390. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. March 20, 1826.]
Dear B.B.--You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the former, I live on scraps obtained in charity from an old friend whose stationary is a permanent perquisite; for folding, I shall do it neatly when I learn to tye my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing wax, I have none on my establishment. Wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place. When my Epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflexions, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E.I.H. I never mended a pen; I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard, where he had so many for nothing. When I write to a Great man, at the Court end, he opens with surprise upon a naked note, such as Whitechapel people interchange, with no sweet degrees of envelope: I never inclosed one bit of paper in another, nor understand the rationale of it. Once only I seald with borrow'd wax, to set Walter Scott a wondering, sign'd with the imperial quarterd arms of England, which my friend Field gives in compliment to his descent in the female line from O. Cromwell. It must have set his antiquarian curiosity upon watering. To your questions upon the currency, I refer you to Mr. Robinson's last speech, where, if you can find a solution, I cannot. I think this tho' the best ministry we ever stumbled upon. Gin reduced four shillings in the gallon, wine 2 shillings in the quart. This comes home to men's minds and bosoms. My tirade against visitors was not meant particularly at you or A.K. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an article. So in another thing I talkd of somebody's insipid wife, without a correspondent object in my head: and a good lady, a friend's wife, whom I really love (don't startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are ludicrous. I send out a character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends. "Popular Fallacies" will go on; that word concluded is an erratum, I suppose, for continued. I do not know how it got stuff'd in there. A little thing without name will also be printed on the Religion of the Actors, but it is out of your way, so I recommend you, with true Author's hypocrisy, to skip it. We are about to sit down to Roast beef, at which we could wish A.K., B.B., and B.B.'s pleasant daughter to be humble partakers. So much for my hint at visitors, which was scarcely calculated for droppers in from Woodbridge. The sky does not drop such larks every day.
My very kindest wishes to you all three, with my sister's best love. C. LAMB.
["Mr. Robinson's last speech." Frederick John Robinson, afterwards Earl of Ripon, then Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Earl of Liverpool. The Government had decided to check the use of paper-money by stopping the issue of notes for less than £5; and Robinson had made a speech on the subject on February 10. The motion was carried, but to some extent was compromised. It was Robinson who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, found the money for building the new British Museum and purchasing Angerstein's pictures as the beginning of the National Gallery.
"My tirade against visitors"--the Popular Fallacy "That Home is Home," in the New Monthly Magazine for March.
"Somebody's insipid wife." In the Popular Fallacy "That You Must Love Me and Love My Dog," in the February number, Lamb had spoken of Honorius' "vapid wife."
Barton and his daughter visited Lamb at Colebrooke Cottage somewhen about this time. Mrs. FitzGerald, in 1893, wrote out for me her recollections of the day. Lamb, who was alone, opened the door himself. He sent out for a luncheon of oysters. The books on his shelves, Mrs. FitzGerald remembered, retained the price-labels of the stalls where he had bought them. She also remembered a portrait over the fireplace. This would be the Milton. In the Gem for 1831 was a poem by Barton, "To Milton's Portrait in a Friend's Parlour."]
391. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
March 22nd, 1826.
Dear C.,--We will with great pleasure be with you on Thursday in the next week early. Your finding out my style in your nephew's pleasant book is surprising to me. I want eyes to descry it. You are a little too hard upon his morality, though I confess he has more of Sterne about him than of Sternhold. But he saddens into excellent sense before the conclusion. Your query shall be submitted to Miss Kelly, though it is obvious that the pantomime, when done, will be more easy to decide upon than in proposal. I say, do it by all means. I have Decker's play by me, if you can filch anything out of it. Miss Gray, with her kitten eyes, is an actress, though she shows it not at all, and pupil to the former, whose gestures she mimics in comedy to the disparagement of her own natural manner, which is agreeable. It is funny to see her bridling up her neck, which is native to F.K.; but there is no setting another's manners upon one's shoulders any more than their head. I am glad you esteem Manning, though you see but his husk or shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers, and will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is. I am perfecting myself in the "Ode to Eton College" against Thursday, that I may not appear unclassic. I have just discovered that it is much better than the "Elegy."
In haste, C.L.
P.S.--I do not know what to say to your latest theory about Nero being the Messiah, though by all accounts he was a 'nointed one.
["Next week early." Canon Ainger's text here has: "May we venture to bring Emma with us?"
"Your nephew's pleasant book"--Henry Nelson Coleridge's Six Months in the West Indies in 1825. In the last chapter but one of the book is an account of the slave question, under the title "Planters and Slaves."
"Sternhold"--Thomas Sternhold, the coadjutor of Hopkins in paraphrasing the Psalms.
"The pantomime." Coleridge seems to have had some project for modernising Dekker for Fanny Kelly. Mr. Dykes Campbell suggested that the play to be treated was "Old Fortunatus."
"Miss Gray." I have found nothing of this lady.
"Manning." Writing to Robert Lloyd twenty-five years earlier Lamb had said of Manning: "A man of great Power--an enchanter almost.--Far beyond Coleridge or any man in power of impressing --when he gets you alone he can act the wonders of Egypt. Only he is lazy, and does not always put forth all his strength; if he did, I know no man of genius at all comparable to him."
"Against Thursday." Coleridge was "at home" on Thursday evenings. Possibly on this occasion some one interested in Gray was to be there, or the allusion may be a punning one to Miss Gray.
"Your latest theory." I cannot explain this.]
392. CHARLES LAMB TO H.F. CARY
April 3, 1826.
Dear Sir,--It is whispered me that you will not be unwilling to look into our doleful hermitage. Without more preface, you will gladden our cell by accompanying our old chums of the London, Darley and Allan Cunningham, to Enfield on Wednesday. You shall have hermit's fare, with talk as seraphical as the novelty of the divine life will permit, with an innocent retrospect to the world which we have left, when I will thank you for your hospitable offer at Chiswick, and with plain hermit reasons evince the necessity of abiding here.
Without hearing from you, then, you shall give us leave to expect you. I have long had it on my conscience to invite you, but spirits have been low; and I am indebted to chance for this awkward but most sincere invitation.
Yours, with best love to Mrs. Cary, C. LAMB.
Darley knows all about the coaches. Oh, for a Museum in the wilderness!
[Cary, who had been afternoon lecturer at Chiswick and curate of the Savoy, this year took up his post as Assistant Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Museum. George Darley, who wrote some notes to Gary's Dante, we have met. Allan Cunningham was the Scotch poet and the author of the Lives of the Painters, the "Giant" of the London Magazine. The Lambs seem to have been spending some days at Enfield.
Here should come a note from Lamb to Ollier asking for a copy of the April New Monthly Magazine for himself, and one for his Chinese friend (Manning) if his jests are in.]
393. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO
[P.M. May 9, 1826.]
Dear N. You will not expect us to-morrow, I am sure, while these damn'd North Easters continue. We must wait the Zephyrs' pleasures. By the bye, I was at Highgate on Wensday, the only one of the Party.
Yours truly C. LAMB.
Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.
Kind rememb'ces to Mrs. Novello &c.
394. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. May 16, 1826.]
Dear B.B.--I have had no spirits lately to begin a letter to you, though I am under obligations to you (how many!) for your neat little poem, 'Tis just what it professes to be, a simple tribute in chaste verse, serious and sincere. I do not know how Friends will relish it, but we out-lyers, Honorary Friends, like it very well. I have had my head and ears stuff'd up with the East winds. A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or The Spheres touchd by some raw Angel. It is not George 3 trying the 100th psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge writing to me a week or two since begins his note--"Summer has set in with its usual Severity." A cold Summer is all I know of disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real Winter, but these smiling hypocrites of Mays wither me to death. My head has been a ringing Chaos, like the day the winds were made, before they submitted to the discipline of a weather-cock, before the Quarters were made. In the street, with the blended noises of life about me, I hear, and my head is lightened, but in a room the hubbub comes back, and I am deaf as a Sinner. Did I tell you of a pleasant sketch Hood has done, which he calls Very Deaf Indeed? It is of a good naturd stupid looking old gentleman, whom a footpad has stopt, but for his extreme deafness cannot make him understand what he wants; the unconscious old gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull sooner than the report reach his sensorium. I chuse a very little bit of paper, for my ear hisses when I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book, for I miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated words raises (almost imperceptibly to you) in a silent reader. I seem too deaf to see what I read. But with a touch or two of returning Zephyr my head will melt. What Lyes you Poets tell about the May! It is the most ungenial part of the Year, cold crocuses, cold primroses, you take your blossoms in Ice --a painted Sun--
Unmeaning joy around appears, And Nature smiles as if she sneers.
It is ill with me when I begin to look which way the wind sits. Ten years ago I literally did not know the point from the broad end of the Vane, which it was the [?that] indicated the Quarter. I hope these ill winds have blowd over you, as they do thro' me. Kindest rememb'ces to you and yours. C.L.
["Your neat little poem." It is not possible to trace this poem. Probably, I think, the "Stanzas written for a blank leaf in Sewell's History of the Quakers," printed in A Widow's Tale, 1827.
"George 3." Byron's "Vision of Judgment" thus closes:--
King George slipp'd into Heaven for one; And when the tumult dwindled to a calm, I left him practising the hundredth psalm.
This is Hood's sketch, in his Whims and Oddities:--
"Unmeaning joy around appears..." I have not found this.]
395. CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
June 1st, 1826.
Dear Coleridge,--If I know myself, nobody more detests the display of personal vanity which is implied in the act of sitting for one's picture than myself. But the fact is, that the likeness which accompanies this letter was stolen from my person at one of my unguarded moments by some too partial artist, and my friends are pleased to think that he has not much flattered me. Whatever its merits may be, you, who have so great an interest in the original, will have a satisfaction in tracing the features of one that has so long esteemed you. There are times when in a friend's absence these graphic representations of him almost seem to bring back the man himself. The painter, whoever he was, seems to have taken me in one of those disengaged moments, if I may so term them, when the native character is so much more honestly displayed than can be possible in the restraints of an enforced sitting attitude. Perhaps it rather describes me as a thinking man than a man in the act of thought. Whatever its pretensions, I know it will be dear to you, towards whom I should wish my thoughts to flow in a sort of an undress rather than in the more studied graces of diction.
I am, dear Coleridge, yours sincerely, C. LAMB.
[The portrait to which Lamb refers will be found opposite page 706 in my large edition. It was etched by Brook Pulham of the India House. It was this picture which so enraged Procter when he saw it in a printshop (probably that referred to by Lamb in a later letter) that he reprimanded the dealer.
Here should come a charming letter to Louisa Holcroft dated June, offering her a room at Enfield "pretty cheap, only two smiles a week."]
396. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
Friday, someday in June, 1826. [P.M. June 30, 1826.]
Dear D.--My first impulse upon opening your letter was pleasure at seeing your old neat hand, nine parts gentlemanly, with a modest dash of the clerical: my second a Thought, natural enough this hot weather, Am I to answer all this? why 'tis as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put together--I have counted the words for curiosity. But then Paul has nothing like the fun which is ebullient all over yours. I don't remember a good thing (good like yours) from the 1st Romans to the last of the Hebrews. I remember but one Pun in all the Evangely, and that was made by his and our master: Thou art Peter (that is Doctor Rock) and upon this rock will I build &c.; which sanctifies Punning with me against all gainsayers. I never knew an enemy to puns, who was not an ill-natured man.
Your fair critic in the coach reminds me of a Scotchman who assured me that he did not see much in Shakspeare. I replied, I dare say not. He felt the equivoke, lookd awkward, and reddish, but soon returnd to the attack, by saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakspeare: I said that I had no doubt he was--to a Scotchman. We exchangd no more words that day.--Your account of the fierce faces in the Hanging, with the presumed interlocution of the Eagle and the Tyger, amused us greatly. You cannot be so very bad, while you can pick mirth off from rotten walls. But let me hear you have escaped out of your oven. May the Form of the Fourth Person who clapt invisible wet blankets about the shoulders of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, be with you in the fiery Trial. But get out of the frying pan. Your business, I take it, is bathing, not baking.
Let me hear that you have clamber'd up to Lover's Seat; it is as fine in that neighbourhood as Juan Fernandez, as lonely too, when the Fishing boats are not out; I have sat for hours, staring upon a shipless sea. The salt sea is never so grand as when it is left to itself. One cock-boat spoils it. A sea-mew or two improves it. And go to the little church, which is a very protestant Loretto, and seems dropt by some angel for the use of a hermit, who was at once parishioner and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night, bring it away in your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden. It must have been erected in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts; yet hath it all the appertenances of a church of the first magnitude, its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a nutshell. Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel. The minister that divides the word there, must give lumping penny-worths. It is built to the text of two or three assembled in my name. It reminds me of the grain of mustard seed. If the glebe land is proportionate, it may yield two potatoes. Tythes out of it could be no more split than a hair. Its First fruits must be its Last, for 'twould never produce a couple. It is truly the strait and narrow way, and few there be (of London visitants) that find it. The still small voice is surely to be found there, if any where. A sounding board is merely there for ceremony. It is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanctity than size, for 'twould feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would. Go and see, but not without your spectacles. By the way, there's a capital farm house two thirds of the way to the Lover's Seat, with incomparable plum cake, ginger beer, etc. Mary bids me warn you not to read the Anatomy of Melancholy in your present low way. You'll fancy yourself a pipkin, or a headless bear, as Burton speaks of. You'll be lost in a maze of remedies for a labyrinth of diseasements, a plethora of cures. Read Fletcher; above all the Spanish Curate, the Thief or Little Nightwalker, the Wit Without Money, and the Lover's Pilgrimage. Laugh and come home fat. Neither do we think Sir T. Browne quite the thing for you just at present. Fletcher is as light as Soda water. Browne and Burton are too strong potions for an Invalid. And don't thumb or dirt the books. Take care of the bindings. Lay a leaf of silver paper under 'em, as you read them. And don't smoke tobacco over 'em, the leaves will fall in and burn or dirty their namesakes. If you find any dusty atoms of the Indian Weed crumbled up in the Beaum't and Fletcher, they are mine. But then, you know, so is the Folio also. A pipe and a comedy of Fletcher's the last thing of a night is the best recipe for light dreams and to scatter away Nightmares. Probatum est. But do as you like about the former. Only cut the Baker's. You will come home else all crust; Rankings must chip you before you can appear in his counting house. And my dear Peter Fin Junr., do contrive to see the sea at least once before you return. You'll be ask'd about it in the Old Jewry. It will appear singular not to have seen it. And rub up your Muse, the family Muse, and send us a rhyme or so. Don't waste your wit upon that damn'd Dry Salter. I never knew but one Dry Salter, who could relish those mellow effusions, and he broke. You knew Tommy Hill, the wettest of dry salters. Dry Salters, what a word for this thirsty weather! I must drink after it. Here's to thee, my dear Dibdin, and to our having you again snug and well at Colebrooke. But our nearest hopes are to hear again from you shortly. An epistle only a quarter as agreeable as your last, would be a treat.
Yours most truly C. LAMB
Timothy B. Dibdin, Esq., No. 9, Blucher Row, Priory, Hastings.
[Dibdin, who was in delicate health, had gone to Hastings to recruit, with a parcel of Lamb's books for company. He seems to have been lodged above the oven at a baker's. This letter contains Lamb's crowning description of Hollingdon Rural church.
"A Caledonian Chapel." Referring to the crowds that listened to Irving.
"Peter Fin." A character in Jones' "Peter Finn's Trip to Brighton," 1822, as played by Liston.
"Tommy Hill." In the British Museum is preserved the following brief note addressed to Mr. Thomas Hill--probably the same. The date is between 1809 and 1817:--]
397. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HILL
D'r Sir It is necessary I see you sign, can you step up to me 4 Inner Temple Lane this evening. I shall wait at home.
Yours,
C. LAMB.
[I have no notion to what the note refers. It is quite likely, Mr. J.A. Rutter suggests, that Hill the drysalter, a famous busy-body, and a friend of Theodore Hook, stood for the portrait of Tom Pry in Lamb's "Lepus Papers" (see Vol. I.). S.C. Hall, in his Book of Memories, says of Hill that "his peculiar faculty was to find out what everybody did, from a minister of state to a stableboy."]
398. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. July 14, 1826.]
Because you boast poetic Grandsire, And rhyming kin, both Uncle and Sire, Dost think that none but their Descendings Can tickle folks with double endings? I had a Dad, that would for half a bet Have put down thine thro' half the Alphabet. Thou, who would be Dan Prior the second, For Dan Posterior must be reckon'd. In faith, dear Tim, your rhymes are slovenly, As a man may say, dough-baked and ovenly; Tedious and long as two Long Acres, And smell most vilely of the Baker's. (I have been cursing every limb o' thee, Because I could not hitch in Timothy. Jack, Will, Tom, Dick's, a serious evil, But Tim, plain Tim's--the very devil.) Thou most incorrigible scribbler, Right Watering place and cockney dribbler, What child, that barely understands _A, B, C_, would ever dream that Stanza Would tinkle into rhyme with "Plan, Sir"? Go, go, you are not worth an answer. I had a Sire, that at plain Crambo Had hit you o'er the pate a damn'd blow. How now? may I die game, and you die brass, But I have stol'n a quip from Hudibras. 'Twas thinking on that fine old Suttler, } That was in faith a second Butler; } Mad as queer rhymes as he, and subtler. } He would have put you to 't this weather For rattling syllables together; Rhym'd you to death, like "rats in Ireland," Except that he was born in High'r Land. His chimes, not crampt like thine, and rung ill, Had made Job split his sides on dunghill. There was no limit to his merryings At christ'nings, weddings, nay at buryings. No undertaker would live near him, Those grave practitioners did fear him; Mutes, at his merry mops, turned "vocal." And fellows, hired for silence, "spoke all." No body could be laid in cavity, Long as he lived, with proper gravity. His mirth-fraught eye had but to glitter, And every mourner round must titter. The Parson, prating of Mount Hermon, Stood still to laugh, in midst of sermon. The final Sexton (smile he must for him) Could hardly get to "dust to dust" for him. He lost three pall-bearers their livelyhood, Only with simp'ring at his lively mood: Provided that they fresh and neat came, All jests were fish that to his net came. He'd banter Apostolic castings, As you jeer fishermen at Hastings. When the fly bit, like me, he leapt-o'er-all, And stood not much on what was scriptural.
P.S.
I had forgot, at Small Bohemia (Enquire the way of your maid Euphemia) Are sojourning, of all good fellows The prince and princess,--the Novellos-- Pray seek 'em out, and give my love to 'em; You'll find you'll soon be hand and glove to 'em.
In prose, Little Bohemia, about a mile from Hastings in the Hollington road, when you can get so far. Dear Dib, I find relief in a word or two of prose. In truth my rhymes come slow. You have "routh of 'em." It gives us pleasure to find you keep your good spirits. Your Letter did us good. Pray heaven you are got out at last. Write quickly.
This letter will introduce you, if 'tis agreeable. Take a donkey. 'Tis Novello the Composer and his Wife, our very good friends.
C.L.
[Dibdin must have sent the verses which Lamb asked for in the previous letter, and this is Lamb's reply. Pride of ancestry seems to have been the note of Dibdin's effort. Probably there is a certain amount of truth in Lamb's account of the resolute merriment of his father. It is not inconsistent with his description of Lovel in the Elia essay "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple."
