoot by moonshine." The best news is that Lamb hopes to be a theatrical critic for the Morning Post.
Here should come a letter to Rickman dated January 9, 1802, the principal news in which is that George Dyer is consorting with the Earl of Buchan, the "eccentric biographer of Fletcher of Saltoun," and has brought him to see Lamb. "I wan't at home, but Mary was washing--a pretty pickle to receive an Earl in! Lord have mercy upon us! a Lord in my garret! My utmost ambition was some time or other to receive a Secretary. Well, I am to breakfast with this mad Lord on Sunday." Lamb refers to his article in the Post on Cooke's "Richard III."
Here should come a letter to Rickman dated January 14, 1802, in which Lamb confesses to the authorship of "Dick Strype" in the Morning Post of January 6 (see Vol. IV.); also of a whimsical account of the Lord Mayor's State Bed (see Vol. I.); and of some of the Twelfth Night Epigrams (see Vol. IV.). He includes two epigrams which the editor rejected.
Here should come a note to Rickman dated January 18, 1802, relating to a joint subscription with Rickman's father for certain newspapers.
Here should come a letter to Rickman dated February 1, 1802, giving the first draft of the epitaph for Mary Druitt (see Vol. IV.). He also says that George Burnett, who had just been appointed tutor to the sons of Lord ("Citizen") Stanhope, is perplexed because his pupils have run away.
Here should come a note to Rickman, dated February 4, 1802, accompanying three copies of John Woodvil and saying that an annuity is to be bought for George Dyer by certain friends.
Here should come a letter to Rickman, dated February 14, 1802, which contains the news that Lamb has given up the Post. He feels much relieved in consequence, in spite of the loss of money. George Dyer's dinner money is now paid from his friends' fund, and Burnett is happy in doing nothing for Lord Stanhope's salary. Mary Lamb does not want Rickman to know that "Helen," in the John Woodvil volume, is of her writing.]
94. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING
[No date. ? Feb. 15, 1802.]
Not a sentence, not a syllable of Trismegistus, shall be lost through my neglect. I am his word-banker, his storekeeper of puns and syllogisms. You cannot conceive (and if Trismegistus cannot, no man can) the strange joy which I felt at the receipt of a letter from Paris. It seemed to give me a learned importance, which placed me above all who had not Parisian correspondents. Believe that I shall carefully husband every scrap, which will save you the trouble of memory, when you come back. You cannot write things so trifling, let them only be about Paris, which I shall not treasure. In particular, I must have parallels of actors and actresses. I must be told if any building in Paris is at all comparable to St. Paul's, which, contrary to the usual mode of that part of our nature called admiration, I have looked up to with unfading wonder every morning at ten o'clock, ever since it has lain in my way to business. At noon I casually glance upon it, being hungry; and hunger has not much taste for the fine arts. Is any night-walk comparable to a walk from St. Paul's to Charing Cross, for lighting and paving, crowds going and coming without respite, the rattle of coaches and the cheerfulness of shops? Have you seen a man guillotined yet? is it as good as hanging? are the women all painted, and the men all monkeys? or are there not a few that look like rational of both sexes? Are you and the First Consul thick? All this expense of ink I may fairly put you to, as your letters will not be solely for my proper pleasure, but are to serve as memoranda and notices, helps for short memory, a kind of Rumfordising recollection, for yourself on your return. Your letter was just what a letter should be, crammed and very funny. Every part of it pleased me till you came to Paris; and your damn'd philosophical indolence or indifference stung me. You cannot stir from your rooms till you know the language! What the devil!--are men nothing but word-trumpets? are men all tongue and ear? have these creatures, that you and I profess to know something about, no faces, gestures, gabble: no folly, no absurdity, no induction of French education upon the abstract idea of men and women, no similitude nor dis-similitude to English! Why! thou damn'd Smell-fungus! your account of your landing and reception, and Bullen (I forget how you spell it--it was spelt my way in Harry the Eighth's time,) was exactly in that minute style which strong impressions INSPIRE (writing to a Frenchman, I write as a Frenchman would). It appears to me as if I should die with joy at the first landing in a foreign country. It is the nearest pleasure, which a grown man can substitute for that unknown one, which he can never know--the pleasure of the first entrance into life from the womb. I dare say, in a short time, my habits would come back like a "stronger man" armed, and drive out that new pleasure; and I should soon sicken for known objects. Nothing has transpired here that seems to me of sufficient importance to send dry-shod over the water: but I suppose you will want to be told some news. The best and the worst to me is, that I have given up two guineas a week at the "Post," and regained my health and spirits, which were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsatisfied. Ludisti satis, tempus abire est; I must cut closer, that's all.