"I have stol'n a quip." The manner rather than the precise matter, I think.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to the Rev. Edward Coleridge, Coleridge's nephew, dated July 19, 1826. It thanks the recipient for his kindness to the child of a friend of Lamb's, Samuel Anthony Bloxam, Coleridge having assisted in getting Frederick Bloxam into Eton (where he was a master) on the foundation. Samuel Bloxam and Lamb were at Christ's Hospital together.]
399. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
[P.M. September 6, 1826.]
My dear Wordsworth, The Bearer of this is my young friend Moxon, a young lad with a Yorkshire head, and a heart that would do honour to a more Southern county: no offence to Westmoreland. He is one of Longman's best hands, and can give you the best account of The Trade as 'tis now going; or stopping. For my part, the failure of a Bookseller is not the most unpalatable accident of mortality:
sad but not saddest The desolation of a hostile city.
When Constable fell from heaven, and we all hoped Baldwin was next, I tuned a slight stave to the words in Macbeth (D'avenant's) to be sung by a Chorus of Authors,
What should we do when Booksellers break? We should rejoyce.
Moxon is but a tradesman in the bud yet, and retains his virgin Honesty; Esto perpetua, for he is a friendly serviceable fellow, and thinks nothing of lugging up a Cargo of the Newest Novels once or twice a week from the Row to Colebrooke to gratify my Sister's passion for the newest things. He is her Bodley. He is author besides of a poem which for a first attempt is promising. It is made up of common images, and yet contrives to read originally. You see the writer felt all he pours forth, and has not palmed upon you expressions which he did not believe at the time to be more his own than adoptive. Rogers has paid him some proper compliments, with sound advice intermixed, upon a slight introduction of him by me; for which I feel obliged. Moxon has petition'd me by letter (for he had not the confidence to ask it in London) to introduce him to you during his holydays; pray pat him on the head, ask him a civil question or two about his verses, and favor him with your genuine autograph. He shall not be further troublesome. I think I have not sent any one upon a gaping mission to you a good while. We are all well, and I have at last broke the bonds of business a second time, never to put 'em on again. I pitch Colburn and his magazine to the divil. I find I can live without the necessity of writing, tho' last year I fretted myself to a fever with the hauntings of being starved. Those vapours are flown. All the difference I find is that I have no pocket money: that is, I must not pry upon an old book stall, and cull its contents as heretofore, but shoulders of mutton, Whitbread's entire, and Booth's best, abound as formerly.
I don't know whom or how many to send our love to, your household is so frequently divided, but a general health to all that may be fixed or wandering; stars, wherever. We read with pleasure some success (I forget quite what) of one of you at Oxford. Mrs. Monkhouse (... was one of you) sent us a kind letter some [months back], and we had the pleasure to [see] her in tolerable spirits, looking well and kind as in by-gone days.
Do take pen, or put it into goodnatured hands Dorothean or Wordsworthian-female, or Hutchinsonian, to inform us of your present state, or possible proceedings. I am ashamed that this breaking of the long ice should be a letter of business. There is none circum praecordia nostra I swear by the honesty of pedantry, that wil I nil I pushes me upon scraps of Latin. We are yours cordially: CHAS. & MARY LAMB.
September. 1826.
[In this letter, the first to Wordsworth for many months, we have the first mention of Edward Moxon, who was to be so closely associated with Lamb in the years to come. Moxon, a young Yorkshireman, educated at the Green Coat School, was then nearly twenty-five, and was already author of The Prospect and other Poems, dedicated to Rogers, who was destined to be a valuable patron. Moxon subsequently became Wordsworth's publisher.
"Constable ... Baldwin." Archibald Constable & Co., Scott's publishers, failed in 1826. Baldwin was the first publisher of the London Magazine.
"I pitch Colburn and his magazine." Lamb wrote nothing in the New Monthly Magazine after September, 1826.
I append portions of what seems to be Lamb's first letter to Edward Moxon, obviously written before this date, but not out of place here. The letter seems to have accompanied the proof of an article on Lamb which he had corrected and was returning to Moxon.]
400. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
(Fragment)
Were my own feelings consulted I should print it verbatim, but I won't hoax you, else I love a Lye. My biography, parentage, place of birth, is a strange mistake, part founded on some nonsense I wrote about Elia, and was true of him, the real Elia, whose name I took.... C.L. was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple in 1775. Admitted into Christs Hospital, 1782, where he was contemporary with T.F.M. [Thomas Fanshawe Middleton], afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, and with S.T.C. with the last of these two eminent scholars he has enjoyed an intimacy through life. On quitting this foundation he became a junior clerk in the South Sea House under his Elder Brother who died accountant there some years since.... I am not the author of the Opium Eater, &c.
[I have not succeeded in finding the article in question.]
401. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. September 9, 1826.]
An answer is requested.
Saturday.
Dear D.--I have observed that a Letter is never more acceptable than when received upon a rainy day, especially a rainy Sunday; which moves me to send you somewhat, however short. This will find you sitting after Breakfast, which you will have prolonged as far as you can with consistency to the poor handmaid that has the reversion of the Tea Leaves; making two nibbles of your last morsel of stale roll (you cannot have hot new ones on the Sabbath), and reluctantly coming to an end, because when that is done, what can you do till dinner? You cannot go to the Beach, for the rain is drowning the sea, turning rank Thetis fresh, taking the brine out of Neptune's pickles, while mermaids sit upon rocks with umbrellas, their ivory combs sheathed for spoiling in the wet of waters foreign to them. You cannot go to the library, for it's shut. You are not religious enough to go to church. O it is worth while to cultivate piety to the gods, to have something to fill the heart up on a wet Sunday! You cannot cast accounts, for your ledger is being eaten up with moths in the Ancient Jewry. You cannot play at draughts, for there is none to play with you, and besides there is not a draught board in the house. You cannot go to market, for it closed last night. You cannot look in to the shops, their backs are shut upon you. You cannot read the Bible, for it is not good reading for the sick and the hypochondriacal. You cannot while away an hour with a friend, for you have no friend round that Wrekin. You cannot divert yourself with a stray acquaintance, for you have picked none up. You cannot bear the chiming of Bells, for they invite you to a banquet, where you are no visitant. You cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow's letter, for none come on Mondays. You cannot count those endless vials on the mantlepiece with any hope of making a variation in their numbers. You have counted your spiders: your Bastile is exhausted. You sit and deliberately curse your hard exile from all familiar sights and sounds. Old Ranking poking in his head unexpectedly would just now be as good to you as Grimaldi. Any thing to deliver you from this intolerable weight of Ennui. You are too ill to shake it off: not ill enough to submit to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The Tyranny of Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: 'tis to have Thirty Tyrants for one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You'll be worse after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon service. She insists upon having her chopped hay. And then when she goes out, who was something to you, something to speak to--what an interminable afternoon you'll have to go thro'. You can't break yourself from your locality: you cannot say "Tomorrow morning I set off for Banstead, by God": for you are book'd for Wednesday. Foreseeing this, I thought a cheerful letter would come in opportunely. If any of the little topics for mirth I have thought upon should serve you in this utter extinguishment of sunshine, to make you a little merry, I shall have had my ends. I love to make things comfortable. [Here is an erasure.] This, which is scratch'd out was the most material thing I had to say, but on maturer thoughts I defer it.
P.S.--We are just sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, to_day_), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish as we mean to be.
C. LAMB.
[Addressed to "T. Dibdin Esq're. No. 4 Meadow Cottages, Hastings, Sussex."
"You have counted your spiders." Referring, I suppose, to Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, the academician, and a famous prisoner in the Bastille, who trained a spider to eat flies from his hand.
"Grimaldi"--Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Ranking was one of Dibdin's employers.
"A pleasant party." Reynolds, the dramatist, would be Frederic Reynolds (1764-1841); Bloxam we have just met; and Wyat of the Wells was a comic singer and utility actor at Sadler's Wells.
Canon Ainger remarks that as a matter of fact Dibdin was a religious youth.]
402. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. September 26, 1826.]
Dear B.B.--I don't know why I have delay'd so long writing. 'Twas a fault. The under current of excuse to my mind was that I had heard of the Vessel in which Mitford's jars were to come; that it had been obliged to put into Batavia to refit (which accounts for its delay) but was daily expectated. Days are past, and it comes not, and the mermaids may be drinking their Tea out of his China for ought I know; but let's hope not. In the meantime I have paid £28, etc., for the freight and prime cost, (which I a little expected he would have settled in London.) But do not mention it. I was enabled to do it by a receipt of £30 from Colburn, with whom however I have done. I should else have run short. For I just make ends meet. We will wait the arrival of the Trinkets, and to ascertain their full expence, and then bring in the bill. (Don't mention it, for I daresay 'twas mere thoughtlessness.)
I am sorry you and yours have any plagues about dross matters. I have been sadly puzzled at the defalcation of more than one third of my income, out of which when entire I saved nothing. But cropping off wine, old books, &c. and in short all that can be call'd pocket money, I hope to be able to go on at the Cottage. Remember, I beg you not to say anything to Mitford, for if he be honest it will vex him: if not, which I as little expect as that you should [not] be, I have a hank still upon the JARS.
Colburn had something of mine in last month, which he has had in hand these 7 months, and had lost, or cou'dnt find room for: I was used to different treatment in the London, and have forsworn Periodicals.
I am going thro' a course of reading at the Museum: the Garrick plays, out of part of which I formed my Specimens: I have Two Thousand to go thro'; and in a few weeks have despatch'd the tythe of 'em. It is a sort of Office to me; hours, 10 to 4, the same. It does me good. Man must have regular occupation, that has been used to it. So A.K. keeps a School! She teaches nothing wrong, I'll answer for't. I have a Dutch print of a Schoolmistress; little old-fashioned Fleminglings, with only one face among them. She a Princess of Schoolmistress, wielding a rod for form more than use; the scene an old monastic chapel, with a Madonna over her head, looking just as serious, as thoughtful, as pure, as gentle, as herself. Tis a type of thy friend.
Will you pardon my neglect? Mind, again I say, don't shew this to M.; let me wait a little longer to know the event of his Luxuries. (I am sure he is a good fellow, tho' I made a serious Yorkshire Lad, who met him, stare when I said he was a Clergyman. He is a pleasant Layman spoiled.) Heaven send him his jars uncrack'd, and me my---- Yours with kindest wishes to your daughter and friend, in which Mary joins
C.L.
["I saved nothing." Lamb, however, according to Procter, left £2000 at his death eight years later. He must have saved £200 a year from his pension of £441, living at the rate of £241 per annum, plus small earnings, for the rest of his life, and investing the £200 at 5 per cent, compound interest.
"Colburn had something of mine." The Popular Fallacy "That a Deformed Person is a Lord," not included by Lamb with the others when he reprinted them. Printed in Vol. I. of this edition.
"Reading at the Museum." Lamb had begun to visit the Museum every day to collect extracts from the Garrick plays for Hone's Table Book, 1827.
"A.K."--Anne Knight again.
The pleasant Yorkshire lad whom Mitford's secular air surprised was probably Moxon.
Here might come a business letter, from Lamb to Barton, preserved in the British Museum, relating to Mitford's jars.]
403. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[No date. ? Sept., 1826.]
I have had much trouble to find Field to-day. No matter. He was packing up for out of town. He has writ a handsomest letter, which you will transmit to Murry with your proof-sheets. Seal it.--
Yours C. L----.
Mrs. Hood will drink tea with us on Thursday at 1/2 past 5 at Latest.
N.B. I have lost my Museum reading today: a day with Titus: owing to your dam'd bisness.--I am the last to reproach anybody. I scorn it.
If you shall have the whole book ready soon, it will be best for Murry to see.
[I am not clear as to what proof-sheets of Moxon's Lamb refers. His second book, Christmas, 1829, was issued through Hurst, Chance & Co.
Barton Field and John Murray were friends.
"A day with Titus." Can this (a friend suggests) have any connection with the phrase Amici! diem perdidi? There is no Titus play among the Garrick Extracts.]
404. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[No postmark or date. Soon after preceding letter to Barton. 1826.]
Dear B.B.--the Busy Bee, as Hood after Dr. Watts apostrophises thee, and well dost thou deserve it for thy labors in the Muses' gardens, wandering over parterres of Think-on-me's and Forget-me-nots, to a total impossibility of forgetting thee,--thy letter was acceptable, thy scruples may be dismissed, thou art Rectus in Curiâ, not a word more to be said, Verbum Sapienti and so forth, the matter is decided with a white stone, Classically, mark me, and the apparitions vanishd which haunted me, only the Cramp, Caliban's distemper, clawing me in the calvish part of my nature, makes me ever and anon roar Bullishly, squeak cowardishly, and limp cripple-ishly. Do I write quakerly and simply, 'tis my most Master Mathew-like intention to do it. See Ben Jonson.--I think you told me your acquaint'ce with the Drama was confin'd to Shakspeare and Miss Bailly: some read only Milton and Croly. The gap is as from an ananas to a Turnip. I have fighting in my head the plots characters situations and sentiments of 400 old Plays (bran new to me) which I have been digesting at the Museum, and my appetite sharpens to twice as many more, which I mean to course over this winter. I can scarce avoid Dialogue fashion in this letter. I soliloquise my meditations, and habitually speak dramatic blank verse without meaning it. Do you see Mitford? he will tell you something of my labors. Tell him I am sorry to have mist seeing him, to have talk'd over those OLD TREASURES. I am still more sorry for his missing Pots. But I shall be sure of the earliest intelligence of the Lost Tribes. His Sacred Specimens are a thankful addition to my shelves. Marry, I could wish he had been more careful of corrigenda. I have discover'd certain which have slipt his Errata. I put 'em in the next page, as perhaps thou canst transmit them to him. For what purpose, but to grieve him (which yet I should be sorry to do), but then it shews my learning, and the excuse is complimentary, as it implies their correction in a future Edition. His own things in the book are magnificent, and as an old Christ's Hospitaller I was particularly refreshd with his eulogy on our Edward. Many of the choice excerpta were new to me. Old Christmas is a coming, to the confusion of Puritans, Muggletonians, Anabaptists, Quakers, and that Unwassailing Crew. He cometh not with his wonted gait, he is shrunk 9 inches in the girth, but is yet a Lusty fellow. Hood's book is mighty clever, and went off 600 copies the 1st day. Sion's Songs do not disperse so quickly. The next leaf is for Rev'd J.M. In this ADIEU thine briefly in a tall friendship C. LAMB.
[Barton's letter, to which this is an answer, not being preserved, we do not know what his scruples were. B.B. was a great contributor to annuals.
"With a white stone." In trials at law a white stone was cast as a vote for acquittal, a black stone for condemnation (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15, 41).
"Master Mathew"--in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in His Humour."
"Croly"--the Rev. George Croly (1780-1860), of the Literary Gazette, author of The Angel of the World and other pretentious poems.
"Mitford's Sacred Specimens"--Sacred Specimens Selected from the Early English Poets, 1827. The last poem, by Mitford himself, was "Lines Written under the Portrait of Edward VI."
"Hood's book"--Whims and Oddities, second series, 1827.
Here should come a note to Allsop stating that Lamb is "near killed with Christmassing."]
405. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
Colebrooke Row, Islington,
Saturday, 20th Jan., 1827.
Dear Robinson,--I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone to visit a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor Norris has been lying dying for now almost a week, such is the penalty we pay for having enjoyed a strong constitution! Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I saw about him I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it, were assembled his wife and two daughters, and poor deaf Richard, his son, looking doubly stupified. There they were, and seemed to have been sitting all the week. I could only reach out a hand to Mrs. Norris. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time I hope it is all over with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend and my father's friend all the life I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Those are friendships which outlive a second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple. You are but of yesterday. In him seem to have died the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart. Letters he knew nothing of, nor did his reading extend beyond the pages of the "Gentleman's Magazine." Yet there was a pride of literature about him from being amongst books (he was librarian), and from some scraps of doubtful Latin which he had picked up in his office of entering students, that gave him very diverting airs of pedantry. Can I forget the erudite look with which, when he had been in vain trying to make out a black-letter text of Chaucer in the Temple Library, he laid it down and told me that--"in those old books, Charley, there is sometimes a deal of very indifferent spelling;" and seemed to console himself in the reflection! His jokes, for he had his jokes, are now ended, but they were old trusty perennials, staples that pleased after decies repetita, and were always as good as new. One song he had, which was reserved for the night of Christmas-day, which we always spent in the Temple. It was an old thing, and spoke of the flat bottoms of our foes and the possibility of their coming over in darkness, and alluded to threats of an invasion many years blown over; and when he came to the part
"We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat, In spite of the devil and Brussels Gazette!"
his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event. And what is the "Brussels Gazette" now? I cry while I enumerate these trifles. "How shall we tell them in a stranger's ear?" His poor good girls will now have to receive their afflicted mother in an inaccessible hovel in an obscure village in Herts, where they have been long struggling to make a school without effect; and poor deaf Richard--and the more helpless for being so--is thrown on the wide world.
My first motive in writing, and, indeed, in calling on you, was to ask if you were enough acquainted with any of the Benchers, to lay a plain statement before them of the circumstances of the family. I almost fear not, for you are of another hall. But if you can oblige me and my poor friend, who is now insensible to any favours, pray exert yourself. You cannot say too much good of poor Norris and his poor wife.
Yours ever, CHARLES LAMB.
[This letter, describing the death of Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer and Librarian of the Inner Temple, was printed with only very slight alterations in Hone's Table Book, 1827, and again in the Last Essays of Elia, 1833, under the title "A Death-Bed." It was, however, taken out of the second edition, and "Confessions of a Drunkard" substituted, in deference to the wishes of Norris's family. Mrs. Norris, as I have said, was a native of Widford, where she had known Mrs. Field, Lamb's grandmother. With her son Richard, who was deaf and peculiar, Mrs. Norris moved to Widford again, where the daughters, Miss Betsy and Miss Jane, had opened a school--Goddard House; which they retained until a legacy restored the family prosperity. Soon after that they both married, each a farmer named Tween. They survived until quite recently.
Mrs. Coe, an old scholar at the Misses Morris's school in the twenties, gave me, in 1902, some reminiscences of those days, from which I quote a passage or so:--
When he joined the Norrises' dinner-table he kept every one laughing. Mr. Richard sat at one end, and some of the school children would be there too. One day Mr. Lamb gave every one a fancy name all round the table, and made a verse on each. "You are so-and-so," he said, "and you are so-and-so," adding the rhyme. "What's he saying? What are you laughing at?" Mr. Richard asked testily, for he was short-tempered. Miss Betsy explained the joke to him, and Mr. Lamb, coming to his turn, said--only he said it in verse--"Now, Dick, it's your turn. I shall call you Gruborum; because all you think of is your food and your stomach." Mr. Richard pushed back his chair in a rage and stamped out of the room. "Now I've done it," said Mr. Lamb: "I must go and make friends with my old chum. Give me a large plate of pudding to take to him." When he came back he said, "It's all right. I thought the pudding would do it." Mr. Lamb and Mr. Richard never got on very well, and Mr. Richard didn't like his teasing ways at all; but Mr. Lamb often went for long walks with him, because no one else would. He did many kind things like that.
There used to be a half-holiday when Mr. Lamb came, partly because he would force his way into the schoolroom and make seriousness impossible. His head would suddenly appear at the door in the midst of lessons, with "Well, Betsy! How do, Jane?" "O, Mr. Lamb!" they would say, and that was the end of work for that day. He was really rather naughty with the children. One of his tricks was to teach them a new kind of catechism (Mrs. Coe does not remember it, but we may rest assured, I fear, that it was secular), and he made a great fuss with Lizzie Hunt for her skill in saying the Lord's Prayer backwards, which he had taught her.
"We'll still make 'em run..." Garrick's "Hearts of Oak," sung in "Harlequin's Invasion."
"How shall we tell them in a stranger's ear?" A quotation from Lamb himself, in the lines "Written soon after the Preceding Poem," in 1798 (see Vol. IV.).]
406. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[No date. Jan. 20, 1827.]
Dear R.N. is dead. I have writ as nearly as I could to look like a letter meant for your eye only. Will it do?
Could you distantly hint (do as your own judgment suggests) that if his son could be got in as Clerk to the new Subtreasurer, it would be all his father wish'd? But I leave that to you. I don't want to put you upon anything disagreeable.
Yours thankfully
C.L.
[The reference at the beginning is to the preceding letter, which was probably enclosed with this note.
Here should come a note to Allsop dated Jan. 25, 1827, complaining of the cold.]
407. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[Dated by H.C.R. Jan. 29, 1827.]
Dear Robinson, If you have not seen Mr. Gurney, leave him quite alone for the present, I have seen Mr. Jekyll, who is as friendly as heart can desire, he entirely approves of my formula of petition, and gave your very reasons for the propriety of the "little village of Hertf'shire." Now, Mr. G. might not approve of it, and then we should clash. Also, Mr. J. wishes it to be presented next week, and Mr. G. might fix earlier, which would be aukward. Mr. J. was so civil to me, that I think it would be better NOT for you to show him that letter you intended. Nothing can increase his zeal in the cause of poor Mr. Norris. Mr. Gardiner will see you with this, and learn from you all about it, & consult, if you have seen Mr. G. & he has fixed a time, how to put it off. Mr. J. is most friendly to the boy: I think you had better not teaze the Treasurer any more about him, as it may make him less friendly to the Petition
Yours Ever
C.L.
[Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth on February 13, 1827, Robinson says: "The Lambs are well. I have been so busy that I have not lately seen them. Charles has been occupied about the affair of the widow of his old friend Norris whose death he has felt. But the health of both is good."
Gurney would probably be John Gurney (afterwards Baron Gurney), the counsel and judge. Jekyll was Joseph Jekyll, the wit, mentioned by Lamb in his essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." He was a friend of George Dyer.]
408. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[Dated by H.C. R. Jan., 1827.]
Dear R. do not say any thing to Mr. G. about the day or Petition, for Mr. Jekyll wishes it to be next week, and thoroughly approves of my formula, and Mr. G. might not, and then they will clash. Only speak to him of Gardner's wish to have the Lad. Mr. Jekyll was excessive friendly. C.L.
[The matter referred to is still the Norrises' welfare. Mr. Hazlitt says that an annuity of £80 was settled by the Inn on Mrs. Norris.
Here perhaps should come a letter from Lamb to Allsop, printed by Mr. Fitzgerald, urging Allsop to go to Highgate to see Coleridge and tell him of the unhappy state of his, Allsop's, affairs. In Crabb Robinson's Diary for February 1, 1827, I read: "I went to Lamb. Found him in trouble about his friend Allsop, who is a ruined man. Allsop is a very good creature who has been a generous friend to Coleridge." Writing of his troubles in Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S.T. Coleridge, Allsop says: "Charles Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb, 'union is partition,' were never wanting in the hour of need."]
409. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON
[March, 1827.]
Dear Raffaele Haydon,--Did the maid tell you I came to see your picture, not on Sunday but the day before? I think the face and bearing of the Bucephalus-tamer very noble, his flesh too effeminate or painty. The skin of the female's back kneeling is much more carnous. I had small time to pick out praise or blame, for two lord-like Bucks came in, upon whose strictures my presence seemed to impose restraint: I plebeian'd off therefore.
I think I have hit on a subject for you, but can't swear it was never executed,--I never heard of its being,--"Chaucer beating a Franciscan Friar in Fleet Street." Think of the old dresses, houses, &c. "It seemeth that both these learned men (Gower and Chaucer) were of the Inner Temple; for not many years since Master Buckley did see a record in the same house where Geoffry Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan Friar in Fleet Street." Chaucer's Life by T. Speght, prefixed to the black letter folio of Chaucer, 1598.
Yours in haste (salt fish waiting), C. LAMB.
[Haydon's picture was his "Alexander and Bucephalus." The two Bucks, he tells us in his Diary, were the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Agar Ellis. Haydon did not take up the Chaucer subject.]
410. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE [No date. April, 1827.]
Dear H. Never come to our house and not come in. I was quite vex'd.
Yours truly. C.L.
There is in Blackwood this month an article MOST AFFECTING indeed called Le Revenant, and would do more towards abolishing Capital Punishments than 400000 Romillies or Montagues. I beg you read it and see if you can extract any of it. The Trial scene in particular.
[Written on the fourteenth instalment of the Garrick Play extracts. The article was in Blackwood for April, 1827. Hone took Lamb's advice, and the extract from it will be found in the Table Book, Vol. I., col. 455.
Lamb was peculiarly interested in the subject of survival after hanging. He wrote an early Reflector essay, "On the Inconveniences of Being Hanged," on the subject, and it is the pivot of his farce "The Pawnbroker's Daughter."
"Romillies or Montagues." Two prominent advocates for the abolition of capital punishment were Sir Samuel Romilly (who died in 1818) and Basil Montagu.]
411. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD
[No date. May, 1827.]
Dearest Hood,--Your news has spoil'd us a merry meeting. Miss Kelly and we were coming, but your letter elicited a flood of tears from Mary, and I saw she was not fit for a party. God bless you and the mother (or should be mother) of your sweet girl that should have been. I have won sexpence of Moxon by the sex of the dear gone one.
Yours most truly and hers,
[C.L.]
[This note refers to one of the Hoods' children, which was still-born. It was upon this occasion that Lamb wrote the beautiful lines "On an Infant Dying as soon as Born" (see Vol. IV.).]
412. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[No date. (1827.)]
My dear B.B.--A gentleman I never saw before brought me your welcome present--imagine a scraping, fiddling, fidgetting, petit-maitre of a dancing school advancing into my plain parlour with a coupee and a sideling bow, and presenting the book as if he had been handing a glass of lemonade to a young miss--imagine this, and contrast it with the serious nature of the book presented! Then task your imagination, reversing this picture, to conceive of quite an opposite messenger, a lean, straitlocked, wheyfaced methodist, for such was he in reality who brought it, the Genius (it seems) of the Wesleyan Magazine. Certes, friend B., thy Widow's tale is too horrible, spite of the lenitives of Religion, to embody in verse: I hold prose to be the appropriate expositor of such atrocities! No offence, but it is a cordial that makes the heart sick. Still thy skill in compounding it I not deny. I turn to what gave me less mingled pleasure. I find markd with pencil these pages in thy pretty book, and fear I have been penurious.
page 52, 53 capital. page 59 6th stanza exquisite simile. page 61 11th stanza equally good. page 108 3d stanza, I long to see van Balen. page 111 a downright good sonnet. Dixi. page 153 Lines at the bottom.
So you see, I read, hear, and mark, if I don't learn--In short this little volume is no discredit to any of your former, and betrays none of the Senility you fear about. Apropos of Van Balen, an artist who painted me lately had painted a Blackamoor praying, and not filling his canvas, stuff'd in his little girl aside of Blacky, gaping at him unmeaningly; and then didn't know what to call it. Now for a picture to be promoted to the Exhibition (Suffolk Street) as HISTORICAL, a subject is requisite. What does me? I but christen it the "Young Catechist" and furbishd it with Dialogue following, which dubb'd it an Historical Painting. Nothing to a friend at need.
While this tawny Ethiop prayeth, Painter, who is She that stayeth By, with skin of whitest lustre; Sunny locks, a shining cluster; Saintlike seeming to direct him To the Power that must protect him? Is she of the heav'nborn Three, Meek Hope, strong Faith, sweet Charity? Or some Cherub?
They you mention Far transcend my weak invention. 'Tis a simple Christian child, Missionary young and mild, From her store of script'ral knowledge (Bible-taught without a college) Which by reading she could gather, Teaches him to say OUR FATHER To the common Parent, who Colour not respects nor hue. White and Black in him have part, Who looks not to the skin, but heart.--
When I'd done it, the Artist (who had clapt in Miss merely as a fill-space) swore I exprest his full meaning, and the damosel bridled up into a Missionary's vanity. I like verses to explain Pictures: seldom Pictures to illustrate Poems. Your wood cut is a rueful Lignum Mortis. By the by, is the widow likely to marry again?
I am giving the fruit of my Old Play reading at the Museum to Hone, who sets forth a Portion weekly in the Table Book. Do you see it? How is Mitford?--
I'll just hint that the Pitcher, the Chord and the Bowl are a little too often repeated (passim) in your Book, and that on page 17 last line but 4 him is put for he, but the poor widow I take it had small leisure for grammatical niceties. Don't you see there's He, myself, and him; why not both him? likewise imperviously is cruelly spelt imperiously. These are trifles, and I honestly like your [book,] and you for giving it, tho' I really am ashamed of so many presents.
I can think of no news, therefore I will end with mine and Mary's kindest remembrances to you and yours. C.L.
[It has been customary to date this letter December, 1827, but I think that must be too late. Lamb would never have waited till then to tell Barton that he was contributing the Garrick Plays to Hone's Table Book, especially as the last instalment was printed in that month.
Barton's new volume was A Widow's Tale and Other Poems, 1827. The title poem tells how a missionary and his wife were wrecked, and how after three nights and days of horror she was saved. The woodcut on the title-page of Barton's book represented the widow supporting her dead or dying husband in the midst of the storm.
This is the "exquisite simile" on page 59, from "A Grandsire's Tale":--
Though some might deem her pensive, if not sad, Yet those who knew her better, best could tell How calmly happy, and how meekly glad Her quiet heart in its own depths did dwell: Like to the waters of some crystal well, In which the stars of heaven at noon are seen. Fancy might deem on her young spirit fell Glimpses of light more glorious and serene Than that of life's brief day, so heavenly was her mien.
This was the "downright good sonnet":--
TO A GRANDMOTHER
"Old age is dark and unlovely."--Ossian.
O say not so! A bright old age is thine; Calm as the gentle light of summer eves, Ere twilight dim her dusky mantle weaves; Because to thee is given, in strength's decline, A heart that does not thanklessly repine At aught of which the hand of God bereaves, Yet all He sends with gratitude receives;-- May such a quiet, thankful close be mine. And hence thy fire-side chair appears to me A peaceful throne--which thou wert form'd to fill; Thy children--ministers, who do thy will; And those grand-children, sporting round thy knee, Thy little subjects, looking up to thee, As one who claims their fond allegiance still.
And these are the lines at the foot of page 153 in a poem addressed to a child seven years old:--
There is a holy, blest companionship In the sweet intercourse thus held with those Whose tear and smile are guileless; from whose lip The simple dictate of the heart yet flows;-- Though even in the yet unfolded rose The worm may lurk, and sin blight blooming youth, The light born with us long so brightly glows, That childhood's first deceits seem almost truth, To life's cold after lie, selfish, and void of ruth.
Van Balen was the painter of the picture of the "Madonna and Child" which Mrs. FitzGerald (Edward FitzGerald's mother) had given to Barton and for which he expressed his thanks in a poem.
The artist who painted Lamb recently was Henry Meyer (1782?-1847), the portrait being that which serves as frontispiece to this volume. I give in my large edition a reproduction of "The Young Catechist," which Meyer also engraved, with Lamb's verses attached. In 1910 I saw the original in a picture shop in the Charing Cross Road, now removed.]
413. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE
[No date. End of May, 1827.]
Dear H. in the forthcoming "New Monthly" are to be verses of mine on a Picture about Angels. Translate em to the Table-book. I am off for Enfield.
Yours. C.L.
[Written on the back of the XXI. Garrick Extracts. The poem "Angel Help" was printed in the New Monthly Magazine for June and copied by Hone in the Table-Book, No. 24, 1827.]
414. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE
[No date. June, 1827.]
Dear Hone, I should like this in your next book. We are at Enfield, where (when we have solituded awhile) we shall be glad to see you. Yours,
C. LAMB.
[This was written on the back of the MS. of "Going or Gone" (see Vol. IV.), a poem of reminiscences of Lamb's early Widford days, printed in Hone's Table-Book, June, 1827, signed Elia.]
415. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
Enfield, and for some weeks to come, "June 11, 1827."
Dear B.B.--One word more of the picture verses, and that for good and all; pray, with a neat pen alter one line
His learning seems to lay small stress on
to
His learning lays no mighty stress on
to avoid the unseemly recurrence (ungrammatical also) of "seems" in the next line, besides the nonsence of "but" there, as it now stands. And I request you, as a personal favor to me, to erase the last line of all, which I should never have written from myself. The fact is, it was a silly joke of Hood's, who gave me the frame, (you judg'd rightly it was not its own) with the remark that you would like it, because it was b--d b--d,--and I lugg'd it in: but I shall be quite hurt if it stands, because tho' you and yours have too good sense to object to it, I would not have a sentence of mine seen, that to any foolish ear might sound unrespectful to thee. Let it end at appalling; the joke is coarse and useless, and hurts the tone of the rest. Take your best "ivory-handled" and scrape it forth.
Your specimen of what you might have written is hardly fair. Had it been a present to me, I should have taken a more sentimental tone; but of a trifle from me it was my cue to speak in an underish tone of commendation. Prudent givers (what a word for such a nothing) disparage their gifts; 'tis an art we have. So you see you wouldn't have been so wrong, taking a higher tone. But enough of nothing.
By the bye, I suspected M. of being the disparager of the frame; hence a certain line.
For the frame,'tis as the room is, where it hangs. It hung up fronting my old cobwebby folios and batter'd furniture (the fruit piece has resum'd its place) and was much better than a spick and span one. But if your room be very neat and your other pictures bright with gilt, it should be so too. I can't judge, not having seen: but my dingy study it suited.
Martin's Belshazzar (the picture) I have seen. Its architectural effect is stupendous; but the human figures, the squalling contorted little antics that are playing at being frightend, like children at a sham ghost who half know it to be a mask, are detestable. Then the letters are nothing more than a transparency lighted up, such as a Lord might order to be lit up, on a sudden at a Xmas Gambol, to scare the ladies. The type is as plain as Baskervil's--they should have been dim, full of mystery, letters to the mind rather than the eye.--Rembrandt has painted only Belshazzar and a courtier or two (taking a part of the banquet for the whole) not fribbled out a mob of fine folks. Then every thing is so distinct, to the very necklaces, and that foolish little prophet. What one point is there of interest? The ideal of such a subject is, that you the spectator should see nothing but what at the time you would have seen, the hand--and the King--not to be at leisure to make taylor-remarks on the dresses, or Doctor Kitchener-like to examine the good things at table.
Just such a confusd piece is his Joshua, fritterd into 1000 fragments, little armies here, little armies there--you should see only the Sun and Joshua; if I remember, he has not left out that luminary entirely, but for Joshua, I was ten minutes a finding him out.
Still he is showy in all that is not the human figure or the preternatural interest: but the first are below a drawing school girl's attainment, and the last is a phantasmagoric trick, "Now you shall see what you shall see, dare is Balshazar and dare is Daniel." You have my thoughts of M. and so adieu C. LAMB.
[Lamb had sent Barton the picture that is reproduced in Vol. V. of my large edition. Later Lamb had sent the following lines:--
When last you left your Woodbridge pretty, To stare at sights, and see the City, If I your meaning understood, You wish'd a Picture, cheap, but good; The colouring? decent; clear, not muddy; To suit a Poet's quiet study, Where Books and Prints for delectation Hang, rather than vain ostentation. The subject? what I pleased, if comely; But something scriptural and homely: A sober Piece, not gay or wanton, For winter fire-sides to descant on; The theme so scrupulously handled, A Quaker might look on unscandal'd; Such as might satisfy Ann Knight, And classic Mitford just not fright. Just such a one I've found, and send it; If liked, I give--if not, but lend it. The moral? nothing can be sounder. The fable? 'tis its own expounder-- A Mother teaching to her Chit Some good book, and explaining it. He, silly urchin, tired of lesson, His learning seems to lay small stress on, But seems to hear not what he hears; Thrusting his fingers in his ears, Like Obstinate, that perverse funny one, In honest parable of Bunyan. His working Sister, more sedate, Listens; but in a kind of state, The painter meant for steadiness; But has a tinge of sullenness; And, at first sight, she seems to brook As ill her needle, as he his book. This is the Picture. For the Frame-- 'Tis not ill-suited to the same; Oak-carved, not gilt, for fear of falling; Old-fashion'd; plain, yet not appalling; And broad brimm'd, as the Owner's Calling.
It was not Obstinate, by the way, who thrust his fingers in his ears, but Christian.
"Hence a certain line"--line 16, I suppose.
Martin's "Belshazzar." "Belshazzar's Feast," by John Martin (1789-1854), had been exhibited for some years and had created an immense impression. Lamb subjected Martin's work to a minute analysis a few years later (see the Elia essay on the "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art," Vol. II.). Barton did not give up Martin in consequence of this letter. The frontispiece to his New Year's Eve, 1828, is by that painter, and the volume contains eulogistic poems upon him, one beginning--
Boldest painter of our day.
"Baskervil's"--John Baskerville (1706-1775), the printer, famous for his folio edition of the Bible, 1763.
Doctor William Kitchiner--the author of Apicius Redivious; or, The Cook's Oracle, 1817.]
416. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[P.M. June 26, 1827.]
Dear H.C. We are at Mrs. Leishman's, Chase, Enfield. Why not come down by the Green Lanes on Sunday? Picquet all day. Pass the Church, pass the "Rising Sun," turn sharp round the corner, and we are the 6th or 7th house on the Chase: tall Elms darken the door. If you set eyes on M. Burney, bring him.
Yours truly C. LAMB.
[Mrs. Leishman's house, or its successor, is the seventh from the Rising Sun. It is now on Gentleman's Row, not on Chase Side proper. The house next it--still, as in Lamb's day, a girl's school--is called Elm House, but most of the elms which darkened both doors have vanished. It has been surmised that when later in the year Lamb took an Enfield house in his own name, he took Mrs. Leishman's; but, as we shall see, his own house was some little distance from hers.]
417. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE
[No date. Early July, 1827.]
Dear H., This is Hood's, done from the life, of Mary getting over a style here. Mary, out of a pleasant revenge, wants you to get it engrav'd in Table Book to surprise H., who I know will be amus'd with you so doing.
Append some observations about the awkwardness of country styles about Edmonton, and the difficulty of elderly Ladies getting over 'em.----
That is to say, if you think the sketch good enough.
I take on myself the warranty.
Can you slip down here some day and go a Green-dragoning? C.L.
Enfield (Mrs. Leishman's, Chase).
If you do, send Hood the number, No. 2 Robert St., Adelphi, and keep the sketch for me.
["This" was the drawing by Hood. I take it from the Table-Book, where it represents Mrs. Gilpin resting on a stile:--
Lamb subsequently appended the observations himself. The text of his little article, changing Mary Lamb into Mrs. Gilpin, was in the late Mr. Locker-Lampson's collection. The postmark is July 17. 1827.]
418. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
Enfield. P.M. July 17, 182[7].