In all this time I have done but one thing, which I reckon tolerable, and that I will transcribe, because it may give you pleasure, being a picture of my humours. You will find it in my last page. It absurdly is a first Number of a series, thus strangled in its birth.
More news! The Professor's Rib has come out to be a damn'd disagreeable woman, so much so as to drive me and some more old cronies from his house. If a man will keep snakes in his house, he must not wonder if people are shy of coming to see him because of the snakes.
C. L.
Mister Fell--or as you, with your usual facetiousness and drollery, call him, Mr. F + II--has stopped short in the middle of his play. Some friend has told him that it has not the least merit in it. Oh! that I had the rectifying of the Litany! I would put in a libera nos (Scriptores videlicet) ab amicis! That's all the news. A propos (is it pedantry, writing to a Frenchman, to express myself sometimes by a French word, when an English one would not do as well? methinks, my thoughts fall naturally into it).
Apropos, I think you wrong about my play. All the omissions are right. And the supplementary scene, in which Sandford narrates the manner in which his master is affected, is the best in the book. It stands where a hodge-podge of German puerilities used to stand. I insist upon it that you like that scene. Love me, love that scene.
I will now transcribe the "Londoner" (No. 1), and wind up all with affection and humble servant at the end.
THE LONDONER. No. 1.
In compliance with my own particular humour, no less than with thy laudable curiosity, Reader, I proceed to give thee some account of my history and habits. I was born under the nose of St. Dunstan's steeple, just where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this twofold city meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar. The same day which gave me to the world saw London happy in the celebration of her great annual feast. This I cannot help looking upon as a lively type or omen of the future great goodwill which I was destined to bear toward the City, resembling in kind that solicitude which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever concerns her interests and well-being. Indeed, I consider myself in some sort a speculative Lord Mayor of London: for, though circumstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and spital sermon, yet thus much will I say of myself, in truth, that Whittington himself with his Cat (just emblem of vigilance and a furred gown), never went beyond me in affection, which I bear to the citizens. Shut out from serving them in the most honourable mode, I aspire to do them benefit in another, scarcely less honourable; and if I cannot, by virtue of office, commit vice and irregularity to the material Counter, I will, at least, erect a spiritual one, where they shall be laid fast by the heels. In plain words, I will do my best endeavour to write them down.
To return to myself (from whence my zeal for the Public good is perpetually causing me to digress), I will let thee, Reader, into certain more of my peculiarities. I was born (as you have heard), bred, and have passed most of my time, in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion was never interrupted or suspended, except for a few years in the younger part of my life, during a period in which I had fixed my affections upon a charming young woman. Every man, while the passion is upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows, and purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I contracted just enough familiarity with rural objects to understand tolerably well ever after the Poets, when they declaim in such passionate terms in favour of a country life.
For my own part, now the fit is long past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-Lane Theatre just at the hour of five, give me ten thousand finer pleasures, than I ever received from all the flocks of silly sheep, that have whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs.
This passion for crowds is no where feasted so full as in London. The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet-street. I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other ills. Often when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my cheek for inutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the shifting scenes of a skilful Pantomime.
The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do not displease me. The endless succession of shops, where Fancy (miscalled Folly) is supplied with perpetual new gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food. The obliging customer, and the obliged tradesmen-- things which live by bowing, and things which exist but for homage, do not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover meanness. I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of honour at work in the dirty ring which encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal justice in the tumultuous detectors of a pickpocket. The salutary astonishment with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than an hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man, in all ages, has leaned to order and good government. Thus an art of extracting morality, from the commonest incidents of a town life, is attained by the same well-natured alchemy, with which the Foresters of Arden in a beautiful country
Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing--
Where has spleen her food but in London--humour, interest, curiosity, suck at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke--what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?