Dear M. Thanks for your attentions of every kind. Emma will not fail Mrs. Hood's kind invitation, but her Aunt is so queer a one, that we cannot let her go with a single gentleman singly to Vauxhall; she would withdraw her from us altogether in a fright; but if any of the Hood's family accompany you, then there can be small objection.
I have been writing letters till too dark to see the marks. I can just say we shall be happy to see you any Sunday after the next: say, the Sunday after, and perhaps the Hoods will come too and have a merry other day, before they go hence. But next Sunday we expect as many as we can well entertain.
With ours and Emma's acknowlgm's yours C.L.
[The earliest of a long series of letters to Edward Moxon, preserved at Rowfant by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, but now in America. Emma Isola's aunt was Miss Humphreys.]
419. CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE
[Dated at end: July 19, 1827.]
Dear P.--I am so poorly! I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners. And we had wine. I can't describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash could, for it was not unlike what he makes.
The letter I sent you was one directed to the care of E. White, India House, for Mrs. Hazlitt. Which Mrs. Hazlitt I don't yet know, but A. has taken it to France on speculation. Really it is embarrassing. There is Mrs. present H., Mrs. late H., and Mrs. John H., and to which of the three Mrs. Wiggins's it appertains, I don't know. I wanted to open it, but it's transportation.
I am sorry you are plagued about your book. I would strongly recommend you to take for one story Massinger's "Old Law." It is exquisite. I can think of no other.
Dash is frightful this morning. He whines and stands up on his hind legs. He misses Beckey, who is gone to town. I took him to Barnet the other day, and he couldn't eat his victuals after it. Pray God his intellectuals be not slipping.
Mary is gone out for some soles. I suppose 'tis no use to ask you to come and partake of 'em; else there's a steam-vessel.
I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will be refused, or worse. I never had luck with anything my name was put to.
Oh, I am so poorly! I waked it at my cousin's the bookbinder's, who is now with God; or, if he is not, it's no fault of mine.
We hope the Frank wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her.
Did you ever taste frogs? Get them, if you can. They are like little Lilliput rabbits, only a thought nicer.
Christ, how sick I am!--not of the world, but of the widow's shrub. She's sworn under £6000, but I think she perjured herself. She howls in E la, and I comfort her in B flat. You understand music?...
"No shrimps!" (That's in answer to Mary's question about how the soles are to be done.)
I am uncertain where this wandering letter may reach you. What you mean by Poste Restante, God knows. Do you mean I must pay the postage? So I do to Dover.
We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howling--part howling and part giving directions to the proctor--when crash! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the widow tittered--and then I knew that she was not inconsolable. Mary was more frightened than hurt.
She'd make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow).
"If he bring but a relict away, He is happy, nor heard to complain."
SHENSTONE.
Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence--like his poetry--redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets.... Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should not like him to sit on my letter.
Do you observe my direction? Is it Gallic?--Classical?
Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for "grenouilles" (green-eels). They don't understand "frogs," though it's a common phrase with us.
If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne) enquire if old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man now.
If there is anything new in politics or literature in France, keep it till I see you again, for I'm in no hurry. Chatty-Briant is well I hope.
I think I have no more news; only give both our loves ("all three," says Dash) to Mrs. Patmore, and bid her get quite well, as I am at present, bating qualms, and the grief incident to losing a valuable relation.
C.L.
Londres, July 19, 1827.
[This is from Patmore's My Friends and Acquaintances, 1854; but I have no confidence in Patmore's transcription. After "picking pockets" should come, for example, according to other editors, the sentence, "Moxon has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid." This is the first we hear of the circumstance and quite probably Lamb was then exaggerating. As it happened, however, Moxon and Miss Isola, as we shall see, were married in 1833.
We do not know the name of the widow; but her husband was Lamb's cousin, the bookbinder.
The doubt about the Hazlitts refers chiefly to William Hazlitt's divorce from his first wife in 1822, and his remarriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Bridgewater.
"Your book." Patmore, in My Friends and Acquaintances, writes:--
This refers to a series of tales that I was writing, (since published under the title of Chatsworth, or the Romance of a Week.) for the subject of one of which he had recommended me to take "The Old Law." As Lamb's critical faculties (as displayed in the celebrated "specimens" which created an era in the dramatic taste of England) were not surpassed by those of any writer of his day, the reader may like to see a few "specimens" of some notes which Lamb took the pains to make on two of the tales that were shown to him. I give these the rather that there is occasionally blended with their critical nicety of tact, a drollery that is very characteristic of the writer. I shall leave these notes and verbal criticisms to speak for themselves, after merely explaining that they are written on separate bits of paper, each note having a numerical reference to that page of the MS. in which occurs the passage commented on.
"Besides the words 'riant' and 'Euphrosyne,' the sentence is senseless. 'A sweet sadness' capable of inspiring 'a more grave joy'--than what?--than demonstrations of mirth? Odd if it had not been. I had once a wry aunt, which may make me dislike the phrase.
"'Pleasurable:'--no word is good that is awkward to spell. (Query.) Welcome or Joyous.
"'Steady self-possession rather than undaunted courage,' etc. The two things are not opposed enough. You mean, rather than rash fire of valour in action.
"'Looking like a heifer,' I fear wont do in prose. (Qy.) 'Like to some spotless heifer,'--or,'that you might have compared her to some spotless heifer,' etc.--or 'Like to some sacrificial heifer of old.' I should prefer, 'garlanded with flowers as for a sacrifice '--and cut the cow altogether.
"(Say) 'Like the muttering of some strange spell,'--omitting the demon,--they are subject to spells, they don't use them.
"'Feud' here (and before and after) is wrong. (Say) old malice, or, difference. Feud is of clans. It might be applied to family quarrels, but is quite improper to individuals falling out.
"'Apathetic.' Vile word.
"'Mechanically,' faugh!--insensibly--involuntarily--in-any-thing-ly but mechanically.
"Calianax's character should be somewhere briefly drawn, not left to be dramatically inferred.
"'Surprised and almost vexed while it troubled her.' (Awkward.) Better, 'in a way that while it deeply troubled her, could not but surprise and vex her to think it should be a source of trouble at all.'
"'Reaction' is vile slang. 'Physical'--vile word.
"Decidedly, Dorigen should simply propose to him to remove the rocks as ugly or dangerous, not as affecting her with fears for her husband. The idea of her husband should be excluded from a promise which is meant to be frank upon impossible conditions. She cannot promise in one breath infidelity to him, and make the conditions a good to him. Her reason for hating the rocks is good, but not to be expressed here.
"Insert after 'to whatever consequences it might lead,'--'Neither had Arviragus been disposed to interpose a husband's authority to prevent the execution of this rash vow, was he unmindful of that older and more solemn vow which, in the days of their marriage, he had imposed upon himself, in no instance to control the settled purpose or determination of his wedded wife;--so that by the chains of a double contract he seemed bound to abide by her decision in this instance, whatever it might be.'"
"A tragi-comedy"--Lamb's dramatic version of Crabbe's "Confidante," which he called "The Wife's Trial" (see Vol. IV. of this edition).
"Procter has got a wen." This paragraph must be taken with salt. Poor Hone, however, had the rules of the King's Bench at the time. Beckey was the Lambs' servant and tyrant; she had been Hazlitt's. Patmore described her at some length in his reminiscences of Lamb.
"Chatty-Briant"--Chateaubriand.]
420. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Enfield, July 26th, 1827.
Dear Mrs. Shelley,--At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are here trying to like solitude, but have scarce enough to justify the experiment. We get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath; the seventh--why, Cockneys will come for a little fresh air, and so--
But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington: I like a giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine, and Mary, pining for Mr. Moxon's books and Mr. Moxon's society. Then we shall meet.
I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the dialogue commey fo: but the damned plot--I believe I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a Hyde Park review. The story is as simple as G[eorge] D[yer], and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the "Evangely." I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama.
I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery book: I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles: to lay in the dead colours,--I'd Titianesque 'em up: to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I'd draw the waters down: to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out: to bring my personae on and off like a Beau Nash; and I'd Frankenstein them there: to bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them.
I am teaching Emma Latin to qualify her for a superior governess-ship; which we see no prospect of her getting. 'Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon. Sisyphus--his labours were as nothing to it.
Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions; her conjunctions copulative have no connection in them; her concords disagree; her interjections are purely English "Ah!" and "Oh!" with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue; and she herself is a lazy, block-headly supine. As I say to her, ass in praesenti rarely makes a wise man in futuro.
But I daresay it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after.
Good-by! Mary's love.
Yours truly, C. LAMB.
[This is the second letter to Mrs. Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the widow of the poet and the author of Frankenstein. She had been living in England since 1823; and in 1826 had issued anonymously The Last Man. That she kept much in touch with the Lambs' affairs we know by her letters to Leigh Hunt.
Major Butterworth has kindly supplied me with a copy of her letter to Mary Lamb which called forth Lamb's reply. It runs thus:--
Kentish Town, 22 July, 1827.
My dear Miss Lamb,
You have been long at Enfield--I hardly know yet whether you are returned--and I quit town so very soon that I have not time to--as I exceedingly wish--call on you before I go. Nevertheless believe (if such familiar expression be not unmeet from me) that I love you with all my heart--gratefully and sincerely--and that when I return I shall seek you with, I hope, not too much zeal--but it will be with great eagerness.
You will be glad to hear that I have every reason to believe that the worst of my pecuniary troubles are over--as I am promised a regular tho' small income from my father-in-law. I mean to be very industrious on other accounts this summer, so I hope nothing will go very ill with me or mine.
I am afraid Miss Kelly will think me dreadfully rude for not having availed myself of her kind invitation. Will you present my compliments to her, and say that my embarassments, harassings and distance from town are the guilty causes of my omission--for which with her leave I will apologize in person on my return to London.
All kind and grateful remembrances to Mr. Lamb, he must not forget me nor like me one atom less than I delight to flatter myself he does now, when again I come to seize a dinner perforce at your cottage. Percy is quite well--and is reading with great extacy (sic) the Arabian Nights. I shall return I suppose some one day in September. God bless you.
Yours affectionately,
MARY W. SHELLEY.
Commey fo is Lamb's comme il faut.
"In the 'Evangely.'" If by Evangely he meant Gospel, Lamb was a little confused here, I think. Probably Isaiah iv. I was in his mind: "and in that day seven women shall take hold of one man." But he may also have half remembered Luke xvii. 35.
"I am teaching Emma Latin." Mary Lamb contributed to Blackwood's Magazine for June, 1829, the following little poem describing Emma Isola's difficulties in these lessons:--
TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING
Droop not, dear Emma, dry those falling tears, And call up smiles into thy pallid face, Pallid and care-worn with thy arduous race: In few brief months thou hast done the work of years. To young beginnings natural are these fears. A right good scholar shalt thou one day be, And that no distant one; when even she, Who now to thee a star far off appears, That most rare Latinist, the Northern Maid-- The language-loving Sarah[1] of the Lake-- Shall hail thee Sister Linguist. This will make Thy friends, who now afford thee careful aid, A recompense most rich for all their pains, Counting thy acquisitions their best gains.
[Footnote 1: Daughter of S.T. Coleridge, Esq.; an accomplished linguist in the Greek and Latin tongues, and translatress of a History of the Abipones.]
A letter to an anonymous correspondent, in the summer of 1827, has an amusing passage concerning Emma Isola's Latin. Lamb says that they made Cary laugh by translating "Blast you" into such elegant verbiage as "Deus afflet tibi." He adds, "How some parsons would have goggled and what would Hannah More say? I don't like clergymen, but here and there one. Cary, the Dante Cary, is a model quite as plain as Parson Primrose, without a shade of silliness."
On July 21, 1827, is a letter to Mr. Dillon, whom I do not identify, saying that Lamb has been teaching Emma Isola Latin for the past seven weeks.
"Ass in praesenti." This was Boyer's joke, at Christ's Hospital (see Vol. I. of this edition).
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Edward White, of the India House, dated August 1, 1827, in which Lamb has some pleasantry about paying postages, and ends by heartily commending White to mind his ledger, and keep his eye on Mr. Chambers' balances.]
421. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. BASIL MONTAGU
[Summer, 1827.]
Dear Madam,--I return your List with my name. I should be sorry that any respect should be going on towards [Clarkson,] and I be left out of the conspiracy. Otherwise I frankly own that to pillarize a man's good feelings in his lifetime is not to my taste. Monuments to goodness, even after death, are equivocal. I turn away from Howard's, I scarce know why. Goodness blows no trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. We should be modest for a modest man--as he is for himself. The vanities of Life--Art, Poetry, Skill military, are subjects for trophies; not the silent thoughts arising in a good man's mind in lonely places. Was I C[larkson,] I should never be able to walk or ride near ------ again. Instead of bread, we are giving him a stone. Instead of the locality recalling the noblest moment of his existence, it is a place at which his friends (that is, himself) blow to the world, "What a good man is he!" I sat down upon a hillock at Forty Hill yesternight--a fine contemplative evening,--with a thousand good speculations about mankind. How I yearned with cheap benevolence! I shall go and inquire of the stone-cutter, that cuts the tombstones here, what a stone with a short inscription will cost; just to say--"Here C. Lamb loved his brethren of mankind." Everybody will come there to love. As I can't well put my own name, I shall put about a subscription:
s. d. Mrs. ---- 5 0 Procter 2 6 G. Dyer 1 0 Mr. Godwin 0 0 Mrs. Godwin 0 0 Mr. Irving a watch-chain. Mr. ------- the proceeds of ------ first edition.* ___ ___ 8 6
I scribble in haste from here, where we shall be some time. Pray request Mr. M[ontagu] to advance the guinea for me, which shall faithfully be forthcoming; and pardon me that I don't see the proposal in quite the light that he may. The kindness of his motives, and his power of appreciating the noble passage, I thoroughly agree in.
With most kind regards to him, I conclude, Dear Madam,
Yours truly, C. LAMB.
From Mrs. Leishman's, Chase, Enfield.
*A capital book, by the bye, but not over saleable.
[The memorial to Thomas Clarkson stands on a hill above Wade Mill, on the Buntingford Road, in Hertfordshire.
Forty Hill is close to Enfield.
Edward Irving's watch-chain. The explanation of Lamb's joke is to be found in Carlyle's Reminiscences (quoted also in Froude's Life, Vol. I., page 326). Irving had put down as his contribution to some subscription list, at a public meeting, "an actual gold watch, which he said had just arrived to him from his beloved brother lately dead in India." This rather theatrical action had evidently amused Lamb as it had disgusted Carlyle.
The "first edition" of "Mr. -----" was, I suppose, Basil Montagu's work on Bacon, which Macaulay reviewed.]
422. MARY LAMB TO LADY STODDART
[August 9, 1827.]
My dear Lady-Friend,--My brother called at our empty cottage yesterday, and found the cards of your son and his friend, Mr. Hine, under the door; which has brought to my mind that I am in danger of losing this post, as I did the last, being at that time in a confused state of mind--for at that time we were talking of leaving, and persuading ourselves that we were intending to leave town and all our friends, and sit down for ever, solitary and forgotten, here. Here we are; and we have locked up our house, and left it to take care of itself; but at present we do not design to extend our rural life beyond Michaelmas. Your kind letter was most welcome to me, though the good news contained in it was already known to me. Accept my warmest congratulations, though they come a little of the latest. In my next I may probably have to hail you Grandmama; or to felicitate you on the nuptials of pretty Mary, who, whatever the beaux of Malta may think of her, I can only remember her round shining face, and her "O William!"--"dear William!" when we visited her the other day at school. Present my love and best wishes--a long and happy married life to dear Isabella--I love to call her Isabella; but in truth, having left your other letter in town, I recollect no other name she has.
The same love and the same wishes--in futuro--to my friend Mary. Tell her that her "dear William" grows taller, and improves in manly looks and manlike behaviour every time I see him. What is Henry about? and what should one wish for him? If he be in search of a wife, I will send him out Emma Isola.
You remember Emma, that you were so kind as to invite to your ball? She is now with us; and I am moving heaven and earth, that is to say, I am pressing the matter upon all the very few friends I have that are likely to assist me in such a case, to get her into a family as a governess; and Charles and I do little else here than teach her something or other all day long.
We are striving to put enough Latin into her to enable her to begin to teach it to young learners. So much for Emma --for you are so fearfully far away, that I fear it is useless to implore your patronage for her.
I have not heard from Mrs. Hazlitt a long time. I believe she is still with Hazlitt's mother in Devonshire.
I expect a pacquet of manuscript from you: you promised me the office of negotiating with booksellers, and so forth, for your next work. Is it in good forwardness? or do you grow rich and indolent now? It is not surprising that your Maltese story should find its way into Malta; but I was highly pleased with the idea of your pleasant surprise at the sight of it. I took a large sheet of paper, in order to leave Charles room to add something more worth reading than my poor mite.
May we all meet again once more!
M. LAMB.
423. CHARLES LAMB TO SIR JOHN STODDART
(Same letter: Lamb's share)
Dear Knight--Old Acquaintance--'Tis with a violence to the pure imagination (vide the "Excursion" passim) that I can bring myself to believe I am writing to Dr. Stoddart once again, at Malta. But the deductions of severe reason warrant the proceeding. I write from Enfield, where we are seriously weighing the advantages of dulness over the over-excitement of too much company, but have not yet come to a conclusion. What is the news? for we see no paper here; perhaps you can send us an old one from Malta. Only, I heard a butcher in the market-place whisper something about a change of ministry. I don't know who's in or out, or care, only as it might affect you. For domestic doings, I have only to tell, with extreme regret, that poor Elisa Fenwick (that was)--Mrs. Rutherford--is dead; and that we have received a most heart-broken letter from her mother--left with four grandchildren, orphans of a living scoundrel lurking about the pothouses of Little Russell Street, London: they and she--God help 'em!--at New York. I have just received Godwin's third volume of the Republic, which only reaches to the commencement of the Protectorate. I think he means to spin it out to his life's thread. Have you seen Fearn's Anti-Tooke? I am no judge of such things--you are; but I think it very clever indeed. If I knew your bookseller, I'd order it for you at a venture: 'tis two octavos, Longman and Co. Or do you read now? Tell it not in the Admiralty Court, but my head aches hesterno vino. I can scarce pump up words, much less ideas, congruous to be sent so far. But your son must have this by to-night's post.[Here came a passage relating to an escapade of young Stoddart, then at the Charterhouse, which, probably through Lamb's intervention, was treated leniently. Lamb helped him--with his imposition-- Gray's "Elegy" into Greek elegiacs.] Manning is gone to Rome, Naples, etc., probably to touch at Sicily, Malta, Guernsey, etc.; but I don't know the map. Hazlitt is resident at Paris, whence he pours his lampoons in safety at his friends in England. He has his boy with him. I am teaching Emma Latin. By the time you can answer this, she will be qualified to instruct young ladies: she is a capital English reader: and S.T.C. acknowledges that a part of a passage in Milton she read better than he, and part he read best, her part being the shorter. But, seriously, if Lady St------ (oblivious pen, that was about to write Mrs.!) could hear of such a young person wanted (she smatters of French, some Italian, music of course), we'd send our loves by her. My congratulations and assurances of old esteem. C.L.
[Stoddart had been appointed in 1826 Chief-Justice and Justice of the Vice-Admiralty Court in Malta and had been knighted in the same year. His daughter Isabella had just married. Lady Stoddart's literary efforts did not, I think, reach print.
"The deductions of severe reason." See the quotation from Cottle in the letter to Manning of November, 1802.
"A change of ministry." On Liverpool's resignation early in 1827 Canning had been called in to form a new Ministry, which he effected by an alliance with the Whigs.
"Godwin's Republic"--History of the Commonwealth of England, in four volumes, 1824-1828.
"Fearn's Anti-Tooke"--Anti-Tooke; or, An Analysis of the Principles and Structure of Language Exemplified in the English Tongue, 1824.
Here should come a note from Lamb to Hone, dated August 10, 1827, in which Lamb expresses regret for Matilda Hone's illness.]
424. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. 10 August, 1827.]
Dear B.B.--I have not been able to: answer you, for we have had, and are having (I just snatch a moment), our poor quiet retreat, to which we fled from society, full of company, some staying with us, and this moment as I write almost a heavy importation of two old Ladies has come in. Whither can I take wing from the oppression of human faces? Would I were in a wilderness of Apes, tossing cocoa nuts about, grinning and grinned at!
Mitford was hoaxing you surely about my Engraving, 'tis a little sixpenny thing, too like by half, in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery. There have been 2 editions of it, which I think are all gone, as they have vanish'd from the window where they hung, a print shop, corner of Great and Little Queen Streets, Lincolns Inn fields, where any London friend of yours may inquire for it; for I am (tho' you won't understand it) at Enfield (Mrs. Leishman's, Chase). We have been here near 3 months, and shall stay 2 or more, if people will let us alone, but they persecute us from village to village. So don't direct to Islington again, till further notice.
I am trying my hand at a Drama, in 2 acts, founded on Crabbe's "Confidant," mutatis mutandis.
You like the Odyssey. Did you ever read my "Adventures of Ulysses," founded on Chapman's old translation of it? for children or men. Ch. is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity. When you come to town I'll show it you.
You have well described your old fashioned Grand-paternall Hall. Is it not odd that every one's earliest recollections are of some such place. I had my Blakesware (Blakesmoor in the "London"). Nothing fills a childs mind like a large old Mansion [one or two words wafered over]; better if un-or-partially-occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of [for] the County and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitude of one, with my feelings at 7 years old.
Those marble busts of the Emperors, they seem'd as if they were to stand for ever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old Marble Hall, and I to partake of their permanency; Eternity was, while I thought not of Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old Dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a grasshopper that chirping about the grounds escaped his scythe only by my littleness. Ev'n now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe me out, perhaps. Well!
["My Engraving"--Brook Pulham's caricature.
"You have well described your ... Grand-paternall Hall." Barton wrote the following account of this house, the home of his step-grandfather at Tottenham; but I do not know whether it is the same that Lamb saw:--
My most delightful recollections of boyhood are connected with the fine old country-house in a green lane diverging from the high road which runs through Tottenham. I would give seven years of life as it now is, for a week of that which I then led. It was a large old house, with an iron palisade and a pair of iron gates in front, and a huge stone eagle on each pier. Leading up to the steps by which you went up to the hall door, was a wide gravel walk, bordered in summer time by huge tubs, in which were orange and lemon trees, and in the centre of the grass-plot stood a tub yet huger, holding an enormous aloe, The hall itself, to my fancy then lofty and wide as a cathedral would seem now, was a famous place for battledore and shuttlecock; and behind was a garden, equal to that of old Alcinous himself. My favourite walk was one of turf by a long straight pond, bordered with lime-trees. But the whole demesne was the fairy ground of my childhood; and its presiding genius was grandpapa. He must have been a very handsome man in his youth, for I remember him at nearly eighty, a very fine-looking one, even in the decay of mind and body. In the morning a velvet cap; by dinner, a flaxen wig; his features always expressive of benignity and placid cheerfulness. When he walked out into the garden, his cocked hat and amber-headed cane completed his costume. To the recollection of this delightful personage, I am, I think, indebted for many soothing and pleasing associations, with old age.
"Those marble busts of the Emperors." See the Elia essay "Blakesmoor in H----shire," in Vol. II, of this edition.]
425. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
28th of Aug., 1827.
I have left a place for a wafer, but can't find it again.
Dear B.B.--I am thankful to you for your ready compliance with my wishes. Emma is delighted with your verses, to which I have appended this notice "The 6th line refers to the child of a dear friend of the author's, named Emma," without which it must be obscure; and have sent it with four Album poems of my own (your daughter's with your heading, requesting it a place next mine) to a Mr. Fraser, who is to be editor of a more superb Pocket book than has yet appeared by far! the property of some wealthy booksellers, but whom, or what its name, I forgot to ask. It is actually to have in it schoolboy exercises by his present Majesty and the late Duke of York, so Lucy will come to Court; how she will be stared at! Wordsworth is named as a Contributor. Frazer, whom I have slightly seen, is Editor of a forth-come or coming Review of foreign books, and is intimately connected with Lockhart, &c. so I take it that this is a concern of Murray's. Walter Scott also contributes mainly. I have stood off a long time from these Annuals, which are ostentatious trumpery, but could not withstand the request of Jameson, a particular friend of mine and Coleridge.
I shall hate myself in frippery, strutting along, and vying finery with Beaux and Belles
with "Future Lord Byrons and sweet L.E.L.'s."--
Your taste I see is less simple than mine, which the difference of our persuasions has doubtless effected. In fact, of late you have so frenchify'd your style, larding it with hors de combats, and au desopoirs, that o' my conscience the Foxian blood is quite dried out of you, and the skipping Monsieur spirit has been infused. Doth Lucy go to Balls? I must remodel my lines, which I write for her. I hope A.K. keeps to her Primitives. If you have any thing you'd like to send further, I don't know Frazer's address, but I sent mine thro' Mr. Jameson, 19 or 90 Cheyne Street, Totnam Court road. I dare say an honourable place wou'd be given to them; but I have not heard from Frazer since I sent mine, nor shall probably again, and therefore I do not solicit it as from him.
Yesterday I sent off my tragi comedy to Mr. Kemble. Wish it luck. I made it all ('tis blank verse, and I think, of the true old dramatic cut) or most of it, in the green lanes about Enfield, where I am and mean to remain, in spite of your peremptory doubts on that head.
Your refusal to lend your poetical sanction to my Icon, and your reasons to Evans, are most sensible. May be I may hit on a line or two of my own jocular. May be not.
Do you never Londonize again? I should like to talk over old poetry with you, of which I have much, and you I think little. Do your Drummonds allow no holydays? I would willingly come and w[ork] for you a three weeks or so, to let you loose. Would I could sell or give you some of my Leisure! Positively, the best thing a man can have to do is nothing, and next to that perhaps--good works.
I am but poorlyish, and feel myself writing a dull letter; poorlyish from Company, not generally, for I never was better, nor took more walks, 14 miles a day on an average, with a sporting dog--Dash--you would not know the plain Poet, any more than he doth recognize James Naylor trick'd out au deserpoy (how do you spell it.) En Passant, J'aime entendre da mon bon hommè sur surveillance de croix, ma pas l'homme figuratif--do you understand me?
[The verses with which Emma was delighted were probably written for her album. I have not seen them. That album was cut up for the value of its autographs and exists now only in a mutilated state: where, I cannot discover. The pocket-book was The Bijou, 1828, edited by William Fraser for Pickering. Only one of Lamb's contributions was included: his verses for his own album (see Vol. IV. of this edition).
Jameson was Robert Jameson, to whom Hartley Coleridge addressed the sonnets in the London Magazine to which Lamb alludes in a previous letter. He was the husband of Mrs. Jameson, author of Sacred and Legendary Art, but the marriage was not happy. He lived in Chenies Street.
"Future Lord Byrons and sweet L.E.L.'s." A line from some verses written by Lamb in more than one album. Probably originally intended for Emma Isola's album. The passage runs, answering the question, "What is an Album?"--
'Tis a Book kept by modern Young Ladies for show, Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know. 'Tis a medley of scraps, fine verse, and fine prose, And some things not very like either, God knows. The soft First Effusions of Beaux and of Belles, Of future Lord Byrons and sweet L.E.L.'s.
L.E.L. was, of course, the unhappy Letitia Landon, a famous contributor to the published albums.
"My tragi comedy." Still "The Wife's Trial." Kemble was Charles Kemble, manager of Covent Garden Theatre. The play was never acted.
"Your refusal to lend your poetical sanction." This is not clear, but I think the meaning to be deducible. The Icon was Pulham's etching of Lamb. Evans was William Evans, who had grangerised Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. I take it that he was now making another collection of portraits of poets and was asking other poets, their friends, to write verses upon them. In this way he had applied through Lamb to Barton for verses on Pulham's Elia, and had been refused. This is, of course, only conjecture.
"Your Drummonds"--your bankers. Barton's bankers were the Alexanders, a Quaker firm.
"James Naylor." Barton had paraphrased Nayler's "Testimony."
Following this letter, under the date August 29, 1827, should come a letter from Lamb to Robert Jameson (husband of Mrs. Jameson) asking him to interest himself in Miss Isola's career. "Our friend Coleridge will bear witness to the very excellent manner in which she read to him some of the most difficult passages in the Paradise Lost."]
426. CHARLES LAMB TO P.G. PATMORE
Mrs. Leishman's, Chace, Enfield,
September, 1827.
Dear Patmore--Excuse my anxiety--but how is Dash? (I should have asked if Mrs. Patmore kept her rules, and was improving--but Dash came uppermost. The order of our thoughts should be the order of our writing.) Goes he muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who are not used to them. Try him with hot water. If he won't lick it up, it is a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Is his general deportment cheerful? I mean when he is pleased--for otherwise there is no judging. You can't be too careful. Has he bit any of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one time--but that was in Hyder-Ally's time. Do you get paunch for him? Take care the sheep was sane. You might pull out his teeth (if he would let you), and then you need not mind if he were as mad as a Bedlamite. It would be rather fun to see his odd ways. It might amuse Mrs. Patmore and the children. They'd have more sense than he! He'd be like a Fool kept in the family, to keep the household in good humour with their own understanding. You might teach him the mad dance set to the mad howl. Madge Owl-et would be nothing to him. "My, how he capers!" [In the margin is written:] One of the children speaks this.
[Three lines here are erased.] What I scratch out is a German quotation from Lessing on the bite of rabid animals; but, I remember, you don't read German. But Mrs. Patmore may, so I wish I had let it stand. The meaning in English is--"Avoid to approach an animal suspected of madness, as you would avoid fire or a precipice:--" which I think is a sensible observation. The Germans are certainly profounder than we.
If the slightest suspicion arises in your breast, that all is not right with him (Dash), muzzle him, and lead him in a string (common pack-thread will do; he don't care for twist) to Hood's, his quondam master, and he'll take him in at any time. You may mention your suspicion or not, as you like, or as you think it may wound or not Mr. H.'s feelings. Hood, I know, will wink at a few follies in Dash, in consideration of his former sense. Besides, Hood is deaf, and if you hinted anything, ten to one he would not hear you. Besides, you will have discharged your conscience, and laid the child at the right door, as they say.
We are dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly, at a Mrs. Leishman's, Chace, Enfield, where, if you come a-hunting, we can give you cold meat and a tankard. Her husband is a tailor; but that, you know, does not make her one. I knew a jailor (which rhymes), but his wife was a fine lady.
Let us hear from you respecting Mrs. Patmore's regimen. I send my love in a ------ to Dash. C. LAMB.
[On the outside of the letter was written:--]
Seriously, I wish you would call upon Hood when you are that way. He's a capital fellow. I sent him a couple of poems --one ordered by his wife, and written to order; and 'tis a week since, and I've not heard from him. I fear something is the matter.
Omitted within
Our kindest remembrance to Mrs. P.
[This is from Patmore's My Friends and Acquaintances, 1854; but again I have no confidence in Patmore's transcription.
Dash had been Hood's dog, and afterwards was Lamb's; while at one time Moxon seems to have had the care of it. Patmore possibly was taking Dash while the Lambs were at Mrs. Leishman's. One of the children who might be amused by the dog's mad ways was Coventry Patmore, afterwards the poet, then nearly four years old.]
427. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. September 5, 1827.]
Dear Dib,--Emma Isola, who is with us, has opened an ALBUM: bring some verses with you for it on Sat'y evening. Any fun will do. I am teaching her Latin; you may make something of that. Don't be modest. For in it you shall appear, if I rummage out some of your old pleasant letters for rhymes. But an original is better.
Has your pa[1] any scrap? C.L.
We shall be MOST glad to see your sister or sisters with you. Can't you contrive it? Write in that case.
[Footnote 1: the infantile word for father.]
[On the blank pages inside the letter Dibdin seems to have jotted down ideas for his contribution to the album. Unfortunately, as I have said, the album is not forthcoming.]
428. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. September 13, 1827.]
Dear John--Your verses are very pleasant, and have been adopted into the splendid Emmatic constellation, where they are not of the least magnitude. She is delighted with their merit and readiness. They are just the thing. The 14th line is found. We advertised it. Hell is cooling for want of company. We shall make it up along with our kitchen fire to roast you into our new House, where I hope you will find us in a few Sundays. We have actually taken it, and a compact thing it will be.
Kemble does not return till the month's end. My heart sometimes is good, sometimes bad, about it, as the day turns out wet or walky.
Emma has just died, choak'd with a Gerund in dum. On opening her we found a Participle in rus in the pericordium. The king never dies, which may be the reason that it always REIGNS here.
We join in loves. C.L. his orthograph.
what a pen!
the Umberella is cum bak.
429. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. September 18, 1827.]
My dear, and now more so, JOHN--
How that name smacks! what an honest, full, English, and yet withal holy and apostolic sound it bears, above the methodistical priggish Bishoppy name of Timothy, under which I had obscured your merits!
What I think of the paternal verses, you shall read within, which I assure you is not pen praise but heart praise.
It is the gem of the Dibdin Muses.
I have got all my books into my new house, and their readers in a fortnight will follow, to whose joint converse nobody shall be more welcome than you, and any of yours.
The house is perfection to our use and comfort.
Milton is come. I wish Wordsworth were here to meet him. The next importation is of pots and saucepans, window curtains, crockery and such base ware.
The pleasure of moving, when Becky moves for you. O the moving Becky!
I hope you will come and warm the house with the first.
From my temporary domicile, Enfield.
ELIA, that "is to go."--
[The paternal verses were probably a contribution by Charles Dibdin the Younger for Emma Isola's album. The Lambs were just moving to Enfield for good, as they hoped (see next letter), Milton was the portrait.]
430. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD
Tuesday [September 18, 1827],
Dear Hood,
If I have any thing in my head, I will send it to Mr. Watts. Strictly speaking he should have had my Album verses, but a very intimate friend importund me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, he will not be in town before the 27th. Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves out right away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced good.
Lord what good hours do we keep! How quietly we sleep!
See the rest in the Complete Angler. We have got our books into our new house. I am a drayhorse if I was not asham'd of the indigested dirty lumber, as I toppled 'em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with 'em for her having an unstuffd brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by Michael's mass. Twas with some pain we were evuls'd from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the door posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don't know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the sense of death's approximating, which tho' not terrible to me, is at all times particularly distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it, & rote [? rout] us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come & try it. I heard she & you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counteraction thro' the Table Book of last Saturday. Has it not reach'd you, that you are silent about it? Our new domicile is no manor house, but new, & externally not inviting, but furnish'd within with every convenience. Capital new locks to every door, capital grates in every room, with nothing to pay for incoming & the rent £10 less than the Islington one. It was built a few years since at £1100 expence, they tell me, & I perfectly believe it. And I get it for £35 exclusive of moderate taxes. We think ourselves most lucky. It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street, & West End perambulations (monastic & terrible thought!), but occasionally to breathe the FRESHER AIR of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be visited. Plays too we'll see,--perhaps our own. Urban! Sylvani, & Sylvan Urbanuses in turns. Courtiers for a spurt, then philosophers. Old homely tell-truths and learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield, Liars again and mocking gibers in the coffee houses & resorts of London. What can a mortal desire more for his bi-parted nature?
O the curds & cream you shall eat with us here!
O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there!
O the old books we shall peruse here!
O the new nonsense we shall trifle over there!
O Sir T. Browne!--here.
O Mr. Hood & Mr. Jerdan there,
thine,
C (urbanus) L (sylvanus) (ELIA ambo)--
Inclos'd are verses which Emma sat down to write, her first, on the eve after your departure. Of course they are only for Mrs. H.'s perusal. They will shew at least, that one of our party is not willing to cut old friends. What to call 'em I don't know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes--Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse. Heroics they are not, because they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. They must be call'd EMMAICS.------
[Mr. Watts was Alaric A. Watts.
"Thro' the Table Book." Lamb contributed to Hone's Table Book a prose paraphrase of Hood's Plea, of the Midsummer Fairies, just published, which had been dedicated to him, under the title "The Defeat of Time." In a previous number Moxon had addressed to Hood a eulogistic sonnet on the same subject. The attacks on Hood I have not sought.
"We shall put up a bedroom." This project was very imperfectly carried out. Indeed Lamb practically lost London from this date, his subsequent visits there being as a rule not fortunate.
"Mr. Jerdan"--William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette.
"Emmaics." These verses are no longer forthcoming.
Here should come a letter to Allsop dated September 25, 1827, saying that Mary Lamb has her nurse Miss James and the house is melancholy. Given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.]
431. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY COLBURN
[Dated at end: September 25, 1827.]
Dear Sir--I beg leave in the warmest manner to recommend to your notice Mr. Moxon, the Bearer of this, if by any chance yourself should want a steady hand in your business, or know of any Publisher that may want such a one. He is at present in the house of Messrs. Longman and Co., where he has been established for more than six years, and has the conduct of one of the four departments of the Country line. A difference respecting Salary, which he expected to be a little raised on his last promotion, makes him wish to try to better himself. I believe him to be a young man of the highest integrity, and a thorough man of business; and should not have taken the liberty of recommending him, if I had not thought him capable of being highly useful.
I am, Sir, with great respect, your hble Serv't CHARLES LAMB.
Enfield, Chace Side, 25th Sep. 1827.
[Moxon did not go to Colburn, but to Hurst & Co. in St. Paul's Churchyard.]
432. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[No date. ?Sept. 26, 1827.]
Pray, send me the Table Book.
Dear M. Our pleasant meeting[s] for some time are suspended. My sister was taken very ill in a few hours after you left us (I had suspected it),--and I must wait eight or nine weeks in slow hope of her recovery. It is her old complaint. You will say as much to the Hoods, and to Mrs. Lovekin, and Mrs. Hazlitt, with my kind love.
We are in the House, that is all. I hope one day we shall both enjoy it, and see our friends again. But till then I must be a solitary nurse.
I am trying Becky's sister to be with her, so don't say anything to Miss James.
Yours truly
CH. LAMB.
Monday. I will send your books soon.
[Miss James was, as we have seen, Mary Lamb's regular nurse. She had subsequently to be sent for. I do not identify Mrs. Lovekin.]
433. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[Dated at end: October 1 (1827).]
Dear R.--I am settled for life I hope, at Enfield. I have taken the prettiest compactest house I ever saw, near to Antony Robinson's, but alas! at the expence of poor Mary, who was taken ill of her old complaint the night before we got into it. So I must suspend the pleasure I expected in the surprise you would have had in coming down and finding us householders.
Farewell, till we can all meet comfortable. Pray, apprise Martin Burney. Him I longed to have seen with you, but our house is too small to meet either of you without her knowledge.
God bless you.