Reader, in the course of my peregrinations about the great city, it is hard, if I have not picked up matter, which may serve to amuse thee, as it has done me, a winter evening long. When next we meet, I purpose opening my budget--Till when, farewell.
* * * * *
"What is all this about?" said Mrs. Shandy. "A story of a cock and a bull," said Yorick: and so it is; but Manning will take good-naturedly what God will send him across the water: only I hope he won't shut his eyes, and open his mouth, as the children say, for that is the way to gape, and not to read. Manning, continue your laudable purpose of making me your register. I will render back all your remarks; and I, not you, shall have received usury by having read them. In the mean time, may the great Spirit have you in his keeping, and preserve our Englishmen from the inoculation of frivolity and sin upon French earth.
Allons--or what is it you say, instead of good-bye?
Mary sends her kind remembrance, and covets the remarks equally with me.
C. LAMB.
[The reference to the "word-banker" and "register" is explained by Manning's first letter to Lamb from Paris, in which he says: "I ... beg you to keep all my letters. I hope to send you many--and I may in the course of time, make some observations that I shall wish to recall to my memory when I return to England."
"Are you and the First Consul thick?"--Napoleon, with whom Manning was destined one day to be on terms. In 1803, on the declaration of war, when he wished to return to England, Manning's was the only passport that Napoleon signed; again, in 1817, on returning from China, Manning was wrecked near St. Helena, and, waiting on the island for a ship, conversed there with the great exile.
"Rumfordising." A word coined by Lamb from Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford, the founder of the Royal Institution, the deviser of the Rumford stove, and a tireless scientific and philosophical experimentalist.
"Smellfungus." An allusion to Sterne's attack on Smollett, in The Sentimental Journey: "The lamented Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted."
"The Post." Lamb had been writing criticisms of plays; but Stuart, as we have seen, wanted them on the same night as the performance and Lamb found this impossible.
"I have done but one thing"--"The Londoner," referred to later.
"The Professor's Rib"--Godwin's second wife, the widow Clairmont (mother of Jane Clairmont), whom he had married in December, 1801.
"Fell"--R. Fell, author of a Tour through the Batavian Republic, 1801. Later he compiled a Life of Charles James Fox, 1808. Lamb knew him, as well as Fenwick, through Godwin.
"Apropos, I think you wrong about my play." John Woodvil had just been published and Lamb had sent Manning a copy. Manning, in return, had written from Paris early in February: "I showed your Tragedy to Holcroft, who had taste enough to discover that 'tis full of poetry--but the plot he condemns in toto. Tell me how it succeeds. I think you were ill advised to retrench so much. I miss the beautiful Branches you have lopped off and regret them. In some of the pages the sprinkling of words is so thin as to be quite outré. There you were wrong again."
"The Londoner" was published in the Morning Post, February 1, 1802. I have quoted the article from that paper, as Lamb's copy for Manning has disappeared. Concerning it Manning wrote, in his next letter--April 6, 1802--"I like your 'Londoner' very much, there is a deal of happy fancy in it, but it is not strong enough to be seen by the generality of readers, yet if you were to write a volume of essays in the same stile you might be sure of its succeeding."]
95. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN
16, Mitre Court Buildings, Inner Temple, April 10, 1802.
Dear Rickman,--The enclosed letter explains itself. It will save me the danger of a corporal interview with the man-eater who, if very sharp-set, may take a fancy to me, if you will give me a short note, declaratory of probabilities. These from him who hopes to see you once or twice more before he goes hence, to be no more seen: for there is no tipple nor tobacco in the grave, whereunto he hasteneth.
C. LAMB.
How clearly the Goul writes, and like a gentleman!
[A friend of Burnett, named Simonds, is meant. Lamb calls him a "Goul" in another letter, and elsewhere says he eats strange flesh. See note on page 232.]