C. LAMB.
Chase Side 1st Oct'r
[Antony Robinson, a prominent Unitarian, a friend but no relation of Crabb Robinson's, had died in the previous January. His widow still lived at Enfield.]
434. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. October 2, 1827.]
My dear Dibdin, It gives me great pain to have to say that I cannot have the pleasure of seeing you for some time. We are in our house, but Mary has been seized with one of her periodical disorders--a temporary derangement--which commonly lasts for two months. You shall have the first notice of her convalescence. Can you not send your manuscript by the Coach? directed to Chase Side, next to Mr. Westwood's Insurance office. I will take great care of it.
Yours most Truly C. LAMB.
435. CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD
Oct. 4th, 1827.
I am not in humour to return a fit reply to your pleasant letter. We are fairly housed at Enfield, and an angel shall not persuade me to wicked London again. We have now six sabbath days in a week for--none! The change has worked on my sister's mind, to make her ill; and I must wait a tedious time before we can hope to enjoy this place in unison. Enjoy it, when she recovers, I know we shall. I see no shadow, but in her illness, for repenting the step! For Mathews --I know my own utter unfitness for such a task. I am no hand at describing costumes, a great requisite in an account of mannered pictures. I have not the slightest acquaintance with pictorial language even. An imitator of me, or rather pretender to be me, in his Rejected Articles, has made me minutely describe the dresses of the poissardes at Calais!--I could as soon resolve Euclid. I have no eye for forms and fashions. I substitute analysis, and get rid of the phenomenon by slurring in for it its impression. I am sure you must have observed this defect, or peculiarity, in my writings; else the delight would be incalculable in doing such a thing for Mathews, whom I greatly like--and Mrs. Mathews, whom I almost greatlier like. What a feast 'twould be to be sitting at the pictures painting 'em into words; but I could almost as soon make words into pictures. I speak this deliberately, and not out of modesty. I pretty well know what I can't do.
My sister's verses are homely, but just what they should be; I send them, not for the poetry, but the good sense and good-will of them. I was beginning to transcribe; but Emma is sadly jealous of its getting into more hands, and I won't spoil it in her eyes by divulging it. Come to Enfield, and read it. As my poor cousin, the bookbinder, now with God, told me, most sentimentally, that having purchased a picture of fish at a dead man's sale, his heart ached to see how the widow grieved to part with it, being her dear husband's favourite; and he almost apologised for his generosity by saying he could not help telling the widow she was "welcome to come and look at it"--e.g. at his house--"as often as she pleased." There was the germ of generosity in an uneducated mind. He had just reading enough from the backs of books for the "nec sinit esse feros"--had he read inside, the same impulse would have led him to give back the two-guinea thing--with a request to see it, now and then, at her house. We are parroted into delicacy.--Thus you have a tale for a Sonnet.
Adieu! with (imagine both) our loves. C. LAMB.
[The suggestion had been made to Lamb, through Barron Field, that he should write a descriptive catalogue of Charles Mathews' collection of theatrical portraits; Lamb having already touched upon them in his "Old Actors" articles in the London Magazine (see Vol. II. of this edition). When they were exhibited, after Mathews' death, at the Pantheon in Oxford Street, Lamb's remarks were appended to the catalogue raisonné. They are now at the Garrick Club.
"An imitator of me." P.G. Patmore's Rejected Articles, 1826, leads off with "An Unsentimental Journey" by Elia which is, except for a fitful superficial imitation of some of Lamb's mannerisms, as unlike him as could well be. The description of the butterwomen's dress, to which Lamb refers, will illustrate the divergence between Elia and his parodist:--
Her attire is fashioned as follows: and it differs from all her tribe only in the relative arrangement of its colours. On the body a crimson jacket, of a thick, solid texture, and tight to the shape; but without any pretence at ornament. This is met at the waist (which is neither long, nor short, but exactly where nature placed it) by a dark blue petticoat, of a still thicker texture, so that it hangs in large plaits where it is gathered in behind. Over this, in front, is tied tightly round the waist, so as to keep all trim and compact, a dark apron, the string of which passes over the little fulled skirt of the jacket behind, and makes it stick out smartly and tastily, while it clips the waist in. The head-gear consists of a sort of mob cap, nothing of which but the edge round the face can be seen, on account of the kerchief (of flowered cotton) which is passed over it, hood fashion, and half tied under the chin. This head-kerchief is in place of the bonnet--a thing not to be seen among the whole five hundred females who make up this pleasant show. Indeed, varying the colours of the different articles, this description applies to every dress of the whole assembly; except that in some the fineness of the day has dispensed with the kerchief, and left the snow-white cap exposed; and in others, the whole figure (except the head) is coyishly covered and concealed by a large hooded cloak of black cloth, daintily lined with silk, and confined close up to the throat by an embossed silver clasp, but hanging loosely down to the heels, in thick, full folds. The petticoat is very short; the trim ancles are cased in close-fit hose of dark, sober, slate colour; and the shoes, though thick and serviceable like all the rest of the costume, fit the foot as neatly as those which are not made to walk in.
Patmore tells us that his first meeting with the Lambs was immediately after they had first seen his book; and they left the house intent upon reading it.
"My sister's verses." I think these would probably be the lines on Emma learning Latin which I have quoted above.
Here should come a very pleasant letter from Lamb to Dodwell, of the India House, dated October 7, 1827. Lamb thanks Dodwell, to whom there is an earlier letter extant, for a pig. He first describes his new house at Enfield, and then breaks off about the cooking of the pig, bidding Becky do it "nice and crips." The rest is chaff concerning the India House and Dodwell's fellow-clerks.]
436. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE
[No date. ? Oct., 1827.]
Dear Hone,--having occasion to write to Clarke I put in a bit to you. I see no Extracts in this N'o. You should have three sets in hand, one long one in particular from Atreus and Thyestes, terribly fine. Don't spare 'em; with fragments, divided as you please, they'll hold out to Xmas. What I have to say is enjoined me most seriously to say to you by Moxon. Their country customers grieve at getting the Table Book so late. It is indispensable it should appear on Friday. Do it but once, & you'll never know the difference.
FABLE
A boy at my school, a cunning fox, for one penny ensured himself a hot roll & butter every morning for ever. Some favor'd ones were allowed a roll & butter to their breakfasts. He had none. But he bought one one morning. What did he do? He did not eat it, but cutting it in two, sold each one of the halves to a half-breakfasted Blue Boy for his whole roll to-morrow. The next day he had a whole roll to eat, and two halves to swap with other two boys, who had eat their cake & were still not satiated, for whole ones to-morrow. So on ad infinitum. By one morning's abstinence he feasted seven years after.
APPLICATION
Bring out the next N'o. on Friday, for country correspondents' sake. I[t] will be one piece of exertion, and you will go right ever after, for you will have just the time you had before, to bring it out ever after by the Friday.
You don't know the difference in getting a thing early. Your correspondents are your authors. You don't know how an author frets to know the world has got his contribution, when he finds it not on his breakfast table.
ONCE in this case is EVER without a grain of trouble afterw'ds.
I won't like you or speak to you if you don't try it once.
Yours, on that condition,
C. LAMB.
[This letter is dated by Mr. Hazlitt conjecturally 1826, but I think it more probably October, 1827, as the extracts (passages from Crowne's "Thyestes") contributed by Lamb to Hone's Table Book were printed late in 1827.
In Lamb's next note to Hone he says how glad he was to receive the Table Book early on Friday: the result of the fable.]
437. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD
[No date. ? 1827.]
Dear H.,--Emma has a favour, besides a bed, to ask of Mrs. Hood. Your parcel was gratifying. We have all been pleased with Mrs. Leslie; I speak it most sincerely. There is much manly sense with a feminine expression, which is my definition of ladies' writing.
[Mrs. Leslie and Her Grandchildren, 1827, was the title of a book for children by Mrs. Reynolds, mother of John Hamilton Reynolds and Mrs. Hood, and wife of the Writing Master at Christ's Hospital.]
438. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[No date. Late 1827.]
My dear B.B.--You will understand my silence when I tell you that my sister, on the very eve of entering into a new house we have taken at Enfield, was surprised with an attack of one of her sad long illnesses, which deprive me of her society, tho' not of her domestication, for eight or nine weeks together. I see her, but it does her no good. But for this, we have the snuggest, most comfortable house, with every thing most compact and desirable. Colebrook is a wilderness. The Books, prints, etc., are come here, and the New River came down with us. The familiar Prints, the Bust, the Milton, seem scarce to have changed their rooms. One of her last observations was "how frightfully like this room is to our room in Islington"--our up-stairs room, she meant. How I hope you will come some better day, and judge of it! We have tried quiet here for four months, and I will answer for the comfort of it enduring.
On emptying my bookshelves I found an Ulysses, which I will send to A.K. when I go to town, for her acceptance-- unless the Book be out of print. One likes to have one copy of every thing one does. I neglected to keep one of "Poetry for Children," the joint production of Mary and me, and it is not to be had for love or money. It had in the title-page "by the author of Mrs. Lester's School." Know you any one that has it, and would exchange it?
Strolling to Waltham Cross the other day, I hit off these lines. It is one of the Crosses which Edw'd 1st caused to be built for his wife at every town where her corpse rested between Northamptonsh'r and London.
A stately Cross each sad spot doth attest, Whereat the corpse of Elinor did rest, From Herdby fetch'd--her Spouse so honour'd her-- To sleep with royal dust at Westminster. And, if less pompous obsequies were thine, Duke Brunswick's daughter, princely Caroline, Grudge not, great ghost, nor count thy funeral losses: Thou in thy life-time had'st thy share of crosses.
My dear B.B.--My head akes with this little excursion. Pray accept 2 sides for 3 for once.
And believe me Yours sadly C.L.
Chace side Enfield.
["An Ulysses"--Lamb's book for children, The Adventures of Ulysses, 1808.
The Poetry for Children. The known copies of the first edition of this work can be counted on the fingers.
"A stately Cross..." These verses were printed in the Englishman's Magazine in September, 1831. Lamb's sympathies were wholly with Caroline of Brunswick, as his epigrams in The Champion show (see Vol. IV. of this edition).]
439. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. December 4, 1827.]
My dear B.B.--I have scarce spirits to write, yet am harass'd with not writing. Nine weeks are completed, and Mary does not get any better. It is perfectly exhausting. Enfield and every thing is very gloomy. But for long experience, I should fear her ever getting well.
I feel most thankful for the spinsterly attentions of your sister. Thank the kind "knitter in the sun."
What nonsense seems verse, when one is seriously out of hope and spirits! I mean that at this time I have some nonsense to write, pain of incivility. Would to the fifth heaven no coxcombess had invented Albums.
I have not had a Bijoux, nor the slightest notice from Pickering about omitting 4 out of 5 of my things. The best thing is never to hear of such a thing as a bookseller again, or to think there are publishers: second hand Stationers and Old Book Stalls for me. Authorship should be an idea of the Past.
Old Kings, old Bishops, are venerable. All present is hollow.
I cannot make a Letter. I have no straw, not a pennyworth of chaff, only this may stop your kind importunity to know about us.
Here is a comfortable house, but no tenants. One does not make a household.
Do not think I am quite in despair, but in addition to hope protracted, I have a stupifying cold and obstructing headache, and the sun is dead.
I will not fail to apprise you of the revival of a Beam.
Meantime accept this, rather than think I have forgotten you all.
Best rememb
& Yours and theirs truly, C.L.
440. CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT
[No date. December, 1827.]
Dear H.,--I am here almost in the eleventh week of the longest illness my sister ever had, and no symptoms of amendment. Some had begun, but relapsed with a change of nurse. If she ever gets well, you will like my house, and I shall be happy to show you Enfield country.
As to my head, it is perfectly at your or any one's service; either M[e]yers' or Hazlitt's, which last (done fifteen or twenty years since) White, of the Accountant's office, India House, has; he lives in Kentish Town: I forget where, but is to be found in Leadenhall daily. Take your choice. I should be proud to hang up as an alehouse sign even; or, rather, I care not about my head or anything, but how we are to get well again, for I am tired out.
God bless you and yours from the worst calamity.--Yours truly, C.L.
Kindest remembrances to Mrs. Hunt. H.'s is in a queer dress. M.'s would be preferable ad populum.
[Leigh Hunt had asked Lamb for his portrait to accompany his Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. Lamb had been painted by Hazlitt in 1804, and by Henry Meyer, full size, in May, 1826, as well as by others. Hunt chose Meyer's picture, which was beautifully engraved, for his book, in the large paper edition. The original is now in the India Office; a reproduction serves as the frontispiece to this volume. The Hazlitt portrait, representing Lamb in the garb of a Venetian senator, is now in the National Portrait Gallery; a reproduction serves as the frontispiece to Vol. I. of this edition.]
441. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE
[P.M. Dec. 15, 1827.]
My dear Hone, I read the sad accident with a careless eye, the newspaper giving a wrong name to the poor Sufferer, but learn'd the truth from Clarke. God send him ease, and you comfort in your thick misfortunes. I am in a sorry state. Tis the eleventh week of the illness, and I cannot get her well. To add to the calamity, Miss James is obliged to leave us in a day or two. We had an Enfield Nurse for seven weeks, and just as she seem'd mending, she was call'd away. Miss J.'s coming seem'd to put her back, and now she is going. I do not compare my sufferings to yours, but you see the world is full of troubles. I wish I could say a word to comfort you. You must cling to all that is left. I fear to ask you whether the Book is to be discontinued. What a pity, when it must have delighted so many! Let me hear about you and it, and believe me with deepest fellow feeling
Your friend C. LAMB. Friday eveng.
[Hone's son Alfred, who had met with an accident, was a sculptor. The Table Book was to close with the year.]
442. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[No date. ? Middle Dec., 1827.]
My dear Allsop--Thanks for the Birds. Your announcement puzzles me sadly as nothing came. I send you back a word in your letter, which I can positively make nothing [of] and therefore return to you as useless. It means to refer to the birds, but gives me no information. They are at the fire, however.
My sister's illness is the most obstinate she ever had. It will not go away, and I am afraid Miss James will not be able to stay above a day or two longer. I am desperate to think of it sometimes. 'Tis eleven weeks!
The day is sad as my prospects.
With kindest love to Mrs. A. and the children,
Yours, C.L.
No Atlas this week. Poor Hone's good boy Alfred has fractured his skull, another son is returned "dead" from the Navy office, & his Book is going to be given up, not having answered. What a world of troubles this is!
[The Atlas was the paper which Allsop sent to Lamb every week.]
443. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[December 20, 1827.]
My dear Allsop--I have writ to say to you that I hope to have a comfortable Xmas-day with Mary, and I can not bring myself to go from home at present. Your kind offer, and the kind consent of the young Lady to come, we feel as we should do; pray accept all of you our kindest thanks: at present I think a visitor (good & excellent as we remember her to be) might a little put us out of our way. Emma is with us, and our small house just holds us, without obliging Mary to sleep with Becky, &c.
We are going on extremely comfortably, & shall soon be in capacity of seeing our friends. Much weakness is left still. With thanks and old rememb'rs, Yours, C.L.
444. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[P.M. Dec. 22, 1827.]
My dear Moxon, I am at length able to tell you that we are all doing well, and shall be able soon to see our friends as usual. If you will venture a winter walk to Enfield tomorrow week (Sunday 3Oth) you will find us much as usual; we intend a delicious quiet Christmas day, dull and friendless, for we have not spirits for festivities. Pray communicate the good news to the Hoods, and say I hope he is better. I should be thankful for any of the books you mention, but I am so apprehensive of their miscarriage by the stage,--at all events I want none just now. Pray call and see Mrs. Lovekin, I heard she was ill; say we shall be glad to see them some fine day after a week or so.
May I beg you to call upon Miss James, and say that we are quite well, and that Mary hopes she will excuse her writing herself yet; she knows that it is rather troublesome to her to write. We have rec'd her letter. Farewell, till we meet.
Yours truly,
C. LAMB.
Enfield.
445. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[No date. End of 1827.]
My dear B.--We are all pretty well again and comfortable, and I take a first opportunity of sending the Adventures of Ulysses, hoping that among us--Homer, Chapman, and C'o.--we shall afford you some pleasure. I fear, it is out of print, if not, A.K. will accept it, with wishes it were bigger; if another copy is not to be had, it reverts to me and my heirs for ever. With it I send a trumpery book; to which, without my knowledge, the Editor of the Bijoux has contributed Lucy's verses: I am asham'd to ask her acceptance of the trash accompanying it. Adieu to Albums--for a great while, I said when I came here, and had not been fixed two days but my Landlord's daughter (not at the Pot house) requested me to write in her female friend's, and in her own; if I go to [blank space: something seems to be missing] thou art there also, O all pervading ALBUM! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albo-phobia!
["A trumpery book." I have not found it. Writing in the Englishman's Magazine in 1831, in a review of his own Album Verses, Lamb amplifies his sentiments on albums (see Vol. I.).]
446. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[January 9, 1828.]
Dear Allsop--I have been very poorly and nervous lately, but am recovering sleep, &c. I do not invite or make engagements for particular days; but I need not say how pleasant your dropping in any Sunday morn'g would be. Perhaps Jameson would accompany you. Pray beg him to keep an accurate record of the warning I sent by him to old Pan, for I dread lest he should at the 12 months' end deny the warning. The house is his daughter's, but we took it through him, and have paid the rent to his receipts for his daughter's. Consult J. if he thinks the warning sufficient. I am very nervous, or have been, about the house; lost my sleep, & expected to be ill; but slumbered gloriously last night golden slumbers. I shall not relapse. You fright me with your inserted slips in the most welcome Atlas. They begin to charge double for it, & call it two sheets. How can I confute them by opening it, when a note of yours might slip out, & we get in a hobble? When you write, write real letters. Mary's best love & mine to Mrs. A.
Yours ever, C. LAMB.
[I cannot explain the business part of this letter.]
447. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[P.M. (? January, Sunday) 1828.]
Dear Moxon I have to thank you for despatching so much business for me. I am uneasy respecting the enclosed receipts which you sent me and are dated Jan. 1827. Pray get them chang'd by Mr. Henshall to 182_8_. I have been in a very nervous way since I saw you. Pray excuse me to the Hoods for not answering his very pleasant letter. I am very poorly. The "Keepsake" I hope is return'd. I sent it back by Mrs. Hazlitt on Thursday. 'Twas blotted outside when it came. The rest I think are mine. My heart bleeds about poor Hone, that such an agreeable book, and a Book there seem'd no reason should not go on for ever, should be given up, and a thing substituted which in its Nature cannot last. Don't send me any more "Companions," for it only vexes me about the Table Book. This is not weather to hope to see any body to day, but without any particular invitations, pray consider that we are at any time most glad to see you, You (with Hunt's "Lord Byron" or Hazlitt's "Napoleon" in your hand) or You simply with your switch &c. The night was damnable and the morning is not too bless-able. If you get my dates changed, I will not trouble you with business for some time. Best of all rememb'ces to the Hoods, with a malicious congratulation on their friend Rice's advancem't.
Yours truly C. LAMB.
[Hone's Table Book ceased with 1827: it was succeeded by a reprint, in monthly parts, of Strutt's Sports and Pastimes.
The Companion would be the periodical started by Leigh Hunt in 1828.
"Hazlitt's 'Napoleon.'" Of this work the first two volumes appeared in 1828, and the next two in 1830.
"Their friend Rice's advancement." I cannot say to what this would refer. Rice was Edward Rice.]
448. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[P.M. Feb. 18, 1828.]
Dear M. I had rather thought to have seen you yesterday, or I should have written to thank you for your attentions in the Book way &c. Hone's address is, 22 Belvidere Place, Southwark. 'Tis near the Obelisk. I can only say we shall be most glad to see you, when weather suits, and that it will be a joyful surprisal to see the Hoods. I should write to them, but am poorly and nervous. Emma is very proud of her Valentine. Mary does not immediately want Books, having a damn'd consignment of Novels in MS. from Malta: which I wish the Mediterranean had in its guts. Believe me yours truly C.L.
Monday.
[Emma's valentine probably came from Moxon, who, I feel sure, in spite of Lamb's utterance in a previous letter, had not yet told his love, if it had really budded.
"Novels in MS."--Lady Stoddart's, we may suppose (see letter above).]
449. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
Enfield, 25 Feb. [1828].
My dear Clarke,--You have been accumulating on me such a heap of pleasant obligations that I feel uneasy in writing as to a Benefactor. Your smaller contributions, the little weekly rills, are refreshments in the Desart, but your large books were feasts. I hope Mrs. Hazlitt, to whom I encharged it, has taken Hunt's Lord B. to the Novellos. His picture of Literary Lordship is as pleasant as a disagreeable subject can be made, his own poor man's Education at dear Christ's is as good and hearty as the subject. Hazlitt's speculative episodes are capital; I skip the Battles. But how did I deserve to have the Book? The Companion has too much of Madam Pasta. Theatricals have ceased to be popular attractions. His walk home after the Play is as good as the best of the old Indicators. The watchmen are emboxed in a niche of fame, save the skaiting one that must be still fugitive. I wish I could send a scrap for good will. But I have been most seriously unwell and nervous a long long time. I have scarce mustered courage to begin this short note, but conscience duns me.
I had a pleasant letter from your sister, greatly over-acknowledging my poor sonnet. I think I should have replied to it, but tell her I think so. Alas for sonnetting, 'tis as the nerves are; all the summer I was dawdling among green lanes, and verses came as thick as fancies. I am sunk winterly below prose and zero.
But I trust the vital principle is only as under snow. That I shall yet laugh again.
I suppose the great change of place affects me, but I could not have lived in Town, I could not bear company.
I see Novello flourishes in the Del Capo line, and dedications are not forgotten. I read the Atlas. When I pitched on the Ded'n I looked for the Broom of "Cowden knows" to be harmonized, but 'twas summat of Rossini's.
I want to hear about Hone, does he stand above water, how is his son? I have delay'd writing to him, till it seems impossible. Break the ice for me.
The wet ground here is intolerable, the sky above clear and delusive, but under foot quagmires from night showers, and I am cold-footed and moisture-abhorring as a cat; nevertheless I yesterday tramped to Waltham Cross; perhaps the poor bit of exertion necessary to scribble this was owing to that unusual bracing.
If I get out, I shall get stout, and then something will out --I mean for the Companion--you see I rhyme insensibly.
Traditions are rife here of one Clarke a schoolmaster, and a runaway pickle named Holmes, but much obscurity hangs over it. Is it possible they can be any relations?
'Tis worth the research, when you can find a sunny day, with ground firm, &c. Master Sexton is intelligent, and for half-a-crown he'll pick you up a Father.
In truth we shall be most glad to see any of the Novellian circle, middle of the week such as can come, or Sunday, as can't. But Spring will burgeon out quickly, and then, we'll talk more.
You'd like to see the improvements on the Chase, the new Cross in the market-place, the Chandler's shop from whence the rods were fetch'd. They are raised a farthing since the spread of Education. But perhaps you don't care to be reminded of the Holofernes' days, and nothing remains of the old laudable profession, but the clear, firm, impossible-to-be-mistaken schoolmaster text hand with which is subscribed the ever-welcome name of Chas. Cowden C. Let me crowd in both our loves to all. C.L.
Let me never be forgotten to include in my rememb'ces my good friend and whilom correspondent Master Stephen.
How, especially, is Victoria?
I try to remember all I used to meet at Shacklewell. The little household, cake-producing, wine-bringing out Emma--the old servant, that didn't stay, and ought to have staid, and was always very dirty and friendly, and Miss H., the counter-tenor with a fine voice, whose sister married Thurtell. They all live in my mind's eye, and Mr. N.'s and Holmes's walks with us half back after supper. Troja fuit!
["The Companion." Leigh Hunt's paper lasted only for seven months. Madame Pasta, of whom too much was written, was Giudetta Pasta (1798-1865), a singer of unusual compass, for whom Bellini wrote "La Somnambula."
The following is the account of the Sliding Watchman in the essay, "Walks Home by Night in Bad Weather. Watchmen":--
But the oddest of all was the Sliding Watchman. Think of walking up a street in the depth of a frosty winter, with long ice in the gutters, and sleet over head, and then figure to yourself a sort of bale of a man in white, coming towards you with a lantern in one hand, and an umbrella over his head. It was the oddest mixture of luxury and hardship, of juvenility and old age! But this looked agreeable. Animal spirits carry everything before them; and our invincible friend seemed a watchman for Rabelais. Time was run at and butted by him like a goat. The slide seemed to bear him half through the night at once; he slipped from out of his box and his common-places at one rush of a merry thought, and seemed to say, "Everything's in imagination;--here goes the whole weight of my office."
"Your sister"--Mrs. Isabella Jane Towers, author of The Children's Fireside, 1828, and other books for children, to whom Lamb had sent a sonnet (see Vol. IV.).
"Novello... dedications... I read the Atlas." In The Atlas for February 17 was reviewed Select Airs from Spohr's celebrated Opera of Faust, arranged as duetts for the Pianoforte and inscribed to his friend Charles Cowden Clarke by Vincent Novello. Holmes was musical critic for The Atlas.
"One Clarke a schoolmaster." See note to the letter to Clarke in the summer of 1821.
"Holofernes' days"--Holofernes, the schoolmaster, in "Love's Labour's Lost." Cowden Clarke had assisted his father.
"Master Stephen." I do not identify Stephen.
"Victoria"--Mary Victoria Novello, afterwards Mrs. Charles Cowden Clarke.
"At Shacklewell"--the Novellos' old home. They now lived in Bedford Street, Covent Garden.
"Whose sister married Thurtell." Thurtell, the murderer of Mr. Weare, I suppose.
In the Boston Bibliophile edition there is also a brief note to Clarke.]
450. CHARLES LAMB TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[P.M. Feb. 26, 1828.]
My dear Robinson, It will be a very painful thing to us indeed, if you give up coming to see us, as we fear, on account of the nearness of the poor Lady you inquire after. It is true that on the occasion she mentions, which was on her return from last seeing her daughter, she was very heated and feverish, but there seems to be a great amendment in her since, and she has within a day or two passed a quiet evening with us. At the same time I dare not advise any thing one way or another respecting her daughter coming to live with her. I entirely disclaim the least opinion about it. If we named any thing before her, it was erroneously, on the notion that she was the obstacle to the plan which had been suggested of placing her daughter in a Private Family, which seem'd your wish. But I have quite done with the subject. If we can be of any amusement to the poor Lady, without self disturbance, we will. But come and see us after Circuit, as if she were not. You have no more affect'te friends than C. AND M. LAMB.
["The poor Lady" was, I imagine, the widow of Antony Robinson.]
451. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
March 19th, 1828.
My dear M.--It is my firm determination to have nothing to do with "Forget-me-Nots"--pray excuse me as civilly as you can to Mr. Hurst. I will take care to refuse any other applications. The things which Pickering has, if to be had again, I have promised absolutely, you know, to poor Hood, from whom I had a melancholy epistle yesterday; besides that, Emma has decided objections to her own and her friend's Album verses being published; but if she gets over that, they are decidedly Hood's.
Till we meet, farewell. Loves to Dash. C.L.
[Moxon seems to have asked Lamb for a contribution for one of Hurst's annuals, probably the Keepsake.
Hood was to edit The Gem for 1829.
"Dash."--Moxon seems to have been the present master of the dog.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Edward Irving, introducing Hone, who in later life became devout and preached at the Weigh House Chapel in Eastcheap.]
452. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. April 21, 1828.]
DEAR B.B.--You must excuse my silence. I have been in very poor health and spirits, and cannot write letters. I only write to assure you, as you wish'd, of my existence. All that which Mitford tells you of H.'s book is rhodomontade, only H. has written unguardedly about me, and nothing makes a man more foolish than his own foolish panegyric. But I am pretty well cased to flattery, or its contrary. Neither affect[s] me a turnip's worth. Do you see the Author of May you Like it? Do you write to him? Will you give my present plea to him of ill health for not acknowledge a pretty Book with a pretty frontispiece he sent me. He is most esteem'd by me. As for subscribing to Books, in plain truth I am a man of reduced income, and don't allow myself 12 shillings a-year to buy OLD BOOKS with, which must be my Excuse. I am truly sorry for Murray's demur, but I wash my hands of all booksellers, and hope to know them no more. I am sick and poorly and must leave off, with our joint kind remembrances to your daughter and friend A.K. C.L.
["H.'s book." In Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries Lamb was praised very warmly.
"The Author of May you Like it"--the Rev. C.B. Tayler. The book with a pretty frontispiece was A Fireside Book, 1828, with a frontispiece by George Cruikshank.
"Murray's demur"-an unfavourable reply, possibly to a suggestion of Barton's concerning a new volume.]
453. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[May 1st, 1828.]
Dear A.--I am better. Mary quite well. We expected to see you before. I can't write long letters. So a friendly love to you all.
Yours ever,
C.L.
Enfield.
This sunshine is healing.
454. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[P.M. May 3rd, 1828.]
Dear M.,--My friend Patmore, author of the "Months," a very pretty publication, [and] of sundry Essays in the "London," "New Monthly," &c., wants to dispose of a volume or two of "Tales." Perhaps they might Chance to suit Hurst; but be that as it may, he will call upon you, under favor of my recommendation; and as he is returning to France, where he lives, if you can do anything for him in the Treaty line, to save him dancing over the Channel every week, I am sure you will. I said I'd never trouble you again; but how vain are the resolves of mortal man! P. is a very hearty friendly fellow, and was poor John Scott's second, as I will be yours when you want one. May you never be mine!
Yours truly, C.L.
Enfield.
[Patmore was the author of The Mirror of the Months, 1826.]
455. CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON
[Dated at end: 17 May (1828).]
Dear Walter, The sight of your old name again was like a resurrection. It had passed away into the dimness of a dead friend. We shall be most joyful to see you here next week,--if I understand you right--for your note dated the 10th arrived only yesterday, Friday the 16th. Suppose I name Thursday next. If that don't suit, write to say so. A morning coach comes from the Bell or Bell & Crown by Leather Lane Holborn, and sets you down at our house on the Chase Side, next door to Mr. Westwood's, whom all the coachmen know.
I have four more notes to write, so dispatch this with again assuring you how happy we shall be to see you, & to discuss Defoe & old matters.
Yours truly
C. LAMB.
Enf'd. Satur'dy. 17th May.
[The last letter to Wilson was on Feb. 24, 1823. Lamb wrote to Hone a few days later: "Valter Vilson dines with us to-morrow. Vell! How I should like to see Hone!"]
456. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS NOON TALFOURD
[P.M. May 20, 1828.]
My dear Talfourd, we propose being with you on Wednesday not unearly, Mary to take a bed with you, and I with Crabbe, if, as I understand, he be of the party.
Yours ever,
CH. LAMB.
[Lamb's future biographer was then living at 26 Henrietta Street, Brunswick Square. He had married in 1822. Crabb Robinson's Diary for May 21 tells us that Talfourd's party consisted of the Lambs, Wordsworth, Miss Anne Rutt, three barristers and himself. Lamb was in excellent spirits. He slept at Robinson's that night.]
457. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
[No date. May, 1828.]
Dear Wordsworth, we had meant to have tried to see Mrs. Wordsworth and Dora next Wednesday, but we are intercepted by a violent toothache which Mary has got by getting up next morning after parting with you, to be with my going off at 1/2 past 8 Holborn. We are poor travellers, and moreover we have company (damn 'em) good people, Mr. Hone and an old crony not seen for 20 years, coming here on Tuesday, one stays night with us, and Mary doubts my power to get up time enough, and comfort enough, to be so far as you are. Will you name a day in the same or coming week that we can come to you in the morning, for it would plague us not to see the other two of you, whom we cannot individualize from you, before you go. It is bad enough not to see your Sister Dorothy.
God bless you sincerely
C. LAMB.
[Robinson dates this letter 1810, but this is clearly wrong. It was obviously written after Lamb's liberation from the India House. If, as I suppose, the old crony is Walter Wilson, we get the date from Lamb's letters to him and to Hone, mentioned above.
By "the other two of you" Lamb means Dora Wordsworth and Johnny Wordsworth. Lamb had already seen William. The address of the present letter is W. Wordsworth, Esq., 12 Bryanstone Street, Portman Square.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Cary, dated June 10, 1828, declining on account of ill-health an invitation to dinner, to meet Wordsworth. Instead he asks Cary to Enfield with Darley and Procter.]
458. CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. MORGAN
Enfield, 17 June, 1828.
The gentleman who brings this to you has been 12 years principal assistant at the first School in Enfield, and bears the highest character for carefulness and scholarship. He is about opening an Establishment of his own, a Classical and Commercial Academy at Peckham. He has just married a very notable and amiable young person, our next neighbour's daughter, and I do not doubt of their final success, but everything must have a beginning and he wants pupils. It strikes me, that one or two of Mr. Thompson's sons may be about leaving you,--in that case, if you can recommend my friend's school, you will much oblige me. I can answer for the very excellent manner in which he has conducted himself here as an assistant, for I have talked it over with Dr. May's brother and I know him to be very learned. He will explain to you the situation of our cottage, where we hope to see you soon--with Mary's kind love.
[The gentleman was a Mr. Sugden.]
459. MARY LAMB TO THE THOMAS HOODS
[No date. ? Summer, 1828.]
My dear Friends,--My brother and Emma are to send you a partnership letter, but as I have a great dislike to my stupid scrap at the fag end of a dull letter, and, as I am left alone, I will say my say first; and in the first place thank you for your kind letter; it was a mighty comfort to me. Ever since you left me, I have been thinking I know not what, but every possible thing that I could invent, why you should be angry with me for something I had done or left undone during your uncomfortable sojourn with us, and now I read your letter and think and feel all is well again. Emma and her sister Harriet are gone to Theobalds Park, and Charles is gone to Barnet to cure his headache, which a good old lady has talked him into. She came on Thursday and left us yesterday evening. I mean she was Mrs. Paris, with whom Emma's aunt lived at Cambridge, and she had so much to [tell] her about Cambridge friends, and to [tell] us about London ditto, that her tongue was never at rest through the whole day, and at night she took Hood's Whims and Oddities to bed with her and laught all night. Bless her spirits! I wish I had them and she were as mopey as I am. Emma came on Monday, and the week has passed away I know not how. But we have promised all the week that we should go and see the Picture friday or saturday, and stay a night or so with you. Friday came and we could not turn Mrs. Paris out so soon, and on friday evening the thing was wholly given up. Saturday morning brought fresh hopes; Mrs. Paris agreed to go to see the picture with us, and we were to walk to Edmonton. My Hat and my new gown were put on in great haste, and his honor, who decides all things here, would have it that we could not get to Edmonton in time; and there was an end of all things. Expecting to see you, I did not write.
Monday evening.
Charles and Emma are taking a second walk. Harriet is gone home. Charles wishes to know more about the Widow. Is it to be made to match a drawing? If you could throw a little more light on the subject, I think he would do it, when Emma is gone; but his time will be quite taken up with her; for, besides refreshing her Latin, he gives her long lessons in arithmetic, which she is sadly deficient in. She leaves in a week, unless she receives a renewal of her holydays, which Mrs. Williams has half promised to send her. I do verily believe that I may hope to pass the last one, or two, or three nights with you, as she is to go from London to Bury. We will write to you the instant we receive Mrs. W.'s letter. As to my poor sonnet--and it is a very poor sonnet, only [it] answered very well the purpose it was written for--Emma left it behind her, and nobody remembers more than one line of it, which is, I think, sufficient to convince you it would make no great impression in an Annual. So pray let it rest in peace, and I will make Charles write a better one instead.
This shall go to the Post to-night. If any [one] chooses to add anything to it they may. It will glad my heart to see you again.
Yours (both yours) truly and affectionately, M. LAMB.
Becky is going by the Post office, so I will send it away. I mean to commence letter-writer to the family.
[Mr. Hazlitt dates this letter April, 1828. The reference to the Widow, towards the end, shows that Hood was preparing The Gem, and, what is not generally known, that Lamb had been asked to write on that subject. As it happened, Hood wrote the essay for him and signed it Elia (see note below). Mrs. Paris we have met. Harriet, Emma Isola's sister, we do not hear of again. I was recently shown a copy of Lamb's Works, 1818, inscribed in his hand to Miss Isola: this would be Harriet Isola. Emma had just begun her duties at Fornham, in Suffolk, where she taught the children of a Mr. Williams, a clergyman. I cannot say what the Picture was. The sonnet was probably that printed in the note to the letter to Mrs. Shelley of July 26, 1827. Charles Lamb's and Emma's joint letter has not been preserved.]
460. CHARLES LAMB TO B.R. HAYDON
August, 1828.
Dear Haydon,--I have been tardy in telling you that your Chairing the Member gave me great pleasure;--'tis true broad Hogarthian fun, the High Sheriff capital. Considering, too, that you had the materials imposed upon you, and that you did not select them from the rude world as H. did, I hope to see many more such from your hand. If the former picture went beyond this I have had a loss, and the King a bargain. I longed to rub the back of my hand across the hearty canvas that two senses might be gratified. Perhaps the subject is a little discordantly placed opposite to another act of Chairing, where the huzzas were Hosannahs,--but I was pleased to see so many of my old acquaintances brought together notwithstanding.
Believe me, yours truly,
C. LAMB.
[Haydon's "Chairing the Member" was exhibited in Bond Street this year, together with "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem," and other of his works. "The former picture" was his "Mock Election," which the King had bought for 500 guineas. For "Chairing the Member" Haydon received only half that price.
Here should come a letter to Rickman, dated September 11, 1828, in which Lamb thanks him for a present of nuts and apples, but is surprised that apples should be offered to the owner of a "whole tree, almost an orchard," and "an apple chamber redolent" to boot.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Louisa Holcroft, dated October 2, 1828, in which, so soon after Mary Lamb's determination to be the letter writer of the family, he says, "Mary Lamb has written her last letter in this world," adding that he has been left her writing legatee. He calls geese "those pretty birds that look like snow in summer, and cackle like ice breaking up."
Here should come a long Latin letter to Rickman, dated October 4, 1828. Canon Ainger prints the Latin. I append an English version:--]
461. CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN
(Translation)
[Postmark Oct. 3, 1828.]
I have been thinking of sending some kind of an answer in Latin to your very elaborate letter, but something has arisen every day to hinder me. To begin with our awkward friend M.B. has been with us for a while, and every day and all day we have had such a lecture, you know how he stutters, on legal, mind, nothing but legal notices, that I have been afraid the Latin I want to write might prove rather barbaro-forensic than Ciceronian. He is swallowed up, body and soul, in law; he eats, drinks, plays (at the card table) Law, nothing but Law. He acts Ignoramus in the play so thoroughly, that you w'd swear that in the inmost marrow of his head (is not this the proper anatomical term?) there have housed themselves not devils but pettifoggers, to bemuddle with their noisy chatter his own and his friends' wits. He brought here, 'twas all his luggage, a book, Fearn on Contingent Remainders. This book he has read so hard, and taken such infinite pains to understand, that the reader's brain has few or no Remainders to continge. Enough, however, of M.B. and his luggage. To come back to your claims upon me. Your return journey, with notes, I read again and again, nor have I done with them yet. You always make something fresh out of a hackneyed theme. Our milestones, you say, bristle with blunders, but I must shortly explain why I cannot comply with your directions herein.
Suppose I were to consult the local magnates about a matter of this kind.--Ha! says one of our waywardens or parish overseers,--What business is this of yours? Do you want to drop the Lodger and come out as a Householder?--Now you must know that I took this house of mine at Enfield, by an obvious domiciliary fiction, in my Sister's name, to avoid the bother and trouble of parish and vestry meetings, and to escape finding myself one day an overseer or big-wig of some sort. What then w'd be my reply to the above question?
Leisure I have secured: but of dignity, not a tittle. Besides, to tell you the truth, the aforesaid irregularities are, to my thinking, most entertaining, and in fact very touching indeed. Here am I, quit of worldly affairs of every kind; for if superannuation does not mean that, what does it mean? The world then, being, as the saying is, beyond my ken, and being myself entirely removed from any accurate distinctions of space or time, these mistakes in road-measure do not seriously offend me. For in the infinite space of the heavens above (which in this contracted sphere of mine I desire to imitate so far as may be) what need is there of milestones? Local distance has to do with mortal affairs. In my walks abroad, limited though they must be, I am quite at my own disposal, and on that account I have a good word for our Enfield clocks too. Their hands generally point without any servile reference to this Sun of our World, in his sub-Empyrean position. They strike too just as it happens, according to their own sweet wiles,--one--two--three--anything they like, and thus to me, a more fortunate Whittington, they pleasantly announce, that Time, so far as I am concerned, is no more. Here you have my reasons for not attending in this matter to the requests of a busy subsolar such as you are.
Furthermore, when I reach the milestone that counts from the Hicks-Hall that stands now, I own at once the Aulic dignity, and, were I a gaol-bird, I should shake in my shoes. When I reach the next which counts from the site of the old Hall, my thoughts turn to the fallen grandeur of the pile, and I reflect upon the perishable condition of the most imposing of human structures. Thus I banish from my soul all pride and arrogance, and with such meditations purify my heart from day to day. A wayfarer such as I am, may learn from Vincent Bourne, in words terser and neater than any of mine, the advantages of milestones properly arranged. The lines are at the end of a little poem of his, called Milestones--(Do you remember it or shall I write it all out?)
How well the Milestones' use doth this express, Which make the miles [seem] more and way seem less.
What do you mean by this--I am borrowing hand and style from this youngster of mine--your son, I take it. The style looks, nay on careful inspection by these old eyes, is most clearly your very own, and the writing too. Either R's or the Devil's. I will defer your explanation till our next meeting--may it be soon.
My Latin failing me, as you may infer from erasures above, there is only this to add. Farewell, and be sure to give Mrs. Rickman my kind remembrances.
C. LAMB.
Enfield, Chase Side, 4th Oct., 1828. I can't put this properly into Latin. Dabam--what is it?
462. CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. October 11, 1828.]
A splendid edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim--why, the thought is enough to turn one's moral stomach. His cockle hat and staff transformed to a smart cockd beaver and a jemmy cane, his amice gray to the last Regent Street cut, and his painful Palmer's pace to the modern swagger. Stop thy friend's sacriligious hand. Nothing can be done for B. but to reprint the old cuts in as homely but good a style as possible. The Vanity Fair, and the pilgrims there--the silly soothness in his setting out countenance--the Christian idiocy (in a good sense) of his admiration of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains--the Lions so truly Allegorical and remote from any similitude to Pidcock's. The great head (the author's) capacious of dreams and similitudes dreaming in the dungeon. Perhaps you don't know my edition, what I had when a child: if you do, can you bear new designs from--Martin, enameld into copper or silver plate by--Heath, accompanied with verses from Mrs. Heman's pen O how unlike his own--
Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy? Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly? Wouldst thou read riddles and their explanation? Or else be drowned in thy contemplation? Dost thou love picking meat? or wouldst thou see A man i' th' clouds, and hear him speak to thee? Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep? Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep? Or wouldst thou lose thyself, and catch no harm, And find thyself again without a charm? Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowst not what, And yet know whether thou art blest or not By reading the same lines? O then come hither, And lay my book, thy head and heart together.
JOHN BUNYAN.
Shew me such poetry in any of the 15 forthcoming combinations of show and emptiness, yclept Annuals. Let me whisper in your ear that wholesome sacramental bread is not more nutritious than papistical wafer stuff, than these (to head and heart) exceed the visual frippery of Mitford's Salamander God, baking himself up to the work of creation in a solar oven, not yet by the terms of the context itself existing. Blake's ravings made genteel. So there's verses for thy verses; and now let me tell you that the sight of your hand gladdend me. I have been daily trying to write to you, but paralysed. You have spurd me on this tiny effort, and at intervals I hope to hear from and talk to you. But my spirits have been in a deprest way for a long long time, and they are things which must be to you of faith, for who can explain depression? Yes I am hooked into the Gem, but only for some lines written on a dead infant of the Editor's, which being as it were his property, I could not refuse their appearing, but I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the names of contributors poked up into your eyes in 1st page, and whistled thro' all the covers of magazines, the barefaced sort of emulation, the unmodest candidateship, bro't into so little space--in those old Londons a signature was lost in the wood of matter--the paper coarse (till latterly, which spoil'd them)--in short I detest to appear in an Annual. What a fertile genius (an[d] a quiet good soul withal) is Hood. He has 50 things in hand, farces to supply the Adelphi for the season, a comedy for one of the great theatres, just ready, a whole entertainment by himself for Mathews and Yates to figure in, a meditated Comic Annual for next year, to be nearly done by himself.-- You'd like him very much. Wordsworth I see has a good many pieces announced in one of em, not our Gem. W. Scott has distributed himself like a bribe haunch among 'em. Of all the poets, Cary has had the good sense to keep quite clear of 'em, with Clergy-gentle-manly right notions. Don't think I set up for being proud in this point, I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well as any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. So there's a bit of my mind. Besides they infallibly cheat you, I mean the booksellers. If I get but a copy, I only expect it from Hood's being my friend. Coleridge has lately been here. He too is deep among the Prophets--the Yearservers--the mob of Gentlemen Annuals. But they'll cheat him, I know.
And now, dear B.B., the Sun shining out merrily, and the dirty clouds we had yesterday having washd their own faces clean with their own rain, tempts me to wander up Winchmore Hill, or into some of the delightful vicinages of Enfield, which I hope to show you at some time when you can get a few days up to the great Town. Believe me it would give both of us great pleasure to show you all three (we can lodge you) our pleasant farms and villages.--
We both join in kindest loves to you and yours.--
CH. LAMB REDIVIVUS.
Saturday.
[The edition of Bunyan was that published for Barton's friend, John Major, and John Murray in 1830, with a life of Bunyan by Southey, and illustrations by John Martin and W. Harvey, and a prefatory poem not by Mrs. Hemans but by Bernard Barton immediately before Bunyan's "Author's Apology for his Book," from which Lamb quotes.
"Pidcock's." Pidcock showed his lions at Bartholomew Fair; he was succeeded by Polito of Exeter Change.
"Heath." This was Charles Heath (1785-1848), son of James Heath, a great engraver of steel plates for the Annuals.
"Mitford's Salamander God." I cannot explain this, except by Mr. Macdonald's supposition that Lamb meant to write "Martin's."
"The Gem." See note below, p. 839.
Hood's entertainment for Mathews and Frederick Yates, then joint-managers of the Adelphi, I have not identified. Authors' names on play-bills were, in those days, unimportant. The play was the thing.
Cary. The Rev. H.F. Cary, translator of Dante.
Coleridge and the Annuals. For example, Coleridge's "Names" was in the Keepsake for 1829; his "Lines written in the Album at Elbingerode" in part in the Amulet for 1829. He had also contributed previously to the Literary Souvenir, the Amulet and the Bijou.
Here should come an unprinted note from Lamb to Charles Mathews, dated October 27, 1828, referring to the farce "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," which Lamb offered to Mathews for the Adelphi. As I have said, this farce was never acted.]
463. CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
[Enfield, October, 1828.]
Dear Clarke,--We did expect to see you with Victoria and the Novellos before this, and do not quite understand why we have not. Mrs. N. and V. [Vincent] promised us after the York expedition; a day being named before, which fail'd. 'Tis not too late. The autumn leaves drop gold, and Enfield is beautifuller--to a common eye--than when you lurked at the Greyhound. Benedicks are close, but how I so totally missed you at that time, going for my morning cup of ale duly, is a mystery. 'Twas stealing a match before one's face in earnest. But certainly we had not a dream of your appropinquity. I instantly prepared an Epithalamium, in the form of a Sonata--which I was sending to Novello to compose--but Mary forbid it me, as too light for the occasion--as if the subject required anything heavy-- so in a tiff with her I sent no congratulation at all. Tho' I promise you the wedding was very pleasant news to me indeed. Let your reply name a day this next week, when you will come as many as a coach will hold; such a day as we had at Dulwich. My very kindest love and Mary's to Victoria and the Novellos. The enclosed is from a friend nameless, but highish in office, and a man whose accuracy of statement may be relied on with implicit confidence. He wants the exposé to appear in a newspaper as the "greatest piece of legal and Parliamentary villainy he ever rememb'd," and he has had experience in both; and thinks it would answer afterwards in a cheap pamphlet printed at Lambeth in 8'o sheet, as 16,000 families in that parish are interested. I know not whether the present Examiner keeps up the character of exposing abuses, for I scarce see a paper now. If so, you may ascertain Mr. Hunt of the strictest truth of the statement, at the peril of my head. But if this won't do, transmit it me back, I beg, per coach, or better, bring it with you. Yours unaltered, C. LAMB.
[Clarke had married Mary Victoria Novello on July 5, 1828, and they had spent their honeymoon at the Greyhound, Enfield, unknown to the Lambs. See the next letter.
"The enclosed." This has vanished. Hunt was Leigh Hunt.]
464. CHARLES LAMB TO VINCENT NOVELLO
[Enfield, November 6, 1828.]
My dear Novello,--I am afraid I shall appear rather tardy in offering my congratulations, however sincere, upon your daughter's marriage. The truth is, I had put together a little Serenata upon the occasion, but was prevented from sending it by my sister, to whose judgment I am apt to defer too much in these kind of things; so that, now I have her consent, the offering, I am afraid, will have lost the grace of seasonableness. Such as it is, I send it. She thinks it a little too old-fashioned in the manner, too much like what they wrote a century back. But I cannot write in the modern style, if I try ever so hard. I have attended to the proper divisions for the music, and you will have little difficulty in composing it. If I may advise, make Pepusch your model, or Blow. It will be necessary to have a good second voice, as the stress of the melody lies there:--
SERENATA, FOR TWO VOICES,
On the Marriage of Charles Cowden Clarke, Esqre., to Victoria, eldest daughter of Vincent Novello, Esqre.
DUETTO
Wake th' harmonious voice and string, Love and Hymen's triumph sing, Sounds with secret charms combining, In melodious union joining, Best the wondrous joys can tell, That in hearts united dwell.
RECITATIVE
First Voice.--To young Victoria's happy fame Well may the Arts a trophy raise, Music grows sweeter in her praise. And, own'd by her, with rapture speaks her name. To touch the brave Cowdenio's heart, The Graces all in her conspire; Love arms her with his surest dart, Apollo with his lyre.
AIR
The list'ning Muses all around her Think 'tis Phoebus' strain they hear; And Cupid, drawing near to wound her, Drops his bow, and stands to hear.
RECITATIVE
Second Voice.--While crowds of rivals with despair Silent admire, or vainly court the Fair, Behold the happy conquest of her eyes, A Hero is the glorious prize! In courts, in camps, thro' distant realms renown'd, Cowdenio comes!--Victoria, see, He comes with British honour crown'd, Love leads his eager steps to thee.
AIR
In tender sighs he silence breaks, The Fair his flame approves, Consenting blushes warm her cheeks, She smiles, she yields, she loves.
RECITATIVE
First Voice.--Now Hymen at the altar stands, And while he joins their faithful hands, Behold! by ardent vows brought down, Immortal Concord, heavenly bright, Array'd in robes of purest light, Descends, th' auspicious rites to crown. Her golden harp the goddess brings; Its magic sound Commands a sudden silence all around, And strains prophetic thus attune the strings.
DUETTO
First Voice.-- The Swain his Nymph possessing, Second Voice.-- The Nymph her swain caressing, First and Second.-- Shall still improve the blessing, For ever kind and true. Both.-- While rolling years are flying, Love, Hymen's lamp supplying, With fuel never dying, Shall still the flame renew.
To so great a master as yourself I have no need to suggest that the peculiar tone of the composition demands sprightliness, occasionally checked by tenderness, as in the second air,--
She smiles,--she yields,--she loves.
Again, you need not be told that each fifth line of the two first recitatives requires a crescendo.
And your exquisite taste will prevent your falling into the error of Purcell, who at a passage similar to that in my first air,
Drops his bow, and stands to hear,
directed the first violin thus:--
Here the first violin must drop his bow.
But, besides the absurdity of disarming his principal performer of so necessary an adjunct to his instrument, in such an emphatic part of the composition too, which must have had a droll effect at the time, all such minutiae of adaptation are at this time of day very properly exploded, and Jackson of Exeter very fairly ranks them under the head of puns.
Should you succeed in the setting of it, we propose having it performed (we have one very tolerable second voice here, and Mr. Holmes, I dare say, would supply the minor parts) at the Greyhound. But it must be a secret to the young couple till we can get the band in readiness.
Believe me, dear Novello,
Yours truly,
C. LAMB.
Enfield, 6 Nov., '28.
[Mrs. Cowden Clarke remarks in her notes on this letter that the references to Purcell and to Jackson of Exeter are inventions. For Mr. Holmes see note above.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Laman Blanchard, dated Enfield, November 9, 1828, thanking him for a book and dedication. Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804-1845), afterwards known as a journalist, had just published, through Harrison Ainsworth, a little volume entitled Lyric Offerings, which was dedicated to Lamb. After Lamb's death Blanchard contributed to the New Monthly Magazine some additional Popular Fallacies.]
465. CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD
Late autumn, 1828.
Enfield.
Dear Lamb--You are an impudent varlet; but I will keep your secret. We dine at Ayrton's on Thursday, and shall try to find Sarah and her two spare beds for that night only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and your rib. Health attend you.
Yours, T. HOOD, ESQ.
Miss Bridget Hood sends love.
[In The Gem, 1829, in addition to his poem, "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born," Lamb was credited with the following piece of prose, entitled "A Widow," which was really the work of Hood (see letter above):--
A WIDOW
Hath always been a mark for mockery:--a standing butt for wit to level at. Jest after jest hath been huddled upon her close cap, and stuck, like burrs, upon her weeds. Her sables are a perpetual "Black Joke."
Satirists--prose and verse--have made merry with her bereavements. She is a stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her crocodile tears, or labelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy mocketh her precocious flirtations--Tragedy even girdeth at her frailty, and twitteth her with "the funeral baked meats coldly furnishing forth the marriage tables."
I confess when I called the other day on my kinswoman G.--then in the second week of her widowhood--and saw her sitting, her young boy by her side, in her recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her estate with any risible associations. The Lady with a skeleton moiety--in the old print, in Bowles' old shop window--seemed but a type of her condition. Her husband,--a whole hemisphere in love's world--was deficient. One complete side--her left--was death-stricken. It was a matrimonial paralysis, unprovocative of laughter. I could as soon have tittered at one of those melancholy objects that drag their poor dead-alive bodies about the streets.
It seems difficult to account for the popular prejudice against lone women. There is a majority, I trust, of such honest, decorous mourners as my kinswoman: yet are Widows, like the Hebrew, a proverb and a byeword amongst nations. From the first putting on of the sooty garments, they become a stock joke--chimney-sweep or blackamoor is not surer--by mere virtue of their nigritude.
Are the wanton amatory glances of a few pairs of graceless eyes, twinkling through their cunning waters, to reflect so evil a light on a whole community? Verily the sad benighted orbs of that noble relict--the Lady Rachel Russell--blinded through unserene drops for her dead Lord,--might atone for such oglings!
Are the traditional freaks of a Dame of Ephesus, or a Wife of Bath, or a Queen of Denmark, to cast so broad a shadow over a whole sisterhood. There must be, methinks, some more general infirmity--common, probably, to all Eve-kind--to justify so sweeping a stigma.
Does the satiric spirit, perhaps, institute splenetic comparisons between the lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and their fulfilment? The sentiments of Love especially affect a high heroical pitch, of which the human performance can present, at best, but a burlesque parody. A widow, that hath lived only for her husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor. The prose of her practice accords not with the poetry of her professions. She hath done with the world,--and you meet her in Regent Street. Earth hath now nothing left for her--but she swears and administers. She cannot survive him--and invests in the Long Annuities.
The romantic fancy resents, and the satiric spirit records, these discrepancies. By the conjugal theory itself there ought to be no Widows; and, accordingly, a class, that by our milder manners is merely ridiculed, on the ruder banks of the Ganges is literally roasted. C. LAMB.
"Miss M. and her tragedy." I fancy Miss M. would be Miss Mitford, and her tragedy "Rienzi," produced at Drury Lane October 9, 1828. It was a success. Hood's rib would probably be the play I have not identified. See letter to Barton of October 11.
Here, a little out of its order, might come a letter from Lamb to Hood, December 17, 1828, which is facsimiled in a privately-printed American bibliography of Lamb, the owner of which declines to let not only me but the Boston Bibliophile Society include it with the correspondence. In it Lamb expresses regret, not so much that Hood had signed "The Widow" with Lamb's name, but that an unfortunately ambiguous jest, pointed out to him by certain friends, had crept into it. He asks that the subject may never be referred to again.
Here perhaps should come a note to Miss Reynolds, Hood's sister-in-law, accompanying Lamb's Essay on Hogarth.]
466. CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON
[No date. Dec., 1828.]
Dear M.,--As I see no blood-marks on the Green Lanes Road, I conclude you got in safe skins home. Have you thought of inquiring Miss Wilson's change of abode? Of the 2 copies of my drama I want one sent to Wordsworth, together with a complete copy of Hone's "Table Book," for which I shall be your debtor till we meet. Perhaps Longman will take charge of this parcel. The other is for Coleridge at Mr. Gilman's, Grove, Highgate, which may be sent, or, if you have a curiosity to see him you will make an errand with it to him, & tell him we mean very soon to come & see him, if the Gilmans can give or get us a bed. I am ashamed to be so troublesome. Pray let Hood see the "Ecclectic Review"--a rogue! The 2'd parts of the Blackwood you may make waste paper of. Yours truly,
C.L.
[I do not identify Miss Wilson. Lamb's drama was "A Wife's Trial" in Blackwood for December, 1828. The same number of the Eclectic Review referred to Hood's parody of Lamb, "The Widow," as profaning Leslie's picture of the widow by its "heartless ribaldry." By the 2d parts of Blackwood Lamb referred, I imagine, to the pages on which his play was not printed.]